I can feel my breath starting to come in long, slow exhalations that end with a slight grunt. My eyes are fixed on Nolan’s disgusting green car, as he weaves his way between the traffic.
Where is he going?
Is he going to her place? Are they meeting for some hot, hard morning sex? I bet that’s it! I just bet it is!
If that is the case, Nolan is obviously buying some contraceptives, because he’s just parked outside a convenience store.
I pull in, several car lengths back, and wait for him to come back out again.
On impulse, I pull out my mobile phone, and bring up the camera. I have the overwhelming desire to record what Nolan’s up to. Maybe it’s because I feel like I’ve suddenly entered a bad spy novel, or maybe it’s just that I want to make sure I have proof of his infidelity when I do confront him.
Nolan emerges from the convenience store – but it’s not condoms he’s come out with.
It’s cigarettes.
Standing right in front of his horrible green BMW, he unwinds the cellophane around the packet, opens it, pulls out a cigarette, and lights it with a box of matches.
What the actual, actual, ACTUAL fuck?
Nolan doesn’t smoke! I’ve never seen him smoke!
Is his fancy woman a weirdo who likes the smell of tobacco on a man? I guess she must be, otherwise why would he be sparking up like this? Maybe she also loves the stench of petrol, hence the stupid gas guzzler.
But why would environmental crusader Nolan Reece want to be around a woman like that?
I am utterly confused, horrified and distressed as Nolan gets back into his BMW and starts it up again.
I then proceed to follow him around the streets, still keeping my distance so as not to be noticed.
In my ongoing desire to capture everything that Nolan is doing, I put my car’s dashcam on continuous record, so that I have proof of all of his movements as we drive along.
OH MY GOD.
He just flicked a cigarette butt out of the window!
Nolan just LITTERED.
I blink a couple of times at the enormity of it. I can’t believe my eyes. I’ll have to look back at the footage on the dashcam later to make sure it actually happened.
And where is he going now?
KFC?
He’s turning into the drive-through at KF motherfucking C?
I have to park the Mercedes across the road, in an industrial unit’s car park, because my legs have started to shake so much I can’t control the accelerator pedal properly.
Is this woman insane? She wants her man to stink of fags, petrol and fried chicken?
And how good must she be in bed for Nolan to go along with all of this?
I watch – with my phone camera and my dashcam recording – as my soon-to-be very ex-boyfriend gives his order at the drive-through window, grabs his purchase as soon as it’s ready, and parks the big green monstrosity in the KFC main car park. There he proceeds to devour several pieces of KFC’s finest fried chicken, and guzzles an enormous milkshake.
He then sparks up another cigarette, and sits back in his car seat with a very contented look on his face.
I am at the opposite end of contented.
I am so far away from contented that I may never be able to feel contented ever again in my natural life, without swallowing a bucket of diazepam.
And I’m starting to think I might have read this entire situation wrong . . .
These are not the actions of a man about to go and have sex with a secret lover.
I don’t really know what kind of man these are the actions of, but I’m pretty sure no man on Earth would think covering himself in chicken grease and cigarette smoke is the best way of getting a woman in the mood for love.
So, this begs the question . . . what is Nolan up to?
I have to let out an audible gasp when I watch him drop his brown KFC paper bag out of the window.
I can see a rubbish bin not ten yards away from where he’s sat!
Nolan then pulls out of the car park in his loud, stupid car, and proceeds to roar away at a great rate of knots, forcing me to get going as quickly as I can so I don’t lose him.
The spy thriller then moves into an action chase sequence, as Nolan decides to open the taps on his awful BMW along the motorway. It’s a good job the fucking thing is the garish shade of green that it is, otherwise I would lose him, given the speed he’s going. It also helps that he keeps revving the engine, which produces a loud bark of exhaust noise that is hard to fucking miss.
I repeatedly check that my dashcam is pointing in the right direction, to make sure I capture all of this reckless, wasteful driving for posterity.
