Love Song Read online

  She sighed, and changed the subject. ‘So – are you coming to the party tonight? You can tell everyone all about it.’

  ‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘I told you before. I need to work on my art assignment. And I’m tired.’

  ‘Oh, come on. It’s at Angelle’s house. I helped her decorate. It’s the last big party before exams. You should be celebrating being an independent woman.’

  ‘I like being an independent woman. Which is why I want to nail this assignment. And I don’t like big parties.’

  It’s true, I don’t. I don’t like people getting drunk and being sick on carpets. I don’t like feeling that I wore the wrong dress, and not knowing who to talk to, or where to sit. I don’t like people casting sideways glances at me, wondering if I’m going to bump into my ex-boyfriend snogging another girl and go to pieces. Even though the last time I did that was practically a lifetime ago, and anyone who wants Jez Rockingham these days is welcome to him.

  Tammy knew this well enough by now. Reluctantly, she left me to it while she went home to get ready. Once she’d gone, I quickly checked on Josh, my little brother. He was half-asleep on the sofa in the front room, curled up under a blanket and watching an old recorded episode of Murder, She Wrote. His pale skin and purple-shadowed eyes showed the signs of a busy day. So did the fact that every chair cushion, book, toy and ornament had been thrown across the room.

  Josh used to have behaviour problems when he was little and even at the grand old age of seven he still completely lost it sometimes. It never lasted long, but the results could be impressive. Nothing was where it should be. It looked as if a hurricane had recently passed through.

  While the twins chased each other up and down the hallway, I picked each object up and put it back, slowly clearing a path for myself as I went. Piece by piece, the room came back together. As it started to look like a home, not a war scene, I realized I was starting to breathe more deeply again.

  ‘Sorry, Neenie,’ he murmured sleepily, as I put one of the cushions behind his head.

  ‘It’s OK. I know you didn’t mean it.’

  ‘No. I was just sad. Can I sleep in your bed now?’

  He looked up at me pleadingly. How could I say no? Josh always preferred my bed to his, even though I had deliberately tried borrowing one of Ariel’s old Little Mermaid duvet covers to put him off, and Josh was ‘allergic’ to anything Disney or ‘girly’. If he went down in my bed, he’d sleep, which he needed to.

  ‘Course, Joshie. Come on.’

  While I bathed the twins, to the sound of Michael practising Purcell on the trumpet, Ariel set the smoke alarm off twice making cheese toasties, then Dad did for a third time, ‘doing a bit of soldering while I had my tools handy’.

  I opened the bathroom window to let some of the steam out and clear my head a little, and I caught sight of a boy in the next-door garden, throwing a ball for his dog to catch. He looked up, alerted by the light, and our eyes locked for a moment – he from the peace of his garden, me from the madness of my house. Then he looked away.

  ‘Robbie! Robbie! Here, boy!’

  He threw the ball high in the air and the terrier practically turned somersaults trying to get it.

  Jez Rockingham had hardly spoken to me in the year since our final break-up, but that was OK. I got over him a long time ago. I was even grateful for the scars.

  I looked at myself in the misty bathroom mirror. My hair is thick and unruly, like Aunt Cassie’s was, and Dad says my heavy fringe always makes him think of a Shetland pony caught in a Highland breeze. Thanks, Dad. My eyes are mud brown and there’s a gap between my front teeth. I used to hate it, but not any more. Mum says it reminds her of Jane Birkin, the British actress who sang with Serge Gainsbourg and made it big in France and became super-cool. Mum’s better at the ‘you remind me of’ game than Dad. It comes from running a hairdressing salon – if you tell your customers they remind you of wild animals of the British Isles, you’re not going to get much repeat business.

  Then, as always, my eyes travelled to my neck, to make sure it was suitably covered by the collar of my shirt.

  Ariel thinks she invented crazy-in-love, but that’s not the case. As Jez and I approached our first anniversary, he told me this was ‘the longest I’ve ever lasted with a girl’. He gave me a pendant with my initial on it, but it was really his initial I wanted to wear. So a few days later, while he was away, I found a tattoo parlour that didn’t ask questions and had a little black ‘J’ tattooed on my neck, just above my collarbone. I wanted the world to know how strong our love was, and it was one of the surprises I wanted to show him when he got back.

