To Be Someone (35 page)

If he hadn’t sworn he wasn’t, I’d have said he was definitely high.

Once more he disappeared into the kitchen, grinning, without waiting for my answer.

Somehow the drinks got topped up more and more often without me noticing. The chips were reduced to a few greasy crumbs at the bottom of the bowl. It was only eight-thirty, and all ideas of dinner had gone out of the window.

Vinnie finally put
Blue Lines
on again, the third time I’d heard it that day. He turned the volume up full blast and pulled me out of my chair to dance, still talking nonstop: politics, music, architecture. Irrespective of his knowledge or lack of knowledge of a subject, it transpired that he always had to be right. He was goading me as we danced, trying to woo me into one of the interminable debates that came to characterize our relationship (besides the sex, that is).

“I can’t dance, talk, and drink at the same time,” I said. His smell and his weird accent pulled at me like a magnet. I will not sleep with him, I told myself. We were getting closer and closer together, laughing as we danced drunkenly around. I wanted him.

“Whoops,” I thought—or maybe I said it aloud. “You’d better go and get me another drink.”

I was drunk enough by then that I kept on dancing even when he was out of the room. All my familiar possessions—pictures, books, chairs—took on a different and jiggly appearance, as though they were my new dance partners. Vinnie came back with two half-filled glasses. “That’s the end of the gin,” he said, laughing.

“You’re joking!”

I stopped dancing and suddenly felt exhausted. “We’ve drunk the whole bottle?”

“Yup. Come on, let’s send it out in style. Down in one!” We clinked glasses again, swigging the remainder of the gin. The room started to spin and I had to hold on to Vinnie’s arm to keep steady. Massive Attack ended but we still swayed together, closer and closer until our heads touched. A hair from one of his wiry curls detached itself and found its way scratchily under my eyelid. I felt his erection press hard up against my thigh and I shivered with excitement. As I blinked the hair out of my eye, I ran my fingers lightly over his bare arm, feeling the contours of his little moles and goose bumps, squeezing a rough elephant’s trunk of loose skin at his elbow. My other hand traced the knob of his spine.

He told me that he broke his back, parachuting, during a youthful stint in the army. “I was lucky,” he said. “The person who jumped out of the plane after me was killed—his parachute didn’t open at all.”

I couldn’t imagine him being in the army; I bet he’d been useless—a sort of opinionated, bossy, male equivalent of Private Benjamin. I laughed at the thought and Vinnie kissed me. His tongue felt nice, firm and insistent, not skinny like the rest of him.

“Whoops,” I whispered again as we went blurrily upstairs to my bedroom, shedding garments en route.

I sobered up briefly in the middle of the sex, our limbs a flailing tangle on the bed. The undersheet had twisted itself sweatily off, exposing the little stitched peaks and valleys of mattress beneath it. My body was loving it while my mind yelled furiously at me to stop—but by that time, stopping was out of the question.

Afterward we both had to go and throw up in the toilet to rid ourselves of the lingering alcohol, and I felt that I was vomiting out more than just the gin. I was puking caution, good sense, discretion. I cleaned my teeth and stared at my face in the mirror; there were two bright red spots on my cheeks that could have been from sex or gin, but might also have been from shame.

When I got back to the bedroom, Vinnie rolled contentedly onto his back, as at home in my bed as he was in the rest of my house. He grinned at me.

“Do you realize we’ve just had an entire night’s events crammed into about three hours?” he said. “We’ve talked, danced, drunk a whole bottle of gin, shagged, puked, slept—and it’s only ten o’clock.”

He gave me a triumphant peck on the cheek and curled up to dream a victor’s dreams.

I looked at him, small and vulnerable without his glasses or his clothes; astonished at the evening’s events. It couldn’t have been me who’d just done that, surely: gotten drunk and had sex with a stranger. Thankfully it had been wonderful, but I had a nagging feeling that I’d had absolutely no choice in the matter. I wondered whether I should kick him out, or perhaps go and sleep in one of the spare rooms, but he looked all warm and soft and inviting, so I climbed back into bed with him instead.

He turned over with his back to me, so I was spooning him, and muttered sleepily, “You know, I’m a huge fan of yours.”

But by then it was too late.

