Altar Ego (16 page)

I tried not to think of him as I opened the international edition of the
Guardian
, delivered a day late to the local trattoria. Until, that is, Zack’s face peered back up at me from page three. The caption declared him a ‘generic rock god in the making’, all ‘cascading hair and thrusting crotch’. The article went on to describe his lyrics as ‘Shakespeare on Acid’.

The abiding irony of all censorship is that any attempt to ban artistic expression produces publicity which only serves to promote mind-bogglingly massive sales. Reports of the court case had given Zack’s record the boost it needed to go into orbit. From
then
on I couldn’t escape him. Publications as diverse as
The Face
and the
Daily Telegraph
were falling over each other to declare Zachary as a ‘voodoo high priest’, the ‘new Lenny Kravitz’, whose lyrics ‘captured the nihilistic sentimentality of the Post-Diana, Pre-Millennium mood.’

There was no escaping him on satellite television either. There he was, giving the microphone the time of its life.

But fans weren’t just mad for his music and macho posturing. The perfection of his buttocks was commanding, oh, 10,000 words a week. His posterior had a career of its own. It had its own publicist for Christ’s sake.
Rolling Stone
listed him as one of the hundred most sexy men on the planet. Amidst the pretentious answers from other shortlisted bachelors, Zack elliptically listed his hobbies as ‘not shaving’.

I still had a leather jacket of Zack’s that I’d worn on the plane to Italy. I found myself touching it, reverently slipping my hand inside its cool interior, adoring the frisson it gave my palm, as though Zack himself were about to lift my hair and shiver-kiss my neck. I started to get an ache inside.

When Julian managed to tear himself away from his submissions and commissions and approached me amorously, I now found myself pushing him off with promises of ‘Later’.

‘Today later, or
some time in the new millennium later
?’ he finally asked after the third brush-off. God, my
worst
fears were confirmed – I’d turned into a Fellatio Refusnik. And so I kept having sex with Julian, but my heart wasn’t in it. It was as though a party was being thrown on my body to which I hadn’t been invited.

Over the rest of that long, cool summer I realized, quite slowly, slow as rising damp, that I’d made a mistake. It was the same rising damp which had rotted the foundations of my parents’ marriage. I could almost smell it.

Matrimony, I thought, needed a little something to break the monogamy.

16
To Love, Honour And Betray

I KNOW I’D
prayed in my marriage vows not to be led into temptation. But let’s face it, I could find the way blindfolded.

‘Don’t you think discretion is the better part of middle age?’ Kate said when I showed her the three tickets I’d just received in the mail to see Zack’s new retro rock band playing at Wembley.

‘I’m just curious. I mean, what harm can it do?’ It was a rationalization nimble enough to qualify for the parallel bars finals. ‘Go on, come with me.’

‘I’d rather remove my own IUD with garden shears.’

‘Where’s your sense of adventure? He’s a star now, you know.’

‘A star, you big dag, is a gaseous state appearing as an apparently fixed luminous point.’

Exactly, I sighed to myself. A heavenly body.

‘Just make sure you wear protective clothing. And if you pick up anything contagious, don’t come back to the bloody office.’ She was still mad at me for getting married behind her back.

‘Please come, Kate. We’ll stay downwind,’ I promised.

‘Oh, all right. But only because your hormones are in a bad neighbourhood, Rebecca, and it’s best not to let you venture in there alone.’

‘Oh, my
God
,’ she said, eyeballing me as I tumbled into the back seat of Anouska’s car two days later.

‘What? Not subtle enough?’

‘Subtle!’ Kate looked me up and down – pausing with particular disdain at my thigh-high leather boots. ‘In
that
outfit, you might as well be wearing a fluorescent T-shirt with “Root me now, you Cum-Coaxing-Fuck Pig!” written on it.’

‘Two men. You’re so lucky, doll!’ Anouska took a swig of vodka. Since marrying Darius she’d come to see alcohol as a major food group.

‘I do
not
have two men. I’m married. There’s a dead-bolt on my knickers. If I ever get serious about a
rock star
, I want you to take me into a dark room and slap me repeatedly until I come to my senses. Okay?’

‘Speaking of husbands, Anouska, have you actually seen yours since the wedding?’ asked Kate. ‘You know you’re getting a little old to have an imaginary friend.’

Anouska floored the accelerator.

Once safely past the scalpers and inside the vast
auditorium
, we were embalmed by the crowd.

