by Lindsey Kelk
What would mine and Patrick’s home look like? His flat was so him, his personality indelibly stamped on every surface. I hadn’t decorated my flat in DC, never quite sure how long I was staying, and the main style reference for my room in our shared house before that was ‘I bought it at Ikea like everyone else’. Maybe we wouldn’t stay in London. Maybe we’d travel before we settled down. Either way, I was happy for him to take the lead on the decorating. Or maybe I could ask John who had designed that upstairs room in the bar. As much as I hated the pretentious steampunk, Insta-friendly downstairs, upstairs was beautiful, a perfect balance of classic and contemporary, masculine and feminine. I wondered if his wife had done the decorating or if they’d used a professional. Or maybe he’d done it himself. I really had no way of knowing.
Running the teapot under the tap, I thought back to our conversation last night. A crossword puzzle with the wrong clues. What was that supposed to mean?
‘Not that it matters,’ I said out loud over the singing teapot.
‘What did you say?’ Lucy called back, twisting as far as she could in her seat. ‘I zoned out for a minute. Baby brain.’
‘It’s nothing,’ I replied, smiling back at her and wiping the thought of John from my mind. ‘Absolutely nothing at all.’
CHAPTER TWENTY
Having spent what felt like hundreds of hours watching his livestreams and his YouTube videos, I had gleaned a few facts about my new co-worker before I set out in Mum’s Mini Cooper on Monday morning for a meeting at Chateau Snazzlechuff. I knew he was fourteen, I knew he had more money than I would ever have in my entire life and I knew his followers worshipped the ground he mostly seemed to sit on. Every time I checked, he was online, playing some game live for all his followers to watch. They didn’t even play along, they just watched him. It was bizarre. Mostly, I was amazed his legs hadn’t wasted away altogether so his body could send more precious resources to his thumbs.
After what felt like an age of tootling along the motorway, Google Maps led me out of six lanes of traffic and into a small village. I kept watch, looking for the mega mansions that usually went with the kind of money Snazz was bringing in, but there was nothing. Just semi-detached new builds and a surprisingly large number of supermarkets. Just when I seemed to be running out of village, the map took me into a perfectly normal-looking cul-de-sac. At least, it looked perfectly normal until I pulled up to park in front of number 18. A sea of teenagers were milling around a tall metal gate, none of them actually talking to each other, all of them staring at their phones.
‘At least I know I’m in the right place,’ I muttered, climbing out of Mum’s car and beeping the alarm.
‘They won’t let you in,’ one boy said as I pressed the buzzer on the gate. He wiped his nose along the sleeve of his white training jacket, a knock-off version of the one Snazz had worn the first time I met him. ‘They don’t let no one in.’
‘What are you all doing here?’ I asked, ignoring the tallest of the group who was either winking at me or needed to see an optometrist. I very much hoped it was the latter. ‘Shouldn’t you be in school?’
They all began to snort and laugh, kicking stones with their very white trainers. No wonder Jo had started going out with girls.
‘OK, OK, get out the way,’ I told them, ignoring the muttered assessments of my tits, and pressing the buzzer again. A clicking noise, a sigh and then, very suddenly, the gate opened just a crack. I breathed in, squeezing myself through to a chorus of ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ as each of the teens began snapping my picture.
‘Get your arse inside,’ Veronica barked from the front door, cigarette hanging out of her brightly lipsticked mouth as I bolted up the path. She stubbed it out on the side of the house and called out to the assembled teenagers at the gate. ‘We’ve got a limited edition drop going live on the shop in seven minutes,’ she screeched. ‘We aren’t announcing it, you’re the only ones that know!’
They silenced themselves with a collective gasp, lifting their phones to their faces as their attention turned from me to whatever delights awaited in the Snazzlechuff shop.
‘What’s the drop?’ I asked, slipping inside, door slamming behind me.
‘Nothing.’ She tossed the half-smoked cigarette butt in a huge bin full of them. ‘But they’ll refresh the website all day before they risk missing out on something so you probably won’t make an appearance on Reddit for at least another couple of hours.’
