To Be Someone (2 page)

I cut him off. “What do you mean, if ever? ”

“Well, um, I understand that your hearing is damaged, as well as you being, erm, physically impaired. If that didn’t return to normal, then … to put it bluntly … there’s no such thing as a deaf DJ. I’m afraid you couldn’t possibly drive your own desk anymore.”

For someone so nervous, he went straight for the jugular. Bastard. It was hard to disguise the loss of my eye, but I hadn’t wanted anyone to know about my deafness. Obviously there was no such thing as patient confidentiality, no matter how high the hospital bills were.

“Whoth doing my thow at the moment?” I asked jealously.

Geoff picked up and replaced several of my Get Well Soon cards, without looking at the messages. “Ralph Porter,” he said, almost defensively.

I exhaled with disgust. Ralph Porter couldn’t DJ his way out of a wet paper bag. I was about to inform Geoff of this, but he plowed on.

“So I’ve come here with a proposal for you, Helena. You take as much time as you need to get better, and then when you are, there’ll still be a job waiting for you at New World. I can’t let you go back to the breakfast show, but I’ll give you a regular night slot.”

Oh no, not the graveyard shift after all my hard work. No.

“But if my hearing returnth to normal, then thurely …?”

I tried hard not to plead, but failed. How could I do a request show at two
A.M.?
The big audience was what made it work so well—telling your stories to the whole of London. I even had bumper stickers saying
HELENA LET ME TELL LONDON MY SONG
. Who would care in the middle of the night, when the only listeners were night watchmen and drug-addled losers? It just wouldn’t work.

But Geoff was getting into his stride, possibly becoming used to the dreadful sight of my scarred and bruised face.

“I’m sorry, Helena, but it’s not as simple as your health. You wouldn’t believe the amount of flak I’ve had from the press and the watchdogs, about allegations that you and Justin were on cocaine at the UKMAs. Frankly, you’re lucky I’m
not
firing you.”

“You can’t prove anything,” I muttered sulkily.

“Let’s hope not, for all our sakes. Personally I don’t need proof—I was at the same table as you that night, remember, I saw what you were like.”

He got up, still holding the flowers. They dripped a spiteful puddle of water onto the floor.

“I’m sorry, Helena. I know how hard you’ve worked. I’ll give these to the nurse to put in a vase on my way out, shall I? Let me know if you want to take the job, whenever you’re ready.”

A BEACH AT LOW TIDE

T
ODAY I LOOKED IN A MIRROR FOR THE FIRST TIME. INTENTIONALLY
, I mean, not just the accidental glance in the reflection of the window at night, or like when the towel covering the mirror in the bathroom slipped as I was washing my hands (I made Nurse Grace rig it up there as soon as I was well enough to get myself in and out of the en suite). I’d turned away instantly without letting myself get a proper look, but even that split second was enough to inform me that, yes, I was in fact a dead ringer for the Elephant Man.

But that morning Grace had said, “Ooh, Helena, you look so much better. The swelling’s really gone down. Once the stitches are out, you’ll almost be back to normal.”

I had more movement in my jaw every day, and the dressings on my face had been reduced to one big one where my eye used to be. Physically, I was on the mend.

The better I got, the more my vanity began to return. I made the nurses wash my hair (even though it hurt like mad to lean my head back) instead of tying a scarf over it, because it had gotten greasy enough to fry eggs on. Plus I became aware that my breath smelled foul. I hadn’t been able to clean my remaining teeth—ugh—since the accident. Mouthwash alone didn’t quite seem to hit the spot. I didn’t think anyone except me would care (Mum—well, she used to wipe my ass, so I was sure a spot of halitosis didn’t bother her; the nurses—ditto), but that wasn’t the point. Thankfully a dentist was booked to come in and cap my stumpy teeth at the end of the week, which meant I’d be able to talk normally again, too.

