Auntie Jan already had the kettle on when I arrived. Uncle Duncan was, she said, fractious, and she sent me in to talk to him, impossible to argue with in her crisp efficiency and brand new lowlights. When I said her hair looked nice, she put a hand to it for a moment, as if she’d forgotten she’d had it done.
In the front room, Duncan stared sullenly out of the bay window. The last fingers of sunlight caught the framed photos that lined the walls and—just for a moment—reminded me of Charlie’s boat, filled with those glossy black-and-white pictures of him with The Stones, with George Harrison, Steve Marriott… each shot somehow more pretentious for the fact that he wasn’t posing, per se, but just caught in moments of casual movement. Smoking, drinking, talking… as if they were just the kind of informal shots he had albums filled with. Maybe he did, I supposed, but then surely he didn’t need them blown up and hung on the walls.
I shook the thought… for now.
“Hello, Uncle Dunc,” I said, pulling up a chair.
He looked at me, his upper lip drawn tight across his teeth and his lower lip jutting out, tongue flexing as he tried to frame what was probably a rude word.
“’llcks,” he said, eventually, the first in a series of tortuous word-shapes, mostly referring to the unappealing qualities of solicitors.
“Well,” I said, having waited patiently for him to finish, “I don’t know about that, Unc. I mean, they must have, if you think about it. Otherwise, who would accountants look down on?”
Uncle Duncan laughed and lifted his hand, hooking onto my arm with his hard fingers. I patted the hand, traced figures of eight on his reddened knuckles, and considered his warm, clammy skin. As a child, I’d known his hands well. They’d picked me up when I fell over, patched up scrapes and grazed knees… shared ice creams and Cornish pasties with me during family holidays.
Mum had split up with my sister, Becky’s, father approximately four months before my birth for reasons that, with that timing, should be obvious. Becky had only been three and, as her dad never really seemed to show much inclination to stay in touch, neither of us remembered him well. He and Mum hadn’t been married—an institution she’d appalled her own mother by expressing intense distaste for—and she’d not maintained many long-term relationships while we were young. I remembered a few transiently affectionate ‘friends’ of hers who’d been around, but Becky and I had been her priority and, once we were grown, I often wondered if Mum had forgotten how to let people into her life. Maybe she just decided not to, or maybe she’d decided it wasn’t worth it. I never knew—never talked about it with her—because she’d have taken it as a challenge, an affront. As if I was questioning how she’d lived her life, judging her success at it.
I couldn’t have hurt her like that.
So, she’d had Becky and I spend time with Jan and Duncan, and Uncle Dunc had been the non-threatening, confidence-inspiring, loving figure of my childhood that I supposed fathers were meant to be. Later, as I grew up, I would wonder about the whole Freudian concept of women’s relationships with their fathers dictating their taste in men, but then Becky had married Mark, a sandy-haired would-be art student she’d met at sixth form college. He’d failed as an artist, but succeeded in fathering her two boys, Ian and Grant, and now they lived near Cheshunt, where Mark worked as an IT consultant.
We had less and less in common as time passed and, every year, there seemed to be something more pallid and stiff about Becky’s Christmas letter. She was a lot like Mum, really. I had no idea whether her life fulfilled her, or why what she thought of as normal—the school fetes and the nativities and the PTA—filled me with a cold dread, but I knew I could never ask her.
I had been talking to Duncan about the everyday minutiae of what I had, supposedly, been doing on campus, and he’d been asking me questions, taking an interest just like he always had. He might not have a clue what it was all for, but he’d want to hear about it, and he’d listen, proudly and dutifully, with a slight sense of confusion, if not exactly disapproval.
Very fatherly, I always thought.
“What’s that, then?” Jan came into the room bearing a tray of tea and biscuits. “Not going to have a tantrum for Ellis, are you? Oh, no. All nice for your niece. Old bugger.”
I smiled, despite the tone of bitterness in her voice, and tried to be the peacemaker. She caught herself, and she let me do it, sitting down by the window and trying to pretend everything was fine. She gave me the solicitor’s letter to look at, and we talked over the implications of an out-of-court settlement, as opposed to carrying on with the case. I saw what she’d had to put up with all day when Duncan started to get agitated, frustrated at not being able to keep up, not being able to shape or hold on to what he wanted to say.
