Fallen for Rock (18 page)

Chapter Thirty

The office phone rang for the sixth time in a row. Caller display showed an unfamiliar London number. I gave an impatient sigh and resolved to put the damn thing on ‘do not disturb’ just as soon as it had finished shrilling. I was in the middle of a difficult report that was due at midday, and I didn’t need the constant interruptions.

It was a Monday morning, and I was once again ensconced at my desk at work. My little trip with MonX seemed to have happened in a different lifetime. Apart from my radically different haircut, which had caused quite a stir among my colleagues, nobody knew what had happened to me four weeks ago. Not even my family. I was keeping my adventure strictly secret, and my ‘touring clothes’, as I had come to think of them, had been hidden at the very back of my wardrobe.

The phone stopped ringing, and I was poised to auto-forward all calls to voicemail when another one came through. Same number.

I sighed once again and summoned a cheery voice. If it was a client, it wouldn’t do to bark an insult at them.

‘Emily Trenden, how may I help you?’

‘Miss Emily Trenden?’ An unfamiliar voice went with the unfamiliar number, and I had a sudden sinking feeling in my tummy. Something was wrong here. An acute sense of foreboding rose in my throat, and I rasped out my response.

‘This is she. May I ask who’s calling?’

‘Hugh Sharp here from the Daily Break. Would you care to comment on your role in the break-up of rock band MonX?’

I dropped the phone in horror. The receiver clattered onto my desk, slipped, and hit the floor. The reporter’s voice continued to issue forth, tinny and indistinct. I hit the disconnect button to stop the jabbering before retrieving the handset from the floor and dropping it into the cradle. My heart hammered in my chest. What on earth had happened? What MonX break-up?
When?

Company policy forbade me from accessing Facebook, Twitter, and personal email, but Google was a vital research tool, and I needed to know. I inched the screen to face away from the glass wall dividing my office from the corridor and shifted surreptitiously in my seat. The phone rang again, but I ignored it.

No sooner had I typed ‘MonX’ into the search screen than Google pulled up pages and pages of results. Most of them read like tabloid headlines.

UK rock sensation MonX breaks up after vicious fight!

MonX No More!

R.I.P. MonX?

Blood and tears at final gig—MonX rockers in catastrophic finale.

My vision blurred and my breathing grew laboured. So it had finally happened. Mike hadn’t been able to fix the rift. In my heart of hearts, I had known this was bound to happen, but I had hoped that the band would sort itself out. Or, failing that, that Adam would sort them out.

I scrolled through the results, needing to know more but uncertain which sensation-lusty link to follow. Eventually, two screens on, I stumbled across an article published by a reputable rock magazine, and I reckoned they would offer some sort of approximation of the truth.

The link registered and the screen started loading. I tapped my finger impatiently while I waited. Would it have been Mike who called it a day? Or had he been thrown out? Was the whole band going to split, or would factions reform?

Thoughts skittered round my brain like so many marbles, my urgent deadline clean forgotten for a moment. And without further warning, my universe collapsed. I was in the shit. Deeply, irretrievably, undeniably in the shit.

For when it finished loading, the website displayed a picture of me in Mike’s arms, in my pyjamas, looking dazed and bleary-eyed and, frankly, stoned out of my mind. If I didn’t know about my fall, I would assume the girl Mike was carrying was as high as a kite.

‘Bugger.’

The implications of this image crashed in on me all at once. The break-up itself was tragic, if not wholly unexpected. My mind filled with questions regarding the ins and outs of the split, but I pushed them in one corner of my brain for later analysis and focused on a more pressing matter. Because I looked drugged in that awful photo, and that had immediate implications for me. My employer had a strict anti-drugs policy in and out of work. If it seemed like I had violated it, I was in trouble.
Big
trouble.

‘This is insane,’ I mumbled under my breath. ‘They know me. They’ll listen. They have to believe me. Besides, there was a medic there. He’ll testify…’

I snorted. Testify, indeed. It might yet come to that. And there was no way my boss would believe me. Heck,
I
wouldn’t believe me. And even if the medic could be found and spoke up in my defence, hours had elapsed between his visit and that photo, and I could easily have taken drugs. There was no escaping the simple fact that I was in as much trouble as the band itself. It was only a matter of time until the shit and the fan would connect.

Random other thoughts jostled for attention. ‘This photo is
weeks
old. Why is it at the centre of this break-up scandal?’

I was still talking to myself, and the sound of my own voice was oddly soothing. I needed to stay calm. I clicked on the article and forced myself to read it. The information was scarce and unhelpful. Basically, or so I was invited to believe, the band ‘decided’ to split following a massive fight after a gig on the previous Saturday night. Allegations were levied backwards and forwards, but Mike’s overbearing nature and bad leadership were generally cited as the major reason for ‘irreconcilable differences.’

