I Was Born for This(60)

I watch Angel. She watches me back. I feel suddenly like she understands me more than any person I have ever met.

She knows now. She knows that the smiles, the romance, the sparkly boy band dream – it’s all just fantasy. Fantasy and lies.

But I can’t do anything.

A hand on my shoulder steadies me. Rowan, playing his guitar without even having to think about it, has joined me on the lower platform. He widens his eyes at me, barely visible through the light reflected from his glasses, silently asking Are you okay?

I smile at him.

It makes the audience scream.

I open my mouth to start the final chorus.





‘it is true i wished to escape; and so i wish still; is not this lawful for all prisoners?’



– Joan of Arc





I expect Juliet to be there when I wake up, but she isn’t. She slept in the other spare room last night. I don’t even know whether Mac is here.

Maybe he escaped, back into his other life.

I don’t feel bad for him.

I think about Bliss and wonder where she is. Has she escaped to her other life too? Gone back to Rowan? Crossed the dimensional void into celebrity land?

I feel like I’ve wandered into the void – the empty no-man’s land between the fans and the celebrities – and now I don’t know how to get out.

I check my phone. It’s nearly half seven in the morning. Missed Fajr prayer and I don’t even want to get up so I can pray. That’s how I know I’m in a bad mood. I barely remember getting back here after the concert. I left before they came back on for the encore. Didn’t want to watch any more. It was just making me feel numb.

Like I was watching a puppet show where you can clearly see the hands.

I don’t know.

I’m just being dramatic probably.

Maybe by tomorrow I’ll feel a bit more normal about all this.

Maybe by the end of the week.

‘I’m sensing you’re not in such a good mood today, Angel.’

Juliet’s nan wanders into the kitchen, dressed and ready for the day. How do old people always seem to be on top of things? Always up early, always doing chores and phoning people and generally living productive and positive lives. Maybe it just takes seventy years to get the hang of being alive.

I’m sitting at the table with a cup of tea in front of me, staring blankly at the fridge door. I smile weakly up at her. ‘Oh, no. Sorry.’

Dorothy sits down opposite me. ‘How was the concert, then? Did you all have a good time?’

I barely know what to say.

I force out a squeaky sort of ‘Yes’ and hope it sounds convincing.

‘When I was your age,’ says Dorothy, ‘I was big into the Beatles. They were huge in the sixties. Girls used to queue up for hours just to meet them, send them love letters in the post, threw their pants at them on stage, screaming like banshees at their concerts. Beatlemania they called it.’ She rests her arms on the table. ‘I’ll never forget what dear old John Lennon said: We’re more popular than Jesus now. They attacked him for that, I’ll tell you. But he was right. It was a religion.’

I listen on in silence.

‘It’s very easy to see why it happened. These Beatle boys – they were unthreatening. Their music was good and fun, yes, but they looked kind. They were attractive, but not in a scary, very masculine way that many young girls find intimidating. They had floppy hair and skinny frames, you know, that sort of thing. Which is very fashionable now, but wasn’t really back then. They gave these girls something very safe to love. Something that would never bite them back. In the sixties, everything would bite you back if you were a girl.’

I wonder whether that’s why I love The Ark. Because they’re safe.

But they’re not, are they?

They still managed to bite me back when I got too close.

‘It was absolute mayhem and nobody knew what to do about it. Especially the poor Beatles themselves. Did you know they just stopped touring in 1966? They just completely stopped because it was too much. The fame, the press, the girls. It was all too much.’

Dorothy sighs.

‘But they always blamed the girls. The media, I mean. They said the girls were hysterical because they were failures in other parts of their lives – they were single, childless, jobless. They kept harking on about their screaming. Oh, goodness me, those male media types, they couldn’t stand all the girls screaming.’ Dorothy chuckles. ‘Which is funny, really. They kept trying to put these girls down by saying how pathetic they were, but in reality the girls were more powerful than anybody.’

I don’t feel powerful. I think I’m the saddest and most pathetic person in the world.

‘One of the reasons they stopped touring,’ Dorothy continues, ‘is because the girls were screaming so loud that nobody could hear the band playing or singing. The screaming just drowned it out entirely.’

‘Were you part of Beatlemania?’ I ask her.

She chuckles and looks down at the table.

‘Well, that was a long time ago,’ she says.





I probably would have been able to sleep for a long time – maybe a full eight hours – if I hadn’t had to stay up until 4 a.m. for the post-tour after-party, and then wake up at 8 a.m., because we’re doing a chat show recording this morning.