Beneath the Blonde Read online

  Dan and Siobhan’s loud condemnation didn’t stop the bile rising in Saz’s throat but it did prompt her to whip through her business in Peta’s office in record time and then out of the house as fast as she could.

  With Peta mostly out of the office at meetings with the tour booker and PR company, Saz was able to spend all of the following day on the phone. She contacted over two hundred florists to no avail. She made contact with sixteen of the twenty-two letter writers, all sounding very sane on the phone, mostly female and mostly in the thirteen to sixteen age range. She also managed brief chats with Dan and Steve over morning coffee in the kitchen. Both were helpful and rather more friendly than Alex, but both were also a little too concerned with their own roles in the band to be paying much attention to Siobhan’s problems. Saz left them with the feeling that success had not necessarily cemented their friendship ties, particularly not now that Alex and Greg were starting to earn royalties from their songs. And while Dan and Steve acknowledged that this was fair and right and just, they couldn’t help comparing their rather smaller bank accounts with those of their co-workers in what had started out as a collective endeavour and was now becoming much more of a financial oligarchy.

  After a couple of hours of phone calling for Peta so she could look like she wasn’t entirely avoiding all office work, Saz enjoyed a more successful post-lunch conversation with Dan, getting what else she could on the genesis of Beneath The Blonde, although she felt no closer to finding anyone who might be considered a threat. So far her only suspects were Alex, for no good reason other than that, from what everyone said about him, he might enjoy upsetting Siobhan even more than usual, or the disgruntled Kevin, who didn’t look like he could get the cash together for a bunch of daisies, let alone huge bunches of yellow roses. From Dan she learned that the New York trip wasn’t the only time Siobhan had disturbed the schedule for the rest of the band. He told her about the several other occasions on which Siobhan had changed their plans at a moment’s notice. “There were the two surprise trips she arranged for Greg. Once to Casablanca after we’d all been watching the bloody movie on late TV and she just got it into her head that Greg would simply love it and the other time to Rio.”

  “Why Rio?”

  “She was doing another of her ‘I’m more Catholic than Madonna’ trips and was suddenly seized with a passionate desire to go and see that big Jesus on the hill.”

  “Must have pissed you all off?”

  “To say the least. It’s not only the dropping everything just because Siobhan wants us too—sure, that’s annoying, but a few days off every now and then isn’t that much of a hardship. It’s that it never really is only a few days, there’s all the aftermath too. Every time they go anywhere we usually lose at least a week because one of them comes back with a stomach upset or a cold or some new and exciting viral infection. And then Greg and Siobhan can’t just be sick by themselves, one of them always has to take time off to look after the other. That’s love, I guess.”

  “They’re prone to illness?”

  “Not Siobhan especially. But Greg’s a bit pathetic, he’ll catch any cold going.”

  These incidents of Siobhan’s unreliability, while doing little to flesh out Saz’s suspect list, actually made for good stories, particularly as Dan tended to act them out, impersonating Greg hobbling through arrivals at Heathrow and Siobhan dramatically throwing herself into the backs of cabs, demanding he be taken home via their specialist homeopath.

  Before she left the office that evening, Saz cornered Siobhan, fresh from her second workout of the day and tried again to get a little information on her past. This time Siobhan was more amenable, cheerfully recounting every difficult friend she’d had as an adult—although Saz noted she didn’t mention Kevin once and certainly didn’t seem to view any of her band relationships as difficult. But she professed to remember virtually nothing about her schooldays. As she told Saz over her second lemon vodka, “I loved my childhood. Well, I loved my family but I hated every bloody minute of my school life. Nuns.” She said it as if the one syllable explained everything. “I forgot it all as soon as I could, and what I didn’t forget I wiped out in a coming-to-London haze of alcohol and cheap speed.” She grinned, “And a few more exciting drugs as soon as we could afford them.”

  Remembering her earlier discussion about royalties accounts, Saz figured that had to be fairly often these days. Siobhan went on, “I tell you, Saz, my real life only started ten years ago. It’s why I only go to mum and dad’s once or twice a year if I can help it. I’m happy for them to come down here, I love it when they do. I get on really well with them, but oh God, I hate to go home. Doesn’t everybody?”

