Christmas on Primrose Hill (35 page)

‘Jules, I think we’d better ask someone,’ she said as they got to the end of the corridor. ‘They could be God knows where and this costume is too heavy to be double-backing on ourselves.’

‘Hang on a minute, hang on a minute,’ Jules said with a grin, pulling her phone out from her back pocket. ‘I’ll text Gus. Mr Lover Lover,’ she murmured.

Nettie leaned against the wall with her eyes closed, her palms flat to it and feeling the vibrations that came from 20,000 girls screaming all at once, a 1,000-watt amp and a drum kit. She tuned it all out, rehearsing what she would say to Jamie when she saw him:
Nice jeans . . . Have you seen the weather? . . . Good luck out there . . . It’s not you, it’s me . . .

‘Bingo. He’s sending someone to collect us.’ Jules pocketed her phone again. ‘I wonder if it’ll be Ron.’

‘Hmm?’ Nettie was distracted. She wanted to get that first look over and done with, behind her. Because then they could just move on with the new status quo between them.

A door at the far end opened and she jumped as a sudden peal of laughter curled into the corridor before it was slammed shut again.

‘So, you remember what you’re doing out there?’

Nettie turned back to face her, trying to focus. She still had a job to do. ‘Yep. Harlem shake.’

‘And you watched the clips for those links I sent through?’

She nodded. ‘Jamie plays the first bit solo, and then when the drum comes in, that’s when I . . . shake?’

‘Exactly.’ Jules patted her on the shoulder with a grin. ‘It’s just as well you’re disguised up there.’

‘You’re telling me.’

‘I wouldn’t want to do that in front of all those people.’

Nettie tried not to think about it. She just wanted to go and do it; do it and go. Jules, she knew, was desperate to stay for the after-party and meet all the other stars, but Nettie knew there was no such obligation for her to stay tonight.

Besides, her father was doing his lasagne. That alone was worth staying in for.

The sound of running feet made them both turn to see Gus approaching at some speed.

‘Hey!’ he laughed, scooping Jules into his arms as he passed and kissing her.

‘Hey,’ she giggled, tipping her chin down coquettishly. ‘I was expecting a minion to rescue me.’

He pulled a sad face. ‘Will I do?’

‘If you must,’ she joked, elongating the word and rolling her eyes. They kissed again and Nettie turned away, embarrassed.

Gus looked up as though only just realizing Nettie was standing there. ‘Sorry, hi. We haven’t formally met. Gus.’

She raised a hand shyly. What had Jamie told him about her? That she was a freak? A psycho? ‘Hi. Nettie.’

Gus looked down at the bulging bags by their feet. ‘This is it, then, is it?’ he asked, picking them up effortlessly.

‘Certainly is,’ Jules said, following after as he began to lead them back down the corridor from which they had come.

‘I can’t wait for this. It’s going to be so mad. The band’s really psyched. Have you heard them through there?’ He jerked his thumb towards the arena on their right. ‘We thought it was loud on Saturday for us. That’s nothing compared to what One Direction gets. I swear to God it’s almost frightening. You just think, if they were all to stampede . . .’ He shook his head, chatting easily.

He pointed to a room just ahead that they had already passed by. ‘Home sweet home.’

‘Well, no wonder we couldn’t find you!’ Jules said, indicating the empty tab beside the door.

Gus grinned. ‘Jamie prefers it like that. Stops the groupies hunting him down.’ He shrugged, seemingly baffled.

They walked in, Gus putting the bags in a cupboard on the left wall. There were three other people in the room. Dave and Jimmy, the drummer, were playing
FIFA
on an Xbox.

‘Hey!’ they both said in unison, taking a hand each off their remotes to wave from across the room.

‘How are you?’ Dave asked her, just as Jimmy scored a goal and pulled his T-shirt over his head in celebration. ‘Agh! Bastard!’

Jamie was sitting on the arm of a black leather sofa, his guitar on his knee as he tightened some strings. He had looked up as they walked in, his hand falling from the strings at the sight of her.

She swallowed, feeling her cheeks burn, her throat close. The same question – the one he’d been asking her when she’d run out through the door on Sunday morning – was still in his eyes.

‘Hi.’ Her voice was tiny, audible only by microphone, visible only by microscope.

He nodded his head in silent greeting, barely a greeting, as he looked away quickly.

