Public Secrets (5 page)

Emma gave a little gasp as he put it in her hand. Speechless, she turned the egg this way and that, watching the ring slide from side to side.

It had been a careless thing, Johnno thought. A machine that took American quarters, and he’d had change left after his speedy shopping spree. More touched than he wanted the others to see, he opened the egg for her, then slipped the ring on her finger.

“There. We’re engaged.”

Emma beamed at the ring, then at him. “Can I sit on your lap?”

“All right then.” He leaned close to her ear. “But if you wet your pants, the engagement’s off.”

She laughed, settled on his lap, and began to play with her ring.

“First my wife, then my daughter,” Brian commented.

“You’d only have to worry if you had a son.” Stevie tossed off the words as easily as he tossed off the drink. Then wished he’d cut off his tongue. “Sorry,” he muttered as the room fell silent. “Hangover. Puts me in a filthy mood.”

At the knock on the door, Johnno gave a lazy shrug. “Better put on that famous smile, son. It’s show time.”

Johnno was angry, but hid it well as the young, bearded reporter sat down with them. They had no idea what it was like, he thought. None of them, save Brian who had gone to school with him, had befriended him. The names he’d been called—fag, pussy, queer. They had hurt a great deal more than the
occasional beatings he’d taken. Johnno knew he would have had his face smashed into a pulp more than once if it hadn’t been for Brian’s ready fists and loyalty.

They had been drawn together, two ten-year-old boys with drunken fathers. Poverty wasn’t uncommon in London’s east end, and there were always toughs ready to break an arm for pence. There were ways of escaping. For both him and Brian, the escape had been music.

Elvis, Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters. They would pool whatever money they could earn or steal to buy those precious 45s. At twelve, they’d collaborated on their first song—a really poor one, Johnno remembered now, lots of moon/June rhymes set to a three-chord rhythm they’d pounded out on their battered guitar. They’d traded a pint of Brian’s father’s gin for that guitar, and Brian had taken an ugly beating. But they’d made music, such as it was.

Johnno had been nearly sixteen before he realized what he was. He’d sweated over it, wept over it, pounded himself into any girl who would have him to turn his fate around. But sweat, tears, and sex hadn’t changed him.

Finally it had been Brian who had helped him to accept. They’d been drinking, late at night, in the basement of Brian’s flat. This time, Johnno had pinched whiskey from his father. The stench of garbage had been rank as they sat with a candle between them, passing the bottle back and forth. On the dented portable record player, Roy Orbison had been soaring with “Only the Lonely.” Johnno’s confession had come out with drunken weeping and wild threats of suicide.

“I’m nothing, and I’ll never be nothing else. Living like a bleeding pig.” He’d guzzled whiskey. “My old man stinking up the room and Mum whining and nagging and never doing nothing to make it change. My sister’s working the streets and my little brother’s been arrested twice this month.”

“It’s up to us to get out of it,” Brian said with boozy philosophy. With his eyes half closed he listened to Orbison. He wanted to sing like that, with that otherworldly melancholy. “We’ve got to make a difference for ourselves, Johnno. And we will.”

“Difference. I can’t make it any different. Not unless I kill myself. Maybe I will. Maybe I’ll just do it and be done with it.”

“What the bloody hell are you talking about?” Brian searched in their crumpled pack of Pall Malls and found one.

“I’m queer.” Johnno dropped his head on his folded arms and wept.

“Queer?” Brian paused with the match an inch from the tip of the cigarette. “Come on, Johnno. Don’t be daft.”

“I said I’m queer.” His voice rose as he lifted his tear-stained, desperate face to Brian. “I like boys. I’m a freaking, flaming fag.”

Though he was shaken, the drink was enough of a cushion to make him open-minded. “You sure?”

“Why the bloody hell would I say it if I wasn’t sure? The only reason I could make it with Alice Ridgeway was because I was thinking of her brother.”

Now that was disgusting, Brian thought, but kept his feelings to himself. They’d been friends for more than six years, had stood up for each other, lied for each other, had shared dreams and secrets. Brian struck another match, lit the cigarette, and pondered.

“Well, I suppose if you’re made that way, then you’re made that way. Nothing to slit your wrists over.”

“You’re not queer.”

“No.” He fervently hoped not—and vowed to spend the next few weeks proving it to himself with every girl he could charm into spreading her legs. No, he wasn’t queer, he assured himself. The sexual acrobatics he’d experienced with Jane Palmer should have been a good indication of his preferences. Thinking of her, he hardened and shifted his legs. It wasn’t the time to get horny, but to think of Johnno’s problem.

“Lots of people are queer,” he said. “Like literary people and artists and such. We’re musicians, so you could think of it as part of your creative soul.”

