Love Song

by Sophia Bennett

  Afterwards, as I waited for them to leave the plane, Jamie had turned to me, briefly, once. ‘If you wanted something, you should have just asked for it,’ he’d said quietly.

  I hung my head in shame. A moment later the manager had asked for my laptop and Sigrid had handed it over triumphantly. He still hadn’t given it back.

  ‘They should call her the Empress of Evil,’ Tammy muttered, over commiseration chicken at Nando’s. ‘She was jealous of you, it’s obvious.’

  ‘Not jealous – angry,’ I corrected her. ‘She must have found out what happened with Angus. I wasn’t supposed to get close to her boyfriend’s friends.’

  Tammy liked to think she was a great psychologist, but as she got all her psychology from the E! channel and Perez Hilton, I wasn’t too sure.

  ‘Nuh-uh. Jealous,’ she insisted. ‘She wants them all to like her, and they don’t. They liked you, obviously. She couldn’t handle it. Evil, I’m telling you.’

  ‘Well, whatever it was, it worked,’ I said, picking at my chicken wings.

  ‘You miss them, don’t you?’ She sounded surprised. I could feel myself blushing.

  ‘Well, um … you know …’

  ‘You said they were a bunch of spoilt millionaires.’

  ‘Oh, they are. They absolutely are.’

  ‘So?’

  I tried to avoid the question by pretending my chicken was too spicy to let me talk. ‘Phew! Hot!’ I fanned my face.

  She grinned, knowingly. ‘See? Told you.’

  ‘What? Oh, not them. I mean, they are, but …’

  Everything was so simple in Tammy-land. Boys are hot. Girls like them. Nobody gets hurt. My world was practically the opposite.

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘They’re messed up.’ I looked across at her and tried to find the right words. ‘But they’re more interesting than I thought, when you get to know them.’

  She laughed. ‘Break the internet! The Point are interesting when you get to know them.’

  ‘Haha. What I mean is, offstage they hardly know what day it is. They play Pizza-Frisbee in hotel corridors. Their lifestyle’s insane. But when they play their songs, they have this incredible … Jamie’s so …’

  ‘Again,’ Tammy grinned. ‘Nina Baxter discovers the absolutely obvious. Anyway, back off – Jamie’s mine!’

  I made a face at her. ‘You can have him.’

  She put narrowed her eyes and gave me a searching look. ‘Really?’

  It made me uncomfortable. ‘Really,’ I assured her. ‘Join the queue. They’re interesting, that’s all I’m saying. I wouldn’t have minded staying with them a bit longer.’

  ‘Oh, Nina,’ Tammy sighed at me. ‘What have they done to you?’

  The next day, I was back at work at Mum’s salon, earning some holiday cash. Two girls walked in to get their highlights done: Clementine and her best friend, Becca.

  I swallowed. So, this was going to be fun.

  ‘Can you get Rebecca ready for me?’ Mum asked cheerily, seemingly oblivious to what was about to happen.

  ‘Of course.’

  With my heart beating like a drum-and-bass track, I sat Becca back in the chair by the basins, and started to wash her honey-blonde hair.

  ‘So,’ she said, examining her fingernails. ‘You’re back early.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed, quietly.

  ‘I mean, Clemmie’s off to Nepal next week, aren’t you, Clemmie?’

  From the basin next to her, Clementine smiled serenely. ‘Mmm hmm.’

  ‘And yet you’re already home.’

  Becca waited for me to fill the silence. I didn’t.

  ‘Anyone would think that Tammy was making it up,’ she went on. ‘All that stuff about you and The Point. Or maybe she was confused. We checked your Facebook status – nothing.’

  She shook her head sadly at my stupid fantasy life.

  ‘Oh, I joined them in Spain,’ I said. ‘I have …. pictures.’ I ended lamely.

  ‘Of you and them together?’

  ‘Um … no.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘Their hotel rooms, and stuff.’

  ‘That’s where you worked?’ Clementine asked. ‘So you were, like, a maid?’

  I nodded unhappily.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Yes,’ I whispered.

  ‘And then – what? Did they fire you?’

