You Don't Know Me (20 page)

‘It's just hard to do it justice when every line feels like a cliché.'

‘Every line
is
a cliché,' I sigh.

‘Nell?' Rose asks, keen to get everyone's opinion.

Nell's caught between her desire to make Rose happy and her natural honesty.

‘It sucks,' she says at last. ‘It really sucks. But it's not you, Rose. Like Sasha said, it's the song.'

Rose comes over and squeezes each one of us in turn.

‘You have no idea,' she says, ‘how much I've missed you. I can't believe I didn't call you.'

We gather around her, Jodie still in the embroidered coat, and hug each other tight. I feel us knitting back together. I could stay here, like this, all day.

As if she's reading my mind, Nell asks, ‘So when have you got to go back to the studio?'

Rose checks the time on her watch. She's one of the
few girls I know who still wears a watch. The rest of us use our phones, but Rose probably doesn't know where her phone even
is
. I'm starting to realise that while I've been obsessed by the internet, and everything that's happened, Rose probably doesn't have much of a clue. Sometimes it would be relaxing to live in her world, even if you do miss the important stuff.

‘I'm supposed to be there in half an hour,' she says, interrupting my train of thought. ‘Jim said he'd be around today, and he might help me out with some tracks. He's a brilliant producer now, as well as playing. Normally, I'd just not go for a few hours, so I could be with you. But I don't want to miss him.'

She bites her lip, uncertain.

‘So you're passing us up for some ancient rock god?' Jodie challenges.

Rose looks miserable.

‘Pop god, actually,' I correct Jodie. ‘But I see your point, Rose.'

And I do. Jim Fisher has played practically every stadium in the world. He's played with David Bowie and Michael Jackson. He's sold gazillions of records. Now he helps produce them. If I got the chance to spend even five minutes with him, I would. And besides, it's clear to see that even though Rose is miserable about many things right now, she's still passionate about the music.

‘I know!' Nell bounces with excitement at her own idea. ‘Why don't we take you there? Then we've got a few more minutes together, at least?'

‘Would you really?' Rose asks.

I grin. ‘We wouldn't miss it for anything.'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Still Want To Be You

W
hen we explain to Sam where we're going, his tongue practically hangs out.

‘Jim Fisher's actual house? No problem. Hold tight, ladies.' He swings the Subaru back down the drive like it was a Maserati.

On the way, Rose explains the most extraordinary thing: these last few weeks, since she recorded ‘Breathless', she's been wishing she were us. Correct:
she's
been envying
our
lifestyle.

‘I know it sounds mad,' she says, ‘but you've still got each other. It's my fault. You tried to apologise right from
the start, Sash, but I was still so angry with you, because you were my best friend. Then I was too ashamed of myself to call. Then it all got crazy. But after this birthday party I performed at, when Paul McCartney came over to say hello, all I wanted to do was tell you about it. It didn't seem real unless I'd told you.'

I shake my head at the wonder of this. Paul McCartney. If I'd been there, we'd have been squealing together about it all night.

‘Kerlanggg,' Jodie says, swivelling round from her place in the passenger seat, next to Sam. ‘Any other mega-stars you'd like to name drop, while we're here?'

Rose grins. ‘See? What's the point of meeting a Beatle if you can't call me a name dropper?'

‘Weren't there loads of people you could talk to about it, though?' Nell asks. ‘I mean, weren't you at a party?'

‘I was. But it's not the same. Linus has met him lots of times, so he wasn't that interested. Elsa doesn't really like the Beatles. She doesn't really like anything except grime and hip-hop. I didn't really know anyone else. I had two glasses of champagne and I felt very dizzy. When I got back to my hotel room, I was all by myself. It was so bizarre – three hours before, there had been hundreds of people all singing along to “Breathless”, and it was the most amazing night of my life. Then . . . there was no one.'

‘That's what groupies are for,' says Jodie, sagely.

‘I don't have groupies!'

‘Well, there's your problem,' Jodie explains. But the half-smile on her lips shows that she isn't seriously recommending screaming fans at the bedroom door as a solution.

‘What about your tutor?' Nell asks. ‘We thought you were going out with him. Aren't you?'

‘Jamie?' Rose boggles her eyes. ‘Really? He's gorgeous, but . . .'

‘But what?'

‘He's twenty-five. He's got a girlfriend. She's twenty-five too. He only goes out to keep me company sometimes. I keep telling Elsa to tell the press we're not dating, but they don't care. Oh my God. I can't believe I can finally explain all this.'

She glances round at us all again, giddy with relief.

‘I know what you mean,' Sam says cheerfully from the front. ‘I often find that when I've just been singing to
a roomful of rock stars
, it's a real downer afterwards.'

‘Shut up, Sam,' I tell him.

Rose grins shyly.

‘I know it sounds crazy, but . . .'

