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Ewan never told Jude what his mother had done that day, so Jude had always been a little surprised at how warm she was towards him. He had thought that she would be angry with Ewan for encouraging him to throw his life away for music, especially when she had always been coolly polite to him when he used to come down for the summer.
Now she still invited him to stay in France for Christmas, when, to tell the truth, Jude would have much rather they decamped to Ewan’s family home, and baked his favourite cake when he did come.
Jude felt – even though he knew it was ridiculous – that he had never really returned home after that fevered teenaged night, and that Ewan was some rosy-cheeked, rosy-haired changeling; the easy-going, amiable son they could have had.
He never got ticked off when rock star antics get in the papers (except by Portia). And Jude didn’t get congratulated on a particularly witty chorus line, either.
He supposed, though, that this is what Ewan must feel like all the time. Seeing someone else singing his words, and a thousand people screaming them back. If he did, he didn’t show it. Not having to play guitar meant that Jude was free to play things up more on stage, and Ewan tended to stay a step back with his bass now, one eye on his antics, silently urging him on. Whilst he was in everyone’s faces, he guessed Ewan could do what he liked without people noticing. Not that he didn’t have his moments; that time in Belgium had stuck in the collective memory.
He did miss his guitar though, terribly. Before, when he was singing and playing, sure, it took concentration, but that was brilliant. Focussing on what he was doing took his mind off the reality of what he was doing in, well, a wider sense. Now, with no distraction, no glossy black Strat to hide behind, he had to face up to the fact that, yes, here were hundreds of screaming people that had paid good money to come and see him perform, and he better bloody make sure it was worth their while.
Suddenly the eyeliner went from being a teenage affectation that he had never really grown out of, to a disguise.
He still envied Ewan. Performing seemed to allow Ewan to be even more himself – as if everyday-Ewan was someone seen through a pane of frosted glass, and being onstage brought him into focus. He was playful, cheeky, mischievous – without ever really stealing the spotlight.
Jude, on the other hand, took on a frosty demeanour. He was very serious about the performance. Or, rather, he acted as if he were. He would come onstage cool, almost arrogant, and rip his way through the first few songs with as little interaction with the crowd as possible.
At first, this had perplexed audiences. Where was the man who gave flirtatious interviews in magazines, had played gigs in hospital carparks outside the windows of unwell fans, and was banned from WH Smiths after signing copies of the NME that he hadn’t actually paid for?
But once the crowd was warmed up, once they’d got on to faster songs and Ewan had monkeyed around a bit, Jude could relax a little, too. Oh, he’d still pose, and pout, but once he’d got control of his nerves, he could close his eyes, clutch the mic stand like a drowning man, sing on his knees. Sometimes he still threw his tops into the crowd, though he was a little more reluctant to part with his smarter Calvin Klein shirts than he had been with his scruffy secondhand gear.
It still wasn’t the same though. Without drink, or drugs, or his shiny black guitar in his hands to stop them shaking, he was a cardboard rock star doing cardboard things. He couldn’t quite explain this to anyone, though. Had he been Ewan, he would have been able to write these feelings in a song, probably better than he’d ever felt it.
Although, that wasn’t strictly true. Jude did write, had always written, a little, in fact. A teenage habit that they had suggested he pick up again, in his ‘therapy’ sessions (he despised the term). So yes, he did scribble down his feelings at three in the morning when the urge to do something stupid got a bit strong, but he didn’t share it with anyone. He didn’t write songs.
Another way in which the duo differed was their attitude towards hotel rooms. Ewan hated them. Blank, featureless, with the same bad Van Gogh prints on the walls and the same porn channels on the telly, and the same bored businessmen in badly fitting suits in the bar. He claimed that he couldn’t write in such soulless places, melodramatically twirling a pencil. Jude watched him, though (they used to share a twin room on tour before Jude’s ‘time away’ and Sienna’s arrival) and saw that he would often channel his boredom and irritation into scribbling away with the free biro provided, hard enough to tear the cheap hotel paper, sometimes, until he’d got through most of the pad.
Jude wondered what people would think if they got really famous, and the first pages of lyrics for songs like Mr Strange and Known Me When would come up for auction, bought by thousands for some collector. (He can dream). And there they will be, words treasured and learnt off by heart and paid through the nose for, on crumpled A5 sheets bearing the legend:
‘Southwark Travelodge’.
‘Newcastle Holiday Inn’.
‘Manchester Hilton’.
Himself, he liked hotel rooms. The anonymity, the blankness that Ewan loathed, was rather attractive to him. This predated his rock star pretensions. He had always liked the idea of being whoever he wanted to be. He liked not having to tidy up after himself, he liked that if he ordered a pizza, or left coke on the bathroom countertop, or if he wanted a girl, none of those things he would have to see again after he checked out the next morning. Starting afresh.
