Husbands (7 page)

‘You’re her friend, I’m a stand-in.’

‘Ohhh,’ I moaned, flattered by Amelie’s assessment of my importance, irritated that I was being manipulated.

At 7.52 p.m. exactly I find myself pushing open the door of The Bell and Long Wheat. I’m overwhelmed by the smell of cigarettes and alcohol and by the profligate confetti of leopard-print tops, huge hooped earrings and sequined Elvis Presley handbags. I didn’t think people still dressed like that, not unless they were starring in sitcoms. The wine bars I frequent are inhabited by people wearing dark suits, smart shirts and discreet ties.

‘Isn’t it fantastic?’ asks Laura.

‘It’s OK as pubs go,’ I mutter ungraciously.

I object, so strongly, to the idea of my best friend falling for a loony busker that I feel miserable about everything associated with him and I’m not going to admit that the pub oozes charm. The windows are original stained glass; the tiny coloured diamonds throw interesting hues around the bar and dance merrily on the optics. There are baroque cherubs climbing the walls, leaving behind them trails of gilded laurels. The chairs are mismatched and worn; the wood has been polished by skittish bottoms and the velvet on the benches is shabby to threadbare. A number of huge ornate mirrors hang on the walls, aged to black in parts. Under any other circumstances this pub would have earned my praise, but
I grumble that it is very smoky and it will be difficult to get a seat.

‘How do I look?’ asks Laura. She’s too excited even to be decently nervous.

Despite myself I grin. ‘Amazing, he’s a lucky man.’

We push our way to the bar and order a couple of Pernod and blacks (not our normal tipple but Laura wanted to blend in), then drive our way to the last couple of overlooked seats squashed into the corner of the room.

‘I’m surprised by the crowd in here,’ I comment.

‘You mean the large number of ladies past a certain age?’ asks Laura.

‘No, I expected a fair showing of wrinklies. I’m surprised to see young guys and girls.’

‘I guess they’ve come with their mums to keep them out of trouble,’ giggles Laura.

You can almost taste the anticipation in the air. Some diehards, with their beaded Elvis T-shirts, sit in silence, grimly guarding their table.

Laura and I steal a glance at our watches. The loony busker is due to appear in fifteen minutes.

‘Pop stars never start their gigs on time,’ asserts Laura.

‘He’s hardly a pop star, is he?’ She ignores me and insists on continuing to look expectant and radiant.

I glance around at the women wearing heavy eyeliner and too-red lipstick and I am back in a place I never wanted to revisit. ‘Don’t you think it’s weird and morbid that these women spend their Friday nights idolizing a mimic of a corpse?’ I ask.

‘No. I think it’s romantic that one man affected the lives of so many,’ replies Laura.

‘Jesus,’ I mutter.

‘No, Elvis.’

I am unsure as to whether she deliberately misunderstood my exasperation.

‘Everybody has a face like a slapped arse.’

‘They’re just normal people, Bella. It’s because you’re used to mixing with the beautiful people.’

‘I prefer the beautiful people, call me shallow.’

‘Shallow.’

I glare at her, so she offers to get us both another drink. Laura fights her way to the bar and this time comes back with a couple of vodkas and orange. We drink them far too quickly. Laura is either nervous or excited and I’ve decided this whole evening will be less tedious if I’m drunk.

‘Do you think we’ve got time to get another in?’ I ask.

‘Better had,’ agrees Laura.

It’s my turn to shove my way to the bar. At first I smile flirtatiously as people make way for me, but soon I’m forced to dig my bony elbows into people’s backs. It’s a dog-eat-dog world. Everyone wants to buy their drinks and get back to their seats or viewing point before the loony busker appears. I can smell other people’s perfume and aftershave only just masking the more raw smell of sweat produced by their sense of urgency. My hair starts to curl in the heat, betraying my faux sophistication. The last time I wore my hair curly was on my wedding day when I noticed approx one hundred of my two hundred guests wore theirs straight – the guys were mostly bald.

Just as I pick up our double gins and tonic, the crowd lets out a cheer. I start to inch my way back through the
throng. Elvis is in the building. Suddenly, the room is awash with the uptempo beat of ‘Return to Sender’. A good opening number, I suppose, and I know the words – doesn’t everybody? Certainly everybody in The Bell and Long Wheat seems to. The pub is a mass of swaying hips and wide grins, people are singing along, clicking their fingers, tapping their feet. The old grannies smile, showing their dentures, and the girls twirl, showing neat waists and high bums. It’s depressingly familiar.

