The Singer by Cathi Unsworth Read Free Book Online Page A

ripping the book to pieces before I had the fag alight, sucking down the nicotine, telling myself: Calm down. You haven’t heard the name in years. Means he’s not working for anyone big. If he’s writing for a web fanzine that proves it.
    I moved back to the desk, nodding to myself,thinking: Print that one out and look for some more. Start compiling a dossier.
    I turned the printer on, fed through the first few sheets by hand until it got the idea. Mick Greer’s feature dropping out onto the tray while I went to the next site, Exile records.
    It was a plug for the
Shots
album Greer mentioned, complete with biography penned by…Mick Greer.
    I was starting to hate the guy already.What he’d written for Exile was a less flowery version of the
Careless Love
feature, concentrating more on the music and how highly Vince Smith rated on Greer’s personal genius scale. It did provide more of an insight into what the rest of the band got up to in the years after, however, with a handful of quotes from Lynton Powell (reformed junkie, now respected jazzer), Kevin Holme (now backingup Lou Feane, the former singer with a weedy early eighties pop band who reinvented himself as a loungecore act) and finally, the thoughts of Steven Mullin, successful record producer and occasional collaborator with Powell.
    ‘Sixteen years later, it’s easier to look back on the actual music we made, rather than the madness that went on around it. Tell you the truth, there were a time when I neverwanted to hear a fuckin’ note of it ever again. But now that I have, sat down with Lynton and gone over the whole of the back catalogue, I have to admit it…I’m fuckin’ proud of us.’
    More Mick Greer humming through the printer, still more of him to come. All the fan sites I could find – and most of them were appalling goth rubbish – had posted up old
NME
articles written by the cunt, with Granger’sphotos to go with them. Oh dear. Granger went ballistic when he found out people had been stealing his images. As soon as I let him know what www.thedarkside.org , www.childrenofthenight.com and www.thebatcave.co.uk had been up to behind his back it would be a darker night in Gotham City than any of them could possibly have imagined.
    Then I could just casually mention the infringement of Greer’scopyright too, get him into the conversation, find out what the bastard was up to these days.
    It was getting on for ten o’clock when the key in the front door brought me back from Vincent Smith’s world.
    Louise stood framed in the hall light. Black wool coat with Astrakhan collar, black gloves, black wool trousers and black high-heeled boots. Thick black hair cut into the style of her namesake,her lookalike, Lulu Brookes. Her lips were red. Her eyes were narrow. She looked like one of the evil queens from the Disney movies, the ones with poisoned apples in their handbags.
    ‘H-hello, darling,’ I tried to sound cheerful. ‘Been anywhere nice?’
    Louise’s glittering green eyes took in the scene.
    Her fat bastard boyfriend in a dishevelled suit he’d obviously slept in, sitting red-eyed amonga paper mountain that spilled from the desk to the floor, a similarly towering ashtray, a coffee cup with rings around it and cornflakes all over the toffee shop.
    Her red nails tapped on the doorframe. The shutters came down in her eyes. ‘Anywhere,’ she finally said, ‘would be nice compared to here.’
    ‘Darling,’ I stood up and went to walk towards her, catching my foot in the flex from the fanheater and diving headfirst into the carpet, spilling cornflakes and print-outs like dandruff as I went down.
    Louise shut her eyes like it was a monumental effort of will for her not to start screaming.
    I stared up at her from the carpet, prostrate at her feet. Started to laugh, laugh hysterically at the stupidity of it all, trying to stagger back upright as I did so, clutching at the side ofmy chair. Hoping my stupid laughter would somehow reach out to