My plan to spend big on an Explorer suddenly seemed very selfish. Dad wasn’t exactly poor, but I knew he still owed money on his mortgage and Jack’s uni fees were huge.
‘There’ll be more of it,’ I said. ‘You could’ve kept the first instalment for yourself and given them some cash once you were set up.’
‘There’s no guarantee of that,’ he said. ‘We don’t know what the rules are, Donadi. The album might be a total flop. The second single might not chart. Beatnik might drop us. I wanted Mum and Dad to be looked after before I went out splurging on guitars and Cristal.’
He looked pointedly at the Champagne in my hand, and when I raised it to my lips it didn’t taste so good anymore. A waitress in full Day of the Dead make-up walked past and collected the empty glasses. Across the dance floor, Carter smiled and beckoned me over, and I knocked back the last of my Cristal and went to join him. He didn’t pull me close, but it was enough to be sharing the space with him. I thought of everything I had – a band, and a number one single, and a huge pay cheque in the bank, and texts from Addie Marmoset on my phone, and Carter – and broke out into a massive grin as I gave myself over to the bass.
CHAPTER 31
‘This is a more badass direction for you,’ said Saskia as the tailor finished sewing me into the dress. It was so tight it compressed my ribs and so short that if my dad had been here, he would have asked where the rest of it was. I hoped I could sing in it.
In the hotel lift, I relayed her comment to Carter as his hands slid down my bare back. ‘I hate to tell you this, Jim, but you’re about as badass as a kitten in a cardigan,’ he said.
‘I don’t see you complaining,’ I replied.
The lift doors dinged open and we scattered to opposite sides – unnecessary, as it turned out, since the crowd of music journalists and fans was already out on the beach. As we left the gold-plated lobby, a hot Ibiza wind whipped around my legs.
In the two days we’d been on the island, Addie and I had Skyped three times, Carter had learned how to order drinks in Spanish, and he and I had agreed to keep whatever it was we had between us a secret from the others.
I’d sent Phoenix a postcard, partly because that was easier than talking to them about Carter and partly because I thought writing ‘I’m about to launch Lady Stardust’s first album!’ might make it less surreal.
Our album launch was meant to be the celebration of everything we’d worked for: all the gritted fights in the boathouse and the drawn-out jam sessions at Richie’s; all the long hours in the studio, the whirlwind interviews and make-up rooms and early training sessions. Carter was treating it like any other party, but I knew what the album launch really meant: reviewers would write about our album in the press, and I wasn’t ready to read what they had to say. When we’d been spinning the songs from thin air, we could always go back and change them. Now they would be out in the world and there would be nowhere to hide.
The sun was setting over the ocean and everyone else was already inside a white marquee, including Addie, who’d flown in from London that morning. Tish had arrived yesterday with a suitcase full of swimsuits; I’d caught Sam eyeing them for structural integrity.
Outside the tent, Carter pulled me into him again. ‘I can’t believe I’m not allowed to touch you tonight,’ he breathed into my hair. ‘And I’m meant to just stand there and watch you being fondled by Addie Marmoset.’
‘No-one is fondling anyone. You know Addie’s just here for the press.’
‘If you say so, babe,’ he said. He kissed my neck, and I felt it on my skin long after we entered the marquee.
Inside the tent, my brand-new Explorer and Carter’s Telecaster were ready for us, watched by a burly security guy, and there was a table of fried finger food, which Saskia definitely wouldn’t let me eat.
‘Hey, you,’ Addie said and wobbled over to me in her stilettos, pulling me into a hug even though there were no cameras.
Richie was at the drinks table, already necking Champagne, his hair slicked into a quiff. Carter made a beeline for him and Sam glanced over as if he thought he could slow them down with nerves alone. I clutched Addie’s arm to stay upright as my cage heels sank into the sand, and tried to ignore the guilty knot I got when I glanced at Carter. Lying to the press about being with Addie was bad enough. If I didn’t tell her about me and Carter, was I lying to her as well?
