The Singer (5 page)

It was after four and the lights blinking on up Camden Road, the last dribbles of pink fading into the grey sky. It was freezing too, the kind of cold that seeps into your bones, embalms you from the inside.

I knew it would be cold in the flat too. I trudged past Sainsbury’s, past the queues for the bus overflowing
onto the pavement. The other side of the road all second-hand and cut-price shops, the one last Irish bar that had been left given a Hoxton makeover six months ago and now standing empty. Someone had been shot there the night it opened and it had remained closed for business ever since.

Past Camden Road station, idling the last few steps to my front door. The churning in my stomach combined with
a feeling of dread. I looked up to our flat, first floor, above the fruit and veg shop. Blinds down. Dark panes reflected back nothing but the street lights.

I breathed a sigh of relief, fumbled in my jacket pocket for the key. Even waved a cheery ‘Hello!’ to Ali in the shop as I opened the door, ever the urban gentleman, never the dirty stop out.

Pressed the hall light on, ignored the pile
of junk mail on the spindly table at the bottom of the stairs, creaked up to the flat. Inside it was colder than out. Spotlessly clean and ordered and empty.

My eyes swept round the room anyway. It was minimalist, the way we both liked it. Well, Louise especially. Black Ikea furniture, stripped floorboards, aluminium blinds. Her concession to ostentation a bookcase full of thick titles, philosophy,
sociology, fine art and old movies – still not sure which part of her studies I made up. My concession, the widescreen TV and DVD player. The reason the flat was so cold, I’d rather spend my money on toys like these than central heating.

In the kitchen, a Duellit 1950s style toaster, a Smeg fridge, all the other things that looked good and so were more important than feeling comfortable.

A Polaroid
of me and her tacked to the side of the fridge. Smiling, laughing.

Ten years ago. When the librarian and the libertarian still made a winning combination.

She didn’t even bother to leave notes any more. The kitchen table was empty, but for a fruit bowl containing a shriveled-looking lemon.

Me and Louise today.

I stooped to turn on the fan heater, pointed it towards my desk, fired up the G3.
Filled up the kettle and put it on to boil.

The answerphone was blinking in the corner.

But it was just the routine Sunday night call from Mother, sounding, as usual, like a battle address from Margaret Thatcher. I didn’t have the will to return it.

By the time the kettle had boiled, the G3 had powered itself up. It wasn’t a bad machine, considering I got it off the IT department at work with
a shitload of software installed all for nothing. But the new iMacs looked so much better. So small and neat and Futurist.

It was still too cold to take my coat off, so I sat down with my instant coffee, clicked on the Internet Explorer icon.

She wouldn’t be able to phone here now, even if she wanted to. Her or Mother.

I went straight to Google. Typed in four words:
Vincent Smith Blood Truth
and watched the pages come up.

The first hit was called
Careless Love: Doomed Rock Relationships.
Underneath it listed Kurt and Courtney, Sid and Nancy, Paula Yates and Michael Hutchence,
Vincent Smith and Sylvana…

A chick happened, mate
.

‘You and me both,’ I said aloud as I clicked onto the link. The
site was done up like a pulp magazine, with lurid headlines in
LA Confidential-style
typefaces.
I scrolled down pages and pages about Sid and Nancy and Kurt and Courtney, the authors deliberately comparing and contrasting the women, their blonde hair and bombed eyes, clear implication:
deadlier than the male
. Skipped past Paula and Hutch, a story far too depressing for Sunday afternoon turning into Sunday night. I’d always secretly fancied Paula, couldn’t fault Hutchence for that, not like
hapless Sid and Kurt.

Finally, under the headline:
Kiss of Death: A Gothic Love Story,
a big picture of the couple sprawled across the back seat of an old Cadillac. Vince with a pompadour oiled and gleaming, black Tuxedo and a blood-red shirt, cigarette dangling from one hand, the other arm around the shoulders of the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.

She almost looked like a doll. Little
porcelain face and red bow lips, huge green eyes peering up from thick lashes, framed by a Ronnie Spector-style bouffant of bright red hair. Red velvet dress with a white lace collar, the sort they put on those antique Victorian figurines, looking tiny and surreal in Vincent Smith’s embrace.

