The Singer (42 page)

He wouldn’t let me pay for this round either, so I promised him a free copy of the book when it ever came out. His response was enthusiastic enough to wake the sleeping Brudder.

‘Bastards,’ he said, and slid off his stool, staggering bandylegged towards the Gents.

This time, when I came through the door and looked at Kevin sitting all on his own, staring sadly at his paper, I didn’t see him as the unregarded little drummer. Instead, I realised what he really was. The biggest man in Blood Truth.

‘So,’ I said tentatively. ‘I take it Vince didn’t realise the magnitude of what he did that night? Until you put him straight.’

‘That’s right,’ Kevin nodded. ‘Oh,
I sat on it long enough, like. About two months I kept that information to myself, ‘cos that were what she wanted, like. But in the end…Everything unravelled so fast after that night. Everything just went wrong. I suppose I didn’t really tell you the truth last time, about that Sylvana. ‘Cos I did hate her too. I hated her as much as Steve did, but for completely different reasons. I hated her
‘cos that bastard just swanned off with her, after he did that to Rachel,
just swanned off without a care in the world. I doubt he would have even come back if we didn’t have that tour booked in the States. And that were nightmare enough, I tell you. For a start, he brought her with him. I had to sit there on that bus, night after night, while they were simpering over each other in the corner,
thinking about that hole in Rachel’s face. Sit there while Lynton turned into a junkie and Steve turned into an alcoholic. While we got bottled off by rednecks and had the KKK threaten to kill us in Alabama. But it was him I hated most. And I let that hatred grow inside me, until finally we were alone.

‘So, yeah. After we staggered back from the States, we had to mek that album. Tony Stevens
somehow managed to banish Sylvana off premises – well, for a week, anyway. And it were all going so well. Steve smashed his guitar to pieces and stormed off in a mood. Lynton just disappeared into the night, as he so often did in them days. And then it were just me and him.

‘So that’s when I told him what he’d done. I described what it looked like in graphic detail, how I’d felt when I was waiting
for the ambulance. And how her parents had had to put her in a sanatorium to get her off the heroin habit he’d given her, hide her away in a place where no one they knew could see what had happened to her. How he had basically, totally ruined her life.

‘And he listened to this all with this scornful expression on his face, like I were a raving madman mekking this all up. Then he said, “You know
what your problem is, Kevin? You’re too soft you are.

‘You’re fucking joking.’

‘I’m not, Eddie. That’s when I lost it. God, it must have looked funny. Like a Yorkshire terrier trying to pick a fight with a Doberman or summat. And the rest, as they say, is history.’

‘Jesus Christ.’ I was at a loss as to what to say now.

‘Not really the story you were looking for, is it?’

Well, that put it
in a nutshell. ‘No. No it isn’t.’ I took a long swig of my beer. ‘So what is Rachel doing now?’

‘Not a lot. She’s still in and out of sanatorium all the time. She has her good days, when she goes back to her parents’ house, walks out on moors, draws a little bit. Then it all gets too much for her and they have to tek her away again. It’s not a life, not really. So you see now why I had to protect
her. If you really want to do her a kindness, you’d not publish any of this. You’d just tek it on board and think about whether you really do want to find him again.’

Those words followed me out of Stoke Newington, through the grey miasma of the long road home. Followed me back up to the flat and hung in the air around me.

It was horrible, and it seemed to be getting worse.

The trouble was,
the more horrible it became, the more I wanted to write it. The mystery was gaining a new momentum, and where I had been dispirited a few days ago, now I was seized by the conviction that what I was discovering was increasing in importance. I knew what I had to do next.

I had to go after Donna.

January 1981

As Tony lifted the glass to his lips, Steve noticed that his hands were shaking. Eleven o’clock in the morning and he’s got the DTs, he thought. Reminds me of my Da.

He’d never seen his boss look so rough before. Hollow cheeked, blurry-eyed, not just unshaven but with a plaster over his top lip where his unsteady hands had obviously done battle with
a razor. Steve wondered if he’d asked him down to this pub because he daren’t show his face at work looking such a fright.

Vince had been gone for a week now. And what a week that had been.

‘So you’ve finally heard from him then?’ Tony drained his whisky down in one, lit a cigarette with his fumbling fingers.

