The Singer (20 page)

Luckily, Ray had no inkling of her real motives. The journo boy-wonder couldn’t believe what had ended up on the end of his arm that night, and was determined to keep this transfixing vamp just where
she was. As Donna had quickly found out, having Ray for a boyfriend opened up a world of advantages.

It had been a week since she had looked in on Sylvana and Helen and in that time she had been to a free gig nearly every night. Pere Ubu at the Marquee, X-Ray Spex at the Vortex, The Clap at the Nashville Rooms, Adam and the Ants at the Moonlight Club – it had all passed in a sulphate rush of
backslapping and backstage interviews. Ray never went anywhere without his notepad and pen, scrawling his endless shorthand notes that to Donna looked like weird hieroglyphics. He’d made his name as the talent-finder general, the one who could sniff out the new bands faster than the rest. Along with John Peel, he had become the person every aspiring Sex Pistols sent their demo tape to first. Consequently
there was nowhere he couldn’t go and no one who didn’t want to speak to him. The undoubted highlight of the week had been the night they spent in the Warwick Castle on Portobello, talking to Joe Strummer about the Anti-Nazi League rally that The Clash would be headlining at the end of the month in Victoria Park.

It was after that benediction that Donna could control the urge
to see her fashion
student friends no longer. She couldn’t imagine what they had been up to since the gig; certainly it couldn’t have been anything half so exciting as what she was doing.

But suddenly, the flat at Queen’s Gate Gardens seemed to have grown two new tenants. Two dubious-looking Scotsmen, who had filled the front room with guitars, strange reel-to-reel recorders, a keyboard and a spaghetti junction
of wires and cable. Were they some of Helen’s extended family, come to stay? Or part of some strange college project? No, it appeared to be worse than that.

‘I’ve joined the band,’ Sylvana repeated. ‘I’m gonna be the singer. How d’ya like that, hey?’

Donna tried to form a reply but found that she couldn’t. Instead, Helen did it for her, but not in the words she would have used.

‘It’s brilliant,
isn’t it? Sylvie’s been hiding her real talents from us all this time. And if you hadn’t wanted to go to that gig so much, it might never have happened!’

‘Yeah, cheers, for that, hen!’ the dark-haired Jock, who appeared to be Helen’s new beau, gave Donna a playful punch to the left shoulder then frowned.

‘Where was you that night then?’

At last.

‘With my boyfriend,’ said Donna icily. ‘Ray
Spencer. You might have heard of him?’

The Jock’s eyes widened. ‘Ray Spencer from
Sounds?’

Donna nodded. ‘The same.’

‘Did ye hear that, Robin?’

The other Scotsman appeared from behind an electric keyboard that he had been fiddling with ever since Donna arrived. Her eyes narrowed as she took him in. It looked like Sylvana had drawn the short straw there. At least Helen’s had a kind of saturnine
charm even if he was bit on the lardy side. This one was scrawny and ginger and she could see his acne scars from the
other side of the room. The thought gave her a sudden rush of comfort. She couldn’t see this manky scarecrow leading Sylvana into the bigtime.

‘Aye, Ray Spencer, eh?’ Robin said. ‘Maybes we should give you a demo tape for him.’

‘Yeah!’ Sylvana squealed. ‘What a fantastic idea!’

It took two weeks for them to cough up the goods, by which time Donna had formulated a plan.

Ray had his own flat on Matheson Road, just round the corner from the Nashville, in the vague backstreets between Olympia and West Kensington. An area cast in slate greys and dull greens that struggled to keep up appearances with neighbouring High Street Kensington, thanks to the thundering Talgarth Road
that cut a rude swathe through the middle and the proliferation of high rises that loomed above the quieter, more modest Victorian streets below. The only splash of colour was the fruit, veg and knock-off goods market that snaked down the narrow North End Road, snarling up the impatient traffic and resounding with cries of barrow boys.

From the outside, it was a bit of a step down from Queen’s
Gate Gardens, but the top-floor flat itself was the hub of a much hipper social whirl. Donna hadn’t taken long to decant her belongings from South Ken and the Tower of Terror to here, where she and Ray held court each night when the pubs and clubs had closed and everyone was still too wired to go to bed, listening to new records and demo tapes with a revolving assortment of musicians, other journalists,
would-be entrepreneurs and less talented hangerson. Donna loved the buzz of being at the centre of everything, of having people from the bands she had once admired from the sidelines now asking her advice. But at the same time, she had no desire to go down in history as just somebody’s girlfriend, or worse, a King’s Road hairdresser. Donna had much bigger ideas than that.