Vincent and Sylvana Smith, just married, Paris, January 1981 read the caption. Only six months later,
Sylvana would be dead…

The hook was too good to resist. I read on:

Largely forgotten now, in the post-punk era, Vincent Smith was the self-styled King of Nothing and his band Blood Truth made the most searing and unholy racket of anyone around. Their live shows were legendary for starting riots: Smith did his best to incite the volatile mix of punks, goths and skins that made up the ranks of
his following, with seemingly half his audience turning up more for the prospect of a fight than the music. Just as well, legend has it that the longest show they ever played lasted thirty minutes.

Blood Truth were formed in Hull in 1977, by Sex Pistols-mad guitarist Steve Mullin (who always emulated the playing style of his
hero, Steve Jones), bassist Lynton Powell and drummer Kevin Holme. They
met Smith, from Doncaster, at a Sex Pistols gig in that town in August of that year. He was two years older than the then sixteen-year-old upstarts and able to relocate to Hull, where he immediately took charge of the fledgling band, picking out a name and writing the lyrics for their songs in earnest.

Smith was obsessed with Americana, in particular Elvis and the writer Flannery O’Connor, from
whose classic novel
Wise Blood
he was inspired to take band’s name. The Memphis King had been dead for only a week when he met up with Mullin and co., and Smith saw this as his sign to resurrect the fallen Presley in his own performance as the anti-establishment Elvis. Coupled with Mullin’s natural flair as a guitarist, this gave them a different edge on the post-Pistols sound than any of their
rivals from the industrial North. Blood Truth’s other secret weapon was Powell, a brilliant musician who had studied jazz trumpet for years before meeting Mullin and reputedly learned the bass overnight in order to play in the band. Even by the time they had scraped together their first single ‘Blind Preach/Dockyard’ in January 1978, they had the beginnings of a distinctive sound that was all the
stronger for their disparate influences. They also looked brilliant – along with Siouxsie Sioux, Vince Smith can genuinely be traced back as the first gothic role model.

Initially managed by local entrepreneur Don Dawson, who put out their first records on his own Dawsongs label, Blood Truth set about conquering the North in ’78 with a succession of gigs that saw them rise from supporting the
likes of The Damned and The Stranglers to their own headline tour before the year was out. A string of further singles accompanied their gradual rise, and the mini-LP that spawned their legendary track, ‘King of Nothing’, fell into the hands of new London-based label Exile. Ever the champion of all things batwinged, they signed Blood Truth early in 1979 and quickly recorded their first full-length
LP
Down in the World
, which rapidly made them the darlings of the music weeklies. Their propensity for
outrageous behaviour claimed yet more column inches and a front cover for NME in which Mullin persuaded a young woman to be tied to the front of their tour van half naked as their figurehead, a photograph that nearly landed the paper in serious legal trouble.

More albums followed.
Ruined
(1979),
The Crooked Mile
and
From the Bottom of the Glass
in 1980, when the band hit a creative and commercial high, denting the bottom of the official chart and staying at Number One in the Indie charts for six weeks solid.

It looked as though 1981 would be the year of their commercial breakthrough, but fate had another idea: Sylvana Goldberg.

Sylvana, an American Jewish princess from a rich New Jersey
family, had come to London to follow the Pistols in ’77 and never left. She’d met a young Scottish musician, Robin Leith, at a Damned gig, fallen in love and formed the band Mood Violet with him and guitarist Aliester McTavish, a schoolmate of Leith’s.

Thanks to the fact that Sylvana (who generally dispensed with her surname) sounded as exotic and eerily childlike as she looked, Mood Violet soon
attracted a cult following. Leith’s inventiveness with synths and atmospheric guitar style lent them an assured accessibility beyond the grasp of most of their goth peers. By the time Sylvana met Vince, at a New Year’s Eve party hosted by Exile records’ founder Tony Stevens, Mood Violet were a breakthrough act who’d had three singles in the Top 20.

According to legend, the attraction was so instant
that Vincent and Sylvana slipped away from the party within half an hour of meeting – leaving her hapless then fiancé Robin Leith stranded over the canapés…

The sudden vibration of my mobile in my jacket pocket startled me out of my reverie. I checked the number and sighed, giving in to the inevitable.

‘Hello Mother,’ I tried to sound cheerful. ‘Yes, just walked through the door five minutes
ago…’

‘You’re on that Internet again, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘How much
money is that costing you? And this mobile phone – you know I hate calling you on it. It’s twice the price of British Telecom…’

‘I’ll ring you back on the landline, shall I?’ I tried not to grind my teeth as I made a bookmark of the Careless Love website, turned the remote access off.

