The Predictions (13 page)

“Yes,” I said eventually, mustering all my self-control. “Lukas and I grew up together.”

Fran, never one to miss an opportunity for bluntness, said, “Wasn’t it a bit more than that?”

Lukas said, “Yeah, it was,” and Serena folded her arms,
not at all threatened, and added, “We thought you’d gone back to New Zealand.”

“Well, it looks like I didn’t.”

“Poppy,” said Fran, “I’m sure there’ll be plenty of time for a reunion later but right now we need to talk business.” It was her way of rescuing me, but also of bringing her agenda back on track.

“This chick wants to be our manager,” said Marlon, addressing Lukas.

“Really?” he said, sounding genuinely amazed. He gave Fran a quick, appraising look and then smiled. “That’s great. We bloody well need one.”

Marlon softened. “We do.” He studied Fran’s card. “It takes F-One to know one,” he said, and held out his hand in Fran’s direction.

“You won’t regret this,” she said, taking the offered hand and shaking it firmly.

I worried they had jumped into things too quickly, but I kept my reservations to myself, more troubled by the momentous new turn in my personal life.

We sat down to toast the new venture, and I watched and listened with admiration as Fran plied her new charges with beer and whiskey and comprehensively mapped out the next five years of their career. She seemed to have it all worked out, from how to shape their image to what kind of sound they should develop to stay ahead of other bands. I wondered how she knew all this stuff, and then I realized how badly I had underestimated her. This whole time, she really had been researching the up-and-coming bands of London,
and not just sleeping with them. While Fran charmed everyone in the room, I played the part of her assistant, going to the bar to fetch drinks and taking notes when she asked me to, grateful to have something to do. For the past hour, I had tried not to make eye contact with Lukas, but the second I dared to glance in his direction he was already looking at me, and our eyes locked on and everyone else vanished. I didn’t think Serena had noticed—she seemed so unflappable—but then, after another one of my forays to the bar to fetch a round of whiskey, I came back to the greenroom and she and Lukas were arguing in the corner. They were trying to keep their voices down, and when Lukas saw I had reappeared, he tried to end their discussion. I didn’t see what happened next—I was busy handing out drinks—but when I looked again, Serena was putting on her coat, and then she coolly said good-bye to everyone and left.

I started drinking too much whiskey. I didn’t know what else to do. The meeting went on, and then at some point it stopped being a meeting and started to be a party. And then it was after three
A.M
. and everyone was drunk and standing on the pavement outside the club, deciding where to go next. I had been avoiding so much as a sweep of the eye in Lukas’s direction, but now he put his arm around my waist and pulled me to him and whispered in my ear: “How long has it been since we fucked?”

“Excuse me?” I was genuinely offended, but elsewhere in my body, something woke up that had been asleep for a very long time. “Aren’t you going to ask me where I’ve been for the last four years?”

“Has it really been that long?” he said, leaning closer. “I’m pretty sure it was yesterday.” He kissed me then, passionately, almost aggressively, and I was so taken aback that I went along with it. I could have been seventeen again, were it not for the overwhelming smell of hairspray and the strands of his mane that got in my mouth, leaving behind a metallic aftertaste. Coming up for air, I checked to see if anyone had caught our wild snogging, but the other guys were drunkenly loading gear into a battered-looking van. Fran was nowhere to be seen, and I remembered, vaguely, that she had taken her leave outside the club.

Still reeling from the kiss, I climbed into the van next to Lukas. The keyboard player drove, or rather swerved, clearly as plastered as we were. Apart from a few cabs, and the odd night bus, the London streets were deserted. At last we pulled into a cobbled lane, and the van idled next to a black garage door, then Marlon and Lukas and I climbed out before the others drove off. To the side of the garage door was another door that belonged in a stable. After Marlon had opened the top half, he had to reach inside to unlock the bottom. It opened into a garage the size of a barn, and in the middle of the garage was an enormous black car with a silver insignia and a bonnet that gleamed like an oil slick. I did not know a thing about cars, except that this one was expensive.

