I stare at Adam in pure bewilderment. ‘You’ve blown four hundred and fifty quid on this?’ I demand. I’m so shocked I can’t summon the necessary torrent of abuse. I’m not worried; I know it will come, just as soon as I start to breathe again.
‘That’s the beauty of it. I didn’t have to
‘What, they are knock-off?’ The words are strangled by outrage.
‘No,’ laughs Adam. ‘I’m working at the gig. These are freebies. I’ve got a job with Scottie Taylor. It’s silly money. You couldn’t guess. Like six times the amount I’d normally get for a similar event. Apparently Scottie has this thing about sharing his wealth. I’ve known about the job for a while but I kept quiet about it so as to surprise you today.’
Adam pauses, no doubt waiting for me to leap on top of him and tell him how marvellous he is. I want to pummel him to death with the soggy toast.
‘Fern, you are looking at Scottie Taylor’s assistant stage manager. I have a
I shake my head. ‘You didn’t pay for these?’
‘No. I said so, didn’t I? They were free. How cool is that?’
No ring, no ring. Bloody gig tickets but no ring.
I hate him.
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.
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.
‘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
