Love Songs for Sceptics Read online

  He might have been gifted in the looks department, but the brains were seriously understocked – a lot like his client.

  ‘I haven’t written a review for months. That’s what I’ve got a reviews editor for. I wasn’t going to tell Delaney who wrote the review because then he’d set his thousands of Twitter twats onto her, but I’ve got a thick skin.’ Getting attacked on social media was par for the course, but Hands Down fans could be particularly rabid. ‘Anyway, as editor, I stand by that review.’

  ‘That wasn’t a review – it was a hatchet job.’

  ‘You might be able to buy glowing reviews from music bloggers and teen websites, but we’re part of the serious press.’

  A tendon in his jaw tightened. Good – I was getting to him.

  ‘You think you’ve got the moral high ground? Your review said, and I quote: “The best cut on the album is the two minutes of silence between the last song and the secret track.” ’

  I bit down a smile. I’d laughed at that line when Lucy filed her copy and I still found it funny.

  ‘It’s one bad review. Surely you can explain that to your poor, wounded client? Every other review sang the record’s praises. Oh wait, every other review was paid for by the label.’

  I wanted to spin round and march out triumphantly, but I couldn’t leave without my jacket – it was a one-off I’d found in Camden years ago.

  ‘You’re not as different at Re:Sound as you think,’ he said. ‘Money doesn’t have to change hands for a barter system to work.’

  Was he reeling off his Economics A-level at me now? I really couldn’t be arsed with this. Thankfully, the curtain whooshed back and the attendant materialised with my jacket. I thanked him, swung it over my shoulder and marched out without another word.

  *

  The encounter had put me in a bolshy mood. So, when a taxi I’d flagged down was intercepted by a random bloke in a suit – probably a mid-level record exec – I marched over and glared him into submission. I swooped into the back seat, slammed the door behind me and asked the driver to take me to Shepherd’s Bush.

  Uppity publicists were the bane of my life. They had no sense of perspective. Their emails were headed URGENT or BREAKING NEWS, but their content was always DULL or OLD INFORMATION. Well, luckily for me, I had no plans to feature Hands Down or any other autotuned upstarts in the magazine ever again.

  Soon, the West End was behind us and we were zipping past Notting Hill and Holland Park. We crept along Shepherd’s Bush Green, sandwiched between buses, and after we’d taken the Acton exit, I directed the driver to my road and my flat – the top floor of the stuccoed townhouse with the most cracks.

  Snowy, my neighbour’s cat, was sitting guard on the low wall, but as soon as she saw me she stretched up and demanded stroking. I scratched the soft white fur under her chin and she purred. You’d think a cat called Snowy would be white, but she was grey with a few white highlights – she was the colour of London snow.

  I unlocked the door and flicked on the light. I was picking my way past the junk mail on the floor when something buried among the adverts for double glazing and pizza menus caught my eye.

  I knelt down and picked it up. It was a postcard from New York: the Chrysler Building sparkling against an indigo sky. I turned it over and started to read.

  Dear Member,

  Great news!

  Rumours of my demise have been vastly overstated. A few bullets can’t stop me! A surgeon was called to my home recording studio and the pesky pellets were removed in between takes of guitar solos.

  In unrelated news, art thief Vladimir Terribol was spotted boarding a flight from Moscow to Heathrow, so that’s where I’m heading, too – I’m coming to London, baby!

  Keep doing the Fandango!

  Zak x

  When was this sent? I scanned the stamp, trying to make out the date, but the postmark was a blue smudge. I reread the postcard to make sure I’d understood it. I hadn’t seen Simon for years, but now he was coming to London? My heart thumped double time as I digested the news.

  Simon was coming to London.

  3

  Nothing Compares 2 U

  My alarm usually went off at 8 a.m., but I woke up at 7.15 feeling refreshed and full of energy. It didn’t make sense – I’d slept less than five hours. But as I lay in bed stretching my arms and wiggling my toes, it suddenly hit me.

  I was happy.

  I hadn’t felt happy in ages. The stress of my job was pulling me under. It was obvious now – why hadn’t I noticed before? One postcard, and it was as if someone had changed the soundtrack from Radiohead to Motown.

