To Be Someone (18 page)

I spluttered with outrage. “No! Of course I’m not! Jeez. What’s the matter with you? When have any of us had time to have dates and stuff in the last two years, anyway?”

The boys exchanged glances implying that they’d somehow managed to find the time. Thankfully, David kept quiet in the back of the van. I was worried for a minute that he’d be tempted to chime in with the benefit of his firsthand experience. But he never even had the chance to, because Justin was like a terrier with a toy between his teeth.

“You don’t hang out with anyone from school, girls
or
boys, H. I’ve never seen you put any names on the guest list, except your folks once or twice. Why are you such a loner?”

I misheard him. “I’m not a loser! How dare you call me a loser!”

Justin grinned, making a winding-up motion with his hands.

“For your information, you bunch of mutons, no way am I a lesbian. And I
do
have friends, Mary Ellen Randall and, er, Margie Westerburg, but they just aren’t into our sort of music. And my best friend, Sam, is coming to stay with me soon. She lives in England, otherwise I’d be hanging out with her the whole time. Satisfied?”

“Oooh, Sam! She wears the pants in your relationship, does she?” sang Joe from the back.

“Shut up, Joe, shut up, Justin. I’m really sick of hearing your voices. Turn the radio on, can’t you?”

Justin smirked maliciously, knowing that yet again they had succeeded in embarrassing me. He did switch it on, though, and after a few minutes of chasing up and down the dial, he stopped twiddling the knob when we heard the final bars of a Jonathan Rich-man tune.

It faded into something else—a song that we all, in one split second, thought, That sounds familiar, what is it? before we recognized it with screams of joy.

“Turn it up!”

“Oh my God, it’s us!”

“Louder!”

“Stop the van!”

Quickly, I pulled over to the side of the road. Cranking the volume up full blast, we opened the windows and let the sound of the first track on our album pour out over the crisp, colorful hillside, accompanied by our voices yodeling along in unison. We were bouncing around with so much excitement that the van shook from side to side, and passing motorists stopped looking at the scenery to wonder what on earth was going on. We’d heard Blue Idea tracks on the radio before, but only when we’d actually been at the station at the time, giving interviews. It was indescribable, the sensation of hearing on the radio, unanticipated, a composition that had come from my own head. As the last note approached, we shushed one another and listened attentively, leaning our heads toward the radio to hear better, even though the speakers were in the doors.

“Shhhh, it’s ending.”

“Yeah, we know, Joe, we were there, too.”

“Shh, see if he says anything!”

There was a moment’s pause and we held our breath. Then the DJ came on air. I would have known this was a college station even without him playing our song, because of the sound of his voice. Every college DJ in the country seemed to have the same voice, languid but slightly hesitant, making it sound as if they were smoking reefer while all the records played. Which they probably were.

“Yeah, um, that was a band with a new record out. They’re called, ah, Blue Something—wait, I’ve lost the sleeve—oh, here. Blue Idea, kids, out of Freehold, New Jersey, and that was ‘This Is Your Blue Idea,’ the first track from their brand-new album, Switch On, out on Ringside Records. Yeah … Actually, they seem, you know, really cool. Check it out. And next up, here’s Japan with ‘Ghosts.’…”

Every time I hear “Ghosts” now, David Sylvian’s autumn voice washes over me like falling leaves, and I see layers of things: peach and red, curried bedspreads, the head-spinning of tequila, hazy sexual pleasure, the purity of unplayed vinyl, and the first thrill of success.

SAM’S TREACHEROUS BLONDE

S
OMEBODY WAS LURKING AROUND MY HOUSE. OVER THE YEARS
I
had of course come across quite a few assorted lurkers, loomers, anoraks, and saddos, but fortunately I’d never had my very own stalker. I’d known plenty of other artists who’d had “privacy-invasion issues,” though. Adam Ant once told me that he had someone living in his roof space for months, spying on him through holes drilled in the loft floor—God, how did he not notice? Ever since I heard that, I had examined my bedroom and bathroom ceilings through a magnifying glass. And what about poor Björk, with the nutter who blew his brains out on home video for her? Nightmare.

So, no peepholes in the plasterwork, but an intermittent, undeniable lurky sort of presence, enough to make me feel extremely nervous. A shadow past the side of the dining-room window, as if someone was trying to peek through a gap in my muslin curtains. A fresh footprint in the mud next to the garden path, which couldn’t belong to the bin men because they’d been there two days earlier. A dry, bottom-shaped patch on my swinging garden seat, when the rest of the garden was wet.

