DARKENING SONG

This novel is dedicated to all women in music - past present and future.

The author worked in the music business for 20 years, across rosters of talent which included Dua Lipa, Liam Gallagher, Little Simz and Adele. However, the characters in this novel are entirely figments of the author’s imagination and not based on any real person, dead or alive. Please note the following content warnings: substance abuse, anxiety, sexual assault, discussion of an eating disorder and an off-page suicide attempt.

Alora

I wrap the curtain around my body. It’s blush-pink velvet, soft like the skin of a peach. A repetitive triangular pattern is woven through the fabric in fine gold thread. The penthouse lights are off and I’m lurking in the shadows, watching them for once, tiny black dots in the street below. They carry their cameras on straps across their shoulders. I carry their presence around my neck. They surge back and forth in relentless anticipation of a sighting, a dark tsunami. I’ve heard that shots of me go for a hundred grand, that one of me crying or yelling or allowing any semblance of emotion to seep through the stone-faced tolerance will go for two – my face, my tears, for sale to the highest bidder.

I step away from the balcony, de-cocooning myself from the curtain and lie down on the chez-lounge which stands on bronze lion’s paws. There’s a point when luxury becomes plain silly and an even further point when you stop seeing it altogether, when you’re ushered through the lobby of the five star hotel in the middle of a scrum of bodyguards and all you see is the toes of your Fendi boots. I passed that point at sixteen years old when my first album went to number one in fifteen countries. I flick the switch and stare up into the chandelier, at the dappled patterns it paints on the ornate ceiling, a mesmerising kaleidoscope of light, a temporary distraction.

I stand quickly, my eyes misting over as the blood rushes to my head, and make my way to the bathroom. My bare feet sink into the plush cream carpet and I count each footstep, as though every one of them is significant. The silk of my gown whispers around me – a strapless bodice blooming out into a full, floor-length skirt, red as rage, as a massacre. I’ve dressed for the occasion. The bathtub is already full, steam rising from the hot water like escaping dreams. I wipe a face-shaped porthole in the condensation clinging to the mirror and apply lipstick, electric blue eyeliner, mascara, a little blush, painting myself into the person they expect me to be. My eyes stare back at me, green and solemn beneath the numbing glaze of a tumbler of tequila. I’m buried at the bottom of the ocean, watching a distorted reflection of real life pass by above me with the clouds whilst the diamonds layered across my knuckles, cascading from my earlobes wink like tiny flashbulbs. I climb into the bath fully clothed, my dress floating up and rippling with the surface of the water, and open up the Z-pix app, then I position my phone behind the gold taps. I’ve got two hundred and seven million followers on this platform alone. The owner of Z-pix, Jared Brisk , boasts about his no censorship approach to social media like he’s liberating humanity. Politicians rant, lobby groups rave, whilst Tusk counts his billions. I click on ‘live stream’ and perfect the angle so I’m centre shot.

Tomorrow night the stadium will be full. My second album is at number one in the charts. My world tour has sold out. But I’m about to give the most unforgettable performance of my life.

Eva  

Two years earlier…

I sat down at my desk in Low Slang Records and began typing out the invite list to the MD’s exclusive summer party at Soho House, delegated to me by his PA seemingly so she could free up more time to paint her fingernails a lurid shade of pink and gossip with Jeff from the post room. At moments like this it was difficult not to think about food. I tried to muster up the willpower not to sabotage the eternal diet and make a second mid-morning trip to the vending machine. Roxanne, the Head of Marketing at the record label, stopped by and asked if I fancied doing the coffee run. She was tall and glamourous with glossy brown hair which hung to her shoulders in a professional blow-dry, reeking of Le Labo perfume like she’d marinated herself in the stuff overnight. She was wearing multiple gold necklaces and a tight, white angora sweater which clung, fluffy and rabbit-like, to her significant breasts. She’d worked for the MD for fourteen years. According to the rumours, their relationship wasn’t entirely professional, I’d been told some private things about her at after work drinks which sometimes made it difficult to meet her eye. I always did the coffee run. It was a detail about my day which, when my friends asked how the internship at the record label was going, assuming it to be a chic, star-studded, rock and roll existence, I routinely omitted to mention.

