Page 5

5

Nicole’s feet are on fire and if she could sit down and take the weight off them, she fears she’d stay there for a week. But there’s no time to rest; there’s still an hour left of her shift, with just enough time to grab a plate of Jim’s loaded potato skins before heading to her second job of the day. Well, she calls it a job, but technically she’d have to be paid for it to be a job.

“Are you all done here?” she asks a table of four, who have been acting up ever since they arrived three hours ago—the wine wasn’t cold enough, the meat not cooked enough, even though they managed to consume both with gusto. Now they’ve been taking up premium space for the past hour, without ordering a single thing, while a line of hungry diners, eager to spend, are queuing around the block.

“We’d like the steaks taken off the bill,” comes the retort, with a dismissive swish of a hand.

“But you ate them!” says Nicole, well used to this ruse.

The mustached man nearest to her places a hand on her behind. “We’re happy to leave a healthy tip though,” he says, raising his bushy eyebrows suggestively.

“You really don’t want to be doing that,” says Nicole, her contempt masked with a look of resignation.

“Isn’t it all part of the service ?” asks the man as he slides his clammy fingers down her leg.

“Jim!” she yells over to the kitchen. “We’ve got a hot one!”

A big, bearded man wearing a bloodied apron looks up from behind the counter, his eyes ablaze. He raises a meat cleaver in the air and slams it down onto his chopping board.

Nicole turns to the man with an apologetic expression. “You might want to explain to the chef over there why you won’t be paying for the food he’s so lovingly prepared for you.”

The man scoffs.

“ And why your hand is currently on his girlfriend’s arse…”

There’s a sudden whipping-out of wallets as the four of them almost fight to be the first to put money on the table.

“Much appreciated!” Nicole calls out, waving their five-pound tip in the air as they fall over themselves to get out of the restaurant.

Jim’s menacing look dissolves into the sweetest smile as he watches them go.

“Give me a sec and I’ll get you seated,” Nicole says to the next in line, a couple who don’t look like they’ll be giving her any trouble at all. She breathes a sigh of relief, knowing that it’ll make the next hour easier to deal with. That’s how she approaches her time at the diner—in short, bite-sized chunks that move her ever forward to what she really wants to be doing.

“Hey, sis!” comes a voice.

A smile plays on Nicole’s lips before she’s even turned around to see who it is—immediately followed by a deepening frown as she realizes it’s two o’clock on a Thursday afternoon.

“Why aren’t you at school?” she asks as her little sister hobbles in, supported by another girl of similar age. The question of why she’s being held up by a stranger can be asked later.

“It’s all right, Mum knows…” says Cassie, rolling her eyes at Nicole’s maternal glare.

“But Dad doesn’t?”

Cassie looks at her as if she’s mad. “Er, no! ”

Nicole shakes her head in admonishment, taking the top chair from a stack and putting it down for Cassie to sit on.

“What happened?” she asks, bending over to take a closer look at Cassie’s foot; the second toe is clawed up and three times the size it should be.

“A car ran over it,” says Cassie, blithely.

“A car ?” shrieks Nicole. “Well, then it’s probably broken—it looks broken.”

“All the better,” says Cassie with a mischievous glint in her eye that Nicole knows spells trouble. “Because it wasn’t just any car…”

Nicole looks at her questioningly before the penny drops. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me…” she says, with an air of exasperation. “This has got something to do with those boys, hasn’t it?”

Cassie grins.

“So, you’ve skipped school to come into town to see them and they’ve run over your foot in their car?”

“Yep, but it was worth every second of pain,” says Cassie, still smiling. “Because Ben Edwards actually looked at me. He knows I exist, and he can break all ten of my toes if it means he knows who I am.”

Nicole tsks condescendingly. “You think he’s going to remember you for this? The only thing he’ll remember you for is being the stupid kid who threw herself under his car.”

“I don’t care,” says Cassie, sounding every bit the immature sixteen-year-old that she is.

“Dad is going to kill you when he finds out,” says Nicole, taking a dishcloth to the recently vacated table and wiping it down. “Not only have you skipped school behind his back, but you’ve done it to chase these boys across town. You know how he feels about all this…”

“But it was with Mum’s permission,” whines Cassie.

