Dead Girl Walking (36 page)

Truth was, for a long time I couldn’t even look at her without my hackles rising, as all I could see was her deceit: her face rising to kiss mine and her face mugging for photographers in Zurich after telling me to man up.

She wasn’t offering any olive branches, never mind an apology.

In fact, it seemed nobody was in much of a mood to build bridges.

I kept checking the
Daily Mail
website, though I knew I shouldn’t, like picking a scab. I don’t know what I was looking for: it was just an insecure instinct to know what else was being said about me. And, like picking a scab, it only made things worse.

‘Fiancé Keith Dumps Lesbian Love-Cheat Monica’ ran the headline.

So this time I was the one who learned about a major development in my own relationship via the press rather than first-hand. Keith had gone from shock and hurt to anger and recrimination, pouring his heart out to the same sleekit bint who had so ruthlessly bodyslammed him earlier.

Speaking from his home in Aberdeen, heartbroken Keith Jamieson (23) said that his engagement was over, and there was little doubt where he laid the blame.

‘I don’t know who Monica is any more,’ he told us. ‘Heike Gunn has turned her head, made her into someone else. Monica’s never been the same since she met her. Heike’s a selfish and manipulative person who just takes what she wants because she can. I could see that from the moment I met her.’

The spurned oil worker didn’t hold back in his tirade against the Islay-born songstress.

‘She’s a spoiled diva who’s grown up being told she’s special all the time because her dad was some artist, and she’s come to believe her own hype. She doesn’t care whose lives she ruins. If Monica can’t see that, then she deserves what’s coming, because she’ll get used up and spat out. I just want her to know that I won’t be here to pick up the pieces.’

Every word stung, feeling his pain and his anger.

I also winced with recognition, seeing the ugly side of Keith so exposed. Keith wasn’t exactly combustible, but when he did get tipped over the edge it could result in a complete loss of control, whichever straw had broken the camel’s back. A couple of years ago he had ended up in the cells for the night after getting into a fight with a guy in a pub in Lerwick. We had been going through a bad patch, and to be honest I
was
flirting with the bloke, because it was nice to be chatted up at a time when I was feeling taken for granted.

Keith didn’t attack him or anything: it could have all been easily resolved if the guy hadn’t been a dick about it. There was unnecessary aggression on both sides, which is why it happened, but the point is that Keith was taking out his frustrations with me on someone else.

All the horrible things he said to the press about Heike were him expressing his hurt and rage at me. But maybe it was fair that she took the abuse, as it was the price she paid for the whole world getting to know that ‘Stolen Glances’ would be available on iTunes and Amazon from the following Monday.

I felt more and more isolated and insecure. I chatted plenty to the guys, but only as people who worked in the same place and had to get along; it felt like they were more colleagues than friends. The atmosphere was too awful. Plus they were wary about talking to either of us one on one, in case they were perceived to be taking sides. Add to that my general awkwardness about them (not to mention a few million others) thinking me and Heike were lovers and I was one very lonely violinist.

During the shows I found myself hopping up on to Rory’s drum riser, or jigging with Scott or Damien during certain numbers. It took me a while to see myself from the outside and realise how much I was flaunting my heterosexuality. Or maybe I just needed to look and to feel like I belonged.

I was an emotional car crash, a disaster waiting to happen, and in Cologne it finally did.

Kölsch was involved, but that wasn’t the most potent thing. Spending an hour in the hotel bar after the show watching Heike bill and coo with some fangirl didn’t help, though I think that deep down the process was already in motion by that point.

I might have caught on to the reasons behind my antics with Scott and Damien, but it was something else that kept bringing me back to Rory. The weird chemistry between us on stage had not gone from my mind during my relationship with Heike: just lain hidden. I had been wary of it before, perhaps even afraid of it, but since Zurich I had been thinking about it, pushing it where before I’d have held back.

