The Fame Factor

‘I’m, er…I’ve got to run a few errands,’ she explained. ‘Sorry.’

‘Is that a guitar?’ asked Eric, even louder, as though wanting his colleagues to appreciate his powers of perception. There was something about the pointy-faced auditor that Zoë found exasperating. He managed to turn every conversation into a competition.

‘Oh, er, yes.’ Zoë looked down at the case. ‘That’s the, um, the errand. Gotta drop it off somewhere.’

A minute later, the revolving glass doors spat her onto the pavement and Zoë fled north, towards the barren wasteland of Shoreditch.

Ellie, it turned out, was running late. Ellie was usually running late. Her whole routine, if you could call it that, was set in a fluid version of time: one that was infinitely stretchable and infinitely compressible. Sometimes, she was early. Very occasionally, her clock coincided with Greenwich Mean Time and she arrived at a place exactly when she was supposed to. Most of the time though, Ellie was late. The only other person on the planet who inhabited the same time zone was Ellie’s boyfriend, Sam.

Sam and Ellie lived in a caravan by one of the Thames’s tributaries that ran through Hackney. Purchased five years ago from a group of travellers, the shack had initially served as a summer stopgap; a place to stay during the two months between first-year halls and their second-year student house. As it turned out, neither Ellie nor Sam made it as far as second year. Sam had been offered a choice by the college: to repeat his first year or to relinquish his place on the design course – which, truth be told, hadn’t taught him much other than how to design the ultimate spliff – so he took the easy option and walked out. Ellie decided that she liked the vibe in the music shop on Denmark Street, where she had found herself working that summer, and dropped out as well. Five years later, Ellie was still at the shop, still living in the caravan with Sam, still smoking weed for breakfast.

‘Hi!’ cried Ellie, skipping across the road in front of a car, seemingly oblivious to its screeching emergency stop. ‘Sorry I’m late!’

The car zoomed off, its driver glaring angrily at their embrace.

Zoë checked the time on her phone as Ellie let them in. ‘I’ve got about forty-five minutes. I had to tell work I was running an errand.’ She pulled a face.

Ellie smiled placidly. She had no idea about the pressures of corporate life. Fortunately for her, at Desmond’s Strings there was no sneaking around behind colleagues’ backs, no faking enthusiasm for mind-numbingly dull tasks, no bullshit. Ellie enjoyed stringing guitars and chatting to the Led Zeppelin enthusiasts who passed through the doors of the shop. In fact, it was thanks to Desmond that they had this pseudo-rehearsal studio at their disposal.

They messed around with the fragments of vocals that had been floating around Zoë’s head for the last few days. We say we will, we say one day / There’s never time, it runs away / The beat, it’s here, but do we care / We’re out of time, we’re out of air…

Zoë felt herself loosening up, drifting away. Ellie’s chords changed the whole sound of the song. After a week of hearing her own imaginary backing parts, it felt as though the melody was finally coming alive.

‘This sounds great,’ she said excitedly. ‘D’you reckon we could get this polished in time for The Mad Cow gig?’

Ellie lifted her slender shoulders. ‘Sure.’

The Mad Cow was Shannon’s local pub. Run by an Irishman, staffed by Irishmen and frequented by an eclectic mix of Irish, Caribbean, Polish, Russian, Indian and probably others; it was difficult to make out the accents above the din of the high-wattage amps. In fact, that was probably why everybody got along so well; nobody had the faintest idea what anybody else was saying.

‘It’d be good if we could get this on the DVD. Maybe this one and the six on our main set list.’ She was thinking out loud. ‘I wonder whether we can ask Eamonn for a longer slot…’

‘Good idea.’ Ellie nodded, trying out an alternative riff.

Zoë trailed off, smiling. Ellie never got involved in the planning. Brilliant harmonies and guitar solos were her fortes; turning up on time and helping with logistics were not.

‘Oh,’ she said, remembering something else. ‘I looked up that band Shannon mentioned – Tepid what’s-it. It looks like they’re really big in the States.’

‘Really?’ Ellie looked up, finally pulling herself away from the strings. ‘How big?’

‘Big. Google them.’

‘Wow.’ Ellie’s eyes were wild with hope and unfulfilled dreams. She didn’t care about the details; details were for somebody else to deal with – usually Zoë. She only cared about the dream. For Ellie, it was just a matter of time before a major record deal landed in their lap.

