I check my calendar. The first show is in exactly a week. Only a week until I am standing on a stage built solely for me in Murrayfield Stadium. Until I am belting out songs from the past fourteen years. Until those songs are echoing in the nightair around me, boomeranging around the stadium to come back onto the stage. The first time I will perform songs likeKind RegardsandYours, Sieto a large, live crowd.
All the songs about Luc for the next album, the ninth album, are on various demo CDs, all dotted around my house, some of them left in CD players, the lyrics scrawled in notebooks in the studio. Written or recorded before I made the decision to retire.
No room in my house is safe from the memory of him, his lips imprinted on wine glasses, his scent lingering on pillows, his jumper on my bedroom floor.
‘Do you guys want to go for a drink?’ I ask my dancers, my back-up singers. It’s not even our last rehearsal yet, but I feel like we need to celebrate.
‘Sure,’ a choral voice agrees.
The tabloids last night published a story littered with pictures of Luc at the pub with a male friend, his eyes red-rimmed for the one picture which managed to catch him without his sunglasses on.TROUBLE FOR SIENNA AND LUC?the headline questioned.
It certainly doesn’t look good, especially when the other pictures in the article are of me, Renée Ross and some of her pals falling out of the club in the early hours. I didn’t think I’d had that much to drink, but from the looks of these photos, I’d had more than enough. But I deserve to enjoy myself, right?
I opened up and look where it got me.
Everywhere I looked, I saw Luc. His eyes on the man across the bar, raising his glass to me, Luc’s mouth on the man behind me in the smoking area, his hot breath on my neck. Everyone’s hands on me, everyone trying to get a look at Sienna Martin. I’m lucky that I was hidden by a big group of people, moving in tandem with them circling me, Dennis never too far.
‘No, you’re not,’ a voice I recognise enters the room, Mimistanding in the doorway. ‘You need to be fighting fresh for your last few rehearsals and… look at you.’
I catch myself in the mirror. My hair is sticking up in all directions from the ponytail I haven’t taken out since last night. The grease and sweat are mixing to form a gel. ‘I’m here to take you home, Sienna.’
I want to stamp my foot, throw myself on the floor and scream while I bang my fists against the floor. When did it stop becoming socially acceptable to have tantrums like that? I want to scream into a pillow, to sob while I stand under the running water in the shower for the next forty minutes. I want to go out, to drink all night, to crawl in in the early hours of the morning, to lay in bed for a few hours before it’s time to get up again.
I’m always so in control. I want to be chaotic. I want to do things I would never do. I want to get smashed in a nightclub normally only frequented by university students to see what it would’ve been like, to have a good time with my friends and go home. I don’t want to go to a fancy club where they want to put me on a table.
Either way, Mimi isn’t giving me a choice. She’s handing me my trainers to change out of the heels I’m rehearsing in now so my legs get used to it.
And then I’m back in Kareem’s car, Dennis in the front and Mimi next to me in the back. I feel like a petulant child, about to receive a telling off from an overbearing mother.
‘You need to stop acting like this, Sienna,’ Mimi scolds. ‘I am sick of it. You are thirty years old. It’s time to grow up.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Too bad, you already have. You grew up the moment you signed that record deal. This is what you wanted to do, so now it’s time to stop throwing a tantrum over it.’
I gaze out the window, hiding my face so that she can’t see my tears. If Mimi wasn’t there, everyone would let me do whatever I want, whenever I want. No one would tell me no.But Mimi is there to ensure I stay on the right path. I stay silent, stemming my tears with my knuckle.
‘I’m doing a drug test on you when we get back,’ she continues.
My head snaps around. ‘Er, why?’
‘Because of the way you’ve been acting. You know… I won’t keep working with you if you go down that path. It’s not safe.’
‘I haven’t, Mimi. Promise. Just alcohol.’
‘We’ll see what the test says.’
They won’t find anything, and I know they won’t. So, I won’t protest. I keep my mouth shut, tired of speaking, of arguing, of trying to hold onto what little control I have over my own life.
‘Now, it’s time to talk about Luc.’ Mimi drops her hands into her lap.
I groan. ‘Do we have to?’
Kareem pulls up outside my house and the gates let us in with a click of a button. He parks up outside and lets me and Mimi out, waiting at the bottom until we are safely inside. I flick the kettle on, and Mimi takes a seat at the breakfast bar, getting her notebook out of her bag.
‘Jess tells me you weren’t aware that Luc initially took payment for the arrangement.’
I nod.
