Backstage Pass Read online

  As the crowd started to thin, slowly she edged down from her high. It felt like those wisps of a dream being steadily tugged away as you wake. What had been so vivid and intense was now rapidly becoming only a memory.

  Back to the reality of flagging down a cab to get her to the station, and then home to Thom. Had she even told him she’d be out tonight? She had a sudden rush of guilty uncertainty. It had all been such a last-minute arrangement, and maybe a part of her even wanted to give him something to be angry about. She’d had enough of the silence.

  She checked her phone and saw that she had told him she’d be late: she’d texted him just before she left work. No reply, of course.

  The crowd around her had thinned rapidly. The lights were up now, and she was one of the last there. She took one more look around, and then made for the main exit.

  As she reached the door, a lanky guy in a black t-shirt caught her eye and said, “Hey, you’ve got a wristband. Drinks in the bar upstairs. Through there.” He waved a hand, indicating the stairs that led up to the balcony area where the bar was.

  “No,” she said. “I...”

  Just then a group of women came through behind her and she had to step aside and then she found herself at the foot of those stairs, looking up.

  Some kind of after-show drinks thing? She couldn’t. They’d just realize their mistake and kick her out if she went up there.

  But then she had the wristband that seemed to mark her out for backstage access. She’d been to enough corporate functions to know that once you were there, everyone just assumed you were meant to be. If someone didn’t recognize you it simply meant that they weren’t as well-connected as they had thought. Maybe she could just go up and take a look, maybe even blag a drink and a glimpse of Ray...

  Emily had always been a confident and assertive person. A woman doesn’t reach her level in management consultancy before the age of thirty unless she can command the trust and respect of misogynistic CEOs twice her age, and that’s exactly what she could do. It was only a recent thing that her confidence had become so undermined. At work she was still fine; she was experienced enough to know what was required. But outside work... Suddenly, she’d become shy and retiring.

  Tonight, though, something had changed. Perhaps it was that sense of feeling like a teenager again, and that teen thing of knowing there was a world out there for you to conquer.

  Before the show she’d been on the verge of making a run for it when she had learned that Marcia had bailed. Now...? Now, she took a step up those stairs, and once you’ve taken that first step you just have to see it through, don’t you?

  3

  Somehow she’d expected more security, but everything was very laid back. There was only that guy at the foot of the stairs, and the smiley security guy she’d met outside who was now loitering near the top of the stairs and checking out anyone who appeared. When he saw her his face split into that big grin again, and he said, “Hey, if it isn’t Marcia’s friend Emily again. Did you enjoy Mr Sandler’s performance?”

  “It was great,” she said. “I loved it. Made me feel like a kid again, some of the old stuff.”

  If anything, that grin just got wider. “That’s cool, really cool, Marcia’s friend. A word to the wise, though: best not to focus on the old material. Tonight was all about trying out some new pieces.”

  “Best not to?” asked Emily. “When...?”

  A hand rested lightly, briefly, on her shoulder, and a voice a little too close to her ear said, “It’s fine, Mo. I’m not that much of a pretentious ass, despite what people say.”

  Ray. Or Ray Oh My Fucking God Sandler, as he’s known when he slips up behind you and touches you lightly on the shoulder.

  She turned, and she could have tipped ever so slightly forward and kissed him, he was that close. Just as she was trying to catch her breath and work out what was happening, he smiled, touched her again – on the elbow this time – and said, “Get you a drink? Bar’s crowded, but somehow they always just make room for me.”

  Oh yes: there were other people up here, too.

  She hadn’t really noticed.

  There was a crowd around the bar, and more people scattered around in small groups, standing or sat in clusters around low glass-topped tables. She recognized the keyboard player, laughing with one group, and Lucy was over the far side of the space, talking intently with a guy in a shiny gray suit.

  Ray was waiting for her answer, and Emily realized she somehow had to remember words, and how to use them.