Zoë watched as she began to pluck at the strings, improvising. They had so much in common, in a musical sense. They both loved to play, to sing, to listen, to get swept up in its powerful, intricate harmonies…But what they took from it was very different.

Ellie’s world was filled with a select group of people, namely Zoë, Shannon, Kate and Sam. She only welcomed those privileged few, not caring what anybody else heard or didn’t hear. Zoë, on the other hand, felt claustrophobic in that world; she needed an outlet. Having created the music, she had to share it. The more people it reached, the quicker it flowed from her and the better she felt.

Zoë knew she had changed since the early days. She couldn’t pretend that the dainty office shoes and starched suit jacket were the only consequences of her lifestyle. Her choice of career path had had an impact on who she was and she resented that impact. She didn’t like having to answer to Brian, having to fit in with the other po-faced clones, having to skulk around pretending to run errands…She didn’t like living a lie. But at the same time, she knew that the changes had made her stronger.

Every day, the resentment inside Zoë piled up a little more. The day job, her parents and even some of her closest friends seemed to be doing their utmost to bring her in line. But Zoë was determined to escape. And the exit route, which seemed to be looking clearer every time she gazed at it, was the success of the band.

‘Awesome,’ she said, as they found themselves back on the chorus. ‘That works. We’ll try that next week.’

‘Let’s.’ Ellie nodded, still playing. She got so wrapped up in the music; sometimes it was hard to pull her out.

Zoë looked at the clock on the wall and felt something plummet inside her. ‘Shit! Is that right?’

Ellie glanced at her bare wrist as though half-hoping to find a watch there. ‘Um…’

‘Bollocks,’ Zoë muttered, having found her phone and confirmed that the time was indeed nearly half-past two.

She rammed her guitar into its case, yanked her coat on and stuffed her notebook and pencil into one of the pockets. Ellie watched her with a perplexed expression.

‘Gotta go!’ Zoë said, flinging herself at her friend in a hasty farewell gesture. ‘See ya!’

Ellie was shaking her head as she leapt towards the door. ‘Honestly, Zoë…You’ll give yourself a hernia.’

Zoë laughed and rushed out.

Brian was standing at her desk when she got back, rubbing a palm over the top of his shiny head.

‘Ah, there you are.’ He caught her eye, glancing down at her heaving chest and the guitar-shaped coat in her hand.

Zoë eased herself into her seat and waited for the inevitable reprimand. Her boss looked very serious.

‘I’ve been looking through your British Trust figures,’ he said, placing a print-out of her summary on the desk and wheezing a little. ‘Now, what do you see here?’

Zoë frowned. ‘Er, my summary?’

He pointed a stubby finger at the revenue line. ‘Here,’ he said, looking at her.

‘Um…Four million, one hundred and sixty-two thousand, two hundred and eighty-five pounds, fifty-five pence?’

Brian cleared his throat. ‘Anything…strike you as odd?’

Zoë shrugged as politely as she could. ‘Is it a prime number?’

Brian closed his eyes briefly and shook his head. ‘It ends in five, Zoë, so no.’

She nodded slowly, pretending to give a shit. There was nothing odd about the figure, as far as she could tell, but then Brian had evidently spent longer thinking about the matter than she had.

Finally, he enlightened her.

‘Decimal points, Zoë! Pennies! We don’t need two d.p. in the summary, do we?’

Decimal points, she thought, pointing a trigger-finger at her boss and faking a smile as he started to bang on about RAP and obvious mistakes. Decimal points. This was what her life had come to.

5

‘Okay, so red for record, black for stop, and this slider thing does the zoom. Got it.’

‘No, you don’t need to press the black at all. Just use the red for record, then it’s the same button for stop.’

Zoë glanced warily at Shannon as they ran her friend through the controls one more time. It didn’t bode well.

‘Drinks, girls?’ the towering landlord called out from behind the bar.

At six foot ten, Eamonn Gallagher was, according to some websites, officially a giant. After thirty years’ serving pints in a bar of normal proportions, he had developed a permanent stoop, which, along with the gout-inflicted limp and the gnarled fingers, scarred from too many closing-time brawls, gave quite a fearsome first impression. But the girls were long past first impressions. Shannon’s local had become something of a second home in the last year and they all knew Eamonn on first-pint-on-the-house terms.

