It Felt Like A Kiss

Chapter Eighteen




Ellie couldn’t quite believe it, then, once again, she was hurling herself futilely at the door, which had locked behind him. It didn’t miraculously open, even when she hammered on it with both fists until she realised that getting angry was simply making her feel worse.

She splashed cold water on her face and on her wrists, which Sadie swore was the most effective way of calming down. It did absolutely nothing to lower Ellie’s blood pressure so she phoned Ari. Ari always knew the right thing to say.

‘Sweetie? Tried to call but your phone was switched off,’ Ari told her. Ellie had tried to call her too, but her phone had been switched off. ‘Saw the photos on the Chronicle website. They are the most unbelievable scum. Are you all right?’

‘No, I’ve been much, much, much better.’

‘What’s up? Well, apart from—’

‘It’s not that. Well, it’s mostly that,’ Ellie admitted, though the argument she’d just had with David Gold – if you could really call it an argument when he kept absenting himself each time she raised her voice – was painfully fresh in her mind. ‘Have you ever met someone and maybe you didn’t even like them, because they were a total and utter tool, but still felt attracted to them?’

‘Yeah, but only when I was younger and I thought that love had to be doomed and desperate and involve china-smashing rows at three in the morning or it didn’t mean anything,’ Ari said drily, which wasn’t very encouraging.

‘But have you ever been with someone and even though you’ve never kissed them, when they stand close or look at you in a certain way, it feels like a kiss?’

‘Ellie, do you really think this is the best time to launch into another relationship?’

‘I’m not.’ That was the truth, after all. ‘I … I’m just very confused. Have you though, Mum? Have you had those kinds of feelings?’

‘Yes, and nothing good ever comes of them.’ Ari sort of chuckled but only sort of. ‘Well, maybe one good thing.’

‘So what do I do?’ Ellie asked desperately. ‘Because I don’t want to feel this way about this person.’

‘Well … hang on! Where are you and who’s this person treating you like shit?’

‘They’re not.’ Though he wasn’t treating her well. ‘Just someone. You don’t know them.’

‘But I know you, Ellie, and I know when you’re lying to me.’

‘I’m not lying!’

‘You’re being evasive so you don’t technically have to lie. Where are you and who are you with?’

Sometimes Ellie hated that she and Ari told each other everything. What she wouldn’t give for some benign neglect. ‘You’ll get mad if I tell you and I can’t deal with you being mad at me right now.’

There was silence as Ari processed this. ‘You know I don’t normally lay down the law because that’s not my style. I’m a cool mum …’

‘You are. You’re the coolest.’

‘… But I’m telling you now to get out. Run. Don’t look back. Men like that will hurt you, darling, and I can’t bear the thought of you suffering from that kind of hurt.’

Ellie couldn’t leave because she was locked in someone’s flat and as she wondered how she could possibly say that out loud to her mother, she knew that Ari was right. She needed to get the hell away from David Gold.

‘I will,’ she said, and she really meant it. ‘But, you know, sometimes I am going to get hurt, Mum. It’s just the way the world is.’

‘You do not get hurt. Not on my watch,’ Ari insisted grimly, but Ellie knew there wasn’t much Ari could do about vindictive ex-boyfriends or morally ambiguous lawyers.

‘I do love you, Mum,’ was what she said instead. Then, desperate to change the subject: ‘Anyway, enough about me. How are you holding up?’

‘Oh, me? Don’t worry about me.’ There was the faint sound of displaced air as Ari made her patented ‘pffft’ noise, which didn’t really work over the phone. ‘Except I’m pissed off with Chester and he’s pissed off with me.’

‘Why would you be pissed off with Chester?’ Ellie asked in surprise, because Chester wasn’t even in the country. Every year, without fail, Chester went to Spain for a Northern Soul week with a gang of his oldest friends. ‘I thought he was still in Benidorm. Or he was when I spoke to him earlier.’

‘He is, and I told him to stay there when he wanted to come rushing back,’ Ari told her tartly. ‘He got really snippy, but all I said was that we didn’t need him.’

‘Well, to say that you don’t need him does sound a little callous,’ Ellie said, because she’d had much the same conversation with Chester, but when she’d told him not to rush back it was because his week in Benidorm was sacrosanct, no matter how much Ellie did need him.

