‘Hi there, you wanna play?’ he asked, the words muffled by the cigarette hanging out of his mouth.
At first Emma was alarmed, assuming he was referring to the guitars lying about the room until she saw he was pointing towards the table football.
‘Sure,’ she said cautiously.
Ste walked around the other side of the table and expertly flipped a ball onto the table.
‘So you’re the bag lady that Clover did some stuff for, right?’ he said, spinning a handle so a line of plastic footballers whacked the ball down the pitch.
‘Bag lady!’ laughed Emma. ‘Well, that’s one way of describing me. How is Clover?’
‘In New York working. Probably better that way for a while, seeing as we’re both trying to keep clean.’
He looked up and motioned at Rob who was talking intently to Chris.
‘So you with the boss now?’ he asked with a cheeky smile.
Emma flushed. She felt a little exposed without Rob’s protective presence.
‘He’s just a friend,’ she said quickly, spinning a handle and ramming the ball into the back of the net.
‘Does Rob have female friends? I’ve never known it,’ smiled Ste.
‘Ah, I see you know him then.’
Despite herself, she found herself warming to Ste. He was not the sinister strung-out poet the newspapers depicted him as.
‘Yeah, well Rob is my fucking idol,’ smiled Ste, knocking the ball down to Emma’s end of the table again. ‘We’d still be playing in tiny pubs if it wasn’t for him.’
‘Did he discover you?’
He nodded and took a swig of black coffee from a polystyrene cup.
‘Two years ago we were some no-mark band on the road in a shitty tour bus that used to be my dad’s old window-cleaning van. We were going nowhere and my dad wanted his van back.’
‘The end of the dream,’ giggled Emma.
‘Yeah,’ he laughed. ‘So we cobbled together some cash to do a demo. Six or seven tracks which we’d put on a CD and sent to anyone we could think of: journos at the NME, DJs, record companies, you know. We put it on MySpace and sold shit-loads of the CD, but still, it’s hardly playing Wembley Stadium, is it?’
Emma had stopped playing to listen to his story.
‘Then some geezer made contact saying he loved our stuff and wanted to meet up. Said he was from a record company. We were like, “Yeah, right!”, thinking it was a mate taking the piss. But it was Rob. He was working in America then, Vice President or something and he rolled up to see us in this pub in Manchester. He’d come all the way from fucking New York, can you believe it?’
‘He must have liked you.
’
‘You don’t get a fucking bog standard record company scout coming north of Highgate, let alone the VP of one of the biggest record companies in the world. Turns out Rob trawls MySpace, pubs and clubs all the time looking for new talent. It’s not his job but he does it because he loves it. He believes, man.’
‘Well, he certainly did you proud,’ said Emma, knowing that Kowalski had just had a US Billboard top ten hit, a rarity for a British band. Ste looked over his shoulder before blowing a smoke ring.
‘Our manager wanted us to move labels,’ he said in a low voice, ‘but I was having none of it. Rob cares about the talent and you’d be amazed how rare that is in this business.’
Emma turned to look at Rob laughing with the sound engineer. She felt so warm inside she felt her heart might melt. In that moment, she realized how much she was attracted to him. He was good-looking. That was obvious; too obvious, but that wasn’t what was making her feel this way now. She liked their banter, their companionship. She enjoyed the way he made her laugh, challenged her and helped her beyond the call of friendship. And yes, she used to think he was frivolous. Yes, he had a worrying track record with women, but today she felt proud to be at his side. Today she respected him, admired him. Today she wanted to kiss him. God, what’s happening to me? she wondered.
How she wanted to go home! From her relaxed happy mood as they had flown in, Emma now felt on edge, completely self-conscious and embarrassed, convinced that her feelings were transparent. After lunch every hour had seemed to drag by interminably. By 5 p.m., she was jumpy with nerves, anxious about Rob’s plan to have dinner at his secret fabulous restaurant. She knew she should be excited and if she had been more confident with the opposite sex it might have been easier to interpret Rob’s invitation to Devon as sexual interest, especially when she’d found out Jessica was out of the picture. But with a sinking feeling, Emma rationalized that he was simply being nice to her, just as he had been all year. Rob gave Ste a bear hug, the singer so thin and slight he almost disappeared in Rob’s embrace. The goodbyes complete, everyone headed back inside the mill and Rob led Emma back to the helicopter, speaking to someone on his mobile as they went.
‘Do you know what, honey?’ he said as he hung up.