‘If you don’t mind, dear.’

She always
got her way.

Live and loud from Guildford, thirty minutes of further interrogation followed. How was work? Fine, Mum. I’m lining up another trip to the States. Why do I like it so much there? Just, well, it’s different, isn’t it? I know they have strange values, Mother, and what that President Clinton got up to and how he got away with it. Terrible, yes, quite so.

And on and on, until she got
to the really excruciating bit, the sore spots she always stuck her voodoo pins into with unfailing accuracy.

‘Louise not with you then, tonight?’ A thoughtful pause as I tried to mumble out an answer, followed by a swift: ‘That why you’re wasting all that time on the Internet?’

‘Actually I’m doing research, Mother,’ the annoyance resounding down the line, giving her the reassurance of my discomfort
she so dearly needed. ‘I’m thinking about writing a book.’

‘Really?’ her tone poised between scepticism and sudden interest. ‘What kind of book would that be? A novel?’

‘No,’ I should never have started this. ‘A biography…’

‘Has someone asked you to ghostwrite their memoirs?’ her tone getting fruitier, more expectant.

‘No, it’s not authorised. It’s just an idea at the moment. Probably nothing
will come of it.’

‘Who did you say, dear?’ Not letting me back down again now. ‘Anyone we know?’

I pictured Dad in the background, hovering like a little grey ghost, nodding earnestly at her every exclamation.

‘No, no one you would have heard of.’

‘One of your musician friends, then?’

‘Yes, Mother. Vincent Smith. Ever heard of him? He was very big with skinheads and punks in the eighties…’

‘Really?” she said again, this time it sounded more like a sigh. ‘Well, that’s lovely for you, dear. And have you a publisher?’

‘I’m seeing someone tomorrow,’ I lied. ‘I’ll tell you all about it when there’s actually something to tell. Now, I’m going to have to get off now and get myself some dinner…’

Shouldn’t have said that either.

‘She isn’t there, then, Louise?’ Mother scenting blood. ‘I
didn’t think she was. Is there something you’re not telling me, Edward?’

‘She just went to Sainsbury’s to pick up a few things,’ I blurted the first thing that came into my head. ‘She’ll be back any minute to get the dinner on, that’s what I was trying to tell you.’

‘There’s no need to shout, dear.’

‘Sorry Mother.’ No, there’s every need.

Teeth grinding spontaneously. ‘Ta ta for now then?’

‘Well, enjoy your dinner,’ she concluded, her voice saying she knew it was actually going to be a bowl of Crunchy Nut cornflakes, eaten alone. ‘Give my love to Louise.
When
she gets there.’

‘I will. And give mine to Dad. Bye now…’

I put the phone down feeling fat, useless and one hundred years old.

Still freezing inside this room.

My breath hung on the air.

Still empty.

Interminable Sunday
night blues coming down.

After Mother’s interrogation, it was nearly five o’clock, but there was no way of telling how long Louise had actually been out. Seeing as I hadn’t bothered to either come home last night or phone her to tell her I wasn’t, there was no way she was going to extend me any such courtesy. This was designed to make me suffer.

A gremlin in my head said: What if she didn’t
come home last night either?

I pushed it away, banged my hand down on the mouse and brought the G3 back to life. Hit remote access status to reconnect and put the kettle back on as it loaded up. I actually could have done with Louise’s fictitious trip to Sainsbury’s. That was the last of the milk, which meant not even cornflakes on the menu, unless I could be bothered to go downstairs to Ali’s.

Which I couldn’t. Just have to eat them dry, I supposed, taking the packet back to my desk. Back to the eighties.

‘What followed sounds like an unholy amalgam of
Spinal Tap, Fatal Attraction
and
Panic in Needle Park’
, I read on:

Leith was none too pleased about the sudden exit of his girlfriend and quickly mounted an escalating campaign of stalking, threats and attempted violence against Sylvana
and Smith. Their immediate reaction was to get married in Paris, announcing they were to relocate to the City of Lovers to get away from the ‘drag’ of the London scene. This in turn didn’t go down too well with Vincent’s band, but Blood Truth were contractually obligated to a month-long tour of America before anyone could actually settle down anywhere.