Never Out of Sight

Farrah Quilliam had built a whole life on being looked at, but only ever by people she had chosen to let look. Forty minutes to doors, and she did her own mouth.

She always had. The make-up artist the promoter had sent was very good and very kind and had done everything else — skin, brows, the gold at the inner corners of her eyes that would read from the back of the Glasgow arena — and had then put the lip brush down on the counter and stepped away from it, because Joanne had warned her. Nobody else painted the mouth. It was the one thing Farrah had never delegated, not on the first pub tour when she had done it in a toilet mirror in Doncaster by the light of a hand dryer, and not tonight, with ten thousand people coming through the doors on the other side of three concrete walls to watch her do something she had never done before.

She pinned her hair first. That was the order: hair up, high and tight off the neck, every pin pushed in until it bit, so that nothing would come down in the second half when she was sweating under the rig. Then the liner, then the colour, a deep blue-based red that nobody made any more. She leaned in to the mirror with her elbow on the counter, the bulbs hot on her face, and drew the top line in one stroke.

The dressing room was bigger than her first flat. It had a sofa nobody had sat on, a rail with her first-half look hanging on it in a garment bag — sequins, black, cut close from breast to knee — a fruit bowl, a kettle, a printed day sheet taped to the back of the door, and on the dressing table beside her elbow, weighted down with her phone, the page. Two verses and a chorus of a song called "Sightline", except that it was one verse, a chorus, and a gap where the second verse should be, with three lines crossed out so hard the biro had gone through.

She filled in the bottom lip. She blotted. She looked up to check the edges.

There was a man behind her.

He was standing just inside the door, which she had not heard open, in a black baseball cap pulled low and a black jacket zipped to the throat, and there was a laminate on a lanyard round his neck, the purple all-access one with her own name printed across the top of it. He was holding the page. Her page, the song, lifted from under her phone without a sound, and he was looking at it and not at her, the way a person reads a menu.

It took her perhaps a second to understand that he was real and not a reflection of someone in the corridor. By the time she had turned round on the stool, the lip brush still in her hand, the door was swinging shut and he had gone, and the page had gone with him.

"Hey," she said, to nobody. Then, much louder, standing, "Oi — Joanne!"

Venue security were two men in hi-vis tabards and a head of security in a fleece with a radio that crackled every time he tried to be reassuring. They went up the dressing-room corridor and down it. They checked the fire door at the end, which was alarmed and had not gone off. They checked catering, wardrobe and the band room, where her drummer was eating crisps and had seen nobody. They asked her twice to describe him, and she described him twice: black cap, black jacket, about her height, white, clean-shaven, maybe thirty, maybe forty, she had not seen his face properly because he had been looking down at her lyrics. Her lyrics, she said, because the head of security kept calling it "the item".

"We'll get the CCTV pulled," he said. "Soon as we can."

"Soon as you can after the show, you mean."

He had the grace to look at his radio.

Joanne stood in the doorway with her arms folded and her reading glasses pushed up into her short grey-blonde hair, which was where they went when she had stopped reading and started thinking. She had been Farrah's tour manager for four years and had never once raised her voice, and she did not raise it now.

"We can hold doors," she said. "Fifteen minutes. Twenty. Nobody will die."

"No."

"Farrah."

"He took a piece of paper," Farrah said. "He didn't take me. I'm not starting my first arena tour twenty minutes late because some sad bastard wanted a souvenir." She turned back to the mirror and looked at her mouth, which was perfect, which had not so much as smudged, and was absurdly proud of it. "Is the pass still live? The one he had?"

"Production's checking."

"Then production can check while I'm on."

In the corridor behind Joanne a young man went past with a garment bag held high over one shoulder so that it would not drag — her second-half dress, the red one, going down to the quick-change behind the stage. Mousy hair, a black crew T-shirt, a lanyard she did not look at. He had come across from somebody else's tour this week, she thought; she had seen his name on the wardrobe sheet and not kept it. He glanced in at the open door, at the security men and at Joanne and at her, and said nothing, and walked on.

"You are allowed," Joanne said quietly, when the fleece had gone off down the corridor talking to his radio, "to be rattled."

"I know I'm allowed." Farrah picked up her phone from where the page had been and put it face down. The counter looked wrong without the paper on it. She had written that first verse in a hotel in Leeds at four in the morning. She had copied it out of her notebook onto the Glasgow hotel's pad that afternoon, to look at while she did her face, and now somebody else had it. "I'm just not going to be."

She was, as it turned out, better than she had ever been.

It started with the dark. Walking up the ramp to the side of the stage with the house lights still on and the room roaring like weather, then the lights going and the roar going up a full octave, ten thousand people making one sound because she was about to walk out. From the wings it hit her in the chest, not the ears. She stood in it with her in-ears in and her band's count coming through them, tiny and precise, one, two, one two three four, and she walked out into the white.