The day Aunty Liz took Katerina and me to see Adele at The Shepherd’s Bush Empire, I decided I wanted to work in the music business. Before then I’d had zero career ambitions to speak of, and when asked by cooing grandmas at family gatherings that age-old question, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ I always answered honestly, much to their apparent dismay: ‘I don’t know.’ I wasn’t even a particular fan of Adele, or anyone else that I remember. At thirteen years old my twenty-one year old sister was my idol. Katerina – a grunge kid who wore ripped jeans and Pearl Jam t-shirts and listened to Nirvana and Sonic Youth with the volume turned up so loud that she developed mild tinnitus in her right ear. Every band Katerina liked, I insisted I liked too. And when our Aunty presented us with the Adele tickets across the dinner table one evening, thinking we’d be thrilled, Katerina said she was busy that night so I – somewhat comically since I had zero social life – said the same. Mum was livid. She immediately marched us up to our rooms and much yelling ensued with some door slamming by Katerina, and soon we were back downstairs apologising to Aunty Liz, thanking her profusely for the tickets and saying we’d love to go.   

The show was sold out, the venue packed. Aunty Liz bought branded t-shirts from the merch stand and insisted we put them on over our clothes. Even before Adele walked out I could feel the anticipation in the air, like static. Then she appeared, and the crowd went berserk. With her enormous eyes which held the entire universe within them and golden hair she looked other worldly, a goddess from an ancient fable. But when she began to sing, I was floored. Her words seemed to be written just for me, despite the fact that back then my greatest romantic heartbreak was my unrequited crush, Alistair Greenwood, kissing Victoria Lawson at the school disco. Her voice was like all of my favourite foods – tiramisu and morello cherry ice cream and profiteroles with chocolate sauce – blended together and poured into my ears in one delicious soup of sound. I myself had no musical talent whatsoever, as had been confirmed by my violin teacher who, after three tortuous lessons, told mum that her hard earned cash would be better spent elsewhere. But that day, standing in the middle of a crowd of adoring Adele fans, some of whom were actually weeping, the music wrapped its arms around me and embraced me. It sucked out the stresses of my tiny life and filled me with hope. I now understood its power, and a few Google searches later – How do you work with musicians when (to quote my former violin teacher) you’ve got no rhythm and you’re tone deaf? – I’d found my calling. So if traipsing up and down to Starbucks every day, pandering to the demands of Roxanne and the rest of the Low Slang Records staff gave me an ‘in’, then I’d do it with gumption.

I smiled sweetly and said, ‘Sure, I’ll get the coffees, no problem.’ I would have probably removed her socks and kissed her feet if she’d asked me to.  

The Head of A&R, Jason – second in command to the MD in deciding what artists the label signed – had lost his wallet on a night out and was waiting for new cash cards to arrive, so I said I’d shout him, the words leaving my lips before I’d had chance to lament the disastrous state of my bank balance. Ray – the other intern who got special privileges because his dad was high up at the BBC – changed his mind about ten times, seemingly oblivious to the possibility that he could actually come with me and help, and Levi insisted I read his order back to him to ensure I didn’t ‘fuck it up like last time’ (his exact words). I returned with two cardboard trays slotted full of coffee and distributed the drinks, but just as I walked into Jason’s office with his double macchiato, I knocked into the corner of his desk and sloshed coffee all over my sweater. It soaked right through to my bra. Jason was sitting on his minimalist Scandinavian-style sofa wearing headphones, nodding and tapping one large-tongued trainer in time to whatever potential hit record was playing. He pulled a half-hearted impression of a sympathetic face and slid a headphone off one ear.

‘Hey, don’t worry about it, Eva,’ he said. ‘Just nip back down to Starbucks and fetch me another.’  

After I’d maxed out my account on a second four pound fifty cup of coffee, made it back into the glass lift, up to the top floor and into Jason’s office without a second spillage, after I’d returned from the loos where I’d scrubbed at my sweater in the sink and attempted to dry it under the hand dryer without removing it from my bikini unready body, I finally sat down at my desk and realised I’d forgotten to buy a coffee for myself.

‘Shit,’ I muttered under my breath, but not loud enough that anyone else could hear me.

