by Beth Garrod
Ska was now flat on the floor.
Was she OK?
AAAAAEEEEEEEWWWWWAAAAAEEEEE-HHHHHAAAAAAHHHH.
A blood-curdling scream rang out. The man in front of me ducked a bit and put a finger in his right ear.
She wasn’t OK?! She was in pain.
People looked worried.
Was someone going to help her?
I turned to Luke, concerned – he looked as freaked out as everyone else.
But no. Ska stood up. One arm in the air. She was OK!
Phew.
The crowd cheered as she lifted the mic to her mouth – she must be about to explain what was happening.
She took a deep breath and … made the wail again.
Oh. My. Unitards.
It was her singing.
The band launched into a mess of beeps and bangs and chords as Ska sprinted around the stage like her life depended on it, singing and wailing. Sailing? Winging? I had no idea.
And she was dancing. Like really dancing. Although limb flinging would be a better description – it was like what I do when I’m alone in my bedroom, but more – so much more. Jo had nothing on her. It was mesmerizing, but I’m not sure if it was in the way she intended.
UHOHOOOO ICCCCHHHHH EIIIIICHHHHH BBOOOOOONNN
Were they words, or just noises? Wait … was it German?
I’d never seen such a large crowd look so … confused.
“Bella.” Adam’s mouth was right up to my ear, whispering straight into it. It actually felt kind of hot – was someone talking into your ear meant to feel nice?! Argh. Brain. Not the point. “What. Is. Going. On?”
OK. So, the world’s most understanding person was also having a problem understanding. That was reassuring. I looked at Luke. He wasn’t smiling any more and his mates were all nudging each other.
Ska was now doing jumping jacks. Nope, now she was hopping.
The song stopped abruptly. Most people were too surprised to manage to clap.
“REBBBEELLLLL ROCCCKKKKSSS,” Ska purred into the microphone. “THANK YOU FOR HAVING ME!”
OK, maybe this was the bit where it got normal.
She dropped into a crab. Or not.
“She’s into crabs like you,” someone yelled at Jay.
“I’m a LOBSTER,” Jay shouted back like a man/lobster on the edge.
Ska stood back up.
“ARE YOU FEELING GOOOOOOD?” The crowd were so confused that instead of making generic cheers back, they actually answered (I heard an “I’m a little hungry”, and an “It’s quite cold”). Ska was unfazed. “ARE YOU READY TO FEEL … EVEN BETTER?”
Luke yelled a “Hell yeah” back. The only one.
Ska flung her head forward, tucking her mic up and under the curtain of her hanging hair. She looked like a big hairy talking lamp.
“OK. LET’S FEEL THIS LET’S DO THIS LET’S BE AS ONE LET’S TAKE WHAT WE’RE GIVEN LET’S BE THE CREATURES WE ARE LET’S LET IT OUT LET’S BE BRAVE LET’S BE UNFILTERED BE WILD BE CAGED BE TAMED BE YOU YOU GET ME?”
I totally didn’t. Was she possessed? Normally she just banged on about how hot her own wrists were.
Luke looked alarmed but shouted encouragement anyway. “BABES, YOU’RE KILLING IT!”
“She’s certainly killing something,” Crab Heckler shouted straight back.
“I WANT TO GIVE YOU WHAT YOU WANT,” Ska shouted, her arm wrapped around her head holding her own chin. I think what we all wanted was someone to explain what on earth was going on. The band were staring forward. Maybe they were robots? Nothing would surprise me any more. “TONIGHT ISN’T ABOUT ME IT’S ABOUT US IT’S ABOUT BEING FREE.”
Luke was right. I was glad I caught this gig. “SO FOR MY SECOND SONG –” OK, so that had been a song “– I WANT TO COVER AN EQUALLY STRONG POWERFUL WOMAN.”
Ska then launched into a version of “Runnin’” by Beyoncé (Tegan had to physically restrain Rach when she twigged Ska had just compared herself to Bey). However, when Ska got to the first chorus, instead of singing the word “runnin’” she pulled out a golden glittery recorder from her unitard leg and played one long note on it. Which she then repeated every time she should have be singing the word “runnin’”.
It. Was. Jaw. Dropping.
