You Don't Know Me Read online

  ‘Who does she think she is? Jesus?’ Jodie mutters.

  Rose bites her lip.

  Roxanne sings more stuff about moments and preciousness and specialness and making it. Then she and Rose appear together, in what seems to be a marble-lined villa somewhere hot. It is possibly supposed to be like a judge’s house from The X Factor, or possibly like heaven, or maybe both. Rose is still at the piano, while Roxanne stands beside it. Their voices rise for the chorus:

  ‘I’ve found my moment

  Living the dream.’

  Eventually, mercifully, the video comes to an end. Nell and I both plaster on our encouraging smiles for Rose. She ignores us and looks straight at Jodie, who doesn’t even try to hide her reaction.

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’

  Rose hangs her head. ‘I keep trying to put genuine emotion into it, but it just comes out cheesy.’

  ‘It’s not cheesy,’ Jodie says. ‘Believe me, it’s beyond cheesy. It’s not even fun cheesy, like we used to do. It’s just . . . cheesy-cheesy.’

  Rose looks panicked. ‘But it’s an easy tune. I don’t know why I can’t do it.’

  ‘It’s not you,’ I say. ‘It’s the song.’

  I feel as if I’m pointing out the obvious here. Rose would never have wanted to touch a song like that when we were together, but she shakes her head.

  ‘It can’t be the song. Everyone loves it. Roxanne makes it sound so real.’

  ‘That’s because Roxanne has no sense of integrity,’ Jodie says. ‘She could sing a shampoo ad like her life depended on it. Oh wait – she did, last week. You should be glad you can’t do that.’

  Rose gives her the ghost of a smile, slipping the tablet back in its case. ‘I suppose I used to think like that. But everyone loves her. And they’ve got this whole stack of numbers like that for me to sing on the new album and I can’t do half of them. That’s why it’s taking so long in the studio. I try to love them, but I can’t . . .’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ I say, interrupting.

  ‘Get what?’

  ‘This stack of numbers like that one. What about your songs?’

  ‘Oh!’ Rose shakes her head. ‘I can’t sing those. They wouldn’t sell, apparently. What?’

  We’re all staring at her. She’s being incredibly weird.

  ‘The number one?’ Jodie reminds her. ‘That song you wrote? Over a hundred million views?’

  ‘Oh, that. That was a fluke. And because of the competition. And good will because of . . . well, you know . . .’

  My God. She actually thinks she’s no good. After everything that’s happened, she genuinely believes that. She thinks people just feel sorry for her.

  ‘Who told you this?’ I ask. ‘Linus?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ she agrees. ‘And Ivan. Everyone on the management team. They want me to be commercial. They want me to sell a lot of records. Nobody will believe a girl like me singing love songs, which is what I write. That’s why I go on the runs. And do the diet. To lose some weight so—’

  A girl like me. What have they been saying to her? Oh yeah. I can imagine. Not just large but large.

  ‘But people love you the way you are!’ Nell yelps, horrified. ‘That’s the whole point!’

  ‘No, they don’t,’ Rose assures her. ‘Not like this. They don’t, because . . .’

  We’re all staring at her again. Flustered, she loses her train of thought.

  ‘Because what?’ Jodie asks.

  ‘Because . . . because . . .’

  ‘Give me that!’ I instruct, holding out my hand for the tablet in its fancy orange case.

  Rose hands it over. It takes me a few goes, because I don’t know the software, but I finally get Interface on there, and Rose’s fan page. Her official one. The one with over a million fans, and all the messages I read every day. I hold it out to her.

  ‘Do you ever look at this?’

  She looks surprised.

  ‘Sometimes. Well, Elsa reads things out to me.’

  I can feel my jaw clenching. Those fans aren’t writing to Elsa, they’re writing to Rose. Jodie catches my eye and even Jodie looks a bit scared of me.

  ‘Well, read it,’ I say, handing the tablet over. ‘Read the first message, and the second, and . . . the fifth.’ I haven’t looked at them yet today, but I know what they’ll say.

  Rose scans down, reading quietly to herself. Her face clouds. She goes over to the nearest chair and sits down, still reading.

