Number One Fan

We always laughed that our story was similar to “A Star is Born,” you know the film with James Mason and Judy Garland, oh and the newer rocky version with Barbra Streisand and the growling Kris Kristofferson, and I think there’s another version, a really old one, a drama and not a musical at all. Yeah, the same type of thing, he (in this case Jonas Gray) was riding high, with records flying up the charts and almost always landing at number one, live shows in packed out stadiums, Top of the Pops and celebrity interviews, and me (Anya Starr – not my real name but we’ll get to that later) just a struggling musician busking on the streets and playing in local pubs and clubs for a pittance.

So, let’s go back to the day we met. It was the summer of 1984 and I was just twenty years old, I was feeling good, wearing denim shorts, black Doc Marten boots, and a tee-shirt, the man himself, Marc Bolan the Electric Warrior, displayed on the front. It was a warm day, blue sky, fluffy clouds and the sun, a great yellow ball pulsing down heat, especially here in Leeds city centre where I’d gone early to set out my stall so to speak, making sure my business cards were on full display, little white squares covered in thick black writing, “Angie-Marie Goodwin, Singer/Songwriter, The Mews, Charlotte Street, Haworth BD22 1AP, Tel: 0535 619080.”

I’d also put some tapes and records out for purchase, a collection of my self-penned songs aptly named, “Angie-Marie – The First Chapter.” Gazing at them, at the picture of me on the front, posing with my guitar, I felt a strong sense of pride, the feeling that I’d accomplished something whilst keeping my fingers crossed and hoping that interest and, therefore, sales would be good. I’d had a couple of not so good years, personally not musically, but it now seemed that things were on the up. Keeping out the demons with my love of music had been the answer to my prayers.

The town centre was busy with people milling in and out of the shops, and music streamed from the record shops, the faraway strains of Queen’s latest hit echoing around the streets, “I want to break free; I want to break free …” I saw Freddie Mercury in my mind’s eye, posturing around the stage, wearing only a pair of shorts, and I smiled to myself.

A knot of interested onlookers had formed around me like a wall so, picking up my guitar, I rocked out a few chords just to get them in the mood before launching into a self-penned masterpiece (I had to call it that because, I mean, who else is ever going to?) its title, “My Rocking Nights,” which bore a strong vibe of Suzi Quattro and “Devil Gate Drive” having the same hard beat, “So come and fight, yeah, come and fight, yeah, on my rocking nights …”

The tight knot danced all around me, children squealed and bounced up and down, whilst their parents laughed and threw money into my open guitar case. “Good stuff,” someone shouted as I finished the first song and immediately launched into a cover of Shocking Blue’s “Venus,” “I’m your Venus, I’m your fire, at your desire …” Having absolutely no idea that a three-girl group called “Bananarama,” would have a hit with a cover of that song two years into the future. “Her weapons were her crystal eyes, making every man mad …”

“Yeah, okay, okay, dear Reader, I’m getting to it, the meeting between myself and Jonas Gray, a bolt out of the blue meeting culminating in a relationship which would last for years. But, no, I’m getting ahead of myself, whetting your appetite for more I suspect. Yeah, I know, you’re wondering what Jonas is like. Is he good looking? Um, yes, incredibly. Is he nice? How could he not be? How come he was just wandering the centre of Leeds by himself anyway, seeing as he’s such a big star? Yeah, okay, be patient. I’ll come to all that.

I’d finished my first set and a few people had gathered around, some chinking money into my guitar case and some browsing the tapes and records. I’d made a few sales and was having a breather, chugging water from a bottle and munching on a chocolate bar, when I heard a voice at my side, “Hey, how you doing today? I really enjoyed your set. You’ve got a good voice.”

My head snapped up, I mean it’s not every day you get compliments, to come face to face with a tall guy with thick dark hair and eyes, revealed after taking off his really cool sunglasses, so deep and green it was like staring into mossy pools. He was clean shaven with a tanned complexion, and had a jaw so square it seemed unreal. He wore blue jeans and a white tee-shirt, showing a picture of Bob Dylan and the words, “Bob Dylan, Blowin’ in the Wind” in swirly letters, that fitted tightly over his broad chest and muscular shoulders. I noticed with an almighty lurch of my heart that he’d picked up one of my business cards.

I found my voice but it was a long time coming, “Oh wow, thank you.” He looked so familiar, eye-wateringly so, but before I could ask his name, he put out a hand and said, “Hi, I’m Jonas Gray, pleased to meet you,” and glancing at the card and then back to me, “Angie-Marie Goodwin.”

