Nothing But Trouble

by Matt Cain

  You tell lies and you’re a cheat,

  But I can dance to my own beat.

  The way you act is beyond belief,

  Don’t forget that I’m Miss Chief.

  That was it. As soon as this rehearsal was over she was going to confront Jake and tell him how she felt – that she was in love with him, whether he liked it or not. Why should she have to hide her feelings all the time? It wasn’t her fault if he was terrified of real emotion and opening himself up to love. She’d pussyfooted around him for too long. But now she wanted more than a quick shag whenever he was pissed or horny. She wanted to be his girlfriend, to share her life with him, and for him to make a commitment not to sleep with anyone else, especially members of her team. And the more she thought about it, the more she felt sure she deserved it.

  Don’t forget that I’m Miss Chief.

  Don’t forget that I’m Miss Chief.

  She hoped Jake was paying attention to her lyrics. Because as soon as this rehearsal was over she was going to ram home their message – and a whole lot more besides.

  *

  Jake rammed his dick into the moist pussy and heard a low groan of pleasure.

  Man, that’s good!

  Fucking had been all he’d been able to think about as he’d gazed across the rehearsal room during endless runs of some bullshit song about Lola being the boss. Like he gave a shit anyway. He held onto the beautifully rounded ass and heard his stomach slapping against it as he slammed himself deep inside the gorgeous black body over and over again. He reached forward to tickle a nipple and couldn’t help chuckling to himself as he heard a little cry of delight. Who’s the boss now, Lola?

  Not that Lola could have any idea he was banging her backing vocalist over a stack of old instruments in a storeroom, the first place he’d found that had been free. He’d been so crazy for a fuck he hadn’t even washed his cock beforehand. Not that it mattered – this chick was a regular and so horny for him he was sure she didn’t care. And anyway, isn’t that what a pussy’s for, washing your cock? Well, this one was sure giving his cock a good wash now.

  ‘Fuck me, Jake! Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me!’

  He wished the dumb bitch would keep her voice down. Sure, she was a great fuck but she was also a terrible squealer. And he wanted to keep this one strictly on the down-low.

  ‘Shut the fuck up, babe,’ he snarled as he slid deeper and deeper into her.

  ‘But Jake, it’s . . . I can’t . . . I . . . Oh!’

  He broke into his sloppy grin. ‘Yeah? Are you enjoying that?’

  ‘Fuck, yeah!’

  He quickened his stroke and began pounding her so fiercely she had to grab onto a spare drum kit to steady herself. ‘Who’s the boss, babe? Who’s the boss?’

  ‘You are, Jake. You are!’

  ‘You bet I am, babe! And don’t you fucking forget it!’

  Every muscle in his body began to quiver in anticipation of that sweet rush of ecstasy. Motherfuck!

  ‘I’m going to come,’ he spluttered, his shoulders already twitching.

  ‘Me too!’ she whinnied. ‘Me too!’

  He burst forth with one final slam, filling her with everything he had and stumbling forwards as his legs swayed beneath him. But the dumb-ass bitch was shaking too and had to grab onto a cymbal to stop herself from falling.

  It was too late. The two of them collapsed into a heap and the cymbal crashed down onto the floor beside them – making a noise so loud Jake was sure it was going to give them away.

  *

  ‘Jake? Jake? Is that you?’

  The door creaked open and Lola stepped in to fill its frame. Her jaw slackened at the sight of them. ‘What the fuck’s going on here? Gloria, is that you?’

  Shit! thought Gloria. There’s no getting out of this now . . . She looked up and swept her hair out of her face, grimacing as her eyes locked onto Lola’s.

  ‘It is you!’ Lola spluttered.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, it’s me,’ Gloria mumbled, picking herself up from the floor and feeling around for her clothes. Jake pulled up his trousers and tried to zip away his still erect cock.

  ‘But I thought we were mates,’ Lola mouthed, her chin quivering.

  ‘We are but. . .’

  ‘But what, Gloria? Is this how you treat your mates?’

  How dare she turn this on me? thought Gloria, so outraged she felt short of breath. But just as she was about to answer back she remembered that, however she felt about Lola, she was still technically her boss. Don’t forget that I’m Miss Chief, she repeated to herself. She closed her mouth without saying a word.

  ‘Wait a second, Lola,’ Jake piped up.

