Page 2

Then

Alice

London, 1972

The hard slap of a magazine dropped from above makes me look up.

‘ This is what sex looks like.’

The voice, strangely gravelled for a non-smoking nineteen-year-old, belongs to Rick. The face and torso now displayed beside my pseudo-Cubist still life is Jacob Earl, the dark-eyed, high-cheekboned singer of Disciples. He’s on the front page of Sounds magazine, black shirt unbuttoned, chest gleaming, objectified just like a Page Three girl.

‘Gig at the Marquee tonight. We’re going,’ Rick says, glaring down at my canvas. ‘Think the apple might work better in blue?’

He says it lightly, to be helpful, but with each new and perfect intuition I feel the familiar drifting to self-doubt. Am I as good as everyone else? Do I truly deserve my place here, one of only twelve students accepted on the fine arts degree at the Slade, renowned as the best art school in the country?

Rick is the kind of artist (slash sculptor, ceramicist, embroiderer; he can excel in any medium) who doesn’t really need to be here. He’s already it , the tutors’ darling, the art school’s mascot, the collector’s early hunch. Last week he sold a self-portrait – his whole face rendered in vertical stripes of green – to a man who turned out to be the owner of San Lorenzo. I can imagine Mick and Bianca eating their gazpacho while Rick gazes down at them with his sharp blue eyes.

This afternoon’s session, printmaking with Gordon King, is the one I dread the most. A former pop artist (he distanced himself from the movement some years ago and now speaks about it only with distaste), his work sells for thousands of pounds and hangs in the permanent collection of the Whitechapel Art Gallery. He swept into the Slade four years ago and turned its printmaking department on its head. It is said that he can make or break a career, and three of his protégés now sell on Cork Street.

Rick is his favourite; he can stand beside him eulogising his colour choices for a full five minutes.

‘Gather round, people. See these pinks and greens and browns. See how the cherry blossom gorgeousness is offset by sludgy olive and shit brown? This is colour calibration at its best.’

Today I am working on a lithograph of a favourite tree and I am hopeful that all the nights I’ve spent frying my brain reading about tonality and chromaticism might finally pay off. Once I’ve drawn the outline of my tree (a mesmerising, strangely humanised oak) onto a block of limestone, I’m going to wash over it in a restricted palette of yellow, red, black and white. I’ve been practising for this moment all week, mixing up little tubes of paint in my student bedroom until I came up with three perfect shades of skin. Soon the tree’s branches will become flesh-coloured limbs, the thick round trunk a torso, its ribs defined by hand. I’m going to call it Metamorphosis 1 , a pleasingly Kafkaesque title and the first in a series of tree people.

But Gordon doesn’t wait to see this transformation.

‘Surely not another tree?’ he says, arms folded, mouth tight, hovering beside me. ‘What is it with you and trees?’

And something crumples inside me. Instead of standing up to him, as I do every day in my mind, I say, ‘I don’t know. I just like them.’

‘Well, I like ice cream, but I don’t paint it every bloody day. Move on now. We need to see some development. This is sub-A-level standard.’

In the pub, Rick feeds me gin and tonic and holds my hand while I cry.

‘I shouldn’t be on this course, I’m going to drop out.’

We have the same conversation every week, always after Gordon King’s class.

‘What is it with you and trees?’

Rick can mimic Gordon perfectly, his soft Anglicised Scottish voice at odds with his bitter personality.

‘The man’s a bully. And you’re his victim. We have to find a way of changing that.’

He glances at my half-full tumbler of gin.

‘Drink up, tree girl. We have a gig to get to.’

There’s time for another drink before the show starts, but the bar is packed full, three hundred drinkers crammed into a tiny space, most of them smoking, the air a greenish grey. Rick holds my hand and hauls me through the crowd.

‘’Scuse us. Sorry,’ he says as we tread on feet and squeeze in between couples. And then, five feet from the bar, he stops dead and I smack into him.

‘What?’ I ask, but Rick doesn’t answer.

Perhaps it’s his pheromones, some kind of chemical energy anyway, that makes me look where Rick is looking. Jacob Earl is standing at the bar, two elbows leant on it, a pound note held in one hand. He’s ordering drinks and there seems to be an invisible force field around him, a whole room full of people who can look but not touch.

He has his back to me, but even that is intriguing, the way his dark, almost black hair curls over the collar of his shirt, the skinniness of his hips in their tight black jeans, his snakeskin boots.

