Love Lies

8. Fern

I don’t have much time to demonstrate the hate. There’s no opportunity to huffily push him away as he makes stealthy sexual advances because he doesn’t make any advances – stealthy or otherwise. Even though it’s my birthday!

Instead he says we have to get up quickly, or at least he does because he has to be at Wembley by nine. He suggests I should come along with him because he has backstage passes and he says it will be interesting for me to see what he does.

‘I know what you do,’ I mutter grumpily. ‘You climb up and down ladders, twiddle knobs and put bulbs in lamps.’

Adam looks hurt. ‘There’s more to it than that, Fern. I am part of a vital team. My contribution to this spectacular is valid. It’s like being part of an orchestra; even the guy with the triangle thing is crucial to the overall symphony,’ he says.

‘Get over yourself, Adam. Being in an orchestra is like being in an orchestra. You are a rigger. You put up scaffolding,’ I snap. He doesn’t bother to correct me and point out that he’s an assistant stage manager now. I think he knows it will be cold comfort.

‘Come anyway, we always need an extra pair of hands to run to the catering hall for coffee and you are on holiday so you’ve nothing better to do.’

The truth of his statement is horribly shocking. It’s my thirtieth birthday and I have nothing better to do than fetch coffee for a bunch of guys, most of whom aren’t even on nodding terms with soap. I wake Jess and give her an update. She’s as sympathetic as I could hope for, considering it’s this early in the day.

‘Can you skive off for the day and keep me company before the gig?’ I ask, not bothering to keep the self-pity out of my voice.

‘I’d love to, sweetie, but I can’t.’ She squeezes my arm. ‘My area manager knows that Adam got us these freebies and is letting me leave the shop an hour before the end of my shift as it is. He’d smell a rat if I failed to turn up at all today. Plus I’d feel a bit of a cow since he’s already agreed to give me the extra hour with pay. You understand, don’t you?’

‘Suppose,’ I mutter, without any grace. My mind is whirling. Seemingly, I veer off on a tangent but in fact it’s all related. ‘Do you realize I’ve never been on a club 18–30 holiday? I can’t now. That’s a missed opportunity.’

‘I’d hardly class that as a missed opportunity. Who wants to drink luminous cocktails with horny, desperate strangers until you puke or skinny dip?’ asks Jess.

‘I wonder how many other opportunities I’ve missed,’ I muse.

‘Very few, from what I remember of your misspent youth,’ says Jess matter-of-factly. ‘Do you want your pressie?’

Jess has bought me some fabulous Mac makeup brushes. They are really glam and grown up. I thank her and resist commenting that right now all I want to do is stick them up Adam’s backside.

‘I’ll call Lisa and we’ll see you at the gig. Once you’re there, do a bit of a recce and then text me to arrange exactly where to meet,’ says Jess, as she kisses her ticket.

I dress with little care and can barely summon the energy to wave a mascara wand or draw a slash of red lippy over my lips. I’d imagined that I would start the day with a long (post-loving) luxurious bubble bath. I thought I might sip champagne in muted candlelight and maybe even persuade Adam to rub a bit of body oil into my back and shoulders. Then, I’d planned to pop to the hairdressers on the corner, to see if they could squeeze me in for a trim and blow dry. My hair has so many split ends, running off in opposite directions, it could be clinically diagnosed as schizophrenic. But I hoped I was going to be celebrating my engagement. Now, I haven’t got the necessary emotional energy for that level of indulgent pampering. I don’t like myself enough.

‘You look great,’ Adam lies, as we set off towards the tube. ‘The whole dishevelled look is very rock chic.’

I glare at him but don’t answer. In fact I don’t say anything all the way to Wembley. I’m not sure if he notices because he’s reading the sports pages of his tabloid newspaper and even if I came up with a new tool to patch up the ozone and scientific data to prove little green men do indeed inhabit Mars, he’d probably just grunt.