That night in the bar, I felt unstable, my emotions, desires and insecurities all mixed up. I was lonely, angry, scared, regretful, resentful, betrayed, undervalued, rejected. I needed someone to tell me everything was okay. I needed someone to tell me
I
was okay.

I saw Rory get up from the table and say he was calling it a night. I gave him a head start of a few seconds then announced I was following suit. I caught up to him as the lift doors opened, and was kissing him by the time they closed. We hadn’t even spoken: it was like he knew my intentions from the way I looked at him. But then, Rory was very adept at recognising such intentions. He spent most nights scanning whatever room he was in for exactly those signals.

On this night I was the one who had homed in on what I knew to be a sure thing.

The next morning I woke up with a dawning horror as I remembered where I was and what I had done. Several times, and in a dozen different ways.

I scrambled unsteadily to the bathroom, my head throbbing, fearing I was going to be sick. Unfortunately I was denied this small mercy. Everything horrible that was inside me was there to stay.

At the very least I hoped I could get my clothes on and leave before Rory woke up, but he stirred as I came out of the loo. He didn’t seem too comfortable with the situation either. The atmosphere was so thick with awkward you’d have needed breathing apparatus to get from one end of the room to the other.

We hadn’t spoken last night in the lift and we’d barely spoken during everything that happened after that. Now we really, really weren’t speaking. We knew we had nothing to say to each other, and that we both wanted to be in different places.

As I gathered my things I realised why Rory had all but blanked me on those first nights out with the band after rehearsals. It wasn’t because he’d been pals with Maxi, or because he’d anything against me. It was because I was spoken for. No point wasting effort on a girl who wasn’t available.

That’s the kind of guy he was. And I had just shagged him. The chemistry between us was simply lust with nothing beyond it, no fascination with each other’s personality and presence.

By contrast, I had wanted to be in Heike’s company constantly, like I was pulled in by gravity. I had thought about her all the time, wondered what she was thinking, felt something radiate inside me when we shared a smile. I had been drawn to her for reasons and by things that seemed to make gender incidental. When we kissed, there had been an innocence to it, like a kiss was everything in and of itself. It was not a prelude or an overture: I hadn’t thought beyond it, about what it might lead to. In that sense it had reminded me of a time when that was how it felt with Keith.

I missed her, and I wondered if, beneath all the anger and the sulks, she missed me too.

Unfortunately, our chances of making up were not helped when she saw me leaving Rory’s room. As soon as I stepped into the corridor a door opened across the hall, and there she was. She’d been in 307, Rory in 304. What were the bloody odds. She left it ajar just long enough to ensure I knew she had seen me, then closed it again.

As I stood there with my hair a mess and in serious need of a shower, I heard the sound of a TV from 305: someone watching CNN. It wasn’t loud, but I could make out every word, which was when I realised the sound insulation was non-existent.

We had been really noisy, and Heike would have heard it all. She must have been waiting for me to come out so that she could communicate this. She had an expression of what I took to be disdain, but at the time my own feelings clouded my reading.

Looking back, I realised she mostly looked hurt.

As always, it was Damien who started the healing efforts, as he was concerned that the wall of ice on stage was detracting from the overall impact of the shows.

‘You two need to sort this out,’ he said to me on the bus to Dortmund.

You two, he said, but he wasn’t talking to both of us. Heike was sitting a couple of rows forward, headphones on. I took this to mean he wanted me to make the first move.

‘You think
I
should apologise?’ I asked, keeping my voice down in case Heike’s iPod wasn’t playing as loud as I thought. ‘Ask
her
to apologise.’

Way to go, Mon. Very mature.

‘It’s not about who’s to blame. It’s about moving on. It’s about what’s best for the band.’

‘Heike finds it kind of difficult to tell between what’s best for the band and what’s best for Heike. That’s why she started kissing me for the cameras just to help boost “Stolen Glances”.’

Damien’s face crumpled.

‘Wait, you’re saying that’s what this is all about? That you think Heike had something to do with the press catching you two…’

‘How the hell else do you think it happened?’ I asked him.

