It’s Not Because I Want to Die

I must be jinxed! Not long after I arrived, the company Dad was working with went out of business, so he wasn’t needed and returned to the States. I loved it in Norway, even in winter temperatures of minus 20 degrees, and I decided to stay. I got a job selling jewellery on a market stall, which turned out to be virtually the only stall in the area that had a licence to trade. There were dozens of illegal stalls, and when the police came by, everyone would quickly load their goods under my stall and disappear.

Lots of different nationalities lived side by side – Palestinians, French, Algerians, Germans, Americans – selling jewellery, trinkets and dodgy records. There was a great community feeling. The Norwegian company Dad had worked with had paid the lease on his house for almost another year, so I stayed on when he left and shocked the neighbours by letting a few of my bohemian friends move in. One of them taught me to ski, which I took to straight away. Living in Oslo was fantastic. Great cross-country or downhill ski runs were only a short bus, tram or boat ride from the city. To me, getting there was as much fun as being there. They weren’t flashy slopes with smart restaurants and multiple chairlifts, like you find in the fashionable resorts in the Alps – just clean, family-oriented spaces. That didn’t cost anything.

A girl I met while working on the jewellery stall took me to the Café de Paris one night and I immediately loved the friendly atmosphere. The owners were a Norwegian-Algerian woman and her French husband, both of whom treated the club like an extension of their home, rather than a place of business, and it worked. It had such a warm, welcoming atmosphere, and it was a second home for a lot of foreigners – French-speaking Africans, African-Americans from the NATO base and of course a wide-eyed English girl. When they offered me a job behind the bar, I decided to accept. I continued working on my jewellery stall by day and took up residence behind the bar of the Café de Paris by night. If they hadn’t paid me to be there, I would have spent all my money on the other side of the bar. It was home-from-home and my time there would prove to be one of those rare life-changing experiences because I met loads of people who would become friends for life: my best friend Vera, Greg (the friend who was with me the day I collapsed in Bradford), Chris Merchant, who was an English singer, the American club manager Dwayne, and Mildred Jones, the singer who eventually coaxed me to Singapore.

Meeting Mildred for the first time was kind of scary. She was larger than life at over 6 feet tall, yet she wore vertiginous high heels, glamorous dresses covered in seed pearls and glitter, full make-up and long lacquered nails – and that was just for breakfast! On stage she was a colossus: incredibly imposing, oozing sex appeal and with the voice of a diva. During her long career, which started in the late 1950s, she had been instrumental in encouraging clubs to open their doors to black artists. She had toured Russia with B. B. King and had played all over Scandinavia, as well as in her native America. She wrote her own songs, full of double entendres, and always had love-struck admirers milling around. She was in her 50s by the time I met her and didn’t encourage these men (some very young). I once overheard her say, ‘Honey, I’ve got underwear that’s older than you!’ But they were like flies to flypaper.

When Omar first met Mildred, he thought she must be a man, due to her stature and deep voice. Singapore was home to lots of lady-boys and it took me a long time to convince him that she was 100 per cent woman under the seed pearls and glitter. Too much woman for most men to handle.

Mildred was playing in the piano bar at the Grand Hotel, just down the road from the Café de Paris. She was usually starving when she finished her set at 1 a.m., so Dwayne would send up a plate of food covered in silver foil. It became my job to take up her late-night supper, and when she noticed that I had fake nails too, she asked if I would come back the next day to help repair hers: she would batter them nightly on the piano and nail salons were crazy money. My hand was trembling the first time I squeezed out the little blobs of glue and positioned the nails in place, but somehow they didn’t go wonky, so I acquired another (unpaid) job. I was in awe of her for ages, until I got comfortable with the astonishing presence and came to appreciate that beneath the glitz she was a down-to-earth southern belle with a filthy sense of humour and a raucous laugh.

Greg was a drop-dead gorgeous American who worked for NATO, and we nicknamed him ‘GQ’ because he was always so impeccably dressed. I dated him briefly, but it’s weird going out with someone who has more hair products than you and takes much longer to get ready to go out in the evening. We drifted easily into friendship and I lived platonically in his flat with him for a couple of months when I needed somewhere to stay.

