Accidental Superstar

by Marianne Levy

  There was no way I’d do that.

  ‘Adrian?’

  ‘Katie!’

  He was downstairs in the den, a bowl of crisps balanced on his stomach. I tried to think where I’d seen someone do that before, then I remembered; it was a photo of Mum, when she’d been pregnant with me.

  I suppressed a full-body shudder and went in.

  Adrian had taken over the room next to the garage and called it The Den. Meaning, I suppose, for it to be this kind of awesome chillaxing zone, as though we were in some American sitcom. He’d even stuck this manky old beanbag in one corner. It was made of brown corduroy and didn’t have enough beans, sagging there like a giant used teabag. Then, there was an ancient TV, not even a flatscreen, taking up most of one corner, and a sort of fake-leather chair thing with a bit that flipped out for your legs. The walls were painted this nightmare toothpaste green and the back wall had mushrooms growing out of it. So it was hardly surprising that the only person who ever did any chillaxing in there was Adrian.

  ‘I just came to say thank you,’ I said. ‘For helping me with my song. It’s kind of incredible to think how many people like it.’

  ‘Yeah, well. When I was in the band, we had a bit of a moment like this. We’d just recorded the single and we got booked to play on Des O’Connor, it was big. Primetime TV. We nearly . . . we might’ve . . .’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘The band split. That afternoon.’

  ‘Creative differences,’ I remembered.

  ‘Yeah. Well, no. It was me. We were in the studio, doing the dress rehearsal and . . . I freaked out. Lost it. Told Tony we should cancel the gig, that this wasn’t for us. He didn’t take it so well. Said I was mad. And maybe he was right.’ He took a handful of crisps. ‘And I said it would come round again, that I was talented, the opportunity would be back. And I waited. And . . . and here I am.’

  ‘Here you are,’ I said.

  He seemed to sort of wake up. ‘But you don’t need to listen to me, you’re young. You’ll have plenty more chances.’

  There was a very long silence.

  ‘This Tony,’ I said. ‘Are you really still friends?’

  ‘He sounded pleased to hear from me. Which was a bit of a surprise, given how we left things. Why?’ He was looking at me, really looking. ‘You still want to go and say hi?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. At which point I had this feeling like I was walking over the edge of a cliff, or something.

  If Mum found out . . .

  It would be bad.

  Really bad.

  This could even split them up.

  No more Mum and Adrian.

  Was I the sort of person who would do that?

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I want to go and say hi.’

  Apparently I was.

  God.

  He broke my gaze. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I know it’s a lot to ask.’

  ‘You know we’d have to . . . keep it to ourselves.’ I nodded. ‘It’s a helluva risk to take. And for someone who doesn’t even like me.’

  So he’d noticed.

  ‘I think you’re great,’ I said, trying to look into his eyes so he wouldn’t know I was lying, and finding that I couldn’t. Maybe if I just kept talking instead . . . ‘I’m sorry if I’ve been grumpy. It’s just the move, and school, and the divorce . . . I’ve found it very hard.’ Which, come to think of it, was true. I had.

  He nodded. ‘Maybe we just need to get to know each other better. A trip to London could be just the ticket.’

  Stay calm, Katie. Stay calm.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It could be. We could hang out, maybe get some food, meet this Tony guy . . .’ My voice was so high I sounded like a chipmunk. I tried to lower it, to regain a little sophistication. ‘It would be pretty cool.’

  ‘OK,’ he said, hesitating. Then, as if he’d decided, properly decided to go for it, ‘OK! I’ll tell him.’

  He watched me doing a sort of dance of excitement, and his face . . . well. It made me stop. ‘Are you sure about this?’ I said.

  ‘I suppose . . . I don’t believe in regrets. I want you to feel like you gave this a shot. So if it doesn’t work out, you don’t spend the rest of your life wondering what might’ve happened.’

  And for a second, or maybe even less, I understood what Mum saw in him.

  I didn’t sleep well. In fact I slept incredibly badly. Worse even than when I was little and trying to listen out for Father Christmas, or the nights after Dad had cooked his beef thing with all those peppers.

