Pretty Lethal. Joe Schreiber

that’s enough,’ I said. ‘Let’s just listen to what she has to say, okay?’

      ‘This is how it starts,’ Linus moaned. ‘This is how it always starts . . .’

      Out in the garage, the guitar and drums had stopped, and I heard Caleb and Norrie come blundering inside, Cokes in hand, to find out what was taking me so long. They saw Linus standing there with Paula and my folks and stopped in their tracks.

      ‘Hey, dude,’ Norrie said. ‘What’s up?’

      ‘I think you’ll find that the terms are boilerplate for any new band with no track record internationally,’ Paula said. ‘Armitage is working out the merchandising deals with promoters for shirts and promotional items, and the exposure for Inchworm – ’

      Caleb blinked. ‘What’s she talking about, Perry?’

      There was a clattering noise, and I looked out the window and saw that Sasha had arrived. He was wearing leather pants and a feather-plumed boa and pedaling the old twelve-speed Schwinn, which meant that his motorcycle had broken down yet again and was drooling oil somewhere in the back of his mom’s garage – but for once, none of these setbacks seemed to be bothering him in the least. Instead, he leapt off the bike while it was still rolling, letting it rattle to a halt into our garbage cans, and came sprinting up my front steps, bursting into the house, taking in the sight of me and Caleb and Norrie with a huge grin on his face.

      ‘Did you guys hear?’ He pumped his fists. ‘Did Linus tell you? We’re going to Europe, bitches!’

      ‘Wait,’ Caleb said. ‘Whaaaat?’

      Norrie’s mouth dropped open. ‘Seriously?’

      ‘Hell, yeah! Inchworm’s first world tour! Linus says once he negotiates the contract it’s gonna put us over the top, and – ’ He turned around. ‘Oh, hey, Linus.’

      Linus dropped his face in his hands. Through his fingers I could hear him murmuring to himself, praying for strength to persevere in the face of insurmountable obstacles – first among them the band that he’d agreed to represent.

      ‘So,’ Paula said, ‘can I call Armitage and tell him we have a deal?’

      

      ‘You Are a Tourist’ – Death Cab for Cutie

      ‘Man,’ Norrie said, ‘anybody else feel like wuh-we’ve been doing this for about tuh-ten years already?’

      It was eight-thirty at night, Italian time, and the Inchworm European tour had just rolled into Venice’s Santa Lucia station – meaning that we were lugging our own gear down onto the platform, having spent the better part of the last two days on the train playing Nintendo DS and trying not to drive each other crazy.

      Time had become a blur. With Linus leading the way, we’d left London yesterday at midday, taken the Chunnel into Paris, and left after lunch today to go to Venice.

      Things had started out a little shaky. At our first gig in London, Caleb couldn’t find his Stratocaster, Norrie was still sick from the airline food, and half our amps weren’t wired to run off European power outlets. Backstage, Linus was pacing a hole in the dressing room floor, chain-smoking some obscure brand of foul-smelling British cigarettes while reassuring everybody that it was going to be okay. Outside, the crowd was getting antsy while the roadies fiddled with the amplifiers until finally, at a quarter past nine, Sasha stood up and said screw it, he didn’t know about the rest of us, but he for one hadn’t flown halfway around the world to sit in some dressing room like a bunch of American losers.

      Then we went out there and rocked.

      In the end it had taken approximately thirty seconds to realize what we should’ve known from the start: When the four of us got together, it didn’t matter if we were playing in New York, in London, or on the moon – when it came right down to it, at this particular moment in our lives, when our backs were to the wall, we could set that shit on fire.

      Even with half the amps off, Caleb’s loaner guitar squealed and soloed like the devil’s own chainsaw, Sasha was pulling out moves that none of us had ever seen before, spoonfeeding the crowd until they were shrieking for more, and Norrie sounded like he was setting off cherry bombs in the drum kit. We roared through every song on the set list, including a few new ones that we’d only practiced a couple times, until even the bouncers came up front and started dancing. Midway through the show, I glanced back at Norrie and saw him grinning back at me, a perfect reflection of that slightly dazed feeling of wonder. This is real, we were both thinking, at the exact same time. Holy shit, this is actually happening to us right now.

      Up front, Sasha gave his patented Navajo war whoop and a flying helicopter kick that just cleared the microphone stand. ‘Hello, U.K.!’ he yelled. ‘We are Inchworm and we are here to rock you – ’kay?’

      The place went absolutely bonkers. Finally, after playing almost three straight hours and closing with a rousing cover of Sham 69’s ‘If the Kids Are United’ that had the whole place up on its feet and singing along, we stumbled offstage, exhausted and soaked with sweat, grinning like fools, and collapsed into a black cab back to the hotel with a couple of girls from the front row. I called Paula in New York and told her how it had gone, while Sasha leaned out the window and howled, ‘Who wants to do that again?’

      We all did.

      Now, forty-four hours later, we were here in Venice. Two steps off the train, Norrie dropped his duffle bag on the platform next to Caleb’s and flung himself down on it as if it were a huge body pillow, pulling down his baseball cap and closing his eyes. Linus had fought his way into the station to buy tickets for the water taxi, and Sasha had tagged along, already on the prowl for Italian girls. Of the four of us, he was the only one with a seemingly limitless supply of energy, propelled forward by the libido of an adolescent rhino.

      I was digging through my bag for the last Red Bull when my phone started ringing. I looked at the screen and saw an international number I didn’t recognize.

      ‘Hello?’

      ‘Perry?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘George Armitage here. How are you, mate?’

      I stood up a little straighter, suddenly feeling wide awake. ‘Oh. I’m – I’m fine.’ Even after all the time I’d been with Paula and talked about Armitage, what he was like and so on, I’d never actually spoken to the man.

      ‘How’s the tour going so far?’

      ‘It’s going great. We were in London . . . It’s been incredible – ’

      ‘Splendid. Love the new songs, honestly. The reviews of the London show have been over the moon. You blokes are going to be huge – you do realize that, don’t you?’

      ‘Thanks,’ I said. In front of me, Caleb and Norrie were now both sprawled out on their bags. They looked like they’d gone into matching comas. Norrie was drooling.

      ‘You’re in Venice now, aren’t you?’ Armitage asked.

      ‘That’s right. We just got in.’

      ‘Brilliant, brilliant. Wish I could be there to show you the city.’

      ‘Yeah, that would be cool.’ For a split second I toyed with the idea of asking him where he was, but I managed to stop the question from tumbling off my lips. According to Paula, George Armitage was an intensely private man. If you Googled him – and