The Takeover

by Oli White

  ‘What, and you think the letter and the caginess are connected?’ Ella said, lifting her head off my shoulder.

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I’m reading too much into it. Forget I said anything; I’m probably just knackered.’

  ‘Are you worried he might be ill or something?’ Ella said.

  ‘I’m not even going to follow that train of thought,’ I said. ‘Not after last year. Actually let’s not talk about it now, eh?’

  She put her hands on my shoulders and gently pulled me around to face her. ‘You’ve got such a good relationship with your mum and dad, Jack. Just talk to him. Ask him straight if he’s got something on his mind. I bet it’s nothing to worry about.’

  I smiled, pulling her in for a kiss. ‘And what makes you so bloody wise?’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t impart the secret of great wisdom to any old dumb-ass,’ she said, kissing me back.

  ‘You cheeky—’

  We were interrupted by Sai, who’d come up to get us. He was bouncing around like an excitable puppy in the light streaming out of the front door.

  ‘Guys! Downstairs. Quick!’

  Back down in HQ, AJ was on the phone – and he had a really weird expression on his face. It was impossible to tell whether he’d won the lottery or his cat had died, or anything in between. Everyone else was gathered around him in a hushed circle, waiting expectantly. After a few yeses and noes and one very firm ‘Of course!’ he held his iPhone out to me, still looking bemused.

  ‘Someone wants to speak to you, Jack.’

  I took the phone, wondering who it might be to provoke such intense curiosity from the entire crew. ‘Hey! Jack Penman here.’

  ‘Hey, Jack, what’s going on?’ It was a voice I recognised instantly: that soft, sexy Texan twang. I nearly dropped the phone. It was Harriet Rushworth! The major international pop artist Austin and I had interviewed in LA the previous year. An interview that had gone so monumentally wrong that it had almost brought about the end of GenNext. Harriet was cool, though – she didn’t hold the screw-up against us, and we’d left things on good terms with her. Still, I hadn’t expected her to be calling me up to shoot the breeze any time soon. Since that first encounter, she’d become more and more of a star. If her rise to fame had been meteoric, she’d now hit the stratosphere. I was on the phone to a major A-lister.

  ‘It’s Harriet Rushworth here. Remember me, sugar?’ she said.

  As if I wouldn’t remember her. ‘Of course I do …’ I said, suddenly realising that I had absolutely no saliva in my mouth whatsoever. ‘How are you, Harriet?’

  ‘I’m fabulous, Jack. What about you? How’s it all going with that website of yours?’

  I gesticulated madly across the room, mouthing the words ‘IT’S HARRIET!’ to the rest of the team, who clearly already knew and were now all staring at me expectantly, wondering why one of the world’s most sought-after stars was calling me for a chinwag.

  Harriet didn’t wait for my answer. ‘Listen, I’ve been talking with your lovely manager, AJ. I could have gone through my management but I thought the personal touch was in order after what happened with y’all last year when we met …’

  I felt myself get hot thinking about that disastrous interview. I just knew that my face was turning the colour of a ripe tomato. ‘Well, that’s nice of you, Harriet.’

  ‘The long and the short of it is, I wanna play on your stage at Total,’ she said.

  I nearly dropped the phone. ‘You … you … you …’

  ‘See the thing is, the main stage is gonna be a minefield as far as I’m concerned: Ariana one night, Taylor the next, and honey, I ain’t stepping on no stage unless I’m headlining the damn thing, you hear what I’m saying?’

  ‘I do. I do hear. I hear perfectly.’ Oh God, I was babbling.

  ‘And I’ll be honest, I admire the way you guys have pulled yourselves up by your Calvin Kleins and got yourselves a stage at the festival. Y’all have an ambitious streak. And I always liked you, Jack, I did. You were a little wet behind the ears when we met before, but I’m confident that has all changed. Tell me if I’m wrong …’

  I started to speak again but I didn’t get far. ‘Well—’

  ‘And another thing, Jack Penman,’ she motored over me, ‘I think your Total Youth stage is going to be where it’s damn well at. It’ll be a little more edgy, and that’s what I’m looking for; nothing too corporate, if you get my drift. I mean, do I need to be walking on stage waving a bottle of sugar-infused fizzy crap just because some sponsor tells me that’s what I should be doing? I do not.’