“That’s shit,” Johnno mumbled, but wiped his dripping nose.

“Maybe, but it’s better than slitting your wrists. I’d have to find a new partner.”

With a ghost of a smile, Johnno picked up the bottle again. “Are we still partners, then?”

“Sure.” Brian passed the cigarette. “As long as I don’t start making you hot and bothered.”

And that had been the end of it.

When Johnno took a lover, he took him discreetly, and never discussed it. His sexual preference was common knowledge within the band, but for his own privacy, and at Pete’s insistence,
he cultivated an image of a heterosexual stud. For the most part, it amused him.

There were regrets, though he hated to acknowledge them. It came to him now, as he bounced Emma on his lap, that he would never have a child of his own.

And with frustration, he was forced to admit, as he watched Brian slip an arm around Bev, that the one man he truly loved would never be his lover.

E
MMA WAS DAZZLED
by New York. After a late breakfast where Brian indulged her with strawberry jam and sugary pastries, she was left in Bev’s hands. It didn’t worry her, not this time. Her da was going to be on the telly that night, and he’d promised that she could go to the place where the telly pictures were made and watch.

In the meantime, she and Bev drove around the city in the big white car. She giggled at the blond wig and big round sunglasses Bev wore. Though Bev didn’t smile much at first, Emma’s excitement soon distracted her. Emma liked watching the people rush along the sidewalks, jostling each other, streaming across intersections while horns blared. There were women in short skirts and high heels, their bouffant hairdos as steady as carved stones. There were others in denim and sandals, with their manes of hair hanging straight as rain down their backs. On the corners there were vendors selling hot dogs and soft drinks and ice cream which the pedestrians snapped up as the temperature soared outside the cool cocoon of the limo. There was a nervy aggression to the traffic that Emma didn’t understand but enjoyed.

Unruffled, and proper in his tan uniform and stiff-brimmed hat, the driver pulled to the curb. He didn’t think much of music himself, unless it was Frank Sinatra or Rosemary Clooney, but he was sure his two teenagers would go wild when he brought them home autographs at the end of his two-day job.

“Here we are, ma’am.”

“Oh.” A little dazed, Bev stared out the window.

“The Empire State Building,” he explained with a gesture toward the doors. “Would you like me to pick you up in an hour?”

“An hour,
yes.”
Bev took Emma’s hand firmly in hers when the driver opened the door. “Come on, Emma. Devastation’s not going to the top alone.”

There was a long, winding line, with wailing babies and whining children. They started at the end, two bodyguards silently falling in behind, and were soon swallowed up. A group of French students filed in seconds later, all carrying Macy’s shopping bags and talking in their fast, flowing language. Amid the mix of perfume, sweat, and wet diapers, Emma caught the dreamy aroma of pot. No one else seemed to notice or care. They were shuffled onto an elevator.

Long, stuffy minutes later, they were led off to wait again. She didn’t mind. As long as her hand was firmly caught in Bev’s, she could crane her neck and look at all the people. Bald heads, floppy hats, scraggly beards. When her neck got tired, she switched to shoes. Rope sandals, shiny wing tips, snowy white sneakers, and black pumps. Some people shuffled their feet, others tapped, a few shifted from side to side, but hardly a one was still.

When she grew tired of that, she just listened to the voices. She heard a group of girls arguing nearby. As teenagers, they had Emma’s immediate envy.

“Stevie Nimmons is the cutest,” one of the girls insisted. “He’s got big brown eyes and that groovy moustache.”

“Brian McAvoy,” another corrected. “He’s really fab.” To prove her point, she took a photo, cut from a fan magazine, out of her madras purse. A communal sigh went up as the girls crowded around it. “Every time I look at it, I just about die.”

They squealed, were glared at, then muffled giggles with their hands.

Both pleased and baffled, Emma looked up at Bev. “Those girls are talking about Da.”

“Ssh.” Bev was amused enough to want to relay the story to Brian, but she was also aware that she was wearing the wig and sunglasses for a reason. “I know they are, but we have to keep who we are a secret.”

“Why?”

“I’ll explain later,” she said, relieved when their turn at the elevators arrived.

Emma’s eyes widened when her ears popped as they had on the airplane. For a moment she was terrified that she would be sick again. She bit her lip, closed her eyes, and wished desperately for her da.

She wished she hadn’t come. She wished she’d brought Charlie for comfort. And she prayed, as fervently as a three-year-old could, that she wouldn’t lose her wonderful breakfast all over her shiny new shoes.

Then the doors opened, and the dreadful swaying motion stopped. Everyone was laughing and talking and crowding out. Obeying Bev’s tug on her hand, she kept close to her while still fighting the nausea.

