Confessions Of A Karaoke Queen (44 page)

‘Who wasn’t …’ Dad blusters, ‘What wasn’t?’

‘Explain yourself!’ Mum demands. ‘And if that is you, Poison, you’d better step right away from my daughter.’

‘Butlins holiday camp.’ Evan’s mouth is twisted as he makes his way to the edge of the stage, taking the steps, dividing the crowd. ‘Skegness, 1991. Remembering yet, boys? Ringing any bells?’

‘Forget it, Poison.’

‘The fans wanted me.’ He moves slowly, eyes fixed on Lenny and Don as the audience disperses, peeling back, moving away. Nick keeps me close, though my instinct is to run down and throw myself in front of Mum and Dad before Evan beats me to it. ‘They were calling my name,’ he says,
voice echoing in the loaded quiet, ‘chanting my song –
they wanted Poison Bergamot
. But no, you couldn’t have that, could you? You couldn’t bear to see me succeed.’

‘We told you, Bergamot,’ Don yells, ‘you’re fantasising!
It wasn’t us
.’

Evan shakes his head. ‘
Never
. You made me suffer out there, on stage, in front of all those people. I never should have worn it, I never should have trusted you; I knew it then and I know it now. My best metallic all-in-one, you rigged it. Didn’t you?
Didn’t you?
Admit it. All it took was a quick snip and my fate was sealed …’ He gulps. ‘Unlike my trousers.’ An excruciating moment passes while he gathers himself. ‘
Two Shay
,’ Evan spits the words, his voice spluttering to its death like an expiring car battery, ‘you ruined my pop career, my lifelong dream … You
humiliated
me.’

Wait a minute … I remember this.

Do I? Yes. I remember this!

I was there. I must have been about six. And this memory, forgotten till now but the image gradually reassembling of an overweight, almost-bald man with a purple eye patch and make-up running down his face, his pale round bum suddenly, appallingly, coming into view, before he hauled up the seat of his silver suit and darted from the stage. The wardrobe malfunction to end all wardrobe malfunctions. Mum clapping her hand over my eyes. The laughing, baying audience.

That was Evan?
Evan Bergman exposed himself at Butlins?

‘For the last time,’ Lenny runs a hand through his streaky hair, ‘we had nothing to do with it.
It wasn’t us
, Bergamot – how many times do we have to tell you?’

‘Wasn’t you?’ Evan shrieks. He stops, fists at his sides, like a bull about to charge. I feel Nick slip from my side. ‘Then who the hell was it? You were on right before me, you liars. You were the only other people in the dressing room!’

Mum’s got one arm across Lenny’s chest; one across Don’s, like the world’s most ineffective bodyguard. ‘You stay back, Poison.’

But Evan’s hurtling towards them now, his hair jumping off the back of his head, his little legs running like pistons down the length of the bar.

‘BASTARDS—!’

Nick breaks his path, slamming into him and pushing him to the floor. Two bouncers descend on them both, hauling Evan up under his armpits, dragging him out.

‘I could have been a star!’ Evan roars, slamming a pink fist into his chest. ‘
Me!
I could have been a
star
!’

It’s then I spot him. Loaf.

He’s standing by the fire exit, one hand on the door, preparing to leave. But not before he’s caught my eye.

And when he does, he winks.

Hang on a minute. Was
Loaf
at Skegness that year? Could Loaf have …?

But before I have a chance to think about it, Nick’s back by my side, gesturing for me to take the mic.

Right. There’s only one thing for it.

‘Mum, Dad,’ I say, finally finding my voice and talking into it, firm and strong despite the fireworks of happiness and confusion and adrenalin exploding in my chest, ‘welcome home. I think this stage belongs to you.’

And before Nick takes my hand, before ‘What You Do
(Ooh Ooh)’ cranks up, before Jaz and Alex and Simon and Ruby run to the stage to embrace me, before I hug Mum and Dad harder than I have in my life, I turn back to the fire exit.

