It Felt Like A Kiss

Chapter Thirty-two




Oh! It looks much smaller than it does on TV, was Ellie’s first thought. Then: why is everyone so mad at me?

Ellie was standing at the back of the room and gazing out, not onto the famous On The Sofa set with its two huge red sofas, but into the audience, which was a sea of angry, hostile faces all looking at Ellie as if she’d gone round to each of their houses and murdered their children and pets.

The urge to cry was sudden and very strong, but the woman with the mike had her arm in an uncompromising grip and Ellie was being yanked forward, as Jeff Jenkins stood up and said, ‘And now here to answer these claims is Lara and Rose’s alleged half-sister, Velvet Underground!’

Ellie was led to a high stool. Apparently she didn’t even merit a sit down on one of the famous sofas and for some reason she was clambering on to it in an inelegant scramble and sitting there patiently while a stagehand shoved his hand down the front of her dress so he could attach her to a microphone.

She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the audience. There was one pugnacious-looking woman, sitting five rows back, who kept pointing at Ellie and shouting something that Ellie couldn’t hear – probably just as well.

‘Velvet?’

‘Huh? What?’ She turned to the nearest sofa where Angie Drake and Jeff Jenkins were sitting. ‘What?’

Jeff Jenkins didn’t seem as nice and smiley as he usually was. Even pretty, giggly Angie was frowning at Ellie. ‘You seem quite surprised by the audience’s reaction,’ Jeff said. ‘How does it make you feel, Velvet?’

Like, I want to get into the foetal position and rock back and forth. Ellie blinked at him. ‘Um, it’s Ellie. My name’s Ellie.’

‘Have you changed your name because of the press attention?’ Angie asked.

Ellie shook her head. ‘No. I’ve always been Ellie.’

‘Does this kind of reception make you wish you’d never sold your story to the papers?’ Jeff Jenkins wanted to know and Ellie stared at him in dismay because if they couldn’t even get that right.


‘I didn’t,’ she said, but she was drowned out by jeers from the audience.

‘You did! Because all you and your mother care about is fleecing money out of our dad,’ cried a voice, and Ellie’s gaze finally swivelled to the other red sofa set at a right angle to Jeff and Angie’s sofa. Sitting on it were Lara and Rose Kay.

She was in the same room as her two half-sisters and suddenly Ellie was trying to remember how to breathe, hands clinging to the edge of the stool as she gawped at them. Lara was the taller, fiercer-looking one and Rose was softer and somehow droopier, as if maintaining her size-six figure was a feat of endurance. They both had a Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea air to them: long buttery limbs, long buttery hair and an air of discontent on their pretty, pouty faces.

‘We always knew you’d go to the papers over Daddy’s little mistake,’ Rose said. She was sniffing and had a tissue clutched in her hand, which she very carefully dabbed under each eye so she didn’t smudge her make-up. ‘Daddy might have strayed that one time but your mother threw herself at him.’

‘It wasn’t like that at all …’ Ellie risked glancing at the audience because they couldn’t be buying any of this bullshit, but one look at their rapt, intent faces and it was clear that yes, they were buying this.

‘I can’t even look at a paper or a magazine without seeing you in it,’ Lara said haughtily. ‘Falling out of your clothes. It’s so undignified. You have no integrity.’

The sheer nerve of them – Sadie would call it chutzpah – rendered Ellie speechless. As if she was having an out-of-body experience, she could see herself perched uncomfortably on a stool, forehead scrunched up and showing quite a bit of leg. She tugged down the skirt of her dress and, as Lara patted Rose’s knee in a sisterly gesture of support, Ellie felt herself getting angry.

It was good. The anger was good as long as she didn’t let it take complete hold. ‘I haven’t done anything wrong,’ she said in a voice that sounded a little stronger.

‘How you can sit there and lie like that?’ Lara gasped, turning the fake indignation all the way up to eleven. ‘What is wrong with you? You’re, like, a sociopath.’

Ellie didn’t know what was wrong with her either. She was on live TV, for better or for much, much worse, and she had to do something rather than sit there with a face full of gormless and take everything that was being thrown at her. She was better than this. She was a f*cking people person and she’d spent days in David Gold’s apartment (she hoped that he wasn’t tuned in to On The Sofa right now) watching nothing but daytime television, and it wasn’t that difficult to get the audience on your side.

She could do this. She had no other option.

‘All right, all right,’ she said, more as a direction to herself than anyone else, then she forced herself to lift her head, pin her shoulders back and look Lara and Rose right in their pretending-to-cry faces. ‘I came on the show to set the record straight so will you please let me do that, OK?’

