by Sue Limb
‘It was Jess Jordan!’ shouted somebody.
‘No, no, that beautiful stranger couldn’t be Jess Jordan. I haven’t met Jess Jordan but I hear she’s one of the ugly sisters.’ Fred glanced briefly into the wings, where Jess was standing, and winked. It was obviously meant to be a joke, but in Jess’s present state of mind she received it as a slap in the face. ‘Well,’ he went on, ‘whoever that ravishing creature was, I shall spend the rest of my life searching for her, and until I find her, no other woman will turn my head for a moment. Although if any of you ladies would like to kiss my shoe buckle, you’re welcome to form a queue. Thank you for coming, and goodnight!’
A midnight-style blast of music, complete with chimes, rang out. Jess, peeping from the wings, saw Fred vanish in the direction of the bar, and the whole hall was swamped with cheering. The awfulness of the past few weeks with Fred, culminating in him literally stealing what should have been her comedy triumph, overwhelmed Jess, and she darted back to her dressing room, fighting back tears of absolute rage.
Chapter 34
Moments later, Flora arrived with Jack. She threw herself into Jess’s arms and gave her the biggest hug ever.
‘You were brilliant!’ she yelled. ‘It was terrific! The whole evening really rocked! Come out and meet your public!’
Jess realised that she had to go out because, apart from anything else, she hadn’t thanked all the people who had helped her: Mum and Dad, Martin and Polly, Ben Jones and his cousin Melissa … She should really have thanked them in her farewell speech, but her farewell speech had been brushed aside by Fred’s relentless egotism.
People were leaving, waving and calling goodbye to one another, the hall was emptying, and Dad was already up a ladder fiddling with some lights. Jess found Polly and all her mates – they’d cleared the buffet away long ago and were chilling out, sitting along the edge of the stage.
‘Thanks so much!’ Jess told them. ‘The buffet was just amazingly delicious, and it all went like clockwork!’
‘Our pleasure!’ said Polly. ‘Any time you’re holding another event, just let us know!’
‘Sure!’ said Jess, though privately she had promised herself that she would never organise another event as long as she lived. Then Martin appeared.
‘Thanks so much, Martin – the band was terrific!’ cried Jess, giving him a grateful hug. She hoped that Martin would be around in her life from now on, but it all depended on Mum really. And on Dad, currently only visible from the knees down as he was up a ladder, fiddling with some lights.
‘The lighting was amazing,’ murmured Flora with a sigh. ‘That mirror ball! And all those lasers! It was just stunning!’
Jess looked around the thinning crowds for Fred. She had to confront him – she was seething. Maybe he would be helping his dad.
‘I have to thank Fred’s dad for running the bar,’ she said. ‘I won’t be a minute!’
She went off to the side room, where Mr Parsons was packing glasses away in a box.
‘Thanks so much for running the bar, Mr Parsons!’ Jess gushed. ‘You were absolutely wonderful!’
‘I’ll have their guts for garters, never fear,’ he replied with his usual charismatic gloominess. She supposed this must refer to Frobisher’s Filthy Glasses Ltd.
‘Is Fred not here? I thought he’d be helping you?’ she asked.
Mr Parsons shrugged. ‘He could be anywhere,’ he said with a melancholy sigh, as if Fred was regularly glimpsed on the ceiling, up the chimney, or hanging from the minute hand of the town-hall clock.
‘Well, thanks so much for helping out,’ she blustered, moving towards the door. Mr Parsons was so weird. Still, he had run the bar for them. This was the longest conversation she had ever had with him, and she was going to keep things like that.
Back in the hall, there were now only a few groups of people laughing and gathering their things together. No Fred. Jess smiled falsely to the last few departing friends while blazing with hidden fury. Fred couldn’t just go home and pretend that that was it, everything was sorted. How dare he?
If she couldn’t find him, she’d have to phone him when she got home and tell him just what a stupid, thoughtless, destructive thing he’d done. First, though, she had to get her coat – now the hall was emptying, she could feel cold air sneaking in from the lobby. She shivered and went backstage to her dressing room again.
There was Fred, coming out of it! He looked startled and embarrassed.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I was just leaving you a note.’