With a guitar in each hand, Marlon led us up a small staircase at the back of the garage and into a low-ceilinged apartment. Here it was made apparent why we had left all the rest of the band gear in the van: there was more of it here, a full drum kit and amps, microphone stands and wires trail
ing everywhere, enough to fill a recording studio. The rest of the room was taken up with the biggest lounge suite I had ever seen—a behemoth upholstered in orange and brown velvet. There was something odd about it, not just the size, but the way it was constructed, the squabs and cushions very plush, but at the edges, strips of exposed metal and plywood. Marlon must have seen me staring at it.

“It used to be a conversation pit,” he explained. “Only now it’s freestanding. No pit.”

“Where did it come from?”

Marlon pointed behind him, beyond a small kitchen and a window with the blinds pulled. “The main house. Mother was renovating again.”

So this wasn’t the main house but an adjunct of some sort, which explained the presence of the giant, expensive car. I wished I had paid more attention to street names and borough signs on the ride here, but beyond pulling into a cobbled lane, I remembered nothing.

“It’s an old wreck,” said Marlon, plonking himself down next to Lukas. “But the terrific thing is it’s basically four giant beds. There’s always plenty of room for friends to crash.” He put his arm around Lukas. “This guy’s been here for years.”

Lukas laughed. “I should probably start thinking about getting my own place.”

“One day,” said Marlon affectionately. “In the meantime, make yourselves at home.”

After smoking a giant doobie, which he shared with Lukas but I declined, Marlon went upstairs to bed, leaving Lukas and me alone on the enormous velvet raft. No sooner
had Marlon left than Lukas stretched out with his head in my lap and looked drunkenly up at me. “I can’t get used to seeing you in all that makeup,” he said. “Some women suit it but you look better without any.”

I wondered if by “some women” he meant Serena. “At least I don’t have hair like a poodle.”

He laughed. “Thanks.”

“Whose idea was it?”

“The hair?”

“Yes, the hair. You can’t tell me you did that to yourself.”

“Marlon’s. It goes with our music. And Serena says girls love it too.”

“Is she your . . . ?” I couldn’t bring myself to say it.

“What do you think?” He leaned over and tweaked my nose, something he had done often in the old days.

“I think she’s very pretty—and that she was in the bathroom with you.”

“She was helping me take off my makeup.”

“Then why was your fly undone?”

“You’ve obviously never worn lace-up leather pants.” When I shook my head, Lukas smiled. “The fly on those things is always undone. That’s the look.”

Was he being serious or pulling my leg? “And you can’t take off your own makeup?”

Lukas shrugged. “I could. But Serena does it better. She’s very quick.”

He wasn’t going to admit it, which for some reason bothered me more than if he had just come straight out with a confession that he had been bonking Serena. I decided not
to tell him about Gavin either, although honestly, it was the first time all evening I had even remembered I had a fiancé. I said, “I thought you went back to New Zealand.”

“Really?”

“You said you were going to.”

“I did?” Lukas was thoughtful for a moment, perhaps trying to remember. “Do you know I looked everywhere for you?”

“I didn’t know that.”

He nodded. “I even went to the police but when they found out we had been living in a squat, they basically told me to piss off. They can’t file a missing persons report for someone with no fixed abode.”

“So you gave up?’

“No,” he said. “I went to the New Zealand embassy. They said they couldn’t do anything unless you tried to leave the country.”

“I was in the hospital,” I said, choking up, because I had missed Lukas so much, and the news that he had searched so hard for me, when I hadn’t looked for him at all, was painful to hear.

“Jesus,” he said, “what were you doing there?”

When I told him, he was appalled.

“You could have died. It was about minus ten that night. I remember almost freezing to death in the squat without anyone to cuddle.”

The thought that we had missed each other by a matter of hours, perhaps even minutes, made me feel sick. “You went back to the squat that night?”

