‘I’m so sorry,’ I say quietly to Tori, my voice shaking so much that it comes out as sohohohohohory. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’
Tori ignores me, still staring heatedly at Gary, her hands on her hips. ‘I got you a top-tier manager, I gave you a place to stay when you needed it, I’ve promoted you on my Instagram, helped you run lines. For god’s sake, I got you a handprint ceremony at the Chinese Theatre! And you kiss another woman, a nobody, no less. A fat nobody! What the fuck?’
‘Oi!’ Imogene shouts at Tori. ‘She’s not a nobody. You’re a fucking nobody.’
‘It’s okay,’ I shush Imogene. ‘She’s got a right to be angry. I deserve it.’
Gary drops Tori’s hands and takes a step back. ‘You got me the handprint ceremony?’ His brow furrows.
Tori rolls her eyes and throws her hands up in exasperation. ‘Oh come on. You’ve been in one hit film, Gary. You think they were just gonna give that to you? They had someone drop out and I made a deal that if they gave you a ceremony, you’d promote the theatre heavily on the Nightcar press junket and do a couple of TV spots for them. Mom and I were going to tell you tomorrow!’
Gary looks across at Aileen and, seeing that none of this is new information to her, stares down at his feet. ‘Oh,’ he says, almost to himself. ‘That makes more sense.’ His eyes track across to me, blazing with a doubt and an anger I can feel deep in my core. ‘You tricked me, Nora – you followed me, made me think… You tricked me into… feeling something. But you’re actually unhinged. What kind of person does this?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say because I don’t know what else to say, how to make this right. ‘It’s a mess, I know. But when a person falls in love…’
‘You’re not in love with me.’ Gary shakes his head quickly from side to side. ‘You don’t even fucking know me, Nora. You violated my privacy and my trust. You need serious help.’
I look down at my feet and take a deep breath. ‘You’re right. I do,’ I say as Imogene squeezes my hand tightly. ‘But what I felt was real. Today was real. And that kiss? That was real, Gary.’
Gary’s eyes bore into mine. ‘That kiss was nothing more than a mistake, Nora,’ he says in a low, gruff voice. ‘You need to leave now, before I let John Alan escort you out.’
‘You’re just gonna let her go?’ Tori screeches. ‘She’s ruined a ton of sponsorships for us! She needs to be charged. You can’t just let her go!’
Gary ignores her and continues to stare at me, his chest quickly rising up and down. I try to find any inkling of softness or warmth in his eyes. Anything at all that might alleviate the pain in my chest right now. But there is nothing. His eyes are as cold as stone.
And that’s my cue to leave.
As we walk out of the gardens, Imogene has to help me because my legs seem to have turned to wet spaghetti. Kennedy grabs my arm on the other side, but I shake her off.
‘I swear I didn’t leak the story!’ she cries. ‘I have no clue how TMZ got a picture of the wall or of you. I have no clue how they know anything!’
I stop walking and turn to face her. I want to believe her, but it’s too much of a coincidence. Her secretively tapping away on her laptop, spending all of this time with me when she is clearly much cooler than I am, the fact that she needed a juicier story for her audition, the fact that she actually looks guilty.
‘Is this how you got the job?’ I spit. ‘I thought we were friends. I’m such an idiot. Jesus, Kennedy.’
‘Of course not!’ Kennedy cries, reaching out to grab my hands. I clasp my hands to my chest and take a step backwards. Kennedy shakes her head furiously. ‘I would never. We are friends! I wouldn’t ever do that to you.’
I examine her face. Wet eyes have made her mascara run down her face. Her normally smiling mouth is stretched into a clownlike frown. She looks desolate.
‘I promise you, Nora,’ she says desperately. ‘I didn’t do it.’
I believe her. But who else? No one else knows the details that were in the article? Who else could have taken a picture of the Creepy As Fuck Soulmate Procurement Wall?
And then I spot Brandon leaning casually against the car, innocently tapping away on his phone. Him!
Hot rage bubbles up into my chest, fuelling a surge of energy that brings my legs back to life. I march over to him.
‘It was you!’ I yell, poking a finger at his big muscled chest. ‘You just couldn’t handle that fat, weird little me thought she could do better than you. How could you be so cruel?’
