I brace myself for some more persuading, but there’s a click – he’s hung up on me! I stare at the phone, then yell, ‘Manners cost nothing!’
I look up and find Tim, Alastair, even Thamy watching me. They seem shocked.
‘What?’ I demand. ‘He’d hung up, he didn’t hear me.’
Three pairs of eyes are trained on me.
‘He was rude,’ I say. ‘He was really rude.’
On my way back from lunch, I exit the lift to the sound of Alastair laughing, the full-on ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. This is followed by an eruption of multiple people’s laughter and I hurry into the office because I’m in the market for something cheery.
Tim and Thamy are crowded around Alastair’s screen. ‘Amy!’ they cry. ‘Come here, you have to see this!’
Over I go and, to my utter astonishment, it’s Mum! It’s her vlog!
I gasp. ‘How do you know about it?’
‘Someone tweeted it to me.’
‘On what?’
I push nearer the screen and see that the vlog has been retweeted more than three hundred times! It’s impossible to overstate how difficult it is to make that happen. I’ve tried so hard with various clients to raise their profile with tweets and vlogs and they nearly all just died in the water.
‘She’s so cute,’ Alastair says. ‘And so funny. She might get Botox when she’s older! That’s absolute gas.’
I’m so proud of her. And of Neeve – that was a flash of inspiration, doing a session with Mum.
‘She’s a looker, isn’t she?’ Thamy says. ‘I can see where you get it, Amy.’
‘Get what?’ I don’t like being patronized.
‘Ah, now!’ they chorus. They’re in wild high spirits from it all. ‘Shur, you’re fabulous.’
‘Imagine having Lilian O’Connell, mother of five, as your mother-in-law!’ Alastair looks at me. ‘How’s that hot sister of yours?’
I side-eye him and go back to my desk. Then I ring Neeve and we shriek with excitement at each other.
‘It only went live this morning!’ Neeve says. ‘It’s been like, wow!’
‘You slay, sweetie.’
‘Oh, Mum …’
‘Ha-ha-ha!’ I’m quite giddy. ‘How about “Well done, darling daughter, I’m most terrifically proud of you”?’
Alastair proceeds to spend the best part of the afternoon watching Neeve’s vlogs and providing running commentaries. ‘Ha! I never knew that!’
‘What?’
‘The difference between dry skin and dehydrated skin. They’re not the same! Who knew?’
I say, ‘Dry is lacking oil and dehydrated is lacking water.’ I’ve watched that vlog too.
‘I wonder which mine is. I’m going down to Space NK to find out.’ He’s halfway out of his chair. ‘I’ll just watch one more before I go.’
Forty minutes later he’s still sitting there.
At one stage I get up and go to the loo, and when I come back Alastair calls across the office, ‘You know she’s done one with Mr Best Sex Ever?’
Tim jerks his head up, Thamy twists her head around from her desk for a better look, and I blanch. ‘Who? Richie Aldin? I know but, Jesus, Alastair, don’t call him that!’
‘How about the Prick You Used To Be Married To?’
‘Better.’
‘Let’s hate-watch it.’
Tim and Thamy have hopped out of their places and, once again, we gather around Alastair’s desk.
And there’s Richie, telling Neeve about what shampoo he uses.
‘He loves himself.’ Alastair is so scathing. ‘So pleased with himself, the pompous arse. Oh, here’s a good bit, listen to this, Amy.’
Richie says, ‘My skin never gives me any bother.’
‘Can you believe that?’ Alastair says. In a comedy voice he repeats, ‘ “My skin never gives me any bother.” As if it’s all down to him, the prick.’
‘I think he’s hot,’ Thamy says.
Off-camera Neeve asks Richie what his thoughts are on Botox.
With a smirk, Richie says, ‘I don’t need it.’
‘But what about when you’re older?’
‘I’ll never need it.’
Alastair splutters, ‘So he can predict the future now, can he? Stay away from him, Amy, because the kind of man he is, he’ll just push and shove till you say yes.’
