The Singer (36 page)

‘The time for celebration’s when you’re safely on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean,’ she kept reminding her. Sylvana was beginning to wish she hadn’t told Helen now. Her nerve
was failing her. Visions of her mother’s face, looking like she’d just sucked on a lemon, saying: ‘What did I tell you, Ruben, the child isn’t capable of standing on her own two feet for a moment,’ kept swimming into her mind. The vision was made still more harsh and surreal by the dayglo yellow the music was provoking. Dayglo yellow and shocking pink. The colour scheme in this house might well
have been a manly monochrome but the music its owner liked was a migraine-inducing assault.

Sylvana wished they could escape back to the roof garden they’d been shown earlier, where palms and ferns made a gentle, almost mystical atmosphere. But Helen had been adamant that they stayed here, where there were too many people around them for Robin to dare make a scene.

For the last hour, he and
Allie had been lost in the
Boy’s Own
wonderworld that was the basement, messing about with some guys from a German electronic band in Tony’s own mini-recording studio. Sylvana neither knew nor cared whether they were down there fiddling about on the banks of synths, going
through Tony’s British Library-sized record collection or playing on the full-sized snooker table.

All she knew was, while
he was doing any of those things, he wouldn’t be getting pissed enough for their plan to work. She had a horrible feeling that before the night was out, he was going to suss out what they were up to. Suss them out and make her pay.

For the past half an hour, she and Helen had been making polite conversation with that Lynton guy who had come backstage at the Rainbow. He seemed a really nice, well-mannered
man, but Sylvana just couldn’t hold the thread of the conversation.

‘Oh.’ She saw Helen frown. ‘There’s Allie.’

Sylvana followed her gaze, her heartbeat quickening. Allie was waving from the doorway. Thankfully, he seemed to be alone. She saw him mouth the words, ‘Come here a minute, hen,’ to Helen.

‘Shit,’ Helen looked dubiously at Sylvana, then Lynton, then back to him. It was obvious she
didn’t want to leave her there, talking to another man.

‘Go and see what he wants,’ Sylvana said, more sharply than she had intended.

‘OK,’ Helen bit her bottom lip. ‘Great timing, Allie,’ she muttered to herself, then tried to fix a bright smile to her face.

‘I won’t be a minute, I promise,’ she said to both of them, and hurriedly made her way to her husband.

Lynton followed all this with
a bemused expression on his face. ‘Is everything OK?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ said Sylvana, wanting to scream the opposite. ‘But I tell you what. Do you think you could slip a little something into this for me?’ She proffered the glass full of orange. ‘Brandy or vodka or something. I’m getting a little bored of this goody-two-shoes routine.’

‘For your voice, yeah?’ Lynton assumed. ‘Well, I won’t tell.
I’ll be back before you know it.’

For a second, standing on her own, Sylvana felt a measure of relief. Now that she didn’t feel pressure from all quarters, perhaps
she could work out a way of getting out of this situation without hurting Helen. Or Robin. Or Donna. Or…

‘You look lost,’ said a voice.

Sylvana looked up abruptly. There was a tall, handsome man standing right in front of her, with
a shock of thick black hair and the most beautiful, violet eyes. For a second, she assumed he must be talking to someone else and turned her head around.

‘No, I mean you.’

When she looked back, he was smiling. It was the kindest smile she had ever seen.

It was a quarter to twelve and Donna was raging inside. Tonight had been hell so far. Pure, exquisite torture.

It wasn’t enough that she was
going to have to spend the biggest party night of the year watching the man she loved with his drippy girlfriend while having to smile through it all like she was oblivious. Now, thanks to good old Tone, she was going to have to share that experience with her bloody band looking on. She was going to have to pretend that she was pleased to be out with them, when she was sick of the fucking sight
of them. She was going to have to pretend to be worried if nasty Robin gave poor little Sylvana a dirty look during the course of the evening, have a fucking conference with Social Worker Helen about it and no doubt see the New Year in holding the silly cow’s hand in a taxi.

