‘I can’t believe we’re doing this,’ Emelie groaned, her head between her
knees as she stretched out in Regent’s Park. ‘Exercising is on your to-do
list, not mine.’
‘You’re being supportive,’ I reminded her. ‘And besides, I said I’d come
to your crappy charity do with you tomorrow night so shut up and run.’
‘It’s not even nine a.m., you torturous mare.’ She pulled an incredibly
unattractive face and then set off ahead of me. ‘Why running? Why not
something nice and relaxing like yoga?’
‘Do you recall when we destroyed my excellent credit rating inside two
hours on Sunday?’ I reminded her. ‘When the lovely man in Topshop had to
call my bank to confirm it was in fact me who was determined to bankrupt
myself in such a short space of time?’
‘I have never been so proud of you,’ she nodded.
‘Well, be proud of the fact that I already owned trainers and this doesn’t
cost us anything.’
She twisted her head from side to side. ‘Fair enough.’
I hadn’t been enthralled by the idea of running, but the list had to be
obeyed and it was the only exercise that didn’t involve exorbitant
expenditure or swimsuits. And, as it turned out, an early run through
Regent’s Park was lovely. Generally speaking, I was not a morning person.
Or an athletic person. But this was just lovely. All of London laid out
around us, waking up to another beautiful summer’s day. It was amazing;
we’d had more than three in a row. Still, it was forecast to piss it down all
next week, my mum had rung to tell me. The BBC and her shaman had both
told her so. No Rachel, I told myself, now is not the time to think about
whether or not your mother is going to end up working the mines of a
Temple-of-Doom-style cult. Now was the time to concentrate on the new
you. On your wonderful run. Shake off the cobwebs, get the blood
pumping. The park really was beautiful: trees, grass, the odd friendly dog
walker to say hello to on the way. Brilliant. This was how every day should
start. In fact, I decided, this was exactly how every day would start from
now on. The new me was a runner. A redheaded runner who didn’t take shit
from anyone and had filthy dreams about doing it with Ethan Harrison in
the music room.
‘So my brother said something a bit random last night.’ I ran a little faster
to catch up to Em. Damn her ever-so-slightly longer legs and considerable
fitness levels. ‘We were talking about my dad’s wedding and he asked if I’d
spoken to you about it.’
‘Weird,’ she replied, stepping up the pace a little. Running was fun. Well,
maybe not fun but still. ‘Maybe he thought you had forgotten about it and I
would have to remind you.’
‘Maybe.’ I was starting to pant a little bit. Good, feel the burn and all
that. ‘I just thought maybe you’d talked about it on Friday night.’
‘Well, that would make more sense, wouldn’t it?’ She stared straight
ahead, her face hidden behind her giant swinging ponytail. ‘Because you’re
hardly likely to forget your dad’s wedding, are you?’
‘Why are you being weird?’ Ooh, bit of stitch there. Not to worry, run it
off.
‘I’m not being weird,’ she said, sprinting off even faster. ‘Shut up and
run.’
‘Then why is your voice so high that the dog over there is covering his
ears?’ My calves were burning but I was not giving up. Not on the running
or on what was going on between Emelie and my brother.
‘It’s nothing.’ Em slowed down a little bit until we were shoulder to
shoulder. ‘Paul just suggested that I come to the wedding to keep you
company.’
‘To keep me company?’
‘Uh, yes.’
‘And did he extend this gracious invitation to Matthew as well?’
‘Uh, no.’
I jogged slowly on in silence for a few minutes, my muscles starting to
loosen up. Em slowed down and trotted along behind me, saying nothing.
‘And what did you say?’ I asked once we’d been overtaken by a couple
of pensioners. Not embarrassing at all.
‘I said I would go,’ she said quietly.
‘And in what capacity exactly would you be attending?’ I focused on the
path in front of me. The muscles that had been loosening up were feeling
really rather tight all of a sudden. That was normal, wasn’t it?
