‘Right.’ I got up from the chair. ‘Goodbye, then.’
‘Goodbye.’ Then she added, ‘I only did what you should have done. What you didn’t dare to do.’
For a moment, I saw what it would be like to kill someone out of hot, futile rage. I felt the pressure build in me like a gale until it throbbed behind my eyes and filled my throat and clenched my hands into fists. ‘You disgust me,’ I said. ‘Hayden was worth a hundred of you. A thousand.’
I turned away and walked out of Sonia’s kitchen. As I closed the door behind me, I heard a violent screaming and then a terrible sound of breaking glass, of objects crashing against surfaces. The screaming went on, like an animal sprung in a trap. I stood there for a few moments, listening to the woman who had once been my dearest friend howling like a creature in agony. Then I walked away.
Before
I took my time, walking up the road to Liza’s flat slowly, as if in a dream. People flowed past me and they seemed to belong to a different world, one full of purpose and certainty, of rules to keep and places to get to. The sun had sunk beneath the horizon and in the mysterious half-light it was cool. I shivered in my thin jacket. Summer was disappearing; soon it would be autumn.
How much can a person change? How much can you trust them to change? How much should you be ruled by the head, and how much by the heart? If you want so very, very badly to feel someone’s arms around you again, to feel their breath in your hair and hear their voice whispering your name, is it wrong to give in to it?
Each step I took towards Hayden was taking me nearer a decision. For a moment I came to a halt, standing under a knobbled plane tree. To love and be loved, desire and be desired – but to be weak and in someone’s power, to be hurt again, betrayed again, left again.
After
Obviously we musicians didn’t get to go to the wedding itself. Thank the Lord. While Danielle and Jed were making their sacred vows in a church in the Strand in front of their nearest and dearest, we were carrying our equipment down into the basement of a hotel in Holborn while other people hauled tables and carried piles of plates and arranged vases of flowers.
We weren’t the merriest of bands. A couple of days earlier, late in the evening, I had heard a sound at my door that was barely even a knock. It sounded more as if someone was desperately fumbling and clawing at the door. I’d opened it to find Amos in tears. ‘Sonia’s left me,’ he said.
I led him inside and sat him on the sofa and put a tumbler of whisky into his trembling hands. He gulped at it as if he was desperately thirsty. He spoke in a series of sobs. ‘She left me, just like that,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘She’s moving on,’ he said. ‘Literally moving on. She’s leaving town, leaving her job. She’s going to get a job somewhere else. She wouldn’t even tell me where she was going.’ He rubbed his eyes with his hands. ‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’
‘I don’t know what to say,’ I said, with rare truthfulness.
‘Did you know about this?’ he said. ‘Did you know she was going to throw everything away, leave everything?’
But it was really a rhetorical question because for an hour or more Amos talked and cried and talked more. I wanted to tell him to stop. I wanted to say that I wasn’t the person he should be saying these things to. I could have asked him why he was so eager to demonstrate to me the strength of his feelings for another woman but, for what it was worth, I think I knew the answer to that. Amos liked to be in control and this had just happened. It hadn’t been part of his master plan. I couldn’t think of the right question to ask and I didn’t care that much. There was nothing Amos could tell me, so in the end it was easier just to sit back and look sympathetic and keep him topped up with whisky and let him talk.
Finally, when he stood up, a bit unsteadily, to go, he said, ‘You know what this means, don’t you?’
‘What?’
‘We can’t play now.’
I told him very firmly that we had promised to play. I was going through with it and so was he. When the rest of the band were told about Sonia, they reacted more calmly. Guy started to say something sarcastic and bitter but the different events and conflicts had knocked the fight out of him and he muttered something about how he’d do his best and try not to let me down. Joakim barely shrugged. ‘I guess why she’s done this isn’t any of my business,’ he said.
‘It sort of is,’ I said, ‘because, without Sonia, you and I are going to have to do most of the singing.’
So the two of us got together and sorted out the vocals in a quick session. Joakim had a wispy, indie-band voice but it would probably appeal to any teenage girls at the wedding. I wasn’t sure about my own. I wasn’t exactly Bessie Smith, who I wanted to be in all sorts of ways, but I could hold a note and I was used to singing in front of classes to demonstrate how things should go.
