Welcome to the Real World

by Carole Matthews

  Forty-four

  ‘Would anyone care to offer any explanations?’ Pop impresario and producer of the Fame Game show Stephen Cauldwell was not a happy man.

  His staff shuffled uncomfortably in front of him. The champagne was flowing, but Evan stood on the sidelines with nothing stronger than a glass of sparkling mineral water. They were in the Green Room—the obligatory television hospitality suite—after the conclusion of the first part of the Fame Game. Now they all had to hang around for an hour until the phone voting element was complete while they went back into the studio and gave the public the benefit of their wisdom, and then they could finish for the night. Though why he was in a rush to go back to an empty apartment, Evan wasn’t quite sure.

  The show had been every bit as much of a trial as he’d imagined. Not one of the performers they’d seen had real talent, and the whole thing just seemed to be an ego trip for the other judges. Evan, quite frankly, could have lived without it. Even the operatic boy band had failed to lift his spirits. Tomorrow, he would remind himself to kill Rupert for ever getting him involved with this.

  ‘Where did she go?’ Stephen Cauldwell wanted to know. The guy looked as if he was about to stamp his foot. ‘Why didn’t anyone stop her?’

  One of the acts—a duo called Just the Two of Us—had, Evan learned, thought better of appearing on the show and had made a break for it just before they were due to go on air. It had caused complete havoc behind the scenes. The next act had been rushed onto the floor and had appeared nervy and unprepared because of it. The running order went to pot, with the whole programme having to be padded out to fill the resulting gap. It was something that had never happened to the production team before.

  ‘She just bolted,’ the woman with the clipboard mumbled. She seemed to be the one in the main firing line. ‘No one could catch her.’

  ‘This is terrible,’ Stephen Cauldwell continued. ‘She was the best damn performer we’ve ever had on this show and we just lost her.’

  Everyone looked suitably chastised.

  ‘What do I pay you guys to do?’ Stephen Cauldwell snatched up his glass of champagne. ‘There will be a postmortem. And it won’t be pretty. Someone’s head will be on the block for this.’

  The woman with the clipboard looked worried.

  ‘Get out of my sight. The lot of you.’

  Stephen’s crew shuffled out of the room. The producer pinned the smile back on his face. ‘Sorry, Evan,’ he smarmed. ‘Sorry about that.’

  Evan gave him a shrug by way of a reply.

  Stephen shook his head. ‘Cock-ups happen,’ he said, ‘but we never made any contingency plans for this. Jeez. Who’d do live television, eh?’ The producer gave a strained laugh. ‘She was bloody good, too. Bloody good. She had this in the palm of her hand. The prize is a recording contract with my label, but between you, me and the gatepost, I would have signed her up anyway.’

  ‘And what about the bloke?’ Evan asked.

  ‘What bloke?’

  ‘I thought the act was a duo. Just the Two of Us?’ Not that he was particularly interested, it just seemed polite to make conversation and try to calm Stephen down before the next part of the show. ‘Was she the only one with any talent?’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ Stephen said dismissively. ‘We blew the bloke out at the audition stage. Good guitarist, but too much of a hippy, if I remember rightly. I don’t know why she didn’t change the name, or perhaps it was us that forgot to.’ Another dark look crossed his face. ‘But, yeah. She was the only one with any talent.’

  ‘Shame.’

  ‘Terrible shame. Can’t believe she just fucked off.’

  Evan thought it sounded like quite a feisty thing to do—not that he’d voice that opinion just at the moment.

  Stephen knocked back his champagne and poured himself another glass. He waved the bottle at Evan in invitation, but he declined. The producer ruefully shook his head again. ‘I thought Fern was made of sterner stuff.’

  Evan David felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. Despite the stuffy heat of the room, for some reason he’d suddenly developed goosepimples. He was sure that the temperature of his blood dropped a few degrees. ‘Fern?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Stephen brightened. ‘Have you heard of her?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he heard himself say. Fern? Surely it couldn’t be her. She said she only sang at family weddings when she was drunk.

  ‘Great voice. Great arse,’ Stephen summarised.

