‘Well, if we do well at our audition, millions of people will end up seeing me, won’t they? And yet I’ve never seen myself. That’s kind of weird, isn’t it? I want to know what they’ll see.’
‘Graham, it’s only an audition.’
‘I know what you look like, Milly.’
‘Oh, do you? And what do I look like then?’
‘You look beautiful.’
And Graham reached up, found her face and drew it towards his. The kiss lasted a very long time, as first kisses often do.
And for Graham it really was his first kiss. Not just between him and Millicent but between him and anyone, and as he lashed about with his tongue inside her mouth he never wanted it to end. Millicent also entered wholeheartedly into the spirit of things. She was not entirely without experience but she was hardly practised and the two of them made up in pressure and energy for what they lacked in style and finesse.
Eventually they parted, Millicent having declined for the time being to allow Graham to put his hand up her jumper.
‘Your mum’s downstairs,’ she whispered.
‘Who cares?’
‘I do, Graham. Besides, this is all, well . . . I just want to get my breath, that’s all.’
‘What do I look like, Milly?’ he asked.
His sunglasses had been knocked off during the lengthy face-wrestling in which they had indulged and now Graham was sitting there with those strange, dark unseeing hollows that she so rarely saw and which when she did she felt she would never get used to. Except now, suddenly she felt that she was used to them. Perhaps interpreting her silence for embarrassment or even revulsion, Graham began to feel about for his shades.
‘Don’t put them back on, Graham. Nobody except rock stars is allowed to wear sunglasses indoors. And you’re not a rock star yet. Oh, by the way . . . you look beautiful too.’
The Four-Z
After Graham and Millicent, Emma had opened another thirty or so envelopes before deciding upon The Four-Z.
Michael, the leader of The Four-Z, had written down his full name as instructed. Michael Robert Harley. Age nineteen.
Next Michael was asked for an address. Michael had considered applying for a PO box number because the postman did not always venture all the way along the corridor on the vast low-rise development in Birmingham where he lived with his mother and sisters. The name of Michael’s estate had at one point been Aneurin Bevan, then briefly Nelson Mandela. Now it was Collingbrook, so called because of the stream that had once bubbled and gurgled across the land upon which the estate was built and which now formed part of the sewage system beneath it. Michael called it hell.
When he was growing up, there had been only two ways whereby a boy (particularly a black boy) might reasonably expect to get out of Collingbrook: crime (mainly dealing drugs) or sport. Now there was a third,
Chart Throb.
To Michael, forming a boy band certainly seemed a more attractive proposition than buying a gun or training as a boxer and so The Four-Z was born, and it was going to get him and his family out of hell.
There had of course been endless debate about the naming of the group and the name was still not considered entirely satisfactory. The problem was that people kept referring to the boys as The Four Zed when it seemed obvious to Michael that what they wanted to be called was The Force.
‘Why don’t you spell it The Force then?’ Michael’s mother asked.
‘Because then people would miss the pun,’ Michael replied. ‘There’s four of us see, The Four-se.’
‘Yes but if you spell it with a Z that makes it fourz like in paws, not force like in Morse. A Z isn’t an S.’
‘Yeah, I
know
, Mum, but a Z looks cool. Look . . .’ Michael took a piece of paper and wrote down Four-Z and beside it Four-S. ‘I mean come on, which looks cooler?’
‘People aren’t going to be reading it, they’re going to be hearing it,’ his mum pointed out.
‘Not on this form, Mum. They’ll be reading this form and I need to give it the best shot I have.’
So Michael wrote down The Four-Z, and when Emma sent the boys an invitation to attend the Birmingham audition she believed she was booking a group called The Four Zed.
Next on the form came the instruction to describe yourself or your group in ten words. Michael and his fellow group members had imagined that listing ten adjectives instead of forming a sentence was an original approach.
They wrote
Bitchin’, Blingin’, Badass, Beautiful, Bodacious, Ball bustin’ Boy Band
. Emma had read many such exhortations but she did not think the worse of The Four-Z for it. When thousands of people are asked the same question and given only ten words with which to answer it even Shakespeare would be hard put to come up with something unique.
The final question was
Why should we pick you?
In answer to this, Michael wrote,
This is our dream. It is all we ever wanted. We will work hard. We will learn and we will grow. We will make you proud and we will rock your arse!
Just like tens of thousands of others who, like Michael, had learned
Chart Throb
-speak from the previous series.
Having agonized for so long over the band’s name, its description and the question
Why should we pick you?
Michael would have been surprised to discover that the thing which interested Emma most about what he had written on the entry form was his address. It is probable that if Michael had done as he had considered doing and used a PO box for his correspondence The Four-Z would never have been sent an invitation to audition at all. Nineteen other entirely similar-sounding black boy bands from the Midlands had already emerged from their envelopes, one even called The Fource, but none came from such a notoriously hopeless place as the Collingbrook Estate. Collingbrook was a byword for everything that had gone wrong in post-war town planning, a drug-saturated war zone into which the police were fearful to venture. Emma knew that the contrast between the lives these boys must currently be leading and the ‘celebrity lifestyle’ of which they dreamed was what Calvin would definitely call good telly.
Emma placed The Four-Z on the Blinger pile.
Like buses, successful application letters seemed to come in groups and the very next envelope that Emma opened after The Four-Z was from Peroxide. Another nod-through, which Emma placed directly on to the Blingers pile without even reading it or referring its contents to Trent. Emma had been expecting to hear from Peroxide; it had, after all, been her who had encouraged them to re-apply.
