Chapter Fourteen

Standing at the side of the stage, ready to go on for the final encore of the final show, Jeff felt remarkably dry-eyed. He felt emotional all right, but the emotions were mostly exhilaration and relief; with a degree of nervousness, given that there were at least two ways in which it could all still go horribly wrong.

Mouse, standing in front of him, seemed to be gesturing to someone he could see at the front of the crowd. Across the other side of the stage, with just their heads sticking up above the staging which the drummers were on, Jake and Duncan appeared to be jumping up and down doing their very best impressions of drunk and demented fans. The four police marksmen in the backstage area had somehow blended into the background, and Bob had reported back that the additional security around the rest of the stadium had run reasonably smoothly. Just as they had been preparing for the final homecoming to the City of Manchester stadium, police had discovered a hideout in some woods near Macclesfield. Stephen Warren hadn’t been there, but it was clear that he had only just left, and had been using some of the trees around the old shed for target practice. They had just arrived at their hotel in Manchester, and were about to disappear under a sea of friends and family and properly party on out, when the police had tried to persuade them to cancel the last two shows.

Jeff knew that they didn’t know how much of a gamble they were taking. Nobody seemed to have any idea whether Stevo was actually capable of firing a gun and hitting his intended target; or even whether any one of them would be his target if he was. The logic seemed to be that because he had gone for Jake before he would do so again; which only proved to Jeff that logic wasn’t what he was best at. The discussion had ended up being almost completely derailed by a particularly clueless old copper who had tried to persuade Jake to perform wearing body armour. Duncan had painted a very concise visual picture of just how stupid body armour would look under a semi-transparent, byronic ruffled shirt, but Jake had barely reacted to the suggestion at all. Mouse had to work hard to get him to tell them what was on his mind: it turned out that was because he was convinced that if he wore body armour and someone was out to get him they would just shoot him in the head.

When Duncan had told Jake that he would take a bullet for him, they all felt that he meant it. It had been an odd moment, and it had caught Jeff off-guard. Mouse had followed suit, leaving Jeff feeling compelled to go along with the general mood. He didn’t have the heart to point out that a bullet in one or more of the rest of them would be at least as much of a problem as one in Jake.

Jake was back, though. There was no doubt about that. For the final shows he was back doing the full set, minus a couple of head spins; and in an odd kind of way it was if there was more of him back than had been there before. When they had been discussing what to do about the Wembley shows, he had asked the others if they could cover for him if he couldn’t go on with Dancing Days. They had all tried, and all made a God-awful hash of it, not realising quite how difficult the phrasing was. That had somehow crept into the chat with which Jake prefaced the song, meaning that they were now right up against the curfew times imposed by the venues. It seemed to have crept into his head, as well: his vocals had improved about three hundred per cent, although none of them wanted to say so.

It was Jake who had insisted that they needed to do something more about Marty in the final show, and Jeff was voted down again. Jake had wanted to do a choreographed group number to some of Marty’s tracks, but the reality was that there wasn’t time to sort out the rights, let alone actually learn the kind of thing he had in mind. After a short-tempered day in a meeting room in the hotel, with the tables pushed back against the walls and the stage positions marked on the carpet with masking tape, they had come up something which was so simple that just before they went on stage Jeff started to panic that it would seem half-arsed.

For the first time in over twelve years, they were five mic stands rather than four being put out for the final number. Most of the spots were trained on the middle one, which would have been Mart’s. It was one thing to discuss the symbolism in a conference room; another one to see it happening before a crowd. When he saw it, Jeff felt a brief moment of exhilaration, before being hit by the kind of panic which made it hard to breathe.

Despite having spent five years of his life effectively living with him, in hotels and tour buses, he struggled now to think of Marty as another human being. Jeff had been the golden boy, the songwriter who was going to be the Next Big Thing; but his solo career had disintegrated, slowly, at the same time as Marty’s had suddenly hit full stride with those heavy, slightly ominous chords at the beginning of ‘Don’t Mind Me’. It was hard to tell who exactly had said what, but Marty had taken to announcing that Jeff was a talentless tosser every time he had an audience. Back then, Mart had an audience for every minute of every day. Jeff had retreated back to the huge, faux-everything mansion he had bought a few miles away from where his parent lived, back in the days when he was Elton John with sex appeal. Every time he tried to write something new, he had ended up back with ‘Don’t Mind Me’. He had even seemed to hear it in his sleep. If he listened to other music, and it included even the smallest part of the melody or the chord sequence, that was all he heard. It almost seemed to follow him around. Jackie had been away on tour with Madonna, and come back to find him spending most of his time half-asleep on the sofa, smoking joints and watching Neighbours. He’d stayed there for the best part of a year. That was all a very, very long time ago, but somewhere in the process Marty had stopped being the joker from Wigan, and turned into something across between a bogeyman and a personal minefield.

As soon as they saw the five mics, the crowd reacted as if an electric current had been sent through it, which made Jeff’s stomach start somersaulting. All they really wanted was Mart. That was all quite a lot of them had ever wanted. If he went out there now, they were all going to look at him and he was going to look like a jealous prick. He started wishing that they wouldn’t look at him; which he knew didn’t make much sense if you were about to go on stage and talk to 40,000 people. Then he started wishing that he hadn’t agreed to do the talking: Mouse had asked him to, on the basis that if he said it then it would be clear that they all meant it. Yet more bad logic, but there wasn’t time to question it as Bob had just given the cue through their earpieces.