‘Come on, everyone!’ Amir called out. ‘It’s time for a toast! Let’s all raise our glasses – someone get Lily a glass – good, thank you – you too, Carter, nice and high! To Lady Stardust and their fantastic debut album, The Dreamers of Dreams.’
Carter smiled the way he always did when anyone mentioned the title, and as we clinked glasses I wished I could kiss him, but Addie’s arm was tight around me.
•
Sam’s shoulders were set as I followed him onto the stage. The noise from the crowd hit me like a gust of wind, so loud I almost couldn’t make out the thrashing waves behind them. Reaching the microphone, I thanked everyone for coming, and the minute I started speaking they fell silent, as if I were the Messiah.
What could I possibly say? Better to just play. I lifted the Explorer, nerves rising in my throat, and played the opening bars to the first song, startled as the feedback leapt at me from behind. Sam kicked in the drums, then there were two more bars of guitar lick. Sidestage, Addie was wide-eyed with delight, as if she could feel it, too: the magic of four instruments combining, four voices, four people, four minds, all of it feeding off the energy of the crowd. Having a number one single was nothing compared to this.
After the gig, we waved to the crowd and descended the stairs. ‘That’s what it’s all about, Donadi,’ said Sam, tucking his drumsticks into his back pocket. His face was open, and I laughed with joy and hugged him.
Now that the sunlight had faded, the tent was as soft and quiet as a cocoon. Addie was already seated at the trestle table, which had been dragged into the middle and sadly swept of finger food. She leapt up to hug me.
‘I knew you’d nail it! What a show! You guys were so great.’
I glowed with her praise. Carter took the seat beside me, resting his arm along the back of my chair like he didn’t care who got the wrong impression. Saskia showed in the first music journo and I shifted slightly towards Addie.
The reporters had ten minutes each. Saskia beeped a stopwatch at nine minutes and if they asked anything she didn’t like, she twirled a finger and sang out, ‘Next question, please!’ Everyone tried to draw Addie into the conversation with questions about her solo album and the fallout from leaving Perfect Storm, but each time she would just smile, touch my arm and say, ‘We’re not here to talk about me tonight.’ I wondered if Saskia had taught her this interview technique as well, or if she was just a natural.
I set my Champagne on the table and resolved to stay clear-headed. Addie noticed and edged her glass of iced mineral water closer to me. Carter topped up his own glass between each interview as if he had to make up for my caution.
‘I think you’ve had enough,’ I said as Saskia ushered out the fifth reporter.
‘Come on, Jim, it’s free Veuve. I can’t help it if you don’t have a sophisticated palate.’
‘It’s not that I don’t like it,’ I hissed. ‘There’s just a lot of press here tonight.’
‘Oh, live a little, Liliana,’ Richie laughed. ‘It’s our party!’
It didn’t feel like a party. It felt like a particularly grim speed dating night with a revolving door of reporters who all asked the same questions.
When we were finally let loose from the tent, the DJ was halfway through her set. Dancers thumped on the sand and a few drunk guys had already stripped off and charged into the Mediterranean.
Carter wrenched me away from the group. ‘There’s got to be a bar around here,’ he said.
The crowd hadn’t noticed us yet, but it was only a matter of time. ‘I can’t go out there,’ I said. ‘And Addie definitely can’t. She’
ll be torn apart by rabid fans.’
‘Well, maybe Addie can go up to her room and let me be alone with my girlfriend.’
I flinched. We’d never talked about what we were and this wasn’t the way I wanted to have the conversation. ‘Carter.’ I glanced out at the crowd, then to the side of the tent, where Addie stood chatting with Sam and Richie. His hands at my waist were very tight. ‘I don’t want to do it like this.’
‘Fine.’ He released me and went back over to the others. I watched him laugh at something Richie said and then they stepped into the throng, girls touching them, introducing themselves, asking for autographs. Carter put his arm around one and leaned down to hear her without a backward glance at me, and jealousy simmered in my chest.
