***
On Saturday, Alex headed off for lunch with Isabel and Robert. As she pulled up outside the house, Isabel came out to greet her. ‘I’ve got a surprise for you,’ she said, as Alex got out of her car. ‘We’ve got a visitor.’
‘Yeah? Who is it?’
‘Our Greg.’
Alex froze. Greg was her surviving brother. They had barely spoken in six years, since their eldest brother, Freddie, had died.
Greg held Alex responsible, because she and Dave had been out with Fred the night before. They partied hard, and although Fred was staying with them, she hadn’t stopped him getting into his car the next morning. So he went out tired and still half pissed, and ploughed his car into the back of a stationary lorry. Alex had gone back to the family home after identifying her brother’s body, shocked and miserable and needing to be with her family for comfort, but instead of offering support, Greg had launched a vicious attack.
‘You fucking irresponsible cow,’ he’d raged. ‘How could you? You knew he had to get up early for work and still you dragged him round the pubs and clubs. Couldn’t you leave it alone for one night? Do you have to be constantly off your face? Fucking hell, Alex, he’s dead. He’s thirty-three years old and he’s fucking dead.’
Alex had been too shocked to say anything. She’d actually tried to get the boys to cool it the night before. Sure, she liked a drink and a toke, but Fred was wild, always had been. Whereas Alex was happy with a spliff, Fred would hot-knife. She’d seen him drop acid, smoke brown and snort cocaine. He took no encouraging. Then he’d cranked up a notch when their mother died; it was partly his way of coping.
She figured Greg was just in shock, that he would see sense and apologise, but he never had. She hadn’t tried to mend fences either, she was grieving for Fred and she couldn’t cope with Greg’s anger as well. Before she knew it, a year had gone by, then another, and it seemed too late to try to make things right. They saw each other occasionally, including at their father’s funeral, but he barely acknowledged her. It hurt, but she’d grown a thick skin over the years as far as the younger of her brothers was concerned.
‘I thought we could all have lunch together, as a family,’ said Isabel. ‘There’s only the three of us now, we should be friends.’
Alex nodded. ‘Okay, I’ll give it a go if Greg will.’
‘Thanks, Alex, it means a lot to me. With the baby, especially. I want him or her to have an auntie and an uncle who can come to birthday parties or Christmas dinner and not fight.’
Inside the house Greg and Robert were drinking beer, waiting for them.
‘Alex.’ Greg nodded in her direction.
Alex gazed at him, noticing how thin and drawn he looked and wondered how the hell they had let this happen. They’d been the least close out of the four of them, but they’d still been closer than a lot of other brothers and sisters. She walked over to where he stood and held her arms out to him. ‘Greg’ she said, ‘it’s good to see you’. He hesitated a moment and then stepped forward. And they hugged each other for the first time in over six years. When they broke apart again, they had tears in their eyes.
The conversation over lunch was lively as they caught up on each other’s news, and when Alex left, it was with a promise to keep in touch and get together again soon, as soon as her work would allow.
Chapter 32
That evening Isabel and Carol, and their friends Janice and Sharon, were coming round to Alex’s place for an unofficial and belated flat-warming party. Janice and Sharon arrived clutching bottles of wine and small gifts. As Alex poured drinks, Janice tipped out the contents of the carrier bag she was clutching and CDs spilled across the floor.
‘Wha-hey,’ Carol exclaimed. ‘Proper music.’ She looked apologetically at Alex. ‘Sorry, mate,’ she said, before diving into the pile and extracting Robbie Williams’
Life Thru a Lens
. ‘Here, Isabel, get this on before she gets the Leonard Cohen out.’
The women caught up on gossip as pizza was ordered and eaten, then Sharon produced some gear and built a couple of joints. Isabel bailed out before midnight, pleading tiredness and a headache as her excuse. Later still, when Janice and Sharon were sharing a joint and a cuddle, Alex followed Carol into the kitchen, where she was stripping the foil from the neck of a fresh bottle of wine.
‘How’s it going with Stuart?’ she said.
‘Good, so far. He’s nice.’ She wound in the corkscrew.
Alex grinned. ‘But is he special?’