  There will be a message from someone who’s been bullied at school, saying she’s given them hope and saved their life. There will be another from someone with a broken heart, saying she’s the soundtrack to their pain, and they listen to her every day. There will be several telling her she’s an inspiration, and there will be pictures: the pictures of roses, in glitter and fabric and arty photographs. There will be a few horrible ones too, saying she’s fat and ugly, because some people think it’s OK to say hateful things to strangers they can’t see, but they’ll be drowned out by angry defence of Rose by her fans. There won’t be a single one, I guarantee, that wishes she’d be more commercial, or that she’d stop singing from her heart.

  By now the tears are pouring down her cheeks, but it just makes me frustrated.

  ‘I can’t believe you don’t read this stuff. I mean, I know you don’t because you never reply. Not in your own words. Elsa does it for you sometimes – spelling it wrong. But why? When all these people love you, Rose? Why?’

  She looks up at me, her face taut with wonder and pain.

  ‘I had no idea . . . I don’t know why.’

  And then, for a while, she ignores us, scrolling down and down, through just some of the thousands of messages, stroking her finger over them, pausing to smile at a compliment, or grimace at some sad story.

  While she reads, Jodie wanders around the room, stroking her fingers over the soft silk of the curtains, admiring Rose’s new set of matching luggage, trying on some of her jewellery collection at the dressing table, waddling around in a pair of her new high-heeled Jimmy Choos. Rose only looks up when Jodie topples over on one of the heels and snaps it.

  ‘Oops. Sorry.’

  Rose ignores the broken heel.

  ‘I didn’t know. I mean, I knew I had fans. Elsa tells me the numbers every day. But they just felt like numbers.’

  ‘They’re not just numbers,’ I whisper.

  To me every person, every message, seems very real. It’s so not fair that I’m the one who’s addicted to Interface and I had to be the one to get all the haters, while Rose gets all the love.

  She puts the tablet down with a sigh.

  ‘They’re so lovely. I want to reply to all of them. They’re going to hate the new song, aren’t they?’

  ‘“Living the Dream”?’ Jodie asks, idly slipping into an embroidered coat from the wardrobe and checking herself out in the mirror. ‘I look good, don’t I? No, sadly my dear, they’re not going to hate your new song, because they’ll love everything you do. But they should hate it. It’s smug, and forgettable, and it sucks.’

  ‘It’s just hard to do it justice when every line feels like a cliché.’

  ‘Every line is a cliché,’ I sigh.

  ‘Nell?’ Rose asks, keen to get everyone’s opinion.

  Nell’s caught between her desire to make Rose happy and her natural honesty.

  ‘It sucks,’ she says at last. ‘It really sucks. But it’s not you, Rose. Like Sasha said, it’s the song.’

  Rose comes over and squeezes each one of us in turn.

  ‘You have no idea,’ she says, ‘how much I’ve missed you. I can’t believe I didn’t call you.’

  We gather around her, Jodie still in the embroidered coat, and hug each other tight. I feel us knitting back together. I could stay here, like this, all day.

  As if she’s reading my mind, Nell asks, ‘So when have you got to go back to the studio?’

  Rose checks the time on her watch. She’s one of the few girl
s I know who still wears a watch. The rest of us use our phones, but Rose probably doesn’t know where her phone even is. I’m starting to realise that while I’ve been obsessed by the internet, and everything that’s happened, Rose probably doesn’t have much of a clue. Sometimes it would be relaxing to live in her world, even if you do miss the important stuff.

  ‘I’m supposed to be there in half an hour,’ she says, interrupting my train of thought. ‘Jim said he’d be around today, and he might help me out with some tracks. He’s a brilliant producer now, as well as playing. Normally, I’d just not go for a few hours, so I could be with you. But I don’t want to miss him.’

  She bites her lip, uncertain.

  ‘So you’re passing us up for some ancient rock god?’ Jodie challenges.

  Rose looks miserable.

  ‘Pop god, actually,’ I correct Jodie. ‘But I see your point, Rose.’

  And I do. Jim Fisher has played practically every stadium in the world. He’s played with David Bowie and Michael Jackson. He’s sold gazillions of records. Now he helps produce them. If I got the chance to spend even five minutes with him, I would. And besides, it’s clear to see that even though Rose is miserable about many things right now, she’s still passionate about the music.

