Love Lies Read online

  OK, I suppose I can admit that normally going to a Scottie Taylor gig would be something I’d get excited about. It would have been the perfect present if it was any other birthday. I saw Scottie live once before, about eight years ago, and he was bloody amazing; I couldn’t sleep for days, I was that high on the buzz he left me with. And yes, any other day than today – the day I’d hoped and hoped and hoped Adam would ask me to be his wife – I might have been thrilled with an ‘Access All Areas’ pass; as things are, the crappy little bit of plastic seems like an insult. Adam casually flashes his pass and a smug grin at the bulky guys on the door. They nod with respect and check out my legs; I glare back resentfully.

  Inside the stadium, it seems to me that everything is set to go. Adam tells me that his recent late nights have all been spent here, setting up for rehearsals. Adam is flying high as a kite. He’s giggling like a seven-year-old girl, flinging orders and cheery hellos by turn at the guys and girls who I assume are his team.

  I am now familiar with what to expect behind the scenes before the razzamatazz of the show; I’ve waited in the wings often enough. I scan the endless rows of lights, the towering stacks of speakers, the white cyclorama, the heavy drapes, and the jet black front curtain which are all carefully suspended from complicated zigzag girders hidden in the roof high above. It looks complex bordering on the chaotic. I know that it does demand a lot of patience and skill to get the set-up spot-on and I know that it is crucial for Adam and his team to get every detail pinned down if the trademark Scottie Taylor attention-grabbing spectacle of a concert is to be nailed. I recognize that this stage is bigger than most; there are more dazzling lights and larger stacks of speakers than I’ve ever seen before. I don’t doubt that the set-up has been arduous and that Adam being the assistant stage manager is a big deal.

  The thing is – I don’t give a toss.

  A girl is meant to take an interest, isn’t she? A good girlfriend should care about her boyfriend’s job. But I don’t. Not today. Whatever is going on here isn’t as glossy and polished as a diamond on my third finger would be. I should be really pleased Adam’s got this great promotion and his career is taking off but I’m not impressed. I wish I was. Adam whips off his leather jacket and flings it my way. He practically leaps up a ladder like some sort of stuntman because he’s seen an out-of-place cable. I can’t remember when he last gave me the same attention.

  I kill time watching guys in black T-shirts scuttling like beetles to and fro. On the stage the instruments are already laid out. They are still, waiting for life to be given to them by Scottie’s enormously talented band. The shiny red and silver drums are set up high on a platform, centre stage. There’s not just one keyboard but a whole gaggle of them to the left and the right and there are racks of guitars hung all over the place.

  On the outer reaches of the stage there’s a horrendous confusion of wires and plugs that presumably make sense to someone. The maze of wires ultimately leads to chunky black cabinets and monitors. Smoke generated from machines drifts across the stage and hangs around at knee level, giving substance to the beams of continuously flashing lights that slice across the floor.

  I check my watch – it’s just after ten. Scottie Taylor won’t be on this stage for another ten or eleven hours and yet it’s as though he’s among us already. His presence can be felt in everyone else’s sense of self-importance; not one bod here can believe they are working with such an enormous star. There are so many dreams coming true on one stage, at this one point in time, that it is likely to be some sort of world record. I can see tension, fear and excitement in everyone’s faces. There’s probably enough energy to power an inner city if it could be harnessed correctly. This is a big gig. Enormous. It means a king’s ransom to everybody.

  With the possible exception of me.

  My dreams are not coming true on this stage, or any other, come to that.

  Adam is still up a ladder and doesn’t seem to remember I’m here at all. I can see from the concentration on his face that he has a lot on his mind. I’d put money on it that he’s not thinking about a princess-cut diamond versus baguette.

  I check my phone. There are text messages from two of my four siblings and a voicemail from my mum. I sometimes think mobile phones were invented just so families could avoid talking to one another.

  Whenever you tell people you have four siblings they offer up a brief prayer for my mum’s slack stomach muscles and the lattice grid of stretchmarks which she must surely have, and then ask if we are all alike.

