‘Discover anything interesting?’ Stan calls from beside the door.
It’s then that it hits me, a smile spreading over my face. A smile so wide and so big that even my brother would be proud of me. Stan may be a practical joker, but I have life-long experience from my brother. Maybe what Stan needs is a dash of his own medicine. Pulling on the mask, I jump from behind the counter, throw back my head, and let out a growl.
Suddenly, I hear the lift doors slide open.
‘Hey, you,’ comes a deep male voice.
I freeze. My heart skipping a beat. It’s Marco Delagado, the ultra-smooth record producer from the top floor. He’s reflected in the smoky windows, swaying slightly, a bottle in his hand. He has his back to me, so all I can really see is the side of his face, but wow is he gorgeous. Dark wavy hair, a chiselled chin with one of those film-star cracked cleft things that are so macho. He’s tall, with every bone of his body encased in a great wedge of wrapped muscle. Why had no one told me there was a God working at the top of the building?
‘Get some food sent up,’ he orders gruffly towards Stan.
Stan’s eyes are looking panic-stricken, going from Marco to me, me to Marco. And as the man turns slowly around, I realise I’m still wearing the stupid mask.
‘My God,’ Marco says with an air of disdain. ‘A goblin! The receptionists these days are as ugly as sin.’
He stumbles back into the elevator, leaving me cowering behind my mask.
‘Phew,’ Stan says. ‘Thank goodness you had that mask on, hey? If you’d shown him your naked face, we would have been in serious trouble. Think you just got trolled.’
MARCO
It’s getting late. Five o’clock, and we’ve had no one. Not one voice in a gruelling two-week period has made my pulse race. Because that’s what it’s all about – emotional connection for the masses, and I’m the guy who has to feel it first. To spot the potential. If I’m going to tell the press, the media, that I’ve found the next big thing, the female vocalist of the year, I have to have something in my pocket and that ‘something’ has to be big, beautiful, and easy to sell. The kind of ‘something’ that makes people sit up and take notice. Different. Knock your socks off great. But no. That hasn’t been happening. Sure, if push comes to shove we can mix the voice up. Post-production can make anyone sound two hundred per cent better than a sad warble fresh from the lips. Even if a girl hasn’t got a great look, we can fix that, but by five o’clock on week two, I’m losing my will to live. We’ve been at it since eight in the morning. I don’t do mornings. Then, to top it all, this girl comes into the recording studio and I cannot believe what I’m seeing. I mean, she looks like a horse, and that’s not an insult. I can do insults. So, no, this would be a statement of fact. She’s got this horse’s head mask thing pulled down over her face. I mean, it’s a gimmick, obviously. She wants me to remember her, and I will, only for all the wrong reasons.
‘Okay,’ I tell her, trying to smile. They’ve got me on camera too. The whole thing will get edited down and televised. Yours truly streamed into the living rooms of the nation with a host of warbling beauties. ‘The horse is cute.’ I manage a thin smile. The ‘cute’ thing is a lie. The horse is stupid. I mean, feathers? Maybe. A funky hat? Yes. Cat’s ears? That can work, but a horse’s head. At best, it says ‘Mafia, the godfather’, and at worst, it comes across as seriously deluded. But I need to keep calm and say it looks good because if they use this footage, they’ll put the content out before the watershed, and kids love horses. That’s probably why she’s wearing the headdress. She wants to make it through to the final cut. My motivation for keeping calm is slightly different. I want to make it through without looking like an arsehole. I’m not an arsehole, despite rumours to the contrary. It’s not personal; it goes with the territory. Everyone hates you if you’re born with a silver spoon in your mouth. It’s wrong. It’s a deeply misguided form of prejudice, but hey, will anyone believe me on that? Of course not. There’s no sympathy for the rich kid. So, I tell the girl with the stupid horse hat/mask/face that it’s cute. Selling my soul yet again.
‘What have you got for us then?’ I glance down the list of names on my call sheet. ‘Tianna.’ God, where do they get these names from?
Tianna smiles. She’s got big teeth. I wonder if I should compliment her on those as well?
‘Milly Stylish,’ she says. ‘Everlasting Eyes.’
Yeah, of course it is, I think, leaning back in my chair. Milly Stylish has been in the top ten for the past six months. I’ve heard four different versions of this exact same song today. Has no one got anything new? The horsewoman will soon be breathing all over the microphone, whispering the lyrics out like she’s got a fur ball in her throat. Just like good old Milly. Don’t get me wrong, Milly Stylish is brilliant. She’s the original. Truly stylish. Got her own thing going on. But this?
