To Be Someone (3 page)

The last thing I remember was little Tommy Space confirming,
“I don’t come from Wales …,”
and thinking, Sam, oh Sam, please help me.

INTRUSION

“D
ADDY! DADD-DEEE! MUMMY!”

I’d been lost in writing about my first meeting with Sam, and the cry nearly made me jump out of my patchwork skin. All my misaligned facial bones rubbed painfully together, and I stopped scribbling, irritated. The voice came from my left, near the door. I couldn’t see anybody, although if I turned my head as far as possible, I could tell that the door was ajar.

A storm of histrionic childish sobbing ensued. By rolling onto my left side, I could see a bundle of purple and pink fun-fur crumpled pitifully on the floor by my bed.

“Er—
hello
?” I said, trying to make my voice as laden with sarcasm as possible, despite being aware that this probably wasn’t the most effective method of dealing with a stray distraught toddler.

The crying intensified, and my head started to throb. Honestly, couldn’t I even plan my suicide in peace? So much for my privacy and protection—if theatrical two-year-olds could wander in and out at will, then what was to stop a
Sun
photographer, or a deranged stalker? I began to feel very put out.

Gingerly, I slid out of bed and got to my knees on the floor, where I stretched out my hand and poked the little girl’s furry shoulder.

“Where’th your mummy?”

She looked up at me then, and the sight of my stitched and bruised face caused her to leap to her feet in one move, like a vertical takeoff. Recoiling with horror, she ran and hid behind my visitor’s armchair. At least she was shocked into silence, though.

“I like your coat,” I mumbled encouragingly. It was true, I did. I contemplated asking her where she’d gotten it from, on the off-chance they did it in grown-up sizes.

“Pink flowerth,” came a hesitant reply. I saw a small finger stroke one of the said pink flowers.

“Very nith,” I said. “Will you come and talk to me now?”

“NO! You got panda bear face like my mummy! I want my mummy!”

I tried hard not to be hurt or angry, deciding that a frosty “Do you know who I am?” might not do the trick here.

“Where ith your mummy?” I asked again.

“No more nap, Mummy! Wake up now!” The finger wagged accusingly, and the tone became quite stern.

“Would you like a thweetie?” I ventured.

Pathetically, I was by now quite enjoying the distraction from my project. It was much harder work than I’d imagined, writing with only one eye to mediate between brain and paper. In slow motion I reached for the tin of travel sweets my mother had forgotten on her last visit. (Very insensitive of her, too, I thought. My jaw was still very tender, and I was enduring meals whose consistency my current visitor had probably outgrown at five months of age.)

Mutely, the hand stretched out.

“Well, come on, then, I won’t bite … although the chanth would be a fine thing.”

She sidled out, eyes downcast. Apart from the chubby red face clashing with her pink and purple coat, she was pretty cute. Skinny little curls sprouted vertically from her head, and her teary eyes held worldly-wise blue depths.

I handed her a wrapped sweet.

“Tankoo,” she said politely.

“You’re welcome.”

She had just crinkled off the paper and popped it into her mouth when my least-favorite nurse, Catriona, knocked and stuck her head round the door.

“Oh, thank heavens, there she is!” she said crossly. “Ruby, your daddy’s been looking everywhere for you!”

Catriona retreated and returned almost immediately with a blond curly-haired man, gray around the eyes with exhaustion and what looked like abject misery. They marched into the room, ignoring me completely.

“What am I, chopped liver?” I said to no one in particular. I was still kneeling on the floor in my nightie, suddenly vulnerable.

“Ruby Middleton, what have I told you about wandering off?” said the man, halfheartedly.

“Daddy! My daddy!” came the ecstatic reply as Ruby hurled herself at her father’s kneecaps. Suddenly we all heard a very strange noise emanating from the depths of the fur coat, a kind of gurgling, hawking sound. Alarmed, the man prised her away from his knees and peered into her puce face.

“Oh my God, she’s choking!” he yelled. “Nurse!”

Catriona, who had just left the room, hurried back in and grabbed Ruby. Inverting her briskly, she slapped her lengthily and enthusiastically between the shoulder blades.