‘As Paul’s date,’ she replied. ‘He hadn’t got round to asking anyone yet
so I said I’d go.’
I wasn’t sure if it was the sudden sick feeling in the pit of my stomach or
the agonizing cramp that got me first but, before I knew it, I was on my arse
at the side of the footpath, making some very unattractive noises and
gripping my bulging calf. That part, at least, was probably the cramp.
‘Oh shit.’ Em was on her knees in a heartbeat. ‘Rub your calf. It’s just
lactic acid, you must not have warmed up properly.’
‘You’re actually going to my dad’s wedding with my brother?’ I asked,
tears streaming down my face. ‘Despite, well, despite having met him more
than once?’
‘I won’t if you don’t want me to,’ she covered her face with her hands. ‘I
just wasn’t thinking. It was after the whole Simon thing and he asked and I
said yes and then I didn’t know how to tell you and … you know I’m an
idiot. And that I sort of like him and I never like anyone and I know it’s
awful because it’s Paul but still, I … I don’t know what to say.’
‘He’s my little brother,’ I wailed. ‘He’s disgusting.’
‘I know,’ she wailed back. ‘I’ll cancel.’
As the pain in my calf started to subside, I looked up at my best friend.
She looked gutted. But my brother was such an arsehole. Why was the
universe testing me? Wasn’t it enough that my boyfriend had declared me
boring and discarded me after one lacklustre shag and taken my toothpaste,
without my brother stealing away my best friend? I lay back on the grass,
narrowly avoiding a dog turd, hidden carefully from view. Ew. Maybe
running wasn’t that lovely. I sat up, shook my head. They were both grownups.
I couldn’t tell her not to go out with him. Jesus, as if this wedding
wasn’t already going to be the shit show of the century, now I was going to
have to watch my brother paw my best friend all day long. Aunt Beverley
was going to love this.
‘Don’t bloody cancel,’ I sulked. ‘I just can’t believe you’ve got a date for
my own dad’s wedding and I haven’t. And don’t you dare say ask Matthew
because that’s just sad.’
She threw herself at me in a massive hug and beamed happily. ‘There’s
got to be a million people you could ask.’
‘I’m going to have to come up with someone soon,’ I said, clambering
upright and trying not to vom. I would just run it off, the cramp and the
brother/best-friend-related nausea. Run it off all the way to Starbucks and
drown my sorrow in muffins. ‘Any ideas?’
‘A million.’ Em nodded at me to start walking. Bloody leg. Bloody
exercise. Bloody list. ‘I could take you to a bar tonight, get a drink and you
could go home with absolutely any man in there. Picking up boys isn’t hard
– it’s one hundred per cent confidence. But walking up to a stranger and
saying, “Hey, want to be my date to my father’s wedding in less than two
weeks?” isn’t exactly a big turn-on to most men. Unless you pitch it in
stockings and suspenders and pair it with blow-job vouchers. Even then—’
‘But I put it on the list,’ I whined. ‘I have to do it.’
‘How’s that going?’ she asked. ‘The list? Where are we?’
Pulling a face, I tried to pick up my pace a little. Nope. Not a natural
runner after all. Shit.
‘It was great on Sunday,’ I said. ‘With the hair and the clothes and
everything, I felt amazing. Every time I get dressed in my new stuff it’s
like, yeah, I can do this today. And I know it sounds stupid but I really don’t
think I’d have told Dan exactly what I thought of him if I hadn’t done it.
And I found Ethan on Facebook last night, that was cool.’
‘Wedding date candidate?’
‘Probably a bit far for him to come from Toronto.’
‘Ahh, a fellow Canadian.’ She tightened her giant ponytail. ‘Did you
message him?’
I shook my head. ‘What’s the point? The list said I had to hunt him down,
that’s all. And honestly, just looking at his photo was enough to send me
head over heels in crush with him; I don’t think I could cope with actually
talking to him. And it’s not like we were best friends or anything. Wouldn’t
it be weird?’
