Accidental Superstar

by Marianne Levy

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Forcing you into a career to make up for his own failures . . .’

  ‘It wasn’t . . .’

  ‘Knowing you weren’t sure, knowing I didn’t want you to have any part in this. And then, when I confronted him, you know what he said?’

  ‘. . . No . . .’

  ‘He told me he couldn’t do “family stuff”. That he’d come to it too late in life, that he’d tried and tried and he knew you’d never accept him. Where did that even come from? Sounds like a coward’s way out to me. Which I told him.’

  Or, I thought, feeling another howl making its way up through my body, the perfectly natural reaction of someone who’d just been informed by his potential stepdaughter to leave her family alone.

  And he’d been right about Top Music. He’d been right all along.

  ‘Mum,’ I said. ‘It’s not . . . it’s not just him. I wanted to do the record label stuff.’

  ‘But he pushed you –’

  ‘I pushed him.’

  ‘He lied to me –’

  ‘I made him lie.’

  She drew back. ‘How?’

  What would I have given, to leap out of my body and into someone else’s? I’d have done anything not to be me.

  And yet there I was.

  Mum was waiting. ‘How could you make him lie?’

  ‘By . . . by saying that I’d start being nice to him. He was so desperate for us to be friends. And, and, we were, we were hanging out and going to London together. Only then, last night, I was horrible. I said some bad stuff.’

  Mum was standing away from me now. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I told him to get out of my life. But that was only because he’d been telling this record label that I wouldn’t go on tour in school time –’

  ‘Of course you’re not going on tour in school time.’

  ‘And he kept saying that something was wrong. And he was right! He was completely right and I should have listened to him but I didn’t.’

  I was crying all over again now, but this time it was clear that there’d be no more hugs from Mum. Not now, maybe not ever.

  ‘So you’re telling me that Adrian is not the villain here. That the villain is you.’

  I nodded, and sobbed.

  ‘That you forced him to go against my will, against his own better judgement, just so that you could get what you wanted.’

  More nod-sobs.

  ‘That a good man came into our lives and you, Katie Cox, drove him away.’

  I couldn’t even say I hadn’t meant to. Because, honestly, I had.

  My eyes were firmly pointed into my lap as I said, ‘We don’t need him, Mum. We don’t. He’s got us living in this rubbish house – we don’t even have broadband! – and his shop’s a disaster, poor Mands is way upset about it, which isn’t fair because it’s not her fault. And it’s not my fault this happened, it’s his, for introducing me to Top Music in the first place!’

  ‘Enough.’

  ‘But . . . we can do better! You can do better! You’re a strong, confident woman and you could have any man you wanted. All right, maybe not a Hollywood-film-star-type man, unless he was quite old. But most of the other ones. Because you are really not bad looking, you know. And anyway, you don’t need a man to complete you! I was thinking, we could use this time to do some family bonding, maybe. That we could maybe even do a quick trip to California and see Dad, that maybe . . .’

  ‘ENOUGH.’

  I raised my head and looked into Mum’s eyes.

  And, oh God. What had I done?

  She turned to go, unhappiness sort of swirling around her in an invisible cloak. Then: ‘We do have broadband. It was the last thing he did before he left. The man can’t afford a new pair of shoes, but he got you back online. The password –’ and she hesitated, just for a second – ‘the password is “superstar”.’

  It took a while before I was anything like together enough to open up my laptop.

  But then, eventually, I did, and there was Just Me. With two million, one hundred and seventy-three thousand views, and pages and pages and pages of comments.

  Need MORE said 49robep49

  Cant live without her said Trouteyes

  Feels shes like 1of us ☺ said PussInBo0ts

  yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! said f862fg

  Do u think shes 4real??? said NodgetheSplodge

  yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! said f862fg

  She is true said J8nny. That’s why I ♥ her

  yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! said f862fg

  This went on and on and on. I read how brave I’d been to show everyone my bedroom. How great it was that I was so ugly (why, thank you). How my lyrics were honest and how you could really see that I was close to my family and my friends. That they’d wanted someone who was good and real. How that someone was me.

