To Be Someone (11 page)

The door opened after a pause that seemed, even to us, discreetly lengthy. Grace came in and gave us both a very hard stare.

“Kate’s mother was just wondering where you’d got to,” she said to Toby, disapprovingly. “She wants you to nip out and get some toiletries for Kate.”

Toby didn’t dare stand up. He cleared his throat noisily. “Right, thanks. I’ll be there in a second.”

Grace retreated without another word, and Toby and I looked at each other mutely.

“Well, at least it wasn’t the mother-in-law,” he said with a straight face. I leaned over to kiss him again, but he groaned and pushed me away.

“No, please, don’t, Helena, or else I’ll never be able to … to get myself together,” he said, gesturing crotchward.

“Do you think Grace will say anything?” I asked.

Toby shook his head. “It’s none of her business. Anyway, I’m sure she wouldn’t. She didn’t even see anything, so it would only be speculation. For all she knows we might just have been playing an extra-exciting game of Animal Snap.”

“That’s
Strip
Animal Snap,” I said, and we laughed at the idea.

Eventually Toby was able to stand up, unencumbered. He touched my hand lightly. “See you later, then.”

“Will I?”

“I hope so.”

The door closed quietly behind him, and I was left once more thinking how incongruous it was to feel lustful in a hospital. All my other emotions, however, fit in quite well with the surroundings: confusion, guilt, longing. Grief.

Elvis Costello and the Attractions
OLIVER’S ARMY

I
QUICKLY WORKED OUT HOW TO PLUG THE BASS INTO THE AMP
,
and what all the knobs and dials did. I also bought a book called
Bass Guitar for Beginners
, but did not pay it much attention because of its marked predilection for the dreaded scales. Instead I figured out my own method of playing, using a lot of chords as if it were a regular six-string guitar, my original choice of instrument. I loved the deep, almost sinister sound that the strings in harmony made. Physically, it was not easy to learn, and for weeks I played wincing with pain as the hard strings cut into my tender fingers. I dipped my fingertips in vinegar every night to try to toughen them up, and thereafter always associated that sharp smell with my early attempts to get to grips with the unwieldy guitar.

The theory, however, came easily to me, and I learned very quickly which notes sounded good with which others. Even though I didn’t do formal scales, I could soon perform rhythmical runs up and down the strings. I started playing along to the LPs in my collection, as well as composing more and more religious songs. I was in my element.

Finally, a few months after I started playing, I was allowed to teach the choir one of my songs at our Thursday-evening practice (a better number than my first creation, my songwriting mercifully maturing as rapidly as my guitar skills). We sang it in church that Sunday, with me accompanying on the bass. I didn’t get the standing ovation I had envisioned, but I got a healthy round of applause, and a warm glow of pride inside my chest. It was the best moment of my life.

I began taking my bass on the bus with me to school on certain days so I could practice in one of the three music rooms in the basement. They had quite good equipment down there—bigger amps and even some effects pedals. I had told the music teacher, Mr. Penfold, that I was learning to play, and he encouraged me to get involved with the school orchestra. I told him that I wasn’t quite ready for that yet, so he offered to give me a spot of coaching when he had a free lunchtime. It was very kind of him, and his occasional input did help me with the more technical and theoretical aspects of playing. The additional lunchtime practices really helped, too.

I became even more of an anomaly at school. Prior to my conversion I had overheard a boy refer to me as “that kinda cool, fat English chick.” I was aloof and withdrawn but was not really given a hard time, even about my chubbiness, because of the inherent cool-factor of my accent and charity-shop chic. At the age of fifteen, when the other girls were wearing bright pink blouses, rah-rah skirts, and stilettos, I dressed almost exclusively in black, or in men’s secondhand clothes. A few of the football-jock types threw the odd comment in my direction, but I never rose to the bait. I just thought they were all stupid. After I started going to church, and was seen at school associating with the “God-botherers,” people decided that I was even weirder, and much less cool than they’d thought. I knew this, but couldn’t have cared less now that I was bolstered up by the protective cushion of my beliefs. Yet when word got around that I played bass, the curve on the graph of my acceptability began to climb again.