Slowly, I shuffle forwards. Laura is beaming inanely at the stage. She’s swaying and nodding with more enthusiasm than I was expecting to see for the first track. On the rare occasion that we go to a club Laura forgets she’s an up-for-it Aussie girl. She follows etiquette dictated by British shyness and shuffles on the spot for ten tracks before dancing. But tonight she has rediscovered her roots and is refusing to be intimidated. Amelie is right, the girl has got it bad. I turn towards the direction of her stare, to see for myself this object of her adoration. My world screeches to a dangerous halt and I’m viciously whiplashed by bad karma, spiteful fate or simply sod’s rotten law.

Elvis is Stevie Jones.

Laura

Bella missed the first song as she was at the bar. Which is a total bummer. Stevie Jones is even better than I remembered him. Who would have thought it possible?

Although my fantasies over the last twelve days have been elaborate, I had not considered what he would be wearing at this gig (in most of my fantasies he is naked or on the way). My overwhelming image of him is as a slightly grubby figure, standing on Hammersmith platform. Tonight he is groomed to within an inch of his life and looks even sexier than I remembered. He is wearing high-waisted trousers and a ruffled dress shirt; the style Elvis favoured in his early years. His wide shoulders and trim bum are displayed for optimum impact. His shaggy surfer hair is greased into a quiff and somehow he looks cooler than anyone with a quiff deserves to look. I hadn’t noticed his broad forearms before.

The room is buzzing and yet at the same time everyone is transfixed. All hearts and minds are paying homage to Stevie. He sang and danced his opening number, ‘Return to Sender’, with perfection. In witty, flawless imitation of Elvis, he faithfully mimicked the suggestive hand gestures, the boxer’s shuffle, the self-deprecating shoulder shrugs.

I am in love. The lusty type of love, not the real type.
Besides, so is every other woman in the room and some of the boys too. Bella makes it back to the table. She looks anxious.

‘Pisser about the crowds,’ I comment sympathetically, ‘but you can understand it, can’t you? He’s mesmerizing.’

‘I can’t stay here,’ yells Bella.

‘What?’ I am not sure I’ve heard her properly. ‘He’s bloody good, isn’t he?’ It is a rhetorical question although it would give me untold satisfaction if Bella agreed. My man is sex on legs and talented. Women are clambering on to the stage to have their photos taken with him. When I say stage I mean the slightly raised area, about a metre and a half long by a metre wide and thirty centimetres off the ground. Still, some of the fans stumble, or at least pretend to, requiring Stevie to catch them. I glare my hostility.

‘You’ve got to admit, he’s not just a busker. Not when you see him like this. He’s special,’ I add.

Bella is always going on about making her mark, making a difference. It’s one of the reasons she admired Ben so much. He left something behind him. His droll, poignant plays make people think.

Stevie is making a difference; he is making people happy. Even if he isn’t performing to thousands at the Royal Albert Hall, even if it is only in a pub in Richmond. Bella can laugh but people are holding up their mobile phones and texting photos of him to their mates.

Stevie begins ‘Jailhouse Rock’.

‘It’s crazy that we all know the words to these songs. We weren’t even born when they were released. I never think of myself as an Elvis fan but it’s all there.’ I tap my
skull and turn to Bella, hoping she’ll enthuse. She doesn’t. She looks as though she’s going to puke or faint or spontaneously combust. ‘Christ! Bella, are you ill?’

It’s as though she hasn’t heard me. I put my arm round her shoulders and shake her. She’s not normally a big drinker and we’ve been mixing irresponsibly tonight. She doesn’t seem aware of me. The only time I’ve seen her like this before was when we went to Brighton to see a hypnotic act. She was picked out of the audience and the guy convinced her she was an egg-laying chicken. I so wish I’d had a video camera with me that night. I click my fingers in front of Bella’s eyes and shake her again. Slowly she returns to me. Her eyes darken and the pupils shrink.

‘I’m going. You should come too,’ she snaps.

‘No, Bella, don’t do this to me. I know you think I should meet a banker or even an estate agent but I like Stevie. Like
like
. I want to stay.’