Several miles down the road, Nolan takes the slipway off the motorway, and drives down into Whitehaven Shopping Centre.
I haven’t been here since that day with the Worriors For The Plonet.
In my time at Viridian PR, I’ve come to learn just how environmentally unsound the kinds of clothes that are sold in places like this are. Nolan himself once lectured me about the evils of disposable fashion. How the clothes are made in sweatshops, by unscrupulous manufacturers, using production techniques that send tonnes of chemicals into rivers and lakes every year.
So this is my first time back to Whitehaven, and I’m doing it in the strangest and most awful circumstances I can possibly think of.
My lovely boyfriend Nolan Reece – my lovely boss Nolan Reece – is acting so completely out of character that he might as well be another man. And it scares me to death, to be honest. Who have I been seeing all this time?
I’ll tell you who:
A man who has just bought a shitload of clothes in Primark!
Fucking PRIMARK, everybody.
The absolute king of throwaway, disposable fashion!
I’ve just spent the last fifteen minutes creeping around behind Nolan with my iPhone grasped in one shaking hand – trying to remain concealed behind the mountains of sweatpants and onesies – watching him grab a whole pile of cheaply made clothes. This includes several pairs of plain black boxer shorts. The same kind of boxer shorts I’ve seen him wearing before. And the same kind of boxer shorts he told me were organically produced by bloody Hempawear!
They’re not Hempawear! They’re fucking Primark!
He must’ve just cut the bloody labels out!
Incandescent with rage doesn’t even begin to cover it now. I am fucking NUCLEAR with it. It’s taking every ounce of my being not to leap out from behind this stack of £10 skinny jeans and confront him right here and now on the shop floor.
I gaze on in horror through the screen of my iPhone as I record him paying for his pile of offensive clothing and walking back out of the store with a stuffed Primark bag.
‘Is he cheating on you?’ a voice says from just beside me.
I whirl round to see a woman in her mid-forties holding a pair of jeans and regarding me with a solemn expression.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Is he cheating on you? I had that same look on my face when I hunted Derek around Tesco on Valentine’s Day,’ she explains. ‘He was buying her a box of Ferrero Rocher and a bunch of flowers. I got a cheap card and a Creme Egg.’
‘No . . . no, I don’t think he’s cheating on me. It’s even worse.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘Yes. I think he’s cheating on the planet.’
I don’t give Jeans Lady time to respond, as I want to make sure I keep up with Nolan for the next stage of his secret sojourn into the life of a wasteful prick.
There’s a sticky moment in Whitehaven car park when he nearly sees me, but I manage to duck behind a Veganthropy Foods delivery van before he does.
Oh, what would Mordred O’Hare think of Nolan’s actions today? What would he do?
Place some sort of curse on him, involving toads and a sprig of heather, possibly. I don’t have access to such pagan magic though, so I’ll just have to think of something else.
. . . and what woul
d Robert Ainslie Blake think about Nolan’s actions, for that matter? Why, he’d probably think he was looking into a fucking mirror. The seats in that stupid muscle car look like they’re more than wide enough for a bit of hardcore manspreading.
Nolan actually heads for home now, still driving the muscle car like a complete bellend. If he revs that engine much harder, he’s likely to develop a clobberdy-bang of epic proportions.
Thanks to the speed he insists on going, we arrive back at his street in no time at all.
I watch Nolan park up and get out of the vomit-green BMW with his bag of Primark nastiness – again with that furtive look on his face – and make his way back across the street to his house.
Right. That’s quite enough of all of this malarkey. It’s time to confront Nolan and find out what the hell is going on!
It’s very important I do this while he’s holding the evidence of his crimes.
My efforts at subterfuge now gratefully set aside, I pull the Mercedes up right in front of his house, jump out, and attempt to dramatically slam the car door to alert him to my presence. Annoyingly, the hybrid has a special soft-close system that means the door shuts with barely a clunk, no matter how hard I try to slam it.