One night after Mum had returned to New Jersey, I was sitting at my refectory table sorting through boxes and boxes of photographs, fanning them out in cascades around me, wondering how to begin to make sense of them all. It was part of a kind of “get my affairs in order” campaign.

I’d sorted through the Hel-Sam Box of Important Stuff as soon as it had arrived from Cynthia, and pulled out some letters and
Bluezine
s, which I intended to copy into the manuscript. The whole correspondence, plus accompanying photographs and press features, etc., was a great source of Blue Idea memorabilia. Might be worth quite a bit after I’m gone, I thought. The rest of the stuff was more personal, and pretty much as I’d described to Cynthia: a gruesome collection of baby teeth, Sam’s beloved dormouse key ring, the aforementioned four-leaf clover, my second favorite Barbie (the top favorite still Missing in Action, last seen at Salisbury Fair in 1977)—oh, and a big Genesis badge, which I won at the same fair. I’d worn it on my coat lapel for ages, thinking myself quite hip and unusual to have such a badge. It was only after an older kid at school asked me if I had all their albums that I discovered Genesis wasn’t just a book of the Bible.

But personal as it all was, I found that these things, though important, didn’t move me as much as, say, hearing two minutes of a song that reminded me of Sam. This could reduce me to an emotional jelly, as could the sight of her tiny spidery handwriting—but her key ring was just a key ring, however much she’d prized it.

I looked at all the photographs in front of me. It was odd, looking at a lifetime’s worth of little shiny Helenas: teen Helena, tummy pooched out over the top of tight jeans; Helena in a yellow bikini ten years later, the same stomach shrunken and bronzed; Helena scruffy, chewing her cuticles; Helena wealthy and manicured. I wondered if I scanned all these different images into a computer, would it come up with the one definitive Helena? And if it could, what would she be like? Thirty-one years of a digital me, assembled from the sum of my parts and the snaps of my holidays. I was sure she would look better than the real thing, this wrinkly, one-eyed, lonely failure.

The telephone rang.

I let the machine pick up. Unless it was Sam, calling to say hi from the Other Side, or Toby, I wasn’t interested.

But the machine clicked off again without recording a message. I had a sudden hopeful vision of Toby cradling the receiver between his neck and his chin, leaving the scent of his aftershave on the earpiece, a feeling so strong that I got up and dialed 1471. “The caller’s number has been withheld,” said the robot inside the phone, and I was disappointed that I couldn’t even smell a trace of Toby.

Sam was in at least eighty percent of the photographs, always smiling: Sam in shorts; on a bike; with Cynthia; with me. There was one of us at about nine, topless, arms round each other’s shoulders. Her chest was flat, brown, and smooth; mine lard-white and flabby, the whisper of cotton wool breasts budding. It looked as though Sam was carelessly pinching my pudgy nipple between thumb and forefinger.

The phone rang again. Again the caller declined to speak into the machine.

I put the Cocteau Twins’
Heaven or Las Vegas
on, loud, but it wasn’t loud enough to drown out the phone ringing a third time.

I toyed with the idea of hiring a bodyguard. Perhaps that would add another twist to the Plan. The police might think that I’d been kidnapped, or assassinated, if I suddenly disappeared after employing security. No, I thought. Keep it as simple as possible, like Richey from the Manic Street Preachers did. No fuss, bye-bye. Gone.

But in the meantime, I didn’t want to be trussed up and knifed to death by a stalker, not before the manuscript was finished.

I picked up a blurry photo of two people kissing, and peered at it for a while until I realized it was Sam and Justin. God, I wished she were here to show it to! What a pity it was out of focus. If it had been sharper, I’d have mailed it to Justin with a note: “You and Sam—remember her now?”

There was a picture of me with Sam and Sam’s traveling buddy, Andrea.
Ondrea
, she pronounced it. It was taken in New York right before the two of them set off on their travels, their gap-year round-the-world trip. Even thinking about it now, jealousy twisted like chicken wire in my guts. Andrea looked so smug in the photo. She was tiny and blond and brittle, with big, high
Baywatch
breasts, and I remembered how hard it had been for me to donate a smile to the camera, when this horrible blond interloper was about to take Sam off to the other side of the planet.

It was a funny sort of jealousy, one I’d had to grow up with ever since leaving Salisbury—that Sam was having experiences in which I should be sharing but wasn’t. And the Australian trip brought up in me an all-consuming resentment that, now that we were old enough to make our own decisions, Sam had decided to go off without me, to have adventures of which I was no part. I’d tried to explain it to her before she left, but she’d laughed.