‘You don't need to explain,' I reassure her. ‘We get it now.'

We reach a pair of grand wrought-iron gates, set in a gap in the wall. Sam leans out to an intercom stuck on a gatepost and explains that we're delivering Rose. The gates swing open automatically and we drive past elegant stables to one side, with a neat orchard of apple trees on the other. The breeze whips the pretty white apple blossom around, depositing petals on the car like confetti. At the end of the orchard we approach a wide circular drive leading to a grey stone Georgian house, with a red Ferrari parked outside the front door.

Jodie turns round to Rose.

‘So this is where you work?' she drawls, eyebrow raised,
as we crunch along the gravel.

Rose blushes. ‘Yup. This is the office. At the moment, anyway.'

Jodie takes in the picture-perfect view.

‘I still want to be you. Just so's you know.'

Sam parks a respectful distance from the Ferrari and Rose leads us round the side of the house to a series of outbuildings at the back. One looks like a party barn – a bit like George's. Another houses an indoor pool. The third – a long, low, modern building made of wood, steel and glass – is the studio.

Rose knocks and enters. We all troop in behind her. The place is a rabbit warren of little rooms. One, the largest, is littered with instruments, speakers and mics. Next to it is a booth with a huge mixing console and a sofa. Then there's a glass-fronted cupboard with a microphone, another room containing nothing but a drum kit, and at the back a kitchen area with a view across miles of farmland, where we can see chestnut horses being exercised in one of the fields behind the house.

‘Do you know what?' Jodie says, looking around, ‘I think I just might be living the dream.'

‘Oh, don't,' Rose says, stifling a laugh.

An elderly-looking man approaches the studio door, knocking the mud off his boots. He's dressed for farming or gardening, in a sleeveless green jacket covered with sensible pockets, old trousers and a frayed checked shirt that shows off his healthy tan. I assume he works on the estate. He certainly doesn't look like a sound engineer. Not that I'd know what a sound engineer's supposed to look like, but I imagine black jeans and an AC/DC T-shirt.

‘I thought I heard you,' he says, coming in. ‘Oh!'

He looks surprised to see five of us in the corridor, but not unduly bothered.

Rose steps forward.

‘I hope you don't mind. I brought my band today. My old band. And—'

Before she can finish, Sam steps up to join her, holds his hand out for a handshake and almost bows.

‘It's an honour to meet you, Mr Fisher.'

Oh my God, he's right.

Up close, I realise that the ‘elderly' appearance came from the wavy grey hair, but the face is not
so
old. It's iconic. I've just only ever seen it on posters and album covers before, wearing eyeliner, above a silk shirt slashed to the waist, and lit by a bank of spotlights. Even meeting him in his old gardening clothes, the temptation to curtsey is embarrassingly strong.

‘Hi kids,' he says, smiling a slow, laid-back, Taylor Lautner smile that must have had the groupies going weak at the knees thirty years ago. ‘Fancy a coffee? Put the cafetière on, will you, Rose?'

What do you do when you meet a music legend? Well, I'll tell you. You sit down for toast and coffee (God, we're starving), and call your mum, at his insistence, to tell her where you are. It's clear that Jim's wild touring days are over. His latest wife and kids are on holiday with their grandparents in America and he shows us photos of them on his phone. There is something bizarrely normal about Jim.

Normal, that is, until we get into the studio proper, the place they call the ‘live room', which is crammed with his collection of guitars, lutes, banjos, ukuleles and practically
anything else with strings. It's worthy of a museum, but it's all right here, for him to pick up and play every day. It also has loads of keyboards and computer equipment, but nothing like the equipment in the control booth beyond, which has one whole wall of computers and monitors. It's pure geek heaven. Sam groans with pleasure.

‘Oh God. Elliot would kill to see this stuff.'

‘Dave rang to say he'll be over in an hour or so,' Jim tells Rose. ‘He's the sound engineer,' he explains to us. ‘Lives nearby but his life revolves around Formula 1. He'll come by when they've finished the interviews. I thought you were sounding better yesterday, Rosie. Shall we carry on with that Mariah Carey cover?'

Rose shakes her head.

‘It's never going to work,' she says. ‘I wondered . . . I wondered if you'd mind if I tried out one of my own songs today?'

‘Sure,' Jim smiles. ‘Whatever you like.'

Rose puts on some headphones and sits at one of the keyboards. We go out into the control room to give her room to concentrate, then stare at her through the window, so she can't. After grinning at us self-consciously, she turns away and I watch her tuning us out, and thinking about the music. For now, there's just her and a piano and a song.

She pauses for a long time before putting her hands on the keys to play, scanning her memory for lyrics she hasn't sung for a long time, and summoning up the emotion of the song. When it comes, it is slow and sad, almost desolate, called ‘The Mistake I Had to Make'. It's Rose at her most vulnerable and raw, and it has all the intensity she couldn't bring to ‘Living the Dream'.

