After the big meeting, Faith had to rush back to her office. She breezily mentioned something about taking a three-month sabbatical so she could do Eat Me with me, that it sounded like it might be a hoot, though after the meeting ended abruptly when the executives called time, neither of us are entirely sure what she may have landed us into. We have to wait until Timothy’s professional agent gets in touch with the new contract. In any event, I was less inclined to kick up my heels and celebrate. Wine, copious amounts of wine, seemed the solution.
We started at the pub, about thirty of us from work. Tuesday night – I didn’t plan on staying out. What happened was I didn’t want to come home.
Steadying my feet on the pavement in my Jimmy Choo shoes – so much for not kicking up my heels – I wave the driver on.
I put my mobile back to my ear. ‘Faith, I fell out of the cab.’
‘You’re home?’
‘Almost!’
At the stairs leading up to my front door, I grip the handrail for stability.
One step, two steps… a small trip and a few more staggers and I’m onto the landing. Now, keys? Keys? Where are you, keys?
Tucking my phone beneath my chin, I search inside my bag. My mobile crashes to the tiles. Shhhhhiiiit. Picking it up, I’m relieved it’s intact. Faith is still on the line.
‘Gracie, you okay?’
I’m acutely aware it’s only a very best friend who would put up with me being this annoyingly intoxicated, this late at night, this early in the week. Having wrapped the deal at her work, Faith was sleeping soundly when I called and woke her up to chat. For my entire cab ride home from Soho to Maida Vale, she listened patiently as I repeated myself down the line.
I find my keys and enter the building and then my flat.
‘Gracie, are you home?’
‘Sort of. Yes. I’m in.’
Tripping through the doorway, I hope I don’t wake Jordan.
‘Faith, you love me no matter what, don’t you?’ I say.
‘Evidently, I do.’
Inside my head, words are beginning to slur before they make it to my mouth. I’m struggling to speak.
‘I don’t think Jordan does. Not any more. He wouldn’t talk to me in the cupboard. Too busy to talk.’
Because Faith had to rush off, we didn’t discuss my problems with Jordan after the meeting. But that wasn’t because Faith doesn’t love me.
In the darkness, I bang into the handle of the coat closet. I stop to rub my hip – this will hurt me tomorrow! I flick on the hallway light.
My eyes blink against the sudden brightness. Reaching out to steady myself, I slide my body down the wall, dropping safely on the floor.
‘Faith, do you think Jordan doesn’t love me any more?’
‘Gracie, shh. Listen, I want you to drink some water and get some sleep. Okay? I’ll phone you in the morning.’
The room spins. I will sit here until it stops. Oh God, please make the room stop spinning.
‘Okay. But, Faith, I don’t want to do the new show. Eat Me. Pfffft. It’s so contrived. And it’s sexy. It probably isn’t even a cookery show. And it’s… it’s… what do we think it is again?’
‘We think it’s time for bed, darling. Goodnight.’
The next morning, too little sleep, too much booze the night before, the landline rings. From bed, I clutch the landline receiver from the side table.
‘Hello?’ My voice is a barely-there rasp. I remember smoking cigarettes last night. I only ever smoke when I’m exceedingly sloshed.
‘Grace, dear?’ It’s my mother. ‘What’s wrong with your voice? Are you unwell?’
‘Of sorts.’ I splutter into the mouthpiece, burning with the shame only a doting parent can inflict on a fully independent thirty-three-year-old. ‘I’m hung-over.’
My mother was forty-seven when I was conceived. Before I came along, my parents had long ago given up hoping for a child. For the first five months of her geriatric pregnancy, my mother assumed I was the menopause. Now, my parents are old. My mother is eighty. My father is eighty-six. Luckily, they’re both in rude physical health, walking eight miles daily between them, and have a social life I sometimes envy. There isn’t pressure for me to look after them yet, which is a relief. That said, my mother is prone to fussing. And my father, I suspect, is becoming senile – my mother insists it’s selective memory that suits him just fine and I’m not to worry a dot.