‘Can you get me a coupla beers?’ yelled Shannon, above the din. The place was noisier than usual, thanks to a large group of half-naked Antipodeans celebrating Australia Day in the corner.

Zoë wasn’t sure it was wise to ply the cameraman with drink before he’d even worked out how to operate the device, but there was nothing she could do. Sometimes, no matter how terrifying it seemed, she just had to put her trust in Shannon.

‘Nothing for you, Zola?’ called the landlord as she passed the bar. He always called her that, after Zola Budd, the Olympic athlete from the eighties. He claimed that Zoë rushed around at the rate of the record-breaking runner.

‘No, thanks!’ Living up to her name, she pushed through the crowds to the backstage door. They were due on stage in twenty minutes.

Gigs at The Mad Cow were different from all the others. At most gigs, the girls were performing for a reason: because their manager wanted them to, because a certain A&R rep was supposed to be turning up, because the promoter was well-connected…Every stage was a potential stepping stone onto a bigger and higher one. But The Mad Cow was no stepping stone. They played here for one reason. Well, two if you counted the free drinks.

Six years ago – for reasons most likely associated with Shannon’s plunging cleavage – the landlord had granted them a Saturday night slot, when the band had been barely more than four girls with instruments and a few ideas for songs. They had played out of time, forgotten their set list, stood around discussing what to play next…It had been too soon for them to perform in public. But Eamonn had allowed them to see out the set and since then, Dirty Money had gone from strength to strength, outgrowing pub gigs like The Mad Cow. They were at a level where they could play every night if they wanted, anywhere on the London circuit – with the recent exception of the Camden House. Now a slick, well-oiled rock machine, they turned down many of the gigs they were offered – but never The Mad Cow.

‘So,’ said Zoë, squeezing through the narrow door of the closet that served as their dressing room. Kate was sitting on the upturned mop bucket, tuning her bass. ‘Are we playing “Out of Air”?’

Kate shrugged anxiously. She raised the instrument to her ear and repeatedly plucked at her E-string. ‘New songs are always a bit of a gamble…’

Zoë needn’t have asked; she already knew how Kate felt. Kate was all about preparation, rehearsal and control. It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy spontaneity; she got a kick out of being on stage just like everyone else. She just liked to prepare for the kick. She wanted every performance to be perfect.

‘I think we should do it,’ Zoë declared.

Kate nodded blankly. ‘Okay.’

Zoë squatted down next to the upturned bucket. ‘What’s up? Is it what’s-his-face?’

‘Tarquin?’ Kate turned her head, finally making eye contact. ‘No, I’m totally over him.’

Zoë tried not to baulk at the name. Really, it was no wonder she’d been having problems. ‘So what is it?’

Kate exhaled shakily. ‘It’s work. My boss.’ She looked into Zoë’s eyes. ‘Oh, it’s everything.’

Zoë shifted her weight, her knees beginning to ache. Kate was training to become an actuary. Nobody knew exactly what that meant, except that it was something to do with measuring risk – something Kate was ideally suited to – and that the qualification process culminated in a series of mind-blowingly difficult exams that only about twenty per cent of applicants passed. The only other thing Zoë knew about the profession was that it ranked even higher than auditing in the tedium stakes, which was saying something.

‘Is the revision getting you down?’

Kate looked up at her through wisps of fine blonde hair. ‘No, it’s not that.’ She smiled ironically. ‘In fact, that’s the only thing that’s going well. I’m good at exams. It’s the job I can’t do.’

Zoë shook her head. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she chided. Kate was smart and hard-working. Although Zoë had never seen her in a work context, she could imagine her being good at her role. What was lacking, however, was self-confidence. ‘What can’t you do?’

‘They want me to stand up and present!’

Zoë looked at her. ‘What d’you mean, present? Like, in a meeting?’

‘Yes!’ cried Kate, highly distressed. ‘My boss is this high-flying guy called Mark and he’s insisting I do it, but I can’t! I just can’t!’

Rocking onto the balls of her feet, her knees in new leagues of agony, Zoë reached for Kate’s hand. ‘How many people?’ she asked.

‘Four or five – maybe six. They want me to stand up in front of clients.’

Zoë looked at her. ‘Kate, you’re about to go on stage in front of two hundred sweaty, jeering louts. Why are you worried about a couple of clients?’

