Beneath the Blonde (6 page)

Saz, then, had approached the office with little sleep and mounting interest only to find that her fears were groundless when the tiny white-skinned, red-headed woman stood up from behind her desk, greeting her with a smile, an outstretched hand and the first surprise of the day. “Hi. I’m Peta. I’m twenty-three, I’m single and I’m gay. Have you had breakfast?”

Saz’s second surprise in her new “office” job came when Peta asked her how she liked her coffee. Saz had suffered more than the usual variety of temping jobs before setting up her own business. She managed most for no longer than a month or so, but even in her best temp job where she’d actually been given real work and trusted to get on with it unsupervised, she’d also been expected to make the coffee, to run out and fill meters with twenty pence coins and to
open the post as if that task was actually valuable and couldn’t be performed by anyone with half a brain. She wasn’t used to the person who was ostensibly her boss offering coffee and she certainly wasn’t used to that offer being followed up with morning snack sandwiches of waferthin, honey-smoked turkey slices on fresh ciabatta and just a touch of Peta’s homemade cranberry and orange relish to liven them up.

Saz enjoyed working with Peta. She enjoyed it so much that, after the first hour, she almost forgot why she was supposed to be there as she scoffed at Peta’s long-winded stories of her sexual exploits, tales delivered in a shouted Cork brogue over the booming Aretha Franklin and Gladys Knight Peta had chosen to accompany their work. Peta showed Saz around the basic filing system and a rather less basic computer.

“I adore technology, Saz. I forced Siobhan and Greg to go on the net when they moved into this house and set up this office—everything to my specification. You can’t imagine how much simpler it’s made things like liaising about tour dates.”

Saz, who could only just cope with receiving her itemized phone bill, let alone deal with being e-mailed, certainly couldn’t imagine how it could make anything simpler to throw more technology at it, merely nodded an appearance of enthusiasm while making a mental note to go through all the old-fashioned files, the ‘paper junk’ as Peta disparagingly called it, to check any fan letters against the letters Siobhan had received. She also checked her enthusiasm for Peta long enough to ask her a few pertinent questions about her relationship with Siobhan, but the fulsome answers and Peta’s obvious devotion to the band in general and Siobhan in particular meant she placed Peta very low on her early
suspect list. As did the fact that while Peta was single, she was certainly not celibate and her frank description of her varied sexual exploits over the past couple of months meant that Saz couldn’t imagine Peta having time to go out shopping for yellow roses, let alone finding the energy to have them secretly delivered.

The morning passed in dealing with fan letters, several calls to the tour manager’s office to check dates and times for press interviews and, for Saz, the slightly more onerous task of working out who was who. Between the tour manager, the tour promoter and the several other people ringing every five minutes claiming to be something to do with the management of the band, she was finding it all rather confusing. Peta called a lunch break at two in the afternoon and went down to the kitchen to reheat the carrot and lentil soup Greg had made that morning. She came back with the news that Alex and Dan had arrived and were just waiting for Steve to join them and if Saz wanted to meet the lads before they retired to the basement until the early hours of tomorrow, she’d better grab them in a hurry.

Saz followed Peta back downstairs and put on a brave face as she entered the kitchen. The heads of three men turned as she walked into the room. As she told Molly that night, “A straight girl would be in heaven. They really are beautiful guys.”

Dan stood up first, wiping his right hand on his jeans before he held it out to her. Saz figured he was about six three, his black skin a burnt caramel brown, jet black eyes, long curly hair caught back in a pony tail and an incredibly well worked out body which he made no attempt to hide under a very thin, just buttoned shirt. Steve introduced himself next, an inch or two shorter than Dan but his wider girth actually made him seem bigger. His close cropped hair
revealed a dragon tattoo across the back half of his head when he bent over to kiss Saz’s hand. Peta pushed him away playfully with a shake of her head and a stage whispered, “No chance, darling, she’s one of us.”

At which point Dan burst out laughing and shot his left hand in the air with an exultant “Yes!” and Alex fell back in his seat, groaned and pulled a ten pound note from his pocket which he then passed to Dan. Peta glared at Alex and turned to Saz, “I’ll have to apologize for my brother, he’s not normally such a rude bastard.”

