by Oli White
Sometime later I was jolted awake, sitting bolt upright and breathing hard. I’d had one of those dreams—you know the type—where your brain is throwing all kinds of weird, panic-inducing stuff at you. I was swimming in the middle of the ocean, completely alone, and diving down into the deep, dark water. Every time the water closed over my head, the panic would surge up and I’d be frantically turning, searching for the threat I was sure was just behind me . . . And then bam! A great white shark streaked through the water toward me, its enormous mouth wide open, rows and rows of needle-sharp teeth ready to tear into my flesh . . .
I awoke from the nightmare with a heart rate like a marathon runner, drenched in sweat. I looked over at the clock radio next to my head; it was 1:47 a.m., and that was it, I was wide awake. I don’t know why, but even as the memory of the dream slipped away and subsided, there was still this sense of panic hanging over me, as if something was very wrong but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was.
I sipped some water and then fumbled about on the nightstand, locating my phone and holding it up to my face to check for messages—nothing. I decided to call home and speak to Mum, find out how she’d got on at the hospital the previous afternoon. OK, so she probably wouldn’t have any results yet, but I just wanted to make sure she was all right. I was thousands of miles away and I knew that if I just heard her voice I’d feel better—calmer, somehow.
When she first answered, Mum’s voice was a croaky whisper, but the second she realized it was me, it brightened.
“Jack! It’s so good to hear your voice; your dad and I have been itching to know how it’s all going and what you’ve been up to. When’s the big interview?”
I was relieved to hear that familiar chatty quality in her tone. It was a happy sound and that gave me hope. The news was going to be good, surely—or at least, not terrible.
“Never mind me, Mum, what happened at the hospital? How did you get on—did it hurt?” I wasn’t entirely sure what the tests entailed, and if I’m honest, I didn’t really want to know. I hated the thought of Mum going through anything that involved needles and pain.
“Oh, it was just, you know, the usual,” Mum said, as casually as if she’d just been queuing in the post office for a book of stamps. “Everything takes ages—you hang around to see a nurse, and then you wait even longer to see a doctor, and then you come away none the wiser; it’s always the same. Then there’s all that medical jargon; you need a degree just to understand what it is they’re talking about half the time. My head was spinning by the time I got out of there.”
Mum was talking but she wasn’t really saying anything that had any meaning. She chattered on a bit more about the friendly receptionist who’d checked her in and the uncomfortable chairs she and Dad had to sit on for ages, and it was then I noticed that her bright tone had a brittle edge to it—there was something slightly manic in her delivery. She was keeping something from me.
I sat up in bed. “Mum?”
“We spent almost an hour just waiting in the canteen,” she went on. “Actually, the food there’s not bad, for a hospital canteen. Your dad had a jacket potato and—”
“MUM?” Now there was silence on the other end of the line and all my hope fell away. “What did the doctors say, Mum? What’s happening? Please tell me.”
She sighed, long and slow. “We wanted to wait until you got home, Jack, that’s why I didn’t phone yesterday. We didn’t see any point in ruining your trip because, well, what can you do anyway?”
My heart felt as though it was caught in my throat and I swallowed hard to push it back down. “It’s fine, Mum, just tell me.”
When she spoke again, the brightness had disappeared completely. “I’ll just . . . I’ll just get . . .”
There was some muttering and rustling on the line and the next voice I heard was Dad’s.
“Jack, your mum has breast cancer.” He spoke softly, like he was trying to comfort a child. “We suspected as much but now it’s been confirmed. They got the results back practically right away as they didn’t want to keep us hanging on.”
I bit my lip and gripped the phone tight. “Right.”
“It’s in her left breast,” Dad went on. “She’ll go in for an operation, probably the middle of next week, to remove all the bad stuff and then she’ll have chemotherapy, probably six doses over the next few months, then they’re talking about possible hormone treatment.” There was a brief pause, and then I heard him sigh. “This is going to be very hard for your mum, and it’s going to be tough on us as a family, too. I’m sorry to do this over the phone, son, I really am. As Mum said, we wanted to wait until you got home, but here you are calling home, so . . .”