  If I’d been feeling bad before I’d logged in, well, now, I felt like I’d gone through bad and out the other side into a new place where bad was actually quite good.

  Back at the top of the page, Past Katie was singing, as though nothing had happened.

  When everything had happened.

  I reached for a tissue, because, you know, unhappiness makes for mucus, and managed to knock the box down the side of my bed. A quick flail for it and I put my hand smack bang into the middle of that old pizza, which by now was doing something really interesting, and which also meant I needed a tissue even more. So I got down and reached properly, and my hand closed on the corner of something hard.

  Only, it wasn’t the tissues. It was the little box Lacey had given me, on our last walk together.

  Very carefully so as to avoid smearing it with pizza slime, I opened it. On the top, a pair of Magnum sticks, tied together with a bit of ribbon.

  And then I knew what I had to do.

  What I wished I’d done in the first place.

  I took a deep breath.

  And then I texted Jaz.

  Please take the video down. It’s all over. K x

  I shut the laptop and turned off my phone.

  It was so still, and the house was so quiet. A light rain was falling from a heavy grey sky, more mist than droplets. What would I do now? What could I do?

  And then I looked across my bedroom and saw.

  Propped up behind my door, like it had been waiting for me to notice it, was my guitar.

  What did Amy Winehouse do when she split up with her husband? She wrote Back To Black. When Dolly Parton’s bloke started messing around with this girl who worked in his bank, she wrote Jolene. And when Morrissey was upset he wrote pretty much all the stuff he’s ever done.

  What I’m saying is that there’s a rich history of miserable people writing really amazing music.

  Not that my music was anything even close to amazing. Now that the Top Music fantasy had gone, I could see that. All the dreams about Wembley and the single, they’d melted away like snow in the sun, and I don’t know how I’d ever thought any of it was real. No way was I a star, or anything like one. I was just some spotty schoolgirl who liked to play and sing. Savannah, Paige and Sofie knew it. Lacey knew it. And now I did, too. I wasn’t the next Amy Winehouse. I wasn’t even the next Crystal Skye.

  But I certainly had enough heartbreak to join the club.

  I picked up my guitar and it fitted so nicely under my arm, a missing piece of the Katie jigsaw. Then I flicked open my lyric book with my other hand and wrote:

  I was wrong. So wrong

  Wrong about my life

  Wrong about my song

  Then I sang it, and let the notes work themselves free, feeling the music ripple from under me, the hard catch of the strings and the way they bit into my fingers. My calluses were going. How long since I’d practised?

  Wrong about you

  Wrong about me

  And so I sang, and scribbled, and played, as outside the street lights came on and the world kept turning. Until it was finished, and I knew where I had to go, and what I had to do.
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  Harltree high street is not somewhere you want to be after dark. What with clubbers staggering in and out of Heaven, and the kids that sit on the steps by McDonald’s, it’s all pretty edgy. Like, OK, no one’s got a gun or anything, but you can do some pretty serious damage with a bottle of Smirnoff Ice.

  As I passed the main group a girl was screaming something, and for a second, I considered getting myself safely back home again. Then I saw that it was Nicole, fighting with another girl over a shoe.

  Deciding that more information would not necessarily make me feel better, I picked up the pace, until I was off the high street, down past the shopping centre and on to the row of charity shops and places selling bits of Tupperware and cheap wrapping paper.

  Vox Vinyl was the last one before the shops ran out all together, and the shutter was down. I’d failed. I . . .

  No, there it was, along the pavement: a needle-thin sliver of yellow.

  I thumped on the cold metal, once, twice, thrice, whatever the word for four times is, and I shouted, ‘HEY. IT’S ME. OPEN UP.’

