It Felt Like a Kiss

  She pulled open the door and took a step back as she was enveloped in a sticky, hot fug that smelled of stale beer and sweat. ‘Yuck. Maybe it won’t be so heaving upstairs. Let’s go and find Ari.’

  As Ellie reached the back of the pub, feet skidding over the wet floor, she bumped into Ari coming out of the back room where a cacophonous screech of guitars could be heard. She was with Tom, her face upturned as she said, ‘Sometimes, I think there’s been nothing truly new in music since 1968.’

  ‘What about acid house?’

  ‘That was a rip-off of sixties psychedelia with a Roland TB-303 Bass Line generator to give it the wobble sound. Like, the 13th Floor Elevators were—’

  ‘Ari! Mum!’

  Her mother beamed. ‘Babycakes! Shall we go upstairs? This band are making my brain bleed.’

  Upstairs Tom’s friend Carl was playing a set heavy on the Tijuana Brass and there was room to dance.

  They’d been there for about an hour when Tabitha arrived, though she didn’t so much arrive as throw herself at Ellie. ‘Sweetheart! My darling girl,’ she cried and wrapped her arms around Ellie so tightly that she could hardly breathe. It wasn’t usual behaviour from Tabitha, who reserved her occasional displays of affection for Tom and Aaron Barksdale, their Bedlington terrier. ‘Oh, Ellie, I love you like you were my own and I have your back. Always.’

  ‘Aw, I love you too.’ Ellie hugged Tabitha in return. ‘Are you very drunk, Tab?’

  ‘No, you don’t understand.’ Tabitha shook her head. Usually she looked immaculate but her platinum blonde shampoo and set had wilted and her mascara was smudged like she’d been crying. ‘I’m sorry to have to show you this.’

  She thrust a newspaper at Ellie, which had become damp and pulpy from being clutched in Tabitha’s sweaty grip. Ellie took it and as she unfurled it, the nagging doubts that had been at the back of her mind all week, like a mild toothache, returned. Then she was jolted so hard she almost fell off her heels.

  On the front page of the Sunday Chronicle was a photo of herself taken three years earlier when she was a stone heavier (it was before she’d discovered superfood salads, five-day detoxes and toning trainers) on holiday in Ibiza. Ellie was posing in a red bikini, back arched, bum stuck out and holding aloft a strawberry daiquiri bigger than her head, and that wasn’t even the worst thing.

  Not even close.

  The worst thing was the headline, writ large in 144 point Times Roman: ‘SIR BILLY’S BASTARD DAUGHTER!’

  Chapter Ten

  ‘Sweetie, what’s the matter?’ Ari asked sharply.

  Ellie was incapable of speech. She shook her head and, as Ari’s arms closed around her, she began to cry.

  ‘Nothing is so bad that it’s worth crying over,’ Ari said. It was what she’d always told Ellie when she was crying over a skinned knee or panicking about her coursework. ‘Everything can be fixed.’

  ‘This can’t be fixed,’ Ellie sobbed, shoving the sodden newspaper at Ari. Tom had moved Ellie to a tiny anteroom behind the DJ booth, and sat her down on a flightcase. Tabitha had fetched a glass of water and Lola and Tess were watching anxiously, poised with wads of damp loo roll for when Ellie eventually stopped crying. ‘I can’t believe this. That headline … it’s worse than anything I imagined.’

  ‘I can’t believe they’d use that word. Not on the front cover,’ Ari said on an indrawn breath. ‘That … that is low.’

  ‘It’s awful. I wondered … I thought if this did happen, I’d be able to deal with it, but I can’t.’ Ellie paused to take in several shuddering breaths. Every time she tried to stop crying, a fresh wave of tears burst forth. ‘What are you doing?’

  Ari was unfolding the soggy newspaper so Ellie was forced to look at the headline and the terrible, terrible picture, which had surely been lifted from her Facebook account. ‘I have to see what other lies and bullshit they’ve come up with,’ Ari snapped, trying to turn the damp pages. ‘And it will be lies because … oh …’

  Ari being angry was infinitely preferable to her going suddenly silent. A silent Ari was far more ominous. Ellie was in an agony of not knowing as Tess and Lola peered over Ari’s shoulder and one look was all it took for Tess to burst into tears and Lola to turn even paler than normal and mutter, ‘Oh God, shit just got real.’

