Kitabı oku: «Who’s That Girl?: A laugh-out-loud sparky romcom!»
Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016
This edition published by Harper360 2016
Copyright © Mhairi McFarlane 2016
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Jacket illustration © CSA-Images/iStock
Cover design © Jessica Lacy Anderson
Mhairi McFarlane asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007525003
Ebook Edition © September 2016 ISBN: 9780008184803
Version: 2016-07-05
Dedication
For Natalie, Paula & Serena
My favourite mix tape
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Mhairi McFarlane
Keep Reading
About the Publisher
1
Life through a phone is a lie. Edie imagined the process like a diagram from physics lessons, the one on that Pink Floyd album cover – a beam of white light refracted in a prism, splintering and fanning out as a rainbow.
I mean, how much artifice, she wondered, was crammed into this one appealing photograph? She gazed at its seductive fictions in the slightly greasy, warm slab of screen in her palm as she queued at the hotel bar.
Activity in the room whirled around her, messy unkempt sweaty reality, soundtracked by The Supremes ‘Where Did Our Love Go?’ In this still life, everything was forever image managed and perfect.
Untruth number one: she and Louis looked like they adored each other’s company. In order to squeeze into the frame, Edie had rested her head against his shoulder. She was coquettish, wearing a mysterious smile. He was doing the self-satisfied, slightly 007 quirk of the lip that conveyed hey life is great, no big deal. It really wasn’t a big deal.
They’d spent five hours as platonic plus ones – the wedding planner had demanded pairs, like Noah’s Ark – and now they were grating on each other, in heat and booze and wedding clothes with waistbands that had got tighter and tighter, as if inflating a blood pressure cuff.
Edie’s heels had, like those high enough for special occasions, moved from ‘wobbly and pinchy, but borderline tolerable’ to stabbing at her viciously like some mythic pain where she’d given up her mermaid tail for size 4s and the love of a prince.
Falsehood number two, the composition. Twinkling-happy party girl Edie, looking up through roadsweeper-brush-sized false lashes. You could glimpse the top half of her red dress, with nicely hoisted pale bosom, stomach carefully held in. Louis’s cheekbones were even more ‘killer in a Bret Easton Ellis’ sharp than usual, chin angled downwards.
This was because they’d held the lens at arm’s length above their heads and discarded five less flattering images, bartering over who liked which one. Edie had eye bags, Louis objected he looked gaunt, the expressions were slightly too studied, the shadows had not fallen in their favour. OK, another, another! Pose, click, flash. Half a dozen was the charm: they both looked good, but not too much like they’d tried to look good.
(‘Why does everyone do that expression now, like you’re sucking on a sour plum?’ Edie’s dad asked, last time she was home. ‘To make yourself look thin and pouty, I suppose. But you don’t look like that face you pull, in real life. How strange.’)
Louis, an Instagram professional and very sour plum, fiddled with the brightness and contrast settings. ‘Now to filter ourselves to fuck.’
He selected ‘Amaro’, bathing them in a fairytale cloud of lemonade fog. Complexions were perfected. The mood was filmic and dreamy, you’d think it captured a perfect moment. You had to (not) be there.
And then there was the caption. The biggest deception of all. Louis tapped it out and hit ‘post.’ ‘Congratulations Jack & Charlotte! Amazing day! So happy for you guys <3 #perfectcouple living their #bestlife.’
This was mostly for the benefit of the rest of the Ad Hoc agency, who’d all found elegant excuses not to travel from London to Harrogate. Nothing tested popularity like several hundred miles of motorway.
Like after admiring Like rolled in. ‘Sigh. You two are another #perfectcouple!’ ‘Shame I’m a bender!’ Louis replied. That’d be the least of our problems, Edie thought. They’d all done the arithmetic with Louis, that if he slagged off everyone else to you, he slagged you off, too.
And of course, Louis had not stopped grousing under his breath about the ‘amazing’ wedding. Edie thought criticising someone’s big day was like making fun of the way they ate, or the size of their ankles. Good people instinctively understood it was not fair game.
I really thought Charlotte would go for something more clean, minimal. Like Carolyn Bessette marrying JFK Jnr. The crystal beading on that gown’s a bit Pronuptia, isn’t it? Even women with taste seems to lose the plot and go Disney disaster in a bridal salon. I am so over those rose bouquets with pearl studs and white ribbon round the stems, like a bandaged stump! Once a WAG has done something, it is DONE. And sorry, but I find a tanned bride vulgar. Ugh, two sips of that Buck’s Fizz and it was into a plant pot. I can’t bear orange juice used to hide cheap champagne. Look at the DJ, he’s about fifty in a blouson leather jacket, where did he get that from, 1983? He looks like he should be on Top Gear. It’ll be rocking out to Kings Of Leon’s ‘Sex On Fire’ and Toni Braxton for the erection section. Why can’t weddings be more MODERN?
The Old Swan in Harrogate was not, as the name suggested, modern. It had the exciting association of being the place Agatha Christie disappeared to during her ‘missing days’ in the 1920s, even though there was probably nothing exciting about being in a confused fugue state.
Edie loved it here. She wouldn’t mind absconding from her life into one of its rooms with four-poster canopied beds. Everything about The Swan was comforting. The ivy-clad frontage, the solid square portico entrance, the way it smelled like cooked breakfasts and plushy comfort.
It had been a blistering high summer day – Haven’t they been lucky with the weather becoming the go-to banal conversation opener – and the French doors in the bar opened on to the honey-lit rolling gardens. Children in shiny waistcoats were zooming around playing aeroplanes, high on Coca Cola and the novelty of being up this late.
Nevertheless, this was, for none of the reasons Louis described, the worst wedding Edie had ever been to.
Giving her order at the bar, she found herself next to a group of women in their seventies and possibly eighties, dressed as flappers. Edie guessed they were here for a Murder Mystery weekend; she’d seen a coach from Scarborough pull up earlier.
There was a ‘suspect’ with no legs, sitting in a wheelchair. She was wearing a feather headband, long knotted beads and draped in a white feather boa. She was sipping a mini bottle of Prosecco through a straw. Edie wanted to give her a cuddle, and/or cheer.
‘Don’t you look lovely,’ one of the group said to Edie, and Edie smiled and said, ‘Thank you! You do too.’
‘You remind me of someone. Norma! Who does this lovely young lady look like?’
Edie did the fixed embarrassed smile of someone who was being closely inspected by a gaggle of tipsy senior citizens.
‘Clara Bow!’ one exclaimed.
‘That’s it!’ they chorused. ‘Ahh. Clara Bow.’
It wasn’t the first time Edie had been given a compliment like this. Her dad said she had ‘an old-fashioned face.’ ‘You look like you should be in a cloche hat and gloves at a train station, in a talkie film,’ he always said. ‘Which is appropriate.’
(Edie didn’t think she talked that much, it was more that her father and sister were quieter.)
She had shoulder-length, inky hair and thick dark brows. Their geometry had to be aggressively maintained with threading, so they stayed something more starlet than beetling. They sat above large soulful eyes, in a heart-shaped face with small mouth.
A cruel yet articulate boy at a house party told her she looked like ‘A Victorian doll reanimated by the occult.’ She told herself it was because she was going through her teenage Goth phase but she knew it was still applicable now, if she hadn’t had enough sleep and caught herself glowering.
Louis once said, as if he wasn’t talking about her when they both knew he was: ‘Baby faces don’t age well, which is why it’s a tragedy it was Lennon shot instead of McCartney.’
‘Are you here with your husband?’ another woman asked, as Edie picked up her white wine and V&T.
‘No, no husband. Single,’ Edie said, to lots more staring and curious delighted ooohs.
‘Plenty of time for that. Having your fun first, eh?’ said another of the flappers, and Edie smiled and nearly said, ‘I’m thirty-five and having very little fun,’ and thought better of it and said ‘Yes, haha!’ instead.
‘Are you from Yorkshire?’ another asked.
‘No. I live in London. The bride’s family are from—’
Louis emerged from the restaurant, gesturing for her to join him with an urgent circling motion of the hand, hissing:
‘Edie!’
‘Edie! What a beautiful name!’ the women chorused, looking upon her with renewed adoration. Edie was touched and slightly baffled by her sudden celebrity status. That was Prosecco drunk through a straw for you.
‘Are you this young lady’s gentleman?’ they asked Louis, as he joined them.
‘No, darlings, I like cock,’ he said, taking his drink from Edie while she cringed.
‘He likes who?’ said one of the women. ‘Who’s “Cock”?’
‘No. Cock.’ Louis made a flexing bicep gesture that Edie didn’t think made it much clearer.
‘Oh, he likes men, Norma. He’s a Jolly Roger,’ said one, casually.
Attention shifted to Louis, the not-that-jolly Roger.
‘I prefer a game of Bananagrams and a hot bath, these days,’ another offered. ‘Barbara still likes a bit of cock, well enough.’
‘Which one of you did it, then?’ Louis said, eyeing their costumes. ‘Who’s the prime suspect?’
‘There’s not been a crime yet,’ one said. ‘Rumour has it there’s going to be a body found on the third floor.’
‘Well you can probably rule her out then,’ Louis said, tapping his nose, gesturing at the woman in the wheelchair.
‘Louis!’ Edie gasped.
Fortunately, it caused a cackle eruption.
‘Sheila used to dig her corns out with safety pins. You don’t mess with Sheila.’
‘Looks like she overdid it.’
Edie gasped again and the old ladies fell about, howling. She couldn’t believe it: Louis had found his audience.
‘Great meeting you, girls,’ Louis said, and they almost applauded him. Edie was forgotten; chopped liver.
‘Come back to the table. It’s all kicking off big style in the main tent,’ Louis said to her. ‘The speeches are starting.’
With a heavy heart, Edie excused herself. The moment she dreaded.
An Audience With The Hashtag Perfect Couple, Living Their Hashtag Best Life.
2
‘Was that free?’ barked the sixty-something man with the hearing aid, dressed as a posh country squire, eyes fixed on the glass in Edie’s hand. Edie and Louis had been put on the odds and sods, ‘hard work, nothing in common’ table. The others had immediately abandoned the hard work and scattered, in the longueur between meal and disco. This sod remained, with his timid-looking, equally tweedy wife.
‘Er, no? I can get you something if you like?’
‘No, don’t bother. You come to these bloody interminable things and they fleece you like sheep. As if the gift list wasn’t brass neck enough. Four hundred pounds for some bloody ugly blue cake whisk, the silly clots. Oh hush, Deirdre, you know I’m right.’
Edie plopped down in her banqueting chair and tried not to laugh, because she thought the KitchenAid was a rinse, too.
She swigged the acidic white wine and thanked the Lord for the gift of alcohol to get through this. The top table passed the microphone down the line to the groom, Jack. He tapped his glass with a fork and coughed into a curled fist. His sleeve was tugged by his new mother-in-law. He put a palm up to indicate, ‘Sorry, in a second, folks.’
‘What’s this crackpot notion of wearing brown shoes with a blue suit and a pink tie, nowadays?’ said hearing aid man, of the groom’s attire. ‘Anyone would think this was a lavender liaison.’
Edie thought Jack’s tall, narrow frame in head-to-toe spring-summer Paul Smith looked pretty great but she wasn’t about to defend him.
‘What’s a lavender liaison?’ Louis said.
‘A marriage of convenience, to conceal one’s true nature. When one’s interests lie elsewhere.’
‘Oh, I see. We’re having one of those,’ he grinned, clasping Edie to him.
‘Forgive me if I don’t scrabble for my inhaler in shock,’ he said, looking at Louis’s quiffed hair. ‘I had you down as someone who likes to smell the flowers.’
Edie had heard more inventive euphemisms for ‘homosexual’ than she expected today.
‘Think you’ll ever bother with marriage?’ Louis said, under his breath.
‘I think it’s more whether marriage will ever bother with me,’ Edie said.
‘Babe. Loads of people would marry you. You’re so “wife”. I look at you and think “WIFE ME”.’
Edie laughed, hollowly. ‘Surprised they’re not making this known to me then.’
‘You’re an enigma, you know …’ Louis said, prodding the bottom of his glass with the plastic stirrer. Edie’s stomach tensed, because meandering, whimsical trains of thought with Louis were always headed to the station of I Can’t Believe You Said That.
‘Hah. Not really.’
‘I mean, you’re never short of fans. You’re the life and soul. But you’re always on your own.’
‘I think that’s because being a fan doesn’t necessarily equal wanting a relationship,’ Edie said neutrally, casting her eyes over the hubbub in the room and hoping they’d snag on something else they could talk about.
‘Do you think you’re the commitmentphobe? Or are they?’ Louis said, moving the stirrer to one side as he drank.
‘Oh, I repel them with a kind of centrifugal force, I think,’ Edie said. ‘Or is it centripetal?’
‘Seriously?’ Louis said. ‘I’m being serious here.’
Edie sighed. ‘I’ve liked people and people have liked me. I’ve never liked someone who’s liked me as much as I like them, at the same time. It’s that simple.’
‘Maybe they don’t know you’re interested? You’re quite hard to read.’
‘Maybe,’ Edie said, thinking agreeing would end this subject sooner.
‘So no one’s ever promised you a lifetime of happiness? You haven’t broken hearts?’
‘Hah. Nope.’
‘Then you’re a paradox, gorgeous Edie Thompson. The girl who everyone wanted … and nobody chose.’
Edie spluttered, and Louis had the reaction he’d been angling for.
‘“Nobody chose”! Bloody hell, Louis! Thanks.’
‘Babe, no! I’m no different, no wedding for loveless Louis any time soon. I’m thirty-four, that’s dead in gay years.’
This was nonsense, of course. Louis no more wanted a wedding than an invasive cancer. He spent all his time hunting for meaningless hook-ups on Grindr, the latest with a wealthy, hirsute man he called Chewbacca to his ‘Princess Louis’. It was just a way of claiming the latitude to take the mickey out of Edie.
‘I did say gorgeous, you diva,’ Louis pouted, as if Edie had been the aggressor. You had to admire the choreography of Louis’s cruelty – a series of carefully worked out, highly nimble steps, executed flawlessly.
‘Ladies and gentleman, sorry about the delay …’ said the groom into the microphone at last.
Jack’s slightly anaemic speech ticked off the things it was supposed to do, according to the internet cheat sheets. He said how beautiful the bridesmaids looked and thanked everyone for being there. He read out cards from absent relatives. He thanked the hotel for the hospitality and both sets of parents for their support.
When he finished with the pledge: ‘I don’t know what I did to deserve you, Charlotte. I will spend the rest of my life trying to make sure you don’t regret your decision today,’ Edie almost knocked back the flute of toasting champagne in one go.
The best man Craig’s speech was amusing in as much as it was horribly misjudged, with gag after gag about the varying successes of Jack’s sexploits at university. He seemed to think these tales were suitable because ‘We were all at it!’ and they were, ‘A bloody good bunch of chaps.’ (Jack went to Durham.) At the mention of a rugby game called ‘Pig Gamble,’ Jack snapped, ‘Perhaps leave that one out, eh?’ and Craig cut straight to, ‘Jack and Charlotte, everyone!’
The bride had a nervous fixed grin and her mum had a face like an arse operation.
Charlotte’s chief bridesmaid, Lucie, was passed the microphone.