Then I closed the MD’s invite list, unlocked my phone and dully resumed swiping through endless grainy videos online, trying to discover ‘the next big thing’. Jason had set this task for Ray and me at the start of the summer. When I’d asked for some guidance as to what kind of artist Jason thought ‘the next big thing’ might be he’d wafted a dismissive hand at me and said, ‘I’ll know it when I hear it.’ He’d been mildly interested in some indie band from Liverpool which Ray had come across on Soundcloud – five young lads with messy bed hair singing about their mums – but Jason said everything I’d found was ‘too derivative’ or ‘too early’ or was seemingly unworthy of any feedback whatsoever when he simply ignored my emails.

But that morning, careening from one video to the next, ingesting wanabees as mindlessly as shoving handfuls of peanut M&Ms into my mouth whilst watching repeats of Love Island, I found her.

Sitting alone, centre stage in her high school auditorium, the angle of the camera – probably someone’s phone – was looking down on her. She had long, white blonde hair with a blunt wedge of a fringe, red lips and electric blue eyeliner which flicked up at the corners. I would later realise how beautiful she was, how delicate her elfin features were with huge, sea-green bedtime story eyes. But from a distance, in platform DM boots with ribbon for laces and an oversized hoodie dress which reached her knees and swamped her slight frame, it seemed like her existence was something she wanted to disguise. She didn’t introduce herself, made no attempt to silence the murmuring voices, sniggering or shuffling of feet. She simply picked up the acoustic guitar, positioned it on her lap and began to sing. The room hushed. I was transfixed from the very first note:

I’ve forgotten how to live

Or maybe I just never knew

Convince the shrink I’m doing fine

When I’m drowning in the blue

Kill me with your kindness

Suffocate me in belief

I don’t know how to love myself

So how could he love me?   

That voice, powerful and pure, swelling effortlessly from deep within the gut. The cryptic darkness of the lyrics. Someone in the background whispered, ‘Wow.’ There was no other word for it.

Alora   

I hear voices, urgent and insistent. I try to resist, but the pull of consciousness is too powerful a force. I open my eyes into bright white lights, the obnoxious glare of life. Doctors surround me, five solemn faces peering into mine.

‘She’s ok,’ one of them says. ‘She’s with us.’ And I know that I have failed.

They wheel me to a private room where nurses fuss and gossip to the soundscape of incessant bleeping, checking my vital signs and scribbling on charts. Julia and Eva appear at my bedside. Julia’s sobbing, her makeup congealing in the creases beneath her eyes. 

‘How could you do this to me?’ she wails.

She leans over the bed and presses her cheek against mine. Her skin feels cold and unfamiliar and I want her to stop.

I glance at Eva. Her face is gaunt and pale and she’s biting her bottom lip hard enough to sever it in two. ‘Julia, maybe give her some space?’ she says, her voice quivering with emotion, like she’s trying not to cry. She touches Julia’s arm and my mother steps back, too involved in her own dramatic performance to object.

My wrists are concealed by white dressings, but I know what lies beneath. I watch the movement in my own fingers with morbid fascination, as though they don’t belong to me. Clearly I didn’t damage any nerves or tendons – a pathetic attempt at ending it all. ‘What’s in this?’ I say to the nurse, gesturing to the tube puncturing the back of my hand. She glances up from her clipboard and says something about replenishing lost fluids. ‘But I don’t want them replenished,’ I say, or maybe I say nothing at all. The TV on the wall is showing an all-female chat show with the sound muted. The presenters and guests are wearing pastel colours and seem impossibly happy. I ask Eva to switch it off and she hurries over to do my bidding. I close my eyes and sink into a deep, dark morbidity which feigns as sleep.

/

I’m standing in the doorway. It looks like any other hotel room; a double bed to my right, shelving lined with the coloured spines of hardback books, polished wooden floorboards and a copper bathtub with a selection of shampoos and body lotions in tiny bottles, white labels fashionably embossed with typewriter print. The back wall is made of glass and looks out onto fields, miles of undulating green beneath an oppressive mass of bleak grey sky. I’m on a private island somewhere off the Scottish coast, accessible only by chartered boat or helicopter. But this is no hotel – it’s a rehab clinic.

I don’t particularly want to talk about what happened, but talking is how we’re supposed to pass the time in this place. I completed the form, told them my age, weight, a vague slither of my family background. I hovered the biro over the neat little boxes that gave everything a label, made it all sound so simple. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be out there either. I just want to be a blank empty space where a person used to be. I follow the woman into the room. She introduces herself as my ‘carer’. She’s talking and Julia and Eva are nodding like plastic dogs off that insurance advert they used to show on TV. I can see her lips forming the shape of words but it’s impossible for my brain to decipher the meaning and they merge together as one continuous garble of sound. Eva looks tired and Julia’s curls are intrusively large and buoyant, taking over the room. I can see the lace of her bra where her shirt hangs open at the neck. My mother. She pouts like a child’s doll.

