Love Me Till Wednesday (Sapphire Stars #1)

6

6

Lisa checked her watch as the train pulled into Birmingham New Street station. Thirty minutes late. There was no chance of catching her connection to London now. She followed the crowd leaving the platform and checked the departure board for the next Euston train. One had been cancelled, and the next was in an hour’s time. She may as well have a mooch around the city centre to kill some time.

She went through the ticket barrier, stopped to photograph Ozzie the bull so she could show him to Sophie later, and then headed outside.

It was odd walking through the streets of her home city. She hadn’t been here for years, and nothing looked the way it did when she’d lived here as a child. Then, she passed a narrow street on her left. The music shop she visited as a teenager used to be along there. As she headed up the hill, she spotted the familiar sign hanging outside the door. Discovery Rare Recordings. The sign looked pretty much the same as it had done all those years ago - just a touch more faded around the edges, which wasn’t surprising considering it must have been at least 30 years since Lisa had last seen it.

The shop’s interior was almost the same as it had been the first time she’d set foot inside the door, clutching the small brown envelope containing her wages from her Saturday job. Four dull hours packing car seat covers into plastic bags earned her enough cash to buy a return train ticket to the city centre and a new CD with a bit left over for clothes.

It had always been dingy thanks to the columns of record sleeves hanging in the window, blocking out most of what little natural light came from the narrow street outside. Instead, it relied on two grimy fluorescent strips to illuminate its rare imports and obscure music.

There were only a few CDs. It looked like it specialised in vinyl records now. They were laid out in wire racks in alphabetical order by artist, with black plastic dividers showing where a new letter grouping began. They were interspersed with an occasional extra divider with old-fashioned dymo marker labels for a specific band whose volume of output justified them having their own section.

The till had changed too. The blue-green glow from its modern electronic display looked alien here.

A bald man was standing behind it, flicking through a music magazine. ‘If you need any help, let me know,’ he said without looking up.

‘Thanks,’ she replied.

He looked vaguely familiar. She tried picturing him with hair, first with a short cut, then with classic early 1990s curtains. Yes, it was him. The guy who used to try chatting her up by showing off his encyclopaedic knowledge of 80s electronica.

She didn’t need a rerun on that. She kept her head down and headed towards “T”. Her fingers flicked through the record sleeves one by one until she found a copy of the first album she’d ever bought: ‘Songs from the Big Chair’ by Tears for Fears. She pulled out the sleeve and turned it over to read the track listing. She could still sing every single one of those tracks word perfectly. She smiled to herself, remembering the excitement of buying it, the train journey home that felt like it was taking forever when all she wanted to do was open the front door and run upstairs to where the CD player waited in her bedroom - her window onto another more exciting world.

She put the sleeve back in the rack and headed for the shop door. A familiar face at the front of the section marked “New Releases” stopped her in her tracks. Those distinctive eyes were looking more creased around the edges. He still had a good head of hair, though it was grey now and styled to disguise a receding hairline. He looked slightly chubbier than she remembered, but not much. The album was simply titled “Love”, with Pete’s name in capital letters at the bottom of the sleeve. Lisa tentatively pulled it from the rack. So he’d become a solo artist. She’d not expected that. She looked down the list of musicians who’d worked on his new album. None of the names rang a bell.

But what was familiar was the title of one of the tracks: ‘Love Me Till Wednesday’. How spooky to see that twice in less than 24 hours. It must be the same song that they’d written together in 1990. He wouldn’t have come up with another one with the same title, surely? Her mind went back to the hot summer’s day when they first worked on it, just the two of them with his keyboard and her notebook full of ideas for lyrics. They’d been sitting in Pete’s cosy one-bedroomed flat in Fulham, a slight breeze coming through the open window. She remembered hearing one of the neighbours in the garden below yelling a complaint about the racket they were making. The song had been a doddle to write. It had all come together perfectly in only twenty minutes from start to finish.

She was tempted to buy the album, but she didn’t have a record deck at home. She’d download the digital version later. She put the sleeve back in the rack, called thanks to the man behind the till, and walked out into the daylight again .

Lisa ran down the steps at New Street, just as the London train was slowly easing to a halt beside platform 6. She tagged onto the end of the queue of other passengers keen to get on board and head back down south. She found a seat next to the window and plugged in her phone charger. She ought to finish typing up her notes from this morning’s training sessions while it was still fresh in her mind, but her curiosity about Pete got the better of her.

As the train pulled out of the station, Lisa opened her phone’s music app and searched for his name. There was his photo - the same one that was on the album cover. She tapped on it to bring up his page. “Love Me Till Wednesday ” was listed in “Top Songs”. She couldn’t bring herself to listen to it yet, so she scrolled down to see what else was there. It looked as if “Love” was his only solo album.

The “About” section made interesting reading:

After the untimely breakup of his first band, The Sapphire Stars, British musician and composer Peter Armstrong collaborated with a variety of bands and vocalists in the UK music scene.

Lisa smirked. That sounded like marketing speak for “Worked as a session musician”.

He quit performing full-time in 2002 and spent many years lecturing in Europe and the USA on songwriting and the music business.

She hadn’t heard about that. For all his faults, she could see Pete as an excellent tutor. He’d patiently taught her lots about crafting songs .

’Love’ marks his return to writing and performing his own work. From the soaring anthem of “Rebirth” to the tender lyrics of “Love Me Till Wednesday”, the album documents Peter’s journey to becoming a husband and father.

Really. She recalled a conversation they’d had when they first got together at sixth form. Pete was firmly against bringing children into the world then. He’d obviously had a rethink about marriage and parenthood.

She went back to the track listing. Stop putting it off! You need to listen to it. Her inner voice was right. She put her earphones in and clicked on “Love Me Till Wednesday”. The first few bars were exactly as he’d written them 30 years ago - the distinctive haunting sound of the synthesiser and the opening drumbeat that mimicked a human heart pounding. Then the vocals came in. Lisa’s lyrics but Pete’s voice. She’d never envisaged it being a man’s song, but he sang it with feeling. She shut her eyes, and tears came from nowhere. No sobbing - just wet trails meandering down the contours of her cheeks.

‘Are you OK?’ Lisa felt a hand gently touch her arm.

She opened her eyes and saw a woman sitting opposite her.

Was she OK? She was surprised it had had such an emotional impact on her. She’d never have listened to it in public if she’d known.

She pressed stop on the music app. ‘I’m fine, thank you. It’s just a song that reminded me of someone from a long time ago.’

‘I have a song like that.’ The woman smiled sadly and offered her a small pack of tissues.

Lisa smiled at her, took her earphones out, and dried her tears with one of the tissues. There would be plenty of time to finish listening to it this evening in the privacy of her own home. She wondered how singing it had made Pete feel. In her mind, it was inextricably linked to the end of their relationship. But that had turned out to be a relief for both of them. So why had she cried? Perhaps because it reminded her of everything that happened next.

The woman opposite looked like she wanted to talk more, but Lisa wasn’t in the mood to engage in conversation with anyone now. She returned the pack of tissues with another smile and a quick “Thank you” and then leaned against the window. The cool glass felt comforting against her forehead. She closed her eyes again, her mind wandering back to 1991.