Dead Girl Walking (32 page)

‘Jack, a black Audi just pulled up in front of the building, and two of the guys from the other night are getting out of it.’

‘Christ.’

His mind raced through contingencies. They wouldn’t go hauling him out of the office as Bodo had an image to maintain in front of his Bad Candy colleagues, but they’d be lying in wait, perhaps in the stairwell. He should have checked the building layout. He’d have to head up to find an exit, along the roof and down through another building. He would also need to ensure they saw him when he hit the street, so that he could lead them away from this neighbourhood before doubling back.

‘Okay, I’m going to have to improvise an exit strategy,’ he said, as he spotted Bodo coming back around the corner from the gents’ toilet.

‘No, you won’t,’ Mairi told him. ‘I made the last bit up. You were just sounding way too pleased with yourself.’

I was in a bit of a dream for most of the next day and night. I felt totally disconnected at times, alternating with stomach-churning confusion when I remembered what was waiting for me back in the real world where I had a fiancé.

We travelled to Salzburg and played a place called Rockhouse, which looked like a cubist sculpture on the outside, but on the inside was like a giant subway tunnel. From the stage, we could have been playing the Arches under Central Station back in Glasgow.

Throughout the journey, the soundcheck and the show, I felt strangely isolated from everyone but Heike, the closeness to her undermined by a sense of loneliness. I was caught between worrying about what might happen between us after the gig, and worrying that nothing would. I treasured every smile we shared, every glance that was meant only for me, then fretted that everyone else could read what was going on, that our seemingly subtle intimacies were obvious to anyone outside our circle of two.

I kept changing my mind as to whether I would be relieved if what happened in Berlin was never repeated, or whether I would feel I had lost something really precious.

As it turned out, we didn’t get much time alone anyway, all of us gathering around one huge and groaning table of food in a busy café bar. With it getting late, Heike moved round to sit beside me and squeezed my hand under the table out of sight. It felt both exhilaratingly secret and disappointingly quick. With thumping music covering our conversation, she leaned close and spoke what were supposed to be words of reassurance, but they couldn’t have been more ambiguous.

‘You’re worried about where this is going,’ she said. ‘But it doesn’t have to go anywhere. There’s no pressure. This is just now. It’s whatever you want it to be. Don’t worry about the future until you have to. As the boys are fond of saying, what happens on tour stays on tour.’

I was woken up by the phone: not my mobile, but the landline by my bed. My first instinct was that I must have overslept and Jan was putting a call through hotel reception. That, or somebody had dialled the wrong room.

I drowsily managed a ‘Hello’ into the handset, resting my elbow on the pillow.

An English female voice replied down the line, over the hubbub of a busy office in the background.

‘Hello, Monica? Hi, this is Petra Collins at the
Daily Mail
. I was wondering if you could speak to me a little about your relationship with Heike Gunn.’

I fumbled for a light switch, the heavy curtains keeping the room in darkness.

‘Ehm, I’m sorry,’ I said, stifling a yawn, ‘but I can’t talk about the band unless it’s been cleared through the record company press office.’

This wasn’t actually true, but it was what Damien told me to say if I ever didn’t want to answer a journalist’s questions.

‘Well, it’s not your musical relationship with Ms Gunn that I’m interested in. I was wondering if you could tell me a little about your personal relationship with her.’

I shuffled my way into a sitting position, my shoulders against the headboard.

‘It’s still a matter for the press office. You need to ask for our publicist, Tanya Gallach—’

‘It’s just that we’ve got photographs of you and Heike kissing in a lesbian bar in Berlin. They’re already live on our website, but I’m working on some background for tomorrow’s print edition. The person who took them said you were in a clinch for quite some time – twenty minutes on and off – so I’m asking if you’ve any comment. Is this an affair that has blossomed on tour, or were the two of you an item before? Is this why she brought you into the band?’

