The Predictions (16 page)

“What?” said Fran. “Is that all?”

Serena said, “That isn’t very interesting.”

Lukas shook his head. He knew that I was covering—and why. “Come on, darling, don’t be shy,” he said. “Tell them about your destiny.” His laugh was kindly, teasing, but there was an edge to it.

“It was nothing,” I said. “A scribble on a piece of card, that’s all.”

“But what was the scribble?” demanded Fran. “You can’t build it up like that and then
not
tell us.”

“It was her true love—a knight in shining armor if I remember rightly.” Lukas looked to me for confirmation but I shook my head, my face growing hot.

“No, it was a king.”

“A king in knickerbockers?” Fran stared at me, unable to contain her amusement. “Are you serious?”

I shot her a genuinely mortified look, hoping she wouldn’t say more, but it was Serena who saved me with a question that was even more horrible. She fixed me with her hard black eyes and said, “So what are you doing with Lukas if he isn’t the one?”

I didn’t answer.

Serena had been sipping burgundy and the teeth and lips of her victorious smile were stained red. Already
bored with me, she turned to Lukas. “And what did you get?”

He laughed. “I can’t even remember. I barely looked at it for a second.”

“Bollocks,” said Fran. “You must remember something.”

Lukas closed his eyes and held his hands up to the ceiling. “It was a picture of a . . . hang on, it’s coming to me . . . a giant—”

“Cock,” said Marlon.

“Correct!” Lukas exclaimed. “It was a giant cock.”

Everyone laughed, and I did too, from sheer relief, because the focus had shifted away from the embarrassment of my prediction and onto Lukas, but later, when I was finally alone with him, I said, “You told me you didn’t look at your prediction.”

“I did?”

“Straight after we got them. You told me you threw yours away without even looking at it—when really you
did
look at it.”

Lukas sighed. “I might have glanced at it, okay?”

“But why did you pretend you hadn’t?”

“Because I really didn’t want you believing in mine as well as yours.”

“Why not? Was it bad?”

“Poppy! This is exactly what I was afraid would happen.”

“It
was
bad,” I said. “And that’s why you didn’t want me to see it.”

Lukas threw up his hands in frustration. “Bad. Good. Even if I trusted Shakti—which I don’t—I wouldn’t believe in it.”

I remembered what he had said earlier, about her preferring young boys, and a penny that should have dropped long ago was finally shoved into place. “She tried to sleep with you, didn’t she?”

Lukas was surprised that I had only just worked this out. “When I said ‘everyone,’ I meant everyone.”

“But, when?”

“Not long after she arrived. She came on strong.”

“And did you?”

“No way,” said Lukas, emphatic. “I ran a mile.”

“Thank heavens.”

“And you?”

“What about me?”

“Did she try to sleep with you?”

“Of course not.” To begin with, I was shocked he had even asked, but then I remembered the morning of nude yoga at the edge of the forest, and I wasn’t so sure I had escaped her advances. “Actually, there was something weird that happened.”

“And let me guess—you wouldn’t put out?”

“It wasn’t like that. Not exactly.”

“Well,” said Lukas, “now you know why I didn’t look at my prediction.”

“But you
did
look at it. You said you peeked.”

“You still don’t get it, do you?”

“Why can’t you just tell me what was in it?”

“No.” Lukas folded his arms and set his mouth in a stubborn line.

“Please?”

“Never. In fact, I’ve just remembered that I can’t remember what it was.”

“Fuck you.”

“Okay,” he said, “fine, I will,” and set about ruthlessly seducing me, pinning my hips to the floor and working away on me until he had triumphed.

London

1988

T
HE BAND HAD STARTED
rehearsing for their first British tour. The album was coming out in May, and then in the summer of 1988, the same month Gavin thought I was marrying him, they would go on tour. In June, Gavin took me aside in the telex room, a level of intimacy he had never once attempted at work, and told me that much to everyone’s relief, above all his own, he had managed to postpone the wedding.

“Postpone?” I said, taken aback. “You still haven’t canceled it?”