Edie had heard much of the legend of Lucie Maguire, from Charlotte’s awed anecdotes in the office. She was a ruthlessly successful estate agent (‘She could sell you an outdoor toilet!’), mother of challenging twins who were expelled from pre-school (‘they’re extremely spirited’) and a Quidditch champion. (‘A game from a kid’s book,’ Jack had said to Edie. ‘What next, pro Pooh Sticks?’)
She ‘spoke as she found’ (trans: rude); ‘didn’t suffer fools gladly’ (rude to peoples’ faces) and ‘didn’t stand for nonsense’ (very rude to people’s faces).
Edie thought Lucie was someone you wouldn’t choose as your best friend unless there’d been a global pandemic extinction event, and probably not even then.
‘Hello, everyone,’ she said, in her confident, cut-glass tones, one hand on her salmon silk draped hip: ‘I’m Lucie. I’m the chief bridesmaid and Charlotte’s best friend since our St Andrews days.’
Edie half expected her to finish this sentence: ‘BSc Hons, accredited by the NAEA.’
‘I’ve got a bit of a cheeky little surprise for the happy couple now.’
Edie sat up straighter and thought really? A wedding day surprise with no power of veto? Oof …
‘I wanted to do something really special for my best friend today and decided on this. Congratulations, Jack and Charlotte. This is for you. Oh, and to make the song scan, I’ve had to Brangelina you as “Charlack”, hope that’s OK, guys.’
Song? Every pair of buttocks in the room clenched.
‘So, on one, two, THREE …’
The other two – blushing, literally – bridesmaids simultaneously produced handbells and started shaking them in sync. They wore the expressions of people who had come to terms with their fate a while ago, yet the moment was no less powerfully awful for it.
Lucie began singing. She had a good enough voice for a cappella, but it was still the shock of a cappella that was sending the whole room into a straight-backed, pop-eyed rictus of English embarrassment. To the tune of Julie Andrews’ ‘My Favourite Things’, she belted out:
Basset hounds and daffodils and red Hunter wellies
Clarins and Clooney films on big HD tellies
Land Rover Explorers all covered in mud
These are a few of Charlack’s totes fave things!
Edie found it hard to comprehend that someone thought this fell into the category of a good idea. That there’d been no shred of doubt during the conceptual process. Also, ‘Charlack’ sounded like a Doctor Who baddie. A squirty one.
Cotswolds and cream teas and scrummy brunches
Meribel and Formula One and long liquid lunches
These are a few of Charlack’s totes fave things!
Fresh paint and dim sum and brow dyes and lashes
Rugger and Wimbledon and also The Ashes
These are a few of Charlack’s totes fave things!
Edie couldn’t risk her composure by glancing at Louis, who she knew would be almost combusting with delight. The top table simply stared.
… When the work bites!
When the phone rings!
When they’re feeling totes emosh
They can simply remember these totes fave things
and then they won’t feel so grooosssssss
Edie held her expression steady as Lucie fog-horned the last word, arm extended, and hoped very hard this horror was over. But, no – Lucie was counting herself into the next verse.
In the brief lull, the hearing-aid man could be heard speaking to his wife.
‘What IS this dreadful folly? Who told this woman she could sing? My God, what an abysmal din.’
Lucie carried on with the next verse but now the room was transfixed by the entirely audible commentary offered by hearing-aid man. He apparently didn’t realise that he was shouting. Desperate shushing from the wife could also be heard, to no avail.
‘Good grief, whatever next. I came to a wedding, not an amateur night revue show. I feel like Prince Philip when he’s forced to look at a native display of bare behinds. Oh nonsense, Deirdre, it’s bad taste, is what it is.’
The spittle-flecked shhhhhhhh! of the spousal shushing reached a constrained hysteria, while laughter rippled nervously around the room.
Edie could feel that Louis had corpsed, his whole body convulsing and shaking next to her.
Ad land and glad hand and smashing your goals
Jet planes and chow mein with crispy spring rolls
Tiffany boxes all tied up with ribbon
These are a few of Charlack’s totes fave thiiiinggssssss
‘… Will this ordeal ever end? No wonder this country’s in such a mess if this sort of vulgar display of your shortcomings is considered suitable entertainment. What? Well I doubt anyone can hear me over the iron lung yodellings of Kiri Te Canary. This is the sort of story which ends with the words, “Before Turning The Gun On Himself.”’
Edie didn’t know where to look. Having the heckler on her table made her feel implicated, as if she might be throwing her voice or feeding him lines.
Edie’s eyes were inexorably drawn to Jack, who was staring right back at her, palm clamped over mouth. His eyes were dancing with: what’s happening, this is insane?!
She might’ve known – he not only found this funny, he singled Edie out to be his co-conspirator. Edie almost smiled in reflex, then caught herself and quickly looked away. Oh no you don’t. Not today, of all days.
Just nipping to the loo, Edie muttered, and fled the scene.
3
While she washed her hands, Edie pondered the mounting conviction that she shouldn’t have accepted her invite today. She’d rehearsed all the reasons for and against, and ignored the most important one: that she would hate it.
When the ‘Save the Date’ dropped into her email, the struggle had begun. It would be easy enough to have a holiday. She needed to say so quickly, though – a break booked immediately after she’d received it could look suspicious.
Though like anyone up to their necks in something they shouldn’t be, she found it very hard to judge how much she was giving away. Perhaps her absence would barely register, or perhaps there’d metaphorically be a huge flashing game show arrow over her seat saying HMMMM NO EDIE EH, I WONDER WHY.
So she uhmmed and ahhhed, until Charlotte said: ‘Edie, you’re coming, aren’t you? To the wedding? I haven’t had your RSVP?’ while they were standing at the lukewarm-water in-crackly-cup dispenser. In the background, Jack’s head snapped up.
Edie smiled tightly and said: ‘OhyesofcourseI’mreallylookingforwardtoitthanks.’
Once her fate was sealed by her stupid mouth, she promised herself that attending wouldn’t just be politically astute, it’d be good for her. As if approaching social occasions like they were a Tough Mudder corporate team package had ever been a good idea.
As the happy couple exchanged vows, and rings, Edie predicted she’d not feel a thing. Her feelings would float away like a balloon and it’d draw a line under the whole sorry confusion. Hah. Right. And if her auntie had a dick she’d be her uncle.
Instead she felt numb, tense, and out of place. And then as the alcohol flowed, it was as if there was a weight of misery sitting on her chest, compressing it.
Edie removed her hands from underneath the wind turbine of a hot-air drier. One of her false eyelashes had come unstuck and she pressed it back down, between finger and thumb.
If she was honest, the reason she was here was her pride. Avoiding it would’ve been one giant I Can’t Cope red flag. To herself, as well as others.
There was something about seeing herself in a bathroom mirror – the ‘Amaro’ magic cloud gone, make-up melting, eyeballs raspberry-rippled by booze – that made Edie feel very contemptuous of herself. What was wrong with her? How did she get here? No one sensible would feel like this.
She took a deep breath as she yanked the toilet door open and told herself, only a few hours until bedtime. With any luck, Lucie would have stopped singing.
As she headed back through the bar, instead of braving the restaurant, she was drawn to the sounds from the garden, and the still-warm fresh air.
Edie could do with some solitude, but was conscious that drifting around the gardens, appearing melancholy, wasn’t the look she was aiming for.
Aha, the mobile as useful decoy – on the pretext of taking a panoramic of the hotel, Edie could wander the grounds. No one noticed that someone was on their own, if they were fiddling with their phone.
She picked her way delicately across the grass in her violent footwear. Lucie’s jihadist mission appeared to be over, Sade’s ‘By Your Side’ was floating from the open doors to the restaurant-disco.
A few of the Murder Mystery pensioners were having a sneaky fag on the benches. It was quite a lovely scene, and she wished she could enjoy it. She wished other peoples’ happiness today wasn’t like a scouring pad on her soul. This is the beginning of getting better, she told herself.
Edie was far enough away from the hotel to feel apart from it all now, watching the wedding as a spectator. The distance helped calm her. She turned her phone on its side and held it up in both hands, to capture the hotel at dusk. As she played with the flash and studied the results, cursing her shaky hands and trying for another shot, she saw a figure moving purposefully across the grass. She lowered the phone.
It was Jack. She should’ve spotted it was him sooner. Was the groom really tasked with herding everyone inside to watch the first dance? Edie had hoped to whoops-a-daisy accidentally miss that treat.
Reaching her, Jack thrust his hands inside his suit pockets.
‘Hello, Edie.’
‘… Hello?’
‘What are you doing over here? There are toilets inside if you need to go.’
Edie nearly laughed and stopped herself.
‘Just taking a photo of the hotel. It looks so pretty, lit up.’
Jack glanced over his shoulder, as if checking the truth of what she said.
‘I came to say hi and couldn’t find you anywhere. I wondered if you’d disappeared off with someone.’
‘Who?’
‘I didn’t know. Instead you’re skulking around on your own, being weird.’
He smiled, in that way that always felt so adoring. Edie had thought ‘made you feel like the only person in the room’ was a figure of speech, until she met Jack.
‘I’m not being weird!’ Edie said, sharply. She felt her blood heat at this.
‘We need to discuss the elephant,’ Jack said, and Edie’s heart caught in her throat.
‘What …?’
‘The Pearl Harbor-sized atrocity that was committed back there.’
Edie relaxed from her spike of shock, and in relief, laughed despite herself. He had her.
‘You left before she got the bridesmaids jazz scatting. Oh God, it was the worst thing to ever happen in the whole world, Edie. And I once walked in on my dad with a copy of Knave.’
Edie gurgled some more. ‘What did Charlotte think of it?’
‘Amazingly, she’s more worried her Uncle Morris upset Lucie with the comments about her singing. Apparently he’s got “reduced inhibitions” due to early stage dementia. That didn’t make anything he said inaccurate, to be fair. Maybe he’s not the one with dementia.’
‘Oh no. Poor Uncle Morris. And poor Charlotte.’
‘Don’t waste too much sympathy on her. Uncle Morris is tolerated because he’s absolutely nosebleed rich and everyone’s hanging in there for a slice of the pie when he dies.’
Edie said, ‘Ah,’ and thought, not for the first time, that she was not among her people. She had thought there was at least one of ‘her people’ here, and yet apparently, he was one of their people. Forever, now.
‘It’s bizarre, this whole thing,’ Jack said, waving back at the hubbub from the yellow glow of the hotel. ‘Married. Me.’
Edie felt irritated at being expected to join in with rueful, wistful reflection on this score. Jack had stopped copying her into his decision-making processes a long time ago. In fact, she was never in them.
‘That’s what you turned up for today, Jack. Were you expecting a hog roast? A cat’s birthday? Circumcision?’
‘Haha. You will never lose your ability to shock, E.T.’
This annoyed Edie, too. Unwed Jack never found her ‘shocking’. He found her interesting and funny. Now she was some filthy-mouthed unmarriageable outrageous oddball. Who nobody chose.
‘Anyway,’ Edie said, sweetly but briskly. ‘Time we went back inside. You can’t miss the most expensive party you’ll ever throw.’
‘Oh, Edie. C’mon.’
‘What?’
Edie was tense again, wondering why they were stood in the gloaming here together, wondering what this was about. She folded her arms.
‘I’m so glad you came, today. You don’t know how much. I’m happier to see you than pretty much anyone else.’
Apart from your bride? Edie thought, though she didn’t say it.
‘… Thank you.’
What else could she say?
‘Please don’t act as if we can’t be good mates now. Nothing’s changed.’
Edie had no idea what he meant. If they were always just good mates, then obviously marriage changed nothing. It struck her that she’d never understood Jack, and this was a problem.
While she hesitated over her response, Jack said: ‘I get it, you know. You think I’m a coward.’
‘What?
‘I go along with things that aren’t entirely me.’
‘… How do you mean?’
Edie knew this wasn’t the right thing to ask. This conversation was disloyal. Everything about this was grim. Jack had married someone else. He shouldn’t be saying treacherous things to a woman he worked with, by some shrubbery. There was nothing, and no one, here of value to be salvaged. She’d known for some time now he was a bad person, or at least a very weak one, and this behaviour only proved it.
But Jack was dangling the temptation of talking about things she’d wanted to talk about for so long.
‘Sometimes you don’t know what to do. You know?’ Jack shook his head and exhaled and scuffed the toe of a Paul Smith brogue on the grass.
‘Not really. Marrying is a pretty straightforward yes or no. They put it in the vows.’
‘I didn’t mean … that, exactly. Charlie’s great, obviously. I mean. All of this. Fuss. Oh, I don’t know.’
Edie sensed he was several degrees drunker than she’d first realised.
‘What do you want me to say?’ Edie said, with as little emotion as possible.
‘Edie. Stop being like this. I’m trying to tell you that you matter to me. I don’t think you know that.’
Edie had no reply to this and in the space where her answer should be, Jack murmured, ‘Oh, God,’ stepped forward, leaned down, and kissed her.
4
She almost reeled with the surprise, feeling the soft brush of his freshly shaven jaw against hers and the pressure of his warm, beer-wet lips on hers. The ‘Jack kissing her’ information was so huge, it didn’t get through to her central cortex in one go. Full comprehension had to be delivered in stages.
1 1. Jack is kissing you. On his wedding day. This does not seem possible?! Yet early reports are it is DEFINITELY HAPPENING.
2 2. Is this going to last longer than a peck? Was it a mistake? Was he aiming for your cheek and missed?
3 3. OK no, this is definitely a KISS-kiss, what the hell? What the hell is he doing?
4 4. What the hell are YOU doing? You now appear to be responding. Is this definitely something you want to do? Please advise.
5 5. ADVISE. Urgent.
Seconds lasted an age. They’d kissed. Edie finally had a grasp of the magnitude of the situation, and her part in it, and pulled back.
There was movement to her right and she saw Charlotte behind them, her white dress glowing like exposed bone in the encroaching darkness. Jack turned, and saw her too. They made a bizarre tableau, for a split second, looking at each other. Like seeing the lightning crack and only hearing the thunder roll a second later.
‘Charlotte …’ Jack said. He was interrupted by screaming or, more accurately, a kind of low howling, emanating from the new Mrs Marshall. ‘Oh, Charlotte, we’re not …’
‘You fucking bastard! You utter fucking bastard!’ Charlotte screamed at Jack. ‘How could you do this to me? How could you fucking do this to me?! I hate you! You fuck—’ Charlotte sprang at him and began hitting and slapping him, while Jack tried to grab her wrists and stop her.
Edie watched blankly with a sudden, intense desire to vomit.
Earlier in the day, Louis had described his abhorrence at brides involved in procedural admin of any kind on their big day. They should float on stardust, and anything like work was earthbound and tawdry. ‘You shouldn’t see the ballet dancer sweat.’ Edie had thought he sounded like he’d swallowed a copy of The Lady.
However, there was something particularly aberrant about seeing someone in such glamorous, feminine attire having a full-tilt barney. There was Charlotte, hair in French roll, shimmering collarbones, princess skirt rustling like tissue, lamping her new husband with manicured hands, one of them bearing the giant sparkling engagement ring and fresh white-gold wedding band.
‘It wasn’t what it looked like!’ Edie said, hearing her voice say those words, as if listening to a stranger. It looked like what it was.
Charlotte paused momentarily in her grappling with Jack and snarled, her subtly made-up, lovely face contorted with rage: ‘Go to fucking hell you fucking bitch.’ There was no comma or exclamation mark in that statement, only certainty.