I frowned at the thought and wiped my shoes on the doormat before following her through the house. From the outside, it looked like a very normal semi-detached house and I assumed once upon a time, it had been. But at some point, it had become some sort of Premiership-footballer-meets-Justin-Bieber Franken-house. The normal-looking front was just the tip of the house iceberg. Gazing around at the bizarre architecture, it appeared number 18 and its semi-detached twin had been knocked into one giant house and extended out at the back, creating an absolutely humungous downstairs area, filled with oversized sofas, armchairs and beanbags bigger than a king-sized bed. And the televisions. So. Many. Televisions. The largest of them all hung on the wall, twice the size of a school blackboard.
Did schools still have blackboards? I wondered. Didn’t seem as though Snazzlechuff was the right kid to ask.
All the soft furnishings were, against all kinds of common sense, stark, bright white, and all the technology was black, giving the room the air of a very fancy chessboard-slash-asylum as designed by Kris Jenner, a feeling only enhanced by the fact that literally everything was either padded or had rounded edges. The effect was at once calming and unnerving. I couldn’t hurt myself in here whether I wanted to or not, and the longer I was here, the more appealing the idea became.
‘Coffee?’ Veronica asked, pushing me through the millionaire’s soft-play centre and into the next room. A considerably smaller but no less swish kitchen.
‘Thanks,’ I nodded, taking a seat at an island in the middle of the room. ‘This is quite a house.’
She answered with a cackle. ‘Isn’t it though? They bought it when he first started making money and now they don’t want to leave, so they just keep adding on and adding on. I’ve told them it’s fucking ridiculous but they won’t listen to me. When they want to sell, who’s going to buy it? A million-quid mansion in the middle of a bloody cul-de-sac and only half a mile from the prison and the dog track. They’ll be queuing up …’
‘Maybe they could buy the neighbours out,’ I joked. ‘Take over the entire street.’
‘They’ve offered but no one wants to sell,’ she said plainly. ‘All the neighbours are trying to cash in on him one way or another. Sad, really.’
I gave a low whistle, for the first time feeling oddly sorry for the junior millionaire.
The end of the room was made of glass and I looked out on the back garden. An assortment of dirt bikes, scooters, Segways, football nets and bouncy castles all stood sentry, patiently waiting to be played with. It had to be every boy’s dream.
‘Don’t know why his mum keeps ordering all that shit,’ Veronica commented, following my gaze. ‘He never goes outside. I try to make him go out for his lunch but he won’t have it.’
‘Even prisoners get at least one hour a day,’ I replied. ‘What sort of state is his skin in under that helmet?’
‘He makes Darth Vader look healthy,’ she said with a shrug. ‘It’d be easier to flay him alive than it would be to peel him out that gaming chair. I’m surprised his mother hasn’t started giving him sponge baths.’
I pulled a very sour face that she caught before I could look away.
‘This job is not without its challenges,’ she added as she dropped a coffee pod into the Nespresso machine. ‘Which leads me to wonder, how come you want to spend your life putting more of his nonsense out into the world?’
‘His nonsense?’ I repeated with a smile. ‘That’s a funny way to talk about your own client.’
Veronica opened the enormous American-styl
e refrigerator and fished around for some milk, holding it up for my approval.
‘I used to represent a different kind of talent,’ she clarified as I nodded at the semi-skimmed option. ‘Photographers, makeup artists, stylists, that kind of shit, but now there’s no money in that. Someone needs a makeup artist, they don’t call me, they go on Instagram and see who has the most likes. Same with a photographer. People think knowing how to use filters is the same as knowing how to take a great photo. Photography is an art. Don’t come to me demanding ten grand a day until you’ve got a herniated disc in your neck from holding up a fucking reflector eighteen hours a day for five years. No one wants to learn the skills, no one wants to pay their dues. Drives me fucking insane.’
‘So you decided to work with a grizzled old veteran like Snazzlechuff?’
She snorted out a laugh that turned into a prolonged smoker’s cough.