“Pleased to meet you,” and before I knew what I was saying, blurted out, “I’ve got posters of you all over my bedroom wall …” Realising what I’d said, a slow painful blush suffused my face as, throwing his head back, he roared with laughter before looking at me again, and saying, “I know that happens, but only because I’ve been painted as some sort of heart throb by the press.”

“Oh no,” I said hurriedly, “It’s your music,” I swallowed, my mouth dry as a bone, “I really love your music. It’s a great mixture of pop and rock and, well, it’s just amazing.” I tried not to but I giggled, to me a silly childish giggle that made me blush all over again, my face feeling like one big pulsating red light.

He smiled, tiny attractive wrinkles forming at the corners of his eyes, “I like your music too. In fact,” He waved the card he’d picked up, “I’m going to speak to my agent about you.” He spread his arms wide, “I can just imagine you with a band, gee, you’d be even more terrific. Your voice is really soulful, and your guitar playing is more than good. How did you learn to play so well?”

“Well, my dad plays guitar so I sort of watched him, you know.”

“I’m impressed.”

I gaped open mouthed, too shocked to reply, “Oh, may I?” He leaned forward to pick up a tape and a record, “I can play these to him, you know, my agent.” His green eyes flashed over the track listings, “Oh, are the songs on here all your self-penned stuff?”

“Ah, yes,” I nodded, “All my own stuff, and when I’m busking,” I shrugged, “I throw in a cover or two as well.”

“Yeah, the Shocking Blue cover was great. Um, how much for these?” He held out the tape and record.

“Oh, please you can have those,” I gabbled. Yeah, okay, I knew I was gabbling but I just couldn’t help it. I was sweating too, the sun burning down onto the top of my head, my heart hammering like Roger Taylor banging on his drums.

Putting them down, he said, “No, I want to make a donation.” He pushed his hand into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out some notes that he put carefully in my guitar case. I was aware of people to the side of us, looking at the tapes, picking up the records and reading the cover, talking quietly amongst themselves, whilst taking furtive glances at Jonas Gray. Thinking no doubt, “No surely it can’t be. What would a massive star like Jonas Gray be doing alone in the centre of Leeds?”

With a grin, he touched the side of his finger to his nose whilst giving me a wink. Picking up the tape and the record and pocketing my card, he said, “I’ll be in touch, Angie-Marie, okay?”

I swallowed again, my throat parched as the Sahara Desert, “It’s been great to meet you.”

He held out his hand and enveloped mine sending a thrill like a surge of electricity shooting through my whole body, and then he turned and was gone as if he’d never been there at all. I blinked trying to conjure him up again, but realising it just wouldn’t work, decided to stand on tip-toe, trying to get a last glimpse but there were too many people, the crowds of shoppers too dense and thick and people now, to my delight, holding out my tapes and records, clamouring to buy, a few die-hard busker fans waiting for my next set.

“Hey,” said a girl as we exchanged a tape for money, “Was that Jonas Gray?”

“Who?” I said frowning, yet with such a warm feeling spreading through my body, I wanted to dance and sing from the roof tops.

She shrugged, “Oh, never mind, I must have been mistaken,” And then with a bright smile, “Thanks for the tape. You’re really good, you know.”

So, that was our first meeting, Jonas Gray, the Star and me, Angie-Marie Goodwin, the Street Busker. Did I think he’d get back to me? No, of course I didn’t, but do you know what? He did!

***

New York, New York – 31 December 1999

Woosh, I’m sucked back to the present, to my apartment in New York City. I gaze at the panoramic view from the huge windows, at the Twin Towers standing tall and proud, surrounded by skyscrapers and church spires. It’s snowing, tiny fine flakes that hover in the air like fairies, and sunlight glints in a myriad of colour, a sparkle of blue, pink and silver on the choppy Hudson River, and the pavements and the parks. A chilly breeze chases fluffy clouds across a baby blue sky and a silver aeroplane shoots past like a bullet from a gun.

It’s New Year’s Eve 1999 and everybody’s waiting for disaster, for hasn’t it been said that on the stroke of midnight the Millennial Bug will come into full force and all the computers will fail, networks will crash and the whole world will plunge into chaos, into darkness. If we survive, it will be to live in a world without electricity, heat or running water, a cold barren place. That great showman Prince croons from every radio, from every television, “The sky was all purple there were people running everywhere …” Everything is gonna crash and burn, baby, crash and burn! “Say say, two-thousand-zero-zero party over, oops out of time, so tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999…”

My heart pounded in anticipation of tonight’s concert, the twelve o’clock transition into the year 2000 being frightening and like something out of a “movie” as I’d got so used to calling “films” since living in America. America, the land of plenty didn’t they say, where everything seemed loud and brash and where my head ached and my body felt splintered and my bones old. I’d been unwell with vague aches and pains that just wouldn’t go away as if something was sucking away my soul, eating me, nibbling at me, a tiny little bit by bit, until there’d be nothing left at all but a pile of broken bones.