“Sshh, love, steady on,” Jan said, reaching out to pat his arm. “Just take it slowly and y—”
He wrenched his wrist away from her, starting to get loud and—even I could tell—abusive. Jan just sighed and shook her head.
“Oh, sort yourself out,” she muttered, crossing her legs and looking out of the window.
I cleared my throat, loud in the awkward quiet. I wished I could have gone straight home and sunk into a hot bath, but such little luxuries had never seemed further away. Though already awash with the stuff, I drank my tea and suggested that maybe it would be a good idea to talk to some of the support group members and see whether anyone had experience of or opinions on the sort of offer being made.
It boiled down to a fairly simple choice: Jan had never wanted to go to court, but recognised that they needed the payment, because there was only so far disability benefits would stretch. Duncan, among other victims of the crash, wanted to take the case to its fullest legal extreme, up to and including charges of corporate manslaughter. It made for a strained half-hour’s discussion.
“You could take that holiday too,” I said, stretching out for some last-gasp conciliatory effort. “Cotswolds, or something similar. You know, you were talking about that, with the adapted….”
Uncle Duncan glowered at me, his mouth crooked, and I thought for a moment I’d really stuck my foot in it, but then his face softened, and he turned his gaze to Jan. She was staring out of the window again, pale and tight-lipped, her chin resting on one hand. There was an awful silence, endless and shifting, around which unspoken things moved like tides.
“’An,” he said eventually. “Sso’y.”
Auntie Jan looked at the pale dusk and the tarmac for a moment longer, pressing her lips together. Then she turned, dusting unseen biscuit crumbs from the front of her pink sweater.
“Oh, you haven’t got anything to be sorry about, love,” she said. Then, briskly, she turned to me and smiled. “Coo, I don’t know. Look at the time. Did you want to stay for dinner, Ellis, love?”
I shook my head. “I’d like to, but I really ought to get moving. I, um, I said I’d meet a friend.”
It wasn’t entirely a lie. I had realised, satisfying as it was in its insanity, that Damon would be wondering where I’d got to. Sorry, can’t do dinner tonight… dead rock star waiting at home. Disappointed in myself, I also realised I wanted to get back and talk to him about all the stuff I’d heard from Charlie. My two worlds, I thought, were eliding. Not as dramatic as a collision, but an insidious, silent thing.
“Oh. All right, then, darling,” said Auntie Jan and, as I bent to kiss Uncle Duncan goodbye, she caught me quite by surprise.
“Not your Seventies man, is it?”
“Erk,” I squeaked. “Um….”
“Y’know, the one who wanted Caro’s scrapbook,” she continued blithely, fetching my jacket from the hall and smiling at me from the doorway. “I thought you was dressed nice today.”
I opened and shut my mouth, then decided I was getting too good at lying as I watched the words troop off my tongue.
“Actually, yes, but it’s really not, um…. It’s a working thing, really. We’re looking at an editorial collaboration. The copies I took from the scrapbook have been incredibly useful. It’s proving to, er, be a really interesting project.”
Jan smiled—far too knowingly, I thought—and slipped the jacket over my shoulders.
“Well, I’m glad it helped, darling. I have to say, I wondered how he was getting on… certainly got me thinking about it all! You know, all the things you don’t really think about remembering. Fondue, and staypress trousers.” The smile broadened into a delicate, soft laugh, and I was so glad to hear it from her. “Those silly men with great big moustaches and polyester shirts, all reeking of Brut and YSL. Terrible, really… but we thought it was so sophisticated!”
I blinked. “YSL?”
“Yves Saint Laurent aftershave, love,” Jan said absently as we moved down to the front door. “Smelled like, oh, I don’t know… quite heavy. Sort of like soggy nutmeg and carnations, I suppose. Mind you, they have those people who’re actually employed for all the different smells, don’t they? You know, picking them out. Like with wine. I don’t know. Gail took me shopping for perfume last Christmas, wanted me to pick out something I liked for a present. A lot of it just smells like toilet cleaner to me. All them years on wards, I suppose. You lose your sense of smell. It was nice, though, that YSL.”