Edie wasn’t sure she’d heard Charlotte swear before. Edie realised she’d not moved from her position because of a strange conviction it’d make her ‘look guilty’ and she should stay and explain.
Having realised the lunacy of this idea, Edie finally moved. As she charged back towards the hotel, the first few people were looking over in curiosity and confusion as the voices drifted across the lawn.
OK, first things first, Edie was definitely going to be sick. Not in the general toilets; too conspicuous. She’d have to get to her room.
Edie dug the hotel key with the metal fob out of her bag with shaking hands as she did a quick swerve towards the main entrance. Fewer people to pass, that way.
Her only object right now was making sure she boaked the chicken dinner that was on its way back into the world into an appropriate receptacle. She knew after that a horrible, terrible, bleak immediate future would open up. One thing at a time.
As she bolted up flights of stairs, and along the quiet hotel corridors, it seemed impossible to Edie that time was still stubbornly linear, and that this alternative universe was in fact implacable reality. That there was no breaking a magic stopwatch open, twirling the hands and stopping this whole lurid saga from unfolding.
That Edie couldn’t un-decide her choice to walk out into the gardens. She couldn’t scroll back, like rewinding old video tape, and say something different to Jack, stalking away as soon as he started uttering gnomic, meaningful things. Or simply have stood somewhere that she could see Charlotte walking toward them, wedding gown draped over one arm, wondering why Jack was gossiping with Edie, wanting to tell him it was time to cut the cake.
No. Edie was the woman who kissed the groom on his wedding day, and there was no way of changing history. Right at that moment, if she had a Tardis, there was no way that Hitler was getting assassinated as a first item of business.
She burst into her deserted hotel room, its disarray reminding her it was so recently the scene of innocuous hair-straightening and full-length-mirror-checking and tea-with-UHT-milk-making. She locked the door and pulled at the handle, rattling it to make sure she was safe, kicking off her shoes.
Edie made it to the loo, held her hair out of the way and retched, once, twice, three times, and sat back up, wiping her mouth. When she came face to face with her reflection, arms braced on the sink, and could barely stand looking at herself.
The bargaining began.
Charlotte knew Jack had followed her, though? That he’d kissed her? But she couldn’t make that case. It was up to Jack to explain.
Edie thought about what was going to be said. She had to leave. Now. She made herself steady and check her watch: 9.14 p.m. Too late to get a train? Could she get a taxi? To London? At no notice? That would be insane money. Still, she’d pay it. Only she considered she’d have to pass through reception with her luggage when it arrived, a walk of shame if ever there was one.
There was only one option left: going to ground. Staying barricaded in here.
The size of what had occurred kept roaring up, fresh waves breaking against her. The disco reverberated below, the tinny squeals and squelches of Madonna’s ‘Hung Up’ mocking her predicament. Time goes by, so slowly.
This was now a horror film, where the arterial splatters and screams are ironically juxtaposed with the sitcom laughter track of whatever show the unwitting victim had been watching.
Edie wrung her hands and ground her teeth and paced the room and vacillated about going back down and facing people down, shouting, ‘It was him!’ while knowing nothing could dissolve the Dark Mark now upon her.
When she risked peeping out of the window, the gardens were spookily empty.
It was impossible not to look online, as much as she didn’t want to, with every fibre of her being. On her four-poster bed, she sat staring grimly at the moon glow of her phone. Every time she clicked, she thought she might be sick again. So far, nothing.
The calm before the storm. Tagged photos of the aisle walk, or smiling, signing the register, a status from Charlotte saying, ‘Champagne for my nerves!’ with scores of Likes. What would people say? What was happening downstairs?
‘Edie? Edie!’ a sudden hammering of a fist at the door had her fear-pulsing heart stretching right out of her chest, like a Looney Tunes cartoon.
‘Edie, it’s Louis. You better let me in.’
It was only then that Edie realised the music had stopped.
5
Louis’s unusually twitchy demeanour did nothing to make Edie less panicked. She hoped against hope he’d sail in and say, It’s blown over, what are you doing up here?
She let him pass, walking on weak, pipe cleaner legs and re-locked the door behind him, as if there really was a murderer loose in The Swan. Louis surveyed her as if suddenly in the presence of a notorious individual. He put his hands on his hips, under his suit jacket.
‘Er. So. What the HELL happened?’
‘Oh God, what’s everyone saying happened?!’ Edie wailed.
‘Jack and Charlotte,’ Louis paused, unable to keep himself from the stagey pause, as if he was announcing the winner on a talent show, ‘they’ve split up.’
Edie gasped and sat back down on the edge of the bed, to steady herself. She was trembling, almost juddering. She knew she’d ruined their wedding day. But to cause them to separate, during it? It didn’t seem feasible. It wasn’t a thing that could happen.
‘This can’t be real,’ she mumbled.
‘Charlotte’s gone back to her parents’ house,’ Louis said, enjoying himself now. ‘And Jack’s somewhere here I think, holed up with a bottle of whisky and his stag-do lads. There was a screaming match, total hysteria. It was chaos. Charlotte threw her wedding ring at him.’
Edie closed her eyes and held on to a bed post with a clammy palm, as the room swam and shifted. ‘What are they saying about me?’
‘That Charlotte caught you together. That you’ve been having an affair.’
‘We haven’t been having an affair!’
‘What happened then?’ Louis said.
It was the first time Edie had recounted it out loud and she hesitated.
‘I went into the garden and … he kissed me. Just for a moment.’
‘Wait, are you saying you weren’t shagging?’
Edie’s jaw fell open. ‘Shagging? No?! Of course not! How could we have been … Are you winding me up?’
‘Some people are saying you were, you know. At it. Or on the way to being at it.’
Edie knew Louis was prone to exaggeration and amping up drama but she had no way of telling if this was what he was doing. She could well imagine the Chinese whispers were out of control. As if the truth wasn’t terrible enough.
‘We were only a few yards from the hotel!’
‘Yeah, I did think that’s more the sort of encounter that happens on a car bonnet, after midnight. And usually, y’know. Not with the groom. So he kissed you?’
Edie nodded.
‘But you are having an affair, yeah?’
‘No!’
Oh God, this was agony. Everyone thinking the last thing she’d want them to think, ever. If she could be granted the option of being forced to streak, instead of this kind of exposure, she might just take it.
‘Erm, OK, darl. So out of the blue, Jack was like, “Are you enjoying my wedding day oh and also my tongue”?’
‘He started saying I meant a lot as a friend, he was very pissed I think, and the next minute he’s kissing me.’
‘And you didn’t kiss him back?’
‘No! Hardly. I mean, I was shocked.’
‘Mmm. Kind of odd you were hanging around out there alone? How did he find you? Sure you hadn’t texted him?’
‘I’d gone to take a photo. I can show you the photo!’ Edie waved her phone at him. ‘Also, no texts on here!’ As if there’d be a court case, and she could put her phone in a Ziploc evidence bag. It was the court of public opinion. She’d do much better from the former kind of trial.
‘Louis, think about it,’ Edie pleaded. ‘Why today, of all days, would I try to get off with him?’
‘Why would he try something like this, out of nowhere? You’re leaving something out, Edie. You must be.’
‘We messaged at work. Chatted. That was all. We were friends. Nothing more.’
‘You flirted?’
‘A bit. I suppose.’
She couldn’t give Louis nothing and get his vote, she knew that. He chewed his bottom lip, weighing things up.
‘… I believe you. I think you’re going to have a problem getting anyone else to believe you, though. The rumours are halfway around Harrogate and the truth doesn’t have its boots on. Also …’
Louis’s pause made Edie’s eyes bulge. ‘What?!’
He lowered his voice.
‘There’s only two people who are going to be blamed here: you and Jack. He’s the kind of guy who falls into a pit of shit and comes out wearing a gold watch. Not to sound cold, but you need a PR strategy. You have to let people know it was him who did this, not you.’
‘How do I do that?’
‘I’ll do what I can,’ Louis said, magnanimously. ‘You should think about that though. We work in advertising. Do crisis management for your brand.’
Edie nodded. She had to put aside everything she knew about Louis and trust him. A friend in need was a friend you couldn’t afford to doubt.
‘Do you think Jack and Charlotte are over, really over?’ Edie said, voice wavering.
Louis lifted his shoulders and let them drop.
‘Not sure I’d forgive a wedding day like this. The shame of it. Could you?’
Edie shook her head, miserably. She hadn’t thought of that until now. She’d focused on her own survival. Look at what Charlotte would have to face, the fact everyone would know about this carnage.
There was a clomp-clomp and a banging at the door, a thud as if a slavering wild animal had suddenly thrown itself at it. Both she and Louis jumped out of their skins.
‘EVIE THOMPSON! This is Lucie Maguire! I am the chief bridesmaid! Open the door THIS INSTANT!’
Edie and Louis boggled at each other.
‘EVIE! I KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE, YOU LITTLE COW. FACE THE MUSIC.’
‘Tell her it’s your room!’ Edie hissed to Louis.
‘What? What if she goes off to my room instead?’
‘You’re not in that room.’
‘I will be later.’
‘Then tell her that’s your room, too.’
‘Then she’ll know I lied about this room.’
‘Louis!’ Edie said, near-feral in desperation. ‘Tell her.’
He grimaced and said, loudly: ‘Hi, Lucie, this is Louis. Not Edie.’
‘Where’s Evie? This is her room! The man on reception told me! Do not toy with me, I am in a VERY AGGRESSIVE STATE.’
Louis made a middle-finger gesture with both hands at the door and sing-songed: ‘No, my room. Little Louis in here.’
‘… Let me in. You know this girl? You can tell me where to find her.’
‘I’d rather not. I’m naked.’
‘Put some clothes on, then.’
‘I’m naked, with someone else who is also naked. Get it?’
‘Is it her?’
‘No, it’s a man, man. Now if you don’t mind, we’d like to get on.’
A pause.
‘Do you know where this slut is?’
‘No, I thought we’d established I’m otherwise engaged.’
‘Well if you do see her, tell her I’m going to be wearing her tits like they’re ear muffs.’
‘Will do!’
Edie winced.
Pause. ‘Also, can I just say I think it’s very bad taste to be having sex while a woman’s life is in ruins? We’re trying to help. And meanwhile you’re up here, naked.’
‘That’s me. Always naked in a crisis. It’s when I do my best work.’
There was tutting and Lucie’s fearsome clomping stride retreated. In the depths of the despair, Louis and Edie couldn’t help small, stifled laughter.
‘How am I going to get out of here in one piece?’
‘Mmm. There may be scenes of a harridan nature. I’d check out early.’
Edie had already formed this plan. The reception was staffed 24 hours, she could escape at dawn. She reasoned that even the very angriest were unlikely to be prowling around, fired up by fury, at half five. Although with Lucie, who knew.
‘Look on the bright side. No music Lucie can get you to face can be worse than the music she already made you face.’
Edie laughed weakly and thought how that experience, where someone else was the centre of attention for the wrong reasons, seemed an era ago.
‘I think it’s safe for me to leave, now,’ Louis said.
At the prospect of being alone again, Edie felt desolate.
‘Louis,’ Edie said, in a quiet, broken voice, ‘I know what I did was wrong but I’d never want any of this. I feel terrible. Everyone will hate me.’
‘They won’t hate you,’ Louis said, unconvincingly, ‘Just let them know Jack jumped you, not vice versa.’
They both knew that a) it wouldn’t be possible to let everyone know this and b) no one was going to be inclined to absolve Edie and thus lose a key player in such compelling You’ll Never Guess What gossip. The narrative needed a vixen.
‘We’re still friends, aren’t we? I feel like I’ll have no friends.’
‘Babe,’ Louis squeezed her in a quick, hard, brusque hug, ‘Course we are.’
After re-locking the door after him, Edie sank back down on the bed. Every bump or scuffle in the hotel startled her. She imagined a procession of people queuing up, Lucie Maguire having rejoined at the back, waiting to scream and rant at her and do horrible things to her tits.
When she could bear it, she looked online. Again, nothing but a chilly calm. She couldn’t see any comments alluding to what had gone on, she hadn’t been unfriended on Facebook (though that was coming, obviously).
And yet … as time ticked by, suddenly, an ugly, worrying notion gripped a panicky Edie. She wrestled with it. She was being paranoid. She didn’t need to check. Of course she was wrong.
OK, Edie had to look. Just to reassure herself she was being paranoid. She fumbled with hot fingers on the touch screen. Oh, God. No. She blinked back tears and hit refresh and refresh again and willed herself to have made a mistake. But she hadn’t.
Louis had deleted the picture of them together.
6
Edie never wanted to be this woman. The Other Woman. Who would? Who in their right mind wanted the heartache, the unsympathetic misery of playing that part? No one was the villain of their own story in their own mind, wasn’t that screenwriting law?
Edie had a feeling for some time that her life had wandered badly off course, and she had to face facts now: it might never come back.
It wasn’t always like this. After a romantically chaotic youth gadding about the capital in the post-university years, she’d settled down by her mid-twenties with her picture perfect soulmate: a difficult, intense, complicated young northern poet and Alain Delon lookalike, called Matt.
He was the glorious culmination of a reinvention, where messy Edith became Edie, pretty, funny writer girl who was taking life in her stride and London by the scruff.
Edie had tried to make the relationship as great on the inside as it looked on the outside. They matched. People envied them. She fantasised the wedding, even babies, but increasingly when faced with Matt’s moods, it was obvious to Edie that it was best kept as fantasy.
After three years of wrestling with difficult, intense and complicated, Edie was thoroughly knackered with the effort of trying to work him out and cheer him up.
They split, and while Edie was very sad, she was also twenty-nine. She wasn’t short of men hovering at the edges of the fall-out, willing to help pick up her pieces. She assumed that Mr Right was a few dalliances away, over the other side of the horizon of thirty, holding a bunch of flowers.
Yet somehow, he never happened. Single went from a temporary glitch to a permanent state. There was no one worth falling for. Until Jack. Who she absolutely shouldn’t have fallen for.
Do we ever choose who we fall for? Edie had many a long lonely evening in with only Netflix for company to contemplate that one.
Edie often cast her mind back to that first meeting with Jack, at the advertising firm where she was a copywriter. Charlotte was an ambitious account executive and had successfully talked their boss, Richard, into hiring Jack, despite a strict No Partners rule.
Edie hadn’t given the arrival of Jack Marshall much thought, beyond assuming he’d be another gym-before-work super over-achiever, like Charlotte.
‘Edie, this is my boyfriend!’ she had called across the table, late last summer, in the Italian wine bar they piled into every Friday. ‘You’ll love Edie, she’s the office clown.’ A mixed compliment, but Edie took it as one and smiled.
Over the table, awkwardly pitched half on the pavement and half inside the restaurant, she stood up to shake the tips of Jack’s fingers in lieu of his hand. She’d later marvel at her total indifference at the time. Jack looked prima facie Charlotte business, with his sharp suit, sandy hair and slim build, and Edie returned to her conversation.
In the weeks afterwards, Edie caught Jack throwing the odd stray glance her way, and assumed he was simply getting the measure of his new workplace. Charlotte was a willowy goddess of the southern counties, it seemed unlikely he was admiring a Midlander who covered her greys with L’Oreal Liquorice and dressed like Velma from Scooby Doo.
One lunchtime, she was reading a Jon Ronson book and eating an apple at her desk and she caught Jack staring at her. She would’ve blushed, but Jack said quickly: ‘You frown really hard when you read, did you know that?’
