Magpie

  ‘Meet my mates.’ Ajesh ushered the two men forward. They were both in suits.

  ‘You’re both in suits,’ Kate said, stupidly.

  ‘That’s because they’re very important, and – unlike us – proper grown-ups with proper jobs, isn’t it fellas?’

  The taller suited man bent forwards and gave her a bright yellow box containing a brand of expensive champagne.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind us gatecrashing,’ he said. He had a nice face and his smile reached the corners of his eyes, which wrinkled in a satisfying way.

  ‘Thank you. This is much better than the stuff I normally drink.’

  ‘I told you, Katie. They’re classy as fuck.’

  ‘So how do you know them then?’

  Ajesh still had his arm around her waist and was stroking her hip with his hand. She was enjoying it, knowing that she looked good, that this was her night.

  ‘Well, Jake and Steve here’ – the shorter suited man winked at her – ‘are financing my next film.’

  ‘Not all of it,’ Jake said, still smiling. ‘Just enough of it to get invited to a beautiful woman’s thirtieth birthday party.’

  She raised her eyebrows. She felt herself loosen, as if all her muscles were relaxing under the steady weight of Jake’s gaze. Carefully, in case the moment broke, she took Ajesh’s hand in hers and removed it from her hip. She took a single step forward, moving towards Jake. She needed, she realised, to be close to him. His suit, which she had previously thought was black, turned out to be a dark navy. He wasn’t wearing a tie – she would discover later that he had taken it off and folded it into his jacket pocket. The top two buttons of his shirt were undone, revealing a triangle of skin she wanted immediately to lick. She wanted to reach up on her tiptoes, lean into the big, safe bulk of his body and press her lips against every inch of him. She had never felt such a conspicuous physical urge and in that single quick moment, Kate realised that all of the sex she had had up to that point, all of the flirtations and relationships and kisses, had been a superficial precursor to this. She had been doing it wrong all this time. She had been playing in the sandpit, when there was a wild expanse of beach to explore.

  The odd thing was, they didn’t even talk that much. It was as if there had been a tacit agreement as soon as Jake walked through the pub door and into her party, that this was simply how things would be. It was inevitable in its recklessness.

  She can’t remember much after that initial burst of excitement. The rest of the evening comes to her in flashes. The two of them dancing to ‘Mr. Brightside’, jumping up and down, sweaty and grinning, Jake’s shirt half untucked from his trousers, the suit jacket long ago abandoned. Drinking the champagne he had brought from the neck of the bottle, Jake tipping the bottom up so that she could get the final dregs, his eyes meeting hers over the yellow-labelled glass. She made a speech and welled up when she saw all her friends in front of her, but really she had just wanted to impress Jake with what she said as he stood at the very back of the room, tall enough to see over everyone else’s heads. Licking the tip of her finger as Ajesh handed her a tiny plastic packet of powder and dunking it in. The lights and the music and the feeling of utter rightness. And then, when everyone was high or drunk or both, the sensation of Jake grabbing her hand and pulling her out into the corridor, pushing her against the wall and holding the back of her head in his large palm as he kissed her, his tongue deep, pressing the weight of his body into hers.

  The kiss was long and when he pulled back, he cupped her face with his hands, running the tips of his thumbs across the soft skin underneath her eyes.

  ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘Hello.’

  He spent a lot of time at her flat. She lived in a one-bed and there wasn’t really room for a 6ft4 man to move in permanently. He said he didn’t mind, and he left his clothes in a neat pile at the bottom of her wardrobe, never complaining that his shirts would be creased when he lifted them out each morning to get dressed for work. She would watch him put on his trousers, do up his belt and shrug his arms into his jacket before looping his tie into a perfect Windsor knot, and she would be amazed at how adult he seemed.