One day I was sitting on the school bus, my guitar case propped up against the seat next to me, reading an old copy of
Melody Maker
that Sam had sent over to me a while back.

The boy behind me leaned over my shoulder. “Wow,
Melody Maker
. Awesome.”

I twisted my head back to look at him. He was cute, with big brown eyes and floppy blond hair. Not many active zits, just the purple shadows of past ones scattering his jawline.

“Yes, my friend in England mails them over to me.”

We got into a conversation about the English music scene and ended up talking all the way to school. The boy said he was heavily into Elvis Costello and Ian Dury and the Blockheads. He told me that his name was Justin Becker, he was in the year above me, and he had a band himself. He didn’t usually get the bus to school, but his bike was in the shop. He asked me lots of questions: my name, how long I’d been here, if I’d been to any gigs (I hadn’t), how long I’d been playing bass for. I answered him methodically, trying to keep cool but feeling, for the first time ever, the rush of adrenaline derived from fancying someone. Not very optimistically, I wondered if he was a Christian.

When the bus dropped us off outside the school gate, Justin said, “Well, nice to meet you, Helena. See you around, I guess. Good luck with the bass.”

He was gone before I could reply. I felt a bit let down that he hadn’t even invited me to see his band play. I thought about him all day, and at recess I asked Mary Ellen what she knew about him.

“Justin Becker? Oh, he’s totally the heartthrob of the twelfth grade. He always has a bunch of girls running after him. I didn’t know he had a band. Still, it figures, I guess. I hear he’s very arrogant.”

I was delighted to have been chatted up by a heartthrob but despondent that he had so many suitors already. I decided not to tell Mary Ellen that I fancied him. I didn’t think she would understand.

Except for glimpses from a distance in the hallway, I did not see Justin again for a couple of weeks. After a few days I put him out of my mind, remembering my vow of chastity and my commitments to the church. One lunchtime, however, I was down in the practice room plugging away on the bass when I felt someone’s presence. I turned around and saw Justin lolling in the doorframe watching me, chewing on a toothpick and running his fingers affectedly through his thick blond hair.

“Oh, hello!” I squeaked, embarrassed. I had been in a hurry that morning and had not realized until I got to school that I’d only applied mascara and eyeliner to one eye. I kept the naked side of my face turned stiffly away from him in the hope that he would not notice.

“Hi. Hey, you’re not bad, you know. What was your name again? ”

I was crushed that he’d forgotten. “Helena Nicholls,” I said, a little crossly.

“Want to be in my band? My bass player just left.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. A real live band! Now, that was something I could write and tell Sam about.

“What sort of band is it?” I asked, playing it cool and trying not to appear as though my neck was in a brace.

“Well, you know, it’s like, I’m the singer, right? And, well, actually, that’s it right now. The guy who played bass left because Coach was gonna kick him off the football team unless he came to more practices. And we nearly got a drummer, but, like, his parents wouldn’t let him get any drums. But it’s gonna be awesome! There’s this other guy, Joe, who might join also, and he plays keyboards. So whaddaya think?”

Sounds pretty lame to me, was what I thought. “What kind of music?” I said instead.

“Well, sorta like Blondie, although with no girl singer, of course, or The Stranglers. We don’t have too many songs at the moment, mostly cover versions really. You write? ”

I nodded, hoping he wouldn’t ask me what sort of songs I wrote. I wasn’t sure about this whole thing.
Half-assed
were the words that sprang to mind. However, the idea of being in a band, particularly one that was just Justin and me, was undeniably appealing. I would get to go to his house and everything.

“We could have a rehearsal and see how it goes,” I said tentatively.

He smiled and the blood rushed into my cheeks, making me feel dizzy. “Great! How about tomorrow night? ”

Luckily that wasn’t Bible study or choir practice. “Fine. Where?”

“Seven-twelve Indiana. Say, six o’clock?”

“Okay.”