‘You were out on a Tuesday evening, dear? On a school night?’
My mother was an English teacher before I was born, my father an air-conditioner engineer with the NHS until he retired. Now, she volunteers at a charity shop and he reads the papers and does the crosswords.
‘It was a work thing, Mummy. Please don’t make it worse. Believe me, I feel wretched.’
Wretched – a word I’d only use with my mother. A bit like how I still call my parents ‘Mummy’ and ‘Daddy’, like I’m five years old, or posh enough to have grown up with horses and nannies, which isn’t true. My parents are just old. My mother reads the classics. It’s the way I was raised to speak with them.
I blow my nose into a tissue and the snot that comes out is rippled with black. London pollution is, if you believe the news, worse than Beijing.
‘All these showbiz parties, I don’t know,’ my mother tut-tuts down the line.
‘It wasn’t a party, Mummy.’
I don’t point out that I rarely go to parties these days, showbiz or otherwise – or that last night was a leaving do for someone fired by the station, let alone what’s going on with my contract. My mother already worries about the stability of me working in television. Of course, she’s pleased to say I have my own show – that’s something she lauds cheerily on about whenever serving customers at the charity shop, or having tea after church (my parents aren’t particularly religious; my mother goes alone for the social connection) and to all her friends at every conceivable opportunity. But I’m not sure my parents regard me being on the telly as having a real job. Sometimes, my mother asks when I’m going back to the bistro. As if I’m on some sort of extended field trip at SC6. She may have a point.
I check my watch. 9 a.m. It feels hideously earlier.
I don’t remember him leaving, but Jordan must have headed off to his office in Farringdon some time ago.
I don’t have to go in to work today. Whatever comes next, Gracie Porter’s Gourmet Get-Together is finished, no more episodes to record. A fact I took into consideration before I obliterated my liver last night because, despite my mother’s lofty aspersions, I’m not so rock ’n’ roll as to recklessly go out boozing on a school night otherwise.
My mother starts on about how the council is making it difficult for the charity shop to host so much as a simple bake sale. Letting her ramble, my head slips back onto the pillow. I recall the events last night that led me to this sorry state.
At the pub, Howard was in more of a mind to celebrate his payoff than to commiserate the demise of Nature’s Best. His farewell was a jovial event, unlike the depressing exits of last year. For the entire evening, he slugged at the bottle of sherry I’d gifted him. But from the moment we arrived at The White Horse, I wanted to go home. Apart from anything else, I wanted to sort things out with Jordan. To check my boyfriend wasn’t ready to hang up on me permanently. For the longest time, Jordan didn’t answer his phones. I left several messages on his mobile, including an apology, and a joke about the cleaning fumes in the cupboard perhaps getting to my head before I’d thought to ask about his choice of wearing underpants to bed. I’d hoped Jordan would call me back and we’d laugh it off – everything that had been falling apart between us lately. Time passed, the crowd thinned, and I didn’t hear a peep. When someone suggested we move on after last orders at the pub, I was first in. Let Jordan sweat about where I might be, I’d thought. Let him miss me, I’d hoped. That might show him.
I downed several shots in a dingy bar before I realised my team weren’t with me, Howard had slunk
off home and I barely knew the people I was with. Uber rates surged, but there were no rides anyway. It took me some time mooching along Shaftsbury Avenue to find a black cab to take me home. Tottering outside in the winter cold in my fancy heels, I looked like one of those girls who might shortly empty her stomach in the back seat. I remember Faith being nice to me as I collapsed in the hallway at home. I don’t remember anything about making it into bed.
I roll over to one side. Jesus, Mary and mother of God, my hip is on fire! I return carefully to the flat of my back.
Having finished regaling me with the latest village gossip, my mother says, ‘your father will want a quick hello. I’ll just go get him.’ Clunking the phone down, she calls out, ‘Derek, Grace is on the phone. Come say hello. She’s not feeling well.’
