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By Root 824 0

thousands of other wet, ticketless fans who were mobbing the street. Even if there hadn’t been so much noise we wouldn’t have been able to hear what was going on inside, but we could sometimes hear snatches of shouting and conversation and the occasional drum roll or guitar riff. I didn’t care. I was as happy as a person who is missing the last performance of a legend could be. I might not be able to see or hear them, but I was standing on roughly the same piece of ground as Sidartha; I was breathing the same toxic air. The same rain that poured down on me would pour down on them as they ran to and from their limousines. Once someone must have opened an inside door, because I was sure I heard Stu’s voice, his actual, warm, rich, unrecorded voice, break into the night like a flame to heat our souls. “What the hell is that supposed to be?” it said.

Even though she wasn’t the one who got caught, Ella was still shaken by our close encounter with the law. She stood beside me, shivering slightly, the only island of silence in the sea of shouting fans.

“You know,” I said, trying to cheer her up, “you’re not such a bad actor yourself.”

Instead of panicking when she saw me with the guard, Ella had faked outrage and marched to my defence. “We’re together,” she’d called out. “What seems to be the problem?” She was so convincing that he didn’t even think to ask to see her ticket. But not convincing enough, unfortunately.

“You almost had me believing I had lost my ticket,” I praised her.

Ella jammed her hands into her coat pockets. “I was so scared, I think I almost convinced myself.” And then she kind of froze the way someone in a horror movie does when an axe suddenly smashes through the front door. “Oh, my God, Lola… It never even occurred to me… What if they’d arrested us?” Her expression of terror deepened as the axe shattered the door a second time. “Oh, my God, Lola… What would my mother say if I was taken home in a police car?”

She probably wouldn’t say anything; she’d just die from the shame.

“It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you aren’t being taken home in a police car.” Not yet, anyway.

Ella, however, wasn’t really in a state for the cool balm of logic and reason. The thought of pulling up to 58 Birch Hollow Drive in the back of a police car with the blue light flashing while the neighbours all gaped through their blinds and her father tried to revive her mother was too much for her.

“Maybe we should just go home now,” Ella said – again. “Before anything else happens.”

“Before anything else happens?” I waved my arms. “Ella, nothing’s happened yet.”

“Yes, it has,” said Ella stubbornly. “We’re soaked, you almost broke your neck, we lost all our money, we were almost arrested, and now we’re standing in the rain outside the concert. I call that something.”

I re-adjusted my hood, though it was so wet by then that there wasn’t really much point. “You can’t make an omelette without cracking a few eggs,” I said philosophically.

Ella smiled, thinly.

I changed my approach.

“Oh, please,” I begged, grabbing her hands. “We’re so close, El. Stu Wolff’s only a few yards away from us. The concert’ll be over soon, and then he’ll be in the same room with us. We can’t give up now. Where would we all be today if Columbus had given up and gone back to Spain? If Paul Revere had decided to stay in bed instead of warning everyone that the British were coming? If the Wright brothers had decided to stick to bicycles?”

Ella looked like she was about to answer me, but I didn’t give her a chance.

“Nowhere!” I proclaimed. “That’s where we’d be. There’d be no America. There’d be no satellites. No television. No microwaves or mobile phones. No mesquite crisps.” Ella loves mesquite crisps. “We’d be sitting in mud huts in Europe eating weeds, that’s where we’d be.” And anyway, we were in so much trouble already that we might as well go on.

Ella looked thoughtful. She’s a great believer in sticking things through.

“I didn’t say we should give up…” she murmured.

She was weakening. I moved in, stealthy as a panther.

“Don’t you want