Vinyl Demand

Book 0: Quick Reads

by Hayley Long

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

`Vinyl Demand? sees two party girls plucked from their dead end, debt-ridden lives and thrust into the big time as Superstar DJs. They only wanted to pay their gas bill!



Beth Roberts and Rula Popek have a lot in common.  They are both 19, both have crap jobs and both live in the worst flat in the whole of Wales.



The girls have no money, no boyfriends, family who are thousands of miles away and a final demand for a gas bill which they cannot pay.  It all looks pretty bleak until one day when Rula stumbles across an entire vinyl record collection which has been left in a local charity shop.  She takes a gamble and blows the money for the gas bill on the whole lot and the dream of becoming Cardiff?s very own answer to the global girl DJ, Lisa Lashes.  It?s just a shame she didn?t bother to explain the plan to Beth first.

Release date: March 1, 2008

Publisher: Accent Press Ltd

Print pages: 96

Sample

1

Beth Roberts picked her post up from the floor. Flicking through the morning’s delivery, she counted three pieces of junk mail, one skinny brown envelope which could only contain a demand for money, and a postcard from her parents in Spain. She pulled out the three pieces of junk mail and threw them on to a large and yellowing heap of similar envelopes in the corner of the hall, then made her way back upstairs to the flat.

In the rent book, 52c Queens Road, Cardiff, was described as a fully-furnished flat but really it was more of a poorly-equipped bedsit. It consisted of one large room which housed a single bed on each of the long walls and a small kitchen area in a corner at the far end. The only other objects which could count as furniture were an enormous old TV which looked as if it might be older than Beth and an even more massive music centre which was definitely a whole lot older than her and cased in polished wood. The music centre was only ever used as a coffee table because it was too old and useless to know what a CD was, let alone play one. Unframed posters of Justin Timberlake and Orlando Bloom clung to the walls and tried to cheer them up. Clothes lay scattered all over a scruffy dark-green carpet. The whole place was nothing more than a very shabby teen bedroom. Through a door across the hallway was a bathroom which was shared with the occupants of flats 52a and 52b. Beth Roberts didn’t live in the best flat in Cardiff.

Beth flopped on her single bed and held the postcard up in front of her. It was the usual picture of a beach and sunshine. On the back her mum had written, ‘Weather is here. Wish you were lovely!’

Beth sighed. Her parents had been living in Spain for almost three years now. They had moved there the week after she had taken her final GCSE exam and they had never really understood why she hadn’t wanted to go with them. Looking around the bedsit, Beth couldn’t really understand it either. But this was where her friends were and Cardiff was her city.

Beth fixed the postcard to the wall with some glue and then turned her attention to the envelope. Opening it, she saw that she was right. It was a bill. A gas bill. Printed in red ink was a demand for £76. A final demand. At the top of the bill in bold letters it said,

Failure to pay this bill within six weeks will result in your gas supply being cut.

Beth sat up. This was bad. No more gas would mean no more meals of heated baked beans. No more noodles. No more boil-in-the-bag fish. No more bananas in custard. No more anything. No more gas would mean that Beth and her flatmate Rula would starve. And then what would she do? Write to her parents in Spain and ask them to rescue her? Tell them that she couldn’t cope in Cardiff on her own?

Beth glued one corner of the red phone bill to the wall to stop it getting lost and got up from her bed. She crossed the room, pulled her mobile phone out of the pocket of a jacket which was hanging from a hook behind the door, and flipped it open. She pressed the speed-dial button and waited. Seconds later, a voice as young as Beth’s but marked apart by a soft Polish accent answered.

‘Hello?’

‘Rula,’ barked Beth into her phone. ‘You haven’t paid the gas bill. I paid it last time, remember? You need to go to the post office and pay it.’

‘Yes, I know.’ There was a pause. ‘I forgot.’

Beth gripped the phone a little tighter and rolled her eyes up to the ceiling. She and Rula had been best friends since they’d met in high school, way back at the beginning of Year 10. Back then, Rula had been painfully shy, homesick for Poland and hardly able to speak a word of English. But she’d had a fun twinkle in her eye and Beth had spotted that and decided . . .