Tracking the flow of her thoughts could sometimes be like following jetsam on the waves. I kissed her on the cheek and said, if there were any problems or she wanted a break, she knew where I was and she only had to ask. She hugged me very tight and, if I hadn’t been concentrating on not hearing it, I might have caught the sound of a tiny sniffle.
“Bye bye, darling,” she said, loitering in the porch to watch me walk down to the bus stop.
The air smelled sweet, overflowing with the perfume of night-scented stocks and sun-warmed earth. My heels clicked on the pavement and, for a little while, nothing in life seemed in the least bit fair.
* * *
It was getting late by the time I got in. I met Mrs. Shah in the hallway, with her son Vik, and Omid, the boy she still insisted on referring to as his cousin. They were filthy; she’d obviously had them cleaning out the brick-built barbecue and, quite possibly, the little lock-up shed at the bottom of the garden. Omid took his hand out of Vik’s back pocket long enough to wave at me, and I stopped to exchange a few words and say, of course, yes, I’d be around next weekend and how lovely, thank you, I’d love to pop down for a halal barbie and a Virgin Mary.
It took a few moments of feeling like there was an itch in the middle of my back that I couldn’t scratch before I glanced over my shoulder and realised that Mr. Downstairs was standing at the other end of the hallway, sorting through the post in the pigeonholes.
At exactly that moment, he looked up at me and smiled glassily. There was nothing about it that should have been eerie—it was just a big, bald, tattooed guy with a ginger beard, wearing Doc Martens, yellow canvas trousers, and a striped t-shirt—but I suddenly wanted to take my skin off and scrub it from the inside. You can’t stay here. I smiled back.
“Well,” I said, “I really ought to, um…. See you next weekend. Give me a shout if you want me to bring anything, or you, y’know.”
Mrs. Shah and the kissing cousins said of course they would, and wished me a pleasant evening. I did likewise and promised myself I wouldn’t run up the stairs.
The door opened before I’d quite finished taking out my key, and I suppressed a shiver at the chill. Damon, in a diaphanous paisley tunic and red velvet loon pants, looked at me with wide-eyed relief.
“What bleedin’ time d’you call this, then?”
I muttered something explanatory about Jan’s thing with the solicitor and left it at that. Mr. Tibbs rolled sybaritically on the carpet, and a half-finished mug of tea stood on the coffee table, next to a copy of The Times, open at the easy crossword. A well-chewed biro lay on top of the semi-completed puzzle, and Janis Joplin was crying her heart out to her Dear Landlord on the CD player.
I heard Damon slide the chain on the door and I sniffed, picking up the smell of something in the oven. Something that smelled good.
“I thought you’d be hungry,” Day said and brushed past me like a winter morning, “so I did a casserole.”
“Thanks,” I said, after a moment of adjustment.
“Go on, baby,” he called. “Sit down, take a load off. Tell me how it went.”
The comforting glug of wine being poured gurgled from the kitchen and, sure enough, he came in carrying two full glasses, the open bottle cradled in the crook of his arm and a half-smoked cigarette in his fingers. I wasn’t about to argue. I took the wine, barely thinking anymore about the way the glass seemed to crawl under my fingers, realigning itself to some new reality. I had kicked off my shoes and flung myself on the sofa, pulling one of Gran’s dodgy needlepoint cushions onto my lap. Damon passed behind me and absently touched my hair. Just a little gesture, but it gave me goose bumps… the broken central heating or creepy psychological thriller kind. I tried not to let him see me shiver, but watched him pad over to the armchair and curl into it, tucking his bare, pale feet up under him. I almost didn’t want to talk about it, but there has to come a time for everything, and the time for letting him get away with keeping me in the dark was well and truly over.
“You never told me you did smack,” I said.
Damon glanced up at me, lips clamped around his cigarette. He shot me a dismissive mini-shrug.
“Once or twice, yeah. With Charlie. He tell you about that?”
I shook my head in disbelief.
“And you never thought that’s why he was pissed off with you? That you did that… and you didn’t have a problem, while he couldn’t kick the junk?”
