Confessions Of A Karaoke Queen (22 page)

‘Well,’ he smiles regretfully, ‘I’m sure you know about my, er’ – he clears his throat, goes a little red – ‘status in certain circles.’

I fold my arms, only to keep out the cold but aware it looks defensive. ‘Yeah.’

‘Yeah.’

I wait for him to go on, but he doesn’t. Instead he rubs his chin, his eyes dark and unreadable. I want to know more, and at the same time I don’t.

‘So you’re hoping this gig might get you back on track?’ I ask.

‘That sounds callous.’

‘Well, are you?’

He pulls at his earlobe. ‘In a way, yes. Evan was … kind to give me the opportunity.’

‘He approached you?’

Nick looks shifty. ‘Yep.’

‘So I guess you have to behave yourself this time.’ I regret the words as soon as I say them. But he watches me like he’s considering it properly.

‘I guess so.’

There’s a silence. I want him to confirm the thing with
Rebecca Ascot, or deny it. But then I don’t really want to know either way. I want him to say that he thinks Evan Bergman’s a weirdo, and reassure me that there’s no hidden agenda. Quite what that hidden agenda might be, I haven’t worked out yet.

‘You cold?’ he asks.

‘A bit. We should head back.’ I get to my feet before he has the chance to offer me his jacket. For some reason it would feel too … rehearsed.

‘We should.’ He stands and the easy banter of the last half hour disappears. ‘Another busy night ahead, we hope.’

I laugh nervously.

‘But you’re happy? That’s really why I wanted to chat – to make sure you’re OK with how everything’s going. No problems with anything?’ He frowns a little. ‘Or anyone?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Great.’ He grins. Neither of us moves.

‘Any problems, you come to me,’ he says. ‘I just want to make your life as easy as possible.’ It reminds me of something Evan would say.

‘Thanks.’

He smiles again. ‘Shall we?’

I nod. ‘Let’s.’

The girl on stage is doing that semi-squatting booty-shake thing that only looks good when Beyoncé does it. When the rest of us try, we could be a) someone’s mum with a worryingly aggressive sex drive, or b) fitting.

Her voice isn’t bad, or at least I don’t think it is – it’s difficult to tell with the distraction. Right now there’s a serious possibility that we neglected to rewire the microphones sufficiently and she’s actually being electrocuted.

This is typical Saturday night fodder. People come in even greater numbers at the weekend, desperate to claim their three-second slot on TV, deciding that if their appearance is
outrageous enough they might make the edited cut – or at least glimpse themselves in the periphery of a shot. Actually hardly any of the karaoke gets broadcast: you often hear it in the background but the cameras are more interested in the patrons themselves, and in following us staff about. Personally I can’t imagine what’s so interesting about watching us clear tables and chat about nothing much (with the exception of Jaz and Andre, who have gained something of a cult status in
TweenGirl
magazine), but Evan says that ‘mundane is the new extraordinary’. What that makes Jaz, then, I’m not entirely sure.

It’s the following weekend and Divas Theme Night. I’m pleased I managed to get this past Evan, who’s had an iron fist on proceedings since our meeting. He didn’t seem all that keen on pursuing any of the ideas I had prior to agreeing to the show, but given that this was one of the reasons we got involved in the first place, I had to put my foot down.

We’ve got about six hen parties in tonight, heavily made-up, over-excited gaggles of girls and scarcely a bloke in sight. Earlier I spotted one buried in a crowd of screaming women and wearing an expression of pure terror, as though he’d just slipped unwittingly into the seventh circle of hell. Limousines have been rocking up outside, even a gigantic pink thing that looked like a school bus crossed with a pig. Jaz informed me it was a ‘stretch hummer’, which sounds to me like a pair of tights that haven’t been washed in a week.

The Beyoncé impersonator leaves the stage to rapturous applause. So marks the end of that group’s slot, and, on realising this, the girls are so distraught that one of our bouncers has to intervene and peel them manually off the mics.

‘Just one more!’ Beyoncé’s friend cries. ‘Just one Tina, I promise!’ The bouncer is stoic. ‘“Nutbush City Limits”!’ the girl babbles – desperate, wild, hopeful, as if this massive bald heavy’s about to go, Oh,
all
right then, so long as it’s not ‘Steamy Windows’.

There’s a scrum as the next lot hit the playlists. One of them produces a list of pre-appointed song choices – wow, that’s efficient – and punches them furiously into the machine like some computer hacker in a heist movie. Everyone else is squabbling over the mics. (In my own experience of karaoke, it’s a job to get anyone to go within two feet of a mic in the first half hour, so we must be doing something right.) Billy Idol winds up with barely a pause. A girl with bobbed brown hair takes to the stage with a tambourine and starts banging it with force.

‘You can’t have this!’ Beyoncé girl complains, hands on hips, shooting daggers at the performers. ‘It’s a man!’

Man or not, I suspect Billy’s one of the biggest divas going, so I’m not about to get involved. Plus it looks dangerously like a bitch fight might be about to unfold, and I’m ill-equipped to handle that at the best of times, let alone to a soundtrack of ‘White Wedding’.

My very own diva slips into the chair next to mine. I’m hidden in a booth at the back, checking through our orders for the past week. They’re miles above anything we were able to afford previously, and even then we’re falling shy of our revised budget. For the first time in the club’s history, we’ve got money to spare.

‘Isn’t this
fabulous
?’ Ruby du Jour sips her cosmopolitan, depositing a red lipstick stain on the rim of the glass.

‘Yup,’ I say, glancing up at the girls doing Billy Idol. One of them looks uncannily
like
Billy Idol, which isn’t, in fact, unattractive. ‘It’s pretty special.’