  She was a piece of work, this girl, but I had to admire her for it. In amongst all the bull-crap about us getting GenNext back on track and how cool and edgy our stage was going to be, the crux of the matter was that Harriet didn’t want to be just another big female solo artist on the main stage and end up being compared to all the others. If she performed on the Total Youth stage, she’d be a massive fish in a relatively small pond. Smart, but I wasn’t complaining. Having Harriet Rushworth on our stage was exactly what we needed – it was the last piece of the puzzle snapping into place.

  ‘Harriet, we’d love to have you, you know that,’ I said, finally getting a sentence in. ‘It’s good to know that you trust us again after … you know.’

  ‘Hell, I’ll even throw in some exclusive behind-the-scenes stuff for the channel … that’s if you’re real nice to me, Jack,’ she added, and I felt myself redden again, glancing over at Ella and hoping to God she couldn’t hear what Harriet was saying.

  ‘That would be amazing,’ I said as calmly as humanly possible.

  ‘OK, so can I hand it over to my management team to finalise everything? Good. That’s settled. I’ll see y’all in a couple of weeks. Be good now!’

  ‘Thanks, Harriet, I …’ But she was gone.

  I looked over at the expectant faces of the team: Sai, Suki, Ava, AJ and Ella. Even Austin looked more excited than he had done all day.

  ‘I guess you know what that was all about,’ I grinned, handing AJ back his phone.

  ‘Not really,’ Sai said. ‘The conversation was a little one-sided and you only said about three words, dude.’

  ‘Well, let’s just put it this way,’ I said, slapping Sai on the shoulder. ‘We’re sorted. Done. We have our line-up and our big headliner. The Total Youth stage is going to be huge.’

  Austin’s mum’s basement became a cacophony of cheers and whoops, like a newsroom that had just broken the biggest story of the year.

  ‘Right, guys, what are we going to do to celebrate?’ I said, attempting to calm the noise. ‘Hit a club, open some champagne … what?’

  ‘I know,’ Ava said. ‘Let’s just all go home early, for Christ’s sake.’

  Ella let out a sigh. ‘Oh babe, I love you for that.’

  ‘Really?’ I was semi-horrified.

  ‘Really, Jack. It’s time for the Nando’s and the box set. Let’s go, buddy.’

  Ava was right, of course. Whatever mayhem we inflicted on ourselves by way of a celebration that night was only going to come back to haunt us in the morning. And God, there was still so much to do. But that was OK, because now I felt like we were really on our way. We were flying.

  THE ARRIVAL

  As our trio of black Cadillac SUVs streaked along, an enormous brightly coloured city seemed to spring up before our eyes, smack bang in the middle of the Nevada desert. That’s what the Total Festival looked like anyway – a crazy metropolis, growing by the minute as we got closer and closer. It was a spectacular sight.

  I was travelling in the first car along with Ella, Sai, Paulo the driver and enough luggage for a six-month trip around the world – mostly Ella’s, of course. Behind us in the second car were Ava, Suki, AJ and his dazzlingly attractive twenty-two-year-old assistant Lily. Lily had been a total godsend so far, parking herself next to Sai, who was a horribly nervous flyer, on the plane and somehow managing to keep him calm throughout the ten-hour fli
ght from London to LA. Austin, meanwhile, had chosen to ride in the third car with a couple of the American crew who were going to be working alongside us at the festival. He told us that he just wanted to zone out and listen to music. It was a little bit odd, but to be honest, he hadn’t seemed himself since the gang had all met up at Heathrow. I wondered if perhaps it was a guilty conscience at having left Jess back in Hertfordshire, which hadn’t been the easiest of tasks. Ella reckoned he’d had to promise to FaceTime her every hour on the hour throughout the entire trip, just so she’d let him on the bloody plane.

  As the sprawling vision of Total got ever closer, Ella smiled nervously at me. ‘Here we go then,’ she said. ‘Are we ready for this, Jack? Like, really ready?’

  ‘We are,’ I said, with a confidence I was trying to make myself feel. ‘We definitely are.’

