It Felt Like A Kiss

Chapter Thirty




There was no horde of snapping, snarling photographers waiting at St Pancras, just Chester standing at the ticket barriers, with a smile that lit up his whole face as he saw Ellie suddenly emerge from the far side of the platform. She was trying to be incognito, which was hard when you had as much luggage as she did.

‘Hello, princess,’ he said, and wrapped Ellie up in a very gentle bear hug, like he thought she might break if he was too enthusiastic.

Ellie thought she might break too. She was still trying to process the half-brother adored by the same half-family that had never even bothered to send her a birthday card. The hour she’d spent crying in the train toilet hadn’t helped either. Or banished the memory of David following her instructions, stuffing his things into an M&S carrier bag and getting the f*ck out of the apartment. He hadn’t said a word but his lips were compressed into such a tight thin line that Ellie didn’t think he was physically capable of speaking.

But when she’d stood by the door so she could slam it shut after he’d gone, he tried to touch her face. ‘This is ridiculous, Ellie. I know you’ve had a terrible shock this morning but don’t you think you’re overly melodramatic?’

‘No, I think my melodrama is perfectly justified in this case,’ she’d told him and he’d had the nerve to smile as if she’d just cracked a joke.

‘I’m not going to say goodbye because this isn’t over,’ he’d said, and Ellie didn’t know if he was talking personally or professionally, and that was always going to be the issue for them. Not their biggest issue, which was that David was a hard-hearted, cold-blooded bastard, but a problem nevertheless.

Now Chester relieved Ellie of her heaviest bags as they walked to where he’d parked. Then he kept up a stream of idle chatter, mostly about the weather and how it had been the longest gap between rainfalls since records began, as they edged out into the late Sunday afternoon traffic.

Chester didn’t stop talking until they joined a long queue of cars waiting for the lights to turn green by Chalk Farm tube station.

‘So, shall I put on the radio or shall we hook up your iPod?’ he enquired cheerfully, but Ellie wasn’t so immersed in her own unhappiness that she couldn’t hear the strain in his voice or see it in the deep grooves at the side of his mouth.

‘Have you and Mum made up yet?’

‘No,’ Chester said flatly.

‘We had a dreadful row this morning,’ Ellie admitted, and it was hard to know what she should be prioritising in terms of grief when she was currently spoiled for choice. ‘I said some vile things to her and I know I should apologise but the thing is that I’m still angry with her. Secretly, I’ve been angry with her about Billy Kay for years, and I just let it fester and then it all came pouring out.’

‘Oh, Ellie.’ Chester sighed. ‘You and Ari will be all right.’

‘I hope so.’ Ellie wasn’t sure. She and Ari had always made it through the hard times, but then it had always been Ellie and Ari against the world and not Ellie and Ari pitted against each other. Billy Kay’s shadowy presence spoiled everything. Everything that had happened was because …

‘I’ve met someone!’ Chester suddenly burst out like the words couldn’t be contained any longer. ‘A woman.’

If he’d wanted to pull the plug on Ellie’s pity party, then he’d certainly succeeded. ‘What? Since when? Were you in Benidorm with a woman?’ Ellie didn’t mean to sound quite so accusatory but she hadn’t thought that Chester was like that; that he had those kinds of feelings towards women who weren’t Ari.

‘Not exactly. I was in Benidorm with a bunch of mates and one of them is a girl called Claire. Well, she’s not a girl. She’s thirty-eight.’ Chester glanced over at her. Ellie tried not to look quite so devastated at the thought that Chester’s world didn’t revolve around Ari … and her. ‘I’ve known her for years. And, yeah, there’s always been something flirty between us, but the thing is, Ell, I always thought that eventually me and Ari would end up together. I mean, we were together, weren’t we? Apart from the whole …’

Ellie was grateful that Chester didn’t actually spell it out. ‘You were like an old married couple,’ she said. ‘Everyone thought so.’

Apparently, after Ari had told Chester to stay in Benidorm and he’d been moping about the beach and the dancefloor, Claire had decided to deliver some much-needed home truths, then kiss Chester into the middle of the next week.

‘It’s not all about Claire,’ Chester explained haltingly, but he looked dazed and happy at the memory of her kiss. ‘She’s a lovely girl but we’ve only been on two proper dates. But she’s right: it’s time I faced up to the fact that despite everything I’ve done for your mum – that I’d do anything for her – she’s never going to love me like she loved Billy Kay. No matter how much she tries to deny it, she still loves him, and on some level she reckons they’ll be together again one day. And I just can’t put up with it any longer. You don’t know what he’s like, Ell. I’m not even going to tell you ‘cause he is your dad, after all, but he treated Ari like shit and all this time she’s been waiting for him to come back to her.’