Vera was working behind the bar in the Café de Paris the first week I was there. I heard it was her birthday and I took a cake from the pantry, but I couldn’t find any candles, so I stuck in a light bulb with ‘Happy Birthday’ scrawled on it. I left it in the fridge for her to find and she thought it was funny. We just clicked. Like me, she loved travelling and music (she plays piano beautifully) and, of course, men. Unfortunately her taste was a bit dodgy in those days and she fell for the club doorman.

Despite (or rather because of) the fact that we were the only girls working at the Café de Paris, at one time Dwayne, who was a gay, black American, used to make us do all the heavy work. He said he didn’t want to risk injuring one of ‘his boys’ and would get our names mixed up. When it was pointed out what our names were, he’d dismiss us with an imperious wave, saying, ‘You all look the same to me.’ He was wonderfully eccentric, very stylish, always strutting around in a long, flapping coat and Cuban heels, and I absolutely loved working with him.

I stayed in Oslo for a couple of years, longer than I had stayed anywhere in my adult life at that point, but then things began to change at the Café de Paris as my friends upped and moved. Mildred had gone back to her hometown of Houston, Texas, and she called and invited me to work there with her for a while. She said she needed someone to help her sort out the copyright on her songs. I reckoned I could manage that, and of course I wanted to see more of the States. My dad was living there again, so I’d be able to squeeze in a visit to see him and Eppy (whose real name, I found out, was Ethel).

I spent a few months with Mildred in Houston, learning some facts about the music world that would stand me in good stead later on, and I grew to love Americans. After leaving Texas, I planned to continue westwards round the world to visit my uncle Tony, who was working in Hong Kong. The plane had to stop briefly in Tokyo, and though I very much wanted to see the city, the cost of breaking my flight was prohibitive, so it was straight on to Hong Kong. When we landed in Tokyo, though, an announcement was made. It seemed the plane was overbooked, so they wanted to know if anyone would be willing to stay the night in Japan, all expenses paid, plus $200. Of course my hand shot up at lightning speed. The next day was the same, and the one after that. I was staying in a much nicer hotel than I could afford, with all my meals paid for, and by now I had received more in compensation than my ticket had cost. By the time they had space on the onward flight, I’d met some people and been offered a job dancing in Tokyo’s Roppongi district, so I decided to stay for a while.

The men I came across were very respectful. I loved dancing and European girls did well in those bars, where if you had even the slightest bit of rhythm they thought you were Janet Jackson.

By day I had a few jobs making conversation in English with Japanese businessmen so they could polish up their language skills. I lived well enough, sharing a flat with another girl, but after about seven months I felt it was time to go. The wanderlust took over and it was off again, this time to Hong Kong.

I arrived to find that Uncle Tony wasn’t there any more, but on my very first night I went to the bar of a hotel where I planned to stay and there was Chris, the English singer I’d met in Oslo. I stayed with him and his wife while I looked for a job and found my feet.

A girl called Jane, who had been working with my uncle Tony before he left Hong Kong, helped me find a job. While looking though her photo album after dinner one night, I was stunned to see a photo of my ex-flatmate Joss, with whom I’d lived for a while. We compared notes and realised I had taken Jane’s old room when I moved in with Joss.

I did a couple of different jobs in Hong Kong. Jane introduced me to an ad agency based in the building where she worked, and I started working for them selling corporate sponsorship for a road-safety project called Constable Care. I had more time (and enthusiasm) than anyone else in the company, so ended up running it. Because of the experience I gained there of bringing together the Government Information Services (GIS), the police, army, kids with corporate sponsors and the media, I ended up helping Ogilvy & Mather PR set up and run the Keep Hong Kong Clean campaign. (The first taught me the power of the media, the second to deal with failure.)

When I’d got myself settled, Vera came over to join me from Oslo and she moved into my flat for a few months. She was now studying sociology and managed to get a grant. We figured that living in Hong Kong and reading her textbooks would probably be good study. The exchange rate and difference in the cost of living meant she could get by in Hong Kong for the academic year.

