Polly Courtney - The Fame Factor

Unable to feel her legs any more, Zoë pushed herself up from the floor and squeezed Kate’s shoulder.

‘Look,’ she said, looking down at her friend. ‘We’ve all got things we don’t like about ourselves.’ She hesitated for a moment, thinking about her own cowardice. She was too weak to even talk to her own family about her ambitions. ‘You’ve just got to live with them. And to be honest, most people wouldn’t even notice your flaws.’

Kate looked up with a grateful smile.

‘Hey, guys!’ Shannon bounded through the door, her mate in tow with the camcorder haphazardly slung over his shoulder. ‘Say something for the camera!’

Zoë smiled wearily. ‘Hi.’

Kate raised a shaky hand.

The cameraman gave up on them and swivelled back to Shannon, who was tipping back the remains of her pint. She swallowed, then looked around. ‘Where’s Ellie?’

Zoë looked at her watch. ‘Good point.’ The camcorder spun back to her. ‘She’s cutting it fine.’

‘Probably gazing at the Hackney skyline with Mr Pot-head,’ said Shannon. The recording equipment swooped back across the room.

As Shannon’s mate sought out the next piece of footage, the door swung open again and Ellie drifted in.

‘Hi, guys!’

‘Ellie, this is Gavin,’ Shannon explained, as the camcorder was pushed into her face.

There was a bang on the door. ‘When you’re ready, girls!’ It was Eamonn’s cousin, the promoter.

Zoë tried to hurry the group along, shooing Gavin back into the crowd and hoping that Ellie’s missed sound-check wasn’t going to matter. There had only been one gig where they’d had to stop playing to ask the sound engineer to turn on her amp. It wasn’t that Ellie didn’t care about the gigs; she was as desperate as everyone else to make a success of the band. She just couldn’t get the hang of time management.

With a quick nod, Zoë led them out from the darkness. After several hundred performances together, they knew the routine. She walked to the centre spot, adjusting her guitar strap as the noise rose up from the room around them.

‘Get ya kit off!’

‘Girl-band!’

‘Tits out!’

One of the Australian revellers in the corner stood up and lobbed a beer-soaked flag at the stage, before toppling sideways and being removed from the premises in the crook of Eamonn’s arm.

Zoë looked round at the girls, smiling with anticipation. They were used to this. With an all-female cast, they had to work doubly hard to prove themselves, particularly in a place like The Mad Cow.

They kicked off with their rockiest number, ‘Delirious’, Zoë pouring her heart into it, watching as the hecklers slowly lost their nerve. A rush of pure, concentrated emotion coursed through her. It was moments like this that Zoë lived for. Offstage, she had an ordinary existence, but on stage, she became extraordinary. It no longer mattered who was listening. It didn’t even matter if nobody was listening. She was surrounded by and absorbed in the music, feeling more alive than she could ever feel in the day. No stomach-churning fairground ride, no skydiving trip, no surround-sound cinema experience could ever match the exhilaration she felt as she emptied her lungs into that microphone.

By the third song, the doubters were few and far between, but Zoë knew they’d be silenced by what was to come. Ellie’s guitar solo had that effect. Complete strangers had been known to throw themselves onto the stage, likening her nimble fingers to those of the masters, Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix. It was at times like this, when Ellie disappeared into a frenzy of movement and sound, drowning them in the beauty of her improvised tune, that the band came into its own.

A few weeks ago, they had featured on an obscure page of the Kerrang! website thanks to Shannon’s brief relationship with the online editor. The review summed up their sound perfectly: Loud and hypnotic, with an edgy disco beat beneath sweet, twisted lyrics, Dirty Money combine elements of The Strokes and New Order with frothy but powerful feminine vocals. When she sang, she could see those words dancing in front of her eyes: Loud. Edgy. Powerful. That was Dirty Money. They were pop, but as another, less renowned reviewer had once put it, ‘more Killers than Kylie’.

‘That was amazing!’ yelled Gavin, beating his way through the crowds afterwards, still shouldering the camera.

Zoë thanked him quickly, her mind already on the bigger picture. ‘Did you get it all?’

He frowned at her. ‘What d’you mean, all?’

Zoë’s throat tightened. ‘All…the songs. The gig.’

Gavin stared gormlessly for a moment, his mouth hanging open a little. ‘Oh my God…I didn’t realise you wanted the whole thing. I just got – you know, the first one? Where the guys were doing that thing with the flag?’

Zoë closed her eyes, cursing herself for letting Shannon take responsibility for something so important. They needed this demo DVD.

It was only when she opened her eyes and spotted Shannon, suppressing a ridiculous smirk, that she realised that the joke was on her.

‘Oh.’ She smiled sheepishly. ‘Very funny.’

‘Dear, oh dear,’ muttered Brian, hovering over Zoë’s desk and grimly shaking his bald head.

Quickly navigating away from the band’s MySpace page, Zoë looked up and forced a smile.

‘What…’ said Brian, bending down and scooping up a handful of papers from her desk, ‘is this?’

‘I think, um…’ Zoë stammered. ‘I think that’s last year’s audit for…’

‘Clutter!’ he screamed, triumphantly. ‘ That is what this is.’ He let the print-outs slither out of his hand and then, rather unhelpfully, picked off some random pages from other piles to make sure the paperwork was completely out of order.

‘It’s all organised in—’

‘Ah!’ he cried again, making sure most of the department could hear. ‘ Organised clutter! Is that what it is?’

Zoë sighed quietly, watching as her boss picked off yet another sheet and put it down somewhere else. She knew what this was about. It wasn’t just Brian trying to annoy her – although he was trying to annoy her. This was about the new rule that had just come into force across Chase Waterman.

Weeks earlier, the powers that be on the seventeenth floor had enlisted the help of some highly respected consultants, whose job it was to improve efficiency in the company. Following a lengthy period of consultation that included employee surveys and a series of experiments comparing staff productivity under different levels of ambient lighting, the troubleshooters had come to the revolutionary conclusion that auditors worked most efficiently whilst sitting in upright chairs, in silence, in natural light. But the beady-eyed consultants had also spotted another spectacular insight: The best auditors tended to have clear desks. It was this little gem that formed the seed of a new way of thinking at Chase Waterman PLC. They called it, imaginatively, the clear desk policy.

‘Sorry,’ Zoë said wearily. ‘It’s just, I like having everything to hand. It’s all in piles. I know where everything…’

Brian silenced her with a raised eyebrow. ‘ODOM,’ he said.

‘Sorry?’

‘Odom,’ he said again. ‘ODOM. An Organised Desk is an Organised Mind.’

‘Oh, right.’ Zoë nodded.

‘Let’s have it clear by the morning.’

Zoë let her eyes glaze over as her boss strode off to persecute some other employee. She stayed like this for several seconds, waiting for the irritation to pass before she got back to pretending to work.

‘There’s no need for paper these days, anyway,’ the weasel next to her piped up. ‘You can just do everything electronically.’