Page 18

18

LONDON, 1986

“Nicole! Phone!” calls out Cassie, stirring her from a Sunday-morning slumber.

Nicole throws the duvet over her head, desperate to take advantage of the only lie-in she gets all week, but now that she’s awake she can hear her dad’s nine-bit drill as he embarks on what is no doubt another DIY job invented in his quest to keep busy.

Since Cassie took it upon herself to stay out until one in the morning after the concert, Nicole has all but moved back home in an effort to keep the peace. But her dad has spent the week incandescent with rage and Cassie has been confined to the house, sullenly shrugging off any of Nicole’s attempts to reach out to her.

“Phone!” yells Cassie again, throwing open Nicole’s door.

“Tell them I’ll call them back,” groans Nicole.

“Tell him yourself,” says Cassie, turning away and leaving the door ajar.

“For fuck’s sake,” mutters Nicole under her breath as she reluc tantly slides her feet into her fluffy slippers and descends the stairs, avoiding the pink flowers on the patterned carpet as she always does—a twenty-year habit that she’d hoped to have grown out of by now.

“Hello?” she says groggily, not knowing anyone who might call her here on a Sunday morning, least of all a boy.

“Hey, is that Nicole Alderton?” comes a voice, far too loudly for this time in the morning. She goes to put the receiver down, not needing her senses to be assaulted by a cold caller, but stops in her tracks once her brain has had a second to catch up.

“Jesus!” she says, taking the phone through to the dining room, stretching the coiled cord to its limit.

“Well, actually it’s Ben,” says the voice, laughing. “But people have been known to call me that.”

A prickly heat wraps itself around Nicole’s neck and her eardrums are banging so loudly that she can’t hear herself think. She needs to break this down into bite-sized chunks; weigh up how to deal with this one piece at a time. The most pressing problem, she quickly ascertains, is Cassie.

“You can’t be calling me here,” she says breathlessly, cupping her hand over the receiver to avoid anyone else hearing. “How did you get this number?”

“Well, the man behind the bar happened to mention you were staying with your parents in Finsbury Park for a while,” he says, sounding a little perturbed. “And thankfully there aren’t that many Aldertons in the phone book, so I tried my luck and kept everything crossed.”

“You can’t call me here again,” she says, her mind fast-forwarding to what her dad will do if he finds out that the man his sixteen-year-old daughter is infatuated with is now trying his luck with the other one.

“OK, I promise,” says Ben resolutely, and despite herself Nicole can’t help but be disappointed.

He waits a heartbeat before adding, “On one condition…”

She sighs for effect, while desperately trying to push away the part of her that’s excited by what his proposition is going to be.

“I need you to listen to something.”

Her heart skips a beat.

“I’ve got something down on tape and I’d appreciate your opinion.”

“OK…” she says hesitantly, not wanting to appear too keen, but the thought of being asked for her musical viewpoint from someone of Ben Edwards’s standing sends an electrical pulse through her nervous system.

“So, is that a yes?” he asks, with an excited lilt.

“I’m sure I can fit it in at some point this week,” she says.

“Ah, no can do,” he says. “I’m on a European press tour for the new album from tomorrow and not back until after the weekend.”

“Well, it looks like you’ll have to find yourself another muse,” she says, at pains to keep the disappointment of a lost opportunity from her voice.

“Not necessarily,” he says. “What are you doing today?”

“Today? ”

“Yeah, what’s the problem?”

There must be a thousand and one reasons why she can’t meet him today, but she’s hard-pressed to think of any of them.

“Be ready in five minutes,” he says.

“Don’t be so ridiculous,” she starts, looking at the clock above the fireplace, the second hand moving ever so slightly out of sync with the loud ticking noise. “I’m not even dressed.”

“So, get dressed, and I’ll meet you in the black car that’s parked on the other side of your street.”

“What?” she says, rushing to the window and pulling the net curtains aside, though why she’s falling for it, she doesn’t know. What she sees snatches her breath away. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”

“Five minutes,” he says, waving at her through the graffitied glass panes of the telephone box outside her house.

With her heart feeling as if it’s about to burst through her chest, Nicole pulls on the first things she can find: a pair of baggy jeans and a tassel-fringed blouse with built-in shoulder pads. It’s a little over the top for first thing on a Sunday morning, but her need to get Ben away from here before Cassie or their dad sees him is far more pressing than what she looks like.

“Where are you going?” asks Cassie, her tone accusatory, as she carries a plate of beans on toast back up to her room.

“I’ve just got to do a few things back at the flat,” she replies, falling over herself as she pulls her pixie boots on.

“Is that code for a secret rendezvous with whoever was on the phone?” asks Cassie, dourly.

“No!” snaps Nicole, before instantly regretting it. She doesn’t need to attract any more attention to the fact that a global superstar, who is as equally revered as reviled in this house, is sitting outside it… like, right now .

She half walks, half runs up to the car and past it, knowing that she daren’t get into it while it’s in sight of the house. Cassie could be looking out of the window right now, and knowing her, she knows the number plate of the vehicle Ben travels in off by heart. So, Nicole keeps walking, around the corner, as the soft purr of its engine follows her.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing here?” she exclaims when it pulls up next to her and the window rolls down. Her burgeoning excitement has been replaced by a raging anger that he would be so arrogant as to expect her to drop everything to see him. He wasn’t wrong though, was he?

“What’s the problem?” he asks, seeming genuinely perplexed. But then, Nicole supposes he doesn’t normally get complaints when he turns up at someone’s house unannounced.