  I should have realized, of course. ‘The longest I’ve ever lasted with a girl’ is not the beginning of for ever – it’s the beginning of the end.

  I was innocent then. I’ve learnt my lesson now.

  Two years ago, the day after I came home with my new tattoo, Mum got the news – Aunt Cassie was dead.

  Drowned, off the coast of Scotland. Twenty-nine, and dead.

  That’s when the screaming started.

  We couldn’t bear it. We couldn’t believe it. She had two babies who needed her. Cassie, hair like straw, eyes like blue fire, was life personified. Her pictures sang with it.

  Lying on the beach. Seaweed tangled in her hair.

  I needed Jez so badly. But he was on holiday with friends from school. Not answering his phone. He was staying at a villa owned by some rich girl’s parents. Mum wouldn’t let me go.

  The day he got back there was a party. Everyone was going to be there. I knew Jez was home, because I saw his bags in the driveway. But still no answer.

  I called around our friends to find out if anyone knew where he was. I knew I sounded desperate, but my aunt was dead and I had to talk to him. Now. Only Jez would do. Only he and I had that connection.

  Night-time. Party. Wandering through the low-lit rooms, looking for my boyfriend. People avoiding my eye. I understand – I am bereaved. Nobody knows what to say.

  ‘Eden’ in the background. Jamie Maldon’s voice, hopeful and haunting, and the sound of rock guitar. I want to dance with Jez. I need to hold him. Skin on skin. I need this nightmare to be over.

  And there he is, in the darkest corner of the darkest room. Slow-dancing with a girl I don’t recognize. He raises his eyes from her long, dark hair and looks at me.

  Jamie Maldon sings a love song and Jez’s eyes meet mine. Blue gaze, long and unblinking. I get the message.

  ‘For ever’ is a relative concept, like time.

  He couldn’t even be bothered to text.

  For several months, I was a wreck. Was it Jez, or Aunt Cassie dying? I don’t even know.

  Jez broke up with Ria, the girl he was dancing with, and got back with me for a while. I took him desperately, gratefully. I was pathetic. Then another girl came along. It happened again. And again. I crashed through my GCSEs. At school, I became a joke.

  Until I lost myself in art and books and gradually learnt some self-respect. Mum adopted Cassie’s twins, Pip and Lara, whose dad had gone out of Cassie’s life long before they were born, and I got infinitely more pleasure and unadulterated love from them than I ever had from a boy. My heart mended. Slowly and messily. But it mended eventually. I am like Mum and Dad: I’m practical and I can fix things. Including myself.

  And here we are.

  I used to think that Ariel was the crazy one – saving all her deepest emotions for four boys who didn’t know she existed, while my boy bought me presents and hung around in my room, showing me the funniest YouTube videos, and stroked the skin on my neck with his thumb. Two years on, though, she is as much in love as ever. The Point, she says, give her life its purpose. Her happiest moments have come from loving them.

  I am … cured.

  For about a week, a grainy clip of a girl leaping on Sigrid Santorini and being squashed by a security guard became a minor hit on the internet. Some people knew it was me, but others didn’t believe it. I di
dn’t bother to correct them. I didn’t exactly want to become famous for starring in a comedy video.

  Dad took Ariel to the concert at the O2 and she said it was ‘the best night of her life’. Tammy said I’d missed an epic party at Angelle’s house. Two couples got together that night, and four broke up. Of the two that got together, one had already split, while two of the broken-up ones had swapped partners and reconnected. Relationships in our school were like a complicated maths question. I didn’t get the impression I’d really missed that much.

  I was in the kitchen the following Saturday, feeding tomatoes from the allotment to Pip and Lara. They wouldn’t touch the red ones, but I’d managed to persuade them that the yellow and orange ones had special magic properties and if you ate enough of them you might get to spot the invisible unicorns hiding in the gro-bags. They both swore they’d seen them a million times.

  ‘I know they’re there because they’re sparkly and they look at me,’ Lara said solemnly, holding a cherry-sized tomato in each pudgy little hand.

  ‘I saw twenty the last time I had an orange tomato,’ Pip announced, stuffing one in and letting the juice run down his chin. ‘Ashlly, i’ ’as ’wenty-four.’ He swallowed. ‘And a half.’

