The Cure

Chapter 55

The crowd was so tightly-packed that Nate had to shoulder his way through the throng, amidst murmurs of irritation, carefully avoiding knocking the plastic cups of warm Carlsberg clasped in too-hot hands. The venue was small enough that there was no backstage – which had become his habitual evening haunt, if work would allow it – just a crowded back room with black-painted brick walls and bad leather sofas, saturated with the stink of smoke and sordidness of a thousand decadent afterparties.

The low-lit air bristled keenly, humid, pulsating, heavy with the smell of spilt beer; the bored drawl of the sound tech, the auguring one two, one two, and the boom of the bass drum intermittently splitting the low rumble of excited chatter, thumping thick enough to shake his stomach.

They pushed their way to the tiny bar, and Nate ordered two bottles of Bud, handing one with difficulty over his shoulder, over what felt like a hundred shoulders, to Jules; they towered above everybody, and after more feminine, muttered complaints from around their breastbones, they chivalrously – begrudgingly – chose the bar as their leaning post.

It never got old; that heady, excitable, twitching atmosphere, the spotlights turning and churning the anticipation about; her sweet, unsmiling face on the posters plastered about the room, the ones he quietly collected and kept rolled up in his desk drawer.

When the lights went down, the deep simmer of two hundred voices became a frenzied bubbling, and there was a long, high-pitched scream from a frenzied member of the crowd as Lola's band stepped onto the stage.

'Christ, she looks amazing,' Jules shouted in Nate's ear over the sudden wall of appreciative ruckus, and Nate could only nod numbly, his tongue darting nervously across his lower lip, his eyes glued to the stage as she walked across it, hips swaying, the hem of her short black dress twisting.

He swallowed in time to her nonchalant hair toss as she looked about the room.

He knew she was bricking it, of course.

And he knew that she would rather die than let it show.

She raised her chin into the air as her band shrugged on their instruments; she wasn't afraid to look about the endless heads in the darkness. Not anymore. 'What's happening?'

He could read her like a book, now, he thought as he studied her from where he leaned against the buzzing mini fridge, in the black of the back room.

The faraway expression that meant a new song was piecing itself together under the fronds of blonde; the gentle, tearless grimace when she was thinking about her mother; the wrinkle of the nose when she was really laughing; the quick worrying of her teeth at her lower lip when she wanted a cigarette.

And it was the latter that Nate saw as she threw back the last of her bottled beer, crossing and uncrossing her legs on the worn leather sofa. He could tell. She wasn't listening to her badly-suited agent at all.

'Lola,' Nate muttered, and she looked up, finding his gaze instantly; the struggle was palpable in the swim of blue.

'I'll be right back,' she told him with a reassuring smile, unfolding herself from the sofa with a nonchalant stretch, 'Miles wanted to start loading the van before it starts getting too wild—'

Nate felt the corner of his mouth twitch upwards. 'Loading the van, huh?'

'—I'll be right back.'

Nate didn't stop her as she wandered casually out of the room, allowing her thirty seconds' head start to make her way down the dark corridor towards the smoking area; her hand was on the bar of the fire escape door when he pressed against her back, wrapping his arms around her stomach and lifting her away.