That incredulous look again, like I’d just suggested boiled baby’s kidneys for dinner. I sipped my wine; he’d opened one of my half-decent bottles of Shiraz. The worst thing was that he managed to make me feel bad. I’d wanted to come home and demand answers—about the drugs, the money, the credit split with Fielding—and I’d probably wanted to take how I felt after going to Jan’s out on him too. And the bastard had made me a casserole.
I leaned over to root through my bag, pulled out my recorder, and tossed it to him.
“There you go. That’s pretty much the lot. It’s a nice boat.”
“Yeah?” Damon weighed the recorder in his hand and looked warily at it. “Always said Charlie wouldn’t leave the Grove. Found a place that fitted him, there.”
I took another swallow of wine, let its warmth wash through me.
“Mm. Have I got time for a bath?”
“All the time in the world, darlin’,” he said, still looking at the recorder.
“Right, then.” I rose and snagged my shoes from the rug. “I’ll nip and do that. Still feel like I’m wearing London.”
Damon didn’t say anything until I was halfway across the floor, and I almost thought I’d made it.
“Ellis?”
I turned, shoes dangling from one hand, wine glass lifted in the other.
“Hm?”
He looked at me and, but for the dull anger in his eyes, his expression would have been close to pleading.
“Was he balling my wife?”
I leaned against the doorframe, expected to have some easy, non-committal, mollifying response lined up, but found my mouth oddly empty. Instead, I lifted a shoulder, a mirror of all those little mini-shrugs he threw at me when he didn’t want to answer.
“See what you think. I’d say yes, but—”
I would have expected more of a reaction, but I supposed he’d already worked through it. He’d had time to. His mouth tightened a little, and he nodded, once. I slid quietly into the bathroom and shut the door behind me.
I made my bath last as long as I could, wanting to give him time to… well, to have his tantrum, if he was going to have it. To make his own judgements, his own decisions. I didn’t want to wait around while he did that, so I sank into the bubbles, lulled by the low sound of voices, mine and Charlie’s, playing on in the background, along with Janis. I tried to picture Damon’s face, wondered how he’d take it.
It was a little bit like knowing there was a wasp in the room and not being quite able to relax until you’d found it.
Eventually, I emerged, steamed pink and towel-swaddled, and found everything suspiciously quiet. The recorder had been shut off, the sitting room empty. I sighed.
“This is classic avoidance, you know,” I said to the ether. “You can’t just sulk your way around it.”
There was no response, at least not one audible on my current astral plane.
I shook my head, about to go in search of that casserole, when the intercom buzzed. I cursed, being neither clad for nor expecting company, but I trundled over to the door anyway. If it was Jehovah’s Witnesses, I could tell them I was a Mormon, and vice versa.
“Hello?”
“Miss Ross? I’ve got the right place, haven’t I?”
Oh. My. Effing. God.
I closed my eyes and silently banged my forehead against the wall. Leon Fielding. On my doorstep. No mistaking the voice, even through the fuzzy blur of the intercom. I bit my tongue.
“Ou— Mr. Fielding! This is a… surprise. Um.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry to just show up like this, but I’m in town for a few days and I had some stuff I thought might be useful to you. I hope that’s okay.”
I looked frantically around the room, at the discarded coffee cups, the screwed up balls of paper on the floor, the untrammelled dust bunnies prowling the lower reaches of the skirting boards….
Oh, shit.
“Y-Yes. Oh, that’s… really…. Um. Thank you. I’ll just buzz you in. Er, top floor. Sorry. On the left. I’ll, uh, put the kettle on.” I took my finger from the button, swore profusely, and then—suddenly remembering I was only wearing a towel—slammed it back on again. “Um. I, er, I just got out of the bath,” I blurted, releasing the intercom again.
Damn.
Damn, damn, bloody damn and bugger! Still, with no time to think, I did a quick circuit of the room, flung open windows, grabbed cups, ashtray, loose paperwork, and anything else that couldn’t run away fast enough in a frenetic pretence at tidying. I re-knotted my towel just as the knock at the door sounded and wished fervently that I had some sort of bathrobe that didn’t look—with good reason—as if Mr. Tibbs had variously slept on it, clawed it and chewed it. I opened the door.