‘Well, I think it’s more like she never got over him because he broke her heart.’ Ellie wasn’t absolutely sure about that because Ari had always withheld on the topic. But now Ellie wondered if it had simply been too painful for Ari to talk about Billy Kay. Generally, the amount that someone could hurt you was governed by how much you’d loved them. Or thought you might grow to love them, if you’d had a chance to be with them for longer than one weekend in Paris.

‘I’m done, Ellie,’ Chester said with a note of finality. ‘I’ve wasted more than half my life loving a woman who’s always going to be in love with someone else. This summer has brought it all back. I’m nearly fifty and I’ve left it too late to have a family of my own, to have kids …’

The world didn’t revolve around Ellie; it carried on spinning regardless of her wishes, but she couldn’t bear the agony of losing someone else. ‘Oh, Chester! Please … I know I’m meant to be strong and independent, but I can’t do without you.’ She reached for the tissue box stashed under the dashboard and blew her nose, then Chester’s hand was covering her hand, snotty tissue and all.

‘You’ll never have to manage without me, Ellie,’ Chester said, squeezing her fingers so tight that she wanted to protest that he was hurting her. ‘I know my timing’s lousy, but I didn’t want you finding out from anyone else.’

‘But do you promise me that whatever happens, even if you and Ari never speak again, you and me are still rock solid?’

‘For ever and always, princess.’ If Chester cried, then Ellie would too. He swallowed manfully instead. ‘It would destroy me if I lost you. End of.’

It wasn’t quite end of as far as Ellie was concerned. Some things had to be spelled out very clearly. ‘Look, I’ll admit that I used to think about what it would be like to have some kind of relationship with Billy Kay, but I always wanted you to be my dad. Not a faux dad but my proper dad. You do know that, don’t you, Chester? Like, if I ever get married, you are so walking me down the aisle, OK?’

Chester sniffed and they sat there in silence for a few long moments, both of them struggling to keep the tears at bay. Ellie was still biting down hard on her bottom lip when Chester breathed out, then gripped the steering wheel and stared straight ahead. ‘I don’t think you get walked down the aisle at a Jewish wedding, but yeah, I’d like that.’

‘But I’m not getting married right away,’ Ellie reminded him. ‘Maybe not ever, because apart from you and Grandpa, and Tom, most men are horrible, conflicted scumbags.’

‘Are we talking about Richey or have you got a new ex-boyfriend that you want me to have a word with?’ Chester nudged her. He suddenly looked a lot happier, as if Ellie’s chequered relationship history was a cause for celebration, a safer subject to talk about. ‘Well, do you?’

Ellie still wasn’t sure that the threat of tears had passed but she nudged him back. Hard. ‘Weren’t you saying something about putting the radio on?’

The house of Sadie’s best friend, Bernice Koenig, was at the other end of Hampstead Garden Suburb from where David’s parents lived and looked just as Arts and Craftsy from the outside. Inside it was chintz as far as the eye could see. Anything that wasn’t chintz was gold-plated.

As well as loving a bit of glitz, Bernice loved Sadie’s progeny as if they were her own, because ‘me and my Larry, God rest his soul, were never blessed with children’. She gathered both Ellie and Chester to her bosom, then led them into the dining room, where a buffet had been laid out, and through the open patio doors into the garden where a lot of familiar-looking people were congregated.

Bernice hadn’t known the correct social etiquette for having a tabloid star to stay, even when she’d changed that tabloid star’s nappies back in the day, so she’d thrown a party. Filling their plates and perched on garden furniture were Ellie’s grandparents, aunts and uncles, various cousins and assorted children of cousins. Tess and Lola were on their way over and Chester was exhorted to stay and ‘eat something! It’s not healthy for someone to be so thin.’ Bernice, who was five foot ten in her stockinged feet and built like a fishing rod, thought anyone under fifteen stone needed fattening up.

After the horrors and revelations that the day had heaped upon Ellie, it was soothing to sit in Bernice’s back garden surrounded by her real family. Even Aunt Carol, who’d never been her greatest fan, got pinch-faced with annoyance as she brandished a copy of the Mail on Sunday, which had run an opinion piece dubbing Ellie the poster girl of what they called the FBAs, which stood for Fame By Association or ‘the desperate wannabes who aren’t famous for being famous but famous for knowing someone who’s famous’.

