by Lindsey Kelk
‘No it isn’t!’ I replied, trying to think of more diversionary tactics, but all I could come up with was flashing the crowd, and that wasn’t going to win anyone over. Certainly not the girls, who already hated me. This was not one of my best ever days. ‘I’m not telling them why Alex isn’t here.’
‘Then I will tell them.’ Virginie gave me a sly smile. The new Virginie had more in common with Jenny than enough. ‘They also want to know why we were fighting with the girl from Stereo.’
‘Fine.’ I looked out at the thousands of people one last time before someone turned a spotlight on above me and made them all disappear. ‘OK, basically it’s like this.’
Somewhere offstage to my right, I heard Graham cursing. Onstage to my left, I could hear Virginie’s fast translation.
‘So at least when I got to Paris, I was Alex’s girlfriend, Alex from the band,’ I clarified by pointing at the huge, blown-up Stills album cover hanging from the stage rigging behind me. ‘But he didn’t tell me his ex-girlfriend lived here, that was the girl that I was sort of talking to onstage a moment ago.’
‘You want me to say “talking to”?’ Virginie stopped translating mid-sentence and gave me a ‘really?’ look. ‘They are French, not blind.’
‘Just say it.’ I gave her look right back and continued with my story. ‘So yeah, she was hanging around, pretending she wanted to be my friend, inviting me to parties and stuff, but it turned out she just wanted to break us up so she could get Alex back.’
I couldn’t see the crowd, but I could hear them ruminating this twist in the tail. The photographer, acting as their representative, shouted a question up to Virginie.
‘He wants to know why they broke up in the first place,’ she repeated in English.
‘Oh, because she was cheating on him,’ I said, waiting for the appropriate response. And I got it. Ten thousand sharp intakes of breath and unmistakable ‘bitch!’ comments echoed around the square. ‘Yeah, she was really awful. And this was a couple of years ago, before I ever met Alex. She totally broke his heart.’
I realized the murmuring had stopped. There was nothing, but silence while everyone waited for me to go on with the story.
‘So yesterday, Stills played Nouveau Casino in Paris,’ I paused for a couple of ‘I-was-there-whoops’ to die down. ‘And she announces that they’re getting back together. And I didn’t know what to think because I’d seen them in a bar together before the gig and Alex and I had sort of had a misunderstanding about us moving in together—’
‘You’re moving in with him?’ Craig asked from offstage. ‘Dude, that’s sweet!’ Graham punched him in the arm and smiled at me, shaking his head.
‘Well anyway, I was really upset because I didn’t know what was going on and I’d cocked up my job a bit.’ I looked over at Virginie who winced as she translated. ‘But I think that’s all going to be OK, and I was really homesick for my friends back in the UK and so I decided to leave and go back to London. And well, basically, Alex followed me to London except I changed my mind at the last minute and came back to Paris to find him. Which is why he’s not here.’
The crowd let this sink in for a moment before the confused chatter started again.
‘Perhaps it was not that sweet a story,’ Virginie said, stepping back from the stage as the crowd started to get rowdy. ‘Or perhaps we should not have told them that he is in London looking for you.’
Before anything could turn nasty, the photographer yelled something out and the crowd began to laugh, chanting something over and over.
‘Angela?’ Virginie tried and failed to suppress a smile.
‘What?’
‘They want you to sing.’
I stepped out of the spotlight for a moment, trying to get my eyesight back. It didn’t change anything. There were still 10,000 people shouting ‘chantez’ at me, over and over and over. And looking over to Graham and Craig, they weren’t helping. In fact, Graham was clapping along with the chant and Craig was running to his drums, shouting something about playing along.
‘No, really. I don’t sing.’ I laughed nervously. ‘Unless you’ve had several drinks and I’m going to do “Hungry Like the Wolf” on karaoke, you don’t want me to sing.’
‘They like “Hungry Like the Wolf”,’ Virginie confirmed as the photographer gave me a thumbs up.
My heart was pounding so hard, I could barely breathe. How was this happening? At what point did I think addressing the crowd at a music festival and joking about singing a Duran Duran song was a good idea?