This sudden resurgence of interest in my appearance made everyone very pleased with me, including the psychotherapist whom Mum summoned to my bedside twice a week to tell me that a spot of depression was Normal and To Be Expected. They all thought that it meant my gloom was subsiding and I was returning to my old self. But I was depressed
before
the accident! I felt like shouting.

Once or twice, though, I did allow a minnow of optimism to flash in my chest. Perhaps it would be okay, perhaps I could be normal again. But the minnow always swam off again instantly. I’d always be half-blind and scarred, my deafness still hadn’t healed, and Sam would always be dead. Sorry, folks, I thought. It’s only vanity.

I’d been afraid to look at myself before, but now I felt that I had to know how bad it really was. On some people scars could look quite distinguished. Suitably psyched up, I shuffled into the bathroom and closed the door. Pulling the cord to switch on the light, I held my breath and moved toward the towel veiling the mirror. I remembered my old face with affection and regret, like a lost love. How my only previous gripes about it had been the beginnings of those lines that Homer Simpson has, the ones that run down from nostril to mouth on each side, and faint wrinkles on my forehead even when I wasn’t frowning, like a beach at low tide.

Feeling like Dorian Gray, I closed my eyes and twitched the towel down.

Oh. My. God. If that was an improvement, I must have been unrecognizable before. Tears flowed down my bumpy, discolored face as I stared at it; it was bristling with stitches and striped with skin grafts. My formerly wonderful nose looked like the model for a Cubist painting. One of my eyebrows had all but disappeared, and I didn’t even dare examine the ridiculous teeth—the ulcers peppering my tongue told me how jagged they were.

The whole effect was as if someone had taken all the bits of my face off and then reassembled them without following the instructions properly. And my forehead was more wrinkly than ever. Basically, I was pig-ugly.

I did not stop crying until just before my doctor’s visit two hours later. When he came in to check my progress, I made a last-ditch attempt at optimism.

“So, once all this heals up, I will look
kind
of how I looked before, won’t I?”

The doctor gave me one of those rueful upside-down smiles and took my wrist between his fingers to monitor my pulse.

“Well, yes, of course,” he said doubtfully.
“Kind
of.”

THE PLAN

I
‘D BEEN LYING IN BED, LISTENING ONE-EARED TO RALPH PORTER’S BREAKFAST
show through my Walkman headphones, but after only five minutes I couldn’t stand it anymore. The show was testosterone-soaked rubbish, and hearing it in mono was making my head ache. I clicked off the radio and instead stared one-eyed at the dust motes sailing around in the morning sunlight, wondering how old flecks of carpet, dandruff, and naval fluff managed to look so sparkly and beautiful. I wished I could shrink down to that size—pure, uncomplicated, free. I couldn’t think of anything better.

Then the dust motes reminded me of my favorite movie soundtrack,
The Big Blue
, which was my “touring album” in 1988, at the height of Blue Idea’s success. It was such a wonderfully mellow record; I’d played it through headphones on tour buses and private jets across the world whenever I wanted to transform from a world-weary lump of exhaustion to a tiny light atom, floating blissfully about in space.

I imagined myself phoning up my own breakfast show and requesting “Deep Blue Dream” from
The Big Blue
. Would I play it for me? Yes, I thought, if I described to London exactly how I’d felt back then, reclining in all those luxuriantly upholstered velour seats, being waited on hand and foot, in the days when I was unscarred and in demand. I should have been reveling in the attention, but Sam had been lying ill in hospital at that time, hovering wraithlike between dreaming and death, and there’d been nothing I could do except worry.

In the remembering, I tasted the bubbles of American Airlines’s mimosas on my tongue, felt the slippery texture of the linen napkins at the Four Seasons in Tokyo, saw the sun rise and set through so many airplane windows. I heard the screams of fans in fifty different countries, how they made my name sound new in each different language. And I remembered how nothing had mattered to me except Sam’s recovery. Behind it all, the tape of “Deep Blue Dream” spooled softly, nostalgically, in my head.