Loads of London venues are being tarted up for the 2012 Olympics and you can’t spit nowadays without hitting an imposing building (or at least the plan or crane for one), but I’ve heard it argued that Wembley is still the most impressive stadium on offer. Renowned architects started work on the project when Noah was a lad and I

‘There are seventy-five thousand seats and there will be fifteen thousand standing tonight,’ he says. He shakes his head, marvelling at the enormity of the upcoming spectacle that he’s part of. The seats, arranged in a bowl, are all protected from the elements by a sliding roof. The stadium’s signature feature is a circular section trellis arch which Adam informs me has an internal diameter of seven metres and a 315-metre span. The arch is not upright but (again Adam’s geeky info) is erected some twenty-two degrees off true; it rises to a striking 140 metres tall. Everything is super-sized. Adam, oblivious to my moody silence, tells me that the new Wembley is the largest stadium in the world.

‘There are two thousand, six hundred and eighteen toilets, more than any other venue on the planet.’

‘Fascinating,’ I mumble sarcastically. I wonder how much enthusiasm he’d show if I started to relay my own treasured statistics? The average age for a woman to marry is twenty-nine, for instance.

‘The stadium has a circumference of a kilometre.’

‘Right.’ The average length of an engagement in the US is sixteen months; I’m still searching for the equivalent data for the UK.

‘There are thirty-five miles of heavy-duty power cables in the stadium. Ninety thousand cubic metres of concrete.’ The average number of bridesmaids is three. ‘And twenty-three thousand tonnes of steel were used in the construction.’ The average cost of a wedding is twenty-one thousand pounds, but you can do it for a couple of hundred quid.

Someone please give me a drink; a stiff and large one. While I can see Adam’s point (yeah, yeah, the place is big), I’m finding it impossible to pretend I give a damn.

‘Each of the two giant screens in the new stadium is the size of six hundred domestic television sets.’

Marry me. Those were the only words I wanted to hear today. Not this inventory of dull facts. Marry me. Why not? Why couldn’t he bring himself to do it? Am I not his one? Am I just the current one? Or the fill-in one until the next one, who really will be the one? The thought hits me with such force I believe I might implode, right here, right now at Wembley Stadium. I sway slightly, like a cobweb in a spring breeze; there’s a real danger I’ll blow away. Adam reaches for my hand; a habitual gesture but I can’t follow our routine. I don’t take his hand and gently squeeze, I pull away. My heart is hard with thoughts of other ones and the one he might propose to one day.

‘You are dumbstruck, aren’t you?’ he says with a wide, crazy grin. I stare back resentful and shocked that he can’t read me better. ‘I just knew that tickets for the Scottie gig would be the perfect present,’ he beams.

OK, I suppose I can admit that normally going to a Scottie Taylor gig would be something I’d get excited about. It would have been the perfect present if it was

Inside the stadium, it seems to me that everything is set to go. Adam tells me that his recent late nights have all been spent here, setting up for rehearsals. Adam is flying high as a kite. He’s giggling like a seven-year-old girl, flinging orders and cheery hellos by turn at the guys and girls who I assume are his team.

I am now familiar with what to expect behind the scenes before the razzamatazz of the show; I’ve waited in the wings often enough. I scan the endless rows of lights, the towering stacks of speakers, the white cyclorama, the heavy drapes, and the jet black front curtain which are all carefully suspended from complicated zigzag girders hidden in the roof high above. It looks complex bordering on the chaotic. I know that it does demand a lot of patience and skill to get the set-up spot-on and I know that it is crucial for Adam and his team to get every detail pinned down if the trademark Scottie Taylor attention-grabbing spectacle of a concert is to be nailed. I recognize that this stage is bigger than most; there are more dazzling lights and larger stacks of speakers than I’ve ever seen before. I don’t doubt that the set-up has

The thing is – I don’t give a toss.

A girl is meant to take an interest, isn’t she? A good girlfriend should care about her boyfriend’s job. But I don’t. Not today. Whatever is going on here isn’t as glossy and polished as a diamond on my third finger would be. I should be really pleased Adam’s got this great promotion and his career is taking off but I’m not impressed. I wish I was. Adam whips off his leather jacket and flings it my way. He practically leaps up a ladder like some sort of stuntman because he’s seen an out-of-place cable. I can’t remember when he last gave me the same attention.

I kill time watching guys in black T-shirts scuttling like beetles to and fro. On the stage the instruments are already laid out. They are still, waiting for life to be given to them by Scottie’s enormously talented band. The shiny red and silver drums are set up high on a platform, centre stage. There’s not just one keyboard but a whole gaggle of them to the left and the right and there are racks of guitars hung all over the place.