‘Not at all, a little online crush could be just what you need,’ she
reasoned. ‘Clear the emotional decks, a little flirting practice.’
‘Maybe.’ I was getting much better at being noncommittal. ‘I’ve got a lot
of other stuff to worry about anyway. We only have ten days for me to get a
tattoo, bungee jump, break the law, find a real live date to my dad’s
wedding, write Simon a letter explaining what a knob he is, buy something
obscenely expensive with no money and travel to a country I’ve never
visited before.’
‘Nothing dramatic then,’ she suddenly sprinted off ahead. ‘We’d better
get cracking, hadn’t we?’
Running lasted exactly seven more minutes before Emelie declared she’d
had enough and diverted our course from Regent’s Park to the bus stop. I
couldn’t say I was against the idea; there was a slight chance I wasn’t quite
the natural runner I’d hoped. And besides, today was going to be a busy
day. Today was all about the list. Since Matthew had cleared out everything
tainted with Simon’s influence, my flat felt incredibly empty, but at least it
meant I could actually sit at the desk in the spare bedroom without tripping
over his trainers, a half-empty bottle of vodka or, god forbid, twice-worn
pants. Why were men incapable of finding their own way to the washing
machine? I’d heard terrible rumours that in New York they didn’t have
washing machines in their apartments. I pitied the poor girls forced to date
boys who had to actually go out to a laundrette to wash their underwear.
They probably crawled down the street all on their own. Pulling aside the
curtain so I could see the summer sunshine outside, I set my to-do list, my
laptop and a steaming cup of tea down on the desk. OK, I meant business. I
felt like tying back my hair and putting on some glasses, only my vision
was twenty-twenty and my hair was too short to tie back now.
‘Right, where am I?’ I studied the list carefully. Nope, hadn’t changed.
Sipping my tea, I pulled my best Carrie Bradshaw pondering face and
peered out into the garden. The point of the list was to catch me up on
everything I’d missed out on, to show me how much fun it could be to be
single and widen my horizons. So far, it had drained my bank balance,
stained three white pillowcases red and given me the subconscious horn.
Maybe they were important milestones on the road to becoming
successfully single. I wasn’t entirely sure where getting fired for the first
time in my life came into it but, surely, there was a lesson to be learnt
somewhere. I wanted to believe it was ‘I’m mad as hell and not going to
take it any more’ but ‘keep your mouth shut or you’ll be bankrupt and
homeless within six months, you complete mental’ was more likely.
I picked up my phone and scrolled through the missed calls. One from
my mum, accompanied by a well-meaning voicemail; one from the bank,
presumably to ask why I thought it was a good idea to spend All My Money
on Sunday, and three from my agent, the first one dating back to precisely
one hour post-Anagate. I could do this. I was a big girl. I was in control of
my life. I was master of my own destiny. I was ready. Taking a very deep
breath and then a sip of tea and then scrolling through a few pages of
Asos.com and then another deep breath and one more sip of tea for luck, I
pressed redial.
Then hung up immediately and opened Facebook.
Ethan’s profile hadn’t changed in the slightest in the last twelve hours
but, given that I could only see one picture and see that he lived in Toronto,
that was hardly surprising. The ‘send message’ button on the right-hand
side of the screen winked at me.
‘Go on,’ it whispered. ‘What’s the worst that can happen? Worst-case
scenario, he doesn’t reply. Best-case scenario, he could be the one!’
