How I Left the National Grid (4 page)

Bonny walked off. I could see she thought her more a girl than a woman.

‘Is that what you do?’ I asked.

She blushed. ‘I’m not chasing after anyone. I’m doing my job.’

I looked at the glass of wine in her hand. She laughed.

‘Yeah, so what? I’m not on the clock anymore.’

Her eyelashes were almost too long for her face.

‘So you thought you’d come backstage after your shift ended?’

‘Yeah. See what’s what. Why, was I not supposed to?’

‘Course. And what do you think so far?’

We exchanged glances.

‘It’s a bit of a circus.’

‘Bonny would have me schmoozing with everyone, like some politician,’ I said, pointing out our manageress. We watched as she tried to prise herself between the radiation suits The Grassmen wore.

‘You don’t need to do that,’ she said. ‘But if a fan is desperate to talk to you, and you give them a few minutes…’

‘What, like I am now?’

She laughed. ‘I’m not a fan. I’m just doing my job.’

‘Careful,’ I said. ‘I’m pretty sure some Nazis had that motto.’

She laughed.

‘What did you think of our set?’

She looked down at her glass. It struck me that I didn’t care what any of the girls in the corner thought. Only what the small girl in the gold cardigan said next.

‘You did remind me of Iggy Pop,’ she said.

‘So what’s your name?’ I asked.

‘Frankie.’

Nataly wrote her first letter to me soon after I’d met Frankie. It wasn’t the best time to receive it.

My relationship with Frankie had moved fast, and somehow I already knew that one day she’d be my wife. I wouldn’t propose romantically, and I wouldn’t gradually woo her. But there’d been such a sense of importance around our early conversations that I knew marriage was inevitable. She found a place in my daily routine so quickly, started taking up chores. Before that Bonny had been the only one who’d shown concern about the way I lived. Who reminded me to eat, and told me off if I picked at my arm with a knife or a compass when we all watched TV. I reckon Bonny felt put out at the way Frankie took over. Bonny had found me a decent place to live, got me sleeping properly, and now here was this stranger running the show. Before long she was at my place every night. Had her feet well under the table. But it felt good, in a way, to have someone want to nurture me.

The band was making waves and I only had the occasional day off. I’d use them to hang around at the offices of Exit Discs. There was a girl in the design department who wore Buddy Holly glasses, who’d show me her artwork for our next single. Sleek flyovers and under-passes. Then our A&R man would hand me a sack full of mail and I’d pick through it. But Nataly’s letter had been sent to Bonny. She made a point of handing it to me when she dropped by.

‘Who’s it from?’ I said.

‘Someone who didn’t trust giving it to a man. Worth a read, I’d say.’

I sat on the window sill and watched Bonny mount her moped
outside. Normally I read letters from fans with an outstretched arm. You don’t take it on, the praise. Reading between the lines, they always want something. And the compliments don’t ring true. They’ve bought into the myth that’s been pushed and think they’re dealing with that.

This letter was different.

It was written neatly in black ink. Not the usual green. She apologised for bothering me, admitted she had little idea why she was writing. Said she was an Athenian girl in her late twenties who wanted to jack in the life she’d started. Start again as a musician.

She couldn’t play a note, she said. Wasn’t even sure she could carry a tune in a bucket. But she’d listened to Siouxie Sioux and now she didn’t know what to do with the emotion. I knew how that felt.

I kept reading.

She’d just jacked in her a job in marketing and had formed a band. She’d bought my first single and got Bonny’s address off her company ad in
Melody Maker.

I’m not after a support slot, she wrote. I’m not trying to sleep with you. I don’t even want you to listen to the songs I’m working on. But your last single did something to me. And I want to know how you did it.

The letter was like a manifesto. Grids of anger, laced with strychnine.

She asked specifics. ‘How did you find like-minded people? How do you get started? How can I get to the point where I can change people?’ It tailed off quickly. It ended with ‘You won’t write back.’

