were wearing and have some notion of what relationship there was between people standing near each other – friend, lover, relative, business acquaintance, whatever it might be.
I, by contrast, was still pretty clumsy. I used to break things a lot. And I was amazingly unobservant. I could be standing next to someone at a party for ten minutes or more and not be aware they were there.
And even now, though my memory for detail is astonishingly acute, I am still capable of forgetting fundamental facts. For instance, I had a sister who died in her mid-forties. Recently I found a photograph of her and couldn’t remember who it was. (Luckily, I’d written her name and family relationship on the back.) It’s not bad memory per se; it’s just, well, to be honest, I never really liked her much. And I rarely noticed what she was doing, or saying. So my memory bank deprioritised her into oblivion.
But I do vividly remember that first time I met Andrei. I staggered off the stage, went to my dressing room. Sank three glasses of vintage champagne, surrounded by my team, fighting off nausea at the memory of my many mistakes of mood and tone. Then my assistant told me there was a man waiting to see me – and it was Andrei Makov. My heart took a little leap. I agreed to see him. A few minutes there was a tap on the door and he entered.
And I remember that when Andrei entered, everyone else seemed to be slouching or deformed. He wore a black dress suit. And I wore blue. Definitely. Blue. And he walked his way slowly towards me, shaking hands with my friends, my business manager, my musical assistant. It was like a sea parting, as this charismatic presence moved closer and closer. Then he took me by the hand, kissed it, and murmured, “So what else can you do?”
At that moment, my purpose, my reason for living, sprang back into vivid relief. I smiled, like a tiger awoken by the rustle of a deer grazing.
“We shall see,” I told him. Then he walked around until he was standing behind me, wrapped his arms under my breasts and lifted me in the air.
I flopped. I let my body weight ebb away into his arms. My legs dangled, my head was loose. All the tension oozed out of me. Then he put me back on my feet. I felt ten times better.
“That was good.”
“I’m sorry… that was, impertinent. You looked tense.”
“I was tense.”
“I have no manners. When I met the Pope, I told him he had bad posture.”
“He has severe arthritis, in fact.”
“So I was later told. Imagine my chagrin.”
“I’m imagining.”
“Forgive me, good to meet you all.”
With a sense of shock, I realised he was addressing his comment at everyone else in the room. This was his graceful apology for hogging me. But in truth, I had “lost” everyone else present. For about three or four seconds, Andrei was the only person there for me.
“We were planning to go for a meal…” I said tentatively.
“Ah.” He looked slightly shy.
“You could join us?”
“I’d like that. Where are you going?”
“Where are we going?” I addressed my question to Philip, my business manager.
“We’ve booked a table at Smollensky’s.”
“Somewhere that’s not Smollensky’s, then,” I said to Andrei. He got it, though not everyone else did. He smiled.
“The Caterpillar Club,” he said to me, very quietly. And left.
Yeah, but what time? And do I change? I was wearing my best piano concert gown. But was that de trop for an “in” place like the Caterpillar Club? Or was it just trop enough?
I left the dress on. I was there at 9 o’clock, at the Caterpillar Club. It was crowded, noisy, everyone was so young. They were all annoying me. Andrei was waiting. He had ordered champagne.
“ Salut,”
“ Salut.”
We drank.
“I read your book,” he told me. But I was very distracted. I could feel my heart beating. This ought to have been an erotic thing, but instead it was annoying. I heard… boom-boom, boom-boom, boom-boom. It meant I couldn’t hear him, and I couldn’t take in a word he was saying.
Then my enhanced peripheral hearing kicked in. I could hear a couple at the back of the restaurant:
“It’s good to talk about these things.”
“It’s stifling. I feel stifled.”
“You need to know what makes me happy!”
“I know too much about what makes you happy. I need to be, you know, spontaneous.”
“It’s not like I’m giving you a schedule. There’s space for you to be spontaneous.”
“How spontaneous? Five minutes of…”
I finally managed to tune it out. Andrei was talking to me. I sifted through my short-term memory banks and picked out a few phrases: “… feel completely ignorant. I didn’t listen to any classical music until I was in my sixties. Does that make me a philistine?”
“No that doesn’t make you a philistine,” I said and he nodded, reassured. And I felt a surge of pleasure; I guessed right about what he’d been saying.
Then I got bolder. “Shall we order?” I said.
“We already have,” he told me. There was a wary tone in his voice.
“Yeah, yeah, of course.” I smiled crazily, sifted my memory banks. I remembered a blonde girl, with a sulky face, I was asking her for lamb cutlets. Was that here, or somewhere else? I glanced around, saw a blonde waitress, sulky face. I felt triumphant. I was on top of this. (This kind of muddlement happens a lot to me. Is it some weird mental glitch? Or am I just too good for this world?)
“I’m a bit tense,” I told him. “Tension does things to me. It makes me tune out.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Forget it.”
I looked at him. There was such a patient air to him. He seemed to really want to hear what I had to say.
“Do you want to know what was the worst thing I ever did?” I asked him.
“Go ahead, tell me.” And so I told him the story of the gang boss and how we “virtually” raped his daughter.
I explained: “The Georgian mob finally killed Valentin in a restaurant in St Petersburg. They pumped a hundred explosive air pellets into his body and walked away. He was still alive. He thought he’d miraculously survived, he picked himself up and walked out. Witnesses say he actually thought he was Rasputin reincarnated. Then he got in his car and the bullets all exploded. All over the upholstery. Like a whale swallowing a depth charge, then burping. No one else was hurt, but there was body fat and hair and blood sprayed everywhere. Fat schmuck. But after what he did to his daughter, it was just deserts. We never proved it, but we think he used to sodomise her with a fire iron. You know, one of those things you used to prod coals on a coal fire? Not a hot one, nothing as truly vicious as that. It was just something that he had to hand, maybe a family heirloom. But we found traces of Victorian cast metal in her anus when we did our medical. That was the clue. Boy, that was a motivator! So anyway, that was how we killed Fat Grigori. Am I talking too much?”
Belatedly, it dawned on me that Andrei was staring at me like a goldfish whose fishtank has just vanished. I mentally rehearsed everything I had just said, and wondered if it showed me in a bad light.
“You, um. Aarrgh,” he said.
“I’ve just appalled you, haven’t I? You are literally, physically disgusted at me.” A familiar sense of defeat washed over me; nice one, Lena.
“No, no, no, not at all. I’m just… taken aback. I’m trying to recall similar anecdotes I can tell you. Like the time in Rome, when I broke my training schedule, snuck out of the hotel in the middle of the night, and ate a burger. A McDonald’s burger no less!”
He’s being self-deprecating, I realised. A good response would be a gentle, but approving laugh. I laughed,
