Chapter 28 #2
Vince gave her a hard look, and she knew immediately that he was well aware that Roly was in trouble.
With mounting panic, she realised he was not only doing nothing about it, but was actively facilitating it.
‘I’d be careful who you say things like that to, sweetheart.
And keep your fucking voice down!’ he hissed.
‘You don’t give a damn about Roly, do you? Or any of them? They’re just cash cows to you.’
‘Look, we’ll take care of it once this tour is over. It’s only three months. He can hold it together that long.’
‘I don’t know if he can.’ But Vince was already walking away. The conversation was over and she’d been dismissed.
Larry, Vince’s business partner and the head of the record label, was almost the worst, because he understood the severity of the problem, but didn’t seem to grasp the urgency. ‘Look, I hear what you’re saying,’ he told her, ‘and you’re absolutely right.’
Ella had almost burst into tears of relief that someone saw the danger, that she wasn’t going to have to handle this alone. ‘Just wait until this tour is over, and we’ll get him the help he needs,’ he continued, and Ella’s heart sank.
‘But that could be too late.’
‘That’s a bit melodramatic, isn’t it?’
‘And in the meantime, what? You just let him carry on like this, so it doesn’t threaten your golden goose?’
‘Of course not. Don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye on him on the tour. We all will. None of us can afford to let him get out of control.’
‘Afford! That’s all you care about, isn’t it? Money.’
‘Come on, love. That’s not true. We all care about Roly. I look after him like a father.’
Ella felt a chill creeping through her veins. ‘Yes, you do. Just like his own father.’
‘There you are then,’ he said, smiling complacently.
‘You’ve nothing to worry about. You know he’s in safe hands with me.
’ He gave her a pat on the shoulder, while rage boiled inside her.
He thought he’d reassured her – because he knew nothing about Roly and what kind of father he had.
It just made her more frightened for him than ever.
Alex and Liam weren’t much better. They were worried about Roly or angry with him, or both in equal measure. They knew he could ruin everything for them if it got out.
‘Our fans are so young,’ Liam explained to her. ‘Some of them are just little kids. So we have to look squeaky clean, you know – be appropriate role models. If it got out that any of us were doing drugs, it’d be a disaster. Promoters won’t want to know, sponsors will drop us.’
There were endorsements at stake, lucrative advertising deals. Liam knew it would be the end of everything, and he was scared of losing it all. But she didn’t blame him like she did Vince. He was just a wide-eyed kid who didn’t want his candy taken away.
Charlie was the only one prepared to stick his neck out. Lovely Charlie, Roly’s best friend in the band. He’d looked reluctant at first, scared like the rest of them, but he agreed to help her try to talk to Roly.
‘I know his family are worried about him. Do you know his mum?’
‘No.’ Ella knew his mother to see at school events, but she’d never met her.
‘I know they’ve tried to get him to sort himself out – her and his nan. His nan’s a bit of a force of nature.’ He smiled. ‘If Christine Punch can’t get him into rehab, I don’t fancy my chances.’
Ella deflated, thinking he was giving up.
‘But we can only give it a go. Come on, and we’ll see what we can do.’
‘Oh, right now?’ Ella was teary with relief. She could have kissed him.
They found Roly in one of the bedrooms with a couple of other people, all sitting on the floor around a low coffee table.
They asked everyone else to leave so they could talk to him privately.
It didn’t go well. Roly didn’t want to know.
He wouldn’t admit he had a problem. He’d blanked them completely at first. Then he’d become defensive, and finally aggressive.
‘What is this, some kind of intervention?’ he scoffed.
He became more and more vicious and scathing. He accused Charlie of wanting to get rid of him so there’d be less competition in the band. Charlie had dealt with it admirably, quietly stoic as he let Roly’s insults roll off him. But Ella could see how hurt he was, how sad and scared for his friend.
Eventually other people drifted back into the room, Roly turned his back on them and they gave up.
‘At least we tried, I suppose,’ Charlie said as they returned to the party.
It was no consolation to Ella. They’d failed.
‘Who the fuck brought that guy?’ She heard Vince hiss as they passed him on the way into the living room. Ella followed his gaze. He was glaring across the room at a gangly, red-headed man talking to Zack and Alex.
‘Who’s that?’ she asked Charlie.
‘Oh, bloody hell! It’s Robert Casey. What the hell is he doing here?’
‘Who is he?’
‘He’s a journalist from the Record.’
‘A journalist?’
Vince appeared beside them. ‘Where’s Roly?’ he snapped, his mouth a thin line.
‘He’s in one of the bedrooms,’ Charlie jerked his head towards the door.
‘Well, for fuck’s sake make sure he stays there and don’t let that dick anywhere near him.’
Charlie nodded.
‘And watch what you say. He seems to have ingratiated himself with Zack, but he’s not to be trusted.’ Vince disappeared again, presumably to warn the rest of the band to be on their best behaviour.
There had been rumours about Roly’s drug-taking before, of course.
But they were always denied, brushed off, and with no evidence and no witnesses willing to dish the dirt, they remained just that.
Occasional little snippets turned up in the press, unsubstantiated stories and bits of gossip that caused a brief stir and faded away again just as quickly.
The people around him would always be invested in hushing it up.
They had too much to lose. But if the truth were to come out, Ella thought, they’d have no option but to do something.
Roly would have to get help. She willed the journalist to somehow find his way into the bedroom where Roly was.
She kept an eye on him the whole time as he moved around the room.
It was why she was still here, hours after she would have gone home.
Maybe if he stayed long enough for things to get messy, people would become careless, tongues would loosen, they’d forget to be discreet.
The party was winding down, but still she stayed, even though her nerves were frayed and she had a pounding headache.
She watched Vince leave, and Marty had disappeared, probably gone to bed, but Robert Casey was still there.
She saw him go out onto the terrace for a cigarette.
When he came back in on his own, she seized her opportunity.
Almost without thinking about it, she made a beeline for him across the room, as if her body was on autopilot.
Feeling reckless and desperate, she approached him from the side and bumped into him, spilling her drink down his shirt.
‘Oops, sorry!’
He turned to her with a smile. ‘It’s okay.’
She insisted on taking him to the bathroom, showing him where he could dry off. No one was watching as she led him quickly out of the living room and down the corridor to the guest bedroom. She swung the door open wide.
‘Oh, Roly!’
He glanced up, but barely seemed to see her, his eyes glancing off her before he bent to his task again, cutting up lines of white powder.
‘Sorry, wrong room,’ she said to Robert, quickly pulling the door closed behind her.
‘You do not want to go in there.’ She put a finger to her nose, miming snorting, and rolled her eyes.
‘The bathroom is over here.’ She opened the door on the other side of the corridor and ushered him inside.
‘I’ll leave you to it. Sorry again.’ Afterwards, she told herself anything could have happened.
It wasn’t entirely down to her. It was his decision, too, and he might have done nothing.
She wasn’t solely responsible for what happened next after she’d led him to the room where Roly was, once she’d closed the bathroom door behind her.
She’d given him the opportunity, and it was up to him what he did with it.
She’d just set it up and let the chips fall where they may.
But, realistically, she knew they were only ever going to fall one way.
The next day, the whole world knew the story.
The fallout was swift and brutal. Sponsors dropped the band from lucrative advertising deals.
Promoters threatened to pull out of the tour.
Newspapers were damning and censorious. So they threw Roly under the bus.
He went to rehab and Oh Boy! went to America without him.