by Emma Grey
One of the girls is particularly insistent. She grabs the loud-hailer from her friend. ‘ANGUS MARSDEN!’ she slurs. ‘ANGUS! Marry me?’
He screws up his face at the others, still hidden from view. Go away.
‘That blonde one is pretty keen, Gus!’ Zach observes. ‘Pretty fit, too. She’s clambering up on the bow of the yacht . . . What does she think this is? Titanic?’
He doesn’t want to know. He is no Leo DiCaprio. He’s sure as hell not saving her if she . . .
‘She’s fallen in!’ Zach yells, urgently. ‘Or maybe she jumped!’
Angus sits bolt upright now and looks at the expanse of water between the two yachts. There’s a loud hailer bobbing around on the surface but nothing else. Nothing! The girls on the other boat are becoming hysterical. Tell me they’re not going to jump in after her, he thinks. Where is she? Where is anyone else? Water police? Yacht personnel? Leo?
He yells frantically at the skipper of their yacht, who mutters something vague about OH&S regulations and protocol. Says it’s really the skipper on the other yacht’s responsibility . . . Angus can’t believe it! Precious moments pass, and she still doesn’t surface. There’s no time to think. Firing entirely on adrenaline, Angus rips off his shirt.
‘Angus! This is not your responsibility …’ Xavier says strongly.
It doesn’t seem to be anybody’s responsibility, does it! Angus is not about to stand by and watch a fan drown. Not when her last words were ‘marry me!’
He stands on the edge and dives in.
It’s cold in the water and he can see her, struggling. She’s clearly not a competent swimmer. Or she’s had too much to drink to know what she’s doing. He reaches her quickly, loops his arm over her shoulder, across her chest and under her arm and drags her to the surface. Even though she’s light, it’s still hard work, because she’s floundering so much. They break through the water, both gasping for air.
She splashes madly, grabbing his shoulders and pushing him under. He pushes up again and tells her to calm down. Then he looks up at her yacht — packed with girls, all squealing and swooning about the fact that he just dived in like that — phones out taking photos of the rescue.
There’s no way he’s getting mixed up in all of that. He’ll take her to his yacht and get her to dry land before anything else goes wrong. He swims her over to the stainless steel ladder on the side of the band’s yacht and helps her onto it. Reuben is at the top, reaching down ready to pull her up. She’s barely able to negotiate the steps. No life jacket, of course. Angus wonders if she has any idea how close she came to drowning just then.
He watches while she fails to put her feet where they’re meant to be on the ladder. With a hand on her waist, he steadies her while she finds her footing. More squealing and swooning and photos from the other boat. Finally, he helps her clamber up to where Rueben can reach her and haul her into the boat.
Safely back on the deck, Angus tosses her a towel. She’s shaking and so is he. It’s probably delayed shock. ‘Don’t EVER do that again, okay?’ he says, barely able to contain his irritation. She bursts into tears, mascara running everywhere, and he feels bad for snapping, but she risked her life. Over him! She could be dead! They’ve never had anything like this happen with a fan before. He’s completely spooked by what a close call it was.
Reuben instructs the skipper to take them back to the marina, while Angus grabs a towel and dries his chest. He can see the girl grasping for the phone she doesn’t have because it’s probably on the other yacht with her stuff. This is one photo she won’t be getting.
Minutes later, coming in towards the jetty, it’s clear that it’s already packed with media. The girls on the other boat must have tipped everyone off.
Angus looks at their passenger, lying drunkenly across the seat in a bikini, salty blonde hair plastered against the streaks of black mascara across her face. Then he looks again at the media pack on the jetty, cameras trained on the boat — hungry for a story. How are they going to handle this? Obviously, it won’t look good for the band, but they’re used to that. What they can’t do is expose this girl to the world’s media in that state. ‘Where do you live?’ he asks, propping her up on the seat.
