Page 5 of Ex in the City
There are all sorts of things in this box. Signed CDs, plectrums and drumsticks given to me by various musicians after their shows – I could probably clean up on eBay, and I may well need to, when I’m out on my arse here. But the thing I’m looking for, the main reason I’m opening this box, is for the photos. Yes, I know I sound like I am one thousand years old, but it was still cool (although only just about) to take a disposable camera around with you back then – and even when we made the switch to digital, it didn’t feel right, not printing them out, not holding the photos in your hands to look through them or put them on the walls. It’s funny because these days we pretty much accept that all of our photos are just data that we push around in the digital world. I’ll take pictures on my phone, post them to Instagram, and then leave them to live happily in the cloud. I miss having real photos, when I realise that.
I pull the photos out and the first thing I see are pictures from the last time I toured with Two For The Road. Wow, you never hear of them any more, they were one of those bands who got way too big way too fast and they let it go to their heads. There was Eddie, the sexy frontman, a guy who had so much charisma he needed multiple girlfriends to help him manage it. Well, when I say girlfriends, I don’t mean that they were his girlfriends – although more often than not they were someone else’s. Then there was Ben, the guitarist, Mark, the bassist, and then Luke, the drummer.
I hold my breath for a moment as I look at a photo of me and Luke, him with his arm around my waist as we both pose for a photo in some dimly lit, grubby backstage room. I had the biggest crush on Luke for years and years, and I never thought he would ever like me back until one tour, when Two For The Road were just starting to hit the big time, when he told me that he felt the same way. It took us a while to get together, thanks to all sorts of reasons, but eventually we did.
I actually lived with him, in London, for a little while when I first moved there – that’s the first time I felt like I was getting my happy ever after. I thought I had a good job at a big newspaper, a cool flat where I lived with my boyfriend and our dog – but it was actually Buddy, my chihuahua, who lasted the longest out of all of the above. He sadly passed away last year but having him in my life for a decade made everything feel so much easier. All of the bad times feel better when you have a dog around, someone who loves you unconditionally, something to care for when you don’t even feel like caring for yourself.
Luke Fox, on the other hand, was a different kind of dog. I thought he was great, he was there for me when I needed him, and I stood by him through his problems with drugs, and when we were out the other side of it all I thought that was it, the bad stuff was behind us, it was all going to be okay. However, the first tour he went on without me, it turned out that he not only loved doing drugs more than he loved me, but he loved doing random groupies even more than he loved doing drugs. He’s not so much my one that got away, more the one I was lucky to get away from. Honestly, it was a really strange moment, when my editor thought it would be a good idea for me to be the person who broke the story about him. It was therapeutic, in a way, and deeply traumatic in others.
Ah, well, good riddance to that lot, they were all dirtbags anyway. So were most bands back then – definitely all of the ones that I knew, or had to work with.
I flick through more photos, looking at my younger self, seeing how happy I looked. We all thought we were so cool back then, that we were living the dream, that our lifestyle was this amazing thing that everyone else wished they had. Looking back now, we weren’t living the dream at all, it was a nightmare at times.
Things that seemed so normal at the time are so obviously the biggest red flags now. In this day and age, with so many people coming forward to expose their past bad experiences with celebrities, I often see people asking the question: why didn’t they say anything sooner? Honestly, I was there, and believe me when I say that none of us realised that we actually could.
The things I experienced, or that I saw, were all things that we were made to feel were normal. It was just a given, that the rich, handsome celebrity was going to pick someone to go back to his hotel room, and you were supposed to hope you’d be chosen as the lucky one. Oftentimes things didn’t even feel like a choice you were making, it was just the done thing, and everyone made you feel like you were so, so fortunate to be there. That’s the thing, when you’re in a bad situation, but you can see so many girls so willing to take your place, it tricks your brain into thinking that maybe things aren’t bad, maybe you’re just being silly. My blood boils when I think of some of the men I encountered back then, and some of the stories I heard from others, and I’m so happy that people are being called out now.
I find one picture in particular, of me and Luke, and I can tell from the state of him that he was fresh out of the hospital (an accident, courtesy of his drug problem), and we’re both smiling, like we’re on top of the world, and I just want to grab that poor girl and hug her and take her away from it all. I went through so much, so young, and if I ever have kids, I would hate to think of them experiencing the same.