  Simon always had that effect on me. We grew up next door to each other, but when he’d first arrived I’d been wary. I was ten and, having lived in the noisy cocoon of an extended Greek family, I didn’t know what to make of a blond, blue-eyed only child with parents who didn’t speak to one another.

  My mum invited Simon over the day they moved in. Quick to notice the harassed faces of his parents as they directed the endless flow of cardboard boxes, she shepherded him out of the way of the Pickfords van awkwardly parked in our Ealing cul-de-sac and shooed him down the side gate that led to our back garden. Mum suggested I show him our vegetable patch, so I left my bike, a Raleigh Chopper with worn-out tyres, in the middle of the lawn and dutifully walked Simon to the end of the garden where my parents grew cucumbers, artichokes, marrows and another leafy thing whose English name was a mystery to me at the time. Its Greek name, lahana, was met with a blank stare. (I later learnt it was a type of chard.)

  The Baxters were American, but this meant nothing to me until my brother Pete appeared and went googly-eyed over the accent and wouldn’t stop asking if Simon personally knew the Dukes of Hazzard and Michael Knight. Poor ten-year-old Simon eventually said yes just to make a new friend. At thirteen years old, Pete still had that allure that secondary-school kids held over primary-schoolers.

  Simon didn’t go to Hazelwood Primary School like I did. His parents – or rather his father’s engineering firm – carted him off to a posh Catholic school all the way out in Hammersmith. Unsurprisingly, he hated it there and never really fitted in. The accent, however cool Pete claimed it was, singled him out as different. So he’d hang out with me after school.

  For those first three years, everything was plain sailing. That was, until we turned thirteen and everything changed. Or at least it changed for me. It was around the time I bought my first bra: I went straight to a B-cup because, being a tomboy, I’d been in denial about having boobs. But my new hormones came with an added complication: I started feeling awkward around Simon.

  One early September day, after I’d got back from my annual four weeks in Cyprus staying with cousins, I found him leaning against the gatepost, waiting for me. He seemed taller, his shoulders wider, and it was as if a switch flipped inside me. I fancied him. Compared to the boys I’d hung out with all summer, he was James Dean. Where they were black-haired and scowling, Simon was dirty-blond and laid-back. He didn’t wear high-waisted jeans or white terrycloth socks. He wore low-slung Levi’s and Converse.

  ‘Alright, Frixie,’ he called when I came to the front garden to meet him.

  Thank God he was acting like nothing had changed, because I was barely remembering how to put one foot in front of the other.

  ‘Hi, Si,’ I muttered, not daring to look him in the eye.

  He stood up straight and I got a whiff of his Sure deodorant. Why was I suddenly weirded out by it? I’d been with him in Boots when he’d bought it, for God’s sake.

  ‘Something’s different,’ he said.

  Terror seized me. I forced myself to look at him. Oh Christ, had his eyelashes always been that long?

  ‘What are we doing, then?’ I said, ignoring his comment.

  He leant closer to me and I got another blast of his heavenly anti-perspirant. My own wasn’t doing a very good job. My armpits were distinctly damp – thank God I was wearing my black Nirvana T-shirt.<
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  He was peering at my nose and I thought: if there’s snot hanging from my nostril I will kill myself.

  He smiled. ‘Are those freckles?’

  I smiled back, relief washing over me. In all the teen romance books I read, the heroine always hated her freckles. But I loved mine because they marked me as normal – all my English friends had them. They were usually very faint, but the Mediterranean sun had coaxed them out.

  It wasn’t just my complexion that had transformed. That summer had changed me in other ways, too. Maybe it had something to do with going to my first nightclub, Careless Whispers, on the Larnaca beachfront, or the first alcoholic drink I had: a San Francisco cocktail that my cousin Elena said would taste great – it didn’t. It was a cliché, but over one summer I’d experienced three revolutionary moments in my young teenage life: sex – a French kiss on the beach with Elena’s friend Demetri; drugs – I was counting the half-shot of tequila in my San Francisco; and the M&S bra-measuring service – why hadn’t I realised I’d grown out of my bikini before I got to Cyprus? I looked indecent. No wonder Demetri was so enthusiastic.