‘Elvis used to slap Priscilla Presley when she frowned,’ Edie said.
‘What? Seriously?’
‘Yeah. He didn’t want her getting lines.’
‘Wow. What an arsehole. I’m giving away my copy of Live in Vegas now. You don’t need to worry, though.’
‘You’re not going to slap me?’ Edie grinned.
‘Hahahaha! No. No lines.’
Edie nodded and mumbled thanks and went back to her book. Had she been flirted with? She doubted it. But not long after, a passing client, Olly the wine merchant, had paid Edie particular attention, and again, she felt Jack’s gaze.
‘My little Edie! How are you?’ Olly said, clearly kippered by the lunchtime intake. ‘What a delightful blouse. You remind me terribly of my daughter, you know. Doesn’t she? Richard? The image of Vanessa.’
Her boss, Richard, hem-hawed the sort of agreement you gave someone who you had to agree with, for money.
Edie thanked him and hoped everyone else in the office knew she did nothing to invite his whisky-breathed attentions.
As Richard guided him away from her desk, her G-chat popped up on her screen. Jack.
‘Young lady, may I tell you, in a completely platonic way, how much I’d like to have sex with you?’
Edie boggled and then noticed the inverted commas. She almost guffawed out loud. Then, gratified, typed back:
Ahem, Olly’s a valued client. He’s family … *like the Wests were family* *seasick face*
Without knowing it, she was sunk. She had picked up the baton from Jack. The journey to ruin starts with a single step.
Jack
The only thing worse than his pick-up patter is his wine. Have you tried the Pinot Grigio? BLETCH
Edie
I think you’ll find my copy describes it as having a tingle of green plum acidity and a long melony finish, perfect for long afternoons in gardens that turn into evenings
Jack
Translation: a park-bench session wine, aromas of Listerine mixed with asparagus wee
Edie
The bouquet could be described as ‘insistent’.
Jack
I’ve actually looked it up for the lols. ‘A fruit forward blend of ripe, zesty flavours. Will transport you to Italian vineyards.’ Will transport you to A&E, more like.
If this sort of instant familiarity had come from a single male colleague, Edie would have treated it as clear flirting. Obviously. But Jack was Charlotte’s boyfriend and she was sat right there, though, so this couldn’t be flirting. It was G-chat, but not a G-chat-up.
They became messaging mates. Most mornings, Jack found some witticism to kick things off. He was catnip to someone with Edie’s quick wit, and he seemed entranced by her. He had an easy self-confidence, and ran on dryly humorous remarks and giant Americanos.
In the boredom of office life, the ping of a new message from Jack on her screen became inextricably associated with pleasure and reward. Edie was like a lab rat in a scientific experiment, pressing a lever that gave her a nut. To follow the analogy, sooner or later it’d give her an electric shock, and she’d prove the mechanics of addiction by keeping on pressing for another nut.
It was all a bit of fun.
Even when the conversation naturally strayed into slightly more serious, personal topics. Amid the anecdotes, the casual intimacy and larks, she found herself telling him things she hadn’t told anyone in London.
Edie found her spirits dip at home time on a Friday – a funny reversal – realising there’d be no more ‘special chemistry’ chatter until Monday.
Eventually, there were text-jokes from Jack at the weekend – saw this, thought of you – and favouriting of her tweets, and explosively she’d even occasionally get the notification he’d Liked an old photo of hers, buried in the archives on Facebook. Truly, the footprint on the windowsill of social media courting.
Jack would sometimes say in front of Charlotte, during the Friday night drinks, that he’d shamelessly distracted Edie at work. Charlotte tutted and chided Jack and apologised to Edie – and then Edie definitely felt a whisper of guilt.
But, why? For conversation that Jack was openly acknowledging in front of his girlfriend that he instigated? If it was anything untoward, it’d be secret, right?
There was enough plausible deniability to park a bus.
7
What Charlotte didn’t know, and Edie didn’t admit to herself, was that the devil was in the detail.
It was unlikely Charlotte would be blasé if she knew Jack got joke-or-is-it? jealous whenever Edie had been out on a date. ‘Oh my word, just imagining the stress of you as a girlfriend though …’ Jack would say. ‘Getting you to tone down the potty mouth when you meet the parents. You bringing them a gift of black pudding sausage.’
They both imagined this intangible ideal and happy-sighed and laughed, Edie pretending to be outraged by his ongoing teasing about her supposed northernness, when in fact it was thrilling he was contemplating her as his other half. There was such a tenderness to it.
Jack played the role of a best friend, confidante and, well, sort-of boyfriend. And she wanted him to.
Eventually, Edie realised she’d crossed an invisible line, without ever intending to. This mistake wasn’t one big decision, it was a series of smaller, unwitting choices.
She was never going to act as long as he was with Charlotte, though, so what did it matter? A crush added a sparkle to your day, it was a calorie-free, non-carcinogenic, cost-free joy.
Only, she found out it did have a cost, some four months after Jack first G-chatted her.
Jack hadn’t wanted a mortgage, and definitely not in commutersville. One lunch time, Charlotte popped a bottle of Moët and handed round fizzing plastic cups. ‘We’ve completed on our house!’
What? Jack never said? And he and Edie shared, well, pretty much everything, she thought.
It felt like a betrayal. She’d had, as her friend Hannah liked to say, her world view bitch-slapped by reality.
She messaged, as soon as Jack was back in his seat: ‘Didn’t see this coming?’
Ack, I know right! She wore me down & got her way in the end. Hold me and tell me it’s going to be OK, E.T. x
That was it? That was all she was going to get?
Edie’s strength of feeling over this development knocked her for six. She could have it out with Jack, push him on why he’d not mentioned it, but then, it wasn’t her business. It was prying into his life with Charlotte and implying she was owed personal information. It was distinctly not cool. She’d argue with herself: Well, you go on dates? Can he not buy property with girlfriends?
But it forced Edie to take a hard look at how her hopes had been building, quietly and unobtrusively, even to her.
She resolved to avoid banter, and for a while, he kept his distance too. But after a short time had passed, and he reappeared on G-chat as sparky as ever, it was difficult to change gears, without it being a giveaway. She had to play it off as business as usual, or the jig was up.
Something that began so lightly was now the cause of much fretting for Edie. She spent evenings scrolling through Jack’s emails and texts, looking for proof of his reciprocal feelings for her. ‘X’ marks the spot.
Jack was also once again saying that Charlotte wanted things he didn’t: weddings, babies. Wood-burning stoves and 4x4s.
Edie now avoided talking about all this, and yet equally avoided what it told her about him. Refusing to look at the great big health and safety warning sign, saying: DO NOT PROCEED BEYOND THIS POINT. HAZARDOUS MATERIALS. MANAGEMENT ACCEPT NO LIABILITY.
It dawned on Edie that he didn’t tell Charlotte about their chatting because he thought it was innocent. He told Charlotte because he was an accomplished liar, and those liars hid in plain sight.
There was only one person to take this to. Her best mate, Hannah, who inconsiderately lived in Edinburgh.
Edie bucketed it all out by last orders in a nice old man’s type boozer on the Royal Mile on a bank holiday trip to the far north.
‘You know,’ Edie said, trying desperately to wear it lightly, ‘I might be better with it if I understood him and Charlotte. They’re so different.’
Hannah shook her head, dismissively.
‘Selfish jokers always like a woman who runs the show. They have a basic respect for finances and efficiency. If not fidelity.’
This had the CLANG of ugly truth.
‘Take it as a sign you don’t know him as well as you think you do, not that she’s wrong for him,’ Hannah said, adjusting her poker-straight brown hair in its top knot.
This sort of common sense wasn’t what Edie wanted to hear. She wanted to be told Jack was fatally in love with her and hadn’t found the courage to tell her.
‘This wasn’t your idea, you know,’ Hannah said, picking at peanuts in the ripped-open packet between them. ‘You didn’t want to end up here. He’s been messing with you and he doesn’t care if you get hurt, as long as he gets his entertainment. The butterflies and rollercoasters that you don’t get when you’re settled. And you’re friendly and obliging; some blokes take advantage of that openness.’
Edie knew the word she wasn’t using that also applied. Needy. He exploited a neediness she’d not admitted to herself she had. Needy Edie.
Hannah had been with lovely dependable Pete since university, though, Edie thought. Perhaps she doesn’t understand what a complicated jungle it is out here.
‘Does he even know I’ve been hurt by it, though? Maybe he doesn’t know I care,’ Edie said.
Hannah shook her head.
‘He knows. If he didn’t know, why keep things that didn’t help, from you? Why not say, by the way what’s your views on this place on RightMove we’re seeing on Saturday?’
Edie nodded, morose. ‘Don’t laugh at me. But could he be confused about his feelings?’
‘He’s not so confused he can’t co-sign mortgage papers. Bottom line. If he wanted to be with you, he’d be with you. However infatuated he is, he doesn’t want to be with you enough to do anything about it.’
Hannah had special dispensation to be brutal, because she was a surgeon (kidneys) and when she’d had a bad day, someone had died. ‘I lost someone on the table,’ was a phrase that kicked Edie’s complaints into touch.
Edie couldn’t find any way out of this last logical point. Her lip went wobbly.
‘Fuck, Hannah, he’s broken me. I feel as if there’s no one else in the world who will ever be right for me, if I can’t have him. And I’m thirty-five. I’m probably right.’
Hannah put her hand on her shoulder.
‘Edith,’ – school friends didn’t hold with her ‘Edie’ revisionism – ‘he was not right for you. If he’s treating his girlfriend like shit by doing this, if you ended up together, he’d treat you like shit too. That is an eternal truth, and you know it.’
Edie couldn’t allow this to be true, even though she knew it couldn’t be truer than Darwin being right about the ape thing.
She whimpered that maybe he didn’t want to hurt Charlotte.
‘Haha!’ Hannah said. ‘Oh wait, you’re serious?’
‘Also,’ Edie said, knowing she was truly rummaging at the bottom of the Christmas stocking with this one, with the unshelled Brazil nuts you could never find a nutcracker to open, ‘he once said that I’m unpindownable and intimidating, I’ve been independent for so long. Perhaps he thinks I’d be a risk …’
‘Oh yeah, so hard to catch that you’re sat in another country crying about him over your weekends! Exactly the sort of thing that manipulative bullshitters say,’ Hannah said. ‘Ugh. Sorry, I really don’t like him, Edith.’
Edie sort-of agreed and yet thought if Hannah met Jack and was exposed to the full force of his charm, she’d understand. And that perhaps Edie shouldn’t have said so much, because now if Hannah and Jack ever met she’d have to do some serious repair work on his image. This was such a triumph of hope over rationality, she wondered if he’d made her loopy.
So, all things considered, Edie should’ve seen the engagement coming.
Yet the Friday when Edie spied Charlotte pink-cheeked with excitement, fingers of her left hand clasped by a cooing secretary – it was like someone had put a fish hook in her stomach, attached it to a flatbed truck and accelerated away.
Edie pretended not to have seen, and slipped out to a client meeting, which she didn’t return from. She got a text later that night.
Hey you. Where were you today? Didn’t see you in Luigis’s after work? And yeah so I’m getting married, what’s up with that? Gulp. Are we growing up? Please tell me we aren’t … I’m not ready for the La-Z-Boy recliner yet, E.T. Jx
She threw her phone across the room, drank three-quarters of a bottle of gin and danced around so loudly to Kelis’s ‘Caught Out There’ that the couple downstairs complained.
It was in many ways worse than if she and Jack had a full- blown physical affair. That infidelity was incontrovertible; making fury and hurt legitimate. An emotional affair required two people to agree it had taken place, even while one person lay in tatters. Her dad once told her about ‘quantum superposition’ which seemed to boil down to something both existing and not existing at the same time. This, to Edie, summed up her and Jack.
She couldn’t complain. She should never have got entangled with someone who was with someone else.
It was like trying to go to the police to report that you’d had a knife pulled on you during a drug deal.
8
The problem with waking up after a day like yesterday, Edie discovered, were those few seconds of freedom before you remembered what had happened. A psychological prison break where you didn’t make it to the perimeter fence.
She had finally passed out in twitchy exhaustion around four a.m., roused by the alarm on her phone at five. For a split second, she couldn’t remember where she was, why she was looking at a flowery bed canopy or why she was so tired and wrung out. When it all came rushing back, it was almost as bad as realising her fate the first time round.
Edie jumped up and ran to the bathroom, dragged a flannel across her puffy eyes, threw make-up in the general direction of her face. She pushed every possession into her trolley case, swallowed hard and squared her shoulders. None of this should be happening. She should be sleeping off the previous night’s consumption, and later sharing a full English with other hungover refugees from the stop-when-you-drop service of a hotel bar. Instead, this.
In the pin-drop quiet deserted dawn on a Sunday, her heart was pulsing, ker-thunk ker-thunk.
Any traces of sleepiness from her grotty hour’s rest were chased away by the gigantic adrenaline surge as she turned the lock to open her door. She half expected to find a crowd of snoring people with outstretched legs, weaponry like unplugged irons in their hands, a boobytrap tripwire at her feet.
The hotel was silent, and Edie winced as if the squeak of her trolley case was making the noise of a jumbo jet taking off. She pushed the handle down and picked it up. She reasoned with herself: what percentage of people will have stayed awake, patrolling the building? What percentage of people, bar Louis, would be able to visually ID her as the fallen woman anyway?
She breathed deeply and jabbed her finger on the button to call the lift, as her skin glowed and prickled with the combined heat of an intensely bright yellow summer morning and the slick of guilty, fearful sweat. As per last night’s vomiting episode, she knew that once the practical problem of getting out of here was out of the way, the creeping psychic torture would be far, far worse.
The middle-aged man on reception looked startled as Edie rolled her case out of the lift and said, testing her croaky voice: ‘I’d like to check out, please.’
He stared at Edie for a moment, putting two and two together, and Edie felt like a celebrity for all the wrong reasons. She had some dark glasses somewhere in her bag, but wasn’t going to put them on until she hit exterior sunlight. Only Stevie Wonder was allowed to wear sunglasses indoors without being a tit, even Edie’s predicament didn’t change that. She wished Hannah was here. She wished she had just one person on her side, to vouch for her. Although she knew Hannah would have some vigorous words for her, too.
‘Could I order a taxi to the station?’ Edie said, ‘I’ll wait out there.’
The man nodded in embarrassed understanding. Given her state, Edie couldn’t help but think that he was thinking was this woman really worth it.
Edie pushed through the revolving door, into the car park and came face to face with another human being. She tried not to startle at seeing the 40-something mother with curly hair, a very small baby in her arms and a toddler bumbling around at her feet. Thankfully, Edie didn’t know who she was, and the woman smiled at her as a reflex response, suggesting she definitely didn’t know who Edie was.
‘Morning!’ Edie said in a peppy, sergeant major-ish voice.
‘Morning! Nice one, isn’t it?’
‘Gorgeous.’ Appalling.
‘You’re up early!’ Her eyes moved from Edie to her case, and back again. ‘And you don’t have this lot to contend with,’ she jiggled the baby, who frowned at Edie with its suspicious crumpled face.
‘Haha no, tons of work to do. Big project on. Thought I’d best get home.’
Oh God, taxi, please turn up, and soon.
‘Do you have far to go?’
‘London.’ Edie swallowed, with a dry mouth. ‘You?’
‘Cheltenham. We won’t be going til his nibs wakes up though. Far too much red wine. Have you been at the wedding, too?’