“Eventually—after I had walked the streets of London calling you every name under the sun. There was a junkie in our bed. At first I thought it was you—then when I realized it wasn’t, I beat the crap out of him.”

“Did you really?”

“I kicked him out with my little finger.”

We both smiled—mine watery, his wry.

“I was so fucking mad with you.”

“I know.”

Lukas cupped my chin, and I leaned into his hand, rubbing my cheek against his fingers. “But I would never have left you like that,” he said. “Not without saying good-bye.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said, trying, and failing, not to sob.

“What for?”

Had he really forgotten why he had been so mad with me that night? I stared into his kind, familiar eyes, the eyes I had missed so much, and I suddenly didn’t want to revisit the past, to risk what bringing it up again might do to us. “I should have tried harder to find you, that’s all.”

“How could you have?” he said. “You were in the hospital.” There was nothing accusatory in his voice, only concern, and I realized that whether it was because he had forgotten or not, he wasn’t going to bring up old wounds either. I was so grateful for his easy forgiveness that I leaned in to kiss him, and was relieved when he responded with tenderness.

What happened next seemed natural and inevitable, at least to begin with, as though we had never been apart, but then halfway through making love, once it was too late,
along came my conscience, and I remembered that we were not boyfriend and girlfriend, not the innocent teenagers we had once been, and that what we were doing was hurting other people and would probably hurt us too in the end. Worst of all was a feeling of deep sadness that we couldn’t turn the clock back to what we’d had, and had thrown away.

“Poppy, what’s the matter?” said Lukas, pulling back. “Are you crying?”

I wiped my eyes and pretended not to be.

“You are. I can taste it.” He dabbed at the skin around my eyes, then rolled onto his back and sighed. “I knew it.”

A knot formed in my stomach. “Knew what?”

“That you still don’t love me. You never really did.”

“That’s not true,” I said, filled with passion. “I love you more than ever—but that’s the problem.”

“Why is that a problem?” said Lukas.

I tried to sound sober, serious. “Because we aren’t meant to be together.”

Lukas was quiet for a long time. “Please don’t tell me that after all this time you still believe in that fucking prediction.” There was a controlled anger in his voice.

When he put it like that, I wasn’t sure I did believe in it, but I was so bone tired, worn out by the avalanche of feelings and booze. It was all too much. “Right now, I don’t know what to think.” I got up from where I had been lying with him, walked to the opposite side of the vast couch, and curled up on my own under a purple fake fur rug. “I really need to sleep.”

After a few minutes, Lukas got up and came and kneeled
on the floor beside me, and put his head close to mine. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m always such a jerk after a gig.” He paused. “I was so happy to see you.”

“I know. Me too.”

“What are we going to do, Poppy?”

I turned around to face him. “I don’t know.”

He didn’t move. “Poppy?”

“Yes?”

“Can I just sleep next to you?”

I wiggled over, made room for him, and he lay down beside me, one arm tucked under his head, the other wrapped around my waist, our bodies fitting together as though they had been hewn from the same piece of wood.

London

1988

S
TREAKS OF SHARP SUNLIGHT
woke me the next morning. I took in the strange surroundings and struggled to remember where I was. It was the weekend, I hoped, or else I’d have to go to work. My head was pounding but it was nothing a glass of water wouldn’t fix. Then I saw Lukas in the tiny kitchen, spooning ground coffee into a white paper cone. He had his back to me, but I would have known his bare shoulders anywhere, the scoop of his spine, the wing-shaped mole at the top of his right hip. Only the hair, pulled up in a girlish knot, was new. To wake up and see him felt so right, as though every atom in the world was where it should be. But then I remembered it wasn’t.

I still had my clothes on from the night before and wandered over to where he stood. “Good morning,” I said, putting my arms around his waist and inhaling his scent. His hair wasn’t so sticky this morning, and the toxic spray had worn off.

