Dead Girl Walking (22 page)

I got the impression she was losing herself in the show, like she had set about losing herself in our work together on the bus, and had the sense that she was giving everything she had because what would be left over wasn’t going to be worth much anyway. So it was no surprise when she headed straight back to the hotel and an early bed.

When I’d worked out the time difference I figured it wasn’t too late to give Keith a call, and managed to catch him on what I intended to be the final try after several failures before the show.

‘Monica!’

He sounded delighted to hear from me, energy and enthusiasm in his voice igniting the same in me.

‘I hope it’s not too late to call. We just got off stage.’

‘No, I was really hoping you’d ring. I got a promotion.’

‘That’s brilliant.’

‘I know. All those extra hours paid off. They’re starting a new department to develop … well, never mind the technical stuff: they want me to head it up.’

‘Fantastic. You must be really juiced.’

‘I’m minted is what I am. This is going to be worth an extra five grand a year basic, but it’s the opportunity that matters. It’s a platform for my personal career growth. We can really start planning for the future.’

‘How about planning a holiday?’ I said.

‘Well, yeah, of course. With the promotion under my belt, I was thinking we could go to Thailand in the autumn, like you always said you wanted.’

‘God, yes. That would be amazing.’

‘It would give us the chance to take a step out of things and take stock, look to the long term. I’ve got real stability now.’

We spoke for ages, almost until my battery was out. I kept to myself the fact that the autumn dates he was talking about were already being pencilled in for more touring to build on the expected momentum around the new album.

The sound of his voice only made me realise how lonely I felt when I finally hung up, so I was in the mood for some company. I joined Scott, Damien and Angus for some late-night tapas, red wine and, for some, dangerously flowing Spanish brandy.

When I asked where Rory had got to, I got awkward looks and half-answers, suggesting another of his solitary pursuits that they assumed I would have a problem with. I wasn’t judgemental towards Rory, I just couldn’t help wondering why he didn’t have any concerns about the desperate girls throwing themselves into one-night stands with him.

I was sitting on a banquette beside Damien, with Scott and Angus opposite. Damien ordered for everybody, talking comfortably and, as far as I could tell, flirtily in Spanish with the waitress. I wondered how he became so fluent.

A few bottles and a lot of dishes in, we went around the table on the subject of best and worst live acts we had seen. It had been Scott’s suggestion, and he spoke with evangelical enthusiasm about Augustines before dumping a bucketload of scorn upon some
X-Factor
Live abomination he had been obliged to attend with his then girlfriend.

Angus cursorily praised Green Day but had considerably more enthusiasm for ripping into Chvrches.

‘Fucking sell-out electropop shite. Two miserable cunts standing behind synths like it’s the fuckin’ eighties.’

His words were a bit slurred, and in his drunken bitterness I detected more than a hint of jealousy.

Damien held forth on the consistent merits of the Manic Street Preachers, but wouldn’t choose a worst, resulting in serious protest.

He wasn’t having it, though.

‘Thing is, I’ve been down pretty low in this business. I know how much effort it takes to put on
any
show, and I know what depths you can plumb just to stay in the game, just to be playing. I mean, once upon a time, sure, there was almost nobody I didn’t believe I was better than, or would one day
be
better than. But when this game teaches you humility, it doesn’t pull its punches.’

‘How low are you talking about?’ I asked, now all the more anxious to avoid my own contribution, as I didn’t feel I had yet earned the right to slag anybody off.

‘I spent nine months playing in a show at a theme park here in Spain,’ he answered. ‘This hideous eighties and nineties hair-metal pastiche about vampires and zombies. Three performances a day in high season, inside a Mayan-themed amphitheatre with a bloody rollercoaster shaking the stage every three minutes. When I was in Discolite and The Descendants, it was a real buzz when a stranger recognised me. But at the theme park it was my biggest fear that somebody might come up and say: “Hey, last time I saw you, you were playing the Barrowlands.”’

He was laughing as he spoke, but I could tell he was talking about his personal long dark night of the soul.