THE DELECTABLE SANDIE

A
FTER DAYS AND DAYS WHEN I’D BEEN UNABLE TO DO ANY
writing at all, Cynthia’s visit spurred me back into it. Suddenly I found that I was actually getting close to finishing the manuscript. I estimated two more weeks of working several hours daily, and I’d be ready to do the show. Not, of course, that I’d actually be reading the magnum opus on air—how could I, in a two-hour show?—but it had to be complete, for me to leave behind as the explanation for my choice of music.

It was time to start thinking seriously about collecting the music. I wanted to be sure that I brought every single CD with me into the studio, just in case New World’s library couldn’t produce a copy. I wanted to leave nothing to chance.

As I conducted a detailed rummage through my CD collection, I wondered who the producer for the two
A.M
. show would be. I supposed it was too much to hope that it would still be Chrissie, my last breakfast-show producer. She was very professional, and, I’d thought, a lovely person, too—she’d been the only one to visit me more than once in hospital, although she hadn’t rung me since. She had probably gone on to much better things by now.

It would probably be better if I had someone awful, anyway. Some thick-skinned dim novice, who wouldn’t get upset when the press asked, “How could you not have known what state Helena was in?” and “Didn’t you think she was acting strangely?” Someone who could bask in his fifteen minutes of fame, as the last person to see me alive.

I made a tidy tower of CDs next to the fireplace, containing the majority of tracks I had planned for the show. I’d already bought
All Mod Cons
, which I realized must still be in my car somewhere, a painful reminder of that sunny, hungry, sick day when I bumped into Toby. I couldn’t help wondering how he was, and if I would be able to find his sister’s address, which was also on the floor of the car. I decided I’d look for it when I went out to retrieve the Jam CD.

A few of the other CDs I’d need were also missing: My copy of
Tapestry
by Carole King was nowhere to be found (I suspected Vinnie had half-inched it), and I realized that I had never owned
The Sandie Shaw Supplement
, “Wichita Lineman,” or any Happy Mondays records.

I rang round all the Richmond record shops to see what they had in stock and managed to reserve copies of
Pills ‘n’ Thrills & Bellyaches, Tapestry
, and
20 Greatest Hits of Country Music
. Only the Sandie Shaw was missing now. But after ten minutes on the Internet, it was ordered, delivery time one to two weeks. Better not take any longer, I thought.

Even though I needed the album on CD, the original vinyl version, source of so much friction between Mum and Dad, would have done if all else failed. I decided to phone Dad to see if he still had it, as a backup in case the CD didn’t arrive in time. The record somehow felt like a bond between us.

Dad nearly fainted with surprise when he picked up the telephone to hear my voice.

“Hi, Dad, it’s me.”

“Helena, my honeypie! How the heck are you!”

I gritted my teeth with annoyance at his Southern twang. God knew where he’d picked it up from—my mother had managed to cling to her Home Counties vowels as if her life depended on them. An American accent was fair enough, after more than twenty years living in the country, but did he really need to sound as if he was just about to go out roping steer?

I was very fond of my father, but in an abstract way, the way one feels about having nicely manicured fingernails. He was a bit of a nonperson to me, really, a pipe-smoking appendage to my mother. In fact, the only time I could actually remember seeing him without her being there was in the early days of the band, when he had reluctantly come to one of our gigs (Mum had refused point-blank to come with him, as she was sure that she would hate it, although she did grace us with her presence once or twice after we’d begun to get successful). Dad had stood at the side, flattened against the wall away from all the moshing high-school kids, sucking on his pipe and looking so uncomfortable that anyone would think that I had been performing a striptease onstage. Justin and Joe had spotted him and, mid-set, began a lugubrious rendition of a
Sesame Street
song:
“One of us is not like the other ones.… ”
I’d been mortified.

“I’m fine, Dad. In fact I’m going back to work soon.”

“Aw, that’s just fan-tastic! I’m real happy to hear that, honey. Me and your mom’s been so darn worried.”

I shuddered.

“We wish you’d just come on out here and visit awhile, Helena. Why, it must be over two years since I last saw you!”

This was how all our conversations went.

“But Dad, you’re always off on your cruises at Christmas, and you know how busy I … used to be with the radio show. You have to be there every day. You can’t just go on vacation whenever you fancy it, you know that. I wasn’t really well enough to come over before, and now I’m starting a new show. There’s nothing stopping
you
visiting
me
, is there?”