  ‘Wow, Pip.’

  ‘I saw them too!’ Lara insisted. ‘And a lady unicorn!’

  ‘Blimey!’ Dad said, walking in and wiping his face with an oily rag. He’d been working on the Mini again. ‘There’s a twin-cam MGA roadster outside, in spanking condition. 1959 or ’60, I’d say. Original leather interior. It’s a classic. Oh, and there’s a man here to see you, Neenie. I’ve put him in the front room. Very tall. Hat.’

  I couldn’t think of anybody I knew who wore hats and drove classic sports cars. Or was ever likely to.

  ‘Sorry to leave you,’ I told the twins, kissing them on their curly heads. ‘Dad’ll look after you for a minute. I’ll be back.’

  In the front room, Josh was curled up in his usual spot, engrossed in an old episode of Columbo. Perched awkwardly next to him was a blond, bearded man in an immaculate cream linen jacket, with a huge green scarf wound several times around his neck, and clutching an old-fashioned peaked cotton cap. He had gold-rimmed spectacles, and the air of an absentminded professor, or an artist from the 1970s, or perhaps the next Doctor Who.

  ‘Ah! Miss Baxter! Hellooo!’

  He leapt to his feet as soon as I walked in, and bashed his head on the ceiling lampshade. He was absurdly tall.

  ‘Um … hello?’ It came out as more of a question than a greeting.

  ‘Rory Windermere,’ he said, holding out his hand. If his top half was ‘eccentric gentleman’, his bottom half was ‘hipster businessman’, consisting of designer jeans and bizarrely bling Nikes, which looked like he’d borrowed them from Jay Z and forgotten he was wearing them. ‘Pleasure to meet you. I hope you don’t mind me popping by. I had one or two things to do at the BRIT School. People to see, you know … So handy it’s round the corner from here.’

  ‘Erm, yes,’ I said, confused. The BRIT School for the Performing Arts was indeed close by, as attended by Amy Winehouse, Adele, Jessie J and various other famous people. But I didn’t go there. I’d never even visited it. What did that have to do with anything?

  He saw my face. ‘So I happened to be passing, and I offered to come and see you. I … we … have a really very excessive favour to ask.’

  ‘Um, OK,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry, but who are you?’

  He seemed slightly surprised to be asked. ‘I manage The Point. I’m sorry, I should have said.’

  It took a moment or two for this information to sink in. Assuming this bizarre person wasn’t lying, he was either sadly deluded or he was in charge of the world’s biggest rock band. Standing in my front room, with the fringing of the purple lampshade resting on his head.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Absolutely. Scout’s honour.’ His face crinkled into a smile. Without another word, he pulled out his phone. (Big, fancy, latest model.) He searched for himself on Wikipedia and showed me his entry. There it was, with a high-definition picture of him standing with his arms around the band. Better than a business card.

  ‘Oh. Wow.’

  The smile became a grin. ‘Known them since they were fifteen. Best bunch of lads in the world.’

  ‘I think it’s my sister you want,’ I told him. ‘She’s the Pointer Sister. I can get her for you, if you like.’

  ‘Thank you, but you’re Nina, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then it’s you I came to see. Is there somewhere quiet we could talk?’

  With no idea, still, why could possibly be here, I did a quick mental tour of the house. The kitchen was full of toddlers, Dad and squashed tomatoes. Here in the front room, Lieutenant Columbo was about to confront the murderer. The back room was too full of toys and ironing to sit down anywhere. Upstairs was … worse.

  ‘This isn’t a great place for a conversation,’ I admitted.

  ‘Outside somewhere, then? A cafe? A hotel?’

  Yeah, right. Like that was going to happen. I meet up with rock managers in hotels all the time.

  *

  Fifteen minutes later, we were sitting at a corner table in the restaurant at Ikea. The manager of the biggest band in the world looked slightly stunned to be sitting in a furniture store, which made me want to laugh. He must be used to waiter service and cordon bleu, not Swedish meatballs and a view of the car park. But this was Croydon, not the Soho Hotel, or wherever The Point were currently residing. It was quiet enough for a conversation. And the apple cake was good.

