My hands tremble as I take out my phone and call Grandad. He’s calm. He tells me not to worry, they’ll be here in a minute.
I find a pack of tissues in my pocket. ‘Here, put some pressure on.’
I sit down beside her and put my arm around her. It’s weird, me taking care of her for a change. My throat aches and I fight the urge to cry. We sit there, me rubbing her back while her shoulders shake in silence.
‘Mum,’ I say after a while, ‘did you say you knew Will Bailey?’
Her face is a mess of tears, snot, and blood. She nods.
I open my mouth to ask the first of a million questions, but my grandparents pull up and I don’t get the chance.
‘That doesn’t look like public health in the Middle Ages,’ Chloe says, sitting down beside me and shoving me with her hip. I shriek and everyone in the library looks over. ‘Sorry! I forgot about your ribs. How are they?’
I roll my eyes at her. ‘Sore.’
At A&E last night, Mum was treated for whiplash and had her eyebrow glued. They told me my ribs and collarbone were bruised from the seatbelt, but it feels way worse than just ‘bruised’.
‘So, whatisthat?’ Chloe asks, pointing to my laptop. I scroll to the top of the Wikipedia page. ‘Will Bailey? Who’s he?’
‘I was playing one of his songs in the car when we crashed. Mum was crying afterwards. She said she knew him.’
Chloe scrolls to the picture of Bailey.
‘He’s hot. Wait, do you think she was a groupie?’ She giggles. ‘What does he look like now?’
‘He’s dead.’
She grabs my arm. ‘No!’
‘He was twenty-six. Says here “drowning and undetermined factors”. Whatever that means.’
‘That’s so sad… How well did your mum know him?’
A sixth-form girl at the end of our table glares at us, so I lower my voice. ‘I don’t know. After the crash, she said she knew him and later, she said she didn’t know what I was talking about.’
‘She hit her head, didn’t she? Maybe she was confused?’
‘I asked my grandparents about him. They gave each other this look, then said they’d never heard of him.’
‘What’s the big secret?’
‘I don’t know.’ I tell her. ‘But I want to find out.’
Chloe reads the Wikipedia entry: ‘William Oscar Bailey (25th November 1972–29th July 1999) was an English singer, songwriter, and guitarist. In 1996, Bailey released what would be his only album,Fragments. It reached number one in the UK and number three in the US.’
‘Can you imagine my mum hanging out with someone like Will Bailey?Notlikely.’
We tap away at our laptops for half an hour, and I’ve just found out what trepanning is when Chloe nudges me.
‘Look at this,’ she says.
My screen’s filled with historical engravings of people having holes drilled into their heads, but Chloe is on YouTube with her earphones in. We must have slipped into an alternate reality where our roles are reversed. She hands me one of her earphones and plays the video.
‘Is that the Pyramid Stage?’ I ask, recognising its iconic shape. ‘Will Bailey played Glastonbury?’
‘Yeah, in 1997. It’s daytime, though, he’s not headlining or anything.’
The camera pans across the vast undulating ocean of people stretching as far as the horizon. It zooms in on the singer’s face, his eyes gleaming as he looks out at the scene before him. He pauses before strumming his guitar and the crowd roars.