The pain of my losses stabbed me suddenly. My eye, my Sam, my job, my looks—all gone. It surprised me how much it hurt to lose my job. Only Sam’s death hurt more. I didn’t want to do a two
A.M
. show. I didn’t want to do a show that wasn’t about people’s memories, their music.

But I couldn’t just slink away in disgrace. I don’t
do
disgrace, I thought. There had to be some other option. I thought about what I really wanted out of life, what exactly it was that I’d been working toward all these years.

Eventually, what I came up with was me, Helena Nicholls,
being somebody
. Not as a songwriter or band member or even as a DJ, not as a friend or girlfriend or daughter, however important all those things were, but as me. I wanted people to remember my name with admiration, not scorn. Not “Oh, her, she was that DJ who got high and smashed her face up—and didn’t she use to be in some eighties band? ”

And right now I was in serious danger of meeting that “didn’t she use to be” fate. Helena Nicholls, made a prat of herself and was never seen again.

So the situation required drastic measures.

A plan started to form in my mind, gathering its genesis around itself like a snail shell’s twirl, tighter and tighter, until all my ducks lined up, quack, quack, quack, in an orderly fashion, and I thought, Yes, now I know exactly what I’m going to do.

I’ll tell Geoff Hadleigh I’ll accept his offer of a job, I decided, and I’ll tell him that my hearing has recovered, whether it has or not. Starting from now, I’ll make a list of all the records that have played behind my life,
my
requests, and write down, in detail, exactly why I’ve picked them. A life’s soundtrack will take more than just a five-minute explanation—if I talked about it on air, I’d never have time to play the songs themselves. Hence the accompanying manuscript.

When I come to broadcast all the songs, even though it will be two A.M. and the show’s ratings will be minuscule, it will make radio history. Once everybody realizes what I’ve done, what I’m going to lock myself in the bathroom and do immediately after the show. I don’t know what method I’ll use yet; pills, probably. But it’s not important
how
I do it.

The point is that it will make me a legend. Bigger than I ever was in Blue Idea, or as a hip breakfast DJ, and certainly bigger than the silly tart who broke her face on a dance floor. Justin’s career will skyrocket. All our old records will be rereleased. It’ll make all the papers. Hopefully I’ll get a publishing deal for the book, and the New World show could be released on a compilation CD. Perhaps even a Hollywood movie …

I got out a pen and a pad of lined A4 (which Mum had brought me, hoping in vain that I might cheer up enough to write some song lyrics) and prepared to take the plunge. I can do this, I told myself. I can write. I’d won awards for my songs; I’d written hundreds of letters to Sam; kept a diary for a little while. In fact, I’d already been published, if you counted the abysmally puerile
Bluezine
(a fanzine the record company made me churn out from the road).

Hell, I’d been meaning to write my autobiography for years. This would just be a different way of doing it. Using the songs would help me focus—I didn’t want to do one of those all-encompassing tomes that subscribed to the “more is more” philosophy, and besides, I’d never be able to remember it all without thinking of the records that went along with it.

It felt so weird, not having to think in rhymes and verses, no breaks for middle eights or guitar solos. This was my life; it needed to be fluent, complete, yet selective. No choruses or intros. No neat bite-sized chunks.

I was going to begin at the beginning, me and Sam, but then I thought—no. Start with the accident, then you’ll get it out of the way and not have to think about it again. It had its own record, very definitely: Space with Cerys of Catatonia—“The Ballad of Tom Jones.” It was a pity, really. I always loved that song, the humor and harmonies and sexy Cerys to boot. Now I loathed it. For days after I regained consciousness it kept going through and through my battered head. It was such a bizarrely chirpy song to induce such terrible memories.

