“What’ll you have?” Paula asked. “Whatever it is, the first one’s on the house.”
“Thank you. I’ll have a whisky, please.”
“Good idea,” said Paula “Summat to warm the cockles of your heart.”
Paula handed her the glass and Sarah sipped. It burned all the way down her throat and spread a warm glow in her stomach.
She hadn’t been paying attention to the radio, but at that moment, Gary Knox came on singing “Blue Eyes, Black Heart,” his biggest commercial success and his least favorite song.
Sarah turned pale and almost dropped her glass.
When Paula realized what had happened, she went into the back. A few seconds later the song stopped and another station came on: an innocuous Whitney Houston number, this time.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Sarah said quietly to Paula when she came back. “But thank you.”
“Think nowt of it. Maybe one day you’ll tell me about him?”
Sarah managed a weak smile. “Maybe one day, yes.” She had heard only a snatch of the song, of Gary’s distinctive voice — like honeyed gravel, a poetic reviewer had once written — but it was enough to bring his image back to her mind’s eye.
Tall, thin, stooped, dark-haired and hollow-cheeked, with a lock of hair constantly falling over his right eye and a distant, crooked smile, he had always looked the way she imagined one of the Romantic poets might look after he had been up all night grappling with a particularly recalcitrant sonnet and a bottle of laudanum. Young Coleridge, perhaps, with feverish opium eyes and mussed-up hair, and that distracted look, as if he were hearing and seeing things no one else could. And, like many a Romantic poet, Gary had died young.
She had tried to imagine Gary’s death many times, how he had faced it. Many of his songs were about death; it was a subject he had thought intensely about since adolescence. She had recognized a kind of death-wish in much of his drug use and recklessness, a sort of cocking one’s hat against the grim reaper and saying, come on, catch me if you can.
As far as Sarah had heard, Gary had simply dropped dead on La Brea after leaving a nightclub with a group of friends. The autopsy had revealed a lethal mixture of cocaine, ecstasy, heroin, LSD, alcohol and barbiturates. His heart had, quite literally, just stopped beating. Had he had time in the moment of his death to savor the experience that had fascinated him so much in his life? Sarah didn’t know, and never would.
Their life together was still something of a blur. Of course, she remembered the early days: the party where they met in Camden Town, and how they walked the quiet London streets all night talking; the sunny idyll on the Greek island of Santorini, all vivid blues and whites, when Gary was writing the songs for what was to be his last album; the frustrations of studio work; the tour.
It was crazy from the start. Pushed by the record company to promote the new album when he was still exhausted from its creation and production, Gary set out for a mammoth US and Canadian tour with the band. Sarah went along for the ride.
And what a ride it was.
She could only remember patches of the chaos: backstage arguments, smelly tour buses, short, gut-churning air hops. New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Montreal, Toronto, Chicago. The names sped by and meant nothing; she saw nothing but hotel rooms and concert halls. Half the time she didn’t even know whether she was in the USA or Canada.
Gary was too sick from drugs to perform in Omaha, and he collapsed onstage in Dallas. The fans loved it. After only a couple of days’ rest, the band hit the West Coast and life became a nonstop party tinged with mayhem and madness. Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, picking up groupies and hangers-on all the way like a snowball picked up snow going down a hill. The further south they got, the more Sarah’s memory started to fail her.
Somewhere along the line, Gary had changed. He was pushing himself at an insane pace, drunk and stoned or coked-out all the time, almost as if he were running headlong to embrace death. There were no rules; nothing was sacred; everything was permitted. Total derangement of the senses. Well, Sarah had read Rimbaud, too, and look what happened to him.
At first she wanted to know why, what was wrong, but he wouldn’t talk to her about anything. They didn’t even make love. When he was capable, he suggested threesomes with poxy groupies or all-out gang-bangs with the whole band. When she refused, he ridiculed her. Maybe she didn’t always refuse; she couldn’t remember. But something had driven her over the edge; something had given her the courage or fear to walk out and salvage what little self-respect she could.
But until then, hurt and humiliated day after day, she had snorted coke to get up, though it no longer made her feel good, and she took booze and ’ludes to get her to sleep. Ecstasy in between. She liked the downers best. ’Ludes or nembies, it didn’t really matter.
After a couple of bad LSD trips, one of them a terrifying nightmare in Tijuana, where she was almost raped by a half-crazed local pimp, whom Gary’s entourage had adopted for the night, she stopped taking hallucinogens altogether. Life had become hallucinatory enough without them. Everything was crumbling, falling apart, until that one day when she just walked out. She felt that she had run so far and so fast with Gary she had left herself behind.
The weeks after she left marked the lowest point in her life: her “illness,” the Great Depression. She couldn’t remember details or events, the number of times she had just wanted to die, except that Ellie had taken her to the clinic and saved her life. But she could still feel the shadow of the emotion, the sense of utter worthlessness; she could still hear the echo of the voices that berated her, told her she was an evil slut, a trollop, a tart. And, from time to time, she still felt the impulse toward suicide. The darkness was still there inside her, and sometimes it beckoned.
“Penny for them.”
“What? Oh, sorry, Paula, I was miles away. I think I’ll have another whisky, please. A double.”
“You want to be careful, you know.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not turning to the bottle. As a matter of fact, I hardly drink at all back in Los Angeles. I just can’t get used to this English cold.”
“You grew up with it, same as me.”
Sarah laughed. “Yes, but it’s amazing how quickly you get soft.”
Paula snorted and poured her a drink.
Sarah paid, then Paula wandered off to serve someone else. The place had started to fill up, Sarah noticed, and one or two people looked at her as if they knew who she was. It wasn’t as if, with her red nose, woolly hat and raw cheeks, she resembled Anita O’Rourke, but probably because she was a stranger in the village and Paula had told them all her famous sister was coming. The actress.
When she met Gary, she remembered, she had been at a loose end because she felt her acting career in England was going nowhere. She was either underdressed in Channel Four art-house erotica or overdressed in BBC costume dramas. There seemed no place for her in a British series. If the Americans put too much of a premium on bland good looks, then the English went too far the other way — crooked teeth and bad skin.
Just before she met Gary, her father had seen one of the Channel Four films. He stopped talking to her for a month and after that, things had never been the same.
She knew her father had always preferred Paula, anyway. Paula did all the right things. Paula got married (even if it didn’t work out). Paula had children. Paula didn’t make dirty films. Paula was the sensible one, the practical one, the down-to-earth, salt-of-the-earth lass who didn’t have ideas above her station.