The Predictions (17 page)

“I hope you haven’t fallen in.”

I opened the door but stayed inside, fiddling with the taps at the sink.

“Sorry about that,” said Lukas. “Marlon does it all the time.”

“Watches you have sex?” I was horrified. “With who?”

“No, shit. I mean he has sex in front of me. He doesn’t care.”

“How long has that been going on?”

“I don’t know when it first happened. He came back to the hotel room with a girl . . . I was in the room, asleep or wasted, I can’t even remember.”

They had been sharing a room since the tour started in Aberdeen, over a month earlier. Did he really expect me to believe that Marlon had been rooting in front of him while he had been celibate?

“What happens on tour stays on tour. I know the drill.”

“Believe me, you don’t. Being on tour isn’t like real life. It’s horrible. Half the time you don’t know what day it is, where you are, who you’re talking to . . . Everything’s a blur so you just kind of switch off.”

“Is that supposed to be some kind of excuse?” Out of nowhere—or perhaps it had been building since I arrived in Bristol—I was filled with rage and unable to calm down. “You switch off—and the next thing you know you’re fucking some groupie in Manchester or Newcastle or Leeds.”

Lukas looked at me like I was crazy. I felt crazy. Instead of reassuring me I was wrong about the groupies, he said, “Are you okay?”

“Don’t try to switch this back onto me. I know you’re
lying—just like you lied about Serena—about what you two got up to in her room with her stuffed toys and her frilly pink bedspread. You even gave her your favorite T-shirt—the one you never let me wear. I know about the vibrator too—how she showed you her clitoris.”

“Poppy?”

Lukas’s eyes swarmed with secrets. I saw nothing else. I had lost it. “I should never have come on tour. This whole thing was a mistake.”

“What whole thing? You mean us?”

“Do
you
think we’re a mistake?”

“No, I . . .” Lukas hesitated. “I feel so shitty. I can’t think straight. Can you wait while I take a shower?”

I said I could but after he had been in the shower a few minutes, I left. I had only planned on leaving the hotel to go for a short walk, but several blocks later, I was across the road from the railway station, and shortly after that, I was on a train.

Back in London, I didn’t have anywhere to go except the mews flat, which now felt tainted. I managed to get hold of Fran and she said I could stay at her place while she was away, arranging for one of her roommates to let me in.

I had taken the week off work and passed it in solitude, moping around Fran’s flat, going for long walks by the river and across the bridge in Battersea Park, in the shadow of the old power station. It was an unusually hot summer. Secretaries sunbathed on their lunch hours and clouds of dust and pollen circled the scorched pavements. I was tired all the time from the heat.

I regretted everything: joining the band on tour, the accusations I had hurled at Lukas, the way I’d walked out, and before that, the way I had thrown Gavin aside and generally behaved as though I was exempt from morality or consequences. Had I really expected that I could escape my fate simply by denying it? I had known nothing good would come of Lukas and me being together and yet I clung to him anyway, pretending things could work out. I had told myself it was because I loved him and he loved me when in fact I was plainly selfish. The words of my parents echoed in my head:
Loving just one person is selfish
. It was the flaw they had tried to breed out of us but it turned out they had failed.

As the week went on, I began to find what I thought was some clarity. If nothing good could come of being with Lukas and going against my fate, then surely my only shot at happiness was to follow my destiny and to be with Gavin. It felt like a trap, but I reasoned that any other path would result in disaster.

On Monday morning, I had it coming to me.

Armed with newfound resolve, I marched into the offices of B, B & B determined to throw myself upon Gavin’s mercy.

“We need to have lunch,” I said to him, in the telex room, pulling the ticker tape off a missive that was six feet long. “You were right. I’ve changed my mind.”

Gavin looked nervous. “About what?”

“The wedding.” To let him know I meant business, I planted a kiss next to his mouth—something I had never done in the office—and naturally, because we were at work, he recoiled.

“Not here,” he said, glancing through the glass partition that separated the telex room from the typing pool. “Someone might see.”

At lunchtime, we went to the greasy spoon on the corner. Gavin sat twitchily reading the paper while we waited for our sandwiches to arrive. When I told him I wanted to marry him after all, that he had been right all along, he wasn’t as overjoyed at the news as I expected him to be.