Space with Cerys of Catatonia
THE BALLAD OF TOM JONES

I
T HAPPENED ON THE NIGHT OF THE U.K. MUSIC AWARDS, THE
biggest of the annual music business backslapping events. I’d been to the UKMAs six times altogether, and Sam had come with me as my guest three times.

This time it was all different. I wasn’t at the Ringside Records table anymore, no longer in one of the planet’s bestselling bands, nor with a solo career like Justin. Worst of all, Sam wasn’t sitting beside me starry-eyed, because she was dead.

I suppose I should have been thankful that at least I still had a career. I was with a new set of colleagues, my fellow DJs and other assorted top brass from New World FM. The DJs mostly cold-shouldered me, but I was used to it—they were just jealous.

I was determined to have a good time regardless, thinking that a night out might cheer me up a bit, take my mind off Sam. But of course that was stupid. I wanted her there so badly that I felt sick.

To my joy and relief to see a friendly face, I bumped into Justin later. It was the first time I’d seen him in over two years. He had a mad glitter in his eyes, and his shirt was rumpled, torn out of his trousers by the teenagers who’d waited hours for him outside, on an unseasonably chilly spring night. When I’d arrived they were there, all pressed up against the barriers lining the red carpet, not even noticing the cold night air, which sent their star-studded breath cloudy. Not that they’d paid much attention to me, though.

Justin looked gorgeous, of course. It was funny how I’d never seriously fancied him, apart from a two-minute crush when we first met. I was possibly the only straight woman on earth who didn’t. I think it must have had something to do with rank socks, transit vans, audible bodily functions, and other such traumatic memories from the band’s early days.

He told me I looked beautiful, too, and I really knew it. It took a tiny edge off the fist of grief in my chest, to see myself as everyone else was seeing me. I was wearing my backless velvet dress, soft folds of burnt orange caressing my breasts, tight across my belly and hips, and swirling erotically around my legs. The chill of air-conditioned air, which occasionally skittered up and down my bare spine, turned me on like a lover’s fingers.

I remembered how Sam had once said that, that even the air-conditioning was making her feel sexy. Sam adored the UKMAs, for the sense of spectacle of the whole event. She used to bang on about it being “an awesome collision of the huge and the tiny,” pointing everything out to me as if I couldn’t see it myself: The enormous venue; the tiny sparkling lights winking and blinking across the ceiling like stars. The massive banks of speakers; small performers onstage blown up huge by video screens. Little reedy voices making industry small talk around big tables. Glitter everywhere, on the women’s cleavages and cheekbones, in the men’s eyes as they sized up the talent. Sam didn’t miss a thing. And when Blue Idea won Best International Group (we were an American band—I was the only Brit) two years in a row, she was embarrassingly pleased for me. Even when we didn’t win, she wouldn’t shut up about how proud she was of me. “It’s because I can see the respect in everyone’s eyes when they look at you,” she’d said. “And these aren’t your fans, they’re your peers. That makes it even better.”

Justin knew Sam, I thought, a long time ago. I’d better tell him.

“Justin,” I said. “I’ve got some bad news, I’m afraid.”

Justin looked anxiously down at himself to make sure his fly wasn’t undone, and then wiped under his nose in case the news was that something horrible had crawled out of his nostril to alight on his upper lip.

“No, not about
you,
” I said crossly. Honestly, he was so vain.

“My friend Sam died, a couple of months ago.”

Justin arranged his face in an expression of vague condolence, without a flicker of recognition.

“Sam, you know, my English friend who used to visit me all the time. You shagged her. Gorgeous, tall, gray eyes, long legs.”

My voice quivered with the pain of describing someone I’d never see again.

Light still didn’t dawn in Justin’s eyes, but he made a good pretense of remembering.

“Ohhhh, right! Now I know who you mean. Oh, Jesus, H, that’s terrible. You poor baby! Such a cute girl, too. What a bummer. Come here.”

He tried to envelop me in a bear hug, but I pushed him away. I didn’t want to start crying among all the sparkly people.