She didn’t wait to find out if it was OK, but plunged on. ‘I know you only have my word for it, but my mother never asked anything of Billy Kay. Not a thing.’

‘No, that’s not true,’ Lara interjected. ‘Not a week went by when there wasn’t a phone call or—’

She sounded so convincing that Ellie found herself wondering if she was the one that had got her facts wrong and then she remembered that she hadn’t. ‘My mother and Billy Kay were together for a year. It was well documented at the time. Then he left when I was three months old and he went back to your mother. I’m really sorry that you’re still hurt by that, but you can’t have a year-long affair with a married man if the married man isn’t willing,’ she said. ‘There was no other contact after that. No phone calls. Not even a birthday card.’

Ellie let that sink in. The audience seemed unsure, Lara and Rose were worriedly whispering to each other, Angie Drake was doing her listening face and Jeff Jenkins was obviously getting directions from the producer in his ear. Ellie hoped the producer was saying, ‘Let her speak! I’m sick to death of the other two.’

‘When Billy went back to his family, he wasn’t famous, but he got famous pretty soon afterwards, yet Ari never took him to court to ask for maintenance. Despite what you might have read, my mum has principles even though when you’re a single parent money’s always tight. New shoes, a school trip, a supermarket shop; whatever you have doesn’t last very long.’

There was the very faintest murmur of agreement. ‘It’s obvious that you love your mother, but she hasn’t been a very good role model, has she?’ Jeff Jenkins said, and it took every ounce of muscle control she had for Ellie not to leap off her stool and smack him. So, Ari was a single mother, big whoop. If that was the worst they had to throw at Ellie, then they were going to have to try much harder. Statistically speaking, a good half of the audience were either lone parents or had been brought up by a single parent, and they needed to join her team.

‘No, she wasn’t a good role model,’ she agreed equably, and she saw Ari’s face, as familiar as her own, smiling that crooked, wryly amused smile. Whatever deeply buried anger and resentment Ellie might have harboured towards her mother was no match for the love that she had for Ari. No matter how bad things were, Ari was the constant in her life, the person she could always turn to. It had ever been so. No matter how inadequate Ellie had felt sometimes, she’d always been good enough for Ari.

‘She was an excellent role model,’ Ellie explained for the benefit of the peanut gallery. ‘Sometimes she’d have up to five part-time jobs, but she was also the cool mum who was in bands and knew loads of interesting people. And somehow she never missed a single school sports day or a PTA meeting.’ There was so much more to say. That Ari had taught her about Patti Smith and the suffragettes, showed her how to play ‘Heart Of Glass’ on the guitar and told her that she was beautiful but that it was more important to be clever and funny, and that she could be anything she wanted to be. She’d stuck inspirational Nora Ephron quotes on the bathroom mirror and though it killed Ellie not to be able to share that with the On The Sofa audience, she needed to keep this simple and direct. She paused and it seemed as if the audience were leaning forward eagerly. ‘Though sometimes I wished that she didn’t turn up for school sports day or parents’ evening in a leopard-print catsuit, but whatever.’

There was laughter at that. Not sneery, cackling laughter either. It could be that the tide was turning in Ellie’s favour. Lara Kay obviously thought so because she pointed a stiff finger at Ellie. ‘Well, she couldn’t have been that good a role model when the papers are full of stories about what … how … well, that you’re a bit of a slapper, quite frankly.’

Even Rose looked shocked and there was a gasp from the audience like they were clutching their collective pearls, and surely Lara wasn’t allowed to say the word ‘slapper’ before the watershed? And …

‘That’s a really hurtful thing to say,’ Ellie said. ‘Especially when the papers print stories that aren’t true and—’

‘Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?’ Rose shrugged sheepishly, like her heart really wasn’t in it. ‘You might pretend that they’ve made up the stories but there’s no smoke without fire.’


Ellie opened her eyes as wide as she could. ‘So, the stories in the papers about you shoplifting and Lara sleeping with her best friend’s boyfriend were true, then?’ she asked in faintly scandalised tones.

‘No! That’s not what I meant!’

‘There were actual quotes from the actual guy you were seeing about your actual sex life!’ Lara reminded Ellie furiously. ‘Actual pictures of you in your underwear.’

A ripple of excitement went through the audience. Angie Drake smiled nervously, eyes darting between the two sisters on the sofa and Ellie on the stool of shame. Jeff Jenkins realised that he had to take control of this situ ation. ‘To be fair, Velvet, Lara does have a point.’

Not from where Ellie was perched, but she was committed to this now. ‘Let me be very clear. I did not sell my story and I certainly did not use my new-found fame to make vast sums of money by giving interviews to the papers and signing up to pose in bra and pants—’

‘That was a legitimate modelling job.’