It wasn’t quite to Jude’s tastes, then, when his parents offered the band the use of their house in France whilst they went off to – Jude can’t remember where, exactly – for their annual month’s holiday. Ewan, though, loved the house out in the country, and gleefully accepted before he himself could refuse. Wandering off with the mobile, he had thanked Mrs Heyworth ever so graciously and hung up with an affectionate goodbye. Jude snorted. He was forever a fifteen year old desperate for his best mate’s parents to like him.
After passing the phone back to him with a flourish, Ewan had reasoned that it was the perfect place for them to go. A couple of weeks in rural France, away from the paparazzi, nice and secluded, they would be able to get on with writing songs for Eminence Front. Sienna would love to go to France. Jonny was happy to follow the herd. Jude was outnumbered. So off they went.
Jude had complained for the entire journey there on the Eurostar. Not just about the fact that they were going in the first place, but about anything he could find fault with. St. Pancras’ Champagne bar, reputedly the world’s longest, was unimpressive and unimaginative. He wanted a window seat. No, Sienna couldn’t sit next to him, his guitar was going there, he couldn’t let it out of his sight. His gin and tonic wasn’t cold enough. Ewan was driving the hire car like an idiot, and Portia have got them a driver?
In the end, they’d stopped at a service station, ostensibly so that Sienna could use the bathroom, but really so that everyone could soothe their frayed nerves by having a much-needed cigarette. Except for Jonny, who ironically, had been influenced by Sienna’s ideals of clean living and spiritual purity just as she had rejected some of them in the pursuit of a more easy-going life. So whilst Ewan and Sienna embraced this rockstar cliché and huddled around her bright new Zippo, Jonny was at a loose end.
Jude, the reason for everyone’s irritability and impending lung cancer, was sat on a curb, with his back pointedly to them. Jonny could see that he was smoking his Gauloises with more ferocity than usual, as if he were trying to inhale the cigarette itself and not just the smoke.
Ewan watched him approach their pissed-off frontman, and raised his eyebrows at Sienna. Him going over there now, when the last time he had been alone with Jude in a carpark, he’d ended up with a split lip, seemed like a very bad idea. Sienna, though, just shrugged.
When Ewan looked over again, they’d vanished. He didn’t think about where they’d gone. If they were round the back shouting at each other, he wanted no part of it, Jonny could look after himself; and if they had walked over to the services to use the bathrooms or buy a hamburger, then it didn’t matter.
He felt that strange awkwardness he had around Sienna rising in his throat. He had made a resolution to try to get to know her better, but the opportunity seemed rarely to arise. Probably because she was invariably with Jude, who had been moody, possessive and frankly, a bit of a bitch lately, or with Jonny, who he didn’t know that well either. Admittedly, they had both the musicians’ fallback of talking about gear, and the male preserves of football, beer and girls to talk discuss, but he felt that Jonny and Sienna, as the two newcomers, liked to have a bit of time on their own.
To vent about him and Jude, no doubt.
Well, he knew that feeling, at least. The trouble was, when he got pissed off with his best mate, there wasn’t really anyone else to go to. In clichéd but true artistic fashion, all such feelings got poured into songs, in his ever present notebook, or, if by some cosmic tragedy, it wasn’t with him, on the back of anything he could find.
So there he was, once more groping around for something to say to Sienna. She made him feel like a preteen talking to a crush, even though it was her friendship he was after, not her love.
“So, um...have you had a chance to take a look at those lyrics I gave you?”
Smeary lines in green felt-tip that he had rushed out in a bathroom backstage before the feeling had passed.
They were about Jude. The way he had been acting, most things were, lately. But Ewan wasn’t sure he was ready for Sienna to know that, yet. Or ever. Better for them to know each other first, at least.
“Thanks for giving them to me”
She had one hand in her pocket, clutching her lighter. Her other hand, it was by her waist, holding her cigarette and tapping out a beat on her belt.
She won’t know, he though, she can’t know, because he doesn’t really know what he was trying to say himself, so how can she-
“Its about Jude, isn’t it?”
His brain stopped and for a few seconds all he could think of was how she was making that nervous metallic drumming. Then he realised, she was tapping the studs on her belt with her ring, some Navajo hunk of silver and turquoise. He wondered if Jude had given it to her, then he realised he was going to have to answer her question, and then, mercifully, her heavy gaze left him. She looked over her shoulder.
“Here are our boys. Where have you been?”
“Bathroom”, Jonny called out, as Jude glanced down at his flies. He did them up sheepishly and got in the car without argument.
The rest of the journey out the house, Jude sat in the back of the car and held Sienna’s hand. Silent, thankfully.
Ewan thought that maybe this trip wouldn’t be so bad after all.