  So when I got back to London, I suddenly appreciated Simon for what he was. Where I used to see a lonely, shy misfit, I now saw a misunderstood, rebellious loner. How had I not noticed how intense he looked when he flicked up the collar on his biker jacket? How could I have brushed him off when he suggested the two of us bunk off school to see Almost Famous in the back row at the ABC? Luckily, none of my casual rejections had affected Simon. He still called me his best friend, but now ‘best friend’ had a hollow ring to it. I wanted more.

  The thing that cemented everything was my Year Nine dance recital. Usually, I quite liked our annual performance to the rest of the school. In Year Eight, we’d danced to a Beatles medley, which had the brilliant side-effect of exposing me to the song ‘Norwegian Wood’. But fast-forward twelve months and our teacher had fallen in love and was busy planning her wedding, which was the only reason I could fathom as to why the usually cool Miss Farrell – she wore a nose-ring, for God’s sake – had decreed we’d be dancing to Céline Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’.

  Was there a sappier song in the history of music?

  No. No, there wasn’t.

  I remember fuming about it to Simon as we watched the episode of Friends where everyone finds out that Monica and Chandler are dating – my favourite, and not only because of the friends-to-lovers trope. But even that couldn’t prise me out of my bad mood.

  ‘It’s not such a bad song.’

  I gave him my best side-eye.

  Simon, sensing he needed to do something drastic, got his guitar out, and plucked the melody to ‘My Heart Will Go On’, singing along in his best falsetto voice. Except, because we were thirteen and easily amused, he changed the lyrics to ‘My Fart Will Go On’.

  I fell about laughing.

  I wish my only problem with that recital had been the choice of music. Unfortunately, worse was to come. I landed badly on one of the jumps and twisted my ankle, but I had to bravely hobble on until the bitter end, red-faced and trying to ignore the sniggers of the Year Sevens in the front row.

  Little shits.

  Simon was there once I got home to help me laugh it off, and he even had a look at my foot. It was an awkward few minutes as I stripped off my sock, rolled up my jeans-leg and he gently prodded the sensitive skin.

  Please God, don’t let my foot stink, I remember thinking. Closely followed by, please God, don’t let that random hair that sometimes sprouts on my big toe be there. Being Greek and hitting puberty was a tough combination.

  How could I not have fallen head over heels for him? He made me laugh, he made me forget my humiliations, and he tended to my swollen ankle with the thoughtful sexiness of Doctor Ross from ER.

  I’d love to report that it all culminated in Simon reciprocating my feelings and eventually falling in love with me while gazing into my eyes as we listened to Eddie Vedder’s baritone on ‘Alive’, but fate rudely interrupted. His dad got a promotion, his parents divorced – the two were possibly linked – and a few days before his sixteenth birthday, Simon told me they were going back to America to live closer to his grandparents now that he was being brought up by a ‘single mom’.

  So he left, and I descended into a type of heartbreak that coloured every relationship of my twenties.

  No one could live up to the image of Simon. Or Saint Simon, as my best friend Georgia used to call him.

  Maybe none of that should still affect me now that I’m thirty-four, but those early years mark you.

  First love is brutal.

  Even the morning rush hour on the Central Line didn’t drain the zip out of me. I emerged from Oxford Circus tube at 9.30 a.m. feeling virtuous, so I eschewed my usual Starbucks Americano and instead bought fresh orange juice from the café next to my office.

  I swiped my key-card to get into our building. Jody was already behind her desk at reception. She always looked pristine – perfectly straight blonde hair that never wilted, no matter how humid the weather. I only had to look at a storm cloud for my hair to go frizzy.

  ‘Did you have a good night?’ I asked her.

  Her cheeks reddened. ‘Stu wants to take me to Paris for the weekend.’

  I grinned. ‘Ooh la la.’

  Jody didn’t have the best of luck with relationships, but thankfully her new guy, Stu, sounded like a keeper.

  I ducked into the stairwell and started taking the steps two at a time.