  Saz, who fully understood about the deadly dull Sunday afternoons of teenage suburbia, nodded and left it at that. Having called Molly to suggest they meet for Mexican in Camden, Saz got her things together, still puzzling over the quick change in Siobhan’s attitude from one day to the next. To be fair, while she had been very little help about possible stalkers, to the extent of not even mentioning Kevin when Saz directly asked her about ex-workers, Siobhan had endeavoured to give Saz a belt-by-button account of every item of clothing she’d ever worn on stage and her preferred makeup to go with each outfit. Their little chat ended with Saz convinced that Siobhan was either a genius or a complete idiot because no normal person could possibly care so much about what didn’t matter and so little about what really did. Or tell the stories with so much charm and seemingly little conceit. When she crept into the rehearsal to say goodbye that night and heard the band playing at just five feet distance, she knew that no matter what stupid things Siobhan said or how very much she pissed her off or how maddeningly naïve she was being about the stalker, the woman standing in the semidarkness, looking like a tainted goddess and making her voice climb scales and dance jigs right at the top of her range, had to be a genius. Though not everyone agreed. When the song finished she heard Alex bark out his judgement that the rendition had been, “Barely adequate. You’re just not fucking working hard enough. Take your time, listen to the bloody music and fucking well get it right!”

  Hearing Siobhan’s tired acknowledgement and immediate acquiesence, she was left to think that perhaps Kevin was right, maybe Siobhan really did enjoy Alex’s nastiness. They’d started the first bars again before she left the house.

  Just as she was lying in bed, explaining to Molly that she thought Siobhan was probably ok after all, the phone rang.

  It was Siobhan, “Hi, babe. Listen, I forgot to tell you, we’re going to Sweden on Sunday, you need to come—ok? Bye.”

  After spending time pretending to be an office junior, Saz figured a relaxing couple of days in the land of sauna might be just what the doctor ordered. The doctor beside her, however, was rather more keen on the concept of bed rest.

  FOURTEEN

  They were playing at home. The kind of playing that their East Coast pretty sunshine homes weren’t really designed for. Childish playing that only solid northern hemisphere brick homes can properly enjoy, making little children feel warm and safe in their smug cosiness, an architect’s dream of Enid Blyton winters. Not the sort of playing made for these thin weatherboard houses set in sectioned-off quarter acres of the New Zealand myth, cabbage trees framing the backyard, now toe-deep in a baby lake of cold tropical rain. Winter rain lasting three days and nights of fast, fat drops kamikaze killing themselves on the corrugated iron roof. Drops that kept the kids awake even longer than John’s scary stories about the tapu on his grandfather’s old house, a beating tattoo of rain that left them tired and grumpy when they woke in the morning, all three of them crammed into Shona’s faded pink bedroom with the lavender ballerina curtains her aunt had sent up all the way from Wellington. But this was the May holidays and with eight-year-old intensity they ignored the wet outside and the damp inside, engrossed in the life of their combined Lego sets, the girls’ long bronze-legged Barbies discarded in an ungainly heap for the greater joy of creation in red
and white plastic brick. Two or three hundred of the bricks of varying ages and various teeth marks had been shaped into farmyards and car yards and building sites, punctuated by Corgi trucks and tiny earth movers that covered a kitchen floor landscape of old lino and Shona’s mother’s hand-made rug, the thin pieces of red and orange wool knotted into a dishwater-stained base extending out to the very edge of the draughty doorframe where they’d placed a saucer of water for the pond.