  The accuracy of her question hit me like a missile. My face said ‘yes’ – my voice didn’t need to.

  ‘Hahahahaha.’

  Mum came over to wash Clementine’s hair.

  ‘Is Nina telling you about the tour?’ she asked.

  ‘Uh huh,’ Becca said, screwing her face into a picture of awkwardness before shooting me a mock-pity glance.

  Mum looked sad for me and sighed. ‘Well, at least she’s home safely.’

  This was hardly the triumphant return Tammy had predicted for me.

  Clementine turned to Becca. ‘Did you hear, by the way?’ she said, ignoring me now. ‘Jamie secretly married Sigrid after this gig in Poland?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘There was, like, a shaman there or something, and they did this ceremony under some sort of peace tent thing in their hotel room. He’s gone a bit …’ She made her eyes go googly and circled a finger beside her head.

  ‘That’s not true!’ I spluttered. ‘They wouldn’t!’

  She turned round to sneer at me. ‘Oh yeah? How would a maid know?’

  A maid would know, I thought to myself. And she was right – that’s pretty much what I had been. Like a maid, I knew what brand of boxer shorts Jamie wore, what time he got up and when he went to bed. I knew he liked Matisse and was allergic to strawberries. I knew he didn’t even like Sigrid’s stupid peace tent, and the most he could be persuaded to do under it was yoga. I knew he wasn’t married yet, because Sigrid still hadn’t decided which wedding planner to use, and no way was she walking up the aisle in her ‘simple Valentino beach dress’ until every last detail had been organized, down to the orthodontic appointment she needed to make because her back teeth weren’t quite perfect.

  I knew all this, and I couldn’t tell Becca and Clementine – or at least, I wouldn’t – because it was private. Not because I’d signed all those agreements, but because on tour the band spent most of their lives in a fishbowl, being stared at, and the one place they relaxed was in the Hotel California. It was the only place they felt safe. Despite anything that Sigrid said, I wasn’t going to spill their secrets now.

  When we’d wrapped the girls’ hair in towels, Mum and I took them through to the main salon. They chattered on about Angus’s ‘secret girlfriend’ (he didn’t have one) and George’s drug problem (actually drink, which was just as bad, I suppose). Mum was surprised I didn’t correct them, but now my silence was my armour. I knew the truth – they didn’t. I shared a connection with The Point, albeit a broken one, that these girls could never imagine.

  All the time, I kept catching sight of my backstage passes from Barcelona, and the special one I used in the Hotel California. When she first saw them, Mum had treated them like ancient relics and asked to borrow them. She’d tucked them into the frame of the mirror at her salon station, where they blinked and shone at me now, like secret talismans.

  At home, things were different. Every night, Mum and Dad asked me for real stories about the secret life of the band. I’d come back in such disgrace that they wanted to understand what had really happened. And the more I talked, the more they wanted to know.

  I didn’t notice the effect on Ariel at first. Nobody was that surprised about the Queen of Evil, but each time I mentioned George’s drinking, or a fight between Angus and Jamie, or the way they treated me, her eager expression grew sadder and dimmer. Her idols were tarnished and it was my fault. Gradually, she stopped playing their songs. One by one, the posters came down. The Jamie Maldon duvet set was listed on eBay.

  I went up to the bedroom she shared with the twins, as she was p
eeling the last of the stickers off her window, and tried to explain.

  ‘I think they were just tired. Touring’s crazy – you never stop. I caught them at a bad time, Lellie.’

  She didn’t look round.

  ‘Jamie was horrible to you.’ Her voice was full of hurt.

  ‘He was at first,’ I admitted. ‘He just wanted some privacy. I think Sigrid hired me without checking with him first.’

  Looking back, Jamie was actually more normal than Sigrid a lot of the time. He was friendly with the entourage, and never directly mean to me. He just seemed to tune out when his fiancée was.

  Ariel seemed to read my thoughts. She looked back at me now, and her eyes were blazing. The last time I’d seen them like this she had been fired by a fierce, protective love of Jamie. Now it was bitter disillusion. ‘Why did he let her be so nasty to you anyway?’