Brandon blinks, holding his hands up at his side. ‘Um… what?’
‘You absolute dick,’ Imogene hisses. ‘You really are a piece of work.’
‘It wasn’t Brandon!’ Kennedy cries, running to her brother’s side protectively. ‘He wouldn’t!’
‘How else did TMZ get a picture from inside the house?’ I yell back. ‘It’s obvious, Kennedy. I know he’s your brother, but he’s got serious issues.’
‘Excuse me, what the hell is going on right now?’ Brandon is looking around the car park as if someone is about to pop out with a camera and reveal that he is being punked.
Kennedy takes out her phone, pulls up the article and hands it to Brandon, who reads it. ‘Holy shit,’ he mutters, shaking his head. ‘I didn’t do that,’ he says firmly.
‘You fat-shamed me, you made me feel like I was nothing, selling a story about me to a gossip blog is a logical next step. Just admit it. There’s no one else it could have been!’
Brandon clenches his jaw together. ‘You’re right. I have issues. I was a real dick to you and I’m not quite sure why. I think your optimism, your belief in love just… showed me that I have very little of my own.’ He takes a deep breath and fold his arms across his chest. ‘And I am really sorry for that. I clearly have some work to do on myself. And I will… but… Nora, I didn’t do this.’ His eyes search mine. ‘And, for the record… I thought that what you did today was really brave. Telling Gary how you felt, no holds barred. I… I’m sorry I made you feel like you were nothing. That’s not what I think about you at all. Far from it.’
He looks like he’s telling the truth, but I am evidently a person not in their right mind. I don’t know what to think any more.
‘I need to go home,’ I mutter quietly. ‘I… just need to go back to where I belong.’
The four of us stand there for a moment, the silence deeply uncomfortable. The sky is dark and the winds start to whip fiercely around us. This is the second worst day of my life.
‘I think you guys should head off,’ Imogene says calmly, now fully sober. ‘We’ll get a car service.’
My eyes blur with tears as I watch Brandon take our luggage out of his trunk and plonk it on the pavement beside us. I take Winklepuff from Kennedy and clasp him to my chest, the soft warm heaviness of him making my chest ache. ‘I will miss you, bud,’ I whisper into his fur. ‘You are a really really good dog. The best of dogs.’
Winklepuff sniffs me a little before frantically attempting to lick my tears away, the sweetness of the gesture making me cry more. I hand Winklepuff to Brandon, who puts him into the car.
I turn to Kennedy.
‘Bye then,’ I say with a sad shrug. ‘Thanks for taking me in.’
Kennedy puts her hands either side of my face, her fingers are trembling just a little. ‘I’m truly sorry, Nora. What a mess, huh.’
I sniff. ‘I know. I’m sorry too. This whole chaos has happened because of me,’ I tell her, stifling a sob. ‘That’s the truth of it. I caused all of this. I’m sorry.’
‘That’s not true!’ Kennedy says desperately. ‘I’m going to figure this out, I promise you I’ll find out how TMZ got a hold of this.’
I nod and smile grimly as she hugs me goodbye, squeezing me tightly and making me promise to call her as soon as I get home.
All I can think about right now is how I’ve fucked everything up so badly. Poor Gary whose life I have absolutely upended. And Tori who really didn’t deserve this. Kennedy who has
done nothing but be kind to me. And Imogene who flew here to bring me home and has ended up embroiled in my shit. Messing things up is a pattern of mine. I cannot seem to help it.
‘Come on,’ Imogene says gently as Brandon revs the engine of his car, giving a brief sad wave as he and Kennedy pull out of the car park. I watch as Kennedy waves goodbye from inside the car, her face streaming with tears. I wave back, not quite believing that this is how it’s ending.
‘It’s time to get back to Brigglesford.’ Imogene rubs my arm. ‘Everything will be all right once we get home.’
I wait to feel a sweep of relief at her comforting words, at the notion of being back in my house, in my warm safe cocoon where I can’t mess things up anymore. But it doesn’t come. The reality of my life before Gary and Kennedy and Winklepuff and Los Angeles somehow doesn’t feel quite so appealing as it once did. I know better now. If anything good has come from this disaster of a trip, then surely it’s that.