For several seconds I was speechless. I felt as though I’d been pushed off the top of a very tall building and I was falling fast, the g-force pummeling my face, waiting for the inevitable crash.
Then Mum was back on the line, her voice more purposeful now.
“Jack, I’m going to beat this. It’s operable, and the treatment these days is amazing, so I’m going to get through it, do you understand?”
I nodded as if she could see me, but the tears were falling so fast that I was scared to speak in case it all came tumbling out and she heard me crying. I really didn’t want that. So I just whispered a “yes” and then listened to her talk about the inconvenience of going into hospital, about Dad’s inability to grasp the most basic of culinary skills and the fact that she’d have to prepare and freeze dinners before she went so we didn’t starve; I listened to her tell me that I’d have to download Game of Thrones and Midsomer Murders on her iPad for when she was recuperating because she still hadn’t got the hang of how to do it, and I listened to her tell me how lucky she was to have the family around her that she did. See, that’s my mum. Even at a time like this, there she was telling me how lucky she was.
Then her voice lowered to almost a whisper. “Listen, Jack, while your dad’s popped to the kitchen, I need to tell you something, something very important.”
“I’m listening, Mum.”
“Whatever’s happening here, with me, you have to carry on with your life,” she said. “You’ve done amazing things over these last few months and you’ve got to keep on; work harder than ever and be the absolute best you can be, do you understand me? That’s really, really important.”
“I . . . I think so,” I said.
“Good,” Mum said, with a smile in her voice. “I don’t need to be worrying about you as well as me, do I?”
“I suppose not,” I said.
Before we hung up, I told her I loved her and that I’d see her in just a couple of days. After that, I sat in the darkness wondering how the hell I was even going to get through the next couple of days. I was completely gutted: hollow and heartbroken. How could this be happening to my mum? I just couldn’t get my head around it. Everything else that had happened that day—the Herald offer, the fight with Austin, Ava and Sai—suddenly seemed so trivial and stupid.
What seemed even more stupid was the fact that I hadn’t had the guts to call Ella and tell her any of this: about Mum, about my real feelings for her. That was going to have to change. To use that ridiculous TV expression, I was going to have to man up. I had to call Ella, hear her voice, speak to her. I had to tell her how I felt about her, because life was too bloody precious not to. And I would call her. Just as soon as the interview with Harriet was out of the way and I could think straight, that was exactly what I was going to do.
THE BLACKMAIL
The following morning—you know, the one at the start of the most important day of my life so far—well, I wasn’t feeling too great. You can understand that, right, after the news I’d had. The thing is, no matter how hard I tried to concentrate on all the positive stuff that Mum had told me during our phone conversation, my mind just kept tripping over into the negative, the sad, and the downright terrifying. So once I was up and out of bed—and that took a while—I just sort of blundered aroun
d like a trapped moth: banging first into the bathroom door and then the wardrobe door and then treading on all my crap, which was strewn about the room as I tried to pack, ready to move hotels. In the end, a cup of strong coffee followed by a long, hot shower helped bring the world into focus a little, while the chirpy buzz of Good Morning America in the background distracted me from my dark thoughts long enough for me to get my act together. I just needed to get today done and dusted and then I could get home to Mum, to my family, where I belonged right now.
Finally packed and still swathed in a complimentary fluffy white bathrobe and slippers, I grabbed my phone to call AJ and find out the schedule for the day and what time we were leaving for The Four Seasons. That was when I spotted the text message; it must have come in while I was in the shower.
WTF? No contact details, and the number was a complete mystery, but surely it could only be from Herald Media, right? I mean, what other offer was there to reconsider?
As I was staring down at my phone, trying to fathom out what the message even meant and why on earth Angela Linford or Tyler would embarrass themselves by sending me such a random text, it buzzed with life again. Another message—same number.