‘Really, it’s not a good idea,’ I said into the microphone, but Virginie had already set hers back into its stand. She held her arms up in a helpless gesture, but I was fairly certain she was enjoying this.
Opening my mouth to speak, the crowd roared, and I closed my eyes.
‘She means it guys, it’s really not a good idea.’
Another voice came over the loud speaker, followed by a ‘da-dum-ting’ comedy drumbeat. The spotlight shifted away from me, over to a tall dark-haired man, striding on to the stage with a microphone in one hand and a guitar in the other.
‘You absolute bastard,’ I said, throwing my arms around Alex’s neck.
‘OK, maybe I deserve that,’ he said, kissing the top of my head before I let go and punched him in the shoulder. ‘I’m not sure about the punch though. What was that for?’
‘For not coming back last night.’ I stared at his face. Was he really there or had I actually passed out? It was my first time in front of a capacity crowd after all.
‘I know, we have a ton of stuff to talk about,’ he said, suddenly serious, but still with light in his dark green eyes. ‘Just promise you won’t take off while we play?’
‘I promise,’ I said, remembering that the crowd weren’t here to see me. ‘But it’s a tough crowd, it’s going to be difficult.’
‘We’ll do our best,’ Alex said, swapping the mic I’d been using for his, and plugging in his guitar. ‘I usually play better when I haven’t been on a wild goose chase to another country, but I’m pretty sure we’ll do OK.’
‘You say that now,’ I said, tiptoeing offstage with Virginie, ‘but I just killed it.’
‘You’re a tough act to follow,’ he shouted after me with a grin.
‘Believe it,’ I shouted back, squeezing Virginie’s hand.
‘Ow,’ she yelped, snatching it back.
‘Sorry,’ I said, gazing out at my boyfriend, pretty certain that he was still my boyfriend, as the band began at last.
CHAPTER TWENTY
It was a good few hours before we were back in Paris, back at the hotel and finally alone. Virginie had gone for a drink with Craig, ignoring my repeated but subtle shin-kicking in the van on the way back to the city, and Graham had gone to lie down. According to him, my impromptu one-woman show had brought on a migraine. Nice. I was scared to think what might have happened if I had sung. A stroke? Keen to avoid any and all discussion of my performance, I had played my favourite ‘pretend to be asleep’ card for most of the journey, resting my head on Alex’s chest, delaying the inevitable ‘conversation’. Everyone in Arras knew the ins and outs of our bust-up, but not even I knew what was going to happen next.
Alex held the bedroom door open and I scuttled back in, suddenly nervous to be on my own with him. I placed my handbag carefully on the bedside table, pretty pointless given the bashing that it and my laptop had taken already, but still, it was nice to be nice. Sighing loudly, I turned to face Alex, who was still standing by the door.
‘You’re not coming in?’ I asked awkwardly.
‘Do you want me to?’ He raised his shoulders with his question.
‘I want to know where you were last night.’ I sat down on the bed and looked at my knackered shoes. ‘And I want to know why you followed me to London.’
‘I followed you to London because when I got back this morning your passport was missing and you’d left a print-out of your itinerary,’ he replied, crossing the room to sit in a
chair. ‘And I spent the night with a friend.’
‘Why were you looking for my passport?’ I had decided to park the ‘friend’ thing for a moment.
‘I check your passport every day.’ Alex shrugged. ‘Don’t take offence, but you tend to lose stuff pretty easily. Who do you think puts your keys back in that bowl by your front door every night? Because it sure as hell isn’t you.’
‘Oh,’ I said, quietly touched.
‘And I know you’re freaking out about it, but you’re not going to ask, so the friend was actually Solène’s brother,’ he went on. ‘They don’t get along, but he and I always stayed in touch. He’s a cool guy. I had a lot to think about and Graham said you’d come back to the hotel because you had a migraine and that I shouldn’t call you. So I went there.’
‘He said that?’ I asked. Bless Graham for lying when he’d said he wouldn’t. Except, if he hadn’t, Alex might have come back to the hotel and none of this nonsense would have happened. Excellent! The whole festival debacle was Graham’s fault!
