Page 77 of Going Solo

“Toby Lyngstad, as I live and breathe!” It wasn’t Cole. It was the wrong Go To altogether. Behind my back, I rolled the underpants up and dropped them into Cole’s bag.

“Chase!” I said. “What are you doing here?”

The muscular frame of my formerMake Me a Pop Starroommate moved across the room towards me like he was breaking free of a rugby scrum with the ball. Chase’s hand was outstretched. I shook it without even thinking. My hand was more, er,moist,than I’d have liked it to be. I saw it register on Chase’s face. When the handshake was over, Chase tucked his hands into his armpits and discreetly wiped the moisture on his shirt.

Five minutes later, we had raided the non-alcoholic minibar and were sitting on the couch, fast running out of pleasantries.

“It’s good to see you, boyo,” Chase said for the tenth time. Cole aside, I hadn’t seen any of the Go Tos sincePop Star. Chase had always been lovely, but I didn’t have much to say to him. And his presence bothered me, because I’d thought Cole was mine alone for the evening.

“Are the others here?” I asked, worried Taylor, Joey, and Yoshi might be about to waltz through the door to make my nightmare complete.

“Fear not,” Chase said. “Joey is in the States somewhere, probably shouting at Republicans online and telling people he’s working class because he mines Bitcoin. Yoshi will be cross-legged in a forest somewhere, meditating on the meaning of life and only eating things that fall from the tree directly in front of him. And Taylor is in South America somewhere, spreading super gonorrhoea and life lessons in disappointment to unsuspecting women.”

Chase sucked on his bottle of water. Of all the Go Tos, he was the most normal. Chase had met a fan in Australia, married her in secret in Thailand three weeks later, and for the past five years, had been dragging his wife and an ever-growing brood of small children around on tour.

“So, are you and Cole back together, then?” Chase asked. The bluntness of the question winded me.

“No,” I said—because we weren’t.

“He used to mope around after you something terrible,” Chase said.

“That’s ancient history.”

Chase shook his head. “Cole was such a misery after you got kicked off the show. Felicity nearly booted him out of the band.”

“What?” This was new information.

“It was only after the thing with the text messages that he finally settled down. But he was miserable for ages. We all were. Can you imagine what it’s like, waking up every morning with Felicity Quant’s fingers wrapped around your balls?”

I shuddered.

“Not literally, you understand,” Chase added. “Metaphorically. Do you know, I didn’t see my parents for six whole months afterPop Star? They had no idea where I was until they’d see on the TV that I’d been on breakfast television in California or done a gig in Zagreb or appeared at a shopping mall in Tokyo. I’ve had ten years of this shit. We’re not people to her, we’re a commodity. A product. I don’t decide when I wake up, let alone what city I’m going to wake up in. I don’t get to decide what clothes I’m wearing. I don’t even get to decide where I stand in a line-up. Everything is planned. No wonder the boys are all a bit fucked in the head. I’m a twenty-eight-year-old man, Toby, whose phone is currently turned off because when Felicity sees the posts on social media of me at Cole’s gig, she’s going to lose her shit at me. You had a lucky escape, boyo.”

I thought of all the crap I’d dealt with over the past decade and wasn’t so sure.

“And I got lucky, too, of course,” Chase said. “I met Hannah. She keeps me on the straight and narrow. But the only person Cole had on tour was Jasper, and that was always going to be a disaster.”

“Jasper?” I asked. “Is that the ex?”

Chase looked surprised. “You know about Jasper?”

I shook my head. “Not much. I know there was an ex. And I know when Cole mentioned him, he sounded sort of broken.”

Chase nodded slowly, his bright blue eyes meeting mine. “Jasper was a costume designer for the band and one of Felicity’s flunkies. He was stuck to her side for years, feeding off her like a tick. I don’t know if she got bored with him and wanted to pass her parasite onto a new host, or whether it was the need to keep Cole in the closet, or to try to cheer him up because he was always so miserable, or because Jasper was a gay she could trust to be discreet and because he wasthere, but Felicity threw them into the path of each other.”

“Like a set-up?” I asked.

“More like Jasper was on a pre-approved list of potential boyfriends. Unfortunately, Jasper was also both a massive sociopath and the Totally Records in-house drug dealer, so that ended the way it was always going to end. Cole didn’t stand a chance?—”

The door flung open, and I looked up, expecting to see Cole, but instead, a camera crew burst into the dressing room. My heart plummeted, carried away in an avalanche of fear to the pit of my stomach. This was a trap.

“We’ll set up over here,” a woman with a clipboard and a pen stuck in her long curly hair said. “Cole will come in this way, so set camera one up to capture his entrance.” She looked around the room, unimpressed. “Christ, it’s drab in here. Kirsty, can you grab some set dressing and make this space look more intimate, more rock star, but also low-key homely?” The woman I took to be Kirsty shot back out the door. “Where’s that bloody genealogist got to? Someone find her…” As more instructions were barked, I felt the quickening beat of my pulse through my body. My fight or flight response was wound so tight my whole body risked spontaneously combusting into a misty puff of blood. The woman looked at me for the first time, and as our eyes connected, I saw the look of recognition on her face. My chest tightened, the air left my lungs, and I felt an overwhelming wave of nausea. She wasnotgoing to get me on film.

“Camera two!” she shouted, eyes never leaving me. “Where’s Phil? I need camera two,now.”

With that, I stood and ran for the door.

“Camera two!” I heard the woman shout as I rounded the door frame. I looked back, catching Chase’s piercing blue eyes and the look of concern on his face, before I bolted up the corridor, out of the arena, and into the street.

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