Love Song

by Sophia Bennett

  Praise for Sophia Bennett’s books

  Great fun. It goes at a cracking pace and girls will love it.

  JACQUELINE WILSON, AUTHOR

  . . . a must read . . .

  INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

  Miss it, miss out.

  MIZZ MAGAZINE

  Bang on trend . . .

  TBK MAGAZINE

  A treat . . . elegant and funny and has real narrative verve.

  DAVID ALMOND, AUTHOR

  Intelligent chick-lit with lots of heart.

  THE BOOKSELLER

  . . . one word, BRILLIANT.

  CATHY CASSIDY, AUTHOR

  [Bennett] writes about what really matters to teenagers

  with zest, warmth and sympathy.

  THE TIMES

  . . . well plotted and crisply and humorously written . . .

  THE TELEGRAPH

  . . . funny and thoughtful, glamorous and sensitive, romantic

  and down-to-earth in equal measure . . .

  BOOKS FOR KEEPS

  A MESSAGE FROM CHICKEN HOUSE

  So the biggest stars started out as music fans just like us – moved and inspired by love and beauty to rock and roll!

  Sophia Bennett takes us on a voyage beyond the lights, to find a bunch of boys who need to remember the truth behind their music – and the only girl who can help them rediscover why it really matters to them, and a waiting world.

  Thanks from all of us, Sophia – love rocks!

  BARRY CUNNINGHAM

  Publisher

  Chicken House

  Contents

  Intro

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Heatherwick Hall, New Year’s Day

  Coda

  Playlist

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  For E, who plays rock guitar

  and writes love songs

  Also by Sophia Bennett

  Threads

  Beads

  Stars

  The Look

  You Don’t Know Me

  The Castle

  The first time I hear The Point I’m fourteen, sitting with my boyfriend at the back of the bus, talking about the Himalayas.

  ‘What’s that?’ I ask, distracted for a moment by the music.

  He has his phone in his jeans pocket, with the earbuds split between us. It’s a new song and he can’t remember the title, so he eases the phone out of his jeans to look. I’m mesmerized by that pocket. I can’t take my eyes off those rivets and seams …

  ‘“Amethyst”,’ he says, checking the screen. ‘This new band. Yeah, it’s OK.’

  It doesn’t move him the way it moved me. But if he doesn’t like it, then I don’t care either. It was only background music anyway.

  ‘In Nepal there’s this sacred mountain they call the Fish Tail,’ I continue. ‘No one’s allowed to climb it, but you can watch it from the nearby trails. You should see what it looks like with the sun setting on the snow.’

  He gives me the sideways look I love. His name is Jez Rockingham and he’s the best-looking boy in our year by miles. He’s funny and clever, and captain of the football team. I think he’s teasing me, and it’s delicious.

  ‘And there’s the Chitwan National Park. You can see black rhino.’

  ‘Rhino? Mmm hmmm?’ Sideways glance at me again.

  ‘It’s got tigers and dolphins. Can you imagine?’

  ‘Tigers and dolphins?’

  ‘Stop it!’ I dig him in the ribs. ‘Aunt Cassie told me all about it. She wants to photograph the wildlife there. It sounds incredible.’

  He grins, flashing perfect white teeth. ‘You’re getting in such a state, Nina! It’s not as if you’re going to go there anyway. Nepal’s in Asia. You live in Croydon. You’ve still got GCSEs. Don’t fuss about it. You’d only get malaria anyway, or mugged, or something …’

  He puts his hand gently on my neck, and his thumb rests on my collarbone. It’s on the tip of my tongue to point out that the risk of malaria in Nepal’s high mountain districts is very low, but he’s looking into my eyes now, and his lips are getting closer, and the ‘OK’ music makes me want to wrap my arms around his neck and pull him in tight.

  When his lips reach mine, I know I won the boy lottery, first time I tried. We are perfect together.

  For ever starts now, and it is beautiful.

  And that’s how it was.