“Fuck off, Petey,” Alex interrupted her, “I’m a rude bastard most of the time actually. I pride myself on it. And I don’t need my baby sister apologizing for me either.”

He pulled himself up off his chair and walked over to where Saz still stood in the doorway. He looked down at her, the shortest of the three men but still a good few inches taller than Saz. He had the same bright blue eyes as his sister, but his accent was muted from many more years living in England. He smiled at her encouragingly as he held out his hand, “Saz, is it? And you’re sure that you’re gay, are you?”

Saz smiled back equally encouragingly as she shook his hand and to the delight of the other two men answered, “Well, I was last time I checked. And are you sure you’re straight?”

Dan’s whoops of laughter were silenced when Alex dragged him to the ground, the two men mock fighting for a few minutes while Steve provided a commentary which dealt rather more with the finer points of Alex’s sexuality than his battle technique. Which is where Siobhan found them when she poked her newly highlighted and perfectly made-up head around the door to call them to their rehearsal.

“I see you’ve met my men, Saz. Leave Alex alone, guys, he’s valuable. And get a move on, Greg’s waiting downstairs.”

And all three of them meekly rose as one and followed Siobhan down to the basement. Saz watched after them as Peta grabbed a bar of chocolate from the fridge. “Does that sort of thing happen a lot?”

Peta ripped open the giant-sized bar of fruit and nut and crammed six squares in her mouth, nodding her head. “Depends. They’re good craic when they’re happy.”

“That’s happy?”

“Sure. Have you no brothers, Saz?”

Saz shook her head, “Just a sister. But I’m quite close to my brother-in-law. We have an understanding. Doesn’t involve a lot of physical interaction though.”

Peta nodded. “Right. Well, I’m the youngest of five. Four big boys and then me. Alex is the oldest and I love each and every one of them to pieces. And he is a bastard too, Alex. An angry young man, even at his age. This, the being with them, playing about with them, I love it. It’s like being at home again.”

Peta smiled as she walked out of the room, “I make every man my big brother, Saz, that way I’m not tempted to fuck any of them.”

That evening Saz described her day in minute detail for Molly. As they sat down to eat Molly poured Saz a generous glass of Chilean Pinot Noir and asked her if she thought she was likely to be affected by big brother syndrome.

“I don’t know, Moll. I mean, I can see that Siobhan is stunning, it’s common knowledge and confirmed in real life, and I suppose I’d noticed that the boys were good looking too. But I can’t say watching them on telly prepared me for meeting them in the flesh. Their size, their energy. And they’re funny too. To tell the truth, I was impressed. Dan in particular is very beautiful.”

Molly left her Spanish omelette to go cold while she
bodily reminded Saz that testosterone or oestrogen, whichever hormone is only as impressive as its results, and Saz went to sleep that night smugly thinking it might not be a bad thing if she could manage to make Molly a little more jealous just a little more often.

Having spent her first day helping in the office, thereby setting herself up in Peta’s and the boys’ minds as the general help, Saz was itching to get on with her real work. But when she met Siobhan the following morning and asked for access to her and Greg’s old correspondence and some time to talk about any other leads either of them might have—not so friendly old friends, for example—she was met with Siobhan’s claim that they were far too busy to go through all that “old stuff”. When she volunteered to go through their things herself, the response was icy. The shutters came down on Siobhan’s usually smiling huge grey eyes and the dimples fled her chiselled cheeks.

“Saz, I’m perfectly happy to have you rummaging through my past, if you must, but there’s nothing about me and Greg—as a couple—that could possibly have any relevance to the case.”

Saz tried to disagree, “Surely if someone is out to have a go at you, then all your relationships are relevant …”

She was cut off by Siobhan with a wave of the hand, “Greg is not the one being hounded here. I am. This is about me and I’d like to keep him out of it as much as possible. Greg and I are very private people. I don’t like being asked about him, I don’t like being asked about my past. What I do now is public, that’s fine. What I’ve done, what I’ve been, that’s old news.”

She carried on talking, not giving Saz a moment to interrupt, “Believe me, no one I grew up with has ended up
wealthy enough to send huge great bunches of yellow roses. And as far as Greg goes, I can’t imagine it’s anyone in New Zealand. Do you have any idea how much it costs to order yellow roses on Interflora these days?”