Our car turns up and after a tearful but mercifully quick drive to the airport, we’re ensconced on the aircraft, ready to leave this whole mad escapade behind.
As the airplane takes off, I stare out of the window and the glittering lights beneath.
‘Goodbye, LA,’ I whisper, pressing my hand gently against the glass. ‘Goodbye, Gary Montgomery.’
Chapter Fifty-Five
Nora
‘My name’s Nora Tucker and you’ve been a brilliant audience!’
I slip the microphone back into the stand and smile at the small but reasonably enthusiastic crowd at the quirky arts café in Camden where I’ve just performed. Gathering up my belongings and pocketing the meagre payment from the owner, I begin to walk back in the direction of my hotel, enjoying the feel of the cold November air on my face, the fierce chilly wind whipping the hair up off my head.
I stop off at a café to grab a quick lunch of a cheese toastie with a cup of tea. As I sit down at a table by the window, a reminder flashes on my phone for my therapy session tomorrow. Because I’m in London for a few days rather than Sheffield, it will be a telephone appointment, but I’ve been seeing Dr Hark for three and a half months now and I’ve made so many strides in terms of understanding why I am the way I bloody am that missing a session, no matter where I am, is not something I’m willing to do. I don’t want to go back to the apathetic, almost numb way I was feeling before. I’m determined not to.
Having to talk about my feelings with a total stranger was deeply uncomfortable at first and after Imogene and I got back from Los Angeles I was so sad and embarrassed and guilty and, well, heartbroken, that I took to my bed, barely able to watch one of my beloved movies, let alone even try to begin to fix the mess I’d gotten myself in.
After two weeks of gently cajoling to no avail, Imogene showed up and lost her shit, practically dragging me out of the bed and to the clinic. I knew that it was important that I go, but that didn’t mean I wanted to! I spent the first three sessions barely able to formulate my knotty jumble of thoughts and feelings in my own head and definitely nowhere near being able to organise and articulate them out loud. But eventually, with the help of Dr Hark, everything spilled out and together we learned that, as usual, Imogene was almost completely right about what had been going on with me over the last two years. That my grief and guilt over Mum and Dad and my part in their death had forced me into a sort of stasis. That as long as I could absorb myself in books and movies and fantasies of ‘The One’ then I could essentially ignore the way I was really feeling. I thought that as long as I hid away and didn’t acknowledge anything or anyone, then I could stop hurting, could prevent myself from causing any more trouble.
Dr Hark said it in a much more eloquent way, of course, and went about setting me tasks in a bid to face my issues and improve my seriously flagging mental health. She didn’t assign me a task as crazy as Imogene’s because she didn’t, you know, want to get struck off the UK psychiatrists’ medical register. But after finding out that I’d got a good head start in ‘living out loud’ in Los Angeles, she gave me three vital tasks.
The first task – to exercise. After coming to love my time in the ocean with Kennedy in LA, I spent the rest of the summer at home wild swimming in the River Derwent at Chatsworth House, imagining that Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy might appear at any moment to sexily peel me out of my costume and go to town on me.
Imogene came with me the first couple of times until she got a leech stuck on her arse cheek and started jumping about, shrieking and calling it a ‘bastard bloodsucking devil leech fuck’, which made me laugh so hard I cried. When the weather turned colder in October, I continued my regular morning swims at the tiny, somewhat shabby Brigglesford Leisure centre, where I have made a couple of new real-life friends in the form of Bony Liam, the skinny lifeguard who likes to talk to me about how I should be reading paranormal fantasy books, rather than Harcourt Royals, and Blanche, who sits with me after our swims to drink hot chocolate and tell me about when she was a Fleetwood Mac groupie back in her younger days and how Mick Fleetwood said she gave the best blow job in all of Europe. Blanche is seventy years old.
I’m still learning not to feel nervous in front of new people, but I’m also remembering the excitement of it too, the possibility. I’ve even reconnected online with a couple of musician friends from my gigging days and have planned to meet them for drinks next week when I return from London!