‘But we don’t need him. I love Chester, you know I do, but you and me, we can manage fine, just the two of us,’ Ari insisted. ‘That’s the way it’s always been. That’s the way it’s going to stay.’


‘I know we can, but I don’t see you turning down Tabitha’s offers of help …’

‘Oh! Talking of Tab, she says you can sleep in her spare room, as soon as she’s got the moth infestation under control.’

‘I think I’ll pass,’ Ellie said quickly, before Ari could derail the conversation, because it was going in a direction that she didn’t like. ‘So why is it all right for Tabitha to be there for us, but not Chester?’

‘Because Chester, God love him, is a man and you can never, ever rely on a man, babes. They’ll always let you down. It’s in their DNA.’

‘Well, Grandpa’s never let me down,’ Ellie pointed out, as she always did when they started down this well-worn path, but Ari just sniffed. Usually Ellie backed off, but this time she ploughed forward into the tangled undergrowth. ‘Is this what happened with Billy Kay? Is this why he left and never wanted anything to do with us, because you said that we didn’t need him?’

‘What?’

‘Obviously I don’t know the exact circumstances but this no-contact thing of his … maybe it wouldn’t have been so drastic and absolute if you’d, I don’t know, left a window open for him. A metaphorical window.’ This wasn’t what Ellie wanted to say or how she’d wanted to say it, and from Ari’s silence ticking away like an unexploded bomb at the other end of the line, she wished she’d left well alone.

‘So, are you saying that it’s my fault that Billy Kay didn’t send you birthday cards or call you up for a chat? Or are you implying that he did send you birthday cards and I lay in wait for the postman to intercept them so—’

‘No! Of course I’m not saying that! What I’m saying is that I thought I’d accepted the fact that Billy Kay wanted nothing to do with me a long time ago and that I’d made my peace with it, but now that I’ve been outed as his secret daughter I realise that I’m not actually at peace with it. Not at all.’

Ari sighed as if all the fight was draining out of her. ‘Look, babycakes, we’ve been through this before. What is the point of dredging it up all over again?’

They’d never been through it before. Not really. Ellie knew that now wasn’t the time, but one day when this was all over – and Ellie hoped that day would come very soon – she was going to sit down with Ari and find out what had really happened with Billy Kay. The affair. The break-up. All the painful, gory details, apart from the sex stuff, which she absolutely did not need to know about.

She wasn’t going to let Ari fob her off with, ‘It’s too painful to talk about,’ or, ‘You’ll never understand because you’re too smart to let someone snatch your heart away.’ She couldn’t get by on the crumbs she’d been fed by Tabitha and Tom, and even Sadie when she’d had one glass of semi-sweet white wine too many. Ellie was a big girl now and she could deal with the ugly truth. But on reflection, she probably couldn’t deal with the ugly truth right now.

‘Sorry, Mum. I’m tired and cranky. I didn’t mean to take it out on you.’

‘Right back at you, honey. We will get through this. What do I always say? When life gives you lemons, you slice the lemons and make a gin and tonic.’

Ellie wouldn’t have said no to a gin and tonic administered by rapid drip, but while she had Ari on the phone, she needed advice that wasn’t cocktail-related. ‘By the way, I need to ask you something and when you answer, don’t exaggerate for dramatic effect, OK?’

‘I don’t exaggerate for dramatic effect. I feel things deeply. It’s what creative people do.’

‘Yeah, yeah, whatever.’ Ellie looked up at the halogen spotlights in the ceiling for inspiration. She really didn’t want to keep bringing up Ari’s past but this was something she couldn’t put off. ‘Do you know a Georgie Leigh? I think she used to be called Georgina Pratt?’

There was silence and for a moment Ellie thought they’d been cut off until Ari made a strange, indecipherable bitten-off sound. ‘She is f*cking evil incarnate,’ she said in a voice that was flatter than Holland. ‘Why?’

Ellie tried to hit the highlights, but she hadn’t got any further than Georgie turning up with David Gold last night before Ari was butting in with: ‘You do not have anything to do with her. You do not speak to her. You don’t believe a single word that comes out of that cesspool that she calls a mouth, do you hear me?’

Ari was shouting, but she didn’t sound angry so much as scared and rattled, as if someone had shaken her hard enough to loosen her internal organs.