Like ‘Breathless,' this song oozes her jazz and blues influences, but standing here, watching her so close, I recognise the emotion in them in a new way now. It's real. I'd always assumed up to now that ‘Breathless' was just Rose's idea of a breakup song – like we used to say, something based on the films we've seen and books we've read. I thought she'd perfectly copied other people's feelings. Now I'm not so sure.

When she's finished, there's a universal ‘wow'. We wave at her through the window and pour into the live room to ‘wow' in person.

‘Where did that come from?' Jim asks.

‘I wrote it a long time ago.'

‘Well, why didn't you sing it, girl?
That's
what we've been looking for. That's got the chill factor. Why have you been messing with all this rubbish when you can do that?'

Rose smiles shyly.

‘Because I'm an idiot,' she says. ‘I didn't listen to . . . the people that know me.'

She gives us a wonky smile.

Jim looks confused for a moment, staring from face to face.

‘Hey! I remember you guys. You're the ones from Killer Act. My daughter showed me on her laptop. What was that all about, then?'

‘Long story,' I say with a sigh.

‘Sorted now, thank goodness,' Nell adds.

‘Don't believe everything you see on TV,' Jodie concludes.

He smiles. ‘Ain't that the truth?'

‘Sasha wrote a song about it, actually,' Nell says. ‘It's really good. She's been learning guitar. Go on, Sash! Why
don't you play it?'

Rose turns to me, surprised, ‘You wrote a song? You play guitar?'

‘Not really,' I say hastily, going pink. ‘I mean, I've started to write a few songs. I don't really play guitar yet. I—'

‘Yes, you do,' Nell says, smiling proudly. ‘Don't be so shy, Sash.' She turns to Rose. ‘You should hear the song, it's wonderful.'

Jim grins at me. ‘You're a songwriter too?'

‘No! God – I wish.'

I really wish. Suddenly, I
really
wish. Despite all the weirdness Rose described, I'd so love to be able to come to a place like this, and work with people like Jim.

‘Well, come on, play it, then.'

Jim carefully considers his instrument collection for a moment, before handing me a battered acoustic guitar.

‘No. Really.'

He's a legend. I only know about six chords. This is silly.

‘No.
Really
,' Jim says. He says it with a smile, but it's the kind of smile an adult gives you when there's actually no choice. ‘I'd like to hear your song.'

Everyone stands back to give me space. Luckily they don't disappear into the control room to watch through the window. I couldn't bear that. I put the guitar on my lap and strum a few chords. It doesn't look like much, but it makes the most beautiful sound. Jim sees my look of surprise at the sweetness of the noise I'm making and grins.

‘Yeah. I played that with Eric Clapton a few times. It's a good little guitar. OK, we're listening.'

And so, on an instrument that has played alongside one of the greatest blues players of all time, I play ‘You Don't Know Me' – slowly, carefully and as well as I can. Goodness knows I'm not perfect, but I've kept the chord sequence simple so I can play it properly. I find it easier to sing when I'm playing, too. More than that, I'm singing my own tune, my own words. The emotion comes naturally, just like it did for Rose.

Rose watches me intently. Of course, she's never seen me play guitar seriously before. She's never heard me sing my own lyrics, either, apart from a couple of verses of ‘Sunglasses'. It's hard to tell what she's thinking.

When I finish, she looks at me with tears in her eyes. Rose always took things harder and felt things more deeply than the rest of us. From that point of view, nothing's changed.

‘Oh my God, Sash,' she says. ‘I'm so sorry.'

‘What for?'

She looks bewildered. ‘I knew that people were mean to you . . . when I won. But . . . I had no idea, not really. It was bad for you, wasn't it? For all of you.'

‘Yes, it was,' I say.

There's silence for a while.

‘You don't know me . . .' she murmurs, rolling the lyrics round her tongue. ‘Do you know – that's exactly what I'm thinking when I'm singing that stupid song for
the ad? Everyone assumes you're happy but if the music's not working you're scared, and you're so lonely sometimes you could curl up and die. Hey – do you mind if . . . ?'

‘What?'

‘May I play it?'

‘Of course.'

Nell gives a whoop of approval.

‘I mean, it's your song,' Rose goes on. ‘If you don't want me to . . .'

‘No. Play it. Here.'

I hand her the guitar. While she works out the chord sequence, I get my phone out of my bag and find the app where I finalised the lyrics. Jim makes a few suggestions for how to pull it together in the middle eight. He hands us all headphones, so we can hear the sound as it progresses, track by track. Using one of the keyboards as a drum kit (which blows Jodie's mind slightly), he helps us lay the tracks down. Slowly, gradually, over the next forty-five minutes, I hear my song truly come to life.