Shit.
‘Uh. Yes.’ Edie gripped the handle on her trolley case more tightly.
‘Awful business, wasn’t it? Stanley! No digging up handfuls of earth, thank you. Clean play only or we go back inside.’
Edie couldn’t be more grateful for Stanley’s sort of muck raking.
‘Seems Charlotte found Jack having some how’s your father, or snogging or something, with another guest. Unbelievable,’ the woman said. ‘Can you believe it? On your wedding day? To be carrying on with another woman?’
‘Huh,’ Edie said, trying to make an incredulous-yet-also-disinterested face. ‘Wow.’ She shook her head.
The woman shifted the baby to her other Boden trouser-clad hip.
‘… Did you not know?’
Shit.
‘Uh, I knew … something had happened. I didn’t know exactly what,’ Edie said, quickly. Think. Think of something to say to keep her occupied. ‘Where are they now?’ Edie said, mindlessly.
‘Charlotte left with her parents. You know her parents? They have the big white house over on the other side of the green.’
‘Oh, right. Yes.’
‘Poor, poor thing. I can’t imagine what she’s going through.’
‘No, dreadful.’
The woman was contemplating Edie more carefully now. She was wondering why she was really stood outside the hotel before six in the morning, looking like a bedraggled Walk of Shamer, and feigning improbably little knowledge of the previous night’s earthquake.
‘How do you know Jack and Charlotte?’ she said hesitantly, asking for confirmation of a hunch.
‘I work with them.’
There followed an acutely uncomfortable few seconds where the woman’s face became a taut mask of revelation. It was as if she’d seen a WANTED poster over Edie’s shoulder.
A minicab finally swept up the drive and Edie could’ve thrown herself arms wide across the windscreen in exultant relief.
‘Bye!’ she said to the woman, who was staring dully at her, not noticing Stanley was now eating gobfuls of soil.
The driver helped Edie haul her case into the boot and she hopped into the back like a scalded flea, in case the woman started screeching that the man from Blueline Taxis was unwittingly aiding and abetting a dangerous felon.
9
As the car turned through near-empty roads, Edie couldn’t resist looking at her phone. If it had been hard for her father to grasp why they pulled duck-face selfies, she imagined explaining to him why, at a time like this, she would investigate things that were guaranteed to violently upset her. Because the big online glass palace full of funhouse mirrors was where half your reputation lived, now.
Edie had a flurry of a dozen or so Facebook messages. She opened them, nauseous with foreboding. They were distant acquaintances, the social media version of phishing scams – feigned concern and closeness, to gather information. Bloody hell, how shameless.
Long time no speak! Heard something kicked off at the wedding yesterday. Are you OK? Laura x
It’s been a while, hope all is good! And WOW: is what people are saying true? What happened, Edie? Hope everything is still going well at your company. I’ve had a second child since we last spoke! Best wishes, Kate
Hi. Do you know what people at Ad Hoc are saying? I felt I had to tell you … don’t know whether it’s true. Terry PS we worked together from 2008-9
Edie gulped and hammered delete-delete-delete, only skimming the first few lines of each. Long time no – DELETE.
She had messages (3) in ‘Other,’ i.e., from people who weren’t in her friends list. She guessed they’d be more savage. U R A RANSID FIRECROTCH TART was all that ‘Spencer’ had to say. She deleted and blocked.
She also deleted and blocked a total stranger called Rebecca who used lots of words that couldn’t be published in a family newspaper. Edie wasn’t upset by the language, the ferocity behind it was frightening. As if she actually would beat seven bells out of Edie if she could only get her hands on her.
Speaking of which …
Edie. This is Lucie, I am Charlotte’s chief bridesmaid and best friend since our university days. Since you are too gutless to face me and got your ridiculous friend Lewis involved in your devious games (that’s right, I worked out you swapped rooms with him, and I hope you enjoyed the sign I left on your door ‘Please Do Not Disturb I’M SHAGGING SOMEONE’S HUSBAND’), I am forced to tell you here what kind of person you are. It’s no exaggeration to say you’re the worst person I’ve ever met or heard about. It’s one thing to try to steal someone else’s man but to DO IT ON THEIR LITERAL WEDDING DAY beggars belief. I hope you realise you have ruined a woman’s life and wasted countless thousands on venue hire, catering and transport. I can’t imagine she will want to keep the photographs either. Will you pay her back? Methinks not.
I know Jack to be a good guy despite this mistake and don’t doubt for a second you’ve been offering it to him on a plate, trying to break them up.
I hope you are happy now you’ve got your wish but you won’t be because terrible people never are.
Lucie Maguire
She’d learned Edie’s name, at least, and it sounded as though Louis got a nice memento.
The activity overall was an odd blend of frenzy of attention and rejection: Edie could see her friend numbers had dipped, yet a lot of people wanted to talk to her – another couple of notifications pinged as she browsed. She clicked through, stomach churning, to Charlotte’s Facebook page and saw, ‘This Link May Be Broken’. This link is very broken. She didn’t blame Charlotte for coming off entirely. In fact, that was one small mark of respect she could offer, and do the same.
Edie deactivated her own page. Why provide a toxic waste dump site.
‘You’re off early,’ said the taxi driver.
‘Yes,’ Edie said, blearily and blankly. ‘Lots of work on.’
‘The trains won’t start for a while yet.’
‘Oh. I best get a coffee then.’
‘The café might not be open for a bit either.’
‘Oh. Yeah.’
Edie spent the next few hours waiting for a connection to Leeds, hiding in the loos for fear of running into other wedding guests, then staring unseeing out of grimy windows, feeling a queasy mix of listless and terror-struck. This wasn’t, she accepted, one of life’s wrinkles. This was one of those jolt-crashes that nearly threw you out of the dodgem car. She felt so morally unclean, it was like she needed a whole-body blood transfusion.
She could call Hannah. But she couldn’t face it, not yet. Hannah would be raging at Jack but might not see Edie’s role in it as much better. Edie didn’t yet have enough distance on this to work out how even those closest to her would see it. And if her best friend withdrew her support, Edie would collapse completely.
After rewording it three or four times, she risked a text to Jack.
Hardly know what to say, but, what happened & why? Call me if you can. E.
No reply. She didn’t think there would be one. Ever, possibly. She needed to message Charlotte too, but that was going to take more time and thought.
Once she was through the door of her cupboard-sized flat, she flopped down on the sofa and burst into heavy, heavy sobbing. She wanted to scream those childhood complaints, that This Was So Unfair and It Wasn’t Her Fault.
This was Jack’s fault. He’d chosen to marry one woman and kiss another, and both were paying a horrendous price. Edie was furious with Jack, but most of all, she was mystified. If he’d wanted her, even so much as for an affair, why choose the first few hours of making an honest woman of Charlotte for his rankest act of dishonesty?
By lunchtime, she steeled herself to call their boss, Richard. Leaving her job, without one to go to, wasn’t only a professional disaster, it felt personal. She hated letting Richard down, and she writhed at the thought of him being repulsed by her behaviour. It was one thing to be despised by the Lucie Maguires of this world, another to disgust people whose good opinion you really valued.
Richard was an incredibly handsome black man and so impeccably dressed, Edie imagined he’d walk away from a plane crash adjusting a cufflink, with one extra waistcoat button undone. (‘He doesn’t sweat,’ Jack said. ‘Literally or figuratively. Ever.’) His wife was a high-flying prosecutor, and they had two eerily well-mannered kids. The secret nickname among their colleagues was ‘the Obamas’.
Everyone said Richard had a soft spot for Edie and she was his ‘little favourite’. Edie didn’t know if that was true. If it was, she could only think it was down to the fact that she dealt with someone as smart as Richard by being absolutely straightforward. A lot of others responded to his fearsomely cool intellect by bullshitting him, which was, to use a Richard phrase, the wrong play.
He answered his mobile immediately.
‘Edie.’
‘Richard, I’m sorry to bother you on a Sunday.’
‘OK. We can skip the explanation as to why.’
‘… Can we?’
‘Louis helpfully put me in the picture.’
Setting aside what this told Edie about Louis’s loyalty, she said: ‘I’m so, so sorry, Richard. I’m handing in my notice. I won’t be coming into work tomorrow so you don’t have to worry about a bad atmosphere or anything.’
‘You’re required by your contract to work four weeks’ notice.’
‘I know,’ Edie said. ‘Under the circumstances I thought you might … let me off it. I can take part of it as holiday owing?’
‘I’m not clear which half of the unhappy couple will be reporting in yet. Am I supposed to have two staff on gardening leave, and a third functioning from behind a vale of tears?’
‘Sorry,’ Edie said, in a small voice.
Richard sighed.
‘Why did I break the no couples rule? Mind you, even when your employees aren’t a couple, it’s no guarantee, eh.’
Edie said nothing.
‘Look, your extra-curriculars are none of my business, except when it affects my business.’
‘Richard, I’m sorry. If there was any way I could come back I would, but I can’t.’ Edie tried not to sob.
‘I don’t want decisions made about that, yet. It so happens I have a suggestion for a solution that might suit us both. A very short-notice job has come in, I was going to talk to you about it tomorrow. Have you heard of the actor, Elliot Owen?’
‘Er. Yes. From that swords and sandals show?’
The conversation had taken a surreal turn.
‘That’s him. A friend at a publishing house has on their knees begged me to spare a copywriter as a replacement to ghost-write his autobiog, after the last guy walked at the last minute. Or the first minute, the one where they met each other.’
‘OK …’ Edie grimaced.
‘He’s back home in Nottingham to do some TV thing. “One for the cred not the bread,” I’m told. There’s a three- month window starting now to get all his hilarious stories out of him, before he’s off to America. Then four to six weeks to type the thing up. You’re from Nottingham too, am I right? So, go. See the folks. It’s good money. Then afterwards, we’ll look at how the land lies in the office.’
‘I’ve never ghost-written a book before,’ Edie said. ‘I don’t know how.’
‘No, but how hard can it be? This will be one of those “separate kids from their pocket money” jobs where you pretend this vacuous pretty boy has amassed a lifetime of wisdom at twenty-five and everyone just looks at the pictures. You’re plenty literate enough to make him sound halfway articulate.’
Edie fell silent.
‘Seriously, it’s stenography. He talks, you marshal his self-aggrandising drivel into something vaguely coherent.’
Edie swithered. On the one hand, this sounded fairly mad. On the other hand, her boss was offering her a way of paying her rent for the near future. And Richard was right: as an alternative, he could contractually insist she worked her notice in the office. Anything was better than that.
‘OK,’ Edie said. ‘Thanks for the chance.’
‘Great. I said Tuesday to start, his people will be in touch. They’ll courier the cuttings over to you, so drop me a text with your folks’ address. By the way - I pass this on with a wry eyebrow raise – they, and I quote, want you to “really get under his skin and get some real meat out of this”. Try to ignore ground that’s been covered already in his press.’
‘Mmm-hmmm,’ said Edie, with the firm assurance of someone agreeing to do something they had no idea how to do.
‘Check in with me, every so often.’
‘Will do.’
There was a pause where Richard heavy sighed again.
‘And this part of the conversation is strictly off the record. I couldn’t care less about the rights and wrongs and who-did-whats of your superannuated game of kiss chase with Jack Marshall. But I’m disappointed in your taste.’
Edie was surprised at this, and could only say:
‘Oh?’
‘You’ve always struck me as a bright woman, with a lot about herself. He’s an irrelevant person. Learn to spot irrelevant people. Don’t expect someone who doesn’t know who they are to care who you are.’
Edie, surprised, nodded meekly and then remembered he couldn’t see her.
‘OK. Thank you.’
‘Oh, and Edie. I’m sure it’s not necessary to say this, but in the circumstances I’m going to go belt and braces.’
‘Yes?’
‘The advice was about getting under his skin, not his clothes, and let’s set aside the “real meat” thing entirely. For fuck’s sake, don’t get off with Elliot Owen.’
10
Edie paid first class to get back to Nottingham, even though it was an extravagant amount extra, travelling on a Monday. The last luxury for the condemned woman, a Big Mac and large fries on Death Row.
It was tough, she knew, to equate her native city with the Electric Chair. Nevertheless.
In their twenties, everyone who’d escaped to The Smoke had shuddered at the thought of moving back to wherever they’d come from. Edie had fitted right in. They were the ones who’d got away, and they revelled in their success every weekend. On Fridays, when Edie drank in Soho pubs, everyone spilling out of the doorways, she felt she was at the centre of the universe.
Then slowly but surely, the tide turned. People married and planned babies, and wanted good schools and a garden. They didn’t go out to explore the capital’s cultural riches and superior shopping at the weekends anyway. Even those who didn’t have families got sick of the commute, the cut-throat competitiveness, the gargantuan property prices, the way London geography made social spontaneity impossible.
Gradually, the very same people who’d proclaim loudly after a few pints that the rest of the country was a backward dump full of UKIPers, began to romanticise home. Being in striking distance of the grandparents, being able to have a dog, a friendly local where everyone knew your name. It taking ten minutes to get into town was a desirable convenience, not a sign you were in Shitsville, Nowhereshire.
As Charlotte said, when justifying St Albans, Now you can get a decent coffee and a cocktail most places, you don’t need to be in London.
And Edie once again was the odd one out, because she didn’t feel like that. London wasn’t about drinks. It had always felt a huge achievement to her, and carried on feeling like one. London was anonymity, London was freedom. London was where Edie had reinvented herself. A London address, albeit a cramped one-bed rented flat in Stockwell, was almost everything she had to show for living, aged thirty-five. Yes, every friend she’d made at the agency prior to Ad Hoc had moved out. It became a social exodus, after thirty. But Edie stood firm.
As the countryside sped past the train window, she kept thinking: STOP. You’re heading in the wrong direction.
She only went home at Christmas, if she could get away with it. It was bleak, for Edie. It was particularly hard as it felt as if everyone else she knew returned to some Cotswolds vision from a supermarket advert, in holly-wreathed timber-beamed farmhouses with spray-on frost edging the windows. There was excited discussion about traditions: smoked salmon and fresh pyjamas on Christmas Eve, Frank Sinatra while you opened your presents, champagne and blinis and Monopoly and snowflakes on smug kittens.
Standard procedure for Edie went like this: she would invent a reason why she had to work until Christmas Eve morning (cursing the years where it fell on a weekend, and elongated her agony).
She’d feel guilt at the disappointment in her dad’s voice when he’d say: ‘Oh, can you not get away any earlier? Oh, OK.’
Richard would have to shoo her out when he saw her in the office.
‘I don’t want to go,’ she’d lament.
‘You’re condemned to a green and pleasant city with a university boating lake, not fucking Mordor. Now get lost – you’re only reading the BBC News site, and the cleaners want to get in.’
Edie would catch the train at St Pancras, ending up on the service that was crammed with inebriated last-minuters. On arrival in Nottingham, she’d go straight to Marks & Spencer, buy as much food as she could carry and a large bunch of flowers. Then she’d clamber into a taxi to Forest Fields, about ten minutes’ drive north of the city centre.
She’d get the cab to drop her at the end of the street, so her sister Meg didn’t hear the rumble of a Hackney engine and give her a lecture on how it was ecologically much better to get a bus, here, LOOK. (Having the timetable thrust into her hands as soon as she was through the door made Edie want to go everywhere on a motorised golden throne powered by unicorn tears.)