Shaking my head, I closed down the article and explored another link. Everything I read smacked of publicity stunt, but the odds were stacked against Mike, who was cast firmly in the role of the villain.

‘Poor Mike.’ My heart bled for him. He would be feeling awful. I wondered where he had gone, and what he would do next. And always, there was that photo of me in his arms.

Mike Loud’s love for women and insatiable appetite for sex and drugs played a critical role in the band’s decision to oust their lead singer…

‘Bugger,’ I repeated once more. Not normally given to swearing, it seemed the only appropriate response to the mess that had crash-landed on my desk. And the phone started ringing again.

‘Bugger
off
,’ I snapped at it. Unfortunately, my boss chose that moment to appear at my door. His hand was half raised to knock on the doorframe, and he wore a frozen rictus of a smile on his face.

‘Mark. Sorry.’ I stood up in a hurry and fluffed ineffectually at my hair. If he knew me at all, he would understand that I was seriously flustered. But he didn’t comment, merely stared. Unnerved by his silence, I prattled on.

‘Sorry. I didn’t mean
you
. I meant…’ I gestured helplessly at the phone, which was ringing again. Every sound pulled at my nerve strings, and I winced in pain.

‘Emily. I need to talk to you.’ Mark ignored the phone and my uncomfortable expression. He stepped into my office and closed the door behind him.

Bad sign.
For the first time in my entire professional career, I found myself stalling for time.

‘Um, Mark. Now is really not a very good time. I…I have that deadline, and…’

I let myself sink feebly into my chair while I was talking, subconsciously admitting defeat. Resistance was futile. Mark wanted to talk, so talk he would.

‘Now, please, Emily.’ He pulled up my visitor’s chair and sat down. For a moment, we regarded each other silently. I wondered if he could hear my heart beating high in my throat. Then again, the phone kept ringing and ringing, and I doubted he would pick up my palpitations over the racket.

‘Can you not turn that off?’ Mark spoke gruffly, with a barely controlled anger in his voice that made me quiver in my low-heeled office boots. I was in deeper-than-deep shit.

I lifted the receiver, slammed it down and lifted it again to punch in the code for auto-voicemail. Immediately, the office filled with silence. At last.

‘What is the meaning of this?’ Mark delicately placed a printout of a grainy photo on my desk, and I didn’t even need to look at it to know what it was. I swallowed and worked hard to keep my voice level and calm.

‘Not what you think.’

Ugh. Classic denial phrase. I tried again. ‘I had a fall. I was concussed.’ Might as well claim the benefit of the doubt. ‘There was a paramedic there, he’ll confirm this.’
Or not
. ‘I couldn’t walk. I was dizzy. Mike was helping me get on the tour bus so I could sleep.’

Mark’s face was a picture. Despite the seriousness of the situation, I relished the surprise in his eyes. I could practically see the little cogs in his brain computing the information.
Emily? With a rock band? On a tour bus?

‘Concussed, huh?’ A timbre of irony betrayed Mark’s disbelief.

‘Yes. Or suspected of being concussed, at least.’ It was probably best to stick with the absolute truth. ‘I fell and cracked my head on an equipment case. The paramedic thought I was probably all right, but Mike and Adam were under strict orders to keep an eye on me and to take me to hospital if I took a turn for the worse.’ My justification emerged in a breathless rush.

‘“Suspected” of being concussed. I see.’ I could hear the sarcasm in Mark’s voice while he picked up the photo again and looked at it closely. ‘If you don’t mind me saying, it’s hard to believe. You look way out of it here.’

I exhaled slowly to stop myself from snapping. ‘I was “way out of it” there. I was dizzy and nauseous. The band was about to go on stage. I needed sleep. So it was thought that it would be best to put me in the bus where I could remain until the band was finished and we would all drive to Bristol.’

‘So. Concussed, but not in need of a hospital. And able to tag along for a ride to the next city?’

It sounded hollow when Mark recapped it so starkly, but I nodded. ‘That’s about the size of it.’

‘That’s not what the papers say.’

He might as well have slapped me. I recoiled from the imagined impact.

‘You believe the tabloids over the word of a valued employee?’

‘I don’t know what to believe. You’ve come back from your holiday looking all different, you’ve
obviously
acted well out of character, and now this.’

‘Now this
what?
It’s a storm in a teacup. I had a holiday. I took a road trip. So what? I’m not a drug abuser. I was
ill
.’ Indignation made my voice rise with every word, but I couldn’t help it.

Mark shrugged. ‘That will have to be determined. For now, I have no choice but…’