The Elvis Interrogation.
A year on from my second date with Elvis and some things have changed: I am single. I am no longer just a dep for the Elvis band, but now sing with them whenever they tour. We have just finished one amazing Summer Tour, traveling around seaside resorts, sunbathing during the day and performing in lovely theatres at night then partying into the small hours on the bus. We’ve all become really close and even though nothing has officially happened with Nick, the boy bombards me with texts. Not that I mind… I get texts all hours of the day – texts to say ‘good morning,’ texts to ask how my day is going, texts to wish me luck for auditions, texts to say ‘watch this thing on tv.’ You name it, Nick is texting me about it.
This particular weekend, we’ve all gone a month without seeing each other so everyone is quite excited to get back on the tour bus. After the gig, we get a takeaway and everyone’s alcoholic drink of choice (by the truckload) and pile onto the bus. Nick is playing his iPod through the speakers and we are all singing, dancing, playing drinking games, arguing over songs, and discussing ‘The Rule.’ ‘The Rule’ is something that is set every gig, usually by Carole (the Scottish singer who did the Elvis cruise with) and it states the specific time that we will all be allowed to go to bed on any given night. Anyone who tries to retreat to their bunk bed before the stated time is verbally and (depending on just how drunk we are) sometimes physically abused. Nothing too nasty, just throwing items at them or trying to carry them back downstairs to the lounge. Tonight’s ‘The Rule’ is set at 4.00 am. Quite respectable really.
By the time we get to 3.30, I am really struggling to stay awake. The Eagles ‘Lyin Eyes’ is playing on a loop. There are spent bottles, used cans and empty takeaway cartons strewn everywhere and the marble effect table has a dodgy looking white substance all over it (don’t panic Mam: it’s just the salt from the takeaway sachets). The Elvises and the three brass players are all in their beds. Owain our pianist is crying quietly into his bottle of rum, Carole is slow dancing by herself in the corner and Nick is proudly peeing with the toilet door open. My impeccable initiative tells me that the best of the night is over…
I quietly creep upstairs and am about to get into my bunk when Nick appears and says, ‘Reet are we going to talk about this or what?’. ‘This’ being ‘us’, presumably. It’s a tad pointless for me to feign ignorance after a year of pretending (and failing to convince myself) that I only like him as a friend. ‘If Carole hears us she’ll drag us back downstairs,’ I warned. Now, a word about the bunks – picture if you will 12 coffins in 3 rows on top of each other, sectioned off from one another by black curtains. ‘Well, we could hide behind this curtain?’ he suggests. So we make an awkward insuffucient little tent out of the bunk bed curtain in an attempt to hide from Carole (as much as we all love her, she takes The Rule scarily seriously).
Nick is about to embark on a load of cliches that I really don’t want to hear. I assume this because he starts with, ‘Look’. Nothing good ever comes after someone saying, ‘Look.’ But before he has a chance to pre-dump me (I mean we aren’t even going out) something hits me really hard in my left side. ‘Get outta there NOW!’ Big Elvis is the other side of the curtain and he just kicked me full force with his size 10. ‘I knew it!’ he says, as smug as Columbo, but with infinitely more venom. Think Bill Sykes with a Geordie accent. Pathetically, both Nick and myself are frozen to the spot. We should just open the curtain so that he can see we are fully dressed but I’m in shock that he just kicked me, and horribly embarrassed that he thinks we were ‘doing something.’ I wait until I can hear him retreat back to his bunk then without a word to Nick I scramble up to my bunk. I hear him whisper ‘sorry.’
I lie awake all night (this is nothing new, I’m an Insomniac). I know we are in trouble, but I don’t know how much trouble. He won’t fire Nick because he thinks he can spin musical gold with his fingers. But I know that female singers are 10 to every penny and he’ll get rid of me in a heartbeat. Plus, I didn’t get to hear what Nick was about to say after ‘Look.’ The plaster has been left dangling, mid-whip.
