Dance On Fire - Chapter 09

The final notes hung there, suspended in the clear air of the white room.

‘Do you know what that was?’ Spike said. Pete hadn’t realised she knew he was there. She turned away from the piano to face him.

‘Yes, I think so. It was a… Schubert piano sonata, wasn’t it?’

She seemed surprised for a moment. ‘Yes, his Piano Sonata in A Major. D664. I didn’t expect you to know that. But, these days we seem to know so little about each other. Back in the old days, the good old days, in the beginning, we knew more or less everything about each other. In those days, though, we used to spend so much time together. Do you know when we last talked, really talked, to each other?’

‘Er… a couple of weeks, a month or two? I dunno.’ Pete shrugged.

‘Months is right, yes…. It was when we first discussed the mini-tour thing. Now here we are way past the end of it. It finished and you went off with that Suzy woman. Months.’

‘Yeah… well.’

‘Like I said on the phone I read that… that thing that she wrote - in the tabloid,’ Spike said. ‘My Steamy Nights with Passionate Pete - the Raunchy Recluse Rockstar!’

Pete sighed. ‘She did a good job on me, that one.’

‘Yes, what was it? Five, no, three times a night, eh?’

‘Absolute rubbish. The only thing I can mange more than once a night these days is to get up for a piss. I know what they mean now by the wee small hours.’ Pete paused. ‘You know, at the time, she more or less told me that she was taking me for a ride… and I let her do it.’

‘That good was she?’

Pete nodded, smiling despite himself. ‘She could su… er.’

‘A virtuoso performer of the trouser-flute sonata?’

‘Er… yes.’ Pete nodded. ‘Anyway, it turns out that they've given her a job on the paper after that piece - it was that she wanted - not me, not the band. That book she was on about was all rubbish. It was a job on a tabloid that she was after all the time. She just used me,’ he said.

‘Well, I suppose that is the world we live in,’ Spike said. ‘It is all false, an illusion.’ She closed the piano lid. ‘You know, I was just trying to remember the last time anyone called me Cordelia - apart from family, of course. I remembered eventually - it was my piano teacher, Mrs Dawes. It was when I told her I was giving up my piano lessons. She begged me not to do it. She said I could become a pretty good pianist. The Schubert was her favourite piece.’ She shrugged. ‘Anyway, I just suddenly felt ridiculous. Here I am a grown woman - forty-three - and everyone still calls me by my teenage nickname. When my mother was my age, she had three children. Sometimes, I wonder if I did the right thing.’

‘I thought you said you didn’t want children? And, well….’

‘I didn’t. I knew I didn’t want an ordinary life, like my parents, like my mother especially. But… look at this.’ She gestured around the big white room and the doors leading out to the swimming pool and the garden. ‘We started out as rebels, almost revolutionaries, and we’ve ended up with all the comfortable upper middle-class stuff we were all so… against… in the beginning. I never wanted to be rich and respectable. I wanted to go to my grave as a shocking uncompromising old bohemian, scandalising ordinary people right up to my dying day.’ She looked up at Pete and smiled apologetically. ‘Sorry. Just a bit pissed off, I suppose.’

‘Anyway,’ Pete said. ‘The reason why you wanted to see me?’

‘Do you remember, all those months ago, after the last World tour ended, when they - the record company - asked us about doing one of those CD boxed sets - a sort of retrospective - for our twenty-fifth anniversary this year?’

‘Oh, yes. You decided you didn’t want to.’

‘I’ve changed my mind,’ Spike said. ‘I dunno… maybe it is my age… could be a mid-life crisis, or something. Maybe it’s….’ she shrugged. ‘I remember sitting next to Jenny’s hospital bed, after the accident… wishing I could… just speak to her, I suppose, apologise… try to make it up. It seemed so….’ Spike shrugged.

‘Unfinished?’

‘Yes, I suppose so. Perhaps that’s it.’

They sat down on the sofa, side by side. Spike’s hand was resting on Pete’s thigh.

‘Of course I'll do the boxed set,’ Pete said. ‘I was interested in doing it anyway. But what made you change your mind?’

‘I don’t know really. I suppose I’ve been thinking about it all, recently.’

‘About what?’

‘More or less what I said when you first came in, about how we have ended up here, how it was in the beginning, and the connection between then and now. But, I think there is something more to it than that.’ Spike took a cigarette from a box on the table.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Twenty-bloody-five years. Where did it all go?’ The smell of dope was suddenly strong in the air. She offered the spliff to Pete. He shook his head and Spike raised her eyebrows.

‘I’m driving,’ Pete said. ‘Dope plays havoc with me these days, if I try to do anything other than just sit and listen to music. Anyway, I gave up smoking altogether about four months ago, six months for ordinary, proper fags. I only went back on them during the tour. Funny, but as soon as it was over… well, after Suzy pissed off, I just stopped again.’

Spike stared. ‘But you said you’d never give up. What happened?’

‘I don’t know. I remember I just woke up one morning and didn’t feel like one, and - I suppose - eventually I just got out of the habit. After a week or two, I even stopped carrying my tobacco around. Anyway… you were saying…?’

‘I don’t really know. I’m not sure if I could even begin to explain it, not yet anyway. But I do feel that things have gone wrong somewhere. Do you remember those rumours about us playing the Millennium Dome at that New Year… millennium bash?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t know where the rumours started, but I think you put paid to them in that interview on the telly.’

‘Ah yes, you remember the Prime Minister saying how he was such a big fan of ours?’

‘I think he’s probably burned all his copies of albums now though.’ Spike lit another spliff. Pete almost reached out to take it from her hand. ‘I think that if you had agreed to us playing, it would be you, not Helena, heading off to the House of Lords.’

‘Don’t be daft,’ Pete said. ‘Could you imagine me in the House of Lords.’

Spike was silent for a moment. ‘Yes. Yes, I could. At times you could out-pontificate Bono, Geldof and Sting all put together.’ She saw the way he was staring at the spliff, almost drooling. ‘Go on, you could probably do with it,’ she said. ‘You can stay here tonight… we’ll get wrecked on dope and nostalgia together. And then, tomorrow we can go into the studio and get all the old tapes out.’

Pete took the spliff. ‘Have you got them all here?’

‘Oh yes. I wanted the studio finished before I moved in,’ Spike said. ‘Once it was done, one of the first things I did was get all the tapes together down here.’ She picked up a remote control from the table and pointed it across the room. Some music started; a solo piano.

Pete could not recognise the music at all. He raised an eyebrow at Spike.

‘Grieg,’ she said.

‘Ah, right. Where was I?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think you had really started yet.’ Spike got to her feet. ‘Hang on a minute longer though. First things first. White or red?’

‘Red, no… hang on. Do you have any beer? Real beer, proper English bitter?’

‘I dunno…. Hang on.’ Spike headed off towards the kitchen.

Pete stood up too and began to wander around the room. On one of the bookshelves, he found Spike's set of leather-bound scrapbooks. On the first page of the first scrapbook, there were pictures of Spike, Jenny and him in various combinations. Most taken in either Pete’s bedroom or Spike’s room in the student house. They looked young, earnest and eager.

He flicked through the early pages, and then back again. There was a change, a big change after Stan became their manager and they had to start taking it seriously. The time came when it changed from what was little more than a hobby, a spare time interest, to the central fact of their lives.