To Be Someone (36 page)

“Do you know,” Sam said afterward, “I really feel like going away for a bit, somewhere really relaxing. I’m owed some holiday. Fancy coming to Greece with me for a week? Santorini’s meant to be amazing. We could get one of those last-minute deals.”

I was delighted, until I thought of the prospect of being without Vinnie for that long. “Hmm … maybe once Vinnie’s term starts again,” I said, opening a bottle of wine and pouring us each a glass.

Sam tutted irritably. She wasn’t used to me not jumping at the chance of having her company. With a start, I realized that I wasn’t used to it either.

“Oh, come on, Helena. Please. It wouldn’t be the same without you, and we haven’t been on holiday for ages. Hey,” she added, turning up the volume as Sinead O’Connor began to sing “Nothing Compares 2 U.” “I love this song. What is this tape?”

“Just a compilation I made. Brilliant, isn’t it? I’ll let you know about Santorini. I must say, I’ve always fancied it myself, too.”

I lay down on my back beside Sam, and we watched the clouds float across the sky as the music drifted over us.

“This sky reminds me of a poem I wrote once, when I started writing song lyrics. You know, when I was going through that religious phase.”

“Can you remember it?”

“Um, hang on, let me think.… ”

I paused for a while, trying to recall the words. Sam sniggered and pointed over to the lovers by the trees.

“Look at them—talk about hot ‘n’ heavy. They’ll have completely ripped off each other’s clothes in a minute.”

The couple was indeed horizontal, him on top of her, bumping and grinding and rolling around. I was temporarily distracted from my poem, remembering the similar behavior Vinnie and I had indulged in the previous night.

Sam sighed. “I’ll probably never have sex again. Life sucks. So, quick, tell me your poem before I get consumed with depression.”

I cleared my throat dramatically. “Okay, here goes: ‘Christians kiss with their eyes closed, he said with a sigh / Rolling over to watch heavy clouds drag by. / I smiled, and opened one eye.’ ”

Sam grinned. “I prefer your later stuff,” she said.

She sat up and helped herself to some broccoli quiche. Suddenly she froze, napkin in hand, and her triangle of quiche fell into her lap.

“Bloody hell, I don’t believe it,” she said, staring into the middle distance.

“What?”

“Oh,” she said, collecting herself and picking up crumbs of pastry. “Nothing … I just thought of something I forgot to do.”

I sat up, too. Her tone didn’t fool me for a minute.

“What?”

Sam shook her head. “I’m sure it’s nothing, but … for a minute I thought that was Vinnie over there.”

I laughed and looked over at the almost-copulating couple. They were sitting up now, rearranging their clothes, still kissing. The girl looked Asian, with beautiful long, silky black hair. The guy had his back to us.

“No, of course it’s not!” I said. “He’s about the same build, though, I can see how you thought it was.”

Then they stood up, folded their travel rug, and began to walk hand in hand toward us, presumably on their way to the car park.

Within ten paces, I saw that it was indeed Vinnie.

My peanut-butter sandwich stuck to the roof of my mouth, and my head whirled with disbelief and panic.

“It can’t be,” I whispered thickly. “There must be some mistake. Perhaps he has an evil twin.”

“Has he?” asked Sam hopefully, her hand grasping my arm.

“No.”

They were getting closer and closer, their heads leaned together, laughing and tickling each other in a nauseatingly lovey-dovey manner. I felt sick. I picked up our half-full wine bottle.

“What are you going to do?” Sam looked alarmed.

At that moment, Vinnie glanced over and spotted me. Without breaking his stride, he wheeled around at a ninety-degree angle and steered the Asian girl away from us, toward the opposite end of the distant car park. He didn’t look back, although I sensed a definite tenseness in the way he held the hairy travel rug under his arm.

I took a deep swig of the Pinot Grigio.

“Oh, Helena. I’m so sorry. Are you all right? You’ve gone really white.”

Sam hugged me hard, partly, I thought, to prevent me from leaping up and bottling Vinnie from behind.

“Men, eh?” she continued, with feeling. “Can’t live with ‘em, can’t shoot ‘em.” She looked anxiously at me. I was still silent. “He’s a bastard. Better you found out now than later. Is that the girl he shares a house with?”

I said nothing, but tears welled in my eyes.

“Speak to me, Helena, please.” Sam shook me gently.

I looked at her and took a long, deep breath. “When can we go to Santorini, then?”

“As soon as we book somewhere to stay?”

“Fine.”

I had been sure that was the last I’d see of Vinnie, and I was heartbroken. I intended to phone Ron and pull out of the dinner party that night, but Sam nagged me until I agreed to go anyway. She said, rightly, that Ron was new in my life (I’d recently hired him with a vague idea of getting some of my old songs remixed by hot new producers, although nothing had come of it thus far), so it wouldn’t do to let him know how antisocial I really was.

Plus I might meet a new man there (not that I wanted one). Plus, I so rarely went to these sorts of functions. Plus, I was a professional. Plus, it would be good to have something to take my mind off Vinnie. Etc., etc. I eventually caved in. I had bought a new dress to wear, the cab was booked, I’d even been looking forward to it, albeit with trepidation.

Sam stayed long enough to zip up my dress and do my hair for me, before she drove back to her flat for another night in watching
ER
and wondering who Timothy was out having fun with. She’d been gone about five minutes, and I was just putting on my lip liner, when there was a hammering at the front door.

Assuming she’d forgotten something, I ran down the stairs and flung open the door, lip pencil in hand.

Of course, it was Vinnie, standing there all spruced up and cleanshaven, clutching a bottle of wine.

I was flabbergasted. I stood there, open-mouthed, as he grinned jauntily at me.