A small green boiled sweet dislodged itself from Ruby’s windpipe and flew across the room, bouncing against the far wall and finally coming to rest under my bed. Ruby, howling, was turned back up the right way, and clung to her father. We all looked silently in the direction of the offending travel sweet, until Catriona spoke.

“Well, for heaven’s sake! Who on earth was daft enough to give a boiled sweet to a toddler?! Some people have absolutely no sense. I mean, really!”

At that moment she and Ruby’s dad simultaneously spotted the tin of sweets on my nightstand.

“Thorry,” I muttered, climbing back into bed, furious with myself for feeling so guilty.

Catriona sniffed and left the room, and I was alone with the man and Ruby. I waited for him to give me a piece of his mind, and was preparing to tell him to sling his hook and leave me in peace, when he suddenly grinned at me. I was totally disarmed.

“I really am thorry,” I said again, more genuinely this time. I felt confused—what was the correct etiquette for receiving unintentionally visiting strangers in hospital?

The man looked as though the same thought had just passed through his own head.

“No, I’m sorry,” he said, “on behalf of Trouble here. It’s terrible of us to barge in when you’re trying to recover in peace and quiet. We’ll get out of your hair now.”

All of a sudden I didn’t want them to leave. Apart from Mum arriving from the U.S., hideous Geoff Hadleigh, and a quick embarrassed fly-past from my production team at New World, I hadn’t had any visitors. Justin had sent flowers but hadn’t shown his (unblemished) face, which really upset me, and the other band members were all in the States, too. I was devastated to realize how few friends I really had now that Sam was gone.

“Would Ruby like a drink?” I heard myself ask.

The man hesitated.

“Orringe, pleathe!” said Ruby enthusiastically.

At that moment, Rosemary the tea-lady hove serendipitously into sight with her trolley.

“You could have thome tea with me, too, if you like,” I said, cringing at how needy I sounded. Billy No-Mates, indeed.

“Well, that would be nice,” the man said uncertainly. “I’m Toby, by the way. And you’ve met Ruby, obviously.”

He stretched out his arm and we shook hands tentatively.

“Helena,” I replied, relieved and embarrassed that he was staying. Strangely, once I looked properly at him, he seemed slightly familiar.

Rosemary poured us both a cup of tea, handing Toby his with a faintly censorious, “There you go, Mr. Middleton. White, no sugar.”

“Thanks, Rosemary,” he replied.

The thick plottens, I thought. Does he work here or something?

“There’th thome cartonth of Ribena in that cupboard there. Would you like to give Ruby one? ”

I pointed to my locker, and Toby obligingly extracted the juice, unwrapping the straw and piercing the carton’s foil hole with a pop.

Ruby sidled over and took the drink silently, obviously cowed by her recent near-death experience. With her free hand she spent the next five minutes opening and closing the locker door to hear the magnetic click of its catch. It was irritating, but better than listening to her howling.

“Pleathe, thit down,” I said to Toby, pointing to the shiny armchair. The whole situation felt horribly awkward.

“So, what are you in here for, then?” asked Toby politely, looking away from my Technicolored puffy and stitched face.

“Oh, my varicothe veinth are playing me up again,” I managed, as airily as I could. He smiled, and again I thought I recognized him.

“Actually, I, er, had a fall,” I said, feeling like an old lady who’d fallen off a curb. “Onto thome broken glath. My teef were knocked out, too, which ith why I thound like thith.”

Toby winced sympathetically. “Ouch,” he said.

“Ouch,” echoed Ruby. “Me kith it better.”

“I with you could,” I said, with feeling. “Thankth for the offer.”

“I kith Mummy better, but she still seeps,” Ruby added conversationally. We were definitely speaking the same language.

Toby’s face scrunched up with pain. “My wife’s in Intensive Care in a coma,” he said, looking at the floor. “She’s been unconscious for ten days now—bad car crash.”

“I’m tho thorry,” I said again. My lisp was irritating the hell out of me. It made everything sound so trite. There was a short silence. I stared at the wall, noticing the silhouette of a small long-legged insect that had been carelessly painted into the emulsion. It made me even more depressed. When I looked back at Toby, he had that same empty expression of desperation on his face that I recognized from my own, when Sam was so ill.