Fielding, in dark slacks and an off-white self-stripe shirt, still managed to exude Pierre Cardin charisma. He held a cardboard archive box in his arms and, as he looked me up and—mainly—down, a grin slid over his face.
“Wow… bad timing, huh?”
“Not at all,” I squeaked. “Please, come in. Um. Make yourself, er…. If you can just give me a minute.”
I dashed for the bedroom, threw on the first available clothes, and flicked my wet hair out of my collar, carrying on a low-grade internal mumble of ire as I did so. How the hell had he even found my addre— business card. Of course. Damn it, I hadn’t even expected him to keep the bloody thing, much less use it.
As I stepped back into my sitting room, I was close to shaking and furious that he’d got me so rattled.
“Something smells good,” Fielding remarked. He stood just far enough away from my desk to not possibly have been taking sneaky peeks at anything.
“Casserole,” I said. “You’re welcome to—”
“Oh, I’ve inconvenienced you enough. I really am sorry. It’s just that I was in Brighton, like I say, and it was probably the most opportune moment to….” He gestured to the archive box, which he’d put on the table. “It’s, uh, just some odds and ends. A few photos, some old, um, notes of Damon’s. Y’know, sentimental stuff, more than anything. I took some copies, thought you might, uh….”
He dried up again and looked faintly embarrassed. I did a surreptitious check of my shirt buttons to make sure I wasn’t exposing myself, but then I realised what bringing me this stuff must have meant to Leon. Even if he hadn’t had the courtesy to phone me first. I smiled, thanked him, and he managed a strangulated grin.
“So, uh…. How’s it coming on? The book?”
“Oh, er, yes. Not bad. Pretty well,” I lied, acutely aware of how easy it would have been for him to have checked me out far more thoroughly than via my home-printed business card. “Your input was really….”
“Yeah,” he said, too quickly. He seemed puzzled.
Puzzle… shit! I realised I hadn’t moved the crossword Damon had been doing. Had he noticed it? All right, I’d moved the ashtray, but what about the cooking smells from the kitchen, his handwriting on the newspaper, his choice of music on the CD player… as if on cue, the whir of a new disc slotting into place leached into the awkward silence. It was a T. Rex album, and I licked my lips self-consciously as the opening riff from a live cut of Cadillac burst crisply through the speakers.
Leon grinned. “Thorough researcher, aren’t you?”
“So, um… what did you say you were in Brighton for?” I asked, subtle as a brick in a wet sock, but desperate to change the subject… and desperate to get rid of him, although, I had to admit, if he’d wanted to, he could have struck me over the head a dozen times already.
Even so, this was my place. My own home. I’d barely got used to Damon dropping in and out; what was next? The rest of the band, plus groupies, make-up artist, and four roadies manhandling a hundred watt Marshall stack? Because, if so, there was no way they’d get it up the stairs.
“Oh,” Leon said dismissively, shifting his weight onto his back foot. “I’m at the Brighton Centre. Four days, starting Monday.”
I cringed inwardly. Once again, damn…. Foot, meet mouth. How had I missed that? Why hadn’t I even checked?
“Got in today, did a signing this afternoon, but, uh, I have tonight off, so….”
“I didn’t know,” I was already running off at the mouth. “Or I would have come along.”
“You want tickets? Like I say, it’s up ’til Thursday. I’d be happy to—”
“Oh, well, I— Thank you.”
“Sure. It’s the least I can do, seeing as—”
“Oh, no, not at—”
“Well, y’know, I didn’t call, and I got you out of your bath and everything.”
We lapsed over the end of each other’s sentences like a ropey Nineties sitcom, and then we both laughed the tight, slightly awkward laughs of people who’ve just realised how stupid they sound.
“Um. Actually, if you really don’t mind,” said Leon, looking hopeful, “I’d kinda like to take you up on that casserole.”
“No problem,” I said, firmly convinced that my life couldn’t get any stranger without at least one alien abduction and a talking vegetable.