  ‘You don’t happen to have a publicity photograph of her, do you?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Stephen rummaged through a folder on the nearby table. ‘There must be one here somewhere.’ After a few moments of searching, he pulled out a photograph and sighed. ‘If I wasn’t such a nice guy,’ he said, ‘I’d be really pissed off about this.’ He handed the picture to Evan.

  Before he looked at it, Evan knew he was right. It was Fern. His Fern.

  Forty-five

  I feel as if I’m in a trance when I finally manage to stagger off the Tube at Oxford Circus station. I don’t want to go home, and I’m in such a daze that I pick the first station where I think my legs will support me. Luckily, at the bottom of one of the escalators, I see a guy that Carl and I know who’s busking one of our pitches in the Underground. With a bit of chat and schmoozing I manage to blag a fiver from him so that I can buy a Tube ticket and not add getting arrested for fare dodging to the list of stupid things I’ve done today. Sure enough, I’m sufficiently coherent to sweet-talk one of the guards and pay my legitimate fare from White City without too much pain. And, to be honest, that little bit of interaction seems to sap the last of my strength, as I’m barely able to haul myself out of the Tube and onto the street.

  Oxford Street is virtually empty at this time of night; the crowds of shoppers and the pickpockets have long gone. The red, double-decker buses trundle up and down largely unhindered; the normally bustling shops are all shuttered up for the night. The bright lights blur together and I have a post-traumatic stress headache coming on. I sit on a bench next to a very smelly bum and phone Carl on my mobile.

  ‘What happened?’ he says immediately, concern thick in his voice. Clearly he noticed that I was conspicuous by my absence on the television show.

  ‘I fucked up,’ I tell him tearfully. ‘I fucked up big time.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘In Oxford Street. Sitting on a bench outside the huge H&M store.’ I start to cry. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘Don’t move,’ he instructs me. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

  And with that Carl hangs up and I sit there and cry some more. Big self-pitying tears. Eventually, I’m depressing the bum so much that he offers me a swig of his cider to cheer me up. And, this is how low I’ve sunk, I accept it and drain half of the bottle, which brings a touch of alarm to his eyes. Perhaps he is regretting feeling sorry for such a madwoman. I hand over the change I have from the fiver I blagged to pay my Tube fare as some sort of recompense.

  Whether it’s minutes or aeons later, I don’t know, but soon Carl is beside me and he hoists me up, wrapping me in his arms, shushing my tears and stroking my lovely pop star hair. He rocks me back and forth while I wail like a banshee.

  ‘What on earth went wrong?’ he wants to know when I finally pull myself together enough to stop sobbing.

  ‘I just couldn’t go through with it,’ I croak. ‘I saw Evan David sitting there as large as life in the front row and I lost my bottle.’ In truth, I thought of all the lies I told him, all the sloping off from work to further my own cause and, quite honestly, I knew I wouldn’t be able to look him in the eye—let alone lay my soul on the line before him.

  ‘Oh, Fern,’ is all that Carl says.

  ‘I need to be drunk,’ I tell him. ‘I need to be very drunk. Take me to a terrible pub somewhere and ply me with strong drink until I’m unconscious.’

  ‘We could go to the King’s Head. They’ll all be worried about you.’

/>   ‘I want to be among strangers. I couldn’t stand anyone asking me difficult questions.’ Or any kind of questions.

  ‘Phone Joe,’ Carl advises. ‘They’ll all be worried sick.’

  ‘You ring him,’ I plead. ‘I don’t want to speak to anyone.’

  ‘Not even your brother?’

  I shake my head.

  With a sigh, Carl finds Joe’s number on his mobile phone and in a brief conversation to my nearest and dearest explains that I have messed up and that he is about to take me out to get me completely bladdered.

  ‘He’s sorry,’ Carl says when he hangs up. ‘No one blames you for this, Fern.’

  ‘I blame me,’ I say.

  I don’t know where Carl takes me, but it is, indeed, a terrible pub. We’re crushed up into the corner of a place knee-deep with rowdy people and thick with smoke. Every mouthful of my drink follows a tortured route of elbow-jogging until it gets to my mouth, but it isn’t hampering my progress much. I can’t tell you how much I’ve had to drink, but I know it’s lots. Lots and lots.

