The kettle was already boiling when I knocked at Addie’s door, barefoot now and with Carter’s hoody swamping my dress. She almost looked like an ordinary eighteen-year-old, or at least an unnaturally beautiful one, in a muscle top and leggings and scrubbed free of make-up, scratching her temple with a long fingernail. When she turned from the door, I noticed her hair ended in a tuft at the back of her neck and was so shocked I reached out to touch it before I remembered we didn’t know each other that well. ‘Your hair …’
A wig was hanging over a mannequin’s head on the kitchen counter, carefully brushed out.
‘Oh, yeah. It’s much more comfortable to take it off when I’m alone,’ she said, then instantly looked like she regretted it. ‘Please don’t mention it to the press.’
‘I won’t.’
‘I can make you sign a –’
‘I know,’ I said, and there was a second before she accepted this with a nod. She looked so different without her hair – younger, maybe, and a lot less like the images of her that I’d grown up with. She caught me staring at her and smiled, tousling her hair self-consciously.
‘I’m making chamomile tea,’ she said.
‘Such a rock star,’ I replied. She looked surprised at my sarcasm, then broke into a laugh, and I was relieved she wasn’t offended. Fleetwood Mac was playing softly, but I could still hear the low bass from the party below. I sifted the wig through my fingers, trying to get over my shock. ‘It feels so real.’
‘It is real,’ she said. ‘It’s just not mine.’ She bent to examine the minibar and chose two packets of chips. ‘Can you keep a secret?’
I nodded eagerly. I was keeping a lot of secrets at the moment.
‘I used to have extensions, when Perfect Storm first started out. After the concert in Reading I took a pair of scissors to my hair. I’d just broken up with Val and I was leaving the band and I kind of had a crisis.’
‘I bet that went down well with Beatnik.’
She grinned. ‘Oh, yeah, they were well chuffed.’
The tea burned my lips. Maybe it was because I could finally see her face, but I felt like she was opening up to me. For the first time, here was Addie: not the Perfect Storm soprano, icon of gay girls everywhere and international paparazzi magnet, but the girl from the academy who’d won the gig of a lifetime on Quest for the Best. I didn’t know what had shifted – when we had gone from cautious acquaintances to business associates to friends – but it was flattering, being allowed to see her like this. I felt like she was letting me into an exclusive club.
‘I’ve been talking to Amir about my solo album,’ she said. ‘I was hoping you might do a duet with me.’
Addie Marmoset wanted to do a duet with me. I didn’t know what to say. ‘I thought you said it was a solo album,’ I blurted out.
Her mouth twitched and the locks went down behind her eyes again, and I cursed myself for trying to joke. ‘Amir says it’ll really solidify your position on the world stage,’ she said, as if that would be the only reason anyone would consider doing a duet with her.
I felt a tug of longing. Half of me was a punk who wore torn jeans and listened to the Ramones, and the other half was a girl who’d loved watching Glee and idolised Perfect Storm. Sam would probably say a duet with Addie was selling out, but maybe it was a way to embrace both sides of myself – and anyway, she wasn’t asking Lady Stardust, she was just asking me. I’d grown up with her poster on my wall. Didn’t I owe my fourteen-year-old self this duet?
‘He’s already asked Boris to get some great songwriters together,’ said Addie, as if the songwriting were an afterthought, and I tried not to look too surprised.
‘It’s really nice of you to offer,’ I said cautiously, ‘but I don’t know about singing someone else’s song. Yours or, um, someone else’s. That’s not really what I’m about.’
‘You’ve played covers before.’
‘Only so I could learn how to put my own songs together,’ I countered. ‘Not so I could pass them off as my own.’
She tapped her acrylics on the edge of her mug. ‘Well, I don’t have a problem with you writing the song if Amir approves it.’
‘Or we could write it together.’
Her mouth tensed and she looked away from me, and any openness between us instantly faded. ‘I don’t think I can do that.’
She was heading to New York the following morning for a promo tour of the States and a guest spot as a judge on the kind of reality show that had launched her career. This was the last time we would be in the same room before she returned to London to record her album. ‘I know how busy you are,’ I said. ‘We could just make a start now and I could finish the song while you’re away.’
‘Lily.’ She looked at me over the top of her mug and although her stare was frank, there was something skittish in her eyes. ‘It’s not that I don’t have time. It’s that I don’t know how.’
‘What?’ I thought of all the songwriting credits she had on Perfect Storm’s albums, and she bristled at the betrayed look on my face.