All her rehearsed speech flew out of the window and she felt the atmosphere in the room thicken like cream on the heat, cocked eyebrows saying what mouths wouldn’t. She felt like her lungs were being squeezed at the bottom, as though she could only scoop cups of air, and she stood helpless in the room, not sure what to do. Even Jules seemed paralysed by the frosty reception.

‘Drink?’ Gus asked, coming to Nettie’s rescue this time and holding up a whisky bottle.

‘Um . . .’

‘Yes, go on. It won’t kill you,’ he said, pouring a fingerful into a tumbler and handing it to her with a friendly wink.

‘Babe?’ Gus asked Jules, handing one to her too and earning himself a round of cocked eyebrows from the band.

Nettie despatched the drink quickly. It made her throat burn, but that only matched the flames in her cheeks. Jamie hated her – he had managed to convey that with one look and no words; frankly she could do with some fire in her belly.

‘Here, take a seat,’ Gus said, wiping a heap of jackets off another sofa with a sweep of his arm.

‘Thanks,’ Nettie mumbled, sitting in the corner, her arms and legs pressed together, trying not to take up any space, trying to become invisible.

Gus pulled Jules down onto his lap and began nuzzling her neck. Nettie pretended to be interested in the
FIFA
game on the giant screen.

A door on the far wall opened and a dazzling girl stood in the doorway of a bathroom. She was wearing a pair of gold silk shorts and a red scooped vest, some long gold necklaces that swung by her navel and wedge trainers. Her skin was so taut and smooth, Nettie thought she could write a letter on it, the year-round tan suggesting either an LA zip code or jet-set diary. She was more dazzling than even her photographs had suggested, Nettie thought, depressed.

‘Who’re they?’ Coco Miller asked, clocking Jules and Nettie immediately, her catlike eyes narrowing.

There was a brief pause as each of the men waited for someone else to volunteer the girls’ identities. They all knew the girls had overstepped their roles from the professional into the personal.

Finally Dave spoke up. ‘Coco, this is Jules and Nettie from White Tiger. You remember how we said about the charity link-up?’ His tone of voice was cajoling, slightly weary.

‘Oh, that’s
you
, is it? You look so . . . normal,’ Coco said her, plumped upper lip curling slightly as she abruptly turned away. ‘Listen, Dave, there’s absolutely no way their song’s going to win, right? I’m really not happy about all of this, you know.
I
never signed up to it. I just wanted to record with Jay.’

‘I know, and trust me, there’s not even a chance of your song not coming out,’ Dave said soothingly. ‘It’s just a publicity stunt for the charity. The single’s coming out on Friday, as agreed. Nothing has changed. It’s a guaranteed number one.’

Coco stretched. ‘Good,’ she murmured silkily, walking over to where Jamie was sitting. She ruffled his hair as she passed, lying out along the sofa so that her legs stretched towards him like a horizon.

Nettie felt sick as Dan’s words – a not-so-friendly warning – became a taunt. She hadn’t been able to resist looking the photos up online when she’d got home and they were worse, far worse than she’d expected. No wonder Dan had looked at her with such pity. Jamie had been grinning, his arm round Coco’s shoulder as she whispered something in his ear, the two of them looking like lovebirds. Lovers.

Jamie resumed strumming a few chords, his head bent down, humming so softly Nettie could barely hear him.

She kept her eyes on the patch of floor immediately in front of her, worried he would sense her stare, worried he’d somehow tune in to the thoughts flashing through her mind – her lips on his neck, his lips on her breast, his laugh in her ear . . .

There was a brisk rap at the door, a sudden crackle of static. ‘Ten-minute call,’ a voice said from the hallway.

‘But we’re only seventy-six minutes into the second half,’ Dave complained, motioning to the screen.

‘I’d get out while your dignity’s still intact, mate. You’re already losing. I’ll have given you a proper kicking by full time,’ Jimmy laughed.

‘Oi!’ Dave protested, but throwing his remote down on the sofa and getting up. It was time to work, not play, and the diffident atmosphere in the room changed with his movements. ‘Right, everyone happy?’

Nettie looked away. The question wasn’t being directed at her, but it stung anyway. She was the very definition of
not happy
.

‘So, to run through: we start with “Crystal Dawn”. Jimmy, remember we’ve cut the solo to eighteen bars on this to get the set done on time. They’re threatening to pull the plugs if anyone runs over.’