‘A note?’ Somehow the idea of a note filled Jess with even more indignation. She dragged Fred into the dressing room and shut the door. ‘Couldn’t face me, huh?’ she demanded.
Fred cringed. ‘No, no,’ he stammered. ‘It’s just – I’ve got to go now – I think my flu has come back. I shouldn’t really have come out tonight.’
‘You bet you shouldn’t have come out tonight!’ yelled Jess. ‘Have you any idea what you’ve just done?’
For an instant Fred looked genuinely stunned and puzzled. ‘Done?’ he asked dumbly.
‘You ruined my routine!’ cried Jess. ‘I’d worked out this really brilliant, brilliant routine, all about Cinderella – I’ve been working on it all week, at the same time, may I remind you, as having to organise this whole event! OK, I turn up, really looking forward to the hosting bit, and you just come barging in and upstage me in front of everybody!’
‘But …’ Fred’s lip trembled. In the harsh light of the dressing room, Jess could see beads of sweat breaking out across his brow. ‘I thought you’d be pleased that I turned up and gave you some support.’
‘Support?’ screamed Jess. ‘Pleased? Pleased that you hijacked the whole evening and didn’t let me get a word in? Pleased that I worked for hours polishing great gags that I never got a chance to deliver? Pleased that I didn’t have a clue what you were going to say next? Pleased I had to improvise, and that I was lame and stupid when I actually managed to get a word in, which was almost never?! I was so freakin’ pleased with the whole situation that when you bounded off the stage and disappeared after your amoeba thing, I completely dried up! My mind was a total blank! My ears were horrible and roaring and I thought I was going to faint! If that’s what you call support, you can keep it!’
‘Phew!’ said Fred after a pause, wiping his brow. ‘I think I might be going to faint myself.’
‘Go home, then!’ hissed Jess, incredulous and seething because he still didn’t seem to realise what he’d done. Instead of apologising, he had grabbed the limelight yet again – he was going to faint now, and his faintingness was going to be so much more important than hers! ‘Go home and go to bed.’ She glared defiantly at him.
He hesitated in his gangling way, which she had so often found adorable. But not now. Now it was infuriating.
‘Yes, I’ll be off,’ said Fred. ‘I’ll see you – sometime.’ And he turned round and went away, shutting the door behind him.
Jess began to shake and shiver. Her mind was reeling from the row. This was the worst that things had ever been between them. She reached for her coat and scarf. Then she noticed there was an envelope propped against the mirror – Fred’s note! Her heart lurched. She stopped for a moment. Looking down at her own hands holding the envelope, she noticed her fingers trembling like mad. It was irritating to be so upset. She ripped the envelope open and inside was a folded piece of paper. On one side were lines she recognised from his amoeba routine, with a lot of crossings-out and added scribbles. He’d drawn a big line across those. She turned over. On the other side were the words he’d written to her:
Jess, you’re a bit of a legend to have organised all this. Your Cinderella thing was hilarious. Sorry I have been so totally useless all along. Thank you for refraining from strangling me – it’s these little courtesies that make life worth living. See you around – if you can spare the time for a fleeting glance at an invertebrate. Fred.
A riot of conflicting emotions flo
oded Jess’s heart. What was he hoping to achieve by this? To wheedle his way back into her affections? It was an apology, sure, but it wasn’t an apology for stealing her comedy evening – the worst thing he had ever done. He hadn’t seemed to realise how selfish he’d been. He’d enjoyed all the applause – applause which ought to have been hers.
OK, he’d praised her organisational skills and her stand-up routine had been ‘hilarious’. But she hadn’t had a chance to deliver the most hilarious bits. They’d been swept aside by his confident hogging of the limelight. Was it bad of her to feel so resentful? She couldn’t help it. She sat down on the hard, cheap little chair and stared at herself in the mirror. Her mascara was slightly smudged from her previous brush with tearfulness. Her cheeks were flushed. Her eyes were bright, but not in a good way. She looked like somebody who had escaped from a fire, shocked and scorched.
