Beneath the Blonde (18 page)

She eventually got to the hotel at around eight-thirty, surprised to find Siobhan up and waiting for her in the foyer.
Steve was missing, he hadn’t arrived for breakfast and one of the hotel staff thought she might have seen him heading for the beach at about four that morning.

Drowning, they say, begins with extreme pain. The lungs hold what remains of the air as long as they can, the heart smashes itself against the chest wall, hammering at the ribs as it tries to pump oxygen through to the choking brain, the blood vessels, too, constrict, squeezing out the last remaining drops of life force. And then the will gives in. There is an involuntary rush as the mouth opens, the diaphragm swings back into place and the lungs flood with water. For a tiny moment it is all torment, choking, fighting and then the pain is gone. There is not enough oxygen for the brain to continue its chemical electric work, the mind becomes spacey, stoned. There is a whole minute, maybe even longer, of intoxicated ease and then the body slips down under the blue and the green. It sinks away.

At least, I believe that’s what happens when the drowning is accidental. I don’t know if Steve had any moments of peace. It didn’t look like it from where I was dog paddling. It’s true Steve is big, was big. Not so terribly tall, though very strong, well built. But the single most beneficial power of water, from my point of view, is that it removes the effect of gravitational pull. Water changes the dimensions of strength and weakness, repositions the impotent, making the clear arc of a single freestyle stroke a force to be reckoned with. If, like me, you are at home in water, if you can hold your breath for moments or minutes, if you couldn’t care less whether the sand bar is ten inches or ten feet below your toes, then you are the master in the water. If
you also savour crashing waves, feed on surf, if you are weary of passionless smooth shores, if for you the only real sea is the Pacific, well, then, you’re practically Poseidon and to be caught in the surf is to see that all around you Aphrodite is rising from the sea-strewn sperm of Zeus.

A little florid I know, but this one felt so much more epic. And rather more elegant than a softball bat.

Los Angeles is a tedious city at the best of times, but in terms of killing it is deadly dull. It sits there in a blocked basin of its own heat, stirring its tepid, stagnant self only to sip the scum as it rises. Shootings and muggings, detached urban crimes, there is no passion in the murders of that city, no joy. No commitment to the killing. And yet it has a coastline full of terrors, dark crevices of hills and mountains within touching range, so why do they always resort to their antiseptic guns? Their distant murders? Los Angelenos prefer their deaths to be a drive-in McDonalds, slaughter untouched by American hands. But I don’t.

Steve wasn’t quite as easy as Alex. He doesn’t like to drink too much, though he does it anyway. I had to bide my time, wait until the grief got him. I knew it would eventually. The grief gets us all eventually.

I’d watched him all day. An accomplished parader of man flesh himself, he fitted snugly between the over-built and the under-made on Venice Beach. Few people swim in that misnamed section of the ocean, but he did briefly. Very late at night, a sobering stroll from the hotel, with a near full moon yellow behind the smog and a quiet, almost empty beach. I knew he would. I waited for him. I knew that once alone he would be drawn to those waves. I’d seen him watching them in the daylight, watched his grief from a distance. I knew that later, no joy in the flesh, he would attempt to find comfort in the sea. I walked a safe distance behind him in the shadows, knowing that soon he would want to slip off his T-shirt, and that he’d find a better reason
than mere vanity to ripple those muscles under the waves. He removed the outer layer and strode purposefully into the surf.