  Because, the opportunity was there. This huge, glittering thing that I didn’t even know I wanted, because I’d never thought I could have it.

  I mean, I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t ever imagined people singing my songs or yelling my name, but it was in the same way that I’d imagined waking up and finding I’d developed the ability to fly. People from Harltree don’t get famous, except that woman a few years back who got knocked on the head and suddenly started speaking Chinese.

  To think that after all the hideous Mum and Dad stuff and Amanda and Adrian and the bus and school, that there was a way to turn my life into something new . . . into something good . . .

  It was amazing, like a dream – ironic, given I hadn’t slept at all.

  ‘Morning, morning,’ said Adrian. ‘I’m frying eggs. Who wants a fried egg? Katie? Nothing like a fried egg, yeah?’

  There was no way he could have been more suspicious, short of wearing a massive hat that said I’m Hiding Something across the front.

  Incredibly, no one else seemed to have noticed.

  ‘You all right to open up on your own today, Manda?’

  ‘What? Oh my God!’ She flushed a deep rose colour. ‘Are you sure? That’s such a responsibility.’

  He grinned at her, and chucked a huge bunch of keys down on to the table. ‘You’ll be fine.’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ she said, all earnest and sincere. ‘Thank you.’

  I couldn’t help rolling my eyes, just a tiny bit. Only, then I felt bad because Amanda bit her lip and looked down at her Curiously Cinnamons. But not in a curious way. She just looked sad.

  ‘Fried egg, Katie?’

  ‘Yuk, no.’ Just in time I remembered my new pro-Adrian status. ‘Oh, all right, just one.’

  He leaned in to plop an egg on to my plate, all wet and glistening and eggy, and as he did, he whispered, ‘End of the road, 10 a.m.’

  ‘What? 10 a.m. today?’

  He was already back at the hob.

  ‘What’s today?’ said Amanda, looking up from her cereal.

  ‘Oh, just . . . this . . . thing . . . I’ve got. With . . . Lacey.’ When it comes to lying, I’m not the best.

  ‘Adrian, can I play the new Michael Kiwanuka EP? Or would you rather I stuck to the official playlist?’

  ‘Play what you like,’ said Adrian. ‘I mean it. You’ve got great taste.’

  She practically danced on the table.

  Meanwhile, I mooched off upstairs, wondering why Adrian wanted to meet me at the end of the road, like we were in a spy film or something. What with mooching and wondering and not being able to find any clean tracksuit bottoms, I didn’t make it to the end of the road until nearly ten thirty.

  Adrian was hanging out his car window. ‘Quick! Get in! We’re going to be late.’

  His car smelled a little bit of mints and a lot of cigarette smoke. This was because just as I’d arrived, Adrian had been pulling on a fag, which he chucked away the second he saw me. Mum has strong views on smoking – which are that me and Amanda mustn’t, ever, or she’ll kill us. This translates into everyone we ever meet also being banned from doing it, which I don’t understand at all. Does she think we’re really that easily influenced? Also, if I’d ever wanted to smoke, which I don’t, the sight of Nose Hairs dragging on a fag butt would be a pretty effective deterrent.

  ‘Late for what?’ I asked.

  ‘Top Music.�
��

  ‘WHAT?’ By now I was in the passenger seat, otherwise I might have collapsed.

  ‘I fired off an email last night, got a reply straight back. He’d love to say hi. Of course, this is just a first meeting, so don’t get too excited. These things take time. Lots more meetings. But it’ll be interesting to hear what he has to say, yeah?’

  ‘But, but . . . it’s a Saturday. I thought people didn’t work on Saturday.’ I was staring down at my scuzzy tracky bums and flaking nail polish. ‘I haven’t even cleaned my teeth!’

  ‘We’ll get you some Polos at the station.’

  I had a quick look at myself in the car mirror, then wished I hadn’t. Maybe we could find a Boots and I could do my face with the testers.

  ‘So, Tony started Top Music a few years ago now. And I think it’s doing pretty well, from what I can tell. Doesn’t surprise me. He always had that kind of drive. Much more so than me.’

