Husbands (36 page)

‘Thank you,’ I stutter. If ever a man needed luck…

‘Well, we need to get going,’ says Belinda, signalling frantically to the waitress for the bill. She knows Neil Curran well enough to guess that he could keep chatting all afternoon; our participation in the conversation would not be required. ‘Stevie needs to try his costume on. We don’t want to be late for the dress rehearsal.’

‘Oh, yes. We’re taking it all very seriously. The rehearsal’s an event in itself. Ticketed, you know,’ says Neil, proudly.

‘I guess that’s so the organizers can make twice as much, is it?’ asks Belinda.

‘Aye.’ Neil smiles, ‘My idea.’ He doesn’t seem to hear her dig. She was forever complaining that the organizers of these events were exploitative and the prizes weren’t up to much. She could never see the fun in just being part of it.

‘I helped find a number of the sponsors too, mind,’ adds Neil. A northern man, in his fifties, who isn’t shy about his canniness with money. If he’d been born in the south, as likely as not Neil Curran would have been running a cutting-edge advertising agency or made a fortune as a City trader.

‘This bash has cost a bob or two with every finalist bringing three friends.’ And then he asks the question I didn’t want to answer in this lifetime, ‘Who did you bring with you, if you haven’t bairns?’

I don’t think the truth – my girlfriend and Belinda’s other husband – would make appropriate small talk so I’m grateful that Belinda takes control.

She kisses Neil’s cheek.

‘Really fantastic to see you,’ she lies. ‘We’ll leave you to your lunch and er…’ She glances at the booth that Neil emerged from; it’s littered with empty beer bottles but he’s eating alone. ‘And er… your beer,’ she adds, as she grabs my hand and starts to lead me away. She appears every inch the devoted Elvis-wife, who sees to it that I leave plenty of time to style my quiff before big gigs, sews sequins on my costume, spends hours on the Internet sourcing the most authentic gold glasses available, that sort of thing. Exactly the type of wife Belinda did not want to be. ‘See you at the rehearsals, tonight, I expect,’ she calls over her shoulder.

‘I’ll be there, lass. You can count on me. Goodbye.’

We pay the bill at the counter and then leave the diner. Belinda manages to keep smiling until we are safely in a taxi, then she immediately lets go of my hand as though it is scalding her and rounds on me like Attila the Hun.

‘Fuck, Stevie, what have you done now?’ she spits, in an angry whisper.

‘Me?’ I’m more than surprised.

‘Didn’t you check to see if you knew any of the personnel running the competition?’

I feel stupid. There’s an information pack in my room with brief biographies of the competitors, the other entertainment acts and the compère. I hadn’t read it.

‘This is all your fault,’ says Belinda emphatically and somewhat unfairly.

‘
My
fault?’

‘It was you who brought us here,’ she snaps angrily.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ I mutter sarcastically. ‘But you weren’t forced to accept the freebie holiday, you could have said you had a previous engagement.’

‘I wish I had,’ she barks.

Hell, of course this was always going to go tits up. How could I, of all people, have fallen for the pseudo-sophistication of Bella Edwards when I knew it was just Belinda McDonnel in a posh frock. Belinda never had the luck to get away with anything as conniving as this. Belinda was the kid in class who always got caught when she copied her homework, the kid who missed the hockey goal on an important penalty point, the kid whose mum died of lung cancer. How did she manage to get away with bigamy for this long with luck like hers?

Bickering isn’t going to help.

‘Bloody hell, Belinda, what are we going to do?’ I have no idea why I’ve asked her. She’s hardly been a leading beacon when it comes to good ideas and foolproof plans to date, but then I am struggling for alternatives.

‘You’ll have to pull out of the competition.’

‘What?’ I’m astounded.

‘There’s no alternative. He thinks we’re married.’

‘We are.’

‘Be serious, Stevie.’

Belinda has disappeared. The woman who wrapped her arms around me and wanted to comfort me in the diner, just ten minutes ago, recedes in front of my eyes and instead Bella, the I-will-survive queen, comes to the forefront. In my head she is wearing one of those T-shirts that read ‘It’s All About Me’.

‘If you go ahead with the show, Laura, Phil and I will be in the audience. Neil’s bound to come over to our table after the show and he’ll let the cat out of the bag.’

‘Well, you and Phil don’t have to come to the competition, we might get away with it.’