Kate baulked as though she couldn’t believe Zoë was making the comparison. ‘That’s totally different! Out there, I’m just playing an instrument. I can hide behind my bass. It’s impossible not to look good with a bass. You just rock up, play the notes and walk out. There’s no talking or answering questions…’

Try being lead singer, thought Zoë. Working the crowds was the most thrilling part of her role, but it was also fucking terrifying.

‘I could never do what you do,’ said Kate, as if reading her mind. ‘I wish I could, but I’m just not like that.’

Unable to feel her legs any more, Zoë pushed herself up from the floor and squeezed Kate’s shoulder.

‘Look,’ she said, looking down at her friend. ‘We’ve all got things we don’t like about ourselves.’ She hesitated for a moment, thinking about her own cowardice. She was too weak to even talk to her own family about her ambitions. ‘You’ve just got to live with them. And to be honest, most people wouldn’t even notice your flaws.’

Kate looked up with a grateful smile.

‘Hey, guys!’ Shannon bounded through the door, her mate in tow with the camcorder haphazardly slung over his shoulder. ‘Say something for the camera!’

Zoë smiled wearily. ‘Hi.’

Kate raised a shaky hand.

The cameraman gave up on them and swivelled back to Shannon, who was tipping back the remains of her pint. She swallowed, then looked around. ‘Where’s Ellie?’

Zoë looked at her watch. ‘Good point.’ The camcorder spun back to her. ‘She’s cutting it fine.’

‘Probably gazing at the Hackney skyline with Mr Pot-head,’ said Shannon. The recording equipment swooped back across the room.

As Shannon’s mate sought out the next piece of footage, the door swung open again and Ellie drifted in.

‘Hi, guys!’

‘Ellie, this is Gavin,’ Shannon explained, as the camcorder was pushed into her face.

There was a bang on the door. ‘When you’re ready, girls!’ It was Eamonn’s cousin, the promoter.

Zoë tried to hurry the group along, shooing Gavin back into the crowd and hoping that Ellie’s missed sound-check wasn’t going to matter. There had only been one gig where they’d had to stop playing to ask the sound engineer to turn on her amp. It wasn’t that Ellie didn’t care about the gigs; she was as desperate as everyone else to make a success of the band. She just couldn’t get the hang of time management.

With a quick nod, Zoë led them out from the darkness. After several hundred performances together, they knew the routine. She walked to the centre spot, adjusting her guitar strap as the noise rose up from the room around them.

‘Get ya kit off!’

‘Girl-band!’

‘Tits out!’

One of the Australian revellers in the corner stood up and lobbed a beer-soaked flag at the stage, before toppling sideways and being removed from the premises in the crook of Eamonn’s arm.

Zoë looked round at the girls, smiling with anticipation. They were used to this. With an all-female cast, they had to work doubly hard to prove themselves, particularly in a place like The Mad Cow.

They kicked off with their rockiest number, ‘Delirious’, Zoë pouring her heart into it, watching as the hecklers slowly lost their nerve. A rush of pure, concentrated emotion coursed through her. It was moments like this that Zoë lived for. Offstage, she had an ordinary existence, but on stage, she became extraordinary. It no longer mattered who was listening. It didn’t even matter if nobody was listening. She was surrounded by and absorbed in the music, feeling more alive than she could ever feel in the day. No stomach-churning fairground ride, no skydiving trip, no surround-sound cinema experience could ever match the exhilaration she felt as she emptied her lungs into that microphone.

By the third song, the doubters were few and far between, but Zoë knew they’d be silenced by what was to come. Ellie’s guitar solo had that effect. Complete strangers had been known to throw themselves onto the stage, likening her nimble fingers to those of the masters, Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix. It was at times like this, when Ellie disappeared into a frenzy of movement and sound, drowning them in the beauty of her improvised tune, that the band came into its own.

A few weeks ago, they had featured on an obscure page of the Kerrang! website thanks to Shannon’s brief relationship with the online editor. The review summed up their sound perfectly: Loud and hypnotic, with an edgy disco beat beneath sweet, twisted lyrics, Dirty Money combine elements of The Strokes and New Order with frothy but powerful feminine vocals. When she sang, she could see those words dancing in front of her eyes: Loud. Edgy. Powerful. That was Dirty Money. They were pop, but as another, less renowned reviewer had once put it, ‘more Killers than Kylie’.