  She compromised, and nodded.

  Close up, his features looked a little more angular than in the posters and magazines, and his jaw had a charcoal smudge of stubble. The low lighting made his dark eyes oily pools, and his mouth seemed always to be on the verge of breaking out into a boyish grin. Would it be rude to just lick him all over now, or should she be polite and wait a little?

  His hand still on her elbow, Ray guided her towards the bar, and said, “What’ll it be?” Then, when words still escaped her, he went on: “Wine? Red?” and she managed to nod again.

  He stepped up to the bar, and as if by magic the throng parted to let him through. It wasn’t even that people seemed to be watching his every move, just that they automatically sensed his presence and made way, as if they had a sixth sense for when the star of the show was nearby.

  He came back with a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon and two real glasses, not the plastic cups these venue bars normally dispensed. “Sorry,” he said, “but it’s the best they had. Hell, it was all they had.” His accent was a mix of London and a few touches of Irish.

  He nodded towards a table Mo was keeping free over in one corner of the bar area, and they started to walk.

  “I saw you, didn’t I?” he said.

  She followed him through and sat. The table was obviously carefully chosen: tucked away, but with a good view around the gathering and down, over the balcony to the now empty stage.

  “Saw you in the crowd,” he continued. He didn’t seem too bothered by her struggle to find words. It was probably a reaction he’d seen often enough before whenever he encountered people outside his inner circle. “Did a double take, because you looked familiar. Decided I hadn’t met you before, though. I haven’t, have I? Or worse: if we’d... and I... How embarrassing that would be. I’m sorry. Shall we start again?”

  The last thing she’d expected was for Ray Sandler to be getting tongue-tied talking to her.

  “It’s okay,” she said, finally finding words that now threatened to come out in a deluge. “Really it is. And no, we haven’t met before. Or anything else. I’ve been to a couple of your shows before but I never did the groupie thing. I’m not some old conquest stalking you with pictures of the twelve year-old love child you never knew you had.”

  ...which sounded like a slap, because Ray Sandler most definitely had done the whole groupie thing, if the tabloid stories were anywhere close to the truth.

  “So,” she hurried on, “you saw me in the crowd?” In truth she was staggered that he remembered her as one of the many he’d made eye contact with during the show. This really was becoming an enactment of one of those teen fantasies. Or maybe he was just making it up: it was a nice line to say you saw someone in the crowd.

  He’d been pouring while they talked, and now he pushed one glass towards her. “Sláinte,” he said, raising his.

  “Cheers.” They chinked glasses, eyes locked. No eye contact when you chink and you’re cursed to seven years’ bad sex, she’d been told. Hell, but she’d take even that right now! Bad sex was better than none.

  “You have that look,” he said. She felt strangely exposed as his eyes explored her face and the pause drew itself out. “Familiar, even when you’re not.”

  “Everyday, you mean?” She couldn’t resist the dig. He seemed to bring that out in her. She knew it was her way of being defensive. Knew that she shouldn’t be here, talking like this with a man like him. And God, but it felt good!
/>   “Not at all.” That boyish smile that had been hinted at broke out briefly, then. “The kind of beauty that’s timeless, feels like I’ve always been around it, if that makes any sense at all?”

  She snorted into her drink. Not at all ladylike or well-mannered, but really. “Are you coming on to me?” she said in disbelief. “I told you I’d never done that groupie thing, and I’m not going to change that now.” And besides, she was a good ten years older than typical groupie fodder and at least fifty pounds heavier. True, she carried most of the extra around her breasts and backside, but nobody was going to look at her and have ‘groupie’ even in the top ten of things they first thought.

  “Sorry, was I being too direct? I didn’t mean anything... I just tend to shoot from the hip, you know? Tell it like it is. I wasn’t coming on to you... I don’t even know your name–”

  “Emily.”