“This isn’t on,” she says, still not sure whether she’s getting in the car or not. “I-I’ve got stuff going on at home and this doesn’t make my life very easy.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he says, looking like a reprimanded schoolboy. “I just assumed…”

“Well, don’t,” says Nicole. “The world doesn’t revolve around Ben Edwards.”

He smiles. “You know my name, though.”

She wants to tell him that the only reason for that is because her little sister has been obsessed with him for the past eighteen months; has spent every penny of her hard-earned cash on him, and every moment she should have been studying staring woefully at his face on her bedroom ceiling.

“You said you had something…” she starts impatiently, the need to give him the impression she has far better things to be doing at loggerheads with the spine-tingling anticipation of what he has in store.

“I want to play you something,” he says, turning a cassette in between his thumb and forefinger.

She makes a show of getting in the back seat, rolling her eyes, as if she’s doing him a favor.

“OK—you ready?” he says, pushing the tape into the slot of the car’s radio cassette player that’s mounted on the carpet-lined partition separating them from the driver. The mechanical spools grab hold of it with a satisfying click. “But I need you to stay open-minded.”

The gentle strumming of guitar chords echoes in Nicole’s chest, making her want to close her eyes and lose herself in the soothing melody.

“ There are things I could never teach you, no matter how hard I try,

Because only you can decide how high you fly,

I can set you on your way and catch you if you fall,

But only you will know…”

Ben’s voice reaches into every crevice of Nicole’s being, its rawness making her fingertips tingle. In all the hours she’s been forced to listen to Secret Oktober through the walls of Cassie’s bedroom, she’s never heard Ben sing like this. She wouldn’t have thought it possible, and just when she thinks she can’t be any more surprised, he sings the chorus in falsetto.

“ If you ever loved someone as much as I love you,

You’d know there is nothing I wouldn’t do,

And I promise you, I will never let you down,

I’ll make you proud of me, no matter where you are…”

Nicole’s eyes widen and she turns to face him. “That’s my song,” she says, the words catching in her throat. “That… that’s…”

Ben grimaces, waiting to see which side of the fence she falls on.

“I sang that in the bar the other night. You were there.” Her mind is a jumble of emotions that she can’t separate. What is he playing at?

“I know, I know,” he says, shifting along the leather seat. “It’s such a beautiful song and I thought…”

“You thought what?” she asks, wondering why she suddenly feels so exposed and vulnerable, while forcing herself to silently repeat the mantra They’re just words . But they’re her words, written for only her to sing, and to hear them in another voice, no matter how beautiful, is beyond disconcerting.

“I just wanted to lay down some vocals,” he says. “To get your mum’s words on the page. It could be your love letter to each other.”

Without warning, tears rush to Nicole’s eyes and no matter how much she battles to hold them back, clenching her jaw, one escapes onto her cheek.

“Hey, I’m sorry,” says Ben, going to put his arm out to comfort her, before thinking better of it. “I really didn’t mean to upset you. I thought you’d like the idea.”

Nicole goes to speak, but her voice deserts her, so she nods instead.

“It’s OK, I get it,” says Ben, falling back against the seat, deflated. “I don’t know what I was thinking—I should never have taken your words.”

“It’s… it’s not that,” she manages. “It’s just—”

“No, you’re right,” he says, ejecting the cassette in a fit of pique. “I overstepped the mark. I wouldn’t have liked it if someone—”

“My mother’s very ill,” says Nicole, the words tumbling out before she can stop them.

An ominous silence fills the car, the atmosphere suddenly dark and foreboding as the gravitas of those four words and what they might mean circle the restricted space.

“I’m sorry,” says Ben, as he presses a button to slide up the soundproof-glass partition.

“We don’t know if she’s going to make it.”

She’s crying now, and without saying a word Ben pulls her into him and wraps his arms around her so tightly that she feels as if she’s being cocooned in a security blanket. As ridiculous as it sounds, she can’t remember feeling this safe since her mother last hugged her, when she had enough strength in her arms to do so.

“I’m sorry… I don’t know why…” She sobs into Ben’s chest, though what she’s going to say, she doesn’t know. Bizarrely, in this moment, her overriding concern is not getting last night’s mascara on his shirt.

“Is your dad around?” Ben asks gently, resting his chin on the top of her head.

Nicole nods.

“I’m so sorry—I never meant to hurt you,” he says. “If I’d known…”

“It’s fine,” she says, pulling herself away from him, suddenly feeling embarrassed. “What you did was really special—I liked it a lot.”

Every sinew in Ben’s body relaxes with relief. “Maybe you’ll want to record it one day.”

Nicole snorts unattractively. “Right, like that’s going to happen.”

Ben smiles that smile of his and, despite herself, something flutters deep in Nicole’s stomach.

“I have a friend who has a studio not far from here. We could go and fool around a bit.” His eyes alight with mischief. “Play with some sounds, work on some lyrics—just see what happens, no pressure.”

Panic and exhilaration engulf Nicole in equal measure. This can’t be happening. This only happens to people in movies. “Are you for real?”

“So, is that a yes?”

“But why would you do this?” she asks, her usual cynicism creeping back with a vengeance; the thought of anyone doing anything without expecting something in return is alien to her. “If it’s to get me into bed, it’s a rather elaborate ruse.”

Ben throws his head back and laughs. “No disrespect, but if I wanted to get laid, the fact that I’m the biggest pop star in the country right now is usually enough.”

“That and your unswerving modesty,” says Nicole with raised eyebrows.

“Exactly!” says Ben. “So, are we doing this or what?”

“OK,” she says, hesitantly. “But I’m not going to sleep with you.”

“And I wouldn’t expect you to,” he says, with a wry smile.