Part 14 (1/2)

'Stop being b.l.o.o.d.y soft.' I consider, should I fess up to an affair I haven't had? I'm sensing that my dad would understand that better than a whirlwind romance. 'Have you not heard of the saying ”Marry in haste, repent at leisure”?'

'Well, yes, but I love Scott.'

'You don't know know him. You live with Adam. Better the devil you know, I always say.' him. You live with Adam. Better the devil you know, I always say.'

'Dad, I'm thirty. Adam was never going to ask me to marry him.'

'Two wrongs don't make a right.' Dad is fond of quoting idioms. Until now, I've never noticed how fond.

'He's a multi-millionaire.' I'm hoping this will impress my dad or at least rea.s.sure him that I'll be looked after.

'Aye well, a fool and his money are soon parted.' I'm struggling to comprehend the relevancy of this particular idiom; I suspect my dad was just on a roll and it's not, in fact, relevant at all. 'Your mother is hyperventilating. I have to go. We'll talk about this later, Madam.'

I seriously doubt we will. When you have five kids a policy on non-interference has to be followed in order to keep sane. In fact, when we were teenagers, it wasn't unknown for my parents to lock themselves in their bedroom by way of disciplining us.

My father hangs up just as Scottie pops his head around the door.

'How did telling your folks go?' he asks.

'Good,' I smile. 'They're delighted,' I add. Although I have the decency to cross my fingers. There is no point in upsetting him by saying their reaction was one of disbelief and hysteria. 'You?'

'Yeah, great.' He nods and smiles enthusiastically, a little like one of those toy puppies that you see sitting in the back window of a Ford Escort. He's lying too, no doubt. 'I think, on reflection, there's no need for us to dash off to Hull at short notice. Better that we get to LA and then we'll fly the parents out for a longer more relaxed introduction, in a week or two. Like you said.'

'Fine by me,' I smile, happy to put that off for a while. Now, about the s.e.x...

34. Scott

My mother has to be sc.r.a.ped off the ceiling; she maintains that this hasty engagement is the most stupid, stupid stupid thing I have ever done out of the many, many, many stupid things she has to choose from. thing I have ever done out of the many, many, many stupid things she has to choose from.

'Is she pregnant?'

Since I was thirteen my mum has been scared the answer to this question would be yes. Then, once I turned thirty, she hoped it would be.

'No, Ma, she's not.'

'Oh.' I can hear her disappointment. 'Well, what's the b.l.o.o.d.y rush then?'

If Fern had been pregnant my mum would have given her some grudging respect as the mother-to-be of her grandchild; she would have approved of the speedy engagement. My mum is big into lads 'doing the right thing', which in her book is marrying the woman they casually and carelessly s.h.a.gged, as opposed to avoiding a pregnancy in the first place. She accepts that s.e.x is a rush and a fact. An unstoppable force. My mum's philosophy is based on the fact that she was four months gone when she and Dad tied the knot and that didn't turn out too badly, except for the divorce and everything. As Fern is not pregnant, Mum will a.s.sume Fern is a flighty gold-digger and 'no better than she ought to be'. I know, her reasoning is flawed, but hey, she's my mum. Fern is not a gold-digger, I've met enough of those to be able to smell their sweat a mile away.

'Everything resonates between us. We rhyme,' I say. 'Fern's going to be so good for my music. She's inspiring.'

I'm so fired up with ideas for songs that I'm jotting stuff on the back of f.a.g packets and old newspapers that I find lying around; I even scribbled something on the hotel wallpaper this morning. It's great. It's a forlorn s.p.a.ce, the place that's left where ideas used to be made. It's like a bed where love used to be made. Fern can fill that. I'm sure of it.

'Three days, you say. You met her three days ago!' The disbelief is biting at my mum's throat; I hope it doesn't choke her. 'Some would say it was a b.l.o.o.d.y silly thing to do to ask someone to marry you after just three days,' she says huffily.

'Why?'

'She might've said no.'

'But that's unlikely.'

'It's too quick. You don't know her,' she says, stating the obvious. 'She doesn't know you,' she adds with more alarm, voicing that which only she or I might worry about. Some say I'm a moulded pop product. Others say I'm a G.o.d. It's become difficult for us to know for sure.

'No one ever knows anyone anyway. At least this way we'll have plenty to talk about over the next fifty years.' Jokingly, I dismiss my mother's fears.