She actually considered pretending to be ill to get out of it. But in the end, she found herself hammering her bank balance
in Vivienne Westwood, picking out the most audacious outfit in there, a black-and-white rubber polka-dot dress with a waist cinched in to only eighteen inches and a hobble skirt. This, when teamed with her eight-inch patent stilettos and vertiginous hairdo – created by Louis, finished off with a white rose behind her right ear – made her look just like Cruella de Ville.

‘Let him keep it in his
fucking trousers when he sees this,’ she
had fumed to her reflection in her boudoir mirror. ‘Let him want to fuck that drippy bitch instead.’

But, nearly three hours into the party, she still hadn’t been able to put this theory to the test.

Despite the fact she had been at Tone’s side for almost the entire time they were there, and it seemed that everyone else in the entire music business had
come up to pay homage to him, there was no sign whatsoever of Vince.

Her heart had given a brief flutter when she saw Steve and Lynton coming towards them, heard them tell Tone that their singer was ‘on his way’. But that ripple of excitement had turned into a millstone of despair as she had then found herself having to endure the incessant, coarse advances of that fucking Steve for the next
two hours. Even Tone and Lynton had seemed to drift away with embarrassment and she’d actually found herself being glad of a rescue from the dreary old bag that commissioned her to write for
Time Out
, who fawned all over her new outfit for the next half an hour.

Well, the silly cow wouldn’t think it was quite so fucking
a-mayyy-zing
if she’d tried to use the lavs while wearing the fucking thing.
That was perhaps the greatest indignity of the entire evening so far – if not, her entire life. Donna couldn’t roll the fucking thing back down over her arse; the rubber had got so hot it had stuck together like glue. The toilet she’d gone into was totally devoid of talcum powder, so in her increasingly frenzied attempts to prize it back down she had managed to get two of her false nails stuck
to her backside and put another one right through the fabric. Donna had almost had a panic attack right there and then and screamed the house down. She didn’t know where she had got the reserve of strength to make herself go back to the beginning, slowly and methodically to take off all her nails, throw them in the bin, roll the rubber down gently, bit by bit and then hide the hole she had made around
her upper thigh by using her eyeliner to paint over her flesh.

She only knew that it was finally done, and she was taking deep breaths while staring in the mirror, when she noticed that the clock behind her was telling her there were only fifteen more minutes ‘til midnight.

Donna tottered out of the door. She was on the first floor landing, where Tone’s Scarlett O’Hara staircase looked out over
his hallway and the champagne fountain he’d had installed for the evening. Naturally, this is where all the champion liggers were circulating. She leaned against the railings to take the weight off her feet, presuming that Tone would soon appear to lead them all into the NewYear’s countdown.

Her eyes roamed the room, but for a minute she didn’t quite take in what she was seeing. There were so
many people down there it took a while to digest the scene properly, to work out their individual faces. But her eye was caught by the motion of someone moving through the crowd, away from the kitchen, towards the front door. Not one person, actually, but two. Someone really tall with his arm around someone much smaller, almost like he was shielding them.

Someone really tall with jet black hair.

Someone much smaller with blood-red locks.

Vince walking towards the door.

Sylvana in his arms.

Lynton had thought his luck had changed when he was finally left alone with Sylvana. But then, he also thought it would only take a minute to cross to the other side of the room and get her a brandy. However, the room was full of people and they all seemed to want to talk to him. First it was Paul,
their music publisher from Exile, roaring drunk and full of tall stories that he wanted to share. After he had extricated himself from that one and finally made it to the table with the spirits on it, there were a couple of girls in a similar state of inebriation who tried to chat him up. By the time he had got away from their bindweed embraces, filled the glass
and turned round to walk back,
he could no longer see the girl he actually wanted to be with still standing by the door.

Instead he saw her friend Helen, looking around the room in a state of panic. He hurried his way back over.

‘Oh there you are!’ Helen almost shrieked. ‘Is she with you?’

‘No.’ Lynton was dumbfounded. ‘She was here a minute ago. I just went to get another drink and…’

‘But if she’s not with you, then where
is she?’

‘Maybe she just went to the toilet?’ he suggested.