  ‘No, Jake,’ Lola jumped in, her voice cracking, ‘I won’t wait a second – because I’ve waited long enough already. And while I’ve been waiting you’ve been shagging this cheap, tacky, two-faced bitch!’

  Gloria’s face burned with humiliation. What I’d give to tell Lola what I really think of her . . .

  ‘You know, it’s no surprise your solo career flopped,’ Lola went on, ‘if this is the way you behave. Fucking your friend’s man behind her back!’

  ‘OK, now hold on,’ Jake broke in, waving around his hand. ‘There’s something I need to make quite clear here – Lola, I am not your man!’

  *

  The words hit Lola with such impact she felt her chest judder. To think she’d been looking for Jake to tell him she loved him – and to demand a more serious, committed relationship. And to think she’d confided in Gloria and the two of them had talked about trying to wean themselves off womanizers. She didn’t think she’d ever been so humiliated in her life.

  ‘And while we’re on the subject,’ Jake went on, turning to glare at Gloria. ‘I’m not anybody’s man. That’s just not how I roll.’

  As Lola listened to him speak she felt like she was sitting on a plane as it landed, being propelled back by a force beyond her control as her ears filled with the sound of the world screeching around her. Her stomach lurched at the smell of sex that still hung heavy in the room.

  ‘But . . . But Jake . . .’ she stammered.

  ‘But nothing, Lola,’ Jake interrupted, ‘I thought I explained I don’t want to be tied down. You know, I did explain that – several times. Or did you just decide not to hear me?’

  Yes I fucking heard you! Lola thought. But what you said and what you did just didn’t match up. That certainly hadn’t been the message she’d received while they were having sex – when she’d looked into his eyes so close to hers their lashes were touching and she felt like she was drowning in love. But what was the point in trying to explain that now? It would only make her feel even more pathetic.

  ‘Lola, I’m so sorry,’ Gloria offered, clutching her clothes to her naked body, her face still flushed with that post-sex glow. ‘I really didn’t plan to do this, it just kind of happened.’

  Lola looked at her and could feel the bile rising to the back of her throat. This obviously wasn’t the first time she’d had sex with him. Did she think the same thing as me when she was shagging him? She remembered what Harvey had said about men being able to have sex without necessarily caring about a woman. And she felt a blast of anger – anger at herself for ignoring so many warning signs and striding head first into trouble.

  ‘Oh give it a rest, Gloria,’ she hissed. ‘I don’t want to hear your bullshit excuses. In fact, I don’t want to hear anything you’ve got to say. And in case you haven’t noticed, I don’t need to.’

  Don’t forget that I’m Miss Chief, she reminded herself, trying to salvage the tiniest shreds of her self-esteem. But it was no use. She wanted to fire the pair of them but knew from previous experience you weren’t allowed to sack someone just because they’d cheated on you – or had sex with your man. No, there were laws against that kind of thing, laws that could only be bent by paying the employees a shitload of cash. And for that she’d need to speak to Harvey and explain to him exactly what had happened, which was the last thing
she wanted to do right now.

  One thing was for sure: she couldn’t delude herself any longer. Whatever had been going on between her and Jake, it was blatantly over – even if she was his boss.

  ‘Lola,’ Jake ventured, ‘I’m sorry if I’ve hurt your feelings.’

  My feelings? The banality of it was so offensive it lodged like a pain in her chest. Doesn’t he realize I’m in love with him?

  ‘Oh cut the crap, Jake!’ she steamed. ‘You don’t know anything about feelings – mine or anybody else’s. And from now on, as far as you’re concerned, I won’t be having any feelings. And that goes for both of you!’

  She stomped out, slamming the door behind her.

  My God what a mess!

  This time she really had excelled herself. And she had no idea what she was going to do next.

  9

  ‘Come on then, love,’ cooed Freddy’s mam as the entire family turned to look at him. ‘What’s going on with you and Lola Grant?’

  He’d been wondering how long it would take her to broach a subject she’d been working up to ever since he’d arrived home an hour earlier – and during numerous phone conversations over the past week, all of which he’d manage to cut short by coming out with increasingly outlandish excuses. But now that he was back in Port Talbot, he couldn’t fob it off any longer.

  ‘I mean, one minute you’re apparently getting married,’ she went on, ‘the next thing we hear, Lola announces she just wants to be friends.’