Damn me and my sensible car choices!
I’ll just have to scuttle over without the dramatic introduction, I guess.
Actually, I’m done scuttling. I’m going to fucking stomp, and there’s not a damn thing anyone can do to stop me.
Nolan still doesn’t appear to notice me however – given that he has his head down and that stupid hoodie up over his face – so he’s putting the keys in the front door before I reach him.
But when I do, he sure as hell knows I’m there, because I slap him hard on his left shoulder.
‘Waaaa!’ he exclaims in shock, dropping the bag of Primark goodies (baddies?) on the doorstep. He swings around wildly, forcing me back down the steps. I start to lose my balance and pinwheel my arms to try to maintain it.
This is not the look I wanted to present. I wanted to be standing there with my hands on my hips like an irate Wonder Woman – not flailing around like I’m in an amateur dramatics production of Wuthering Heights.
I manage to steady myself on the pavement enough to look up at Nolan with towering indignation. I’d ideally like to have the high ground here, but this will just have to do. I’m pretty sure I have the moral high ground regardless.
‘Ellie?!’ Nolan blurts out, the blood draining from his face.
‘Yes! Ellie! ’ I roar back at him. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, Nolan?!’
Of course, this is not the way one should talk to one’s boss. Under any circumstances. It’s a guaranteed one-way ticket to unemployment town. But of course, I’m not talking to my boss now, am I? That relationship has been superseded by the other one.
‘What do you mean?’
Oh!
Look at that guilt! Just look at it!
‘You know exactly what I mean!’ I point at the Primark bag. ‘You! Yooooouuuuu!’ I howl accusingly, stabbing my finger down at it again.
Nolan yanks the hoodie off his head and takes off the sunglasses. The jig is up, and he knows it. ‘It’s not what it looks like!’ he entreats.
‘Not what it looks like?!’
‘No!’
‘You mean to say you haven’t spent the entire day driving around in that fucking green thing over there, smoking cigarettes, eating fried chicken, littering everywhere . . . and buying Primark pants?!’ For some reason, it’s the last thing that really gets my free-range goat. ‘Primark pants, Nolan!’ I point at his crotch. ‘You wear Primark pants!’
He also looks down at his crotch with mounting horror. I hope it’s because he realises he’s not getting anywhere near my pants again (genuine Hempawear, I should add – I still have to use creams every now and then), unless he comes up with a decent explanation for his behaviour pretty fucking quickly.
‘You’ve been following me?’ he eventually says, looking back up at me.
‘Yes, Nolan! I have been following you! And I’ve seen what you’ve been doing!’
‘No! No! It’s really not what it looks like! I’ve been . . . role playing. Yes, role playing.’ His expression changes to the thoughtful one he always gets when he’s had an idea for Viridian PR and is bouncing it off me. ‘I wanted to spend a day in the shoes of an ordinary person, you know? Get inside their head and try to—’
‘Don’t you even bother!’ I interrupt. ‘There’s no way you’d do something like that! At least, there’s no way the Nolan I thought I knew would do something like that! Tell me the truth! What’s going on? Why are you acting like this?’
For a moment Nolan’s face contorts like it’s being pinched by invisible hands. He’s obviously weighing up the situation and trying to devise an excuse that I might believe.
My face, however, tells him in no uncertain terms that there is nothing he can tell me right now that will sate my rage. He might as well come clean. I have him bang to rights and he knows it.
‘I can’t take it any more!’ he eventually screams, his voice echoing around the street. ‘I thought I could live like a greenie for as long as I needed to. For as long as it took to really establish Viridian PR.’ His face crumples. ‘But it’s impossible! If I have to look at another fucking tofu stir fry again, I’ll kill myself!’
‘What do you mean, live like a greenie?’
He waves a hand. ‘You know . . . like one of them. The vegan types. The climate-change weirdos. The beardy weirdies.’
‘The beardy weirdies?’
‘Yeah! The beardy weirdies. All of that bunch.’