  But oblivion isn’t coming. In fact, reality is hitting home rather too hard. I keep reliving my pathetic sprint from fame, and I can’t get the picture of Evan David’s face from out of my brain. Each time I go over it doesn’t make it get any better. ‘Vodka,’ I demand. ‘Give me vodka.’

  ‘I think you’ve had enough,’ Carl tells me, sounding rather more sober than I do.

  ‘Nooo,’ I slur. ‘Need more.’

  ‘I think you don’t.’

  And, as I slither down the wall, I think Carl might be right.

  He hoists me up once more and, arms tight around me, guides me towards the door. Out on the street, the fresh air makes my head reel. Carl risks letting go with one arm while he hails a taxi and while a few, quite sensibly in my opinion, give us a wide berth, one idiot eventually stops. My friend loads me into the back of the cab, where I promptly slide off the seat and onto the floor.

  ‘She’d better not throw up,’ the cab driver warns Carl.

  ‘She’ll be fine,’ Carl assures him, rather recklessly I think, and gives the driver his address, which is only a few minutes away.

  My dearest, darling friend picks me up off the floor, physically and metaphorically, and puts me back on the seat. Then he collapses into a heap next to me.

  I start crying again. What a wreck. What a useless wreck I am. I’ve let everyone down. I’ve let myself down and, more importantly, I’ve let Carl down. And he so does not deserve this after all that he has done for me. I feel terrible. More terrible than I ever thought I’d feel. Gulping back the tears, I take hold of Carl’s hand and say, ‘Do you hate me?’

  ‘No, Fern.’ Carl exhales a long and unsteady breath. He turns towards me and fixes me with an unwavering gaze. ‘I love you.’

  Forty-six

  Carl lives in a housing association flat behind Euston station, not far from my parents’ place. The tiny one-bed-roomed digs are in a marginally worse state of repair than mine. His front door looks like a dozen people have tried to kick it in this week. Carl lives here alone apart from about two dozen guitars, an electric keyboard and a bunch of amplifiers in a range of sizes and ear-splitting volumes.

  My friend is very tidy for a rock ’n’ roll rebel. Whereas my flat could quite easily pass for a student squat, Carl’s dishes are always washed and his bathroom sparkles. You do have to clamber over the aforementioned musical equipment though.

  ‘Do you want tea?’ Carl asks.

  I nod, immediately regretting the violent movement, and he deposits me on the sofa while he goes off to do domesticated things. I’d like to tell you that I managed to sober up in the taxi on the way home, but that would be a lie. Yet another one. How easily they trip off your tongue once you start.

  I’ve kicked off my shoes and have sprawled out on the cushions, but have singularly failed to make the room stop rotating by the time Carl comes back with two steaming hot mugs of tea and a plate of toast.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve eaten, either,’ my friend says, which makes me cry again.

  He sits down next to me and pulls a nice, buttered bit from the toast and feeds it to me. I chew lethargically, but swallow it down obediently until the whole slice is gone. Then he gives me sips of tea until the mug is drained.

  ‘Better?’ Carl asks.

  And I nod, even though I’m not. My head is still spinning as much as the room is. Carl leans against me, letting his head fall back against the sofa. ‘What are we going to do with you?’

  Nestling into his shoulder, I say weakly, ‘Look after me.’

  ‘Don’t I always?’ Carl gives me an affectionate squeeze. ‘We should get you to bed. You’re going to have a thumping headache in the morning. I don’t know if I’ve got any clean sheets though.’ He looks worried and chews at his lip.

  Whether Carl’s sheets are clean or not is the least of my worries.

  ‘I’ll bed down on here.’ He pats the sofa.

  I look up at him. ‘Carl…I don’t want to be by myself tonight.’

  ‘I’m here for you. You know that.’

  ‘I mean…’ I hesitate over the words. ‘Stay with me. Tonight.’

  ‘That’s too much vodka talking,’ Carl says, putting his finger on the end of my nose.

