The Singer (38 page)

Helen gave a mirthless laugh. ‘Meanwhile, I was on Sylvie patrol. Our plan was to get Robin as drunk as possible so we could get to the airport in the morning while he slept it all off. She was so scared of him that I’d had to go to her flat while they were on tour, get her passport and everything and buy her a suitcase full of clothes and stuff to take away with
her. She was terrified that if Robin saw a single thing out of place when they got back, he’d realise what she was doing. She was terrified that night too. I think as the hours went by, she was getting more and more afraid, either of actually going through with it, or getting caught out in the process. So I was watching her like a hawk, trying to make sure she didn’t get pissed. Not that she was
much of a boozer, but when she was unhappy, she tended to drink herself into a stupor, and I really think she was in that frame of mind that night. Silly girl was scared of hurting Robin’s feelings, scared of hurting my feelings, scared of doing anything to get herself out of the situation.’

‘So, unware of any of this, I come up and drag Helen off to the basement to show her all this amazin’
stuff we’d been doing with these Germans,’ said Allie.

‘And I spent half an hour trying to get back upstairs again,’ Helen said. ‘I mean, I had left her talking to that Lynton guy from Blood Truth, we both liked him, so I thought she was safe enough. You know, so long as Robin didn’t see them together. But I just had this awful feeling that if I left her, I would never see her again. And then,
when I finally got back to the kitchen, there was Lynton standing there with two drinks in his hands and she’d disappeared. I started to panic then and he was trying to calm me down, saying she’d probably just gone to the loo or something else entirely logical but I just knew she’d gone, I just knew it. And then they started counting down to midnight, you
know, the whole rest of the house partying
away.’ She shuddered. ‘Then the next thing I knew, bloody Donna came running round the corner screaming blue murder at me and trying to beat me up. Only she missed and sent poor old Lynton flying across the room.’

‘Blimey.’ I tried to picture the scene. Obviously Ray hadn’t been exaggerating about his ex. ‘What was wrong with her?’

Allie and Helen exchanged glances.

‘Well, what we didn’t know
was Donna had been having this secret affair with Vince Smith for months. And she saw Sylvie leaving the party with him about five minutes before I’d got back to the kitchen. Whatever it was that had been going on between them, the sight of him and Sylvie together sent her totally round the bend. Of course, Sylvie would have been completely oblivious and I don’t even know if she ever found out
about it, I’m sure he didn’t tell her. No one knew until then. But Donna had always hated Sylvie anyway. The very first moment we met her she tipped a pint of beer over Sylvie’s head to try and start a fight, but I stepped in and she didn’t have the guts to take me on.’

I wasn’t surprised about that. Helen looked like she could punch out an ox.

‘Then, as soon as she found out that Sylvie was
an heiress, she was bloody all over her, pretending to be her best friend. I tried to get rid of her for nearly two years, I knew she was bad news; all she ever wanted to do was social climb her way to the top. But as soon as she started seeing Ray Spencer and found a way of using him to get a record company all set up, there was nothing I could do. We were stuck with her. But she’d always kept her
distance with me; she knew I didn’t trust her as far as I could throw her. Until that night.’

‘Aye,’ Allie nodded. ‘But it gets worse. That whole scene kicked off in Stevens’s kitchen. It took three guys to get her off Helen and poor old Lynton was knocked unconscious. So old Stevens runs
in and finds this whole bloody scene ruining his la-di-da party and he hits the roof too.’

‘My God.’ Helen
shook her head. ‘He got her in an armlock and pulled her out of there, still kicking and screaming. I don’t know if he locked her in a padded cell or threw her back in the street or what, but he got rid of her somehow. Of course, everyone who is anyone was there, looking at all this chaos, taking it down. Must have embarrassed the hell out of him. Meanwhile, someone called an ambulance for Lynton,
and there were a lot of people in that house that probably assumed the police would be coming too, so half the people there just scarpered. It was almost funny the way they swarmed out of there. So much for Happy New Year.’

‘Me and Robin missed all of this, of course, we was still dicking around in the basement with the Germans. First we knew was some guy appearing in the doorway saying the filth
were on their way and if we had any gear we’d better get rid of it fast. So we go upstairs to find Helen putting an ice-pack on Lynton’s head, Stevens all red in the face and fuming and Sylvana completely disappeared. Which, of course, sent Robin off the deep end.’