“Okay, see you then.” He slouched back round the doorframe out of sight, and I heard his rubber-soled sneakers squelch away on the parquet floor. I took a deep breath, breathing in the strong school smell of adolescents and antiseptic, and swallowed down my excitement. I’d just give it a go. Maybe I could even adapt a couple of my songs so they weren’t about God. It would be easy enough to do, and I would love to hear them performed by a real band. I felt faintly traitorous at this thought, but quelled it by reasoning to myself that it was all additional practice for me, practice that would better serve my mission of praising the Lord through my gift of music.

The rehearsal was not a huge success. It was just the two of us, in the Beckers’s basement games room, and at first I was so nervous being in Justin’s presence that I could not seem to play anything properly. We had a stab at “Oliver’s Army,” reading the lyrics out of Justin’s
Elvis Costello Songbook
, but Justin wasn’t very good at playing his guitar—he couldn’t get the chords right—the song sounded truly awful without drums, and his mum kept coming down to complain about the noise.

Justin was a total poseur, and sang as if performing in front of thousands instead of a quivering cat and his harassed-looking mother. He did have a wonderful voice, though. After a while he abandoned the guitar and we sang the song in harmony, with just my bass to keep time. It didn’t sound too bad, and I began to be a little more cheered. We decided that if we could find a drummer and a keyboard player, we might have something. I told him that next week I would bring in a couple of my songs for us to try. At that point Mrs. Becker reappeared to say that my father had arrived to collect me, so we called it a day. As I packed up my bass and amp, I asked Justin if the band had a name yet.

“Blue Idea,” he said firmly, smiling his gorgeous smile at me. “We’re gonna be huge. You wait.”

I wondered if that “we” included me, but I didn’t have the nerve to ask. Instead I said good-bye to Justin and his mother and, much to Dad’s irritation, sang the harmony line to “Oliver’s Army,” loudly, all the way home in the car, my brain filling in the crashing jubilant staccato of the piano chords and Elvis’s mellow tenor:
“ ‘And I would rather be anywhere else, tha-an here to-daaay. Woah, oh, oh, ohhh-oh, Woah oh-oh-oh-ohhhhh.’ ”

The following week I went back again. When I arrived, there were two other boys in the basement, drinking Dr. Pepper and horsing around with Justin. I instantly felt even more shy and very out of place, especially since Justin showed no signs of introducing me. I got on with tuning up my bass until finally the shorter of the two, a nerdy-looking character with thick black-rimmed glasses and tufty black hair, came over. “Hi, Helena, I’m David,” he said. “That’s Joe over there, in case you didn’t know.”

I waved hesitantly across the room to Joe, who was trying to slamdunk a foam basketball into a wall-mounted hoop. He was incredibly tall and lanky, with a neck and wrists that seemed to go on forever, and he had heavy metal braces all over his teeth. He waved back at me in a friendly fashion. I vaguely recognized both him and David from school.

After a while I got fed up with waiting for something to happen, and just started to play a bass riff over and over again. Eventually David sat down on a stool behind a shabby-looking three-piece drum kit and picked up the beat, Joe wandered over and started playing some melancholic accompanying chords on a little Casio keyboard he’d brought with him, and Justin managed to add a reggae-style guitar skank over the top of it all. It didn’t sound half bad. We bashed away for almost ten minutes until the tune died a natural death and we all petered out, ending it with a cacophony of crashing drums and writhing, frantic guitar chords (luckily Mrs. Becker was out that day). Justin was windmilling his right arm round and round as though he was Pete Townshend onstage at the Rainbow, until I was afraid he might try to smash up his guitar on the three-quarter-sized pool table.

In the ear-ringing silence that followed we all looked at one another, grinning and flushed with the success of our first-ever jam session. Justin and Joe exchanged triumphant high fives and all three boys whooped and yelled with excitement.

After that we started to play together regularly, quickly learning to belt out versions of our favorite pop and New Wave songs with great conviction. I also taught them the melodies of several songs I had written, substituting the words “my love” for “my Lord” where appropriate. I didn’t think anyone guessed that they had ever been anything but simple rock songs about being in love, or finding one’s way home. (I’d deleted the line that had originally explained that “home” was in fact “heaven.” It worked a treat.)