‘We won’t,’ says Belinda. ‘Things are getting out of hand.’ I’m not sure if she’s referring to the unfortunate meeting with Neil Curran or our snog last night.

‘Promise me you’ll pull out,’ she says.

‘Don’t ask me to do that.’

‘I
am
asking. I’m pleading.’

‘I can’t do that, Belinda. This means too much to me.’

‘As much as I mean to you?’ she demands. I pause for a moment and wonder how I can explain.

Eventually I mutter, ‘You’re not mine.’

‘Just a few minutes ago you said you were in love with me. Was that just something to say at the time, to increase your chances of getting your hand down my knickers, or did you mean it?’

A number of things go through my mind. Whether I’ve ever had even the slightest chance of getting my hand down her knickers is, I’m ashamed to admit, one of the thoughts. The others are a little more pragmatic as I struggle with the nub of the question. Did I mean it when I said I loved her? And, if I did, how much am I prepared to do in the name of love?

‘I think I meant it,’ I say weakly.

Not exactly impressive, I know. Not the sort of fighting talk that wins the lady. I watch Belinda struggling with indignation and common sense. I realize she’s probably heard more romantic propositions but I don’t want to say anything I might regret. Anything
more
that I might regret.

‘Sort it out, Stevie,’ she says, and then she tells the taxi driver to stop.

‘But, lady, you’re nowhere near the Mandalay Bay,’ says the driver.

‘I can walk a few blocks. I need to shop,’ she tells him. Then she turns to me, repeats her instruction, ‘Sort it out,’ and flounces out of the car and in the direction of an enormous shopping mall.

I stay in the taxi and as we edge through traffic on the Strip, I ask myself, can I sort it out?

Neil Curran is a loud, diehard compère who, in another lifetime, had a stand-up act at seaside resorts such as Blackpool and Yarmouth. We got to know him when
I was trying for the Greatest European Tribute Artist Convention and Competition in 1996. Funny that he should be compèring the competition this year as he did on the night that Belinda did her bunk. Of course, Belinda would argue that this isn’t so much a coincidence as indicative of the fact that the job of a tribute artist is small-time and the circles I mix in are small too. She won’t accept, or even acknowledge, that the Elvis tribute industry is massive. Facts aren’t going to get in her way.

The mini-drama that ensued after Belinda walked out was the talk of the town for several days and the talk of the circuit for… well, longer than I was prepared to keep track of. Belinda doesn’t know, she’s never asked, but I did not win the King of Kings title that night in Blackpool. I did not even compete.

We weren’t having a good night, or a good year, come to that. I’m not a bloody fool, I knew that much. We were forever rowing about our secret marriage, our lack of cash and where and how we should best earn our livings. Even so, nothing could have prepared me for what she did that night.

I will never forget the humiliation as I sat at the table, nursing a warm pint and a glass of crap white wine, waiting for her to return from the loo. After twenty minutes I sent someone to look for her, I was concerned, not worried. I thought she must have an upset stomach or something. I became more than concerned, more than frenzied with anxiety in fact, when she wasn’t in the Ladies, or anywhere else in the hotel.

Neil kept insisting that there was nothing to worry about and that the show must go on but I couldn’t do it.
It was obviously serious. Your wife doesn’t go to the Ladies and then just forget to come back.

How could she have left me on the most important night of my career to date? How could she think that was an acceptable way to end a relationship? A marriage. There wasn’t even a note. Nothing. Zero. Zilch. Diddly-squat. Fuck all.

I have never felt lonelier than I felt that night; the night I slept alone in the grotty B&B, on a hard narrow bed. Blackpool is my hometown and while my mum was still living up in Kirkspey at that time, I had other relatives – aunties, uncles, cousins – who I could have called on. Any one of them would have happily loaned me a bed and even made me a fry-up the next day, but I stayed put. I slept in scratchy sheets, in a room with malfunctioning central heating because I thought – I hoped – that she might come back to me. Her clothes were gone but it didn’t have to mean she had indisputably, literally quit. I told myself that maybe she’d get as far as the coach station and then she’d find out there wasn’t a bus to Edinburgh until the next day so she’d come back to the B&B. We’d talk about what was wrong and we’d put it right. It might be OK. It didn’t have to be a big deal.