  No, we are not. Despite the fact that we all have the same mum and dad, and we were brought up with the same Protestant work ethic in the same lower-middle-class semi-detached in Reading, we are pretty much opposed in every way. In an attempt to ensure a close family, poor Mum went to the enormous effort of pushing out a kid every two years – which I find scarier than watching the movie Alien (actually, I imagine the whole experience was like Alien, a series of exploding stomachs). Therefore it must be a bit galling for Mum and Dad that ever since we could all walk, we’ve been walking in separate directions, doing everything we can to carve out a bit of space and individuality.

  We are nothing like the Russian doll set that my parents imagined. One of my brothers, Bill, went to Cambridge University to read politics. He glided through exams without having to break into a sweat; he didn’t even appear to break the spine of the cover of a book – he’s just dizzyingly intelligent. He’s gone on to be a trust fund manager. Please don’t ask me what that is because I have no idea. I do know that he drives a top-of-the-range X5 BMW, which, as my dad put it, ‘must have cost a bob or two’, and he married an equally bright (and smug) lawyer and they now live in a huge, tastefully decorated pile in Holland Park with their three kids. The type of kids who watched Baby Einstein on TV from birth and now have an opinion on international current affairs. I’m truly intimidated by my young nephews and baby niece. I usually try to read the quality newspapers before I visit them so that I have topics of conversation to discuss with the eldest (he’s four). Neither Bill, nor his wife, has sent me a text to wish me happy birthday.

  My sister, Fiona, managed to get to Salford nursing college but, hell, did she have to work to scrabble together the grades. She’s a dedicated (read knackered) nurse at some OAP hospital, up north somewhere. I truly admire her but just can’t imagine why she wants to work with the smell of pee. She’s incredibly busy, lives miles away and has two kids, so we rarely see each other. When we do meet up (Christmas, big birthdays and Mum and Dad’s anniversary) it’s always excruciatingly embarrassing. I get the sense that we’d both like to be close but we find we have nothing in common and we struggle for something to talk about. My attempts at small talk seem silly in light of the fact that Fiona is pretty much Florence Nightingale and Mother Teresa in one neat, determined package. I once commented how I always think of her when I have to deliver a bouquet of flowers to a hospital. She said that flowers were a bloody nuisance and nurses didn’t have time to run around looking for vases, plus they set off sneezing among patients with hay fever. That sort of brought the conversation to an end. Fiona’s text reads: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, FGR+D. She doesn’t have thumb time to text her family’s full names.

  Then there’s Jake. I didn’t really expect a call from him since he’s resting at Her Majesty’s pleasure; nine months for some piracy crime. I don’t know the details because I avoided reading about them in the local rag and I tune out whenever Mum starts explaining the circumstances of his arrest. Mum maintains my brother Jake suffers from middle child syndrome. He tried too hard to carve out a point of difference in the family. It’s her excuse for him being a criminal; she can make as many excuses for him as she likes. He was a thieving bastard from the day he could walk and I’ll never forgive him for selling my Barbie doll in the playground when I was seven; Airhostess Barbie was a difficult doll to come by.

  Then there’s me. I’ve resisted sending a text to myself or posting cards to myself, as th
ough I’m some sort of Mr Bean saddo. My younger brother, Rick’s, text reads:

  :-) bday sis. mAk suR itz a gud l. hav lots of SX w Adam while he stil fancies u. jst kidding. hav a gr8 dA.

  It takes me a while to translate. Ha ha very funny. The chance of having lots of sex with Adam never arose, did it? Clearly, Adam has already reached the point of no return in terms of lusting after me.

  If I had to pick a sibling I’d take with me to a desert island it would probably be Rick. Something to do with him being the only one I could boss around, perhaps. No one in our family has any idea whether Rick’s naturally brilliant, like Bill, but we do know that he’s not prepared to work like Fiona. All Rick wants to do, has ever wanted to do, is play video games. He discovered Pac Man when he was about three years old and has been surgically attached to buttons and screens ever since. Mum and Dad despaired. Mum regularly tortures herself by going on to the internet, late at night, and reading cases about psychotic murderers who listed video game playing on their otherwise blank CVs. Fortunately, and somewhat miraculously, Rick hasn’t turned out to be a psycho (one jailbird is enough for any family struggling to appear respectable) and he’s somehow managed to turn his obsession with games into a career; he’s a games tester for Sony. He does conform to stereotype in so much as he does smell and he doesn’t talk. Which is why his long text is quite thoughtful.

