To Be Someone (37 page)

I quickly checked that everyone’s eyes weren’t completely glazed over, but they were all still agog.

“It wouldn’t be enough to just make a request; I’d make them explain why the record meant so much to them. In detail. Right down to what color underwear they were wearing that night. If they couldn’t remember exactly what was going on, then I wouldn’t believe the record could be that important to them.

“Take today,” I plunged on recklessly. “I was in the park, having a picnic with my best friend, Sam, when we saw”—at the last minute my sense of circumspection thankfully returned—“her boyfriend, kissing another woman.”

Tuts and sighs rippled around the table.

“We were playing a tape at the time, a song that Sam hadn’t heard for ages, and that she’d just told me she really loved.”

“Which one?” interrupted Clint curiously.

“Sinead O’Connor, ‘Nothing Compares 2 U,’ ” I said impatiently, wanting to get on with the story.

Clint swooned theatrically. “Oh, I just love that record, too. Her face on the video! Makes me want to cry just thinking about it.”

“Yeah, yeah. So, anyway, I reckon that if Sam hadn’t liked the song, she wouldn’t even have known we’d been listening to music at the time. But since she did, I’d put money on the fact that forever more, when … Sam thinks of her lousy, two-timing
dickhead
of a boyfriend”—(I may have thumped the table at that point)—“she’ll think of that song, and watching clouds, and eating quiche, and how prickly the grass felt, and she’ll feel really, really sad and hurt and betrayed.”

I was about to have to leave the room to go and splash cold water on my face, when Gus spoke. “How would you fancy a job on New World, as a DJ on the evening session?”

The salty tension that had been building inside the bridge of my nose suddenly disappeared.

“Pardon?” I asked, clutching the tablecloth. Now they were all nodding, like it was catching, and beaming moronically at me.

“We’ve got a slot opening up soon. I think you’d be perfect for it.”

“But I don’t know how to DJ,” I burbled.

“Don’t worry. You’ll learn. We’ll train you up before you start. The main thing is, your music knowledge is great, your name is already well-known, and you’ve got a great new idea for a show.”

I was astounded. “I have?”

“Yes, definitely. A kind of confessional request show? I think it would be terrific. What do you say?”

After three seconds thinking about it, I finally joined in with the nodding. “Okay. Why not?”

THINKING ABOUT GOD AND TOBY

I
LAY IN BED LATE ONE HUMID NIGHT, UNCOMFORTABLE ON A
creased-up fusty sheet which I hadn’t bothered to change for weeks, drowsy from the pill I had to take to make me sleep. I had taken off my eye patch and was tracing the stitched-up socket where my eye once was. The skin had healed, but it was twisted and velvety, like a stick-on scar, and the absence of my eyeball made the space feel concave and hollow. I marveled at how even I had kind of managed to become accustomed to being one-eyed: Like anything else, it was a process of adjustment. It was a bit like having contact lenses, really; you eventually just got used to fiddling about with sterilizing fluids and screw-top containers, intermittently blurred vision, and the ever-present fear of a lens popping out at an inopportune moment. Not that anything could pop out of that sealed-up space now, but the rigmarole of adjusting eye patches and being vigilant about not bumping into lampposts was vaguely comparable. Having to pay attention to one’s vision instead of taking it for granted.

Even if I was getting used to it, though, it didn’t prevent me from loathing and detesting the fact that my eye was gone. I wished fancifully that it would just
come back
, the way my mislaid hearing had. But it never would, and neither would Sam. Or Toby. It surprised me that I was still thinking about him, after the beery debacle, but I was—albeit with a lot more reservations and a lot fewer expectations.

It was two
A.M
., and despite the pill, I still couldn’t get to sleep. I wondered if I ought to say a prayer, to ask for some sort of spiritual guidance and healing. What with my hour of need being at hand, and all.

But I couldn’t do it. It somehow didn’t seem to work anymore. It wasn’t that I ever stopped believing in God; He just didn’t seem to be around very much.

Perhaps I’d gotten too confused over the years. I had briefly dabbled in so many different esoteric and spiritual practices that the easy faith I’d gobbled up in high school had been usurped by something more … well,
cool
. It wasn’t cool to think of God as a white-beardy man peering anxiously down at us from His cloud. God was a spark of pure light. God was an essence. God was all around us. God was inside me. God was an energy. I’d had so many different people tell me what God was, or wasn’t, that I no longer knew what to think.