Arena rooms have a sound of their own, and she had been warned about it and had not believed it. There was a slap off the back wall, a fraction of a beat late, so that every hard consonant she sang came back at her like somebody mocking her from the cheap seats. The first two songs she fought it. On the third she stopped fighting it and sang into the gap, let the room answer, and it was like learning a new instrument in front of an audience that had paid to watch her learn it.

Her in-ear mix was nearly right. Too much kick, which she could live with, and the backing vocals sitting a hair above her own voice in the second chorus, which she could not. At the end of the song she turned her back on ten thousand people, found the monitor engineer's eyes across the stage, touched her ear and raised her hand flat and then lowered it. He nodded. By the next song it was fixed, and she could hear herself — the actual grain of her own voice, dead centre of her skull, where it belonged.

When she sat at the piano for the slow one, the lights went down to a single spot, and the room went up. Phones. Thousands of them, all at once, little white squares held over heads, rising in waves up the tiers until the far end of the arena looked like a city at night seen from a plane. She had seen footage of this happening to other people. She had not been ready for how quiet it was — ten thousand people holding their breath and a thin film of light on every face.

Every one of them was looking at her. That was the job. That was the thing she had wanted since she was eleven and singing into a hairbrush in a back bedroom in Hillsborough with the door locked against her brothers. She had never once minded being looked at.

She thought, halfway through the second verse, of a man in a cap holding a piece of paper as if he had a right to it, and she sang the next line harder, and the room took it and threw it back at her.

The quick-change was fine. The red dress was where it should be, unzipped on its hanger, and two wardrobe women got her out of the sequins and into it in under a minute in the blue dark behind the stage, and she went back out with her heart going like a drum machine.

At the end of the encore she did the thing. She stood at the lip of the stage in the red dress with the whole room screaming, reached up, and pulled the pins out of her hair, one after another, dropping them on the boards, until the whole heavy chestnut length of it came down her back. The sound the room made was the loudest sound of the night. Every photographer in the pit knew to wait for it. She had started doing it in a club in Nottingham when a pin had been sticking into her scalp for an hour, and she had kept doing it because nothing she had ever written got a noise like that.

She came off soaked, shaking, laughing, into the arms of her guitarist, who was shouting something she could not hear.

It was after midnight by the time Joanne came back to the dressing room, and she had the head of security with her, and he had a different face on.

The laminate had not been forged. It had been borrowed. One of the lighting crew had hung his pass on a hook in the corridor behind the stage — beside the wardrobe rail, the fleece said, as though that were a detail anybody needed — while he went up into the rig to change a lamp, because you did not climb with a lanyard round your neck. When he came down it was not on the hook. He had thought he had dropped it. He had gone to production for a replacement and said nothing more, because losing your pass on opening night was embarrassing and not, as far as he knew, a crime. The purple laminate had turned up an hour ago on the floor of the gents by the loading bay. The page had not turned up at all.

"And the cameras?" said Farrah. She was in a silk robe the colour of oyster shell with her make-up half off and her hair still loose round her shoulders, and she sat on the arm of the sofa nobody used with her bare feet on the cushion and her arms wrapped round her knees.

"Corridor camera's been down since the last event, I'm told." The head of security did not look at her while he said it. "There's a ticket in."

"There's a ticket in," Farrah said. "Brilliant. Great. Fuck me."

He went. Joanne shut the door behind him and stood with her back to it for a moment, and then took her glasses down out of her hair and folded them and put them in the pocket of her jacket, which meant that the thinking had finished.

"I want protection on you," she said. "From tomorrow. Proper, private. The promoter uses a firm, they did the boy bands last year, they can have somebody here by the afternoon—"

"No."

"Farrah, I'm not asking."

"No, I heard you." Farrah put her chin on her knees. Her hands had been steady all the way through the set and they were very steady now, which was how she knew something was wrong with them. "I'm not saying no to protection. I'm saying no to the promoter's firm. If somebody's going to be following me round every corridor in the country for three weeks, then I'm the one who hires them. I pay them. They answer to me. Not to the promoter, not to the label, not to the insurers." She met Joanne's eyes. "Not to you either, love, and I say that with enormous affection."

Joanne almost smiled. "You've never once in your life let somebody else hire anybody."

"And look how well it's gone." Farrah unfolded herself off the sofa and went to the dressing table. Her lipstick was still standing uncapped where she had left it, forty minutes before doors, when she had looked up and seen a man behind her. She capped it. She looked at the empty space beside it where the page had been, and then at her own face, half cleaned, the red still on her mouth. "Three names," she said. "Firms, people, whatever. Good ones. On my phone by the morning."

"By the morning."

"I'll see them tomorrow. Before the show."

"You'll see them," Joanne said, "and then you'll haggle."

"Obviously I'll haggle." She picked up a cotton pad and began, very carefully, to take the red off, the one thing she never let anyone else touch. "It's my name on the laminate."

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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