On the outer reaches of the stage there’s a horrendous confusion of wires and plugs that presumably make sense to someone. The maze of wires ultimately leads to chunky black cabinets and monitors. Smoke generated from machines drifts across the stage and hangs around at knee level, giving substance to the beams of continuously flashing lights that slice across the floor.

I check my watch – it’s just after ten. Scottie Taylor won’t be on this stage for another ten or eleven hours

With the possible exception of me.

My dreams are not coming true on this stage, or any other, come to that.

Adam is still up a ladder and doesn’t seem to remember I’m here at all. I can see from the concentration on his face that he has a lot on his mind. I’d put money on it that he’s not thinking about a princess-cut diamond versus baguette.

I check my phone. There are text messages from two of my four siblings and a voicemail from my mum. I sometimes think mobile phones were invented just so families could avoid talking to one another.

Whenever you tell people you have four siblings they offer up a brief prayer for my mum’s slack stomach muscles and the lattice grid of stretchmarks which she must surely have, and then ask if we are all alike.

No, we are not. Despite the fact that we all have the same mum and dad, and we were brought up with the same Protestant work ethic in the same lower-middle-class semi-detached in Reading, we are pretty much opposed in every way. In an attempt to ensure a close family, poor Alien (actually, I imagine the whole experience was like Alien, a series of exploding stomachs). Therefore it must be a bit galling for Mum and Dad that ever since we could all walk, we’ve been walking in separate directions, doing everything we can to carve out a bit of space and individuality.

We are nothing like the Russian doll set that my parents imagined. One of my brothers, Bill, went to Cambridge University to read politics. He glided through exams without having to break into a sweat; he didn’t even appear to break the spine of the cover of a book – he’s just dizzyingly intelligent. He’s gone on to be a trust fund manager. Please don’t ask me what that is because I have no idea. I do know that he drives a top-of-the-range X₅ BMW, which, as my dad put it, ‘must have cost a bob or two’, and he married an equally bright (and smug) lawyer and they now live in a huge, tastefully decorated pile in Holland Park with their three kids. The type of kids who watched Baby Einstein on TV from birth and now have an opinion on international current affairs. I’m truly intimidated by my young nephews and baby niece. I usually try to read the quality newspapers before I visit them so that I have topics of conversation to discuss with the eldest (he’s four). Neither Bill, nor his wife, has sent me a text to wish me happy birthday.

My sister, Fiona, managed to get to Salford nursing college but, hell, did she have to work to scrabble together the grades. She’s a dedicated (read knackered) nurse at some OAP hospital, up north somewhere. I truly admire

Then there’s Jake. I didn’t really expect a call from him since he’s resting at Her Majesty’s pleasure; nine months for some piracy crime. I don’t know the details because I avoided reading about them in the local rag and I tune out whenever Mum starts explaining the circumstances of his arrest. Mum maintains my brother Jake suffers from middle child syndrome. He tried too hard to carve out a point of difference in the family. It’s her excuse for him being a criminal; she can make as many excuses for him as she likes. He was a thieving bastard from the day he could walk and I’ll never forgive him for selling my Barbie doll in the playground when I was seven; Airhostess Barbie was a difficult doll to come by.

Then there’s me. I’ve resisted sending a text to myself or posting cards to myself, as though I’m some sort of Mr Bean saddo. My younger brother, Rick’s, text reads:

:-) bday sis. mAk suR itz a gud l. hav lots of SX w Adam while he stil fancies u. jst kidding. hav a gr8 dA.

It takes me a while to translate. Ha ha very funny. The chance of having lots of sex with Adam never arose, did it? Clearly, Adam has already reached the point of no return in terms of lusting after me.