‘It was a total brass neck, but it was a gig, the only way I could still get paid to play at that time. That’s what I told myself anyway, but there comes a moment when you wonder whether there’s more dignity in admitting it’s all over. In my case it was playing in low season in front of nine people, four of whom left after ten minutes because their toddler got scared by the noise. I’d like to say I left at that point, but I hung on another three months.’

Bored of Damien’s gloomy confession, Scott and Angus started pouring more venom on despised targets.

‘How did you last nine months?’ I asked Damien.

‘There was a girl involved,’ he said, turning a little in his seat to face me more directly. ‘This dancer called Natasha, from St Petersburg. We were in the same show, and very much the same boat. We were both past thirty, and we both knew we were there on the way down. We were very close, but…’

He sighed, toying with a piece of bread, soaking up the last of the sauce from a dish of
patatas bravas
.

‘Maxi got in touch and said he was in a new band that was looking for a lead guitarist. He told me Heike was something special. I had three days off and spent two of them getting over to Glasgow and back: horrible flight connection times because it was high season and everything was full. I was barely in town long enough for the session, or audition, as I suppose it was. It was long enough, though, for me anyway: one afternoon playing with Heike and I knew that was my ticket out for sure – if she wanted me.’

Damien tipped half his brandy into his mouth and let it sit there for a few moments before swallowing and inviting the burn.

‘Maxi phoned me on my mobile at Luton, ninety minutes into a six-hour transit, told me I was in. The check-in wasn’t even open for my next flight, so I just went to the desk and booked myself and my guitar on to the first plane back to Glasgow, and I was in Maxi’s flat before my flight to Spain would even have taken off.’

‘You never went back?’

He shook his head, an apologetic yet firm look on his face, like he knew I wouldn’t approve but he’d make the same decision every time.

‘Natasha knew why I was going to Glasgow, and what that meant. That’s how it was between us. If I had come back we’d have gone on same as before, nothing said. I wish I could have taken her with me, but I guess we all wish we could rescue somebody. We both knew that if either of us got a chance of something better there would only ever be room on the lifeboat for one.’

Still unable to compete with how little sleep my bandmates could get by on, I left at around two, and was surprised to be joined on the short walk back to the hotel by Angus, of all people, normally one of the hardiest insomniacs in the party. He had seemed pretty hammered as he cackled over the table, so maybe he did actually know his limits. Had I downed what he’d skulled over the past few hours, I’d have vomited my own bodyweight.

The air must have sobered him up a little, as he seemed a bit less slurred of speech. But I was wary of him, as his mood was still pretty dark, and I found his archness even more unnerving because he normally came across as completely happy-go-lucky.

I had watched him early on in the evening, playing his solo opening set. He did it when the schedule permitted, which meant the opportunities were very much in Heike’s gift. There was an obvious correlation between, for example, Heike catching him and Scott doing coke in Newcastle, and the soundcheck overrunning that night so that there was only time for the main support act once the house doors were open.

When he did play, he would run through five or six of his own songs with an acoustic guitar, a loop station and a stomp box. Building up the loops and rhythms, it could sound like there was a full band backing him by the time the vocals started, switching between registers impressively.

I had only managed to take in his performance a few times so far, but on each occasion I saw the charismatic player Heike had sparked off of back in their schooldays. It wasn’t hard to see the scorn he had been pouring upon Chvrches as a way of deflecting his regrets at pissing his talent up the wall in his adolescence instead of honing it like Heike, Scott or even me.

He was humming something I recognised, and it took me a moment to work out that it was actually the song Heike and I had been jamming on the bus.

‘Lightning in a bottle,’ he said. ‘That’s what you’re trying to do: catch lightning in a bottle.’

‘Feels like that, yes,’ I said, agreeing just to keep the peace.

‘You can be brilliant and not get lucky, never catch the lightning. Or you can be super-lucky. One song on a fuckin’ telly show and suddenly you’re a fuckin’ millionaire.’

He gave a tipsy laugh at this, but I sensed only resentment, and I was done putting up with his pissed self-loathing.

‘Catch on to yourself,’ I said. ‘If that were true, then every song that got used on a TV show would make its singer a millionaire. It takes a special song to have the impact “Do It to Julia” had. It takes a special singer.’

