Chapter 28
She hurried down the hall and ran down the stairs as if someone was chasing her, too impatient to wait for the lift.
She summoned a taxi on her phone, relieved that she didn’t have to wait long.
When she got back to Roly’s house, she raced to her bedroom, hauled her suitcase down from the top of the wardrobe and began opening drawers frantically, throwing clothes into it.
She didn’t waste time folding or sorting, just slung everything in randomly.
She could sort it out later. Her hands were shaking too much to do it neatly anyway.
She knew it was cowardly, but she was desperate to be gone before Roly got back.
Then she stopped. Her first instinct was to run and hide, not just for her own sake, but for his.
He didn’t want to see her again, and he shouldn’t have to.
This was his home, he shouldn’t have to share it for another moment with someone he…
hated. She winced even at the thought of the word.
But she knew she was partly doing it because she couldn’t face him, and that was cowardly.
She should at least try to talk to him again.
Maybe when he’d calmed down a little he’d listen, give her a chance to explain.
She had to at least try. She owed him that much.
She upended the suitcase, emptying it onto the bed. Then she began packing again, more methodically this time, folding her clothes carefully. It would be hours before Roly came home, so she had plenty of time. He might not come back at all tonight.
When she’d finished, she sat on the bed, leaning back against the headboard and picked up her laptop.
With shaking fingers, she typed Roly’s name into the search engine.
She knew what she was looking for and where to find it.
But she had to take it slowly, ease herself into it.
All the predictable hits came up – articles about Oh Boy!
’s meteoric rise to fame, the salacious headlines when Roly left, stories about his problems with drugs and drink, scathing reviews of his debut solo album, spiteful blog posts and social media chat about his weight gain and financial difficulties.
She scanned over the headlines, but none of the results were what she was looking for.
She clicked on the images tab, and was confronted with a kaleidoscope of photos of Roly – young and skinny, gurning at the camera and goofing off with the band; close-ups of his beautiful face, unlined and untroubled, and with an innocence she only recognised now at this distance of years.
There were album covers and promotional posters, concert photos and paparazzi shots.
But there was only one image she was looking for – an image she hadn’t looked at in a very long time because she couldn’t bear it.
It was already there in her peripheral vision the moment she clicked the images tab.
She didn’t let her focus stray to it as she scanned the other pictures, but it was there all the time, in multiple frames – the most iconic photo of Roly in existence, the one that had changed everything.
She took a deep breath and forced herself to look at it head on.
It was a kind of penance. She clicked to enlarge it, and her stomach clenched as it filled the screen, hitting her like a visceral thing.
There was Roly, sitting on the floor of the bedroom in Marty’s house – hunched over a mirror with four lines of white powder clearly visible on its surface, a rolled-up note in his hand.
A half-empty bottle of vodka sat on the floor beside him.
He looked so lost and lonely – even though she knew the house had been filled with his friends, colleagues and hangers-on, a party raging in the next room.
She could still hear the music pounding on the other side of the door, feel the bass vibrating in her chest along with the hammering of her heart.
She felt once again the dread of that night, the horror as she was confronted with the reality of how far he’d fallen, the terror when she realised no one would help him.
He was surrounded by people who were supposed to take care of him, but he was so alone.
An overwhelming sadness washed over her, and the image blurred as her eyes filled with tears.
This photograph had been the catalyst for everything that had happened to him afterwards.
It was the drop of rain that started the avalanche that would bury him.
It was the beginning of the end – the beginning of his recovery too, she reminded herself, swiping away tears.
It was his downfall and his salvation captured in one moment.
But all she saw was her hand in it – pushing him, catching him; she wasn’t sure which.
Maybe both. She still thought she’d done the right thing, the only thing she could have done.
But that didn’t stop her feeling guilty too.
There was Roly – disgraced, exposed, shamed, poised on the edge of a precipice.
He was about to lose everything. And it was all her fault.