  There were only three years between them, but Kate’s work did not require her to wear formal clothes or act like a grown-up. Quite the opposite, in fact. In film, it was a positive asset to seem as though you were perpetually in your early twenties. Her offices were in the heart of Soho and most nights of the week, she would still go out for drinks with her colleagues – the men in heavy-framed spectacles and box-fresh trainers thinking they were hip-hop stars; the women in combat trousers and straightened hair thinking they were athleisure models. Once or twice a week, the drinks would turn into all-nighters and a rag-tag group of them would end up in the Groucho in the early hours, eyes glittering, noses twitching as they piled into a single toilet cubicle and shared out lines of coke, despite the sign hanging on the wall that said ‘This Club Operates A Strict No-Drugs Policy’.

  Afterwards, they would stagger through the streets arm in arm, walking in the middle of the road with youthful bluster as black cabbies beeped their horns and shouted at them to get out of the way. They waited for the night bus as street-cleaners started clearing the pavements and they would go home, get a couple of hours’ sleep, and then go back into work, wearing dark glasses and leopard-print and eyeliner, still out of it from the night before. Speckles of last night’s glitter on their faces, sticking like burrs to the hem of a skirt.

  They were inviolable. They were having fun – so much conscious, declarative, necessary fun – that it seemed the only way to live. They pitied the men in suits, the ‘fat cats’, the chief executives, the wage slaves, the bankers and the management consultants and defined themselves in opposition to them. Never mind that they got paid less, that they had no pensions, that their bosses used them as glorified student interns. It was the principle of the thing that counted, whatever that principle was. The personal was political, they would say to each other, nodding fervently but not really sure what it meant. They were anarchists, re-writing the rules of work, of life, of the world their parents had inherited. Except they were also just producing movies and marketing the make-believe and going to free private screenings with miniature bottles of mineral water and triangular sandwiches from Pret on plastic trays where they would ask journalists to sign non-disclosure agreements and email them afterwards to ask them their thoughts. But the moral worth of their work or the inherent contradictions in their position never seemed questionable as long as they voted Labour and did their recycling.

  Part of Kate’s role when she had first joined the company was to help organise the junkets where a hotel suite would be booked for two days and the actors, accompanied by their entourage of assistants and trainers and scented-candle-lighters, would sit in an overstuffed armchair, enveloped in a mist of unlikely glamour, as interviewers from newspapers and magazines and radio and television would come and ask the same questions over and over again.

  ‘What was it like to work with so-and-so?’

  ‘How did you prepare for the role?’

  ‘Why did you and [insert name of celebrity spouse here] break up?’

  And, exclusively to the women with children: ‘How do you manage to juggle it all?’

  And, exclusively to the women without children: ‘Do you want a family?’

  Kate would listen discreetly from the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the marble-lined basin, keeping an ear out for questions that had been specifically banned beforehand by the celebrity’s team. It was awkward. She wasn’t meant to be sitting in on the interview, and yet everyone involved knew she would be and if she heard the journalist straying into uncomfortable territory, she had to appear from the bathroom like a hologram and shut the interview down. Kate hated doing this and always felt nervous beforehand. Often, the journalists were much older than she was and it felt strange telling them off, as i
f she were denying free speech, not that she wanted to get all deep about it. But why shouldn’t they be able to ask what they wanted, and why wasn’t the celebrity capable of saying they didn’t want to answer?

  She had asked her boss, Mica, the head of the marketing department, about this once and Mica had looked her straight in the eye and said, ‘Because celebrities are like overgrown babies and need other people to do everything for them. They lose the capacity to make their own decisions.’

  Kate had given a short, nervous laugh. ‘That’s a bit of a generalisation, isn’t it?’

  Mica looked at her. She wore big gold hoop earrings and matt coral lipstick and her hair was close-cropped against her skull and she was intimidating, in her way.

  ‘Babe, it’s not your job to question why it’s done the way it’s done,’ Mica said. ‘It’s your job to do it. OK?’