‘We calmed him down enough to get him back to their flat,’ said Helen, ‘and of course, she wasn’t there. I had her passport and everything
back at my house, so I went home, hoping she’d turn up there, while those two spent the whole night driving round, trying to find her. It’s a miracle you didn’t get arrested for drunk driving.’ She took Allie’s fingers in her own.

‘Aye.’ He nodded. ‘Or driving under the influence of a fucking maniac. I’d seen Robin’s moods before, but Jesus Christ, I’d never seen anything like he was that night.
I probably shouldae just handed him in at Broadmoor there and then.’

‘Sylvie was right though, he did suspect something,’ Helen said. ‘Didn’t he keep saying to you, “I knew it! I knew it!”?’

‘Aye, he did. And then he started threatening Helen. Things between us two went downhill pretty quick after that.’

‘But you must have seen her again, otherwise how did she get to Paris with Vince?’ I asked.

‘After a week, that poor Lynton turned up to my stall in Ken Market,’ said Helen. ‘He told me that Sylvie was with Vince in some hotel somewhere, that she was safe and happy and that they planned to elope to France. She didn’t want anyone to know, because by then Donna had told Robin what she’d seen, and he was going round threatening death to them both. And, of course, if she was too scared to
face her parents about Robin, she didn’t want them to know that she was about to run off with another bloke; they would have put a stop to that right there and then. But she wanted me to know that she would always be thankful to me for trying to help her and for being her best friend…’

Helen choked again then and had to spend a few minutes wiping away more tears.

‘So, eventually, after a lot
of sneaking around, I met up with Lynton at a fabric shop in Berwick Street and handed him the suitcase and all her things. We knew Robin had gone mad and was following us all around in case we’d lead him to her, so it was the only thing I could think of. I always went to that shop for my fabric, and I always came back with bolts of stuff in a suitcase.’

‘God, how horrible,’ I said. I decided
then not to tell them about Robin threatening me. They’d been through enough of his debased behaviour for them to have to worry that even now he might be spying on them with field glasses from a nearby tree.

Eerily, Allie appeared to be reading my mind.

‘You better hope he doesnae find out about you writing this book, eh?’ he said.

‘Do you know where he is now?’ I asked, a tad hastily.

‘No,
thank Christ. Like I said, we cut our losses with London and moved out here as soon as we possibly could. We didn’t realise, but Helen was four weeks pregnant with Luke at the time we went to that party. If old Lynton hadn’t got in the way of Donna, things couldae ended up immeasurably worse. We
didnae tell anyone in the music business what we were doing, no one knew but our families but we couldnae
have our first child growing up with all that madness around us.’

‘God, so it was all over, just like that?’ I said, remembering Louise and her suitcase.

‘More or less.’ Helen had recovered her composure. ‘I never did see poor Sylvie again. The last I heard from her was the week before she died. She called me from Paris totally distraught because her grandma had died. I think that was why she
did what she did. I think that just pushed her over the edge. ‘Cos from everything we saw and heard about Vince Smith after she died, I think her knight in shining armour was a very dark prince indeed. She just went out of the frying pan into the fire. I suppose the grimmest irony was that Donna had spent all those years chasing after Sylvie’s cash, and lover boy just waltzed off with the lot. Not
that it ended up doing him any good. I like to think he came to a very unpleasant end. I like to think of him in a cold, dark, unmarked grave…’

‘And that,’ Allie, ‘is where the story ends.’

I took the hint and switched the tape recorder off. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Thank you very much for talking to me, both of you. It can’t have been easy and I really appreciate it.’

‘Nae bother.’ Allie got to his
feet. ‘Shall I run you back to the station now?’

‘Thank you, that would be great.’

Helen stood up and offered me another of her bone-crushing handshakes. ‘Just remember,’ she said, ‘to tell it like it was. Tell the truth about her for once. That’s the least she deserves.’

Conversation was muted as we drove back over that tranquil, leafy landscape, gilded by the slowly sinking sun. Now I really
understood why they loved it so much here. It was a sanctuary, a place to bury the past and bring up a better, cleaner future.