  She looked on the verge of tears. I tried to put an arm around her, but she shrugged me off.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I sighed. ‘I don’t think he noticed me much. And he loves her.’

  ‘That’s no excuse,’ Ariel muttered. ‘Why can’t he see what kind of person she is?’

  ‘She’s very, very beautiful. She’s nice to him. And he’s locked in this world where everything’s perfect. Everything’s done for him. I don’t think he notices anything much any more.’

  The more I tried to make it better, the worse it got.

  After the twins’ tea, when I went up to run the bath for them, I caught her in the bathroom with a pair of scissors, cutting off the bottom half of her hair.

  ‘Ariel! Your blue!’

  She looked at me dully in the mirror above the basin.

  ‘I don’t want it any more.’

  The floor around her was scattered with thin blue strands, like a sea of fine needles.

  ‘But … it was your glory.’

  She surveyed the strands without emotion, then cut off another hank.

  ‘I don’t need it. I’m better like this.’

  She was beautiful however she chose to cut her hair, but her sadness made me want to cry. If she hadn’t been brandishing a very sharp pair of scissors, with a purposeful glint in her eye, I would have hugged her. Instead, I watched as she finished the job.

  ‘There. Done. I’ll go and get a brush.’

  Jamie Maldon was out of her life, whatever his favourite colour was.

  She walked past me without another word.

  He wasn’t out of mine, though. None of them were. And not just because their manager still hadn’t given me back my laptop.

  Yes, they turned out to be ‘interesting when you got to know them’, but I had to stop obsessing about them all, like a sad, crazy stalker, following every story about them on the internet. It wasn’t my business if Jamie was busy ranch-hunting with Sigrid in Montana. ‘My heart really lies in the mountains’: Sigrid Santorini tells all about her life-long love of horses, and how she can’t wait to settle down with her rock-star beau and raise a family of cowboys. Or if Angus was due to feature on Digger V’s latest album. Or if there were rumours that George had finally passed out onstage at a gig with some friends in LA and been taken to hospital in a coma, or that he and Connor were fed up with waiting for Jamie to write more songs, and were starting a breakaway band.

  I found out all this information on my phone. The lack of a laptop was completely infuriating. I rang Rory Windermere’s office every day to try and get it back. But each time I spoke to someone, they said he was busy.

  A week went by, and then another. I found the office’s address online and even went to Soho in central London to visit it in person. But they said he was away that day, visiting a sick aunt. The most pathetic lie I’d ever heard. Meanwhile, nobody knew where my precious computer was.

  ‘Tomorrow I’m reporting it stolen,’ I told the girl at the reception desk.

  ‘Mmmmm hmmmmm.’

  The wall behind her was lined with gold and platinum discs in Perspex frames. She didn’t seem that interested in a school-girl’s computer. I wanted to kick something, or cry. Instead, I wrote a message to Mr Windermere demanding the return of my property, and made her promise to leave it on his desk.

  He rang me the next day, soon after breakfast.

  ‘Miss Baxter! What wonderful timing! I gather you popped in. So sorry I missed you. Thank you for your note.’

  He sounded friendly. Very. Not like a man who’d sat on my most precious possession for over a fortnight. Or who’d watched as my ex-boss ripped my reputation to shreds on a private jet in front of his biggest client. I’d half wondered if he’d kept the laptop in case Jamie wanted to sue me.

  ‘Are you busy?’ he asked.

  ‘Um, no. Not exactly.’

  I’d been googling Montana real estate. Pathetic.

  ‘The thing is …’ he went on, ‘I have a terrible favour to ask.’

  ‘A favour?’ I stared at the phone in my hand to see if the sound was working properly. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I’m so sorry about your laptop. I’d forgotten all about it. I’m having it couriered to you as we speak. But your note got me thinking … Look, I know things ended badly before, and I’m sorry. But I can promise it will be different this time.’

  This time? The tour was over. The last date had been a massive outdoor gig in Berlin. The Point had released a thousand silver balloons into the night sky and partied until dawn, then flown off in different directions and apparently not spoken to each other since.