I went through to the kitchen and, aware of him propping up the doorframe and watching me, I served the food. It was excruciatingly strange; catching sight of him from the corner of my eye, he looked just like Damon. An older, dark-haired version, but…. So much of the way he stood, his mannerisms, all seemed the same. Yet, the differences—aside from the obvious not-being-dead one—were huge. His whole body language was tighter, more defensive. His looks, roughened with time and hewn into character rather than prettiness, still lent him a certain glamour, but there was something hidden, something unpredictable about him. Also, I could hardly dispute his physicality. Everything that had thrown me off with Damon by its absence, with Leon, mixed me up by its reality. There was that slight but pervasive hint of vetivert and oranges, the sound of his breathing, the movement of his body, his clothes. He was, I realised, a disconcertingly attractive man, despite pushing sixty.
We sat at my rickety kitchen table, and I served the casserole. It should have been weird. The day I’d first met him at Dulwich, I’d been left in no doubt that he didn’t want to be there. Tonight, he’d turned up purely of his volition, so what had brought about the change of heart? I tried to work it out, read the hidden things on his face.
Maybe he felt he owed it to Damon. Maybe he wanted to make sure I wasn’t screwing up the biography… or maybe he was worried about what I might uncover. Either way, showing up out of the blue like this had to be his style of experimentation. How would I take it? Where did I live, and what kind of person was I? What did I know?
We picked and talked our way through the casserole. It tasted good—very good, as a matter of fact—heavy on the onion and black pepper, with lots of rough chopped fresh veggies. As he ate, Leon looked slightly startled, slightly dislocated in time and space.
“You ever make this with green beans?” he asked, and I was nearly paralysed with the strangest sense of terror that he knew.
He knows everything. Ridiculous, I told myself, and I forced out some generic, TV-chefs-made-me-do-it reply. He smiled. My open bottle of Shiraz was a far cry from the pricey Sauvignon we’d drunk together before, but Leon had way too much class to comment on it. Bastard. We chatted about his show at the Brighton Centre, his forthcoming album… my apocryphal book, once again. Nervous catatonia aside, with the electrically ethereal strains of Life’s A Gas curling lazily around us from the CD player, I decided that I liked Leon Fielding a lot better like this. He seemed at ease, not putting on the charm like he had in Dulwich, not pulling the moody and intense act. He’d started to throw in a few anecdotes about local characters and crazy people he’d met backstage; he was overlapping, just, with the nationwide tour of a TV talent show, and it made, he said, for more drama than he’d seen in the wings since being with Brother Rush. I laughed, cleared the plates, and wondered again exactly why he’d come here.
“Freaked the crap out of me, actually,” he said with a smile. “There’s a girl group—I think they made the final twelve on the show—doin’ a cover of Come On Back.”
“Oh?” I put the kettle on. Charlie had mentioned that song… one of the things he said Day caught credit for. I fought the urge to punch the air. “You, um, co-wrote that with Damon, right?”
Leon nodded. “Uh-huh. It’s, I dunno, kinda nice to see some of our stuff still out there. And the girls are sweet. They mobbed me in the green room, made me sign… things.”
I quirked an eyebrow. “Oh, yeah?”
“Mm.” He chuckled. “Day woulda liked that.”
“Yeah,” I said, adding casually, as if it had just reminded me of something in passing, “So, you still get a split on the Brother Rush material, royalty-wise? Because, as I understand it, you wrote a lot of the—well, I suppose you’d say classic—songs, didn’t you?”
Leon looked surprised, so before he could disagree I tossed out the song titles Charlie had given me.
“Love You (Like A Brother), One More Night, You Don’t Say….”
He shook his head, faintly suggestive of mild irritation.
“Nah, I-I thought I explained. We co-wrote all of that, me and Day.”
“You wouldn’t say that your input—”
“What? W—look.”
Setting down his glass, Leon went to the archive box he’d brought me. After a few seconds’ rustling, he brought out a thin sheaf of photocopied manuscript paper, held together with a treasury tag.
“Take a look at that, tell me it’s one person,” he said, tossing it at me with a little of the same belligerent defiance he’d had in Dulwich. “Tell me you can split points on that. Huh… y’know, there have been times I wished I’d just let Inez have the lot.”