After a few hours of just staring up at my coffin lid, I can hear the Elvises moaning about something. I peer out of my bunk curtain and see them and a couple of the brass players staring into the toilet. Oh no, not again, I think. It seems as if every gig some unwitting dep musician or sound technician does a forbidden poo in the bus toilet. There are signs everywhere telling people not to, because the flush isn’t strong enough to handle it, but some poor desperate person gets caught short every time. The men are all crowding around in their boxer shorts, y fronts and socks, inspecting the unidentified faeces. I half expect Big Elvis to have a magnifying glass and Little Elvis to be taking notes. ‘There is nee way a lass has produced that,’ Nick (who has woken up) says, sounding almost impressed. Big Elvis spots me peering around from my curtain. ‘Did you do this?’ he asks, sounding completely disgusted in me. ‘Um no, I didn’t.’ ‘Well come and have a look. It might jog your memory,’ Little Elvis suggests. I know with all my heart that I didn’t do this but I’m in trouble already, so I climb out of my bunk and oblige. They have got to be kidding! That…thing is practically the same size as me. ‘No, it’s DEFINITELY not me,’ I stress as much as I can, trying not to sound rude. ‘Reet. Well, we’ll have to sort this out,’ Big E says, and for a moment I think Poo Gate has eclipsed last night’s events and saved me. I am wrong. ‘And darling,’ he says to me in a tone that suggests I’m anything BUT his darling, ‘ We’ll see you in our dressing room as soon as you’re dressed.’ The big unidentified shit is clearly about to hit the fan.
I knock on the dressing room door and enter to find the Elvises waiting for me. I sit down. I’m completely unprepared for what happens next. ‘Tell us, are al backin’ singers whoo-uz,’ Big Elvis starts, ‘or just you?’. It takes me a few seconds to realize that he just said ‘whores’, partly because of his accent and partly because I thought that word was only used in films about brothels in the deep south of America. I open my mouth to say something but find that I can’t. His question has taken the wind out of my sails more swiftly than his kick did last night. ‘You know Kelly, we really didn’t think you were like this. We met yuh parents just a few weeks agan. Can ye imagine how ashamed they’d be, like?’ and with that well aimed shot at my Achilles heel, he strikes me silent again. ‘Now diven’t start crying,’ (I hadn’t even realized that I was) ‘I think we are being geet (very) reasonable. We are just disappointed in ye cos we didn’t think ye was a slut.’ Neither did I. Up until now. At this point, Big Elvis leaves the room to take a phone call. Little Elvis, like the proper little sidekick that he is, adopts the Good Cop persona. He leans forward. ‘Listen now pet, Nick doesn’t like you. The boy is just a little charmer. He’s a good lookin’ lad and a canny good geetar playa. He can charm the birds from the trees. He can have any lass he wants,’
he softens his voice, ‘why would he want you? Eh?’ Nice. So I’m no longer just a whore, but an ugly one at that. My silent tears have, rather humiliatingly, turned into heaving sobs now. I’m starting to worry that I might throw up on their dressing room floor. ‘It’s only because you’re easy,’ Little Elvis continues. I wish I could muster up the self control to articulate how particularly UNeasy my previous boyfriends have found me, but I can’t. I’ve started hyperventilating. Great stuff.
Big Elvis returns and finishes with, ‘The lad just likes pussy, that’s all.’ This is officially the cheapest I’ve ever felt – and I’m an actress living in London. For a girl who normally has way too many words in her mouth, I can’t seem to find any in there today.
‘Now, I hope ye aren’t ganny cause a big hoo-hah over this conversation we’ve had,’ Big Elvis passes me a roll of toilet paper to clean up my face. ‘Be professional, and diven’t be on moaning to the band about this. It’s between us. And we haven’t given ye your cheque for last month’s gigs yet and ye’ll be wantin’ payin’ won’t ye? So…’, he doesn’t finish his sentence. He doesn’t have to. I’m pretty sure I’ve just been blackmailed.