  As far as I was concerned, there was no room for uncertainty. It was in moments of self-doubt that my mind traitorously played back GenNext’s car crash of an interview with Harriet the previous year, when I’d totally blanked, live on air, in front of millions of people. I wasn’t going to let that vision creep into my head. Not today.

  ‘Although,’ I added, shaking off the memory, ‘I’ve never been to a festival before, so I don’t really know what to expect.’

  ‘Let’s put it this way,’ Ella said. ‘When I went to V Festival a few years back, the toilets were uber grim and it poured with rain the whole time. It took me a week to get the mud out of my hair.’

  ‘I think the toilets will be a lot more glamorous in the VIP areas here,’ Sai said from the front seat.

  ‘Well, it’s always nice to have something to look forward to,’ I said.

  ‘And what about those sick tent jobs we’re staying in on site?’ he went on.

  ‘Yurts! They’re luxury yurts,’ Ella said, turning to me. ‘And I’m still not convinced we shouldn’t just be staying in a nice dry hotel with multiple plug sockets, babe.’

  ‘We’ll be fine. We’ll embrace the adventure together,’ I said, laughing.

  Staring out of the window, mesmerised by the red and orange sandstone rock of the desert, it suddenly dawned on me that in all the excitement of arriving in LA, I’d completely forgotten to text Mum and Dad – and I’d landed a good four hours ago.

  ‘Crap!’ I said out loud, and as I fumbled in my pocket for my phone, my mind flashed back to the drive to Heathrow with Mum and Dad. They’d both been unusually quiet, with me riding shotgun and Mum in the back seat, staring out of the window with a distant look in her eye. It was weird. Mum always had so much to say to me before I left for even the shortest trip: Have you remembered to pack this, Jack? Do you need that, Jack? Don’t forget to take loads of pictures, Jack. But there was none of that today: just some stilted chit-chat about how lucky we’d been with the traffic. In the end I had to turn up Scott Mills just to cut through the atmosphere.

  Before I jumped out at the drop-off point, ready to head into the terminal to meet the rest of the crew, Mum leaned over and hugged me tight, planting a fond kiss on my cheek. ‘I’ll miss you, love.’ Was it just me, or did she seem more emotional than usual?

  ‘We both will,’ Dad said, like it was a competition. ‘Have a fantastic time, Jack. And be careful.’

  ‘Of course he’ll be careful,’ Mum said dismissively. ‘Keep me up to date with what’s happening when you get the chance, won’t you? And text me when you land in LA!’

  ‘Yes, Jack, fire me a quick text too,’ Dad said.

  I promised I’d send them both messages the moment I landed. Then I gave them both another hug and they waved me goodbye as I walked into the airport, although they were standing about five feet apart from each other.

  What was up with those two? It was unlike them to be snappy with one another. It seemed obvious to me, as I wheeled my case through the terminal towards the bag drop, that whatever had been making Dad act so strange lately was having an impact on how he and Mum were getting on. I know what you’re thinking: why hadn’t I confronted them about it? Why didn’t I just come out and say, ‘What’s going on with you two?’ The truth was, after Mum’s cancer diagnosis last year, I was worried about what their answer might be. OK, so Dad had told me that it wasn’t anything to do with Mum’s health, and of course I believed him, but I couldn’t bear the thought that something else could be wrong.

  Right at that moment, I was just about to get on a transatlantic flight. I was about to embark on something important and amazing, and I owed it to myself and my friends to be on form.

  I’d tackle Mum and Dad once I got back to Hertfordshire.

  ‘Jack! Look, we’re almost there.’ Ella’s excited voice shook me out of my thoughts and I glanced up from my phone and out of the front window.

  ‘Bloody hell, that was a quicker journey than I thought,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, I’m pretty pleased about that; I’m feeling a bit queasy,’ Sai said, looking slightly grey in the face.

  Ella leaned over and patted his shoulder. ‘You really don’t travel well, do you, Sai?’

  Sai shook his head sadly, and I looked back down at my iPhone at the text message I’d composed.

  That was OK, wasn’t it? Yeah. I’d send the same text to both of them. Keep it simple.

  Pulling up at the artists’ entrance to the festival site in front of two enormous metal gates, AJ and Lily jumped out of their car to be met by a uniformed man who carefully checked each of our names off on a clipboard, while a more casually dressed dude in a Coldplay T-shirt handed Lily a wad of laminated passes and stickers. Eventually the guy in uniform signalled the opening of the gates, and our convoy was directed through along a dusty, bumpy trail to one of the backstage parking zones. We were there!

