My welfare is just fine, thanks.
Ollie
“Hey.”
Ollie glanced up. Shay was standing beside the office table he was working at. “Hey, yourself. Did you win?”
“Win what?”
“The row about playing roadie for the rest of the tour.”
“There was nothing to win. We either do it ourselves and fuck it up, or we get strangers in who might fuck it up too.”
Ollie closed his laptop. “I thought the crew who quit were Jumbo’s cousins?”
“They were.”
“So hiring people you know didn’t work out either?”
“I didn’t know them.” Shay flopped into the seat opposite. “But Jumbo wanted to do them a favour, and I agreed because I’m a pushover. Finn told me not to do shit like that.”
“Finn?”
“McGovern,” Shay clarified. “We opened for The Lamps last summer.”
Ollie swallowed hard. Finn McGovern had been the first rock star he’d ever crushed on. “If that had happened a few years earlier, I might’ve seen you play. I went to every Lamps gig I could, back in the day. What are they up to now?”
“Writing, I think. You could ask Ben, though. He played with them for a while a few years back, but Finn goes off radar sometimes, so he might not know either.”
Ollie could relate to that. He’d spent a whole year playing hermit. “So… whatareyou going to do about the roadie situation? Jumbo was being a dick about it, but he kind of had a point.”
“What point was that? That I’m too sickly to move my own equipment around?”
“No, that was the dick part. I meant that it’s too much for all of you while you’re working full-time on gigging.”
“Lots of bands do it and get by. We’re not precious, Ollie.”
“Doesn’t mean you can’t look for a better way. Do you have a budget to hire a new crew?”
Shay winced. “That’s the other thing. We ran way over on studio time when we recorded the album, so our support budget for the tour was cut. We hired Jumbo’s cousin because he was cheap, and we paid them up front, in cash, with no contract. Even if we get someone else in, I don’t know who the fuck’s gonna pay them.”
“Isn’t this Corina’s problem?”
“You’d think, but she never sanctioned the cash payment, and she said it’s not her job to fix our juvenile bullshit.”
Ollie drummed his fingers on the table. The three-hour journey from Glasgow to Newcastle was relatively short compared to the mammoth run down to Bristol they had coming up, but without his work, and the band bickering at top volume to distract him, anxiety was beginning to claw at his guts. “Have you got enough cash between you to pay anyone else at all?”
Shay slumped forwards, head on his arms. “Maybe a couple, but we had four guys before. I don’t think two could handle it.”
“I can help.”
“Help?”
“Yeah, I can move shit around before and after your gigs. It’ll give me something to do.”
“Don’t try and convince me you haven’t got enough of your own work to keep yourself occupied.”
“But when does it stop?” Ollie leaned forwards, dropping his face so it was inches from Shay, so close he could’ve stuck his tongue out and licked Shay’s full lips. “Sometimes I work because it keeps my brain quiet.”