‘Will you let me finish?’ It was the ‘don’t f*ck with me’ voice that Ellie didn’t know she was capable of until it came out of her mouth when Muffin was being absolutely impossible or Ari was about to embark on some ridiculous scheme. It was the voice that could even stop Vaughn in his most autocratic tracks. Lara Kay settled back on the sofa with angry huffing noises. ‘If I’d wanted to sell my story – which I didn’t and don’t and never have done – then I would probably have done it when I was working insane hours in awful jobs to fund my degree. Have you ever cleaned the men’s loos of a pub after last orders on a Friday night?’

It was a rhetorical question but Angie and Rose both shook their heads.

‘Well, I have, and it’s character-building. Or that’s what my boss used to tell me.’

The audience were definitely Team Cohen now. Before she could lose their interest or Lara and Rose could make it all about them again, Ellie spread her hands wide. ‘I don’t want to be all “woe is me” but the last two weeks have been awful. I’ve had my privacy stripped away from me, my grandparents, my mum, my friends have been door-stepped by the press; I’m not even sure I still have a job; and I know it’s a bit rich to sit here on a prime-time TV show and moan about press intrusion, but I wanted people to be able to see the real me.’

‘Do you really expect people to believe that you didn’t pose for those photos?’ Jeff Jenkins asked with a sceptical look to camera. Ellie would never have believed he’d be such a tough crowd; he had always seemed so charming on TV.

‘When you’re followed round all day by photographers, they take hundreds of shots and use the one picture when you’re stretching up or bending over or—’

‘… like, sometimes it’s really hard to get out of a sports car with your legs clamped together,’ Rose Kay offered eagerly. ‘I’ve had photographers lie on the ground to try and get an upskirt picture. They’re disgusting.’

‘Right, well, there you go,’ Ellie said, and Rose beamed at her. It would have been churlish not to smile back. Ellie managed a tight grimace as Rose was poked in the ribs by her sister, who then turned the full weight of her venom back at Ellie.

‘Like, that bikini picture wasn’t papped. It was posed!’

It was impossible for Ellie not to roll her eyes. ‘What is your problem?’

Lara quivered with outrage. It had to be exhausting to maintain that level of outrage for so long. ‘You are! The things you’ve done to my family. You should be ashamed of yourself.’

It was time to wrap this up. Ellie could tell that from the guy who was standing behind the camera making winding motions, and Angie was sitting up straighter, looking right to camera and smiling …

‘I’m not ashamed of anything,’ Ellie said quickly. ‘What have I done that’s so wrong apart from dating an absolute creep and not having tighter security controls on my Facebook photo albums? If that’s what I’m guilty of then so is every other twenty-six-year-old woman in Britain, am I right, ladies?’

Ellie wasn’t sure she could pull off an Oprah-esque ‘am I right, ladies?’ but the On The Sofa audience were clapping and there was even an excited, ‘You go, girl!’ from one of the back rows.

‘Ellie, you’re handling this so well,’ Angie Drake pronounced breathily. ‘But before we break, how did you feel when you found out you had a half-brother?’

The question caught Ellie unawares like a punch to the stomach, so she wasn’t capable of dissembling. ‘I was … I am kind of shocked.’

‘Especially when Charlie’s grown up knowing his father. It must have been very hard for you not to have a dad. Is there anything you’d like to say to Billy Kay?’

One of the cameras zoomed in on Ellie. If it got any closer, she’d have a good case for aggravated assault. But it was hard not to tear up because for most of her life she’d thought about what she wanted to say to Billy Kay. Even a month ago she’d have tried with all her might to forge some connection or bond with him. But that was a month ago, and this was now.

‘He might have been there at my conception but it takes more than that to be a dad.’ There was one single, unprompted tear teetering on her bottom lashes. ‘Anyway, who needs a father when you have grandparents and aunts and uncles, cousins and amazing friends?’ Just the thought of Chester gave the unshed tear the push it needed to start a slow trickle down her cheek. ‘So I don’t feel like I ever missed out by not having a dad. Not even a little bit. In fact, I feel lucky and blessed that I’ve spent my entire life surrounded by people who love me.’

The audience were actually getting to their feet and cheering, but it was less to do with Ellie’s tour de force performance and more that a producer was making frantic arm movements to get them to stand up and applaud wildly.

As Jeff Jenkins asked the On The Sofa viewers to tune in at the same time tomorrow Ellie was helped down from the stool. Someone shoved a wad of tissues into her hand as she was hurried from the set.

Once Ellie had finished dabbing at her eyes and blowing her nose, she realised that the someone was Tess. ‘I’m sorry it turned into such a bloodbath.’

