Chapter 21
Joni took a deep breath, filling her lungs with fresh, pine-scented air.
Her ears buzzed with silence. Tall grasses bent and shivered with the afternoon breeze.
In the distance, the lower, green slopes of mountainsides were bathed in golden sunlight.
She didn’t care about the weight of her pack, or the thunder of her hangover.
All she could think was: Look where I am!
Where she should have been was at a sound check in a huge arena in Germany.
She would have been breathing in tour-bus-engine fumes, or the stale sweat of the roadies, or the blunt fug of the dry-ice machine.
There would have been people clamoring for her attention, speakers and guitars and drum kits being tested, radio microphones clipped to costumes, the press of warm battery packs at her waist, layers of makeup to paste on, eyelashes to glue.
She’d never pulled out of a gig before. Not once.
Not even when she broke her ankle five hours before going on and was so dosed on painkillers and coke that the roadies carried an armchair onto stage and she sang from the crushed velvet, her broken ankle raised on a footstool, silver nail polish glittering in the spotlights.
The show always went on.
Until now.
She’d stepped out. Walked away.
Kept walking.
And look where she was!
She gazed around, drinking in the lush valley, the dense thatch of forest ahead, the mountain peaks rising jagged into a blue sky. It was dizzying, impossible to gauge distances with so much space and horizon and sky.
She caught up to Liz, who was waiting with her hands hooked around the chest straps of her pack. Her head was tipped to the mountains. “The scale is something else, isn’t it?”
“The space—I can barely grasp it,” Joni marveled. It was an age-old landscape and her body responded to it with ancient instincts, as if waking her from a deep, dreamless sleep. She felt alert, aware, as if the rest of her life had been sleepwalked through.
“We didn’t get to talk properly last night,” Liz said as they fell into step together, the sun on their faces. “How are you feeling?”
Joni concentrated on the hard press of the earth beneath her boots.
She wanted to be honest with Liz, but how did she even begin to explain?
Liz’s life made sense. She had a husband, two children, a job.
She had ticks in all the right boxes. Fame was the opposite of sense.
It was confusion. It was the white noise of drugs and alcohol.
It was the haze of tour buses and hotels and jet lag.
It was the tabloid hall of mirrors of being celebrated on a Tuesday and shamed on a Wednesday.
It was the claustrophobia of strangers shouting your name.
It was the relentless hounding of the press. It was having no way out.
Seeing Liz and Patrick in the audience at her Dublin gig had exposed every story she’d told herself about her life.
Joni believed—or wanted to believe—that she was wild and free and happy.
But there, in the crowd, arms around one another, were Liz and Patrick, whooping and hollering her name, their faces bright, their children tucked up in the care of family, with a home to return to.
What if that was the story Joni wanted?
Liz glanced sideways, waiting for a response. There was so much she couldn’t tell her. “I’m burned out,” she settled on.
Liz nodded gently. “In Dublin, you needed me, didn’t you? I’m sorry—I feel like we came to the gig, enjoyed the free tickets, then disappeared.”
“Don’t do that. You had a migraine. Don’t apologize for things that aren’t your fault.
” She looked at Liz in her neat hiking trousers, her hair brushed into a ponytail, her honest, open heart.
Joni stopped walking. “You have always been there for me.” She thought of the time Liz had driven across the country when she’d broken up with a guy she was seeing in Manchester and had no money to get home.
Or how Liz had come over in the middle of the night when her grandmother died and didn’t leave for a fortnight.
“You’re my good thing. I hope you know that. You always have been.”
In the middle of the valley, they hugged. Liz’s cheek was warm and smooth against her own. She could feel a surge of emotion pushing upward, feelings she didn’t want to examine.
Joni’s phone vibrated in her pocket.
“You’ve got reception out here?” Liz asked.
Joni slid it from her pocket, glancing at the screen. “One bar.” There was a message from Kai. As she read it, the blood drained from her face.
“What is it?” Liz asked.
Joni pushed her sunglasses onto the top of her head and stared at the screen. Then she turned the phone toward Liz.
The message read: You’re going to need a lawyer.
Beneath, there was a video. She clicked Play.
Liz stood at her shoulder as the video buffered. Then suddenly Joni saw herself on camera, singing on a makeshift stage, a borrowed guitar in her arms, a small crowd bobbing up and down.
“Oh no . . . no . . . ,” she said, head shaking.