  “I wasn’t coming on to you, Emily. Not because you’re not gorgeous, but because I just don’t do that shit any more. I haven’t offended you, have I?”

  He seemed genuinely put out, concerned that he might have said something wrong.

  She raised her glass towards him again, and said, “Not at all. I’ve never spoken to someone like you before. It’s new territory. Do you know, I had posters of you on my wall when I was a teenager?”

  “You’re trying to make me feel old now.” He raised his glass towards her, then drank. “So tell me: how do I compare in the flesh?”

  “Less make-up,” she said. “Which is good. More... more real.”

  “Which is reassuring.” That smile and brief laugh again. “I’d hate not to seem real.”

  Funny how quickly she’d gone from star-struck to relaxed in his company. And how he had rapidly gone from teen heart-throb to just the funny guy she was sharing a drink with, a guy who could get tongue-tied and concerned about her feelings, a guy you wanted to make smile like that because of the way it transformed his face.

  “Great show,” she said.

  Instantly, a cloud of insecurity drifted across his features. “You think? I wasn’t so sure. Some of the new songs... This is why I stopped performing after the Angries split. Fans just wanting the same old same old. I don’t want to be some nostalgia act playing seaside ghost-towns on an endless cycle of greatest hits tours.” Then that sensitivity again: “Sorry if that offends you... if you came here for the old stuff. I mean–”

  “It was the perfect mix,” Emily said. “Sure, some people just wanted the old hits, and you gave them plenty, but you didn’t compromise. I like that you didn’t compromise.”

  He didn’t seem convinced. Was he really that insecure about the new material?

  “I’m really glad I saw that tweet and worked it out,” she said.

  “You saw that? It was Mo’s idea.”

  “Mo?” The big security guard she’d first encountered on the door.

  “He’s my righthand man. A dab hand with all the social media stuff. He hand-coded my website, which he tells me is pretty damned impressive and I don’t know enough about it to argue. And he’s the one who set up the Cans Fans accounts everywhere. That tweet... I didn’t want this just to be a show for people who didn’t have a clue. Looked like it was going to be just a few friends of people here at the Roxette until we sent that tweet. I was really surprised how many fans saw it and worked it out – the guys in the box office say they’ve never had such a sudden rush for tickets. But the crowd still just seemed to want the old stuff.”

  He seemed pretty flat about the show, and she wondered if this was how he always was after a gig: coming down off the adrenalin high, and clearly a perfectionist who worried away at every detail of a performance.

  “You gave them what they wanted,” she said to him now. “Like I say, the balance was perfect. I really liked the new songs. And that medley you did for the encore was astonishing.”

  “You think?”

  “I do.”

  It still seemed surreal, sitting here and talking to him. Even more so now that she had got over the awkward fan stage of things. The everydayness of it made this so much stranger.

  “When you said you were only going to play one song and then started on a new one, I loved it,” she said. “And then, when you turned it into one hit after another–”

  “I wasn’t going to do an encore at all, you know.”

  She raised an eyebrow, and waited for him to take another long drink and then go on.

  “Tonight was all about trying out the new album. It wasn’t about pleasing a few fans. That sounds selfish, I know, and it probably is, but... I’d just hit that point in the studio where I’d stopped believing. I had to stand up in front of people and make that connection again. So anyway, I’d played the album material, I’d thrown in a few songs from the Angries, and that was it. I didn’t have anything more prepared – that medley? I just made it up on the spot. I didn’t know what song was going to come next until I hit the point where I needed to switch and somehow managed to bridge to something else. I just kept going until my voice was about to give way.”

  “Everyone loved it.”

  He shrugged. “It suddenly stopped being selfish,” he said. “Time to give them all what they wanted.”

  “And the new one? The one you opened the encore with?”

  He’d been looking down into his drink, but now he glanced up. Why did he seem so nervous around her?

  “Songs come from all over the place,” he said. “Sometimes they take weeks of careful crafting. Other times, all it needs is a spark, an inspiration. Maybe a line of overheard conversation, or a face in a crowd, and it just triggers something.”