I sit down on the edge of the bed whist Eva and Julia talk to the woman. She’s wearing navy blue trousers and a matching tunic which is tapered at her thick waist, her name embroidered at her chest – Maureen. Despite everything I start to think about him. I can’t help it. Pathetic I know.

‘Alora?’ I look up. Maureen’s smiling. Her skin is brown and her eyes are optimistically bright, brimming with false promises about how they’re going to fix me here. ‘Do you want to say goodbye to Julia and Eva?’ She speaks to me in a slow pronounced tone, rolling the vowels and consonants around her mouth as though I’m hard of hearing or a toddler being dropped off at day-care.

‘Where are they going?’ I hear myself say, but my voice is faint and seems to be coming from somewhere outside my body. 

‘We have to leave now,’ Eva says. ‘We can come back and visit you in a month.’

The clinic is owned by some revolutionary psychiatrist called Max Beaumont. It’s the only one of its kind in the world. He developed a form of therapy he humbly named the Beaumont Process which took off when some big Hollywood actor talked about it on Oprah – he said it saved his life – but everyone just calls it The Process. I know a few people who’ve done it for addiction issues and got clean to the point of death by boredom. From what they’ve told me, it involves sitting around in a circle with other unhinged rich people, acting out weird roleplays and collectively wallowing in your own problems, all for the bargain price of thirty grand a month. No wonder Max Beaumont could afford to buy the whole island. I stand up and endure my mother’s arms around me, then Eva’s. Her touch is light and tentative, like she’s worried I might snap in two beneath the pressure of a hug. She smells of the perfume I bought her last Christmas, custom made in Paris, musky and floral and rich.

‘Take care,’ she whispers. ‘I’m sure you’ll feel better soon.’ I almost laugh out loud. 

Once they’ve left I slip off my trainers and walk towards the window. The complex consists of a series of chalets in a courtyard formation, one for each patient, a canopied walkway which protects its clients’ privacy from photographers hovering in the sky. The therapy centre sits to the left in a stone building with the restaurant, fresh-water swimming pool, health spa and shop to the right. I trail my fingertips around the edge of the glass searching for an opening where there’s none. I press my nose against it and feel the damp warmth of my own breath as it condenses into fog. The view makes me feel anxious, the vast expanse of nothingness. An entire swat team on reception searched my body and bags when I arrived. I leant against the wall and closed my eyes as they confiscated a Gucci belt, a packet of Xanax, a long silk Hermes scarf. Eva pulled out my phone which I’d left balanced on the taps at The Edinburgh Grand Hotel, streaming it all live on Z-pix, and they locked it away. I’ve got no means of communication with the outside world, no way of finding out what they’re saying about me or what he’s doing. Panic rises in my throat like bile. I don’t want to care, but I still do. I see an eagle swooping low on the horizon and squint into the sunlight, then I realise it’s a crow. It cries out with its ugly voice like its laughing.

Eva   

I practically ran into Jason’s office. I had visions of him jumping up from his seat, summoning the MD, Roxanne and the rest of the team to tell them what an incredible artist I’d found, how they needed to sign her immediately and offer me a job at Low Slang Records finding new talent – the ultimate dream when I’d applied for a place on the intern scheme. What actually happened was I knocked on Jason’s door, he looked up irritably, said he was busy and told me to come back later. Then he left the office for lunch and didn’t come back for the rest of the day. So I emailed him a link to the video and he replied saying he’d watch it when he had a spare minute, which was apparently never, because a week went by, and then another, and he said nothing more about it. I finally plucked up the courage to insist I play it for him. But this time when I walked into his room he was on the phone, puffing on a cigarette despite the building’s impenetrably unopenable windows and no smoking policy and gesticulating with his free hand. I waited until he ended the call which concluded with him yelling, ‘Tell Jordan he can go fuck himself!’ Then I somewhat timidly asked if I could play him something. ‘Play me what?’ he barked, and when I told him, voice trembling, at first he looked confused to see me standing there in the middle of his rug in my baggy jeans, Glass Animals t-shirt and battered Adidas trainers. Then his cheeks flushed and his eyes seemed to bulge out of his skull. I wondered if was about to have an aneurysm. He asked me who the fuck I thought I was, waltzing in here telling him how to do his job. He said I needed to get back in my box. 