Carol looked embarrassed. ‘I think he might be, Alex. I’m trying not to get my hopes up, though. Many a prince has turned into a frog once kissed.’ The cork popped free from the bottle, and she handed the corkscrew to Alex.
‘Ain’t that the truth.’ Alex twisted the cork free and put it in the bin. ‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ she said, her back to Carol.
‘Yeah? What have you been up to?’
Alex turned to face her. ‘I’ve moved into Johnny Burns’s house.’ She held her hand up when she saw Carol’s expression change. ‘Nothing like that, it’s purely business. It means we can work together more easily. There’s nothing going on, I just have a room there instead of at the local boozer.’
‘If you say so. But you should be home by now writing things up.’ Carol poured wine for them both. ‘You’ve got it bad, haven’t you, kid?’
Alex picked up her glass and took a sip of her drink.
‘What’ll you do when he puts some sleazy move on you?’
‘He won’t. It’s just business.’
‘Don’t be naïve, Alex.’
‘Honestly, Carol, there’s no subtext, no innuendo, nothing untoward.’
‘So you don’t think he’s bragging to his mates about how he got the little blonde to move in with him?’
‘I think there’s more chance he’s chatting somebody up in a club.’
‘You don’t sound too happy about that.’
‘I don’t care about that, it’s really none of my business what he does.’ She picked up Carol’s wine glass and handed it to her. ‘Come on, let’s go back through. I just wanted to tell you where I was staying. I don’t want a row.’
‘It would take more than a bloke to make us fall out, you know that. Just be careful.’
***
Next morning Alex packed up the stuff she planned to take back with her, including her swimming gear. Johnny had said he was aiming to be back by early evening, and she figured on doing the same.
Around noon she was nursing a mug of coffee, brooding over what Carol had said, when the doorbell interrupted her thoughts. She went to answer, expecting to find a friend on her doorstep. Instead she found Dave.
‘What do you want?’
‘Alex, please. Can we talk?’
‘There really isn’t anything to talk about.’
‘You ignore my calls. You don’t answer my emails. Last time you wouldn’t talk because we were both pissed. Well, we’re not now. So please, let me in. Talk to me. Just for a bit.’
She threw her hands up. ‘Okay, if it means that much to you.’ She stood back and let Dave into the flat.
‘You’ve got it looking nice,’ he said, taking in his surroundings. ‘You always had a way with that sort of thing.’
Alex remembered their first flat together. Bedsit, really. Dave’s shop was struggling and she was launching her freelance career. They’d made it their own cosy space despite having little spare money.
‘Thanks,’ she said. She picked up her coffee.
‘Any chance …?’ Dave gestured to the mug.
‘Don’t push it.’
‘No. Course not. Sorry.’ He met Alex’s eyes. ‘Alex. What can I say? I’m so sorry about what happened. It was a big mistake. Huge. I … if I could turn the clock back … you know?’
‘Well, I wish that too, sometimes. Just turn the clock back and make it not have happened.’
He shot her his best smile and Alex felt a sharp pang of regret. She remembered the taste of him, the silky feel of his hair in her fingers, skin warm against hers.
‘But we can’t,’ she said, shutting the door firmly on any thoughts either of them might have entertained that they might get back together. It hurt her, too, hurt her to think what might have been, but it was over.
‘Never say never,’ he pleaded. ‘We were good together.’
‘So good that you slept with someone else.’
‘That was a mistake.’
‘Was it the first mistake?’
He faltered, eyes darting around the room, avoiding hers.
‘No, I thought not. Goodbye, Dave.’
‘I hear you’re working with a new client.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Johnny Burns, isn’t it? Heartbreaker?’
Alex nodded. Dave smiled, put on his puppy dog eyes. ‘I’d love to meet him.’
She slammed the empty mug down. ‘So, finally, we find out what this is really about. It’s not about you being sorry or wanting us to get back together at all, is it? It’s about you seeing an opportunity to meet Johnny Burns.’ She shook her head in bewilderment.
‘No, love, no it isn’t—’
‘Save your lies. Get out, you bastard, get out and don’t come back.’
Still protesting, Dave was bundled out of the flat. ‘This isn’t over. I’ll be back next time you’re in town,’ he shouted, as the door slammed in his face.
Suit yourself
, thought Alex.
I’ll throw you out again then if I have to
.