She found a big sigh waiting in her ribcage and let it out. She took her earrings off – she didn’t like their sparkle. She looked at her hands – they had stopped trembling. If only Fred had stayed at home with the flu! She would have had a wonderful success, and their relationship … well, they might have salvaged it. But now, she felt something truly awful – hatred. Hatred, for Fred? Impossible. Well, anger, perhaps.
She tore Fred’s note up and threw it in the bin. A fragment of it missed and fell on the floor. She scooped it up: if you can spare the time for a fleeting glance at an invertebrate. Then she decided what she was going to do. It just wasn’t acceptable for Fred to behave like this. To get back into her good books, he was going to have to change.
Like somebody in a fairytale, he was going to have to earn her respect all over again – from the beginning. If indeed he could be bothered. And if he couldn’t be bothered, so what? There were plenty more fish in the sea.
Jess sighed again, but this time with a faint sense of relief. She felt as if she had got control of herself again at last. She didn’t look too bad for a girl who had just been through a nervous breakdown and needed about three days’ sleep.
Somebody appeared in the mirror behind her. It was Mum.
‘Hi, love,’ she said softly. ‘Well done! The whole thing was a spectacular success, especially because Dad and Martin gave their services for free and everybody was very generous when the collection went round. I haven’t done all the sums yet but it looks as if you’ve made hundreds of pounds for Oxfam!’
‘Oh, brilliant!’ said Jess, cheerful to be thinking about something mega important, not her own little on-off love affair.
‘Did you see Fred?’ asked Mum. ‘Are things OK between you two now?’
‘So-so,’ said Jess, getting up and reaching for her coat. ‘But that’s OK. Give it time.’ She couldn’t face telling Mum all about it now.
‘The band was great, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes!’ said Jess. ‘Thanks so much for helping me out, Mum. If it hadn’t been for you and Dad and Martin, I’d have had to cancel the whole thing.’
‘The food was great, too,’ said Mum. ‘I suppose if I hadn’t had a dodgy date or two we’d never have met Polly.’
‘Right!’ agreed Jess. ‘Tell you what, Mum, let’s have a big Sunday lunch tomorrow and invite Martin, shall we?’
‘I don’t know …’ Mum hesitated. ‘Martin won’t be able to come – he’s flying out to Canada on Monday for some kind of showdown with his ex-wife.’
‘Oh?’ Jess was immediately concerned. She hadn’t even known that he had an ex-wife. Was it really a showdown, or could it turn into a reconciliation? ‘Men! Aren’t they useless?’ She sighed, and took Mum’s arm as they walked out into the hall. It was empty now apart from Dad, who was standing in the middle of the floor, winding a length of cable round his arm. He looked tired. ‘Not counting Dad, of course,’ she added affectionately.
Jess ran up and gave him a hug. ‘Thanks for the awesome lighting, Dad!’ she said. ‘It was utterly amazing!’
‘I’ll have to spend all tomorrow dismantling it and taking it back to Oxford,’ said Dad. ‘Jack and his brother said they’d help me, though. Really nice guys, those boys.’
Jess was silent, aware that for Fred to be unavailable with tragic flu only emphasised the difference between him and the tomfoolery gang. In some sense Fred wasn’t really ‘a normal bloke’. Even if he hadn’t been ill and he had tried to help dismantle the lights, he’d almost certainly have ended up breaking something. Fred always ended up breaking things … Jess didn’t want to take that thought any further.
‘And then, next week,’ announced Dad, ‘I start to look for a job and somewhere to live.’
‘So we’ve all got projects,’ said Jess thoughtfully.
‘What’s yours, love?’ asked Mum, taking her arm again.
‘I’ll tell you when we get home,’ said Jess.
She wasn’t sure if she would, though. Her ongoing melodrama with Fred was something she didn’t really fancy talking about. But in a way she was quite looking forward to it – it was a strange new adventure and Jess couldn’t wait for the next act to unfold.
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Chocolate SOS
Chapter 1
‘No!’ breathed Flora. ‘I can’t believe it! You and Fred haven’t really split up, have you, babe? Really?’
‘Really!’ Jess said sternly. ‘Really, really, really, really, really!’