He said, “I can’t. I’ll lose my deposit.”

“Your deposit on what?”

“On the hotel ballroom. Where we’re going to hold the reception.”

I had never considered these details, as if the wedding had been organized by a magic spell. “Is it for a great deal, this deposit?”

“Yes,” said Gavin, “a considerable amount.”

This would be a sticking point—perhaps even the main sticking point—and I couldn’t see a way around it. “How long will they hold it for?”

“A couple of months,” he said.

OVER SEVEN LONG WEEKS
that summer, Cheatah was booked to play in thirty-one university halls across Great Britain, starting in Aberdeen and ending in Southampton. I was joining them in Bristol, toward the end of the tour. They felt certain it would be a triumph. Everyone had high hopes for the future, discussing what types of cars they would buy, the places they would go on holiday once they were rich. Marlon and Serena had already driven Bentleys and Jaguars, and had vacationed with their parents in St. Barts, St. Tropez, St. Moritz, but they played along, bless them. The day the band left to go on tour, a Saturday morning, it was raining. It had been raining for weeks on end, and each day Lukas had wondered out loud if this would make more people go to the concerts or fewer. Ticket sales had been unpredictable. Good in some places, poor in others. A lot of students had already gone home for the holidays. Others were caught up in exams. Too late, someone suggested it would have been better to start the tour in early September, when all the students were back, instead of that being the end date. Packing to go, Lukas was in a melancholy mood, saying he would miss me too much and that he didn’t want to go. Then, when the other guys in the band came to pick him up, and they
started packing gear into the van—instruments galore plus a whole trunk of leather pants, studded belts, and cutaway vests—he caught their collective excitement, became overly jubilant, and was rushed and distracted during our farewell. “See you in Bristol, Pops,” he’d called out, drumming on the roof of the car before he got in. “Miss you already!”

“Break a leg, guys!” I called to the revving car.

They drove off, tooting, and I opened the door to the mews flat and climbed the steep wooden stairs. Serena had drifted off to the big house to change before meeting her mother for lunch someplace she called “Harvey Nicks,” and Fran had gone to her newly acquired office to sort out some promo. In the lounge, I opened the curtains, which had been drawn for so long that the mechanism was jammed, and the seedy wreckage of the last few months was thrown into harsh relief: discarded coats and shoes, empty wine bottles, ashtrays loaded with stubs. A full-length mirror stood by the coffee table, which had been used as a dumping ground for dug-out eye shadows and empty hairspray cans. Here and there the velvet couch cover had split, exposing its crumbling yellow foam innards. It resembled Parmesan cheese, in not just appearance but also smell. While the party had been raging, I hadn’t noticed any of this ruin, but now it was hard to miss. I picked up one or two wineglasses and took them to the sink, a graveyard where every dish and vessel in the flat had gone to die. It would take hours to make a dent in the kitchen but the bathroom was worse, strewn with lipstick-smeared tissues, entrails of sticky blond and black hair, and towels so wet they would have to be wrung out. I could not
believe I had been using the toilet, which had been treated for months like a urinal. Around the base was a tacky yellow gunk, and at the sight of it I dry-heaved.

On the upstairs landing outside Marlon’s uninhabitable bedroom, I found a small clear square of carpet and sat down. The circus had rolled out of town, and I had been left with the cleanup. Would this be my life from now on? I couldn’t even move back to the bedsit. We had disbanded it and Fran had moved into a flat with other girls.

I tidied up just enough to make living in the flat bearable, but I couldn’t get rid of the Parmesan stench that came from the conversation pit and followed me around the flat. The next day this odor tailed me to the Tube station, boarded the train, and was still there at work, and the day after that, the same thing happened. Paranoid, I sniffed at my clothes, wondering if I was the source. I bought cans of air freshener, scented candles, and the hippie cure, incense. Nothing worked. The smell exhausted me, and at the same time, made me hungry. In my lunch hour, and again at dinnertime, I went to the local café and ate crumpets and jam, beans and eggs, sausages and chips. We had been so busy in the last few months we had hardly eaten, but in the interval between the first tour date in Aberdeen and the one in Bristol, where I would join them on the road, I more than made up for it.