“Okay then, Ms. Nicholls, only one thing for it—and it’s in a small packet in my top pocket. Come on, a flat surface and a credit card await us.”

I tutted irritably.

“You know I don’t like cocaine,” I said.

“Wrong,” replied Justin, frog-marching me toward the backstage loos. “I know that you actually
love
cocaine, and that’s why you never do it. You’re afraid of getting hooked. Well, I think that’s totally sensible and mature of you—but give yourself a break, just this once. It’ll make you feel much better.”

He was partly right about the fear bit, but it wasn’t the only reason I abstained. I’d spent years enduring the company of bug-eyed, bollock-talking, coked-up prats the world over, and I had no desire whatsoever to join their chopped-out ranks. Plus Sam hadn’t approved.

But Sam wasn’t there.

We ended up in a cubicle in the ladies’, Justin sculpting two huge chrysalises on the toilet lid with his credit card. I wondered how many lines he’d previously ingested, since he’d suddenly become totally paranoid, grumbling sotto voce throughout the entire operation.

“What if someone sees us?” he asked.

“So what? Everyone else is doing the same thing. Listen.”

I angled my ear toward the thin partition of the cubicle next to ours, and pointed down toward the heel of a man’s boot, which could be seen underneath the wall. The sound of sniffs and gruff mutters was clearly audible.

“Not everyone. I have to be so careful, Helena. People might not recognize you anymore, but I could end up with my face splashed all over the papers. It could ruin my career!”

“What do you mean? You’re the one with the eighth in your breast pocket, so it can’t bother you too much. And besides, you aren’t the only one with a career—I’ve still got a face to get splashed and a career to be ruined, too, you know.”

How prophetic. The papers weren’t all my face ended up splashed over. But all I was concerned with at that moment was the fat tapered line of cocaine camouflaged before me on the white porcelain altar. I knelt in worship, not even caring that my beautiful dress was trailing on the sticky tiled floor.

The UKMAs eventually wore down to a tired crawl. People were beginning to huddle around their tables in a jumble of black ties and diamanté, like affluent refugees waiting to be rehoused. The mini–fairground rides no longer had to be queued for, and there were puddles of vomit in discreet corners of the arena.

At two A.M. Justin and I decided it was time to move on, and so we managed to fight our way through the hordes of drunk and fractious A&R men milling around outside, to claim Justin’s pre-booked limo. We headed back into Soho to a club where his promotions company was holding a private party. We were both wired, and we knew that this was the Place to Be Seen. I wanted so badly to be seen. I was suddenly fed up with the more low-key fame of being a DJ, hungry for the old thrill of adoration I needed to justify my existence.

The air in the club was muggy with cigarette smoke and overly subtle lighting, claustrophobic after the vast hangar of the Docklands Arena. It was a tableau of studied and strained chic, everyone dressed up to the nines, but well the worse for wear, trying to hold it all together.

Jus had a crowd of acolytes constantly hanging around him, and I felt put out. Although he’d always been the focal point of the band, as the token female and songwriter I’d usually received more than my fair share of adulation, too. But it had been a while.

It was a boring party, dull music, drunk people. I was considering going home, but then it all changed. After a lot of worthier-than-thou trip hop, “The Ballad of Tom Jones” suddenly came blasting over the PA, perking me up more successfully than the previous three lines of coke had.

“Let’s dance,” I said, dragging Jus away from his sycophants toward a raised area of the dance floor, empty except for the swirling lights swooping and glancing over its blackness, giving it the appearance of a deep murky pool.

“To this? You never dance! And besides, no one can dance to this!” he protested, trying to shake off my hand as we climbed up the three steps at the side of the stage.

“I never threw my knickers at you, Tom Jones, Tom Jones,” Cerys warbled innocently
.

