Playing Along (2 page)

“Your brother’s grown up a bit, hasn’t he?”

George holds his breath when he hears these words swoop past his bedroom door. He’s thirteen, but his sister is two years older and her friends are an enigma. They smell like grapefruit and cigarettes and layer mascara on their lashes until they look like pandas. Most of them have boobs. Big ones. He’s fascinated by the divide. George’s sister, Polly, has maybe said one word to him in the last two weeks and that was muttered in disdain when he had mistakenly knocked her make-up brush off the counter and into the toilet. It had floated forlornly in the bowl like a drowned rodent.

“Arsehole!”

But now there’s a chance of redemption. Despite his skinny legs and spotty rounded face, it seems as if one of the awesome grapefruit girls has noticed something in him. Something unique. He reckons it will take a very special woman to appreciate his nuances. His love of Grover from Sesame Street (so underrated—why did Kermit get all the limelight?) and his adoration of the most amazing music the universe has to offer—Bowie, U2, Portishead, Dylan, New Order. The woman who takes his heart must take his record collection as well.

“My brother?” replies Polly in dramatic shock. “Yeah, you could say he’s grown up—into a first rate troll.”

The grapefruit girls giggle and their laughter snakes under his door and rings painfully in his ears. George bites his bottom lip, scraping his teeth against peeling skin. Another nervous habit.

“And listen to this… he claims one day he’s going to be in a famous band and be on the cover of
NME
and have groupies. What a joke!”

George, prepared for the inevitable cackle of mockery, grabs his headphones and his CD player and presses play with an urgency. “Fools Gold” by the Stone Roses floods his brain. He turns up the volume as loud as it will go and hurls his notebook across the room where it ricochets off the wall and slides under his bed. The notebook is filled with songs. George has been unpacking heartache from his sensitive soul since the age of ten.

His sister’s harsh words are never as brutal as the words he calls himself.

He knows what he wants, but he’s pretty damn certain that a boy like him is never going to get it.

LEXI
November 1
^st
, 1994
Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, California

“I’m psyched about the game tomorrow!” Andrew enthusiastically polishes off his second burrito, gazing longingly at Lexi across the table. She smiles at him mischievously knowing that she drives him crazy with her Juicy Fruit breath, her shiny brown hair, and her legs which have conveniently slimmed out and toned up since she started diligently attending an after school kickboxing class.

“I’m excited too,” she replies, playfully nudging his size twelve basketball shoes under the table. “I hope you win, so we can celebrate.”

Lexi and Andrew are
the
couple at Pali High. Just embarking on their senior year, they have been an item since the eleventh grade. Andrew first kissed Lexi on Zuma beach with the waves lapping at their bare feet two nights after passing his driving test. His parents had given him a convertible Mustang for his sixteenth birthday and when he drove her home, one hand on the wheel, the other holding hers, Lexi had a sweet taste lingering in her mouth and salty wind in her hair.

“So unfair,” her best friend, Meg, had complained the following morning. “It’s not supposed to happen like that. He’s supposed to drool, or run out of gas, or step on your toe or something. Why is your life like an Audrey Hepburn movie and mine like a bad TV sitcom?”

And Lexi certainly didn’t want to be smug, but there was some truth in Meg’s observation. Things just seemed to go her way. Her parents had raised her to believe in herself and face life with a positive outlook. Not that she was syrupy or self-obsessed. She worked hard at her studies and had an excellent Grade Point Average. She volunteered at a local homeless shelter, fingerpainting with vulnerable kids after school. She’d started up a current events debate club in her junior year and persuaded many of her friends to join. They now competed nationally. Oh and of course, she kickboxed and played on the girls’ volleyball team, and thankfully had the sort of hair that didn’t frizz on damp mornings when the fog rolled in off the coast.

Lexi had lost her virginity to Andrew on the floor in his bedroom on a Sunday afternoon while his parents shopped at Target. He had lit a scented candle stolen from his mother’s bathroom, and the smell of orange mimosa flooded the room. “Can’t Help Falling in Love” by UB40 was playing on his CD player.