  We’d arrived by taxi, leaving the manager’s low-slung sports car parked outside our house. I’d decided to bring Ariel with me for moral support, and his car wasn’t big enough for three.

  Ariel was now staring at us wide-eyed, with the kind of excitement she normally reserved for a new video on the band’s YouTube channel. Mr Windermere took a thoughtful sip of coffee, while I dug into my cake.

  ‘This will sound rather odd,’ he began.

  I nodded. Anything a rock band manager had to say to me in a furniture shop in Croydon was going to sound odd. Literally anything.

  His eyes twinkled behind his glasses. ‘First of all, I must tell you how grateful we are.’

  I blinked. ‘For what?’

  ‘For what you did for Miss Santorini. I’m so sorry about the confusion afterwards. Our security team are top notch, but they can be a little … enthusiastic sometimes.’

  ‘Oh, that. It’s OK. My shoulder’s better now.’

  ‘You seem like a useful person to have in a crisis.’

  ‘She is,’ Ariel agreed cheerfully. ‘Nina’s perfect in a crisis. She’s saved Josh’s life a million times. And when the twins had this sick bug and pooed everywhere last week, she—’

  ‘I’m sure she was brilliant then too,’ the manager interrupted, turning slightly green and pushing his cake away.

  ‘So … is there a crisis?’ I asked.

  ‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘But Sigrid’s latest film project has fallen through. A hazard of showbiz, I’m afraid. So she’s decided to accompany the boys on the last few dates of the tour. Paris, Verona, Berlin and so on. We’re delighted to have her, of course.’

  He wasn’t – that was obvious. If she went around calling people ‘little meet-and-greet fans’ all the time, I wasn’t surprised.

  ‘And … me?’

  ‘That’s why I’m here. She’d like you to help her. As her assistant. The last girl had to go. Family problems, I believe.’ Again, he looked momentarily shifty. ‘Sigrid asked specifically for you.’

  Across the table, Ariel gasped and raised her hands to her lips. I frowned. A million things about this made no sense. I picked on the first one that came to mind.

  ‘But I hardly know her. We only met for, like, five minutes.’

  ‘As I say, you made a big impression.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about being an assistant.�
�

  ‘It’s not rocket science, I promise you. Just managing her diary. Keeping track of her luggage … There will be plenty of people to show you the ropes and help you out.’ He seemed to take it for granted that I would say yes.

  ‘I’m still at school. I have exams,’ I pointed out.

  Girls like me do not become assistants to Hollywood stars. It’s pretty simple. This was obviously a mistake.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind, but we checked,’ he said. ‘Sigrid was really so insistent on hiring you. You’re doing these AS level things, I gather? And in between, you don’t have classes? We can fly you back for the exams if necessary, but we can almost certainly arrange for you to take them wherever we are. I can get supervision for you and that sort of thing.’

  He saw the look I was giving him. Really? Really? Sigrid Santorini sounded pretty freaky. She had me checked out? Who does that? I’m supposed to take my exams in some random country? And she got the manager to ask me to work for her? All this so I can help her keep track of her luggage?

  He met my look with a smile. ‘I manage a rock band. A big one. I solve problems bigger than this before breakfast. You haven’t been on tour before, I take it?’

  ‘Well, no.’ Obviously.

  ‘Try it. It’s the opportunity of a lifetime, Nina, I promise you. Take it. You won’t regret it.’

  His steady, smiling eyes met mine. He was very persuasive. If only what he was asking me to do wasn’t quite so ridiculous.

  Back at home, after we’d waved him off in his little sports car, Ariel danced me around the front lawn.

  ‘Oh, Neenie,’ she squealed, hugging me. ‘This is the best thing ever! Just think – you’ll be on tour with Jamie.’

  ‘I’m not doing it!’ I assured her. ‘That’s your dream, Lellie.’

  She looked at me pleadingly. ‘I know. But if I can’t do it, you’re the next best thing.’

  ‘There are a million girls who could look after Sigrid better than me.’

  ‘But they don’t have me as their sister! Please, Nina! Please! You can tell me everything about Jamie – what he wears, what he says, all those cute little things he does all the time. Maybe he can have a nickname for you. That would be so cool. You can check that …’ She paused and chewed at her bottom lip for a moment.