‘Aye,’ Steve winced. Of all people, he’d expected Tony to be the strong one. But the
chaos that had erupted when the clock struck twelve on New Year’s Eve seemed to have turned everyone he knew into a walking disaster.

As far as Steve could make out, it had all gone wrong at the point during the party when he’d had to leave Donna to go off for a
slash. Up until then, he had been thoroughly enjoying himself, tucking into Tony’s hospitality, pretty sure he’d be getting his oats
before the evening was out.

He’d had a wander on his way back, looked around the place a bit. Old habits die hard, and Steve’s fingers still gave a little prickle as he opened bedroom doors and cast his eyes over antique furniture and fine porcelain. Stevens’s brass had gone a lot further than any other record company boss he’d known. Far beyond old Don, that was for sure. And to think he’d once
considered Dawson the musical Don Corleone.

All this, he was sure, was not merely the result of a few successful records. This was how Steve imagined the landed gentry lived.

His perusal came to an abrupt end when he opened one door and found a mass of writhing bodies on the bed, some of whom, he gradually worked out, were the members of a suddenly famous punk-turned-pop band. They appeared
to be enjoying both heterosexual and homosexual favours all at the same time, though it was quite hard to tell what was female from what was male. Steve had never seen so many naked bodies contorted into so many ludicrous positions all in one place, never heard such moaning and groaning.

‘Can any one join in?’ he finally asked, as no one seemed to be paying him any mind.

The eyes of the most
famous member of the ensemble immediately snapped open. He looked a picture, he really did, framed between the young girl bucking away on the end of his cock and the pair of dangling, hairy bollocks suspended over his forehead.

‘Who left the fucking door unlocked?’ the pop star screeched and a few seconds of highly amusing squealing and scrabbling later, Steve found a Victorian chamber pot hurtling
towards his head. He only just dodged it in time, hearing it smash to pieces on the closing door.

Downstairs, people had started to count down the New Year. Steve followed the source of the sound, realising he’d lost his drink somewhere on the way.

Donna was not where he’d left her, but neither was anyone else. They’d all congregated around the staircase and the hall, leaving unattended bottles
and glasses all over. Steve took one look at the throng and decided to minesweep for a while rather than fight his way through. He found a half-full bottle of Bollinger and an empty glass and sauntered in the opposite direction, looking for the master bedroom. He wanted to see how Tony Baloney really lived.

Up on the top floor, another gaggle were clustered around the steps leading up to the
roof, where the sound of shrieking laughter indicated yet more inhibitions being lost. Steve walked past, strolled the length of the landing and back, casually turning door handles as he did, ready to say he was looking for the khazi if anyone asked him. But the door to every room up here was locked.

Ah well, Steve thought, at least he’s not stupid.

He stopped by the sash window on the landing
to put down his drink and roll up a fag. That done, he pushed up the bottom of the window and leaned out onto the sill, staring over Tony’s back garden. It was even more like
The Godfather
out there. White fairy lights had been strung up in the pine trees, illuminating a gravel patio full of Roman statues, all nudes and nymphs, arranged tastefully around clipped privet hedges. Oh aye, thought
Steve, bet he comes out here for his orgies in the summer time and all.

No sooner had that image had flashed through his mind than a sight appeared below him that made the roll-up drop from between his lips.

The door was flung open, casting an orange light onto the scene. Tumbling out came Tony, wrestling a wildly flailing Donna.

He put her in a headlock while he slammed the door behind
them,
then tried to drag her up the path away from the house while she pulled backwards, her heels thrashing on the gravel.

‘Get off me, you fucking queer!’ she shrieked, pummelling him with her fists.

Tony managed to drag her around the back of one of his topiaries, so that no one looking from the back door could see them. Then he grabbed hold of a huge handful of her hair, pulling her head back
and forcing her down on her knees. ‘You’ve really gone and done it now,’ he said, his voice quiet but ominous with menace. ‘All I done for you, girl, and this is how it ends up?’

Donna panted and writhed in his grasp, her eyes flashing with defiance even as her teeth gritted with pain.

‘Fucking homo queer,’ she yelped.