  ‘What time?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, as I’m sure you’re aware, the boys are supposed to start writing their new album. It’s long overdue. Someone’s let me down and I think you could be the girl to help me.’

  ‘O-kay,’ I said, still confused. I was beginning to wonder if he wanted me to ranch-sit for Jamie and Sigrid or something. Which Wasn’t. Ever. Happening.

  ‘They need some time together to write songs and get some demos down. I’m sending them to a secret location for a few weeks. I was wondering if you could go too, if you’re willing.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘You, Nina. Absolutely. Your note was a timely reminder. I need someone who can cope with them, and whom I can trust completely to be discreet.’

  ‘But … Sigrid ...’

  I couldn’t bring myself to describe the way things had ended. But he’d been there on the hideous plane ride to Gdynia. Surely he remembered?

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he acknowledged, with a polite cough. ‘While Miss Santorini is a joy to behold … one can’t always rely on absolutely everything she says. She gave the impression that you were inclined to divulge private information. Whereas I happen to know that you don’t.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Well, for example, you spent the night with Angus and didn’t tell a soul.’

  What? He knew? He knew about that? I felt my face burning.

  ‘Um … we didn’t … there wasn’t … I—’

  ‘I know nothing happened,’ he said with a smile in his voice. ‘And don’t be surprised – a manager hears everything. You were very helpful to Angus that night, and afterwards your lips were sealed. Believe me, that’s rare. And your artwork was fascinating, by the way. You should do more of it. I rather liked it.’

  Oh. My. Goodness. Everything I thought they thought was wrong. He didn’t want my laptop so he could sue me after all. And he liked my pictures. Rock bands began to rise in my estimation.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Windermere. But what about Jamie? Doesn’t he …?’

  ‘Don’t worry about Jamie. I’m just making the final arrangements for the studio. Do say you’ll come,’ he went on smoothly. ‘It will be an entirely more civilized affair, I promise. No crowds. No girlfriends. Categorically no girlfriends. No hustle and bustle. They’ll be staying somewhere private, near the sea. There wouldn’t be a huge amount for you to do. Just a little light housekeeping and helping out. I had a woman lined up, you see, but she’s twisted her knee. Most unfortunate, and at the l
ast minute too. The deadline’s very tight, I’m afraid. I need you to be ready in less than a week. I’ll come and pick you up, if you agree. And do call me Windy. Everybody does.’

  He didn’t know it, but he had me at ‘categorically no girlfriends’.

  My brain, which had stalled around the ‘Sigrid is unreliable’ moment, suddenly went into overdrive. ‘Your artwork was fascinating … You should do more of it …’ I pictured myself lounging round a pool on an island somewhere exotic, pausing to photograph the dappled light on the water while the boys jammed with local musicians and hung out with their friends. Maybe there would be movie directors and artists to talk to, if Jamie’s tastes were anything to go by.

  ‘A little light housekeeping … No hustle and bustle.’

  Nobody’s bags to carry, and nobody making bunny faces.

  A total absence of supermodels and movie stars.

  As if I hadn’t got fired the last time. As if I hadn’t been humiliated in public on a daily basis. As if Rory Windermere wasn’t just a little bit crazy. And I wasn’t just a little bit crazier for trusting him.

  ‘You want to do what?’ Dad spluttered, when I found him in the shed doing some joinery for a project he was working on.

  ‘Go and work for the band for a few weeks.’

  ‘But they treated you like dirt! They sacked you!’

  ‘They didn’t – Sigrid did. I thought they all agreed with her, but it turns out they didn’t. And …’

  ‘I thought you hated them.’

  ‘I didn’t. Not all the time. Sigrid was the problem really. And she won’t be there.’

  ‘C’mon,’ Dad said. ‘We need to consult the oracle.’

  He went to join Mum in the garden, where she was hanging out the washing with the twins, which mostly involved stopping them from dressing up in it. I helped her peg out underwear while we talked.

  ‘Where would you be going?’ Mum asked.

  This was tricky. I shrugged, rescuing a pair of Dad’s under-pants from Lara’s giggling head. ‘Windy said it was a secret, so I don’t know, exactly.’