When it finally finished Luke said words like “avant garde” and “experimental” and “current trend” as loudly as he could. Weirdly he didn’t also say “my girlfriend has totally lost the plot”.
Rach thrust her phone in front of me. It was the hashtag result for #SkaAndTheLets – post after post of pictures of Ska from the side of the stage and from the crowd. The main three letters being posted alongside them being W T and F. When the next song finished – well, I think it was the same song, but it went on for ten minutes so it was hard to tell – Ska threw her recorder into the crowd. Instead of catching it, people parted, letting it fall to the ground (note to self: look for that on our last litter-picking shift tomorrow – it might be worth something if she goes viral). Ska didn’t notice, still looking smug, truly believing she was pushing the boundaries of art, rather than eardrums.
A tiny, tiny bit of me felt sorry for her … but it was buried under a year of her being the Queen of Mean to me so I didn’t pay too much attention to it.
As Ska lifted the mic to speak again, Adam tightened his grip on my hand like we were in a scary bit of a movie and were genuinely afraid of what might come next.
“THANK YOU, MY FELLOW HUMANS… THANK YOU FOR EXPERIENCING THIS WITH ME.” She turned to the back of the stage and crouched into a tiny ball. “TONIGHT WE ARE ONE.” She leapt up. Please let her Lycra seams hold. “TONIGHT YOU ARE INSIDE ME.”
Mikey belly-laughed so hard his lemur hood fell right over his face – and he wasn’t alone. Half the crowd were in full-on hysterics. The only reason I wasn’t is because Adam was next to me and I was pretending to be a nicer person than I am.
Luke was staring at the stage – even he knew how bad this was. The only person who seemed to have no concept of how much people were enjoying it for all the wrong reasons was Ska.
“TONIGHT WE ARE MOVED BY LOVE. WHO IS IT THAT FEELS ME?”
Seeing an opportunity to win some points back, Luke put his hands to his mouth and yelled.
“I FEEL YOU. FEEL YOU ALL OVER.” He then did this weird slow, satisfied nod to make sure we all knew they were together – in every sense. “LOVE YOU, BABES.”
But Ska didn’t hear him – or if she did she didn’t acknowledge it, sitting down and dangling her legs off the side of the stage.
The words “LOVE. REAL. LIFE. YOU. ME.” were projected in big white letters behind her. Luke’s voice was the only thing we could hear. “This is the bit I was telling you about. She said I was her muse.” Ska stood and tiptoed to the back of the stage.
Luke raised his voice to an absolute shout. “THAT ARSE. I mean?! So fit, mate. SO FREAKIN FIT.”
Ska stopped still. Before jumping three times on the spot and whipping back round to the audience.
“LOVE IS A CONCEPT,” she was shouting double speed, “BUT WE ARE PEOPLE NOT CONCEPTS WE ARE FREE AND WE ARE BEINGS AND LOVE IS FOR EVERYONE.”
Luke’s smile had frozen.
“WE ARE BODIES WE ARE FEELING WE ARE ME WE ARE YOU AND WE MUST DO.”
Ska slowly walked up to the keyboard player and … was she whispering to him?
Nope.
No she was not.
She was full-on snogging him.
Luke turned to me, as if checking whether I’d seen. Like it was possible to miss. The cameras had zoomed right in and you could see every detail on both of the huge screens. Too much detail. Even a spit string between them. I smiled sweetly and gave him a thumbs up. He mouthed something about “art”.
But the kiss was still happening. The only noise coming from the speakers was a slurping that sounded a bit like when Mumbles drinks water.
Luke cheered. “Love it, yeah, all part of the plan.” He was talking to absolutely nobody. He
then shouted at the stage. “Meet me backstage, yeah?”
As he waited for an answer that was never going to come, Ska slinked over to the guitar player, took her face in her hands and went in for an even longer kiss. They only stopped when the four men dressed in black from the start returned. Everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief it was ending.
Then re-inhaled that sigh when Ska went up to the tallest one, put her hands through his hair, and went in from the most graphic snog yet.
Breathless, she broke away.
“THANK YOU GOODBYE GOODNIGHT I DIDN’T KNOW WHEN IT WOULD BE TIME BUT THE TIME IS NOW AND THE ENERGY HAS BEEN AMAZING AND YOUR TIME IS NOW AND NOW IS MY TIME. TIME TO BE ALONE. ALONE WITH DEREK.”