It was a brilliant place to live, with 24-hour music and parties. It was obsessed with money and hedonism, probably a bit like the City in London but with a better climate.

I lived in Hong Kong from 1988 to the end of 1990, and I was there when the students protested in Tiananmen Square and Chinese troops opened fire on them. Information wasn’t getting through to the Chinese public, who didn’t have access to Western media, so the South China Morning Post printed cut-out A4 pages explaining the situation and anyone who could faxed them to contacts on the mainland. The massacre caused consternation in Hong Kong because the 1997 handover had already been arranged and was fast approaching and locals were worried that this might be the way they would be treated under Chinese rule.

Meanwhile, back home, Mum’s health had been deteriorating over the years and she was now finding it difficult to look after herself. She was overweight, and that probably contributed to her lack of mobility, but it was also the reason why she wouldn’t ever consult doctors. ‘They’ll only tell me to lose weight,’ she complained, and I’m sure she was right. Unfortunately it meant that her diabetes was never diagnosed. Uncle Frank, the husband of Mum’s sister Beryl, was diabetic, so Mum would clip recipes out of magazines that would be suitable for him, while still eating sugary foods herself. She didn’t complain much about her health, but she needed someone to help her with shopping and housework and anything that required much energy. Carolyn had been doing it for years, and I now felt it was time I helped.

I flew back from 25° sunshine to cold, grey, rainy Bradford, a city I’d never lived in before and where I knew no one apart from Mum and Carolyn. I got a job in Leeds with a recruitment agency, Michael Page. I initially went to ask them to find me a job, but they laughed and offered me a job with them instead. I bought a house near Mum’s, a tall, narrow terrace on a steep hill. Mum was happy to have me at home, and I was happy to be able to spend time with her. I was nearly 27 years old and had had more than a dozen careers to date, so maybe it was time for me to settle down just a bit.

I really enjoyed getting close to Mum again, but we were to have limited time together because in 1992, just over a year after I came back to Britain, she died very suddenly. The shock left me reeling for the next couple of years. I couldn’t decide what to do with myself any more. I felt unbalanced, like a tree without roots or a house without foundations.

Dad came back and took a job in Cheltenham. I took a marketing job in Redditch, near Birmingham, and was able to live with him during the week and drive back to Bradford at weekends. The work was fine at first, but I soon got frustrated. When you keep changing profession, as I did, you never get a chance to work your way up to the interesting jobs at the top. No one’s going to offer you a massive new opportunity when you have a track record like mine. Some people stay with the same employer for decades and climb the ladder – my brother worked for the BBC for over twenty years – but it wasn’t in my nature to put my head down and work. So when Mildred rang and invited me out to Singapore in September 1994, I was ready to change jobs, homes, continents, everything.

Within a week of arriving, Mildred had introduced me to Peter and I’d got the job with Adventure Travel, a company that offered adrenaline-fuelled package breaks to expats living throughout the Far East. They needed someone who knew where the apostrophes should go and I persuaded them that punctuation was my specialist subject.

The job was like a dream come true for me, especially when Peter said he’d like me to go and check out some of the sporting activities and write copy myself – except that my MS diagnosis came only a few months after I’d started. Would I still be able to do all the things they needed me to? I was utterly determined that nothing would stand between me and my newfound love of scuba-diving, so in April 1995, soon after I returned to Singapore, I went to review an Indonesian dive site.

I could still swim and breathe in the mask, so I didn’t think there would be a problem. After a dive one day, though, I swam to the shore and was walking up the beach when I looked down and saw I’d left a trail of bloody footprints all the way up the sand. My feet had been cut to ribbons on the sharp coral and I hadn’t felt a thing. That was a bit of a shock. I was going to have to take a little more care of myself.

Peter sent me on a number of other trips: white-water rafting down rapids on the edge of a jungle in Borneo and more scuba-diving, but I learned to keep an eye on my legs because I couldn’t trust that I was feeling sensations in them accurately. They weren’t responding the way I’d been used to. I never thought I’d be doing this job for too long, but I’d figured a bit longer than this.