“Good morning,” he said, twisting around to kiss me, his lips so soft and tender, his breath merging with mine. It was one of those moments where every inch of skin is charged with sensation and all modesty and reason fly away. We fell to the cold terra-cotta floor, ripped off any clothes that were in the way, and went at it. I was expecting just to fuck—that would have been enough—but less than a minute in, Lukas pushed his head down between my legs and found, first with his mouth, and then with his tongue, the hub that was driving it all. He had never done this before, not once, and just after I came with a force to lift the roof off, I rejoiced that he had finally found my clitoris, and then quailed because I hadn’t been the one to show him where it was. In the three years we had been apart, he’d had an education, but from whom?

Lukas slipped into me and came almost immediately, and we lay in a heap on the kitchen floor, clutching each other and breathing heavily, and then a male voice called to us from upstairs. “Is it safe to come down yet?”

It was Marlon.
Dear god, has he been up there the whole time? Did he watch us having sex?

“Yeah, man,” said Lukas, rearranging my clothes in a way that was both loving and careless. “Just making coffee. You want some?”

“Love some.”

I stood up, and pulled up my knickers, just as Marlon walked slowly down the stairs in his underpants, yawning. When he reached my level, he winked at me.

“Thought you’d never ask.”

I had never met anyone like Marlon before. His confidence, the pantherlike way he moved—he was a different species. The only person he regarded as an equal was Lukas, and it made me think he was secretly in love with him. When he announced he was going up to what he called “the big house” for breakfast, I was relieved.

The second he had gone, I asked Lukas how they met.

“Well,” he said, “it was only a couple of months after I lost you.” He stared into the middle distance as if recounting a legend. “I was in a pub in Camden, feeling sorry for myself, as usual, when this joker came in. I could hear him talking with his mates on the other side of the room. He was very loud, very posh.”

“Marlon?” I said impatiently.

“Yes.” Lukas smiled at the memory. “He was looking for musicians to join his band, and he said he’d buy anyone a pint who could play something by Deep Purple.”

“You played ‘Smoke on the Water’ and you got the pint—”

“And the rest is history. We started jamming that afternoon, right here, in this room, and we stayed up for about three days—with a bit of help, of course.”

“Help from who?”

“From . . .” He paused. “From the BBC.”

“You watched television?”

“Um, yeah, to stay awake.”

I had a feeling that he wasn’t telling the truth, but I didn’t know what he was lying about, so I said nothing, and he continued to recall the legend of his meeting Marlon. For close
to a year, they had holed up together in the mews flat, performing for no one but each other, until they had developed an almost telepathic way of playing. Along with musical chemistry, they shared insatiable ambition. Alan, the drummer, and Vince, the keyboardist, were easy to recruit—they were old boarding school “chums” of Marlon’s.

“With Marlon,” said Lukas, “I don’t have to explain what I’m trying to do. He just gets it and starts in—it’s the same when he starts playing something. I know exactly what to add to make it better.”

“I don’t even know what you’ve called the band. I bet it’s something posh.”

“The Communists.”

“As in Russia, Vietnam, East Germany?”

“It’s a double entendre,” he said, trying to sound French. “Marlon’s a socialist, and I grew up on a commune.”

I laughed. “Marlon, a socialist?”

“He can’t help who his father is.”

“Who
is
his father?”

“The Right Honorable Giles Andover—he’s a QC or something.”

“Marlon should move out—live among the proles.”

“He will,” said Lukas. “When he turns twenty-one.”

“What happens then?”

“Something matures—a trust, I think.”

“Ha,” I said. “Remember what Hunter said?”

“What?”

I lowered my voice. “
Beware the champagne socialist . . .”

“Marlon isn’t like that—he’s genuinely passionate about
the cause. You heard our song—the one about the Cold War.”

I had heard it but wished I hadn’t. “Remind me how it goes.”

“Frozen hearts,” sang Lukas, “melting like ice . . . in the fire. Beating with one . . . true desire.”

