The Singer (40 page)

‘No son of mine behaves like a bloody puff.’ Vince imitated
his father’s final speech to him. ‘Mixing with limp-wristed, Marxist degenerates at a bloody art college when you’ve a good, solid future ahead of you. You go there and you’ll never come back. You’ll not be any son of mine any more.’

Like Sylvana, Vince hadn’t been back home for a very long time.

He told her how he met Steve and Lynton at a Sex Pistols gig in Doncaster, how Steve had tried to
hide him in the van on the way home but he had woken up and thought he was having a vision of Elvis which was really a pendant hanging over the rearview mirror.

Sylvana laughed and said she had met her own band at a
Damned gig about a year later. Then she started telling him what had happened with Robin. ‘I thought he was so amazing to begin with,’ she sighed. ‘You see…’

She paused, wondering
whether it was wise to continue. But they had shared so much already, and after all, tonight had been all about throwing caution to the winds. ‘I don’t know if you can understand this,’ she said. ‘But when I hear certain words and all music, I can actually see colours.’

She stared hard at Vince.

‘Wow,’ he said, looking genuinely interested. ‘What do you mean? A wash of colour over everything,
or like coloured shapes dancing around in the air?’

‘It depends what the sound is. If it’s harsh, like the music in that house tonight was, it’s like big blocks of colour in abstract shapes, really bright and quite brutal. But the music we made was more like swirls and patterns, like a whirlpool of the colours of sky at twilight. The most beautiful colours, I think. That was why the band was
called Mood Violet. That was the colour I mainly saw when Robin and Allie first played me their tapes.’

Vince’s own twilight eyes were round with amazement. ‘Wow,’ he said again. ‘How amazing to see the world through your eyes. God, I wish I could do that.’

‘It’s not always amazing. Sometimes it’s hideous. My mother thought I was crazy, that I was making it up to get attention, so she sent me
to all these shrinks to try and straighten me out. I hate to say this, but Robin was the first person who seemed to understand what I was saying. He told me he could see colours too, and his music proved that to me. It was so easy to write lyrics and sing to it, it just seemed to flow out of me. But I was so wrong about him. Like everything else,’ she dropped her eyes to study the bubbles in her
champagne glass, ‘that was just one of his lies. He delighted in telling me so, the last time he was angry.’

‘Oh, little Sylvana,’ Vince put his own glass down, took hers
and put it on the bedside table. Then he wrapped her in his arms, dropped delicate kisses on her forehead, her eyelids, her face.

‘Do you want to see what else he did to me?’ she finally had the courage to say. ‘Do you want
to see how fucked up my life has become and why I need to get away from it?’

‘Only if you want to show me,’ whispered Vince.

She rolled out of his arms, sat on the side of the bed for a moment, gazing out at the sparkling, revelling city below. If Vincent Smith was all that he seemed to be, then he would have to pass this test.

She stood up and unbuttoned her dress, her back still to him. Stepped
out of it and draped it across a chair. Then she turned to face him, still wearing her bra and knickers. With those still on, he could see it well enough, and if he was going to turn and run in disgust at the sight of it, she didn’t want to be left here naked and alone.

She watched the horror bloom on his face as he took in the rings around the top of her breasts, a bouquet of burns made by cigarette
ends. At the purple arcs carved above the line of her knickers, abstracts made with broken glass that curved down still further where he couldn’t yet see.

‘Oh, my God,’ he finally said, sitting up and swinging his legs over the side of the bed, looking up at her face at last. ‘My poor darling. He did that to you? That ugly bastard did that to you?’

Sylvana nodded.

‘Come here to me,’ Vince stood
up and strode towards her, picked her up like a child in his arms and carried her back to the bed.

‘No one’s ever going to hurt you again, I promise.’ He stared deep into her eyes. ‘I’m not going to let them. Christ, no wonder you needed to get away.’

His fingers traced around the patterns of her scars, and as he dropped his eyes she saw a single teardrop on his thick black lashes.

‘Does it
still hurt?’ he asked.

‘Not physically. And the rest of it, I try to blank from my mind.’

‘Jesus. If I ever see him again, he’s a dead man.’

‘I’m never going to see him again. I don’t know how yet, but I’m getting as far away from him as possible,’ Sylvana said. ‘Whatever it takes.’

