It Was Only Ever You (5 page)

For the first time in her life, Ava looked and felt like a woman.

A
FTER
SHE
discovered her parents had died, Sheila escaped into the radio, listening to it obsessively, every minute that she could. The joyful twinkling jazz piano of Count Basie, the comedic lyrics of Fats Waller and the harmonic bebop of the Delta Rhythm Boys were able to cheer her up in a way nothing else could. The pleadings of Louis Armstrong spoke to her soul and listening to music was the only time Sheila was able to be herself.

Uncle Samuel deplored swing. When Count Basie or Eddie Condon came on the radio, he would rage and fluster. ‘Turn off that rubbish!’ he would shout. ‘Music is Mahler and Mozart – never forget that, Sheila.’

Samuel hoped Sheila would develop more sophisticated, classical tastes as she grew older but his pompous pronouncements only made her even more determined to pursue her love of modern music. She bought records and hid them in her room. There was no point in trying to explain to her uncle that this was the music that moved her. Not the droning misery of Mahler who reminded her only of her dead family and all she had lost. This was the music that made her feel alive. It was new, exciting. Swing music was who she was now – and that was all that mattered. Classical piano made her recall learning ‘Für Elise’ on her uncle’s knee and Sheila had closed the door on those times. Good or bad, she did not want to remember.

As she grew into a young woman, Sheila fulfilled her family obligations by being a grateful little orphan and a good Jew. Samuel and Anya Klein hoped she would meet a nice boy in school whom she might marry. A doctor, or an accountant, perhaps, not a musician like her father, or a poor professor like Samuel. A good Jewish man with some status and a little money. Sheila deserved a nice husband who could give her a good life, after all the poor child had been through. She went along with their wishes because she was grateful for all they had done for her. At the same time, she could feel something wild smouldering inside her. She knew that, however happy it would make Anya and Samuel, a cosy life in Riverdale was not for her. At nineteen, during her second year of college where she was studying pharmacy, the fire broke out inside her. She went to see Charlie Parker playing at the Three Deuces and that night, in the velvet-red underbelly of New York, Sheila grew up. She sat on a leather banquette in a smoky corner swaying from side to side, a cigarette expertly falling from full scarlet lips, and she felt as if she was at home. Shy of dancing in public, she hid in the corner, watching as couples twisted their hips and swung their partners, pretty skirts swooping and smart boys smiling. Black and white, rich and poor – everybody wanted to dance.

This was where she wanted to be, not in some dusty college.

Sheila’s quick academic mind enabled her to fly through her college work at double speed. The rest of the time she spent in the jazz clubs around 52nd Street: Three Deuces, Onyx Club, the Famous Door. She stuck out her degree to keep Anya and Samuel happy, then, as soon as she could, got a job in a diner in the city and left the house in leafy Riverdale.

‘Where will you live?’ Samuel said. He was sorry she was leaving but Sheila was an adult of twenty. She could go where she liked.

He could see she was aching to get away. She was escaping her past. She needed to do that.

‘I’ll find somewhere in the city,’ she said. ‘I’ll be back every weekend.’

Anya wept like Sheila was dying. Sheila knew she should feel bad at leaving them but, in reality, she felt relieved, and that just made her feel more guilty.

She took a room in Times Square, above Al’s Diner.

Sheila felt at home in Times Square with its huge, Technicolor advertisements urging people to ‘Relax with Camel Cigarettes’ or improve their lives with Admiral Television Appliances. The transience, the constant moving, was in such sharp contrast to the leafy, closeted environs of Riverdale, yet, for some reason, the crazy pace made her feel at ease. This was a no-man’s land, a commercial hub where people came to see a show, eat a meal, or dance their socks off for a few hours before going back to their suburban lives. Times Square offered New Yorkers a brief interlude in their dull lives to be entertained and indulged. Anxious for adventure and escape, Sheila turned that series of sweet, brief interludes into her life.

Sheila soon got bored working in the diner. The daytime hours didn’t suit her. So she got herself a job in the Twilight Ballroom, an old-style dance hall, right across the street. She lived from one work shift to the next, from one man to the other, club-to-club, dance-to-dance – snatching meals when she remembered and going back to her shabby apartment.

