Fallen for Rock (16 page)

Chapter Twenty-Six

‘Here, try this.’

Mike handed me an ice pack and helped me hold it loosely against my temple. The lump around my cut was rapidly swelling to golf ball proportions, and the incessant throbbing in my head was nauseating.

I was laid up on the sofa in the green room with Mike and Adam fussing over me. The rest of the band had completed the soundcheck and disappeared off to have dinner somewhere. But Mike had remained by my side, his eyes full of genuine concern. Adam had also remained by my side, tutting and puffing and worried I might bring a health-and-safety suit against him.

‘Are you sure you don’t want a doctor?’ he asked me for the twentieth time.

‘Sure I’m sure.’ A yawn crept up on me and incapacitated me for a few moments. Lying down, I suddenly felt weaker and shakier than I had done immediately after the impact of my fall. I guessed the adrenaline had worn off, and shock was setting in.

‘It was my own stupid fault,’ I continued when the yawn eventually subsided. ‘I wasn’t looking where I was going.’

‘That case shouldn’t have been there. Anyone could have broken their neck.’ Adam was seething, and I sensed there would be trouble.

‘Let it go,’ I mumbled. ‘It was my fault. The roadies were packing up, I simply was in the wrong place at the wrong time.’ I tried to turn to smile at him in a reassuring manner, but the movement caused an explosion of stars in front of my eyes, and I groaned.

‘Lie still,’ Mike ordered firmly. ‘
You
might not think so, but
I
think you should see a doctor. You’re as white as a sheet.’

‘I’m fine.’ My protest sounded feeble even to me, but I meant it. ‘Please don’t fuss. Let me rest up for a while, maybe have a little sleep…’

‘No.
No!
’ Mike’s voice cut loudly through my hazy consciousness. I had already half closed my eyes and was happily giving myself up to the arms of Morpheus, but this vehement exclamation startled me. Mike’s face was right in in front of me, and he bored his eyes into mine. ‘Don’t sleep. You mustn’t sleep.’

‘Why not?’ Adam and I spoke in unison, equally surprised. Mike straightened up and sighed.

‘If she’s concussed, she shouldn’t sleep. Let’s call a doctor.’

‘I don’t want a doctor,’ I insisted again, but I was overruled. A few short minutes later, a paramedic first-responder appeared by my sofa-side. He pulled up a chair and started talking to me while Adam and Mike hovered in the background.

‘Hi, you. I’m Joseph.’ His tone was light and conversational, and he picked up my wrist to check my pulse while he spoke. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Emily.’

Joseph checked his watch and looked at me. ‘Emily who?’

‘Emily Trenden.’

‘Good. Emily, do you recall what happened to you?’

‘I tripped and I fell, that’s all.’

‘Do you know what day it is?’

‘Of course I know what day it is. It is…’

Heck, what day was it? I had been on tour with MonX since Sunday—or Saturday, depending on how you looked at it—but everything was so extraordinary that the days had lost their normal feel. Yet I knew what day it was. I
knew
I knew. I had thought about it only a few hours before at the hairdresser’s.

‘Emily? What day is it?’ The paramedic looked at me more intently.

‘Tuesday.’
Finally
.

‘Okay. What did you have for dinner last night?’

‘Um.’
How was I supposed to remember these things?
‘I don’t remember. But I can tell you that we were in Manchester and that we stayed in a hotel.’

‘What hotel?’

‘The…er… I don’t know what it was called. Mike, help me out here.’ I tried to catch Mike’s eye, and he stepped forward a little, but Joseph held up his hand as though to stop him from speaking.

‘Never mind. Do you know what you did this morning?’

‘I went to the hairdresser. I had my hair cut
and
coloured, and I was really excited about it, which is why I didn’t pay attention when I walked into the hall. End of story.’

Joseph smiled for the first time. ‘That sounds good. Nice haircut, too.’

I smiled back and raised a hand to feel whether my hair was still in place, but once again the movement made me dizzy, and I winced. Joseph saw it and frowned.

‘Hm. I don’t like the look of this.’ He produced a flashlight and shone it in my eyes. ‘Look straight ahead for me now, okay?’

I declined to answer but obediently fixed my gaze on a point in the distance, a little fleck on the wall. Joseph’s flashlight came and went, in and out, first one eye, then the other.

‘Pupils are fine,’ he muttered to himself, but kept shining the light in my eyes for another few seconds. The effect was strangely hypnotic. I felt my eyelids drooping.

‘Stay with me, please.’ Joseph took my face in his hands and very gently tilted my head from side to side. He stood up and bent over me, presumably to examine the gash in my temple.

‘This looks quite nasty. Are you in any pain?’

I grimaced. ‘Not pain as such, no.’

‘But?’

Man, he was persistent. ‘I feel a little unsteady.’

‘Unsteady.’

‘You know. Dizzy.’