When it was over (slightly painful, but not nearly as uncomfortable as she had imagined), he leaned on his elbows beside her and whispered in her ear, “I can’t help falling in love with
you
…”

One year later, sitting opposite him watching him wipe guacamole from the side of his lips, Lexi feels in her heart that she loves him too. In fact she is sure, along with almost everyone else at Pali High who either knows them or admires them from afar, that they will most likely end up getting married. Lexi’s mother has saved her own wedding dress for the occasion, wrapped in delicate layers of archival tissue in an ivory box on the top shelf of her cupboard. “It’s just waiting, my beauty,” her mother has promised.

Lexi can picture their home now (a cozy New England style house, a few blocks from her parents, with whitewashed floors and shabby chic couches), two or maybe three kids (she really doesn’t have a preference for boys or girls) and most definitely a dog, a black Labrador called George. She imagines a fulfilling and creative part time job as well, maybe a teacher or an art therapist, something that leaves her with the freedom to be a hands-on mom. So what if she is only seventeen? It’s just a dream, but life has already proven to Lexi that dreams do find a way of coming true.

GEORGE
1
^st
November, 2009
Greenwich, England

“George… I love you!” On certain nights this professed love is yelled out a hundred times from men and women alike. Most nights it disappears into the roar of the crowd, but at some gigs a single voice will miraculously separate out and hover above the throng of faceless fans and George hears it and needs it to be true.

George is at the piano finishing the final chords of “Beyond Being,” a poignant ballad based on his teenage existential musings and a lyric which popped into his head one day as he polished off a carton of mint chocolate chip ice cream. The audience sways in time and cell phones punctuate the blackness like rechargeable flames. George hangs his head as the song comes to a quiet end, his voice wavering with a sad clarity.

Thousands of fans cheer and whoop in adoration and George looks up shyly with his trademark grin. “Thank you very much for coming. We appreciate you might have better things to do with your Saturday nights, like watching
X Factor
, and the boys and I really enjoyed playing to you tonight…” This, as intended, whips up the crowd into an even louder frenzy as George and his band mates lope off the stage with a schoolboy charm that has captivated fans across the world from Denmark to Chile, and every destination in between.

George has come a long way from the corner of his brown bedroom. His band, Thesis, stormed onto the music scene with an unstoppable force after his best mate and guitarist, Simon Ogden-Smith, persuaded George to start up a Myspace page and stream some of their music. George, Simon, Simon’s cousin Mark, and Mark’s sister’s friend Duncan from Australia, had been playing local pubs in Islington and had been slowly building up a loyal fan base. But the Myspace page catapulted them into a whole new stratosphere, and with a swiftness which at times found George’s throat closing with unprecedented anxiety, they burst onto the alternative music scene and made their mark. Three months after being signed by a record company they were flown to Los Angeles to record their first album,
Twelve Thousand Words
. George Bryce, still a sweaty lonely teenager at heart, found himself surrounded by attractive, fawning women called Claudia and Agnes and Nell. They willingly offered their breasts to him without any pleading involved and he indulged in a whole new adolescence at twenty-two.

The band’s first big hit was a rocking anthem called “Grapefruit Girls,” an opportunity for George to get his revenge on those elusive females who had inducted him into the hall of shame. George became an unlikely heartthrob, a self-deprecating lad who wore T-shirts with Grover on them and gave interviews about obscure comic books and rare vinyl. His boyish looks, lopsided smile and thick shaggy black hair, once his greatest insecurity, suddenly became irresistible. Even America, notoriously hard to break for an unheard-of alternative band, lapped up the accents and the awkwardness. Critics either loved or hated Thesis and George made a point of reading every review, because no matter how famous they became, he never stopped caring about what people thought of him.

Tonight they have sold out a third night at the 02 Arena in London. Three albums in six years and each one more successful than the last. George is obsessive about the set list. Simon is obsessive about sandwiches.

Off stage Simon squeezes George’s shoulder. “What a night, huh? The best of the three, my boy. You were rather on form this evening.” Simon is like the brother George never had. He loves him unconditionally, with an unspoken tenderness.

George, distracted, calls over to Duncan, their drummer, who is dripping like a tap. “What happened to you in ‘Under the Radar’? You came in so late? It threw me.” Duncan blows his nose on a manky Kleenex dug up from his jeans pocket.