Justin was right. It must have been the coke talking, since I had never been much of a dancer, other than a bit of jigging around onstage with my bass, and the song was about as impossible to dance to as “Come on Eileen.” My one big chance to show off: a whole four hundred square feet of media possibilities, all to ourselves, like the old days of the band, no competition—but in this case no inspiration either. There was no way I was going to shuffle around halfheartedly and then skulk sheepishly off again in defeat.

A memory came back to me of an old playground game Sam and I used to play, the junior school’s equivalent of drugs, I supposed. A head rush of shifting gravity and stretched boundaries, the scary exhilaration of having no choice but to trust your partner implicitly, blood pounding in your ears and rushing scarlet around behind your eyeballs.

“I know,” I said, like the ten-year-old me. “Turn around, put your back against mine. Now link arms with me from behind.”

Jus obliged, puzzled. We were still alone on the stage and already people were shooting glances at us from the bar area, wondering why we were standing back-to-back. I noticed, and the buzz in my head intensified. I began to bend forward, trying to pull him up onto my back. He twigged what I was proposing and twisted away from me.

“Stop it, Helena! You’re crazy—you can’t seesaw me in the middle of a stage! Besides, I’m way heavier than you!”

I was mortified. To stop now would make me look ridiculous—just when I was beginning to attract some attention, too.

“It’s cool.” I grabbed his arms behind his back and relocked them in mine. “Please, let’s have a go. It’ll be a laugh. What happened to the old daredevil Justin that we all knew and loved? You’d have done this five years ago—people will think you’ve lost your nerve!”

I knew all the right buttons to push, and it worked a treat.

“Go ahead, then, Wonder Woman,” he said. “Jeez, talk about putting me in some embarrassing situations. I’ll never live this down.”

I could feel the warmth of his sticky skin through his thin silk shirt, and the way his shoulder blades nudged me just below my own. It felt nice, safe and familiar on my bare back. We were actually around the same height, but that night in my three-inch wedge heels I was taller. The hairs on his forearms tickled mine as we wriggled around a bit to get comfortable.

“Ready?” I asked, over one shoulder. “I’ll go first!”

So right there, in front of a half-amused, half-aghast crowd of minor media personalities, we began seesawing each other up and down, my legs flying in the air as I balanced on his back, then my own creaking spine taking the weight of the somewhat heavier Justin. He held back at first, worried that I wouldn’t be able to support him, but soon we got into a groove. Up and down, blood rushing to my head as I leaned forward to swing him up, and then my own cocaine-enhanced flight into the disco night, serenaded by Cerys. Then he began to relax and enjoy it, too, and we were laughing, harder and harder. I saw a blur of grinning faces below me and I thought they were laughing with us.

But then the laughter and the exertion and the drugs suddenly all took their toll on my body, and my knees gave a tiny little tremble as I hoisted Jus horizontal for the last time. The tremble ran down my right leg and into my ankle, which twisted slightly. It was enough to make me lose my balance, and I began to lurch heavily to the right, toward the edge of the stage. But at the same time, Jus was in full flight. The second before I stumbled, he gave a joyful whoop and kicked his legs as high as he could, his full weight pressed along my back.

I fell. But I didn’t
just
fall, the way you do when you trip on an uneven paving slab or down a step. My arms, you recall, were tightly pinioned to my sides, and worse, at that particular moment, pulled even further away from the ground by Justin’s joyous ascent.

I slipped off the stage and fell three feet, literally, flat on my face. Look, no hands, nose impacting first. All one hundred fifty pounds of Jus landed on top of me, mashing my head still further into the dance floor.

But it got worse. In the six or so inches of sprung wooden floor with which my head collided, some other careless reveler had recently dropped his champagne glass. It had broken, of course, and yes, it was still lying there in wait for my tender face.

Over the ringing in my ears, I was aware of a distant crunching sound. Immediately before passing out, I noticed several jagged pieces of ivory swimming sedately past me in a bubbling puddle of blood. Good-bye, expensive teenage dental correction work.