‘He might be a little twat but he is talented,’ she replied, pressing a hand against her chest as she finished her hacking. ‘Admittedly, that talent is not curing cancer or even being able to remember to shower twice a day, but at least it’s honest. Someone was going to take him on, I figured it might as well be me. Every wanker with a pair of AirPods thinks he’s an agent these days and they’re all out to take advantage, lining their own pockets rather than looking after the client. I am actually attempting to look after the little bastard.’
Who would have believed it? Underneath it all, Agent Veronica had a heart.
‘But you didn’t answer my question,’ she continued, pushing my coffee across the island. ‘What’s gone so wrong that working with my little shitstain is the best you can do with your life?’
Or maybe not.
‘I think all kinds of stories have value,’ I said, clinging to something I once thought was true. ‘Snazz has a perspective to share that no one else does. There aren’t many people in the world in his position.’
‘Thank fuck,’ she replied flatly.
‘In all honesty, the job came to me but I’m really glad it did,’ I said, trying to sound convincing. I wrapped my hands around the mug, freezing cold in my jeans and T-shirt, even though it was still scorching outside. Snazz wanted you to know his house had air conditioning and he was not afraid to use it. ‘I was in radio before this, producing news shows, culture shows. I worked on a show called The Book Report, you might have heard of that?’
Veronica locked her steely eyes on mine before bursting out into a throaty cackle that, against all the odds, I found endearing.
‘You’re funny,’ she gasped. ‘I like funny. No, Ros, I haven’t got time to read a book, let alone listen to a podcast about reading books. Last novel I read was that one about that daft slag who had everyone thinking her thick husband killed her but then it turned out she staged it all because she was a mental.’
I digested her capsule review for just a moment.
‘Do you mean Gone Girl?’
‘That’s the one,’ she nodded. ‘What a waste of fucking time. Went on a mad rampage just because she didn’t like taking it up the arse. Just dump him, love, there was no need.’
‘I don’t remember that being her entire motivation but I hear what you’re saying,’ I replied weakly. We’d interviewed Gillian Flynn on The Book Report and I wished we’d had Veronica’s capsule review back then. ‘Maybe you ought to have your own podcast instead of Snazz.’
Veronica clacked her long, blood-red nails on the kitchen top.
‘Sad truth is more people will take an hour out of their day to listen to Snazz and his mates chatting shit than they would to listen to a forty-eight-year-old woman with something useful to say,’ she declared with a resigned shrug. ‘The world’s fucked.’
‘You never know until you try,’ I said, avoiding the sad fact that she was probably right by checking the time on my phone. ‘Is the young master ready for me?’
‘He is,’ she said with a deep breath in. ‘But I’m not sure what you’re hoping to get out of him. PodPad came to us with the idea of doing a podcast, he said he was into it and so I did the deal, but I’ve got to tell you, you’re fighting an uphill battle. Don’t take this the wrong way but I think they’d have done better pairing him with someone who didn’t mind doing all the work themselves.’
‘I’ll do the work,’ I said quickly. ‘I’m not afraid of hard graft.’
‘That’s not really what I meant,’ she replied, leading me back through the designer asylum. One Flew Over the Kardashian’s Nest. ‘They should have given him a producer who wanted to lead the show and just have him there for colour. You don’t seem like someone who’s interested in the limelight.’
‘Oh,’ I nodded as we passed what looked suspiciously like a baby shark, darting around a fish tank bigger than my first car. ‘Yeah, that’s not really my thing. My job is to make everyone else look great, in an ideal world no one even knows I’m there.’
‘You’re a dying breed,’ Veronica said, voice full of regret. We climbed the stairs rather than taking the glass-encased lift and took a sharp left at the top of the landing.
‘Just out of interest,’ I said, following her down a hallway covered in photos of Snazz wearing assorted masks and posing with every celebrity you could think of, from A-list movie stars to at least four different heads of state. ‘How did the two of you meet?’
‘Me and Snazz?’ She pulled a packet of cigarettes out of her pocket and knocked one loose into her hand. ‘He’s my godson. His mum’s my best mate.’
I thought she couldn’t shock me any more than she already had. I was wrong.