Sylvana suddenly felt completely wiped out. The fact that Vince hadn’t rejected her, the fact that she felt
safe in his arms, meant that her struggle was over. Now the events of the night were catching up in a sudden, soporific wave.

‘Gosh,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, I feel really sleepy all of a sudden.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ said Vince. ‘When you go through something traumatic and come out the other side, that’s the natural reaction. Your body shuts down to let you repair yourself. You go ahead and sleep;
I’ll be guarding you. No ginger Jock wanker’s coming anywhere near you ever again.’

‘Vincent Smith,’ she said, her eyelids heavy, her vision swimming in a purple haze. ‘You really are an angel.’

When she woke up, he was still staring at her, with an expression of such love and tenderness she wondered if she was still dreaming. The events of the previous night fast-forwarded through her mind.

‘God, it’s really true,’ she said. ‘I am here with you.’

Vince stroked her hair. ‘Sylvana, I’ve been thinking. All night I’ve been thinking,’ he said, and his voice was gruff with the lack of sleep. ‘I’ve never met anyone like you before. You’re pure genius.’

‘No, I’m not,’ she said quickly. ‘I’m an idiot. I—’

‘Shhhhh,’ Vince put a finger up to her lips. ‘Yes, you are, Sylvana. Now I’ve met
you, I don’t ever want to be apart from you.’

She didn’t say any more. She just started to kiss him and he kissed her back and it was what it should be like; no timidity, no revulsion, no suppression, just love, deep love, like she’d never
known before, like part of her had known all along this would happen and now she’d finally found him.

Hours later, exhausted and giddy, collapsed on their
backs with their fingers entwined, Vince said. ‘Can I finish my sentence now?’

She laughed. ‘What sentence.’

‘Well,’ Vince rolled over onto his front, took hold of both of her hands and looked her straight in the eye. ‘As I was saying, before you so rudely interrupted me with all these terrible physical demands, I was thinking all night long about what to do about this situation we find ourselves
in. Deciding that having met you, my life would be wholly incomplete if I wasn’t sharing the rest of it with you. Wondering whether you would do me the honour of being my wife?’

She laughed, for a moment still thinking he was mocking her.

‘I’m serious,’ he said. ‘I’ve never been more serious about anything in my life. Marry me, Sylvana, and I’ll take you away from this dreadful place and all
the rest of the shit that’s been following you around. I’d never joke about something like this.’

‘But what…What about the rest of your life?’

‘The rest of my life can sort itself out. I just want to be with you.’

‘You’re really not joking, are you?’

‘Woman,’ he said, thickly putting on his Yorkshire accent, ‘will you marry us or what?’

She started laughing again, delighted. ‘Yeah, all right
then. Yes, yes I will.’ And she carried on laughing.

May 2002

I couldn’t decide what to do about Donna. For the rest of the Bank Holiday weekend I tried to weigh up Allie’s warning about her innate personality defects against what there possibly could be to gain from meeting her. All the time, the unwelcome spectre of Robin Leith kept popping back into my mind, rasping his dire warnings against waking the dead.
It all went round and round in my head while I tried to keep myself gainfully employed transcribing the tapes and avoiding Mother’s calls.

I was overdue for a visit and I normally caved in to pressure around Bank Holidays, but I still hadn’t found the courage to tell her that me and Louise were kaput. I knew what would happen if I did. She would wonder how on earth I was going to manage to keep
the flat on with my sporadic earnings. She would muse that I might be better off giving it up; start spinning the web to try and snare me in my own shortcomings and drag me back to Guildford. To assuage my sorrows with burned oven pizzas and gravy that you could cut with a knife.

I couldn’t be doing with that. Of all the things I was afraid of,
that was by far the worst. I wished I could have
sloped off with Christophe for a few days of alcoholic rumination, but he had gone to some rock’n’roll weekender with his new bird, in bloody Great Yarmouth of all places, so he was no good to me. I pictured him wearing a Kiss Me Quick hat in force nine gales and pissing rain, wandering up and down a tatty seafront full of SAGA holidaymakers and one-eyed yokel children. That kind of made me feel
better. But not for very long. I was starting to get cabin fever and I couldn’t concentrate on work, couldn’t settle in front of the TV, couldn’t find any solace in any kind of music at all.