“But you’re on the road all the time! What’s that if it’s not an adventure?”

“Well, come on the road with us instead!” I’d replied.

How secretly gleeful I’d felt, then, six weeks later, when Sam had called collect from Australia to ask if she could come and spend the rest of her six months off with me after all, since she and Andrea had fallen out. Blue Idea was about to set off on tour again, but I instantly arranged for Sam to fly to Seattle and meet us there.

When she arrived at our hotel, I’d listened, tutting and head-shaking, to her tale of woe and false friendship. Apparently the trip had gotten off to a great start in Sydney: They’d both gotten waitressing jobs, and had rented a flat with a three-month lease. Then one day a beautiful tanned surfer with luminous lime shorts and a washboard belly had sauntered into the café where Sam worked.

Sam had fallen, instantly and passionately, in love, and nearly passed out with excitement when the Sex God (whose name was something ridiculous like Dwayne) had asked her out that night. She raced home after her shift and tarted herself up like she had never tarted before, rabbiting incessantly to Andrea about how wonderful he was, how gorgeous, how sexy, and consequently how nervous she was feeling.

“What if he’s late? What if he stands me up? What if I’m left sitting there all night like a prat? What will I do?”

Andrea had magnanimously suggested that she go with Sam, just in case Dwayne didn’t show up. Once he had, Sam could introduce Andrea and Dwayne, then Andrea would push off, pleading a prior engagement, and leave them to get on with their date.

Only it didn’t quite turn out like that. Sam and Andrea arrived at the venue on time, and were twirling on bar stools, sipping daiquiris, when, just as Dwayne walked in, a woman sat down on the stool next to Sam. Before she had the chance to tap the woman on the shoulder and say, “Sorry, this seat’s taken,” Dwayne had sashayed over and, with a glowing smile and hello to Sam, perched his two walnut-tight buttocks on the stool next to Andrea.

Sam waited and waited for Andrea to leave, but she didn’t. Sam kept looking at her watch and saying, “Golly, Andrea, you’d better hurry up, you’re going to be late for the cinema,” but Andrea just shook her Hollywood hair and said, “Oh, actually, I don’t fancy that film tonight after all.” Then Sam had waited for Andrea to go to the ladies’, so she could casually change seats with her, but Andrea’s bladder was evidently extra capacious that night. Instead of including her in the conversation, Andrea gradually and subtly moved her shoulder around so she almost had her back to Sam. Sam had sat miserably sipping her third cloying pink drink and wondering how best to go about cutting off Andrea’s breasts.

Eventually Sam got up and said, “Well, I’m off, then. Anyone coming?”

Dwayne and Andrea had looked at the floor and muttered, “Just stay for one more, I think, don’t you?”

The next morning when Andrea returned to the flat, wearing the same clothes as the night before and with a red stubble-burn rash around her mouth, Sam was packed and ready to go.

When she asked Andrea, tearfully, how she could have done such a thing to her, Andrea’s only defense was, “Well, he was just so gorgeous, and it’s been such a long time since a man paid me that much attention.… ”

Sam was on the next plane to Seattle, and I had a worm of vindication wiggling guiltily in my heart for months afterward.

I decided not to use the story of Sam’s treacherous blonde in my manuscript. It was tempting but not really relevant to my own life. Instead I would just record the facts: Andrea would get a mention, but that was all she merited.

I managed to get most of the photos into some kind of order, chucking away all the overexposed and blurry ones (except the one of Sam and Justin), and filing the others under headings like
BAND
and
SALISBURY
and
SAM
. As an afterthought, I pulled out three of my favorite shots of Sam and put them into the Hel-Sam box, on top of everything else. I wanted them to be the first thing anyone saw when opening the box.

When I was getting ready for bed that night, I thought I heard a heavy dull sound, like a stumble, in the back garden. It must have been quite loud, for my one ear to pick it up. Creeping into the spare room, I watched for a long time through a gap in the curtains but saw nothing except the dusky shapes of trees and silhouettes of shrubs. There was usually a movement-triggered security light on the patio, but the bulb must have blown, for it remained dark.

I wondered again whether to call the police but suddenly felt too tired. Plus, dialing 999 might lead to publicity, and I couldn’t risk that, not yet. I’d just have to take my chances with the stalker.

Nonetheless, I double-checked that all the doors and windows were locked, made sure the alarm system was switched on before I went to bed, and slept with a rape siren and a baseball bat under my pillows.