Dead Girl Walking (8 page)

Over her shoulder I saw Rory, leaning against the wall. He glanced back, raising his bottle in salute. He had a smile on his face, calm and unreadable; not that it would stop me from reading things into it. I had the most vivid fear that he knew what had gone through my mind. I knew this was daft, but the moment had been intense enough to make me believe some very strange things were possible.

A voice in my head told me to phone Keith. I needed to centre myself, or maybe ground myself was more like it, given the electrified sensations I had experienced on the stage.

I reached inside my jacket for my phone, but something stopped me as I swiped the handset awake. When I’d called after orchestra shows, I’d wanted to tell Keith all about it, to share my experience. This time I had been driven by a fearful instinct to place myself back outside of this.

Holding the phone in my hand, I realised I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to share it with him. He wasn’t part of this, and nobody who wasn’t part of this could understand it.

I put the phone back in my pocket, downed what remained in my bottle and picked up another, clinking it against one Scott was holding up.

As he walked towards his car, Parlabane heard a voice call for him to wait. He turned to see Damien striding across from a huddle of musicians who had gathered outside for a smoke.

If he hadn’t looked up his details online, Parlabane wouldn’t have guessed him even close to his late thirties. It wasn’t just how he dressed, but something about his manner that seemed buoyant, optimistic. Maybe that was how he’d managed to carve out one more chance at the big time after already having had a couple of near misses.

He looked rather serious right now, though.

‘I just wanted to check,’ Damien said. ‘Did I hear you say you were interviewing Heike for this piece as well?’

He was looking Parlabane in the eye, crows’ feet around the edges of an intense gaze that betrayed his true years. They also betrayed that Parlabane was being closely scrutinised.

‘That’s right. Monica as well, though I gather she’s maybe not the best disposed towards my profession.’

Damien ignored this attempt to divert the focus.

‘When you meeting Heike?’

Interesting.

‘Mairi’s still working out the fine details, to be honest. I need to file before you guys head to the US, so it’s not urgent, but sooner would be better. Maybe you could put a word in, say I don’t bite. When are
you
seeing her?’

‘I’m not sure,’ he replied, poker-faced.

Damien knew something was up, and was curious as to what Parlabane might know, but couldn’t probe for fear of giving anything away.

Parlabane had been looking for a weak spot in the façade Damien was shoring up, and he was pretty sure he’d just found it.

‘You used to be in Discolite, didn’t you?’ Parlabane asked, pretending this had spontaneously occurred to him.

Damien nodded.

‘The whole time in there, I was trying to work out why I knew your face. I saw you guys play the Kelvin University Union.’

The guitarist couldn’t help but smile.

‘We were practically the house band for a while. Never quite found an audience beyond Glasgow, unfortunately. It might well have been our final gig that you saw.’

‘Well, I liked you, for what it’s worth.’

Damien’s gaze remained intent, perhaps asking himself what a guy Parlabane’s age had been doing at the student union back then, and coming upon a genuine recognition of his own.

‘Hang on, you were … We played the inauguration ball – were you not the rector or something?’

‘In another life. And I only won the election by default. I’m nobody’s idea of a figurehead.’

‘You were an investigative reporter, though, were you not? As opposed to a music journalist.’

He said it with just an edge of accusation. That’s right, pal: follow the breadcrumbs.

‘I go where the work is,’ Parlabane replied, choosing his words with precise ambiguity.

Damien reflected on this, then glanced towards the rehearsal suite.

‘How do you know Mairi?’

‘We go way back. Known her since my teens.’

Damien nodded, getting the picture.

Parlabane knew he could take a risk here. This was the experienced head Mairi described as the glue that held the band together, but Parlabane also recognised that Damien was the one he could most trust to keep quiet about his suspicions. This band was the ship Damien must have thought had long since sailed without him, so he was going to do nothing that would take her into choppy waters.

‘Mairi’s having trouble getting hold of Heike,’ Parlabane said, dropping his voice a fraction. ‘She’s starting to get a wee bit worried, just between you and me.’

