Page 44 of The Next Chapter

Seb had taken the news of my skydive as expected. He hadn’t believed me, and I’d had to get Noah to come and confirm that I had in fact jumped and not been pushed out of the plane.

‘You’ve changed, Lily Brown,’ he’d said.

‘Not really, I’ve just tapped into my adventurous side.’

‘Like I said, you’ve changed.’

I’m confused. On the one hand, it seems that time has no meaning here on Skye.

Or that’s how it probably seems to everyone else.

For me, time is galloping away at pace. I count down every morning.

Every evening. I drive myself mad counting it down.

At the start of summer six weeks felt like forever, a huge expanse of time ahead of me.

But now, there’s only one week left. One.

And I’m still lying to them all.

At this point, I’m telling so many lies, I’m convinced I’ll trip up and give myself away.

I’m lying to Lola and Noah about who I am.

I’m lying to both of them about the fact that I knew who Lola was before I came up here.

I’m lying about Seb being my brother.

I’m lying to myself about what I want to happen when the summer is over.

At least the courier made it with copies of the business plan.

I’ve met Lola a couple more times and she’s talked me through the first weeks and then months of the band.

She’d gotten all breathless with excitement, talking about how the band had learned together.

How Jimmy kept promising them that they’d be stars.

How they all felt like they were on the edge of their big break.

It’s strange, hearing your birth mum get excited about the thing she cared about more than you.

I don’t think I’ve seen Lola so excited this whole summer as when she talked about the band’s early days when everything seemed possible.

She was pretty thrilled with a big cucumber she grew in her vegetable patch, mind.

Nothing she’s said even comes close to hinting at why she left.

It’s all muddled in my head because on the one hand, I can’t wait to get home, to get back to everything being nice and ordered and calm. But on the other, the thought of all this ending, to go back to filling my days without Noah and without Lola, well, it fills me with dread.

I’m back under the willow tree, fidgeting with the edge of the picnic blanket Lola has laid out again.

She’s disappeared to help Harper and Blake’s foster parents with something, so I’ve nothing to do but wait for her and think, wondering what she’ll say today that’ll reveal some part of my past without her even realizing it.

I stare out over the massive black loch and watch as the sun dances flecks of gold across it, you know, for maximum drama.

‘Sorry about that.’ Lola’s voice makes me twist around.

She’s kicking off her worn Crocs and lowering herself onto the picnic blanket.

Today her dungarees are cut-offs, bits of thread hanging down. Her white T-shirt is covered in strawberries. It’s really hard to feel anything but warmth for a woman covered in embroidered fruit.

‘Everything okay?’ I ask.

Lola nods. ‘Blake can get frustrated. It’s hard for his foster parents, but for some reason, I calm him down.

’ She shrugs. It’s not at all hard to imagine Lola soothing Blake, talking to him steady and low in her lilting accent.

It’s then that I realize that the image I had of Lola as a drug-addled party addict just isn’t there anymore.

I don’t mention that I think Blake’s foster parents need to worry as much about Harper as they do about Blake. It isn’t my place.

Bertie the blind chicken, the one that seems to have a sixth sense about where Lola is at all times, comes bumbling down the hill towards her. It gets close this time before it falls onto its side, its legs still moving as if it’s walking.

Lola reaches out and picks it up, righting it as it clucks happily.

‘You do seem to collect waifs and strays,’ I tell her, watching as the chicken does a couple of laps of where she’s sat.

Lola smiles. ‘I feel an affinity with them all. Same with Noah, I guess.’

I nod and look down at my phone, which is ready to start recording.

I’d half wondered if Lola was trying to make amends with all of her good deeds, but I probably need to remember that not every single thing in the universe is about me.

And despite all the time we’ve spent together now, Lola has never, ever mentioned the baby she left.

‘Shall we get started?’ I ask, to cover the weird feeling. ‘How many more sessions do you think we’d need?’

‘Two, maybe?’ she ventures.

I’m back to professional mode, totally professional. Not at all thinking that it’s yet another countdown hanging over me.

‘It’s like therapy.’ Lola smiles as the chicken finally flops down next to her, upright for a change.

‘A lot of people say that. But I think that actual therapists get paid more. I barely make a living wage.’

Lola laughs.