  Ellie hardly dared ask. ‘What does it say about me? What?’

  The three of them glanced at each other, then back at Ellie. ‘You don’t want to know,’ Tess choked out. ‘You really are better off not knowing.’

  ‘But she has to know! She can’t not know.’ Lola looked at Ellie reproachfully. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that your real name was Velvet?’

  ‘Because no one has called me Velvet since I was four.’ Ellie held out a shaking hand. ‘Give it to me.’

  Ari started to pass over the paper, then abruptly retreated. ‘No,’ she said flatly. ‘We’re going home.’

  ‘I have to see it, Mum.’ Ellie made a swiping motion in the direction of the paper, as Ari side-stepped to avoid her. ‘Give me the bloody paper!’

  ‘You can look at it when we get home.’ Ari was already stalking out of the tiny room. ‘I know you’re glaring at my back, but honestly, you’ll thank me for this.’

  Ari’s flat was hot and stuffy and there weren’t enough chairs for everyone, but Ellie was given the best seat in the house, an old barber’s chair. Lola, Tess and Tabitha squeezed onto the pink Chesterfield, Ari perched on the arm and Tom hovered in the living-room doorway.

  On the little occasional table in front of her, made from a repurposed Stooges album, was a mug of sweet tea, a tumbler filled almost to the brim with vodka and a packet of chocolate Hobnobs.

  ‘Right, are you calm?’ Ari asked.

  ‘I’m perfectly calm,’ Ellie managed to say, though her teeth were clenched so hard it felt as if she had lockjaw. ‘Can I please have the paper?’

  ‘OK, but we’re all here for you if you—’

  ‘Just give me the damn paper already!’ Ellie reached forward and ripped a new, unsullied copy of the Sunday Chronicle out of Ari’s arms.

  She couldn’t bear to look at the front cover again so she turned the page, and gasped.

  ‘TRIPLE VELVET! MY 3-TIMES A NIGHT DRUG-FUELLED SEX SESSIONS WITH BILLY KAY’S SECRET LOVECHILD.’

  It was so much worse than she could ever have believed possible.

  She wasn’t Ellie Cohen any more, but Velvet Underground, because that was the name on her birth certificate. First name: Velvet. Surname: Underground. In a fit of youthful rebellion and utter stupidity, Ari had changed her name by deed poll from Ariella Cohen to Ari Underground ‘because it was the early eighties and I was obsessed with White Light/White Heat and it just seemed like a really punk rock thing to do and then I joined a band and I was in the NME and it stuck’.

  Ellie wasn’t an exhibition and sales manager at a prestigious Mayfair art gallery any more either, but

  a star-struck gallery assistant making the tea for A-list clients like Mandy Stretton by day, but at night voluptuous Velvet, 26, turned into an insatiable sexpot who begged her boyfriend, music video director Richey Wallis, to make mad, passionate love to her.

  ‘Velvet always wanted to have sex,’ says Richey, his handsome face creased in a rueful grin. ‘I’m a red-blooded bloke but even I couldn’t keep up with her.’

  As well as being obsessed with sex, Velvet, who was raised by her benefit-claiming mother, Ari, on a notoriously rough council estate in Camden Town, London, was also obsessed with her famous father.

  ‘It was all she could talk about. She had real daddy issues. Velvet loved to listen to her dad’s music while we were in bed,’ Richey remembers. ‘She even used to perform a sexy striptease to his biggest hit, “It Felt Like A Kiss”.

  ‘I really loved Velvet but she was just using me for my music industry contacts. I took her to Glastonbury for our three-month anniversary but she abandoned me to blag her way backstage and chat up rap star Tone Jam. She thinks that
by hooking up with people in the music biz, she’ll get close to her dad.’

  There was more. Much more. That she’d snorted lines of coke during one particularly tawdry sex session and begged Richey to invite a friend round for a threesome. The story was the perfect trifecta of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, except none of it was true.

  Ari was portrayed as a hard-faced groupie-turned-single-mother who now lived in a luxurious Regent’s Park flat paid for by taxpayers, and that Ellie’s conception had been the result of ‘a sordid encounter in a toilet in a grimy London club’. None of that was true, either.