Damien’s silence said plenty, his lack of surprise blethering unguardedly too.

‘When did you last speak to her? Berlin maybe?’

Still he said nothing, and still his silence spoke volumes.

‘I’m wondering if there was something on her mind. New album due out, this huge US tour coming up … That’s a lot of pressure. How did she seem when you last saw her?’

‘She was fine. Normal.’

Parlabane nodded, like he understood.

‘You know, loyalty isn’t always what you think,’ he said. ‘Telling me the truth doesn’t make you a grass.’

Damien’s cheeks flushed a little as he weighed this up. They both knew he was lying now; all that remained was whether he would keep up the charade.

‘She was pretty withdrawn,’ he admitted.

‘In Berlin?’

‘Before that. After Rostock. I’ve never seen her like it: so distant, her mind somewhere else – away from the music, I mean. Normally, no matter what else is going down, Heike’s still a pro. I’ve never seen her so disengaged. I put it down to running out of steam towards the end of the tour. Things were pretty fraught after the photos.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘I tried to engineer a bit of a clear-the-air tête-à-tête between the girls in Rostock, but I guess it backfired. Heike was dealing with it better than Monica at that point, which is what you’d expect, but after that it was the other way around.’

‘It seems disproportionate from the outside, but I suppose when you’re on tour and living on top of each other, you can start to feel besieged.’

Parlabane was trying to seem sympathetic, but really he was fishing. He just wanted to keep the conversation going, to see where Damien might take it. He was looking for what he called a satellite: a significant outlier that had stuck in the guitarist’s mind for reasons not immediately obvious even to himself.

He listened to Damien talk about the pressures of life on tour, and the stresses Heike in particular had to endure, not merely of being the main attraction, but from being one of only two women in the party. That was when he spotted it.

‘I suppose in terms of other women there were also the merch girls: they were on the bus a couple of times, though that wasn’t exactly all sisters together. Heike had a problem with them being there, in fact, but that was way before we got to Germany.’

‘Merch girls?’

‘Merchandising staff. I think they worked for Bad Candy.’

I could hear raised voices as soon as I opened the door. I was returning from a café on Westgate Road with two heaving cardboard trays, having volunteered to get us all something a bit more appetising than yet another round of instant coffees before we started the soundcheck. All had been calm when I left, although everybody was a little stiff and cranky after getting stuck in a motorway tailback for an hour en route to Newcastle.

I say voices plural, but mostly it was Heike’s that was carrying; the responses low male mumbling. Heike had quite a register. She didn’t have to shout for it to be loud and forceful, the kind of tone you could feel vibrating your chest.

‘We haven’t even soundchecked yet,’ she was blasting. ‘We’ve barely set up. There’s two miles of cable still rolled up and guitars sitting there needing strings.’

‘Christ’s sake, it’s only a wee bit of ching,’ came the response. Sounded like Scott. ‘Need something to perk us up after that fucking bus journey.’

I approached, feeling like I used to when my parents were arguing and they’d seen me in the doorway, so there was no option to sneak away and pretend I hadn’t heard.

Heike was facing down Scott, the bass player, and Angus, the guitar tech, both of whom were stood with their heads bowed like guilty schoolboys. The others were waiting awkwardly, wishing they could be somewhere else until the aggro was over. Rory looked even more uncomfortable than the rest, which made me wonder whether he had been about to join in before teacher arrived and caught them at it.

The scene was one we had seen before: Heike overreacting to something she couldn’t control and which, as far as everybody else was concerned, didn’t matter.

‘Only,’ she stressed. ‘Only. Does that word not ring any alarm bells about your perspective? It’s a class-A drug. Enough to get you a night in the cells if someone wanted to throw a spanner in our works. And where did you get it?’

She rounded on Dean, the head of the road crew, and the one I had heard mouthing off about her to the support act in Bristol.

‘Did you sell them it? Is dealing your sideline this tour, or do you only specialise in flesh?’