Once actually in the water his bravado slipped away, quietly. It is dark in the ocean. Secluded and dark and private. A unique selling point. The hotel is rightly proud of its elemental access. He swam around a little, the cold of the water no doubt educating him as to just how drunk he was. An unaccustomed drinker of spirits, he probably didn’t realize what five Southern Comforts can do to a big, sad man. His fear crept up on him as the tide did. As I did. He didn’t notice how worried he was until he heard the tiny rippling splash. He’d been able to hold on to his myth of strength until I passed him with my slicing strokes and fast kick, my head as happy underwater as above. My breathing regulated and attuned to the swell of each new-built wave. The deep holds no fear for me. When I caught his legs and pulled him out and down he was disoriented immediately. By the time he came back up coughing and spluttering I was three feet away, turned in concern and went to him fast, held him in the life saver’s position, the one they taught us at school, my arm crooked around his neck. I told him not to worry, he’d be safe. I soothed him. Whispering soft in his ear and the mother water close against his skin, he relaxed in my grip, closed his eyes and I began choking him with my elbow. Then the surf was there to do it for me, water that I floated over and through while he turned and twisted in it. Like a single sock in a violent washing machine. His colours weren’t fast and his screams came quiet, muted from under water and blown away on a warm night wind. I looked and the moon gave me light but I didn’t see any moment of peace on his face. He sank.

I waited for five, ten minutes. Long enough to be certain, then I swam a long way up the beach, far past the Santa Monica pier, where the signs warn of pollution and dirt.
As if there were single locations in the city that could be pinpointed, circled and declared, just this piece here, this is the unsavoury part. You must beware of this particular area. As if everywhere else was clean.

I didn’t need to wash myself this time. This was a much cleaner death. I retrieved my towel from where I had left my things, neatly bundled into a dark corner. I suppose I should have been scared—muggers, thieves. Murderers. The night was too gentle for fear though. I dried myself and slipped into cool, clean clothes. I walked out on to the road and in an easy distance I slipped into an all-night cafe, smiled at the waitress. She was about to finish her shift. I asked her if she wanted to join me in a drink, to celebrate the fact that the sun would be with us again in an hour or so. She had other plans though, a bath and bed. I sat alone, relaxed against the cane of a bar chair and toasted myself—Two down, two to go.”

Pretty soon it would just be her and me.

I finished my beer and walked back to my little room; I was humming “Hotel California”. I hadn’t thought of the Eagles in a very long time.

And then it was police and coast guards and police interviews and more interviews and fielding requests from offices they didn’t even know the record company had, from the hotel, from the airline. Saz told the police what she could about the blonde. Nothing other than that she was blonde. And even that information was dismissed as the hotel receptionist remembered the tall woman leaving the hotel foyer just after three in the morning, her hair still wet. There was Cal raging and simultaneously hugely efficient and Dan crushed and crying and Greg placating and the record company solicitously teetering on the edge of throwing the whole thing in and then police again and the coast guard again and calls to and from England, to and from Peta, and the poor replacement drummer left waiting alone in the foyer for hours before anyone remembered him, remembered to politely tell him he wouldn’t be needed just now and, in the middle of the tempest, Siobhan sat still. She was quiet and sincere. She was makeup free and perfectly tearstained. She spoke in a small gentle voice, answering the hundreds of repeated questions politely and patiently in measured tones. She behaved impeccably and dealt with each moment as it came, pre-empting no one and keeping up with the pace of everything and everyone around her. Surrounded by a choking sea of chaos, she was one tiny piece of perfect calm. And her hands were so tightly clenched in her smooth linen lap that her French manicured nails dug a row of bloody stigmata into her palms.

At seven o’clock that evening, their New Zealand flight having left hours earlier, Steve’s body was spotted ten miles down the coast, pulled from the weed and frothy sewage that lined the shallows. At midnight Cal made a formal identification. At ten the next morning the police examiner got through four gunshot deaths, two recreational drug overdoses and one barbiturate suicide, had a quick look at the fluid in Steve’s lungs and scribbled drowning as the cause of death. She’d had a long night. Two days later the body was released and the record company flew Steve’s parents and brother out for a tiny, very private funeral. He was cremated in West Hollywood and flown back to London, a puny ash pile, perfectly reduced to hand luggage proportions. Everything was quietly and efficiently and expensively taken care of, almost before the press had a chance to point out that someone was missing.