But the woman was totally panicked. ‘Oh God, I knew I shouldn’t have let her out of my sight.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Are you sure she was here a minute ago? Only it’s taken me ages to get back here and now it’s nearly midnight…’

‘Well,’ Lynton noticed the time – it had taken him half an hour to get the drink, but he didn’t want
to worry Helen any more – ‘maybe ten minutes ago. It takes so long to get anywhere in this house. But I’m sure she won’t have gone far…’

As the words left his mouth, he could hear someone ringing a bell.

‘Order! Order!’ a voice shouted from the hall.

Someone else shut off the jukebox.

‘Ten…’ people began to shout, ‘nine…eight…seven…’

Then round the corner a banshee came. Wild-eyed and black-haired,
she launched herself at Helen, grabbing hold of the lapels of her jacket, screaming into her face: ‘Do you realise what that little tart has done? Do you know what’s she’s up to?’

Lynton tried to move in to intervene.

‘Six…five…four…’

‘Get off me, Donna, what the hell are you doing?’ Helen was falling backwards.

‘Three…two…one…’

Lynton felt the fist intended for Helen connect with his lower
jaw.

‘Happy New Year!’

May 2002

Less than a fortnight after my meeting with Ray, I was on a train headed for St Albans and a meeting with Mood Violet’s former guitarist Aliester McTavish.

It was the first Saturday in May, the Bank Holiday weekend, and it had dawned so hot and sunny I’d cracked out my finest Hawiian shirt for the occasion. With my cream slacks and Ray Bans, I felt like Al
Pacino, a wise guy travelling incognito through the rolling fields of Hertfordshire. I was going to find out some old secrets, settle some old scores. For the first time since Louise left, I was actually feeling good.

The sudden heatwave wasn’t the only reason for this either. It was the line of detection that had brought me here, something I’d managed to figure out for myself without Gavin’s
help. I had been right about Ray Spencer; he was no Kevin Holme. We’d had a couple more jars after our meal that night, across the road in the Dublin Castle, where we joined the old Irishmen gathered around the tables near the long copper-topped bar, the Ghosts of Camden Past as they so nearly were these days.

Ray must have decided I was worth trusting, as he told me a bit more about his involvement
with Mood Violet and this woman, Donna Woods. She sounded like a kind of cross between Paula Yates and Janet Street-Porter and had been big news for about five minutes in the early eighties.

When the band had ended, he said, it had taken all friendships with it. Aleister had been the only one to come out of it unscathed, Ray reckoned, though the process had burned him to the extent that he never
played in a band again. He was a music teacher these days.

Yet perhaps, after all this time, it seemed he might like to set a few records straight. Or even get some kind of acknowledgement for pioneering a type of music that all the kids were so happily ripping off these days.

I’d spoken to Aleister, or Allie as he told me to call him, a couple of days previously on the phone. Thankfully, he
sounded nothing like Robin Leith. I knew that they came from the same small town on the outskirts of Edinburgh, but there was no harshness or implicit threat in his tone at all, instead he had a genial rumble. He said he would pick me up from the train station and drive me over to where he lived with his wife and kids on a smallholding just out of town. He even had the train timetable with him so
we could work out which one I would take.

But he did sound one note of dissent. ‘You’ll just be coming on your own though, mind, not with your photographer pal?’

It was more of a statement than a question, although he did sound apologetic even as he said it. ‘It’s just that my wife…well, she doesnae like him much.’

Actually, I had intended to go it alone. I didn’t think it was appropriate for
someone who routinely referred to the band’s singer as a fucking bitch to come up and have tea and cakes with the guitarist anyway, so I wasn’t surprised to hear he wouldn’t be welcome. Mood Violet were my own separate investigation, one
that I doubted Gavin would be interested in anyway. Besides, he was off on one of his jaunts for the
Sunday Times
that weekend.

St Albans station was small and
full of teenage girls tottering around in baby pink T-shirts with sparkly logos and jeans cut low enough for you to see their nylon g-strings disappearing up an inch of well-fed arse cleavage. No doubt they were all dolled up for a day ‘up West’ or whatever the local parlance was, all of them furiously texting, jabbering and chewing their nails as they went. A few youthful Jeremies, trying to disguise
themselves as 50 Cent in hoods and jeans with waistbands around the knees, loitered by the payphone, thinking they looked hard.