The Fame Factor

‘D’you think this is for you?’ he asked, holding the package just out of Zoë’s reach.

‘James, please…’ She grabbed at his long, muscular arm, stepping on a pile of junk mail and skidding to the floor.

‘You want this?’ he goaded, waving the brown box around as she crawled onto all fours.

Using the parcel, he led her onto the sofa where she collapsed on top of him, dizzy and panting.

‘Will you put it on?’ Zoë pleaded, as James unwrapped the disc, at arm’s length. The note enclosed, which he eventually relinquished, was written in neat, female handwriting – presumably belonging to Louis’s PA.

Hope you like. Will be meeting the Universal boys this week. Fingers crossed.

Louis

James reached back and switched on the hi-fi system. Stretching, he inserted the CD, raised an eyebrow seductively at Zoë and, with excruciating slowness, moved his finger across to the Play button.

Zoë sat up, straddling her boyfriend and starting to undo the buttons of his shirt. She wanted to hear the tracks but she also wanted a piece of James. His eyes were filled with mischief and she could feel his hand – the hand that wasn’t controlling the stereo – working its way up her thigh.

The introduction to ‘Delirious’ started blasting out of the numerous speakers and she suddenly stopped. She could feel the colour drain from her cheeks.

‘Oh my God,’ she said, feeling instantly sober.

Fleetingly, she wondered why he’d put that track first, when ‘Sensible Lies’ was so much better, but there were bigger things to worry about.

It was like being punched in the stomach. She couldn’t think about anything – couldn’t articulate a response. All she could do was listen to this…this sound that was filling the lounge.

‘It’s fucking disco,’ she spat, when the song got into its groove.

If James replied, she didn’t hear him. Her ears were focusing on the clinical beat. She waited for Ellie’s chords to come in, then the vocals. It was unrecognisable. Like listening to somebody else’s music.

‘Fuck!’ she yelled, as her own voice sang back at her above the sanitised riff. She wanted to cry. ‘What’ve they done?!’

The song finished and, transfixed, Zoë waited mutely to hear the next butchered track.

‘Zoë?’

Zoë listened to the mutilated rendition of ‘Sensible Lies’.

‘Zoë,’ James said again, propping himself up on the sofa and pulling her firmly towards him.

‘What?’ she asked, distracted by a cheesy key-change that had been inserted just before the second chorus. It was unbelievable what they’d done.

‘I said, this is amazing.’

Zoë looked at him and frowned. They both seemed to have sobered up now but James wasn’t making any sense. ‘What, amazingly bad?’

‘No,’ he said, pushing himself up on the sofa so that she was sitting in his lap. ‘Listen to it.’

In silence, they listened to the instrumental that preceded the final verse – ordinarily, Zoë’s favourite part of the song.

‘Seriously,’ said James, wrapping his arms round her waist and squeezing her against his body. ‘Imagine you’ve never heard of this band.’

Zoë closed her eyes in anguish, letting her head roll back on James’s shoulder. She had never heard of this band. It wasn’t hers. This was not the sound of Dirty Money.

Enveloped in James’s arms, swaying gently to the unfamiliar music, Zoë tried to force herself to hear it afresh. She heard the pulsing beat and the harmonies and the catchy tune…

The song finished and the final track came on. ‘Run Boy Run’ was one of their most uplifting numbers. Zoë tilted her face upwards to tell James that he was right, that she was too obsessed with the band, that she was sorry for sometimes neglecting her commitment to him, that she really was grateful for his unwavering support. But she didn’t get a chance, as James’s lips were pressing against hers.

11 (#ulink_97ba65b1-0e04-5c88-9962-9345a64c51b0)

The phone rang for the second time in as many minutes.

‘It’s Brian again.’

Zoë’s typing became even more frantic.

‘The email still hasn’t come through.’

‘Uh…Really? That’s weird.’

She scanned the main paragraph, trying to stem her internal panic. In fact, there was nothing weird about the situation at all. It was simply that Zoë had failed to complete the audit in time and was now shifting the blame onto the mysterious workings of the client email server.

‘You did cc me this time, didn’t you?’

‘Yep,’ she replied, quickly typing Brian’s name in the cc box. She hadn’t wanted to lie, but the client had called her this morning and launched into a long story about firewall issues at their end and it had slowly dawned on Zoë that they were assuming she’d sent the audit the previous week, and…well, it had just seemed simpler not to make the correction.

Brian grunted. ‘Very strange. I’ll get onto IT.’

‘No,’ she said quickly, knowing that even the cretins employed by the Chase Waterman IT department would spot that no email had been sent from her machine. ‘I’ll do it. I think it might be something to do with my computer anyway.’ She checked the message one last time and pressed Send. ‘Oh, it seems to be doing something now.’

‘I’ll leave it with you,’ he barked.

Zoë slumped back in her seat and let out a heavy sigh. She didn’t like disappointing clients, but it seemed to be happening more and more these days. Perhaps it was because of her workload. Nobody else seemed to have so many projects on the go at once – or at least, nobody else seemed to struggle with the volume of work. But then…She leaned forward again and squinted to check that the email had been sent. Nobody else spent hours every week taking calls from promoters, liaising with venues, updating websites or slipping out to write songs. Nobody else came in to work with a raging headache, their eyes bloodshot from the late nights in sweat-filled bars.

Maybe it wasn’t possible to combine the two careers, Zoë conceded. Not that the band was a career, exactly. She didn’t know the exact definition, but she had a feeling that ‘career’ had something to do with making money. So far, if you added everything up over the years, Dirty Money had probably lost them a few thousand pounds.

Her mobile phone started buzzing its way along the desk, flashing Unknown number. She snatched it up, preparing to explain to the client, yet again, that the email was on its way.

‘Hiiiiii.’

‘Louis?’ she checked. This was surely the call they’d been waiting for.

‘Yeah! How you doin’? What’re you up to?’

Zoë pushed back her chair and sloped off towards the lift lobby. Good news or bad news, this wasn’t a conversation she wanted to have in front of her colleagues.

‘I’m…I’m at work,’ she replied, not entirely sure whether Louis expected an answer or whether it was simply one of those rhetorical Americanisms.

‘Oh yeah.’ Either Louis hadn’t wanted an answer or he had simply forgotten that most people, at half past eleven on a Wednesday morning, were at work. ‘Where’s that then?’