When it came to driving music, Alex decided that Siobhan Scott had the right idea; you couldn’t dawdle down the road with Lemmy spurring you on. She rummaged through her cassettes;
Bomber
was in there somewhere, and so, she was pretty sure, was
1916
. As a bonus, she also turned up a copy of
No Sleep ‘til Hammersmith
. She hit the road at two-thirty and completed the journey in record time, Motörhead rocking all the way.
Chapter 33
The following week brought forth a torrent of tales about the band’s punishing touring schedule. As the Heartbreaker machine grew, more people were drawn in. Suddenly the guys needed people to look after and set up their instruments, more road crew, lighting technicians, sound engineers. Fearsome stacks, banks of monitors and trippy lights became standard artillery for Heartbreaker’s live shows.
Johnny had an indecent number of guitars, but his main gear was a Gibson Les Paul and a Marshall stack. Paul’s drum kit got bigger every tour. One bass drum became two, floor toms were added to complement the hanging toms, extra cymbals, he got congas and bongos, and then finally a fuck-off great big gong. He was as likely to beat his kit with his hands as his sticks, the noise he made was incredible. Eventually, he started touring with Harry, his sister’s kid, who helped him to look after it.
‘Fucking drum technician,’ scoffed Tom when Johnny told him. ‘What’s that, then?’
‘It’s Harry. The technician who looks after my drums,’ said Paul amiably, coming up behind Tom. ‘And don’t you even think about having a go at the kid.’
Tom feigned innocence. ‘Would I?’ he said, his hands in an open gesture.
‘Yes, you would. But think on this. You see that little bat-faced cunt that pisses about with your guitars and keyboards? Well, how fucking useful would he be to you with two broken thumbs? Ask yourself that when you’re thinking about winding up little Harry.’ Paul shook a finger in Tom’s face. ‘I’m not kidding, man, leave him be.’
The pranks and silliness had continued. Johnny remembered being interviewed in his hotel room by a journalist from some mag or other and seeing Andy outside the window, grinning like a fool. They were eight storeys up. For all he was tall, rangy, Andy was a great climber. He was fearless, would hop out of a window at any height without a moment’s hesitation.
‘Dan would have had a fit if he’d known about Andy’s Spider-Man impression. The record company and their insurers wouldn’t allow us all to travel in the same limo after a gig in case there was an accident, and there he was climbing about on buildings.’
Johnny was glad the journo and photographer had their backs to the window; he kept a straight face despite Andy’s antics, and eventually the singer got bored and moved on to peer into someone else’s room.
‘I can’t remember what mag they were from,’ he told Alex, ‘but I’m sure it wasn’t
Sounds
. They didn’t write a good word about us until the ’80s. We kind of liked that, being disapproved of by them.’ He shook his head, laughed. ‘Then they turned all sycophantic and thought we’d jump at the chance to be interviewed by them, that we’d take them on tour and pose like good boys for a load of pics. Fat chance. We told them to take a running jump. We’d got by without them when we were starting out, we sure as hell didn’t need them then.’
Following the success of
Rescued
in 1976 the band had travelled in style, using a large, well-equipped tour bus to cover the American and European tour dates. After
Icarus
, the fifth album released at the end of 1978, the record company had hired a plane and had the band’s name painted on the outside.
‘It was terrific,’ exclaimed Johnny. ‘We were all so knocked out by it, we hadn’t seen anything like it. We’d never even been abroad before Heartbreaker had kicked off. Now we travelled in our own plane.
‘Having supported other bands and had the shitty end of the stick ourselves; no soundcheck, crap treatment, just generally getting pissed about, we were only too keen to play fair with the bands that supported us. We tried to do that all the way through, although by the time we were touring
Icarus
we didn’t share the bill with anybody else, we just did a long set ourselves.
‘We also started only putting out singles that weren’t available on the albums. We thought of ourselves as an albums band anyway and we hated the practice of mining albums for singles and making the fans pay twice for something. We had enough clout by then to just refuse to do it. Crawdaddy wanted to keep us so badly that they agreed.
‘I’m getting ahead of myself, though. Getting back on track, ’76 was mad, all sorts of craziness kicked in. Everything kind of cranked up a notch, you know? Just more of everything.’