Eventually Toby spoke. “Rubes just can’t understand why she won’t wake up. It’s terrible. She gets so frustrated. I wonder if I’m doing the right thing, bringing her here at all, especially since Kate’s face is still so swollen, but I’m sure it helps her to hear Ruby’s voice.… ”

“My friend jutht died, a few month ago,” I blurted out shamelessly, unable to help myself. Suddenly it felt as if both our sorrows had sparked and ignited into one great big furnace of hot grief. When I looked up, we were both in tears, embarrassed and overcome.

“Don’t cry, Daddy,” said Ruby, her tone suggesting that this wasn’t something new. “Don’t cry, lady,” she added, slurping her drink noisily through the straw. She climbed onto Toby’s knee and threaded an arm around his neck. He hugged her back, and I had never felt so alone.

“Ith all tho unfair!” I bawled, not really knowing whether I was crying for Sam, for Toby’s wife, for Toby, or for myself.

Toby wiped his eyes and moved over to hand me a box of tissues, Ruby still clinging around his neck. I couldn’t blow my nose on account of it being broken, so I dabbed delicately above my top lip instead.

“I’m sorry about your friend. Had you known each other a long time?”

We managed watery grins at each other, acknowledgment of the bizarreness of the situation.

“Yeah, thince we were about five. Tham wath my betht friend in the world. I don’t know what to do with mythelf without her.… ”

My watery grin drizzled away. Toby’s head suddenly shot up.

“Oh, no! Sam died? Jesus, that’s terrible!”

I stared at him and gulped with shock. All my old steel shutters clanged down to the ground around me, bang, bang.

“How do you know Tham?” I hissed.

Ruby’s eyes grew like saucers as she followed the exchange. Toby groaned. A blush crawled up his neck, into his cheeks, and over his ears.

“I knew I should have admitted it straight away, but I thought you wouldn’t want to be recognized. I don’t—didn’t—know Sam, but I do know you. We met years ago, when Blue Idea was on tour in London. I interviewed you for
Melody Maker
, and you told me all about Sam, and the charity record, and how she had recovered from the leukemia. You were so happy she was better.”

I thought I was about to explode.

“I don’t believe it! You’re a … 
journalitht
! You complete thcum-bag, how could you do thith to me? Did you thend her in firtht, to get into my room? ”

I pointed at Ruby, who shrank back, terrified.

“Wath thith whole thing planned? Ith there a photographer out there? Who’th the piece for? Or are you auctioning it to the high-etht bidder? Get the fuck out of here, now, before I call the polithe!”

Toby stood up, clutching Ruby, panic and grief printed across both their faces.

“No, Helena, please, you’ve got it all wrong. I didn’t even know you’d had an accident, honest! I swear it’s not a setup. I didn’t even recognize you at first, until you said your name. Please, I—”

“Jutht get out!” I yelled feebly, completely unable to think straight.

They shot through the door in a blur of fake fur and curls, Ruby gripping her juice carton so hard that Ribena sprayed up through the straw and across the carpet in their wake.

I cried and cried, even though it made my face throb with pain. I didn’t care. I wanted it to hurt. All I could think was, How soon could I make this stop? How soon could I do the show?

And the answer was … as soon as I got it all written down.

Jackie Wilson
I GET THE SWEETEST FEELING

S
AM GRANT WAS FIVE WHEN WE FIRST MET, AND I HAD RECENTLY
turned six. I was in the backyard playing on my swing, a dangerous-looking contraption with frayed green nylon ropes and a plank for a seat, which my father had rigged up for me from a sturdy low branch of the big chestnut tree. The tree itself was in our garden, but the branch holding the swing wandered out and stuck over the fence into a separate paved area where our garage was.

I was swinging mightily back and forward, with my back to the garage. Humming tunelessly and kicking my legs to make myself go higher, I was enjoying the sensation of the wind flapping my skirt up and catching underneath my hair. I was at the apex of the swing’s trajectory, eyeing the bloomers hanging on next door’s washing line, when a massive, metallic
boom
rang out in front of me and almost caused me to plummet off my seat. I managed to hang on, but listed heavily toward the left-hand rope, which made the swing twirl around, out of control. I hadn’t noticed the two figures standing nearby, until I rotated limply to a halt. Then I heard the sound of scornful laughter.