  For a while.

  In the year that followed, I had Jez, and he had me, and our love dipped and soared, and I was happy. Meanwhile, The Point’s third single, ‘Unlock Me’, went to number one in America and from then on there was no stopping them.

  Their new song, ‘Eden’, was the song of the summer as our first anniversary approached. I had a surprise to show Jez, and all the plans in the world. I’d even spent a month writing a poem to encapsulate my love. Dare I share it with him? Probably not. He’d laugh at me, but then, Jez laughed easily. His laugh was one of the things I loved most about him.

  I was still working on the final lines when I heard Mum screaming.

  ‘And so how did you get here today?’

  It was a warm summer’s day, and my sister Ariel and I were standing in a meeting room in one of the poshest hotels in London. A huge banner with a red and black target logo dominated the back wall, illuminated by a couple of dazzling spotlights. ‘Eden’ was playing in the background. I still knew every note, every word, every minor chord. I hated it.

  The room was full of excited girls. Next to us, a perky interviewer in a green T-shirt was talking to a platinum blonde with a Taylor Swift body, sticking a microphone under her nose.

  ‘So, like, when the concert dates were announced I got, like, ten friends to help me,’ the blonde girl answered with an American twang, ‘and we all spent, like, forty minutes on our laptops, pressing refresh as soon as the tickets came out. I couldn’t get one for the O2, but then they announced this extra meet-and-greet for the mega-fans and I spent, like, four hundred dollars on this ticket, plus my air fare from Cincinnati, and here I am.’

  She said the whole thing without a flicker of a smile, like one huge ‘duh’ to Perky Girl – because that was exactly the normal procedure for getting your hands on an Ultimate VIP meet-and-greet ticket to meet The Point these days – and I decided I liked her deadpan attitude.

  ‘Well, that’s very interesting,’ the interviewer gulped, looking slightly intimidated. ‘And how do you feel right now?’

  ‘What? Seriously?’

  I grinned. If it was possible to distil the essence of What
do you think? into one raised eyebrow, Deadpan Blonde had mastered it. But once she started talking, her expression changed. Her eyes welled up. Her lips twitched. I watched her try to control herself, but she couldn’t help it.

  ‘OK, so I’m excited, obviously,’ she said. ‘I’ve met them before, in Chicago, and that time I got to hold Jamie’s hand. Which was …’ She looked away. ‘… so …’ Whatever it was, she couldn’t bring herself to say the words. ‘… but I didn’t really get to say hi to Angus, and I want to tell him … that I … he … he means a lot to me. That’s all. The music …’

  She bit her lip. The interviewer nodded sympathetically. ‘Uh huh. Angus has that effect, doesn’t he? They’re all so … scrummy.’

  Yeah, because scrummy just perfectly captured all the complicated feelings Deadpan Blonde was struggling with just now.

  I tried to catch her eye to offer some sympathy but that moment Ariel grabbed my arm.

  ‘Nina! They’re coming!’

  She was right. After a flurry of activity in the corridor outside, two massive bodyguards moved in to stand either side of the nearest doorway. Moments later the boys were walking past us in a blur of famous, surrounded by their entourage. Four iconic hairstyles glinted in the light. Last year we studied A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and this motley crew reminded me exactly of Oberon and Titania and their attendant fairies. Ariel squeezed my arm more tightly. We’d seen so many news videos like this – the busy entourage, and the band captured fuzzily behind them. Now they were real, and it was weird to see them in 3D.

  As they swept towards the far end of the room, an assistant said something to Jamie Maldon, the singer, and as he turned to answer, he happened to catch my eye. He looked straight at me and smiled. He has the most beautiful lips, all curves and curlicues, and three moles on his left cheek, which Ariel says he hates, but which every Pointer Sister would sell her soul to kiss. He looked at me like he knew me, half questioning, half laughing.