A vast comparison to Jonas who was lapping it up, like a cat at a saucer of cream, loving every minute. He seemed younger and more vibrant, his green eyes bright, his body youthful and elastic. I felt weighed down and full of woes whereas he was up there, high as a kite. A complete turnaround from when I’d had my first hit record and I’d been, like a shooting star, on the way up and Jonas on that long drop down, as long a drop as it would be from those two enormous towers, totally in my line of vision, winking and blinking in the waning sun.

“Where was he right now?” I thought to myself as I stood gazing from the window, “Who was he with? Had he met somebody else? What was happening to us? He’d taken to wearing glasses, saying they made him look cool, intellectual, but they mirrored his eyes so I couldn’t see him anymore, couldn’t read him, and sometimes I didn’t know who he was, as if he wasn’t Jonas but somebody quite different, a stranger.

He seemed to take all this wealth we’d accumulated for granted, whereas I for one would never forget my busking days, playing for hours in busy town centres for a pittance, but money being unimportant then, interested faces and clapping hands being everything I wanted. Lean days but happy days when I looked back and realised how far I’d come.

My thoughts turned to Mariana and to Clarence, the bird with the beady black eyes, squawking nasty words that he picked up from everybody around him. No secret was safe with Clarence around. He’d unnerved me then just as Chucky the doll did in the film “Child’s Play” from so many years ago. I was glad that at least one of them was gone now, gone from my life, never to return. Yet Matt was still here and, obviously, Mick too, who had always been the better one in my opinion. Maybe it was my fault, maybe I should have tried harder, not expected perfection. “When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are.” Isn’t that what they say?

Regardless of all that, after this concert, if the world still carried on revolving, if it hadn’t exploded into a molten wheel of red, if we still had heating, lighting and pure running water, I wanted to go home, home to England. Home to green rolling hills and the endless moors. I was sick of miles and miles of concrete. “Home, home on the range, where the deer and the antelope play …” What a weird song to think of but that’s how I felt. Oh, how I wanted to go home. “Where seldom is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day …”

I’d speak to him tonight, that was for sure, for definite. He’d try to persuade me otherwise I knew that but I had to try. I could almost hear his voice, “Angie-Marie, honey, come on, we can’t leave. You cracked America! So few performers can do that! And, anyway, what’s in England for us now? Isn’t our life here in New York City, the biggest, the craziest and the greatest place in the world?”

“No,” I wanted to say, to shout, “No Jonas, it isn’t the greatest place in the world.” After this massive thing we’d been planning for so long, “The Anya Starr Millennium Concert,” I’d speak to him, make him see reason, make him see that I had to go home. That it was serious. After all I’d been through, the trauma, surely, he’d realise that it was the only thing to do.

Even so, I wanted this concert to go without a hitch, to be a crowning point, for Jonas, for me, for Mick Smithson, who had worked so hard to help me get where I was today, even for Matt, but especially for David. If only he could be here.

***

Haworth - Back to Summer 1984

“Jonas Gray?” exclaimed my sister, Kate, as I related the whole story to her when I arrived home that evening, “You’re having me on, right? There’s no way a big star like him would be wandering around Leeds on his own. He would have people with him, a bodyguard, you know a big man.” She squared her shoulders and pasted a frown on her face, “Otherwise he’d get mobbed, surely!”

“No,” I said, “People noticed him yeah but, because he behaved so normally just like an ordinary guy, they doubted it was him. He took one of my cards and said he was going to tell his agent about me. He bought a tape and a record too.”

She laughed uncontrollably, her shoulders shaking, and sank down, her head buried in the soft pillows scattered over my bed. Jonas Gray gazed down at us from the posters on the walls, his handsome face smiling, his poses seductive.

“In your dreams, Angie-Marie,” she said, before getting up and flouncing from the room. The sound of her voice telling mum and dad everything I’d just told her, floated up the stairs. Kate was two years younger than me and a big fan of Madonna, the song “Borderline” being a big favourite and she raved a lot about Prince, the strains of “Purple Rain,” always sneaking from her room. Jonas Gray at twenty-two was just a bit too old for her hence the decidedly mocking way she’d received my news but “time would tell” I thought gleefully, crossing my fingers and hoping upon hope that he really would contact me with good news.