‘I don’t play guitar or piano or anything, Lily, so I can’t write whole songs. But I’ve got a four-octave vocal range. My voice is my instrument.’
For an instant, something about her reminded me of the kids at the academy who had been so sure of their talent, who got defensive whenever anyone suggested singing might be a skill set that could be learned. I remembered Verity’s words: you either had it or you didn’t. Maybe that applied to songwriting, too. Maybe she’d come up with some of the lyrics for her songs, and that was why she’d been credited on the albums, even if she hadn’t written the music. But the idea that she had never written a song was kind of sad, somehow – like she’d been lying to herself about ‘her’ music.
‘If you’ve never written anything, how can you say those songs are yours?’ I said cautiously. ‘I thought you wanted the solo album to represent you.’ No wonder Beatnik were having trouble coming up with the right material; if she couldn’t be specific about what she wanted changed, every time they went ‘back to the drawing board’, as she put it, they would have to start again.
‘I’ll be singing the songs.’ She crossed her arms over her chest.
‘You’ll be singing someone else’s words. The songs will always belong to their writers. You’re just a puppet, a mouthpiece for them.’
I felt the air rush from the room and she baulked as if my words had slapped her. She stared into her mug and I was too ashamed to say anything else. How could I have said something like that? How could I have said something like that to Addie Marmoset? She’d trusted me, if tentatively, with the information that she didn’t actually know how to write, and I’d thrown it back in her face. I gathered my room key and padded to the door. ‘God, I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘I should just go.’
‘No,’ she said, and the force in her voice stopped me. She raised her eyes to mine and they were glassy with tears. ‘You’re right, actually. I’d be a better singer if I wrote my own songs, but I’m too scared to even try. When I was at HOTMA I tried a few times, but they were terrible. There were all these kids there who understood how to fit songs together, but I was a terrible student. I guess I’ve tried to tell myself that I have such a brilliant voice that I don’t need to write my own songs.’
I touched her shoulder with a shaking hand, like she might shatter. ‘It’s not as hard as it looks.’
‘I doubt that.’
‘Hey, if Carter can write a song, you can do it too.’
‘Who’s Carter?’
A blush crept over my face as if even mentioning his name to her was out of order. ‘My guitarist.’
‘The blond bloke?’
‘No, he’s the bassist.’ I tried to contain my smile, but I was too relieved that she seemed to have forgiven me, and it broke through. ‘You really don’t know much about music, do you?’
Luckily, she smiled back. ‘Teach me, then.’
•
We started by listening to her favourite tracks. She knew nothing about rock or punk, but had a huge range of soul and R&B singers on her playlist, and we put on song after song, rewriting the lyrics to the existing tunes. She was reluctant to share with me and at first I thought her inexperience was holding her back, but then I realised she was worried about my judgement. The idea that Addie Marmoset might be a human being who needed help and encouragement like anyone else was shocking, but I tried not to show my surprise.
‘Just get something down – you can make it perfect later,’ I said.
We worked on lyrics in companionable silence, sitting opposite each other on the bed and filling pages of hotel notepaper until light spilled through the curtains. When she showed me her work, she avoided my eyes and sucked her bottom lip while I read.
They whisper softly in your ear
‘I’ll make you a star,’ they say
But they crush everything you hold dear
And you’ll never go home again
Sometimes I wonder if I should’ve stayed
At the academy with my friends
Instead of hitching a ride on the express train
Who knows where it will end?
Trent, my music teacher back in Sydney, always started his criticism with a compliment, so I ignored the fact that the syllables didn’t line up and praised her choice of subject matter. I’d expected her to produce the same kind of romantic content she’d sung in Perfect Storm, not these tangled observations about the music industry.
‘Lady Fame’s a cruel mistress,’ she said, relief washing over her face. ‘I guess that’s at the top of my mind right now.’
‘Perfect Storm had such great love songs.’
‘They never really did it for me. Especially the hetero ones.’
That was enough to remind me that she was meant to be my girlfriend and I shifted, tugging at the hem of my dress. Who was Addie Marmoset? She seemed so competent, so composed – and yet the first lyrics she’d written hinted at this inner turmoil. She always knew how to brush off a reporter, how to deflect an invasive question, but that had clearly come at a cost.
When her assistant knocked on the door in the early hours she stretched, surveyed the notepaper all over the bed, and got gracefully to her feet. ‘Please tell me there’s some gold in there, Lily. I’ve never worked so hard in my life.’
I grinned. ‘Leave it with me.’