I stared at the paperwork. The pages were covered in two different hands. It should probably have worried me that I could recognise Damon’s rounded, florid script, which meant that the spidery scrawl was Leon’s. The first page contained rough draft work for Sit Tight, Baby, and I had a brief moment of feeling star-struck. I held in my hand the first inception of a song that I’d heard played more times than I could count, a song that—for Mum—had been iconic and, for me, had been as much a part of my childhood as watching Thundercats on TV or buying virulently coloured pick ’n’ mix sweets from Woolworth’s.
Assorted doodlings covered the edges of the page, and about a third of the lyrics had been crossed out, some more heavily than others, with occasional abusive marginalia. Damon had annotated one line with an arrow and a cheerful ‘what the fuck??? I don’t think so!’, to which Leon had scribbled back ‘sez you’ and rewritten the chord, in big, black letters. It reminded me of schoolboys passing notes on coach journeys but, in the middle of it, there were lines I recognised:
She got a face like Mona Lisa (Sit tight, baby)
But she ain’t smilin’ (Sit tight, baby)
And I can’t see her.
Sit tight, baby / She said and then she walked away
Sit tight, baby / Now, what did she mean to say?
Leon was right; no line could be drawn between one and the other. There were plenty of tab diagrams, little notes and asides… the chords were all there, along with a fluent mix of opinions. I looked at the other pages. He had similar drafts for Only A Woman (Does It That Way), which still popped up on the odd TV advert these days, and Darby & Joan, another of Mum’s favourites. I tried hard not to be shaken. Only as I finished flicking through the pages did my brain catch up with my ears. I looked up sharply at Leon.
“Sorry… what d’you mean, ‘let Inez have the lot’?”
He peered at me over the rim of his wineglass—perhaps realising he couldn’t pretend he hadn’t said it—and swallowed. A wine stain bloomed on his lower lip.
“Well, she did make, um…. See, after Saturday Loving charted—that was the first thing of mine and Day’s that we recorded, right? The two of us got a fifty-fifty split on the mechanical royalties, though it was still a pretty shitty deal. He pushed for a renegotiated package in late ’73, and we got it in ’74, then he kicked up again in ’75, after Rush On Love came out… mainly because she kept telling him to. Of course, squeaky wheel gets the grease. We got more points on artistic royalties as a band, plus the two of us got a bump on mechanical royalties. Um. Actually, Day got more than me. Which didn’t bother me,” Leon added quickly.
I wasn’t sure I believed him, but I said nothing.
“Y’know, like I said, I really didn’t feel my material had a lot in the way of form until Day got to it. I’d just start throwing things in, but it didn’t come together ’til we— Thing was, everybody had an opinion, y’know?”
I wished I knew the right way to go; to keep quiet and let him talk, or to try and prompt, draw him out. He’d reached back into the box, pulled out an envelope full of photographs. They were black-and-white eight by tens, a lot like Charlie’s glossy private collection, but not proving so much of a point.
Leon emptied his glass in one large swig. “Yeah. I mean, Charlie always thought Day was arrogant.” He smiled, but showed no inclination of sharing the joke. “He thought he took credit for my stuff where he shouldn’t have, that he was too—what?—autocratic about the way we did things, I suppose. Hmm. Joss was much more laid-back about it, happy to let everybody get on with their own way of doing things, so long as he could get on with his.”
He reached out for the wine bottle, topped us both up without asking if I wanted a refill. I hoped he wasn’t driving and found myself wondering if he’d called a cab, or if he had some luckless driver sitting down on the street.
“Joss did kinda think we were all peasants, though. Y’know, because I didn’t know to use a raised seventh in a minor scale over some particular chord change, or ’cos Charlie’d be popping notes all the time…. Of course,” Leon continued, stifled a belch, “after Inez came on the scene, like, seriously… well, she always said Day deserved more money. But, y’know, she would’ve said that. You speak to Inez yet?”
“I’m working on it,” I said truthfully.
As a matter of fact I was aching for the opportunity, sick and tired of hearing the bloody woman’s name. Leon nodded consideringly, twisting the corner of his mouth.
“Last I heard,” he said, fingering the edge of the envelope full of photos, “she sold Westleve and went back to London. Moved around a bit… I think she ended up out Cheltenham way, but I’m not sure. ’Course, that was still well over twenty years ago. I got no idea if…. She never played again, I know that. Not professionally.”
