To Be Someone (42 page)

“I was desperate, H. Please forgive me. You were the only good thing in my life, and I let you down.”

I leaned back against the headrest and watched a little boy heading our way, three or four years old, followed by his mother. The boy was dressed in yellow galoshes and one of those really cute yellow duck raincoats, where the peak of the hood was the duck’s beak. He was carrying a small translucent umbrella decorated with a frieze of tropical fish, which he held down low over his head. I could see his baby breath misting up the inside of the plastic. His mother was carrying car keys and looked harassed.

“Come on, Timmy, hurry up, the car’s parked just across the road,” I heard her say.

Timmy broke away, ran a couple of steps, and jumped with both feet into a deep puddle by the curb, soaking himself and his mother. I waited for her to yell and drag him off to the car, and for a second she looked cross. Then suddenly and unexpectedly she skipped forward two steps, too, and jumped into the same puddle. They stood there laughing with glee, and even in the midst of Vinnie’s machinations, I couldn’t help smiling as well.

Suddenly I wished, with a fierce, fearful yearning, that it was Ruby splashing under a duck’s beak hat in front of me, and Toby clowning around with her. I could have gotten out and joined them, and forgotten all about Vinnie.

“You’ve always let me down, Vinnie,” I said. I’d always thought it was a cliché, when people’s voices were said to sound “very far away,” but mine did. Probably because it was off somewhere with the rest of me, jumping in puddles with Toby.

“Whenever I needed you, you let me down. You’ve cheated on me, taken advantage of me, sponged off me. When Sam was dying, I thought for once you were there for me, but you weren’t. When I had the accident, you never visited me in hospital; you never came near me until you decided that you could make some money out of me. Why on earth would I want to marry
you?
”

Vinnie made one last-ditch effort. “I only didn’t visit you in hospital because you said you never wanted to see me again.”

“But I’m always saying that. It’s never stopped you before.”

I grinned very slightly, and Vinnie sensed that I was weakening. I couldn’t help it. I began to remember all the good things about him: his sense of humor and adventure, his amazing prowess in the sack. How he kept me company. How he made art for me.

“Please, Helena, let’s give it one more try. I really want you. I’m so sorry about everything.”

Then I remembered the Plan and snapped back to reality. “Sorry, Vin, no can do,” I said briskly, putting the key into the ignition. “We can’t get back together because I’m leaving in a couple of days. I’m going away, and I’m not coming back.”

“Where? Let me come, too!”

I laughed shortly. “You can’t. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got preparations to make.”

His expression turned from peachy wheedle into purple tantrum. So much for contrition, I thought.

I started the car and put it into gear. If I looked straight ahead, I couldn’t see Vinnie at all, since he was sitting on my blind side.

“Bye, then, Vinnie. This time I can promise you that you won’t be seeing me again.”

Vinnie opened the door, narrowly missing getting it torn off its hinges by a passing car. “Aren’t you even going to thank me for not selling the photos?”

I cackled again. It felt quite liberating. “Er, let me think.… No. Do you really expect me to be grateful to you for that? Now please go. I’m not even going to wish you a nice life this time, because your karma is probably so rotten by now that it’s very unlikely that too many more good things will happen to you.”

I twisted my head so that I could see Vinnie get out of the car, dragging his backpack like a petulant child. Before closing the door, he stuck his head back inside. There was an extremely nasty expression on his face, worse than any I’d seen before.

“I’ve got news for you, Miss ‘I’m a Pop Star,’ ” he said. “You think you’re so fucking famous that you don’t like to go out in case you’re mobbed? Well, that’s just a joke, because I know for a fact that nobody gives a shit anymore. No one cares that you had an accident, no one cares that you lost your job, no one cares if you never work again. Blue Idea are naff eighties has-beens.”

He continued, talking almost to himself. “Of course, I should’ve realized that it was all in your head long ago, but you had me fooled, too. All this talk about paparazzi and stalkers and people hassling you—I went out with you for a year, and I never saw you get hassled for being famous. I never even saw you sign an autograph!”

“You always made us stay in because you were afraid of Miyuki seeing us together!” I protested, half afraid, half amused by Vinnie’s lame attempt to get back at me.

“It’s all in your head, Helena,” he hissed, tapping the side of his forehead with a nicotine-stained finger. “God, I feel sorry for you. You’re living in a fantasy world. I only came near you because you’re rich. Why else would I bother? You’re a loser.”

