How I Left the National Grid (2 page)

A second later Savile stepped into the crowd and introduced us. He made some joke about us being the runts of the litter and then I heard our keyboards blast through the speakers, thinner than usual, but growing louder. The lights went onto us. I grabbed the microphone.

I could just about make out all these young girls with hands on their hips. I had never seen them at our gigs before and yet the moment the track started they were screaming. It was almost as if their whole lives
had been lived in preparation for seeing us play. I knew they would soon stop screaming when they heard our song.

I’ll never forget that sense of seizing the moment. You have to make it out of absolutely nothing. It felt reckless and dangerous and there was genuinely no sense of what it might lead to.

Jack’s drum-beat instantly connected with the crowd, made them move. Then that rich synth line filled the air and the audience cheered. Simon, visibly shaking, began miming energetically on his guitar. I felt my body crackle and twitch and I opened my mouth. I knew I would be singing over my own voice, but I wanted to do it with heart, and for people to see that. There was one sensational moment, like the moment a woman gives you as you pin her to the bed, when the whole audience looked up to me.

I tore into the song. I had laboured over every line, every last vowel and consonant, and I wanted to mainline it straight into every living room in the country. When it came to the bridge, where the band suddenly sped up, something took over my arms and I felt possessed by the need to make the band create a sound so huge and overpowering that the audience were permanently altered. The sheer force of the first chorus overwhelmed me, my voice urging its way through this thick storm to enhance the recorded vocals, stick onto the contours of every note and bury that damned hook in the mind of every terrified kid dreading school the next day, every dead-eyed office drone working for managers they loathed, every housewife longing for the visions of the future sent to her in adverts through the letter-box daily. Now is the time for revolution, I thought. I’ll be the spark.

As the song reached its climax I tried to move to the front of the stage, and the whole of the front row moved forward to touch me. In the last verse, as I sang the refrain
‘wind the commuter belt around your neck,’
I lifted the microphone lead up to my throat. I decided in a split second what my one act of defiance would be.

I could see elbow patches watching from the wings. He met my eye as I stopped singing, and slowly shook his head. I could see all the smiles on the faces of the young girls as they sang along to this weird
hit on Top Of The Pops. I could feel the sheer fear this one movement was provoking in the studio. Was he going to try choke himself with the mike lead on air? Elbow patches held a finger to his throat. The audience looked up at me, transfixed by my sudden lack of movement, my voice still audible even though my mouth was shut. As Simon sliced into the outro I threw the cord around my neck and pulled, hard. The air was forced out of my throat and I choked into the mike, which dropped to the floor with a loud bang. The audience gave off a huge, icy gasp. I fell onto my knees, putting my foot onto the lead to get some leverage, and then I yanked it hard. I don’t know what came over me, but at that moment I sincerely wanted to do it. Choke myself to death, on live television. My eyes bulged, and I saw my knuckles turn white.

Elbow patches stormed over to Bonny, who was already smiling. He gestured at the stage, and she shrugged, a smile on her face. He pointed at the sound desk, and a moment later, the backing track stopped.

The audience were no longer dancing. The sound faded, as I writhed on stage, winding the cord round and round my neck, my free hand clawing for air. I looked up, and my vision started to narrow. Every single girl in the audience was looking at me, confused, and I was slowly blacking out. But the one set of eyes I met, over by a pillar, were Bonny’s. She looked back at me and nodded, calmly, as she folded her arms.

It took two security guards to pull me from the stage. As they unravelled the cord, the crowd drew back like closing blinds. Elbow patches ran up to me. ‘You will never, ever play on this show again,’ he said, spittle flying onto my face.

I got up, and shook my head. In the distance I could hear muted cheers. I gulped, and as she came closer Bonny held her arms out.

She and I both knew it would be all over the press the next day, that every playground and office would be buzzing with what I’d done. Every housewife would be terrified that their kids would buy our record.

That was exactly what happened.

1

‘I think you deserve this treat,’ Sam said, stepping ahead of Elsa and dramatically opening the door to the restaurant.

‘Hmm,’ she said, her eyes narrowing.