  ‘I know!’ Nell bounces with excitement at her own idea. ‘Why don’t we take you there? Then we’ve got a few more minutes together, at least?’

  ‘Would you really?’ Rose asks.

  I grin. ‘We wouldn’t miss it for anything.’

  Still Want To Be You

  When we explain to Sam where we’re going, his tongue practically hangs out.

  ‘Jim Fisher’s actual house? No problem. Hold tight, ladies.’ He swings the Subaru back down the drive like it was a Maserati.

  On the way, Rose explains the most extraordinary thing: these last few weeks, since she recorded ‘Breathless’, she’s been wishing she were us. Correct: she’s been envying our lifestyle.

  ‘I know it sounds mad,’ she says, ‘but you’ve still got each other. It’s my fault. You tried to apologise right from the start, Sash, but I was still so angry with you, because you were my best friend. Then I was too ashamed of myself to call. Then it all got crazy. But after this birthday party I performed at, when Paul McCartney came over to say hello, all I wanted to do was tell you about it. It didn’t seem real unless I’d told you.’

  I shake my head at the wonder of this. Paul McCartney. If I’d been there, we’d have been squealing together about it all night.

  ‘Kerlanggg,’ Jodie says, swivelling round from her place in the passenger seat, next to Sam. ‘Any other mega-stars you’d like to name drop, while we’re here?’

  Rose grins. ‘See? What’s the point of meeting a Beatle if you can’t call me a name dropper?’

  ‘Weren’t there loads of people you could talk to about it, though?’ Nell asks. ‘I mean, weren’t you at a party?’

  ‘I was. But it’s not the same. Linus has met him lots of times, so he wasn’t that interested. Elsa doesn’t really like the Beatles. She doesn’t really like anything except grime and hip-hop. I didn’t really know anyone else. I had two glasses of champagne and I felt very dizzy. When I got back to my hotel room, I was all by myself. It was so bizarre – three hours before, there had been hundreds of people all singing along to “Breathless”, and it was the most amazing night of my life. Then . . . there was no one.’

  ‘That’s what groupies are for,’ says Jodie, sagely.

  ‘I don’t have groupies!’

  ‘Well, there’s your problem,’ Jodie explains. But the half-smile on her lips shows that she isn’t seriously recommending screaming fans at the bedroom door as a solution.

  ‘What about your tutor?’ Nell asks. ‘We thought you were going out with him. Aren’t you?’

  ‘Jamie?’ Rose boggles her eyes. ‘Really? He’s gorgeous, but . . .’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘He’s twenty-five. He’s got a girlfriend. She’s twenty-five too. He only goes out to keep me company sometimes. I keep telling Elsa to tell the press we’re not dating, but they don’t care. Oh my God. I can’t believe I can finally explain all this.’

  She glances round at us all again, giddy with relief.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ Sam says cheerfully from the front. ‘I often find that when I’ve just been singing to a roomful of rock stars, it’s a real downer afterwards.’

  ‘Shut up, Sam,’ I tell him.

  Rose grins shyly.

  ‘I know it sounds crazy, but . . .’

  ‘You don’t need to explain,’ I reassure her. ‘We get it now.’

  We reach a pair of grand wrought-iron gates, set in a gap in the wall. Sam leans out to an intercom stuck on a gatepost and explains that we’re delivering Rose. The gates swing open automatically and we drive past elegant stables to one side, with a neat orchard of apple trees on the other. The breeze whips the pretty white apple blossom around, depositing petals on the car like confetti. At the end of the orchard we approach a wide circular drive leading to a grey stone Georgian house, with a red Ferrari parked outside the front door.

  Jodie turns round to Rose.

  ‘So this is where you work?’ she drawls, eyebrow raised, as we crunch along the gravel.

  Rose blushes. ‘Yup. This is the office. At the moment, anyway.’

  Jodie takes in the picture-perfect view.

  ‘I still want to be you. Just so’s you know.’

  Sam parks a respectful distance from the Ferrari and Rose leads us round the side of the house to a series of outbuildings at the back. One looks like a party barn – a bit like George’s. Another houses an indoor pool. The third – a long, low, modern building made of wood, steel and glass – is the studio.

