That was why when she got into the van, sitting in the middle seat between Ari and Chester – because that was where she always sat – she let him gather her up into an enthusiastic hug. Chester was all ribs and elbows and the smell of Creed Green Irish Tweed aftershave tickled her nostrils and made Ellie want to sneeze but it was Chester and she’d known him her entire life, and a hug from Chester always made her feel everything was all right in the world.
‘That’s enough, Chester,’ Ari said, as she climbed up next to Ellie and slammed the van door shut. ‘Girl needs to breathe.’
An hour later, after picking up Richey, Ari and Chester’s friends, Tom and Tabitha, and enough alcohol to see them through the weekend, they were on the motorway with the windows wound down and happily listening to a Stax compilation if only Ari would shut up.
‘I’m just saying, Ellie, that luxury yurts aren’t what Glastonbury is about. It won’t be the end of the world if you can’t straighten your hair for a couple of days.’
‘It will be the end of my world,’ Ellie said, and she fingered some sample strands of hair to make sure they were still straight and silky smooth. ‘If God had wanted us to sleep in tents, he’d never have invented luxury yurts, and I take it you won’t be coming round to borrow my hairdryer and charge your phone, then?’ she added slyly.
‘Of course I will, but I’ve earned my Glastonbury stripes.’ Ari smiled smugly.
‘If you’re going to behave like a brat all weekend, then no yurt privileges for you,’ Ellie told her mother sternly. Ari opened her mouth to argue the point but Chester rapped on the dashboard to get their attention.
‘Hey, do you think it’s going to be as hot as it was in 2010? Do you remember, Ells, you nearly passed out during the Pet Shop Boys set?’
‘I don’t know,’ Tom piped up from the back of the van. ‘It was pretty hot in 1999 too.’
Chester nodded. ‘Manic Street Preachers.’
‘And Blondie!’ Ari and Tabitha chorused, because Deborah Harry was like a god to them, and they were off.
Someone would shout a year and someone else, usually Chester, would reel off a long list of bands that had played that year, with other fun facts (‘and wasn’t that the year Mad Glen fell over and broke his foot in the healing circle?’) being thrown in from the cheap seats.
‘Then there was 1993 and 1997,’ Tabitha announced. ‘Very special years because …’
‘Ninety-seven was the year of the mud,’ Ellie reminded everyone with a shudder.
‘Yeah, but it was still a good year and so was 1993 because those were the years that I played Glastonbury,’ Ari said with a slightly injured tone.
‘Did you really?’ Richey asked. He’d been quiet up until then, but every time Ellie had turned round to make sure he was all right and that the stories of Glastonburys past weren’t boring, Richey had grinned like he was enjoying himself. ‘You’ve played Glastonbury twice?’
‘Well, not on the main stage,’ Ari admitted sadly. ‘But yes, in 1993 I was in a Riot Grrrl band called The Beauty Queens and we played one of the smaller stages, and by ’97 it was all Britpop and I was playing guitar with these muppets called Bloomsbury.’
Richey gave a long, low whistle. ‘They got quite big, didn’t they?’
‘Yeah, just after they kicked me out because they decided they’d be better with an all-male line up.’ Ari sighed. ‘Story of my fucking life, isn’t it?’
There were murmurs of agreement. Although Ari was an amazing guitarist and a pretty good singer (and that wasn’t Ellie cutting her some slack, there were actual reviews, even one from the Guardian, supporting that claim), success had always remained just out of reach. Sooner or later, usually when whatever band Ari was in was on the verge of signing to a major label, Ari would be told it wasn’t working out. ‘Musical differences’ were usually mentioned, but Ari had forgotten more about music than most of her band-mates would ever know and she’d been on the scene – on countless scenes – for so long that A & R always wanted to go with a fresher face. Or a face that wouldn’t call them on it when they were acting like corporate, soul-sucking twats.
Ari would rage for a couple of weeks, then dust herself down and scout around for another band to join, always hopeful that this time it would be different, that this time she might get a shot at the fame that had always eluded her, that this time she’d finally get her dues.
It still hadn’t happened, but Ellie hoped she’d inherited just a fraction of her mother’s grit and determination. ‘I loved The Beauty Queens,’ Ellie declared, though they’d been very shouty. ‘They taught me about third-wave feminism and bought me loads of Hello Kitty stuff. I think Glastonbury was their best ever gig.’