  Still, that’s the sum total of messages. Ben will no doubt call when he gets a minute but he’s in the shop on his own, which he never likes; he’s probably busy. Lisa will be dropping the kids off at nursery and the gym crèche. She’ll probably call after her aerobics class. As I mentioned, nothing comes between Lisa and her being ‘well turned out’ – not even a thirtieth birthday.

  I sigh. The low number of messages wishing me many happy returns is depressing. In my opinion birthday celebrations peak when you are about six and ever after there is an annual decrease in merriment (with quite a steep gradient). Rationally, I know that there are a number of people scattered across the country who will look at the calendar today and think, ‘Oh, it’s Fern’s birthday!’ A few of them might have popped a card in the post. Of course, I can’t expect everyone I know to interrupt their busy schedules just to shower me with gifts and present me with balloons, cakes and lashings of champagne, but –

  I blame the media, or books, or movies, or ten seasons of Friends or all of these things combined. Because, truth is, a little part of me does expect everyone I know to interrupt their busy schedules to shower me with gifts and present me with balloons, cakes and lashings of champagne because the media, books, movies and Friends – especially Friends – have conspired between them to somehow create the impression that life would be just a little bit more than this. Especially today.

  I’m bored watching Adam play chief and decide I might as well take full advantage of my ‘Access All Areas’ pass by wandering into the catering hall. It’s quite something; clearly, feeding the team is taken seriously by Scottie Taylor. There are two chefs and about six more staff cooking breakfast. There’s a choice of bacon butties, eggs (fried, scrambled, poached, boiled), sausages, tomatoes, onions, mushrooms, even black pudding – who the hell eats that? Maybe it’s an ironic nod at Scottie Taylor’s northern roots; he’s from Hull, a city that (as far as I’m aware) is famous for absolutely nothing other than Scottie – I’ve heard him joke in interviews that Hull is the new Manchester but no one believes him. Still, it’s nice that he’s proud of it. Besides the cooked breakfast there are yogurts, croissants, Danish pastries, mountains of fresh fruit and about a dozen cereals to choose from.

  I’m not hungry, but like most women when I eat, and even how much I eat, has little to do with hunger. I eat because it’s a mealtime, I eat when I’m fed up and when I’m in a really good mood, I eat loads when I’m premenstrual and often just because food is there. So far, this complete lack of discipline has had no adverse effect because I’m lucky enough to have inherited my father’s metabolism. Honestly, he eats like a pig but looks like a whippet. It’s the one thing worth inheriting (as one of five in a family that tends to ‘make do and mend’, I’m not holding out for any family heirlooms). Today I feel entitled to pile my plate with everything I can, except for the black pudding, and I wash the lot down with two huge mugs of tea.

  I eat really quickly (again it’s the result of being one of five kids) and so despite the mountain of food I find that by 10.35 a.m. I am once again twiddling my thumbs, or more accurately the cord of the weighty AAA pass which hangs around my neck. Idly, I wonder exactly how far it can get me. Maybe I could have a snoop around the dressing-rooms. I have no interest in what Adam is doing front of stage, but as an avid reader of glossy gossipy magazines I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to being just a tiny bit interested in seeing what Scottie Taylor’s dressing-room is like. After all, I’m flesh and blood. Yes, disappointed flesh and blood but all the same… I wonder what sort of riders and demands Scottie Taylor makes? Adam once worked on a gig for a very famous boy band and they all insisted on having their own dressing-room with en-suite bathrooms, which isn’t so strange, except they all had their baths filled with M&M sweets. Total madness but I can’t criticize. Who’s to say what I’d ask for if I could have anything? I bet those guys couldn’t believe their silly request had been taken seriously. Scottie and his band won’t be arriving for hours yet. Usually the artist arrives by helicopter just before the gig starts; it’s part of the theatre of the event. I think I could have a little poke around the dressing-room without disturbing anyone.