Writing about music gave me the chance to meet and interview lots of fascinating people, and gave me free access to Singapore’s buzzing music scene, but the late nights were becoming harder to cope with (even before my MS diagnosis).

My next job – one I’m still doing today, albeit a bit differently – was managing Omar. It’s not something I actively chose in the beginning, but I was living with a houseful of musicians. Their talent lay in making music and mine lay in organisation, so we all just did what we could. They also each did what they could to make my life easier (except getting places on time).

It was incredible luck that I met Omar and the Cuban Boys when I did. The timing was impeccable. They needed managing and they met me, and I became friends with a bunch of people who were able to make me laugh at things that would otherwise have made me cry. It was through them that I worked out how to deal with the disease. Because of them, I was able to take my neurologist’s advice and get on with everything I wanted to do for as long as I could.

Chapter 5 The Boys from Cuba

The house where the Cuban Boys were living in Singapore had five bedrooms to accommodate the ten of them. Omar had been sharing a room with Mariano, the bass player. After I moved in, Mariano would stay elsewhere whenever he could to give Omar and me some space. No one seemed to mind my arrival. It was a very easy place to live. We took it in turns to shop and clean up and cook, although there was only really breakfast to worry about because the band could eat dinner at a restaurant owned by Fabrice (as per their contract) and there really wasn’t time between getting up and dinner to think about lunch.

Omar started trying to teach me Spanish so we could communicate better, but he wasn’t the world’s most sympathetic language teacher. If I said something that was grammatically incorrect, or mispronounced a word, he would call the rest of the band into the room and get me to repeat it and they would all fall about laughing. After the fourth or fifth time he did this, I announced, ‘Right! That’s it. I give up. You’ll have to learn English instead.’ And I stuck to my guns. We were living in a country where English was the universal language, so it was more useful for him to learn English than for me to learn Spanish.

In a way, I didn’t want to learn Spanish, because I had a feeling I didn’t want to hear everything that was being said. Omar flirts with anybody and everybody, and being a nice Englishwoman, it makes me a little uncomfortable. He tells women how beautiful they are. He genuinely means it; he has never been that impressed with half-clothed nubile lovelies, but finds women intriguing. If a woman is wearing a new dress or has changed her hairstyle, he will comment on it. It doesn’t mean he plans to try it on with her; he just notices and comments. I decided it was easier if I didn’t know everything he was saying. Because we were together twenty-four hours a day, privacy was precious and language could provide that.

On stage the band members were charming, sexy, flirty musicians, but if I saw one of them standing straight like a lollipop stick and just playing his instrument without any of the normal messing around I knew it was probably because his girlfriend was in that night. And I didn’t want to be the person who turned Omar into a lollipop stick.

Of course, he didn’t like anyone to flirt with me. Omar once finished his part, put down his violin, left the stage, ‘encouraged’ a man who was drunkenly chasing me round our table to leave, then got back on stage and picked up his violin without missing a beat.

A month after I moved back to Singapore post-diagnosis, it was my 32nd birthday. I hadn’t realised that in Cuba they celebrate birthdays as the clock strikes midnight, so when Omar asked me to come to the club because they were trying something different that he wanted me to hear, I didn’t think anything of it, even when he was insistent: ‘Make sure you are there for the first set. We’re going to do this new thing really early on.’ (Of course, our conversations weren’t nearly as fluent as this; they were still monosyllabic, spoken in whatever language we could remember a word and accompanied by plenty of sign language. It took us twenty minutes to have a three-sentence conversation, which is actually quite good at the beginning of a relationship because it means you can’t argue.)

I obediently turned up at the club and was surprised when, in the middle of the first set, the whole band launched into a very Cuban version of ‘Happy Birthday’. As the number ended, Omar climbed off stage and came over to hand me a red rose. It was a fabric rose because, he explained, he’d been running late and hadn’t had time to go for a real one. The thought was so romantic. I still have the rose: I’m an old romantic too.

