CHAPTER TWO

Cate

Things had changed for me. The time on the road hadn’t changed; it was always this way except when I started it was for a week or three to four nights at the same venue. Now I was lucky if I got two nights. I didn’t bemoan my situation; I was still doing the thing I loved, singing. When I was young and fresh there would be small presents in my dressing room with offers to dine or to supply me with something that would relax me. Well you can imagine what they thought would happen after. It didn’t. I was a Rock chick that didn’t do the drugs and sex scene. Doesn’t sound possible does it? It’s true though. I saw early on what happened to the girls who went that way, the media trashed them, unlike the guys who, it seemed enhanced their profile with every spliff they smoked and every teenybopper who dropped their knickers for them, especially when the girls seemed to be under-age. It’s a man’s world and despite the efforts of the woman’s lib crowd, it still is. I became cautious of any entanglement. Oh, I did have some relationships, but my relationships worked themselves out over a period of months rather than hours.

When I married, it was to a guy in my backing group. I married for life; he married for security, believing that there would always be a place for him in whatever backing group I used. The problem with him was that he still thought of himself as freelance. He was free with his lance, and he had a Bill Clinton zipper. Getting divorced was not easy. The legal bit was a piece of cake, but the publicity was horrible. The tabloids could not believe that he would cheat on the beautiful, shapely girl he married without cause. So the rumours started, there was something wrong with me, I was frigid or perhaps I was a lesbian. He was guilty. Yet I was the one who was tarred.

My manager, the little shit, had guided me all through my career until two years ago. I was young and naive when I signed up. He moulded my appearance, introduced me to the right A and R men, chose what songs I would sing, looked over the contracts and showed me the dotted line where I signed. After twenty years in the business, I learned a thing or two and asked some pertinent questions of him. I read the music papers and was astounded at how much I was presumed to be earning, yet I didn’t have anything like that sort of money in my accounts. The answers he gave me were so evasive; I knew there was something wrong. Therefore, I went looking and found an unbiased accountant who specialized in investigating money trails. He delved for a couple of months and then laid it all out for me. Money was being siphoned off from all my contracts and was split between my manager and whatever agent was involved in the deal of that time. The returns to the Inland Revenue that my manager’s chosen accountant filed on my behalf were nothing like the value of the contracts. The Revenue came sniffing looking to recover tax unpaid from me. It was only after the Court case that they backed off, understanding that I had been the victim and that I had never received the full amount of my contracts. If my manager had revealed where he had stashed the money he stole from me, his sentence would have been lighter, but for reasons unknowable he stayed tight-lipped.

After all these bumps in the road, I had made it a rule that I would never make a quick decision. I would look at things and then think. Then I would think some more. So becoming friends with Jack so quickly was well out of character for me. Most men would have been incandescent at being cut up like that, but Jack just sort of shrugged his shoulders and offered me a drink. Usually I would make an excuse and leave at that point, but Jack had this aura of non-threatening composure. Therefore, I sat down.