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Kitabı oku: «Who’s That Girl?: A laugh-out-loud sparky romcom!», sayfa 4
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?