Trying not to let spirits sag as she entered the poky, ramshackle semi, wreathed in fag smoke, books stacked against the walls and on the stairs, wallpaper peeling. Edie would hug her father, Gerry, hello. He was always in a moth-eaten jumper, his craggy face like an Easter Island statue. You would never guess that Edie, her dad and Meg were related, they looked completely dissimilar. (Edie couldn’t help think that was telling.)
Meg had a very round face to Edie’s pointed chin, small cornflower blue eyes to Edie’s vast and doll-like dark ones, and patchily bleached mousy hair, which she wore in matted dreadlocks, gathered into a pineapple-style ponytail.
Edie would unpack the food into the fridge, while Meg loitered and complained at the Oakham chicken touching her tofu wieners, generally acting as if Saudi royalty had come to stay.
Meg was a militant vegan and if Edie wanted anything resembling a Christmas roast, she had to bring it herself and fight for its right to party. (She’d offered to take them to a pub for lunch in the past, but Meg thought it was outrageous exploitation of the proletariat who had to work on a public holiday.)
With relief, Edie would chuck her flowers in a jug which, in the chaotic tip of a kitchen, was akin to pencilling a beauty spot on a corpse. Then she’d faux-cheerily open a bottle of wine. Glugging it took the edge off, and helped abort the annual argument about whether her father and sister smoking stood in the back doorway, freezing faggy air rushing in to the kitchen, did in fact constitute ‘not smoking in the house’.
They’d long ago cancelled the gift giving on Christmas morning. Edie’s father was on an academic pension and Meg was mostly unemployed, and no one had a clue what to get for each other anyway. So they got half-drunk while Edie tried to make seven dishes in a small kitchen without anything meat or dairy so much as looking the wrong way at Meg’s spartan ingredients.
Meg would slowly build up a head of steam at the fact that Edie dared trample on their ‘cruelty-free lifestyle’ in this insensitive way, and cava-pissed Edie would stop herself from saying it felt pretty cruel to appetites.
With her sister and father parked in front of a rerun of The Snowman, Edie had to clear the piles of mouldering New Scientist magazines from the only-used-once-a-year dining room table and cobble together clean crockery that sort of matched.
They’d eat a botched-together lunch with a Gaza Strip in the middle made of candles, separating Edie’s Henry VIII food from a glowering Meg’s bean banquet. If Edie’s dad recklessly praised anything on Edie’s side of the table, Meg would say: ‘The succulent flavour of murder. The lovely taste of unethical slaughter. I’m having to eat with death filling my nostrils.’
Edie would likely snap: ‘Well we’re having to eat with hippy grief filling our ears,’ and Meg would rejoin: ‘Yes, anything other than your choices is hippy. Why don’t you just join the Bullingdon Club, Bernard Matthews.’ And so on.
And that was it; that was magical Christmas Day. If they could find something on television to agree on, it provided a few hours of respite, but if tempers frayed, or Meg got on to politics, all bets were off.
There’d been a particularly bad row two years ago when Meg had a long soliloquy about scandalous under-funding in the NHS. Edie snapped and said: ‘You know how they pay for the NHS? Taxes, from people who work, and PAY TAXES.’
In the ensuing fight, Meg called her a ‘consumerist chimpanzee’ and a ‘Nazi in a dress’ and Edie said Some Nazis did wear dresses so that doesn’t make sense, which you’d know if you didn’t skive off sixth-form college to smoke weed and call the tutors “head wreck fascists”. An observation that really calmed things down.
Their dad went to the dining room to play his old piano. He treated trying to defuse arguments between his daughters as bomb disposal; he might cut the wrong wire … better to stay back entirely.
Edie got a mid-afternoon text from Jack, last year, that said: ‘Do we need to talk about how this is in fact, the worst day invented?’ and she could’ve kissed her phone; whirled around the room hugging it, while humming. The happy few hours of text tennis with Jack that ensued was the only pleasure to be had that day. He got it, he hated Christmas too! Soulmates! And his jokes about his in-laws – ‘the outlaws’ as he called them – were so funny.
The only other respite in the entire experience was if Edie could get out for a Boxing Day pint with her school friends Hannah and Nick, yet this was increasingly difficult. Hannah had a gorgeous place in Edinburgh and had taken to inviting her parents to come to her, and Nick had a wife – a real Nazi in a dress, from what Edie could tell – and a small child, and recently said he couldn’t get a pass out.
On the 27th, the day she went back to London, Edie felt near-euphoric. She tried to hide it from her dad, but the haste with which she packed and the fizziness of her mood was hard to completely conceal.
The two key emotions of Edie’s visits home were guilt and disappointment, one feeding off the other. The more disappointed she felt, the guiltier she got. Despite best intentions, she could never effectively hide her hating being there, always playing her part in the three-hander Mike Leigh film they were trapped inside.
She got through this nightmare by having her London life to flee back to. It relied on there being a cast of people down south who thought of her as funny, sparky Edie, who coped, who enjoyed life. Who wasn’t a failure of an absent daughter. Who wasn’t a deeply disliked sister.
Now she’d been reinvented again, and not by her own design. She was reviled Edie, the home-wrecking whore. London hated her now. Nottingham didn’t want her or understand her, either.
As the train pulled into the destination, Edie’s eyes brimmed with hot tears. Three months here. The phrase ‘all my Christmases’ usually meant a massive treat, didn’t it?
11
Edie’s dad was delighted to see her, making her feel the usual remorse she wasn’t glad to be home. She’d wrestled with whether she could get away with staying in a hotel and concluded: no, not without badly hurting his feelings, and anyway, hotel plus her London rent = exorbitant. Home it was. Sorry, Meg.
‘Three months?’ her dad said. ‘I don’t think you’ve been here this long since before university!’
Edie grit-grinned and said he must be right. They hugged in the narrow hallway, with the dappled Artex walls that had reminded younger Edie of rice pudding. She rolled her trolley case to the foot of the stairs and hung her coat on the banister. They’d lived in this cramped but homely house since her dad retired early, on ill health grounds, when they were still kids. He’d had a nervous breakdown, but they never referred to it as a nervous breakdown.
‘We’ve become a fully vegan household,’ Meg said, by way of greeting, appearing from the kitchen in a T-shirt saying BITCH PLEASE with a picture of Jane Fonda doing the Hanoi Jane fist, and geometric-print leggings that pouched at the crotch. ‘So don’t bring anything of meat or dairy nature onto the premises or it’s going straight in the bin.’
‘Don’t be daft, Megan,’ their father said, all jocular, ‘She can have the odd bacon cob if she wants one.’
‘Bacon cob?’ bellowed Meg. ‘No she CAN’T! Have you ever heard a pig’s death rattle?’
‘No, but you hum it and I’ll try to keep up.’
Once again, she and Meg weren’t really talking about what they were talking about. This wasn’t about bacon cobs, it was about Meg repelling Edie as a rebel force invading her territory.
It hadn’t always been this way. Edie had been a hero to Meg when they were younger, and Meg trotted behind her like a duckling. Edie had been excessively protective of Meg, almost as much proto mother as older sister. Things started to change when Edie went to university and after she moved to London, Edie returned to find she’d become a fully fledged villain. Her popularity, once so simple, so powerful, had completely curdled. Once lost, it wasn’t possible to get it back. Meg was perpetually resentful, as if Edie was a giant fake, and every word out of her mouth only confirmed it. Edie had probably shouted: ‘What IS your problem?’ many times at Meg, yet non-rhetorically, it was a good question. Edie gathered that it was because Meg deemed Edie’s life choices the choices of a sell-out; a false, superficial lightweight.
‘It’s fine, I can eat meat out of the house,’ Edie said, trying to keep to her resolve of no fighting on the first day.
Meg ‘hmphed’ at this, with an air of irritation at a typical Edie ploy.
An assertive rap of knuckles against the flimsy wooden front door made them all jump.
‘Did you bring back-up with you?’ her dad said.
Edie dodged past him and answered, suddenly nervous that it’d be a gift-ribboned turd in a box or something with ‘Love From The Office’ and she’d be forced to explain it.
A motorcycle courier said ‘Thompson?’ – and handed over an A4 envelope, while Edie used the plastic wand to scribble on the electronic receipt-of-delivery device. The adrenaline subsided as she inspected the publishing house watermark and realised it was the Elliot Owen Files.
When Edie closed the door she saw her father and sister watching, once again, as if Joan Collins had wafted in.
‘Cuttings. To help me interview this actor for his autobiography,’ she said.
‘What an interesting project,’ her dad said, kindly. ‘Has he been in anything I’ve seen?’
‘The fantasy show Blood & Gold. If you’ve seen that.’
‘Ah. No. Didn’t look like my bag. Tolkien is enough questing dwarves for one lifetime.’
‘The one with the sexist attitudes to women where it’s all “Oh, look, my bubbies have fallen out of my lizardskin jerkin, again,”’ Meg said, and Edie laughed.
‘Exactly.’
Once again, Meg looked irked that Edie hadn’t disagreed with her.
‘Why are you writing a book about him, then?’ she said.
‘For the money,’ Edie said.
‘You don’t have to say yes to everything that pays money, you know,’ said Meg.
‘No, just some things, so you don’t have to live off gruel. Can I put my things in my room, Dad?’ Edie said hastily, before Meg took off from the runway.
‘Yes, of course. I’ve moved the washing out of it and most of the wardrobes are free.’
Edie made noises of thanks and, envelope clamped under one arm, began huffing her giant case up the stairway, made narrower by the books lining each step. The books were on their way to or from a bookcase, stuck in mid-flight.
She felt Meg watch her progress, suspiciously and sullenly. Edie could explain she wasn’t back at home to mess up her life, or to show off, and that her own life had gone spectacularly to shit.
But what would be the point? Even if Meg believed her, she’d no doubt think Edie brought it all on herself by being a sex puppet of the patriarchy, or whatever.
It wasn’t that Edie violently disagreed with most of Meg’s principles, even if she didn’t want to be vegan herself. The fact was there was no point agreeing with Meg about anything – because Meg’s views existed to establish the difference between herself and most of the rest of the world, specifically her older sister. When Edie concurred, it was viewed by her sister as some sort of spoiling and tarnishing gambit.
Edie flubbed down on the bed – she was touched to notice her dad had put clean sheets on it, and old blue faded ones from her childhood, too – and considered unpacking. But it was too much like accepting the length of her visit.
She had hoped that, if nothing else, Nottingham would make her feel better about what had happened to her life in London. Sat staring at the old built-in wardrobes, from the days her dad still did carpentry, and the bare emptiness of this box room without her things in it – bar a few old musty dresses on plastic hangers inside the wardrobes – she felt worse.
In a vacuum, there was nothing to stop her howling, no routine to cling to. She put her toilet bags in front of the mirror, the one she’d gazed into a thousand times while applying copious amounts of kohl before a teenage night out drinking an illicit concoction she and Hannah had devised, ‘Poke’, a blend of port and Coke.
She dug her phone out of her coat pocket and saw she had a text from Louis.
Hey babe, how you doing? Xx
Not great, but thanks for asking. You spoke to Richard? X
Yeah, I wanted to save you the hassle. He was cool about everything, as always. How long are you off for? Everyone misses you, you know <3
Hah! Yeah, Edie betted that was what everyone was saying. Louis was such a snake on wheels. This was his dream: a catastrophe that overlapped on the personal and professional Venn diagram. He could be excited onlooker and major political fixer, whispering in everyone’s ears, with the sole hotline to the villain of the piece. This was Edie’s Vietnam and his House of Cards. He’d deleted the Instagram picture to distance himself from Edie, and called Richard purely to stir and get a measure of her fate. Now he wanted Edie to tell him whether she’d been sacked, so he could be bearer of that news, too.
That’s nice. Three months.
OMFG, three months! Paid leave?
Did Louis think she was stupid? Did he not realise she knew he’d look up from his phone and say ‘My God, listen to this, she only got a three-month holiday out of ruining Jack and Charlotte’s wedding’? Louis knew what Edie knew, that a false friend was the only kind of friend she had left in that office.
Not leave, on a project in Nottingham. How’s Charlotte?
No reply. Of course not. Edie asking after Charlotte didn’t fit the story and there was nothing in answering it for Louis.
Edie got up off the bed, and thundered down the stairs. Her dad was fishing a tea bag out of a mug in the kitchen.
‘I meant to say, dinner’s on me tonight, as thanks for having me! We could go out. Or get fish and chips. Or, chips for Meg. Whatever you like.’
‘I’m cooking,’ Meg called, from the front room. ‘The kidney beans are already soaking. Also that chip shop doesn’t use separate preparation areas. I asked them and everything’s contaminated. And I don’t want to give them more profit anyway.’
You wouldn’t be, would you, Edie thought.
‘Uh, OK. Maybe tomorrow?’ Edie said, heart plummeting, as her dad nodded. Meg was an awful cook. That wasn’t anti-veganism, just a fact. Meg had never met a seasoning she liked to use. The one consistency all her curries, stews, hotpots and casseroles achieved was ‘non-toothsome sludge’. She eschewed recipes as creative constraint, and generally just mashed some stuff into other stuff.
Most terrible cooks were aware they were terrible, and limited people’s exposure to it, thus they weren’t a danger to the public. Meg was either blissfully unaware or strangely sadistic – the more Edie pushed it round her plate or her dad declared himself ‘pleasantly full’, the more she’d heap spoonfuls of it out and say, ‘This is full of iron,’ or similar.
There was an aggressive piety to forcing it on them: it wasn’t for the food to get nicer, it was for their minds to get wider.
She trudged back up the stairs thinking she’d eat Meg’s Sewage Slurry tonight to make nice, then tomorrow, go to Sainsbury’s and try to fill a cupboard with edible items. She might even hide a packet of Polish sausages inside a large bag of rice.
Back in her room, she was at a loss about what to do in the middle of a Monday afternoon, when not at work. She physically ached for the life she couldn’t go back to. She wasn’t only separated by geography from it now. She couldn’t even indulge herself with a crying jag, and come down for dinner pink-eyed and puffy, and have to explain what was up. The envelope with her name scrawled on it sat in the middle of the bed.
Sod it. There was no avoiding Elliot Owen. She was probably one of the few women in the country that this opportunity was wasted on.
12
It was strange to get to know someone through their press before meeting them, but Edie guessed it had been a while since Elliot had met anyone who hadn’t met him in print first.
What was that quote about Paul Newman, something about, ‘He was as nice as you could expect for a man who hadn’t heard the word “no” for twenty-five years’?
The photogenically brooding Elliot Owen couldn’t have heard the word no for at least five now. From women, possibly ever.
His bio details weren’t very colourful. He was thirty-one, not twenty-five, as Richard had said. Same age as Meg, though he’d been busier. Born to a comfortably middle-class family in the leafy Nottingham suburb of West Bridgford, went to a state school with a better OFSTED score than Edie’s, joined a local TV drama workshop, got spotted by a scout. He moved to London and ended up in a boring medical drama, did a bit of time in a soap, and a very quickly canned sitcom.
He was the love interest in a video by a terrible American emo-rock band for a song called ‘Crumple Zone’, which was a huge hit in the States and got his face known. It landed his breakout role in Blood & Gold.
As Prince Wulfroarer in the epic and boisterous fantasy series known for its stabbing, shouting, tits, scheming and tits, he was suddenly ‘sex in a wolf pelt’. A swaggering, high-born Northern warlord – rallying cry; ‘For the Blades of My Brothers!’ – he fell in love with a servant girl called Malleflead. Sadly that had proved his undoing, as Count Bragstard had also set his Machiavellian sights on her.