“Crikey,” he said. “This is very sudden.”

He turned back to the paper. Our sandwiches arrived. His ham on white and my ham on brown; lately, I had adopted Gavin’s plain stodgy diet as my own.

“Isn’t it great?” I said, after a few mouthfuls. “You won’t lose your deposit after all.”

I had been attempting humor but Gavin’s reply was grave.

“I have already taken steps to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“Good for you,” I said, then wondered if I had misconstrued his meaning. “What kind of steps?”

“
I’m
getting married,” he said, looking past me and out the window.

“Yes, we are! I still have the dress.”

“I’m getting married,” said Gavin. “You’re not.”

A long, heavy interval passed before I understood he was marrying someone else.

“You didn’t really expect me to wait, did you?” His tone was bitter, mocking—unlike anything I’d ever heard. “I mean, not after everything you put me through. The way you mucked me around. You led me on like a right little
tart.” He shook his head. “My mother was right. You can’t trust a hippie.”

“I’m not a hippie.”

“Well, you’re not like the rest of us. Decent.” Gavin stuffed a triangle of sandwich into his mouth and chewed it to pieces. “If you want to know who I’m marrying, ask the girls in the office. They’ll tell you. In fact, they were queuing up.” He stood to leave. “One more thing. You’re a fattie.”

He swung out of the greasy spoon with a spring in his step, and I watched him go, feeling wretched, not because I had been wronged, but because I deserved every bit of scorn he had thrown my way. I probably deserved worse.

The napkins at the greasy spoon were rough, like sandpaper, and after I had dabbed at the area around my eyes and nose with about a dozen of the things, my face wasn’t dry, it was raw. I had already eaten my sandwich, though I didn’t remember doing so, and I was hungry again. I wasn’t sure how long I had been sitting there, oblivious to the waning of my lunch hour, when a steaming hot mug of tea appeared on the table. “I know you didn’t order a cuppa,” said the waitress, “but you looked like you could use one. It’s on the house.”

“Thanks,” I said, looking up into a face that was soft and kind. “Are you new here?”

“No, love, I’ve been working here for years.” She perched on the seat opposite me. “You all right?”

The fact that she had bothered to ask, when I had never noticed her before, made me cry again. “I’m starving,” I said. “All the time.”

“I know just what you need,” she said, and went up to
the counter, appearing soon after with a plate of toast and butter and strawberry jam, which she set down in front of me. She waited for me to tuck in, then leaned in close to my ear and whispered, “I got really sick with all my pregnancies. The trick is to make sure you never get hungry. Eat all day if you have to. It passes.”

I listened politely to her advice, wondering who it was meant for, then realized it was for me. She thought
I
was pregnant. I didn’t know what to say, but when she had gone back to the counter, I looked down at my swollen stomach and patted it, wondering if that was the culprit. I
had
put on weight, but that had happened before. It was no cause for panic.

When I tried to pay for the tea and extra toast, the waitress wouldn’t let me. “I know the thought of having a baby is terrifying but I promise you’ll never regret it. My kids are the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“How many do you have?”

“Free.”

“Free?”

“Terry, Lisa, and June.”

In a nearby pharmacy, I bought a pregnancy test and buried it deep in the folds of my handbag. All afternoon it stayed there, a land mine waiting to explode. If it was positive, I didn’t want to find out in one of the cubicles at work. It was bad enough that, all afternoon, I had to sit among the typing pool girls, pretending not to notice Joanna’s fat finger was squeezed into my old engagement ring.

Lukas and I had been careless, caught up in the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, with no time for details such as contraception.
I was not even aware how much time had passed since my last period.

The test was positive, and the first person I rang was Fran. The tour diary said Cheatah was in Exeter, where they had a day off before the concert, so I called the hotel there and asked for her. I woke her up from a disco nap. She had spent the whole day corralling the band from one monosyllabic interview to the next, after driving the tour van from Cardiff to Exeter in the wee hours of the morning.

I regretted telling her almost immediately. The first thing she said was, “I thought you were on the pill.”

“I forgot to take it.”

“Well, it’s easy enough to get rid of.”

“You mean, an
abortion
?” I’d not said the word out loud before—it felt like swearing.