In the end, I thought, fuck it. It was seven o’clock, Sunday night and everyone else was lapping up the rays and enjoying the long weekend in the company of a significant other. I couldn’t stay put in my
stuffy mausoleum with dead singers and fucked up rock’n’roll casualties from another era for company. I may as well go out for a wander, drop into the few pubs worth going to, see if anyone I knew was about and up for a few beers. You know, try and at least act as if I had a life.

Just as I had decided this, the phone rang. ‘Oh, piss off, Mother,’ I said aloud, but something kept me lingering
by the doorway while the answerphone clicked on. I suppose, in my most futile fantasies, I was hoping it might still be Louise, admitting she’d made a mistake and wanting to come home. Seeing Helen and Allie’s cosy set-up had upset me more than I wanted to acknowledge.

But the voice that came out of the machine was a most unexpected one. ‘Hello, Eddie, it’s Kevin Holme here. I’m sorry it’s been
such a long time. I said a couple of days, didn’t I? And that was a couple of months ago. Anyway, I—’

I ran back over to the phone and swooped it up. ‘Kevin,’ I said. For a moment there was just the squeal of the answerphone protesting as I clicked if off and I had a hideous feeling I had just gone and cut the connection.

But then I heard: ‘Eddie?’ His little voice sounded dubious.

‘Kevin,
hi,’ I said, trying to sound as cheerful as possible. ‘How are you?’

‘Oh, I’m fine. I didn’t know if you were still going to be there. I lost your number for a while and I only just found it. Would you believe, it was still in the pocket of the jacket I was wearing that day I met you. Like I say, I’m sorry it’s taken so long, but things have been a bit hectic since I saw you, d’you know what
I mean? I got asked to go on a tour of Japan and there was a few other things I had to see to that took me longer than I thought…’

He carried on in this slow, plodding manner for another few minutes, while I started to wonder if it would all come to any point soon.

‘No need to apologise,’ I tried to chivvy him along. ‘Are you back for a while then, now?’

‘Oh yes, you know, I still live here,
like. It’s just not often that I go away for so long these days. They’re quite crazy, those Japs, you know. Don’t seem to matter to them how long in the tooth or past your sell-by date you are. It’s still all punk rock to them. Somethin’ else, they are, really.’ He gave a little chuckle and I tried not to start grinding my teeth.

‘Are you still writing the book then?’ he finally enquired.

‘Yes,
yes, I am. I’ve met Steve now, and Lynton. It’s going pretty well…’

‘Oh, that’s nice. How were they? Doing all right for themselves, still, are they?’

‘As far as I could see.’

‘Oh, that’s good. I don’t see much of them any more, as you know, but I still like to hear that they’re doing OK.’

I had a sudden fear that I was actually caught up in the middle of one of Alan Bennett’s thought processes
and I’d never come out again. Had Kevin only managed to find my phone number again when I was in the worst of all possible moods, just to taunt me with his fey Northern banalities? Was he doing this on purpose to punish me?

‘So, anyway, I’ve been giving it some thought, this interview you wanted to do…’

‘Oh, have you? Really?’ Subconsciously I put my hand on my hip and started nodding.

‘That’s
right,’ he said and sighed. ‘Do you remember, I told you about Rachel?’

I tried to. ‘Vince’s old girlfriend?’ I dredged up from memory.

‘That’s right. Well, I’ve talked it over with her and I’ve decided that I will do another interview with you.’

‘Well, that’s very good of you. And her. Thanks, thanks a lot.’ I really tried not to sound sarcastic but I think he caught a hint of it.

‘All right
then,’ his voice gruffened a shade and speeded up. ‘Have you got any spare time then, this week? Only I could meet you Thursday, if that would suit. Same place as last time?’

‘Thursday…’ I pretended I was consulting some diary or other. In reality, all my pages were blank for the foreseeable. ‘Yeah, that would be fine, Kevin. What time shall we say?’

‘Let’s make it midday, shall we? Just come
and ask the barman, like you did before. Oh and Eddie…’

‘Yes?’

‘Would you mind coming on your own again? Not with Gavin, like?’

This was becoming a popular refrain. ‘Of course not, Kevin, I’ll be there at noon, this Thursday, upstairs at the Red Lion, was it?’

‘That’s right,’ he sounded doubtful again, even as he said it. ‘I’ll see you then. All right, Eddie. Ta ta.’