“Don’t forget to color in the rest,” he said, gesturing toward my outlined lips. “Right, what time are we off?”

I hung on to the doorframe, blinking in disbelief and fury. “You have got to be fucking joking.”

Vinnie had the gall to look surprised.

“Is it canceled? What are you all dressed up for, then?”

I was approaching meltdown. “How
dare
you!” I spoke through gritted teeth. “I can’t believe your nerve, I really can’t. You were all over some whore in Richmond Park this afternoon. How could you think that I’d ever want to clap eyes on you again, after seeing that? Just get lost, and don’t bother coming back.”

Vinnie slapped the side of his head as if he had forgotten that he’d snogged someone else in front of me only hours earlier.

“Oh! You mean Miyuki! Man, we weren’t all over each other. We’re just housemates, you know, old friends.” He paused. “You saw us walking through the park together, didn’t you? Hey, you should have called out. I’d have introduced you!”

Miraculously, I stayed relatively calm; i.e., I didn’t actually kill him. “No, Vinnie, I didn’t ‘just’ see you walking through the park. I saw you lying on top of her, dry-humping away like a terrier in heat. I saw you suck the face off her. I saw you whisper sweet nothings in her ear. And now I learn that you live with her, too! Please don’t insult me by telling me you’re just friends. God, it’s so obvious now. No wonder you never liked to be seen out with me; no wonder you said you were ‘embarrassed’ by what a mess your house is.”

Vinnie grinned. “Listen, it’s fine. She doesn’t mind if I see other women, honestly. She’s cool.”

That really was the final straw. To my utter disgust and humiliation, I burst into tears.

“I MIND!” I bawled.

I was about to slam the door in his face and retire to bed with a bottle of vodka, when a black cab bumped along the path outside the front gate, tooting at me. There was no way I was going to let Vinnie see he’d ruined my evening as well as my life.

Mustering up what vestiges of dignity I could, I snuffled, “Excuse me, I have a dinner party to attend,” and shot back in the house to grab my makeup and handbag. Ron lived in Highgate, so I had a good long cab ride ahead of me in which to apply enough slap to disguise the fact that I’d been crying.

I locked the front door behind me, ignoring the fact that Vinnie was still standing outside the porch behind me.

“Have a nice life, asshole,” I hiccuped as I barged past him, grabbing the bottle of wine from his arms on the way.

It was only once I was barreling safely around the North Circular, having just about managed to repair the damage to my face, that I looked at the bottle I’d purloined from Vinnie. It was Blue Nun.

I left it in the taxi.

It must have been a remnant of the discipline I’d learned in Blue Idea, the same consummate professionalism that had gotten me through a grueling national tour knowing that Sam was lying in a hospital bed, but I was
great
that night. Vinnie’s betrayal at least had one positive effect: It swept aside all my qualms about meeting new people.

From the moment I sat down at the snowy linen and sparkling crystal–set table in Ron’s house (which was ultramodern, architect-designed, and overlooked the cemetery; it had a very public-toiletesque exterior, but was beautiful inside), I was in top form, caring about nothing, allowing my wineglass to be filled repeatedly. I didn’t even feel too ashamed for not having brought a bottle myself—I told Ron I’d left it in the taxi. He waved away my apology with a flourish of his napkin.

I knew I was a hit, and I loved it. Suddenly I wondered why on earth I didn’t get out more, why I had wasted yet another year for the sake of Vinnie’s infrequent attentions.

The other guests were Clint, Ron’s young boyfriend, who wrote screenplays and was an absolute sweetheart, and a couple named Maggie and Gus—she worked for Reuters and he was deputy program director for a London radio station called New World, which I never listened to. I apologized profusely for Vinnie’s absence, and told them he had caught a nasty stomach bug from eating some dodgy shellfish, and had not been off the toilet for the past five hours. Wishful thinking.

Gus and Ron had been at university together. “Isn’t she fabulous? Didn’t I tell you she was awesome?” Ron kept saying to Gus about me, and Gus kept nodding, until Maggie looked quite annoyed and stabbed her fork into her
champignons farcies
with enough force to make Gus desist.

Over the course of the evening, in answer to their questions, I told them all about Blue Idea: what it had been like, how we got our first deal, how it felt to be in front of a crowd of thousands and thousands, what I missed about it, what I’d loathed about it. How I managed to remember it all so well.

I told them that I could remember most of the key events of my life through the songs that had been in the background, the “soundtrack to my life”; not Blue Idea songs, because so much work and sweat and tedium went into the perfecting of each of them, but other people’s songs, the ones that struck me deep down, in a way I knew I’d never forget.

“I have a theory, right?” I said, elbows on the table, on my second glass of Beaume de Venise. “If I were a DJ, I would play the only records that had done that for other people, because if you think about it, it’s rarely the completely crappy songs that people remember and weep over for years to come. My theory is: Say something totally momentous happens to you when you’re listening to the radio—for example, you open a letter saying you’ve won a million pounds. If the particular record being played at that moment is, say, ‘Agadoo,’ then you just forget that you even had the radio switched on. But if it’s something brilliant, maybe, ‘Life on Mars,’ then forever afterwards you associate that song with winning the money, and get all nostalgic when you hear it.”

Ron joined in with Gus on the enthusiastic nods, and handed round the after-dinner mints.

I was on a roll. “So I reckon if you got people to ring in with the songs that meant something to them, then you’d have a fair chance of getting a decent show. Of course, you’d have a few morons saying that they lost their virginity to ‘The Birdie Song,’ or whatever but anyone who has that as their favorite song probably isn’t articulate enough to ring into a radio station and request it. Because that’s the other thing.… ”