“Yeah, a friend of mine had one.” She paused. “Actually I did.”

“Really?”

“It was no big deal. Took half an hour. I’ll give you the name of the clinic when I get back to London.”

“I’m not sure I want to—”

“You haven’t told Lukas, have you?”

“No. Not yet.”

“Good, that’s good,” said Fran, adding, “Don’t.”

“Don’t tell him?”

“Not until the tour’s finished.” There was a note of impatience in her voice that I wasn’t accustomed to.

“But, Fran, he’s the father.”

“I know he is, sugar—but the last thing he needs to hear right now is more bad news.”

London

1988

M
ORE BAD NEWS. THAT’S
all my pregnancy was to Fran: an inconvenience to the singer in her band. She had swapped allegiances. She was no longer my best friend but Cheatah’s manager first and foremost. Yet despite her misgivings, and everything that had gone wrong between Lukas and myself, I didn’t feel that way about the embryo in my womb—the same womb that had been forecast to bear only sorrow. I wanted what was in there to live.

There were still two or three days left of the tour, but I couldn’t wait that long to tell Lukas. The next day, I called in sick and hopped on a train to Exeter. All the way there I felt buoyed. Carrying a human life in my belly made me feel important, and I had to stifle the urge to tell strangers so that they too would understand how important I was.

When I arrived I went straight to the hotel Lukas was staying at, marched purposefully to his room, and knocked on the door. Marlon opened it. He was half-dressed and half-asleep.

“Get out,” I ordered. “I need to speak with Lukas in private.”

“Yes, ma’am, tout de suite,” Marlon said, sensing I meant business.

Lukas was sitting on the end of the bed, curled around a guitar, humming softly to himself. When he saw me he stopped playing and smiled, woozily, pleased to see me but not quite sure if I was real or a figment of his imagination.

“Hi,” we both said, and with that one word, all the speeches I had prepared, of reproach and remorse, seemed irrelevant. Always, when I saw Lukas after being apart from him, I was struck by how easy it was to be in the same room as him, and how jarring it was, by comparison, to be with other people.

I went to the window and opened the curtains, flooding the room with light.

“I’m pregnant,” I said, addressing the street below, where a newspaper seller called out headlines to passersby, loud enough that I could hear. “I think that’s why I lost it. I haven’t been myself. And look at me—I’m fat.”

He didn’t speak until he was by my side at the window.

“Is it mine?”

“Of course it’s yours.” I had spoken sharply, and was mentally preparing for combat, but when I turned to Lukas he was grinning. A goofy, ear-to-ear smile, the likes of which I’d not seen since we left New Zealand. “You’re happy about this?”

“A child that’s half you and half me? I can’t think of anything more awesome.”

I had hardly dared hope for this reaction. “Do you really think we can start afresh? Put everything behind us.”

“We can try.”

Before that could happen, I needed to come clean about Gavin. “While we were apart, I got engaged.”

Lukas was incredulous. To a bloke with a sword?”

“Oh my god,” I said. “Don’t.”

“Fine,” he said. “But at least I can laugh about it.”

“And Serena?”

“A fling.” He paused. “For the record, I didn’t sleep with any groupies.”

“Why not? Don’t they throw themselves at you?”

“It turns me off. I prefer women that are—”

“—unavailable?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

For the remaining handful of tour dates, Lukas didn’t drink, and he came home a different man, more like his old self. He apologized for how out of control things had gotten on the tour and for turning into one of those rock star assholes that he had always steered clear of. As the tour had progressed, he said, he and Marlon had gone from casually smoking hash and drinking whiskey; to snorting a few lines here and there; to devouring a cocktail of cocaine, prescription painkillers, and whatever else they were offered each night. Things had reached a peak in Manchester, when Spike had taken them out to his mate’s acid house club after the gig. The evening had been humiliating. When they arrived in full stage costume, everyone had laughed at them—and Lukas had coped with the situation by getting fucked up.
Someone gave him pills he had never tried before, and to his surprise, they started enjoying themselves. At least the rest of the guys did. The club had a swimming pool in the middle of it and people were throwing around beach balls, but Lukas had not been able to escape the uneasy feeling that Spike had taken them there to be mocked by his friends—a thought that escalated, under the influence of whatever he had taken, to how maybe Spike had signed Cheatah to his record label for the same reason: as a laugh, at their expense.

