'Aye, ye fell doon the stairs. Pull the other wan; it's got bells on it.'
I laughed. 'I didn't fall; I was climbing.'
'Were ye trying tae break in somewhere?'
'No; it was just... I was drunk. Just climbing. I wasn't trying to nick anything.' I put my hands under the sheets and lay on my back.
I lay, she sat, silent for a while. I stared up at the high ceiling of the tower bedroom for a while. I was thinking. 'You know,' I said eventually, 'I've never stolen anything in my life.' I looked at her. 'Isn't that extraordinary?'
'Bloody amazin,' Betty said, dark eyebrows lifting briefly. She leant down, subtracted another fag from the packet. 'Ye sure?'
'I think so.' I nodded. How on earth did I get through my childhood and youth without nicking anything? All my friends did. Almost everybody I knew did. I didn't; I was frightened. I always imagined what it would be like getting caught; the guilt, the awful feeling of knowing you'd been told not to do something, having done it and then being caught and punished. The appalling sequentiality of it, as though it was all pre-ordained, already set up. I couldn't bear that. Fear stopped me. Fear of guilt. Fear of the sheer embarrassment. Fear of what my mother would say.
So instead I ended up feeling guilty about not joining in with my friends.
Betty lit another cigarette. I lay there thinking.
I didn't think I'd even stolen any hearts. Not with my looks. I had my fans when I was Weird, and sure some of them were female, but that was different. It's a very dubious proposition indeed that fans actually love their idols; they worship them but they don't, can't, love them. It might feel like love, but have kids, adolescents, suddenly learned how to tell what is and isn't love? Jesus, I didn't know when I was that age. I don't even know very much more about it all now, and I've been trying to work it out for half my life.
But even if you can call the glorification of the average star 'love', I wasn't even a normal idol. I think I was chosen by some kids as a sort of anti-hero figure, proof that you didn't have to be pretty to be in rock, but there was also a sort of adult-baiting perversity about making me an object of adulation. Kids stuck posters of me up on their walls to shock their parents. Weird leered down, mirror-shaded, wild-haired, scowl-mouthed, from thousands of bedroom walls, something menacing but contained; a safe cheap thrill and a kind of token totem of glossy threat. I displaced the prettier stars so that kids could make a point; as though, in its own small, modest way, my elevation to honorary stardom prefigured the half-sincere, half-pretended disgustrionics of punk.
Or maybe I was a different sort of threat, and kids encountering parental resistance to their latest choice of clothes or decoration used me for comparison; you think this is bad; think yourself lucky I don't look like him. Could be even simpler of course; maybe they just found my big stupid face funny.
No, I don't think I broke or stole any hearts. I didn't steal Inez'; that was safely under lock and key, somewhere deep inside her. It had been stolen once before, and she'd had to pay a lot — in exactly what currency of the heart, I never did find out — to get it back, battered and torn. It would never escape or be stolen again. She was in control from the start. We lived on her terms.
Christine... no, she loved me for a while, or said she did, but it was as a friend, I think... Maybe even as a pet. That was the way I felt with her; like a big stupid clumsy dog; likeable and loveable, but too keen to please, too liable to jump up and slobber all over your face, and slap ornaments off tables with a wagging tail.
There were others: Anthea, Rebecca, Sian, Sally, Sally-Ann, Cindy, Jas, Naomi ... but I don't think they really lost their hearts to me either, and I don't think I wanted them to, really. Too much responsibility. I wanted to be liked, not loved. Love was dangerous. Love could cripple, love could kill.
But I never wrote songs like that. My songs, when they were about love, were fairly conventional, if a little more enlightened than the standard of the time (and one hell of a lot more enlightened and unobjectionable than what you'll find in the con�temporary rump of rock, heavy metal). The most I ever did was write sarcastically about love songs ('Love in Transit'; 'Well when the seas freeze, and the air leaves, will you really still be loving? Will you behave, past the grave? And are the ghosts of dead lovers still coming?'), which is better than nothing, but not vastly so.
I was too conventional altogether. I ought to have spread my wings, flexed my muscles; all that shit. I could have written different songs, I could have been more radical, more adven�turous, more daring. Instead I just kept on churning out the same old stuff. Oh it changed a little as we went on, but not that much. Why did I keep doing that? It wasn't the money; after the first couple of albums, and finding the number of cover versions being done, I knew I could live quite comfortably for the rest of my life without writing another note, and that was really all that con�cerned me. So what was it? Why did I produce all those nice hummable songs?
Because it was easy. Because it was expected of me. Because it was what people seemed to want. Because they always seemed to see more in what I was doing than I did, and the tunes I thought all very standard and conventional were praised as stretching the limits of the popular song, and creating a fusion of rock and classical styles. (What? My knowledge of classical music began and ended with the fact I didn't like it. I thought you fused rock and classical music by putting strings on a backing track... and we only ever used strings twice in about sixty songs... But if that's what people say, who am I to argue?)
But I should have made the effort. I ought to have experimented more. I was writing the sort of songs I wanted to write, but I should have wanted to write different sorts of songs. I know me; it wouldn't have been difficult to interest myself in something a bit more challenging and original. If I'd done that, if I'd listened to different types of music, I'd have thought, 'Hey, I quite like this. This is okay... but I could do it better,' and at least have made the attempt. But I never got round to it.
Betty's exhaled smoke made a grey-brown cloud across the tall window on the far side of the bright, warm room. Smoke rolled slowly against grey cloud. A few seagulls crossed the sky.
There was a little more noise than usual from St Vincent Street; they were ceremonially opening the wonderful new Britoil building across the road, and the area was thick with police and security men.
I had, reluctantly, allowed a policeman into the folly that morning, to check the roof of the tower for snipers. I don't think he liked the look of me any more than I liked the look of him, but at least I hadn't had a police marksman stationed on my roof.
Betty sighed and stubbed her fag out in the saucer, exhaling smoke and lying back. Her breasts were slipping out again. The very tops of her aureoles were exposed above the sheet. She licked her lips, gazing vacantly at the far wall. She stretched, still not looking at me, put one of her arms back behind her, between her head and the white plaster wall; blonde hair spilled over her smooth forearm, gold on white. I lay there, thinking about what her mouth was going to taste like; faint disgust and extreme nostalgia combining.
Maybe I could ask her not to smoke when she's with me; I'm the client after all. But I couldn't. That would put a barrier between us, make everything less natural. I'd no sooner ask her to do that than ask her to do some of the 'special' things some of her other clients requested.
But I guessed I was a fool to pretend that my relationship with Betty was anything other than a commercial transaction. Can't buy me friendship. Well, I'd settle for sex and a chat. Even if the sex was rubberised (Betty is — very responsibly — worried about AIDS) and the chat only reminds me of things I'd rather forget.