Dad hemmed and hawed. “Well, honey, it’s kind of hard this side, too, what with work, and me being chairman of the Country Club Society Committee.… Anyways, to what do we owe the honor of your call? Want to talk to your mother?”

“No, actually, Dad, I wanted to ask you something. I’m, um, getting some records together for my first show back on air, and I really want to play a Sandie Shaw track. You used to have it on vinyl, I remember it from when I was a kid. The album was called
The Sandie Shaw Supplement.”

Dad laughed. “Oh my, I
loved
that record! As I recall, it featured the delectable Sandie spray-painted gold—lots of hair and a teeny chain bikini. Your mother disapproved.”

“Yeah, that’s the one. I’ve ordered it off the Net, but I’m worried it won’t arrive in time for my show. Do you still have it?”

There was a pause while he considered.

“You know what? I believe I might do. I sure haven’t seen it for donkey’s years, though. I’ll have a scout round for you. I remember your mother tried to throw it away, but I’m sure I rescued it and hid it in my study.”

Dad’s study in New Jersey was exactly the same as his study in Salisbury had been: whole mountain ranges of paperwork, yellowing newspapers, golf books, and an assortment of pipes, jumbled together in one huge fire hazard. It was hard enough to spot Dad when he was in there, let alone one thin vinyl record. I didn’t hold out much hope of getting a copy anytime this decade.

“Oh well, don’t worry, Dad. If it turns up let me know. Is Mum there?”

“No, honey, she’s out playing canasta. I’ll tell her you called.”

“Okay—well, that’s all, then. Thanks anyway.”

“Good to talk to you, sweetheart. We don’t do it enough. You take care of yourself, mind.”

I was going to have to hang up pronto, because a marble seemed to have gotten stuck in my throat. “Yeah, thanks. Bye, Dad. I love you.”

“Excuse me?”

Dad must have thought he’d misheard.

“I love you, Dad. Bye.”

“Love you, too, angel,” he said in a bemused voice.

I put the phone down and cried for ten minutes.

Sinead O’Connor
NOTHING COMPARES 2 U

A
RE YOU REALLY A FAN OF BLUE IDEA? I ASKED VINNIE AFTER OUR
first night together.

“Oh, man—yeah!
Painting the Ceiling
is one of my favorite ever records. I can sing all the words to it.”

“Go on, then,” I challenged him.

For a split second, when he thought I was serious, the look on his face was priceless. He later told me that was the moment he fell in love with me, although it was another ten months before he actually said it in so many words.

The already-subdued lights in the restaurant dimmed further, and a beaming young waiter emerged, bearing a beautifully decorated cake in the shape of a champagne bottle, five tiny flickering candles atop it.

Sam leaned over to me as everyone began to sing.

“Vinnie organized the cake for you,” she said, squeezing my hand.

I threw my arms around Vinnie’s neck and kissed his cheek repeatedly, breathing in his distinctive Vinnie scent of aftershave and Gauloises.

“Oh, Vin, baby! It’s wonderful! Thank you so, so much!”

“You’re welcome, angel,” he replied, a faintly puzzled expression on his face.

As the final “Hap-py Birth-day to yooouuuuuu!” faded away, the other diners in the restaurant applauded politely, and Sam, Timothy, David, David’s wife, Joe, Vinnie, and I all clinked glasses in a noisy and protracted toast to celebrate my thirtieth birthday.

I stood up, fingering the beautiful bracelet Sam had given me earlier, and smiling from ear to ear.

“This is so fantastic,” I said. “It’s the best birthday I’ve ever had. I’ve got my wonderful best friend here, my gorgeous and considerate boyfriend, old friends David and Joe, and, er, new friends, too! I just feel totally … great!”

They all cheered. Vinnie delved into his backpack under the table and brought out a thin, flat tinfoil package (from my kitchen—I’d caught him replacing the Bacofoil in the kitchen drawer earlier). He handed it to me, and it was so light that at first I thought there was nothing inside.

“Careful how you unwrap it,” he said. “It’s fragile.”

I gingerly undid the foil corners and opened the present to reveal a piece of wire twisted painstakingly into the wavy fingers, trouser creases, and joint bends of a realistic little wiggly man.

“Oh, Vinnie,” I said. “It’s lovely! Thank you so much.”