I wrote back the next day. From then on, whenever I saw Bonny, she’d have another letter to give me. She never told Nataly to send it to my home address, and she never minded playing courier.

I think she thought Nataly was better for me than Frankie. An artist who’d challenge me. She always wanted a finger in every pie, Bonny.

In later letters Nataly would get too dark. You could sense her trying to articulate something. Bad poetry crept in, stuff about ‘black rivers’ and ‘fingers of darkness’. Mentions of obscure Italian film directors no one knew. I started to mention my own obsessions. How I dreamt about
shining cars and ruined cities. We started trading internal furniture. The pieces that only mean something to you. You can’t do that with many people, so you protect the ones you can exchange with. Keep them for yourself.

We kept on writing while I was on tour, and I kept it quiet. I’d tell her how the shows went, what I’d learnt, what I feared. What I was reading. Burroughs, Crowley. She’d then read the same books, in some dark flat in London, with the blinds down. Making notes. Then she’d write back. Pushing me.

Romance never crept in, but we both knew we were on intimate ground. You don’t lay yourself out like that without being vulnerable. She was so disciplined about replying, it was like she was doing a course by mail order. If I was late she’d want to know why. What is this, I thought?

We’d been writing for about two months when she sent a photo of herself. It was a clipping of her onstage at her first gig, taken from the local newspaper. Dark, slanted fringe covering most of her face as she focused on her guitar. A slim, Greek girl in a black dress. Trying to put a song across to a room full of indifferent strangers. Men looking at her thighs and her breasts. Not listening.

‘How do you make them sit up and take notice?’ she asked. ‘How do you tell them that you’re not messing about, and you will be heard?’

I drew a map of my movements onstage. Zones that I moved in. Make your own set of rules, I said. Exhilarate them by teaching them what they are during a show.

She tried it out. Then wrote to me again. ‘Come and see me live,’ she said. ‘See what you think.’

Her next gig was at some pub in Islington. The Hope and Anchor. I told Frankie I was going out with Bonny. Bonny took me for a pint over the road but then left well before the gig. I remember thinking, ‘you know what you’re doing’.

Outside the pub a punter guided his dog to a dish of stale water. I had on a black raincoat, collar pulled up. A toothless punk still recognised me, and nodded slowly. I nodded back, and as I went inside I
heard him shout, ‘Did you see who that was?’

I took my pint inside the venue. Grim. This stench of pies and trapped fag smoke. Tinny drums pummelling through the speakers.

The ceiling was low and sweat seeped off the walls. Every inch covered in graffiti, promoting this or that band. People’s dreams, piled up like wrecked cars. It was filling fast and I couldn’t see Nataly anywhere. Three women in black jeans with shredded t-shirts were bringing amps down the stairs. A woman with a severe, dark haircut following behind, carrying a bunch of leads. Scanning the faces.

I caught her eye and smiled. She didn’t smile back. Showed them where to stack the amps. I leant against the bar.

When she went on stage, in front of the microphone stand, she held both her arms out, straining her finger-tips. Then she said to her bassist, ‘Don’t come any nearer than that.’

She stuck a set-list to the floor with masking tape. As she crouched down I saw there was nothing under her short, strappy black dress. A tiny gash of dark hair under her armpits. Sharp black heels. When she stood up I could see she had no makeup on. Her features were so strong that already men were clamouring at the front in a tight semi-circle, tightening. Looking everywhere but at her. She saw it and leant into the mike. ‘I’d like to invite the women in the audience to come to the front,’ she said.

One or two did, nodding to themselves.

‘You’re Robert Wardner,’ someone shouted. I looked round. A man, laughing, stumbled over to me. Pretending someone had pushed him.

He looked up at me, jabbing his forefingers alternately. ‘You’re Robert Wardner,’ he repeated.

‘What do you want?’

‘Have you come to see Diameter?’

‘No. Them.’ I said, nodding at the stage.

‘Are you shagging her?’

