The band is me.’
‘You’re an artist too.’ She smiled and took his hand, tracing the lines on it with sensitive fingers. ‘I could paint you.’
‘I could write a song about you,’ Karl said, touching her face with his other hand.
Their faces were inches apart now, Karl was drinking in every inch of her, his eyes travelling from her tawny hair, past the softness of her jaw down to the firm, high curve of her breasts highlighted in the tight little T-shirt she’d borrowed from Ella.
‘You’re so sexy,’ he whispered. His eyes roamed lower, past her waist to the rounded curve of her hips and along her jean-clad legs. For once, Amber didn’t bother trying to lift one thigh up so her leg looked thinner. There was no mistaking the fact that Karl liked her the way she was, and that was headier than any alcohol she could have drunk.
‘Get a room!’ shouted someone to them, and everyone creased up laughing.
Amber and Karl didn’t hear the jest or the insistent throbbing of the club music: they were locked into their own beat, aqua eyes in a lean face staring fiercely into grey-and-amber eyes in a gently rounded one, the red stain on each of Amber’s cheeks owing nothing to her make-up.
They moved at the same time, Karl’s arms winding around Amber’s waist, her hands spreading out to feel the heat of his torso through the thin shirt. Before her fingers had a chance to revel in the fine muscles of his back, his mouth met hers and they were kissing. It was unlike any kiss Amber had experienced: Karl’s tongue snaked into her mouth with practised ease, banishing the memory of every St Bernard slobber of a French kiss she’d ever had before. They melted against each other, his hands cupping her face, her hands raking through his hair. The heat of their bodies burned through their clothes. And long afterwards, when Amber was again capable of thinking, she realised that this was what love was all about.
As the morning bus lurched along into the city, Amber sat on the top deck in her finery and thought of how much had changed in the past two weeks. She had been a kid then, but now she was an adult.
An adult with an adult relationship. Or at least, she’d be properly having an adult relationship soon. Today, she was meeting Karl to take him home where they’d have the place to themselves all day. There was no privacy in the poky flat he shared with five other musicians. In her bedroom on Summer Street, there would be as much privacy as they needed. Briefly, Amber thought of how she’d explain it all to her mother if she arrived home early from work. She could imagine Faye’s horrified face, and how hurt she’d be to have been lied to. But Amber flicked the thought away. She’d worry about that later. Everyone had secrets, didn’t they?
Twice a week for the past six months, Faye Reid had taken an early lunch and walked a mile to the swimming pool complex near her office. The brisk walk past the mirror-windowed buildings of the docklands was soothing. Striding along the pavement, away from the incessant phones and the beehive drone of the busy recruitment company where she worked, she listened to music, watched seagulls swoop and dive towards the river, and relaxed.
Today, she had Billie Holiday on her portable CD player. Billie’s golden voice told of men who’d left and Faye thought how wonderful it was that, no matter how many times she heard Billie, it always sounded as if the guy had just that second gone, the screen door still banging behind him.
Music talked to Faye. Sound was the most evocative sense for her and the first few bars of a song on the radio could take her right back to where she’d been when she’d first heard it. She herself had a softly husky singing voice that few people had ever heard and could repeat a melody after only hearing it once. When she’d been Amber’s age, she’d always been singing but she rarely did now.
For music could be a curse too. There were still some songs she couldn’t listen to, songs that would break her heart because of the memories they brought to life.
Billie Holiday songs thankfully, for all their pain, didn’t fit into that category.
‘It’s lovely and everything, but it’s kind of depressing, Mum,’ Amber had pointed out the previous weekend about her mother’s love of exquisitely melancholy jazz.
‘Some of it is,’ Faye agreed, trying to see things from her daughter’s point of view. It was an unseasonably warm Saturday for the end of April and they’d spent the afternoon in the garden, Amber keen to start a dusting of golden tan on her face.
With the iron discipline Faye brought to every area of her life, the housework in the Reid household was always up to date. But when it came to gardening, she didn’t know weed from plant. Occasionally, she wished she was more like Christie Devlin who’d created an exquisite all-white garden at the front of her house. Faye had never seen Christie’s back garden, had never seen the inside of the Devlins’ house, actually, because they barely knew each other in spite of living mere doors apart for ten years, but she’d have bet that it was just as beautiful, with frothy roses and trailing blooms that flourished under Christie’s magic hands.
On this particular Saturday, Faye wore a tired pale-pink polo shirt over cheap loose-fit jeans that did nothing for her shape, and was trying to uproot any weeds she could identify. It all looked weedy to her. Surely that big thing that looked strangely like a marijuana plant couldn’t be a flower? Although since she’d thrown those packets of wildflower seeds every which way last year, it was hard to tell. That would be a fine advert for sensible single parenthood, wouldn’t it: a hash plant in Faye Reid’s garden.
She grinned. If there was any illegal vegetation in her garden, nobody would cast aspersions on the arch-conservative Mrs Reid, the very model of a career-minded widow with an equally model teenage daughter. Faye had worked very hard to reach that place in the local psyche. She’d learned that a single woman bringing up a child needed to be beyond reproach. Nobody would ever have cause to accuse her of trying to steal their husband or of letting her daughter run wild.
‘I like songs like “Respect”,’ Amber went on. She was lying on her tummy on a rug on the lawn, her feet in the air and a school book propped up in front of her. ‘Not sad ones where everyone’s depressed, like no guy will ever look at them again ’cos they messed it up the first time.’
Faye paused in her weeding.
‘You’ve got to remember, Amber, that the old jazz and rhythm-and-blues songs are from another age, when life was different and women didn’t have the same opportunities we have today,’ she said, wiping her hands on her jeans so she could clip a few strands of light-brown hair back. Faye didn’t bother with her hair much: shoulder length, wavy and undyed for many years, it got washed, tied back firmly and treated to conditioner when she had the time, which wasn’t often.
‘They didn’t have contraception, any hope of equal pay or equal rights in lots of things. So it might sound depressing to you now,’ she explained, ‘but they were brave. I think they were feminists in their own time because they sang when it wasn’t considered a decent job for women. They didn’t have what we have now. Girl power hadn’t been invented then.’
‘Yeah, I know that, but why do all the women hang around waiting for the lover man to turn up?’ Amber wanted to know, abandoning her book with a speed that showed she hadn’t been that engrossed in revising maths equations. ‘The women do all the waiting in these songs and in the old movies. If a guy doesn’t respect you, he’s going to walk all over you. They’re waiting for him to make it right. It’s so passive. You don’t need girl power to see that.’
‘You and Ella have got to stop reading the therapist’s sections in women’s magazines,’ Faye groaned, but she was smiling. ‘I thought you were going to study art, not psychotherapy.’
‘Ha ha. All I’m saying is that some people want to be rescued and that’s, like, not going to happen.’ Amber’s small face was determined,