This time the message was immediately followed by a photo of a girl and a guy—actually it looked more like a screen grab than a photo. The girl was on a bed, half naked, and the guy was . . . Hang on . . . I widened the photo with my fingers, enlarging it as much as I could, my heart thumping in my chest. It was a bit blurry and the guy had his back to the camera, but . . . the blonde hair, the nose ring . . . I couldn’t be one hundred percent certain, but the girl looked like . . . like Ella. Exactly like her. But how? How the hell would Herald even have such a photo? Was this a joke? Had some hideous Internet troll photo-shopped Ella into some tacky porno shot?
I stood there, my wet hair dripping on to my iPhone screen, trying to piece together a jigsaw of haphazard information in my head. Then another message arrived with another screen grab, this one more explicit than the last but the face, the features, much clearer. It was Ella. It was her. What the hell was going on?
My mind was all over the place, and I seriously expected to wake up at any second. What was this anyway—some kind of James Bond, Bourne trilogy blackmail crap? Was I actually supposed to take it seriously? I mean, how was it even possible that Herald could have got hold of a video of Ella in that kind of situation? Surely she couldn’t have known there was a camera—no, of course she didn’t. I wanted to throw up, the whole thing was so sick and revolting.
I glanced back down at my phone, my heart rate going up a notch—as if that was even possible—as I looked again at the guy in the screen grab. It was just the back of his head in one shot and a shadowed profile in the next, but could that be him? Could that be Hunter? Oh. My. God. Jack, you idiot! Of course it could be . . . of course it was.
Within a few seconds, I’d thrown my phone down on the bed and was hunched over the desk in one corner of the room, hammering the keys of my laptop, filled with adrenalin and dread as the penny finally began to drop. OK, Google—Herald Media, location . . . no; IMDB . . . no; Facebook . . . no; shows produced by, website, career opportunities . . . no, no, this wasn’t it. Come on, there had to be something. OK, try again. Google—Herald Media staff, Herald Media CEO . . . Images, yes, that was what I needed, images. I scrolled through a few dozen images of logos and screen shots of TV shows I hoped never to see before I finally double-clicked on what I was looking for: a handful of photos from some low-rent awards ceremony—definitely not the Golden Globes: “The Herald Media team toasting their success in the Most Popular Daytime Quiz Show category.” And there they were, staring up at me, champagne flutes raised and cheesy grins from here to Mars: Angela Linford, Tyler Masterson, and standing next to them, “founder and owner of Herald Media, Callum Connor.”
I jumped up from the desk, knocking the chair over and laughing out loud like a maniac—mostly at myself. So this was what Hunter meant when he warned me there was much worse to come. And how stupid had I been not to figure out that Callum’s company was Herald Media—or at least that there was a connection? Sure, it had seemed a little weird that GenNext got one big offer right after the other, but I had no idea Callum’s company was anything like the huge corporation that Herald had turned out to be. I wasn’t sure if everything suddenly made sense or if I was just losing it. I wanted to kick myself for not checking all this stuff out before the meeting—but that ship had well and truly sailed. The only thing that mattered was what I did next and how I retaliated. OK, I needed to send a return message, right? Tell them I knew who was behind the video and that I wasn’t going to give in to their blackmail. Or should I ignore it? Was it just a bluff, an idle threat? I also needed to warn Ella that all this was happening, but how I was supposed to deliver that piece of news was completely beyond me. Oh God, somebody tell me what to do, please!
There was no time to think. Before I could make any sort of a move, AJ was hammering on the door of my room and angrily reminding me that I was supposed to have been downstairs in the lobby twenty minutes ago. I threw my laptop into my bag, grabbed my case and opened the door, heart still thumping.
The second AJ saw me, his face dropped. “Jack, what’s wrong? You look bloody awful.”
I opened my mouth to blurt out everything: Callum, the video of Ella, the blackmail, my mum, but something stopped me in my tracks. Call it instinct, call it a gut reaction, but something caused my mouth to shut like a trap.
