Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. (24 page)

Well I’m not going to keep it. No question. Mum says she’ll help me raise it. No way. Yuck. Me and my mum and a baby crammed into the top-floor flat of a council block. Nappies hanging on the clothes airer suspended from the ceiling in the steamed-up kitchen, no money, no heating, the metal lift that smells of piss: the thought of it makes me feel sick. It just can’t be, not now, not in this situation. I’ve been warned so many times not to mess my life up by getting pregnant and now I’ve gone and done it. I can’t keep the baby. Mum suggests adoption, but I think that’s crueller than death. That’s my opinion. To burden a child with abandonment and rejection right from the start. A living death. All or nothing, that’s me. I choose nothing. Nothingness for baby. I think this is a responsible decision. I will not countenance any other option.

I make an appointment at a clinic. You can’t just go and have an abortion, you have to prove you’re mentally incapable of having a baby or they make you keep it. I don’t know how I can think of getting rid of a baby so calmly and yet get so upset when some spotty boy doesn’t call.

I go to the clinic and cry. That’s what other girls who’ve been through it told me to do. If you cry, they’ll let you have an abortion. I’m sure the doctor would have let me anyway. He sits behind his desk, looking at me sobbing in a short, tight, pink second-hand child’s dress, fishnet tights and black Dr Marten boots, blonde hair sticking out all over the place.
Better not let this one have a baby
. In two days’ time I’ll be over the legal limit and then they’ll make me have it. I’m sent to a clinic in Brighton. Mum waves me off at the station. I’ve got a little overnight bag, it’s a duffel bag with pictures of 1970s pop stars printed on it, I bought it at a jumble sale, thought it was funny. I feel strangely calm. I don’t feel like I have a baby growing inside me. I don’t even think of it. It’s just something that needs to be sorted out. Before I leave I tell Mick over the phone that I’m pregnant and I’m off to the hospital to deal with it on my own. He offers to come with me but I don’t want him to. I don’t want to feel anything. If he’s there I might feel something.

I’m given a place at the end of a long row of beds with girls about my age in them. A nurse comes in to give us a talk. ‘You will be taken into the operating theatre. You will be given an anaesthetic. The foetus will be removed by suction. You will be wheeled back into this room. When you wake up you will experience cramping in your stomach, it will help relieve the pain if you draw your knees up to your chest and roll onto your side. Then you will be served dinner.’

The other girls are nervous. I’m not. I’m last to go in. I’ve never been to hospital before. I’m not allowed to walk anywhere, I have to be wheeled in a wheelchair. I don’t like it, I’m perfectly healthy. Two orderlies trundle me down the corridor, doors crash open and swing shut behind us. People hover over me fiddling with tubes and charts as we glide along. In the anteroom a doctor says he’s going to give me the anaesthetic now, it will feel like I’ve drunk a large gin and tonic. Just as he puts the needle into a vein on the back of my hand, the plastic casing on the ceiling light above me crashes down and lands on my face. A nurse rushes forward apologising.

I wake up in my bed. The girl next to me is sobbing. My stomach hurts, I draw my knees up to my chest and roll onto my side. The pain subsides. A trolley arrives with our dinner. I’m starving and it’s a Sunday roast, my favourite. The girl next to me can’t eat, she’s too upset. I ask if I can have her roast potatoes.

The next day I get the train back to London. Mum meets me at the station. We go home. I go straight to bed. Tomorrow I’m going to Paris with the Slits. Julien Temple is coming along to film us for Malcolm McLaren.

I can’t sleep. I think about the terrifying power that women and mothers have. We don’t need to fight in wars. We have nothing to prove. We have the power to kill and lots of us have used it. How many of you boys have ever killed anyone? I have. I’ve killed a baby. It doesn’t get much worse than that. Maybe your mother has secretly used her power to kill in the past and not told you. Maybe she even thought about doing it to you. It’s a secret and a burden she carries with her.