Sam watched the sunlight race over the windows, reflecting the silvery hue of the river beside them. He was still trying to find his way through this new world of bright, polished surfaces. He felt that for years he had lived amongst damp corners, in the dank atmosphere of bedsits. But taking in the sparkling cutlery, and the elegant dresses around him, he felt like he was finally stepping into the light. A blistering modern light, that blasted away the squalor of his past.

He looked at Elsa, who was taking in the hubbub. He considered her elfin, Gallic look, which still attracted so much male attention. Her floral summer dress displayed flashes of her legs that were a little too slim.

A waiter swept them to their upstairs table with a hearty wave. He seated them at a table close to the window, which overlooked a quayside blooming with sun. The river played upon the windows of the surrounding offices like a distant mirage.

Elsa loved these displays of chivalry from Sam. In the early days he would take her for dinner even when he evidently couldn’t afford it. Once or twice an extra drink had been too much, and he’d had to offer to wash up, but he’d been useless even at that. But this time she suspected there was more to it than just generosity. He kept pulling the slightly dirty curtains of his Mowgli-style hair out of his large, blue eyes.

‘I wish I wasn’t going to dinner with all this dust in my hair,’ she said, coiling a blonde lock around her finger.

‘We’ve been working all day,’ Sam said, his eyes scanning over the menu. ‘Everything’s in the house now. Besides, this is
my treat. I want to talk to you.’

She ordered a glass of white wine and concentrated on Sam. ‘You want to talk to me?’ she asked. ‘What does that mean?’ She paused. ‘It’s about that phone call, isn’t it?’

He took her hand, and she offered in return a small smile. ‘I’m so glad that we’ve taken the plunge and got a place together,’ he said.

She laughed. ‘Give over, Sam. I had to drag you kicking and screaming into any sort of a domestic life, and you know it. You’d have spent the rest of your life eating Super Noodles and wearing a sock for a belt.’

‘I know. You were right,’ he pressed. ‘I couldn’t keep living like that. I know it wasn’t good for us.’

‘Wasn’t good for us? I think it would have been the end of us, Sam.’

The remark seemed to cause a pronounced drop in the temperature.

‘Not quite,’ Sam responded. ‘I know this is my last chance. I’ll become a proper man about the house. Changing light bulbs, using a feather duster.’

‘You’d end up using it in the bloody toilet, Sam. Anyway, you don’t have to worry about all that. We get a cleaner and have a caretaker. Part of the deal.’

‘Does he know how to use the taps? Because I can’t bloody work them out.’

‘But I think that’s part of the fun, you know?’

‘Not being able to wash? Yeah, definitely.’

She tossed her head back. ‘Don’t be a twat. So who was this call from? A credit card company?’

He leaned in. ‘No.’

‘How could anyone else have got our number yet?’

‘It was from a guy called Martin Graham. From this book publisher. Mason House.’

‘Go on.’

‘He’s heard that Robert Wardner has been confirmed as alive, for the first time in twenty five years.’

‘Oh god. That National Grid guy? Didn’t he murder some girl?’

‘That was never proven.’

‘It was you who told me about it. Why else would he suddenly take off, vanish like that?’

‘He was unable to finish this incredible record he was making. Now there’s talk that he’s going to reform the band and complete it. And this publisher was asking what I knew about it all.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, I’m guessing he wants someone to track down Wardner. Tell the story about how he vanished, in a book.’

She cocked her head. ‘If he did kill someone, he’s hardly going to want his story told, is he? If he’s in the habit of killing people who intrude on his life, you’re just going to make yourself a target.’

‘I doubt it. I wrote some of the first major articles about him, ones that helped him get famous.’

‘You were a teenager then. You can’t be chasing after men like that in your forties!’

‘But you don’t choose when these opportunities come along, Elsa. This is my chance to finally make my mark on the world. Plus, I think it could make us some money.’

She pulled a bread-stick out of the basket, and looked as though she might snap it.