  Freddy cut into his roast chicken and did his best to look nonchalant. ‘Oh it’s no big deal really. We just went out on a date and we had a cracking time, like, but I get the impression she’s too busy with work to get serious with anyone. She’s about to go on a big tour and then she’s off to the States for six months – the last thing she needs right now is a boyfriend.’

  He omitted to mention the fact that he didn’t even have Lola’s phone number so had learnt all this from the same newspaper interview they’d read. He popped the chicken into his mouth and did his best to chew it; even though it was moist and smothered in gravy, his throat was dry and his Adam’s apple felt like it had swelled to the size of a Granny Smith.

  ‘But I don’t understand,’ bleated his mam, ‘I thought you were moving in together?’

  ‘And trying for a baby,’ added his sister Helen in a brief break from shovelling mashed-up food into her one-year-old son’s mouth. She’d just returned from maternity leave to work as a beautician in the salon owned by their mam and was struggling to reconcile her previously glamorous image with the reality of being a parent. She brushed away a squashed pea that had somehow attached itself to her left cheekbone.

  Freddy swallowed his chicken with a gulp he was sure would be audible down at the steelworks. ‘Yeah, well, don’t believe everything you read in the papers. Could somebody please pass the gravy?’

  ‘But what about that photo of you getting off with her outside some restaurant?’ asked his brother-in-law Owen, a balding, out-of-shape thirty-year-old who wore shorts in all weathers and had a permanently sweaty top lip. ‘You looked more than friends in that – you looked like you were about to get down to business.’

  Yeah, thanks mate. Rub it in, why don’t you? Freddy couldn’t help bristling whenever he was addressed by Owen, probably because his sister’s teenage sweetheart had been the golden boy of Freddy’s childhood, the star of the Wales youth rugby team coached by his dad and widely predicted to be destined for great things until he’d walked in front of a car aged sixteen and had his career cut short by a permanent leg injury. Since then Owen had piled on weight and developed a serious chip on his shoulder but everyone in Freddy’s family adored him; he worked as his dad’s assistant and followed him round all day, lapping up his every word. No one seemed to notice when he made sly digs at Freddy or was so jealous of his success he couldn’t bear to watch him on TV. Sometimes Freddy thought his parents loved Owen more than they loved him.

  ‘Yeah, well . . .’ he struggled, inching back his chair and hearing it shriek across the sparklingly clean tiled floor. ‘You can read anything you want into a quick pap shot. Especially when there’s a caption next to it telling you what to think.’

  ‘But don’t they say the camera never lies?’ Owen jumped in, looking towards Freddy’s dad for some kind of back-up. ‘Or did Lola say she just wanted to be friends after you’d got down to business?’

  Freddy was sure he caught his dad giving Owen the faintest whiff of a snigger. Don’t get wound up, he told himself, stabbing into an over-boiled carrot. He looked at his brother-in-law and saw a flash of the golden boy who for years at school had been the barometer against which his own failure had been measured. Then he saw his thirty-year-old moobs straining at his shirt and comforted himself with one of his favourite sayings – Early to ripe, early to rot. ‘Well, I hate to disappoint you, Owen,’ he frowned, ‘but me and Lola didn’t actually get down to business. Like she said, we’re just good friends. And I don’t know why you’re all making such a big fuss about it.’

  There was an awkward silence, filled only by the sound of the baby spitting out cabbage all over Helen’s top and eventually broken by Freddy’s dad clearing his throat, a sure sign he was about to launch into one of his self-aggrandizing anecdotes. ‘Did I ever tell you about the time I went out with a famous singer?’ he began.

  ‘No!’ trilled a wide-eyed Owen.

  ‘When was that, Dad?’ gleamed Helen as she dabbed at her front with a wet wipe.

  For the next half-hour, Freddy’s dad dragged out an at-best-mediocre anecdote about the time he’d briefly dated a pub singer called Gladys Glitz he’d met in a working men’s club in Swansea in the mid-Seventies. He described her as ‘a dead ringer for Olivia Newton-John’ and claimed she turned down the chance to work in America because she was so head over heels in love with him. Freddy didn’t have the heart to say he knew all about Gladys Glitz because she’d written to him shortly after he’d made his debut on Channel 3 News, begging for his help in relaunching her career and enclosing a CD of Bonnie Tyler covers she murdered with a voice that sounded like a bulldog choking on a cactus and a photo of her with an overly made-up face so puffy she looked like a character from Royston Vasey. Instead he kept quiet, gasping and giggling along with his family as his dad cued their laughter with the occasional pause. For once, Freddy was glad to hear him talk about himself; it gave him a brief respite from talking about Lola.