  “‘A face in a crowd’?”

  “Like I say, I wasn’t going to do an encore. I only decided to as I was walking off stage. That song is only a fragment: I only had a verse and a chorus. That kind of forced me into the whole medley thing – the best way to get out of a half-finished song was to slip into something else. So yes, a face in a crowd: I saw you early on, and it feels like I spent the rest of the show looking for you again, but I couldn’t see you. I thought you must have left. But it was one of those things, one of those sparks. I walked off the stage and a new song was in my head. Back in the dressing room I just picked up the Washburn–” the acoustic guitar, Emily assumed “–and started to play the verse.”

  Ray Sandler wrote a song about me... for me...

  “Really?”

  Ray Sandler was one smooth operator, she’d give him that much.

  “I know,” he said, topping up their glasses. “Sounds like bull, but it’s true. You don’t turn down a song when it hits you like that. Especially when it’s so damned good.”

  He leaned forward, then, and took both of her hands across the table. Gazing into her eyes, he started to sing – the same almost crooning style of earlier, when he’d played the song on stage, but now he was messing about with it, singing it karaoke-Frank-Sinatra-style.

  “I never knew I could.

  I knew I didn’t should.”

  People nearby interrupted their conversation to look, and Emily didn’t know what to feel or do. This whole thing had just taken several steps deeper into weird

  “It always had to be would...”

  His hands were cool on hers, and she remembered his touch on the guitar, that lazy, effortless glide of fingers across the strings.

  “Hey baby, don’t give me no maybe,

  Let’s make this thing happen.”

  He finished, and started to laugh, and the people nearby returned to their conversations.

  Emily shook her head at him, mock disapproving. “I bet you tell that to all the girls,” she said.

  “Maybe I would,” he said. “If they were all as enchanting as you.”

  He really was coming on to her. His hands still covered hers and when she closed her eyes, briefly, those hands were exploring her body. A girl can dream. It was so vivid she knew exactly how his touch would feel. She opened her eyes and he was gazi
ng at her, suddenly intense.

  “I don’t do this,” she said. Was she telling him, or reminding herself?

  “Me neither,” he said. “I don’t do this thing at all.”

  She should pull her hands away, but somehow she couldn’t. And he certainly wasn’t going to. Now, his thumb gently stroked the skin on the back of her hand. So light a touch!

  Had he really just made up that song on the spot, as he left the stage? Inspired by a glimpse of her face in the crowd...

  Let’s make this thing happen.

  Strangest thing in this long succession of strange was that now she felt she knew something of the real Ray Sandler he was actually more attractive than the man of her fantasies. A complex mixture of strong and vulnerable, a man who has seen the world and survived, a man not scared to be sensitive. It would be so easy...

  What was she thinking?

  “I have to go,” she said. “I have a train to catch.”

  He sat back, and finally his hands left hers.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” he said. “I forget what it’s like, sometimes. Meeting real people, making real conversation. I spend my life surrounded by people who lap up everything I say and do. You saw them parting like the Red Sea at the bar. It’s just... Sorry: that all sounds a bit crap, doesn’t it? All ‘look at me in my sad little celebrity world’.” He laughed. “It’s really not bad. Just a different world. And then I meet someone like–”

  “You’re doing it again.” She couldn’t help but laugh along with him, even when she was rebuking him at the same time.

  “Forgive me,” he said. “And I might even stop apologizing. I need a bit more practice in the real world, clearly.”

  “I really have to be going.”

  “Can I at least walk you downstairs and make sure you get a cab okay?” he asked. “Late night in the city, you know.”

  She hesitated, and he leapt in: “Or I’ll get Mo to. I’d just like to know you’re safe.”

  She stood, smiled, and said, “Thank you. I appreciate that.”

  4

  He went to the stairs with her.