All I Hear // Calum Scott

Chapter 4

One month. One whole month without Calum Scott.

Well, not really.

His face was everywhere. I would watch the news, and reporters would go boasting of him, putting more than a lot of effort in keeping track of his every move. I would turn on the radio, and I would hear him talking, or, on some occasions, singing. I wouldn't order a coffee without overhearing teenage girls squealing at the sound of his name. The Apple store would replay his only music video over and over again. His face was on the thumbnail of every recommended video on YouTube. He tweeted and posted selfies almost daily.

He did, however, receive some hate. With a voice like that, I never thought he would, but I guess you can't please everyone. Comments on YouTube and tweets swarming my Twitter feed were stained with the words copycat and unoriginal and boring, and a lot of profanity. I was usually a quiet person online, not likely to post a comment on anything or reply to others, but my anger persuaded me to defend him. Every ounce of my anger traveled from the thoughts inside my brain to my fingers flying madly across the keyboard and my laptop screen. I wanted him to be surrounded by people who support him. Not the opposite.

It was great seeing him gain attention, but seeing him everywhere made me miss him more.

Of course, I tried calling him, but each call started and ended with "Oh... Hello, Kate. I'm sorry, but I'm really busy, and I can't talk right now. I promise I'll talk to you soon" or among the lines of that. The process repeated every single day since the finals. The goal: A real conversation, like the ones we always used to have before.

I got even worse. I couldn't stop thinking about him, and it was unhealthy. While filling people's glasses at the bar, I would look up and imagine him performing on the stage in front of the club. Then I'd be scolded by Tiffany for being distracted. I couldn't look at a phone without remembering one of our conversations... They played and replayed in my head as if my brain was a tape recorder or a vinyl record that somehow got our voices burned onto them. Whenever I would start to think, I would hear his voice offering me advice, and he would sing in my head to calm me down, but only faintly. That was the reason why I would rush out of Fuel's door at three o'clock in the morning to play and replay all of his Britain's Got Talent performances back at home under the covers. That, and so I could go on interview sprees. It got to the point where I downloaded one song, because that was all my iTunes gift card could afford, and it was the only one without crazy background crowd noise. That way I could listen to his voice without an internet connection or my cellular data.

~*~*

His voice sounded so rough and sore, I thought as Calum told James Hoggarth how impacting and life-changing his experience on the talent show was to him. I've noticed that he has explained it almost the same way on every interview with the same question.

I couldn't help but think how tired he must be. It took a lot of dedication to record an exclusive cover in the middle of the night and send it with no one to edit it with some finishing touches for one moment of redemption. (Well, now that I think of it, he doesn't really need them or that redeeming moment.) In addition to that, he's been traveling all over London from interview to interview, from television station to radio show, trying his best to withstand dozens of unexpected flashing lights around every sidewalk he passed and encountering many screaming fangirls in the middle of it all. I'm scared for the day when he'll say he couldn't handle this. It all seemed too much for him, and it was all coming at him too quickly.

"How exclusive is this exclusive?"

"This is the first time it will go out with no problems, no changes. It's exactly how it was intended to be, umm, and, I can't want for people to listen to it," Calum spoke proudly but in his currently rough voice.

"My name's Calum Scott, and this is my cover of Diamonds."

Calum sang, with all of the lyrics sung correctly this time, until I drifted off to sleep.