I wanted to ask Him to help me, only I didn’t know to whom to address my inquiry. Angels didn’t seem somehow senior enough, and Jesus seemed too busy. It was a dilemma. But, apropos the Plan, I didn’t think God would kick me out if I suddenly turned up on the Other Side prematurely. Whether He was big or small, cloudy or solid, I was sure He would understand. That idea about suicides being eternally damned was a medieval concept; I’d read that somewhere. Besides, Blue Idea had given tons of cash to charity, surely that would stand me in good stead.… I might have a bit of extra karma to work off, like calories after Christmas, but it would be a small price to pay to see Sam again, and to not feel this emptiness anymore.

It was quite funny, really. I could still recite all twenty-six lines of the Creed, faultlessly. I knew how to chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo until my voice turned into white noise. I could do the Yang Style Tai Chi Long Form and the yogic Sun Salutation. I’d wrapped myself in white robes and meditated in silence for hours, and been put in touch with my angels (right before they took early retirement, apparently).

The only thing I still didn’t know how to do was to get anybody, or anything, to help me cope with what I was currently going through. When I thought about religion, I felt like a tourist trying to buy a 50p pencil sharpener in the Harrods sale while being shoved to the back of the queue by diplomats’ wives waving Platinum Amex cards. Overlooked and invisible. I was in the right shop, but all the shop assistants were busy swiping credit cards, or else were standing about examining their fingernails and ignoring me.

I supposed I should have gone back to that therapist, the one who visited me in hospital—but therapy wasn’t what I wanted. It was too rational, somehow, and I was afraid that I’d end up getting talked out of the Plan. End up calm but forgotten. No, no, that would be no good.

After I finally got to sleep, I dreamed about Salisbury Cathedral, and about Toby and Ruby. They were adjudicating a Great Continental Quilt Bob-Sleigh Race between two teams: me and Sam versus Vinnie and Sam’s ex, Timothy. The event was being held in the cathedral close, on the long stretch of smooth gray path outside the west front.

Toby sat on a big throne in the cathedral doorway, wearing a bishop’s miter, and Ruby sat on his right-hand side in a fetching sparkly crown. As we raced past them, I relived the feeling of thrilled fear I always got when Sam and I used to play there as kids: that all the stone saints and gargoyles looking down from their ledges and drains and corners could actually come tumbling off on top of me; that the whole towering stone facade could topple down and crush me at will. It was as much a sensation of respect as of fear, the power of the building pouring into and through me.

Sam and I beat Vinnie and Timothy to the finish line.

“Well done, you’re the winners!” Ruby said graciously to us. “Here’s your prizes. You”—pointing a magic wand at Sam—“get six mini-packets of M and Ms, and you”—pointing at me—“get a lifetime supply of being my mummy.”

I was delighted.

I woke up freezing cold, with my duvet on the floor and a fresh pack of memories of the cathedral shuffling themselves around inside my head, sharp as knives, summoned by the dream. As I wrapped myself up in the chilly quilt, I turned the cards over in my head before me, one by one. I was surprised at how many there were. Even at eight or nine years old, Sam and I used to love going on guided tours up the cathedral tower, retracing the steps that the drunken shepherd must have taken before he made his maiden flight.

Memories of walking outside along the cathedral roof’s base, knowing that its waterproof lead coverings heated up in summer and became soft to the touch of our small fingers, as though the roofs were all lagged with giant slabs of gray toffee.

Memories of looking up the tower, from the inside now, and seeing the crisscrossing scaffolding of thick oak rafters, jumbled together, the veins and supporting arteries of the spire, getting closer and tighter toward the top, a giant pyramidal bird’s nest of twigs the thickness of a man’s torso.

Memories of climbing from ground level up and up the tiny winding steps carved into the thickness of the walls, round and round until we felt dizzy, with vertigo and the joys of a secret hidden place.

Memories of daylight filtering into the narrow stairwells from arrow-slit windows, throwing weak dusty stripes of light on our faces.

That’s odd, I thought. All those memories, and no accompanying song anywhere, not even the vague low chants of the cathedral choir singing matins. It felt like watching television with the sound turned down.

The other effect of my dream was that I couldn’t stop thinking about Toby. If his friend Bill had been telling the truth, that Toby really was mad about me, then I owed it to him to see him just once more. I had retrieved from my car the receipt with his sister’s address scrawled on it, and put it for safe keeping into the Hel-Sam box. The receipt was still scrunched into a ball about the size of a hazlenut—I was putting off unwrapping it until every other part of the Plan was ready.

Although I didn’t know them very well, Toby and Ruby were going to be the hardest people to leave behind, because they represented the only part of my life that might possibly look to the future.