If I had to pick a sibling I’d take with me to a desert island it would probably be Rick. Something to do with him being the only one I could boss around, perhaps. No one in our family has any idea whether Rick’s naturally brilliant, like Bill, but we do know that he’s not prepared to work like Fiona. All Rick wants to do, has ever wanted to do, is play video games. He discovered Pac Man when he was about three years old and has been surgically attached to buttons and screens ever since. Mum and Dad despaired. Mum regularly tortures herself by going on to the internet, late at night, and reading cases about psychotic murderers who listed video game playing on their otherwise blank CVs. Fortunately, and somewhat miraculously, Rick hasn’t turned out to be a psycho (one jailbird is enough for any family struggling to appear respectable) and he’s somehow managed to turn his obsession with games into a career; he’s a games tester for Sony. He does conform to stereotype in so much as he

Still, that’s the sum total of messages. Ben will no doubt call when he gets a minute but he’s in the shop on his own, which he never likes; he’s probably busy. Lisa will be dropping the kids off at nursery and the gym crèche. She’ll probably call after her aerobics class. As I mentioned, nothing comes between Lisa and her being ‘well turned out’ – not even a thirtieth birthday.

I sigh. The low number of messages wishing me many happy returns is depressing. In my opinion birthday celebrations peak when you are about six and ever after there is an annual decrease in merriment (with quite a steep gradient). Rationally, I know that there are a number of people scattered across the country who will look at the calendar today and think, ‘Oh, it’s Fern’s birthday!’ A few of them might have popped a card in the post. Of course, I can’t expect everyone I know to interrupt their busy schedules just to shower me with gifts and present me with balloons, cakes and lashings of champagne, but –

I blame the media, or books, or movies, or ten seasons of Friends or all of these things combined. Because, truth is, a little part of me does expect everyone I know to interrupt their busy schedules to shower me with gifts and present me with balloons, cakes and lashings of champagne because the media, books, movies and Friends – especially Friends – have conspired between them to somehow create the impression that life would be just a little bit more than this. Especially today.

I’m bored watching Adam play chief and decide I might as well take full advantage of my ‘Access All Areas’ pass

I’m not hungry, but like most women when I eat, and even how much I eat, has little to do with hunger. I eat because it’s a mealtime, I eat when I’m fed up and when I’m in a really good mood, I eat loads when I’m premenstrual and often just because food is there. So far, this complete lack of discipline has had no adverse effect because I’m lucky enough to have inherited my father’s metabolism. Honestly, he eats like a pig but looks like a whippet. It’s the one thing worth inheriting (as one of five in a family that tends to ‘make do and mend’, I’m not holding out for any family heirlooms). Today I feel entitled to pile my plate with everything I can, except for the black pudding, and I wash the lot down with two huge mugs of tea.

I eat really quickly (again it’s the result of being one of five kids) and so despite the mountain of food I find that by 10.35 a.m. I am once again twiddling my thumbs,

I follow my nose through a labyrinth of corridors. I hope that stars’ dressing-rooms truly do have enormous glittering stars on the door or else I won’t have a clue which door to open. I pass a few busy-looking people, all of whom are smoking, which is illegal as this is a public building. I don’t think they care; breaking rules is what they do. Some are carrying clipboards or instruments, everyone nods at me but no one strikes up a conversation or demands to know what I’m doing aimlessly wandering

I can’t hear anything so I risk a sneaky peek. I can always say I’m lost if I do get spotted and questioned by anyone. The dressing-room is not as glitzy as I expected. There are enormous leather couches pushed against two of the walls and a huge low glass coffee table in between. On the table there’s a nice arrangement of large white calla lilies; I check the tips and they are fresh, they’ve probably just gone in water. I hope whoever put the flowers here put a drop of lemonade in the vase too; it gets a good few extra days of freshness out of most stems. There’s a wall of mirrors with high stools lined up like soldiers and trolleys full of makeup. There’s a bar; it’s well stocked with various brands of canned and bottled beer and water but not much else. There is nothing to indicate that the band backing the current rock god phenomenon dresses here; no baths of M&Ms, no baskets of Labrador puppies, no lines of clothes or coke.

A bit disappointed, I leave and continue down the corridor to the next room. On the door, in even bigger red letters than the first, is written, SCOTTIE TAYLOR STAR. I get the sense that the huge and bold letters are a bit of a joke. The sort of joke I imagine Scottie Taylor would make; a tongue-in-cheek prod at ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ Grinning, I open the door and stride in.

The voice bangs through the air. ‘What are you doing in here?’