The boyfriend and the band

When people ask, 'Why did you stay?'

Me circa 1990. Who’s holding that burger? © Rebecca Whitney

His brother was in a band, quite a big band at the time. It was all very backstage bar, nicely louche and sleazy. At first it was fun, and then when it wasn’t, it was the free tickets and the getting-through-by-holding-the-hand-of-the-right-boy that rooted me there, and what kept the other girls beating down the door with their promises of blow jobs when the irony was, we’d all have had an infinitely better time with a nice group of mates on the other side of that wall, away from the fat bouncer and smelly dressing room with Jack Daniels rider. Always JD and Coke. I still hate that drink.

I read about Pamela Des Barres, how she claimed being a groupie gave her power. Access to crazy parties and the beds of men she’d never have otherwise met. Another self-proclaimed groupie, Cynthia Albritton, made plaster-casts of rock stars’ dicks. A currency traded for privileges: excitement, elevation and a freedom rarely afforded to women back then. Her name in history. I worked in the music industry and other women at the office had also arrived there through some kind of love interest, because that’s how it was then. The women who made it another way, the right way, were the anomalies. They were the true rock stars. But for a bumpkin like me, blindsided by a flicker of fame, I justified my access, freebies and minor role at an indie label by tapping into some sex-positive ideology, when in reality the pickings were pretty slim, and all the while, I had to pedal away at being worthy as a thousand sexier women hammered to be let in.

I met a nice woman at work. We became friends. She and the bf became friends too. We were a good trio. She was sharp and cut through his bullshit, a good lesson for me… if only. She and he used to go out drinking together on occasion, though he never teed it up with me first, batting away my questions when he arrived home. He seemed to enjoy inspiring that rackety fear in me. After a few of their pub sessions, I tore into her about his unfaithfulness and were they doing the same? She didn’t reply, simply left, and I never saw her again. He never saw her again either. He was angry at me for sending her away with my suspicions, and I was sad the friendship was lost – a female ally was hard to come by. For years I thought the break-up was my fault, when really it was his.

The band were staying in a hotel after one of their gigs. It was called the Adelphi or something, near the Science Museum, I think. I could be wrong on both these details because I was always pretty out of it at the end of an evening – the excesses of convincing myself I was having fun. The bf got out the cab and told me I wasn’t allowed in the hotel. Pop star lore dictated that Yoko was the curse who brought down The Beatles – girlfriends disrupt band harmony and creative flow… could they be anymore Spinal Tap? So, the partners weren’t welcome to the after-hours and I had to go home. Or perhaps it was just me who was barred – too green, too gauche, my internal metronome rocking between the shame of my naivety and my outrage – and his excuse was to blame the band.

I lay awake in our terrible bedsit in Willesden with its doll-sized sink and two-ring electric hob, wondering what the bf was engaging in besides the drink and drugs. The band loved that whole rock-n-roll thing, acting out the myths of their heroes. Rock star antics and star fuckers, trashed hotel rooms and the sexy decadence of it all even though most of the places they stayed were seedy few-stars on rainy British streets with warm mini bars and limited room service. And they were just a bunch of pale thin, barely post-pubescents. Streaks of piss getting laid. Later I heard a woman had been strapped to a bed. It might have been untrue, or perhaps I misheard – even after all this time, so much doubt, my instincts rewired from being told repeatedly I’d got it all wrong – although the possibility didn’t seem implausible. Apparently, she’d made herself available to whoever wanted her. I imagine the bf was one of them. Before he came home, to me.

I wonder if this woman ever thinks about that night. Perhaps the memory floats into her consciousness as she’s wiring money to her kids to help with their rent, or as she sits at her desk in a high-rise office and a dreamy light falls across her fingertips on the keyboard. Does the scene still excite her, make her proud or laugh? Is it a story she drunkenly whispers to friends at dinner parties about her wild and sexy youth? Or might replaying the event in her head bring her to a standstill on the street, the strength exiting her legs so fast she almost crashes to her knees?