From what little information I could glean from Lukas, the tour was a mixed bag. In some towns, such as Liverpool, local metal fans came out in force to support them; in other places—Glasgow was the worst—they were bottled off the
stage. Lukas was confused, at first, then depressed. He had started the tour by calling every day but as it went on his phone calls became more sporadic, his mood increasingly unpredictable.

One afternoon at work I picked up the phone to an apocalyptic drum solo and Lukas yelling over it, “Sorry, babe—in the middle of sound check. Just had to hear your voice!”

“Where are you?”

“Fucking York! Can you believe it? How the hell are you, babe?”

He sounded overexcited, maybe drunk, and when I replied, “I’m fine, you know, same as always,” someone on his end of the line whooped so loudly it drowned me out.

He shouted, “Babe, are you there?”

“I said I’m great.”

This was lost in a howl of guitar feedback.

I tried, “I love you.”

“What?”

“I miss you!”

“Me too. Hey, I’ve got to go—they’re testing the mics.”

The next time he called, three or four days later, it was early morning and very quiet on his end of the line. He sounded as though he hadn’t slept. When I asked how the gigs were going, he was irritable, as though he couldn’t bear to revisit what had happened the night before. “Babe,” he said, “I didn’t ring up for an inquisition.”

“I just hope you’re okay.”

“It’s fucking tiring,” he said, pausing to yawn down the phone. “We drive all day, arrive at some shitty venue, set up,
go talk to some piss-awful student radio station, eat dinner, sink a few beers, then go onstage. By the time we get back to the pub or whatever shit-hole we’re staying in, it’s two or three in the morning. I’m sharing a room with Marlon, and he’s an asshole. The next morning we get up and do it all over again.” He yawned a second time. “Does that answer your question?”

“Yes, it does,” I said, wondering why he had bothered to call me at all.

His mood swings took on a pattern. If he called before lunchtime, he was morose, reluctant to talk, but sometimes in need of reassurance. If he called later in the day, or in the evening, he was often so exuberant, so up, that it was like talking to a game-show host. As the time approached to join Lukas and the band on tour, I grew more and more apprehensive, particularly when, in the week leading up to the trip, he neglected to call me at all. Through Fran, I learned that he had laryngitis and had been sleeping it off during the day, under doctor’s orders to avoid unnecessary conversation. Still, my apprehension grew. I was also worried, stupid as it was, that I had put on weight. I was never normally concerned about that kind of thing, and Lukas had never been critical of my appearance, but I had gone up a whole dress size, maybe two, and I figured he was bound to notice.

Fran left the tour and came back to London for a few days, and the plan was that I would travel cross-country with her to Bristol on the train. We met at Paddington at seven in the morning, an early start. I hadn’t traveled much by train before and had terrible motion sickness from the moment
we left the station. It was a dogged kind of nausea that came and went in gusts. “You just got up too early,” said Fran, taking me to the dining car and forcing me to drink a cup of sugary tea. I bought an egg sandwich to go with it. Then another.

“I thought you were going to spew?” said Fran.

“So did I, but while the sandwich is in my mouth I feel okay.”

The boys were staying near the station in an old Victorian hotel that went on for blocks and had once been white but was now various shades of gray. The interior was a riot of green and orange and red carpet from the seventies that had been dragged into the eighties and left there to rot.

We took the lift up to the third floor and knocked on a series of doors. No one answered. “They’re probably still asleep,” said Fran, producing a trio of keys on numbered tags. She consulted a piece of paper and gave me a room number and a key. “This one will get you into Lukas and Marlon’s room. I’ll go wake the others.”

It was morning-tea time, not early anymore. In the last month, I had started measuring time not by the clock but by how close or far away the next meal was. The more weight I put on, the worse this compulsion became.

When I got to the right door, I knocked a few times but no one answered. I put the key into the lock and turned it, quietly, so as not to wake anyone who might be asleep in the room. Fran had booked the rooms and paid for them, so it was only fair that reception had given her the keys, but it still felt wrong somehow to let myself in unannounced.

