Married By Christmas (20 page)

‘Oh, right, well, yes it was,’ Liv said, wondering exactly how many times Tom could unwittingly crush her to smithereens without her actually turning to dust. ‘Make sure you don’t do it again.’

‘I will … I won’t, I mean,’ Tom said. ‘Are we friends again? Because I don’t think I could take falling out with you now, you are just about all there is holding me together. What I was really trying to say, before, up there, is that things might not have worked out romantically for us, but you mean a lot to me.’

‘Do I?’ Liv said, any remaining ice chips in her heart melting in a moment.

‘Course you do,’ Tom said, dropping his arm around her shoulders and kissing her on the temple. ‘There’s no one else in the world I can talk to the way I talk to you. So, come on, there’s nothing we can do until Anna gets in touch. How about ice skating, then lunch, then maybe several gins in the bar at Anna’s hotel until she finally shows up and we can get things back to normal?’

Trouble was, Liv thought, as she rested her head against Tom’s shoulder for a moment, getting things back to normal was the last thing she wanted.

Chapter Twelve

‘This is not at all how I imagined it,’ Anna said as she followed Miles into the Bowery Ballroom, where he was about to audition for the New York Rock Department. It was an impressively shabby old variety theatre on Delancey Street, which had clearly been a club for some years. The gold paint was cracking and peeling off the plaster and a wooden floor had been scuffed and scratched by decades of dancing feet. Both gave the venue an atmosphere of authenticity added to by the faint but lingering scent of stale beer.

The Bowery was decorated for Christmas with equally old, vintage-looking decorations: 70s-style big-eyed, plastic light-up reindeer; strings of yellowish fairy lights with huge sections hanging in limp darkness. There were plastic stars – mostly bald of the silver glitter that had once gilded them – hung from the vaulted ceiling, held in place with determined drawing pins, which marked the already pitted surface of the ceiling. With the snow driving down past the windows in the lobby, it felt a little to Anna as if she had stumbled back in time or perhaps through some magic wardrobe where a permanent Christmas party rumbled on, despite whatever the world was doing outside.

‘How did you imagine it?’ Miles said tightly, as he approached a bored-looking girl, with a record label ID round her neck, sitting behind a trestle table in front of the double doors in the auditorium. The sound of very loud music vibrated the glass in the doors, and made the swirls of ancient carpet beneath Anna’s feet hum and vibrate.

‘I pictured a recording studio, I suppose,’ Anna said. ‘And you in headphones behind a glass wall and a table with a lot of buttons and slidey up and down things. This seems much more … intense.’

‘The NYRDs want someone who’s good live, who can blend in with the band, and still bring something new. It’s all about the vibe,’ Miles said, his tone short and tense, his nerves clearly visible in his clenched jaw and the throbbing vein in his temple. It was the only time in their – admittedly very short – acquaintance that Anna had ever seen him any less than utterly relaxed and at ease in his body, and somehow this unexpected vulnerability made her like him all the more.

Nevertheless, despite his nerves, he managed a near perfect smile as he greeted the girl, whose ID tag revealed she was called Cheri Mortimer.

‘Hi, I’m Miles,’ he said, extending a hand to her.

‘I know who you are.’ Cheri smiled at him, visibly perked up by the sight of him. ‘I love your stuff. It was me who suggested you when they were brainstorming for replacements. I showed the bosses your YouTube stuff too.’

‘Really,’ Miles said, a little awkwardly, two bright spots of colour appearing on his cheekbones, as he was confronted with a bona fide fan. ‘Thank you … I don’t know what to say.’

‘Oh, don’t say anything,’ Cheri told him cheerfully. ‘I might have got your name in the conversation, but my opinion doesn’t count for much round here, not yet anyway. Your music is what got you here, and you’re the last of the five they are seeing, so go for it. The guys need someone to really rock it out now.’

‘They’re only seeing five people?’ Miles asked her, as she handed him a pass with his name and photo on it.

‘Oh yeah,’ Cheri said. ‘Yeah, it’s going to be one of you guys, just depends which one. The label wants looks and charisma, the band wants talent. I guess whoever has both is the winner. It’s that way through to the auditorium. The last guy is just finishing up, so you can sit in the back and watch him if you like.’ Cheri smiled at Anna, who’d been hanging back, doing her best to be discreet. ‘I shouldn’t really let your girlfriend go in with you, but as long as she sits at the back it should be OK.’

‘Thank you.’ Anna smiled at Cheri as she followed Miles into the theatre, realising as the doors opened to blast them with unadulterated hard rock at top volume that neither one of them had done or said anything to contradict the girl on her status as Miles’s love interest.

