The Fame Factor. Polly Courtney

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СКАЧАТЬ she was sitting next to. It was another world. A world she could have inhabited herself, had things turned out differently, and now, more than ever, she felt glad that they hadn’t.

      Zoë let the man talk, nodding when the moment seemed right. People like this, she thought, were evolutionary anomalies. They were so focused on themselves and their own activities that they should, by rights, have become extinct years ago – eaten by a bear whilst regaling others with their tales of bravery. But somehow, they lived on to tell their dreary tales.

      Zoë watched as her sister surreptitiously slid her profiteroles onto a neighbour’s plate, glancing about as if worried that somebody might be watching. Their eyes met briefly and Tamsin cast her a guilty smile. Zoë winked back, thinking about all the times she had flouted laws and bent rules in the last few weeks.

      A month ago, she and Shannon had had the brilliant idea of performing a gig wearing hard hats, on a stage decorated like a road works site: traffic signs, cones, flashing orange lamps…Of course, they had planned to return everything after use. It was only when Shannon appeared on the night with the pièce de résistance – a large set of temporary traffic lights – that the promoter had put his foot down and threatened to report the girls to the police. It seemed obvious, thinking about moments like this, that Zoë wasn’t destined to follow in her sister’s footsteps.

      They were similar, in many ways. They had the same drive, the same sense of determination and resilience. They were both bright, hard-working and ambitious, but they were motivated by different things.

      For Tamsin, it had always been about following the path but walking it quicker and better than everyone else on it. She had excelled at school, acing her exams and easily overcoming hurdle after hurdle. That was how she had ended up here, a trainee barrister at one of London’s most prestigious chambers.

      Zoë had never cared about following the path. For her, the further she got from the path, the better. She knew, having lived in Tamsin’s shadow for twenty-four years, that she was the outlier. She understood that her parents couldn’t understand her way of thinking. That was why she compromised. She had gained a degree – albeit not the one her parents would have liked – and she had found herself a respectable job. But inside, she knew she could never be satisfied by her traditional middle-class existence.

      ‘And what about you?’ asked the man, poking his pitted nose in Zoë’s face. ‘What do you do?’

      Zoë straightened up and looked at the man. ‘I’m at Chase Waterman.’

      ‘Ah!’ he cried. ‘You’re a bean counter!’

      ‘Well,’ Zoë averted her eyes. She wanted to defend her role at the UK’s largest independent auditing firm, but she couldn’t think of anything positive to say about it.

      ‘Didn’t you fancy your chances in law?’ He tugged proudly at the navy gown that engulfed his ample frame.

      ‘Something like that,’ Zoë replied, deciding that now was not the time to admit that she’d failed to make the grades for her first choice of degree. Looking down the table, she watched as her father became embroiled in a debate with a man in a green tweed jacket.

      ‘You’d be surprised,’ her father was saying. ‘Misconduct has existed in top-level sport since long before it all went commercial.’

      The man, who appeared to have far too much hair for his age, squinted at Zoë’s dad. ‘Is that so?’

      ‘It is.’

      Zoë smiled wryly. They were trying to out-sport one another. Her father would put up a good fight, she suspected; he had once played rugby for Hertfordshire. He was also one of the most highly-respected defence lawyers in London.

      ‘What sort of misconduct?’

      ‘The England rugby squad in the nineteen-eighties,’ Zoë’s father replied. ‘There was plenty of match-fixing, even then.’

      The man drew his head back, frowning. ‘How could you possibly know that?’

      ‘I trained with them. I was offered a place on the squad.’

      Zoë nearly yelped. Her father had nearly played rugby for England? How did she not know this? And why had he turned it down? She looked at her phone. It was eight fifty-two. The questions would have to wait.

      Still reeling, Zoë leaned back as the waitress poured coffee into her bone china cup. She would slip out now, pretending to visit the ladies, and then by the time everybody adjourned to the room with carpet on the walls for drinks, they’d all be too sloshed to notice her absence. She felt bad about leaving her sister, but there wasn’t really an alternative. She could hardly skip up to ‘High Table’ and explain that she was abandoning one of the most important dinners of the legal calendar to go and rehearse with her band.

      

      Out of the darkness came an unmistakable Irish shriek.

      ‘Over here, you eejit!’

      Zoë followed the sound to where Shannon was parked illegally in the middle of High Holborn, honking and yelling through the open window.

      As a drummer, owning a large car was a prerequisite, but there was something about the battered old Volvo estate that particularly suited Shannon. The car was like the vehicular equivalent of its owner: noisy, colourful and unreliable. It had transported Shannon and all her belongings, including the drum kit, from Limerick to East London six years previously – miraculously, only breaking down once along the way.

      ‘I’ve had an idea,’ said Shannon, winding up her window and swerving into the fast lane. ‘Fuck off!’ she yelled as the driver behind them made a gesture with his hand in the glow of the next car’s headlights. ‘We should get some celebrity endorsement.’

      Zoë gripped the fabric of the seat, glancing at the silhouette of the angry man in the wing mirror. ‘What d’you mean?’ she managed to ask. Rides with Shannon were not for the faint-hearted. Kate refused to get in the car unless there was no alternative.

      ‘Well, we’ve got fans all over the world, all over the internet, but none of them are famous. If we could get a big name to say, “Hey guys, I think you’re great”, we’ll be made.’ She yanked the steering wheel round and pulled a sharp left, provoking more sounding of horns.

      ‘Mmm, maybe.’ Zoë nodded, grabbing the door handle to keep herself upright. It was hard to focus on promotional strategies and staying alive at once.

      ‘That’s what Ladyhawke did,’ Shannon went on, flicking on the internal light and checking her hair in the rear-view mirror. Zoë watched as a fearless motorcyclist approached them on the outside. ‘Apparently Courtney Love left a glowing review on her MySpace page.’

      ‘Right…’ Zoë tried to control her breathing as the motorcyclist slipped into Shannon’s blind spot. ‘And don’t you think maybe that might have been a PR stunt by Ladyhawke’s management? Watch the bike, by the way.’

      ‘I don’t know. Don’t matter, does it? If it’s a stunt, then we need to be doing one too. Jesus! Where did he come from?’

      Zoë breathed a sigh of relief as the motorcyclist emerged, seemingly unscathed, in front of them. ‘Um…yeah, although it might not be that easy. I bet if you look closely, you’ll find that Ladyhawke’s on СКАЧАТЬ