My finger was poised on the wireless mouse. One click. One message. It
was just a message. How many Facebook messages had I had from people I
went to school with? People I went to primary school with? And yes, I’d
ignored most of them, but still, I hadn’t shared a Twix with them during a
trip to see the London Philharmonic on the fourteenth of August, twelve
years ago. That was something. He’d remember that. He’d remember me
sitting across the aisle and two rows behind him on the bus. He wouldn’t
think I was a freak. But, just in case, I immediately went through my
Facebook pictures and untagged any and everything that could be
conceivably considered to be unattractive. Gone were the Halloween
pictures of me dressed as a Fraggle. Gone were the pictures of me tossed
over Matthew’s shoulder. Gone were the pictures of me in a bikini – he
could make his mind up about that situation as and when he came to it. Just
one message.
I opened up the dialogue box and typed ‘hi’ into the subject. Hi. That was
OK, wasn’t it? There was nothing potentially crazy about hi? There was
nothing bunny boiler about a simple hello.
Now, for the message. Hi Ethan, I began, I don’t know if you remember
me, we were in orchestra together when we were kids.
‘Eurgh,’ delete, delete, delete. When we were kids? Because now I’m a
dried-up old crone whom no one wants and so I’ve been reduced to hunting
you down online because you’re my last chance at love! How’s it going?
‘They’re always saying Facebook ruins marriages in the Daily Mail,’ I
whined out loud. ‘Why is this so hard?’ Maybe Matthew was right; perhaps
photos of genitals were the way forward. Hey Ethan, Check these out –
they’re my boobs. Love Rachel xoxo. This was just too difficult. There was
no way to send a message without looking like an obsessive stalker or a sad
loser. Until I’d decided which of those was preferable, I’d just keep looking
at his manly photo. And keep opening a photo of me right next to it so I
could see what we’d look like together. We looked good. And this would be
a funny story to tell the grandkids, wouldn’t it? Guess what, before your
nana and granddad got together, your nana may or may not have cut herself
out of a picture from her dad’s second wedding where her bridesmaid dress
looked a bit like a wedding dress and then pasted it into a picture of your
dad. Simon once told me loads of guys he knew used Facebook as a porno
substitute when they were having ‘a quiet five minutes alone’. I wasn’t sure
which was worse, masturbating over the girl in accounts’ holiday photos or
Photoshopping pretend wedding photos. Yes I did. Yes I did.
Thoroughly ashamed, I accepted that it was time for my punishment. I
picked up the phone.
‘Veronica Mantle,’ she answered right away. ‘Can I help you?’
Uh-oh.
Now, I knew for a fact that Veronica recognized my number. And for the
six years she had been my agent, her response to seeing that number on her
screen was exclusively ‘what the fuck do you want?’ or ‘darling, I have
fantastic news’, so either she’d had a recent head trauma and developed a
completely new personality, or this was some hilarious joke. That only she
was in on.
‘Veronica? It’s Rachel.’
Nothing.
‘Rachel Summers?’
‘No, it can’t be,’ she replied. ‘She’s dead.’
Double uh-oh.
‘Um, no, definitely not dead.’ I tried a nervous laugh but it just came out
as a faint squawk. ‘Felt it yesterday though.’
‘Right.’ Veronica did not return my squawk. ‘But if Rachel wasn’t dead,
she would have returned my calls before now. Or fled the country before I
came over to her house to kill her.’
The last two words were so carefully enunciated, I actually turned in my
seat to see if there was a Tarantino-esque hit man at the door.
‘Yeah,’ I mumbled into a steadying sip of tea. ‘Not dead. Dumped, not
dead.’
‘I haven’t dumped you yet.’ Her voice was worryingly breezy. ‘Oh god
no. If this in fact is Rachel and she isn’t dead, I won’t be dumping her until
she’s had the mother of all roastings, cried like a baby and begged for my
forgiveness. Then, if she’s really lucky, then I’ll dump her sorry arse and
she won’t fucking work another day in her hopefully very short life. Have
you got any fucking idea what sort of damage limitation I’ve had to do
because of your fucking temper tantrum? How many arses I’ve had to kiss?
I thought I was going to have to suck Ana’s dick to calm her down at one
point. And she doesn’t have a dick, Rachel. So how was I going to do that?