  We were on the fourth floor, but I avoided the lift because it broke down so much. However tired I was, it wasn’t worth the risk.

  The office needed a good paint, the carpet was threadbare and the air-conditioning was patchy. Hard to imagine that Re:Sound, established 1966 in Carnaby Street, had ended up like this. Back then, Jimmy Page used to play at the Christmas parties, and Keith Richards was introduced to his first dealer by the founding editor. In some versions of the story, he was Keith’s first dealer.

  But since the rise of the internet, print media had been a tough industry to navigate. Re:Sound was one of the biggest music monthlies in the business and we had a loyal readership, but each year our numbers were being slowly eroded by free online content and last year’s circulation figures hit an all-time low. We had to cut costs and staff numbers, so new carpets and reliable air-conditioning were luxuries we couldn’t afford. As was triple-ply toilet paper, but I still managed to sneak it into the budget – Zoë Frixos: protector of bum cheeks.

  The tune playing when I walked in was by a band that Gavin, my deputy, had discovered in Brighton on Saturday. It was Friday today, and he still hadn’t let anyone change the album. His monitor was on, but he wasn’t at his desk.

  Lucy, the reviews editor, was also absent.

  Still, it was barely ten o’clock and today was the most relaxed day of the month. Yesterday, the magazine had gone to press, which meant today we got to sort out our desks, reply to non-urgent emails and generally relax, safe in the knowledge that the next deadline was four blissful weeks away.

  I sat down at my desk and powered up my Mac. I unpeeled the sticky notes attached to the side of my monitor – all stuff from the issue we’d just put to bed – and threw them into the bin, just as Lucy barged into the office.

  ‘Morning, boss,’ she said, flinging her canvas bag onto the floor by her desk. Lucy was twenty-three and a bit of a prodigy. To be the reviews editor so young was testament to her amazing talent.

  She was Caitlin Moran but with pink hair.

  She started writing for us at twenty, sending in reviews of gigs, and after we published the fifth one I offered her a job. Her well-to-do parents had been horrified that she’d chosen a career in music journalism over university and had promptly kicked her out.

  ‘How was Patrick’s retirement do last night?’

  ‘It was okay,’ I replied. ‘He got a bit tearful when the speeches started, but apart from that he looked happy enough.’

&n
bsp; ‘I heard you were accosted by Jonny Delaney.’

  I was tipping back the last of my orange juice, but Lucy’s comment made it go down the wrong way. I panic-coughed until my throat cleared. ‘How do you know that? Did he write something online?’

  She went slightly pink, almost the same shade as her hair.

  ‘I bumped into Mike coming in.’

  ‘And how did he hear?’

  ‘He had Jonny’s new PR man with him. Who, for the record, is sexy as fuck.’

  ‘Nick Jones was here?’

  ‘Yeah, with Mike.’

  As publisher, Mike looked after the financial side of things – he wasn’t supposed to get involved editorially. But six months ago the magazine had been bought by The Octagon Group, a corporation that made soft drinks, and our new overlords only cared about the bottom line. We’d been promised that things wouldn’t change, but, of course, they had. Our expenses were pored over and there had been a freeze on pay rises. But worse was the fact that Mike had started encouraging me to put more commercial bands in the magazine to help reach a wider mainstream audience. I’d pushed back; it was at odds with why our readership had remained loyal for so many decades. But I’d finally relented with the Hands Down review, and the improved sales figures of that month’s issue proved, frustratingly, that Mike had been right.

  My eighteen-year-old self would have branded present-day Zoë a sell-out, but teenage me never had to pay rent on a flat in zone two.

  My desk phone rang. Mike’s name flashed on the display, but I let it ring. This needed a face-to-face.

  Mike’s office was tucked between the loos and the fire escape. The walls were lined with teak panelling untouched since 1970, and the glass in the windows was criss-crossed in that fireproof mesh that reminded me of school.

  He was sucking an unlit e-cigarette as I entered his office. He may as well have been sucking on a biro for all the satisfaction it was giving him.

  ‘Lucy told me about your visitor this morning.’

  He removed the cigarette from his mouth and threw it into a drawer. ‘You seem upset.’