It wasn’t all bad memories. Sure, there are lots of them dotted along the timeline, but when things were good, they were great. I had so much fun – I’ve probably forgotten more than I remember – and I made the kind of memories that most people don’t get the chance to. I remember back when I was at school, and I was first getting into music in a big way (assuming we don’t count how obsessed I was with the Spice Girls back in thenineties), I would put posters on my walls and lie on my bed listening to albums on my allegedly portable CD player (which seems laughably unportable, compared to the iPod I eventually got for my sixteenth birthday) and I would fantasise, dreaming up all these different scenarios, imagining them playing out like movies in my head. I would think about my favourite bands, me going to see them, my favourite band member spotting me in the crowd, picking me – a socially awkward teenage mosher still in school – out of a sea of other dorky teenage girls, him totally falling for me – despite him being rich, famous and ultimately able to get any girl he wanted. I would think about touring with them, being on the bus, hanging out backstage at their shows. I never thought in a million years that any of it would happen but I did it, I made it, I got myself there.
It’s funny, when I was a kid I would look at photos of my parents and cringe at their outfits. I could never get my head around how painfully uncool they were, how they must have known, at the time, that they looked like dorks with their silly hairstyles and their not-at-all stylish clothing. Now, however, I am willing to admit that they may well have been the height of style and coolness at the time, because I am looking at pictures that span enough years to see the same in myself. I mean, come on, there’s a whole chunk of time where I wore what was basically a school uniform – for fun. Even if I wasn’t in full fake school uniform, I still loved a tie. When I was at school, I would whinge about having to wear my dull uniform every day, but then I would wear fashion ties basically all of the time. In fact, if I remember rightly, I used to wear ties on non-uniform days, except I would pair them with enormously oversized baggy jeans (the kind that completely hide your feet) and whatever Tammy Girl fishnet top I had recently acquired. I remember a time when I used to go to this tattoo and piercing place, and what I really wanted was to get cool tattoos and a nose ring, and an eyebrowbar, and maybe my lip done – but I was of course too scared, and my mum and dad would have killed me, so instead I used to get these rainbow-coloured hair extensions done there. It was just some guy, with a glue gun, who would attach these brightly coloured pieces of rainbow. These days I won’t blow-dry my hair without using heat protection spray, and back then I was letting random guys put glue in my hair.
I’m not quite sure if wearing a pair of jeans under a dress with a seriously tacky belt is better or worse and, if I were to try to say something nice about the emo fringe that I rocked for a while (you know, the big thick one that swept in from the side and made it impossible to see where you were going), at least it covered my eyebrows. My eyebrows, over the years, went on a real journey, and not a nice one like a holiday, a chaotic one, likeLord of the Rings.
Eventually, I get to the photos of Dylan King – yes,theDylan King, the frontman of The Burnouts. If anyone (let’s say human, otherwise Buddy the chihuahua would have it in the bag) could claim the title of ‘love of my life’ then it would be Dylan King.
The first photo shows me smiling almost manically as Dylan squeezes my face and kisses me on the cheek. With Dylan, I really do look happy, and do you want to know the secret (and this might only apply to musicians, although I can’t say gymfluencers are any less complicated)? The fact that things between us were platonic. Dylan and I were best friends, together through thick and thin, and the fact that I was potentially the only woman on the planet who he wanted around him but didn’t want to sleep with made me feel more special than any man who has ever actually desired me has.
The thing you need to know about Dylan is that he was a nightmare at the height of his fame. He drank too much, he slept with lots of girls, he was a true bad boy with no respect for the rules, a rock-star rebel, and his antics probably paid themortgages of half of Fleet Street – there will be journalists who retired on the money they made while the legendary Dylan King was at large. Not this one, though, oh no, because I was his friend, so I spent my days trying to help him. If he went missing, I found him. If he fucked up, I cleaned up his mess. I remember one night, in the middle of nowhere, running around some town all night trying to find him, to make sure he was sober and on the tour bus the next day. But I found him, and I got him where he needed to be, and okay, he wasn’t sober, but the point is I had his back.
Things were great between us until one day, back in 2014, when he called me up with some shocking news. He told me he had got someone pregnant, although that wasn’t the shocking news because, with the number of girls he slept with, statistically it seemed like there should have already been a few Little Dylans running amok – if you don’t count the Little Dylan in his pants, to use the name we all so lovingly gave his penis.