Tianna starts singing. I phase out until the horsewoman bleats three flat notes in a row. There’s barely any song left to murder. There’s surely an easier way to make a living. ‘Know what?’ I say, getting to my feet. ‘I think maybe, maybe we need a break.’
I know they’re all looking at me like I’m an entitled idiot. I don’t care. I need a reality check. A shot of normal. ‘Think we all need a little something to eat,’ I say, stretching my gym-toned arms behind my neck. They are gym-toned; that’s not just me hyping my body up for no good reason. I have the best personal trainer in town. I hate personal training. Seriously loathe it, only guess what? I wish I were doing press-ups now rather than listening to… whatever it is coming out of horse girl’s mouth. ‘Stay there. Give me five.’ I walk out of the booth and head for the lifts. Not my lift – the lift that takes me from my parking spot to the seventeenth floor. No. Reality is different. Reality comes in through the main doors, and sometimes it’s good to remind myself of that fact.
I get into the golden elevator and press zero. The lift jerks into action and has me sliding down towards planet Earth. I grin at my face reflected in the cube of mirrors. Okay, so I’ve been drinking. In fact, I appear to have a bottle attached to one arm. The alcohol is certainly making me snappy. It was a bad idea to hit the booze, but in my defence, I’m pretty sure it would have been impossible to get through one more day of auditions without drowning my senses in a few shots of highly expensive single malts. Okay, so maybe it’s been more than a few shots, but who’s counting?
The zero light above the door pings into action, indicating I’ve hit ground level as the lift glides to a halt. Slowly, the doors slide back. I’m always impressed by the foyer; it has more marble than an Italian mountain. My dad was responsible for the design. I can’t take the credit. In truth, I can’t take credit for much around here. My existence is an inherited hand-me-down: lucrative, flash, but with very little wiggle room for forging a personality. I’ve spent my life under the eye of the press. Being wealthy appears to have made me public property. Maybe that’s why I normally sneak up and down in my own elevator. I don’t want to be seen, I don’t want to be on show, and I don’t want to be reminded of my rich old sod of a father. He might have been well and truly loaded, but he was not a nice man, saving his truly worst bits for his nearest and dearest.
As we hit the ground floor and the lift door opens, I catch sight of the guy standing in the revolving doorway in that same spot – the old one, with the wrinkled smile and cheeky grin. He’s been working here for years. I should know his name, but since I never use that door, there’s no point.
‘Hey, you,’ I shout at him before I’ve even left the comfort of my mirrored cage. ‘Get some food sent up.’ I’m not sure if this is his job or not, and to be perfectly honest, I don’t care. If I tell someone to do something anywhere in this building, it will get done – my name’s over the door.
The guy’s looking odd. Doing some kind of ping-pong thing with his eyes. Shifting them rapidly from left to right.
I follow his gaze, and seriously, I could scream. There’s this… Actually, I’m not even one hundred per cent sure what it is. Neck down, it’s nice. Some woman, curvy as hell. I like my women curvy. Fashion, music, and the world I work in, those curvy types of women are few and far between. She’s dressed all in blue, the kind of soft woollen material that makes you want to stroke it. It’s one of those wrap-dress things. The ones that accentuate any attributes. Not that she needs to do any accentuating – there’s a lot going on without requiring any added extras. But her face, her head? I mean – I have a horse woman up in the studio and now this! It feels like today I have truly seen it all, but I have no idea what the hell this receptionist’s got covering her face. What is this, some kind of fashion trend? It’s not even Halloween, and this isn’t even an arty space. Creative dressing is okay in creative spaces, but this is the foyer of the swankiest building in town, housing some of the most important industries. Some women will stop at nothing to get themselves noticed.
‘My God,’ I stutter, horrified. She’s got this beautiful body, and then she sticks some kind of atrocity on top of it. What the hell is happening in the fashion industry? Maybe I should be paying more attention. ‘Why…?’ And for a moment, I stall because that’s enough. All I want to say is ‘why?’ The world seems to have gone mad. Luckily, I’ve had a fair few drinks and, like most men in my circle, I’m never short of a quick quip when my head’s buzzing, so I let rip, announcing, ‘Receptionists these days are as ugly as sin.’
I stumble back into the elevator, leaving what I think must have been the life-size goblin with the great body whimpering behind me and hoping that the guy in the revolving doors got the food order I’d managed to bark out. Reassuring myself, as the elevator pulls me back to my floor, that a) I’ll never risk dropping down seventeen levels again, and b) nothing that happens street level is relevant anymore. I thought it was crazy in the studio, but ground level is a whole heap worse.
CHAPTER 2
CLARA
When six thirty comes, I’m reaching for my coat and the hideous Halloween mask. Forget the charity shop; that thing is going straight in the bin.