Sheila started out waiting tables, then worked behind the bar and eventually, after five years, was promoted to manager. The Twilight had a resident band who stuck to ballroom and swing. It was a good job and it enabled her to live the nocturnal life she enjoyed, but as the years went by, Sheila’s heart remained firmly in the jazz scene. Part of her felt that she should be working in the jazz clubs and not some schmaltzy outdated ballroom. However, she also knew that if she worked in the clubs where she socialized, she might go into a hedonistic free fall. Sheila knew how to party but she knew her limitations too. She loved her black musician friends but loving things too much could lead to trouble, so she kept a respectable distance, working hard in the ballrooms then relishing her rare nights off in her precious jazz clubs. Ballrooms and jazz clubs and even the up and coming dinner-dancing venues were worlds apart from one another. Those musicians who worked in the ballrooms were mostly white and classically trained. The self-taught musicians in the jazz/R&B clubs were mostly black. They overlapped, of course. Good musicians were always welcome in both camps, and it wasn’t unusual to see a middle-aged white saxophon- ist in an all-black jazz band or, indeed, a black trombone player in a big band.

However, all of this was about to radically change, and Sheila wanted a piece of it.

Sheila had bought a record the year before called ‘Crazy Man Crazy’ by a white kid called Bill Haley. The record had a wild beat, and she liked it. So when she heard that this kid from Michigan had just got a regular gig in New Jersey in a dance bar, she decided to go and check him out.

As soon as Sheila walked in the door she could tell this was a country bar. Not her scene at all. Nice girls in pretty dresses with full skirts – boys in Sunday-best shirts and slacks. Not as formal as the ballrooms – but all white. She got a drink and stood at the small bar and watched the crowd. As they waited, Sheila could feel their excitement in the air. But then, she thought, country people always got a bit excited when they were out. Eventually, a bunch of white boys came on stage. The chubby front man had a big smile and a cowlick in his hair. They all wore long, tartan jackets and dicky bows. Pure hick. The singer was carrying a guitar and as he closed his eyes and reached his head back to release the first note, Sheila braced herself for the cowboy yodel. What came out surprised her more than anything else she had ever heard. As the band broke into ‘Rock Around the Clock’, her hips started to swing.

Sheila was a cautious dancer. In the jazz clubs, she never felt she belonged on the dance floor. She sat, clicking her fingers, tapping her feet, smoking laconically, enjoying the music that way. But with this new, strange rockabilly sound she found her hips were swaying from side to side at a speed that felt fast – too fast – and yet she was compelled to move in a way that felt utterly natural. It was as if the beat had injected her, and everyone else there, with a kind of electricity. Her body seemed to understand what to do in a way it had never done before now. By the time the lead singer roared out ‘put your glad rags on’, Sheila had grabbed the hand of the nearest stranger, not noticing or caring who he was, and was allowing herself to be swung and twirled around the floor in his expert grip, her feet stamping out the one-two beat as if she were born with it inside her.

Then, as Sheila moved around the floor like a wildcat she realized she had heard this very song being played before. It was a proto-rock song called ‘Rock the Joint’ that she had as a Jimmy Preston recording. She had always enjoyed the beat of it and yet she had never actually danced to it before. However, the way these hillbilly boys were playing the tune she simply had no choice but to dance. It was like a tribal drum, as if something old and terribly familiar was instructing her to get ‘with it’. When the song ended her body was hungry for more and she joined the crowd in baying for Bill and his Comets to play it again, and again. Three times the crowd danced to that tune as if they had never heard it before. While the band took a break, Sheila leaned against the wall, and it hit her like a thunderbolt. This was black music for white kids. These hillbilly kids and their crazy white R&B could change the world.

The next day she went into work and marched straight into Dan’s office.

‘You have to book this band, Dan,’ she said, ‘Bill Haley and His Comets. They are calling it rock and roll; it’s going to change everything.’

Dan looked across at her, narrowed his eyes and gave a hollow laugh.

‘I heard of them, bunch of kids from Michigan. Waste of time. It’ll never take off.’

‘But... it’s like black music for white people, Dan. This is what we’ve been waiting for. You didn’t see the crowd there. They were going nuts.’