I don’t know how he can make this assessment on three minutes forty seconds of a chat about SPF.
‘He wants you back?’ Thamy is agog.
‘Well, no, not like that –’
‘Wow. Go for it, he is a FOX!’
Out of curiosity, I say to Tim, ‘What do you think of him?’
Tim’s answer is simple. ‘He won’t stop until he gets what he wants.’
And I laugh and think, Richie Aldin can go fuck himself.
49
Fourteen months ago
Ouch! A spatter of bacon fat had jumped out of the frying pan and fizzed on my arm. The pain dimmed immediately but I couldn’t run the risk of the hot fat speckling my top: it was only just on and the laundry basket was already full.
I pulled off my T-shirt, threw it on to a chair, but the apron wasn’t in its spot, hanging from the radiator. God knows who had done what with it, but there wasn’t time to find another. I’d have to finish cooking the dinner in my jeans and bra, but I barely noticed: my head was full of Josh Rowan.
On our regular lunch last Tuesday – the sixth week in a row that we’d met – he’d suddenly thrown into the conversation, ‘I miss you propositioning me.’
‘Do you! Ah, okay. Ha-ha-ha.’
‘Have you any plans to do it again?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘So should I do it instead? Proposition you?’
Right. Well, I’d known this would happen.
And, oh, the thoughts of sex with him. Both of us naked. Him pressing me by my hips on to the bed. Sitting astride me with a giant erection. Playing with me …
Druzie’s flat was empty tonight. I could bring him back there and no one would know.
But this was so dangerous. I was going down a path there might be no way back from.
‘I love Hugh.’
He nodded. It was his turn to say he loved Marcia, but he stayed silent.
And the way he was looking at me … his mouth in a grim line, his eyes ablaze with want, oh-so-serious about this.
He turned his palms upwards, revealing the pale skin of his inner arms and the blue tracery beneath the surface, like a map of a river. The twitching of his pulse was visible and all that vulnerability crushed something tender and painful in me.
‘Don’t take this the wrong way,’ he said, ‘but I wish I’d never met you that day in the Black Friar.’ He stared at the table as he spoke. ‘I was doing okay. But when I saw you, searching for your comb and you looked up, and your sweet face and your clothes, it was a shock, Amy, weird, because you’re a one-off but I felt like I already knew you.’
He could be feeding me a line.
‘Then the fierce way you fought Premilla’s case. So many publicists, they say the nice words but their hearts are cold. You, I knew you were kind. I tried harder than I usually would to get the Marie Vann piece pulled. I didn’t like failing but it gave me another chance to see you. I’d have stayed with you that night. I’d have gone to your room the night of the awards. I want you.’
Hearing all this sent thrill after thrill through me. ‘But, look, Josh. If we started a … thing, what would happen?’ Quickly, I added, ‘I don’t mean what kind of sex or …’ I swallowed. I froze, thinking about him naked, sliding himself into me … and from the still, intense way he held my gaze, I was sure that was what he, too, was imagining.
‘Jesus.’ He pressed his hand over his eyes and made a small, strange sound, a cross between a groan and a whimper. Then he looked at me again. ‘You mean, what would happen ultimately? Would you leave your husband? Would I leave my wife? I don’t know, Amy.’ He shrugged helplessly. ‘There’s no script here.’
I wanted a script. I needed to know the ending before I could start anything. ‘What about you and your wife? Do you love her?’
‘Sometimes.’ He sighed. ‘But now isn’t one of them.’
‘Does love work like that?’
‘I don’t know about other people, but it’s how Marcia and I seem to do it.’
‘Your other times, did you feel guilty? Did your wife ever suspect?’
‘Yes and yes.’
‘And what happened? Did you tell her?’
‘No. But Marcia’s had her own things.’
‘Things? You mean affairs? She told you?’
‘I guessed. I asked her. Like me, she lied.’
‘And?’