So she didn’t let slip
the fact that she had a demo of a new band even Ray could never have heard of until she’d given the tape a good listening to herself. It was a double-edged sword in a way. If it was no good, she’d have nothing to build foundations on. If it was good, then Sylvana might just pull off the one thing Donna had always wanted, but knew she didn’t have the talent to do herself – become a proper singer.
So Donna would just have to be the first to exploit that talent.

Ray was actually at the Nashville the first time she played it, feigning a headache to stay behind. Actually, she felt quite nauseous, with conflicting emotions churning her stomach and turning her brain.

It didn’t matter how much they went on about the DIY spirit of punk and how anyone could take part, Donna could never commit
herself to doing anything unless she knew she could do it a hundred times better than anyone else. Being laughed at was her worst nightmare. And much as she’d tried, much as she’d spent night after night praying for a miracle, she’d never been blessed with the gift of a golden voice. Or any sort of voice, for that matter. The music teacher at school had said she was tone deaf. She’d always suspected
that was why she got straight into punk when all of her classmates were still down at the disco. She didn’t like music that sounded
nice
. She liked music that felt like she did inside – icy, angry, full of the desire to intimidate and control.

She was almost wincing when she took the tape out of its box, with its little card inlay carefully fashioned by Sylvana, who despite all her training in
fashion clearly still didn’t have the first idea about what constituted good design. For a start it was in purple. With silver writing. For Christ’s sake, didn’t she realise those were hippy colours?

Mood Violet
it read.
Thorn Necklace. Tracks: While You Were/Heavenly Shades/Thorn Necklace/Crimson Contact: Sylvana on 01 942 3669

Dear God. It sounded worse than her brother’s prog-rock
collection.
All it needed now were some Arthur Rackham flower fairies to seal its fate. Donna scrunched her eyes shut as she pressed play.

Found them opening spontaneously a couple of seconds later.

It was a whole lot better than she had dared expect. In fact, she realised, as track followed track and took her nowhere she’d ever expected, it was everything she needed.

Ray came back alone that night, as
she knew he would if he thought she was ill. Before he did, she disposed of Sylvana’s original inlay card, fashioning one herself from the heaps of music papers, fanzines and flyers that Ray hoarded, typing out the tracks again on his own typewriter. Then, satisfied that this one would embarrass no one, she went to work on herself. Shortly before eleven o’clock, she had arranged herself prettily
under the bedcovers in a silky black nightie, a surprisingly risqué number she’d actually had out of British Home Stores on one of the rare occasions she’d been shopping with her mother in the past three years. She shut her eyes, tuning into the footfalls on the street outside, waiting to hear his key in the lock.

‘How are you feeling, love?’ Ray came through the door and straight over to her,
kneeling down by the bed with an expression of genuine concern. He had such a sweet face. Despite his albino porcupine hair and the row of sleepers that went all the way up his left earlobe, he still could have passed for a twelve-year-old.

Donna pretended to blink awake, touching her forehead delicately as she did so.

‘Hmmmm, a bit better, thank you,’ she sat up, allowing Ray the full benefit
of BHS’ daringly cut bodice. ‘I’m sorry I fell asleep, I wanted to stay up for you.’

She glanced at the clock. He hadn’t even waited for last orders.

‘Don’t worry,’ Ray had a laugh in his voice that was very endearing. It didn’t seem possible that he could get angry about anything. ‘I brought some chips up, if you fancy?’

He rustled the blue-and-white striped carrier bag he had put
down by
the bed and Donna’s heart skipped a beat. Even if she had been legitimately off-colour, the smell of fried food would have brought her round.

They lay there companionably for a while, eating the chips out of yesterday’s paper, hot and salty and drenched in vinegar, washed down with a can of Tizer. Tonight’s gig hadn’t been very inspiring, apparently, so she let him talk that out of his system
before he got up to put the chip wrapper and the crumpled can in the bin. Nicely house-trained he was too.

