It Was Only Ever You (26 page)

When Gerry had told Patrick the news that Iggy had hired a manager for him and he was to come straight over and meet them, Patrick had not been expecting a woman. He didn’t know that women were music managers. Perhaps they were like secretaries and Iggy didn’t think he was important or good enough to have a male manager yet. Patrick was disappointed but immediately decided it didn’t matter. A few weeks ago Iggy Morrow had noticed him, and now he was making an investment in him.

The boy was gawping at her with his mouth slightly open. It made him look somewhat gormless. Had he never seen a woman before? With those good looks, she doubted that was the case. He really was a distractingly pretty boy. Anyway, she didn’t need him to be bright, and she didn’t need him to like her, she just needed him to look gorgeous and sing. She had remembered his moody good looks, but she needed reminding of the voice.

She said, ‘So, Patrick, let’s get straight down to business, shall we? Why don’t you run me through your repertoire.’

‘Now?’

Sheila smiled. The very brittle ‘management’ smile she reserved for shoddy cleaners and lazy barmen.

‘Is there a problem, Patrick?’

‘Well, it’s just that my wife is pregnant and I said I’d take the day off.’

A wife? Sheila’s heart sank. The number-one rule for aspiring young pop stars was ‘no wife, no girlfriends’. You belong to your screaming fans. Iggy had kept that one quiet from her.

‘And yet,’ she said firmly, ‘here you are.’

‘Yes well, Gerry said that Mr Morrow asked if I could come in and meet you, and now I’ve met you, so...’

Patrick’s new manager pursed her lips, her dark eyes glowering with a barely veiled threat. The expression brought to mind Patrick’s Aunt Biddy, when she had walked into a pub back home and caught him breaking his confirmation pledge. The silence seemed to last for ever until she finally said, ‘Patrick.’

‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘Shall we get started?’

‘Of course.’ What else could he say?

For the next three hours Sheila put Patrick through his paces.

He had the raw material, but there were plenty of pretty boys out there who could sing. Sheila knew she had a lot of work to do to get Patrick on track to stardom.

First, she made him run through every song he knew, unaccompanied.

Patrick felt very uncomfortable at first. He had got used to singing in front of an audience, and although he often practised on his own, this woman stood squarely at the front of the stage with an imperious expression on her face. It was most off-putting.

For the first two songs, he was so nervous he kept stopping, forgetting the words, hitting bum notes. He moved on to one of his best ladykiller tunes, ‘Only You’, but ended up so off tune that he thought he might cry. He then moved on to a couple of Irish ballads that he had been singing since he was a child and knew completely off by heart. Sheila seemed particularly uninterested in them, checking her nails and chain-smoking with obvious boredom.

During his rendition of ‘The Galway Shawl’ she walked across to the bar and poured herself a whiskey. Patrick found himself so addled and insulted that he stopped singing.

‘Why have you stopped?’ she said.

‘You don’t seem to be enjoying it,’ he said.

She took a long drag of her cigarette and blew it out in his direction.

‘It’s not about me enjoying it, Patrick. It’s about both of us figuring out where your strengths lie. Keep singing to the end of that song.’

Patrick was feeling frustrated. He had never had such a dreadful, unappreciative audience, and it was shattering his confidence.

‘What’s the point if the audience doesn’t like it?’

‘I am not your audience, Patrick,’ she said, ‘I am your manager. Don’t ever forget that. No, I do not like those schmaltzy Irish ballads, although I’m sure they make lots of Irish ladies go weak at the knees. However, unless I’ve listened to you sing every damn line, I can’t be sure that I’m not missing something...’

He didn’t have the first clue what she was talking about. Neither did she really.

‘Look,’ she said, inviting him to sit down on the stage next to her. ‘You are a good-looking kid and you can sing. Now that you have a nice regular gig here, you can call yourself a professional singer. That’s a lot. That’s more than a lot of kids get.’

Patrick nodded and tried to look sage. Inside he was thrilled. He was a professional singer!

‘But it’s not enough for me.’ She lit a fresh cigarette from the old one, which she stubbed out on the stage.