‘We don’t belong here,’ she says as though I’ve just asked her to join a mad religious cult, rather than stay and have a few jars and watch hunk of the month gyrate on a stage. What is her problem?

‘These people are not like us. Not our sort.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘The smoke’s making my eyes sting and I think I might have an asthma attack.’

‘You’re not asthmatic,’ I point out.

‘I have to go. Please come.’

‘No, Bella.’

I glance around the room to assess the people Bella has taken a disproportionate and inconvenient dislike to. The room is full of people who eat too much cholesterol,
exercise too little, dream more than average. They seem very much my sort. I turn to say as much to Bella but she has gone.

Bugger, bugger, bugger her. I reach for my handbag. I’ll have to go and find her, as much as I want to kick on and drool over Stevie Jones, Bella is my best friend – even if, right now, I could cheerfully throttle her. The moment I start to push through the crowd the music changes from ‘Jailhouse Rock’ to ‘Stuck On You’.

Stevie’s voice, deeper than I remembered – a touch more gravelly – breaks through the noise. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I dedicate this track to Laura Ingalls.’

The crowd throws out a mindless cheer. They have no idea who Laura Ingalls is, other than a freckly, goofy kid with a penchant for big bonnets and bloomers, but they cheer anyway, such is their intense, albeit transient, love for Stevie.

Stevie locks eyes with me and beams. It is the widest, happiest grin I have ever seen on an adult. I’m stunned. Even before Oscar stomped on my self-esteem, I knew my limits. Generally, men look at me and think ‘best mate’ rather than ‘total goddess’. I’m the type of girl men fall in love with after they have got used to my weird sense of humour and my inability to put the cap back on the toothpaste. If I was ever foolish enough to ask a man why he loved me, he’d invariably reply that he appreciated my extensive film-trivia knowledge. I am not the sort of woman who stops traffic (unless I’m stood at a Zebra crossing), but right now, I know,
absolutely know
, that the way Stevie Jones is looking at me is important. It means he thinks that I’m important.

And so do many of the other people in the room. The men turn with interest, the women with ill-disguised envy, to see who Stevie Jones is singing to. Suddenly, I’m not so sure of the words to ‘Stuck On You’. So I listen carefully. Initially, I try not to read too much into it. I tell myself that it’s not as though he is saying that if
we
were together
we
couldn’t be torn apart.

It’s just a song.

It’s not as though Stevie is planning on catching
me
. He doesn’t even know me. No doubt he does this every night; he picks some woman from the crowd, sings something that seems poignant to her and throws out that smile of his. He makes her feel as though she is the only woman on the planet. I’m probably in the epicentre of a horribly shoddy, humdrum moment. I don’t even have long black hair, like the lyrics specify. I remind myself that logically speaking I am not special. This is not a special moment.

Yet… while my brain is telling me that this is a tacky, predictable move, my heart is pounding with such ferocity that I think it is about to break out of my chest and jump up on to the stage to join Stevie and dance a jig. It
feels
extremely special. And, if I’m not completely deluded or plastered (both are possibilities but not probabilities) Stevie looks as though seeing me is the equivalent to all his Christmases and birthdays coming at once. I don’t think that his reaction is entirely because he thinks I’ll be an easy lay. I realize that by allowing an absolute stranger to kiss me after exchanging approximately one hundred and fifty words on a train then I have, perhaps, given off ‘available’ signals (if not ‘slapper’). But even so, it is
obvious that Stevie is not without options. If an easy lay is what he requires, just about every woman in the room will happily oblige.

I start to sway my hips. And my shoulders. For about six tracks I am the most beautiful and accomplished woman in the universe. I see myself as a sort of Kate Moss/Keira Knightley mix, with a bit of Liz Hurley mystery thrown in for good measure. Throughout ‘(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear’ and ‘A Big Hunk o’ Love’, I believe that I have a higher butt than Kylie’s. As he sings ‘Wooden Heart’, I am sure that I can do mental arithmetic faster than Carol Vorderman and I am perhaps more green-fingered than Charlie Dimmock. I could scour an oven, clean behind the back of a settee and descale the taps in my bathroom faster than Kim and Aggie, those cleaning women with their own TV show. I am
invincible
. Although, the more I stare at sexy Stevie, the more convinced I am that these housewifery skills, which I have long admired, will not be required. I start to focus along the lines of imitating Lucy Liu’s gymnastic ability instead.