She didn’t come back to the B&B nor was she waiting for me in our flat when I returned to Edinburgh. I will never forget – and God knows I’ve tried to – the wave of fear, panic and then unadulterated terror that swept over me when I opened the door to our flat and there it was – nothing. Total and complete nothingness. No letter. No missing possessions, no trace, no clues, no reasons, no explanations.

I contacted the police. I told them it was possible my wife had been abducted; neither they nor I believed that to be the case. They added her name to a long list of people who had done a ‘Reginald Perrin’ as they called it and said they’d check the hospitals. But as she was an adult and there were no signs of foul play there was little they could seriously be expected to do.

No signs of foul play? Even if Belinda had left of her own free will and no crime had been committed, the foul play quota was still off the scale. What she had done to me was so intensely cruel and profoundly wicked that it was categorically unforgivable. That’s what I told myself,
unforgivable
. Then I spent weeks, months, and eventually years thinking of ways to forgive her.

Nothing comforted or helped me. Belinda would probably laugh if I ever tried to explain to her that even Elvis Presley’s music failed to console me in those bleakest months. I didn’t think he’d suffered as much as I had. I didn’t think he’d ever been so totally humiliated.

For ages Belinda had been trying to get me to give up Elvis. It was ironic that her departure achieved what she had longed for, and yet she never knew it. My greatest love had stolen the joy I had in my other great love. It appeared that one could not exist without the other. Not for me. For several years I couldn’t even listen to an Elvis song. I hated the man, or at least the music. If ever I was in a shop and an Elvis track drifted through the sound system, I would leave the shop. I’ve walked out of quite a number of karaoke bars and wedding receptions in my time. I thought it was meaningless pap and even ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ and ‘My Baby Left Me’ did not scratch
the surface of agony at being so unceremoniously binned.

After about four weeks, she sent me a postcard so that I knew she was alive – and that she didn’t feel alive near me.

For some time I thought I was rubbish, crap, leftovers. I endlessly mulled over the self-indulgent, self-destructive questions that all dumpees ponder, regardless of gender. I found the answers a year and a half later, after I’d been travelling abroad for some time. What did I do to deserve this? Nothing. What is wrong with me? Nothing. Why would she treat me like this? Madness.

Look, it’s all water under the bridge now. But, I’m just saying at the time it was hard. Granite.

When I came back to the UK I decided to study for a PGCE so I could teach music. It took a further two years before I could let Elvis back into my life.

But when he returned, he returned with a vengeance. My music had matured. I thought as much and others confirmed it to be the case. I had more to put into the lyrics because loss has a whimsical way of making some people bigger. Having loved and lost was good for my art – much better than good old-fashioned happiness or contentment. Although, to this day, I’d have preferred to be a ‘not bad’ tribute act with a wife and kids at home, rather than a ‘sensational’ one with a different cutie from the crowd in my bed each night. I guess I’m just an old-fashioned guy at heart.

The thing is, I hankered after winning the heats and the trip away to Vegas but I covet and crave winning the final competition, with an undignified longing that borders on an obsessive need.

Of course, I don’t believe I can turn the clock back. It will never be January 1996 in Blackpool again. I will never have the opportunity to say to Belinda, ‘Don’t go to the loo. Talk to me, tell me what’s wrong.’ I cannot change the sequence of events that followed that fateful trip to the Ladies. Events that cascaded into the casual heap that – for want of a better term – I call my life. However, if I compete and win this time, I might just be able to jump-start my life again and put myself back on track. I might regain some dignity.

I threw the competition for her once. And I threw my life away too. But I won’t do it again.

I am going to go to the rehearsal and I am going to be good. Seriously, intensely good. I am going to be the King of Kings European Tribute Artist Act 2004. Belinda McDonnel and Bella Edwards will have to find a way to live with it.

I sneak into my hotel room and pick up my costume and leave again without being spotted by Laura. I leave her tickets for tonight’s dress rehearsal show and a note telling her I’m missing her. Which is only part of the story.

I catch the monorail and as I hop on board it crosses my mind, what am I thinking of? Do I really believe that winning the competition would win me back some dignity when I consider that I have wrapped my arms around two women in twenty-four hours? While I am determined to attend the rehearsals and enter the competition I know that to sing or not to sing is not the difficult question. And probably, for that reason alone, it’s the question I decide to focus on.