  ‘OK, but—’

  ‘No. You see, that’s what we’re not doing, babe. We’re not making this into a two-way discussion. We don’t want all our lovely film publicity being hijacked by some airhead saying she … I don’t know … Hitler wasn’t all bad.’

  Kate snorted. ‘As if.’

  ‘You’d be surprised, babe,’ Mica said, standing up from her desk and crossing her arms so that her gold bracelets jangled. ‘You’d be surprised.’

  Kate took Mica’s advice and did as she was told, working her way up through the marketing department until she replaced her old boss, who left to found a lifestyle brand producing high-end leggings and crystal face-rollers, saying she had ‘burned out’ and needed to live a slower paced, more meaningful existence. Kate had bought some stuff from the website once. It was nice, if overpriced. The leggings, when they came, had vertical gold zips at the ankles.

  A few months later, one of the company’s films had tanked at the box office after the director gave a press conference in which he said he thought a book written by a notorious holocaust denier was ‘not without merit’ and Kate remembered what Mica had said. She hadn’t even been shocked, as she drafted a crisis management memo to the film’s distributors, at what the director had said. Kate’s entire focus had been handling the fallout, distracting the press and drafting an apology that the director would later sign without having read. They posted the apology on Twitter and it got 25,000 likes.

  Now, Kate saw girls like her starting out with similar idealism and cluelessness, and she realised how annoying Mica must have found her and that she, too, had become hardened to the business – imperceptibly at first, and then all at once, so it seemed to happen overnight. She lost her love for mainstream film and forgot about her previous beliefs in the power of art to change people and she became cynical about the publicity stunts and the gross expense of the junket hotel suites and the endless lobbying at film festivals and the stupid requests from Hollywood A-listers to find a macrobiotic chef at 3 a.m. in Soho. Which is why, when Ajesh had asked her to help with Badolescent, she’d leaped at the chance. She had enjoyed caring about something; working late into the night on the fold-away table in the front room that doubled up as a desk. She had stopped going out as much with her colleagues and found that she didn’t miss it. She was older now, and lacked the energy, and the coke was getting tiring and she was ready for something to shift, as if she were playing a computer game and waiting for the next level to unlock. When Jake had walked into her thirtieth birthday party, she knew. She knew that this was the thing she had been waiting for. It wasn’t just him. It was everything he represented. Adulthood. Togetherness. Settling down. Opting out.

  He was so sincere, and this is what she liked. He didn’t operate in her world, didn’t understand it. He was not swayed by the glitz or impressed by the names. He liked numbers and spreadsheets and mathematical sums that made sense. But he also liked her a lot, this much was obvious. After three months, he asked her to move in with him. Her flat was only rented but Jake, being sensible, had bought his before the property market boom. It was a split-level in a mansion block in Battersea near the park. The old Kate would have turned her nose up at it, believing it to be far too posh and establishment: a part of south-west London populated by young men in red trousers and puffy gilets who studied chartered surveying with the express purpose of one day managing their family estate. But thirty-year-old Kate decided not to be as judgemental as twenty-five-year-old Kate would have been. Besides, Jake’s salary dwarfed hers and he was offering to pay most of the mortgage, asking for only a nominal contribution from her.

  The flat itself was nicer than she had imagined: low ceilings but big windows; two bedrooms and one en-suite; the floors strewn with Moroccan rugs; a kitchen with floating white shelves filled with patterned crockery that Jake’s mother had given him. The main bathroom had a huge shower which Jake called a ‘wet room’.

  ‘It’s a shower, Jake,’ Kate insisted when she moved in.

  ‘It’s a wet room,’ he said, grabbing her lightly by the shoulders and pressing his thumbs into her back, massaging the knots loose. ‘That’s what the estate agent called it.’

  She laughed.

  ‘Oh well, in that case … I mean, estate agents always tell the truth, so …’

  He bent his head down and kissed her and she pressed herself against him, feeling the hard warmth of him and the dependable beat of his heart.

  ‘I love you,’ she said, and she had never meant it so much.