‘The call centre work is regular though, Sam. Something we can rely on.’ She closed her eyes for a moment. ‘The house deposit cleaned us out. I can’t see any way we’re even going to make the first mortgage payment.’ She folded her napkin into a tight, hard wad. ‘Perhaps dinner wasn’t such a good idea…’

‘Elsa, if I can convince this publisher to give me a commission to write the book, it will more than pay for that first instalment.
Shifts at the call-centre certainly won’t.’

‘You’ll be happier there once the regular pay starts to come in.’

‘Elsa, it’s bloody awful there, like being a hen in a coup. I want to do something creative with my life. How am I doing that now? I play on people’s fears about getting burgled, to convince them to get stupid burglar alarms. When I can’t even work the ones in my own house!’

‘They’re state of the art, that’s why.’

‘They’re unnecessary.’

‘And a book about Robert Wardner is necessary? Sam, come on. Not only is he dangerous but you…you could end up getting sick again. I couldn’t bear it.’

‘How would I get sick? I’d be getting that fire back in my life!’

‘But that fire didn’t do you any favours, did it? When you should have been at university like every other eighteen-year-old you were instead obsessing over them at home. By your own admission, that was the first step that ended with you getting…’ She stopped herself.

‘You can say it, Elsa. They won’t ban us from coming here for olives if you say it.’

‘Getting institutionalized.’

‘But that wasn’t just about them. And besides, I did go back to university, because otherwise we wouldn’t be together, would we?’

‘You went back eight years after everyone else.’

‘That was because my head wasn’t right, not because of the band. I had to do something with that time, which is why I used it to research them.’

‘Perhaps a bit much? Come on, Sam, that counsellor said you needed to stay clear of anything dark. Especially now. We’ve worked so hard to get here.’

‘All that will pay off now.’

‘Well it doesn’t seem a pay-off to me, Sam. Not on the day we had promised to leave all that behind. Come on, this is your last chance.’

‘But you know it makes sense. Come on, Rodders. This time next year we could be millionaires.’

She smiled, and cupped her hand over his. The small silver ring on her middle finger sparkled for a moment in the white light. ‘I love that you have this passion. I know it isn’t easy for you right now, but this will pass.’

‘Give me the chance to prove that it is possible, Elsa. That we don’t have to spend our time on this planet doing things we detest.’

‘Come on, it’s not that black and white. Look at what’s happened with me at the gallery. Any day now Malcolm is going to give me my first exhibition to oversee. Then we can start to have the sort of lifestyle a couple of losers like us could normally never get.’

‘I’m not sure you working for Malcolm is picking up where Harold Pinter left off.’

A waiter drifted to her side. Elsa ordered a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, Sam consenting with a nod. As the waiter turned Elsa bowed her head again.

‘It gives us the occasional holiday, Sam. Would it kill us to have one or two soft furnishings? But you’d have to give all that up to go off chasing after a murderer.’

‘He wasn’t a murderer! I’m not venturing into Colombia to discover the story of Pablo Escobar. Wardner was based in Manchester, and the recent sighting of him was in London. The biggest risk will be that I get short-changed for a baguette in Stepney Green.’

Elsa looked out at the river again. Sam knew she had always felt comforted by the thin belt of sparkling water running through the city, and the opulent houses built around it. She once said that they had seemed like a secret symbol, communicated from the city to her, telling her that this was the place she should build her future.

‘I know that it could work,’ she said. ‘But I think it’s far more
likely that I’ll end up funding this folly by putting in extra shifts. How on earth are we going to make the first payment as it is?’

‘I think I could get an initial advance off him. This Martin sounded fascinated by the idea of a book. You know what these London types are like, always wanting to think they’re one step ahead of the game. I’ll just use that to get us a fat pay cheque.’

‘You’re not the entrepreneurial type, Sam. It wasn’t so long ago you replaced a broken car window with a bin liner.’

‘I can be entrepreneurial. I’ll show you, Elsa. It will be my name on the front of the book. I’ll get a suit. We’ll have the book launch at the gallery…’

She laughed. ‘And you and Wardner can dance the night away, looking deep into one another’s eyes.’

He laughed. ‘No, I’d dance the night away with you. He couldn’t dance, anyway. Famously.’