‘He did.’ Alex looked up at me from behind a stray lock of black hair that had escaped from behind his ear. ‘But I’m guessing it’s not true. You spoke to Solène at the show, right?’
‘I did,’ I said. ‘And I saw you together in the bar before.’
‘Jesus, why didn’t you just come over?’ Alex ran his hands up over his face and through his hair. ‘So that’s why you took off. Honestly, Angela, how many times do we have to have the same conversation about talking to each other?’
‘So talk to me now,’ I replied quickly. ‘Tell me why you were even in a bar with your ex-girlfriend who you hate so much.’
‘Because she wouldn’t leave me alone. Because she wouldn’t leave you alone. Because I needed her to know that it was over, for ever, and that I was in love with someone else and that nothing she could say or do would change that fact.’ He stood up and crossed the room towards me, kneeling at the edge of the bed and taking my hands in his. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but it was kind of a personal message to leave at the front desk. I was going to tell you afterwards. She’s not part of my life, Angela, no matter what she told you. She hasn’t been part of it since the day she cheated on me, and she will never be part of it again.’
‘Good to know.’ I sniffed, determined not to cry. I still had more questions. ‘So what happened the other night? On your birthday?’
‘You tell me.’ He twisted himself around until he was sitting cross-legged in front of me. ‘You’re the one that went all weird.’
‘Nuh-uh,’ I squeaked. ‘It was totally you. You said all that stuff about not getting married or having kids and then you said you didn’t want to move in with me any more.’
‘Oh. That.’
‘Yes. That.’
‘Well,’ he looked down at the floor, ‘you kept saying you didn’t want to move in with me, so I just thought it would be easier for my ego if I took away the stick for you to beat me with.’
I frowned. I hated when Jenny was right about stuff like this.
‘But I do want to move in with you,’ I said in a tiny voice. ‘I was just scared about, you know, the last time I lived with someone.’
‘And I’m scared too. The last time I lived with someone didn’t go so great either,’ Alex said, looking back at and me, and brushing my hair behind my ears. I though it was very sweet of him not to comment on how gross it was. ‘But I want to live with you. I want to do everything with you.’
‘But you said—’
‘I know what I said, and I was being a dick.’ He held his hand against my twice-bruised cheekbone and shook his head. ‘I guess seeing Solène fucked me up more than I thought it would. I don’t think I ever told you, but I actually asked her to marry me. It was dumb, things weren’t working out, she was having problems with her visa, and I thought it would make everything better. It wasn’t the strongest foundation for a lifelong commitment, I know.’
‘You didn’t tell me, but she did,’ I said, pressing my hand against his. ‘But you know I was engaged before, I would have understood.’
‘Yeah, like I’m not totally jealous every time I remember that.’ He raised an eyebrow and smiled. ‘And really? You would have been totally cool with it?’
‘I would have understood eventually,’ I admitted. ‘Really, I do get that it’s not a big deal. I suppose I wondered why you never mentioned it, but I do get it. I wouldn’t go around spouting off in favour of marriage if someone waved my ex around in my face.’
I chose not to mention that I’d only realized that once Jenny had pointed it out. Let him think I was wise and empathetic, he could work out whether or not it was true in his own time.
‘Yeah, well that was some of the stuff I was thinking about,’ he said quietly. ‘Saying that I didn’t want those things kinda made me think about them.’
‘Oh?’ My mouth was suddenly very dry. ‘And what did you decide?’
‘That maybe, I do want them,’ he said, raising his face up towards mine. ‘With you.’
‘Really?’ I whispered against his lips.
‘Really,’ he whispered back. ‘This is it for me, Angela. I’m yours, however you want me. If you want to get married tomorrow, we’ll fly home via Vegas. You want to move back to London, I’ll get Graham to pack up my stuff and we’ll go right now. You want eighteen kids and a white picket fence, shit, I’ll get a job in advertising, slick back my hair and we can go totally Mad Men. Except without the philandering and prescription meds. Whatever you want. As of now.’