Dan shook his head.

‘I heard about it. Jumping up and down and going crazy like savages. The kids are going wild – it’s a phase. It’ll never catch on.’

‘Well I think it will!’

Dan smiled at her, although she could sense he was getting irritated.

‘I had a meeting with the boys in the band about it last week.’

‘Without me?’

‘Sheila, darling, I’ve told you before, leave the music to the experts. As manager, you are in charge of keeping the books straight and making sure the cloakrooms are tidy...’

Sheila would have walked out if she thought she could have got a manager’s job anywhere else. If she left the Twilight, she’d be back to square one selling cigarettes in some other dive. How she wished she could be in charge of the whole place. In charge of her own life...

‘Me and the boys have been looking into it and, let me tell you, rock and roll ain’t never going to hit the mainstream ballrooms and dance halls. Not in New York – not anywhere. The big bands are going nowhere. This rock and roll nonsense is a flash in the pan. Dancing cheek-to-cheek is here to stay. Let the lunatic kids wear themselves out in their living rooms and underground dives, they are not coming in among the respectable folk in the Twilight.’

If Dan McAndrew had been a respectable, churchgoing, God-fearing man, Sheila might have understood his resistance. But he was anything but. He drank like a fish and cheated on his wife. However, he was also funny and charming, so he got away with it. In the years that she had been working for him Sheila had come to care about his business, and a little bit about Dan himself. Sheila knew she was right about bringing in rock and roll. Unfortunately, being a woman meant that she could never be right when it came to a man’s business. However, knowing that just made her even more determined to keep trying.

A month later, ‘Rock Around the Clock’ was all over the TV and radio. Still Dan and the resident band would not change their minds. The old guard would not let down their guard. If they let this reprobate music into their ballrooms, all hell might break loose.

Sheila decided to try and persuade Dan one more time.

At one a.m., after the bar shut up and the club closed for the night, Sheila ran into the ladies’ restrooms to get changed out of the pencil skirt, blouse and heels Dan insisted she wear at work. She pulled on pedal pushers, low pumps and polo neck sweater, all black – her off-duty uniform. Briefly, she checked herself in the mirror. Shaking out her bun and pulling her eyebrow-length fringe down, she squinted through it as she quickly slicked a slash of red over her full lips. She barely looked at herself before moving on. Time in front of the mirror was wasted time. Sheila was puzzled by women who spent time fussing over themselves. You couldn’t change how you looked any more than you could change who you were. Men said they preferred pretty faces so women spent a lot of time trying to make themselves look prettier for them, but Sheila had sussed out long ago that it was all just a game. Seduction had very little to do with beauty, and everything to do with sex. Sheila wasn’t ‘easy’ for the sake of it. She was discerning about whom she slept with. The guys she had sex with, she liked. Sheila needed affection and the human touch as much as the next woman, but unlike most women, she was not prepared to get married to have it. As soon as she felt a guy was getting to like her too much, getting soft on her, she made sure to blow him off. Sheila did not want to shackle herself to one man. She found the very idea boring and frightening. If she could find a man who was her equal, one who would let her work and be herself, then that would be fine. But if there were guys like that in New York, she never met them. She always made her position clear with all her lovers. No strings. Strictly sex. Most men didn’t believe her. They convinced themselves that she must be in love with them and sometimes got very offended when they found out that she had not got the least intention of marrying them. Sometimes men fell in love with her. She broke some hearts but, as long as she gave them a warning shot, Sheila did not feel she was doing anything wrong. Intimacy, and the hurt that went along with it, was beyond her. That was the way she liked it.

When Sheila walked into his office, Dan was slightly taken aback. He had never seen her with her hair down before. She looked a bit wild tonight. Untamed. Angela, his wife, was on holiday in Italy for the month. Angela’s family were old mafia. They all met in Naples once a year and Dan was never invited. It bugged him how her brothers were always lording it over him as if they were something special. Tough guys. He could tell they thought his wife was too good for him. Nonetheless, Dan had promised himself he would be good while she was away, this time. Plus Sheila worked for him and that had never played out too well for him in the past. She was on about the rock and roll thing again.