  They’d been playing for an hour, a game they played day after day, John staying with Shona, while Ruby took a brief respite from her home-based extended family and went to the relaxing embrace of her own cousins further south. Shona’s mum had gone to work at eight, leaving their usual lunch on the table—a half loaf of buttered white bread, a family-sized jar of Vegemite, an even larger jar of sticky smooth peanut butter and, stacked in the fridge, ten slices of thick cut luncheon, wrapped in greaseproof paper. The kids would smother the rounds of fatty sausage meat with peanut butter then roll them up into fat cigar shapes, munching through them as the day progressed. Gaelene had made up the Tang, a bitter-sweet powdered fruit drink, full of colour and flavouring—though no one really cared about that in 1973. She had her back to Shona and turned, peanut butter and luncheon roll in one hand, overfull glass of drink in the other, to see Shona, three quarters of the way through creating a building.

  “Shops?” she enquired spitting a lump of half-chewed, thick white bread from her mouth as she did so.

  Shona mumbled an unheard reply.

  “Is it shops? For the car yard? Or a garage for the trucks? ‘Cos we need one of them.”

  “Nah,” Shona mumbled, not looking up, “it’s a house.”

  Gaelene nearly spat out her lunch with her sneer, “What the fuck for?”

  “For the people to live in. They need a house. And it’s a really big house, a flash people’s house. Look, there’s heaps of bedrooms and a rumpus room for a ping-pong table and a garage for three cars and a really big kitchen and a lounge with a verandah with ranch sliders and everything …”

  Shona, in her excitement with the plans, didn’t see Gaelene and John coming closer, engrossed in the room-by-room description of the beautiful edifice, she didn’t notice the look of disgust as it filtered across Gaelene’s face, a look which flashed from face to fist and into her naked left foot which came crashing down onto the creation.

  “Crap. Fucking stink fucking doll’s house!”

  Gaelene smashed the house and then mashed her peanut butter and luncheon roll into it. Shona, knocked off balance, reeled back for a second before jumping up and knocking the glass from Gaelene’s hand, the juice spattering over John and the kitchen wall as she splattered her hand across Gaelene’s mouth. The three kids caught each others’ hair and clothes, throwing themselves into the fight as easily as they had earlier thrown themselves into tearing up the pieces of luncheon, rolling on the house, the tiny cars, the plastic cows, liberated just that morning from their cornflake packet and now grazing in a green plastic field. For five minutes they rolled in a frenzied eight-year-old tumble of kicking and spitting and hitting and biting, then, exhausted, they withdrew for a moment.

  Shona’s eyes flashing, she glared at Gaelene and John, “What the fuck did you do that for? It’s not fair. This is my house, I can do what I want.”

  “We don’t play fucking dolls’ houses, we play building! It’s what we always play. You can’t change the game.”

  “Yeah,” John chimed in, “You can’t change the game, Shona.”

  Shona and John had cleaned up the kitchen by the time Shona’s mum came in from work, cleaned up the kitchen and wiped down their faces, the only trace of their fight a small bruise on the side of Shona’s left eye. Her mum was used to it, though, used to the kids fighting, used to their pretending they hadn’t, used to ignoring the signs of frustrated rage in her tiny girl. Most of all, she was just tired of trying to explain that it was ok for John to fight, but not Shona or Gaelene. Tired of explaining and not certain it was true anymore anyway. And the next day the kids were playing together again, as if nothing had happened.

  To Gaelene, violent in temper and quick to forget, nothing had happened, it had gone, she was already in the next thought, the next thing, the next action. For her it was all forward movement, hurrying on. John didn’t care, he was already starting to think that maybe his place wasn’t at Shona’s house anymore and a year or so later he would stop playing so much with the girls, he would stop being a child and become a boy and then a man and therefore other. Shona, however, would hang on to the pain for years, taking it out late in the dark to tremble in silent night rage and frustration at the unfairness—she’d only wanted a nice house.

  And anyway, who said she couldn’t change the game?

  FIFTEEN

  With only a day to check up on Alex, Saz took a short cut. First thing on Saturday morning she rang Helen and Judith. Old friends, they were both cops and, while not approving of her choice of career any more than she condoned theirs, they had proved helpful in the past. Knowing that Judith would be in touch as soon as she turned up anything on Alex, Saz then initiated the other branch of her attack. If Alex had two ex-lovers who were dykes, and now that he was more than just a little famous, then someone she knew ought to know something about him. And her gossip-fuelled ex-lover would be the one to find out. Although getting Carrie’s help could be costly—in this case a fifty pound reduction in her next month’s rent—Saz’s investment was quickly returned. Carrie called back three hours later to say that she’d contacted three ex-lovers of her own and that one of them knew a girl who knew a girl who knew a woman who was definitely not a girl. Who was willing to talk to her this afternoon.