Anna perched on the very end of the back row, Miles standing by her side as they watched the band, and the other potential new singer, perform one of their songs together. It was very loud, a world away from the song he’d sung for her on the open mic night. Full of screaming guitars and thundering drums that, if Anna was honest, mainly hurt her ears and made her dream of some benign elevator music. When the other auditionee sang it made her wonder if all the dogs in the vicinity were howling and all the cats running in the opposite direction. Still, maybe that was how it was supposed to be, all loud and shouty, and, as a girl who mainly listened to the sort of boy bands whose edgiest move was getting up from a stool and walking forwards in response to a key change, she acknowledged that she wasn’t best placed to sit in judgement.

‘Is he any good?’ she repeated twice before realising she’d have to stand up and whisper the comment in Miles’s ear. She rested her hand on his shoulder as she put her lips very close to his ear. Caught off guard he turned to face her, and suddenly their lips were very close together indeed, their noses actually touching. In all the noise and din, Anna caught her breath as she looked into his ice-blue eyes, her hand still on his shoulder. And then before Anna could move, or even react, Miles leaned forwards and kissed her, very gently, very briefly on the mouth.

‘For luck,’ he said, as the track came to an end, and suddenly the room was almost silent again, silent enough for Anna to be able to hear her blood thundering in her ears. ‘And no, he was terrible. I’m going to kick his arse from here to the moon and back, just for you, Annie Carter.’ With one last smile at her, Miles grabbed his guitar by the neck and strode towards the stage.

‘Thanks, man.’ The bassist shook the other guy’s hand. ‘We’ll call you later, yeah?’

Anna watched as Miles leaped onto the stage with athletic ease, shook hands and exchanged man hugs with the other musicians, talking and laughing about something she couldn’t make out, but the truth was even if she hadn’t been right at the back of the auditorium she still wouldn’t have been paying any attention to what was going on, because at that moment, and for quite a few moments afterwards, all she could think about was that Miles had just kissed her, albeit briefly, for a matter of seconds and with no more sexual intent than a peck on the cheek. Which begged the question, why was her heart threatening to pound its way out of her chest and why had her knees turned to jelly?

Miles was now performing serious rock music, wielding his electric guitar with more than a little theatrical aplomb, and a fair amount of phallic implication. It was quite a different spectacle from the one he’d given in the little bar, when he’d sung just for Anna and, more than that, it was quite a thing to behold. Anna sat down with a little wobbly-kneed bump, after the first NYRD track that Miles had had to learn kicked in, and found herself unexpectedly swept up by the driving guitars and, more pertinently, by Miles. She found it was impossible to take her eyes off him as he strode across the stage, interacting with the other musicians like he’d known them all his life. It was if he owned that few square feet of rickety, dusty wood, which became the very centre of the known universe as long as he was standing on it. Whereas the last candidate had all but screamed the lyrics – which seemed to have something to do with whisky, fast women and Armageddon – into the microphone, Miles’s rendition was altogether more tuneful – he actually sang the words and, as a result, Anna realised she could almost detect a melody that was verging on catchy. Entranced, she watched as his fingers flew over his guitar like … well, like a well-practised lover who knew exactly how to make his instrument cry out. Anna smiled as he smiled, filled with the sheer joy of what he was doing, grinning at the other musicians on stage as they listened to each other play, catching each other’s enthusiasm. For a total of five numbers, Anna sat on the edge of her faded red velvet seat, entranced, as Miles gave everything he had. She delighted in every arrogant toss of his head, each provocative thrust of his hips, and particularly the way he slid on his knees from the back of the stage to the front during one particularly challenging solo. And as she watched him perform, Anna came to a conclusion which somehow, deep down, did not surprise her: it was very easy to be sexually attracted to a man with an electric guitar.

And the truth was that, after forty-eight hours in his company, she was undeniably, and very strongly, sexually attracted to Miles. The man she’d assumed to be an idiot with a propensity for unwittingly selecting near fatal beverages, the man she’d dreaded sitting next to on a plane and fully hoped never to see again had somehow become irresistible. Which, Anna realised with a heavy, heavy heart, was very bad news for someone with a life plan.

Anna waited as Miles clasped hands with the drummer, pulling him to his chest in a weird sort of macho hug. ‘Great playing with you, man. We’ll be in touch real soon. Stop by Bill, our manager, on your way out, he wants to check your availability, other commitments.’

Miles leaped off the stage with ease and grace, and spent several minutes bent over an iPad, as he talked to a huge man with long hair that flowed down his back. It was a hairstyle at odds with his expensive-looking, tailored suit. The other candidate had left without stopping to talk to anyone, so this had to be a good sign, Anna decided, discovering she was just as anxious that Miles did well as he was. Finally, after some more handshaking, Miles bounded up the aisle towards her. Anna hoped that her newfound attraction to him didn’t somehow show on her face.

‘How’d I do?’ he asked her, his face flushed and his voice a little breathless.

‘Really good,’ she said, grinning. ‘Really amazing!’