  ‘And he’s nice, right?’

  ‘He’s in the music industry,’ said Adrian, doing a three-point turn in the middle of a really quite busy road. ‘What do you expect? In fact, let’s go over our non-negotiables. It’s good to be clear on this kind of thing from the beginning.’

  ‘Clear about what kind of thing?’

  ‘Not missing school.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘You know what your mum thinks.’

  ‘Dad wouldn’t mind,’ I mumbled. ‘He’d let me miss school, if it was important. Which it is.’

  ‘I’m not taking parenting lessons from a man who leaves his kids to go and live on the other side of the world,’ said Adrian, which was the most he’d ever said about Dad. ‘No missing school.’

  I shoved myself down low into my seat. ‘It’s not going to be a very fun meeting, is it? If you go in and basically start telling him off.’

  ‘Katie, I’m on your side.’

  ‘But I can handle myself,’ I told him. ‘I’m really very sorted.’

  We passed a sign for the station, and it occurred to me that I was on my way to London to meet a man at a record label.

  ‘Katie, are you all right?’

  ‘Mnnnrg.’

  ‘You don’t sound all right.’

  ‘Uwuuuug.’

  ‘Do you want me to pull over? Breathe, Katie. In out, in out. There we go.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I managed. ‘It just occurred to me that I’m on my way to London to meet the head of a record label. Whoooooah – it’s happening again.’

  ‘In out, in out,’ said Adrian. ‘And, look, it’s exciting. But it’s not that exciting.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘He’s not going offer you a deal on the spot, if that’s what you were expecting. You weren’t, were you?’

  ‘. . . No.’

  ‘Good. These things take forever, weeks of negotiation, they’ll want to hear you play, maybe see what you’re like in front of an audience. And that’s if he wants you for the label, which he may not. Most likely it’s just going to be a friendly chat so he can keep an eye on you, watch what you do next.’

  ‘That’s still cool,’ I said, bravely.

  ‘Don’t be upset. That’s more than most people get in a lifetime!’

  Which was true.

  Well, at least the hyperventilating had stopped.

  London’s brilliant. It’s basically everything that Harltree isn’t. It’s so big that even familiar places aren’t familiar really, at least not in a Harltree way where I know the exact location of every last puddle and the last major event was when they opened the new Tesco Metro.

  There’s just this . . . feeling about London. It’s only a few miles from home but, really, it’s another planet. London is dirty and dangerous and exciting and stuff happens there. Which is to say that even though I don’t ever quite relax when I’m on the tube and I can’t work out how anyone knows how to get the bus anywhere and when I get home and blow my nose my snot’s grey from all the pollution, it’s still my favourite place. It makes me want to write songs, like Warwick Avenue or Waterloo Sunset. Only mine would be crazy happy-making and have a racing beat, with the kind of hook that makes you jump in the air and scream.

  In fact, I got so caught up in thinking about how the chorus would loop into the verse and back that I’d sort of forgotten what we were doing there in the first place. It was only when we got to what had to be the biggest building on earth that I remembered again.

  ‘Blimey.’ Adrian looked up at this kind of infinite glass roof thing that reflected us into a million chopped-up bits. ‘Tony’s done well for himself.’ He took in the massiveness all around us and it was as though he was literally shrinking. ‘We were mates,’ he said, like he was trying to convince himself it was true. ‘He was a right one.’

  I tried to imagine Adrian being mates with someone like I was mates with Lacey. Tried to picture him talking to them late at night on the phone, but I just couldn’t. Possibly because mobiles hadn’t been invented then. Maybe landlines hadn’t either. He was pretty old.

  ‘Are we going in?’

  ‘. . . Yeah,’ said Adrian, fumbling his way through the revolving door and tripping over his own feet.

  I followed him in. The walls were made of this kind of ripply, shiny stuff and there were TVs inside the tables and on the pillars and, basically, all the places you’d least expect to find a TV. They probably had them in the toilets, too.

  It looked like a film-set. One all about a billionaire, who lived in the future. On Mars.

  We stood frozen for a second.

  ‘Well?’ I said.

