Chapter 10 Margot
Chapter 10
Margot
My knees are bent and my feet are tucked firmly under my bum as I sit on the sofa watching This Morning on mute. The persistent prattle of today’s conveyor belt of presenters is already getting on my nerves. But now the house is silent. Too silent. Because silence and I aren’t great bedfellows. Silence gives me too much time to think. To dwell on the past. To relive the old life I miss more than anyone could know.
Soon after the kids returned to school post-Christmas holidays, Nicu began making regular trips to our neighbouring town of Milton Keynes to rehearse. After this spring, my professional ballroom-dancing husband will begin a four-month countrywide tour performing in a brand-new show. He mentioned the theme, but I wasn’t really listening. Old School Hollywood or some other rehashed cliché , I think. Every show looks the same to me, full of perma-tanned, glittery bodies wearing the same sequinned, glittery gowns or glittery shirts unbuttoned to their glittery navels performing the same glittery dance routines. And all for a paying audience of sexually frustrated women who fantasise that my husband is about to dance them into bed. I suppose it’s not inconceivable. He danced me flat on my back once upon a time. Then as winter approaches, he’ll return to his regular gig on TV’s Strictly Come Dancing , where he first found fame and I found him.
Today, he’s borrowing my car while his is being serviced, which leaves me stuck in the village all day. I glance at the fireplace clock: it’s not even 10.15 a.m. It’s going to drag, like watching an old person sucking a boiled sweet.
I need a distraction, so I pick up my iPad and visit the favourites section. Then I spend half an hour being pissed off as I re-download apps that have vanished overnight. This bloody gadget keeps erasing them for no reason and it’s driving me mad. I know I’m not very tech-savvy, but it’s even confused the bloke at the so-called Genius Bar at the Apple store who I went on to harangue about how useless he was. Genius Bar? No. Acne-ridden virgin bar is a more accurate description.
I respond to some of the messages left on an app I’ve hidden inside a subfolder titled ‘Home Decor’. The kids are banned from using my device, but if they were to pick it up, they’d have no reason to look there. It’s my little secret. Next, as the YouTube app opens, I choose a 2009 episode of Christmas Top of the Pops I’ve previously favourited. My band the Party Hard Posse is sandwiched between a JLS studio performance and a Sugababes video.
Amidst the cheering of the audience I’m taken back into the studio when the opening synths of our biggest-selling single kick in, and I’m reminded of how young I once was. Twenty-five, all tan, tits and teeth. The latter two, along with my nose, had by then already benefited from a little surgical revision. The following February we were at the Brit Awards in Earl’s Court accepting an award for British Single of the Year. Somewhere up in the loft, I think I still have that award, along with some gold and platinum discs. I considered trying to sell them once, as I’m sure the fans would snap them up, but I decided against it. They and YouTube are all I have left of that Margot. Christ, I miss her.
The song comes to an end, and the applause begins before the camera moves away and focuses on the next big thing. A metaphor for the rest of my career, it turned out.
I’m reminded of the turning point for the band a few short months later. The name Glastonbury still sticks in my throat like a particularly well-endowed Brazilian I met backstage during Rock in Rio. It was my idea for us to pitch to perform, and I was overjoyed when they offered us a forty-minute Friday afternoon slot at the festival, following Florence + The Machine.
My fellow band members lacked the vision to see how a successful show could alter the trajectory of our career. They hadn’t accepted our time in the spotlight had a shelf life and that somewhere, another group of fame-hungry pop puppets were being groomed to replace us. To quote our own lyrics, ‘shaking our booties on the dancefloor’ or ‘partying with a capital P-A-R-T-Y’ weren’t going to cut it for much longer.
In hindsight, our management team were right to have warned us against Glastonbury, as it turned out to be an epic fail. We couldn’t have counted the number of bottles of wee that were hurled at us when we reached the chorus of the second song. It was like an orchestrated missile attack. But the bottles and the booing didn’t stop us. We ploughed on right until the bitter end. Some critics praised us for our ‘stoic, if unwise performance’, but to everyone else, we were a laughing stock. Potty Hard Pissy became our nickname. Even now, footage from that performance makes regular appearances on those TV list shows, like The Fifty Most Embarrassing Moments in Music .
Soon after, management dropped us and the band went their separate ways All these years later, and we still haven’t spoken.
I move on to another YouTube clip, this time for my first solo single. It has almost 500,000 views now – about 499,999 more than the number of copies it sold. Try as it might, my new record label couldn’t get either the airplay or the press’s interest. There were thousands of thumbs-down symbols on YouTube, which stopped the algorithm from suggesting it to other users. Two years after the Party Hard Posse imploded, I was playing the songs I’d fought so hard to distance myself from on cruise ships around the British Isles like a low-rent Susan Boyle.
I’d earned enough money to delay finding a real job for a few years. I’d co-written a handful of songs for a German pop group who were huge in Europe, which paid reasonable royalties until one of their singers was found guilty of getting handsy with underage fans and radio stations ditched them.
But it wasn’t only the money I missed from my old life, it was the acclaim. It was the magazine covers, the parties, the fine-dining restaurants, the camera flashes, the awards shows, the other celebs, the free, limitless wardrobes, the hotels, the holidays ... everything that came with being famous. I knew who I was then.
I wanted it all back. Until I got it. And then fame became infamy.
A passing car draws me out of another of my all-too-frequent wallows in my ruined career. It parks outside Liv’s house and Liv herself exits. Why she can’t park on a drive with room for at least five vehicles is beyond me. Instead of going inside, she rings Anna’s bell instead. Are they meeting without me?
I survey this empty room and the empty hours that I’ll need to fill.
‘Balls to this,’ I mutter to myself.
I grab the cupcakes Tommy made at school yesterday and open the front door. The sudden movement scares a cat taking a shit in our borders. It’s that bloody furball of Liv’s. It turns to glare at me like I’m the one in the wrong. I clap my hands and it scampers back home.
I’m about to head across the street to see what I might be missing out on when I spot the side of my car. One word has been daubed across it in red paint.
Murderer.