When I told Neal, he seemed worried at first and then suspicious. ‘Is she losing it?’ he said. ‘Is she suddenly going to make a confession to clear her conscience?’
‘Definitely not,’ I said. ‘She’s not like that.’
Neal looked thoughtful. ‘Is there something I should know?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said, again truthfully. There were things he didn’t know, and nothing he should know. But I felt I couldn’t leave it at that. ‘It was probably inevitable. I don’t think we could stay together with something like that hanging over us. It’s probably good that she moved – she’ll be with new people in a new job.’
‘But she left Amos,’ said Neal.
‘It’s probably a lucky escape for both of them,’ I said.
‘That’s a bit harsh.’
‘Allow me some bitterness,’ I said.
A hotel official directed us to a makeshift stage at the end of the hall. As we set up, I felt we were like people on the morning after a night where we had got terribly drunk and said too much to each other and done things, some of which we couldn’t quite remember and others of which we were ashamed. And now, after it all, we were a bit hung-over, a bit the worse for wear, and we didn’t quite want to catch each other’s eye. Oh, and we were nervous about performing in front of a crowd of strangers.
Gradually people began to drift in from the ceremony and look for their places on the tables. I thought they’d be curious about us but they scarcely noticed us. I had a sense of what it was like to be one of the invisible people, those who take your coat or hand you your food or clear up after you. Finally Danielle and Jed came in like a pair of celebrities you don’t quite recognize, greeted with whoops and clicks from mobile-phone cameras. They processed around the filling tables, hugging and kissing cheeks. Then Danielle caught sight of us, gave a shriek and, with her huge cream dress billowing around her, ran over to us with the bridegroom in tow.
‘Omigod, omigod, omigod,’ she said, and enfolded me. ‘This is just the most incredible day. I was so nervous. I thought I was going to forget my own name. I can’t even remember if I did. I can’t remember a single word I said. We’re probably not even married. This is Jed. Jed, Bonnie. Bonnie, Jed. Doesn’t he look fantastic?’
Jed was tall with a mop of blond hair. He was wearing a grey morning suit with a very flowery waistcoat. He surveyed us with an expression that was slightly disbelieving.
‘This is so brilliant of you, Bonnie,’ said Danielle, ‘after all you’ve gone through. It’s the most awful thing. I can’t believe what it must have been like for you. Everyone here can’t stop talking about it.’ I couldn’t bear to say anything so I just nodded. ‘When we get back from – well, I’m not meant to say where we’re going – we must have a proper talk about it all. I want to have a really good talk.’ She stopped and looked at us all. ‘Is that what you’re wearing?’
We were wearing our alt-country get-up, which was almost exactly what we normally wore: jeans and shirts. I also had on some cowboy boots I’d found at the bottom of one of my packing cases. ‘It goes with the music,’ I said.
‘Brilliant,’ she said. ‘Is your singer here yet?’
‘Sonia can’t make it,’ I said.
‘Omigod,’ said Danielle. ‘Is anything wrong?’
‘She’s unavoidably detained,’ I said, ‘but we’ll see what we can do.’
‘Good, good,’ said Danielle, as if she’d had the first inkling that something might go wrong with her perfect day. ‘I’ve fixed you up with something to eat. If you talk to Sergio, the sweet man in the purple jacket over there, he’ll sort you out. We’re going to have some speeches after we’ve eaten and then you can strike up. I’m so looking forward to hearing you and having a bit of a dance.’
Sergio steered us out of the main room and into a sort of store area to one side with cardboard boxes and a picnic table on which there were some pieces of chicken, a bottle of wine and a carton of fruit juice. Joakim and Neal ate heartily while the rest of us sipped our drinks and didn’t speak. Guy was drinking orange juice but I stuck to wine. If I was going to sing to this lot, I needed it.
The speeches were perfect. Jed’s best friend told stories that fell completely flat about getting drunk and about previous girlfriends. You could hear the wind blowing outside and crickets chirping. Then Danielle’s father read out a speech that was too long even though it turned out that a page had gone missing, which rendered quite a lot of what remained meaningless. By the time he toasted the bride and groom, it would have been hard for anything not to be an improvement. Danielle seized the microphone and told the crowd they were in for a huge treat, that one of her oldest friends was a musician and had got a band together especially for the occasion and that they had been practising the entire summer and overcome lots and lots of obstacles and could everyone just put their hands together for Bonnie Graham and her band.
