Page 110 of The Reboot
Once they got here, he’d quickly abandoned her. But though she longed for her bed, she hung on, afraid to look away. She’d never seen Roly so out of control, and she had a horrible feeling that something terrible would happen if she wasn’t paying attention.
Earlier she’d tried to talk to the people around him, to get them to do something, but they’d all brushed her aside with varying degrees of dismissiveness. In a week’s time they were leaving on the American leg of the tour, and who would watch Roly then?
Marty, Roly’s party-loving accountant, had been patronising and avuncular. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll take care of him,’ he’d said when she mentioned her concerns.
She looked across at Roly, huddled with a group around a table, twitchy and loud, gesticulating manically as he held court. ‘It doesn’t look like it.’
‘He’s just letting off steam. You know Roly. He has a lot of nervous energy to burn off. He needs to be doing something. Once the tour gets underway and he has something to occupy him, he’ll be fine.’
Ella wasn’t convinced. But no one would take her seriously when she tried to tell them Roly needed help.
‘Lighten up,’ Zack said. ‘He’s just having fun. You remember fun, Ella?’
‘I’m really worried about him. He needs to be in rehab.’
‘Well, that’s not going to happen anytime soon. We’ve got the American tour coming up. There’s no way he can ditch that to go to fucking rehab!’
‘I think his life is more important than some tour!’
‘The tourishis life! This band is his life!’
‘Well, it’ll be a short one if he carries on the way he’s going. I’m going to talk to Vince, tell him what’s going on.’
Zack snorted. ‘You think he doesn’t know? Jesus! Who do you think keeps it all hush-hush? He’s not going to let Roly fuck this up for all of us.’
Ella’s eyes widened. She hated that Zack made her feel so naive.
On the off-chance that he was bluffing, she cornered Vince later and broached the subject. ‘Roly’s got a drug problem,’ she said baldly. ‘He’s in a really bad way. You need to get him into rehab.’
Vince gave her a hard look, and she knew immediately that he was well aware that Roly was in trouble. With mounting panic, she realised he was not only doing nothing about it, but was actively facilitating it.
‘I’d be careful who you say things like that to, sweetheart. And keep your fucking voice down!’ he hissed.
‘You don’t give a damn about Roly, do you? Or any of them? They’re just cash cows to you.’
‘Look, we’ll take care of it once this tour is over. It’s only three months. He can hold it together that long.’
‘I don’t know if he can.’ But Vince was already walking away. The conversation was over and she’d been dismissed.
Larry, Vince’s business partner and the head of the record label, was almost the worst, because he understood the severity of the problem, but didn’t seem to grasp the urgency. ‘Look, I hear what you’re saying,’ he told her, ‘and you’re absolutely right.’
Ella had almost burst into tears of relief that someone saw the danger, that she wasn’t going to have to handle this alone.
‘Just wait until this tour is over, and we’ll get him the help he needs,’ he continued, and Ella’s heart sank.
‘But that could be too late.’
‘That’s a bit melodramatic, isn’t it?’
‘And in the meantime, what? You just let him carry on like this, so it doesn’t threaten your golden goose?’
‘Of course not. Don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye on him on the tour. We all will. None of us can afford to let him get out of control.’
‘Afford! That’s all you care about, isn’t it? Money.’
‘Come on, love. That’s not true. We all care about Roly. I look after him like a father.’
Ella felt a chill creeping through her veins. ‘Yes, you do. Just like his own father.’
