DO YOU KNOW THE FUNNIEST part of that whole scene with the KGB? I hadn’t even called Jet Lucas yet.
I’d looked at that piece of paper with his phone number on it maybe fifty times, but I couldn’t muster up the courage to actually call him. I kept thinking there had to be a catch somewhere – a trick, a joke, like Carrie being invited to the prom and ending up covered in pig’s blood. Which just goes to show you what was going on in my head. All Jet had said was that he wanted to talk to me about his concert – and here I was acting as if he’d asked me to elope with him. But I still could not make myself call the number.
And then the day after my interrogation session with the KGB, I was sitting in the library trying to think of a way to keep my sister out of their evil clutches and pursue my Jet Lucas dream … when he slid into the seat next to mine.
‘Hi, Luisa.’ He grabbed one of my books, flipped it open in front of his face and sort of ducked down behind it. ‘You never called me.’
Inside me, the tsunami was building again. Out loud, in a remarkably calm voice, I said, ‘I know, I’m sorry. I was going to, but …’
‘But … you were too busy? Washing your hair? Hanging out with the cool people?’ He was pretending to be hurt, which I didn’t buy for a minute.
I decided to tell the truth.
‘I wasn’t sure that you were serious.’
Now he was acting shocked. ‘You’re kidding? Why wouldn’t I be serious? What kind of guy do you think I am?’
Did he really want to know the answer to that? Maybe not, because he hurried on. ‘Why would I not be serious …’ He paused and turned his head to look at me for the first time. ‘Why would I not be serious about La Sombrita?’
He pronounced the name exactly right, rolling the r brightly and hitting the t so it was almost a d. It was so unexpected I forgot to act like I didn’t know what he was talking about.
‘I’m right, aren’t I?’ he said. ‘You are La Sombrita?’
I suddenly felt as if someone had ripped me open and everything hidden inside me had fallen out into the light. It wasn’t a good feeling.
‘How did you find out?’ I hissed. ‘No one knows about that site. Not even my family.’
He shrugged. ‘I just put two and two together from your blog. Musician father, the Spanish thing … it wasn’t that hard.’
I couldn’t look at him.
‘La sombrita. “The little shadow” in Spanish, right?’
Still I didn’t say anything and for a second he seemed worried, as if this wasn’t going the way he’d planned.
‘Hey,’ he said and his voice was softer now, kinder. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you. I think your stuff is great. I think …’ and he leant closer so that I could feel his breath on my cheek, ‘… we could make a great team.’
What did that mean? What did he want from me? I should have been ecstatic that Jet was even in the same building as me, but all I was was confused.
He seemed to be checking the room as though to make sure no one was listening in, something I should have found strange but didn’t. ‘I was thinking,’ he murmured, ‘maybe we could write some songs together? You and me? La Sombrita and Jet?’
By this time, I was way past confused and well on my way to total neural meltdown. I thought I managed to cover it pretty well though. ‘Why?’ I asked, with only a slight tremor in my voice – probably only about 5.5 on the Richter scale. ‘You don’t need me.’
He shrugged again. ‘Maybe I don’t need you. But,’ he went on, dropping into a sexy purr that made my whole body vibrate, ‘maybe I want you. Maybe I want to spend some time with my little shadow.’
Boy, was he a piece of work! And boy, was I far gone.
I suppose I should tell you about La Sombrita. That’s my songwriting name. At least, it’s the name I use on my MySpace site. It’s kind of dumb, I know, but I never thought anyone would figure out it was me. Like I told Jet, no one even knew that I wrote songs anymore. I did tell Meko, but I didn’t really explain what I meant so I don’t think she thought I was serious. She thought I wrote songs the way most teenagers write songs – because it sounds cool or romantic or something.
Dad and Nina didn’t know. I only ever picked up my guitar when they were out and I guess they just thought I’d given it up for good. I did give it up for a long time – I’m not sure why. At first it seemed almost disrespectful, somehow. Too frivolous or trivial. I always felt I should be doing something more practical. There was so much to do and nobody else seemed to want to do it.
But then something happened. Not that I had some great epiphany or anything, but I felt so hollow – so vacant and empty, like a big chunk of me had been surgically removed – I knew I had to try and fill the hole with something before it got so big I disappeared completely. I also knew music was the only thing that would work.
I used to look at myself in the mirror sometimes – mostly just to check that I was still there. And maybe I was imagining it, but I thought I could actually see the empty place inside me – like looking at an X-ray of yourself and only seeing shadow where your insides should be. And I remembered that I’d seen that same emptiness somewhere before – in Grandma Abbie.
Poor Abbie. I called her that, remember, because I couldn’t pronounce abuelita properly – but then it caught on and everyone called her Grandma Abbie, even the next-door neighbours.
I loved going to Abbie’s house. It was so different from ours – always dark and gloomy inside with lots of big old wooden chests and cupboards full of strange and interesting things. To me, it was like another world – magical and mysterious and exciting.
One day I asked Abbie why her house was so dark and she told me it was because she’d left the sun behind in Spain. She said she only had room in her suitcase for a few belongings, and the sun was so big and hot there wasn’t enough space for it.
‘But Abbie,’ I said, ‘the sun is right there. Out the window. You just need to open the curtains.’
‘Ah, Lulu,’ Abbie sighed, ‘ees not my sun. Ees not the real sun. Ees not the same thing at all.’ And she would sit in her chair with her back firmly to the blacked-out windows and peer sadly at me through the gloom.
That’s what Abbie’s emptiness was made of – a hole where the sun should be.
I think that must have been when I decided I would go to Spain one day and see the real Spanish sun – Abbie’s sun, which she sighed for every day but never saw again.
And that’s kind of why I started playing again. So I would never be like Abbie and regret losing something for the rest of my life.
At first, I would only play other people’s songs – it seemed safer, somehow. But then all this stuff began to erupt out of me – stuff I didn’t even know was there. I couldn’t stop it, so I just poured it all out into my notebooks and locked them away. It was almost as if my guitar was some sort of lightning rod, channelling all the energy bottled up inside me. For an hour or two when I had that guitar in my hands I’d feel stitched back together again. For a while I would actually feel like the old, solid Luisa and not the strange, brittle, hollowed-out Luisa I seemed to have become.
And now Jet knew. In some ways it was a relief. Secrets are horrible. Real secrets, I mean. They’re like lead weights that someone’s sewn into the lining of your clothes when you weren’t looking – and they get heavier and heavier the longer you carry them around.
Perhaps I should have told Dad I was playing again – but it seemed cruel somehow to even talk to him about it. Since he’d stopped writing real music himself, he didn’t listen to his old vinyl records anymore and he never played his guitar, not even for work. He wrote his jingles on a keyboard instead. I know he must have missed it as much as I did – more, probably – but he just couldn’t bear to go there.
I can remember so clearly how Dad’s face would change when he talked about music. It was as though a light would go on inside him, like when you open the fridge door. The light was there on the nights when Dad’s old band-mates would come over and drink too many beers, thumping their guitars and bellowing away in the back yard until grumpy old Mr Pirelli next door threatened to call the cops – and it was there on those Sunday afternoons out in the back shed.
I guess I thought that if Dad knew that I still wrote, it would just make it worse for him and I couldn’t do it to him.
And there was no one else to tell.