‘Wait till he turns round,’ Rick says, and at that moment, Jacob does.

The face is astonishing, it’s true, a perfect blend of male and female, though not in the Bowie way, for he is even prettier, with his curly hair and big brown eyes, his full lips. Around his neck he wears a flowered choker and several gold chains. His shirt, like in the photo, is open almost to his waist. It’s impossible not to stare.

‘Oi, Jacob!’ Rick calls out unexpectedly, and the singer turns around. ‘Get us a couple of ales while you’re there, would you?’

He does this, Rick, asks for the impossible with an optimistic grin, and people often fall for it.

‘All right,’ Jacob says, and he begins to smile slowly in return. ‘Pints or halves?’

‘Pints. Please.’ Rick passes over a pound note.

‘For your girlfriend too?’

‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ Rick says, too fast, and Jacob laughs.

‘You sure about that?’

‘Positive. This is Alice. I’m Rick. We’re at art school together.’

‘Art school? Whereabouts?’

‘The Slade.’

‘Hey, Eddie. EDDIE.’

Another man in head-to-toe black turns around from the bar and looks at us without interest.

‘These guys are art students,’ Jacob says. ‘They’re at the Slade. You know the Slade, right? The best art school in the country. Remember what we were talking about earlier?’

‘Oh yeah.’

Whatever it was, Eddie clearly couldn’t give a toss.

‘So maybe we should talk to them? About our idea?’

Eddie shrugs. He looks at his watch.

‘There’s no time. We’re on in ten.’

Jacob nods, reluctantly it seems to me.

‘You’re right, we should go.’

He looks at me with a final heart-shattering smile and I return his gaze, heat flooding to my cheeks.

‘Well, enjoy the show,’ he says. ‘See you for a drink afterwards?’

Waiting for the band to come on, the small, dark room now crammed with bodies and pulsing with the collective energy that accompanies anticipation, I am preoccupied with the beautiful singer. I am physically affected by those brief seconds of interaction, stomach tense, heart banging in my chest, whole body framed in some kind of expectation.

I assume I’m going to like the band, everyone else seems to, but when they finally come out onto the stage, all of them in black, the density of their opening chord – simultaneous drums, guitar and a long-drawn-out vocal – leaves room for nothing else. I am immersed in the music in a way I never have been; my eyes scan each musician – the drummer, the bass guitarist, the backing singers, two girls, one guy – before returning each time, as if magnetically pulled, to Jacob. Never have I seen someone so effortlessly at ease with himself. Singing so close to the mic that his lips almost touch it. Dancing across the stage between vocals, though dancing is not the right word for this strange, hip-swinging side-shuffle. It might look odd on anyone else, but not him, with his pretty-boy thinness and his cool, jerky moves.

But it is the words he sings that tip me head-first over an invisible line to a place where I can no longer remember a time when Jacob wasn’t the headline in my thoughts.

The first song, ‘Sarah’, about breaking up with a girl, is the embodiment of sadness. I want to be Sarah, I want to immerse myself in Sarah’s sorrow.

‘Does he write his own songs?’ I ask Rick without taking my eyes off the stage.

Rick laughs, also without shifting his attention.

‘Of course. He’s a god.’

What to say about the next hour, the two of us rapt in sound and visuals and private fantasy? As a whole – an all-male three-piece consisting of singer/guitarist, bass player and drummer, plus for tonight the trio of backing singers – the band seems to exist in permanent frenzy, explosive riffs, each one longer than the last, extended drum solos that are exhausting in their demand for focus. But it’s the quieter moments I like best, the slow, somnambulant drift into ballad, lyrics that pierce the heart with their compelling sadness. For the final, tortured love song, Jacob sits on the edge of the stage, singing into the microphone with his bluesy Americanised voice – honey flecked with gravel.

He walks from the stage first, one hand raised in salute, guitar slung around his neck – even his casualness is arresting – and then, in turn, the bassist and drummer both take a final solo before following him.

No encore, just the explosive sound of audience rapture.

‘Christ, they’re bloody amazing.’

‘His voice,’ Rick says. ‘David Bowie, but better.’

‘His face. Mick Jagger, but cuter.’

Rick raises his brows and tilts his head to examine me.

‘And finally,’ he says, ‘the girl made of ice begins to thaw.’