  After a couple of minutes I heard a shuffling, and then about thirty different bolts sliding open before the shutter thunk-clicked upward, and Adrian was unlocking the door.

  What I saw was so surprising that I actually forgot why I’d come.

  Because it was just lovely in there. Every last inch of the wall was covered in posters, and fairy lights were strung around a little wooden platform, stacked high with shelf upon shelf of vintage vinyl. The record racks were labelled with these awesome fluorescent signs that said things like GROOVE IS IN THE HEART and DANCE BABY DANCE and IN THE HOUSE, and someone had done a huge mural on this monster speaker, of instruments and microphones and notes and hearts all twined together.

  It was cosy and it was cool.

  Vox Vinyl was ace.

  He watched me stare. ‘Your sister did all this. We were just this scuzzy record shop before but she’s completely transformed the place. Look at that!’ He waved at the fairy lights. ‘She’s even made a little stage so we can do live stuff!’

  ‘I bet everyone loves it.’

  ‘I’m sure they would. If they just knew about it.’

  A clubber staggered past, chucked out of Heaven and by the sound of it on his way down to hell.

  ‘Come through to the back,’ said Adrian. ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea.’

  I followed him through a door behind the counter and into what must normally have been the stockroom. Not tonight, though. Tonight, the boxes had been shoved to one side to make room for a drum kit, stacked precariously in the corner, a keyboard, a couple of guitars and on the tiny bit of floor that was left, a lilo and our spare duvet. The one used by Auntie Jean’s dog.

  ‘Can’t really afford a hotel,’ said Adrian. ‘Thought I’d sell my instruments to tide me over for a bit, but no one wants them. I’ve made a bit of a mess of it all, really.’

  Hearing him say it just made things worse.

  ‘I’ve made the mess,’ I said, hearing how lost I sounded. ‘You were totally right about Tony. He didn’t want to make me a star. He just wanted revenge on you.’

  Adrian had been looking pretty bad to start with. This didn’t help. ‘The old – Oh, Katie. Katie, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘And now my music career is over. And I don’t care, really, only I’ve made Manda hate me and I’ve lost all my friends and . . .’

  Credit where it’s due, he didn’t put his arm around me and he didn’t tell me it was OK. He made some tea, and then listened while I told him about the conversation in the office and Jaz tipping a vase of flowers over Tony’s head.

  ‘Good for her.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, smiling at the memory of Tony blinking bits of wet leaf from his eyelashes. ‘I sort of wish I’d done it.’

  We both laughed.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t care about a music career?’ said Adrian. ‘If I was you, I’d be pretty upset.’

  ‘No. Not really. I mean, I get scared when I sing to more than three people at a time and I haven’t done any proper playing in ages. No. I’m glad it’s over. I’m glad the video’s gone and I don’t want to go on tour. It’s a relief, really. I’ll just go back to school and forget this ever happened and –’

  And then I surprised myself by bursting into tears.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s just . . . it was my song. And people liked it . . . And I was so proud. And now it’s ruined.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  I thought of everything that had happened. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘Well. You’ll write more.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  Somewhere upstairs, a toilet flushed. And outside another set of clubbers staggered off to find the taxi rank.

  ‘You’ll have more chances.’

  ‘And so will you,’ I said.

  He laughed, in that way people do when something is the opposite of funny.

  ‘I mean it,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Adrian. And from the way he spoke I could tell we weren’t just talking about his music.

  If I’d felt bad when I arrived, well, now I felt bad times one hundred. Times one thousand.

  I’d had lots of worst moments recently. This, though, this was the worst of worst. It was even worse than that encounter with Mum, which is mental, because she was Mum and he was just Adrian. Adrian, who had a creaky leather jacket and hairs coming out of his nose.

  It was worse because at least, when all this was over, Mum would have me and Amanda.

  Adrian wouldn’t have anyone.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘If it wasn’t for me, you and Mum would still be together.’

  He did this little twitch. The very tininess of it showed me just how much it hurt.