Ann Peebles
I CAN’T STAND THE RAIN

O
UR TRIP TO SANTORINI ENDED UP BEING POSTPONED UNTIL THE
following spring, not only because of my new career as a DJ, but also because Sam started feeling iller and iller. Within five months she’d had to leave her job and move back to the basement flat in Salisbury again. She got a part-time position in a local solicitors’ office, but even that was a strain. Every time I talked to her she sounded more wheezy and exhausted. She qualified for a disabled parking sticker, started popping an array of Day-Glo tablets, and had to embark on a program of physiotherapy to try to clear her malfunctioning lungs.

I was worried sick. If it hadn’t been for the job, I would have moved to Salisbury to be with her, but by that time I’d been promoted to the breakfast show, and had to get up at five o’clock every morning as it was. Commuting, even in my new 5-series BMW, would have been a nightmare. Instead I sped down to see her as often as I could on weekends, taking her tapes of my best shows from the previous week and entertaining her with stories of who I’d met, how the New World ratings were going up, what songs I had played and for whom.

I did believe that I had dumped Vinnie for good, but somehow, when he turned up on my doorstep again a few weeks later, wheedling me with stolen roses and come-to-bed eyes, telling me that I was the only one he’d ever really loved—well, I just couldn’t resist him. I made it clear that I’d never trust him again, but strangely that didn’t seem to worry him in the slightest.

He had moved out of the house with Miyuki (“Been thrown out, more likely,” Sam said) and was staying with another “friend” until he “found his feet” (“Tell him that they’re on the ends of his legs,” suggested Sam wheezily). I immediately realised that he was angling to move in with me, and to my boundless relief, I stayed strong enough to refuse permission. If it hadn’t been for the memory of him and Miyuki rolling around in the park, Vinnie would have had his misplaced feet planted firmly underneath my table—at least that was something for which to be thankful. We contented ourselves with frequent sex and no questions asked. When I thought too deeply about it, it broke my heart, but I was too busy with New World and Sam to allow myself to take it too seriously.

By spring of the following year, I felt established enough at New World to risk taking a week off. I had spotted nine
HELENA LET ME TELL LONDON MY SONG
bumper stickers on my way home from the show that morning, plus I’d just had a very complimentary review in the media section of
The Independent
. Sam wasn’t getting better, but she was no worse either, and we both really needed some sun and a change of scenery.

“Come on, then,” I said to her on the phone. “Pack your bikini, we’re off on vacation. I’ll drive down and collect you on Wednesday morning. Be ready by ten.”

At ten-thirty the following Wednesday, Sam and I were heading back up to Heathrow Airport to catch an afternoon flight to Santorini. My car was full of things to maximize Sam’s comfort: cushions to support her bony ass on the plane; a borrowed hospital wheelchair to help conserve her limited energy; enough medication to start a small pharmacy; her own feather pillows. I wondered how she had suddenly managed to turn into an invalid, and it made my throat swell with sorrow.

It was a beautiful April day, and we decided to take the scenic route to the airport. Being on tour, all those years of bleak American highways, always made me so thirsty for the English countryside. I drank in every bright yellow acre of rape, the green of the patchwork fields, the arches of tree branches overhanging the smooth arrow-straight roads.

Sam was uncharacteristically quiet for most of the drive. At one point she switched on the radio, tuning it to Radio One just as the DJ announced,
“Next up, that classic song that stormed the charts six years ago—seems like only yesterday—the fabulous Blue Idea, with ‘Take Me Away’ …”
I laughed and cringed a little as the synth intro started up, joined by my bass and then Justin’s high-pitched voice, as familiar as my own skin.

“Turn it off, turn it off!” I cried. “Radio One is banned from this car!”

Sam refused. “Don’t be a spoilsport! You know New World doesn’t reach out to the sticks.” She cracked a smile for the first time that day. “It’s funny, but I still get such a thrill when I hear you on the radio or see you on TV—even after all these years, I still want to yell out to everyone, ‘Hey, that’s my best friend!’ ”

And even after all those years, I was still pleased.

After a couple of miles speeding along a deserted Roman road, littered with the tiny corpses of squirrel, pheasant, and rabbit, the Blue Idea song finished and was replaced by a dreary interview with a techno band. I clicked off the radio again and slid my Ann Peebles CD into the CD player, to listen to the title track: “I Can’t Stand the Rain.” I was humbled by how far superior that song was to ours: her creamy vocals, the pounding rhythm, and the passion of the incredible Memphis Horns. It made “Take Me Away” sound like a weedy little preprogrammed tune on a cheap Bontempi organ. Sex versus impotence. Scotch on the rocks versus orange squash through a straw.

I sang along, but Sam was silent again. I sensed something brewing in her, and waited for her to tell me about it.