‘So fucking uncool,’ Ade said when I told him about the whole mortifying incident later that day, reliving it in the process and going blotchy all over. We were at Mimi’s parents’ place, hanging out in the pool house which Mimi had commandeered as her own private residence for the summer. It was a warm summer evening, the sun slowly fading from the sky in a haze of lilac, the air lapping gently against my skin. The glass doors were opened out onto the terrace where Petra, Mimi and Mairead were lounging in the shallow end of the pool wearing miniscule bikinis and drinking frozen margaritas. I’d decided not to change into my swimming costume which had a high-neck and special tummy control panels, but Ade was in his swim shorts. He had the body of an athlete even though the extent of his exercise regime was the occasional game of five-a-side football with his mates. He scratched his chest and took a sip of margarita as Mimi positioned her glass on the side of the pool and rolled over onto her stomach. I looked away but I could still feel her eyes burning into me, which I tried to ignore.

Ade was my best friend, my favourite person in the entire world. He was an incredibly non-judgemental, chill and positive person and always found the silver lining in whatever cloud of doom I chucked his way. With Ade, everything was either ‘cool’ or ‘uncool’, and he always took both scenarios perfectly within his stride.

‘Seriously Eva, don’t waste your time on losers like that. You found her on Z-pix, right?’ I had found her, the handle was @darkeningsong but the profile pic was definitely her, and I’d been surprised to see that she had nearly twenty thousand followers – more than some of the development acts signed to Low Slang – who wrote comments like:

Hit me up dark sis 😊​

U speakin str8t to my soul no lie!!!

Beneath posts of her lyrics and video clips of her singing, sitting on a single mattress with a guitar in her arms, the wall behind her covered in posters for classic dystopian movies (the originals, not the remakes) – 1984, Mad Max, Westworld, Battle Royale. She had, I’d discovered, also self-released a couple of songs. The quality of the recordings wasn’t great, like she’d possibly just recorded them on a phone, but the streaming numbers on Spotify and Apple Music were decent – just shy of a million per track. She’d obviously got some initiative, because as far as I could tell there was no team around her, she was just getting on with it all by herself. 

‘Just DM her,’ Ade said.  

‘And say what? Low Slang is never going to sign her if I can’t even get Jason to listen to one song. He’s the only person who’s got the MD’s ear and I’m hardly going to walk into the MD’s office and play it to him myself.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because he’s terrifying and I’m an intern, a complete nobody! I doubt he even knows I exist.’ I looked up to see Mimi whispering something to Petra. She stopped when I met her eye.

‘Hey, do you remember when I got that summer job in Espresso Yourself on Mare Street?’

‘Uh-hum. You told them in the interview you knew how to work the coffee machine and make a leaf pattern in the milk when you barely knew how to boil a kettle.’

‘Exactly! And that worked out alright, didn’t it? Ok apart from a few minor customer complaints until I got the hang of it.’

Mimi climbed out of the pool and made her way to the deep end, bikini bottoms conveniently riding up between her cellulite-free ass-cheeks. She stood poised on the side for a moment, flexing her sinewy body and I, with a certain degree of repressed jealousy, watched Ade watching her. Then she stretched her arms above her head and dived in. The water barely rippled. ‘What’s your point?’ I said.

Ade returned his gaze to me. ‘I just followed one of life’s basic principles.’

‘Which is?’

He drained his glass and smiled. ‘Sometimes you’ve just got to fake it ‘til you make it.’ 

Alora   

Maureen says I should eat some lunch before my first therapy session begins. I tell her I’m not hungry and she arches one eyebrow. She says that its obligatory for me to eat three meals a day. I ask if they do room service.

The restaurant is in the same building as the swimming pool and spa. The windows are tinted like the windows of all of my cars. Maureen walks by my side, swinging her sturdy arms in an enthusiastic manner. A blonde woman is standing outside the door smoking a cigarette. Her straw coloured hair is set into a rigid, bouffant cloud. She’s thin, painfully so. The skin of her forehead is taut, her eyes lift at the corners like everything’s been pulled back and up and her lips are grossly plump, that bee stung look everybody wants these days but she must’ve been attacked by the whole hive. Her age is apparent despite all of this which is tragic really. Her hand trembles as she takes a last drag before throwing the cigarette to the ground. Maureen tuts. The woman ignores her. She casts her eyes over me as though I’m an object in a shop that she has no interest in buying, pulls open the door to the restaurant and struts in ahead of us.

