Page 47 of The Next Chapter

‘Okay,’ I answer, way more nervous to sing with Lola than anyone else. ‘Sure, why not?’ I give the fakest nonchalant shrug in the history of fake nonchalance. My voice is unnaturally high.

‘I’ll go get my guitar.’ Lola leaves, and I know that she’s going to her office to get the guitar that she has hanging on the wall there.

I walk back over to Noah. He’s leaning against the wall to the dining room, watching everyone else mingle.

‘I’m going to sing with Lola,’ I tell him where he’s standing with James. Saying it makes it even more real.

James’s eyebrows lift up. ‘Lola hardly ever sings on karaoke night.’

‘She doesn’t?’ I swallow.

‘I think you’ll sound great together.’ Noah must be able to sense my nerves. ‘Look, she’s waiting for you.’

I twist around and sure enough, Lola’s stood by the laptop, her dad’s guitar strap over her shoulder, looking closer to Lola the star from Beyond Baton Rouge than I’ve ever seen her.

‘Did you want to play the piano?’ she asks. And at this point it’s very much in for a penny in for a pound, because in a second, I’m pulling the piano out from the wall, opening the lid with a clunk. The whole thing is very sobering.

‘It’s been a long time since I played.’ We seem to have agreed on what we’re singing at least. Lola strums and I recognize the opening chords of ‘Eyes Full of Wonder’. I suppose that I did tell Lola it was a favourite of Mum’s. And Lola obviously knows all the words. She wrote them, after all.

She strums the guitar some more and fiddles with the tuning keys at the end.

It’s the most melodic of all Beyond Baton Rouge’s songs.

‘Pared back’, I’ve seen it described as.

Apparently, people went absolutely wild for it.

It was their last single and it made Lola quitting seem even more inexplicable.

‘You said that about singing.’ Lola brings me out of my recollections.

I risk a glance out and see that everyone has moved to stand in a semi-circle around the front of the hall.

At least some of these people must know who Lola is.

So, they know that they’re about to get a show from a real-life superstar, for free.

I wonder if this is why more people seem to come to karaoke than anything else that Lola offers.

Lola starts to strum the opening notes again and I hover my fingers over the keys I’ll need, hoping that muscle memory kicks in. It’s all so painfully familiar to what I used to do with Mum. Something catches in my throat and the keys get blurry in front of me.

Lola’s voice is, well, it’s amazing. I’ve heard her before, of course.

There are plenty of videos of the band on YouTube and I’ve probably contributed no small amount to their crazy high views over the years.

But hearing her in real life is different.

And it’s completely at odds with the quiet, softly spoken Lola.

I join in after a second. I’m nowhere near as good as her, but we sound nice together. The words come back to me like I sang them yesterday and I’m sure my fingers aren’t in any way connected to my brain. They dance over the keys like they’ve a mind of their own.

With eyes wide in wonder, you looked at me and I think you knew.

That I was just no good for you.

I’ve sang the words before, but I’ve never really thought about them.

About what Lola was trying to say. Everyone assumed that she’d written the song about a lover, possibly Ashton after things went wrong between them.

But what if it isn’t a song about lovers?

What if it’s a song about something else entirely?

And now you’re gone, it’s just too late.

How can what I’m living be my fate?

We finish singing the chorus and this time there’s no delayed reaction. I won’t have to pretend that there was a slow clap in my dramatic retelling of this. It’s instantaneous, people are clapping and cheering and I’m smiling and taking a pretend bow from where I’m sat at the piano.

I’m laughing along until I realize that Lola is looking at me. I feel it too, some unfathomable link between us. Between me and Lola and my mum.

Lola is speaking but she’s being so quiet that I have to lean towards her to hear.

‘I think I’d like to finish my story now,’ she says.

And even though it’s a Saturday night and I’ve been semi-pissed for half of it, I get it. The sense of urgency, that things are coming to a head. Except is it too early? I’m meant to have another week here.

I feel the panic rising in every fibre of my being. Swelling like a wave that doesn’t crest.

Lola looks straight at me. ‘I’ll see you in my office.’

And then she turns and leaves.

I make my way over to Noah, who immediately pulls me into a hug. ‘You were amazing.’