  I follow my nose through a labyrinth of corridors. I hope that stars’ dressing-rooms truly do have enormous glittering stars on the door or else I won’t have a clue which door to open. I pass a few busy-looking people, all of whom are smoking, which is illegal as this is a public building. I don’t think they care; breaking rules is what they do. Some are carrying clipboards or instruments, everyone nods at me but no one strikes up a conversation or demands to know what I’m doing aimlessly wandering about backstage. Other than the smoking, the people I run into seem to have little in common. They are not uniformly young and breathtakingly beautiful, as might be expected from a Scottie Taylor entourage, nor are they all decked out in fabulous designer clothes. They do have a higher than average hit of slightly weird and whacky hair styles but that is about all that defines them as rock and roll. That, and the fact they are all very focused on whatever it is they are supposed to be doing, and so no one bothers with me. I imitate their efficient and purposeful strides so as to blend in. After a while I spot a door with the words THE BAND emblazoned in large red letters. I reach for the handle but before I push the door open I listen to see if there’s anyone inside.

  I can’t hear anything so I risk a sneaky peek. I can always say I’m lost if I do get spotted and questioned by anyone. The dressing-room is not as glitzy as I expected. There are enormous leather couches pushed against two of the walls and a huge low glass coffee table in between. On the table there’s a nice arrangement of large white calla lilies; I check the tips and they are fresh, they’ve probably just gone in water. I hope whoever put the flowers here put a drop of lemonade in the vase too; it gets a good few extra days of freshness out of most stems. There’s a wall of mirrors with high stools lined up like soldiers and trolleys full of makeup. There’s a bar; it’s well stocked with various brands of canned and bottled beer and water but not much else. There is nothing to indicate that the band backing the current rock god phenomenon dresses here; no baths of M&Ms, no baskets of Labrador puppies, no lines of clothes or coke.

  A bit disappointed, I leave and continue down the corridor to the next room. On the door, in even bigger red letters than the first, is written, SCOTTIE TAYLOR STAR. I get the sense that the huge and bold letters are a bit of a joke. The sort of joke I imagine Scottie Taylor would make; a tongue-in-cheek prod at ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ Grinning, I open the door and stride in.

  The voice bangs through the air. ‘What
are you doing in here?’

  9. Fern

  I want to be forthcoming but my throat tightens and chokes my words; he’s got these eyes, you see, green, sparkling, soul-slicing eyes. He flashes them at me and with one single glance he strips me naked. I honestly feel my clothes come away at the seams and land in a heap at my feet. The sensation is so real that I look down just to check.

  It’s the man himself. Scottie Taylor. It takes a fraction of a second for me to understand this and I acknowledge the fact between my ears and between my legs simultaneously; I feel dizzy in both places. Close up he looks much bigger than I imagined. When I saw him in concert, eight years ago, he was a tiny dot on the stage. OK, so I was at the back in the crap seats but his size is still a surprise. I mean, most stars I’ve ever seen in real life are much tinier than you expect. Although, thinking about this theory, I ought to confess now that the sum total of stars I’ve seen in real life includes Beppe off EastEnders (I saw him in Covent Garden once, he was just coming out of a shop selling jacket potatoes) and Patrick Duffy (you know, Bobby from Dallas; I took my nephews to a panto last Christmas and he played Cinderella’s dad) – so my theory is not based on what you’d call a robust study.

  Scottie has huge muscled arms and he’s about six foot one. He became famous when he was practically in short trousers, so it’s easy to think of him as boyish. But that was then and this is now. There’s no element of boy any more. He’s man. One hundred per cent. My palms start to moisten; oh my God, so do other parts of my body!

  ‘What are you doing in here?’ He repeats the question; his tone is suspicious and cool.

  Finally, I find my voice. ‘Being nosey. Look, I’m sorry, I’ll leave,’ I squeak as I begin to edge out of the door. While my reply is absolutely accurate I don’t think it got to the heart of what Scottie was trying to establish.