I showed it around the table, and everybody duly admired it. Only Sam had a slight frown furrowing her forehead. But Vinnie constantly gave me homemade presents, etchings and sculptures he’d done at college—a cute clay dinosaur with a rose in its snout, a hand-enameled mirror—and I loved them. After years of receiving vacuously expensive corporate gifts as tokens of gratitude for making Ringside rich—cashmere dressing gowns, vintage wines, state-of-the-art audio equipment, and so on—Vinnie’s little trinkets touched me deeply.

Vinnie clicked his fingers to order another bottle of champagne. After further toasts to the future happiness of David and his new wife, Cherry; Peter Gabriel, for kindly coinciding his world tour with my birthday (the reason Joe and David were in town as they were now employed as members of Gabriel’s touring band); absent friends (Justin was making his second solo album in a studio in the Bahamas); and Vinnie for generally being wonderful, we ordered a third bottle, and I cut the cake.

As we tucked in and Joe regaled us with tales of how sick-makingly in love David and Cherry were, Sam noticed that a table of older diners across the restaurant were looking askance at us.

“Do you think we’re being too loud?” she asked worriedly, when she could get a word in edgeways.

“Nah,” said Joe, in mid-flow of a story about what the newlyweds had been discovered doing underneath the stage at Earls Court, much to Cherry’s embarrassment. “They probably just recognize us.”

At that moment one of their group, a middle-aged woman with overplucked eyebrows and a tight Jaeger banana-colored suit, came up to our table and tapped me on the shoulder.

“Hi,” I said brightly to her. “Would you like an autograph?”

She looked at me for a minute, as if I was being facetious. “No,” she said. “Thank you. The thing is, you see, it’s my husband’s birthday today, too, his fiftieth, and
that
”—she pointed at the crumbs and slabs of icing, which was all that remained of the champagne cake—“was his cake.”

“What do you mean?” I asked indignantly. “My boyfriend brought it. Maybe yours was the same. Why don’t you ask the waiter?”

The headwaiter materialized immediately beside the woman. I felt, rather than saw, Vinnie squirming in his seat beside me.

“No, madame,” the waiter intoned sonorously. “We were only in possession of one birthday cake. Unfortunately, my junior waiter was not aware that there were
two
birthday parties taking place, and so when the signal was given for the cake to be brought out, he brought the cake to your table, when, in fact, it was intended for the other party.”

Everybody fell about laughing, and then looked at Vinnie.

“Hey, this isn’t my fault!” he protested.

“Well, where’s the cake you brought, then?” Sam demanded.

Vinnie lit a Gauloise and managed to blow smoke into the faces of both the headwaiter and the cakeless woman.

“Thing is,” he said, “when I said I’d organized it, what I meant was that I’d asked matey-boy over there”—he pointed at the greeter by the door, who suddenly became very engrossed in his reservations book—“if he could sort us out with a piece of apple pie or something with a candle in it, you know—something to bring out for Helena so we could all sing. I was well chuffed when the other waiter appeared with this great cake. I thought, Wow, what a cool restaurant.… ”

We all slapped our hands against our foreheads, Homer Simpson style, and a chorus of “Doh”s arose.

“Well, how was I to know that someone else was having a birthday?” Vinnie said to the headwaiter. “You should have been better organized, mate. It’s not our fault if you bring out a cake to the wrong people. Here, let’s see what we can do.”

He leapt up and went round all our plates, collecting the chunks of discarded icing that had originally formed the label of the champagne bottle. After piecing them together on a side plate like a sugary jigsaw, he stuck a candle on top, lit it with his cigarette lighter, and, with a flourish, bounded across the room to present the cakeless candle to the birthday boy.

By this time the entire restaurant had ground to a standstill. Vinnie spread his arms wide, Gauloise still in his mouth. “Come on, everybody!” he shouted, and led all the diners in another round of “Happy Birthday,” sung lustily by him, ourselves, and the fiftieth-birthday party, grudgingly by everyone else (who were beginning to look at one another with “We’re not coming here again” expressions), and not at all by the birthday boy’s wife, who was furious.

I put my head in my hands and groaned, although I couldn’t help laughing.

David leaned over the table. “Quite a guy you got there, H,” he said affectionately. “I’m glad you’ve met someone you like so much. He sure seems crazy about you, too, I hope it works out. You never were that lucky in love before, were you?”

“No—it’s about time, isn’t it? I’m pleased you’ve found your soulmate, too.”

I grinned at him and Cherry, clasping hands with each other across the debris of scrunched up napkins and misappropriated cake crumbs.