  Expecting an extreme politico-dyke from the description, Saz was galled to find that the woman Carrie had described as someone who “sounds like the kind of chick who wouldn’t exactly approve of me calling her a babe,” was sitting in the Islington café with two babies on her knee and a husband beside her. It seemed that while Alex’s exgirlfriend had become a dyke after going out with him, she had also returned to her true inclination in the end. The American earth-mother who cradled her twin babies on her lap didn’t seem much like Alex’s sort. Saz had rather more expected his ex-lovers to look like lesbian Bond girls. When Hannah showed Saz old photos of herself and Alex, Saz noted that indeed she used to give a good Bond girl impression—tall, strong coffee black and razor-cut sharp. She was still tall, but the cooing and sweet mama baby talk, passing from her to the babies and back via their father, was anything but sharp.

  Hannah wiped milky baby vomit from the front of her dress and smiled, “I wasn’t really cut out to be a rock chick.”

  “From your past, it wouldn’t seem that you were cut out to be a wife and mother either?”

  “I never knew what I wanted. Not for years. So I tried it all. I came to London, I worked in alternative theatre, I dabbled in music—that’s how Alex Cramer and I met—I lived with him, I left him, I lived in a lesbian co-op, I left that, I lived in a black lesbian co-op, I left that. Eventually I went back to New York and met Will.”

  “And found true happiness for the first time ever,” Will added, returning with coffees for Hannah and Saz and reaching for one of the twins. “I’ll take them out for a bit, give you women some peace—half an hour do?” Hannah handed her babies over with obvious reluctance, “If you have to. I don’t mind keeping them.”

  “No. But I mind hearing all about your ex-squeeze. This way I can at least get the good father kudos on the street.”

  He walked to the pushchair parked against the door, a baby in each arm, and already two young women on their way to a table were falling over themselves to help him load them in.

  Hannah shook her head, “And that just never happens to me.”

  Saz was always amazed at how the journalist myth could encourage almost anyone to unburden the secrets of their lives in return for a little fame. She’d told Hannah that she was wr
iting a Guardian article about the changing nature of women’s sexuality. Or, in this case, for what Hannah redefined as “the hope that my story might encourage other women to search for their own truths”. Trying not to feel too guilty—and succeeding—Saz launched into her list of questions. To make the ruse look real she did pursue something of the hasbian line, but primarily centred her interview technique on the part of Hannah’s life that involved Alex. After half an hour of following Hannah through her stories of incarnation workshops and sexuality training and therapeutic dolphin sessions, Saz was in quiet despair. The woman before her was a fount of knowledge about the “alternative world”, what she wasn’t doing was dishing any dirt on Alex. Eventually, though, it came out, hidden in a spiel about her years in the world of London squats, Hannah unwittingly gave away a gem about Alex.

  “Of course, once that band started rehearsing no one ever saw Alex anymore. He and I had already broken up but I still saw him every now and then. He’d even manage to be quite civil to me if I didn’t mention my girlfriend.”

  “So you didn’t see him because of the band?”

  “Kind of. The band and Siobhan. What with his working on the music and then seeing her, he never had time for any of his old friends. We all just sort of drifted away.”

  Saz was jolted from praying for Will to return. “Seeing Siobhan?”

  Hannah stretched her long mouth into a skewed apology, “Whoops. That’s still a secret, I guess. They had an affair. Just when the band started.”

  “I thought Siobhan Forrester was with Greg? The guitarist?”

  “She was. Still is, apparently—I don’t know, I don’t exactly get invited over to Alex’s for afternoon tea, not that I’d know what to say to him. I don’t imagine he likes kids any more now than he did then. What did he used to call them? ‘Midget parasites’, something like that …”