‘Oh, she’s special. Nobody knows that better than me. I’ve been in the passenger seat for most of the journey. But I’m just trying to warn you: she’s selfish and ruthless too.’

‘I’ll consider it noted,’ I said, picking up pace now that the hotel’s awning was in sight.

‘You’re not hearing me,’ he insisted, grabbing me by the sleeve and stopping me on the spot. ‘I’m telling you this because I’ve been where you were today. She’s the most manipulative person on the planet, and it’s when you think she’s not manipulating you that you’re truly in her control. She’s like the fucking … morning sun,’ he slabbered. ‘She’ll make you feel you’re harnessing power you never knew you had, that you can be so much more than you thought. But in the end she’ll take as much as she gives, and then she’ll take some more. She’ll steal from you. You think what you did today means you were writing together? Don’t you think Maxi did the same thing – jamming, improvising, suggesting. Don’t you think I did too?’

His eyes were wild, his words drunkenly overemphasised like they were a new gospel.

‘Maxi says he’s got something up his sleeve, says he’s gaunny get his pound of flesh, but I don’t know. Damien’s been around the block, and he hitched his wagon to Heike because the minute he saw her, he knew she was a juggernaut. Heike will get wherever she wants to be, but she’ll leave bodies in her wake.’

The Brauereihallen had an altogether more vibrant feel about the place upon their return. It was just after nine and there was a gig in progress in one of the larger halls. Parlabane reckoned it must be the support band’s rhythm section he could hear throbbing behind the heavy wooden doors, as there were dozens of people wearing the headline act’s T-shirts still milling around in the covered concourse.

Mairi had made a few calls as they walked up Friedrichstrasse, getting someone back home to pave her way with the venue staff by vouching for her role as Savage Earth Heart’s manager. Fortunately that distinction had currency here, the band having left the Brauereihallen a couple of years back on better terms than they had Palast.

Another factor in greasing the wheels and getting them both sorted out with passes was the fact that tonight’s troubadours, Altar State, were being chaperoned around the Continent under the Bad Candy imprimatur.

Parlabane’s intention was to get the venue staff and road crew to have a look at Bawjaws’s photo, but Mairi insisted they stop for a bite to eat as she hadn’t had anything since Starbucks.

‘I had a Mississippi mud muffin,’ she told him. ‘Tastes exactly like it sounds. She mimicked a southern accent: ‘
Unleash your inner fat-ass, with a Mississippi mud muffin
. At the time I thought it would be weighing me down all day, but I’m glad I had it or I’d have faded ages ago.’

‘Aye, if only they could cut out the fat as effectively as they cut out their tax liabilities,’ he muttered.

Mairi ignored him and helped him order from a food stall. ‘Helped’ meaning she overruled his request for currywurst and chips, which he would have to confess he thought was the when-in-Berlin thing to order. He didn’t know what it was actually going to entail.

‘It’s disgusting,’ she assured him. ‘Almost no natural ingredients.’

‘You know, I thought it was one of the consolations of being separated that I wouldn’t have my dining choices dictated by someone else’s health obsessions.’

‘This is not about health, it’s about taste. If you want a giant sausage and chips, have a bratwurst or a paprikawurst if you like it spicy. Just don’t have the currywurst. Trust me on this: it’s like eating a sliced-up plastic dildo smeared in warm ketchup.’

‘And you would know this how?’

She ignored that as well.

They found places at the end of a trestle table otherwise bustling with noisy adolescent Altar State fans. Mairi had ordered them both something called flammkuchen, which seemed to be a very thin German version of pizza. He caught a glimpse of what he deduced to be currywurst in front of one of the lads further down the table, and decided he’d dodged a bullet there. Or dodged a sliced-up dildo, anyway.

Their dining companions were cheerful and boisterous, and between the language barrier and the intent manner in which they were yelling all communication back and forth, the effect was to make Mairi and Parlabane’s end of the table seem private and secluded.

Two girls in the middle of the group began singing one of Altar State’s anthems, belting it across the table into each other’s faces in accented and occasionally mistaken English.