Beneath the Blonde Read Free Page A

had set them up with a new tour manager, dates were being booked and time on the road was coming up in the new year. Only three months to start with, but that was three months too long for Alex and Steve who both hated to go away—and nine months too short for Dan who, having just broken up with his boyfriend, would have been happy to go on the road forever and never come back. Siobhan knew that they stood a chance of becoming something with this album, of building on their first success and actually making all the work really matter, not just the years she’d been with the band but everything else too: the hundreds of nights in grotty clubs and pubs since she was sixteen, the effort she’d put into trying to make homes out of sad bedsits and worseshared squats with Greg. She knew that Beneath The Blonde On Tour had to be something incredible.
    She also knew that the silent phone calls she was receiving at three in the morning were starting to annoy her. The nasty anonymous letters weren’t very pleasant and when the first bunch of yellow roses arrived, she realized she was frightened and maybe it wasn’t just a joke after all.

FOUR
    The band had been Alex’s idea. Stoned again in the muggy summer of 1988, sitting on the roof of his squat in Vauxhall, gas tanks and the Oval hazy in the near distance, he was burning his back and rewriting his fourth poem of the day. Stuck on line three, he was relieved to hear Greg shout up from the street. He stood on the warm pavement with a twelve pack of beers and the bongos he’d borrowed for a party the night before. Alex threw the keys from the roof and watched after them as they floated down to the street on their pink silk handkerchief parachute. Five minutes later Greg dropped a cold beer two inches in front of his new friend’s face. “I bought them this morning and left a couple out so they’d warm up for your crap taste buds.”
    “Very considerate. Unusual for a colonial. Smoke?”
    To Greg’s nodded agreement, Alex rolled his fourth joint of the day—it was one-thirty in the afternoon, he’d been up since ten and he was cutting down.
    The two young men smoked and drank through the heat of the afternoon, enjoying the solid wall of breeze-free London heat and the freedom of summer. Greg was an engineer for a recording company and loathed every minute of his weekday job. He’d taken the job hoping it would help him with his own music, but found that the best of his work involved recording cheap radio ads with bad voice-over actors, while in the worst moments he was just a glorified (and slightly better paid) runner. Alex was signing on every second Tuesday morning and putting in twelve-hour days ata pine furniture factory in West London for twenty quid a day cash in hand. He’d just arrived back from two weeks with his family in Cork and was gearing himself up to the regime of fortnightly lying to the government and daily lies to the tube inspectors and then wasting himself at the weekend as a relief from hating his weekdays.
    As they sat and smoked and drank, Alex occasionally made forays all the way down to the cellar kitchen to bring up another slice of bread and jam for himself or bread and Vegemite for Greg, who complained that the Vegemite in Alex’s kitchen was Australian, not New Zealand, and therefore not the real thing. And then ate it anyway. After two warmish beers and a half-hearted attempt at conversation about cricket, Greg, who had cleared his own flat of party goers at six that morning, fell asleep and Alex finished his poem. Then Alex fell asleep, Greg woke up, rolled another joint, read Alex’s poem, edited Alex’s poem and wandered downstairs to chat in the kitchen to Alex’s Spanish girlfriend. Mariella had spent the day at Kennington Lido and after too long asleep by the reflected water, was applying after-sun to the backs of her arms and legs. He stayed long enough to make coffee until three of her dyke friends arrived with two dogs and a