I walk quickly to my dressing room and stare angrily at my pathetic tear stained face in the mirror. But it’s not them I’m angry at. It’s me. Why didn’t I say anything? Why didn’t I explain that I’m single, over 18, and that I just happen to like a boy that I work with? That it is as simple and mundane and every day-ordinary as that? I can’t believe that I just sat there and took it. I can’t stay at the theatre so I walk to the seafront. I know, how very ‘romantic heroine’ of me. But its not the 19th century and I’m no Jane Eyre. There are girls in badly fitting leggings, pushing prams, and sucking on cigarettes, teenage boys banging arcade games angrily, old drunk men having conversations with people who aren’t there: you’ve got to love the British seaside. Everyone seems at war with the world which suits me just fine. I sit on a pigeon-poo stained wall and get my phone out. But who to call? If I tell my mother she’ll worry and start telling me to go straight to a solicitor and I haven’t got the energy. I can’t ring my best friends because they think I was completely nuts to finish with my lovely ex-boyfriend on what they see as a daft whim. And I certainly can’t ring the afore mentioned ex boyfriend. The air smells strongly of chips but, testimony to how sorry I’m feeling for myself, I don’t have an appetite. I sit until my bum goes numb and then, because it’ll be time for soundcheck soon, I head back toward the theatre.
I’m back to my room just in time to hear Big Elvis call Nick into his room. It’s obviously Nick’s turn. I hope they aren’t too harsh with him. I sneak out of my room and press my ear up against their dressing room door. ‘Reet son. Ye knaa the rules. No funny business with the lasses.’ ‘Aye alreet son, I hear ye like,’ Nick says. ‘Get the subways in and we’ll forget al aboot it,’ Big Elvis says. And then I hear the scraping of the chair on the floor. Nick must be getting up to leave. What?! That’s it? Nick just has to buy them two meatball marinaras and he’s completely forgiven? I mean, I hadn’t wanted them to castrate him but I’d expected a bit of a telling off, at least. The feminist in me is outraged but the stupid little girl in me is just plain hurt: Nick didn’t say, ‘but I really like Kelly. She’s different. Can you bend the rule for me this once?’ God, I’ve been really stupid. I picture my face on the wall of fame of Nick’s ex girlfriends, placed up there after Halitosis Helen, Cake Baking Mandy, and last month’s offering, Linzi (he dumped her because after he got to know her a bit more intimately, he discovered her bottom was decidedly larger than he’d first suspected).
I was so grateful when show time finally came around. That’s what I’ve always loved about performing: it doesn’t matter what the truth is, you can be anyone you want when you step from the wings onto the boards. I sing with all my heart and smile until my cheeks hurt and no one is any the wiser, except Carole, whose the only one close enough to see the smile is just a tad fake tonight. She keeps throwing in new little steps to our dance routines to keep my spirit up.
After the gig, we all go to a pub and I continue the performance, making conversation with the musicians and pretending everything is ok. Nick gives me the odd strange look every now and then.
Back on the bus, I go straight up to my bunk. I pull the black curtain across and listen to them switch on Nick’s iPod downstairs. They all start singing along to The Eagles ‘Lyin Eyes’. Everything is the same as last night, but not quite as shiny. I hear Big Elvis say to Carole, ‘I hope she’s not gone to bed to be aaakward mind. That’s exactly what we are trying to avoid – that kind of carry on.’ I hear Carole, ‘No she’s just really tired.’ Thank you Carole, I think to myself.
Just then my curtain is drawn back, and Nick is stood there, holding a rose. Where did he get a rose from?! ‘Listen,’ he starts. Here we go, I think. ‘That pair of fannies have obviously said something that really upset you.’ I don’t say anything, just lay there in my coffin and let him carry on. ‘I like you, like. Forget what they said. Do you wanna come to Newcastle mebbies (maybe)? I could take you on a date?’ But, worried that ‘that pair of fannies’ are right about him, I just say, ‘I’ll have to have a think about it,’ and pull the curtain shut. I assume Nick has left but after a few minutes he pushes the rose through and, after some thought, I take it. ‘Night pet,’ he says and jumps downstairs. I hear him click the iPod onto ‘Billie Jean’ and everyone starts cheering while he does his moonwalk.
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