‘No idea, but I can tell you for sure Heike would never do that. Are you kidding me? Sell herself to the press? To the
Daily
Heil
?’

‘You never know how mercenary you can be until the choice is put in front of you, Damien. Do you remember telling me about a lifeboat with only room for one?’

He looked wounded and I felt shitty for what I’d said, but it was out there now, and I felt the point needed to be made.

Damien sighed.

‘I’ve known Heike a lot longer than you, Monica. I know what she is and isn’t capable of. She can be selfish, arrogant, controlling, careerist and the most infuriatingly bloody-minded person on the planet. But what goes along with it all is that she is utterly brazen when she’s in the wrong: full, over-compensating defiance as it gets harder and harder for her to back down.’

‘So you’re saying I just have to ride it out? That I’m only making it worse by expecting her to apologise for what she’s done?’

‘No. Because that’s not what’s going on here. Heike isn’t acting brazen: she’s in the huff, and that only happens when somebody’s hurt her feelings. It only happens when
she’s
the one who’s been wronged.’

It took a few seconds for logic to defuse my emotions, and even then I couldn’t quite get the importance of what Damien was telling me. Kind of like you can’t quite make out the rock wall in front of you is actually a mountain because it’s so huge.

Oh.

Dear.

God.

How do you say sorry for that?

The short answer is you can’t. Not to Heike.

Nothing I said made a dent, and I could understand why. I was the one she had trusted most, the one she had opened up to. I was the one she had taken risks on, taken risks for.

I was the one she had kissed, then I’d called her Judas for it.

She would never forgive me.

She did speak to me a couple of times after I admitted my mistake, or more like talked
at
me, laying down what she was dealing with. I think it was part of my punishment that she was going to outline how much she was hurting but not let me do anything to help.

The last time I spoke with her in any depth was in Rostock, after we had played a club called Moya. It was an intimate venue, a place where the crowd really went for it, and where there seemed to be an unspoken gratitude for us having come beyond the usual cities of the German circuit. The owner told me the crowds in Hamburg and Munich would never understand what it meant to watch a band rock out up here on the Baltic ‘because they never grew up listening to DDR radio’.

The show felt special. We all came off stage on a high, and I thought that maybe the ice was melting. Heike and I found ourselves together alone in a chill-out area, quite possibly engineered by our colleagues. I thought it might be the first glimmer of a new beginning. Instead all I saw was the beginning of the end.

There was almost nothing she said that didn’t worry me about her mental state.

‘We’ll be in Berlin in two days,’ she told me blankly. ‘It was my request that we finish up the European tour there. I was delighted when the first night sold out and we added another. I had it in my head as a secret kind of homecoming. Now it seems like the closer we get, the more I just feel dread.’

‘Why?’ I asked, pleasantly surprised that she might be confiding in me again about her mum.

‘Because of what’s coming after.’

She meant the launch of the third album and the US tour.

‘We’ll blow them away,’ I said, undercutting my bravado with a self-conscious smile. It was my way of letting her know I shared her anxiety but believed that we had what it took.

It didn’t penetrate. I’m not sure anything would. I’m not sure she was even listening.

‘I don’t think I’m capable of holding all this together. I’m not sure I can keep being the person everybody else needs me to be. I don’t even know what I’m more afraid of: success or failure. You think what the press did to us last week was tough? This is early days. They’ve only just noticed me. Once this album is out there, with all that big-label machinery pushing it forward, the person I used to be will be gone for ever, buried under the masks and costumes of the persona I’ll need to inhabit.’

She took a sip from her glass. She was on whisky again, rather than beer. Bad sign. She’d bought a whole bottle of it from the bar.

‘Everyone thinks I know exactly where I’m going, and that I’d do anything to get there. The truth is I’m lost, and I’m not even the one driving this thing. Do you know who Richey James Edwards was?’

A few months ago, no would have been the answer, but I’d been on a non-stop crash-course in rock history through living around Damien.

‘The guy from the Manic Street Preachers who went missing,’ I said.