She'll calm down. My mum likes to pretend she's oblivious to my famous charm but in fact I honed my skills on her. Besides, it's not my mum who tells me what to do any more; it hasn't been since I was about six. Mark is happy with the engagement and my fans are too, now. The hype about the wedding is already growing; it's going to be cataclysmic. Right on plan. It appears I can do anything I want, as long as I don't grow up.

'Mum, somewhere along the line I lost the luxury of just being liked for who I am. And maybe that's no bad thing, because I'm not that likeable and if all I had to offer was me, naked, then who's to say anyone would want to hang out with me?' My mother sighs but doesn't comment. 'I'm impossibly cool and I mean that literally. It's impossible to be as cool as they want me to be and I'm exhausted trying. Then along came Fern. Fern likes me for who I am.'

My mum is not a romantic. She's been in love too often for that to be possible. Grimly she holds on to her anger and disapproval. 'Your problem is you've had such a splendid life that now you've become fascinated with the mundane. That's all that's left.'

I would argue, but she might have a point. What do I know? My mum worries about my success but then, if I was a failure, that would worry her too. She's one of the few who understands that if I'd never made it big it would have been good and bad in equal parts. Bad because I was born to be big. Convinced that I was a huge talent, that needed to find the light, she knows I would have died in the attempt to become great. But then, she knows I might die in the act of being great.

If I'd stayed in Hull I'd have been a cheeky rascal womanizer, with a few women crying after me and maybe an illegitimate kid I'd chosen to stand by. But now. Now, after this enormous and overwhelming unprecedented success, my influence has stretched too far. My opportunity to break hearts is too wide. There isn't a hole out there that isn't prepared to welcome me. Maybe my mum is thinking along the same lines, because she adds grudgingly, 'Well, I hope this Fern is firm with you. You need to hear ”no” more often.'

'You'll meet her soon.'

'When?' Her curiosity can't be crushed.

'In LA.'

'LA,' my mum says with a tut.

Many Europeans are f.u.c.king sn.o.bby about LA because there aren't any ancient coliseums or lofty spires. They dismiss it as flimsy, gaudy and tawdry, but still, everyone seems to find the place irresistible. Funny that. I think LA is a little like a big plate of microwave lasagne; empty calories but tasty. The trick is not to gorge yourself, not to eat the whole thing believe the whole thing because you'll be left feeling sick. It's true there's a fair share of neon and plastic and broken dreams I see them from my limo if I look hard enough but there's splendour and excitement and magic there too.

My mum's dismissive tut has nothing to do with lack of spires. She doesn't like LA because it's a long way away plus there are lots of drugs there. Of course there are lots of drugs everywhere and she probably knows that too, but it's a thought that's too big and scary for her heart to deal with.

I think it must be torture being my mum.

I try to rea.s.sure her. 'LA is peaceful. My relatively low profile there means I can actually walk down the street without being mobbed. In the US only the European tourists bother me for autographs.'

When they do, I put on a hilarious (and no doubt inaccurate) accent and I swear I'm not Scottie Taylor but Zoran Obradovic from Serbia. I even offer to sign their autograph books as a lookie-likie but no one is ever interested in that, which is funny when you think at home women ask me to sign their t.i.ts with their lipsticks. In Europe I'm constantly met with hysteria: in Sweden my clothes are ripped from me, shops close for me in Germany, roads close in France. A police escort is essential in all the Latin countries. I'm often trapped inside a hotel room or TV studio. The screaming has become deafening.

'Oh Scott, love,' says my mum sadly. I think we both know the truth. The thing is, with each unha.s.sled footstep I take in the US, I remember Paul McCartney telling me that the most important thing to all record producers, and to most artists too, if they are honest with themselves, is to break America. The thing is, without America you're nothing. No one. You're not even a Hasbeen. You're a Neverwas.

And that makes me enjoy the anonymity an awful lot less. I need America. I have to have America. Above everything.

35. Fern

Falling in love with a mammoth superstar is not ordinary. Yet in some ways it is.

Falling in love with Scott Taylor or even Scottie Taylor is exactly like falling in love with anyone else. I want to be with him every moment of the day. Everything he says is wonderfully profound, interesting and clever. I can't eat. Or sleep. I don't even want to. We can't stop touching one another. We both keep giggling. We forget that we're sharing this planet with 6.6 billion other humans.