She manages to slur out the address of a share-house which she says is near Sydney University. Xavier calls to make sure one of their cars is waiting. Angus puts his T-shirt on and passes her the check shirt that he’d been wearing over it. Reuben gives her a wet towel to wipe her face with, which she does — but it only makes the mascara streaks worse. She puts the shirt on but can’t focus properly on the buttons, so leaves it gaping open. Angus does up a couple of buttons for her while he lectures her about how they’re going to manage this: ‘Don’t say a single word to the media, all right? We’re just going to walk straight through. Can you walk?’
He drags her to her feet and she clutches at him unsteadily. He helps her step off the boat, tries to shield her face and the two of them are shepherded through the gallery of cameras by security guards, towards the waiting SUV. She falls into it and he slams the door and runs around to the opposite side. He can’t just put her into a car and hope for the best, even though that’s exactly what the others suggested he do. He needs to make sure she gets home before the band is implicated in something even worse than the stories that are no doubt being manufactured right now about this whole ordeal.
She falls asleep almost as soon as the car drives off, her head flopping onto Angus’s shoulder. The glamorous life of a pop star, he thinks sarcastically. He checks his phone to assess the damage. It’s pretty bad. Photos from all angles of him and this ‘mystery blonde’, in the water, on the ladder, in the boat. Oh, great — a telephoto lens even captured him doing up the shirt buttons for her, except it looks like he’s undoing them. This is exactly the kind of media scenario that he hates.
Angus and the driver ensure the girl is safely home and he decides he needs some time on his own before he goes back to the hotel and wrangles the fans and media that are permanently camped outside. There are six missed calls from the band’s publicist and another three from their manager, Michael. He’s really not in the mood. Not for any of it.
‘I just need twenty minutes, Kev,’ he says, pulling his hat down low over his face. He walks for a bit, playing out one of his favourite fantasies — imagining he’s just a regular uni student. What the world doesn’t know is that he is one. He’s studying English literature part-time by distance Ed in London; but it’s just not the same as being there.
There are some days, like today, where he almost wants to give all of this up. The fame. The success. All of it. The best part of his life — Unrequited — can also be the worst part. If it wasn’t for the way he loves the music . . .
‘Have you seen the Who magazine Instagram share?’ Reuben texts. ‘If not, you need to.’
No, he doesn’t. He really doesn’t care.
Walking past a performing arts centre a few minutes later, he sees a vending machine through the windows in the foyer. There’s no one else around, so he drops some coins into the slot, grabs a can and has a bit of a snoop in the quietness.
He sips the soft drink and looks at performance posters on the walls. They’re doing Legally Blonde. Something about the show’s logo looks familiar, but he can’t think why.
Somewhere in the centre, there’s a girl rehearsing a song. Actually, no. She’s not rehearsing it. She’s writing it. He can tell by the way she’s experimenting with chords and melodies, stopping and starting.
I’ve got the major role in a stick figure theatre
My very own papier mache puppet show
I’m just a cardboard cutout cartoon character
Progress through this plastic world is slow.
And I’m living in two dimensions
And it’s just not right
I need shadow and light in my life
I’m living in two dimensions
In black and white
Show me the light.
Those lyrics. Is she in his head? She’s got a good voice, although he can tell, even from this distance, that she doesn’t believe that yet. He remembers feeling exactly the same way himself, more recently than anyone would imagine. He looks at his watch. There’s time. He follows the sound upstairs, and leans against the wall outside the studio where she’s playing, just listening. This song is seriously good.
I’m a faded photograph on the shelf
In a family portrait with strangers
Sitting here in the dust all by myself
Never trying new things, so I’m never in danger.
A few more bars into the melody and he slides down the wall and sits on the floor. Mesmerised. The more he hears, the more he realises the song is really something. She’s stuck on a particular chord and he knows exactly the key change she needs, right there . . . Also, wouldn’t it lend itself to a duet?
It’s all he can do not to barge in and deliver the chord, the key change and a male perspective on the lyrics, but he doesn’t want to scare her off. She’ll either be some closeted uni student who’s never heard of him (which would be grand!) or she’ll recognise him instantly, and his cover will be blown. He does not need another girl splashing posts about him all over social media today.