I hug him back extra tight, wondering if I could just stay here. Because I can’t help but feel that if I follow Lola into that little office, everything might change.

‘Lola wants to talk to me,’ I tell him, watching as his eyebrows crease together.

‘Now?’ he asks.

‘Yeah, she’s waiting in the office.’

‘Did she say what it was about?’

‘No.’ I shake my head, feeling guilty because even though Lola didn’t say, I know why she wants to talk to me. I just do. ‘I’ll come back to the cottage after. Wait for me?’

‘Course.’ He smiles. ‘I’ll see you there.’

There’s nothing left to do then except go to Lola and listen to the start of it all.

‘Knock, knock,’ I announce myself before pushing the door open to Lola’s office.

I find Lola on her little stool, waiting. It’s getting dark outside now, so she’s turned on her desk lamp, making the room warm and glowing.

I take my own seat, just like that first time, though now there’s so much more familiarity, it’s hard to believe that it was only five weeks ago that Seb and I arrived.

Lola hasn’t moved. She’s tracking me with her eyes, though, like she can’t take them off me. I make a show of getting my phone out, ready to hit record.

I clear my throat.

When I can’t think of anything else to do and the silence is becoming oppressive, I say, ‘So last time, you’d been practising with the band and getting close to Ashton.’ Another throat clear. ‘Did you want to just pick up where we left off?’

Lola closes her eyes and does a big breath in and out and I think for a moment that she’s going to call the whole thing off. I don’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed. But then, with her eyes still closed, she starts to talk.

Like I said before, it all took off after the first single. We weren’t maybe going to be the next big thing anymore, we were the next big thing. The single went straight to number one. Then the second one did too, three months later. Then our first album went to number one – platinum.

We’re talking about a time when there was little to no press regulation. Photographers followed us everywhere. The label worked us hard. We never knew where we were going from one day to the next. Most days it made my head spin, the pace of it.

But I loved the singing, and the music. I’ll admit to it, I liked being famous.

For the first time ever, people wanted to be around me.

Men wanted to kiss me. Women wanted to dress like me.

Or how the label wanted me to dress at any rate.

I was like a doll. Even that orange dress that became a bit of a thing, well, I’d never pick somethin’ like that for myself.

It’s like I was a whole different person. A better person, or so I was told.

We were playing other people’s songs then of course, not that I minded that much.

I didn’t know anything about writing music.

It felt like every time we played, I was proving something.

I don’t know what. Maybe I hoped that Ma or even Pa would call me up and tell me that they’d been wrong.

That Pa had been wrong to leave, and Ma was wrong about me being bad luck because here I was, making something of myself.

The band members were my friends too. There were the usual rumours about in-fighting and us all being tempestuous and what not, but they were pretty much all started by the label, by Jimmy, the same way that they put out about me and Ashton dating.

It wasn’t true, none of it. I’d say that Ashton’s the best friend I ever had, but he’s like a brother to me, nothin’ more.

Plus, there was Jimmy. He was with us almost every day, I remember thinking that we must have seen him more than his own family.

Even late at night, after we were done doing whatever we needed to be doing that day, Jimmy would come into the apartment – we had a much nicer one by then, mind, but we still all lived together in LA – and sit around with us.

He always paid me extra attention. I thought it was on account of me being the youngest at first. I wasn’t even twenty yet, but I’ll admit to liking it a whole lot when he called me his little star.

I think that was about the only time that me and Ashton argued, come to think about it.

He wasn’t happy about how much time Jimmy was spending with me.

I thought he was jealous. The label wanted Ashton to be careful, said a whole lot of things that wouldn’t be allowed these days.

Things are better now, or at least I hope they are.

But the truth is, when Jimmy said that I gave him something his wife couldn’t, I believed him.

It’s… hard to admit now. How I fell for all the things Jimmy said. How I got so swept up in it all when he’d lay next to me and talk about the future and all the things we could do together. He was so much bigger than me, broader. It felt safe there with him.

It was Christmas time, the first time he kissed me proper.

We were in London to play on Top of the Pops and he’d come with us.

There are not many places do Christmas like the British.

I was so caught up in it all. Jimmy came to my hotel, said he couldn’t keep away no more.

It felt like somethin’ from a movie. When he started to kiss me, I didn’t push him away.