The first thing Jeff did when the screaming died down was to announce that Marty wasn’t there. He needed to get that out, so that he didn’t have to ride the prospect of the crowd’s disappointment any longer. There was a murmur, but he knew how to read a crowd, and could tell that it was still with him. He didn’t feel relief, yet, but at least felt that it was possible that he would get out alive.

“No, Marty’s not here. We all wish he was, but he’s not. And you know we always said that we would have a mic backstage waiting for him. And with all that’s happened, we just wanted to show that we still miss him…”. As he started the explanation he saw Duncan turning to walk back offstage. For a split second he thought that shots were about to ring out, and flinched as if to follow him off, only to realise that the Woods swagger seemed to be more playing to the crowd than running to the cops. Duncs returned with a box of Kleenex, and walked over and presented it to Jeff, who knew better than to fight back.

“We all miss him, and we really really hope he’s OK, so as this is the last show we wanted to do a little tribute to him.”

He tried to get it out, only for Mouse to disappear behind him and return with a bucket. He knew he was doomed, and knew equally that he had no option but to carry on.

“Marty, wherever you are mate, we all hope you’re OK. And we’ve put the mic out frontstage just to show we haven’t forgotten….”

By the time that Jake had fetched a mop, Jeff had totally and utterly gone, with the inevitable tears streaming down his face. Bastards. Total and utter sodding bastards. It was great; and they were all utter bastards, and the crowd was laughing with them and applauding at the same time. He almost forgot to worry whether the tribute to Mart might have been undermined. His best hope on that one was the fact that Mouse had been in on it: Mouse’s motives were generally agreed to be beyond reproach. He could do with a bit of that himself, as far as Marty was concerned.

‘Stay’ had been their first ever number one. Cam had believed very firmly in the importance of keeping it light and fluffy, despite the bondage gear, so it was never going to win prizes for being deep and meaningful. But it had been surprisingly easy to adapt. They had replaced the middle eight with an extended instrumental section, with the band pushed as far to the side of the stage area as the staging allowed. The four of them, dressed in black, turned to face the screens at the back of the stage, heads bowed; and a series of black and white images of the five of them in their younger days were projected onto the screen. The final image was of Marty alone, dressed as a clown with a beer bottle in his hand. It had been carefully posed, to look like a snatched moment of contemplation. His face was whited out, with a big downturned mouth and crosses over his eyes; and the make-up the eye which was turned towards the camera was smudged in a long dark streak down the side of his face.

They sang the last verse and chorus still facing the picture of Marty, as two of the dancers brought on a single, enormous red balloon: it seemed to glow against the black and white of the photo. On the final chord, it was released up, and their was a short silence. Jake had wanted a longer silence, in which to watch the balloon suspended above the stage, but Duncan had pointed out that if they hung about for too long everyone was going to think that Marty was dead. Then came the fireworks, which were their cue to head for the trap door.

Jake had stopped clearing his mind and letting himself just float through the final number. He didn’t feel that it was getting things out of proportion to want to stay as alert as possible to what was going on around him, given that the police seemed to think that there was a relatively high chance that there was a gunman out there looking for him. He loved the idea of the balloon, which he thought of as a slow, floating kind of freedom; but as it went up he had a sudden image of Marty trapped in a very small space. It was like a box or a cupboard, but he could only see the inside of it. The same image had presented itself to him in dreams over the previous few days, but he couldn’t work out why, or where it had come from.

As soon as they were out of sight, Duncan let up a huge, slightly crazed whoop of “we’re alive, we’re alive, we’re alive” and sprinted straight through the under-stage area. Jake was happy to go with him, on every level, to get the thought of a boxed-up Marty out of his head. Once he had started running, he would have been happy to just carry on forever: the high of the final show meant that it didn’t even really occur to him that it would have hurt like hell. But the dancers were waiting in the corridor behind the stage, ready to spray them with champagne: the speed of their arrival almost caught them off-guard but corks popped as soon as they burst through the fire door. Rachel had tried to follow after them to rescue their clothes, but was too late. She got through the door just as Duncan emptied the rest of one of the bottles over his head. He presented her with his shirt. trousers and socks in a sodden heap, knowing that recriminations would be limited as they probably wouldn’t need them again, and carried on drinking wearing just his pants.

Jeff and Mouse changed before heading backstage. Because they had been facing the other way they hadn’t been able to see the reactions of individuals within the crowd, and they were both surprised at how unsure that left them feeling as to how it had been received: the popping champagne corks as they eventually joined the others in the corridor came as a bit of a surprise.

The party that night was a good one. They had taken over a club near to the city centre, and invited friends and family along. Jake’s Dad had tried to smuggle in a couple of fans, and Ed had had to intervene and return them to the hotel bar, but that was the closest that they came to a security alert. Much to Duncan’s disgust, a couple of the dancers had persuaded the DJ to play parts of the Dirty Dancing soundtrack. While he started negotiating to get control of the decks, Jake hit the floor with the rest of the dancers. The high point was the lift; which culminated with a distinctly triumphant Natalya lowering herself back down into Jake’s arms and showing every intention of staying there for the rest of the evening. Jake’s father, grinning like a bulky, bearded Cheshire cat, made sure that there would be plenty of photos to remember it by. Jeff was caught between jealousy at the ease with which Jake did it, and curiousity as to how many of the dancers would refuse to work with them again.

The important thing was that the four of them had done it; and they were actually getting on together better than they ever had before. So long as they actually liked one another, anything felt possible.