‘I’m more or less his second mum. Sharon has her ups and downs, not for me to go into, but yeah, I’ve known him since he was born. The boy’s a nightmare but he’s my nightmare,’ she said as we stopped in front of a black lacquered door. ‘Anyway, enjoy your chat. Snazz, get your hand out your pants, Ros is here to see you.’
She threw the door open, a cloud of Lynx body spray, Wotsits and feet blasting onto the landing.
‘I’ll see you back downstairs in two minutes,’ Veronica said. ‘I’ll have a bottle open.’
‘Thanks but I drove,’ I replied, steeling my senses.
‘Didn’t say it was for you,’ she said, sparking up as she went. ‘Oh, and don’t touch anything that looks sticky.’
Words to live by.
‘Knock knock,’ I said as I entered the room. People always say women turn into their mothers but my default setting was definitely more embarrassing dad.
I was expecting some sort of Las Vegas hotel suite crossed with the Playboy Mansion, meets the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, but Snazz’s bedroom was just that. A bedroom. Slightly larger than the usual teenage boy’s den but, compared to the rest of the house, peculiar only in how average it was. The curtains were almost entirely closed, parted just enough for a slender crack of sunshine to slice the room in two with a full company of dust particles dancing in the shaft of light. I stepped carefully, trying to avoid treading on abandoned Funko Pop boxes, takeaway containers and carton after carton after carton of Ribena. The boy had a problem and it was blackcurrant flavoured.
‘Hi Snazz, it’s Ros from PodPad. I’m here to talk about the podcast.’
He had his back to me as he sat in the far corner of the room in an enormous black chair. An oversized head, complete with pair of pointed ears, was silhouetted against three different active screens. Was I meeting a teenager or a cat-human hybrid Bond villain? It was impossible to say. Over his bed was a built-in cabinet that stretched all the way to the ceiling, full of different animal heads. Not disconcerting at all.
‘Not interrupting, am I?’ I asked, looking around for somewhere to sit. Unmade bed? Nope. Beanbag covered in clothes so dirty they were stiff? Definitely not. The floor? I tried to find a square foot of carpet that looked like it wouldn’t give me a rash. Well, they did say sitting was the new cancer.
‘No, I’m not streaming,’ he squawked as the three screens froze all at once. I nod
ded as though I had any idea what he was talking about. ‘Veronica said you wanted to talk about the pod stuff.’
‘Yep,’ I replied, slowly edging my way towards the window and reaching out for the curtain. This might have been enough daylight for him but, as someone who prized their eyesight and didn’t want to drive home with a migraine, I needed at least a little more. ‘Is it OK if I open the curtains a bit?’
With a trademark teenage sigh, he slumped down in his chair before spinning it around to face me.
‘Whatever,’ he groaned. ‘But, like, stay out the window or they’ll get a photo of you.’
I peeked around the curtain, expecting an army of paparazzi, but there was nothing out of the ordinary.
‘How will anyone get a photo from inside your bedroom?’
‘Telephoto lenses,’ he replied as though it was perfectly ordinary. ‘The neighbours let them hang out in their bedrooms and take pictures.’
‘That is extremely disturbing,’ I replied as I snatched the curtains closed as fast as I could. ‘Is that why you wear your mask in your room?’
He scratched at his neck, right beneath the opening of his furry guinea pig head.
‘Yeah,’ he squeaked, tossing a complicated-looking controller onto his bed, accidentally choreographing another dust ballet. ‘And, you know, means I haven’t got to shave.’
Hmmm. I wasn’t so sure he needed to worry too much about that.
‘So, about the podcast,’ I said. ‘What I’m thinking is, we pair you with a couple of co-hosts, people you’re comfortable with, and we pick a different game each week to play and discuss. Could be an old game, could be a new one, maybe a game that’s famously considered to be bad?’
The guinea pig clasped his hands together in his lap.
‘Like what game though?’
‘I don’t know.’ I desperately tried to remember the names of any of the games I’d literally heard of for the first time over the last seven days. ‘Grand Theft Auto? Halo?’
He giggled, the mask bobbing back and forth on his narrow shoulders. ‘They aren’t bad, they’re iconic.’