The second task? To write a new song each week. Dr Hark thought this would be a great way for me to learn how to express my emotions in a more measured way than my usual patterns of either bottling them all up for ages or letting them all out in one big uncontainable mess at other people’s engagement parties, and such. And so I now have a selection of sixteen new complete songs. Most of them are about Mum and Dad, a few are about Gary and there’s an upbeat comedy song called ‘Joy Ahoy’ that is silly and cheerful and hopeful, just like the woman who inspired it. Most of the songs are shit and indulgent, but there are maybe five that have some potential.
A few weeks after I started therapy, I felt strong enough to start calling some of the old pubs and clubs I used to sing at and asked if I could do a short unpaid set. The first few gigs were a nightmare. Without alcohol or Gary watching me like he did the day we kissed, I properly stumbled, playing wrong notes and staring at my feet for the whole performance. At one open-mic night at a live music venue on Brigglesford High Street, my voice shook so much that I sounded like a dying sheep, which one member of the audience didn’t hesitate to shout to me across the room. I felt like giving up again that night, but something inside of me knew that if I did, I would never pick it back up, and the thought of that made my whole body flood with sadness, which, frankly is an emotion I’ve had quite enough of. So I held my head high, gathered up the courage I somehow discovered in LA and I marched on, booking more free spots and open mics until eventually my old spark seemed to return and the pub and club owners started offering me money to come back in a professional capacity. I’m making enough money now that hopefully I can stop working at Virtual Assistants 4U in the new year, and maybe even save enough to record a demo in a studio.
The third, and most important, task that Dr Hark assigned me was to leave my house every single day no matter what. After the two solid weeks I spent in bed after my mortifying return from LA, this one was a bit of a wrench. For a start, I didn’t really have many places to go beyond swimming or the park with Imogene and Ariana. So I started volunteering a couple of afternoons a week at the dog rescue in Sheffield city centre. Before I met Winklepuff, I thought dogs were mostly annoying, but since that stinky-breathed little rat wormed his way into my heart I’ve been longing for the feel of soft fur on my face, for that easy company that comes with zero expectations outside of affection and meat. I love walking the dogs, sneaking them bits of ham and trying out my songs on them.
Bit by bit, the memories of all the bad, humiliating parts of my time in LA made way for the good memories. The excitement I felt at being
in my body for the first time in so long, the warm, ticklish feeling of the sun on my skin, the pride I had felt at trying new things I had been scared of, of interesting new people and eating marijuana ice-cream. Gary… I realised pretty quickly that I wanted more of those types of feelings. Of course in Brigglesford the energy and excitement isn’t as frantic and exciting as it was in Venice Beach. But it’s not nothing.
Imogene and I have been hanging out a lot more, which has been so lovely. She’s in a much better place now that she confronted Dan about how fed up she was with his lack of input into the family. He was horrified and, like me, had thought that Imogene was doing absolutely fine. Once he found out the truth, he started making a real effort to do more than his fair share around the house and with Ariana. I mean, I will always think that she’s too good for him, but she loves him and, as I now undoubtedly know, you can’t help who you love. At least he’s stepping up at last.
On the way to the hotel, I pass the billboard I’ve been seeing everywhere over the past couple weeks. It’s a poster for Gary’s next movie, Nightcar. The one he was filming while I was there. It’s being released early next year. The poster shows him sitting behind the wheel of a neon-lit car, staring intensely off into the distance. His face makes me catch my breath.
I smile sadly, my heart aching with a strength that hasn’t diminished one bit since I got back home. I might have fixed some of the holes in my life, or at least started to, but the hole in my heart feels like it will be there until the day I croak.
The one thing Imogene didn’t get right about me and my problems was her belief that Gary couldn’t possibly be my soulmate. If I know one thing now, I know that I was right the whole time. He is my soulmate. Well, was.
I read online that Gary had split up with Tori Gould, who is now very publicly dating a fitness Youtuber with three million subscribers. He also fired Aileen and, after finishing his Nightcar shoot, just disappeared from any sort of public life. He was never on social media anyway, but there was nothing about him on any of the gossip blogs or in the newspapers. Someone on Reddit claimed they saw him in Texas with his dad and another woman. Someone else claimed they saw him on a silent retreat in Bali, but they couldn’t ask if it was him because of the whole silent retreat thing.
He Will Be Mine: The brand new laugh out loud page turner! Page 29