‘Let me tell you something, Patrick. You’re my only client. Just you. Nobody else. I saw something in you a few weeks ago and I hounded Iggy Morrow to let me manage you.’

Patrick didn’t know whether to be pleased or not. He thought he was Mr Morrow’s charge. He was the one paying his salary.

‘Mr Morrow may be paying your salary, Patrick, but believe me, I am calling the shots here.’

This woman was scary, it was like she could read his mind.

‘So what I need to do now is take that little special something I saw in you, nurture it, make it grow until it is big. Really big. So big, that everyone in this country knows who you are. Elvis big. Jerry Lee big. There’s a lot of copycats out there, and right now you’re one of them. You’ve got the Elvis moves but here’s some news for you...’

Patrick flushed.

‘You are not Elvis, Patrick, and you know why?’

Patrick shook his head politely. He felt a bit sick.

‘You are not Elvis because you are not different. Elvis was different. Bill Haley was different...’

Patrick shifted around uncomfortably. He wished to hell he had just sung all the songs like she had asked him to do.

‘...Little Richard? Different. When I heard you sing a few weeks ago, on this stage, I thought I saw something, some little spark, that might set you apart. Something that could make you different too. Something that could make you big. But what I’m getting from you right now, Patrick, is run-of-the-mill. Are you with me?’

‘Yes,’ he said. He could feel tears building up in the back of his eyes. He swallowed hard.

‘What I’m getting is regular, dumb-ass, white Irish-boy bullshit. Is that who you are? Just some regular fool kid who happens to be able to sing good?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘Good. Because I don’t need that. I need a star. Could that be you?’

‘Yes, ma’am, it could.’

‘I want to you sing every single song that you know how to sing, as best as you can, to me, just me, right here, right now, so that I can figure out what is special and different enough about you that I can use to help make you into the kind of star that I need to get on my books so that every bullshit man in the music management business will take me seriously. Are you going to do that for me?’

This woman was truly crazy and he was going to do every single thing that she said.

‘Yes, ma’am, I most certainly am.’

For the next two hours she cajoled and coached him through every song he knew and some he didn’t. They played every record in the place and she put him through his dance and microphone moves, making him sway, and throw his mike from hand to hand a thousand times until it was as natural to him as gunslinging to the seasoned cowboy.

She instructed him on just the right way to tilt his head and where to set his eyes to get that gazing into the distance mooning about his true-love-ways look. She taught him to loosen his hips so that he owned his ‘Elvis’, and made him drop the raised-lip snarl so that he didn’t look derivative.

By the time Sheila sent him home sweating and exhausted, Patrick felt he was just getting into his stride. He had worked harder than he had ever worked in his entire life, even when pulling in the hay on the farm during the hottest summer days, and yet it felt liberating to be told what to do. He was honing his craft, and he would have stayed all night inching through each improvement. Sheila, however, was glad to send him home so she could regroup. The kid had everything: talent, looks, willingness and ability to learn. What he lacked was an edge. Every act needed an edge, and Sheila was not sure that Patrick truly had one.

‘Send my apologies to your wife,’ she said, as he was leaving.

‘Ava would love to meet you,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you will come round for a meal soon.’

‘Perhaps,’ she said, although they both knew she was just being polite.

The wife thing was not good. Fans liked their stars single. Sheila would have to figure out a way around that one too. Iggy had given her the opportunity to work with Patrick but, although Sheila sensed something special about him, for the life of her she could not get it out of him that afternoon. He was good, but ‘good’ wasn’t good enough. She would have to work with him a lot more before he was ready for her to bring out into the world. Until she had a recording contract, Patrick couldn’t earn any money for her outside the salary Iggy was paying him to sing in his venues.

*

Iggy had worked that out too.

He had a plan: Gerry clearly couldn’t manage his place on his own so he would put Sheila in as joint manager.

However, it was tricky because Iggy had a policy of not putting women he fancied on his payroll.

And he fancied Sheila.