I noticed that the car parked across the road contained a uniformed child propped up asleep in the backseat, alone, her face compressed and melted in sleep against the window, her school hat slipping off the side of her head like a little clown’s. The front window had been left open for her, just a crack, as if she were a dog on a hot day.

“If you say so, Vinnie. But I think you’re the one who’s imagining things.” I tried to sound bored, but his voice was so scathing and venomous.

“Ah, but that’s just where you’re wrong, Miss Barking Mad. I’ve got proof. When I rang up the
Daily Mirror
to say I had exclusive photos of you after your accident, know what they said? They laughed in my face. ‘Give you fifty quid for them, mate,’ they said. ‘No one’s interested in her these days. We only ran the shot of her accident because her mate Justin Becker was involved.’ So now do you see? It’s
all in your mind
. You aren’t famous at all anymore.”

He slammed the door and walked away from me for the last time, whistling a vindictive little tune, which sounded a lot like a Blue Idea song. The sleeping child stirred and stretched out in the backseat of her car, disappearing from my view.

The Sundays
HERE’S WHERE THE STORY ENDS

T
WELVE-THIRTY A.M. ON MONDAY THE TWENTY-EIGHTH. I WENT
around caressing all the walls of my beloved house, thanking it for its indefatigable support and hospitality over the years. I turned the radiators on low, just in case an unseasonal frost should happen to nip at the gutters before anyone got back to check on it. I emptied the larder of perishable foods, put the rubbish out, switched off the water, made sure all the windows and doors were locked. It was like going on holiday, that silent, dark, creeping-around time before the start of a long journey to a nice, warm, relaxing destination. Yes. That was a good way to look at it.

My carefully assembled props consisted of the following:

1. Three jars of paracetamol, a half-full jar of Valium, an unopened bottle of gin, and a picnic tumbler in my Kate Spade giraffe-print shoulder bag.
   
2. Box of CDs.
   
3. Manuscript, with letters and
   Bluezines
   and diary entries glued carefully in, sitting proudly in its purple folder on the dining-room table.
   
4. Letter to Ron in my coat pocket, addressed and stamped and ready to drop in a post box on the way to the studio:
   

   Dear Ron, By the time you read this (
   etc., etc
   .). Keys to house under mat (
   etc.
   , etc.). Please come to house and collect purple folder (
   etc
   .). Any advance you receive on publication of manuscript, feel free to keep fifteen percent for yourself. The rest is for my parents, at this address (
   etc
   .). Please also forward the enclosed letter to them. Have informed lawyers, all should be in order. Thanks for everything, Helena. P.S. By the way, I’d really like it if you could suggest to publishers that a CD of the songs from the show accompany the book. Kind of a new idea, but why not? (
   Etc
   .)
   

5. Difficult tearstained letter apologizing to parents, enclosed inside Ron’s envelope.
   

I was ready. I went to put the CDs into the car, but when I picked up my giraffe-print shoulder bag, the bottle and jars all clinked and rattled together so excessively that I felt compelled to do something about it. I went back into the kitchen, pulled a Ziploc bag from the drawer, unscrewed the tops of the pill bottles, and emptied their contents out into the bag.

Small as it was, this unforeseen hitch threw me, and my hands started to shake. I’d have had a swig of the gin, only I couldn’t take the risk of being stopped by the police while driving to the studio—being thwarted by a Breathalyzer test at this late stage was too terrible to contemplate.

So I remained sober and did some yogic breathing instead. This involves pinching one nostril shut, breathing slowly through the other side to the count of four, holding your breath for the same count, exhaling for eight, then repeating with the other nostril, ad infinitum. I’d always suspected that the reason this actually worked was that you felt such a prat doing it that it took your mind off why you were stressed in the first place.

After several breaths, I did feel better. Everything had begun to feel super-real, like my “revelation” in the car outside Sam’s flat that time, when I was convinced that she was going to be fine. Now I was convinced that I was going to be fine, too. I was going to be free of my one-eyed, less-than-perfect body. It was an ending and a new start, simultaneously.

I arrived at New World and parked the car on a yellow line right outside the building. After climbing out, I retrieved the box of CDs and the giraffe-print bag from the boot, locked the car, and headed slowly toward the studios. It was 1:45
A.M
.

