TRACK 23 Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve)?
I noticed now that I was stricken with anxiety whenever I wasn’t with Melissa. It was a startling and unpleasant new development. The anxiety came from not knowing if I was doing enough, if I was doing all I could, to make her love me. Let Melissa love me was in my head all the time and made it hard to concentrate. I couldn’t get used to the idea that there was nothing I could do to change the way she felt. Sometimes I thought my anxiety would kill me, though I wasn’t certain exactly how it would accomplish this.
With Melissa’s encouragement, I used her flat as a recording studio. I downloaded royalty-free drum loops off the Internet and modified them on the sampler. Nick and I went to charity shops and outdoor markets, digging up obscure CDs I thought might contain interesting, usable beats. One of my favorites was a selection of Cuban rhythms. I didn’t think anyone in Afghanistan would care if I nicked four seconds of it. I decided it would be perfect for my punk-reggae song “Holiday in Afghanistan.” I lifted out a few seconds of the beat I wanted to use and recorded it onto the sampler. Then I looped it so there were no seams. I recorded this basic beat as a track on the digital recorder.
Track by track, I started adding instruments. I got out the drum machine and played along to my basic beat in real time on the touch-sensitive pads. Each pad was a different part of a drum kit, and I had thirty drum kits to choose from. I spent a few hours writing and recording a bass line with Jake’s custom Fender bass that had both Precision-bass and Jazz-bass pickups.
We went to a music shop and bought a tiny, secondhand electronic keyboard for five quid. It was meant to be a child’s toy, and the keys lit up pink when I played them. But it had the capacity for making different sounds like organ, jazz piano, and brass. I connected it to the digital eight-track using its headphone jack, and the recorder was so superb it sounded like real keyboards. It only had two octaves, but that was sufficient.
Late one afternoon when Nick was off with some mates, Melissa came upstairs to find me. She took off her scarf and shook out her hair, which shone in the overhead light. “I’m absolutely shagged out. Fancy taking a night off and watching a video with me?” Suddenly her tone changed. “What is it?” She looked at my horrified expression.
“You’ve been absolutely fucked?”
“What? No, tired. Shagged out is tired. Not shag as in fucking.” She’d been on-call for after-hours care the night before, had been called out twice, and hadn’t got much sleep.
“Oh. I thought you meant you’d been out with Martin.”
“I’m not shagging Martin,” Melissa laughed. “But if I do, you’ll be the first person I tell.”
I looked up at her, at the way her gray, cable-knit sweater hung on her body, accentuating her broad shoulders, and wanted to say, don’t do it. He’s not good enough for you. But how could I know that? I’d never even met the bloke.
I went out and got vegetable biryani, curry, and a few of my favorite horror films. I felt like a good scare and told Melissa she’d benefit from one, too. “Take your mind off frightening reality,” I said. One of the videos I’d rented was an old one, The Amityville Horror, because Melissa had never seen it. James Brolin and his new wife Margot Kidder buy a possessed house in Amityville, New York. He gradually turns into one of the people who’d lived in the house previously, a man who’d murdered his entire family. Every night, he wakes up at precisely 3:15 a.m. because that’s when the bloke he’s turning into killed everyone with a shotgun.
We turned off the lights in the back sitting room and huddled together on the couch. Even though I’d seen The Amityville Horror before, it still frightened me. The demonically possessed house locked the babysitter in the closet. Melissa grabbed my arm, and I screamed. “I thought you’d seen this,” she whispered.
“What’s your point?” I said.
James Brolin discovered a direct passageway to hell in his basement. Melissa was almost sitting in my lap. “God,” she yelled at the hapless family on the telly, “the walls are fucking bleeding! What’s your first clue you should get out of the fucking house?”
After it ended, we were both terrified. “Wasn’t that fun?” I asked.
“Fun,” Melissa agreed. We went upstairs, and I got my hat and gloves off Jake’s bed. “Where the bloody hell do you think you’re going?” Melissa asked.
“Home,” I said with false bravado.
“Are you mad? You’re not seriously going out in the dark by yourself?”
I didn’t like the thought any more than she did.
“You scare me to death then think you’re leaving?” Melissa said. “You’re staying the night or I’ll never sleep. You can leave anytime after daylight.”
I shrugged gratefully and turned to head downstairs to the spare bedroom. There was a telly in there I could watch if I couldn’t fall asleep.
Melissa shook her head. “Uh uh. You’re sleeping in here with me and we’re locking the door.”
As she got ready for bed, I sneaked my medication out of Jake’s room and went into the loo. As I swallowed my pills with water from the tap, Melissa rapped lightly on the door. “Come in, Melissa.”
“Here.” She opened a cabinet and handed me a fresh toothbrush. She was wearing a clean Pretenders tour T-shirt with a picture of Chrissie Hynde and her blue Telecaster on the front.
“Oh, ta,” I said. When I was done using it, I put it proudly next to hers.
In the bedroom, Melissa handed me another tour item, a gray sweatshirt that said “Pretenders” on it in pink letters, and I beamed happily at her. I carefully climbed into bed next to her, and Melissa turned out the light.
“Oh, no.” I sat up suddenly. “What time is it?”
“Stop that,” Melissa said. “It isn’t anywhere near 3:15 a.m. yet.”
“I was just asking. Oh, no!” I grabbed Melissa, and we both screamed.
“What is it?” She turned on the light.
“Is that James Brolin climbing up the stairs?”
“Stop it.” Melissa shoved me. She turned off the light again.
“I thought you’d want to know,” I said.
“Well, I don’t. Tell Mr. Brolin to make sure the door shuts completely on his way out,” Melissa murmured sleepily.
“Melissa?” I shook her.
“What?” she moaned.
“Satan wants to know if he can have a cup of tea.”
“Yes,” Melissa said. “Yes. Satan can have a cup of tea and even a biscuit. Alright?”
“Melissa?”
She sighed. “What?”
“Satan wants to know can he cook something in your kitchen?”
“Just so long as it isn’t an animal. This is a cruelty-free zone.”
“No sacrificial babies or virgins?”
“I should think not. Now go to sleep. And tell Satan to do the washing up or I’m sealing off the passageway to hell in the spare bedroom forever.”
“Melissa,” I said, after we’d been lying quietly a while, “do you think you’ll sleep with Martin?”
“What?” Her tone told me that now she was awake. “I don’t know. Why?”
“No reason. Just—you don’t have to.”
“What makes you think I don’t know that?” She sounded annoyed.
“I don’t know.” I knew I’d said the wrong thing. “I suppose I meant he shouldn’t pressure you if you don’t want to.”
“What makes you think he’s pressuring me? What’s this sudden interest in my sex life or lack of one?”
“Do you like him a lot?”
“If I didn’t like him, I wouldn’t go out with him.”
“Do you practice safe sex?”
“Amanda. What’s got into you?”
“Nothing. I hope he appreciates you, that’s all,” I said sullenly.
“Are you trying to tell me something?” Melissa shifted around, and in the dark I saw her staring at me.
“I’m trying not to tell you something.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Do you know something about Martin that I don’t? Have you even met him? Look, Amanda, I’ll have him fill out a questionnaire before I even think about sleeping with him. Happy now?”
“Overjoyed. It’s a big decision.”
“No, love, it isn’t. It either happens or it doesn’t. I’m sorry to disappoint you.”
“Don’t say that. You never disappoint me.”
“If you’re afraid I’ll fall in love with him and disappear or something, I won’t. Is that what’s bothering you? I don’t do that to my mates. Now will you please shut up and go to sleep?”
I lay there castigating myself for coming too close to saying too much.