I don’t tell the Slits what I’ve been through. I’ll look like a bloated milk pudding in Julien’s film though (
luckily it was never made
). When I look in the mirror I see a round pale face with two little currants poked into the doughy, uncooked skin. I keep the hospital identity bracelet on my wrist, I think it looks good: no one notices it. Emotionally I’m in a bit of a state. I’m physically weak too.

After the Paris show – in a club called Gibus – along comes a very handsome French boy called Jeannot. He has dark hair, dark eyes and olive skin. He says that my name, Albertine, is considered ugly in France, it’s a servant’s name, a peasant’s name. I laugh it off but inside I’m crushed. I have no confidence. It’s been sucked out of me with the baby. Jeannot offers me heroin. I’m tempted. Not because I want to forget what I’ve done, or because I’m so down, even though both are true, but because I’ve lost my identity. I haven’t a clue who I am. I feel like a nothing. But I know without a doubt, if I take heroin now, I will destroy the tiny morsel of myself that is left, I will be lost forever. (Funny how heroin comes along at times like this. These guys can smell your weakness, like sharks smell blood.) I muster all my strength and say no. Jeannot sneers. He goes off with Tessa and Palmolive. He doesn’t speak to me again. Julien follows Ari around with the camera, because she’s the one Malcolm’s interested in. I sit in my little hotel room and stare out of the window at Paris, watching people walk up and down the street, the heels clacking on the cobbles keeping me awake all night. So this is what I’ve chosen over a baby: the Slits, gigging, hotel rooms, music, self-expression, loneliness. It was the right decision – wasn’t it? I wish I was at home with Mum.

I didn’t regret the abortion for twenty years. But eventually I did
and I still regret it now. I wish I’d kept the baby, whatever the cost. It’s hard to live with. But I still defend a woman’s right to choose. To have control over her own body and life. That cannot and must not ever be taken away from us
.

50 SID AND NANCY

1977

A groupie from New York has arrived in London, she’s been here a couple of days. Well, this is a first: there aren’t any proper groupies in ‘punk’. Doesn’t fit with the ethos. There are girls who sleep around a bit, the usual thing in a group of mates, but nothing official like a groupie. Who will want her? Maybe Steve. She’s followed the Heartbreakers over. I suppose groupies are more of an American thing. Her name is Nancy Spungen, not a sexy name like the groupies I’ve read about: Pamela Des Barres (Miss Pamela), Bebe Buell or Sable Starr. I heard rumours that she was in trouble in NY and had to get out quickly. And she takes heroin. I wonder if she’ll be scary and sophisticated, will she be cold towards us other girls? Bet she’s beautiful.

Although we hang out there a lot, none of us go to the Roxy to pull. We go there because it’s the only place to go. Of all the people who end up pulling at the Roxy, it turns out to be Sid. I think one of the most shocking things he’s ever done is get involved with Nancy Spungen.

Like any groupie, Nancy went for the singer first; she tried it on with John Rotten a couple of nights ago – he wasn’t interested. Next she tried the guitarist, Steve Jones, and worked her way down through the band. Tonight I see it happen with Sid. It’s been a good night, the Heartbreakers are here and it feels a bit more exciting than usual. I see Nancy early on, slinking around, all pouty; I know it’s her immediately, she stands out a mile, doesn’t look right at all. She has bleached blonde hair, but that old ladies’ hair-salon colour, sort of yellowy blonde, all curly in a long wedge shape, boring. Her eyes are nice, big and brown with a bit of a squint, quite cute, like a kitten or the actress Karen Black. She wears loads of leopard print but she looks like a barmaid – more Bet Lynch than Bebe Buell – a slick of red on her lips and a dark triangle of rouge on her cheeks, like a giant hand has grabbed hold of her face and left two bruised fingerprints. Her eye makeup is conventional and her tits are pushed up and out showing loads of cleavage. I’m quite disappointed; she’s a cartoon groupie, not an interesting one. She’s the embodiment of everything we’re against: American for a start, a boring dresser, uncreative, just a follower. And on top of that, she takes smack. I’m not going to bother getting to know her, she’s trouble, and not in a good way.