Ari beamed at her. ‘We did rock it out, didn’t we? And that was one of the best Glastonburys ever anyway because the Velvet Underground headlined, and I wanted you to see them once before they all started dying.’
‘Have you been to every Glastonbury then?’ Richey asked, interrupting the mother–daughter bonding.
Ari had been to every Glastonbury since 1984. ‘Well, apart from 1996.’
There were murmurs of agreement, as they’d all boycotted that year too in solidarity, but Richey wasn’t to know why they’d been a no-show or what Tabitha meant when she said, ‘Well, that was the year you-know-who was headlining.’
Chester made a sound in the back of his throat that conveyed exactly what he thought about you-know-who, because again, apart from Richey, everyone else in the van knew that only Voldemort and Ellie’s dad were the two names that you never, ever mentioned.
‘Have I missed something?’ Richey looked perplexed. ‘Who headlined in 1996? Shall I google it?’
‘No!’ Ellie turned round again so she could glare at Richey, then at Tom and Tabitha for good measure. ‘Can we please change the subject?’
‘Honestly, Richey, it’s not worth talking about,’ Ari assured him. ‘Though I like to think that Ellie was a gift from the angels, she does actually have a father.’
‘Mum!’ Ellie wrenched herself round, so she could now glare at her mother. But Ari was immune to Ellie’s glares.
‘So, yeah, Ellie’s dad is … well, kind of a big deal. Elder statesman of rock. The godfather of cool. You know the type? But he wasn’t that famous when I knew him.’ Ari’s eyes were hidden behind her shades, but Ellie knew she was rolling them and she knew that Ari wouldn’t say much on the topic because she never did, so it was best just to let her mother say what she had to say. ‘I’m not knocking him; he’s shifted a metric fuckton of units and raised millions of pounds for starving children, and I can’t argue with that, though he only organised that global concert because he had an album to plug, but whatever … Anyway, we fell madly in love back in the day, then we fell madly out of love, then he became household-name famous, and I certainly wasn’t going to pay good money to see him do his tired old man of the people shtick …’ Ari drew a deep breath. ‘So that’s why we didn’t go to Glastonbury in 1996.’
The silence was absolute. Even Richey had stopped asking questions because anyone with a passing knowledge of the British music scene could work out who Ellie’s father was, and Richey had a lot more than a passing knowledge. After all, the album that her father had released six months after he left Ari, Songs For A Girl, was the eleventh best-selling UK album ever and always topped the ‘Greatest Records Of All Times’ polls in the Sunday supplements. And the most famous single off that album, ‘It Felt Like A Kiss’, was one of those songs as instantly familiar as ‘Hey Jude’ or ‘Dancing Queen’. It was embedded into the national consciousness, had been used to advertise everything from lipstick to cars, and the man who’d written it was known only by his first name. Since he’d been knighted two years ago (though, as Tabitha and Tom continually pointed out, David Bowie had been cool enough to decline his knighthood), he was also known as Sir. So, there was no doubt about it, Richey could confirm who her father was with one click in the Google search box.
> ‘Just one more question?’ Richey asked timidly. Ellie sank down in her seat. They hadn’t had the Dad conversation, other than to establish that neither of theirs had stuck around, so why couldn’t he just let this go? ‘How come you’re so straight, Ellie, if your parents are so rock ’n’ roll?’
Ellie grinned. ‘I think the rock ’n’ roll DNA skips a generation. You’d know that if you’d met my grandparents.’
‘Ellie is not straight,’ Ari argued. ‘She just pretends to be straight when she’s working at that stuffy gallery, don’t you, dollface?’
‘Well, I am a little bit straight but it’s OK because you’re rock ’n’ roll enough for the both of us,’ Ellie said, and it was time to shift the mood. She reached forward so she could jab at the iPod hooked up to the dashboard. ‘I’m sick of this compilation. Any requests or shall we listen to Magic FM?’
There were good-natured howls of dissent, then a fierce debate about what constituted the perfect road trip soundtrack and soon they were all sucking on lemon sherbets and nodding their heads in time to a Doo-Wop playlist.