“Chill out, George. I’ve got man flu—I told you that before. It was cool—no one noticed. They were crazy for us out there.”

“Correction,” chips in Mark, the bass player, who has worn the same pair of lucky orange socks during every performance for the last twelve months, “they were crazy for George, Dunc. We’re just the wallpaper.”

This is a running joke in the band, and while George secretly knows it might be accurate, he also realizes he would be nothing without his mates. The thought of being on stage without them makes him feel queasy, like approaching a bungee jump with no harness. Inevitable destruction. Confidence smashed to smithereens. He needs these three men to keep him in one piece. It is only here, in this group of four, that he has ever felt a sense of belonging.

They have two songs yet to perform in their encore and the audience is going wild chanting the chorus from “Grapefruit Girls.” There is a fine line between being off stage for too long and reappearing too quickly.

“I’m wondering about that smoked turkey and cheese baguette I had before the show,” says Simon thoughtfully. “I’m thinking some mustard next time, you know, to add a bit of zing.”

“Did you just say zing?” asks Duncan.

“Try a sharper cheddar,” offers Mark.

“That’s an idea,” says Simon, beckoning to Zac, his guitar tech who promptly appears with his trusty red Fender.

Thesis are both renowned and rebuked for their clean living. Of course the scathing half of the media revels in slamming them for their cautious approach to a rocker’s lifestyle, accusing them of making music to knit to. George recoils from the criticism but is truly dedicated to his fans. He genuinely believes that in one way or another, the music they make impacts the lives of the people who listen to them. He knows only too well what it feels like to be a fan locked in relationship with one album or even one song. Playing it incessantly. Never enough. He only wishes that he had the same experience with women.

George’s endless conundrum—girls. The irony of being adored by thousands but never truly known by one. Sometimes George feels that no amount of recognition will ever erase the sense of rejection indelibly tattooed on his ego, leaving him painfully thin-skinned. Even with the opposite sex flocking around him now. Even though he’s had a string of short-lived “girlfriends.” Even though Fanny Arundel, one of the most seductive and quirky singers of his generation, has recently been sending him suggestive texts on a weekly basis. He still feels faulty, and the women he meets just don’t fill the gap. In fact they seem to dig the hole deeper and deeper.

Back on stage for the final two songs, George faces the screaming crowd and murmurs affectionately into the microphone, “We missed you,” before launching into the opening lines of “Grapefruit Girls.” The band follows tightly behind: Simon, buoyantly one with his guitar; Mark lingering and soulful on bass, and Duncan brandishing his sticks with a momentous energy. The entire audience bounces in anticipation of the addictive chorus.

I wanted you, wanted you, wanted you

I needed you,

You needled me,

Bleed bittersweet, I faced defeat

Soured Hours, love left scoured

Oh, oh, oh squeeze me tightly

Myyy Graaapefruit Giirls

Myyy Graaapfruit Giiirls…

George, soaked with perspiration, feels the adrenaline coursing through his veins like a frantic blue stream. The auditorium is a seething mass of love and adoration. He knows they feel connected. Understood. Couples will return home on the tube smiling and still be up at two a.m., entangled, ears ringing, recounting the events of the unforgettable concert. Misfit teenagers with acne and lank hair will reignite their ailing hopes, believing they too could be like George Bryce one day, a talented loner who has crossed over into cool without even trying. Forty-something women will imagine George either as their son or their lover and both fantasies will leave them warm. Hundreds of others will head straight to their laptops and download blurry pictures from their mobiles, blogging on fan forums or obsessively comparing notes in chatrooms. There is no question that George is at the top of his game. Everyone feels it. Everyone except George.

LEXI
November 1
^st
, 2009
West Hollywood, Los Angeles

“Lexi, get over here! This one looks good…” Andrew’s shriek reaches Lexi in her bathroom where she is dutifully applying concealer to the dark circles under her eyes. She pushes her nose close to the mirror scanning for wrinkles and instead notices a very fine, but decidedly black hair growing from the tip of her chin. She lunges for the tweezers.