  The sex was good. It wasn’t, if she were going to be brutally honest, the best sex she had ever had but contextually, it worked. The context being that this was a good man who loved her. When she’d had amazing sex in the past, it had always been with unreliable narcissists who prided themselves on their performance and showed little interest in emotional attachment. She had mistaken the bubbles of anxiety in her stomach for a simmering romantic passion, wrongly believing that love felt unsettled, like a half-packed suitcase awaiting a trip that never comes.

  Jake, by contrast, was home. He felt safe. He was solicitous in the bedroom, always asking what she wanted, always concerned in case he was hurting her or making her uncomfortable or in some way not pleasing her, whereas really what Kate wanted was to be dominated and fucked, cleanly and without any conversation. She had too much conversation in her normal life to want it to continue in the bedroom. She was so sick of negotiation, so sick of people not knowing what they needed. But she felt this was shameful of her and her feminist self was appalled by her secret desires. So the normality of sex with Jake turned into its own kind of relief.

  The biggest turn-on about Jake was that he wanted her so much and this made her feel sensual and desired. The sex got better the more time they spent together. Jake began to learn how her body responded to his touch and Kate tried to switch off her thoughts until she existed as much as she could as a pure physical entity, and in this way, it worked. For a while, at least.

  14

  Looking back later, after their life imploded, Kate would challenge herself to pinpoint a moment in time when it had started to go awry. She wasn’t aware of the significance of it then, but in retrospect she eventually came to the conclusion that it was when she had met Jake’s mother. That was the first time there had been any tension between them, and it had stayed there, this discomfort, like a speck on the kitchen floor from a long-ago broken glass: unnoticeable until you stepped on it with your bare morning feet and the sharpness of it lodged under your skin.

  They had been together for six months when the invitation was issued from Annabelle. Jake’s mother called him every Sunday night at 5 p.m. for ‘a catch-up’. Kate could hear the strident tinkle of her voice on the other end of the phone when he chatted to her on the sofa in the living room and Jake would sound different when he talked to her. More needy, somehow, as if he were still craving approval.

  Kate found it odd that a grown man should have such a regimented yet cloying relationship with his mother. On the rare occasion that Jake would forget t
he 5 p.m. slot, Annabelle would be defensive and hurt. Once, Kate and Jake had been to the cinema on Sunday evening and when they emerged into the night, he had turned on his phone to four missed calls and three messages from Annabelle, each one increasingly frantic about his whereabouts.

  ‘Fuck,’ Jake had said. ‘I’d better call her. She’ll worry otherwise.’

  ‘OK,’ Kate replied, removing herself from his arm. She wasn’t going to interfere but she still wanted him to know it was weird.

  He had called, and Annabelle had been mollified, and the next day he had arranged to send her a bouquet of flowers, which Kate definitely thought was overkill.

  ‘I guess I should be glad that the only other woman in your life is your mother,’ she joked, even though it wasn’t really a joke.

  ‘You’re the only one I want to have sex with.’

  It wasn’t quite reassuring enough. He hadn’t, she noticed, criticised Annabelle or sought to distance himself from her.

  ‘Well that’s a relief.’

  ‘She’ll love you.’

  Again, it wasn’t what Kate had needed to hear.

  The subject had been dropped. Jake told her their closeness was because he was the only boy, and the eldest, and as such Annabelle relied on him. But it seemed odd she didn’t turn to her daughters or to her husband, Jake’s father. ‘Oh, Chris isn’t much good at that sort of thing,’ Jake said, with a matter-of-factness that suggested he was parroting someone else’s long-held view. He called his father by his first name when he wanted to diminish him.

  ‘What sort of thing?’ she asked.

  ‘I mean, he’s very affable and nice and all that, but he doesn’t have much of a backbone. Mum’s the strong one.’

  ‘I thought he was a doctor?’

  ‘Retired GP. He was never exactly a high-flyer.’

  ‘What about your sisters?’