Two hours out of London, they stopped at a service station. Ellie saw everyone off to purchase coffee and snacks while she stayed behind to check her email.
Chester came back with her Diet Coke as Ellie was frowning over an unintelligible message from Inge. ‘Everything all right, princess?’ he asked. He called Ari ‘duchess’, but as far as Chester was concerned, Ellie would always outrank her.
Ellie frowned a little harder. ‘I can’t get a 3G signal.’ She held her phone out like she was divining for water. ‘It’s very frustrating.’
‘You shouldn’t have to work over the weekend.’
‘If I refused to work over the weekend, Vaughn would sack me and then I’d be poor,’ Ellie said, as her phone decided that it would send her email into the ether with a whooshing sound.
‘They’d never fire you. You run that place single-handedly,’ he said proudly. ‘But I actually meant is everything all right with you and Richey?’
It was no surprise that Chester knew about Richey’s misdemeanours. Ellie told Ari everything and Ari usually fed the information back to Chester because they’d been friends for thirty years. ‘He’s like a faithful family pet,’ Ari had once said to Ellie. ‘I love the guy to death, but he’s not what my heart wants, you know?’
Ellie thought that Chester’s dogged devotion had to count for something. He’d stuck by Ari through thick and thin. Even after one of Ari’s attempts to cook had hospitalised him with the worst case of food poisoning the A&E doctor had ever seen. That was why Ellie still held out hope that Ari would one day finally realise she’d never find a man who was worth even a fraction of Chester.
‘Richey’s fine,’ she said with conviction. ‘We had a talk and it was all a fuss over nothing. He promised it would never, ever happen again.’
‘It better not,’ Chester said grimly and predictably. ‘Otherwise me and Richey are going to have to have a little man-to-man chat.’
‘You don’t have to do that,’ Ellie assured him quickly, because even though Richey had twenty years on Chester, Chester had his own roofing business and was wiry, street-smart and tough. Ellie could still see the scar that bisected his eyebrow after an altercation with a scaffolder and a crowbar. ‘Really, he’s been on his best behaviour ever since we talked about it,’ she added.
‘Well, if you’re sure …’ Chester didn’t sound as if he was and he watched intently as Ellie opened her can of Diet Coke in case her face gave her away.
‘I am sure,’ she said after she’d taken several icy gulps. ‘Stop doing your heavy-handed dad routine, or I won’t get you a Father’s Day present this year.’
‘We go through this every year,’ Chester said, but he ducked his head and tried not to smile. ‘It’s not like I’m your real dad.’
‘But you’re my faux dad so you get a faux Father’s Day present,’ Ellie said. She shrugged. ‘Deal with it.’
‘Well, if I must.’ Chester sighed and played along. ‘As long as you haven’t made me aftershave out of crushed-up bay leaves and hot water again.’
‘I was nine. I had a lot to learn,’ Ellie said and there was just time for a faux father/daughter hug before they heard Ari’s voice calling to them and they were done with their special moment.
Glastonbury, as ever, was the best and worst of times. On the Friday, it had almost been Ellie’s best Glastonbury ever, though a lot of her good cheer was down to the luxury yurt. It had a proper door and walls covered in billowing white cloth and, best of all, a proper bed with duvet and pillows. It would have been absolutely perfect if there’d been an en suite, but at least there were luxury toilets and showers in the gated yurt enclosure, which was patrolled 24/7 by security guards, and a restaurant providing meals made from locally sourced ingredients. It was like Ellie had never left North London.
Even Richey had wondered aloud if they could stay in and around the yurt all weekend, but the sun was shining so they decided to venture out among the riffraff who weren’t lucky enough to be staying in a luxury yurt enclosure.
It was impossible to stick to a schedule at Glastonbury, but sometimes not having twelve hours of your day diarised was fun. Mostly Ellie and Richey ambled along, saw some bands they wanted to see, but not all of them, hung out with some people they’d planned to hang out with, but not all the people they’d arranged to meet, and spent a lot of time entwined on the grass behind the Healing Field working on their tans when they weren’t engaged in mild PDAs.