I picture my father getting up from in his wing-chair in the front room, where he was inevitably happily absorbed with the papers, and dragging his slippers down the hallway to the kitchen. After lunch, my parents will pull on their wellies and amble for several hours across the local fields, hail or shine.
My father clears his throat into the mouthpiece.
‘Morning, Grace.’
‘Morning, Daddy.’
‘How are you, dear? Your mother says not well?’
‘Oh no, I’m fine, really.’
‘Good-oh. How’s the weather in London? We’re getting a lot of rain down here.’
My parents still live in the small, semi-detached house in Surrey where I grew up. Under an hour by train from London Bridge station, they get pretty much the same weather as I do.
‘Same here, Daddy. It’s been very wet.’
Next, my father will ask about my work. Then he will finish our conversation briskly.
‘And how’s work?’
‘Work is fine, thank you.’
‘Jolly good. I’ll put you back to your mother. You take care now.’
My father doesn’t wait for me to say goodbye and I don’t take offence. I love him enormously, but we can both do without the phone chats my mother cajoles us into. This morning, in particular, I appreciate the brevity. The phone passes between my parents.
My head throbs. My bladder is fit to burst. If I mention I don’t have to go into work today, my mother will natter at me for hours.
‘I must say, Grace, aren’t you a bit old to be waking up with a hangover?’ she jumps straight into. ‘Isn’t it time you settled down?’
‘You mean get married, move to Redhill and have babies?’
‘Why not? I could help you more if you lived closer.’
For starters, Jordan and I haven’t come close to a conversation about marriage, let alone babies. My mother’s vision of settling down isn’t an offer that’s available to me, even if I wanted it, and I don’t want it. The thought of motherhood doesn’t fill me with the joys of spring. My ovaries aren’t tick-tocking like Big Ben beside my uterus. Babies aren’t yet on my agenda. Apart from being terrified about what they’ll do to my body, stretching and tearing me in places I don’t wish to imagine, there are practicalities to consider. For instance, I’m still renting. And my rented flat has only one bedroom, so there isn’t room for a nursery. I also don’t have a lot of savings for all the things that babies require, including day care. I’m only thirty-three. If forties are the new thirties, why, I’d be practically a teen mum if I had babies now, which doesn’t appeal. Faith is steadfastly single, so there’s no peer pressure. And let’s not forget, at the moment, I’m not even having sex.
‘I’m not having children until my forties, Mummy. Like you,’ is all I say.
‘I could be dead by then,’ she warns me.
‘Well then, you won’t be much help.’
We both laugh. My mother is not without a cracking sense of humour.
‘Mummy, I must go. I’m not yet out of bed.’
‘I won’t go on, dear. One thing quickly. Beryl is hosting another of her famous murder-mystery dinner parties. Your father is refusing to come with me. He says he doesn’t like to dress up, which is nonsense as he never bothers anyway. He also called Beryl an awful gossip and grumbled that life is too short to spend it not enjoying himself.’
‘Beryl is a bit poisonous, Mummy,’ I point out gently. ‘You’ve said as much yourself.’
‘She’s also someone I’ve known a long time, dear. I worry about her since Gerald passed. These dinners might be the thing that keeps her going…’ Beryl’s long-suffering husband, Gerald, died of a coronary last New Year’s Eve. He dropped dead in front of everyone at the party they were hosting. Because of Beryl’s famous murder-mystery dinners, there was, apparently, a moment where everyone assumed Gerald’s clasping of his chest and falling to the floor was part of an elaborate script. My mother told me it took several moments, and Beryl fainting to the floor, before anyone rushed to help. Sadly, to no avail. Why on earth Beryl insists on throwing such dinner parties still is anyone’s guess. My mother trails off somewhere. ‘Would you come with me, dear? It’s a few weeks away, the first Saturday in February. You could stop the night, if you like?
