Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
‘You too, darlin’. You’re a sight for sore eyes, that’s for sure.’
His barrow-boy patter hadn’t changed at all, and neither had his way of looking every woman up and down as if he was sizing them up for a new outfit. He always made her want to hand him a tape measure and be done with it.
He’d aged in a much more obvious way than her, and it wasn’t that she was bigging herself up.
His hair was almost totally white, and his face was gaunt.
He might have thought that tight leather-look jeans and a black T-shirt overlaid with plenty of silver jewellery was a youthful look, but all it did was emphasise his small frame.
What was considered wiry back in the day had become skinny.
She’d often noticed it with British men.
They went one way or the other. Thin legs and flat bottoms or ruddy faces and big guts, neither of which was particularly attractive.
However hollow his face looked, Frank’s unnerving smile was still in play; the smile she’d learnt often meant trouble ahead.
He finally released her from his clutches, and it was her turn to be scrutinised.
‘You don’t look a day over thirty.’
Now he was going in for over-the-top flattery, or rather outright bullshit. Fifty she’d take as a compliment, but thirty was ridiculous. She needed to change the subject.
‘Is anyone else here?’
‘No, no, you’re the first. It’s only the tech crew on stage.’
As he spoke, a commotion at the back of the auditorium let her know someone else had indeed arrived. Or judging by the noise, quite a few people.
Juice, a former boyband, whose lead singer, Jake, she’d once had an ill-advised snog with, came bounding down the aisle. They were now a troupe of middle-aged men, carrying their own equipment in cases and mainly wearing cowboy hats.
‘Suze!’
A man picked her up and twirled her round. It could well be Jake, but she really didn’t have a clue. It had been nearly forty years, and she could barely recall him anyway, whereas Frank’s face was one you didn’t, or more accurately couldn’t, forget.
‘We heard you’d be here. Where have you been hiding yourself away all these years?’
Back on solid ground after Jake put her down again, Suzie pulled herself up to her full height, which meant she was still dwarfed by the man above her.
‘Not hiding anywhere, honest, just living.’
‘Okaaay.’
The man with the cowboy hat shading his eyes seemed rather surprised by her sharp response.
Had she been a bit of a walkover back then?
Happy-go-lucky Suze who went with the flow?
One of the lads, always up for a beer and a laugh, with a ready smile on her face?
She’d been so young, the details were hard to recall.
But perhaps there was some truth in the image of herself back then.
Not that she’d slept around, although she could have mistakenly given the impression that she might.
There was plenty of opportunity; they were all young and starting out, and the need to decompress after a gig was real, however you decided to relax.
The fact that she was choosy had undoubtedly made her more of a target for the likes of Jake and Frank, who’d seen her as a challenge.
It had been a different story with Christian.
From the moment she’d met him, she’d known he was someone she should keep at arm’s length – and she’d failed miserably on all counts.
He’d not treated her as one of the lads, far from it.
So far from it she couldn’t allow herself to go there.
She hoped her neck wasn’t about to go red and betray the warmth that had rushed through her body and was swiftly making its way towards her face, at the mere thought of his hands on her body.
Thank goodness he wasn’t about to show up. She’d tried so hard to put him squarely in the past. A tiny voice asked her why she was all hot and bothered if that truly was the case, but she stamped it down.
Suzie turned to the five men who made up the band, now ranged in front of her.
They’d often played the same venues, and their dressing room had virtually been a revolving door for women within a five-mile radius.
They were still a credible threat, albeit to the middle-aged female population now rather than to the twentysomethings, but still.
‘What about you lot? What have you been up to?’
It definitely was Jake at the head of the pack; she could see his sparkling green eyes now he’d taken his cowboy hat off at last. He answered her question on behalf of them all, much as he had done back then.
‘Making music, hitting the road, gigging wherever we can. This new fad for Eighties music’s been a big boost for us.’
Suzie smiled. She was genuinely pleased for them. They’d been the nice guys back then, and she hoped they hadn’t changed too much.
‘That’s great to hear. And have you bumped into any of the others we used to hang out with on your travels? Pete and Jess, Jonno or … maybe even Christian?’
