Idolism (19 page)

So I just got up and left without saying a word. Outside of Michael’s house about a dozen fans were waiting. They surrounded me when I got out and asked me a million questions. I don’t remember any of them, and I didn’t answer them. I just signed a couple of autographs and then I left. I didn’t go home. I didn’t know where I was going or where I was supposed to go. The night was dark and cold, and I felt like I was the only human left in the world. I certainly was, at that time, the only person left in me own world. Except …

After wandering aimlessly through the night for two hours, I ended up in front of Momoko’s house. I hadn’t meant to go there, and I didn’t realize I was there until I actually stood on her doorstep. It was around midnight. There was still light in her bedroom on the first floor. I knocked on the door. Twice. After a while I heard her coming down the stairs. She opened the door in a silk dressing gown.

“Tummy,” she said, visibly surprised. “What’s wrong?”

I didn’t say anything. I just threw meself around her neck and started to cry.

She led me to the living room and made me a cup of tea. We talked. I mean, I did. I told her everything. I told her how Julian, Ginger, and Michael were the only friends I’d ever known and the only people who had ever cared about me. I told her how this was the most exciting time of me life, and how I suddenly felt more miserable and more lonely than ever before. And I told her how me dad hated me and didn’t even have the guts to show it, to shout at me, to be angry at me, and to punish me.

“You think you deserve to be punish?” Momoko asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I suppose. Me parents have always punished me for pretty much everything I ever did. And now me friends and I have completely ruined me dad’s career, and there’s nothing. Nothing but this subtle passive-aggressiveness. They say everything’s okay, but at the same time they won’t pass me the salt at the dinner table. It’s like they’ve finally stopped giving a damn.”

Momoko looked at me, then at her beautiful fingernails, then at me again. “You like me to punish?”

“What?!”

Momoko jumped to her feet and slammed both her hands on the table. “I said: you like me to punish?!” She shouted it, and she sounded really angry. Also, the belt of her dressing gown had come undone and I could see that she didn’t wear a bra.

I don’t know what I was thinking. I didn’t know what I was supposed to think. So I just said, “Yes, please.”

* * *

When I woke up the next morning, it took me a good minute to realize who I was or where I was or what had happened. Do you know those first few moments when you wake up and the last fragments of your dreams still linger in your mind? I love sleeping, but the part of it that I love the most is waking up, those few precious seconds when you don’t know who you are or where you are or what you are. All you know is that you are. You do exist. And nothing else matters. The birth of consciousness, the moment when awe strikes you because you’ve just become self-aware. You feel happy, and for a tiny little moment your happiness is all that matters. It’s the only reason to be alive, the only thing worth living for.

And then it hits you like machine gun fire from all sides.

Bam! Bam! Bam!

And within a second you remember everything. Everything you went to bed with is still there, and you know it won’t just go away. Climate change is still happening, you’re still suspended from school, your dad still hates you, your friends still don’t care, and you’re still fat. And just when you’ve realized that your life still sucks, and that you’re in really deep shit because you’ve ruined your dad’s career, and because you’ve spent the night away from home and your parents are probably sick with fear, and they’ve probably called the police to look for you, it suddenly strikes you that these are all petty problems compared with what you’ve gotten yourself into
now
. Because right there in the doorway stands Momoko Suzuki, a 22-year-old TV celebrity, one of the most famous and most loved faces of the nation, and you’ve probably ruined her career too by effectively turning her into a child molester. You should just get out of bed, take a shower, and then kill yourself.

“Ohayo gozaimasu, Tummy-chan,” she said. That had to be a good sign, because it was Japanese and meant ‘Good morning, little Tummy’. At least she didn’t say, ‘Get the fuck out of my bed, and make sure nobody sees you on the way out’. Not that I’d have understood that if she’d said it in Japanese.

“Ohayo gozaimasu, Momo-chan,” I replied.

Momoko sat down on the bed, tucked her long brown hair behind her beautiful ears, and smiled at me.

“You like breakfast?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sure. Breakfast would be nice.”

She swung her leg around and sat down on me belly like a rider on a horse. Then she opened her dressing gown, took both her boobs in her hands and asked, “You like milk for breakfast?”

I’m asking you, how is a 17-year-old boy supposed to deal with that type of thing? I had no idea, so oops, we did it again. It’s what rock stars do. They wake up in the morning, and before they even have breakfast they have sex with their girlfriend. I was living the life of a rock star. It was all sex and drugs and Rock’n’roll, with the drugs of me choice being adrenaline and testosterone.

And this is where the story could—or should—have ended as far as I was concerned. You know, they had seven children and 49 grandchildren, and they lived happily ever after. That would have been perfectly fine with me. But it’s obviously not what happened.

When we were finally having breakfast, I made the tactical mistake of switching me mobile back on. I had 28 new text messages and 15 voice mails, but before I even had the time to check any of them, the phone started to ring.

It was me mum.

“Thomas!” she barked at me. “Where the hell are you?!”

“I’m with a friend,” I said. “I’ll be home soon. Bye.”

I pressed the disconnect button. The phone rang again after just a few seconds. This time it was Ginger.

“Tummy! Where the hell are you?!”

“Wow,” I said. “You sound exactly like me mum.”

“I know,” she replied. “Because that crazy woman keeps calling and driving everyone insane. I told her you spent the night at Michael’s and that you’re still asleep. You might want to keep that story in mind when you get home to get your suitcase.”

“Me suitcase?”

“Yes, you suitcase. We’re going on a trip. Our flight leaves in three hours, so you better hurry and roll your arse over here. Where are you anyway?”

“I’m with a friend,” I said.

“You don’t have any friends. Your only friends are here with me.”

