The Singer by Cathi Unsworth Read Free Book Online Page B

her, explain to her that I was sorry, so sorry, for everything that I’d done wrong, for all the late nights and trips away and showbiz parties while she stayed in alone, with her books. Sorry for allthe times I’d staggered in drunk and broken things, for the time I tried to take my cowboy boots off and fell through the window, forthe time she found my friend Christophe asleep in the bath when she tried to get ready for work in the morning. Sorry for all the money I spent on drinking and trying to impress other people who were not her, for the fact that ten years after I so grandly announced I was going to be a writer I had got only so far as leaving a shitty second-hand paper shop for a regular gig on a low-selling gentleman’smonthly. Sorry for the fact I once had the most glamorous, mysterious woman at our school and now I ignored her and dreaded seeing her and preferred the company of ageing photographers and vanished goths. Sorry for all the things I couldn’t say and all the lies I told instead.
    Sorry that I existed.
    The ice maiden’s eyelids slowly rose on her hard, cold, emerald eyes.
    ‘You’re fucking pathetic,Eddie,’ she pronounced, letting each word drop like dead leaves on dirty flagstones. She didn’t say anything more. Just turned on her heel towards the bedroom, slamming the door behind her so loudly my coffee cup jumped off the desk to join me in splinters on the floor.
    Another night on another sofa, dreaming of a vanished rock star, and how he could save me.

5

Oh You Silly Thing
    June 1977
    ‘What you got there then, Kevin?’
    Kevin Holme nearly dropped the bass drum he had been carrying into the school hall.
    Lounging against the side of the wall by all the massive food bins storing leftovers to be taken away for pigswill, was Stevie Mullin. Stevie Mullin looking like he’d come in from a different planet. Wearing a leather jacket and a T-shirt allripped up and then pulled back together with safety pins. Drainpipe jeans with luminous yellow socks and black, thick-soled brothel creepers. A padlock holding a bike chain around his neck. His hair all up in spikes. Stevie Mullin looking harder than even he had looked before. Smoking a fag on school grounds.
    Kevin’s eyes darted around, looking for teacher.
    ‘What you doing with that, Kevin?’Stevie nodded at the kit, almost bigger than the awkward boy holding it.
    Old Tucker already in the school hall, helping all the other kids to set up their gear. Not even looking round and noticing.
    Kevin could feel his heart beating as Stevie slouched off thewall and started towards him, with a slow, menacing, bow-legged swagger.
    ‘You play that, do you?’ Stevie was still smiling as he gotnear enough to blow his fag smoke into Speccy Kevin’s face, watch him go red and start stammering: ‘Wh-wh-what’s it to you, Mullin?’ Kevin’s voice was only just breaking and veered from high-pitched to low to comedic effect.
    ‘I’m interested in music, me,’ Stevie told him. ‘Especially in drummers.’ He circled around his prey like a panther. ‘So that’s what you get up to behind Dunton’s back, eh?Playing drums in school band? You any good at it, Kevin?’
    Kevin looked like he was going to shit himself. ‘Look, Mullin, I’ve got to go in,’ he sounded like a girl, pleading. ‘They’ll notice.’
    ‘All right, Kevin,’ Stevie said amiably. ‘I’ve got a detention to go to myself.’ He blew another line of smoke into Kevin’s face, dropped the butt of his cigarette and ground it out slowly, like he didn’tcare if anyone saw.
    Walked off just as casually. Speccy Kevin blinked, took off his glasses and rubbed them on his pullover. By the time he’d put them back on, Mullin had disappeared. As if he’d never been there in the first place.
    Kevin couldn’t concentrate on band practice that night. He got shouted at three times for not coming in at the right moment, and then, most mortifyingly, playingthe wrong part