I felt like the walls around me were about to collapse, or that I had been suddenly cut adrift on this bed in the middle of a raging flood. I went to hang up but dropped the handset because my hands were like rubber all of a sudden. It bumped off the nightstand and dangled by the cord, spinning slowly. I could still hear the journalist’s voice, tinny and distant.

‘What do the other members of the group think about it? Has it caused any tensions?’

I replaced the handset at the second attempt, then scrambled across to my laptop, my heart thumping and my fingers trembling as I waited for it to boot and the browser to launch.

They’re already live on our website
. The most-visited newspaper website in the world.

The lead item was a piece about immigration. I scrolled down, seeing nothing, then spotted the link on the infamous ‘sidebar of shame’, to the right of the main story. It was just a thumbnail, but even at that size I recognised us both.

The link took me to the showbiz section, where they had posted two photos of Heike and me at our table: us sitting close together, face-to-face; then us locked in a kiss. A further link took me to eight more: two sequences shot from different angles. One had been taken through the window, using a zoom lens, and the other was from inside the bar, possibly snapped with a phone.

I sat staring with my hands on my cheeks, physically shuddering, my breathing becoming deeper until I was starting to hyperventilate.

A pitiless voice asked me how I couldn’t have seen this coming.

I had somehow convinced myself we were in a world of our own. Our tour was the land of do-as-you-please, but now I could see I had grown donkey ears. Yesterday my biggest concern had been that someone in the band would pick up on our secret, but I hadn’t worried about the outside world, other than what this meant when the tour was over and I had to go back to reality.

I thought we were invisible, far from home: out of sight, out of mind. What happens on tour stays on tour.

Oh God.

The old saying about tomorrow’s chip wrappers didn’t work any more. Now that these pictures were out there, they were out there for ever.

My mum was going to see these.
Keith
was going to see these.

This realisation plunged me to a new level of despair.

Keith. My fiancé. I thought of how happy he sounded, telling me about his promotion, our talk of a holiday in Thailand, his cosy plans for the future. He was completely oblivious to all this. It was going to hit him like a train. There was no way he could understand this. There was no way he could forgive this.

I thought of how long I’d known him, everything we’d shared, everything we assumed we’d share in future. How certain it had all seemed.

All of it had fallen apart in a matter of seconds.

I don’t know how long I sat there, numb and paralysed. I was only roused from my trance by a knock at the door, to which I wouldn’t have responded had it not been accompanied by Heike’s voice.

I zombie-walked across the room and let her in. She was dressed in black trousers and a loose-fitting blouse, which she always wore to travel. It was only as I took this in that I realised I was still in only the T-shirt I’d worn to bed, my feet bare on the carpet.

From her expression there was no need to ask if she knew.

I wandered back to the edge of the bed, a couple of feet from where my laptop sat on the dresser. The screensaver had long since kicked in: rain on a window, droplets running down the screen and distorting the display. To my eyes, they looked like tears streaking the images that stared out from the website.

I couldn’t find anything to say. I just sat there, glancing from the laptop to where Heike stood, and felt totally helpless.

She folded her arms across her chest.

‘The bus is scheduled to be leaving in about five minutes,’ she said. ‘You need to get your shit together.’

Her tone was businesslike, the terse side of neutral. There was no warmth in it at all.

I got the impression I had done something wrong; or at least hadn’t done anything right.

I had expected her to act as she had done when we both got the nude pictures on our phones: concerned, angry and sorry for dragging me into this. Instead she seemed distant and severe, like I was a problem employee who needed to be dealt with. I had the definite sense that whereas the nude photos had pulled us together, this had driven us apart.

‘I can’t go out there,’ I told her, grabbing uselessly at the bottom of my T-shirt, like I could stretch it down to my ankles. I wanted to pull a sheet over my head. ‘I can’t face them. Not if they’ve found out like
this
.’

Heike grabbed my pull-along and flipped it open, chucking me a pair of jeans.

‘Aye, so, welcome to my world, Monica,’ she said, rattling the space-bar on my laptop and bringing the images back into perfect focus. ‘This says you live there now too, I’m afraid. There’s no escape and no h
iding place, so the sooner you get out there the sooner you can start getting used to it.’