I gaze around my bedroom at the disarray, boxes piled everywhere, empty book shelves and records in tall wonky piles on the floor. I was in the process of leaving home, not before time I suppose at the age of twenty. I wasn’t going far, just to Haworth Main Street, and a flat above the gift shop I worked in part-time. The owner and my boss, Gloria Ratcliffe (a real honest to goodness Dolly Parton look-a-like) was buying a house in Ilkley and had offered me the flat for free, “Because you work for me and I trust you,” she’d declared, “And because I feel better having someone on the premises.”

Of course, I’d snapped it up immediately, excited at the thought of having a place of my own, to be able to decorate and arrange the rooms as I liked and to come and go as I pleased. I hadn’t been prepared for mum’s tears when I told her though and dad’s exclamations of worry and surprise. “Oh, Angie-Marie,” I remember mum saying, “Why? Don’t you like it here? And when will we see you?”

“Of course, I like it here,” I’d said, “And you’ll probably see me every day, the flat’s only on the Main Street!”

“It’s not because of what happened is it?” I remember mum asking me, “You’re okay now?” Dad hovered at her shoulder, a very hard to fathom look on his face.

“Okay dear reader, I’ve had a couple of tough years that I can’t talk about yet but I said, “No mum, it’s got nothing to do with that … I … look I don’t want to talk about it, okay? Not yet …”

She nodded and then they calmed down and she started giving me little knick knacks for when I moved in. A frying pan for the kitchen, as well as one of those new-fangled woks for healthy stir fry cooking, a couple of cat ornaments for the sitting room and a duvet with a bright pink cover “to make your bedroom look nice,” she’d said, giving me a hug.

My mind wandered back to today’s meeting with Jonas Gray, becoming even more aware of the posters smiling down at me from the walls. The sun streamed in through the window, lighting up his long lean body (just exactly as he was in real life) clad in a sexy stage outfit, his bright white teeth and luminous green eyes shining in his handsome face. Sitting on the bed, I reached into the bedside cabinet and took out my diary, fluttering through the pages until I came to today’s date, 28 July 1984, and taking a pen wrote,

“Wow, what a day, busked in Leeds city centre and who should come and introduce himself? Only my idol Jonas Gray! No, dear diary, I’m not joking, it’s true, true true! He was impressed with my singing and guitar playing and said he’d be in touch when he’d spoken to his agent. Fingers crossed dear diary he’ll contact me soon. I just can’t wait.”

Putting my diary away, and full of a sudden restless energy, I got up and padded to the window, peering out at the still bright day, the sun shining down like an egg yolk frying in a pan. From here I could see the parsonage where the Bronte’s had lived so many years before, the cemetery spread out all around it, grave stones poking up through the dry earth like broken teeth, others unsteady on stone legs like dismal tables, the epitaph’s faded now, covered with moss and slime or wiped away entirely by harsh winters of snow, and wind and rain, or the fierce rays of the summer sun.

“What a harsh life they must have had,” I thought, as peering further away, past the parsonage, I could just about see the Main Street, its cobbles baking in the sun, visitors tramping up and down, peering into open shop doorways, eating and drinking in the cafes and the pubs, gazing wide-eyed around the “Black Bull,” at its bumpy misshapen walls and thick black beams that ran like tracks along the ceilings and the walls, where Branwell Bronte was said to have drunk his nights away much to the despair of his father and his sisters.

The shrill ringing of the phone suddenly cut into my thoughts and I started, my heart beating fast and hard in my breast. I imagined our dated trimphone sitting on the table in the hallway, the colour distinctive as a jar of English mustard, and heard Mum’s fluffy slippered feet as they slapped along the black and white tiled floor, and then her tentative, “Hello, Haworth 619080,” she was still so nervous of answering the phone.

“Oh yes, hello,” and then a brief silence, “Just a moment, I’ll call her.”

My heart still hammering, I stood very still, waiting, the palms of my hands slippery with the heat, or was it nerves? for her to call my name.

“Kate … “she shouted up the stairs, “It’s Roger …”

Kate’s bedroom door screeched open and the sound of Prince and the Revolution trickled out, “I can’t disguise the pounding of my heart, it beats so strong, it’s in your eyes - what can I say? They turn me on …” and then Kate’s voice, “Hey, okay, coming down …”

Slowly shaking my head, I smiled wryly, “Did I really think he would get in touch so soon? If at all?”

Busying myself, I fetched boxes and started to fill them, books, records, cuddly toys, clothes, all the time hearing Kate’s breathy, flirty conversation with her boyfriend, Roger (or Rog as she liked to call him), as it wound its way like tendrils of smoke up the stairs.