Prince Wulfy had therefore died on the end of a pointy weapon at the end of last series, uttering the heartbreaking words to his distraught shag-piece, before he bit on the fake blood capsule: ‘I am my Kingdom’ (his catchphrase), ‘but I would sacrifice it all for you.’ His demise prompted much speculation about whether female viewers would desert in droves.
Edie was resigned to Elliot being at best, boring, and at worst, an obnoxious brat. The fact the last ghost-writer had exited immediately was a very bad sign.
She didn’t think this expectation was prejudice on her part, it was straightforward logic. Take one male ego, rain down this much attention, employ someone whose sole job it was to blast his armpits with a hairdryer, and so on. Pay him millions, spooge a luge of adoration all over him. To come through that and not be an arsehole would take someone of spectacular character. Which meant you were gambling on a man not only being given his physical gifts, but also bestowed with Gandhi-esque substance.
You might as well pop down to the shop on the corner and expect your lotto ticket to pay off your mortgage.
Edie leafed through the photos of him on set in whichever raggedy-beautiful Eastern European country doubled for ‘Easterport’ or ‘Goldendale’. (Edie hadn’t seen much of Blood & Gold and could never keep the fictional geography straight.)
Elliot’s dark brown, slightly curly hair was dyed boot-polish black for Blood & Gold, and he wore dragon-green contact lenses. He had one of those squared-off jaws that a draughtsman could draw with three swipes of the pencil, and full lips that Edie envied, they were the sort she’d always wanted.
It was obvious why he’d been such a hit. It wasn’t sensible or interesting good looks, in Edie’s humble opinion. It was silly-to-the-point-of-ridiculous, pin-up handsomeness, to appeal to teenagers who hadn’t developed a more complex palate yet. The sexiness equivalent of strawberry milkshake.
She remembered Charlotte and others in her office all swooning and sighing over Elliot Owen, and Edie saying, ‘Meh, looks like the one in the TRAINEE BARISTA T-shirt who makes your cappuccino sour and gritty’, and Jack laughing in approval. Then Jack repeated the rumours he ‘played for Man City, not Man U’ and all the women chorused nooooooooo.
Edie had best buckle down to this homework – she also had a stack of celeb auto biogs, and they made drear reading – so she didn’t give him an excuse to kick off when she fumbled a question to which there was a well-known answer.
She’d start with a recent Sunday supplement profile. She flipped past moodily blue photos of Elliot resting his forehead on his forearm, with an expression as if he’d just been given terrible news. Headline: FANTASY CHAMPION.
It’s considered good manners to dip your headlights, at night, so as not to dazzle the oncoming traffic. When Elliot Owen strides casually into the dramatically under lit environs of the hip East Village restaurant he chose for our meeting, you can’t help wonder if he wishes he could flip his full beam off, at will. As he asks the waitresses for his table, they virtually crash and burn in the blazing glare.
Jesus wept, seriously?!
Raymond Chandler once described a ‘blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window’. In the 21st century, Owen’s a brunette who could leave a nunnery in smoking ruins.
Yes, that’s how religion works, Edie thought, nuns simply haven’t met sufficiently fit men and so married the Son of God as a fallback. These people.
With effortless good manners, Elliot inquires what I’m drinking. ‘Diet Coke, right?’ He summons the waitress, who is caught still staring at us. If Elliot’s noticed, he doesn’t let on: an old-fashioned gentleman, under the modern-casual shirt and jeans. ‘Can we have a Diet Coke, and which beers do you have?’ The waitress almost trembles as she offers Budweiser. ‘Ah, not a big fan of Budweiser. Clearly not spent enough time here yet,’ he says, with that sleepily devastating smile, as the waitress almost ovulates. ‘But that will be fine.’ And where is ‘here’? America, or the spotlight he’s now occupying? He’s seemingly come from nowhere … ‘Or Nottingham, as we like to call it,’ he corrects me, sharp as a tack. There’s that impossibly disarming smile again.
Christ, this is some hardcore drivel, Edie thought. Man In Ordering Beverage Shocker. He’s just a person who has to poo like the rest of us. Also, is that a dig at Nottingham? She flared with indignation, which was a bit hypocritical, she realised.
New York has its fair share of celebrities and its most fashionable inhabitants are well trained in ignoring the famous. But Elliot Owen is so white hot right now, even those who aren’t looking over at us are still looking.
How exactly do you look and NOT look at the same time? Edie wanted the female journalist to show her working. She was also curious how you show someone to their table in the style of a crashing car. Or ‘almost’ ovulate.
The reason, of course, is Blood & Gold, the fantasy series that sparked many a female fantasy about its heroic, flawed, tragic lead, Prince Wulfroarer. With Byronic looks that could unlace a bodice at thirty paces, Owen bestrode the pitiless landscape of the ‘Eight Islands’ like a warrior Heathcliff, spliced with Mr Darcy. And like Mr Darcy, had his cold, proud heart melted by a woman of inferior class. In the hands of a lesser actor, the Prince might’ve been a …
Oh God, enough, Edie thought and started skimming. Right, here was a bit about the Nottingham series.
The world is Owen’s oyster right now, yet he makes it clear that he’s not interested in the low-hanging fruit of decorative roles. His first job, since hanging up Wulfroarer’s armour, is a relatively low-budget gritty thriller set in his native Nottingham, called Gun City.
Written and directed by Archie Puce, the enfant terrible of British drama who made a splash with his BAFTA-winning science fiction film INTERREGNUM, Puce is notorious for pushing actors to their limit, and giving studios, and the media, hell.
Both Owen and his US co-star, Greta Alan, are taking a huge pay cut to be part of Gun City, as the two detectives unravelling the mystery behind a young woman’s corpse, found spread-eagled and naked in a fountain in the middle of the town centre on Christmas Day.
‘When Archie got in touch, I was thrilled,’ Elliot says. ‘Everyone wants to impress people who are hard to impress and Archie is very much in that category. When he explained the thinking behind Gun City, examining the real law-and-order problems facing the region, I knew I wouldn’t be able to live with someone else taking this role. Not least because it’s my stamping ground. It’s great to spend some time at home.’
Edie shouldn’t be rankled, but the whole thing irritated her. As if the city was going to be grateful for rich ex-pat Elliot Owen giving it lots of publicity as a crime-ridden grot hole.
The rest of the cuttings didn’t live up to the swooning hagiography of the Sunday magazine piece. The papers and women’s glossies were mainly interested in the fact Elliot was dating a hot British actress called Heather Lily. (Two flowers? Impossibly fragrant.) They featured together in recent paparazzi pictures in New York; Elliot in that very self-conscious ‘off-duty’ outfit of no-doubt hideously expensive binman’s style donkey jacket and artfully battered brown boots, carrying Starbucks cups. His blonde girlfriend only a perfect Dairylea triangle nose peeking through a bundle of thick blonde hair, with a tiny sphere-of-fluff dog on a lead bouncing behind her. Why did starlets always have dogs? Maybe it was the pissy cat lady stigma.
Hmm, Edie conceded the angle of Elliot’s jaw was caught nicely in photo number five, as he stepped out to hail a yellow cab. She caught herself getting sucked into the whirlpool of trivia and thought, you really had to wonder at a society that was fascinated by couple buy coffee.
She put the cuttings back inside the envelope and laid back on her bed. Her dad had yet to find the funds or the will to fix the damp problem at the back of the house, so the off-white walls in this back room sagged and bloated like a wedding cake that had been left out in the rain. The ghostly remnants of her teenage self filled it, from the greasy blots left by Blu- Tack on the walls, to shreds of ripped-off stickers (the New Kids on the Block phase.)
Edie was once obsessed with glow-in-the-dark stickers, peppering her navy-blue bedroom ceiling with a constellation of white-green paper stars, crescent moons and comets.
She lay in her bed and stared at the universe on her ceiling in the late afternoon murk. Edie used to lie there thinking what a big world it was and how, one day, she was going to strike out into it.
That had gone well.
13
‘Whereabouts, love?’ said the taxi driver, as they both peered at deserted acres of not much at all, some ugly squat container buildings and trailers dotted about.
It seemed making dramas – the fictional sort – was less thrilling than Edie expected. When she got details of her first on-set meeting with Elliot Owen via his flunkies, she expected to be told to meet at somewhere like the Council House, which they were re-dressing as a haunted library, or something.
Instead she got the coordinates to an industrial estate at the south of the city, near a race track. A pile of churned mud. Oh.
Edie could see some vans in the distance, and possibly the odd human.
‘Just here, thanks,’ she said, doubtfully, wondering at the wisdom of having worn a small heel and her beloved tartan coat with brown fur hood. (Jack always asked if it was ‘real gerbil’. She HAD to stop thinking about Jack.)
She picked her way towards the vague signs of life in the distance, men in North Face jackets, holding walkie-talkies. If she squinted, beyond them she could see some arc lights and maybe cameras.
As Edie drew nearer, she realised what she thought was ‘someone telling a funny story, in a heightened excitable voice’ was in fact, a person having a massive rant. A wiry, bespectacled man in a long narrow beanie hat was having a meltdown, hopping around, gesticulating at a deeply dismayed looking member of the North Face team.
They were gathered round in a circle, staring at something. As the people shifted, Edie glimpsed the focus – a figure of a garden gnome, in a hat with a bell, holding a watering can at a jaunty angle.
Edie suspected, due to the sense of cowed deference, that the shouter was enfant terrible Archie Puce – being terrible if not enfant. The words faded in.
‘—back and get me what I FUCKING WELL ASKED FOR, THE FUCK IS THIS? Do you grasp the significance of Buddha, Clive? Do you realise why this scene where Garratt smashes up a statue of BUDDHA in ANGER is IRONIC? I mean should I even BOTHER MAKING ART, WITH THIS SORT OF CLOWN WORKSHOP OVERT COCK-ENDERY?’
Lots of shaking of heads and chewing of lips and shuffling of feet. Blimey, Edie didn’t think even divas did shit fits on day one at 10 a.m.
Archie waved a sheaf of paper in his hands and read from the page.
‘Garratt sees the terracotta figurine, and gripped by an unreasoning fury at its ironic juxtaposition in these war-torn surroundings, destroys the smiling round-bellied icon of peace as he hurls it at the fence, again and again. As it shatters, so does Garratt’s hope.’
Archie looked up at Clive.
‘Perhaps I should have been more explicit for the hard of thinking. He is committing an act of ICONOCLASM. What is iconoclasm, please?’
Clive looked pretty miserable and very pale. He scratched his cheek. ‘Smashing up … religious stuff?’
‘OH, A BREAKTHROUGH. Religious “stuff”. So, on the one hand, Buddha, an enlightened sage of the sixth century and figurehead of a faith. What do we have here as substitute?’
Archie picked it up.
‘A gnome. A small old cunt with a pointy beard found in suburban gardens. Do we see the difference? What does smashing a gnome up signify? GOOD TASTE?’
Edie was suddenly gripped by an urgent need to laugh and had to choke back a honk as it surfaced.
Archie read the lettering on the base. ‘Ninbert. So we have two options, Clive. Either we found a new religion based on THE CULT OF FUCKING NINBERT OR WE BUY THE RIGHT ITEM WHAT STRIKES YOU AS MORE FEASIBLE WITHIN OUR SHOOTING SCHEDULE?’
Clive was in that deeply unpleasant situation during a bollocking where you were required to explain the unacceptable and dig yourself in deeper.
‘Sorry it’s just B&Q didn’t have any garden statue Buddhas and then I … looking at comparative size …’
‘Size?’
Clive nodded.
‘My head is comparative in size to a large gourd. Should I replace my head with a large gourd, Clive?’
He shook his head.
Archie hurled Ninbert in the air, and booted him with the toe of his shoe, causing onlookers to duck.
‘What’s in there?’ Archie said, spotting another B&Q bag, beyond Clive’s legs.
‘Uh. Another one.’
‘Get it out!’ screeched Archie.
Clive miserably produced the second gnome, which was lying on its side, insouciantly smoking a bubble pipe, which seemed in the circumstances likely to inflame Archie. ‘Who’s this, Dildo Baggins?’ He inspected its name. ‘Boddywinkle.’
Archie kicked that gnome clear of the group too, with a menacing zeal.
‘This production,’ he pulled his hat from his head and threw it on the ground, ‘is a PROPER SHITTERS’ PICNIC.’
An obliging runner nervously ducked in and snatched the hat up.
‘LEAVE MY HAT WHERE I PUT IT, YOU ARSEFUCK!’ screamed Archie.
The runner darted in and threw it back down again.
A silence where no one said anything, for fear of being an arsefuck. Edie couldn’t back away without it being noticed. She stood very still, as if she was a small shivery mammal in an old wildlife programme and a tiger was prowling around nearby. Unfortunately, Archie’s boggling eyes swept over the company for fresh meat, and Edie had rather made herself stand out by being dressed as a cute librarian in an indie movie, instead of the regulation fleece.
‘Who the fuck are you?’
Edie cleared her throat as everyone turned and stared.
‘Edie Thompson. I’m a copywriter … I’m here to interview Elliot Owen.’
Archie ignored this.
‘Since you’ve decided to join us without invitation, let’s hear your thoughts on Buddha being substituted by Ninbert and or Boddywinkle.’
‘I haven’t read the scene.’
‘Well neither has Clive, clearly.’
‘Erm,’ Edie was sweating inside her coat. ‘… Why would there be a statue of Buddha lying around on an industrial estate in Colwick?’
There was a pause while Archie Puce went, well, even more puce. Then his features twisted in an unpleasant fashion, as if he’d thought of something cunning and done a sly fart at the same time.
‘Why is there a fucking gnome out here?’
‘… Because you sent Clive to B&Q?’
Edie couldn’t be sure but it seemed as if there was a beat of shock followed by some suppressed laughter-snorts. A harassed-looking woman at Archie’s elbow who’d previously stayed neutral stepped forward and said briskly:
‘Can I see some sort of ID?’
Edie dropped her bag to fumble for her wallet and the crowd dispersed, amid mumbling. When Edie looked up, Archie was stalking back towards the set and the air pressure had reduced considerably.
‘When did he say he’d see you?’ the woman said, handing Edie’s driving licence back to her in disgust.
‘Just to be here at ten.’
‘Alright, wait here.’
The woman turned on her heel and left Edie feeling like turning up at the appointed place and time had been the most presumptuous thing she could’ve done.
After ten minutes, the irascible woman with a walkie-talkie trudged back to Edie.
‘Elliot can’t see you today, sorry.’
‘Oh. Can I—’
‘That’s it. Sorry.’
‘OK …’ Edie tried to say more but the woman had already turned. She hit the taxi number on her mobile and tried not to feel stupid, as people milling nearby glanced at her.
Usually, Edie would be very pleased to find herself with what amounted to a paid day off. Time tooling around by herself felt a lot less appealing now she had huge anxieties and a guilty conscience, with no online rabbit hole to tumble into, either. She wanted to be busy-busy-busy to avoid all the bad thoughts.
Also, while she appreciated he was an important man, she suspected she’d had her first taste of the behaviour that caused the previous biographer to exit stage left from the Elliot Owen Story. Edie had a very nasty feeling she was going to fare no better, and be what Boddywinkle was to Ninbert.