‘That’s what I thought,’ Miles said. ‘Thanks, Anna. Thanks for coming, for making me see sense and letting you come. It meant a lot to me that you were out there. I think I played better because I knew you were.’

‘Oh well,’ Anna said, feeling like giggling and blushing but telling herself at the same time not to be so ridiculous. After all she was not some thirteen-year-old groupie. ‘That’s what friends are for.’

‘I know,’ Miles said. ‘And you are a good friend. The best impromptu New York Christmas friend I’ve ever had. And even if our lives take us in opposite directions after this, I’ll think about this time. Always.’

‘So do you think you’ve got it then?’ Anna asked as they walked back to the subway, the snow crunching under their feet, the cold making their cheeks ruddy and fingers numb.

‘I don’t know,’ Miles said. ‘But you know what, in some ways, Annie, it doesn’t matter.’

‘Really?’ Anna asked him. ‘Why not? What about the equipment you sold to get here?’

‘Well, when I was up there playing today and last night in that little bar, singing, if that is what you can call it, with you, I realised, I love doing this, I love it. And as long as I am doing it, one way or another, in a stadium or a pub, it doesn’t matter. Music was what I was meant to do, and I get to do it every day, sometimes even for money. That makes me very lucky.’ He stopped for a second in the middle of the pavement. ‘Yes, right now I feel like a very lucky man. Now, how about something to eat, and then we can go and hunt down that bitch that married your fiancé.’

Anna found herself grinning happily as she followed Miles down the steps to the subway, thinking how very wonderful it must be to be so certain about something without the need for lists, and counter-lists and footnotes and contingency plans and colour-coded high-lighters, and how amazing it must be to just know something, know it with all your heart, with absolute certainty and never ever doubt or second guess yourself. Just once, just once in her life, Anna would like that moment of certainty to belong to her.

The Long Dark Night of the Soul
was not exactly easy viewing, a fact that became apparent about ten minutes into the production when one of the nuns hanged herself from a scaffolding pole, the dramatic impetus of the moment being somewhat reduced by the deceased nun continuing to cough for several minutes after she was pronounced tragically dead. Anna would have laughed if she wasn’t so compulsively polite, and Miles did laugh, sniggering into the back of his hand like an unruly little boy, which earned him a furious glare from a very pious Mother Superior onstage.

It was a small auditorium, one of several in the theatre complex, and much less glamorous than the one that Miles had rocked out in just a few hours earlier, for all its similar brand of vintage decay. There was no stage to speak of, and no set beyond what was already there. The seats were built on scaffolding that surrounded the performance area, rising in a steep pitch that looked like they could accommodate maybe four hundred people. Anna only realised as they arrived that she had bought front row tickets, and that apart from perhaps twenty other people, the theatre was empty, which perhaps wasn’t surprising as suicidal and sexually confused nuns were rarely traditional Christmas viewing. (It was clearly not
The Sound of Music.
) Still, Anna was full of anticipation and a sense of dread: at any moment she knew she would be inches away from Charisma Jones, almost within touching distance of her husband-to-be’s current wife.

Miles had been on an incredible high after the audition. His usual funny and charming self but pumped full of extra energy, he’d taken Anna for some Greek food in a place that Cheri from the record label had recommended to him on the way out, and Anna had spent pretty much all of the meal in happy silence, laughing as he told her a series of anecdotes from his life as a musician on the road, trying not to notice how his blue eyes sparkled or how much she wanted to run her fingertips over the smile lines in his stubble.

It’s fine, Anna had told herself, leaning her chin into her hands as Miles re-enacted the time he and his bandmates had to go on stage soaking wet because of a dare involving a lamppost and a fountain and how he’d almost killed himself and shorted out all the electricity onstage in the process. All she was experiencing was a teenage crush, and teenage crushes were perfectly normal. OK, perfectly normal in teenagers, usually, but, as Anna reminded herself, she had not been a normal teenager. Whilst Liv had been mooning with obsessive dedication over an assortment of moody-looking pop boys, who’d lined the walls of their bedroom from around the age of twelve, Anna had not had time for crushes. She was intent on getting perfect grades in her GCSEs. Which meant that her and Liv’s school lives complemented each other quite well, the pair of them always opting to stand with their backs against the wall at school discos: Liv was a wallflower because the idea of talking to boys she liked made her want to kill herself and the boys she didn’t fancy only ever wanted to play football with her anyway. Anna had been regularly asked to dance to the slow ones by the same opportunistic ranks of boys who were hopeful of getting their hand up her top. But, soon after the Regina Clarkson incident, her English teacher had told her that to get distracted by boys now would be the ruin of her academic career, one that she had to work hard to keep up, because brains didn’t come naturally to her. And so Anna, being Anna, had all but stifled every single hormonal impulse that her body threw at her, with the one notable exception that led to the Regina Clarkson incident, and she preferred never ever to think about that.