I fought tears, feeling like a wee girl being scolded by her unsympathetic mum.

‘I can’t
live there
,’ I protested. ‘I can’t do this.’

Heike all but manhandled me into the bathroom with a roll of her eyes. There was no compassion, only impatience. I didn’t understand what I could have done to make her react this way, for her not to see that I was in way over my head and in danger of drowning.

‘Yes you can. I hate to use the expression, but you’re just going to have to man up, because this is going to get a shitload worse before there’s any glimmer of it getting better.’

She sure got that right.

I sat on the bus unable to look at anybody. Damien had patted my shoulder as I went past, the gesture enough to push me over the edge into more crying. I also briefly caught Rory’s eye. He had looked sympathetic and sheepish, but all I could think about was the time I heard him talk about images of Heike and her lovers being lodged in people’s ‘spank banks’.

This was a special kind of hell.

I turned towards the window, feeling awful and looking every bit of it too. Occasionally we’d pass a building tall enough for the shadow to turn the bus window into a cloudy mirror. My face was teary and swollen, and my sojourn in catatonia had cost me the chance of a shower and the opportunity to even wash my hair.

My phone started to ring about twenty minutes into the journey.

Keith.

I just couldn’t answer. How could I speak to him?

I was trying to think if there was any way I could spin this. The Scottish catch-all excuse of being a bit pissed wasn’t going to cover it. What did that leave? ‘It’s not what it looks like.’ Well, it looks like we’re kissing in a women-only lesbian bar.

I pressed ignore. Thirty seconds later he was ringing again.

Heike was right: there was no hiding place, but I just wasn’t ready yet. I switched my phone off completely.

I wondered why she was being so remote, why this wasn’t us against the world, but something I needed to get over instead. Man up, she had said. My distress obviously meant a lot less to her than her own anger, which seemed so unfair. But was it?

I kept thinking how it wasn’t my fault, and that was true, but maybe there was a difference between blame and responsibility.

I remembered that Heike had been living like this for a long time: ever since ‘Do It to Julia’ had brought her to mainstream attention. Once the tabloids found out that the outspoken and glamorous singer behind this international hit was gay, they had been all over her life. They even made the mistaken assumption, mainly from the title, that the song had some kind of lesbian message. As Heike put it: ‘You can’t expect the subliterate cockwombles on the
Daily Heil
showbiz and gossip desks to have read Orwell.’

It was a song about human weakness, and how we shouldn’t judge each other too harshly for it: pretty much the antithesis of the British tabloids’ stock-in-trade.

They had doorstepped Heike, offered money to her girlfriends for kiss-and-tell stories, but no one had come forward. There had been art before, but they never had an angle. Even Heike snogging a member of her band wasn’t enough to get these pictures promoted from the website to the paper. For that, they needed a story, and I felt my stomach drop again as I realised I had given them one.

I had a fiancé.

They might not be aware of that, though. What would anybody at a tabloid know about an obscure fiddler who had only properly joined the band a few months back? By way of answer, I asked myself instead how hard it would be to find out. One call to my mum would do it.

Oh God. The thought of sleazy hacks calling up my mum – of me bringing this to her door – was almost impossible to take. How could something as tender as a few kisses cause so much hurt?

I switched on my phone and called home. It was engaged. Before I could try again, it buzzed with an incoming call. Keith.

I thought of Heike’s words from the hotel.

This was where I lived now. I had to do this.

I pressed answer.

‘Keith,’ I said, my voice dry.

‘Monica. Where are you?’

His voice was hollow and distant, and it was nothing to do with the signal.

‘Outside Salzburg. On my way to Zurich.’

His question seemed absurd, my answer irrelevant. It was like we were practising for a conversation, not yet ready to really talk.

‘I got a call from a reporter. A woman from the
Daily Mail
.’

Probably the same woman who had called me. If I hadn’t been so spineless, I could have phoned him right away to warn him.