“Well, that’s even worse—you’re going to get her in a whole heap of trouble too.”

Cassie’s hunched shoulders relax. “I don’t know why he gets so bent out of shape around this stuff. I could be doing a lot worse…”

“Not in his eyes,” says Nicole. “He can’t bear to see you waste your time and energy on a fantasy that will never come true. He’s been there, seen it—remember? All those years he spent trying to get a break, quite literally working his fingers to the bone on that bloody guitar, night after night, so convinced was he that he was going to hit the big time. But his commitment and sacrifices amounted to nothing.”

“He met Mum, didn’t he?” muses Cassie petulantly.

“Yes, and he dragged her around the country with him,” says Nicole. “And that’s something he’s never forgiven himself for…” She looks away, quelling the desire to cry. “Especially now.”

“That’s not exactly his fault,” says Cassie, her bottom lip softening.

“Of course it isn’t,” says Nicole, pulling herself up short as she looks at the girl with her sister, not wanting to air her family’s issues in public. “But he doesn’t want the same for you.” She ruffles her little sister’s hair affectionately. “And you shouldn’t want it for yourself—you’re worth more than that.”

Cassie shrugs despondently. “But you’re following your passion,” she says.

“Oh yeah, I’m smashing it,” laughs Nicole sardonically, not wanting to give Cassie false hope of a life she’s not sure exists. She hopes it does—that somewhere out there in the universe is a spotlight just waiting to shine on her. But it hasn’t happened yet, despite months of gigging up and down the country every night, and waitressing in Jim’s every day. She’s exhausted, and spends some days barely able to function, but she has to push on—not just because that’s what you have to do if you want to earn your stripes on the circuit, but because time is running out.

Her father had allowed her to ditch college, to pursue a dream they once both shared, only on the strict understanding that if, after a year, she hadn’t made significant inroads into establishing a career that was notoriously hard to conquer, then she was to return to her studies with not so much as a by-your-leave. But what they hadn’t yet agreed on, with just two months to go, was what , exactly, amounted to “significant inroads.”

In Nicole’s mind, it can be gauged by the fact that she’s able to support herself, although the lion’s share of her income isn’t coming from her singing. But still, she’s set herself up in a rented studio flat in Islington and is managing to put petrol into her run-down Mini. Surely that has to be seen as a win?

Yet Nicole fears that her father’s barometer is going to be set by whether she’s played Wembley Arena, thus creating an impossible task that she can’t help but fail. She understands his reservations; no one had tried harder to be a professional musician than he had, and most would argue that that’s exactly what he was. But he’d been under-booked and underpaid, which didn’t bode well with a mortgage and a baby on the way. So, he’d given up on his castle in the sky and believed that everyone else should, too.

But Nicole’s not ready to return to her marine biology course just yet, because performing speaks to her soul in a way that the underwater world, however fantastical, never could. It’s in her blood, as much as it was in her father’s, and although he may well have developed a method of denying it, as one brutal rebuttal followed another, if you have something burning within you—a passion that you can’t extinguish—you have to at least follow that light for as long as you can.

“But you’re happy,” says Cassie, not yet mature enough to understand the sacrifices Nicole has made in pursuit of a dream that may never be realized. “You don’t have to listen to Dad droning on about how you’re wasting your life. He doesn’t get to dictate where you go or what you do anymore.”

“It’s only because he cares,” says Nicole. “Being a grown-up is hard, and I imagine being a parent even harder, so go easy—try not to upset him with all your antics. He’s got a lot on his plate right now.”

“That doesn’t give him the right to be even more of an arse than normal,” says Cassie.

“Perhaps he has every right—what with everything going on with Mum,” says Nicole, looking at Cassie questioningly as she wraps a bag of ice in a tea towel and carefully places it on her sister’s foot.

“I wish you’d come back home,” says Cassie. “It was better then.”

“Me being home isn’t going to make what’s going on any easier,” says Nicole, though she has to admit, it would certainly alleviate some of the guilt that makes her feel as if she has a ten-ton weight around her neck.