  But what if all those stories about the months in the summerhouse in the back garden of a playwright’s house in Primrose Hill weren’t true either? What if Ari and all her friends – Chester, Tom, Tabitha – had just invented that story to make Ellie feel better because nobody would ever amount to anything in life if they knew they’d been conceived in a toilet?

  ‘It wasn’t a one-off, was it?’ she asked in a rusty voice. ‘In a toilet?’

  ‘No!’ Ari, Tabitha and Tom snapped the word in unison.

  ‘I swear! I swear on my life and Mum and Dad’s lives, and on my fucking Les Paul guitar, which I love almost as much as I love you, that there was no sex in a toilet ever,’ Ari insisted, and Ellie had hardly ever seen her cry but her mother was perilously close to tears now. ‘If you must know … well, I always thought, and the dates seemed to match up, that I got pregnant in Brighton, the first time we got together.’ Ari swallowed hard and looked longingly at the vodka she’d poured out for Ellie. ‘We were in a very nice flat in a square on the seafront. It was almost in Hove! You don’t get much more respectable than Hove.’

  Ellie subsided back in the barber’s chair to read that

  a source close to the Kay family said that Sir Billy has always been devoted to Olivia and his daughters. He regrets what happened with Ari Underground but he’d have to have been a saint to resist when Ari constantly threw herself at him. As far as he’s concerned, it’s all water under the bridge. He might have been a bad boy back in his younger days but Olivia is the only woman he’s ever loved.

  They’d reprinted the photo of Billy and Olivia from the cutting in her Dad box. The two of them looking at each other and smiling as if they were still madly in love after thirty years of marriage. By way of contrast, there was a picture of Ellie on the other side of the spread, captioned: ‘She’s a real wild child.’ Or rather, it was a photograph of Ellie’s bottom clad in ruffled panties as she was tipped over the shoulder of a burly rockabilly two weeks before at the Blitz-themed party she’d gone to in Shoreditch. God, they’d been following her round with their cameras for over a fortnight and she hadn’t even noticed.

  ‘What did I do to make Richey hate me so much?’ Ellie asked. ‘I dumped him and he deserved to be dumped, but why would he do this to me?’

  ‘Anyone who knows you isn’t going to believe a word of this,’ Tabitha said, but she was wrong. There would be loads of people who’d be only too happy to believe every single lie captured for posterity by the Sunday Chronicle. Like her clients, who didn’t know her that well because she tried to exude a cool professional demeanour around them, or Muffin, who not-so-secretly thought that she was poor white trash, or the surly barista who made her mid-morning flat white.

  Then there were the people she didn’t know, the countless faceless strangers reading about her antics and her so-called sex life, and looking at her breasts and her arse and judging her. Calling her a slut and a gold digger.

  It was online too and once something was on the internet, it was there for ever. All these terrible lies would be instantly available whenever anyone entered Billy Kay’s name into a search engine.

  Ellie groped for the tumbler of vodka, picked it up with shaking fingers and gulped it down greedily like it was a glass of refreshing cold water. As soon as the vodka hit her stomach, it decided that it wanted out. She jackknifed off the chair, body-slammed into Tom, who was blocking her exit, and managed to get into Ari’s minuscule bathroom and drop to her knees just in time.

  She threw up and threw up and threw up. Each retch made her feel as if her ribcage was being turned inside out, and every time Ellie thought she was done another wave of nausea had her clutching the toilet seat even though there was nothing left inside her but bile, bitter and corrosive.

  Then Ellie wasn’t being sick any more but was still huddled over the toilet, crying and shaking until she felt a gentle hand on her back.

  ‘Come on, my sweet girl,’ Ari said softly as she coaxed Ellie upright. She pushed the damp strands of her daughter’s hair back. ‘Clean your teeth. You’ll feel much better.’

  It was going to take much, much more than a two-minute up and down and side to side with some Colgate to mend Ellie’s broken soul, but it got the acid taste out of her mouth and she let Ari wipe her face with a piece of wet kitchen towel before she felt brave enough to go back into the lounge.

  The others had beaten a tactful retreat, leaving mother and daughter alone. Ari tried to smile encouragingly as Ellie sat down in the barber’s chair.

  ‘It will all be fine, darling. This will all blow over.’