I pressed the number pad outside the front door, 8-1-5-7, and the door buzzily invited me to push it open. It sounded so inviting and businesslike, I felt like kicking it. If I come in now, I’m never going to leave—don’t you know that? I thought. The door didn’t care. I barged my way in, all elbows and sharp cardboard corners, and it shut behind me with a heavy, ominous click.

A security guard I didn’t recognize sat at the front desk. “Name, please?” he said unsmilingly.

“Helena Nicholls.”

“Two o’clock show. Right. Studio One.”

I wasn’t going to thank him, not if he didn’t even know who I was. I walked over to the wall of pigeonholes and looked up to mine to see if there was any post. It was stuffed full of letters, but when I reached up and took them down, the security man said, “That ain’t your box. That’s Millie Myers’s box.”

I peered at the letters, pink, brown, blue, and white envelopes in all shapes and sizes, decorated with stick-on hearts and curly schoolgirl writing or the scruffy hormonal scrawl of the adolescent male, addressed to Millie, Gorgeous Millie, Miss. M. Myers, I Love You, Mills.

None for me. The label on the pigeonhole bearing my name had been peeled off unceremoniously, and a smart new
Millie Myers
sticker slapped over the top of it.

Crushed, I shoved the fan mail back into the box. Perhaps what Vinnie said had been right. Perhaps I wasn’t half as famous as I thought.

“Where’s mine, then?”

The security guard shrugged. “Try the bottom right. That’s usually where they put stuff for new DJs.”

“I’m not a new DJ.”

“Oh, wait. I remember. Mr. Hadleigh left something for you behind the desk here. This is it.”

He handed me some sheets of printed paper with a memo from Geoff clipped in the top right-hand corner: “Dear Helena, Here’s your show. As per my letter to you, please stick to the format. Speak soon, all the best, Geoff.”

It was a printout from Selector, the computer that programmed all the music and ad breaks and timings of live links for the station. I scanned it frantically, a line jumping out at me here and there:

No. No way. There was no way, after all this, I was playing the fucking Spice Girls and Bon Jovi! None of my records were here, not one. Geoff had completely ignored my playlist. How dare he! My teeth were clenched, and I was having trouble swallowing. Don’t lose it, don’t lose it, I kept telling myself. This is too important.

I sank down on a sofa in reception, causing the neck of the gin bottle to peep out from between the handles of my bag. The security guard noticed, and looked at me with an expression of casual disdain, but I didn’t care.

I’d been stitched up! Bet Geoff had never even sent that letter—he must have known I wouldn’t do the show if I couldn’t play my own records. Oh, God, what was I going to do?

“Five minutes till you’re on air. Shouldn’t you be in your studio by now?” the guard asked boorishly.

“Mind your own damn business.” I was still reeling from Geoff’s bombshell and this awful, preprogrammed, bolloxsy, brain-dead excuse for a show that they seriously expected me to do.

I jumped up, grabbed my things, and headed down the corridor, punching in the security code again as I passed through another door, and again as I finally entered the studio. It was my old breakfast-show studio, looking exactly the same as it had the morning of the UKMAs, when I’d done my last request show.

I sank down in the swivel chair behind the desk and, out of habit, slid off my shoes. Putting my handbag on the carpeted floor by my feet, I let the bag of tablets flop out slightly, so I could feel its soft bulk with my toes.

Three minutes to go. Through the thick window, the glass fuggy and brown as if all the DJs chain-smoked, I could see Pete Harness and his producer finishing up in Studio Two. Surreptitiously, I unscrewed the gin bottle, poured half a glassful into the tumbler, and downed it in one gulp, my throat constricting with the effort of not gagging.

Next door they were letting Pete’s final record (“Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina and the Waves—one of my least favorite tunes) play out while they put on their coats and gathered their things. Pete waved tentatively at me through the window and gave a thumbs-up signal. I could tell that the producer, a pretty young black girl, was scrutinizing me slyly, probably trying to see how different I now was from the photos she’d seen of me before the accident. I hoped she hadn’t seen me swig the gin.

Two minutes. I hesitated over the Selector printout for a moment and then swiveled around and lobbed it into the bin by the door. What was the worst thing Geoff could do—fire me? I was only planning the one show, anyway, and besides, probably no one would even notice. Feeling giddy with rebellion and adrenaline, I unpacked my box of CDs and lined them carefully up in order, cueing up “The Ballad of Tom Jones” first. I watched as the CD slid into the machine with a metallic skid, thinking, Here goes. I was going to completely override Selector.