Loaf has already gone, the door swinging shut on the dark clear night outside.

‘We’re so proud of you, poppet.’ Mum kisses the top of my head. ‘How you managed to pull this one off I will
never
know.’

Gratefully I take the lurid green cocktail from her hands, a hasty concoction thrown together by Alex, and chuck a stinging slug of it down my throat.

‘Even though I turned Sing It Back upside down,’ I say, ‘and in the process lost a treasured friend of yours, changed the club’s name, prostituted it to the nation, brought Evan Bergamot-Laidislaw back into your lives … and did it all without asking you first?’

‘Are you serious?’ Dad grins. ‘We never thought we’d see anything like it,’ he gazes around in wonder, ‘never in a million years. It’s incredible, sweetheart, nothing short of a miracle.’

‘We raised you to have your own mind,’ Mum agrees. ‘And when we gave you this opportunity we knew you’d do something spectacular …’ she raises an eyebrow, ‘even if we didn’t
quite
envisage live TV.’

‘To Pineapple!’ proposes Simon.

Rob, handsome and smiling so the dimples in his cheeks come out, looks hopefully at my parents. ‘If we can … to Sing It Back? I always preferred the original.’

‘Do you know what?’ Mum says, stirring her drink. ‘I do, too.’

‘In that case,’ says Dad, ‘to bringing back Sing It Back!’

‘Original is best.’ I smile at Rob, stripped of Ruby du Jour make-up, and he returns it ten-fold. ‘Why change it,’ I say, ‘when it’s already just right?’

It’s well past midnight and, after the cameras have packed up and gone home, after Evan’s been manhandled from the premises amid frantic whispers that he’s going to be investigated by Ofcom – not to mention Two Shay’s lawyers – and after the last of the straggling revellers have tailed off into the night, gossiping and speculating on the scandals set to explode across the tabloids tomorrow morning, only a few remain. My parents, tired and elated and overflowing with questions; Two Shay, nipping outside for a fag every ten minutes to get catty about ‘that venomous little bitch’, by whom I can only assume they mean Evan Bergman; Jaz, as inseparable from Alex as she is from a feather-boa-clad Andre, as the three of them snuggle up in a booth
littered with party streamers and half-eaten vol-au-vents, reliving for the twentieth time the moment, at about ten p.m. if reports are to be believed, when Alex punched Carl (he, bursting with pride: ‘And so I punched him!’ Jaz, head bobbing in agreement: ‘And Alex punched him. Well, pushed him …’ Alex, affronted: ‘He didn’t push me back though, did he?’); Rob chatting animatedly to Mum and Dad, with just the faintest trace of Ruby du Jour on his cheekbones and eyelids; and Simon, grinning anxiously from ear to ear as he stands before us, occasionally shoving his hands in his pockets, then taking them out again, then shifting his weight from one foot to the other, then laughing too loudly whenever someone tells a joke. Most of all, he can’t stop looking at Lou, who’s sitting next to me on the edge of the stage, looking beautiful in a silky cream dress and matching every flirty glance of his with one of her own.

In the end, Lou came. She couldn’t miss it, she said: after a lot of soul-searching she realised that she’d already missed me, and Simon, and all of us, for far too long.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she told me the second it was over, Mum and Dad warbling their hit in the background as Nick and I found our way unsteadily through the crowd. ‘Can you forgive me?’

I hugged her hard for a long time. ‘What on earth are you sorry for?’

‘I overreacted,’ she said, teary and emotional, ‘it was unfair of me. I freaked out and I blew the whole bloody thing out of proportion. Listening tonight brought home how much you’ve had to deal with all by yourself and that wasn’t right – I should have been there. You were going through a tough time and I wasn’t around for you. I’m so sorry.’

‘Come here, you nob.’ I pulled her to me. ‘Best friends always. Nothing’s going to change that, never ever.’