Ellie peered over Tess’s shoulder to the On The Sofa set. Lara Kay was screaming at one of the producers. ‘Have you been fired for giving me the heads up?’

‘They decided that Zach was expendable after he did such a rubbish job of prepping you.’ Tess smiled beatifically. ‘New producer’s going too for sullying the On The Sofa brand. You know, when Lara Kay called you a slapper?’

‘It will be etched into my memory until the day I die,’ Ellie said truthfully, because she wasn’t in that place where she could joke about what had just happened. She didn’t think she’d ever get to that place. ‘I can’t believe you’d want to carry on working here. It’s a pit of vipers.’

‘No, it’s really not,’ Tess insisted. ‘Usually it’s fluffy and extremely non-controversial, which is why our phone lines are jammed and Slappergate is trending on Twitter. Look, I am sorry, Ellie …’

‘I know you are and you did try to warn me.’ It hadn’t been Tess’s fault, Ellie knew that, but she wasn’t ready to let the subject rest. ‘So how did my interview get derailed when you were meant to be looking out for me?’


‘I’m not exactly sure. When I got in at eight thirty this morning, everything had changed. Apparently, the new producer took it upon herself to contact Billy Kay’s publicist to see if he’d come on so you could have a touching televised reunion  .’

‘God, no!’

‘And it turned out that Billy Kay’s publicist was a real piece of work,’ Tess said, just as there were the sounds of a commotion behind them and Ellie looked round to see Georgie Leigh storming onto the set from the other direction so she could yank a still-screaming Lara Kay to one side and seize the producer by her shirt.

‘That was not what we agreed!’ Georgie was dressed all in black this time, still dripping with gold jewellery so her bangles jangled furiously as she all but shook the hapless woman, who was trying to say something but not getting very far. ‘Who coached that little tart? When I find out who it was, I’m going to end them!’

Tess and Ellie both cowered behind one of the stage flats. ‘Now I understand how my interview got derailed,’ Ellie whispered. ‘That’s Ari’s deadliest enemy.’

They watched as Georgie unhanded the producer and pushed her away. She did a keen-eyed sweep of the studio, her gaze coming to rest on the flat behind which Ellie hoped she was obscured from view.

‘The only other time I met her she was really nice. Overbearingly, creepily nice,’ she hissed to Tess. ‘I think the homicidal threats are actually preferable. You know where you are with homicidal threats, don’t you?’

‘Let’s get you out of here,’ Tess decided, and she bundled Ellie out of the studio, down several miles of corridor, and deposited her in a tiny airless room with a desk, chair and a flipchart. ‘I’ll grab your things and order you a car. Be back in ten minutes.’





Camden, London, 1987

Carol started crying as soon as Ari arrived at The Coffee Cup in Hampstead, wheeling Velvet in the new pram that she’d bought with the proceeds from selling her second favourite guitar.

‘You’re keeping her, aren’t you?’ Sadie asked. When Ari nodded Carol cried even harder.

Eventually she stopped crying and once she’d dried her eyes, she stood up. There was a hardness in her eyes that hadn’t been there before. ‘I will never, ever forgive you for this,’ she promised.

Ari was sorry for hurting Carol, the kind of sorry that couldn’t be put into words. She did try but Carol turned her face away.

‘I never want to see you again. What you’ve done … You promised … I didn’t think it was possible to hurt this much,’ Carol said in a choked voice, and Ari knew how she felt because she knew how much it would destroy her if she didn’t have Velvet.

‘But I am sorry, Carol.’ The words weren’t ever going to be enough, but when Ari went to place a hand on Carol’s arm, her sister reared back as if she had dipped her fingers in hydrochloric acid. ‘I just never knew that I’d love her like this.’

Sadie stood up too. Ari had never seen her quite so furious – close to it, but she’d never reached the summit before. Nice Jewish girls didn’t have babies out of wedlock. Or if they did, they certainly didn’t brazen it out instead of having the child adopted by a lovely, kosher-keeping couple or the older sister whose life was blighted by the curse of infertility.

‘You are a selfish, selfish girl. Don’t come crawling to us when you’ve changed your mind, and don’t think you’ll get a penny from us either. You’re on your own, Ariella,’ were Sadie’s parting words, as she swept majestically out of the café, Carol trailing behind to send one more agonised but venomous look in her sister’s direction that would haunt Ari for years to come.

They’d left a pot of tea and a round of raisin toast behind and Ari wasn’t proud. Also, she was hungry and had one pound, forty-seven pence to last until she could get a job.

For one fleeting second, she wondered if she’d done the right thing by her daughter. All she had to give Velvet was love and Ari was never very good at loving people.

Well, she was just going to have to get better at it.