Two hours after Steve’s ashes left LA International Airport, Cal issued a brief press statement stating that Steve had drowned in the Pacific Ocean. He took great care to emphasize that, while Steve had been very upset about Alex’s death two weeks earlier, as indeed were all members of the band, there was absolutely no suggestion of suicide. The drowning was a terribly unfortunate accident—an accident confirmed by both the LAPD and the Coast Guard. Confirmed only in that they didn’t bother to propose any other suggestion; there was no way for the officials to know for certain whether or not Steve had meant to drown. It was just another wet death for them. The authorities didn’t much care whether Steve had floated away accidentally or intentionally but it hurt no one for them to write “accidental” on the form and certainly made the paperwork a damn sight easier. Cal added to his press release that Steve had been in good spirits—all things considered—and very much looking
forward to the band’s short holiday in New Zealand. His death was a tragic and devastating accident. There was a coda to the statement which asserted in no uncertain terms that any mention, covert or otherwise, of suicide in press coverage would result in immediate and very expensive legal action. If “accidental” was good enough for the weight of the American judiciary, then it was certainly good enough for Beneath The Blonde—and therefore for the tabloid-buying British public. By and large, the press accepted Cal’s statement, Steve had been found to have a high blood alcohol level and he had chosen to go swimming in the middle of the night. The right-wing press took it as yet another opportunity to lecture on the loose morals and life-wasting antics of a new generation of “foolish and arrogant youth” and the left-wing papers found another way to blame the long years of Tory government for the dissolute deaths of the young. There was no reporting of funeral and wake as with Alex’s murder, there was no big celebrity party to photograph. This time Cal presented the band with a funereal image of quiet composure and restrained suffering. What press coverage there was centred on Siobhan’s elegant grief and, after a day or so of dignified silence, Cal’s hopes for the future of the band.

Only
Loaded
chose to point out that to lose one band member could be considered an accident, but to lose two looked like carelessness. Saz, feeling particularly negligent, couldn’t help but agree.

The girls had remained friends until they were just thirteen. Best friends, through Shona’s first period started early and painfully at eleven. Proud of her new status as woman, she explained all that needed explaining to Gaelene, who knew little enough about her own body to be terrified and disgusted by what was to happen to it and had her innate horror confirmed when Shona scratched a picture of a sanitary napkin and belt into the top of her desk with Gaelene’s compass. They stayed best friends even though John deserted their threesome somewhere around eight or nine, acting as if he hardly knew them when they went to Ruby’s in the holidays and could barely wait to get home when it was his turn to spend a week at Shona’s house. John’s desertion hurt Gaelene more than it hurt his blood cousin. In a way, though she resented the change, Shona was now glad of the chance to have her best friend all to herself, but for Gaelene the growing separation between boys and girls was a gulf she didn’t want to acknowledge and one which John made sure to rub in every morning when they were at the beach and he set off early to go fishing with his uncles, leaving the girls behind to peel and chop potatoes for the chips that would go with the fresh snapper Ruby would cook them all for breakfast.

Back at school after the holidays, the year before they went reluctantly into double figures, Gaelene took the only route she could find around the enforced separation of the sexes. She became a leader of the girls, as tough as any of
the boys, heading the little groups of girls who would meet at morning break to play four square or marbles. And when one of the boys would steal their four square ball, the other girls would not fight him themselves but come running for Gaelene. She would chase the boy, catch him and, often as not, give him a good hiding before taking the ball back. The second time she gave a boy a black eye, Mr Stephens the headmaster came into the playground himself and, in front of the whole school of almost two hundred children, Gaelene was given the strap. If Mr Stephens had thought that the punishment—and what he assumed would be humiliation—would deter Gaelene from her violent activities, then he had reckoned without the heroine factor. To see Gaelene given a punishment reserved for boys, to see her hold out her hand and not flinch as the strap came down, its leather twice as thick as that of her dusty red roman sandals, was to watch a little girl become a star. The girls thought she was brave beyond belief and even the boys had to admire her courage. That night, walking home from school, Gaelene was surrounded by other little girls all offering her glow hearts and pineapple chunks and bites of their peanut slabs. Not pretty like other little girls, not startlingly clever like her best friend Shona, Gaelene was, for the first time, basking in her own glory—and loving every minute of it. In fact, the only person who didn’t like it so much was Shona. Other people wanted to play with Gaelene now, and Shona wanted her all to herself.