“Not very good, are you? Let’s have a go,” said a voice.

I turned to see a boy and a girl in the yard. The boy was holding a football and had a mean expression on his less-than-clean face. He looked to be a couple of years older than me. The girl was smaller, and thin. She had her fingers in her mouth and was lagging behind the boy, looking anxious. She was jiggling her legs, perhaps from nerves, although it looked to me more like the sort of fidgeting brought on by having wet one’s knickers. Her red woollen tights sagged in wrinkles around her skinny ankles, and I could see their low crotch showing underneath the hem of her short purple-and-red-checked pinafore dress. Then I looked back at the boy and realized what had startled me on the swing.

“Did you just kick that into the door?” I asked, pointing indignantly at the football.

As if to demonstrate, the boy drop-kicked the ball again, sending it crashing into the pale green metallic up-and-over garage door. I was outraged. “I’m telling my dad on you. Buzz off! You nearly made me fall off of my swing!”

The boy swaggered toward me threateningly. I felt a little nervous.

He moved closer and retrieved his ball. “Give us a go on your stupid swing, then.”

“No! Buzz off!” I had heard some bigger boys say this in the playground the week before, and had been saving it up for a suitable occasion. This most definitely was a situation calling for strong language. The girl still lurked behind the boy, not meeting my eyes. I was glaring at both of them, hating the intrusion, when a woman’s voice yelled from the end of the street: “Dylan! Sa-am! Where are you? Tea’s ready! I’m not telling you again!”

To my relief, the boy started to turn away. “You’d better let me play on it next time, fatso,” he said menacingly, and ran out of the yard. The girl stayed in her spot, fidgeting even more. We stared at each other. Eventually she took her fingers out of her mouth and said, “That’s my brother, Dylan. He’s often a bully. Can I come and call for you later? ”

I was taken aback, but disarmed. In retrospect I don’t know what endeared me to her—I must have been a fairly intimidating sight, standing there guarding my territory with an aggressive scowl on my face and hands firmly planted on hefty little hips. Possibly it was the lure of the forbidden swing. Anyhow, I graciously conceded that she could, if only to spite her awful brother.

It transpired that the Grants had just moved to Salisbury to run the pub on the corner, the Prince of Wales. By happy coincidence, Sam also ended up in my form at school (although there was almost a year between us—I was the oldest in the class, and she the youngest).

This put the final seal on our friendship. For the duration of our primary-school years we pretty much lived in each other’s pockets: We played at the pub, in my bedroom, or raced unsteadily through the terraced streets around our houses on our baby bicycles, first with training wheels, and later without.

Mostly we tried to avoid Dylan, who by the age of nine had acquired a worrying head for business. He used to round up a few of his friends on a regular basis and charge them 5p each to see Sam and I reluctantly show them our underwear. This weekly ritual was known locally as “Bum Time,” and I believe that for double the admission fee we’d actually pull down our knickers for a quick flash to the more affluent of the group. I don’t recall what Sam and I got out of this arrangement—none of the takings, that was for sure. A deep and permanent feeling of mortification lasting into adulthood was more like it. Dylan threatened to give us Chinese burns if we refused to oblige.

The fact that Sam’s parents ran a pub made her something of an icon at school—everyone thought it was the coolest thing that parents could possibly do. In the early seventies, the Prince of Wales was a standard locals’ pub, open at lunchtimes and in the evenings only, in accordance with the restricted licensing laws of the time. Sam and I were allowed to sit downstairs in the bar after school, before the evening session began. It was the biggest thrill—sliding around on the leatherette benches, learning how to flip beer mats from the edge of the pockmarked tables, revolving the wheel on the jukebox to make the selections clunk laboriously around. Sometimes Mr. Grant gave me 10p to put a record on, and I always chose “I Get the Sweetest Feeling” by Jackie Wilson, because it was just such a happy song. I loved the
plink, plink, plink, plink … hmmmm
of the introduction, and the fat, deeply satisfying brassy noises going on in the background. To this day, it’s one of my favorite records.