  ‘I haven’t seen him since that afternoon,’ said Adrian at last, and he looked down at the floor, which was glowing. And at the table covered in glossy magazines. ‘We didn’t leave on the best of terms.’

  ‘Chill,’ I said. Not that I was feeling especially chilled.

  At which point he took a big breath and went up to the reception desk.

  ‘Hi, love. I’m Adrian Lambeth and this is Katie Cox. We’re here to see Tone.’

  ‘Tone?’ said the lady, who might have been a cyborg.

  ‘Tone. Eee. Tony Topper.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Robowoman. ‘Take a seat.’

  We went and sat down and I watched the different TVs playing Karamel videos.

  ‘They what you listen to at school?’ Adrian said, nodding towards the screens.

  ‘I’d rather saw off my own ears,’ I said.

  He tried to take his big jacket off and got an arm stuck, and, quite genuinely, it was the most embarrassing thing in the world.

  ‘So,’ I said, quietly, ‘I was thinking maybe you could wait out here.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll give you a complete rundown of everything he says.’ Then, because this didn’t seem to be going down too well, ‘I’ve got a very good memory. Not in a photographic way, but I’ll definitely be able to tell you the gist of the conversation, and –’

  ‘ADE!’

  The voice boomed across the reception, echoing up into the glass ceiling.

  ‘T-Tony? You all right? It’s b-been a while.’

  ‘Mate! I didn’t think you’d make it! How’ve you been?’

  ‘This is Katie.’

  ‘Hi Katie. God, it’s been forever, Ade. How many years? Come through, come through. So, you married yet? Gemma’s always asking about you, you old dog . . .’

  London Yeah

  Trafalgar Square and then Big Ben

  Bond Street and Covent Garden

  Greenwich and the Cutty Sark

  And a really massively big Primark

  Put your hands in the air

  For London yeah

  Camden Town and Kensington

  Notting Hill and Wimbledon

  Leicester Square and Regent’s Park

  And a really massively big Primark

  Put your hands in the air

  It’s London yeah

  Take me to the bridge

  London Bridge


  Or the Millennium Bridge

  Either is good

  Put your hands in the air

  For London yeah

  Put your hands in the air

  It’s London yeah

  [Repeat until exhausted]

  Tony was about the same age as Adrian – whatever that was – and the same kind of build, too; sort of fleshy, with a big face.

  Which sounds like they were really similar but they weren’t at all. Because this guy, he was rich.

  There are people at school who clearly have more money than me. You can tell because they come back from the Christmas holidays with a tan. And they have designer bags and clothes and will not stop talking about them. I know more about Savannah’s Juicy Couture jeans than I do about some of my cousins.

  Tony was different, though. He seemed rich all the way through. I’d hardly looked at him but I could see he had the sort of ripped, rumpled clothes you only get if you spend zillions of pounds on them; stubble far too exact to be an accident; and teeth so white it was bananas. Like he’d put some fake ones into his mouth and then coated them in Tippex.

  ‘You look great,’ said Adrian. ‘Seriously, mate.’

  ‘Ach, I’m just back from the Caribbean. You should’ve seen me before I went. Kurt, from Karamel – you know Karamel, right? – he was telling me I needed to take a break before I dropped down dead. And he was right.’

  ‘So you’ve been busy these last few years,’ said Adrian, as we shot up two floors in a lift that was all mirrors, giving me a great view of the largeness of my behind. ‘Since . . . since everything.’

  ‘Yup, yup,’ said Tony. ‘Started the label small, meant to keep it that way, but Crystal Skye went platinum and then we just had to try and keep up, really.’

  Crystal Skye was one of those people you heard everywhere. In shops, in cafés, in toilets . . . Her music was supposed to be relaxing, all plinky-plonky piano and the sound of rushing water. Which, come to think of it, probably explains the whole toilet thing.

  ‘So –’ Tony glanced back at Adrian as we swung into a corridor smelling strongly of perfume – ‘you’re not in the industry any more?’

  ‘No, not any more,’ said Adrian, and I wondered if Tony could hear the regret as easily as I could. ‘Got the shop now, keeps me busy.’