‘Do you have to read the whole thing out?’ Ellie asked as she nibbled on a smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel, but there was no stopping Auntie Carol, who had Ellie cornered on a sun lounger so there was no escape.

‘They’ve quoted some so-called psychologist who says your pathological need for attention is because you never had a paternal signifier,’ Carol read out with just a smidgen of sadistic glee. ‘Grandpa has always been there for you, hasn’t he?’

‘He has.’ Ellie nodded. ‘Always.’

‘Sometimes to the exclusion of his other grandchildren, but I suppose they do all have fathers … fathers that are married to their mothers.’

It was kind of comforting that Auntie Carol had reverted to type and was being her usual undermining, bitchy self, but Ellie still gave a grateful yelp as she saw Tess and Lola come through the patio doors, each clutching a laden paper plate and a glass of orange squash.

There were a few moments of awkward plate and glass redeployment, then Lola opened her arms wide and drawled, ‘Come on, ladies, let’s hug it out,’ and five minutes later, the three of them were sharing a sun lounger, which sagged dangerously under their combined weight, and combing the rest of the Sunday papers, even though assorted aunts, uncles, grandparents, honorary grandparents and Chester all assured Ellie that she was better off not knowing.

The girl portrayed in the papers would forever be a girl clutching an alcoholic beverage and showing too much skin. She was Billy Kay’s bastard daughter, as if that was all anyone needed to know about Ellie, when a few weeks ago, that was the one thing no one had known about her.

‘It’s so unfair,’ Ellie sighed. ‘Everyone gets to stick the knife in me. Even Billy Kay. He might not have spoken to the press but whenever they say “a source close to Sir Billy”, it’s obvious it came from his publicist. Mum tried to warn me about her and it turned out she was right and she was double-crossing me the whole time. They all were.’

Tess looked up from the Sunday Mirror‘s charming photo essay called ‘Like Mother, Like Daughter’, which charted key fashion moments when Ari and Ellie had worn vaguely similar outfits. Ari in a leopard-print coat at a Pulp gig fifteen years ago, Ellie at a charity auction last winter in aid of the World Wildlife Fund wearing a little black dress and a pair of leopard-print pumps from Office. Ari with her hair swept up in a quiffed ponytail; the bloody photo of Ellie being flung over the head of a quiffed Rockabilly, and to round things off a picture each of the honourable Olivia and Miranda, the erstwhile model, both looking refined and elegant.


‘Are you still maintaining a dignified silence?’ Tess asked. ‘I’m not angling to get you on TV, by the way. I’m just enquiring as a concerned friend.’

‘I know that,’ Ellie assured her, though she was already stiffening in suspicion because it was hard to trust anyone any more. ‘I don’t know how I’m meant to be reacting. Jesus wept, when is this going to be over?

‘Let’s face it, Ellie, this is never going to be over. Not now your new baby bro has rocked up,’ Lola announced, putting down the Sun on Sunday, which had an obviously photoshopped picture of Charlie bookended by Lara and Rose on its front cover and an exclusive interview with the sisters. ‘And not while these two trolls are guaranteed column inches so they can bang on about how you’ve given them an attack of the sads. As for Billy Kay – I bet you any money that in less than a month he’ll be releasing a new record and doing a tour. I bet you fifty quid!’

‘You are so cynical,’ Tess told her.

‘I can’t help it. I was born cynical,’ Lola said, and Tess rolled her eyes but it was good-natured eye-rolling so they’d obviously made up since falling out over Come Dine With Me. ‘Look, Ellie, you need to be proactive about this shit. Make it happen, instead of having it happen to you.’

‘But the tabloids will twist everything I say,’ Ellie protested, not that she had any intention of talking to them, though maybe she did need to do something to take control of her public image. But what?

‘Maybe an interview with a broadsheet?’ Tess suggested. ‘Call one of your mates on the arts desks and pitch a piece about emerging Scandinavian artists, but really it would be about how you’re not the chavvy tart that the tabs say you are.’

‘Or what about YouTube, like that bird from that TV talent show whose ex posted that video online of her noshing him off …’

‘Lola, don’t use the word “nosh” in that context when there are elderly Jewish people about.’

Lola grinned at Ellie. ‘Whatevs. One minute everyone hates that girl for sending home that lady who worked in Sainsbury’s and having really bad fashion sense, and the next, she’s become a feminist icon. And she got to put her point across without it being spun by anyone else.’