There was no getting around it. Around six o’clock he went into the manager’s restrooms to have a shower and change into a fresh shirt. As he stood in front of the mirror patting aftershave on his freshly shaved cheeks, he thought to himself how hollow and haggard he looked. Beady eyes glared back at him, accusingly. Even though he was a self-assured man, certain about almost everything he said and did, Iggy always looked perplexed and slightly annoyed. It was one of the great injustices. He was not handsome. He never had been and while it had bothered him as a boy, when he started making money it stop bothering him at all. Women liked money and power. They liked looks and talent too, but Iggy’s money and power put him on a level playing field with his handsome young acts. The problem was not that women didn’t find him attractive, the problem was that Iggy didn’t always trust their intentions. So, while he found a lot of the women he knew sexually attractive, they were simply not interesting enough for him to want to spend time with them outside the bedroom.

Sheila was different, and as Iggy was preparing himself for the evening he could only hope he might be spending in her company, he could feel a hint of fear creeping into his heart. He had never been in a position where he felt nervous before seeing a woman. He worried that he might become diminished if he allowed himself to fall in love with her. He had cancelled his travel arrangements to Boston the following day. His whole month’s schedule had been compromised because of a woman. This was not good. And yet, Iggy knew he had to follow it through. The fact that she had turned up like that, after he had been looking for her, was a sign that fate already had him in her grip. A smart man knew when the wind was too strong to fight. Sometimes, in life as in business, Iggy thought, as he tightened the knot on his silk tie, and grin-checked his teeth in the mirror, you had to let yourself get blown around a bit, just to see where you landed up. The true test of a man was where you would take it from there.

Sheila’s spirits fell when she walked into the office and saw Iggy perched on the side of the desk, freshly shaved, in a three-piece suit. One look at him was all it took to tell her Mr Morrow was planning to take it all the way this evening. Dinner and a nice hotel. It would be a nice hotel because he was rich. But that really was not the point.

Sheila was exhausted after working so hard all afternoon with Patrick, and now her boss wanted to sleep with her. Not simply wanted to. He intended to. There was no other possible explanation for the deliberate way he was standing, cigar in hand, trying to make himself look as powerful and important as possible.

‘Things went well with Patrick?’

The formality was gone now. It was straight down to business. Sheila liked that, at least.

‘Very well,’ she said. ‘I think we’ll work well together.’

‘How would you feel about joint-managing the place with Gerry? As you can see, he’s a bit overwhelmed. He could use a helping hand.’

Sheila was less insulted than disappointed at how predictable he was. Having him turn up like that and then offering her the job of managing Patrick had turned her life upside down in a day and set her on a path which had felt, until a few seconds beforehand, like an unforeseen adventure. Now the sense of adventure had been replaced with the dull inevitability of sex. Sheila was not a romantic soul. Often, if the opportunity to sleep with someone came up, she was happy enough to run with it. She thought that Iggy was an interesting and attractive man, but never before had Sheila felt offended by the idea of having sex with somebody.

‘Two jobs in one day, Mr Morrow. You’re a very generous man.’

‘I rang around town and I’ve heard you’re a good manager. I’m no fool.’

‘Neither am I...’

She let that hang in the air for a few minutes but he didn’t flinch. If he had been ringing around asking questions then he knew about the Balducci brothers. He also knew that she had slept with her last boss.

‘How come you’re all dressed up?’ she said, raising her chin at him.

It was his turn to flush, although he made pretty certain he didn’t show it. Jesus, but she wasn’t making this easy. Whatever ‘this’ was. Iggy decided to play it straight. That was always the best hand to play in business if you were not sure.

‘I was going to ask you out to dinner and if it went well, back to my hotel.’

His eye was unflinching. His gaze was steady and remained cool, and yet she felt it sear through her like white heat.

‘Pretty fancy suit for dinner.’

‘Was planning a pretty fancy dinner.’

She opened her palms and looked down at her outfit.

‘I’m not dressed for dinner.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

Sheila didn’t know if he meant ‘It doesn’t matter what you’re wearing’ or ‘It doesn’t matter because I don’t care that much’. She couldn’t read him, and suddenly the distinction mattered.

‘What doesn’t matter?’