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Part One
The Rocker
Prologue
Two Years Ago
Her office was total chaos. Situated in the upstairs of an old, converted firehouse, every surface, every shelf, every square inch of floorspace—was used to house something. Mostly paper.
“So, d’ya think you’re up to the task?” She flicked the long cigarette ash from her current smoke into an already overfull ashtray (her third smoke since I’d arrived).
She let her cigarettes mostly burn to ash and I thought perhaps she preferred passive smoke or else holding something—anything—was better than holding nothing. Then again, maybe smoking was how she psyched people out. Whatever. I just knew her super-king cigarettes had already stuffed themselves up my nose aplenty and I’d only been in her office for half an hour.
I sat on the opposite side of her desk in a plastic Ikea chair, one of those you’d likely receive flatpack and would only need fixing together with two screws and some shoving. Her own chair was studded antique leather and the desk itself some Edwardian hulk.
I was a little green around the edges back then and asked sensibly, “I’m still not sure of my duties—”
“You said you’d been a PA before?” Her thick eyebrows rose and she eyed me intently, as though accusing me of having lied about my own capabilities—when I hadn’t. She was the one who’d divulged very little so far. I was still young, but I wasn’t going to be fooled.
“Yeah, like, PA to someone’s secretary… I was a proper lackey. Just some grunt agency work, really.” I gazed around at her mountains of paper and saw all the work that potentially lay ahead. “I figure I might have my work cut out here.”
“Yeah, you’d have that right,” she said, and took a rare drag from her cigarette. “Let’s be honest. Albie is a cunt. There, I said it. He’s probably the person you’d least wanna work for on the planet, but that’s rock stars for ya. Cunts all.” She rolled her shoulders and I nearly laughed, but didn’t. Maybe it was her off-handedness, or maybe the way the offensive word sounded when pronounced in her Aussie accent. “We have a job managing him, for sure. Mopping up his messes and keeping a lid on all of his secrets. But will this set you up for life…?”
This time she shrugged in a strange, kind of hypnotic way that made me think she’d once been a model or a rocker herself before she let her hair go grey, shaved it severely on one side Cyberpunk-style… and obviously developed a non-smoking habit that’d seen her put on a lot of stress weight. She definitely had a touch of the dramatic about her, but perhaps she’d adopted that to fit in with the divas she managed.
“Nah, well, I can’t actually say this will set you up for life, love. However, I do know that you’ll get to meet a lotta famous people and probably fuck some of them. So, what d’ya say?”
“Well, the benefits seem to far outweigh the negatives, huh,” I chuckled, and her nose wrinkled in response to my sarcasm.
In that moment, my answer was a definite and unequivocal no. My friend Kallie, who knew I wanted to get into PR, had suggested I apply for this job—and it did kind of seem close to my end goal, and also a little in my area of interest being in the music biz and all. Then again, it did also seem a little bit more hassle than it was worth.
Clearly, the human being in front of me was a terrible person to go around calling her biggest-selling artist a cunt. Her meal ticket, in reality.
All I knew was that I was one second away from saying no…
Then he crashed through the door.
“Oh, for fack sake, Sharon,” he said in his distinct Essex accent.
Albie Hart, the lead singer of famous rock band Flawless, was breathtaking.
Tall, dark, hairy… tanned… so much hair. Wiry. I liked them wiry. Like he’d not eaten anything but burgers at 4am for most of his life, the rest of the time living off caffeine, booze and music.
Yeah, so maybe I kind of did have a thing for rockers…
He accidentally (or maybe not) kicked a pile of papers that went crashing into another pile of papers. It was a domino effect and the two of them started screaming at one another as dust motes floated through the air.
“I thought I told you to facking answer my facking fan mail,” he yelled.
“I thought I told you to fucking behave yourself at gigs or I’d fucking drop you!”
She stood up, all five-foot-three of her, and was ready for him when he waded through the toppled piles of paper, then rounded her desk to face off with her. Sharon’s cigarette was still burning between her fingers with another dangerously long bit of ash hanging off. He meanwhile had a fag perpetually between his lips, his hands on his hips. They squared off, her pointed nose lifted up to face Albie, who was at least a foot taller. All I could think was that their habit and the amount of paper in here was a disaster waiting to happen.
“Who the fack is this?” He briefly gestured in my direction.
“Someone who might have been persuaded to work for us, but fuck if your cunt self hasn’t screwed that up now!”
I pinched my lips inside my mouth and tried not to laugh. She was deadly serious about him being a cunt and I could tell from the way he glared back at her that they detested one another.
