Page 33 of All Summer Long

He shook a couple of pills from the pack and then a third for good measure.

Two for the headache, one for the additional ball ache of having to deal with Marsh.

The fact that his manager was here was wrong on every level.

Marsh didn’t travel easy; he was pathologically terrified of flying.

It would have cost him dearly to get on that plane, so Robinson could only assume that it was going to cost him dearly too.

More than that. Marsh’s arrival had stuck a needle into the bubble he’d been living in in Borne.

He was part of his other life, and having him here overlapping with this life muddied all the waters.

Going home wasn’t part of his plan yet. The problem was he didn’t actually have a plan, something to produce with a flourish and present to Marsh as a fait accompli, and it left him vulnerable, like a petulant teenager whose dad had turned up to fetch him home from a party early.

‘Need I remind you about the concert? The tickets that thousands of fans have paid for?’

‘It’s not for weeks,’ Robinson said.

‘They put you where you are, son, and they’ll turn on you just as fast if you don’t show up for your own goddamn party.’

It was true and Robinson knew it, and somewhere in the back of his brain he knew he wasn’t a guy who could sleep easy at night if he let his fans down. Maybe he did have a plan of sorts, after all.

‘I’ll do the concert, Marsh.’

The other man puffed up his chest like a turkey.

‘Too dang right you will! What the hell are you doing here, spinning your wheels and makin’ out with blondie when you’ve got a wife keepin’ the bed warm at home and a job to do?

Goddamn you, Duff. You’re too young for a midlife crisis, and I’m too old to nursemaid you.

’ Marsh thumped his fist down hard on the table. ‘We leave. Today.’

‘Whoa, back on up there one second, Marsh.’ Robinson really wanted to keep a lid on his temper, but his manager sure was testing his limits. He could feel the hot, sickly burn of injustice in his gut.

‘I am not, as you so kindly put it, “spinning my wheels”, and I think we both know that my soon to be ex-wife is keeping someone else’s bed good ’n’ warm these days – a fact you knew long before I did and decided to keep to yourself, I might add.’

Marsh wasn’t a man who cared what people thought of him.

He’d earned his tough-as-nails reputation in the business by having very few ethics and a lot of ruthless ambition, and he made his decisions based on how to get the best out of his artists rather than how to do the best for them.

He’d known Lena was cheating for months before the shit hit the fan, and he’d kept his mouth shut and hoped she’d tire of it before Robinson found out.

His only regret on the matter was not turning up with his chequebook and paying off the dufus who’d been banging Robinson’s wife, because it didn’t look as if the woman Robinson had tangled himself up with here was going to take the bait.

‘Cab’s booked for midday.’

Robinson scrubbed his hands over his face. ‘I’m not leaving here yet. I haven’t done what I came here to do.’

‘Which is?’

‘None of your damn business, Marsh.’

‘It looks a lot like you’re hidin’ out to me. I didn’t have you down as yellow, Duff.’

Robinson sighed. ‘I know what you’re doing and it’s not gonna work. I’m not twelve years old. You can’t goad me into getting on that plane.’

‘Your sister misses you like crazy. Why do you think she told me where you are? She wants me to bring you home. Your poor momma, too. Have mercy, Duff. I saw her just last week and the woman was in tears on the street.’

Robinson laughed at the idea of his wise-cracking mother in tears in public.

It was a standing joke in their family that Janna Duff’s tear ducts had long since gone rusty from lack of use.

She was the toughest woman he knew and he loved her all the more for it.

‘I highly doubt that,’ he said, drily. ‘So. You’ve tried threats, and you’ve tried emotional blackmail.

What’s your next trick gonna be, Marsh?’

The smaller man shot out of his chair, too fired up to sit still. He’d always been that way, a firework forever on the edge of going off.

‘This is no game, Duff! Do you know how many pills I had to take to get on that plane? I’m rattling louder than an angry rattler, here!

’ He stopped stomping around the room to make a violent rattlesnake motion in the air with his arm, the loose wrinkled skin of his forearm juddering.

‘Damn it, Duff, I did it for you, because your career matters to me. You go down the pan and you take me with you, son, and there ain’t a universe out there where that’s gonna happen. ’

The fact was that, even if he was a fully paid-up member of the self-preservation society, Marsh had something of a point.

Sentimentality aside, Robinson owed his manager for his career and all of the good, life-changing things that had gone along with it, and he was a guy who always honoured his debts.

‘Look, Marsh,’ he said. ‘I hear you, okay? I know how much it must have taken out of you coming over here. I appreciate it.’ He reached for the coffee from the cupboard and filled the machine.

‘Now I’m gonna make us some coffee and take a shower, then we can sit down and talk this through, man to man. ’

Marsh looked at his watch and started pacing again. ‘Two and a half hours, Duff. Say your goodbyes if you need to, because by hook or by crook, you’re going home.’