Tess looked as if she was in a thousand agonies. ‘I’m not saying anything,’ she said with a pious air. ‘Not even that I’m a freelance researcher for a TV show that goes out live every morning to five million people and has two really lovely presenters who were voted “the people we’d most like to have a coffee with” by Mumsnet. I’m not saying that.’

‘Except you totally have just said that,’ Ellie pointed out. An idea was forming in her head. ‘So, if it goes out live that means I can’t be edited, right? I get to say exactly what I want to say. Hypothetically speaking. I’m just curious.’

‘Well, within reason. No swears. Nothing libellous and you don’t get question approval before the show.’ Tess wrinkled her nose. ‘If you did choose to go on, then it has to be your decision. I’m not pressurising you in any way.’

‘But you do know that they’re not renewing all the researchers’ contracts and Tess is too bossy to suck up to anyone and she’s not knobbing a cameraman, so she needs a bit of leverage,’ Lola said. ‘And she is your best mate, apart from me, and it would be helpful if she could pay, like, her share of the rent.’

They both looked at Ellie pleadingly. She stared down at the bagel that she’d barely made a dent in. Maintaining a dignified silence hadn’t made the media circus pack up its tents and move on to the next town. Meanwhile, everyone else, from Billy Kay’s other daughters to leader writers for the tabs, got to weigh in with an opinion on Ellie, even though they had no idea who she really was.

Even Ellie had lost sight of who she really was, or who she tried to be, but she knew what she didn’t want to be. For as long as she could remember, taped to Ari’s bathroom mirror, then transferred to her own bathroom mirror was a Nora Ephron quote: ‘Be the heroine of your own life, not the victim.’

She’d been playing the victim too much these last few weeks; being rescued, when she was more than capable of rescuing herself. It was time to write her own script.

‘The presenters of On The Sofa – they’re not at all controversial. It will just be a nice chat, right?’ Ellie widened her eyes and tilted her head. ‘“Oh Ellie, we’d love to know about the real you, rather than all these dreadful stories in the papers. How have you been holding up?”’

‘Right, right.’ Tess was nodding so frantically that Ellie thought her neck might snap. ‘Jeff and Angie do what they’re told. He’s obsessed with the camera getting his left side and Angie is sweet but as dumb as a bucket of mud.’

‘If I do it, it has to be tomorrow. Is that a problem?’ Ellie asked. The oily aftertaste of the smoked salmon was making her feel sick, or maybe it was the prospect of going on national television. It might be the only way that Ellie could have her own unedited right to reply, but that didn’t make the prospect any less terrifying. She had to have at least three vodka shots before she could think about doing karaoke and occasionally the On The Sofa studio audience could get quite chippy. ‘If I don’t do it right away I know I’ll lose my nerve.’

Tess knitted both brows and hands together imploringly. ‘So, are you saying that you’re going to do this?’

Ellie took a deep breath. She even thought about putting her head between her knees so she didn’t faint. Instead she took a sip of lukewarm, oversweet orange squash. ‘Yes. Yes,’ she repeated, her voice getting firmer. ‘But it has to be tomorrow and I don’t want them using that sodding bikini shot when they introduce me.’

‘I’m going to make a phone call.’ Tess shot off the sun lounger and almost sent Lola and Ellie crashing to the ground as the end that she’d been sitting on sprang up in the air. ‘I’ll probably have to go into work this evening, but I forgive you.’

The two girls rearranged themselves and sat back down. Lola prodded Ellie in the side. ‘You’re really brown, you know,’ she said apropos of nothing, as if Ellie being really brown wasn’t a good thing. Lola preferred to look as if she’d just been laid out on a mortuary slab. ‘Will you promise to lay off the self-tanner between now and tomorrow, otherwise you’ll look like you’ve been Tangoed?’

‘But it’s TV! I don’t want to look washed out by the studio lights.’

‘You don’t want to look like a drag queen either,’ Lola insisted. She assumed a martyred air. ‘Maybe I should come with you as your personal make-up artist. I’d love to have a crack at Jeff Jenkins … Beneath that bland daytime TV exterior, he’s meant to be an absolute sex monster. Dick bigger than a French stick.’

Ellie clapped her hands over her ears. ‘You are so not coming anywhere near the On The Sofa studios tomorrow. And thanks, now all I’ll be able to think about when I should be concentrating on my interview is how big Jeff Jenkins’ knob is.’