“You really think he would do that?”

“I don’t know,” said Lukas, “but we’re the only metal act on his books. All his other bands play indie rock or acid house.”

“Can you leave—sign with someone else?”

“No,” said Lukas. “We’re stuck with him for another two albums.”

Stuck with Spike, stuck with spandex, stuck as Cheatah. I could see his dilemma, the pain it was causing him, but I felt disconnected from it, as though he was in a room that I had walked out of, and I was in another one that he couldn’t enter. I was around three months pregnant, and even though the baby was only the size of a cashew nut, it was changing me from the inside out. I had stopped feeling queasy but in place of the awful fog of nausea was a whole new spectrum of emotions and anxiety. The baby was a living thing. A piece of me, but also separate. I began to imagine it was a girl, and then I dreamt about her. She was tiny, a talking doll with big blue eyes and tufts of soft yellow hair. I found that I already loved her, this being I had never met, and it wasn’t like any
love I had felt for Lukas or Fritz. It was boundless. But as this love grew so too did a corresponding fear. I kept harking back to my prediction, and the more I tried not to think about it, the more I thought about it. What did it mean, that my womb would bear only sorrow?

I shared none of my fears with Lukas and roughly six months into the pregnancy we were married in the registry office at Chelsea, with Marlon and Fran to witness. Getting hitched had been Lukas’s idea, and I had gone along with it, unable to say no in my vulnerable state. Officials in the registry office had been concerned when they found out we already had the same last name, Harvest, like all of our brothers and sisters on the commune. Were we cousins or otherwise closely related? No, explained Lukas, we had grown up in a cult.

We moved into our own place, a small flat on the ground floor of a mansion block in Maida Vale, opposite a recreation ground, and I quit work to wait for the baby. Cheatah’s first album had sold only modestly in England, but in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Norway, the Netherlands—in fact across the whole of Northern Europe—fans couldn’t get enough of
Hungry for Hell
. No one could explain the phenomenon, but as a result, real deutsche marks started rolling in. Every other weekend, Lukas jetted off to Düsseldorf, Helsinki, Vienna, Cologne, for gigs, TV appearances, rock festivals, and even to collect awards. A thirty-seven-date European tour was hastily planned for the spring.

As the tour approached, Lukas and I disagreed about whether or not I should go with him. He wanted me to,
insisting my presence would keep him on the straight and narrow. I couldn’t think of anything worse than being the beached whale on the tour bus, asking the driver to stop every five minutes so I could get out and find a restroom, so we had come up with the idea that I could jet in to meet him in various cities, only to be told by my doctor that I would be too far along to fly. We reached a compromise. My due date fell somewhere in the middle of the tour but I would accompany them on part of the first leg, through Austria and Germany, the most civilized part, then, when I had reached the limit of my endurance, catch a train back to London to fluff up the nest and wait for baby’s arrival. At the last possible second, Lukas would fly home for the delivery.

I made it as far as Zurich. To get there I had suffered an overnight bus ride from Frankfurt, through the Black Forest, where, in desperation, I had climbed out of the tour bus and, unable to see my own feet, peed behind a tree at the side of the road. As the city lights of Zurich came into view, I thought,
No more
. I would never again put myself in such a compromised position. Straight after the concert, I would catch the first train home.

It was held in a huge discotheque that doubled as a concert arena in the heart of Zurich. From the minute we pulled into the car park at the back of the venue, exhausted after the long bus trip and a day spent dozing in the hotel, I wished I was somewhere else, a quiet place with no groupies or roadies or managers swarming around. I was sick of everyone staring at my huge stomach, or else ignoring me because they were too afraid to have a conversation with
a pregnant woman in case it was catching. In the last three weeks, I had ballooned to the size of a house bus. I tried to behave like a normal person, to crack the same jokes, but no one could see past the bump. It canceled out my personality. Fran, in particular, seemed repelled by the thing that was growing in my belly. She had long ago stopped lending me her clothes or trying to style me, and once, near the middle of the pregnancy, when I had asked her if she thought I should wear a blue T-shirt of Lukas’s or a green one, she had screwed up her nose and said, “To be honest, love, you don’t look that flash in either. Have you thought about getting dungarees?” That same day I went to a department store in Knightsbridge—Lukas told me to splash out—and bought a selection of balloon-shaped dungarees and floral-patterned tents with Peter Pan collars. It was a relief to find something comfortable, but on tour with rock stars, I felt like Lady Di in an East End pub.