CHAPTER 32
The kettle was already boiling when I knocked at Addie’s door, barefoot now and with Carter’s hoody swamping my dress. She almost looked like an ordinary eighteen-year-old, or at least an unnaturally beautiful one, in a muscle top and leggings and scrubbed free of make-up, scratching her temple with a long fingernail. When she turned from the door, I noticed her hair ended in a tuft at the back of her neck and was so shocked I reached out to touch it before I remembered we didn’t know each other that well. ‘Your hair …’
A wig was hanging over a mannequin’s head on the kitchen counter, carefully brushed out.
‘Oh, yeah. It’s much more comfortable to take it off when I’m alone,’ she said, then instantly looked like she regretted it. ‘Please don’t mention it to the press.’
‘I won’t.’
‘I can make you sign a –’
‘I know,’ I said, and there was a second before she accepted this with a nod. She looked so different without her hair – younger, maybe, and a lot less like the images of her that I’d grown up with. She caught me staring at her and smiled, tousling her hair self-consciously.
‘I’m making chamomile tea,’ she said.
‘Such a rock star,’ I replied. She looked surprised at my sarcasm, then broke into a laugh, and I was relieved she wasn’t offended. Fleetwood Mac was playing softly, but I could still hear the low bass from the party below. I sifted the wig through my fingers, trying to get over my shock. ‘It feels so real.’
‘It is real,’ she said. ‘It’s just not mine.’ She bent to examine the minibar and chose two packets of chips. ‘Can you keep a secret?’
I nodded eagerly. I was keeping a lot of secrets at the moment.
‘I used to have extensions, when Perfect Storm first started out. After the concert in Reading I took a pair of scissors to my hair. I’d just broken up with Val and I was leaving the band and I kind of had a crisis.’
‘I bet that went down well with Beatnik.’
She grinned. ‘Oh, yeah, they were well chuffed.’
The tea burned my lips. Maybe it was because I could finally see her face, but I felt like she was opening up to me. For the first time, here was Addie: not the Perfect Storm soprano, icon of gay girls everywhere and international paparazzi magnet, but the girl from the academy who’d won the gig of a lifetime on Quest for the Best. I didn’t know what had shifted – when we had gone from cautious acquaintances to business associates to friends – but it was flattering, being allowed to see her like this. I felt like she was letting me into an exclusive club.
‘I’ve been talking to Amir about my solo album,’ she said. ‘I was hoping you might do a duet with me.’
Addie Marmoset wanted to do a duet with me. I didn’t know what to say. ‘I thought you said it was a solo album,’ I blurted out.
Her mouth twitched and the locks went down behind her eyes again, and I cursed myself for trying to joke. ‘Amir says it’ll really solidify your position on the world stage,’ she said, as if that would be the only reason anyone would consider doing a duet with her.
I felt a tug of longing. Half of me was a punk who wore torn jeans and listened to the Ramones, and the other half was a girl who’d loved watching Glee and idolised Perfect Storm. Sam would probably say a duet with Addie was selling out, but maybe it was a way to embrace both sides of myself – and anyway, she wasn’t asking Lady Stardust, she was just asking me. I’d grown up with her poster on my wall. Didn’t I owe my fourteen-year-old self this duet?
‘He’s already asked Boris to get some great songwriters together,’ said Addie, as if the songwriting were an afterthought, and I tried not to look too surprised.
‘It’s really nice of you to offer,’ I said cautiously, ‘but I don’t know about singing someone else’s song. Yours or, um, someone else’s. That’s not really what I’m about.’
‘You’ve played covers before.’
‘Only so I could learn how to put my own songs together,’ I countered. ‘Not so I could pass them off as my own.’
She tapped her acrylics on the edge of her mug. ‘Well, I don’t have a problem with you writing the song if Amir approves it.’
‘Or we could write it together.’
Her mouth tensed and she looked away from me, and any openness between us instantly faded. ‘I don’t think I can do that.’
She was heading to New York the following morning for a promo tour of the States and a guest spot as a judge on the kind of reality show that had launched her career. This was the last time we would be in the same room before she returned to London to record her album. ‘I know how busy you are,’ I said. ‘We could just make a start now and I could finish the song while you’re away.’