The bf worked as a roadie for the band. I felt sorry for him because his brother was a big deal and the bf’s job was the help. Plus, there was this sense they only gave him the work of taping up the mic stands and lugging round the gear because they too felt sorry for him. The bf wanted to be the pop star but didn’t have the talent, only the looks and attitude, and he was always one step away from getting sacked because he used to get so fucked-up. His brother held this over him along with being more talented and famous. Buried in this rivalry, I intuited a more profound dynamic that’d been going on since they were two little scraps, the older brother forever keeping his sibling in his place. And this is where I stepped in, believing I could free the man stuck inside the boy.

He only had one pair of jeans. They were grey drainpipes that had once been black. He said he couldn’t afford new ones even though he always had money for endless pints of shit lager, and happily evacuated his wages into any waiting fruit machine. One time he arrived home with his crappy jeans covered in felt-tip drawings of dicks. He’d got so messed up at an after-party, he hadn’t known his legs were being scribbled on and had to ride the train with trousers decorated in a way that told everyone he was an arsehole. I knew about the arsehole bit, but I also absorbed the pain of only one pair of jeans and a big-noise brother. I took him shopping, helped him choose new 501’s and a couple of John Smedley tops. They were fashionable then and probably gave him more pulling power. Thanks to me. Years later, long after we’d broken up, I bumped into him and he was still wearing the same outfit, or a slightly newer version of it. It had become his uniform, a visual shorthand for dependable, intellectual, mature. I hadn’t realised when I helped choose the clothes that I was creating the illusion of a yearned-for reality, and on re-meeting him, I had a compulsion to apologise to all the women I’d inadvertently persuaded to sleep with him on account of him looking like a decent bloke. Shoulda left him in drainpipes.

I’d been unkind to a couple of boyfriends before him. I’d become attractive in my teens after a chubby, invisible childhood. The pretty-power had been new to me, opening unexpected doors, and I’d maladapted to this new sense-of-self. When the bf was being a shit, I remembered how I too had skipped over people’s feelings, so it seemed like karma, the man-gods righting my wrongs, bringing me down a peg or two, and I let the bf continue.

Once, he got back off tour and smelt a bit funky. I asked him if there’d been another woman and he laughed, not at the suggestion, but at me. Ridicule rather than explanation, so I knew he had slept with someone else and hadn’t showered, but I still blushed at his laughter, at forever being the fool. Another time he’d fallen asleep on a train and missed his stop so had to wait out a cold dawn on the platform of some distant station until the next ride home. I sort of believed him. He might have been shagging someone else then too. He probably was.

When I was at university, I got pregnant. He was so made up. Not to have the baby of course, but because it meant he was virile. After my operation, he brought me home in a taxi and didn’t mind me asking him for stuff, like going to the shops to buy a packet of Hobnobs. The biscuits were so crunchy and chocolatey, I ate the whole lot. It was the most loved by him I’d ever felt, and still to this day I have a warm feeling when I think about my abortion recovery. Scraps of love for the starving – those Hobnobs bought him another year of me as his girlfriend.

Ending the pregnancy was my biggest act of self-care in the entirety of that relationship. A distant yet unmistakable klaxon cutting through the fog, telling me I should not, could not, must not be tied to this man for life. It was the beginning of the end, but how to say, I am done with all your shit to someone who’d made me so small I no longer understood my instincts. So, on we rumbled.

It’s obvious now it was never love, but at the time I thought it was – my sanity depended on believing we had this bond. I had yet to understand the difference between tingling desire and the nervy feeling of being kept dangling.

He pushed me once, only once. I fell hard and the bowl of soup I was holding, smashed on the kitchen floor. Later, I was disappointed there wasn’t a bruise as proof. After we split up, a couple of friends still hung out with him, but not so much with me. They too had wanted to see a bruise.

Then there was the time he told me with a smile of pride that when we met, I was Tank Girl and he’d turned me into a mouse. I reflect on this now and think, how dare he have treated me this way, I was and am someone’s precious daughter. And it occurs to me, even after all these years, I only value my young self in the abstract, through the prism of my mum and dad’s imagined reaction. I hover above the words on this page so I can write them. An abdication of the me in I got me through, and still today there are slippery moments when I don’t really care what happens to me – bottom-of-the-food-chain kind of thing. Is this his forever gift to me, or was I always malleable? And like a parasite, he recognised my uses.