At the concert in Zurich I wore the pinkest of the tent dresses, the “smart” one, and wished that it really
was
a tent so I could zip it up and hide in it. The greenroom was behind the stage and up a flight of stairs so steep I’d had to stop for a rest halfway up. At the top was a large lounge area with dressing rooms off to one side and a big window that looked out over the stage on the other. In case we couldn’t stand the noise, there was a selection of soundproof earmuffs. I still found it amusing that while everyone out front paid good money to hear the band at full throttle, everyone backstage blocked their ears.

Lukas fetched me an orange juice from the rider, then
apologized and said he had to go and run through the lyrics of a new song one more time before the show.

“I’ll be fine,” I said. “Serena’s here, and lots of other people, if I need anything.” At the sound of her name, Serena had glanced in my direction and held up her martini glass, which I answered with a nod of my slightly fizzy, off-tasting orange juice. Since last autumn, she had been going out with Vince, Cheatah’s androgynous bass player, and though I was never sure if she loved him, or had simply hit on the best way to legitimately hang out with the band, it had made her slightly less insufferable.

Lukas stood at the darkened window overlooking the stage. “You should be able to watch the whole thing from up here. Save you going down those stairs.”

“I’ll have to go down at some point.”

“Yes,” he said, planting a kiss on my forehead—I was, in the late stages of pregnancy, treated more like an ailing pet than a lover. “But not without my help.”

When he had gone, Serena plonked herself down next to me on the white leather couch. “Can’t be long now,” she said, gesturing toward my stomach with an olive speared by a cocktail stick. “You look ready to pop.”

“To be honest, I’m not sure. The doctors tried to work out my due date but they weren’t a hundred percent sure if it was this month or—”

In the middle of my sentence, Serena got up from the couch and wandered over to the window. “I think they’re about to start playing,” she said, cutting me off. “I’m going down. Want to come?”

“No thanks, I’ll watch from up here.”

Serena left the greenroom, her heels clanging on the treacherous metal staircase. Even in her able-bodied condition she was going slowly, taking her time. I was alone in the greenroom, everyone had gone downstairs, and I lumbered to the snack table to inspect the selection of meats and cheeses that had been backstage at all the German concerts, and that no one except me had ever touched. I nibbled on a few gherkins and a square of Emmentaler and poured myself another orange juice, this one fresher tasting. Then I sat back down to wait it out. Again.

Out in the arena, a huge cheer erupted, followed by galloping drums and howling guitar feedback. They were starting with “Autobahn Child,” a song they had penned hastily to appeal to their German fans. The viewing window rattled, and I put on a pair of earmuffs. I thought about at least
watching
the band, but I had seen them play so many times before that I could already visualize the prancing and gyrating and posturing that went with each song. Besides, I did not think I had the strength to raise myself and the bowling ball once more off the couch.

At this end of the pregnancy, I often had heartburn, and the orange juice and gherkin were telling me they did not want to be together in my stomach. I had also drunk too much juice, too quickly, and needed to pee, but the only promising door was locked. I was going to have to go downstairs, and soon, before I was too desperate even to waddle.

I stood at the top of the staircase and looked down. The
descent did not seem as steep as I remembered, but the stairs went on forever, descending from high up in the roof of the arena to stage level far below. It was the kind of staircase that would normally have had a bend in the middle, but because of where it was, behind the stage, there was no room for a zigzag or a landing.

I took my time, feeling, in the metal handrail, the reverberating bass line from “Autobahn Child.” It was one of my least favorite songs, all about a pretty, orphaned waif who lives underneath a motorway and grows up to be a hooker. The singer of the song is in love with her but before he can rescue her, she dies of an overdose. Total downer.

I had made it down a dozen steps, about a quarter of the way, when a clacking noise made me turn around and glance back up the stairs. I did not expect anyone to be there, and when I saw the figure of a woman silhouetted in the doorway, I got such a fright that I lost my footing.