Joseph didn’t seem to like that statement at all. He held up his right hand and folded two fingers down on the inside.

‘Three,’ I answered before he could even ask the question. ‘I said I was dizzy, I didn’t say I was seeing double.’

‘You certainly have attitude.’ Joseph chuckled. ‘But I’m still not certain you’re quite all right. Here.’ He scribbled on a pad. ‘I’d like you to take these painkillers, two immediately, two more at eight o’clock tonight. I’d also like you to stay awake for a little while longer, but if you absolutely must, you may sleep. If you’re still dizzy or light-headed in four hours, or if you have been sick, you
must
go to the emergency department. Okay?’

‘Okay.’ I acquiesced quietly.

‘You.’ Joseph addressed Mike and Adam. ‘If she does go to sleep, I would like to wake her every other hour or so to make sure you can still rouse her. If you
can’t
, you must call 999 immediately.’

‘I will,’ Mike promised.

‘Likewise, if she gets worse or starts vomiting, I want you to bring her in.’

‘Okay.’

‘Good.’ Joseph turned to me once more. ‘You take it easy, now, Emily, and I trust these two gentlemen will look after you.’

‘Okay. And thank you.’ I summoned another sleepy smile and elected not to tell the man that I was seeing him double right at that moment in time. Nothing a little sleep wouldn’t fix. Sleep was all I wanted. I was so, so tired.

My eyes closed before the paramedic had even left. I heard a vague interchange of voices, one concerned and one reassuring. They seemed to be fading in and out. Someone placed a blanket over me, and I drifted off properly.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

‘I don’t give a flying fuck what you think. That song is rubbish, and I ain’t putting my name to it.’

‘Don’t, then. I’ll take the credit.’

‘The blame, more like, when it flops.’

The loud and angry exchange woke me from my slumber, and for a moment I didn’t have a clue where I was. My head was throbbing, my tongue appeared to be coated with sandpaper, and my hips ached. I saw the blanket and took in my surroundings, and I remembered.

‘You’re a moron. You really have no clue about any of this.’

A third voice entered the verbal fracas. I frowned, trying to work out who was shouting at whom.

‘Yeah? You’re calling me a moron? Take your songs and stuff them where the sun don’t shine.’

‘Fuck you and the horse you rode in on. You couldn’t put together an advertising jingle, let alone a rock song.’

‘Ha! I wrote our number one hit.’

‘
You
wrote a fucking round of fucking pentatonic scales that were so mind-numbingly boring, people were buying the song simply to annoy other people with the ringtone on their mobiles.’

Ouch.

‘You shit-head. You fucking arrogant bastard. Just because you have some classical training, you think you are the boss here. Well, fuck you!’

‘Fuck you too! If I didn’t tell you where to go, you wouldn’t find your way from the green room to the stage, you stupid dimwit.’

Double ouch. The voices were growing louder still. I had worked out that the band were in the second, smaller green room, the one adjacent to mine. Even though the door was shut, it was all too easy to hear what was going on. Mike, Will, Lewis and Dylan were having the most almighty bust-up. It appeared that the storm that had been brewing for days had finally broken. I wondered idly where drummer Jake stood in this mess.

‘I’m fed up with you getting all the credit and all the money.’ That was Lewis’s voice.

‘You know the answer to that one. Pitch in with the writing, and you’ll get the credit too.’ Mike.

‘Ha. I
will
write. Will and I have this plan…’

‘Shut the fuck
up
,’ Will cut into Lewis’s revelation.

‘Ah, so you have a plan. Good for you.’ Mike’s voice dripped with sarcasm. ‘Of course, it would help if you could actually read music, but hey, who am I to talk? I’m only the arrogant shit-head who got us to number one by putting an actual
song
to go with your tedious scales.’

I cringed and reflexively curled up my toes with embarrassment by proxy. Had they forgotten I was here to witness their fight, or did they not care?

‘Erg!’ Evidently, Mike had struck a nerve. It sounded as though Lewis was charging him, and there was a shuffle of feet and the sound of chairs being overturned. I desperately wanted to be somewhere else. If they found me here, they would never be able to pretend the argument didn’t happen.

Cautiously, I lifted my feet off the sofa and sat up. Instantly, the room began spinning around me, and bile rose in my throat. My vision flared and dimmed, and there was a searing pain in my head. I hated to admit it, but I had given myself a much worse knock than I had thought. I breathed deeply and lay back down again, very, very gently. Pulling the blanket high to my chin, I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep. If I couldn’t remove myself from the situation, at least I could feign ignorance.

‘Enough. I said,
enough
.’ Adam’s voice halted the action next door, and there was silence.

