The Fame Factor

Zoë shook her head. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she chided. Kate was smart and hard-working. Although Zoë had never seen her in a work context, she could imagine her being good at her role. What was lacking, however, was self-confidence. ‘What can’t you do?’

‘They want me to stand up and present!’

Zoë looked at her. ‘What d’you mean, present? Like, in a meeting?’

‘Yes!’ cried Kate, highly distressed. ‘My boss is this high-flying guy called Mark and he’s insisting I do it, but I can’t! I just can’t!’

Rocking onto the balls of her feet, her knees in new leagues of agony, Zoë reached for Kate’s hand. ‘How many people?’ she asked.

‘Four or five – maybe six. They want me to stand up in front of clients.’

Zoë looked at her. ‘Kate, you’re about to go on stage in front of two hundred sweaty, jeering louts. Why are you worried about a couple of clients?’

Kate baulked as though she couldn’t believe Zoë was making the comparison. ‘That’s totally different! Out there, I’m just playing an instrument. I can hide behind my bass. It’s impossible not to look good with a bass. You just rock up, play the notes and walk out. There’s no talking or answering questions…’

Try being lead singer, thought Zoë. Working the crowds was the most thrilling part of her role, but it was also fucking terrifying.

‘I could never do what you do,’ said Kate, as if reading her mind. ‘I wish I could, but I’m just not like that.’

Unable to feel her legs any more, Zoë pushed herself up from the floor and squeezed Kate’s shoulder.

‘Look,’ she said, looking down at her friend. ‘We’ve all got things we don’t like about ourselves.’ She hesitated for a moment, thinking about her own cowardice. She was too weak to even talk to her own family about her ambitions. ‘You’ve just got to live with them. And to be honest, most people wouldn’t even notice your flaws.’

Kate looked up with a grateful smile.

‘Hey, guys!’ Shannon bounded through the door, her mate in tow with the camcorder haphazardly slung over his shoulder. ‘Say something for the camera!’

Zoë smiled wearily. ‘Hi.’

Kate raised a shaky hand.

The cameraman gave up on them and swivelled back to Shannon, who was tipping back the remains of her pint. She swallowed, then looked around. ‘Where’s Ellie?’

Zoë looked at her watch. ‘Good point.’ The camcorder spun back to her. ‘She’s cutting it fine.’

‘Probably gazing at the Hackney skyline with Mr Pot-head,’ said Shannon. The recording equipment swooped back across the room.

As Shannon’s mate sought out the next piece of footage, the door swung open again and Ellie drifted in.

‘Hi, guys!’

‘Ellie, this is Gavin,’ Shannon explained, as the camcorder was pushed into her face.

There was a bang on the door. ‘When you’re ready, girls!’ It was Eamonn’s cousin, the promoter.

Zoë tried to hurry the group along, shooing Gavin back into the crowd and hoping that Ellie’s missed sound-check wasn’t going to matter. There had only been one gig where they’d had to stop playing to ask the sound engineer to turn on her amp. It wasn’t that Ellie didn’t care about the gigs; she was as desperate as everyone else to make a success of the band. She just couldn’t get the hang of time management.

With a quick nod, Zoë led them out from the darkness. After several hundred performances together, they knew the routine. She walked to the centre spot, adjusting her guitar strap as the noise rose up from the room around them.

‘Get ya kit off!’

‘Girl-band!’

‘Tits out!’

One of the Australian revellers in the corner stood up and lobbed a beer-soaked flag at the stage, before toppling sideways and being removed from the premises in the crook of Eamonn’s arm.

Zoë looked round at the girls, smiling with anticipation. They were used to this. With an all-female cast, they had to work doubly hard to prove themselves, particularly in a place like The Mad Cow.

They kicked off with their rockiest number, ‘Delirious’, Zoë pouring her heart into it, watching as the hecklers slowly lost their nerve. A rush of pure, concentrated emotion coursed through her. It was moments like this that Zoë lived for. Offstage, she had an ordinary existence, but on stage, she became extraordinary. It no longer mattered who was listening. It didn’t even matter if nobody was listening. She was surrounded by and absorbed in the music, feeling more alive than she could ever feel in the day. No stomach-churning fairground ride, no skydiving trip, no surround-sound cinema experience could ever match the exhilaration she felt as she emptied her lungs into that microphone.

By the third song, the doubters were few and far between, but Zoë knew they’d be silenced by what was to come. Ellie’s guitar solo had that effect. Complete strangers had been known to throw themselves onto the stage, likening her nimble fingers to those of the masters, Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix. It was at times like this, when Ellie disappeared into a frenzy of movement and sound, drowning them in the beauty of her improvised tune, that the band came into its own.

A few weeks ago, they had featured on an obscure page of the Kerrang! website thanks to Shannon’s brief relationship with the online editor. The review summed up their sound perfectly: Loud and hypnotic, with an edgy disco beat beneath sweet, twisted lyrics, Dirty Money combine elements of The Strokes and New Order with frothy but powerful feminine vocals. When she sang, she could see those words dancing in front of her eyes: Loud. Edgy. Powerful. That was Dirty Money. They were pop, but as another, less renowned reviewer had once put it, ‘more Killers than Kylie’.

‘That was amazing!’ yelled Gavin, beating his way through the crowds afterwards, still shouldering the camera.

Zoë thanked him quickly, her mind already on the bigger picture. ‘Did you get it all?’

He frowned at her. ‘What d’you mean, all?’

Zoë’s throat tightened. ‘All…the songs. The gig.’

Gavin stared gormlessly for a moment, his mouth hanging open a little. ‘Oh my God…I didn’t realise you wanted the whole thing. I just got – you know, the first one? Where the guys were doing that thing with the flag?’

Zoë closed her eyes, cursing herself for letting Shannon take responsibility for something so important. They needed this demo DVD.

It was only when she opened her eyes and spotted Shannon, suppressing a ridiculous smirk, that she realised that the joke was on her.

‘Oh.’ She smiled sheepishly. ‘Very funny.’

6 (#ulink_dda75ffb-0aab-51e5-99aa-1dec5509c8af)

‘Dear, oh dear,’ muttered Brian, hovering over Zoë’s desk and grimly shaking his bald head.

Quickly navigating away from the band’s MySpace page, Zoë looked up and forced a smile.

‘What…’ said Brian, bending down and scooping up a handful of papers from her desk, ‘is this?’

‘I think, um…’ Zoë stammered. ‘I think that’s last year’s audit for…’

‘Clutter!’ he screamed, triumphantly. ‘That is what this is.’ He let the print-outs slither out of his hand and then, rather unhelpfully, picked off some random pages from other piles to make sure the paperwork was completely out of order.

‘It’s all organised in—’

‘Ah!’ he cried again, making sure most of the department could hear. ‘Organised clutter! Is that what it is?’

Zoë sighed quietly, watching as her boss picked off yet another sheet and put it down somewhere else. She knew what this was about. It wasn’t just Brian trying to annoy her – although he was trying to annoy her. This was about the new rule that had just come into force across Chase Waterman.