‘I’ll leave you here,’ Maureen says, picking the burning cigarette butt up off the ground and holding it disapprovingly between her thumb and index finger.

‘Can’t I just eat in my room?’ At eighteen years old I’m whining like a child. I’ve already asked this question twice and Maureen regurgitates the same answer with unfathomable patience.

‘We don’t insist that our clients interact with each other, but we do find that it’s beneficial to The Process if they dine communally.’ I roll my eyes in an exaggerated manner. She smiles into my petulance and says that she’ll collect me in an hour. 

Some diners sit alone, others congregate in clusters, chatting amicably as though they’re old friends holidaying together in the Algarve, all of them wearing the same clinically white uniform complete with gold trim like they’ve just escaped from a luxury mental asylum. I attract a few glances as I weave my way through the tables but people quickly divert their eyes. One of the many rules of this place is no staring at other guests, no questions about their lives unless expressly invited to ask or in the context of an open discussion in therapy sessions and we’ve all signed contracts with confidentiality clauses as long as my arm. I choose a seat as far away from everyone else as is possible. The internal window looks out onto the pool and the surface of the water is still. Palm trees erupt from terracotta pots and the ceiling is covered in lush green vines with a tropical feel although the aircon is turned up so high it’s like they’re trying to cryogenically freeze us all. A waiter darts towards me. He’s wearing jeans and trainers with a crisp blue shirt. ‘I’m professional but relaxed,’ his clothing screams. He introduces himself as Jacob and asks if I’d like still or sparkling water. The clinic is dry. How am I even supposed to get through the day? I shrug in a non-committal way and he returns with a bottle of each, asks what he can get me to eat. He looks disappointed when I tell him that I’m not hungry, like he’s been trained to pretend he genuinely cares.

‘We’ve got some small plates.’ He picks up the menu, points to a section at the top which lists a few fussy sounding dishes, all jus and foam and caramelised air.  

‘I said, I’m not hungry.’ I say it firmly, probably a little louder than necessary. 

He walks away looking defeated and I notice the blonde woman is staring at me from across the room. She’s sitting alone, holding a glass of thick green juice which looks like blended grass-cuttings which she’s stirring absentmindedly with a straw. With her eyes yanked back like that she looks more feline than human but not in a cute Instagrammable way. I stare back, opening my eyes as wide as I can to make the point that she’s staring but she doesn’t get it, she doesn’t look away and I wonder if she’s going to walk over and ask for my autograph. I stand up and make my way towards the door. Jacob gets there before me.

‘You’re leaving?’

‘I’m going for a walk.’  

‘But you can’t, not by yourself.’

‘Seriously?’ He’s standing in the doorway, blocking my path. ‘This is ridiculous.’

‘Please.’

I sit back down. The woman isn’t staring anymore and I relax a little, turn towards the pool. A middle-aged man with flabby jowls and a super hairy chest is swimming now. He’s doing front crawl, slowly and methodically. He seems oblivious to the diners observing him as he lifts one fleshy arm after another and slices his way through the water in his Speedos, enough to put anyone off their food. He duck-dives as he reaches the side before commencing another lap. Back and forth, left to right, these small repetitions which formulate a life, getting older and weaker until we finally sink to the bottom.

A few minutes later Jacob appears with two plates and places them down on the table in front of me with a flourish. He announces, ‘Avocado salad with pine nuts and mushroom risotto with cashew cheese. I know you’re vegan.’ He seems proud of this knowledge which he probably acquired from the columns of a gossip magazine.