  ‘No! No, it won’t.’ She was shouting and holding her hands out in front of her to push away Ari’s platitudes. ‘There is no way to make this better. Nothing is ever going to get better now. My life is ruined. My life is over.’

  It sounded like such a melodramatic thing to say that for a moment Ellie wondered if she was overreacting. But if anything, she was underreacting because after tonight she was a joke. There was no way anyone would ever take her seriously as an ambitious junior art dealer now. Ellie was pretty much unemployable unless she wanted a career as a D-list celebrity who got paid to pose for pictures in her pants with her hands cupping her breasts. And every man she ever met from now on was going to think that she was a coke-addled nympho who’d give it up for some column inches or a backstage pass.

  ‘Ellie. Honey. Babycakes, we’ll sort this out,’ Ari said desperately. ‘It’s not as bad as you think it is.’

  ‘I can’t even conceive how bad this is,’ Ellie said, because she’d managed to think about how it would affect her job and the cruel joke that was her love life, but when she tried to delve deeper to analyse how she felt about her life being pulled apart and ripped wide open, and the fact that the one person who might have been able to stop it hadn’t even bothered to lift a finger to help, to make a call, then Ellie got really scared, as if that part of her mind was strewn with land mines that would explode if she didn’t watch her step.

  She couldn’t even tell Ari, because Ari would rant about Billy Kay and what a waste of space he was, and this wasn’t about Ari and Billy. It was about Billy and Ellie – father and daughter – and that was something that she could never bear to think about.

  Camden, London, 1986

  It was nothing that Ari could put her finger on to hold it down and examine it at close range, but something important had changed between her and Billy.

  Billy never mentioned Olivia and his kid and Ari certainly wasn’t going to, but she thought that maybe he might have left them because he seemed to be living in the summerhouse permanently.

  That didn’t mean that Billy was in love with her – and Ari was trying so hard not to be in love with him – but maybe he was missing her when she wasn’t around. If she was working at the Lizard Lounge, he’d call and ask her to come over when she was finished. ‘Just to hang out,’ he’d say. ‘You don’t even have to take your clothes off, though I love it when you do.’

  Ari didn’t always obey when she was summoned. But when she did make the trek down the Chalk Farm Road, Billy was never alone.

  It wasn’t like he had friends. Not like Ari had Tabitha and Tom, who were her sister and brother in a way that not even her real sisters and brothers were. Billy had an entourage of dead-eyed, cold-blooded satellites all orbiting around his sun. They looked down on Ari because she was competiti
on and she looked tarty with her heavy make-up and spike heels, and because her parents had earned their money and their big house in Belsize Park rather than inheriting it.

  They’d lounge around the playwright’s garden on warm June nights and Ari would sit on a wall, smoke her Marlboro Lights and pretend that she wasn’t bored shitless. The only people who spoke to her were Jimmy Vaughn, who was sweet when he wasn’t wasted, though he was wasted all the time, and Georgina Pratt, who’d been a superfan of Billy’s previous band but was too fat and ungainly to be a groupie.

  And this was how Billy Kay reeled her in, because time alone with Billy was such a rare commodity, such a thing to be treasured, that when he did kick everyone out and only Ari was left, inevitably she’d go down on her knees for him.

  Chapter Eleven

  She was woken by the doorbell ringing. Or she might have been woken by the thumping on the door and the rapping at the window that accompanied the sounds of the bell, Ellie wasn’t sure.

  Her head felt twice as large as normal and her ribs and throat ached and for a moment she wondered how much she’d had to drink last night. It was a lovely moment. All she had to worry about was how bad her hangover was. Then she remembered why she’d really been sick and the events of last night came rushing back all at once in a horrible 3D cavalcade that didn’t skimp on any of the details.

  Now she remembered crying for so long and so hard that eventually Ari had forced her to take a sleeping tablet. Ellie had curled up on Ari’s bed, still sobbing and hiccuping, and Ari had stroked her hair and held her until she’d fallen asleep.

  Ellie kicked off the covers because she was sweaty and hot and lay there until the constant banging on the door and the ringing of the bell and the trilling of a mobile phone forced her to abandon her plan to spend the rest of her life holed up in Ari’s bedroom.

  Still wearing the bikini that she’d put on under her dress yesterday for the barbecue, Ellie staggered out into the hall and ran head first into Ari.