  For a moment, all the fame just fell away, and I felt a connection. It was as if he knew me, and he liked me, and he wanted me to like him too. We smiled at each other and …

  I was an idiot. One second later, he was giving Deadpan Blonde exactly the same look, and she practically cooed with excitement. Jamie Maldon was famous the world over for that smile. It was one of the reasons he was the superstar of the band, and not Connor Clark the bassist, with peroxide locks and sharp-angled cheeks, who was so uncannily beautiful that it almost hurt to look at him. I couldn’t believe I fell for it.

  Beside me, Ariel sighed. ‘Did you see the way he looked at me?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Jamie.’ She glowed with happiness.

  Goodness, the boy was a male Mona Lisa. Whoever you were, his eyes seemed to follow you round the room. I was even more of an idiot than I thought.

  Ariel’s eyes glazed over and I could tell she was in the middle of her very own fanfic story. The one where you meet the band, your favourite member spots you across a crowded room, falls instantly in love with you and spends the next twenty chapters trying to win your affections. Ignoring the fact that she’s thirteen and he’s nineteen. Oh, and like me, she’s a schoolgirl and he’s a rock star. And another minor detail: Jamie was engaged. Taken. Spoken for.

  Without another glance, the boys walked over to stand in front of the banner. I still had an image of them in my head from three years ago, when ‘Amethyst’ came out. They all had a schoolboy-rebel look about them then – tight jackets, white shirts, scruffy trousers and James Dean hair. Now they were glossier and more designer. Their faces had developed sharper lines, their hairstyles were more extreme. Close up, they looked frailer than I’d expected, and tired too, despite their cheerful smiles.

  Meanwhile, the door to the corridor opened again. Two girls entered. One was tall, pretty, serious and dressed in sober black. The other was a tiny, curvy figure in a white cotton dress with trailing cut-out sleeves.

  ‘OMIGOD!’ she announced, beaming at us all. ‘I’ve never DONE this before! You must be all Jamie’s little meet-and-greet fans! You guys are just BEYOND!’

  I stared at her, then looked at Ariel.

  ‘Is that …?’

  My sister nodded.

  Sigrid Santorini was a Hollywood rom-com star who had started going out with Jamie at Christmas. Three months later, they were engaged. Backstage with Sigrid, her reality TV show, was required viewing at school. If you didn’t know that Sigrid’s chihuahua was called Ryan, or that she once skydived for charity in a pink bikini, then you wouldn’t understand half the conversations in the sixth-form common room.

  And here she was, grinning at us all as if it was really her we’d come to see. It was fascinating how the room seemed to refocus around her. She was more compact, thinner and somehow brighter than the rest of us. In the flesh, she was even more spectacular than on TV. She seemed to glow, from her tumbling black hair to her lightly-freckled, golden skin and clear blue eyes that sparkled almost as intensely as the utterly ginormous diamond on her left hand. She was like a slightly-smaller-than-lifesize perfect doll.

  Next to me, Deadpan Blonde groaned. ‘I don’t believe it. It’s like she’s following Jamie everywhere these days.’

  Several of the Pointer Sisters turned to glare at Sigrid as she stalked over to stand near her fiancé in teetering heels. When you’ve paid four hundred dollars for an Ultimate VIP ticket, you don’t want to be labelled as a ‘little meet-and-greet fan’.

  ‘Did you see the diamond?’ Deadpan Blonde whispered to us.

  I nodded. The rock on Sigrid’s engagement ring was impossible to miss – the size of a Malteser and glittering on her hand like a distant star.

  ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ Ariel sighed.

  Um … Large, yes. Beautiful … maybe. For me, in order to be beautiful, something has to be more than just very, very big and shiny. It has to produce an emotion, and the only emotion it made me feel was worry about what would happen if she lost it.

  ‘Did she choose it?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh no!’ Ariel said. ‘Didn’t you hear? About the proposal?’

  I shrugged. ‘It was at night, wasn’t it?’ I remembered something about moonlight. Also a car.