* * *
How To Save A Life
It was a chilly October night, but it was too warm inside Marty’s Killiney house, and Ella was grateful for the cool sea breeze from the open terrace doors.
People had spilled out onto the terrace to smoke, huddled together against the cold, while inside the press of bodies and the mixture of loud music and chatter made the atmosphere stifling and claustrophobic.
Ella stood by the window sipping champagne, feeling sad and anxious, longing to leave and yet feeling she needed to stay.
Oh Boy!’s world tour had ended with a concert at Croke Park, and Ella had been in the audience.
She’d gone on her own, more out of a sense of duty than anything.
Afterwards, she’d gone backstage to say hello to Roly, and he’d dragged her off to this party in Marty’s house.
She hadn’t wanted to come. She felt out of place with this crowd and it wasn’t her kind of party.
But there’d been something about him tonight, and she found herself unable to say no.
He’d had a weird manic energy, and there was something desperate about his intensity that scared her.
He wasn’t the old, sweet Roly, but he wasn’t the cocky asshole either.
There was a blankness in his eyes, a lack of affect in his whole demeanour that chilled her – as if he’d been replaced by an android who looked and sounded like Roly, but had no blood or life force, nothing behind his cold, dead eyes.
It was infinitely worse than the arrogant, swaggering git she’d met last Christmas, and she longed to have that Roly back.
At least there’d been some life in him; there was a person there who you could rail against.
He’d called her a few times from the tour, and he’d said some things during those late-night conversations that worried her.
He told her about drugs he’d tried, sounding blasé as if it was just part of being a grown-up, laughing off her concerns.
Sometimes it did make her feel like she was just a gauche, naive student, while he was worldly and sophisticated.
At other times she wondered if he confessed these things to her because he was scared and wanted an adult to intervene, to rescue him.
On the taxi ride over here, she’d tried to talk to him, but he was already high and glassy-eyed, and he’d blanked her, determinedly keeping the conversation light and frivolous.
He’d told her about his girlfriend Pippa’s antics on Celebrity Cell Block, which she was currently appearing in.
Once they got here, he’d quickly abandoned her. But though she longed for her bed, she hung on, afraid to look away. She’d never seen Roly so out of control, and she had a horrible feeling that something terrible would happen if she wasn’t paying attention.
Earlier she’d tried to talk to the people around him, to get them to do something, but they’d all brushed her aside with varying degrees of dismissiveness. In a week’s time they were leaving on the American leg of the tour, and who would watch Roly then?
Marty, Roly’s party-loving accountant, had been patronising and avuncular. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll take care of him,’ he’d said when she mentioned her concerns.
She looked across at Roly, huddled with a group around a table, twitchy and loud, gesticulating manically as he held court. ‘It doesn’t look like it.’
‘He’s just letting off steam. You know Roly. He has a lot of nervous energy to burn off. He needs to be doing something. Once the tour gets underway and he has something to occupy him, he’ll be fine.’
Ella wasn’t convinced. But no one would take her seriously when she tried to tell them Roly needed help.
‘Lighten up,’ Zack said. ‘He’s just having fun. You remember fun, Ella?’
‘I’m really worried about him. He needs to be in rehab.’
‘Well, that’s not going to happen anytime soon. We’ve got the American tour coming up. There’s no way he can ditch that to go to fucking rehab!’
‘I think his life is more important than some tour!’
‘The tour is his life! This band is his life!’
‘Well, it’ll be a short one if he carries on the way he’s going. I’m going to talk to Vince, tell him what’s going on.’
Zack snorted. ‘You think he doesn’t know? Jesus! Who do you think keeps it all hush-hush? He’s not going to let Roly fuck this up for all of us.’
Ella’s eyes widened. She hated that Zack made her feel so naive. On the off-chance that he was bluffing, she cornered Vince later and broached the subject. ‘Roly’s got a drug problem,’ she said baldly. ‘He’s in a really bad way. You need to get him into rehab.’