“Your musical style,” I said, trying to keep a straight face. “It’s really changed.”

“Are you mocking me?”

“Would I do that?”

“Yes, you would. You bloody well would.” Lukas leapt over to where I was sitting on the couch, and we wrestled, a little like we had in the old days, only this time it ended with what can only be described as quite rough sex. I didn’t even feel guilty this time, although I did feel guilty, later, that I hadn’t.

Showering, afterward, in the bathroom Lukas shared with Marlon, I noticed all their stuff—hairspray, razors, deodorant—was muddled together and appeared to be communal. Lukas had never spoken about any of his former bandmates the way he spoke about Marlon, and I understood this was different, that they were closer, more like lovers. Only the thing that held them together was stronger, in a way, than love, because in each other they saw how to get what they had always wanted: success. Lukas didn’t have to tell me any of this. I could smell it on him. It was in the way he stood a little taller when Marlon was in the room. I had experienced the backdraft from it in the club the night before. While Lukas and Marlon had plotted world domination with Fran, the rest of us had become invisible.

A feeling of apprehension crept into my chest as I took a measure of the life I would be signing up for if Lukas and I got back together. Lukas and Marlon were a team, a club of two that I could never join. I could tag along all I liked, but I had to understand, from this day on, that what had happened last night in the greenroom would happen again. It might even become the norm. Was that the life I wanted? I had just had my first taste of independence, of surviving on my own outside of the commune. I had even had fun. Yet within hours of reuniting with Lukas, I was already contemplating a sidecar existence, my life attached to his once again.

And what about the prediction? Was I brave enough to go against it, to abandon Gavin? Even then I had the sensation of being pulled in the wrong direction but being too weak to go the other way.

Gray morning light filtered through the windows of the bathroom, which faced what appeared to be a brick garden wall, and I was abruptly curious to see what lay beyond it, the mansion Marlon had mentioned the night before. Wrapped in a towel, I went out to the kitchen and pulled up the blind and there it was, five or six stories high, and separated from the mews house by a decorative formal garden. Sun glinted off the building’s slate roof, and in the middle of that, a winking dormer window, giving it the appearance of polished silverware. I couldn’t be sure, but the house looked familiar somehow, as though I had seen it in a dream.

“There you are,” said a voice close to my ear, and I startled as Lukas put his arms around my waist and nuzzled into my neck.

“Where are we?”

“Marlon’s place.”

“I mean where in London. What area?”

“The one rich people live in.” He pointed up the garden to the big house. “On the other side of there is Regent’s Park.”

So that’s why it was familiar. On the night I had almost caught hypothermia in the park, I had gazed at these buildings from the other side and wondered who lived here, thinking they couldn’t possibly be real. “They’re more than just rich,” I said. “They’re upper class.”

Lukas shrugged. “I suppose so. But they’re not snobby or anything.”

We had been brought up to believe that living like this wasn’t just ostentatious, it was morally wrong. All those lectures from Hunter about the evils of capitalism, elitism, and the moral bankruptcy of the Western world, and yet here we were, in the lap of it, enjoying the spoils. I opened the window to get a better look at the mansion and noticed a woman slowly making her way down the garden from the main house, careful to avoid any grass or puddles. “Is that Serena?”

Lukas peered over my shoulder. “She brings leftovers from breakfast, usually croissants. They get chucked out otherwise.”

“She lives there?”

“Serena is Marlon’s little sister.”

I should have guessed. This information was both a relief, in that it explained Serena’s presence regardless of her
relationship to Lukas, and annoying, because it meant she would always be hanging around.

When she appeared in the kitchen, however, my dislike of her was as straightforward as it had been the night before. In her miniskirt and loafers, the scent of apples wafting off her glossy chestnut hair, she was just too perfect, too
aristocratic,
and I did not want her to get her hands on my man. I stood in front of her in a towel, defiantly clutching the clothes and underwear I’d had on the night before, and hoped she could smell on me the salty odor of semen.