But on Saturday there were stormclouds. Not actual stormclouds rolling across the duck-egg-blue skies, but metaphorical stormclouds. They’d started before ten on Saturday morning when Ellie and Richey had had a slight contretemps because she didn’t want a pint of lager with her breakfast burrito. It wasn’t like she minded if Richey wanted to start drinking before lunch, it really wasn’t, though she did think that he should pace himself. Then Richey had called her uptight, and if there was one thing Ellie hated, it was being called uptight. She worked very, very hard never to give off an uptight vibe.
They’d separated for a few hours, and while Ellie hung out with Lola, whose friends were appearing in the cabaret tent (though Ellie also thought it was a bit early for a full burlesque show), Richey had texted her to say that he was sorry. Then he texted her to say that he was with his friend Spencer but he’d meet her at five at the entrance to the Acoustic Tent. Ellie was unmoved. She was also suspicious because Spencer was less a friend and more a partner in crime. Maybe she should have listened to Tess and Lola; not allowed herself to be swayed so easily by Richey’s easy charm and easier smile, she thought as she watched one of Lola’s friends shimmy her nipple tassels. But then Richey had texted her to say that he loved her. They’d never said that to each other before, and Ellie thought that it might also be too early for ‘I love you’ but it was just what she needed to make her feel better, and why she waited at the entrance to the Acoustic Tent with an expectant smile.
The expectant smile was long gone when Richey stumbled towards her twenty minutes later than scheduled.
‘Sweetheart! Sorry! Maybe I’ve had a little bit too much to drink,’ he slurred in her ear when he reached her side, and then he’d made a grab for her arse, which made Spencer, his leather jacket unzipped to reveal a pallid pigeon chest, snicker.
Richey was drunk. Very, very drunk. Maybe not just drunk because his pupils were pinned, his top lip was sweaty and he kept rubbing his thighs and licking his lips and talking absolute bollocks about things that he patently knew nothing about, in this case the God particle, and got really aggressive when Ellie challenged him.
‘I don’t know what you’ve been doing, I don’t even want to know, but can you snap out of it?’ she’d demanded, and Spencer had snickered again.
Richey had pointed at himself with an exaggerated ‘who me?’ face. ‘Babe? Babe! Don’t be so fucking uptight.’
It took two hours, a spliff and a portion
of Thai noodles before Richey was back to mellow. ‘Too much booze and too much sun,’ he insisted. Ellie wasn’t that naïve but she didn’t want to fight in the middle of a field on a Saturday night when they were meant to be sharing a luxury yurt for another twenty-four hours. She also didn’t want to confront her dating demons when she was so far away from any of her comfort zones, so she’d had a few puffs on the joint too (which totally didn’t count as giving in to peer pressure because she never, ever inhaled) before they headed over to Ari and Chester’s traditional Saturday night Glastonbury cocktail party. The dress code was festival glam, which meant swishy dresses in bold prints for the ladies and Hawaiian shirts and drainpipe trousers for the men. They’d rigged up a sound system to play Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra and somehow, some way, they were able to serve ice-cold Martinis.
When she’d been little, Ellie would waltz around on Chester’s shoulders or stand on Tom’s feet as he tried to do a quickstep, but now she was all grown up and quite capable of foxtrotting under her own steam with Allison, the bassist from The Fuck Puppets, or doing the salsa with Lola, who kept asking her if something was wrong, ‘’cause you’re looking kind of pissed off, Ells.’ She was kind of pissed off, especially when Richey went AWOL again, but drinking quite a lot of ice-cold Martinis took the edge off her irritation.
Ellie could remember staggering back to the yurt compound at an ungodly hour, via a long detour to the Tipi Field where she got lost. Then collapsing on her double bed in a drunken stupor only to be woken up after what felt like five minutes by Richey. Or more accurately, Richey ‘and a few friends’. It had felt as if there were fifty people all crowded into the yurt although, in reality, there were no more than six, but they were very drunk and very loud. Spencer had started chopping out lines on Ellie’s laptop case and when she‘d asked him what the hell he thought he was doing, he and Richey had shared a conspiratorial look, then Spencer had said, ‘Stop being so fucking uptight.’
The two girls and the other guy with them had all laughed and Richey had made this big deal out of giving Spencer a bollocking. ‘You shouldn’t do coke, Spence. It’s not big and it’s not clever, and it makes Ellie mad at me.’