The jukebox was only one of the gadgets that made the Prince of Wales an Aladdin’s cave of technological wizardry. We didn’t even have a black-and-white television at home until I was eight; the Grants had two color sets, one in the bar, stuck high up to the wall with a bracket, and one upstairs in their sitting room. They had the first microwave oven I’d ever seen, and pinball and slot machines (which we weren’t allowed to touch). Sam even had one of those kiddie synthesizers with the colored piano keys, as well as a record player and a radio. I was so envious.

During business hours we were not allowed to set foot in the bar, and so we played upstairs in the residential part. The Prince of Wales was a very old building, a public house since its inception in the eighteenth century, and was full of appealing little features. As a child I failed to appreciate them, but in retrospect I remember the sloping floors and ceilings, wood-paneled walls, odd cupboards everywhere, and narrow hallways interspersed every few yards with two or three crooked steps up to another level and around a new corner.

These passageways were the venue for one of our favorite games: the Great Continental Quilt Bob-Sleigh Race. Continental quilts, as they were called in those days, were in themselves a total novelty. I had never seen one before, and begged and begged my mother to buy me one, explaining at great length how labor-saving they were—no more constant bed-making or sheet-ironing. Unfortunately, she regarded anything Continental as being French and therefore somehow sweaty and unhygienic, and it was a few more years before she capitulated and bought duvets for “
toute la famille.
” My fascination was such that I would drag Sam’s quilt off her bed and into the sitting room—initially, I suppose, so we could both lie on it and watch TV. Then one day it became a method of transport.

“I know,” I said. “I’m Cinderella going to the ball in my carriage. You be my horse, and pull me.” I plumped down in the middle and gathered up the edges around me, leaving the two front corners for Sam to pick up. She neighed obligingly, bared her teeth, shook her mane, and hauled me with difficulty out of the sitting room and down the long hall back to the bedroom doorway. I remember catching sight of myself in a hall mirror and noticing with pleasure the regal air about my demeanor, the queenly tilt to my chin, and my gentle poise as Sam bumped me slowly forward to meet my prince. I was visualizing the adoration of all the lords and ladies at the ball, not just the prince, but everyone. That was the first time I was aware of craving the spotlight.

Sam dragged me back again, faster this time, so I could drop my glass slipper on the way home. That, however, was done less gracefully: I fiddled with the strap of my scuffed blue T-bar Clark’s sandal, pulling it off with a jerk, which made me lose my balance and lurch over backward. I then lobbed the shoe over my shoulder, and it hit the wall with a jingle of its buckle, leaving a dirty mark.

“If that was real glass, you’d have broken it,” Sam told me disapprovingly. I did a quick role switch from princess to prince, retracing my steps down the corridor to tenderly retrieve the bulky-soled sandal, holding it to my chest and then my lips, looking wistfully back toward the bedroom door for my princess. The drama was lost on Sam; she was too busy trying to rub the scuff mark off the wallpaper by spitting on her doll’s dress and wiping it on the wall. The doll was wearing the dress at the time, and the friction from Sam’s rubbing only caused the doll’s porcelain fingernails to add little scritchy marks next to the original scuff.

But we kept refining the quilt scenarios, and over time they evolved into more of a sport than a charade, which we practiced zealously when Dylan wasn’t around to laugh at us. One of us would sit in the quilt, wrapping its back and sides around us for padding, and the other would pick up the front and drag it plus passenger down the hallway from the starting line of the sitting room. Because the hall was so narrow and sloped gently down, with the little sets of stairs and turns breaking up its length, it made quite a respectable bob-sleigh run. We managed to get quite a speed up. The idea was to get to the finish line (the kitchen doorway) without the passenger falling off or the “puller” falling over.

The only problem was that our weights were not well balanced enough to get the maximum momentum. When I was the puller, I’d gallop full tilt for the first flight of steps, charge down them, hurtle round the first bend—and more often than not be left holding an empty quilt, Sam having been catapulted screaming into a cupboard door, or picking splinters from her palms further back up the course. And when she pulled me, she would puff and pant, heaving with all her strength to drag me to the top of the three little stairs, where gravity would kick in and I would invariably cascade down faster than her, catching her in the back of the knees on the way. We once heard her mother commenting in puzzled tones to her father about how quickly their new hall carpet had developed a nasty shiny streak down its center.