‘That was amazing!’ yelled Gavin, beating his way through the crowds afterwards, still shouldering the camera.

Zoë thanked him quickly, her mind already on the bigger picture. ‘Did you get it all?’

He frowned at her. ‘What d’you mean, all?’

Zoë’s throat tightened. ‘All…the songs. The gig.’

Gavin stared gormlessly for a moment, his mouth hanging open a little. ‘Oh my God…I didn’t realise you wanted the whole thing. I just got – you know, the first one? Where the guys were doing that thing with the flag?’

Zoë closed her eyes, cursing herself for letting Shannon take responsibility for something so important. They needed this demo DVD.

It was only when she opened her eyes and spotted Shannon, suppressing a ridiculous smirk, that she realised that the joke was on her.

‘Oh.’ She smiled sheepishly. ‘Very funny.’

6

‘Dear, oh dear,’ muttered Brian, hovering over Zoë’s desk and grimly shaking his bald head.

Quickly navigating away from the band’s MySpace page, Zoë looked up and forced a smile.

‘What…’ said Brian, bending down and scooping up a handful of papers from her desk, ‘is this?’

‘I think, um…’ Zoë stammered. ‘I think that’s last year’s audit for…’

‘Clutter!’ he screamed, triumphantly. ‘That is what this is.’ He let the print-outs slither out of his hand and then, rather unhelpfully, picked off some random pages from other piles to make sure the paperwork was completely out of order.

‘It’s all organised in—’

‘Ah!’ he cried again, making sure most of the department could hear. ‘Organised clutter! Is that what it is?’

Zoë sighed quietly, watching as her boss picked off yet another sheet and put it down somewhere else. She knew what this was about. It wasn’t just Brian trying to annoy her – although he was trying to annoy her. This was about the new rule that had just come into force across Chase Waterman.

Weeks earlier, the powers that be on the seventeenth floor had enlisted the help of some highly respected consultants, whose job it was to improve efficiency in the company. Following a lengthy period of consultation that included employee surveys and a series of experiments comparing staff productivity under different levels of ambient lighting, the troubleshooters had come to the revolutionary conclusion that auditors worked most efficiently whilst sitting in upright chairs, in silence, in natural light. But the beady-eyed consultants had also spotted another spectacular insight: The best auditors tended to have clear desks. It was this little gem that formed the seed of a new way of thinking at Chase Waterman PLC. They called it, imaginatively, the clear desk policy.

‘Sorry,’ Zoë said wearily. ‘It’s just, I like having everything to hand. It’s all in piles. I know where everything…’

Brian silenced her with a raised eyebrow. ‘ODOM,’ he said.

‘Sorry?’

‘Odom,’ he said again. ‘ODOM. An Organised Desk is an Organised Mind.’

‘Oh, right.’ Zoë nodded.

‘Let’s have it clear by the morning.’

Zoë let her eyes glaze over as her boss strode off to persecute some other employee. She stayed like this for several seconds, waiting for the irritation to pass before she got back to pretending to work.

‘There’s no need for paper these days, anyway,’ the weasel next to her piped up. ‘You can just do everything electronically.’

Zoë’s frustration ramped up a notch as her neighbour’s spiky hair poked into view.

‘Well, maybe I just like having piles of paper,’ she said, wearily.

She jiggled her mouse to see the time. Thankfully, it was twelve minutes to six.

‘What’s that?’ asked Eric.

Zoë quickly minimised the browser, annoyed that the oily-haired rodent had caught her out.

‘The GM audit,’ she replied in a monotone.

‘No, not that. The website.’ He wheeled himself up to her screen.

It was no good, she thought. He had seen it. And with a voice as loud as his, it was likely that most of the office would be seeing it if she didn’t shut him up soon.

‘It’s just a band,’ she shrugged, briefly showing him the page. Nobody at Chase Waterman knew about Dirty Money. It was her secret – her other life. Her colleagues wouldn’t understand if she tried to explain how it felt to strut onto the stage – to belt out her songs to a roomful of strangers.

‘Hold on! Go back.’

Reluctantly, she returned to the page.

Eric let out a low-pitched whistle. ‘Fuck me!’

Zoë cringed.

‘It’s a girl-band!’ Eric went on. He was practically salivating. Zoë could feel her breathing become shallow as she waited for the penny to drop.

‘Look at – oh my God!’ He slapped the desk with his palm. ‘That’s you!’