The Alphabet Sisters Read Online Free PDF

leaving a spare key with friends or family? In case this happens again?”
    She’d nodded, smiled politely. She’d spent the time waiting for him thinking just that, before realizing with a dull aching feeling that not only did she have no family here, but no friends close by either. Jessica lived on the other side of London. There were several other people, journalists and a band booker in one of the live music pubs, whom she met occasionally for a drink, but she could hardly call them close friends. She couldn’t really leave a key with them either.
    She blinked now and dragged her attention back to the computer in front of her, trying to concentrate again. Cheer up, Bett, she told herself firmly. She gazed around the office, taking in all the band posters, the piles of CDs, the overflowing files of press clippings. Everything was peachy, wasn’t it? She was living in the epicenter of the music industry, she had a great job, she’d never been happier. Not only that, she was about to fly home to Australia, to see Lola and her parents for a week. And yes, all right, Anna and Glenn and Carrie and Matthew would be there, and yes, it would be awkward and uncomfortable, but she was a grown woman and she’d cope. And it would be great to see her niece, Ellen, again, too, wouldn’t it? Yes. Exactly. She shut her eyes tight, then opened them again, stared intently at the computer screen, and started typing.
    Lead singer Mutt Dagger says it’s time that real music took over from the manufactured bands. “Enough of this candy crap. People want truth and energy in their music, and that’s what we’re giving them. This is us telling our stories with our music. And the difference is we’re telling it as it is.”
    Bett pressed Save, then glanced down at the folder of plane tickets beside her coffee cup. She’d spent her lunch hour with her travel agent, running through all the flight details, paying the final installment. It was only afterward she noticed she’d conducted the entire conversation with a piece of spinach from her lunchtime salad on her front tooth, covering it so completely, in fact, it looked like she had lost a tooth, in pure witch fashion. On the way back to the office she’d had an overwhelming urge to ring her sister Anna in Sydney, to tell her about it and hear Anna’s laugh. Except she didn’t make those sorts of calls to her sisters anymore, did she? Calls about disastrous days or wild nights, work trials or love lives or friends or recipes or hangovers or … anything.
    The band combines a youthful energy with pure adrenaline, producing a raw, rocky sound, guitar-edged and bass-driven.
    No, they don’t, she thought. She typed quickly. The band do what they’re told by a middle-aged man who is living out his own musical fantasies and making a lot of money along the way out of kids reared on reality TV programs.
    She started to growl, a constant, satisfying kind of noise from the back of her throat.
    Jessica peered over her own computer screen. “Bett, are you okay?”
    She stopped midgrowl to nod, then started it up again as she kept writing.
    The band’s drummer, Raven Deathmask, is a self-described anarchist and spotty-faced little tosshead who looks like he may still wear nappies.
    Bett pressed Delete and tried again.
    The band’s first album is a remarkable feat of hideous guitar squeals and nonsense lyrics about rebellion when the most any of the spoiled kids in this manufactured band have had to rebel against is—
    Stop it, Bett. She pressed Delete once more.
    Dogs from Hell are a force to be reckoned with, combining youth, anger, and bad haircuts—
    Bett stopped writing altogether. A new, frightening thought had appeared in large letters in her head.
    She didn’t want to do this anymore. It wasn’t about music; it was about packaging. Karl had said as much to her a month ago, on one of his fleeting visits to the office. “Just a license to print money, Bett. Stop taking it so