Towards the end of the evening I notice Nancy lurking behind a pillar – it looks like she’s hiding from someone; what’s she up to? She leans forward out of the shadows, pursing her glossy mouth and batting her eyelashes. With a come-hither look, she does a sexy beckon with her index finger to someone across the room. It’s hilarious. I follow her eyeline and see that the person on the receiving end of all this is Sid. I try and catch his eye to laugh with him about it, but to my amazement, he grins shyly and with his long arms dangling by his side, trots over to Nancy like an obedient little puppy. I can’t believe it. This cynical, judgemental guy is going against everything he’s ever said and falling under Nancy’s – very corny – spell.

Sid tells me a couple of days later what happened that night: Nancy gave him heroin –
as far as I know, Sid hadn’t taken smack before he met Nancy, certainly not regularly
– and a blow job (I bet she was good too). And that was it. From that moment on they went everywhere together: it was
amour fou
.

In January 1978, before he goes on tour to America with the Pistols, Sid and I meet up and he asks me to spend some time with Nancy at Pindock Mews – the house they’re renting in West London – whilst he’s away. He says she’s very lonely, no one will have anything to do with her. I say I’ll do it (only because he means a lot to me, I’m dreading it). A couple of days after Sid leaves, I call Nancy up; she’s really excited to hear from me and invites me over for the evening. We sit on the squishy black sofa drinking Coke. Nancy smokes a lot and drones on and on. ‘It’s not fair, they all hate me, they’ll only be happy when I’m dead,’ she whines. ‘Malcolm hates me the most. But I’m going to show him, I’m going to cut off my head and send it to him in a jar, I’m going to have it pickled. That’s what he wants and that’s what he’ll get. Then he’ll be sorry.’ She goes on like this for hours. It’s torture.

It’s really late, I’ve got no money to get home and Nancy asks me to stay the night. There’s only one bed, it has black satin sheets on it. Nancy doesn’t take her makeup off, she undresses and puts on one of Sid’s old Sex T-shirts – the cowboy one – with the armholes cut out really wide – ‘to remind me of my baby’. I get into bed next to her, fully dressed. Nancy talks for another half-hour and eventually falls asleep on her back, mouth open, snoring loudly.

There’s no way I am going to sleep a wink tonight, I’m not good at sleeping in other people’s homes even when I know them really well, let alone with this strange and annoying girl next to me. I lie awake, the minutes crawl by, god it’s unbearable.
I wonder when the buses will start running again. Then I can leave. Maybe about six o’clock
. The sun comes up slowly, watery and thin through the blinds. I stare at the ceiling. Nancy rolls over towards me and her boob falls out of the armhole of Sid’s T-shirt. It rests there next to my shoulder on the black satin sheet, pale and pert, like a perfect little meringue, floating on an oil slick.

When Sid gets back from America I go round to see him. He’s really grateful that I visited Nancy and thanks me, says that I’m the only person who came to see her and it meant a lot to her and to him. He’s quite moved. I feel a bit guilty because I only went once. He says Nancy’s told him all about our conversations that night, including the one where I said I’d never really had an orgasm. ‘I’ll give you an orgasm, Viv,’ he says. He wants to do something nice for me, as I’ve been so nice to Nancy. Nancy says, ‘Sid’s fucking great in bed now. I’ve taught him what to do.’ Sid agrees with her, he’s very open about his lack of sexual prowess before he met Nancy. There’s no sexual jealousy between them, he says he would just as happily ‘lend’ Nancy out to someone.

I thank them both for the kind thought, but not at the moment. He says any time I want to, just let him know.

It’s so funny because I’ve only ever known the shy, bashful Sid, not this bragging, sexual Sid, he’s got a swagger about him now. I’ve also never seen him so soft and affectionate, he really loves Nancy, cares about her, he’s very protective, almost fatherly towards her. It’s quite beautiful to see. She’s found someone to love her. Not an easy feat. But everyone deserves love, even Nancy.

Sid: May 1957–February 1979
Nancy: February 1958–October 1978

Sid’s signature from the Ashford letter, when he was still spelling his name ‘Syd’. 1976

51 PERSONALITY CRISIS