  ‘It’s not.’ I run my hands over the front of his jacket, fiddling with the Levi’s-stamped buttons. ‘It’s…it’s…I want to…I want to…’ I want to feel something other than pain and guilt, but I don’t know how to say it as my brain is fuddled with alcohol.

  ‘If you’re offering to sleep with me, Fern, then that’s very nice. But having waited for about seventeen years to consummate our platonic relationship, I’d really rather do it when you’re sober.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I say and that’s the last thing I remember.

  I wake up in Carl’s bed. The sheets are very crumpled, but they look perfectly clean to me. I’m worried that both sides of the bed look equally crumpled though. Did Carl and I end up sleeping together?

  My vertiginous heels and my jeans have been removed, but when I check my underwear, it’s all where it should be. Surely that’s a good sign? Lifting my head from the pillow, I realise that it is a bad, bad thing to do. With a superhuman effort, I haul myself out of bed, pull a sheet round me and stagger towards the kitchen. I will never, ever drink again. Never. Ever.

  Carl is already in the kitchen. While he scrambles some eggs he’s whistling softly, which hurts my ears.

  ‘Hi,’ I croak from the doorway, sounding more like gravel-voiced Barry White than is healthy in a woman.

  Carl spins round. ‘Whoa!’ he says, recoiling. ‘You look like a spat-out Smartie.’

  ‘I feel like one.’

  ‘Sleep well?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Scrambled eggs?’

  I shake my head which is also a bad, bad thing. ‘No.’

  ‘Yes,’ Carl says. ‘It will do you good.’

  I sidle into the kitchen, pulling my sheet tighter around me, and lean on Carl’s cupboards in order to stay upright. Even in my dull-sensed state I feel that Carl is looking a bit hot this morning. My friend is even more tousled than he normally is and it suits him. He’s wearing just his jeans, and somehow the rips seem to be in all the right places—teasing little glimpses of his legs peep out. I haven’t seen Carl in such a state of undress for a very long time. His feet are bare as he pads about his kitchen, and that also seems incredibly sexy. Grunge has never looked quite so gorgeous. My eyes drift towards the bedroom. Carl follows my gaze.

  I clear my throat and rasp, ‘Did we…?’

  ‘Yes,’ Carl says. ‘It was wild. You were wild. I was shocked. I didn’t know you did those things. Are they legal?’

  I smile at my friend. ‘So we didn’t?’

  ‘No,’ he admits. ‘Of course not. Call me strange, but when I have sex with a woman, I kind of like her to be conscious.’

  ‘Oh.’

&n
bsp; ‘I have, however, stored your kind invitation to share your body for future reference. I think that also requires an “oh.”’

  ‘Oh,’ I oblige.

  ‘Your eggs are ready.’

  Taking the plate, I go through to the lounge. Carl follows and sits opposite me on the one armchair.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say.

  ‘For the eggs or for not ravishing you?’

  ‘Both,’ I admit.

  We avoid looking at each other and concentrate on our eggs instead. Among other things that Carl’s wonderful at, I now discover he makes great scrambled eggs, too. I balance the plate precariously on my knees, and the heat of it burns through to my skin.

  ‘Want to tell me a bit more about yesterday?’

  ‘Not really,’ I sigh.

  ‘In the cold light of day does it still feel as if you did the right thing?’

  ‘No,’ I confess with a heavy heart. ‘What I should have done was arrange to speak to Evan before the show to clear the air.’

  ‘Maybe they wouldn’t have let you do that.’

  ‘I should have at least asked,’ I say. ‘That would have been the grown-up, sensible thing to do. Then I could have gone on the show and given it my best shot. I can’t believe that I blew something that was so important to me. To us.’ I want to hang my head in shame. ‘Perhaps I just haven’t got the right temperament for the big time. Perhaps I’m destined to sing at the King’s Head for ever.’

  ‘I don’t believe that and neither do you.’

  ‘Thanks for being so bloody reasonable about this, Carl.’ I give him a sad smile. ‘And thanks for not taking advantage of me when I was…vulnerable.’