  Deadpan Blonde and Ariel shared a look. The Proposal was obviously a Pointer Sister story. Something you had to know about in all its gory details if you were a true fan.

  ‘Sigrid turned twenty-two in March,’ Deadpan Blonde recounted. ‘She had a crazy party at this big hotel in Las Vegas.’

  ‘The one Prince Harry stayed in,’ Ariel added breathlessly.

  ‘But Jamie whisked her away from it, like, secretly, and flew her to the California coast, and he’d hired this car …’

  ‘A pale blue vintage Mustang convertible,’ Ariel specified. (Truly was she our father’s daughter.) Oh yeah – the Mustang. I liked the Mustang.

  ‘And he took her to her favourite restaurant,’ Deadpan Blonde went on, ‘and he’d hired the whole place, so it was just them and this pianist playing jazz …’

  ‘And he proposed to her on the terrace, overlooking the ocean,’ Ariel concluded. ‘With the diamond.’

  As you do.

  ‘And she said yes,’ I assumed.

  As you would. If you were a rom-com star like Sigrid and still believed in heartfelt proposals from nineteen-year-old rock gods with Mona Lisa smiles, who would never, obviously, cheat on you, and seriously intended to spend the next seventy-plus years of their lives hooked up to you and only you.

  ‘It was just … so … romantic,’ Ariel sighed dreamily. ‘He’s such a wonderful person.’

  This made me smile. While the details were hazy, I did remember that after the news was announced, many of the Pointer Sisters had queued up to hate Sigrid online, or threaten to kill themselves, or her. But my little sister just saw the good in his proposal.

  It was Ariel’s soul that was beautiful, I thought. She’d never said so out loud, but I’d seen her practise her signature in
the back of her notebooks: Ariel Maldon, Ariel Maldon, Ariel Maldon. There had been hope. Crazy hope, but hope. Now there was none. The rest of the family teased her about her passion for Jamie, but not me. I’m an expert in heartbreak. A black belt in unrequited love. I know it hurts enough as it is, and it takes all your energy to heal.

  ‘Why don’t you tell him you’re happy for him?’ I suggested at the time. ‘Nobody else seems to be.’

  And so she did – in a long video, describing all her favourite Jamie moments, culminating in the-diamond-by-the-ocean. And by some miracle he saw it, and wrote back saying how touched he was, and how he’d noticed she’d said she couldn’t get tickets for any of his shows, and so he was sending her a couple for the special meet-and-greet today, with his love.

  With his love.

  And his signature, and a kiss.

  Ariel had been walking on clouds ever since. She wore the paper with his signature on it in an old locket, hanging near her heart.

  It made her feel … ‘happy’.

  God.

  By now, the boys were in position at the back of the room, ready for the fans to file past them for the meet-and-greet. The two bodyguards stood nearby, arms folded, making it clear that nobody was getting close unless they wanted it to happen. Meanwhile, dark-dressed members of the entourage bustled about, getting us all into something approaching an orderly queue.

  Ariel and I were about halfway down, which gave us plenty of time to watch the boys in action. They certainly weren’t painful to look at, though they didn’t look like any real boys I knew. Over the years each of them had developed his own sense of style. Connor used to look like an angel who’d just stepped out of a Renaissance painting. Then he had his peroxide hair cut super short and now he was more like a visiting alien. He emphasized the effect in a silver T-shirt and spray-on jeans. Angus, the guitarist, was black and moody from slicked-back quiff to biker-booted toe. George, the frizzy-haired drummer, wore a sleeveless vest to show off his bodybuilder physique. Jamie’s loose silk shirt was probably a one-off by a designer mate of his. I knew this because Ariel and Mum had had a long conversation about it over breakfast.

  The Point were famous for their jokey friendship, and it was one of the things Ariel loved most about them. There was lots of laughter and silly gestures, kisses, hugs and stupid faces. They hit their mark for every photograph – eyes front, smiling – and all the fans walked away beaming.