‘But maybe she’s changed? It’s been a long time, Mum. She was really nice. Very understanding. Very sympathetic,’ Ellie said. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve upset you, but—’

‘I’m not upset. I’m worried about you. Georgina Pratt is not good people. She’s very, very bad people.’

‘It’s just that she’s Billy’s publicist so I do need to talk to her, I suppose.’

‘I don’t see why,’ Ari argued. ‘She used to be absolutely toxic. I can’t believe that she’s changed that much, and as for that lawyer—’

‘You’ve never even met him!’

‘There’s no such thing as a nice lawyer. Everyone knows that. That expensive lawyer and Georgina Pratt are there to do what Billy wants. I’m sorry, baby, but I don’t see you factoring that highly on the list of Billy’s priorities. All he cares about is himself so it’s a pretty f*cking short list.’

Ellie was always going to take Ari’s side. Always. Even if it turned out that Ari had murdered Georgie’s family in cold blood, then framed Georgie for the crime, Ellie would find some extenuating circumstances and plead Ari’s case. So, really, it didn’t matter whether Georgie had changed her ways, if she was Ari’s enemy, then she was Ellie’s enemy too, not to be trusted with Ellie’s exes or anything else belonging to Ellie. And the same went for David Gold.

It simpled things up. If they were on Billy Kay’s team then, according to Ari, they couldn’t be on Ellie’s team too. But if she was being honest with herself and not still clinging to silly childish dreams, Ellie had always known that Billy Kay wasn’t going to come through for her. ‘You’re right, Mum. Between the two of us, we manage just fine, don’t we?’

‘Damn right we do. Now promise me you’ll get the hell out of Dodge.’

Getting the hell out had to wait until David Gold returned. In the meantime Ellie had had five missed calls from Tess since she’d been on the phone to Ari.

‘What’s going on?’ Tess demanded, as soon as she answered the phone. ‘I got your message saying that all personal effects and correspondence had to be sent to the hot, intense lawyer’s office. Where are you actually staying?’

‘He’s not hot,’ Ellie cried, because talking to Ari had made it clear she needed to kill this crush, stat. ‘He’s very, very cold and, Tess, I’m locked in his bloody flat!’

‘Really? Are you? How kinky! So, you’re staying with a Jewish lawyer of good prospects and marriageable age who owns his own home,’ Tess practically chortled. ‘Isn’t that a full house in Jewish bachelor bingo?’


Ellie felt as if she’d run the gamut of every dark, draining emotion in existence during her call to Ari – she wasn’t mentally prepared to now be mercilessly teased. ‘Shut up! It’s not at all funny! I’m not staying with him. I was brought here under false pretences and now I’m being held hostage …’

There was a noise in the background and Ellie heard Tess say, ‘It’s Ellie. She’s all shacked up with the cute lawyer from last night. Shall I put her on speakerphone?’

There was a click, then the disembodied static of being on speakerphone and Lola saying gleefully, ‘You’re hooking up with that David guy? Haven’t we talked about getting involved with dudes that we haven’t vetted first? Bet you any money that he’s another lame duck. Come on, what’s wrong with him?’

‘What’s wrong with him? What’s bloody right with him?’ When he wasn’t there, infecting her brain with his pheromones, it was easy not to want him. ‘He’s controlling, his charm is just a front, he hates me and he’s got really severe OCD.’

‘Now I researched a segment on OCD and actually it’s not just about being super tidy; they have rituals and a prescient sense of doom,’ Tess explained earnestly.

‘For f*ck’s sake, who even cares?’ Lola demanded. Ellie had to agree with her.

‘You know how you take the piss because I always remember to buy milk just before we run out and you say that’s my secret superpower? Well, he has a barely started two-litre bottle of milk and a spare one!’

‘Oh my God, what kind of freak is he?’ Lola exclaimed, and then both of them giggled and it wasn’t even the least bit funny.

‘He’s locked me in and he keeps slamming doors in my face and he told me off for washing out my sushi container and leaving it on the draining board, and I just can’t take any more.’ Ellie’s voice was climbing up the upper register again and she’d been on the verge of tears so often in the last few days that her throat ached and her eyes itched from trying to keep them at bay. ‘He only wants me here because he thinks I’ve been running my mouth off to every newspaper in town, but at the same time he doesn’t want me here. It’s awful.’

‘Ellie, we were only teasing,’ Tess said gently, and then Ellie heard Lola stage whisper: ‘Christ, she’s cracking up. I’m amazed that she’s lasted this long.’