Sometimes I think we were both just kids sloshing round in the Lad-mag morals of the time, fucking up, finding our way, trying to do better. I’d behaved badly in the past, acted like a dick towards people in ways I’m ashamed of – for which I’m deeply sorry – but I mean, he kept up this shit with me for years.

A friend asked, why write about him now? I sound angry – am I angry? I guess I must be, but I don’t feel it. Again, I stand two steps outside of myself. Perhaps, revisiting these events is to do with my kids being roughly the same age now as I was then. Or the well of me has become so full that old junk needs to float to the surface. A film of scum to be skimmed off and disposed of.

I was sorting through some attic crap last weekend, after I thought I was done writing about the bf, and weirdly I came across a faded strip of photo booth shots of him, the ones you took for fun at the station because no one had cameras in those days. The discovery was uncanny, a nudge from the writing gods… don’t turn away yet, there’s more to be mined. My stomach didn’t do that lurching thing when I looked at his face. Perhaps the words I’d already written had squeezed out the last of the poison after thirty or so years. He’d been one of my chapters, now so distant the whole experience belonged to someone else, my cells having replaced themselves enough times that nothing of me here and now has been in contact with anything of him. Except for memory and its neurological trickery of keeping this kind of shit alive. Scar tissue renews as a scar even though the skin is new. Why is that? I read a piece in The New Yorker about how people relate to their past selves. Some view their lives on a continuum, and each stage they grow though is an addition to their essential self, which fundamentally never changes. Other people become fresh inventions as they age, discarding their old iterations as flawed or impossible to know. I am both touched and untouched by him. I will always contain the reality of having put up with him and will always be flummoxed that I did. And for so long. Four long years of my good young life.

In my attic box of memories was another picture of him as a boy wearing a grin of excitement on an airplane. It was a school trip, he’d told me, the first time he’d flown. In the photo, he looks free, on the cusp of something. That dance towards manhood when everything is up for grabs. He loved animals, and I remember him at parties, fishing round in kitchen bins for the plastic rings that had held the multipacks of beer cans together. If the yokes were left intact, he said, they’d get stuck around the necks of seagulls and turtles. This tiny pre-emptive rescue was one of his redeeming qualities, but even so, he made it a chore, his surly presence leaning against the countertop as he stretched and snapped the plastic into a long flabby strip. And I had to listen to his party-bore lecture about the birds and the plastic while everyone else walked away. Because they could. But I wasn’t completely stupid; I’d invested kindness and hope, willing him to make a different choice from the blunt force of machismo and so become a sweet boy again – if he ever had been, I’d gone through too much for that not to be a possibility. So, like playing one of those shove-penny machines in an arcade, I kept feeding in coins to tip the balance of those tantalisingly precipitous towers of cash that never ever pay out.

When I did finally manage to leave him – when the last molecule of my self-esteem simply couldn’t face another trip to the pub for pints of carbonated crap then home to a waxy nub of hash to blank it all out – he just shrugged, like it was nothing, like I had been nothing. His last power play. Weeks later, he sent me a couple of wincingly terrible tee-dum-dee-dum poems about his passionate and enduring love, and his spell over me was broken. 

Praise be to shit poetry, because before this, even when he was mocking or cheating or telling me I’d be nothing without him, I was unable to stop myself tumbling down a wormhole towards the vision of a scared little boy in a dark kitchen with forks flying. Some kind of saviour complex or mutant empathy allowed me to allow him to rob me, to take what he needed, to use me up. A trade-off between my comfortable childhood and his not. Posh, he used to call me, even though I wasn’t, the word delivered as punishment, as a challenge. On occasion, like here and now on this page, I still allow myself to remember the clever animal-loving child he’d once been, with a dad on the booze and a penniless powerless mum who couldn’t cope. How he learned from them and repeated and refused to be anyone else’s victim. Still, someone had to atone for his wounds, and I just happened to be there.

NB: I write this having arrived in a good place, and send you love if anything here resonates in difficult ways.