  ‘I should never have made us go to Top Music behind her back. I knew it would drive her bananas, and I did it anyway.’

  ‘But I let you,’ said Adrian.

  ‘Still,’ I said. ‘It really was my fault. And I know you won’t be able to forgive me. But at least . . . at least I’ve said it.’

  He was smiling, very slightly. ‘I can forgive you.’

  ‘I don’t deserve it.’

  ‘Probably not. But I’ll do it anyway.’

  The fairy lights shone and suddenly it was like Christmas. Hope was swooping through me like birds and if we’d been in a film the soundtrack would have been rising as I said:

  ‘I’ve talked to Mum already, she knows it was me. She’s pretty narked at the moment, but she’ll get over it. At some point.’ I knew I was babbling, but honestly, I couldn’t help it. ‘So, if you really can forgive me, and if Mum understands that this was really nothing to do with you, then . . . then . . .’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then you and Mum can sort things out,’ I said.

  He put his head in his hands. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But it’s way obvious! You should be together!’

  His face told me that maybe the soundtrack wasn’t rising in hope, but had faded into sad, slow chords, falling like the misty rain. ‘Your mum and me . . . we’re not some loose end to be tied up, just like that.’ He stared at me over the edge of the mug, dark hairs curling over those thick fingers, his chin prickling with specks of black, and of grey. ‘I’m not an idiot, Katie, I know you think I haven’t noticed you rolling your eyes at me and telling your friends that you can’t stand me.’

  ‘No . . . ’ I began.

  ‘I’ve lived alone my whole life, I liked it. Doing my own thing, you know? Everyone paired up except me and for a while I wondered what I’d done wrong. And then they started divorcing again, and I realized I was well out of it. Always thought I’d stay out, until your mum turned up. And it was good, for a while. But it’s difficult, being in a family. Especially when that family’s not yours.’

  I wanted to tell him that he was wrong. But I couldn’t. It was the three of us and him. It wasn’t the four of us
. It never had been, and maybe never would be.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, for about the billionth time.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ said Adrian, sounding very, very tired. ‘But it is . . . hard. And it’s late. You should be getting home. I’ll call you a cab.’

  ‘You’re not coming too, then?’ I said, hopelessly.

  ‘Not tonight, no. Maybe I’m not supposed to be happy. Maybe Tony was right.’

  It was then, as I was going back through the shop, that I noticed the sign behind the counter. The sign that said CLOSING DOWN.

  And all the other signs, saying things like BUY ONE, GET ONE FREE and EVERYTHING MUST GO, which is also the name of an album by the Manic Street Preachers that I’d been meaning to get. Adrian was probably selling it off cheap, but somehow I didn’t feel like asking.

  He saw me take it in. ‘Yeah. Gonna shut the doors on Thursday. Bank account’s empty.’

  ‘But . . . I’ll tell people at school to come, everyone loves a bargain, and maybe you could do one of those gigs Amanda was talking about, or . . .’

  ‘Katie, I don’t want to do this any more. Any of it.’

  And that was that.

  What could I do?

  I wrote.

  I wrote and I played and I played and I wrote.

  When I wasn’t with my guitar, time ran slow and it was like even the air hated me. It was only the music that made things, if not OK, if not even bearable, then kind of maybe existable. Maybe.

  I played from when I woke up until it was time for breakfast, spreading my toast with sore fingers and it didn’t matter when no one spoke to me in lessons because the songs were talking in my head. My phone stayed switched off and my curtains were drawn and if anyone was worried, they didn’t mention it. Probably they didn’t even care. Amanda sat with Mum in the kitchen until late every night but I don’t know what they were talking about as every time I came close they went quiet. And in the mornings we all three moved through the house like ghosts.

  ‘Aren’t you going to work today?’ I asked Mands, finding her slumped over the kitchen table, stirring some Weetabix sludge around and around and around.

  ‘I don’t think it would be appropriate. Do you?’