Jimmy gave a salute in understanding as he too got up and opened a water bottle, drinking several large gulps. Nettie watched as he began cutting the top off the bottle with a pair of scissors – emptying the contents over himself after the big drum solos was his party piece.

‘And, Gus, if you blow this amp too, I’ll fucking kill you,’ Dave continued.

Gus saluted as well.

‘Jay, Nettie’ll come on after “Rocks and Bones” when you start your spiel, OK? Remember the hashtags.
Don’t
forget the hashtags: the sponsors want those mentioned. Then we go into the cover of Harlem shake, blah, blah, blah.’ He looked over at Coco. ‘And you, Ms Miller, we’re keeping the best for last, so just be your usual gorgeous self. Trust me, you’re going to love the response you get. Those kids out there are getting the world exclusive on your new duet, and this stunt has got them going wild, so we want to give them a bit of banter between you two, OK? Wait for Jay to introduce you once Nettie’s off. I’ve got them to autocue your words for you.’

‘Don’t need it,’ Coco said with a knowing smile, pointing one toe to nudge Jamie’s leg. ‘I can wax lyrical about this man.’ She extended her leg as she said this, her pointed foot now almost touching his crotch.

Everyone laughed except two, Jamie’s eyes flickering towards Nettie for the briefest moment, before looking down again quickly. He looked angry.

Jules got off Gus’s lap and Nettie stood up, smoothing her jeans. She had to get changed. She had to get away from here.

‘I need to check my strings. See you after?’ Gus said to Jules, kissing her on the lips.

‘You’d better,’ she murmured, her face splitting into an enormous smile as he gave her a wink, before trooping out through the door with Dave, Jimmy and Coco, their voices echoing loudly down the hall.

Jamie turned to place the guitar he’d been tuning back on a stand in the corner as Jules went to the wardrobe and grabbed the bunny costume. She turned to Nettie and silently mouthed, ‘Talk to him,’ before disappearing into the bathroom, ostensibly to hang it up.

Jamie turned back, seeming as surprised as she was to find they were suddenly alone together.

They looked at each other in silence across the room, the memory of him standing in the corridor in his boxers, calling after her, still an echo in both their minds. A moment passed between them, the electric charge that always came when their eyes locked – a blue flicker across the room, but before she could even open her mouth, he looked away again, the ball of his jaw pulsing with checked anger. ‘See you out there,’ he said to the floor, moving towards the door, brushing past her.

‘Wait!’ The word was out before she could stop it, a ball of fire shot from the cannon into the night.

He stopped dead, his neck bent as he stared down at her, and she swallowed to see the coldness in his eyes. The intimacy of only three nights ago was as distant, now, as a star and it seemed almost impossible to recall how easy she had felt in his company – lingering glances, private smiles, a magnetism between them that had seemingly propelled them from the virtual reality of the Twittersphere into the flesh, blood and beating hearts of one another’s orbits. She had felt thrown towards him by the gods, able – somehow – to forget that he was one of them. But not now.

‘I-I wanted to say I’m sorry. For the other night. I-I mean, morning,’ she corrected herself, cheeks burning. ‘I know it was unforgive—’

She saw his eyes fall to her hand and she flinched to realize that she was holding his wrist. She dropped it with a start, sensing she had crossed an unspoken boundary. He was standing so close she could feel the heat – the anger – radiating from him in waves, but a cold, galactic sea was freezing the air in the small space between them.

‘Don’t stress,’ he said with a dry laugh that held no humour in its walls, and deep inside herself, she felt her heart, paper-thin and fragile, collapse in a heap of ashes. ‘Nothing I haven’t seen before.’ He looked back at her with . . . She frowned to see it . . . Was that superiority in his eyes? Where last week there had been amusement and gentle teasing, flirtation and curiosity, a meeting of equals, now there was a gulf between them, the one she’d expected to find from the start: he had drawn a line – he was the star, she a nobody, just a stupid girl in a stupid bunny outfit who had to go out there and do a stupid dance in front of all those stupid—

‘Shit! I forgot my—’ Coco panted, stopping dead in the doorway.

The intrusion broke the deadlock of his cold stare and Nettie gasped like she was breaking the surface of the ocean, gulping for air. She looked over at the beautiful singer, who was watching them with disbelief, guessing, somehow knowing . . .

Nettie stepped back, out of his orbit, her back slamming into the wardrobe door so that she took a half-step forwards again – startled as a rabbit. Ironically.