I couldn’t see much at first, just a pencil line of light around the edges of the curtains. This only served to intensify the range of smells that rose to meet me. Strongest was that of cigarette smoke and unwashed armpits, but there was also a swampy odor of liquor and something else that was sharper, more chemical. The combination made me gag, and I went straight to the bathroom and brought up all the sandwiches I had eaten on the train—not a good beginning to the reunion.

At the sink, I rinsed out my mouth with water. It had crossed my mind to borrow a toothbrush, or some toothpaste, but there was none, just an assortment of lighters, the ever-present hairspray cans, and a pile of rolled-up banknotes. Like an idiot, I clocked these items and thought,
Oh, how nice, they must be starting to make money.

Light from the bathroom went a little way to illuminating the hotel room, and I made out the hump of a body passed out on each of the two double beds. Neither was under the bedclothes, but on closer inspection, one had his face buried under a pillow, and the other, with his face exposed, turned out to be Lukas. I sat on the bed next to him. He was fully clothed, with even his boots still on, but it was the appearance of his face that upset me. Even in shadow, I could see that his skin was ashen, and that he’d lost more weight than he could afford to.

“Lukas,” I whispered, panicking suddenly that he might not wake up. I took him by the shoulders and shook him, feeling how easily he moved, his body so relaxed it was like jelly. “Lukas! Wake up.”

He murmured something that sounded, at a pinch, like
my name and, without opening his eyes, pulled me forcefully to the bed and clamped his arm around me. For a living corpse, he was still very strong, but I wondered if he had actually registered my presence before grabbing me and sinking back into a coma, or if I was taking part in his dream.

Across from me, on the other bed, Marlon rolled over, still under the pillow, put his hand down his red leather pants and rearranged his tackle. I had grown up with four boys who did that kind of thing constantly, and his behavior didn’t so much gross me out as remind me of life on the commune. There had been something so natural about living in close proximity to other people, as if that was how humans were meant to exist. We had never been cold, or lonely, or bored. And even if we didn’t have proper parents, we always had each other. For the first time in ages, I yearned for my brothers and sisters, and wondered what they had been doing with their lives. I couldn’t remember why or how we had lost touch, but I was pretty sure it was mostly self-centeredness. The last thing I noticed before falling asleep next to Lukas was that the table between the two beds was littered with minibar bottles, all of them empty.

I woke up a few hours later with a rod poking into my lower back and whiskey breath in my ear. In my relationship with Lukas I had grown familiar with the morning stiffy but I was flabbergasted when he pulled down my pants and began working it into me without so much as a hello.

“Hey, wait a minute,” I said.

“So good to see you,” mumbled Lukas.

“Are you okay? I’ve been worried.”

“It’s fucked,” he said, pawing at my clothes. “Tell you about it later.”

“Okay.”

We kissed a little, but he tasted weird, like menthol cigarettes and chlorine, and I was self-conscious about my breath after puking. Better to just let him take me from behind, to get it over with, although once he was inside me, I started to enjoy the sex more than I had expected—not that it went on for long enough to really take me anywhere.

“Far out,” whispered Lukas, collapsing on top of me. “I’ve missed you.”

I’d had my eyes shut for most of it, and when I opened them, Marlon was staring straight at me from the other bed.

He let out a long wolf whistle. “Good morning, beautiful,” he said, and rubbed the straining leather at his crotch. “How about you come over here and sit on this?”

“Fuck off, creep, the show’s over.”

“And it’s lovely to see you too, darling. Especially your pink bits.”

Behind me, Lukas snorted with laughter, while I gathered up my clothes and fled to the bathroom to die of shame. Regardless of how careless I had been in front of Marlon, I felt violated, as though the two of them had colluded against me to contrive the situation. On the other side of the door, I could hear them laughing and bantering as though nothing had happened. On and on they went, then silence. The door to the hotel room clicked open and shut. There was a knock on the bathroom door.