If she shared any similarly hostile feelings toward me, she did a first-class job of hiding them.

“I’ve got the most terrific news,” she said to Lukas, placing a small basket covered with a napkin on the kitchen counter. “I’ve been badgering Daddy for weeks, and I think I’ve finally made some headway.”

Lukas mumbled something in response but hunger blocked my ears. Serena lifted the napkin, and a waft of yeast and sugar syrup hit my nose. These weren’t croissants but five plump Danish pastries, bursting with apricots and blueberries.

“When did you last eat?” said Lukas, catching my wide-eyed stare.

“Oh,” I said, trying not to drool. “I can’t even remember.”

He handed me a pastry, and I scoffed it, watched closely by Serena. At first I thought she was offended by my greediness until I realized she was staring at the pastry with intense longing, eating it vicariously through me. No wonder she brought us the leftovers—it removed the temptation of eat
ing them herself. “Would you like one?” I said, jiggling the basket in her direction, and enjoying her look of repulsion.

“Made headway with what?” said Lukas, oblivious to the standoff.

The pastry had so mesmerized Serena that she had forgotten to tell him her news. “Daddy’s agreed to pay for recording sessions,” she said, coming back to earth.

“That’s great,” said Lukas. “Does Marlon know?”

“Yes, and he said he doesn’t want Daddy’s help.”

“Fuck.” Lukas threw back his head in frustration. “Most people would give their eyeteeth for that sort of leg up. Why can’t he see it’s so much worse to have all the advantages and to throw them away?”

“I agree,” said Serena. “It makes no sense.”

“Maybe he’s afraid you won’t have any credibility,” I said.

Lukas was indignant. “With who?”

“I don’t know. The music industry, fans, critics?”

“Bullshit,” said Lukas. “They’re going to love us—but if we don’t record anything, no one will know we exist.”

“Why don’t you get Fran to try and convince him?”

“Fran! Of course.” Lukas ran to the telephone to call her. “I forgot we had a manager.”

On Sunday morning, after a second blissful night with Lukas, I went home to the grotty bedsit I shared with Fran and bawled my eyes out to her. “What am I going to do?” I said between sobs. “I can’t break up with Gavin. We’re . . . we’re engaged.” I still couldn’t bring myself to tell her about the prediction, that I thought he was my destiny.

“You don’t love him. Or you wouldn’t have jumped into
bed with Lukas. Even I wouldn’t cheat on someone I loved.”

“You wouldn’t?”

Fran thought about this for a moment. “It’s an untested theory.”

“You’ve never been in love?”

“I don’t think so. I just don’t see the point. It’s messy. Too complicated.”

I burst into tears again. “But I love him.”

“Who?” said Fran. “Who the fuck do you love?”

“Lukas,” I said. “I love him so much.”

Fran smiled. “There, I bet that feels better—to finally admit it.” She handed me another tissue. “Don’t worry about Gavin. He’ll get over it. He’s too dull to stew on it for long.”

“I hope you’re right. I don’t want to hurt his feelings—he’s just so . . .” I tried hard to think of a complimentary word about Gavin. “He’s just so decent.”

“Decent?” said Fran. “For fuck’s sake. Dump him now.”

We had both laughed at that, but Gavin
was
decent, so decent that when, on Monday, I asked him to come to the greasy spoon with me for lunch, and told him that we had to call off the wedding, he said, “Is it because my parents didn’t like you?”

“No,” I said. “That’s not the reason.” And after a pause, “They really didn’t like me?”

“I don’t care what they think,” he said. “I’ve told them we’re getting married, and that’s that.”

“That’s that?” Had he not heard me asking to call the whole thing off? “It isn’t about your parents. It’s about us.”

“But the church is booked, and the reception, and”—he
took a deep breath—“I was going to keep this a surprise, but I’ve put down a deposit on a house in Croydon. Not far from where my parents live.”