‘It’s unbelievable.’ She chases her glacé cherry with an umbrella stick (glacé cherries? Umbrella sticks? I thought we were updating things). ‘Rick and Sapphy aren’t going to know what hit them!’

‘Hmm.’ I scribble down my monthly projection.

‘How are they? I got a text from Sapphy last week but I couldn’t make out what it said. Someone’s keyboard exploded?’

‘They’re OK, I think.’ I flip the file closed. ‘Mum rang on Tuesday but we only got to speak for five minutes because they were having drinks with Kajagoogoo.’

‘Kaja-who-who?’

‘Not knowing will have absolutely no impact on your life whatsoever.’

‘Have you seen the face on that?’ Ruby sends a catty glance across the room, where stroppy Beyoncé is being drip-fed a garish green concoction by a sympathetic friend. Toby’s hovering nearby with one of the cameras, Nathan’s boom craning over them like something prehistoric. ‘Hardly ladylike behaviour.’ She sniffs and tends to the elaborate construction aloft her head: a blonde beehive with little red flowers wound into it.

I laugh. ‘So where’s Rob been hiding?’ I’m referring to Ruby’s male alter ego. Once it was easy to forget which was the original and which the costume, but lately Rob’s nowhere to be seen. I have my suspicions why.

‘Oh, this is all
much
too exciting for him.’ There’s a twinkle
in Ruby’s eye, but it’s accompanied by a twinge of self-consciousness.

‘You don’t think he finds it a bit overwhelming?’

‘Certainly not!’

I shrug. ‘It
is
overwhelming, I’m the first to admit it – some days I could really do with a Ruby in my life.’

‘You could?’

‘Sure.’ I consider it. ‘Some days I’d love to try another version of me. And there’s more than one side to people, isn’t there? With Ruby you get to explore different parts of your personality – that’s an amazing thing.’

She smiles. ‘I suppose.’

‘But Rob’s just as important, remember?’ I hope I’m getting my meaning across.

Ruby looks uncomfortable. ‘He’s not very – I mean, I’m not very –
exciting
without … Never mind. I can’t imagine he’ll interest many people out there, that’s all I’m saying.’

‘He’ll interest me.’

‘He won’t interest Evan,’ she says, and the tone she uses is so unlike Ruby that I turn to check she’s OK. Of course she covers it with a smile.

‘Has Evan said something to you?’ I knew it!

‘No, just …’

‘Just what?’

‘Only …’ She clicks her teeth. ‘He’d rather I was Ruby, that’s all. Said it was good for TV. And the Rob thing is confusing, I know that. I can see his point …’

I frown. ‘I guess I can see it too, kind of, but he’s forgetting that this is meant to be a reality show. What’s real about it if we’re all pretending to be something we’re not?’

Ruby gestures down at her dress with a sad sort of expression. ‘Aren’t I doing that already?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Forget about it, it doesn’t matter.’

‘The principle does. I’m sick of Evan issuing us orders. God!’

Alison swoops in, camera trained on the scent of scandal. Even though the idea is to carry on conversations as normal, I instinctively clam up.

‘Well come on then!’ says Alison, exasperated. ‘Or this is going to be the boringest instalment of anything
ever
.’

‘Didn’t Toby catch the spat with Beyoncé?’ I ask. ‘You might still have time – she’s been weeping for about fifteen minutes now.’

Alison whips round. ‘Beyoncé’s here?’

‘Yeah. And Gaga and Rihanna. Needed the publicity, apparently.’

‘I’m serious,’ she moans, putting the camera down. ‘Evan told us to get as much juice as we could, and all I’m going back with tonight is a load of drunk people singing and falling over.’

I raise an eyebrow. ‘I hate to break it to you, but that’s what tends to happen in karaoke bars.’

‘But Evan wants
action
. He thinks—’

‘Stuff what Evan thinks.’

Alison looks affronted. I wonder what Evan would think if I suggested lifting the lid on whatever’s going on between him and his chief camera op – that’s a little goldmine of action right there. Not that I would, of course. Because there’s a little thing called privacy that Evan seems to have forgotten about.

Alex slips in opposite us, all chiselled jaw and plasticine
hair, a square foot of copper chest on show where his flimsy top falls open.

‘Shouldn’t you be working?’ I demand. On cue Alison resumes filming.

‘Just taking a break.’ He regards me with flinty eyes. ‘The others have got it covered.’

I check the bar. Lou and Simon are at one end, chatting and laughing and finding any excuse to be with each other.

Their date went brilliantly. Lou texted soon after Nick walked me home, and when I saw her name pop up I knew it was either a complete success or a complete disaster. Just three words – ‘I’m eating steak’ – was all she needed to say. I did consider telling her about my chat with Nick, but in the end I chickened out. There didn’t seem any point and, besides, I knew she’d be the voice of reason – and I wasn’t sure I was ready to listen to reason just yet.

‘Jaz seems moody,’ observes Alex, running a hand through his Action Man crop. It’s so rigid I’m surprised it moves.

‘Does she?’ I turn round. Jaz is clad in a torn denim ‘shipwreck chic’ ensemble, with what appears to be a plastic crab caught up in the red seaweed of her hair. With her rodent side-kick in similar garb, I wonder if it’s a ‘modern twist’ on
Robinson Crusoe
, with Andre as Guinea Pig Friday. She’s laughing with a customer.

‘Yeah’ – he fires a purposeful glance at the camera – ‘must be the Simon and Lou thing.’

I frown, deciding it safest not to comment. But Ruby beats me to it.

‘What do you mean? She’s not jealous of Lou … is she?’

‘Of course she’s not jealous,’ I say firmly, just as Alex makes
a face that suggests she is, in fact, extremely jealous. ‘She’s not.’