With that she twinkled a “See you later, must work” while slamming the basement door on Saz, ending the conversation with a bang. Saz stormed back to Peta’s office more certain than ever that Siobhan was hiding something and determined to look into Siobhan’s history at the earliest possible moment.

Alex walked into the office half an hour later looking for his little sister. He looked tired and dishevelled and didn’t bother wishing Saz a good morning, simply growling, “Where’s Peta?”

“She’s gone to the Post Office. Anything I can do to help?”

“Got any drugs?”

Not especially prudish, but all the same surprised at his audacity, Saz didn’t quite know how to reply and Alex sneered at the confusion on her face, “Pain killers I mean. Christ, it’s only eleven in the morning, what kind of an arsehole rock and roll band do you think we are?”

Figuring that honesty was likely to get her more information than anything else, Saz replied, “I don’t know. I’m not that much into music and I don’t know a lot about you guys.”

“Yeah, well, that’s obvious.”

“You’ve got a headache?”

“Hangover. Brain fucking shafting bitch of a hangover, aching stomach and a mouth that tastes like … oh fuck it, I don’t know, not enough sanity for clever similes. Now where does the silly tart keep her drugs?”

He then rifled through the drawers of Peta’s desk until he found a box of Nurofen, swallowed the last four dry and
left the office, slamming the door behind him. Saz watched after him, delighted to have been of use.

Later that morning Saz asked Peta about Alex’s drinking habits and she was treated to a lecture on the drugs of choice of the whole band.

“No, it won’t be just a hangover on Alex. Too much bloody coke, that one. He wants to watch it, last time we were all home for Christmas my mother nearly caught him at it and there’d be hell to pay if she did.”

“They use a lot of drugs?”

“The band?” Peta shrugged her shoulders, “Depends what you call a lot. They’re hardly the Velvet Underground. The boys smoke dope. Every day, I guess. Well, not Steve, he hardly ever touches anything other than lager—his body is a temple, if you see what I mean.”

Saz did. “The others?”

“Alex and Greg and Siobhan like a line or two of coke. Several lines in Alex’s case. Addictive personalities run in my family …”

Saz could see that Peta was about to launch into a tale of alcoholic aunties and uncles and drew her back to the band, “Dan?”

“A little of whatever’s going, I suppose. When you’ve got the money and you need to keep working and half the time the work looks like partying, well it does the trick, doesn’t it? Dan’s more into your young person’s drugs though. Clubbing and all that. He likes E. I don’t touch any of that stuff myself, I can’t stand the music that goes with it and I prefer my chemical release in liquid form.”

“What about Siobhan?”

“She doesn’t smoke, but she’ll do the rest now and then.”

“She doesn’t like dope?”

“Bad for the voice, you know. Actually, it’s bad for the band really. The five of them, they’re ready for an argument
almost any time these days, but with the drink and drugs—it just makes them even nastier to each other.”

“When they’re off their faces?”

Peta laughed, “Oh no, that’s the only time they seem to like each other anymore. They’re all the best of friends when they’re pissed. Even Alex. Mostly. It’s when they have to be sober and get on with the work while they’ve still got the hangovers from the night before that the shit really starts to fly.”

“Like Alex this morning?”

“Exactly. Mr Happy coming down. It can get very nasty. Alex picks on Siobhan. That’s normal enough, he’s always picking on Siobhan. But then maybe he goes just a little too far, Greg sticks up for her and Alex turns on Greg. Then Siobhan screams at Alex, Dan has a go at Alex, blah blah blah. Eventually even Steve gets pissed off and then they’re all at it. It’s why Kevin left in the end. He couldn’t stand it.”

Saz sat up at the mention of a new name, “Who’s Kevin?”

“Ex-tour manager. He was an old mate of Siobhan’s. He was with the band from the beginning—at least, from the beginning of doing gigs anyway. Started off as just a mate humping the gear, then as they did better and better he went from roadie to crew to tour manager.”

“But not any more?”

“They had a big bust-up last summer. Alex was screaming at Siobhan—”

“It sounds to me like he’s always having a go at Siobhan about something.”