‘I’m on speakerphone, I can hear every word you’re saying,’ Ellie sniffed, then there was another sniff and … ‘I just want to come home.’

Tess and Lola were much better at managing crises than some other people that Ellie could mention. As it was late Tuesday evening and the press scrum outside their flat had whittled down to a paltry two photographers and one guy with a video camera, they cooked up a convoluted scheme whereby once she managed to escape, though they were foggy on the details, Ellie would be driven up to the restaurant’s back door, where an extendable ladder would be placed so she could enter their flat via their unofficial roof terrace.

Also, ‘You should wash and blowdry your hair, Ellie,’ Tess added. ‘You always feel better once you’ve done that.’

By the time she put the phone down, Ellie was calmer. Once she’d filled them in on David Gold’s many character flaws, which was a good form of aversion therapy, Tess and Lola had been suitably disparaging, because that’s what friends did.

‘He’s gone for a run?’ Lola had spat incredulously just before they’d said their goodbyes. ‘It’s like a hundred degrees.’

‘It would serve him right if he dropped down dead from heatstroke,’ Tess had said, then paused and told Ellie in a serious voice to give it another hour and if David Gold hadn’t returned then she was to call the police and the fire brigade to rescue her, and possibly the ambulance service because they needed to know there was a dead lawyer somewhere on or around Hampstead Heath.

David Gold wasn’t dead, though, because not half an hour later Ellie heard his key in the lock again. This time she was ready. She was standing by the front door with most of her bags packed and the bouquet of flowers, sent by Mandy Stretton née McIntyre, who’d scrawled on the card, ‘Keep your pecker up, sweetie,’ cradled in her arms.

As the door opened and he stood there, red-faced, coated in a fine sheen of sweat and with a wary expression on his face, Ellie charged at him, dragging her suitcase behind her. ‘I’m going,’ she said unnecessarily, and he had to duck out of her way because, so help her God, she would have mown him down and possibly kneed him in the groin if he’d tried to impede her progress. ‘Sorry, I’ve had to leave some of my stuff behind. I’ll get someone to pick it up tomorrow.’

Then she was beetling down the corridor towards the lift. Not beetling very fast because she was loaded up like a pack mule so it was easy enough for him to catch up with her. ‘Velvet … Ellie. Where are you going?’

‘Well, I’m hardly going to tell you!’ She still didn’t exactly know where she was going. Her first priority was to get in the lift. Without David Gold. ‘I have options and even if I have to go back to my own flat and be pushed and shoved and have vile questions shouted at me by a pack of rude, ill-mannered reporters then it still has to be better than being locked up in your apartment.’

It would probably be better if she focused on getting into the lift rather than coming to a halt so she could give David Gold a telling-off. He was a few metres away from her but she could still feel the waves of heat coming off him – it was like standing downwind from a blast furnace. He was panting slightly, his hair wet with perspiration, the curls kicking in again, and it was no wonder that he was so lanky when he went running for hours in the middle of a heatwave.

‘You’re not thinking clearly,’ he said a little breathlessly.

‘You don’t know me. You don’t know how I think,’ Ellie argued. She took a firm grip on her suitcase handle and carried on towards the lift. Then she stopped and turned because David Gold was following her. ‘Look, just go away.’ She made a shooing motion with the hand that was clutching the flowers and her laptop case. ‘Go and have one of your electrolyte drinks before you die from dehydration.’

‘You have absolutely no idea of where you’re going, do you?’ he said, catching Ellie up and walking alongside her. ‘I promise you that if you turn up at your flat, you’re going to be besieged again.’

‘Then I could call my grandfather and he could come and pick me up, and I could lie on the back seat of his Volvo with a rug over me so I couldn’t be spotted by any photographers,’ Ellie explained. ‘Or I could go and stay with Tess’s parents.’ That was low down on her list of options as Tess’s parents had moved out of London to Hertfordshire or Herefordshire, or some other place that was in the countryside.

They were at the lift. David Gold pressed the button so he couldn’t be that dismayed that she was escaping. Ellie turned to him. He was dripping sweat onto the parquet flooring, which was disgusting. She assiduously avoided any activities that might cause her to sweat. ‘Look, the only reason you brought me here was because you think I’m in cahoots with the press.’


He shrugged. ‘It’s a logical assumption.’

