Idolism (26 page)

“Oh my god, so that’s what it is.” Julian slumped back in his seat. “You’re jealous!”

“What?”

“You’re jealous. You hate the attention because it disrupts your cosy little life where you never get to leave your bunker. You’re jealous because you suddenly have to share your life and your friends with the rest of the world.”

“Come on now, Julian,” Michael said with a trembling voice, “that’s just ridiculous. I’m not jealous.”

“I think the problem is,” I said, “that it all went so fast. It’s been only six weeks since the school anniversary. Our lives have been turned upside down and inside out, and we simply didn’t have the time to adjust. I’m not saying it can’t be done. Of course it can. One can get used to everything. But it takes time, and it may take different people different amounts of time. I think what we need to do is take a step back and take it all in, and I don’t think we can do that if we spend the next three weeks on the road hopping from one TV show to the next.”

“So what are you saying?” Julian asked, staring out of the window.

“I’m saying we probably should take a break and go home.”

“I see.” He looked at Michael. “Michael?”

He shook his head. “Sorry, Jules, but this isn’t working for me.”

“Tummy?”

Tummy was wriggling in his seat. “Uh, guys, sorry, but I’m a bit slow. What exactly am I voting on right now? Are we just talking about this America trip or are we talking about the end of the band?”

“No!” I frowned. “I mean, if we were ever to consider the end of Puerity we shouldn’t do it on board an airplane, all tired and cranky after a night in jail. That’s my whole point. I just want to take a break so we can think things through and sort it all out. So yeah, we’re talking about a break, not a break-up, right?”

I looked at Michael, waiting for some kind of affirmation that never came.

“Jolly good,” Tummy said, “because I sure as hell love what we’re doing and I don’t want it to end. Having said that, I don’t think we should pull this America thing through, at least not right now. Because there are two people here who are clearly not happy with this. And if we make them do it against their will,” he looked at Julian, “then none of us will enjoy this trip, because everybody will be cranky and in a foul mood all the time. I don’t want that, because I know you. I know all of you well enough to know that if we get on each other’s tits long enough, we’re all bound to say or do something incredibly stupid. Sooner or later someone’s going to snap and quit the band for good. I don’t want that. And that’s why I’m going to have to agree with Ginger and Michael on this one. We should take a break. Calm down, get a couple of good nights’ sleep and sort things out.”

Michael raised an eyebrow at me. I nodded back at him, silently acknowledging my surprise at how much sense Tummy was able to make when he wasn’t being loud and obnoxious.

Meanwhile, Julian was sitting in his seat, again staring out of the window at the clouds below. After a while he got up and started walking towards the front of the plane.

“Julian,” I said, “What are you doing?”

“I’m going to tell Tholen,” he said and closed the door behind him.

That was the last we saw of him.

The Gospel According to Michael – 12

Shortly after we had landed at La Guardia, Tholen made his way to the back of the aircraft to let us know what was going to happen next.

“Okay, guys,” he said, “we have to refuel and wait for a new flight crew. It’ll take about half an hour. You guys just stay put. They will take you back to Heathrow right away.”

“Take
us
back?” Ginger asked. “What about you then?”

“We will stay here and honour our media commitments.”

“
We
?”

Tholen nodded. “Julian and I. He decided that he didn’t want to miss this opportunity.”

“He’s going it alone? He can’t do that!” Ginger looked at me. “Can he do that?”

I shrugged. “He’s doing it.”

“Let me talk to him,” Ginger said to Tholen.

“I’m afraid he doesn’t want to talk to you—to any of you—at the moment. Besides, he’s already left the plane.”

I looked out of the window just in time to see Julian disappear in a big black limousine with tinted windows.

“Wow,” Tummy said. “He
is
pissed off all right.”

“Yeah well,” Tholen said. “I don’t blame him. You guys let him down big time. Unless you want to change your minds, that is. It’s not too late yet.”

We looked at each other, but we had made our decision.

“No,” I said. “We’re going home.”

“All right then. I’ll call your parents and let them know when they can pick you up from the airport. I’ll see you guys in a couple of weeks. I suggest you sort out whatever issues you have until then. Cheerio.”

Tholen left. A minute later I saw him get into the limousine where Julian was waiting for him, and they drove off.

“Can you believe that?” Ginger asked. “I never would have thought he’d do that. I thought he’d come back with us, be sulky for a couple of days and then move on.”

I shook my head. “I’m not sure if it was entirely his own idea.”

“You think Tholen talked him into it?”

“I think Julian didn’t need much talking into,” I said. “You have seen how eager he was to do this. What I’m saying is that going it alone sounds much more like it was Tholen’s idea rather than Julian’s. I mean, let’s face it, Tholen was never really all that interested in us anyway. All he ever cared about was Julian. We were just the entourage. He only signed Puerity as a band rather than just Julian because back then there was no way Julian would have dumped us. Back then! Sounds like it happened years ago. It’s only been a couple of weeks. Anyway, Tholen doesn’t need us. Perhaps if we were a proper band and we actually owned the rights to our music, he wouldn’t let us go so easily. But since all our songs are just copyright-free, rearranged classical pieces we are, from Tholen’s point of view, more or less useless. Nothing can stop him from hiring a bunch of musicians to replace us and do the exact same work that we used to do, and the lyrics are all Julian’s anyway. So yeah, for Tholen, working with Julian as a solo artist is much more attractive than working with Puerity as a band, because from his perspective we don’t contribute anything vital. We only make his life more difficult, because we are more likely to question his plans than Julian is. Julian is a stage whore to the extent that he either doesn’t see how Tholen is using him, or he simply doesn’t care. Julian just wants to be out there and sing and preach. He probably even thinks he is using Tholen, not the other way around.”