‘So,’ Allie finally said, as we approached the outskirts of St Albans. ‘Are you going to talk to Donna then?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said honestly, not relishing tangling with a female equivalent of Robin. ‘Part of me thinks I should. I mean, today has been great, I’m really
thankful to you and Helen ‘cos I wouldn’t have got to the truth any other way. So I kind of feel that for the sake of the book I should meet her. On the other hand, Ray said that if I did, I might end up not being able to get rid of her.’

‘Well,’ Allie frowned. ‘If you want my advice, I’d stay the hell away. Her and Robin are the last two people you want knowing where you live.’

‘Was she really
that bad? If she looked after your band for all those years…’

‘Whatever madness got uncorked that night,’ Allie said solemnly, ‘it never got put back into the bottle. Donna was all right up until that point. Helen never liked her, true enough, but I never saw the harm in her, she always did the most for our career that she possibly could. But after that night, forget about it – she showed her
claws, she was as mad as Robin. And her whole world crumbled without Mood Violet. She lost her main band and without that, the rest of her business went up the Swanee pretty quickly. She ended up with nothing after being the virtual Queen Bee of that scene for so long. If you were to meet her now, I’d say you’d meet the most viciously bitter woman alive.’

By now we had reached the train station
car park. ‘Well,’ said Allie. ‘Whatever you decide, good luck to you, man. You’ll no doubt need it.’

He raised a comical eyebrow, but I think he was deadly serious.

‘Thank you,’ I said, unlocking my seatbelt. ‘And tell Helen, I won’t let her down.’

‘Aye. Well. Safe home, Eddie.’

It was still a beautiful, warm evening, but I felt a little shiver as the genial Scotsman drove away. I felt that
my supposedly inspirational story of a band who never got their due was starting
to get hijacked by dark forces of insanity and obsession. All was not as it had seemed in the shiny new world of post-punk. Should I delve into it, head first, do a real exposé on what the music business did to people? Or should I just stick with what I had, take the safe route away from any other ghouls I might dig
up from their long sleep?

‘Youz goes proddin’ around amongst the deed like this an’ don’ be surprised a what springs up outta the coffin,’ mad Robin Leith had warned me. Could this Donna be even worse than him? And what was I – a man or a mouse?

‘Safe home, Eddie.’

Safe home…

January 1981

‘I am lost,’ she told him. ‘I shouldn’t be here and I don’t know how to get out of it now.’

The words just fell out of her mouth and for a moment she was shocked she had uttered them to a complete stranger. Although there was something familiar about this man. She had the strangest feeling she had met him before and that it was perfectly logical she should
talk to him this way. Either that or she had made him up in a dream. Whatever it was, she felt that she already knew him.

‘Well, that’s no good then, is it?’ he said. He had a deep voice, with some of the Northern inflection she had caught in Lynton’s. As he spoke, she put two and two together. She had seen him before, or at least his picture. On the pages of
Sounds, NME
and
Melody Maker
.

‘Are
you the singer in Blood Truth?’ she asked.

‘Vincent Smith, at your service.’ He stuck out a hand and she took it. It was cool and strong. ‘And I know who you are. You’re Sylvana.’

His eyes were an incredible colour. Fringed with long, dark lashes, they seemed to dip from deep blue to violet as he turned his head in the light. Her favourite colours; the colours of twilight; the colours she had
named her band for. The hideous spectral din emanating from the jukebox seemed to dim in his presence.

‘Oh.’ Sylvana had no idea he might have been reading the same papers as she did or would even be interested if he had. ‘Yeah, that’s right.’

‘So were you not invited then?’ he said. ‘Did you sneak your way in to take a look at the pop stars?’

The way he said it, she couldn’t help but laugh.
Nothing could have been further from the truth.

‘That’s right,’ she said, playing along. ‘And I was so disappointed in them, that now I want to leave. Although I did like the bass player from your band. He’s somewhere over there, if you want to find him.’

Sylvana reluctantly dragged her eyes away and cast them around the room. Lynton seemed to have been absorbed into the throng of bodies around
the tables of food and drink; she couldn’t see him at all, although her new companion was that much taller he probably had a better view.