The shocking part of the tale was that he had hired a publicist to manage the ‘crisis’ and that somehow this publicist had convinced him to get married to the pregnant girl – a wannabe glamour model called Crystal Slater – whom he hardly knew! I’m sure it goes without saying but that turned out to be a terrible idea, the twins turned out not to be his, and while all of this felt pretty on-brand for the infamous Dylan King, the original top shagger, my accidental involvement – and subsequent brief brush with tabloid fame – pretty much marked the beginning of the end for me. I wonder if that’s why Lisa recognised me, if somewhere in the back of her mind she recalls seeing me on the front of a newspaper, branded (wrongly, of course, but that never seems to bother tabloid journalists) as the woman whom Dylan was cheating on his wife with.
It was such a silly thing, a non-event, the kind of night out we had all the time. Still, the press ran with it, and for a whileI went from being someone who silently reported the news to actually being the news. Nicole Wilde: Homewrecker. I cleared my name, of course, and life did get a little better before it got worse. It wasn’t too long after that when I realised I needed to get out, I couldn’t live that lifestyle, or in that world, any more, I just wanted to be normal and happy and secure – although that hasn’t exactly materialised either.
Looking back, it all seems like such a mess. So much of it was so wrong. I chew my lip thoughtfully for a second. I was happy, though, for the most part, and that’s the part I miss. I miss the excitement, the buzz of being with the band, living on tour buses, sleeping in beautiful hotels, and having my tour family. Did you ever have a sleepover, when you were a kid? All of your best friends piled into your bedroom, your poor parents frazzled looking after you all, none of you wanting to sleep, laughing and screaming and having a blast all night long. It was like time didn’t exist, like a normal tomorrow wasn’t coming, the only thing that existed was the night. That’s exactly what life on tour was like. When things were great, I loved it.
Of course, that’s easy to say now, when I’m so, so unhappy. Everyone on the outside gawps in at me and thinks I have the most perfect life. They see the big house, the dream man, the gorgeous kids and every part of our Instagrammable existence and they think it’s a dream come true – but it’s just a dream. A nightmare at times. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, I am trapped here. This isn’t a life, it’s a show, and I’m playing a part – but I am working on writing myself out of it.
I stare at the photo of me and Dylan, looking deep into the eyes of my much younger, fresh-faced self, and for all the mess and the chaos and the bad people I was surrounded by, I see a sparkle in my eyes. A genuine happiness – I look like I’m home, unlike when I’m here, my actual home, and I just feel this huge hole inside, one that I can’t seem to fill.
I place the pile of photos back inside the box, followed by the access-all-areas passes, the signed CDs – all of it – one item at a time, slowly returning my memories to the confines of the box, to never be thought of again – well, until the next time my past life pops into my brain. Today feels different, though, somehow, I don’t quite seem to be able to close the memory box in my brain quite as easily as I return the cardboard lid, securing it in place before popping the box back inside the wardrobe.
I turn around and see that I’ve left the photo of me and Dylan lying there on the carpet. I pick it up again and stare at it, almost accusingly, as though it removed itself from the box to mess with me. I run my fingers over the edges of the photo, remembering the good times, the secrets we shared, the bond we had with each other – one that I know I’ve never been able to find with anyone since. And then I think about what happened between us, how our decisions tore us apart, and the pain of losing his friendship still makes my heart ache.
I head towards the wardrobe before almost immediately stopping in my tracks, turning around again, and heading for my bed. Instead of returning the photo to the memory box, I decide to put it in my bedside table drawer, hiding it under various bits and pieces – why? I don’t know. I have no idea why I’m not only keeping it from the box, but hiding it too.
The past is the past, and it’s not good for me to be constantly raking it up, but my present is a mess and my future is so uncertain. Right now, letting my brain wander back to happier times is a welcome break from reality.
But reality is what it is, and the past is the past, so it’s time to close the drawer and crack on with things.
For now, at least.
5
I used to dread Monday mornings when I was a kid. Sometime, usually around Sunday lunchtime, the impending sense of doom would set in, and that would be it, my weekend would be over, and I would just miserably count down the minutes until the school week started. But then, when I grew up, that feeling just sort of went away. Sure, I had work, but I never dreaded it like I did school. In hindsight, I suspect the reason it felt so stressful was because school – at least when I went – was so needlessly strict. There was no benefit of the doubt, no reasonable excuse for being late, no leeway for accidentally leaving something in the car. It was that fear, that I might displease one of the militant sticklers for the rules, that had me panicking every day. Mondays in particular, though, because, after two days off, it always felt so much worse.
