Love Lies

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 creche. 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