He continued to introduce me at gigs, after going through the band members, by saying, ‘There’s the woman who has my heart in chains.’ Some of the other guys decided this clearly worked – if it turned the most ferocious tiger into a purring pussycat, it was worth a try – but it never worked as well as it did for Omar. Originality probably says sincerity.

Our schedules were completely different in those days. Omar got back from the club at three or four in the morning, by which time I would usually be sound asleep in bed. He’d wake me up to share the night with me. It was nice, I suppose, that he wanted to include me in everything he did, but it took hours to go back to sleep. I had to get up at nine to be at work for ten, and if I accidentally woke Omar while I was getting dressed he would complain, without any sense of irony, ‘Why aren’t you respecting my sleep?’

Gradually, with the help of a well-thumbed dictionary, Omar’s improving English and Rolando’s occasional translations, I began to learn his life history and find out more about the man I was living with.

Omar Puente was born in Santiago de Cuba in 1962, three years after the revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power. His father was a doctor, and the family had been living in New York but decided to return in 1959 because Cuba was in desperate need of doctors. After the revolution thousands of predominantly wealthy, white and Hispanic professionals left the island, fearful of what might change. Omar’s parents joined thousands of Cuban expatriates going the other way. Many Afro-Cubans and native Cubans had found it difficult to practise professions under the previous Batista dictatorship. Now they went home to family and friends. In 1962 his mum and dad already had a 10-year-old son, Victor, so it must have been a shock when baby Omar put in an appearance.

Little Omar loved music from the word go and he was sent to the Esteban Salas music school in Santiago, and then, at the age of 12, he won a scholarship to the prestigious Escuela Nacional de Arte in Havana. There he was taught classical violin by the top Russian and Cuban teachers (hence he speaks some Russian) and spent his evenings hanging around Havana’s famous music halls and developing a taste for Latin music. It was the heyday of Havana. Musicians like Chucho Valdés, Rubén González and Guillermo Rubalcaba were playing nightly. Omar was in his element.

In 1978 he saw the jazz fusion band Weather Report playing at Havana’s Karl Marx Stadium and he left the gig on a high, thinking, I want to be able to make people feel that way one day. He loved Latin music, he loved classical, and he was developing a taste for jazz.

The family were living in an apartment near Havana’s famous Malecón, where the Gulf of Mexico crashes up on to the rocks, only separated from a main road through the city by a sea wall. After the revolution, everyone got food, housing, education and healthcare, all the essentials, but the American blockade meant that if you wanted to buy international goods, like records by American artists, you needed foreign currency. Omar started playing his violin in restaurants, where tourists left foreign-currency tips, and that’s where he perfected his ‘charm’. The more customers liked him, the bigger the tips, so flattery and flirtation were useful talents.

When Omar left school, he was due to go to the Moscow Conservatoire to study classical music, but instead he was accepted at Cuba’s newly founded Instituto Superior de Arte, which is a university for the performing arts. The teaching there was intense and he met loads of musicians with whom he would work throughout his career: Omar Sosa, a pianist who now lives in Spain; Giraldo Piloto, leader of a band called Klimax; Gonzalito Rubalcaba, the son of the famous Guillermo; and Angá Diaz, a brilliant percussionist, among others. They graduated in 1986 and each spread across the globe finding work, but always kept in touch.

When Omar was in his early 20s his beloved father died. His elder brother died shortly afterwards, following an asthma attack. At the age of 24, Omar felt it was up to him to take responsibility for his mother and support his sister-in-law, mother of two of his three nephews, Victor, Aaron and Ramses. He’s a very practical person who doesn’t have time for weeping and wailing and high emotion – he just gets on with things, and that’s what he did.

Omar isn’t a political person and he never joined the Communist Party in Cuba, but he is fiercely loyal to his country. They have a world-class education system and universal healthcare. Cubans look out for each other, as they do in all community-dominated cultures. They have a saying that I love (and try to live up to): ‘We share what we have, not what we have left over.’ He grew up without extreme poverty or extreme wealth. No one has much, but they all have enough.