And it’s a very good job Lou did come. Because without her, the night could have ended quite differently.

‘What was I meant to do?’ She blinks at me now, the picture of innocence. ‘Lawrence is a liability. A
drunk
liability.’

‘You didn’t need to lock him in a cupboard!’

Lou makes a face. ‘Maddie, it was
so
obvious he only came back on the scene to claim his piece of the limelight. The minute he turned up tonight I knew he had a plan – I knew it!’

‘OK, OK,’ I concede, ‘you were right.’

‘I usually am.’ Lou stirs the gaudy cocktail made personally – and without argument – for her by Jaz. She hates rum, but the fact she didn’t tell Jaz this makes me think she’s pretty close to forgiving her. ‘And you have no idea how agonising it was seeing pictures of you two out; all that stuff they said about you getting back together. I just thought, Maddie’s not
that
stupid, surely!’

‘Hmm. For a while I think I was.’

‘Well it’s a good job you have a friend like me.’

I grin at her. ‘I guess so. How else would I come up with genius ideas for disposing of ex-boyfriends, like luring them into broom cupboards and trapping them there?’

‘How do you
work
this thing?’ Mum is unsuccessfully punching the controls on the new karaoke machines, her and Dad circling them warily like they’re creatures from outer space.

Seriously, though: I’m joking about it now but as well as being ridiculously happy that Lou came, I’m also ridiculously
grateful. Because it turns out Lawrence was planning to corroborate Evan’s story about me plotting the thing with Nick. His gambit was that he knew me better than anyone; that he was going to tell the nation how I’d dumped him ahead of the show to free up my time for a full-on seduction campaign (a concept I find laughable); and how I was so desperate to be famous that I’d do anything – or anyone – to make sure that happened. The hypocrisy of it baffles me.

But Lawrence couldn’t quite pull it off. Panicking about executing his plan – and even more so after several intimidating meetings with Evan Bergman, who needless to say had promised him a starring role in a sitcom he had coming up – he’d polished off one too many vodkas before showing his face at the club. Five minutes in he’d bumped into Lou and, whether it was ill-thought-out relief at seeing a face he knew, sheer drunkenness or plain old arrogant Lawrence desperate to brag, he soon spilled his plan to get up on stage and ‘do the right thing’. Well, clearly Lou deemed the right thing to be something else altogether, and moments later he was inside the broom cupboard, no doubt banging on the door and begging to be let out, every plea drowning in the cacophony of noise outside.

A thought occurs to me.

‘Hang on …’ I say, turning to Lou with an expression of alarm. ‘Did anyone actually let Lawrence
out
of the cupboard?’

Lou matches my gaze with her own, her eyes like saucers.

Jumping up, we rush around the bar and out to the store. Exchanging one last look of simultaneous horror and exhilaration, the likes of which I haven’t seen on Lou’s face since we
were seven and about to lift the lid on a dead vole Lou’s cat caught and we’d kept in a shoebox for three weeks because Lou promised me she was learning a spell to bring it back to life – she hadn’t, of course, it just really smelled – I reach for the handle and pull open the door.

Lawrence is inside, slumped like a sack of potatoes behind a mop and several rubbish sacks. His eyes are closed and he’s drooling unattractively out one corner of his mouth.

‘Lawrence?’ I venture.

‘
Yeurgh
.’ He changes position, delivers a couple of grunty snores and turns away from the assaulting light. ‘Mummy,’ he whimpers, still dreaming, ‘take me home.’

Lou clamps a hand over her mouth, stifling her giggle. I do the same and for a bit we just stand there trying desperately not to laugh.

‘Lawrence,’ I say eventually, prodding him with my foot. ‘Get up!’

‘Wha—’ he moans, clutching his head, a mole blinking against the light. I wonder if this isn’t too far removed from what that shoebox vole might have looked like had Lou’s spell worked. ‘Whozat?’