‘No, it’s not! It’s an insulting assumption, especially when the other reason you want to keep me under surveillance is so you can pump me for my exes’ contact details so Georgie Leigh can use them for her own evil ends. Anyway, for all I know, you might be the one who’s in cahoots with the press.’

For once it was his face that flushed darker, and for a few seconds he stared down at his trainers. When he raised his head Ellie could see that she’d hit on some kind of truth. ‘We don’t know each other very well, do we?’ he said as if he wasn’t talking about this argument, but about them, about two unsure, distrustful people thrown together.

‘We don’t,’ Ellie agreed, as the lift finally arrived with a triumphant ping. It was the perfect moment to ask him if he was still the same man she’d met in the middle of a field on a hot Sunday afternoon, but she couldn’t bring herself to. ‘So, did you leak my location to the press, last night?’

He shook his head. ‘No, I didn’t. Did you tip off anyone?’

It was Ellie’s turn to shake her head. She made sure to look him right in the eye. ‘Then it had to have been Georgie.’

The lift doors suddenly began to close and Ellie threw herself at them, but David got there first, stepping into the lift to hold the button to keep the doors open.

‘You don’t know that it was Georgie for certain,’ he said, but Ellie did. She was sure of it.

‘My exes: why did you need to know about them? Who asked you to get the lowdown on them? What were you going to do with the information?’

‘Usually in these situations, I contact all parties involved and slap them with a pre-emptive gagging order and a lot of nasty legal threats. It’s largely nothing more than grandstanding. Not that they know that,’ he finished with a wry smile.

Ellie made sure her gaze was steady and true. ‘So, that’s what you were going to do, was it?’

‘It’s what I was going to do. I can’t speak for anyone else.’

She rubbed the back of her hand over her tired eyes. ‘None of this is fair.’

He made one of those fleeting gestures towards her that he always thought better of just before he touched her. ‘I’m sorry. I haven’t really appreciated how difficult this must be for you,’ he said very, very gently.

Don’t be nice. It will break me, she thought, and she was able to lift her shoulders half an inch and pull a face to convey that message.

He very deliberately pulled her suitcase away. ‘You’re not going anywhere tonight,’ he decided, and just as deliberately he took her wrist and though his hand was hot and sweaty, Ellie still shivered and she still followed him out of the lift and back down the corridor to his flat.





Camden, London, 1986

Ari was booked into the clinic – she wished she wasn’t as far gone as she was, but she couldn’t change that. It was Billy who was having trouble dealing with it.

‘It’s our baby,’ he murmured on the night before the termination was due, his curly head resting on her belly. Ari was too bloated with indigestion to push him away.

‘It’s not a baby,’ she told him for the hundredth time, the word making her lips curl. ‘It’s just a parasite squatting in my uterus. We agreed, Billy.’

‘We did. Anyway I’ve already got one and that hasn’t worked out so well.’ He changed position, so he was spooned in behind her. ‘I had this idea before Lara was born that I’d try to be a good father, but I’ve never been much of a father or a husband or any of the other things that people expected me to be.’

‘I’ve never expected anything from you,’ Ari reminded him because if she didn’t expect anything from him, then he’d never disappoint her.

‘I know you didn’t, but everything’s different with you, Ari,’ Billy said, cupping her chin so she had to turn her head to look at him. ‘Just think. It’s my genes, your genes. It’s our legacy just as much as the songs are, and the songs might never get heard, but this …’ His hand curved over the bulge that had started to make its presence felt and meant that Ari couldn’t get into her tightest dresses any more. ‘We made this. Our love made this.’

‘We weren’t in love when your sperm found a way to my egg.’ She knocked his hand away. ‘For f*ck’s sake, I thought I was the one who was meant to be a slave to my hormones. I’m not keeping it!’

‘I’m not asking you to. We’re going somewhere and a kid would slow us down, but you could have it, couldn’t you?’ He shrugged, tried to make a joke out of it. ‘We could probably get Georgina to look after it if we paid her in chocolate.’

‘She would. She’d love that. It would be the ultimate Billy Kay fan artefact,’ Ari said sourly, but when Billy’s hand covered her stomach again, she rested her hand on top of his and she thought of the baby. A little boy with Billy’s dark eyes and sweet smile. Not his nose, though. Her nose. And, hopefully, a sweeter temper than both his parents.