And making out with Derek, she got carried off whilst clamped to him like a limpet.
I’ve never seen a crowd of people so still. It was like a mass game of musical statues. Everyone was entirely motionless, mouths open, trying to figure out what they’d just seen. Or if we were all having a mass hallucination from some sort of burger poisoning.
Well, all except one. Because Luke was marching as far away as he could get from the stage, his face like absolute thunder.
Adam leant over and grinned.
“I guess at least my gig can’t be any worse than that?”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
After that unforgettable gig, there were still three more bands we wanted to see, and the seven of us stayed and leapt around to all of them. But even though Mikey and Jay – spurred on by the chanting of “GO PANDA, GO PANDA, GO PANDA” – crowd-surfed during the headliners, attempted to clamber on stage, and got wrestled into submission by four security guards (with actual tail fluff flying up in the air – I caught it all on camera), when Tegan and I were back in out tent, Ska’s performance was still the only thing we were talking about.
“I’m wondering if I should get her number to chat about joining the gymnastics team.” Tegan’s muffled voice came from her sleeping bag. The night was so cold it was already a bag-over-face-to-survive-the-cold situation. “I’ve never seen someone bend that way.” Coming from a girl who could get her leg behind her head, that was a big claim.
I poked a straw through the tiny gap in Adam’s hoodie and swigged my third Capri Sun of the night. I’d pulled the toggles so tight around my face I only had a 50p-sized opening exposed to the freezing temperatures. I buried back down into my bag to check that I’d set my phone alarm for our final shift tomorrow. 4:48. BLEURGH.
All my battery chargers were dead, so this evening my phone was strictly on an emergency-use-only basis (i.e., taking pics of Tegan looking like a mole in her sleeping bag). Tegan was using her phone to do the other important stuff – stay in touch with Rach who was out with MGC, and keep an eye on numbers for tomorrow.
“Any good news before we go to sleep?”
Tegan shuffled around – buying time for an answer.
“Lots of comments – so sure that means there’ll be loads there tomorrow…” Which meant we hadn’t had any more people get in touch to say they were definites. Even though no one could see, I grimaced. Hard. Tegan was already starting on the “it’ll be OK – we tried our best” chat, which was a million miles away from the “we’ve got this!” of yesterday. I just had to hope beyond hope that when we got together tomorrow at midday to start making the banners there would be plenty of people there to help us.
I lay in the dark and cold, listening as people headed back to our tents around us.
But it wasn’t noise keeping me awake; it was worry.
Tomorrow was a big day.
The protest.
Adam’s gig.
And all around us were a lot of Session fans who wanted us to fail.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX
I woke up what felt like seconds later, only one thing on my mind.
SWEET CHEESES I NEEDED A WEE.
Despite it being so cold I thought I would open my tent to find a snowy wilderness, I wriggled out of sleeping bag to make the dash.
Fact. There is nothing less dignified than being in public, wearing pyjamas, double socks and flip-flops, rocking face creases from sleeping on a rolled-up jumper, and running across a field clutching a wad of loo roll in one hand, phone torch in the other, while bursting for a wee. But that’s what had to happen.
And it was worth it. I headed back to the tent a new person. As I got nearer, I spotted a light moving around in Adam’s tent. Was he awake too? I’d got up before my alarm, and had time to spare, so took a detour. He was awake – and he was muttering to himself. It was kind of adorable.
Marcus must still be out. Crouching down I prodded the fabric of the tent door and whispered, “Knock knock.”
The shuffling stopped, then came towards the front of the tent.
“Beefy?”
“Uh-huh…” The zip went up. “G—” A sleepy, ruffled, extra-gorgeous Adam face appeared. All humans slept, so why did seeing him all soft round the edges make my thought processes stutter? Get yourself together, Bella! “—uten morgen.”
He grinned up at me. “Well, this is a nice first thing to see in the morning.” He must be in that waking-up stage where you can’t really see detail. I let it slide. He rubbed his face with his hands. “I could. Not. Sleep… How cold was it?!”
“New levels.”
