Page 31 of The Reboot
‘Of course. I wouldn’t expect to live anywhere for free.’
‘But I could give you mate rates.’
‘I wouldn’t want to take advantage, though. You could get someone who’d pay proper rent.’
‘I’d rather not take my chances with a stranger. Seriously, you’d be doing me a favour. I don’t need much coming in – just enough to stave off the panic attacks until I figure something else out.’
‘Well, Icouldpromise not to follow you around fangirling over you.’
‘Does that mean you’re considering it?’
‘I don’t know…’ She was touched by the offer, but did he really mean it? And would it be a good idea? She looked around the living room, trying to envision herself living here.
‘I’d clean the place up,’ he said quickly. ‘And there’s plenty of space.’
It could be the perfect solution. She could move out, and her mum and Nora could go on their trip without worrying about her being alone. A slow smile spread across her face. ‘Roly, is this a genuine offer? Because I have to warn you, I’m tempted to take you up on it.’
‘Of course it’s genuine. It’d be great, the two of us living together. We’re kind of both on the same page – trying to get back on our feet, get fit. We could do it together.’
Ella was starting to get excited about the idea. She loved a project, and she was already envisioning Kanban boards and goal-setting sessions. ‘It would be good to have an accountability partner. We could do our own personal boot camp.’
He nodded. ‘We can cook healthy food and work out together. We could start running!’
‘Or not. Suddenly I’m less tempted.’
He grinned. ‘Okay, we don’t have to go running. Why don’t I show you around, and you can have a think about it?’
Ella loved the house, and was already picturing herself having coffee in the little terrace garden – ‘it’s a total sun trap in summer,’ Roly told her – or snuggled up in the big armchair in front of a real fire on a cold winter day.
It was only when Roly was showing her the bathroom and they were both standing in the small space that she began to have doubts. They hardly knew each other really. Would it be awkward sharing a bathroom? It seemed scarily intimate.
‘And this would be your room,’ he said finally, leading her into a large airy room with a double bed and lots of wardrobe and drawer space. Like the rest of the house, it was crammed with junk, the bed buried under a jumble of clothes. ‘Obviously I’d clear it out. And there’s an en suite through there.’ He pointed to a door, and Ella immediately felt better about the whole thing as she stepped through into a small bathroom. This might be doable after all.
‘So, what do you think?’ Roly asked as they walked back downstairs.
Ella grinned. ‘I think you’ve got yourself a lodger.’
These Are Days
Ella had been surprised and,though she’d barely admit it to herself, hugely flattered, when Roly stayed in touch with her after they’d left school and he’d moved to London with the band. He messaged her occasionally with updates about his exciting new life when Oh Boy! were recording their first album and they’d all moved into a vast warehouse apartment in Shoreditch paid for by the record company. She sometimes wished she had something more interesting to tell him in return. She’d started college and she was enjoying her studies and the new friends she was making. But her life largely went on much the same, and compared to Roly’s it seemed dull and uneventful. He was busy touring the world, playing giant stadiums and appearing on TV, while she was writing essays, studying for exams and working part-time as a waitress in a small cafe to supplement her grant.
As time went on and the band became bigger, his communications became increasingly sporadic. It was sad, but inevitable, she thought, that they’d eventually drop off completely. Their lives were so different, they had nothing in common now — and they’d had little enough to begin with. It still sometimes puzzled her how they’d become friends in the first place. But always just as she gave up and decided she’d heard the last from him, a message would appear out of the blue. She suspected she mostly heard from him when he was a bit down or homesick, or when he’d fallen out with one of the guys in the band.
Then last week, almost a year after he’d left, Oh Boy! were coming to Dublin on their first tour, and he offered to put Ella on the guest list. She didn’t want to hurt his feelings by saying no, even though Oh Boy! really weren’t her kind of thing. She didn’t know if she’d see Roly afterwards or if he just wanted to show off. But she talked Julie into going with her, and the two of them sat in the 3Arena amongst a crowd of hysterical, squealing teenyboppers and their parents.
‘We should have brought a kid with us,’ Julie hissed at her, making an ostentatious display of not enjoying herself. A memory of the Debs flashed through Ella’s mind; Julie standing on the sidelines, a supercilious smile on her face.
She regretted bringing Julie tonight. Why couldn’t she just let go and enjoy it for what it was, in all its insane, ridiculous glory? She thought it was funny that they looked so out of place among the sweaty, over-stimulated children, and it was fun seeing Roly up on stage doing his thing, bumping and grinding his way through the preposterous dance routines. The whole thing was cheesy and over the top, but it was kind of wonderful in its way, and it was nice to see all the kids so into it, screaming their heads off and sobbing with joy and emotional overwhelm.
So the music wasn’t her and Julie’s kind of thing, but the show was fun, and she could see how it could be kind of cathartic if you just let go and went with it. She’d never experienced anything like it before. The venue was a boiling mass of emotion, the kids swept along on a huge swell of love, longing and hero worship, like a Mexican wave of emotion rippling through the crowd.
The band had real charisma, and their performance was smooth and polished. The songs weren’t awful, just bland and nauseatingly repetitive, so you were sick of them by the time the second chorus came around, and were almost grateful for the ear-splitting screams threatening to drown them out. But they were undeniably catchy, and as the teenyboppers sang along at the tops of their voices, waving phones above their heads, Ella found herself itching to join in – to just let herself go and ball out the songs while she waved her arms in the air and sobbed unreservedly for no particular reason.
To her surprise, when they’d turned up at the door, the woman doing the guest list had handed her a backstage pass before waving them inside. She was relieved when Julie announced she was going home as the lights came up and the crowd streamed towards the exits. She’d been pointedly looking at her watch and heaving loud sighs throughout the encore.
‘You don’t want to come backstage?’ Ella silently prayed she’d say no.
Julie smiled crookedly. ‘No, thanks. I need to go home and have a long, hot shower to scrub myself clean after that.’