Same Time Last Year
Peroxide’s story had begun the year before. They had been a promising prospect plucked from the stands during one of the stadium audition days. Stadium days very rarely bore fruit, it being pretty much impossible to form a useful opinion about anything when twelve thousand people were all trying to grab your attention. The stadium days were little more than stunts, set up partly to get the biggest of the crowd shots for the opening credits and partly to lend a whisper of credibility to the central
Chart Throb
fiction, that thousands of people were genuinely considered for inclusion. These were entirely open calls, where anyone who felt like it could turn up and wait in the stands while teams of researchers hurried along the lines picking out anybody who caught their eye, seeing as many of them as possible in conveyor-belt manner at twenty- to thirty-second intervals. Of necessity snap decisions were made and the harassed and sweating teams could do little more than go by appearance. Peroxide, two near-naked blonde teenagers, had been selected and had thereafter done a surprisingly good audition before the three judges. It turned out that their embarrassingly inept attempts at sexuality were not their only promising feature. They could actually sing and suddenly everybody had got rather excited about them.
Emma could still remember the production meeting that had taken place the previous year when Calvin had announced his plan for them.
‘We’ll chuck them out after the next round,’ he explained, to everyone’s surprise. ‘You have to play the long game.’
‘I thought you might put them in the final,’ Beryl remarked. ‘Thought they were just your type. They can sing at least as well as half the other finalists, they’re cute and they’re absolutely fucking desperate. What could be better? I mean, did you see the way they cried when we put them through?’
‘Exactly, these are Alpha Clingers, particularly the younger one,’ Calvin agreed. ‘They cry even better than they sing. If they cry like that when they win,
imagine
what’s going to happen when they lose.’
‘Why not give them a bit of a run then, so they can lose big time?’ Beryl had persisted. ‘They’re lovely-looking girls and quite frankly we’re way over quota on Fatties and Dogs.’
‘The long game, darling, the long game. You have to ask yourself, what’s the story?’
‘And what is it?’
‘Well, we could certainly give these birds a run, as you say, and I’ve no doubt they’d be good TV.’
‘Plus all the cunty ex-boyfriends crawling out of the woodwork to talk about the girls’ insatiable man-hungry needs and eight-times-a-night marathon sex sessions,’ Beryl chipped in.
‘That’s right,’ Calvin replied. ‘It’s all there for the taking and I’m sure you all think we should grab it with both hands. But how about
this
? We build them up on the first round, big stuff, give them the whole “You two are the best thing to come through that door all day” and “Thank God for some real talent” bit.
Then
, shockingly, we dump them almost immediately, straight after round two. Nobody’s expecting it, least of all them. You’re horrified, Beryl, the girls weep, you hug them, shout at me, throw water over Rodney, but I am immovable and of course Rodney votes with me because he does what he’s fucking told. Just kidding, Rodney.’
‘Ha ha.’ Rodney grinned, as if he loved nothing more than this gentle joshing from his great mate and equal.
‘Outside with Keely in the holding area,’ Calvin continued, developing his theme enthusiastically, ‘it all gets even more hysterical. Peroxide’s hearts are broken. Keely can’t
believe
they’ve been dumped, she wants to walk straight in there and give me a piece of her mind. Beryl is now threatening to quit . . . Lots of shots of Rodney looking grim,
knowing
Beryl’s right and that he’s made the wrong fucking decision
again.’
‘Ha ha,’ Rodney laughed woodenly.
‘Even I’m suddenly looking doubtful,’ said Calvin, barging on. ‘Did I make the right choice? The girls certainly know the answer to that! They go to the Bite Back Box and shout into the camera that they
will
be stars, breasts heaving, mascara running, belly-button jewellery jiggling with emotion. “Just you wait, Calvin Simms!” they shout. “We’ll be
huge
and then you’ll be sorry.” We milk it for a week, debate it over and over again on ITV2, try and tease the papers into running a “Support Peroxide” campaign. Feature the whole thing heavily on the Christmas DVD . . .
Then
,’ and Calvin grinned triumphantly at his own cleverness, ‘we bring them back
next
year. Now
that’s
a story that has what it takes.’
Peroxide
Ten months after this conversation, Georgie’s parents were sitting in their small sitting room listening to the sound of the toilet flushing upstairs. They had not heard their daughter Georgia vomiting but that was only because she always played loud music when she went to the toilet to puke.
It had started again the moment she got the phone call.
‘Yeah, hi, Mr Costello, it’s Emma from
Chart Throb
, remember me? How’s
gorgeous
Georgie, we so
love
Georgie. We are such big fans. Is she there?’
Georgie was the younger of the two members of Peroxide, a pop duo which she and her friend ‘Chelle had formed while attending Saturday morning drama classes and which the previous year had triumphantly sailed through the first round of
Chart Throb
only to be sensationally dumped in the second. Georgie had been just seventeen at the time, too young, in her father’s opinion, to be appearing half-naked on television.
‘If it’s a singing competition why can’t you wear some clothes?’ he asked.
‘The show’s all about having what it takes, Dad,’ Georgia would reply, standing on the living-room carpet in little more than her underwear. ‘Calvin’s always saying it . . . do you have what it takes? Well, this is what it takes.’
The skimpy costumes had been ‘Chelle’s idea. At nineteen, she was very much the senior partner in the act.
Georgia’s parents were firmly of the opinion that their daughter’s eating disorders had begun with those costumes. ‘Chelle was a natural exhibitionist who would happily have worn her hotpants and bra top to the pub, but Georgia had what her school counsellor called ‘body issues’. She was a slim girl who, when she stood before the mirror, saw a fat girl staring back. Despite being generally acknowledged as very pretty, Georgia could never quite convince herself that her body was good enough to be displayed alongside the confident ‘Chelle’s and so she began to punish it for its inadequacy.