Two months later, on an impulse during one of my weekly calls home from the phone box on the corner of the street, I invited Pete to come and watch the band’s first-ever live gig. I was so excited about it, and I suddenly really wanted to see a friendly face in the audience – assuming there would even be an audience. We were playing in the function room of The Five Bells. Every time I’d been in that pub previously, the only clientele had been elderly gentlemen in raincoats hunched on bar stools, grimly sipping pints and ignoring each other.
‘Up to London?’ Pete repeated, as if London was a four-day camel ride away.
‘Yes, up to London. Don’t, if you don’t want to!’
‘Well, I could, I suppose. It’ll be half term. Can I stay on your sofa?’
I looked out of the phone box window and could see the pathetic excuse for a sofa that even we squatters had rejected as being too disgusting. It was languishing on its back in the front garden, looking drunk, stuffing spilling from its stained cushions. Fortunately, it was highly unlikely that any of the neighbours would complain – apparently the entire street, a once-handsome crescent of redbrick terraced apartment buildings, was a squat. Europe’s largest squat, we found out some years later when it was raided by the police and it was on the local news.
I hadn’t confessed to Mum and Pete that I was squatting. They thought I was in a flatshare funded by my job in the local leisure centre. I did have a job there as a receptionist, but only one day a week.
‘Um … yeah, you can crash at our place, sure. Bring the sleeping bag.’
I thought it would be better to let him see my current living arrangements when he arrived, rather than whip him up into a frenzy of stress about it beforehand. Pete could be a right old woman at times. But I was reasonably confident that once he’d seen how nice the boys were and how homely we’d made the place, he wouldn’t freak out as much as if I told him outright I was living in a squat.
He didn’t know about me and Samantha yet either. I decided I’d cross that bridge when I came to it too; and that would depend entirely on whether she deigned to put in an appearance at the gig. She’d better, I thought. She’d been away at Greenham for the past three weeks, but she knew it was our first – I’d made her write the date down in her notebook last time I saw her.
It would be a lot for Pete to take in, but I didn’t like lying to him and I felt bad that we were already so distant from one another.
‘So will you come?’
‘I’d like to, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to afford the train. And how do I get to your place from Waterloo?’
I tutted. ‘It’s not hard. Jubilee line – the silver one – straight here. We’re a one-minute walk away from Willesden Green station. You could always hitch up if you can’t afford the train.’
‘Hitchhike?’ Pete sounded appalled, and I rolled my eyes.
‘God, Pete, grow a pair! It’s how we all get around.’
Samantha did, anyhow. She never went to Greenham by any other means, unless someone gave her a lift.
‘Mez, you mustn’t! It’s so dangerous. Mum would have an eppy.’
‘Oh, put a sock in it, Pete, it’s fine. Look, I’ve got to go, I don’t have any more ten pences. Just aim to be there between one and three on Friday. We have to go and set up and soundcheck about four.’
I just had time to give him the address, directions from the tube and the name of the pub in case he was late, then the beeps went, and the line was dead. I wasn’t convinced he’d really come, but I hoped he would. I missed him.
And I wanted him to see me fronting the band. After my initial nerves, I loved being the lead singer. I became someone else in front of that microphone. I’m sure a psychiatrist would have had a field day with it, but it was as if all my grief and rage at Dad’s death channelled itself into my voice and out through the speakers.
‘Woah,’ Marsh had said, the first time I screamed out one of the more militant protest numbers we’d written, staring at me as if seeing me for the first time. ‘You’re terrifying.’
I beamed. I felt like I was seeing me for the first time too.
There was no mirror large enough in the squat to practise my snarl into, but I did it in the mirrors at work instead. As a member of staff I got free swimming passes too, and I went three times a week to swim and, more importantly, shower afterwards, the song lyrics churning through my head in constant earworms as I ploughed up and down the lane. I took all my dirty knickers into the shower with me once a week and washed them with the same shampoo I used on my hair.
I did that on the morning of the gig – I wanted at least to have clean hair and pants for my debut. We’d practised so hard for it and, even though I said so myself, we weren’t half bad. Webbo had borrowed a mate’s drum kit, and the pub already had a backline so we had everything we needed. As I dried my hair with the wall dryer in the women’s changing room, my nostrils were filled with the scent of chlorine and my brain with the random to-do list of what needed completing before showtime: write set lists; take Pete for a pint to calm him down after he’d seen the squat; shoplift some gaffer tape as we were nearly out; put make-up on; inspect the sheet on my mattress to make sure it wasn’t too revolting, since Pete and I would have to top and tail; fill my oil lamps up so we’d have some light when we got home; buy – or nick – shoelaces for my DMs as the old ones kept breaking…
I didn’t approve of stealing anything, by the way, and always wrote the purloined items down in the back of my diary. As soon as I had any money, I bought the same thing somewhere else and replaced it on the shelf of the original shop I’d nicked it from.
I’d wanted to make a banner bearing our name, to put behind Webbo’s drum kit, but I wouldn’t have time for this gig and I didn’t have a spare sheet or any black paint. We’d called ourselves Cohen, which was the name of the people who used to live in the flat before we took it over. Their post still arrived in surprising quantities and we burned it all in the brazier. It never looked like anything interesting.
I turned the corner into our terrace, these thoughts still chasing themselves through my mind, and was about twenty feet along the pavement before I noticed the tall figure of the woman ahead, shoulders bowed by the heavy rucksack on her back, red hair obscured by the roll of her sleeping bag…
‘Samantha!’ I shouted joyfully, pounding towards her as she turned and opened her arms wide, beaming at me.
I threw myself at her. ‘You came back!’
‘Of course, honey – as if I’d miss your first show!’
Then she kissed me, long and hard, and I didn’t even care that a passing dog walker sucked his teeth at us. It was only when we finally came up for air that I had the thought, Oh shit, now I’m going to have to tell Pete.