I put the glass down, went to his nose. Intakes of breath all around. ‘Do you want to get fucking knocked out?’ I said.

Nataly was coiling a mike lead onstage.

‘Robert Wardner’s here!’ someone shouted.

I leant back on the bar, hoping Nataly hadn’t seen.

‘Let him be,’ said the soundman.

A lot of people around me were hunched, looking into their glasses. I wanted to smash a few heads against the bar. I focused.

Now it was all about me, not her.

I looked at the sea of hunched shoulders. Everyone still, now. Nataly looked at them too, and then for the first time that night she smiled.

She likes tension too, I thought. It fuels her.

Nataly had something about her.

As the drummer pounded out a rhythm she threw shards of untreated guitar over it. When she sang, her head bobbed up and down, like a coach talking to a boxer. Between songs the younger members looked to her and were instructed with a glance.

Before the last song there was a moment when she held out her hands and slowly flexed them into fists. The drummer, watching her, began to make thuds on the bass drum in time with it. She started to speak. ‘I want you to take all your poison, and dance it out in this song.’

I sensed people straining to catch every word. ‘There’s a beat,’ she said, snapping her fingers at the drummer. ‘And there’s a tune. And in the chorus, the words.
‘This is where I let my poison out.’
Now are you going to sing it with me or not?’

A few cheers. From somewhere at the back, a woman wailed. Cracked open, at last.

‘I said, are you going to sing it with me or not? I’m not here for the fun of it.’

‘Yeah!’ a man shouted, raising his pint.

Her splintering guitar line bled into a raw chorus.
‘This is where I let my poison out,’
she sang. Stamping her feet to every syllable.

In waves, the audience sang it back. Streaks of devotion fizzling through them. It built.

By the end, I had the mantra under my skin. She was crashing the neck of her guitar against the mike stand in time, letting it ring out its
hollow plea. Backed with echoing drums.
‘This is where I let my poison out.’

They chanted it back. It was like a political rally. Fists in the air. She was evangelical.
‘This is where I let my poison out.’

On the final note, some of them screamed their throats raw.

At the bar after, she gave me a tight grin. She reached over the counter and pulled out a bottle. ‘You made it then,’ she said.

‘You followed my instructions,’ I said. Her dress clung to her body. A patch of skin above her breasts glistening with sweat.

‘Guidelines,’ she answered. ‘No one instructs me.’

We had dinner.

Despite all those letters, it was still like walking on a tightrope to get to that point. She suggested a cheap Italian place. We barely looked at each other when she ordered salad and water. It was only once we were left well alone that she wanted to talk. As she asked her first question her knife was suspended in the air. ‘How did you learn to perform?’

I watched the blade glimmer. ‘It’s not a performance,’ I said. ‘You’re just a conduit.’

‘For what?’

‘For everything the audience can’t put across themselves.’

‘But how do you know what they want to express?’

I looked her in the eye. ‘You knew. It’s at the back of the room. Lingering over their heads. Resentment, bitterness, rejection. You tap into it.’

‘What about if none of that is there? If there’s only apathy?’

‘Apathy’s just a front. People offer it when there’s something stronger hiding underneath. You have to work harder to tap into it, but then your performance has even more power.’

She’d listen, then cut and eat. Gradually, the knife was laid down. She weaved her fingers. ‘There was something at the end there, that finally made me feel right.’ The hard eyes softened. ‘I could learn so much from you.’

‘Soon, I’ll be learning from you.’

‘True,’ she said.

At the end she wrote her phone number on the receipt. When we left she clasped her fingers on my coat for a second, and looking at the floor she told me to ‘go safe’.

I kept the phone number in a shoebox under my bed, along with a review I found of that gig. Whenever I saw Bonny I’d ask if she’d heard anything.

Some months I’d get nothing. I’d see a review in the
NME,
six or seven lines. They got bigger once she was signed. Eventually a letter would come, Bonny handing it to me with a smile.