FOR TOMORROW, damon albarn

06 starry-eyes

DECEMBER 1995

Wembley is in 5 days. Christmas Eve. All the fans have been waiting and preparing for Blur and Oasis to take to the stage. Annette Meadows, their special guest, has still been deemed as the pacifist throughout this feud. But, with new information rocking up of Liam and Annette's Friday night rendezvous, we wonder if she's taken her side.

Annette had really fucked things up.

She had woken up the morning after the party with Liam Gallagher sleeping beside her. There was something so peaceful about his droopy eyes and the soft snores that hung in the silence. She'd never seen him so quiet, so vulnerable. But then her mind turned back.

The majority of the party became a haze. Yet, she could still remember throwing up her insides and a hand clutching at her hair, preventing her front staining it with her sick. Whoever the person was, they soon left. She was sat on her own with only her thoughts. She begged into the darkness for this strange figure to reappear but they never did.

"Ann?" Liam mumbled. He put a hand to his head whilst groaning. "You there?"

Annette clambered out of the bed and grabbed her phone. She needed to call Noel. Wembley was in less than a week. She needed to get to rehearsal with Blur. Liam looked like he was going to fall to the ground and never get back up again.

"Annette." Liam said her name once again. This time he had turned around in the bed, duvet covering him, hair a mess.

She knew that they hadn't done anything. He had stayed the night. He was too drunk to think, too drunk to attempt to walk home. Annette didn't want to have to worry about him, so she let him sleep beside her.

What she didn't know was that a journalist for Select had taken pictures of the two of them walking up to her hotel room. The magazine had been slipped under the doorway. Someone must've known they were staying in here. Maybe it was even the journalist.

Annette wanted to throw up at the sight of the two of them on the cover. She heard Noel's voice saying the words, "Seen Select yet?"

She breathed into the phone whilst peeling the thin slip of paper from the sticky ground. There they were, plastered on the front cover. Liam had an arm over her shoulders and a drunken grin, placing a kiss on the top of her head. Her eyes were sunk deep in the bags underneath, her arm across his waist in an attempt to hold him up.

The sad thing is that her mind went straight Damon and the look that would be upon his face at the sight of it. She was going to have to see him today for rehearsal. She was going to see the whole band. She was a little bit terrified.

"Seen it now," she murmured in response to Noel who had been chewing at the other end of the line . She set herself beside Liam on the bed, stroking the sides of his face. He was probably insanely hungover. She wondered if he could even feel the sensation of her hand at skin or if the alcohol had numbed his nerves.

"Something happened?" Liam groggily spoke. His voice was low and foreign. "The fuck's that?"

He turned the magazine to allow himself to see the cover. At the sight, he frowned, glanced at Annette, scrunched it up into a ball then threw it in the bin. He then closed his eyes once again. He couldn't be bothered to go out and have a tantrum about a stupid Select article. Annette was quite shocked to see him so unfazed.