Love Lies Read Online Free PDF Page A

toss rice and congealed leftovers into the bin. I wash up and I wipe the table. Anything rather than meet Adam’s eye. It takes me twenty minutes to have the tiny kitchen gleaming; I even drag a soapy cloth across the floor. Throughout my frenzied activity Adam says nothing and he doesn’t move.
    He is truly petrified.

3. Scott
    Some people think it might just happen. Fame and that. That you’ll just stumble on it. Or that someone will hand it over, that’s the Simon Cowell effect, that is. But I always knew finding fame took more than that. It needed plans, schemes and determination. It needed energy. When I’m pissed I don’t have much energy and I forget plans. So I had to stop getting pissed. Because to lose it all now, well, it would be a damn shame. It would.
    The other thing people don’t realize is that it’s a violent toil making art. It’s far too easy to lose your nerve. People who aren’t good enough rarely realize it. Others who are good enough don’t believe it. You have to believe in everything. In luck, in your fans, but mostly in yourself.
    When I was fifteen I got a Saturday job in a butcher shop. I needed extra money for clothes and records and stuff that makes life bearable. Nothing could be as ugly as chopping meat. For twelve months all I smelt was blood. Even when I was nowhere near the fuckin’ shop I smelt of blood. The bloke I worked for was an arse. I had to wear green nylon trousers and a green checked dickie bow. There was no amity or fun. Nan thought being a butcher was a good trade: ‘You never see a skinny butcher.’ (Yeah, but who wants to be fat?) She thought I should suck up to the arse that was my boss so he’d take me on full-time after my GCSEs. Mum didn’t disagree, she didn’t have the energy. It was like we were living in a different century to everyone else by growing up in the north in the late 70s and early 80s. It was made clear to me that I was starting at the bottom and that was where everyone expected me to stay. No one believed I’d be anything. A lack of belief can break your heart; it breaks your soul. If you let it.
    But I do believe in myself, except when I don’t. I do when I’m up there on stage and women are flinging their bras and morals at me. Then I know I’m a god. Trick is, not to think too carefully about exactly what sort of god I might be because then you stop believing in yourself and it’s possible you might drown in your own vomit (the default end for a rock star).
    When I think back about how I got here, I am not surprised. People say, ‘A lad from Hull, here with all of this! Who’d have thought?’ They say that all the time and they are surprised. But I tell you who’d have thought. I’d have thought. The wall-to-wall open legs, the millions in the bank, the swimming-pool that I could fill with champagne if I wanted to, this is my proper place in life. The two-up-two-down terrace in Hull was the mistake; that was the angels’ clerical error. I should never have been dropped off there among all that disappointment. In our house there were just two states of existence, both underpinned by a solid sense of disappointment (my mother’s – never too happy to be married, heartbroken after my father pissed off). The two states of existence were basically TV On, TV Off.
    TV On was the dominant state; it ran from about 7 a.m. all the way through to 1 a.m. the next day (and the next and the next). The thin curtains would be pulled across the window, shunning the bright daylight in the summer and offering no protection against the dreary black elements in the autumn and winter. The TV droned or blared and my family sprawled in front of it. My nan, small, neat and industrious, usually knitting booties for young girls on our estate that had come undone. The girls were never grateful for the old-fashioned booties, preferring Mothercare’s finest, purchased with government clothing vouchers. My brother and me sprawled in front of the TV;