  I got out of the SUV and looked around, feeling the warm breeze on my face. The site looked epic. Through the hazy desert sun I could make out all the crews hard at work: hooking up light rigs, securing tents, setting up food stalls, and generally putting the finishing touches to everything, ready for the festival opening the following day.

  ‘OK! I’m going to find someone to show us where our yurts are and help transport our luggage,’ Lily said. ‘Do you guys want to have a look around and I’ll call you when I know what’s going on?’

  ‘Sure thing, Lily,’ I said. ‘Shall we find the Total Youth stage? Make sure it isn’t looking like the water park at Alton Towers. It could go either way with palm trees.’

  After all the heated discussions and a lengthy afternoon steering Sai away from the idea of recreating the bridge of the Starship frickin’ Enterprise, we’d eventually agreed on Ella’s idea of a twisted jungle wonderland theme for our stage, with rose-gold-coloured trees, hanging vines of light and these amazing hybrid-animal sculptures: a wolf with the wings of an eagle, a zebra with a lion’s head, a snake with a panther’s body – you get the idea. Suki had sweet-talked one of her set-designer friends into pulling it together for us super-fast and within our allocated festival budget, plus they had it all made in California so we didn’t have to spend thousands shipping it. Now we just had to hope it had all arrived in one piece – and that it looked as amazing as we’d imagined when we drew up the designs back in GenNext’s HQ.

  ‘Sounds good, Jack,’ AJ said, looking down at his phone. ‘Actually, Jason Croft wants us to meet him over at the Youth stage anyway. He’s a nice guy; one of the festival’s owners. He’ll show us what’s what.’

  ‘Cool, let’s all go,’ Ava said. Her arm was casually linked through Suki’s, I noticed. ‘The sooner we do a recce, the sooner we’ll have a feel for the festival, and what we’re dealing with.’

  ‘OK, why don’t you guys go meet Jason, and I’ll go with Lily and scope out the living quarters,’ Sai said. ‘She probably needs a hand.’ Ella and I raised eyebrows at each other and I had to stop myself from grinning. It was clear that Sai had taken a bit of a shine to Lily after the plane journey, despite having his head in a sick bag for most of it. It was no real shocker, I
guess. Lily seemed like a really cool girl, and she was as striking as she was pretty, with dyed silver-white hair, twisted up in dreads, and this massive septum piercing through her nose, which on anyone else would have looked insane but which on her looked amazing.

  ‘Talking of our stage, where the flippin’ hell is it?’ Austin piped up. ‘This place is massive.’

  Lily rifled amongst the passes and envelopes she’d been handed at the gate. ‘There are a few site maps here somewhere …’

  ‘I can show you where it is, if you like.’

  A skinny, mousy-haired dude in cargo shorts and a checked shirt appeared from behind a white van parked adjacent to one of our cars. ‘You’re GenNext, aren’t you? Total Youth stage?’

  ‘That’s us,’ AJ said as the guy started walking towards us.

  He was around our age, quietly spoken, with an English accent, and he had a pair of Pioneer headphones slung around his neck.

  ‘I was just over at your stage, it’s very nice. Would you like me to take you there?’

  Ava strode forward to shake the dude’s hand. ‘That would be really helpful, thank you. I’m Ava.’

  ‘Ethan; pleased to meet you.’

  ‘And you’re from the UK,’ Ava said.

  ‘Well spotted,’ he smiled. ‘But I’ve been living and working out here for the last few months.’

  ‘Are you working here at the festival?’ I asked, stepping forward. I felt like I’d seen him somewhere before but couldn’t for the life of me think where.

  ‘Sort of. I work on a TV show and we’re doing some filming at Total.’ He shook my outstretched hand. ‘It’s very nice to meet you, Jack.’

  I was taken aback that he knew my name, and must have looked it.

  ‘I’ve seen the GenNext channel, of course,’ he said. ‘You’re something of a legend, Jack.’ He looked over my shoulder, his polite smile widening. ‘And you’re Ella, right? Wow – you’re even more stunning in real life.’