Maggie and Helena had caught up. “What are we looking at?” Helena said, lurching her pack from her shoulders, breathing heavily as she peered at the screen.
Joni said, “A video of me playing at the lodge.”
They all looked to the screen, but the clip had frozen.
“It puts me in breach of my contract! I’m supposed to be signed off! Your doctor’s note,” she said to Liz, “which exempts me. Means I’m insured. All the ticket holders get a refund. The band still gets paid. But not if I’m gigging on the same night someplace else!”
The video began to play again. Whoever was recording it had been dancing, too, pointing the screen at the stage.
Joni watched herself, mouth lowered to the mic, fingertips strumming the guitar, eyes closing as she hit a high note.
Then the camera panned to the crowd, traveling over a sea of heads, hands thrown in the air.
It paused on Maggie and Liz, who had their arms wrapped around one another and were swaying, beaming directly at the camera as they sang along with the lyrics.
Then the image jolted as the camera was turned around, an arm briefly in the frame, before it refocused on Helena.
She pouted, thrusting her index and pinky finger into a Rock on! sign.
The video ended.
There was silence.
“It’s your video?” Joni said, turning to face Helena, her voice cut with disbelief.
“I wasn’t thinking. Sorry! It was just on my Instagram. I’ve got about ten followers.”
Joni’s chest tightened. “Those followers shared it with their followers, and now it’s everywhere! There are three hundred thousand views already! The tabloids will crucify me!”
“Sorry, okay? I didn’t know the gig was secret.”
“It wasn’t a gig!” Joni shot. “Maggie dragged me onstage!”
Maggie recoiled. “Oh. God. I didn’t mean to—”
“You’ve got nothing to be sorry about,” Helena said, back stiffening. Joni recognized Helena’s tone—the switch to something sharper, defensive. “Joni was hardly dragged.”
“What does that mean?” Joni demanded.
Tension pulsed in Helena’s neck. “You could have said no.”
“You expected me to get on the mic and explain I wouldn’t be singing because of legalities and insurance provisions?”
“I expected you to get onstage because you love it. A roomful of people chanting your name? Begging you to perform? It’s an ego trip.”
Joni felt winded. The weight of her pack was cutting into her shoulders. She snapped off the buckles, let her backpack crash to the earth. She turned away from Helena, hands lifting to her hairline.
Panic rose hot and spiked in her body. “I’m screwed! They’ll sue me for this. They’ll figure out that the doctor who signed me off was my mate. Liz is in the video!”
Liz blanched. “Oh God. Am I going to get in trouble? What if the clinic finds out? You didn’t even have a consultation. I shouldn’t have written a doctor’s note while on annual leave!” she said, wringing her hands. “They could revoke my license for this!”
Helena shook her head. “That won’t happen. Your doctor’s note said Joni is suffering from exhaustion and stress, right?”
Liz nodded.
“Then it will be fine. You wrote the note—but it’s not up to you to decide what Joni does with the advice.”
Joni felt scalded by Helena’s tone—as if she were a schoolgirl who had caused trouble.
It was just like when they were teenagers—the others turning together, protecting each other whenever Joni went too far.
Liz’s solid career couldn’t be threatened; Maggie wasn’t to be blamed for dragging her onstage; Helena couldn’t get in trouble for simply posting a video.
It was Joni—she was the flawed one. The bad girl.
She looked at each of them in turn. “You’ve screwed me.”
Helena gaped. “You’re blaming us?”
“I came out here to be with you all. To have some space from the crazy mess of my life. Not to be hauled onstage . . . and then splashed across social media just to get a few likes from people you barely know!”
There was silence.
Maggie shifted.
Liz’s gaze was on her boots.
“That is your take on our friendship?” Helena said, voice deathly quiet.
“We’ve heard nothing from you on the group WhatsApp for weeks.
Then you swan in, all smiles and champagne.
You put on the Joni Gold Show. Sprinkle us with your own brand of glitter.
What comes next? Hike with us for a few days and then disappear for another two years?
” She shook her head sharply. “Don’t expect a round of applause from me for your part-time friendship. ”
Joni felt like she’d been gut-slammed. She looked at each of her friends. Their gazes were averted.
“And by the way,” Helena said, hauling on her pack. “I didn’t post the video to get a handful of likes from people I ‘barely know.’ I did it because I was proud of you. I was happy that you showed up for us. That’s why I shared it.”