‘Maybe we can just start with the whole living together thing before we get on to talking about marriage,’ I suggested, my heart pounding so hard I could feel my pulse in my bruised cheekbone. ‘Or kids.’
‘Let’s just hope that when we do have them, they aren’t as dumb as me and as clumsy as you or they’re screwed from the start,’ he said, ending the conversation with a kiss. I pulled him up on to the bed, never taking my lips off his and, as I felt his familiar weight above me, the warmth of his body against mine, all the voices in my head finally went quiet.
Later, curled up around each other in the darkness, a thought crossed my mind. ‘Alex?’ I said, stroking lazy circles on his chest with my fingers.
‘Yeah?’
‘What were you going to do when you got to London? I mean, how were you going to find me? You knew I didn’t have a working phone.’
‘Oh yeah.’ He yawned, rolling over on to his side and wrapping his arms around me. ‘Tomorrow morning, we need to call your mom and tell her you’re OK.’
‘You called my mother?’ Suddenly I was very awake.
‘In the morning,’ Alex replied, kissing the back of my hair. ‘Sleep now.’
‘Easy for you to say,’ I whispered, as angry as it was possible to be with a man who had just been doing something incredibly rude to me not fifteen minutes earlier. ‘I cannot believe you called my mother.’
‘I cannot believe you didn’t call me!’ my mother screeched down the phone at the top of her voice. ‘First you’re coming home, then you’re not. Then I’ve got strange American men ringing me up and asking where you are. Then you’re calling me up and telling me everything’s fine. Well it’s not fine, Angela. You bloody well get your arse home right now. I’ve been up all night, sick with worry, no idea how to contact you. We tried that Facebook thing and you didn’t answer, we called Louisa, we called your flat in America, I called that Jenny girl and she told me to “chill out”. Chill out! You tell me Angela Clark, what was I supposed to think?’
I closed my eyes and made a mental list of all the people I needed to call and apologize to. ‘I’m sorry Mum,’ I said once she’d stopped to breathe. ‘Yesterday was a bit mad, but I’m OK and I’m going back to New York this afternoon. I actually really need to go, we’ve got to get to the airport.’
‘Oh no. No, you’re coming back here immediately, young lady. My nerves have had all they can take. First you’re running off to New York,
then it’s gallivanting around LA, next you’re in Paris, then you’re in London. No, you’re coming home.’
‘Mum—’
‘Don’t mum me—’
‘Will you please just let me finish?’
‘There’s nothing else to say! Get on a train right—’
‘Mum, will you just shut up for a minute?’
She shut up for precisely one second.
‘Did you just tell your mother, your own mother, to shut up?’ she breathed out slowly. ‘Well. Honestly, I can’t believe—’
‘Oh, don’t start!’ I was really, seriously thinking about hanging up and telling people I was an orphan, but I knew this was all just because she cared. Somewhere, somehow I knew that. And had to keep reminding myself. ‘And it wasn’t strange men calling you, it was Alex, so don’t make out like I’ve got random blokes ringing you constantly.’
‘Get off the phone, get off it,’ my mum was ranting, her voice getting quieter as she went on.
‘Mum?’ I asked, ignoring Alex, who was laughing at me from the bathroom. ‘Mum, are you there?’
‘Angela, it’s your dad.’
My mouth dropped open. I hadn’t heard my dad’s voice in months. According to my mother, he ‘never had much to say’, but I was more inclined to believe that she hadn’t left him anything to say. And besides, she didn’t like him talking on the phone in case he got ‘ideas’.
‘Dad?’
‘Yes, Angela, love?’ he replied, calm as anything despite the clattering and commotion that was going on around him. I could still hear my mum rattling on in the background, louder than before if anything.
‘It’s really nice to talk to you,’ I said, crying before I realized. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I am,’ he said. ‘Now, are you all right?’
‘I am,’ I replied. ‘I really, really am.’
‘And you’re going back to New York, you say?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you know you can come back whenever you like?’
I couldn’t hear my mother any more and had a strong suspicion that he had locked himself in the cupboard under the stairs. I’d always wondered why there was a bolt on the inside of that cupboard.