She had to do it, didn’t she? She’d promised herself she wouldn’t, but she couldn’t help mentioning his name. ‘Mentionitis’ was a real thing, not just something talked about in books.
Jake looked like he was giving it some serious thought.
‘Jonno’s back in rehab, and Pete and Jess eventually got it together and went off to start a sheep farm in Australia.’
Suzie turned her mouth down.
‘Poor Jonno, he could never keep off the booze, could he? But good on Pete and Jess for getting away from it all.’
She left a pause but couldn’t let it go on for more than a few seconds. She kept her voice light.
‘And Christian?’
‘Oh yeah, good old Christian. We caught up with him and his band at a pub gig in Cornwall last year.’ Jake’s shrewd eyes were trained on her. ‘You were a bit keen on him back in the day, weren’t you?’
She’d better disabuse him of that notion once and for all. Any focus on Christian was a bad idea, and she silently cursed herself for being the one to bring him up first.
‘God, no, not me. He had more women on the go than Casanova. And he was rather too fond of the marching powder, on top of the booze and fags. I’m surprised he’s not in rehab too, the way he used to push his body to the limits.’
She’d shouted the first few words. Was she sounding like the lady who doth protest too much? She knew all too agonisingly well the limits that Christian’s body could be pushed to and what he’d made her feel. Why couldn’t she shut up?
Jake gave her a thorough once-over before replying. She willed herself not to go red.
‘Oh no, not anymore. Christian’s a reformed character. He’s mister clean living now. Organic farming and all that stuff. Well, except for the smoking, but you’ve got to allow people at least one vice.’
Jake’s dazzling white smile almost blinded her for a moment.
He’d obviously had his teeth done and wanted to get maximum value out of them by smiling a lot.
Looking at him closely, there’d definitely been a tonne of Botox too; his forehead was suspiciously smooth, and his skin was unnaturally orange.
She’d never gone in for costly cosmetic procedures – there wasn’t much call for it on her little island – and after years in Greece her tan was real, not out of a bottle, although she tried to keep out of the sun most of the time.
But to be fair to the lads in Juice, she’d not had the pressure of keeping up a singing career all these years, where youthful looks were the golden ticket as much as talent. Good on them for sticking it out.
Jake moved a step closer, a little too close for her liking.
‘So, what about you, then, Suze. Where have you been?’
They all used to call her Suze back then.
‘Living happily on a Greek island. Running a bar and bringing up my two sons, now fully formed men.’
‘Ah, that solves the mystery. We all wondered where you’d disappeared off to back then. And are you still with their dad?’
Jake made his question sound like it would be impossible to retain interest in someone for that long. Suzie truly believed it was possible, but she’d have to tell him the truth.
‘Nope. Amicably divorced, as they say.’
She noted Jake’s eyes widen with interest at her answer.
Surely he wasn’t going to try and tick off the one who’d got away just to prove a point.
Jake’s tastes had always been for the much younger groupies who hung around the band.
That probably took in forty- and fifty-somethings now, as the guys in the band had been a few years older than her.
A couple of them must be approaching seventy, in fact, but, to be fair, they still looked OK, although she was seeing it from the perspective of a sixty-year-old woman herself, rather than the person she’d been back then.
Anyone in their twenties would definitely see them as old men.
She fixed their young faces in her mind.
For a moment, it was as if the time since she’d last seen the band had melted away.
Here they all were again, playing the same roles, professionally and personally.
But if Jake thought she was going to flirt with him, or worse, he had another think coming.
They might not have changed that much in the intervening period, still carving out their groove on the road, but she sure had.
Was it a bad idea to try and recreate that time?
Should she just have accepted it was over? It was rather too late now.
She got the feeling that Frank was listening in to the whole conversation too, even though he was chatting away to the sound engineer.
That man had always had eyes and ears in the back of his head.
She just hoped he hadn’t heard her mention Christian.
Throwing any sort of bone to Frank to toy with was dangerous.
‘So that’s me. What about you, Jake? Marriage, kids?’
‘Oh, no. Always going to be a rolling stone, me. Never in one place for long enough to lay down roots.’