Ray came back over and flopped down on the bed next to her. He gently traced the outline of her face with an index finger.

‘You’re gorgeous, Donna, what did I do without you?’ He almost sounded in pain as he whispered it.

‘I don’t know,’ Donna raised one eyebrow. ‘I supposed you just had
to make do with dirty old punk rockers.’

He leaned forward to kiss her and Donna tried, she really tried to kiss him back with the same amount of enthusiasm. He was so delicate with her, it was easier to fight the wave of revulsion she usually felt at being touched, easier to nail back the memories of other, harder, more forceful fingers probing into her young flesh, the taste of vinegar on his
lips so different from the stale smell of whisky and ashtrays that always brought back her worst nightmares. She could control the urge to slap him off her and beat him a thousand shades of purple, to see him lying naked on the floor, defenceless against her stiletto heels and her fists full of rings.

Ray wasn’t like the other hormonal oafs she’d made short shrift of in her time.

Better than
that, he wasn’t her dad.

All the same, she didn’t want to get him too carried away just yet. She pulled away from his embrace smiling, put her finger on the end of his nose. ‘I’ve got something special for you,’ she said.

Ray looked slightly dazed.

‘You
are
special, Donna—’ he began.

‘I’m gonna prove
how
special, though,’ Donna slid off the side
of the bed. She reached for the cassette that
she’d left beside his tape recorder. ‘And how clever I am.’

She flipped up the plastic lid, fitted her future dream between the spindles and clicked the machine shut.

‘Listen to this, Ray. I bet you’ve never heard anything quite like it before.’

Ray, who had been hoping that Donna was about to show him something else entirely, lay back on the tousled bed, confused. She enjoyed watching that
expression change, as the first notes filled the room with eerie wonder; that strange, scratchy guitar, those undulating keyboard swooshes, and then the unbelievable sounds that had come out of Sylvana’s throat.

Another thing that was perfect about Ray. He could always be distracted from matters carnal by his truest love – music. She let him drink it in, stealing back across the room to lie beside
him, soft and compliant in his arms. Ray looked like he was receiving a Holy Sacrament. Finally, when the four tracks had played themselves out and the tape recorder abruptly snapped off, he sat up and said: ‘Where on earth did you get that?’

‘They’re just some friends of mine,’ Donna replied, smiling up at him. ‘Pretty good, hey?’ she echoed Sylvana’s words.

‘Pretty amazing,’ Ray scratched
his head. ‘You’re right, I’ve never heard anything quite like that before. Do you know what she’s singing about?’

Donna shook her head. ‘No, I can’t understand a single word she says. Except that it’s enough to turn a man’s knees to jelly.’

She prodded him there and he laughed.

‘Shall I run it by my editor?’ he said. ‘I’m sure he’d be really interested.’

‘You could do,’ Donna toyed with the
end of a strand of her hair. ‘But I think I have a better idea.’

‘What?’ Ray frowned. ‘You’re not gonna give it to the
NME?
You couldn’t…’ His face started to colour in a way she’d never seen before.

‘Shhh, shhh,’ she shook her head. ‘Course I’m not gonna give it to those wankers. I’ve just had a better idea than just writing about them. Why don’t we put the record out as well?’

‘You what?’

‘It would be easy, Ray, you know it would. Who was that bloke you had over here the other night? Tony, was his name? He set up a label with a hundred quid loan from his old man, he earned it all back on his first release and still had enough over for the second. It looks pretty easy to me. I know we ain’t got a hundred knicker, but you know plenty of people who’d give you that kind of backing, Ray.
’Cos they know they’d make it back like that,’ she snapped her fingers.

‘Everyone would buy a record you championed. Everyone knows you. And it wouldn’t just be this band, there’d be loads of others would follow. Don’t see why you should be making money for some magazine that you could be making for yourself.’

Ray winced at this. ‘It ain’t about the money, though, is it, love?’

Shit, thought
Donna, those fucking punk principles. How tiresome.

‘Course it ain’t.’ She shook her head furiously. ‘That weren’t what I meant, Ray, it just came out wrong. What I meant was, instead of just writing about them, you could actually help them get their records out. That Tony said it was the biggest rush he’d ever got in his life. Said it was dead easy, everyone’s willing to help. And I know helping
people is what you love doing most.’