Tell me how?’
Veronica never had been one to mince words.
‘I don’t know?’
‘So no, I haven’t dumped you yet. I suggest you start your grovelling
apology now and I’ll let you know when to stop, you fucking knob.’
‘I meant Simon dumped me,’ I whispered. And I’m sorry. Very, very,
very, very, very, very, very—’
‘What the fuck?’
Was cutting me off mid-apology the same as letting me know when to
stop?
‘Rachel, what did you just say?’
‘Simon dumped me?’
‘When?’
‘Saturday?’
‘And you went to work on Monday?’
‘I did.’
‘Even though you knew you were going to have to work with that
ridiculous twat?’
Did she mean Dan or Ana?
‘Yes.’
‘In that case, what can I do for you today, my love?’
I held my phone away from my ear to check the number. Had I just
redialled my mum by mistake?
‘Really?’ It wasn’t that I wanted to push my luck, just make sure I hadn’t
been whacked and then slipped into some sort of personal heaven where life
suddenly became easy.
‘You should have fucking called me before now.’ She dialled her volume
down from eleven to somewhere around eight and a half. A good sign. ‘And
you should never have fucking gone in the first place but since you haven’t
fucked up ever before and that, as of right now, you are my own personal
bitch, I’ll let this one go. Did you know she’s fucking Dan?’
‘I did.’ I stopped waiting for the barrel of the rifle to pop through the
letterbox and turned my attention back to my tea. ‘They’re going to have to
come up with a new kind of STD for them to give each other.’
‘Well, you owe him a thank you,’ Veronica replied. ‘He talked her down.
I’d say send flowers but maybe a box of assorted condoms would be better.
Barbed-wired for her pleasure.’
‘Nice,’ I winced and crossed my legs.
‘You’ve also got a “let’s go out and get twatted on expenses” voucher to
redeem. You free later?’
She really was a great agent. If it weren’t for the fact she’d told my mum
that all she really needed was to go out and get properly shagged at my
twenty-fifth birthday party before blasting out ‘I Touch Myself’ on karaoke,
I’d have even called her my friend.
‘I think I’m still hungover from Saturday. And Sunday.’ Still far too soon
for alcohol. ‘But there is something you could help me with.’
‘You do know I can’t actually have anyone killed, don’t you?’ She
lowered her voice. ‘Not that I want that getting out to the masses.’
‘I assumed people just killed themselves on your command.’ I touched
the list for good luck. ‘No, I was hoping you could get me some
international work. I really want to travel for a bit.’
‘Hmm.’ The keys of her keyboard clicked for a few moments. ‘I’m not
just going to be able to pull something out of my arse for you on this, you
know? There aren’t that many people out there who know you. Which is
entirely your own fucking fault.’
‘I know,’ I said, turning my profanity filter up a notch. I hardly ever even
heard it any more. ‘But I really want to get out there. I don’t care if it’s
shows or shoots, studio, location, whatever.’
‘You haven’t done anything on location in years.’
If she hadn’t been an agent, Veronica would have made a fantastic
mechanic. She was a teeth-sucking away from, ‘And I don’t like the look of
that head gasket one little bit’.
‘Now, if Dan weren’t fucking furious with you, he’s got a job booked in
Sydney in a couple of weeks. I could have pulled some strings and got you
on that if he’d insisted. The editors love him.’
Oh, fuck a duck.
‘Give me a couple of days, yeah?’ She sounded confident enough. ‘And
just take it easy until then. Go out, get twatted, shag some ridiculously fit
moron who won’t be able to follow you home. Never been a better time to
be single, Rachel. Women have the dicks now. We’re the men. We say who,
we say when, we say where and we say how. Who wants a boyfriend when
you’ve got bigger balls than they have?’
I said my goodbyes, chugged my cold tea and spent the rest of the
afternoon trying not to think about the size of Veronica Mantle’s balls.
No comments:
Post a Comment