“So is this the end, then?” Tummy asked. “The end of us as a band?”

“To be fair,” Ginger said, “Tholen
did
ask us if we had changed our minds. We still could have gone along with it. And he said we’ll talk in a couple of weeks when they’re back home. I don’t think he’s completely given up on us yet.”

“He only asked us because he knew we’d say no. And in a couple of weeks, when Julian will have been a flaming success in America all on his own, he’ll be able to say, ‘Look, guys, you have seen that I don’t need you at all. I’ll still be happy to work with you, with Puerity as a group, but it has to be completely on
my
terms.’ We’ll have no leverage at all. All we can do is become his puppets and do whatever he tells us to do. We can either take it or leave it.”

“So this is it then,” Tummy said. “This is the end. We have a great future behind us.”

“I understand what you’re saying, Michael,” Ginger said, “but I don’t think this is something we should be talking about right now. Let’s just do what we said we were going to do. Go home. Take a break. Sort things out for ourselves. Everything will fall into place eventually.”

“Yeah,” I said although I wasn’t convinced.

Half an hour later a new flight crew arrived on board. They brought us sandwiches and fizzy drinks and a family size bag of crisps for Tummy.

“Rock’n’roll!”

The pilot came to us and introduced himself. He told us that the flight back to London would take about hour less than the flight into New York because of the jet stream. That’s when I first started missing Julian. He would have told us all about the Earth’s rotation and gravity and solar radiation, and how they all contributed to the jet stream.

We didn’t talk much on the flight back home. I guess we were all preoccupied with trying to come to terms with what had happened. I knew I was, and I found it particularly difficult. The moment we took off from La Guardia and headed back home, I felt a strange sensation, and it wasn’t the acceleration of the airplane or the pressure on my ears. I suddenly realized that I couldn’t remember when I had last been separated from Julian for more than just a few hours. Ever since I had first met him in nursery school, he had always been there, every single day. Even the two or three times when I had gone on vacation with my dad, the two weeks at the Costa del Sol, the weekend in Brighton, the trip to France, we had taken Julian with us because he was my best friend, and his mum, apart from her mental problems, only had a minimum wage cleaning job and couldn’t afford to take him anywhere. And now Julian was going to tour the United States for at least two or three weeks, and I was going home without him. It was as if an invisible umbilical cord that had tied us together for almost our entire lives had been cut; or rather: torn.

I was veering between hating Julian and feeling sorry for myself. How could he let this happen? How could he be so stubborn, so narcissistic? How could he choose a life of shallow fame over his friends, the only friends he had? It occurred to me that Julian was right. I was jealous. I hated that I had to share him with the rest of the world. I hated that the outside world was infringing on our friendship. All those hundreds of thousands of people who adored Julian and who were glued to his lips, they didn’t deserve him. They didn’t even know him, at least not the way I did. They didn’t know that their great big idol had wetted his bed until he was nine years old. They didn’t know that deep down inside the great, charismatic, eloquent Julian Monk who seemed to know everything, who seemed to have a solution to every problem, who didn’t shy back from confronting the leaders of the land, the leaders of the world even, was full of insecurities and self-doubt. Not even Ginger and Tummy knew that. I was the only person in the world that Julian frequently shared his darkest secrets with, his fears and his doubts, his feelings of inferiority and inadequacy, his feeling of being a lost soul wandering aimlessly through a starless night waiting for a dawn that never seemed to come. Nobody knew these things about Julian, not even his mother who was suffering from depression and anxiety herself. He never would have bothered her, worried her, with his own problems. I knew that because he had told me. He had told me everything. Except in the last couple of weeks, ever since we had made national and international headline news, he hadn’t told me much at all anymore. And it wasn’t just because we simply didn’t have the time and hardly ever got to spend time alone anymore. It was almost as if he had put me on hold to give the rest of the world the chance to catch up.

Yes, he was right. I was jealous. I hated that I had to share my best friend with a million strangers, and the longer I thought about it, the clearer it became to me that I had every reason to be jealous. Jealousy is the fear of losing someone to somebody else, and wasn’t that exactly what had just happened? I had lost Julian to a life of superficial fame and hordes of silly little girls who kept singing our songs without even understanding what they were singing and who kept wearing their school uniforms on weekends because that’s what Julian did. I hated them. I hated them all. I hated Julian and I hated the world. I was sulking like a five-year-old who had lost a game of Snakes and Ladders, and in a sudden impulse of passive-aggressive vengefulness I logged into our PayPal account, the one where all the payments from sales we generated with music downloads from our website still kept pouring in. We had a balance of 251,329.74 pounds, and without even taking the time to think about it I transferred 50,000 pounds each into the private accounts of Julian, Ginger, Tummy, and myself.

Two minutes later Ginger looked at me with eyes as big as saucers and held up her mobile. “Oi, sulky boy,” she said. “What’s this?”

“What?” I asked, pretending not to know what she was talking about.

“You just sent me 50,000 quid.”

“Oh, that. That’s your share of our earnings so far. Don’t spend it all at once, and remember to pay your taxes.”

Tummy immediately checked his own account. “Blimey,” he said when he saw the money.

Ginger kept staring at me, but she didn’t say anything or ask any more questions. She knew. It was all too obvious. She had called me ‘sulky boy’. She knew that the money was a signal, the clumsy way of a pathetic, helpless kid to say, ‘Here, take your bloody money, be happy with it and leave me alone!’  She also knew that this signal was aimed at Julian, not at her or Tummy. Tummy didn’t say anything either. He just sat there slouched in his seat looking miserable, probably thinking that this was the end of Puerity after all.

I didn’t even care anymore. I was too busy pitying myself.

The Gospel According to Tummy – 14