‘Lily.’ She looked at me over the top of her mug and although her stare was frank, there was something skittish in her eyes. ‘It’s not that I don’t have time. It’s that I don’t know how.’
‘What?’ I thought of all the songwriting credits she had on Perfect Storm’s albums, and she bristled at the betrayed look on my face.
‘I don’t play guitar or piano or anything, Lily, so I can’t write whole songs. But I’ve got a four-octave vocal range. My voice is my instrument.’
For an instant, something about her reminded me of the kids at the academy who had been so sure of their talent, who got defensive whenever anyone suggested singing might be a skill set that could be learned. I remembered Verity’s words: you either had it or you didn’t. Maybe that applied to songwriting, too. Maybe she’d come up with some of the lyrics for her songs, and that was why she’d been credited on the albums, even if she hadn’t written the music. But the idea that she had never written a song was kind of sad, somehow – like she’d been lying to herself about ‘her’ music.
‘If you’ve never written anything, how can you say those songs are yours?’ I said cautiously. ‘I thought you wanted the solo album to represent you.’ No wonder Beatnik were having trouble coming up with the right material; if she couldn’t be specific about what she wanted changed, every time they went ‘back to the drawing board’, as she put it, they would have to start again.
‘I’ll be singing the songs.’ She crossed her arms over her chest.
‘You’ll be singing someone else’s words. The songs will always belong to their writers. You’re just a puppet, a mouthpiece for them.’
I felt the air rush from the room and she baulked as if my words had slapped her. She stared into her mug and I was too ashamed to say anything else. How could I have said something like that? How could I have said something like that to Addie Marmoset? She’d trusted me, if tentatively, with the information that she didn’t actually know how to write, and I’d thrown it back in her face. I gathered my room key and padded to the door. ‘God, I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘I should just go.’
‘No,’ she said, and the force in her voice stopped me. She raised her eyes to mine and they were glassy with tears. ‘You’re right, actually. I’d be a better singer if I wrote my own songs, but I’m too scared to even try. When I was at HOTMA I tried a few times, but they were terrible. There were all these kids there who understood how to fit songs together, but I was a terrible student. I guess I’ve tried to tell myself that I have such
a brilliant voice that I don’t need to write my own songs.’
I touched her shoulder with a shaking hand, like she might shatter. ‘It’s not as hard as it looks.’
‘I doubt that.’
‘Hey, if Carter can write a song, you can do it too.’
‘Who’s Carter?’
A blush crept over my face as if even mentioning his name to her was out of order. ‘My guitarist.’
‘The blond bloke?’
‘No, he’s the bassist.’ I tried to contain my smile, but I was too relieved that she seemed to have forgiven me, and it broke through. ‘You really don’t know much about music, do you?’
Luckily, she smiled back. ‘Teach me, then.’
•
We started by listening to her favourite tracks. She knew nothing about rock or punk, but had a huge range of soul and R&B singers on her playlist, and we put on song after song, rewriting the lyrics to the existing tunes. She was reluctant to share with me and at first I thought her inexperience was holding her back, but then I realised she was worried about my judgement. The idea that Addie Marmoset might be a human being who needed help and encouragement like anyone else was shocking, but I tried not to show my surprise.
‘Just get something down – you can make it perfect later,’ I said.
We worked on lyrics in companionable silence, sitting opposite each other on the bed and filling pages of hotel notepaper until light spilled through the curtains. When she showed me her work, she avoided my eyes and sucked her bottom lip while I read.
They whisper softly in your ear
‘I’ll make you a star,’ they say
But they crush everything you hold dear
And you’ll never go home again
Sometimes I wonder if I should’ve stayed
At the academy with my friends
Instead of hitching a ride on the express train
Who knows where it will end?
Trent, my music teacher back in Sydney, always started his criticism with a compliment, so I ignored the fact that the syllables didn’t line up and praised her choice of subject matter. I’d expected her to produce the same kind of romantic content she’d sung in Perfect Storm, not these tangled observations about the music industry.
Stars Like Us Page 16