I am utterly astounded, and not a little devastated. ‘Are you telling me . . . are you telling me, Nolan, that you’ve been faking it this entire time?’
He shrugs his shoulders. ‘Of course I have.’
If I clench my fists any tighter, my nails are going to draw blood. And I’m not necessarily talking about mine.
‘WHY?’ I screech like an enraged fishwife.
He plasters himself against the front door. ‘Because . . . because I wanted to make Viridian PR profitable!’
‘What?!’
‘There’s a lot of money in environmental stuff, Ellie,’ he attempts to explain. ‘You know that. And they don’t have that many people fighting their corner, so I thought it’d be a good idea to target them. Get them all on board with a company that understands them. Get the business really going, before—’
He stops himself, his eyes suddenly going very wide.
‘Before what?’ I demand.
‘Nothing!’
My eyes flash. ‘You’d better say what you were going to, Nolan, otherwise I’m likely to start doing things to your person that we will both regret.’
He gulps.
‘Talk!’ I demand.
He gulps again, but does indeed speak. ‘Before I . . . before I sell it off.’
‘Sell it off?!’
‘Yes! That’s the endgame with these things! Get a company up and running, get loads of clients, and then sell both to the highest bidder once you’ve earned a good reputation. There’s millions to be had.’ He gives me an imploring look. ‘And I’ve tried my hardest to keep up the environmental lifestyle, but it just gets too much. I have to go off and . . . you know . . . let off some steam every now and again.’
Oh Christ.
That’s where he’s been going on his little sojourns out of the office! I thought he was touting for business, but he’s really been cramming his face with fast food and polluting the atmosphere like an absolute arsehole! He hasn’t been avoiding me because of what happened at Irene McClapperty’s!
I’m speechless.
My blood has run cold.
I can feel the edges of my vision starting to blur.
I think I’m about to have a panic attack.
No you bloody don’t, missus. You didn’t have a panic attack with your head stuck in other people’s s
hit and piss, and you’re not going to have one now.
I bite my lip painfully hard, to bring myself out of it.
It works, but now I’ve tasted blood, I want more of it.
‘You lied! You lied to me!’ I screech.
I hope the neighbours are all out at work, otherwise they’re going to have their afternoon ruined by all of this shouting.
Who cares though? I am clearly never coming back here again, so I am going to go to bloody town on Nolan Reece – in a golden carriage pulled by fucking horses.
‘You lied to everyone!’ I continue, scarcely able to believe what I’m saying.
My entire relationship with Nolan Reece has been built on a massive falsehood. Both as a boss and a lover, everything about him has been a lie. Everything I knew about the person I may well have been falling for has been completely manufactured, just in the pursuit of financial gain!
You did the same thing though, Ellie. Remember?
No!
No! I am not having that!
I was just trying to save my job! Save my skin! I wasn’t trying to manipulate dozens of people just to sell them down the river when the time was right!
And besides . . . I’m not that person any more. I’ve had my eyes opened, goddamn it.
Unfortunately, all of that started with this lying charlatan standing in front of me, and that’s why I’m so bloody angry.
Nolan contrives to look apologetic. ‘I was going to share it all with you though, Ellie! I was going to tell you everything!’
‘Rubbish! I don’t believe you!’
‘I was! Once Viridian was in the right position, I was going to sit down with you, and go through the next stages. You would have been instrumental in helping me sell the business off!’
‘Oh, would I?!’
‘Yes! Especially if someone like Mr Ainslie Blake was keen on buying it. You could have sweet-talked him for me, given . . . you know . . .’
Instantly, all of the warmth in the whole universe is sucked into an inescapable oblivion.
‘Robert?’ I hiss.
Nolan actually looks terrified. ‘Yes. He . . . he could have been a buyer. He wanted to improve his property development company’s image – and diversify his portfolio. What better way to do that than owning your own PR firm? And, you know, because you dated him, you might have been able to . . . to . . .’
Going Green Page 27