‘We’re all fucking adults here,’ he said. ‘You’re their lead singer, not their fucking mother.’

He walked away, not staying for the scolding like the others.

‘I know they’re adults,’ Heike said to his retreating back before directing her next words at Scott and Angus. ‘I just thought you were professionals too. You need something to get you through a
soundcheck
? Are you kidding me?’

‘All right,’ Scott said, ‘no, I don’t
need
it, but it was
there
, and—’

‘This is how it starts, Scott. Maybe you tell yourself you just want something to celebrate with after the show, or to keep the buzz going when you come off stage. Soon it becomes the thing you’re looking forward to and the show’s the thing between it and you. I’ve seen this before. We
all
have.’

And with that, she walked away, stomping off outside leaving us all to stare at each other awkwardly for a few moments before Damien geed everybody up to get themselves back to work.

So, basically, just another day on tour with Savage Earth Heart.

You’d be amazed what you can learn about people when you’re around them every waking hour for the best part of a fortnight.

Such as, bugger all.

Don’t get me wrong, I found out a lot about their habits, moods, what they ate, sleeping patterns, grooming regimes and even OS preferences, but very little of any real substance. This was, of course, because they were mostly men. I try not to generalise, so I’ll acknowledge that statistically speaking, this was a very limited sample, but my data suggested that men can talk all day about music, movies, books, TV, sport, science, politics, religion and even clothes, but almost never about themselves: their families, their upbringing, their relationships, their ambitions.

Heike put it more bluntly when she said that men talk about their feelings like they talk about their periods.

As for who these people really were, I found out more in ten minutes on my laptop than from several days sharing a coach, a dressing room and several hotels. It felt a bit creepy, to be honest, looking up websites to investigate the people I was travelling with, as suggested by the fact that I only did it in my own room. Was that daft? I wouldn’t have felt at all conflicted about doing it if I had just been a fan of Savage Earth Heart, but now I knew these people, it seemed a bit stalkery. However, the whole issue was that I
didn’t
know these people.

It was a jolt to see my name listed on the band’s Wikipedia page. Worse, the words hyperlinked to some Royal Scottish National Orchestra and National Youth Orchestra pages, where there lurked some truly embarrassing photos from my earlier years, just waiting to be discovered by the curious. Seriously, I’d have felt less squirmy knowing nude selfies had been hacked and posted (not, I should stress, that I have ever taken any nude selfies).

Scott had been in the band from the start, and it turned out he was Heike’s cousin. She had taught him to play guitar when he came to stay with her on Islay one summer, according to one of the few articles that made much mention of anyone other than Ms Gunn. I was envious of the instant advantage this gave him: even of the fact that her big-cousin status meant she was constantly on his case.

I found out that Damien was thirty-nine, which was at least twelve years older than I thought. I could still see why I had assumed that, though. He was naturally young, always positive and energetic, by far the least cynical person with regard to his outlook on music, which was even more surprising when I read that he had been around the block a few times. I knew Heike looked up to him due to his greater experience, and I wished I could be calm and impressive around her like he was.

I learned that Rory was divorced, which was some going for a guy not long turned twenty-five. I was unsure how this made me feel, especially after all the remarks I had heard about being already engaged at twenty-two (even if we hadn’t set a date yet). ‘That’s awful young, is it not?’ people would ask, implying I was making a mistake, or at least hadn’t given myself time to consider all my options.

Rory had worked as a secondary-school physics teacher until the sudden success of the second album meant he could concentrate full-time on the band. A bit embarrassingly, I also sussed that he had nothing specifically against fiddle players. It was at our Cardiff soundcheck, when the engineer asked me what I wanted in my monitor mix, that it dawned on me that this was what Rory had been talking about when he said he ‘didn’t want to hear any fucking fiddle’. It would have been nice to be able to say that I told him about this and we shared a laugh over my hilarious misunderstanding, but despite learning that he didn’t hate my guts, I felt even more awkward around him after whatever weird mojo had passed between us up on that drum riser.