One minute. It felt so strange, flying solo. Strange but liberating. Pete and the producer disappeared, waving foolishly at me again. I got the impression that they’d wanted to come in and say hi, but my closed-down expression had put them off.

The Selector screen to my left was showing the supposed running order of my show, the same as the printout, but because it was to my blind side it was easy to ignore.

I found a minidisc with the New World jingle on it and shoved it in the machine, followed by one of my old breakfast-show idents—why not, I thought.

Thirty seconds. I reached beneath the desk for the bag of pills, selected ten paracetemol to be going on with, and arranged them in a daisy-petal pattern around the base of the tumbler. Taking them throughout the show would mean less to swallow all at once at the end. The pills looked inviting, and I imagined them soft and sugary like sweeties on my tongue. I decided on two per record, and none of the Valiums until the final track—I wanted to be awake to finish the show.

The clock hand swept gracefully north, toward two o’clock, and I took a deep breath, clamped the cans on my ears, adjusted the microphone, and hit the on-air button to take control. No turning back now.

“Good morning, London—those of you who are unlucky enough to be awake at this time, anyhow. Helena Nicholls here; yes, it’s me. Remember me from a few months back? Well, as I expect you heard, I had a rather nasty accident, and they had to get someone else to cover for my breakfast show. Millie’s doing a great job, isn’t she? And to be honest, I’m more of a night owl myself, so I thought I’d give this a try. I’ve got some fantastic music lined up for you tonight, twenty songs in all. It’s kind of going to be a request show—but not in the way that you remember my show from before. Sorry, folks, but you can’t ring in—tonight is going to be my songs, from my life. Don’t worry, I do have quite good taste, so don’t touch that dial.… I’ve got some Elvis Costello, Blondie, Dexys, Jimmy Cliff—so stick around. Ten songs in a row coming up after these messages.”

I bunged in a trail and ran an ad break—better make at least a minimal effort to do the right thing, I thought. There was a tap on the window, and I looked up to see the little producer girl standing there waving a white envelope at me.

I swiftly moved the tumbler, leaned my elbow on the pills so they were hidden, made sure the gin bottle was out of sight, and reluctantly waved her in.

“Hi, Helena, I’m Vicky. Are you really playing ten songs in a row? Won’t you get in trouble? That’s not the running order, you know.”

She sounded concerned, but her eyes were secretly scanning my face in the hope of seeing a scar close-up. I had a sudden urge to rip off my eye patch and loom ogreishly up at her, shouting, “Grrrrrr,” just to see if she’d scream and run away.

“I know. Thanks. I’ll deal with it.”

She handed me the envelope. “Sorry, but this was stuck between the pages of Pete’s show. I think it’s been floating around for a few days, but you didn’t seem to have a pigeonhole.”

“Thanks,” I said again. “Better crack on now.” I gestured back to the desk.

“Good luck, then.” Vicky edged backward out of the studio, as if she was worried I might take a bite out of her ass on the way out. I faded up the mic, planning to talk up to the vocals:

“Right, first up we’ve got the only recent song from this show. It’s the song that was playing when I had the accident—macabre, you might think, but I couldn’t leave it out. I think music’s like everything else in life. Even the tough things have to be faced up to. They never go away on their own. Here it is, then, the lovely Cerys Matthews with Space, and—”

Damn! Tommy started singing, catching me out. I’d crashed the intro, a cardinal sin for a DJ. Off to a great start, then.

“ ‘The Ballad of Tom Jones,’ ” I added hastily.

It was the first time I’d heard the song since the UKMAs, and it was even harder than I’d imagined. I instantly felt high again, foolish, the metallic taste of coke numbing my teeth and the rush of the bright lights spinning my head. I thought of poor Justin, having to heave me up and down on his back, and … no, I couldn’t bear it. Despite what I’d just said on air, I still couldn’t face up to that particular song. I lowered the pre-fade to a nonintrusive hum, poured myself some more gin, popped two paracetemol in my mouth, and downed them, retching almost immediately. This was not going to work. I’d have to take the tablets with water instead—one more mouthful of gin and everything would be coming straight back up again. I should have stuck to vodka.