  ‘So what happened then, Dad?’ he asked. ‘How did it all end?’

  ‘Well, she started to get really clingy and wanted to see me all the time,’ his dad boomed on. ‘But I told her, don’t try to come between a Welshman and his rugby!’

  Freddy sat back and forced himself to laugh at his dad holding court – the famous ‘Big Freddy’, tall, broad-shouldered and still with a full head of rust-coloured hair, reliving his glorious youth for his wife, daughter, son-in-law and son. A son who was still known both within the family and around the whole of Port Talbot as ‘Little Freddy’, even a year after the arrival of ‘Baby Freddy’. He couldn’t help wondering whether his nephew would still be called Baby Freddy when, like him, he’d reached the decidedly adult age of twenty-eight. He hoped he’d grow up to be the grandson Big Freddy hoped for – and didn’t turn out to be as big a disappointment as he was as a son. He popped the final carrot into his mouth and pushed forward his empty plate.

  ‘And that’s when I met your mother,’ his dad ended with a flourish. ‘And I haven’t given Gladys a second thought since.’

  His family actually gave him a round of applause.

  ‘That’s a brilliant story!’ fawned Owen, wiping the sweat off his top lip.

  ‘Dad, that’s so romantic!’ echoed Helen, picking some baby sick out of her hair.

  ‘Oh wouldn’t it be nice,’ added his mam, ‘if one day Little Freddy and Lola could be just as happy as me and your dad?’

  Freddy’s heart sank. His mam obviously wasn’t giving up j
ust yet – and he braced himself for the onslaught continuing all weekend. Of course he knew she was only asking about Lola because she was proud of her son and his famous so-called girlfriend, just like she was proud of his success on TV and would boast about his latest reports to her customers in the salon. Usually her attention came as a welcome relief from his dad’s disinterest, but in this instance her pride in him only made his failure to make Lola like him even worse.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mam,’ he said, giving her a weak smile. ‘But I can’t help it if Lola’s career’s taking off all over the world.’

  ‘No, but it’s such a shame. The girls at work will be so disappointed. And the customers have talked about nothing else all week.’

  Oh it’s not my fault, Freddy wanted to say. And I’m disappointed too! But he bit his tongue, unable to shake off the suspicion that it was his fault. After all, he could tell himself that girls dumped him for bad boys because of their own low self-esteem, but how did he know he wasn’t the one with low self-esteem, always going for girls who were out of his league and would knock him back because he didn’t think he deserved love? Well, if that was true then this time he’d surpassed himself, falling for a hugely successful pop star who obviously wouldn’t ever consider going out with someone like him. ‘Look, I’m really sorry, Mam,’ he repeated rather sombrely, ‘but you’ll just have to tell everybody the truth – even if it is a big let-down.’

  ‘I know, but everyone was so excited about meeting her,’ she protested, her diamond danglers rattling from her ears. ‘We were going to ask her to one of our girls’ nights at the salon.’

  Freddy tried not to cringe as he imagined Lola stepping inside MillionHairs and being greeted by his mam with the heavily highlighted Krystle Carrington bouffe she’d refused to change since the Eighties, and her staff made up of either teenage girls who looked like they’d walked straight out of an episode of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding or ageing wannabe cougars with fake tan congealing in the wrinkles of their crêpe paper cleavages. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea that she’d knocked him back before things had even got going. All right, everyone knew she’d had a tough upbringing, but now that she was the biggest pop star in the country she’d probably only have scoffed at his parents’ aspirations of grandeur, their oversized house perched on the hill overlooking the town with its private driveway and portico columns, its wrought-iron gates emblazoned with the names Freddy and Trish, and its over-the-top sweeping staircase leading up to a framed portrait of the entire family shot by a professional photographer in black and white and slightly soft focus. He wondered what she’d make of his dad lording it around Port Talbot in his flash car with its private registration plate FREDDY 8, the number of his shirt when he’d played rugby for Wales. Maybe it was a good thing he wouldn’t be finding out.