We barreled through yet another tiny picturesque village, this one with a quirky little square church tower peeping over the rooftops, pinnacles on only three of its four top corners.

Sam finally spoke. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

She turned down the volume on the CD.

“I thought so. What is it?”

There was a brief pause over the top of the muted Memphis Horns.

“I didn’t say anything to you before, but I saw my specialist at the hospital yesterday. My lungs aren’t ever going to get better on their own. In fact, they’re packing up. He says I’m going to need a lung transplant.”

I got a funny swimmy feeling in my head and had to grip the steering wheel hard. All I could think of to say was, “When?”

“Whenever I decide to go on the waiting list, and then as soon as they find a donor. That could be three days or three years.”

The swimmy feeling turned into a sick feeling. “One lung or two?” I asked, as if I were at some surreal organ-donors’ tea party.

Sam laughed, catching my thought, but she had tears in her eyes. “Just one should do the trick.”

I didn’t want to ask—but I couldn’t
not
ask. “What are the success rates like for this … kind of thing?”

“If you mean what are my chances, the survival rate is about forty percent in the first year.”

This figure whirled around my brain for a while in a useless way, not sticking anywhere, like the algebraic formulas we had to do in school. I didn’t understand what it meant, and that time I didn’t ask. It didn’t sound at all promising to me.

“But do you have to do it?” I was almost pleading.

“No, not immediately. But I should do it before I get too weak to cope with the operation. If I don’t have it done eventually, I will probably die.”

She sounded so calm, but also slightly numb, as if it hadn’t sunk in yet. Her last statement shocked me even more—I knew it wasn’t good, but I hadn’t realized her health had gotten
that
bad. I suppose I hadn’t wanted to realize.

We were out of the village, but suddenly the countryside looked drab and uninteresting. I pulled the car into a lay-by, buried my face in my hands, and burst into tears.

“Oh, don’t, please,” Sam said, “you’ll start me off.”

But she didn’t cry. She stroked my shoulder as if it was my life under threat, and then pulled out a packet of fruit Polos, offering me one. “Go on, it’s red, your favorite.”

I took the Polo but I couldn’t look at her. It was too painful to think that something might go wrong and I’d never see her again. The sharp sweetness of the Polo hit the back of my tongue, and I clung to the taste as if someone had thrown it to me, a mini red life belt.

I tried hard to think of what I’d learned over the years, in my various flirtations with different sorts of spirituality: Christianity, Buddhism, Transcendental Meditation—they all said the same thing, that the soul was eternal, and death of the body meant nothing, not in the grand scheme of things. But not Sam’s body! Sam’s body had
Sam
inside it!

Cars whizzed intermittently past us in a whining crescendo of painted metal and engine noise, the wake of their momentum making my BMW rock slightly.

Sam leaned her head on my shoulder. “Listen, Helena, I’m not going to go on the list just yet. I’m going to think about it for a while and then decide. In the meantime I really want to enjoy this holiday, okay?”

“Okay.” I blew my nose and after a minute we drove off again. I still felt stunned but I tried to be optimistic, to look at it as a piece of good news.

“Just think what you’ll be able to do with a new lung—run, swim, shop. It’ll change your life totally. I’ll make you get up early with me and help me with the show—in fact, why don’t you come and live in my house with me?”

“I hate getting up early. And thanks for the offer, but there’s no way I’m moving in with you if Vinnie’s still on the scene,” said Sam grumpily, taking advantage of my vulnerability.

“Then he’s history, definitely this time. I would happily never see him again, for you to be better, and close by. Oh God, Sam, it would be so wonderful to have you back to your old self.”

Sam sighed. “What is my old self? I really can’t remember.”

It was late that evening when we finally got settled in our apartment in Santorini, which was basically a luxuriously furnished cave, carved from the side of the cliff. Even in the dusk we could tell that it was utterly beautiful, but it was also probably the world’s most un-wheelchair-friendly place. There was a short but very windy walk up steps and round corners from the road to the apartment, so I left Sam and her wheelchair waiting in the car while I puffed up and down the path with all our stuff. When I’d finished I was sweating like a cart horse, and worried that it might finish me off altogether to have to give Sam a piggyback, but thankfully she was able to walk unassisted. She collapsed peakily on one of the beds as soon as we made it through the door.

“Why didn’t you rent an apartment that we needed to abseil down to? At least that might have been less tiring to reach.”

She wasn’t cross, just being sarky, but I still felt stricken.

“I’m sorry, Sam, really. The brochure made out that it was just by the road. I had no idea.”

“Oh, don’t worry. It’s just nice to be here. Let’s sleep on it, so I’ve got the energy to face some retsina and sunshine tomorrow.”