“Rugby or football?” He didn’t need my help to rest the weights.
“Football.”
“I don’t really. Don’t mind watching it, but I prefer rugby.”
The conversation switched to the safer topic of sport. I didn’t mind hearing about girlfriends and shit, but it had been a while for anything – relationship or one night stand – and my head wasn’t in the right place to go there.
“Didn’t you make some announcement at one of Simone Wood’s restaurants?” Max frowned as if he didn’t quite recall the memory.
“Yeah. It was where I told a load of journos that I was quitting.”
His eyes narrowed. “Why did you decide to quit? You were making decent tunes with your band.”
“Thanks. Been doing it twenty years. Needed a break. A long one.”
He nodded, put the weights back on the rack and clicked his shoulder. “I get that. Don’t you think you’ll miss it?”
“Probably. But not yet and when I do, I can go back to it. I’m songwriting at the moment for other people. Looking at setting up a studio here.”
“In Iceland? That’ll be novel. And a way to get away from stuff. I know Sophie – one of Vic’s friend’s – is looking at opening a spa around here. A getaway for the rich and famous.”
And there was her name again. Sophie. The blonde bombshell that exploded into my life the night of that announcement and left detritus all over it with just eight words.
Who the fuck do you think you are?
Not my finest hour.
But then it hadn’t been hers either.
Seeing her today had made me want to hole up in my suite with my guitar and notebook and write all the words about regret and women who were pains in the arse, but it was someone else’s song that I needed to write.
She was still as fucking gorgeous as when I first saw her. When I thought she was some super fan stalking me in what was not my finest hour. Small, honey blonde hair, green eyes and a body that had curves in every right place. It was just a shame our words had been from all the wrong places.
Max started to set up the smith machine with a bench underneath, clearly ready for another round of torture given what he was loading the bar with. “Carrying on?”
I shook my head. “No. Done mine for the day and I’ve got tomorrow.”
“I’ll try and fit a workout in. You joining us at the bar later? I think you’re the only other guest.”
It sounded really fucking sad that I was here on my own while everyone else was in a big party celebrating an upcoming wedding.
“Maybe.” I really didn’t know. That was part of the problem. It’s hard to know what you want when you can have everything.
* * *
Growing up in a residential children’s home is something few people get to experience. The staff that worked there did so for more than the money. You had to, because it wasn’t an easy job. The kids in care homes can’t often be fostered because they’re too volatile and unpredictable, and we were all that in ours. But the staff that worked there stayed. None left in the six years I lived there and they became the consistency for me, Jodie and Lena. We somehow developed our own family and after I left and moved in with my bandmates at the time, Jodie and Lena found a flat together.
It was Jodie I found myself phoning, taking a chance that she wouldn’t be at one of her kids’ gymnastics meets or show choir rehearsals, because that was the life she had now.
She’d left school and found a job as an office junior in an accountants. Then she’d worked her way up, meeting a man on the way who could cope with her fiery temper and somehow managed to just smile when she had a tantrum over a speck of dust due to her OCD.
“Greetings.” I heard a child singing in the background as soon as she answered. ‘I believe you’re about to save me from death by ‘Let It Go’.”
I laughed and started to sing the song back, hearing where Evelyn, her eldest, was up to.
“No! No! No! Don’t do this to me!”
There were shrieks of laughter as Evelyn realised what was going on – we’d sung stereo before – and then there was silence.