“What is it, Jack?” AJ said again.
“It’s . . . it’s nothing. I’m just not feeling very well. I think I might have a bit of food poisoning,” I lied.
AJ’s face softened. “Oh, Jack, sorry to hear that. Are you going to be OK?” He put his hand on my shoulder, squeezing it firmly, and for a second I thought I might actually cry. There was just too much to think about; too much information to process, and I was trying to do it all on my own.
“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” I said, attempting a smile. “Let’s go.”
As I followed AJ along the hall toward the elevator, I wondered if I could do a runner. Maybe I could just jump in an Uber and head back to Venice Beach; sit there in the gorgeous sunshine looking at the sea until I made sense of everything and could decide exactly what to do. There was no chance of that, though. Before I knew it, a porter had taken my bags off me and AJ had hurried me out of the hotel’s front door. Almost immediately, a car pulled up in front of me—a blacked-out SUV, no less—and within thirty seconds I was in the back with Austin and AJ, pulling out of the hotel driveway and heading for The Four Seasons Hotel . . .
Oh . . . and I guess that’s where you came in.
THE INTERVIEW (PART 2)
So there you have it. You’re bang up to date with everything—right up to the minute. I’m perched on a stool next to Austin with a camera in my face and an audience of potential millions watching, and I’ve just announced to the world that my shoelace is undone. Nice. Austin is staring over at me, the denim-shirted host is staring at me—I don’t even know his name—in fact the whole audience is staring at me, clearly waiting for something to happen. You can see now why I might be all over the place, right? This is a life-changing moment, a career highlight involving a massive pop star, yet I’m engulfed in a stinking quicksand of takeover bids, sex tapes and blackmail. Yeah, that. It’s not the kind of thing a seventeen-year-old would normally be dealing with, is it? All I can think about is what the hell I’m going to do to stop everything tumbling down around my ears—and more importantly, wondering how I’m to save Ella. Any ideas?
Just as her name flashes through my mind, so do the images on the video I received five minutes ago. The video followed the threatening phone call, just as we were on our way to do the interview, which followed the mysterious text messages earlier that morning. They were all from the same, blocked number. Callum and Herald Media have a video of Ella in a compromising position with Hunter, except that he’s been mostly crop
ped out of the video so the focus is all on her. I’m finding it hard to get my head around the idea that even an idiot like Hunter would stoop so low and do something so vile to somebody he was going out with just a few weeks back, but there’s no doubt. It was Hunter’s voice I heard on the phone a few moments ago, threatening to release the video—I’m sure of it. And after the incident with me at his party, I have absolutely no doubt that he’s prepared to do it. It’s pathetic, really. The video isn’t even that bad, nothing you’d call hardcore. It’s enough, though. Enough to destroy Ella and maybe ruin her chances of building a career on what she started with GenNext.
“Jack? Jack, do you need a drink of water?” Austin says, leaning sideways on the stool and shaking me out of my trance.
I’ve been staring down at my untied shoelace while poor Austin tries to hold it all together, chatting to the guy in the denim shirt and answering questions from the audience as best he can. When I finally look up, it’s clear that all eyes in the room are on me. Most of the audience are wearing frowns and speaking in hushed tones, like “Who’s the nutter?” and “What drugs is that dude on?”
Eventually I look over at Austin. “No, I don’t want any water. I’m cool, seriously.” Only I’m not cool. I’m not cool at all. The guy in the denim shirt, who’s been doing his best to get a word out of me for the past few minutes, looks vaguely panicky and glances over at Duke for guidance. Duke, meanwhile, is waving his arms about like an out-of-control helicopter. I can’t be certain but I think the essence of what he is trying to convey is let’s-wrap-this-crap-the-hell-up-and-get-to-the-main-event-fast. I look back over at the red light on the camera, which is now blinking, and I’m not sure if that means that it’s off or that I’m still being beamed around the world looking like a total nut-job.