‘But if you’re ready, let’s start.’

‘Jimmy’s right, you’re going to be a star, Lola,’ Ashton said when we finished in the studio that day.

He put his arm around me and I heard the click of a camera from somewhere. The label liked that, when we got pictured doing things like holdin’ hands. They said it would help us get traction, if people thought there was a romance between us.

Our first single would be called ‘Storm Inside a Teacup’.

Someone else had written the words, all I had to do was sing them.

Over and over and over again, I sang the same words, till Jimmy said that it was perfect and that me singing like that was going to make all of them a whole lot of money.

No one mentioned how much it would make me and I didn’t ask.

I worked harder than I’d ever worked in my life.

Burnin’ the candle at both ends, like. The label arranged for us to go to all these parties, to get us mixin’ with the right sort of people, making connections, that sort of thing.

And even though we weren’t old enough to drink, or me and Prune weren’t at any rate, no one seemed to mind very much that we weren’t twenty-one yet.

Sometimes I’d catch a look at myself, all dressed up in some outfit that Jimmy thought was a good idea, and I’d hardly recognize myself, you know? Especially since I had all my thrift store clothes in a drawer in my room.

I’m not sayin’ we didn’t work hard. We weren’t famous yet, even though there was this buzz around us. That’s what Jimmy said. We were pipped as the next big thing.

I worked at everything, even the apartment. If something needed fixin’, I did it myself. You don’t live in a falling down house without learning a thing or two about sorting it out yourself. Ma wouldn’t have ever called a plumber or anything like that.

One morning I was fixing the tap in the kitchen and when I sat up, Ashton was there. I must have been all red faced. Some days, I wondered that I was half in love with him, he was always making me laugh.

It was… a good time. I’d never been real excited for the future when I was young. But I was now, for the very first time. I guess we were all caught up in it, in this idea that we’d be superstars.

When no one else was around, Jimmy would tell me that I was the special one, that the band would be nothing without me. I’d never been special to anyone, not in a good way, and I liked it, though it’s shameful to admit it now. I liked being special.

Jimmy arranged for us to go on MTV the week our first single was released.

They dressed me up in this orange dress that was so tight and short, I remember thinking that the Merrywells would have had a coronary.

I hated that dress. There was glitter all over my face too, making my skin itch.

I don’t know that I was nervous, I think I’d gone beyond nerves.

I was numb to it all. It felt like it was happenin’ to someone else.

I still felt like I was there by mistake, even then.

We’d practised so much that I didn’t even have to think about what I was doing while I was on stage.

It took me a few moments at the end to realize that everyone was cheering.

Ashton was jumping up and down next to me, Prune and Shawn too.

And the audience were deafening. The loudest thing I’d ever heard.

It’s intoxicating, people clapping and cheering for you. Addictive. Anyone who says otherwise is lying.

It went quickly after that. We went from acting famous to being famous.

Those first months it felt like we were the most famous people in the whole entire world.

We never stopped moving, no matter how tired we got.

There was always some other high to chase.

I’d think jeez, I just met the president!

And then the next week we’d see Prince Charles at a charity gala.

We were always on display, always performin’.

I didn’t know then what I know now. ’Bout how it costs you, performing like that. Living under a scrutiny of sorts. Or maybe it doesn’t cost everyone. Some folks thrive off of it, I dare say. But it cost me. It cost me so much.

Lola stops talking and I realize that she’s done for today. This is what I expected to hear, stories about her performing, being famous.

‘It sounds like a wild time,’ I tell her.

‘It was different to old town Baton Rouge, put it that way.’ She smiles.

‘Do you miss it? Or do you think you would if it hadn’t… cost you?’ I ask, repeating her words.

Lola thinks for a second. ‘Sometimes. Or maybe what I miss is the feeling of possibilities. It felt like anything was possible then. Course it wasn’t. I was still me, but it was a nice feeling. Plus, there’s a lot I’m not proud of from back then.’

I pause a second, not entirely sure what to say.

‘Things are still possible now,’ I tell her in the end.

‘Are they?’

I don’t know what she’s asking.

Or why the air feels so heavy all of a sudden.

‘If you want to stay a moment, I could bring us some lunch out here. It’s such a nice day,’ she says.