In any case, after the fiasco on the harbour he doesn’t have the energy to boost some rookie songwriter’s confidence. He should be focused on Elle and how to explain to her via Twitter that those images she’s probably seen by now of a blonde girl all over him on a yacht today are really not as bad as they appear.
Outside, a few minutes later, Kev is standing there with his phone and car keys. He had to park in a multi-storey complex down the road.
‘Auditioning for Legally Blonde?’ he drawls when Angus wanders out of the centre.
‘There was a girl . . .’
Kev laughs. ‘Do you ever give it a rest, Angus? Which one now?’
‘This one’s a songwriter. And this is just about the music. I didn’t even speak to her.’
Kev looks warily at the expression on Angus’s face. ‘Maybe you should have.’
Has his bodyguard appointed himself chief adviser on All Things Love? He is not about to take relationship advice from someone who spends all day reading crime novels in the car and placing horse-racing bets online. Even if Kev is right.
Maybe Angus should have spoken to the singer. After all, her song is still in his head. He can’t shake it. He could have told her she’s good. And to let go and really enjoy it.
He wants to play with her music! Not just play with it. Finish writing it.
In fact, the compulsion to do that is almost greater than the simultaneous compulsion he’s experiencing to walk purposefully all over Sydney in the faint hope of bumping into Elle, despite this being a city of four and a half million people. He wishes he could explain to her in person about ‘bikini-gate’.
‘Emergency PR meeting. 4 pm. Your suite.’ The message flashes on his screen and he groans. What was he meant to do? Let the girl drown? As they drive, he stares out the car window at the people walking along the street. Normal people. Free to walk along a roadside without being mobbed. Free to come and go from hotels without being flanked by security staff. Free to quietly save a person’s life without the Spanish Inquisition afterwards. What he’d give for just a few days of it not being so complicated all the time!
And now this unwelcome PR meeting will get in the way of his escape into that song. He can’t let it go! How he’d love to get his hands on it. It’s not like he’d be stealing it. He’d just be working on it with her. Or without her, more accurately. And in secret. And then he’d find a way to get it back to her. Sort of a ‘random act of kindness’ thing.
Could he get any more lame? What’s happening to him? ‘This PR meeting had better be fast,’ he says to Kev. ‘I need a piano.’
Chapter 11
Kat has been dreaming for years about the Year Twelve formal, but when she looks at the invitation, stuck to the mirror in her bedroom, part of her is kind of deflated by the whole ‘Plus One’ scenario. Of course another part of her takes that scenario and runs with it, wildly, all the way to the train station car park where she replays in her mind the Unrequited-concert shemozzle.
In her fantasy version, McDreamy does give her his number.
She, of course, waits two days to call it and, even when she does, she plays it über cool, despite her internal fluster. She arranges to drop the cab fare over to him and this time she’s washed her hair and straightened it with the GHD Lucy gave her after she won it in a competition and thought Kat needed it way more than her. Eek . . .
She’s maybe in her favourite seventies sundress and sandals instead of shorts, T-shirt and Docs, and maybe she’s even bothered with some makeup, but just the perfect amount so he’s not even sure she’s wearing any. In fact, she’s hopeless with makeup so she probably stops by the makeup counter in Myer on the way and has it done professionally but for free somehow, because she is, after all, broke, apart from the money from her mum which she’s using to pay back McDreamy.
And she is witty. Oh, the wit that slips effortlessly from her lips in her fantasy reunion — every sentence reeling him further in until he’s comprehensively hooked and can’t believe he ever thought of withholding his phone number in the first place. What a very near miss he will think he had.
He’ll suggest coffee and she’ll hesitate for exactly the right amount of time, then she’ll order something intriguing like a macchiato, and she’ll even have learnt how to pronounce it before she gets there. She’ll laugh at his dry humour, and not with the snorting laugh from the train but a really attractive one, to match her outfit.