‘Do the words “cat” and “swing a” mean anything to you?’ Kate asked as we fought our way to our freebie seats. The crowd had already begun the stubborn, staccato cry of ‘Zack! Zack! Zack!’

The bass guitar started up like a Boeing 747 – with the audience as its flight path. There was the pheromonal rush of the lead electric guitars, then the nerve-jarring electronic squeal of the synthesizer. In time with the percussive undercurrent, the whole audience executed the kind of jubilant jump normally associated with winning the Lottery.

A guitar solo slithered across the stage. A cartwheel of light spurted from the wings … and then there he was, undulating into the spotlight. With a great roar the crowd convulsed towards him. I felt a delightful throb of expectation not far from my naval.

‘Oh my God, doll,’ gasped Anouska. ‘Could his pants be any tighter?’

Zack gave a petulant yowl – he wasn’t just performing; that was a testosterone tornado out there. His body was pure energy; solidified light. I tried not to drool like Pavlov’s dog. His voice was strong, raw. He’d mixed musical genres like pizza toppings … soul, rap, rock. But the lyrics were consistent – assassinating all in their wake.

He prowled closer to the crowd. In the muffled blue light, the writhing audience looked like an octopoid creature. The sensation of peering into a rock pool was
heightened
by the sea anemone of swaying arms. Fans reached for him, then, as soon as Zack touched their fingers, retracted, enraptured.

I jumped as we came under scrutiny from the random gaze of the spotlight. Beneath its Cyclops surveillance I realized, with a sudden chill to the spine, that we were the oldest people in the audience.

Towards the end of the hypnotic set, he spoke for the first and only time in the microphone, besides the obligatory ‘Hello, London!’ and ‘It’s great to be here.’

‘Becky, this song is for you, babe.’

My heart lurched. It trampolined, somersaulted and pogoed about in my chest.

Despite the syntactically bewildering title, ‘Love You Much’ was a slow song about love, or ‘Lerve’, rather, and how opposites attract. Not exactly Sondheim (looking good in latex seemed of more importance than an understanding of iambic pentameter), but there was an aching, inarticulate eloquence – a melancholy hunger to his words that burnt. I felt the familiar stirring of steamy anticipation. All around me, people were lip synching to the lyrics. Lyrics about me. Was this every girl’s dream or what? I thought marriage had inoculated me against Zach’s charms, but everything about him was thrillingly irresistible. A male Lorelei, he lured me on to his rocks.

In a collective whoosh, the audience were up on their feet, dancing on their chairs for the final song. It wasn’t so much an auditorium as a
shrine
. Zack and
his
band were only the support act, but just being in Wembley bathed them in a deified light. There was an epileptic lighting effect – and then he’d gone. Evaporated. No encore.

The lights came up abruptly. The doors opened, disgorging the rock congregation into the bars.

‘Jesus, doll,’ Anouska gushed, as we filed down the stairs. ‘Where’d you find
him
? A male-order catalogue?’

‘You seem a tad underwhelmed, Kate …’

‘What do you want me to do? Discharge small firearms into the air?’

‘I loved the song about you, doll,’ Anouska thrilled. ‘It really lodges in your head …’

‘Yeah,’ said Kate, ‘like a migraine.’

‘I think the band is way ahead of its time …’ Anouska enthused.

‘Or maybe just late,’ amended Kate, sulkily.

A bouncer with a black pompadour inspected our ‘Access All Areas’ passes before escorting us backstage through a tangle of cables and wires, thick and treacherous as eels. It was so crowded in the band’s dressing room that the only way to survive was by holding our cocktail glasses ten feet above our heads … when I say cocktail, what I really mean is toxic defoliant. One sip and our tonsils were ricocheting around our upper brain lobes. The air was charged with emulation; as pungent as Rotty’s
aftershave
, which assailed me shortly after our arrival.

‘Jesus Willy Christ. What thuh fuck are you doin’ here?’

‘Nice to see you too.’

‘Shaddup. I could’ve pressed GBH charges, yer know, yer loony bitch. Now stay away from my boy, yer little shit weasel.’

’I really don’t think that’s up to you,’ I said, spying Zack. The sight of him took my breath away. He was ploughing through the leather jackets and lycra jumpsuits like Moses parting the waves.

‘Remember me?’

We held each other as though it were freezing instead of ninety degrees in there.

‘Tell me, is that a guitar you’re carrying, or are you just pleased to see me?’