“Never mind, I’m on me way. Where are we going anyway?”

“Deutschland,” she said. “Time to say sorry to the Germs.”

The Gospel According to Ginger – 9

When we arrived in Berlin that afternoon, Momoko and her camera team were already waiting for us at the airport. I don’t know how they did it. Peter Tholen didn’t know how they did it either, but at that point he didn’t care. We had come to Berlin to play a concert for the Germs in order to apologize for the political mayhem Julian had created at Wembley, and to have a T-Vox camera team there who could report our diplomatic efforts back to the UK seemed like a good idea to him, so he couldn’t care less about how Momoko had even found out about it. The man was a public relations genius, and as long as he could use the media for his own purposes, he didn’t ask any questions. In fact, in a quick little chat at the airport he even told Momoko the exact time and place of our gig, so that when we arrived at the Brandenburg Gate for our concert in the evening, Momoko, Cameraron, and Audiomike were again already waiting for us. And they weren’t the only ones. There were about 5,000 people there when we got on that stage right in front of the Brandenburg Gate, most of them in their mid to late teens. The stage was part of a music festival that was supposed to start the next day, and we were allowed to use it because Tholen was well connected even in the German music scene, so all he had to do was pull a few strings.

The concert went pretty well from what I could tell. The crowd went wild as soon as we started playing, which I thought was pretty amazing considering the fact that we hadn’t done any promotion in Germany whatsoever, unless you counted our rendition of their false anthem at Wembley as promotion. But apparently Tholen had called a couple of local radio and TV stations, and they had been kind enough to let their viewers and listeners know about our little surprise concert. So yeah, the concert started out pretty well, but of course it ended in mayhem. But at least this time it wasn’t our fault.

The concert was supposed to last 45 minutes or an hour or something like that. We were about halfway through with our set list, and things seemed to go really well. The German fans were really nice. Well, at least I think they were. I didn’t understand any of the things they were shouting at us, but there were lots of smiles and cheers, so I guess they must have liked us. Anyway, halfway through our set list, Julian started his little speech. In German. He read it off a piece of paper. I don’t speak any German at all, so I had no idea what he was saying. Later I’ve been told that he apologized if he had hurt anybody’s feelings when he messed up the lyrics at Wembley the other day, but that he had looked at both lyrics, the official German anthem and the old East German one, and that he thought that the East German one was so much better and easier to understand and so much clearer in its vision of the future. There were cheers and applause from the crowd, and then suddenly they started singing their anthem. I mean, they used the melody of the official anthem but with the East German lyrics, just like Julian had done at Wembley. And they seemed to love it. I remember that the four of us just looked at each other, not quite sure what to do, and then Julian just started to strum along the melody on his guitar, and I thought
what the heck
and joined in with the keyboard. And before we even knew it, we were playing the exact same song we’d come here to apologize for. And the crowd loved it. They were singing and cheering and clapping their hands and having a great time. Until Peter Tholen pulled the plug on us, and the sound system went dead silent.

* * *

When we got off the stage, Tholen stood there flailing his arms about and shouting at us. That man knows some pretty ugly words. The problem is, we had no idea what the hell he was on about. We tried to tell him that the crowd had started to sing the song and that we just played along. He wouldn’t even listen. He just kept shouting, “Scandal! International relations! A disgrace for our country!” Things like that. It was sort of funny, really. We couldn’t help but just stand there, look at each other and try not to burst out laughing. Of course he saw the smirks on our faces, which just aggravated him even more, and I remember thinking that I never want to grow so old that I completely lose my sense of humour. What a miserable kind of life that must be, even if you’re rich. I’d rather be poor and laugh every day than be rich and walk around with me head up my arse all the time. So pathetic.

Well anyway, he kept shouting at us as he drove us back to the hotel in our rented minivan, and he kept saying completely crazy stuff like, “This trip is over! We’re going back home tomorrow!” which was hilarious because we were supposed to be going back home the next day anyway. So yeah, that was one hell of a punishment. Bloody idiot. Not my own words. That’s what Julian kept calling him throughout the ride back to the hotel.

“You’re a bloody idiot,” Julian said to him whenever he opened his mouth to continue whining about how we were destroying our own career. Interestingly, this is what seemed to calm him down in the end. He saw how pointless it was to keep shouting at us. He may have been looking for remorse, but all he got was Julian repeatedly telling him that he was an idiot, and the rest of us happily smirking away. So he finally shut up, and at that point I almost felt sorry for him.

The Gospel According to Tummy – 10

I woke up in the middle of the night because me mobile rang. I answered it before I even realized where I was. Literally.

“Hello?”

It was Michael. “Tummy, where the hell are you?”

“I’m in bed,” I said, and before the words even left me lips I bit me tongue. Wrong answer.

“No, you’re not!”

We had three rooms in that hotel in Berlin. We always had three rooms. Julian needed a single room because he couldn’t sleep with strangers around. Yeah, apparently even his best friends qualified as strangers when it came to sleeping. Ginger had a single room as well because all our parents thought it was inappropriate for a teenage girl to be sharing a room with teenage boys. That left Michael and I sharing a double room, which is why he knew I wasn’t in bed, because he was. Except I was in bed. It just wasn’t me own bed, if you know what I mean. Momoko and her camera team stayed at the same hotel, two floors above us, and they all had single rooms. Momoko now switched on the bedside lamp, squinted into the light and said, “Nani?”

That’s Japanese for ‘What the hell is going on?’

“Oh, right,” I said to Michael on the phone. “No, what I meant was, I was in bed but then I was too tired to sleep so I went for a walk. Yeah, I’m taking a walk. I’m walking, like, right now.”

It took Michael a second to process that. Eventually he said, “You forgot to put on your shoes.”