‘But I didn’t order…’

He starts to look nervous and I suddenly realise that I’m going to cry. He can obviously tell. He asks if he should take the food away and I nod, because it’s all that I can do, because I can already feel the water leaking from my eyes. He points to the toilet and touches my back lightly as I stand, which seems like a kind gesture but one he’s probably not permitted to make. I rush towards it, heart thudding as though invisible paparazzi are pursuing me. I lock myself in the cubicle, slide down the back of the door and sob into my palms. I can still smell the hospital on my skin, the unmistakable fragrance of disinfectant and death. I tip my head back and emit a long, anguished howl. ‘Please!’ I cry towards the ceiling. ‘Please, please, please!’ But I don’t know who I hope is listening or what exactly I’m begging for. Eventually, I scrub at my face with a wad of toilet tissue, unlock the door and emerge. I stare at the girl who greets me in the mirror. She’s thin and scrawny with an excessive amount of hair. Her face is red and swollen like a beef tomato. Julia’s right, I’ve always been an ugly crier, she says its genetic. I hear a knock and Maureen appears. She doesn’t blanche at my appearance. 

‘Come on, you,’ she says, with a sense of familiarity that I find slightly shocking. She links her arm through mine and walks me back to my chalet where she gestures for me to take a seat in the armchair. She perches her ample ass on the edge of the bed then reaches over and covers my hand with her own. Her hand is plump and matronly, mine a shrivelled weed beneath it. ‘You’re here to heal,’ she says.

I emit a loud gasping sob. ‘I wish I was dead,’ I say, and she clucks her tongue.

‘Maybe you do, but we might be able to change that. This is a good place, good people. Be kind to your body. Eat the nourishing food. Open your heart to the possibility that we might be able to help you.’

I narrow my eyes and her outline blurs through my tears. ‘There’s no helping me,’ I say. ‘You’re all wasting your time.’

Eva    

I admit that I found her intimidating, this cool, aloof sixteen year old girl – the polar opposite of me at that age – sitting in the front room of a dingy flat on the outskirts of Manchester. The flat was above a café and the air smelled of rancid chip fat. It was incredibly stuffy in there and when I asked if we could possibly open a window, please, I was told they were painted shut. I could feel sweat patches forming at my armpits beneath my denim jacket. I smiled at Alora. She stared back at me blankly. She had that trendily malnourished look about her, razor-sharp cheek bones and grey half-moons beneath her eyes. And the mum was not what I’d expected at all.

Julia had the appearance and physique of a Barbie; large, bulbous breasts sloping into an impossibly tiny waist, dark hair which swept across her back in lustrous curls and long, false eyelashes. Everything about her was tight; her vest top, her jeans, her smile as she said to me, ‘I didn’t expect someone so young. You must be what, the same age as Alora?’

‘I’m eighteen,’ I said.

‘Hmm, you don’t look it. And you work at a record label, you say?’  

I felt my cheeks colour, my body’s betrayal of the lie. What had I been thinking, coming here alone on a Sunday afternoon on the pretence of officially representing Low Slang? ‘Yeah, I do…I mean, sort of.’

‘Well do you or don’t you?’ she snapped.

‘Yeah, yeah I do.’ She leaned forwards in her seat and asked me if I’d met any famous people. I told her I’d once got in the lift with Chris Martin and she asked what he was like and whether I knew if he was single.

‘So can you get me a record deal, or what?’ Alora said. It was the first time she’d actually spoken to me other than a grunted hello when I first walked through the door. Her startlingly green eyes seemed to be searching mine as though she would soon find the truth and use it as a sharp implement with which to bore into my soul. The temperature in the room suddenly seemed to reach boiling point, the walls appeared to be moving inwards and the various objects – the record player and shelves full of vinyl, the strange assortment of pottery figurines lined up across the mantelpiece and the many framed photographs of a much younger version of Julia, the soft-focus kind where the backstreet photographer tells you he’ll make you a model then charges you five hundred quid for the privilege – seemingly multiplied and threatened to avalanche. ‘Is that what you want?’ I managed to say. ‘A record deal?’

Alora tucked her hair behind her ears. She was wearing tiny gold hoop earrings, two in each ear lobe and a ring on her index finger in the shape of a bird in flight. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t just want a record deal. I want to be an icon.’   

And I heard myself say, ‘I can make that happen.’ 

‘How?’

I’d heard about artist management. I’d seen managers wandering around Low Slang Records with their clients, off to the MD’s office in search of the holy grail of a record deal. I knew that they worked independently from the record labels, outside of the confines of ‘the machine’, that they looked after the artists’ careers, representing them, guiding them, advising them, with seemingly no formal qualifications whatsoever necessary. If Jason wouldn’t listen, I would do it without him. In a voice brimming with conviction which surprised even me, I said, ‘Let me be your manager, and I’ll show you.’