Lola looked entirely unrepentant. ‘Well, it beats imagining the audience in their underwear when you get nervous.’






Camden, London, 1987

Everyone was making demands on her. On one side there was Sadie and Carol. On the other side was Billy. But they were all united by a common purpose: to snatch Velvet away from Ari and install her in the beautiful nursery in Golders Green with the handmade cot and rose-sprigged wallpaper, and never give her back.

Velvet should have been the most demanding thing of all, but she wasn’t. She’d stare up at Ari with big, trusting blue eyes in a way that made Ari fall apart.

Billy was furious when Ari brought Velvet back to the playwright’s house instead of handing her over to Carol, but Carol would get to spend the rest of her life with Velvet so the least she could do was let Ari have a measly six weeks. Not that Carol saw it like that.

Billy was furious that even the playwright’s Japanese girlfriend was besotted with Velvet and invited mother and daughter out of their third-floor suite of rooms to ply them with expensive baby clothes in return for cuddles.

He was furious that Ari was breast-feeding and eyed Velvet jealously as she clutched onto her mother, as if Ari’s breasts were for him alone. ‘Why can’t you bottle-feed her, Ari? It’s the nineteen eighties for f*ck’s sake.’

He was especially furious that Velvet slept in the same bed as them, in between them, and that Ari couldn’t give him her undivided attention like she used to because Velvet needed her undivided attention too.

But Ari was furious with Billy too. Furious that he still hadn’t fallen in love with his daughter when loving Velvet was the easiest thing in the world.

When the six-week deadline slid by and Velvet was still with them, Billy didn’t shout. And when Carol came round almost every day and demanded what she’d been promised, he watched with an impassive face as Ari gave her sister reason after reason why now wasn’t a good time.

‘Of course you can have her, but the thing is she’s a bit chesty at the moment.’

Or, ‘I just haven’t had time to see the lawyer.’

And even, ‘The health visitor says I need to breast-feed her for at least three months. At least!’

Billy didn’t say a word but he arranged for the playwright’s girlfriend to babysit Velvet and he took Ari to dinner at the Russian restaurant in Primrose Hill. Ari tried not to twitch or to look as if her mind was miles away, or not miles but five hundred yards down the road and across the square where Velvet might be left unattended or have developed colic or was perhaps simply crying because they’d never been parted.

She tried to focus on Billy, who was smiling at her in the soft candlelight. He looked so beautiful that it was hard to remember that most of the time his face was split with a sneer.

They ordered borscht, then stroganoff, mopped up with dark rye bread, but Ari could hardly eat. Finally Billy pushed their plates to one side so he could take her hand.

‘You know I love you, Ari,’ he said. ‘You know I’ve been waiting for you.’

Ari knew what was coming. She stroked her fingers along the rigid line of his knuckles. ‘I’m still here. I haven’t gone anywhere.’

Billy shook his head. ‘You don’t love me any more. Not like you used to.’

‘I do love you, but now I love Velvet too. It’s not like people just have a set amount of love to dole out. It doesn’t work like that.’

‘But we had a deal. You promised, and I get that your hormones are through the roof, but Ari, we were heading somewhere. We’re not going to get there if you take your eyes off the prize. When was the last time you even picked up your guitar?’

The solution was simple. She wondered why’d she never thought of it before. ‘It doesn’t have to be either or. I can have it all,’ she said, and she laughed because it was so obvious now. ‘Why can’t I have Velvet and fame, if it will have me, and you?’

Billy’s face darkened and Ari realised too late that he didn’t want to be third on her list of priorities, and actually he wasn’t. But Billy hated being in second place too. ‘You can’t have it all,’ he told her bluntly. ‘You either love me completely, and that means that you give me all of yourself, or you don’t love me at all.’

She wasn’t going to keep Velvet, but Ari had never counted on Velvet being part of her, so that losing her would be like losing a limb. Worse. People managed without arms or legs, but once Velvet was gone, Ari would be fractured and the kind of broken that couldn’t be made whole again. She loved Billy – she did – but he was never going to be enough to fill the void that Velvet would leave. When Velvet was gone, Ari still wouldn’t be able to give all of herself to Billy, because her heart belonged to her daughter now.

‘Two more weeks.’ It was a desperate plea. ‘Let me have two more weeks with her.’

Billy didn’t shout or swear or cause a scene. He stood up, pulled two grubby ten-pound notes from his pocket and put them on the table. ‘Me or the kid, Ari,’ he said, and then he walked out.