Dead Girl Walking Read Online Free PDF Page B

to be able to give our best.
    It wasn’t Mötley Crüe I was going out there with.
    People still loved winding me up about what I was getting myself into though, especially old orchestra colleagues and friends from back home. All the usual rubbish about throwing televisions out of hotel windows. Yeah, yeah: sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. Please. My fiancé Keith was always making duff jokes about it, failing to hide his own unease. When he wasn’t acting like he couldn’t take it seriously, he was acting like it wasn’t happening at all, or that things would get back to normal once it was over.
    We never discussed what ‘over’ would mean.
    I got more nervous and more impatient the closer I came to that opening night. I just needed it all to be under way. Then, only a few days before we were due to kick off the tour, Granda died.
    It wasn’t exactly out of nowhere. He was ninety-two and he’d been fading over the past three years, requiring him to move into assisted accommodation and then into a nursing home, but it still felt sudden, as he hadn’t been ill or anything.
    Dad came back for the funeral, flying in from London. First time I’d seen him in close to a year. He fronted up I guessed as a gesture of respect and affection for Granda. Given the way he’d acted over the last few years of their marriage, nobody was going to mistake it as a show of support for Mum.
    I admit I got a weird buzz from the look of shock and worry on his face when I told him why I’d be flying out first thing the next morning.
    Aye, Jamie, your first-born daughter is running away with the circus. Suck it up.
    Then he kind of neutralised it by telling me that he had Savage Earth Heart’s last album on his iPod. Actually he said ‘the’ album, obviously ignorant of it being their second, but then that went for just about everybody who bought
The Venal Tribe
after ‘Do It to Julia’ got used on that American TV show. No matter. The point was, if my dad listened to them, then how hell-raisey could Savage Earth Heart be?
    It was a good funeral. We do generally give good funeral in Shetland, which is not to say that we sent Granda off to sea in a floating pyre, but that it was more of a celebration than a wake. I saw lots of familiar faces, got a lot of hugs, and we all cried good tears, warm tears, the kind that make you feel better.
    Despite the temptations of such a gathering, maybe haunted by the image of Damien standing over me and glancing at the clock, I got myself a comparatively early night. Keith came up to bed around the same time too, under the pretence of making sure I was all right but actually a bit frisky. The combination of such an emotional day and a few too many drinks had much the same effect on me.
    We had sex for what was actually only the third time. (I’m not even sure if the second one really counts, as he barely got it in. Things were even tighter than the first time, as I kept tensing up.) It went better than on both previous occasions, but to be honest, it still didn’t feel anything like as good as before we lost our virginities. Prior to that, there had always been the thrill of pushing things to the next stage, then for a long time just getting good at what we did do.
    This is not a blog, by the way. I mean, it
is
a blog, obviously, but that doesn’t mean it’s for anyone else to read. In fact, it’s absolutely NOT for anyone else to read, so I suppose it’s a diary then, but that doesn’t sound right.
    Whatever.
    The point is, I’m writing it for myself. I’m writing it because I think the next few weeks are going to pass in a blur, and I want to get all of this down so that I’m able to remember it when I’m older. When I have kids and grandkids, I want to be able to look back and tell them: you know, I was actually once a rock star – sort of.
    Plus, I reckon it will give me something to do on all those bus journeys, which look like being a big part of my life in the weeks to come.
    The