“Thanks, Helena. I’m sorry we didn’t invite you to our wedding, but like I said, we just slipped away to Barbados on the quiet. You should try it—married life is awesome!”

“Maybe we will, some day,” I said. “You guys are certainly a good advertisement for it.”

Eventually the fuss was smoothed over. The headwaiter, a muscle twitching violently in his cheek, was forced to offer the fiftieth-birthday party desserts on the house, and several free bottles of champagne, and I thought it was probably time to ask for our table’s bill.

“It’s my birthday, I’m treating everybody,” I said when Sam and David began to protest.

I paid up, and Vinnie courteously helped me into my coat.

“There you go, old lady,” he said, kissing my cheek. “Have you had a good time, despite the, er, unfortunate incident?”

I nodded. “Fantastic, thanks. And even if you didn’t get it together to actually
bring
a cake, thanks for organizing someone else’s for me. It’ll be a great story to tell our grandchildren, don’t you think?”

“Mmm,” said Vinnie, tilting my head back for a huge, passionate birthday kiss, and wrapping his arms tightly around my waist.

“I love you, Vin,” I said when I came up for air.

“Love you, too, Helena,” he replied, for the first time ever.

I grinned and hugged him triumphantly. “You staying over tonight?”

Vinnie looked at his watch, a Rolex I’d given him for his birthday two months earlier. “Can’t, angel. I really have to get back and work on that project I’m in the middle of.”

“But it’s my birthday!”

Vinnie kissed me again. “Sorry. See you tomorrow, okay, baby?”

Sam looked hard at me. “He doesn’t stay round at your place much, does he?”

Two weeks later, we found out why.

Sam and I had gone to Richmond Park on a warm September day, for a picnic. I’d thought of asking Vinnie to join us, but then I remembered him telling me that he’d been enlisted to help his friend Ivan lay a patio that afternoon, but would see me that night at seven to accompany me to a rare function: a dinner party I’d been invited to at Ron’s house.

I’d secretly been relieved that Vinnie was busy. Even though I was looking forward to the dinner party, I was feeling quite stressed about the prospect of meeting lots of strangers, and I just wanted a chilled-out afternoon in the sun. Sam and Vinnie would only have sniped at each other—they had never gotten on all that well, and it was getting worse. Sam made snide comments about his new Paul Smith suit, his penchant for meals at tiny, very exclusive restaurants, and his sudden urgent need for expensive equipment for his art course: computers, scanners, cameras, VCRs, and the like. All paid for by me.

“It’s my money,” I’d say defensively to Sam. “I like spending it on Vinnie.”

I could tell she didn’t want to make too much of an issue out of it, in case I thought she was jealous that I wasn’t spending it on her. I didn’t think that at all. In fact I was touched by her concern; I just thought it was entirely misguided.

So that day it was a joy, as well as a relief, to have Sam all to myself. Since my birthday she’d been feeling a bit low and unwell, and I was terrified that her ill health might presage the return of her leukemia.

“It’s definitely not that,” she insisted as she unpacked the picnic hamper. “I promise you, Helena, it isn’t. I’ve been working too hard, that’s all, and my lungs are playing up from the graft-versus-host. Plus it’s so depressing being dumped for ‘not being enough fun.’ ”

Timothy had recently decided that he did not require a girlfriend who went to bed exhausted at nine o’clock practically every night, and Sam had taken it badly.

“Timothy’s just a shallow loser, if that’s all he cares about,” I said as I put a compilation tape into the boom box I’d brought with us. I was about as fond of Timothy as Sam was of Vinnie. I’d only tolerated him at my birthday party because Sam wanted him there.

I spread out an Indian throw under a tree in a secluded part of the park, away from all the families biking down the yellow gravel paths, and the hesitant children on horseback. Our nearest neighbors were a couple snogging near the next cluster of trees, about fifty feet away, and a father flying a kite with his young son on our other side.

“I’m sorry, though, Sam, I know how much he meant to you. I’ll throttle him if I ever see him again, for putting you through all this. Here, have a sarnie—I made your favorites, look, peanut butter and pickle.”

Sam reclined on a cushion, halfheartedly toying with her sandwich, as we spent an intense hour analyzing in excruciating detail every single word and gesture of Timothy’s, trying to deconstruct the whys and wherefores of rejection.