He laughed, a deep, wicked laugh with a promise of unmentionable sex acts in it. I broke free to introduce him to Kate and Anouska.

‘So
you’re
the one who defies description,’ Anouska purred, flicking her hair. Anouska was a flick-teaser from way back. It Girls saw hair auto-manipulation as part of their sexual allure – not, like the rest of us, as dandruff-distribution.

Zack extended his hand to Anouska, who wrung it enthusiastically, and then to Kate who regarded it with the ocular zeal one would give a maggot in a jam jar. She shook Zack’s fingers with limp reluctance and said sarcastically, ‘I’m so nice to meet you.’

I elbowed her hard in the ribs. ‘Don’t worry about her,’ I told Zack. ‘She’s
Australian
. Australia had a rough childhood, you know.’

But Zack just laughed and took my face in his hands. ‘I’ve missed ya, Becky … I’ve missed sayin’ yer name. I love the gentle sound of yer name. I love to put my tongue around it.’

Which reminded me of something
I’d
missed – that anaconda tongue of his.

‘Your songs are amazing, doll.’ Anouska was now follicular-flicking up to seven times per second.

‘My songs are sex with you, Beck, set to music.’

I tell you what was amazing – the fact that he could say lines like that without making me want to throw up. No. It made me want to do other things all together …

‘Why did you jest go an’ dump me out like that?’ Zack demanded, hurt.

‘You told Rotterman!’

‘Hell, you told
yer
friends, didn’ cha?’

I looked at the fixed smiles of Kate and Anouska. Beaming like deranged orang-utans, they made for the bar.

‘Becky, I need you. Yer different from all the other chicks I meet an’ all …’

I glanced at the hordes of young women in awed orbit around the band. It looked like a training class for those innocuous, smiling female quiz-show sidekicks – ‘Ladies and gentleman, a
car
.’

‘No wonder. Most of
these
women look as though they just crawled out from under a rolling stone … probably Mick.’

‘Yer make me think, yer know what I’m sayin’? And I’ve been thinkin’ about this long and hard …’ Oh God. Did he have to choose those exact words? ‘An’ I wantcha to move in with me.’

‘
What?
’ What was wrong with men all of a sudden? It must be the oestrogen in the drinking water or something. Overnight every man in the world wanted to commit all over the place.

‘Yer make me happier than a dog with two dicks. I love yer, goddamn it.’

‘You’re a musician. Musicians don’t love. Love is just a four letter word …’

He ran his thumb down my cheek. Two seconds and he had me humming like a stereo amplifier. I began to give myself over to the narcotic inertia of lust. But then my wedding ring nagged at me from my third finger and I pushed him away.

‘I can’t break up with Julian. Not now.’

‘Why not? … Yer don’t love him. End of story. If yer loved him, you’d have married him.’

‘I did.’

‘Do
what
? Sweet Jesus.’ He reeled away from me. ‘Well, yer
have
to leave him now. I ain’t gonna be some married lady’s boy toy.’

‘I can’t just
leave
him …’ I gulped for air.

‘Are yer happy to be where yer are when yer close
yer
eyes at night an’ when yer open ’em up in the mornin’?’

‘Oh, let’s start with the easy stuff.’

‘Why are you Brits so goddamn strung out to bein’ miserable? You’re in Happiness Denial.’ He turned me to face him. ‘Be my destiny, Beck.’

‘You know the judgement of a man willing to be seen in public wearing lamé loafers cannot really be trusted,’ I said, mock-insouciantly, treading on his toes.

He stared at me intently as he rolled up his sleeve. There, in amongst a clump of barbed wire, a tattoo of my name coiled sinuously around his upper arm.

‘I wanna be yer man. More than I wanna play Madison Square Garden, even.’

Oh God. So corny … So
horny
. What the hell was happening to me?

‘Why are yer so scared to commit? … Most babes wanna be head over heels in love, yet you just want the heels over head bit.’

I took a step back which was when Rotterman propelled someone who
wasn’t
frightened to commit, into my place.

The Suicide Blonde (she dyed by her own hand – actually, this girl’s hair couldn’t get back to its roots without a genealogist) was all of nineteen. Her sequinned boob tube and lycra hot pants (believe me, this was one girl who really
could
say ‘read my lips’) was a look that didn’t quite come off … but definitely
would
later. Probably for the
whole band
. She gave Zack the kind of kiss you need a lifeguard for. I felt a stab of jealousy.