There was a big stand with shelves of bright souvenirs, and wide, wide windows where she could see the sky and the spread of buildings that was Manhattan. Dumbfounded, she stood still while people swarmed around them. Sickness passed into wonder.

“It’s something to see, isn’t it, Emma?”

“Is it the world?”

Though she was as amazed as Emma, she laughed. “No. Only a small part of it. Come on then, let’s go out.”

The wind barreled over them, sending Emma’s skirts flying up as she staggered back. But the sensation excited rather than frightened as Bev, laughing again, plucked her up.

“We’re on top of the world, Emma.”

As they looked over the high wall, Emma felt her stomach do playful little leaps and bounces. It was all spread out below, the crisscross of streets in the canyons made by the buildings, the tiny cars and buses that looked like toys. Everything ran so straight and true.

When Bev put a coin in a box, she looked through the telescope, but she preferred her own view, through her own eyes.

“Can we live here?”

Bev fiddled with the telescope until she focused on the Statue of Liberty. “Here, in New York?”

“Here. On top.”

“No one lives here, Emma.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s a tourist attraction,” she answered absently.
“And one of the wonders of the world, I think. You can’t live in a wonder.”

But Emma looked out over the high wall and thought that she could.

T
HE TELEVISION STUDIO
didn’t impress Emma. It didn’t look as pretty or as big as it did onscreen. The people were ordinary. She did like the cameras, though. They were big and bulky, and the people behind them seemed important. She wondered if looking through one of the cameras was like looking through the telescope on the Empire Sute Building.

Before she could ask Bev, a skinny man began talking in a loud voice. It was the oddest American accent she’d heard yet. She couldn’t understand half of what he said, but she caught the word “Devastation.” Then came the explosion of screams.

After the first shock, Emma stopped cringing into Bev’s skirts and leaned out. Though she didn’t understand the screaming, she realized it wasn’t a bad sound. It was a good, young noise that bulleted off the walls and slammed off the ceilings. It made her grin, though Bev’s hand trembled lightly in hers.

She liked the way her father moved across the stage, prancing and strutting as his voice, strong and clear, merged with Johnno’s, then Stevie’s. His hair glowed gold under the bright lights. She was a child, and easily recognized magic.

As long as she lived she would hold this picture in her mind, and her heart, of four young men standing onstage, drenched in light, in luck, and in music.

T
HREE THOUSAND MILES
away, Jane sat in her new flat. There was a pint of Gilbey’s and an ounce of Colombian Gold on the table beside her. She’d lit candles, dozens of them, using those and the drugs to mellow her mood. Brian’s clear tenor played on her stereo.

She’d moved into Chelsea with the money she’d taken from Brian. There were young people there, musicians and poets and artists, and the ones who followed them. She thought she would find another Brian in Chelsea. An idealist with a beautiful face and clever hands.

She could pop off to the pubs whenever she liked, listen to the music, pick out a likely companion for the night.

She had a six-room flat with shiny new furniture in every room. Her closets bulged with clothes from fashionable boutiques. On her finger was a fat diamond ring she’d bought the week before when she’d been feeling blue. She was already bored with it.

She had thought that one hundred thousand pounds was all the money in the world. She ran one hand down the silk robe she wore, pleased, very pleased with its sinuous feel. She’d soon discovered that large amounts were as easily spent as small ones. She still had enough to last her awhile, but it hadn’t taken long for her to realize she’d sold Emma cheap.

He’d have paid twice as much, she thought as she nursed her gin. More than twice, no matter how much the bastard Pete had frowned and muttered. Brian had wanted Emma. He had a soft spot for children. She’d known it, but, she thought in disgust, hadn’t been clever enough to exploit it.

A lousy twenty-five thousand a year. How was she supposed to live on that, she wondered.

A little bleary with gin, she rolled a sloppy joint.

She still took in a John now and then, but that was as much for the company as the extra cash. She’d had no idea she would miss Emma. As the weeks passed the concept of motherhood took on new, emotional meanings.

She’d given birth. She’d changed nasty nappies. She’d spent her hard-earned money on food and clothes. Now the little brat probably didn’t remember she existed.

She’d hire a solicitor. She’d hire the best with Brian’s money. There was justice in that. There wasn’t a court in the country that wouldn’t see that a child belonged with her mother. She’d get Emma back. Or better, she’d get twice as much money.

Once she’d bled them a bit, Brian and his snotty new wife wouldn’t forget her. No one would forget her, not the stinking press, not the stupid public, or her own little brat.

With this thought dangling in her mind, she brought out her cache of Methedrine and prepared to go flying.