“Plus, today’s the day.” He mouthed an eek, then pointed up at me. “Ahhh – I’d forgotten that’s where it went.” I still had his hoodie on. Was that why he’d been freezing?
I started to take if off, but he stopped me. “Bells – keep it!”
He took my hands in his, taking away my choice. His hands felt all toasty. And he smelt of warm, and cuddle, and him. And suddenly, despite neither of us having brushed our teeth and me not having woken up all my limbs yet, we were kissing. And it was incredible. As in seriously incredible. So incredible I tried to push through the thigh-squat-pain barrier to keep it going as long as possible. But, as I have the balance of a newborn foal (and due to my razor crisis, the exact same amount of leg hair too) it wasn’t long before I ended up toppling over, and into his tent. And on top of him.
Which just meant we did even more kissing. I wriggled out of his hoodie, knowing he needed it but would never take it back. But who cared about hypothermia? This kiss was worth it. His hands were in my hair (I really hoped I’d removed that fork), my hands were up and under his T-shirt (his skin was soft and warm and felt both really out of bounds and totally mine all at the same time) and all of us seemed to be pressing up against each other. It didn’t feel awkward, or weird, or clunky – just amazing. I was totally lost in it. I never wanted this to end.
But my phone had other ideas.
And chose this exact moment for my alarm to go off (technically, I’d chosen this time, but still).
Things I hated right now:
•My alarm
•My phone
•The concept of alarms
•The concept of time
The noise made us pull apart, the self-consciousness that had disappeared instantly reappearing and slapping us both around the face. I searched around for my phone, but I’d dropped it outside the tent. ARGH.
“Talk about timing.” Adam laughed under his breath. I had no option but to fully disentangle from him. I crawled out and grabbed my phone, hitting snooze, before heading back in. “Sorry – but I …” Eurgh. I so didn’t want to finish the sentence. I didn’t want to have to go.
He nodded. “I know – you gotta go. But—” He reached over to the scrunched-up hoodie I’d tried to leave behind. “Don’t think I didn’t see this. Have it back. Don’t want you freezing out there.” Truth was, I loved wearing his stuff. It was like getting a secret cuddle the whole time.
“Thank you.” I took it from him.
He looked me dead in the eye. “It’s not entirely unselfish. Cos if you freeze, we wouldn’t get to do this again.” MAJOR STOMACH LURCH. He wanted round two as much
as me?!
I crawled back out of his tent, dazed and drawing a total blank of how to reply (that didn’t involve me doing a happy dance). As I stood up he waved with both hands from down on the floor.
“Seeya, Bells. And thanks… That was…” He grinned. “A nice way to start the morning.”
I pulled his hoodie on. “Sure was.”
To put it lightly. He propped his head up on his elbows.
“I’ll try and be there at 12 – but we’ve got ‘on stage walkthrough rehearsal’ whatever that is, so if not I’ll be there in spirit.” He’d already explained he couldn’t make the prep session for the protest, but it was lovely that he’d even think about trying to with all his stuff going on. He waved again and blew a kiss. I blew one back. Turns out we’re both super cheesy before 5 in the morning. With potentially my biggest grin to date I headed back to my tent. It was not normal to be awake at 4:51 a.m., to be about to pick rubbish for four hours, and to be this happy. But I wasn’t the only one smiling. ’Cos Lols was on the other side of the fence, staring straight at me. She blew me a kiss, taking the mick out of the one I’d just given Adam.
I pretended not to see her, even though we both knew I had, and ducked into my tent to get ready. Seven minutes later Tegan and I were out of our field and walking down to do our final shift. People were still returning from the fun of last night. And one of those people was running towards us.
“I thought it was you guys!” A smudgy, happy-looking Rach stopped in front of us. I’d never known her have so much stamina. Sometimes she fell asleep during The One Show.
I twirled and pulled on my top. “Y’know, I’m starting to like Uncle Vest-a.” That was my new name for it/him. “You just getting back?”
Rach got the concern in my voice and pointed behind her. “Marge is with me. I may have just had an hour’s kip while they danced.” She cricked her neck. “Turns out floors can be surprisingly comfortable.”
Tegan did a mini eye-roll; she wasn’t even pretending to like them any more. Rach totally saw. “C’mon, Teeg, they’re not that bad.”