“That’s… sad,” I said, aware that there had been—for the briefest of moments—something in his voice which suggested he felt quite the opposite.
Maybe I’d imagined it. I was certainly enervated from the oddities of the day. I still couldn’t work out what the hell Fielding was playing at here, or why I couldn’t convince myself that he didn’t have some kind of ulterior motive.
“It’s awful, really,” he said, this time sounding as if he believed it. “When…. Y’know. With losing the baby and everything else. That wasn’t fair.”
I glanced up, a little nervous. I’d never relayed that to Damon, not after what he’d said about Inez’s protestations of Harley Street doctors. If he hadn’t known back then, dangling the child in front of him now seemed unnecessarily cruel.
Realisation struck me like a knife then. Cruel.
What else had I been when I let him listen to the interview with Charlie? We’d talked about it on the boat; I’d watched with glee as I sprung his former lover’s lost child on him from the pits of the past.
Oh, fuck.
I blinked rapidly, not wanting Leon to notice my disarray. I needn’t have worried—he wasn’t paying me any attention at all, deep frown on his face, his mouth crumpled up and his eyes darkened.
“I went down to Westleve one weekend. Guess it was late May, early June… just before she hurt her leg. Found her in his studio. She was messed up, y’know? Drunk, cryin’… pawing all through his records and stuff. I said he’d get really pissed if he found her messing about with it, and she kept bawling, said he loved all that shit more than her.” He shook his head. “I gave her a cuddle, calmed her down. It all just slipped out. She was furious with herself for telling me. Made me promise not to squeal. Her words.”
“Damon never knew?”
Leon’s lip curled. “I wanted to tell him. I mean, it’d have hurt him real bad that she wanted to keep it to herself, but she was some kinda strong woman. She really was. And it wasn’t my place to say anything. I could never do that. Y’know. Put myself between ’em like that.”
The silence stacked up quickly when he stopped talking. If I had a window to take back control, it was tiny, and I missed it. Leon smiled brightly—a tinge of that falseness back in his face—and slapped his hands against his thighs.
“Anyway, listen… you’ve been really hospitable, Ellis. But I ought to get going. I hope this stuff, uh… well, y’know, if it gets some use.”
“Of course,” I said. “Are you sure you don’t mind—”
“Oh, no.” He waved a hand dismissively. “They’re all copies. Um. Maybe, I don’t know, sometime… if it’s useful, you wanna come by and take a look at some other stuff? I got a pile of pictures and junk at home. Somewhere. Y’know. Day never had any family, after his parents died. Didn’t make much of a will, either. Inez just boxed everything up and…. Yeah. So. Um.”
He smiled awkwardly. I had a sudden, painful image of years and years of photographs—memories, childhood snaps and moments caught in time—dumped into archive boxes like the one now on my coffee table. No care for chronology, sentiment, or meaning. I thought I smelled cigarette smoke too. An odd light passed across Leon’s eyes, and he smiled again, this time brittle and uncertain.
“Thanks,” I said. “That’s really kind. And… really useful. Opportunity. Uh.”
“Mm. So, um, yeah. Well, we’ll fix…. We’ll fix somethin’. So keep in touch, all right? Maybe I can read something soon.”
He said it with a cheeky little grin and an actual wink. I chuckled, well and truly disarmed, but not really minding it that much.
“I’ll get those tickets over to you too,” Leon said as we got to the door. “For the show. Is there, uh, anybody particular you’d like to bring along?”
I blinked. Was he just checking how many, or asking if I was single?
“Er….” I thought immediately of Auntie Jan and then tried not to. It was just too complicated. “Possibly.”
Leon grinned. “I’ll just send a bunch, okay?”
“Right. Um. Thanks again, I—”
“No problem.”
“Bye, then.”
I’d opened the door, not expecting him to go all Continental on me and kiss my cheek. His hand still cupping the back of my elbow, Leon smiled at me.
“By the way… you have really nice towels.”
My mouth hung open, and he jogged off down the stairs, chortling to himself. It wasn’t that I couldn’t think of a comeback, just that too many crowded on my tongue and—as Charlie Davies had mentioned earlier that day—the man really did have good timing.