We slunk onto the stage slightly shamefacedly, except Guy. I glimpsed him taking his place behind the drums and had the feeling that, in his imagination, he had become John Bonham going out to beat the skins for Led Zeppelin,
circa
1972. I just hoped he wouldn’t try to sound like John Bonham. I rather wished I was wearing sunglasses, like Roy Orbison, but it was too late for that now. I sat at the keyboard, tapped the microphone and muttered congratulations to Danielle and… First there was a tiny pause because I forgot Jed’s name and then, when I remembered it but before I said it, there was a howl of feedback from one of the guitars and people in the crowd winced and put hands to their ears. Neal looked at me apologetically. ‘A bit of rock-and-roll,’ he muttered.
‘Sorry about that,’ I said to the audience. ‘This is for Danielle and Jed.’
And we began ‘It Had To Be You’. It was like an out-of-body experience. I watched Danielle and Jed step tentatively out onto the open space, put their arms around each other and start to dance. I was listening to myself. My voice sounded fragile but that was OK. It’s a fragile song. Joakim was fine, of course. Guy was all right. Neal wasn’t very good. Amos was bloody awful, with wrong notes all over the place. He had a glassy look in his eyes as if he was about to faint. The song came to an end and there was a fair amount of applause.
Joakim stepped forward to the microphone. ‘This is a song that is not necessarily appropriate to a wedding,’ he said. ‘In fact, it’s completely inappropriate. But we like it.’
As I sang the first line, basically informing the man that since he clearly wants to walk out, he might as well do it straight away, I saw disbelief pass across the crowd like a Mexican wave. There was a look of deep concern, maybe even of horror, on some faces. Others were grinning. There was nothing to be done. I couldn’t give up and try another so I concentrated on singing, and as I did, something completely unexpected happened. I suddenly felt the song in a way I hadn’t during all the weeks of rehearsing it. All the pain in the music about partings, about making yourself say goodbye, about recognizing the space that exists between you and someone you were once close to, got me right in my chest. I didn’t sing it with a sob in my voice like Patsy Cline does, but I felt myself choking up. I was making a sad song even sadder. When I finished, there was hardly more than a ripple of applause, more a stunned silence, though whether this was because people were moved or appalled or embarrassed I didn’t want to think.
I got up and strapped on my banjo, Joakim picked up his fiddle and I instructed the crowd that it was time for people to start dancing. We began playing ‘Nashville Blues’, the first song we had ever played as a group, and instantly I could feel a whoosh of relief in the room, and there was a rush onto the dance-floor, if only because there was a mass attempt to pretend that the previous five minutes hadn’t happened. It’s a song that depends on handing the tune between the banjo, the guitar and the fiddle in a sort of friendly competition, and once we saw how people were responding, we extended it, like badminton players keeping a shuttlecock in the air. At one point I looked across at Neal and he grinned at me. Even Amos seemed a bit more lively. For just a moment I had a feeling of what it was meant to be like, of what really good music could do for you, the wounds it could heal, the suggestion it could give of something better. I knew that we weren’t playing really good music – or, at least, we weren’t playing all that well – but we were doing OK and we were doing it together.
The unity that music gave us was an illusion. I’d lied to Amos. In a different way I’d lied to Neal. Guy felt I’d helped to lead his son astray. What about Joakim? Had I led him astray? And then there were the people who weren’t there, the spaces and absences, the faces I would never see again.
But the crowd didn’t seem to mind, and when we came to a messy close, there was not just applause but cheers and whistles and whoops. We went into another, even more raucous, instrumental and the dancing became positively tumultuous. Then we played a rare happy Hank Williams song that you can dance to, and we finished with another Patsy Cline song, but a happy one. Except it wasn’t the end. When we finished and thanked the audience, Jed leaped up on stage, grabbed the microphone and boisterously asked everyone whether they wanted any more. It turned out that they did. We didn’t have any more so we just did ‘Nashville Blues’ again, but went on for longer, and some of the crowd even started making some strange attempt at a bluegrass dance. When we finished there was a roar of acclamation. We had discovered one of the secrets of life, which is to make people think you’re better than you really are.