‘Why, thank you, darling,’ Tony’s face twisted into a snarl, ‘I’ll see you
live to regret that remark’ Then he started pulling her again, away under the branches of a tree, away from Steve’s sight.

Steve started legging it downstairs, pushing his way through the throng. As he reached the main stairway, he could see people hurrying into their coats, hear snatches of conversation about a fight and the cops coming.

But all he could think about was Donna being dragged
across that garden. Just the way his Da used to drag him off for a hiding. He skidded into the kitchen, ready to punch Tony Stevens through the nearest wall.

And saw Lynton trying to get up off the floor, a vaguely familiar woman with short, spiky hair helping him, pressing an ice pack to his forehead.

‘What the fuck?’

‘It was Donna,’ said the woman. ‘She just went mad. She came down here screaming
her head off and punched him clean out.’

Steve’s gob fell open.

‘Ambulance on its way,’ someone shouted behind him.

Lynton was shaking his hands, wobbling around on unsteady legs.

‘I don’t need no ambulance, man,’ he groaned.

‘Oh, fucking hell’ Steve just managed to catch him as he pitched forward out of the woman’s arms. ‘Lerrus get clear, can you?’ he shouted at the gawping moon faces pressed
around him. ‘Lemme get him somewhere he can lie down.’

‘I’ll take his legs,’ the woman said. She was the only person in the room who seemed capable of rational thought. Together they got him into one of the lounges, hoisted him onto a sofa, scattering pissed liggers like confetti as they went.

After that, the woman disappeared and ambulance men appeared in her place. They flashed a pen torch
into Lynton’s eyes, put a neck brace round him and lifted him onto a stretcher.

‘It’s probably only concussion,’ one of them said to Steve. ‘But let’s get him out of here, eh?’

There was a lot of screaming going on in the hallway as Steve followed them out, a mélée of bodies hustling for the exit. For a second he caught sight of the woman who had helped him, red-faced and animated in argument;
then of Tony’s face in the kitchen doorway, white as a ghost as his party dissolved around him.

The back of an ambulance seemed like a quiet place of sanity after that.

They took Lynton to hospital because he’d hit his head as he’d fallen on the floor and they needed to be sure he hadn’t fractured his skull. It was dawn before they discharged him, with a huge headache and a lump on his jaw the
size of a duck’s egg. Steve called them a mini-cab from the numbers pinned up around the payphone in reception. He’d been drinking the vilest coffee he’d ever tasted from the vending machine for three hours by then. As they staggered into the freezing cold beginning of 1981, Steve felt like the most sober man alive.

Lynton crashed out as soon as they got home, but Steve couldn’t rest. There was
something wrong with the house too. No
one was in it. There was a strange, nasty smell lingering on the air.

It suddenly occurred to him that he hadn’t seen Vince at the party. Nor Rachel. Nor Kevin. And there was no sign of any of them here either. Every room was deserted. In the kitchen, there was a huge burn in the carpet, the source of the noxious odour.

He remembered Rachel moving the iron
back and forth, back and forth, and a horrible feeling of impending doom settled in Steve’s stomach. But the ironing board had been packed away, the iron itself standing cold on the sideboard.

He was sitting on the stairs, still trying to puzzle out what the fuck had gone on, when Kevin came through the front door at midday.

‘What the fuck...?’ Steve began.

Behind his wire-rimmed specs, Kevin
was hollow-eyed with exhaustion.

‘Don’t ask,’ he said, and went to walk past him up the stairs.

‘Kevin?’ Steve caught his arm.

Kevin shook his head. He looked like he’d been crying. ‘I’ll tell you later, Stevie. I can’t think straight any more. I’m going to bed.’

Steve dropped his arm and put his head in his hands. He must have dozed off for a while, perched on the stairs like that, but then
Steve always had the ability to set like concrete when he went to sleep. The next thing he knew was Kevin tapping him on the elbow with a mug of steaming tea, saying: ‘Thought you might like this.’

‘Ow!’ Steve came back to consciousness with a nasty crick in his neck, wondering for a moment where on earth he actually was.

‘What? Oh, er, thanks, Kevin.’ The aroma of the brew woke his stomach
before his brain was fully engaged. ‘Fucking hell, I’m starving!’