  Rose knocks and enters. We all troop in behind her. The place is a rabbit warren of little rooms. One, the largest, is littered with instruments, speakers and mics. Next to it is a booth with a huge mixing console and a sofa. Then there’s a glass-fronted cupboard with a microphone, another room containing nothing but a drum kit, and at the back a kitchen area with a view across miles of farmland, where we can see chestnut horses being exercised in one of the fields behind the house.

  ‘Do you know what?’ Jodie says, looking around, ‘I think I just might be living the dream.’

  ‘Oh, don’t,’ Rose says, stifling a laugh.

  An elderly-looking man approaches the studio door, knocking the mud off his boots. He’s dressed for farming or gardening, in a sleeveless green jacket covered with sensible pockets, old trousers and a frayed checked shirt that shows off his healthy tan. I assume he works on the estate. He certainly doesn’t look like a sound engineer. Not that I’d know what a sound engineer’s supposed to look like, but I imagine black jeans and an AC/DC T-shirt.

  ‘I thought I heard you,’ he says, coming in. ‘Oh!’

  He looks surprised to see five of us in the corridor, but not unduly bothered.

  Rose steps forward.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind. I brought my band today. My old band. And—’

  Before she can finish, Sam steps up to join her, holds his hand out for a handshake and almost bows.

  ‘It’s an honour to meet you, Mr Fisher.’

  Oh my God, he’s right.

  Up close, I realise that the ‘elderly’ appearance came from the wavy grey hair, but the face is not so old. It’s iconic. I’ve just only ever seen it on posters and album covers before, wearing eyeliner, above a silk shirt slashed to the waist, and lit by a bank of spotlights. Even meeting him in his old gardening clothes, the temptation to curtsey is embarrassingly strong.

  ‘Hi kids,’ he says, smiling a slow, laid-back, Taylor Lautner smile that must have had the groupies going weak at the knees thirty years ago. ‘Fancy a coffee? Put the cafetière on, will you, Rose?’

  What do you do when you meet a music legend? Well, I’ll tell you. You sit down for toast and coffee (God, we’re starving), and call your mum, at his ins
istence, to tell her where you are. It’s clear that Jim’s wild touring days are over. His latest wife and kids are on holiday with their grandparents in America and he shows us photos of them on his phone. There is something bizarrely normal about Jim.

  Normal, that is, until we get into the studio proper, the place they call the ‘live room’, which is crammed with his collection of guitars, lutes, banjos, ukuleles and practically anything else with strings. It’s worthy of a museum, but it’s all right here, for him to pick up and play every day. It also has loads of keyboards and computer equipment, but nothing like the equipment in the control booth beyond, which has one whole wall of computers and monitors. It’s pure geek heaven. Sam groans with pleasure.

  ‘Oh God. Elliot would kill to see this stuff.’

  ‘Dave rang to say he’ll be over in an hour or so,’ Jim tells Rose. ‘He’s the sound engineer,’ he explains to us. ‘Lives nearby but his life revolves around Formula 1. He’ll come by when they’ve finished the interviews. I thought you were sounding better yesterday, Rosie. Shall we carry on with that Mariah Carey cover?’

  Rose shakes her head.

  ‘It’s never going to work,’ she says. ‘I wondered . . . I wondered if you’d mind if I tried out one of my own songs today?’

  ‘Sure,’ Jim smiles. ‘Whatever you like.’

  Rose puts on some headphones and sits at one of the keyboards. We go out into the control room to give her room to concentrate, then stare at her through the window, so she can’t. After grinning at us self-consciously, she turns away and I watch her tuning us out, and thinking about the music. For now, there’s just her and a piano and a song.

  She pauses for a long time before putting her hands on the keys to play, scanning her memory for lyrics she hasn’t sung for a long time, and summoning up the emotion of the song. When it comes, it is slow and sad, almost desolate, called ‘The Mistake I Had to Make’. It’s Rose at her most vulnerable and raw, and it has all the intensity she couldn’t bring to ‘Living the Dream’.

  Like ‘Breathless,’ this song oozes her jazz and blues influences, but standing here, watching her so close, I recognise the emotion in them in a new way now. It’s real. I’d always assumed up to now that ‘Breathless’ was just Rose’s idea of a breakup song – like we used to say, something based on the films we’ve seen and books we’ve read. I thought she’d perfectly copied other people’s feelings. Now I’m not so sure.