14
Edie finally had a reply from Jack. Six days after he’d unpinned a grenade and lobbed it into the middle of several lives at once, then scattered before the smoke had cleared.
She was getting ready for what could be grandly called ‘an evening out’, applying her make-up, peering into the old milky mirror of her youth with the plastic red frame, rummaging around in a cosmetics basket that had a topsoil of shattered kohl pencils and lidless grey eye shadows.
The name that used to give her such a sting of excitement appeared on her phone screen. Now it just stung. Involuntarily, Edie recalled how his lips felt on hers before she pulled away. She hadn’t allowed herself to think about that until now.
Hi you. So. Sorry about everything. Hear you’re up north for now? Take care. Jx
That was it?!
Trembling slightly, Edie hammered out three different replies of varying sarcastic rage, and deleted each of them in turn. This man had dabbled with her heart like it was a finger- painting kit and he never ever took responsibility for the consequences of his actions.
But if she got too emotional, he could simply drop the conversation. How did Jack always manage to shield himself from feedback? Actually, he couldn’t, not without her help. She needed to breathe deeply and be smart, here.
Hi yourself. ‘What were you thinking’ might be a cliché but, what were you thinking?
Near-insta ping back.
I wasn’t, clearly. I know you weren’t either. Apologies for inviting you to a wedding that had an ‘aftermath’ in place of a ‘reception’. Man alive. Jx
And this was how Jack’s wiles had sent her slowly mad. Within seconds of receiving this ostensibly self-deprecating reply, Edie realised he’d apologised, but neatly stopped her screen-grabbing the conversation and using it as proof of his guilt. To her, it worked as Jack’s usual easy charm: ‘I assume nothing from your momentary reciprocation’. To anyone else, it read as if they were equally to blame.
She had to find a direct question to ask that he couldn’t wriggle out of. She steeled herself and typed:
But why decide to kiss me?!
‘Edie! Time to get going?’ her dad called from downstairs. He’d volunteered to drive them to their dinner. Edie had thought the best way to get her dad and Meg out was to promise to pay but let them choose the restaurant. Which meant, Meg choosing.
As they crushed into the back of her dad’s old Volvo, footwells lined with old newspapers, Edie wondered why her dad burning a fossil fuel was OK with Meg, but taxi drivers doing it was not.
Meg also gave them a long explanation about rewarding venues that offered solid vegan options, to justify picking Annie’s Burger Shack. Edie suspected the ethical reasoning boiled down to Meg fancying a burger. She was just relieved that Meg hadn’t found some café full of nubbly seed-filled discs of tempeh and hemp burgers that looked like something you’d leave on a bird feeder table.
It took a lot longer to get a response from Jack this time and given the starkness of her question, Edie wasn’t surprised. Evade THAT, motherfucker. She tried not to twitch her phone out of her pocket every sixteen seconds as they rumbled towards the city centre, to see if Jack had replied.
By the time they were seated at Annie’s, had the menus and ordered drinks, bingo, a reply finally limped in. Edie had started to grind her teeth that he’d simply ignore her.
I was drunk and all over the place & I thought we had a special connection. Events overtook me with the wedding, I didn’t have my head straight. Honestly, E.T., I can’t say sorry enough. You don’t deserve any of this.
Nicely played. ‘I thought we had a special connection.’ The nickname. Once again, nothing that could be easily passed on, without people who’d already made up their minds taking it as tacit confirmation that Edie was pursuing Jack. But was she reading too much into it? Did Jack realise he was safety- proofing it? Edie wondered if she was paranoid. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean everyone isn’t out to get you.
She asked herself whether she should care what those people thought. She did, though. She couldn’t help it. Could she ask ano—
‘Ahem,’ her dad coughed, and nodded towards her phone, as Edie listlessly fiddled, eyes straying to it for the umpteenth time. ‘Something interesting?’
‘Hah no!’ Edie turned her phone over, with some effort, screen facing down. She wasn’t going to discuss Boy Trouble with her baffled father and hostile sister, and especially not when the story hinged on her own awful transgression. And Edie badly needed a space where everything was business as usual, even if that meant, ‘still not great’. ‘It’s nice in here,’ she said, with polite-fake enthusiasm.
Annie’s was in a grand, high-ceilinged old lace warehouse in the Lace Market, quite a glamorous room for fast food, filled with the clatter of shoes on stripped wood and the burble of background music vibrating on wrought-iron fittings. As Edie glanced round the table, her dad in a faded cable- knit jumper, Meg in her denim dungarees, she realised how long it was since the three of them had been anywhere together.
On her birthdays, she usually took them to the local pub and vigorously batted away her dad’s offers of meals, pretending she didn’t want the fuss, knowing he wasn’t well off enough and it would be too awkward for Edie to stand the bill on that occasion.
Three bottles of beer arrived and Edie felt the pressure, despite her low mood, to jolly it all along. She had suggested they go out, after all.
‘Good choice, Meg,’ she said, making them clink glasses, cheers.
Meg looked at her impassively, obviously figuring out what stripe of bullshit this was. Edie considered her enthusiasm might contaminate Annie’s, so quickly added: ‘Do you, er, come here often?’ She laughed at herself.
‘No, I can’t afford it. I’ve been once, when the home did a day out.’
Meg worked for three days a week at a holiday care home for the elderly, ill and extremely infirm. It was a noble and decent thing to do, but Meg thought her three-day-a-week work for very little money conferred sainthood upon her, and her saintliness came at a price she didn’t pay. She drew state benefits to which she wasn’t – in Edie’s view – strictly entitled, while her dad picked up the rest of the slack, financially. Edie had tried to nudge Meg to look for a full-time or better-paid job in the voluntary sector, but it was like trying to lion tame wearing Lady Gaga’s meat dress.
Thus I can’t afford it was imbued with her usual sanctimony and implied Edie had no idea, living high on the hog. It wasn’t an act of God that meant Edie had more money. It wasn’t a secret of the elite, the whole ‘working five days a week’ trick, was it?
‘Did they have a nice time?’ her dad asked Meg, pouring some more beer out of his bottle.
‘It was a bit of a ’mare. Roy came, you know the one with the bone tumours? He got brain freeze from drinking his root-beer float too fast and ate too many onion rings and started puking everywhere. The next table were totally out of order about it.’
From Meg, ‘totally out of order’ translated as anything from calling for Roy’s execution to ‘preferred to move out of the range of the spray’.
‘Maybe they didn’t realise he was poorly,’ their dad said.
‘Oh my God, of course someone’s poorly when they’re yakking chunks everywhere.’
‘I meant his cancer. Vomiting in public is quite a tearing up of the social contract.’ Edie’s dad gave her a wry look and she thought, Oh no you don’t, I’m not getting involved.
‘It was INVOLUNTARY, it’s not like he wanted to huey,’ Meg said, eyes blazing, and her dad clucked and soothed and said he was only kidding. Meg turned her gaze on Edie and Edie knew she was thinking, He’s only like this when you’re here.
Edie edgily checked her phone and saw she had a text message from Louis. Almost certainly something she should leave for later, but she didn’t have the restraint. She’d only fidget and fret about its contents otherwise.
Hola E. How’s home? OK BIG news … Jack & Charlotte are BACK TOGETHER. Can you believe it? X
Edie stared, put her phone back down with a bump, and gulped her beer. Yes, she could believe it. She realised now she’d half expected it. What did Louis say about Jack, he was a kind of smooth-talking Houdini? You could tie his hands and drop him in a tank and he’d be out by the end of the show.
Her reaction was stronger than she expected. Not because she still wanted Jack herself. Or, she didn’t think she did. This development made her inwardly howl with frustrated anger. They’d made it up. Jack had been forgiven. Once again, his misdemeanours had cost him nothing. (Well, unless you counted the wedding, but it sounded as if the bride’s family picked up that tab.) And kissing her had no more meaning than a moment’s confusion.
Jack’s timing in making peace with her wasn’t accidental. He must’ve known she’d hear about this, and hate him for it.
Wow. So all is forgiven? Ex
Not sure ALL. But he’s back in St Albans. Apparently he went up to Harrogate to see her parents and sisters to apologise. He’s mounted the full-scale I’m Sorry I Don’t Know What Came Over Me tour, we’ve not seen the like since Hugh Grant after the prostitute. (Not saying you’re a prostitute lol)
LOL OF COURSE NOT. Thanks, Louis. Always one to give the knife a quick twist. Edie could’ve cried, screamed, thrown her phone across the room. Her life had been trashed by Jack’s actions, but there would be no forgiveness or reconciliation for her.
‘What’re you having?’ said the friendly, buxom young waitress with the nose ring and magenta hair tied up in one of those Dig For Victory poster headscarves, pen poised above pad.
Edie could barely focus.
‘Uh. A cheeseburger, please,’ she said.
A pause while the waitress looked perplexed and said: ‘A plain burger, with cheese?’
‘Yes?’
‘Meat?’
‘Where?’
‘Do you want a meat burger rather than veggie or vegan?’
‘Oh. Yes.’
‘And for your sides?’
‘Just … chips?’
‘We do curly fries, Cajun wedges or just wedges?’
‘That’s fine,’ Edie said. ‘I mean, the fries are fine.’
‘Any sauces?’
Dear God, stop demanding things of me.
‘Just ketchup, thanks.’
‘Ketchup’s on the table.’
The waitress gestured with her pen.
‘Oh yes. Thanks.’
Her dad looked baffled and Meg frowned suspiciously at Edie, as if she might be doing the space cadet thing as London aloofness. They went on to give more detailed orders – ‘The Lemmy, vegan, plain wedges, American mustard side’ – that made Edie realise she hadn’t got into the spirit of the thing at all. She had ground to make up already.
‘And a portion of onion rings,’ she volunteered. ‘For the table.’
‘For the tapeworm,’ her dad said.
Don’t think about Jack, Edie instructed herself. He doesn’t deserve to be thought about.
15
Edie was thinking about him. Jack and Charlotte were back together. It wasn’t only that Edie resented them sorting it out and sparing Jack’s arse. It was that she knew what this meant for her.
If Jack had been restored by Charlotte, it’d make Edie the only real bad guy. Friends might mutter about Jack in private, but in public, it was disloyal to Charlotte. They’d have to redistribute the weight of their disapprobation and put it all on her. So now the official story would go: reunited against all odds, once the scourge of that hussy was eradicated. Charlotte could forgive Jack, but not Edie?
Ping, another Louis text.
PS Listen, I don’t know when the best time tell you this is but in wake of J & C sorting it out, Lucie put an email round everyone at work asking them to print out and sign a petition for you to be sacked. No one’s signed it though. Xx
… Yet. Edie sagged with the weight and shame of it. She couldn’t go back, no matter what Richard said. Even if Jack and/or Charlotte left of their own accord, she’d be hissed at. Why should she lose her job and not Jack, though? So he walked away with the job and the wife?
‘Do your work really need to get hold of you this often?’ Edie’s dad said, as she turned the phone face down on the table again.
‘It’s not work, Dad, at half seven at night,’ Meg said, faux-sweetly.
‘Oh.’ Her dad’s eyes widened. ‘Are you courting?’
‘No,’ Edie said, forcefully.
Then, with not inconsiderable effort:
‘Sorry. Being hassled about something work-related, by a friend. How was everyone’s day?’
‘Not bad, thank you,’ her dad said. ‘Radio Four and pottering. Have you clapped eyes on the elusive star yet?’
‘He’s saying he’ll see me at his parents’ house in West Bridgford on Sunday. Well, his PA says he’s seeing me. Believe it when I see it. Or him.’
‘Sunday? Funny hours you have to work.’
‘I have to be available whenever he’s available. I spent today reading more cuttings about him. God knows how you get a book’s worth of words out of a thirty-one-year-old’s life story. I’m going to have to do a lot of padding.’
‘It’s so stupid that we write books about people who’ve been in films rather than aid workers, and people who’ve actually contributed to society,’ Meg said.
‘Hmm yeah,’ Edie said, nodding. ‘It is. Or anyone who’s thirty-one, really.’
She said this before she realised it sounded like a dig at Meg.
‘Alright, Yoda.’
It was tiring, being around someone who not-so-secretly despised her.
The food arrived and Edie was glad of something that could unite them, the simple pleasure of stuffing your face. They carried trivial conversation through food and a second round of beers, with Edie asking a string of questions about things and people she’d missed in Nottingham. There was no foothold for Meg to complain about her being lordly.
‘Oof. I feel as if my innards are trying to knit me a beef vest,’ her dad said, exhaling and patting his stomach.
‘Your colon will be sluggish with decomposing animal protein,’ Meg said.
‘Not my colon,’ her dad said. ‘Business is brisk, let me promise you. Nice frock, Edith,’ he added, as the plates were cleared away. Edie was in a dark blue, long-sleeved cheap-buy dress that she’d pulled, crumpled, from her case. She’d not worn it much as it had a wide strip of lacy material across the bosom that acted as a cleavage viewing window. She reasoned no one here would be interested in taking the opportunity.
In a misguided attempt at paternal even-handedness, her dad added: ‘You’d look nice in that too, Meg.’
Meg wrinkled her nose. ‘No thanks, that’s a very Edie dress.’
‘Oh, an EDIE dress,’ Edie said, doing shock-horror palms. ‘What could be worse?’
‘You know. It’s a bit “Have you met my breasts?’’’
‘Megan!’ her dad said. ‘Settle down.’
Of all the things to mock Edie about at the moment, the idea she was a showy tart really was going to hurt the most. In front of their dad, too: cringe. She took a deep breath.
‘Why do you have to be so horrible, Meg? Do I ever say anything critical about your clothes? No.’
‘God, it was only a joke,’ Meg muttered. ‘Chill out, Cranky McCrankerson.’
‘And I’d have thought it’s not totally feminist ethics to comment on another woman’s chest like that, is it? Didn’t you just “slut shame” me?’
‘Oh, here we go.’
‘No, there you went.’
Meg squeezed the American diner style tomato-shaped tomato sauce holder and said, reflectively: ‘As George Monbiot said, if hypocrisy is the shortfall between our principles and our behaviour, it’s easy to never be a hypocrite, by having no principles.’
‘I have no principles?’
‘You called me a hypocrite.’
‘Well. Cheers. Thanks for dinner, Edie!’ Edie said, in sing-song voice.
‘Oh, what a surprise, you had to throw that in my face. I didn’t ask to come here.’
‘Actually, you did.’
Meg scowled and Edie tried to regain self-control because she was angry enough to say plenty more.
This had escalated quickly.
‘Sod this, I’m having a smoke,’ Meg said, pushing her chair back with a loud scrape.
She disappeared off, digging the Rizlas out of her kangaroo-like dungarees front pocket for her roll-up. The waitress reappeared and Edie muttered: ‘We’ll have the bill please,’ as her dad looked uncomfortable.
Edie felt bad for him. It surely wasn’t nice, having children that couldn’t stand each other. Edie wasn’t able to face a sullen car journey and the four walls of her bedroom yet.
‘Dad, you keep the peace and take Meg home. I’ve texted a friend and I’m going to meet them round the corner, so I’ll be back home in an hour or two,’ she lied smoothly, as smooth as when she was fourteen and sneaking off to meet boys.
Her dad nodded, as Edie tapped her pin number into the card reader and handed it back.
‘Tonight was a nice idea, you know,’ he said, and leaned over and gave her shoulder a squeeze, with the unspoken addendum, just terrible execution.
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