‘But he was so funny in the hosting routine you did last night!’
Jess was silent for a moment – silent with a kind of white-hot, boiling, deep, volcanic rage. She hadn’t told Flora yet what a terrible thing Fred had done.
‘Oh yes!’ The words burst out of Jess’s mouth in a stream of fury. ‘He was absolutely hilarious, wasn’t he? Absolutely side-splitting. Ha, ha, ha!’
Flora stared in amazement at Jess’s harsh tone. ‘What … ?’ she faltered.
‘He’d left me to organise the whole dinner dance on my own, a week before the event! He said he was “resigning from the committee”. Hah! What committee? We were supposed to be running it together, just him and me. So basically what he meant was that he was dumping me in it and refusing to help me any more with anything. That was bad enough!’
Flora winced in sympathy.
‘So I told him I’d do the whole thing myself,’ Jess ranted on. ‘And that included the stand-up routine for the hosting bits, obviously. I mean, you can’t plan and rehearse a hosting routine if you’re not speaking to each other, can you? Besides, Fred had flu all last week. He wasn’t at school, so I just naturally assumed the hosting bit was totally my responsibility.’
‘Awesome!’ murmured Flora, gazing at Jess in admiration.
‘Yes. Well, I worked on my Cinderella routine, right?’
‘Right!’ Flora nodded. ‘And it was brilliant!’
‘I showed you bits while I was writing it, didn’t I? I really enjoyed working on that – you know, some great jokes just kind of bubbled up in my mind and I was so looking forward to performing it. Then, on the night, what happens? I nerved myself, stepped out into the spotlight and when I was only a couple of lines into my routine, Fred appeared from nowhere, dressed like a freakin’ amoeba, and jumped up on stage!’
‘You mean …’ Flora was struggling to get her head around this. ‘You mean that wasn’t rehearsed?’
‘No. It was a total shock to me. I had no idea what he was going to say next. He just hijacked my routine and went raving on about that amoeba stuff, and I had to stand there like a dummy while everybody cracked up.’
‘But, Jess, I’d never have guessed. You didn’t even look surprised. I mean, you seemed to have lots of banter and …’ Flora’s voice trailed away.
‘No!’ snapped Jess. ‘There was no banter! I managed to improvise a line or two – just to justify my existence, standing there like a lemon while he had the audience in stitches – but most of the material I’d worked on all week never got delivered. He stole the show – literally.’
‘So now maybe you understand,’ concluded Jess bitterly, ‘why I had to dump Fred.’
It was Sunday afternoon, the day after Chaos, the Valentine’s dinner dance, and Jess had gone round to Flora’s to talk it all through – because that’s what best mates are for. Flora’s dad had taken her mum out for Sunday lunch, her older sister Freya was away at Oxford and her younger sis Felicity was on an orchestra weekend, so Jess and Flora had the enormous cream sofa all to themselves.
‘But you and Fred, you’re just so obviously meant to be together!’ Flora’s huge blue eyes looked panicky and lost.
‘I used to think that.’ Jess shivered and snuggled more deeply under the elegant throw (100 per cent Italian cashmere, dove grey, no change from £300). ‘But Fred was worse than useless even when he was trying to help. Basically, he pretended to be organising stuff and then later admitted he hadn’t done anything! At the last minute, too! So I had to sort out the mess!’
‘Chaos was a terrific success though. You made oodles of money for charity.’
‘Only because my parents stepped in and sorted everything! I mean, we only had a band at all because my mum’s boyfriend just happened to be a jazz musician and some of his mates just happened to be free.’
‘But the band was great. And Martin seems a really nice guy.’ Flora picked idly at some chocolate peanuts laid out on a porcelain dish on the coffee table. She tended to nibble chocolatey things when stressed out – who doesn’t? ‘Maybe he and your mum will become an item, yeah? I mean, he could end up being your stepdad.’
‘I don’t think so.’ Jess shook her head doubtfully and rested it against a satin cushion decorated with a trail of tiny beads, like tears. ‘Guess where Martin is right now?’
Flora shrugged and looked intrigued.
‘On his way to Canada to have some kind of showdown with his ex.’