He’ll suggest a second coffee and she’ll stick with water because too much coffee always makes her run for the toilet and that’s thoroughly unromantic. Plus, she doesn’t want to seem too eager, so she’ll glance at her watch as if she’s got somewhere important to be, which will worry him, because the only place he wants to be is with her. Obviously.
Ahhh, it’s all so perfect in her imagination. And so very far from the reality she suddenly snaps back to. The school formal invitation, minus a ‘Plus One’. Oh, and half a new song. She can’t forget that. Writing music is the one thing keeping her sane right now. As always. If only she could get past the bit she’s stuck on . . .
Purely for procrastination purposes, she checks Instagram and Twitter, telling herself it’s not pathetic at all to be stalking Angus Marsden’s pages because it’s actually this Elle girl she finds entertaining, not him. But for once, he hasn’t mentioned Elle. He doesn’t have to. The pages are littered with photos people have posted of him with some blonde woman who’s all over him on a boat. Is it Elle? Or is this just the latest girl to pass through the revolving doors of his love life?
Weirdly, he’s not even talking about it. Not a single comment. He’s talking about work instead. Apparently he’s in ‘self-imposed inspirational lockdown’, whatever that is, over a new song. Tosser. She throws her phone in her bag and decides to meet Lucy for a milkshake.
‘Kat!’ Lucy gushes, ‘Can you believe the formal is so soon?’
‘Not even!’
‘Who are you going to ask?’
Kat shrugs. ‘You?’
‘You’re going to ask me?’
‘What? No!’ Kat laughs, ‘Do you know who you’re going to ask?’
‘Nuh, but I’ve got a suggestion . . .’ Lucy begins, conspiratorially, brushing her light brown fringe out of her eyes. ‘I was thinking — if you really don’t have someone in mind, would you let me set you up on a blind date?’
Kat squeals. ‘As if! No way!’
‘I promise you’ll like him, though! I’m your best friend, Kat, I wouldn’t set you up with a loser.’
Kat shakes her head. There is No Way she will ever, in this lifetime, agree to a blind date. Unless it’s with McDreamy, of course, in which case it’s not a blind date but a normal one. Albeit a par
ticularly spectacular version of normal.
‘Okay, what about a compromise?’ Lucy suggests, carefully. ‘What about this — if you haven’t found a partner within twenty-four hours of the formal, you’ll let me set you up with the guy I have in mind. Trust me, it’ll be special. You’ll thank me!’
Kat thinks about it for a minute. She has to find someone anyway, so maaaybe she’ll consider it. But only as a VERY LAST RESORT. Only if she is UTTERLY desperate, which, given her history with boys to date, is entirely on the cards. In fact, at the rate she’s going, she’d have a better chance getting her fledgling song into the charts.
Chapter 12
‘Relax, Joel, it’s not a job interview. It’s just shopping!’ Sarah says, dragging him off Market Street and through the heavy double doors into David Jones — heading straight for the designer menswear section. He doesn’t know how, but she’s convinced him to part with some of the money he’s made trading shares on the stock market. It’s a hobby he’s been hooked on since he was sixteen, when he volunteered for work experience with Sarah’s stockbroker father over summer. He reinvests a lot of his profits — never spends them on expensive clothes. Shopping somewhere like this is foreign to him. He just wants to get it over with.
Then, as if things could actually get worse, on the escalator, in front of people, Sarah bursts into song. Something about how much she loves shopping for men? What?
He clamps his hand over her mouth. ‘What are you doing? Have you completely lost your mind?’
Sarah removes his hand and says, ‘I’m rehearsing! It’s from Legally Blonde! Talk about life imitating art. You know the scene where Elle Woods drags Emmett Forrest, the tutor, into the department store for a makeover?’
‘Who’s Emmett Forrest?’
‘The friend,’ Sarah explains. ‘Whom she eventually marries. Keep up, Joel! We’ve watched it a thousand times!’