‘You lot ought to be bloody ashamed of yourself. Never have I had to work with such a bunch of brats. You wanna be a world class rock band? Then jolly well start acting like one. Sex scandals, I can deal with. Drugs, I can deal with. But if you start slicing each other to shreds, you are dead. Now bugger off and get ready for the show. And if I even see the slightest hint of this disagreement reflected on that stage, you can kiss your contract goodbye.’

Well said, that man. The inscrutable Adam rose several notches in my estimation. Inexplicably, I found I was shaking from head to toe. I was shocked to the core by what I had heard. I had only just discovered the band. I had only just discovered rock, at last buying into the friendly, happy-go-lucky, we-just-want-to-make-music image of the band. And now it transpired that everything was built on cracked foundations and a lie? The mind boggled.

What would happen next, I wondered. Would the band reconcile their differences and go on as usual? Was this the first time they had fallen out in this way, or was this the latest in a long string of fights? And what was going on between them? I couldn’t see Mike in the role of the arrogant dictator, but what did I really know about him? Although I could see, plain as day, that the jealousy raging among the other band members was unhealthy and destructive.

Perhaps that was why Adam had warned me off. Perhaps it was nothing to do with me being there as such, but with me hanging with Mike. Maybe that set him apart from the rest of the band even further. Quite possibly, I wasn’t the problem, but a catalyst for existing problems to come to a boil.

Either way, I needed to go. I couldn’t hang around for another three days. I needed to disappear. The last thing this band needed was an audience for their differences. Determination gave me a surge of strength. Once more I sat up, and this time, ignoring the dizziness, I rose to my feet and started to move.

Bad mistake. Within three steps, nausea overcame me, and I emptied myself out all over the floor. My knees buckled, and I fell down heavily next to my puddle.

‘Emily! What are you doing up? You okay?’ Mike was by my side in an instant, even though I hadn’t heard him enter the room.

‘I…’ I croaked, and swallowed another bout of nausea. ‘I’ve got to go.’

‘I know. I’ll take you. C’mon, do you reckon you can walk if I can help you?’

I stared at him blankly. He was going to take me home? All the way to London?

‘You’re going to take me home?’

‘What? No.’ Comprehension dawned on Mike’s face, and he shook his head. ‘I’m taking you to the hospital, like the man said. You were sick.’

‘I wasn’t sick…’

Mike snorted impatiently. ‘You’re sitting next to the evidence. Heck, you’re damn near sitting in the evidence.’

‘That wasn’t being sick. I got up too quickly and I was dizzy, that’s all.’

‘That may be, but it shouldn’t. No argument, young lady.’ He tried to coax me to stand up, but I refused to cooperate.

‘Mike, listen. You don’t need me here. You have enough going on. What I meant was, I need to leave. I need to go home.’

Mike looked crushed. ‘You heard, huh?’

‘I…um…yes. I’m sorry. It was impossible not to. I don’t belong here, I’m only in the way. I need to go home.’

‘You’re not fit to travel, at least not alone. Let me take you to the hospital and have you checked over. Then we can figure out how to get you home.’

‘You’ve got a show to do. You haven’t got time to hang around in a hospital waiting room for hours,’ I pointed out the obvious.

‘I don’t care—’

‘But I do. Look, okay, fine. I was sick. I’m dizzy. I’m not feeling great, I admit it.’ I held up my hands in defeat. ‘But don’t do anything stupid like completely destroying the band. I’m perfectly lucid, am I not? So my head hurts a bit, and I can’t move very fast, but I’m fine, really. I promise I’ll be good. Just…maybe if you call me a cab, and I can get a train…’

‘Don’t be bloody ridiculous. You can’t travel in your condition.’

‘Well, I can’t stay. I…’

‘All right. Here’s the deal. I won’t make you go to the hospital, but you have to do what I say. I’ll make up your bed in the bus and tuck you in. I’ll check on you every couple of hours, as the man said. And if I have
any
more doubts, I
will
call an ambulance. But if not, we’ll drive you down to Bristol overnight, and we’ll take it from there.’

I stared at my feet and said nothing. In truth, he was right. There was no way I could travel. I probably wasn’t concussed, but certainly at that moment in time, I wasn’t fit to get up and walk away. Damn that bloody fall. This wasn’t how I had imagined my day. I sighed.

‘Okay. I’m sorry to be a burden, I never meant to.’

‘I know. I’m sure you had other plans than to do a dying swan.’ He smiled and stroked my face gently. ‘Let’s get you rested up, and everything will look better in the morning, I’m sure.’

‘You’re a kind man, Mike Loud.’

He offered me a sardonic smile. ‘I’m sure not everybody would agree with you.’

‘I’m not everybody.’

‘No. You’re not.’

Unspoken words hung heavy between us, and the moment stretched and assumed a strange significance. Eventually, Mike broke the spell without commenting on it. Perhaps I had imagined it.

He stretched and rose up from his crouched position by my side. ‘C’mon,’ he said again. ‘Let’s get you back on that sofa while I get organised.’