I don’t need to check if I have anything on. Ignoring last night, I don’t go out often any more. I could easily tap Faith up for a night out if I desired, but, these days, I’m such a homebody. Aside from giving her grandchildren before she passes, my mother rarely asks me for anything. Of course I’ll go with her.
‘Okay.’
‘Okay you’ll come?’ My mother’s voice is tinged with delight.
‘If you let me get off the phone right now, Mother dearest, yes, okay I’ll come.’
‘Oh, we’ll have such a laugh. Oh, I am looking forward to it. Now, will Jordan stop with your father at home?’ she prattles on gaily. ‘I can make up the sofa bed for him. It’s not a problem. I’ll make a roast on Sunday, and perhaps you can both join us on our walk?’
Between my mother’s unbeatable roast dinner and the opportunity for fresh air, most Londoners would jump at the chance. But Jordan has met my parents only twice in the year that he and I have been living together. Once, at their wedding anniversary party, last summer, when Jordan was set up on the sofa bed but sneaked into my bedroom while my parents slept (and we didn’t). And again on Boxing Day just gone when he collected me in his rented Audi A3 after we spent Christmas separately with our own families. Jordan had been all the way down in Cornwall with his three brothers and a myriad of cousins – an awkward situation when, throughout the whole of Christmas Day, he didn’t call to wish me Merry Christmas. I’d sent him a text immediately on waking. When Jordan hadn’t replied by dinnertime, I’d been too nervous to call him. Until my boyfriend breezed in the next day and brushed the issue off as mobile coverage problems, I’d no clue how to allay my mother’s concerns that something dreadful may have happened to him.
‘Let’s assume it’s just me, Mummy.’ There’s zero chance Jordan will say yes, and I won’t be asking anyway. Not to mention my father won’t appreciate the inconvenience of them babysitting each other on a Saturday evening. His life is, as he warned my mother, now far too short. ‘Mummy, I really must get off the phone.’
‘For the murder mystery, you’ll be Satine Featherbag,’ my mother presses on obliviously, her hearing akin to the selective memory she accuses my father of. ‘Satine is the secret lover of Billy Bragalot, who is the owner of the shoe factory where the murder occurs. You could wear—’
‘Hanging up right now.’
‘All right, dear. We’ll talk soon. I love you.’
‘I love you, too.’
‘Goodbye.’
Putting the phone down, I brace myself to throw back the covers. The central heating switched off an hour ago. The air is icy. I’m still wearing the white shirt and bra I came home in last night. My black trousers – and knickers – are strewn over the dresser. Too drunk to undress properly, I suppose. I hope I didn’t say anything of the sort to Jordan. I honestly can’t remember.
I go to the bathroom, and take two Nurofen with water from
the tap. I slink back into bed.
I’m lying very still, trying to recover, when the landline rings again.
‘Mummy, please.’ No one but my mother, and occasionally Faith, calls my landline. My mother because she believes mobile phones cause brain cancer and Faith because, sometimes, my mobile doesn’t work inside my flat.
I’ve agreed to go to Beryl’s murder mystery dinner, dressed up as the slightly slutty-sounding Satine Featherbag. What more can my mother want of me this morning?
A high-pitched voice, most likely male, certainly not my mother, responds, ‘Oooh.’ Then in a deeper voice, ‘I’ve had Daddy before, but Mummy? That’s a newy.’
‘Who is this?’ I gasp, sitting bolt upright and pulling the covers right up over my naked bottom-half. My black cotton knickers on the dresser aren’t quite the lacy underwear Faith so brazenly discussed when pitching me as a food porn presenter. But still. It’s quite the scene. What if this voice belongs to some kind of pervert, on the loose in Maida Vale? I hope Jordan locked the door behind him when he left this morning. He doesn’t always.
‘Sorry. I forget. We haven’t yet met. But what an opening you gave me.’
‘Who is this, please?’ I repeat, burrowing deeper underneath the duvet – a better use of energy would be for me to get up and lock my bedroom door.
‘Gracie Porter, this is Harrison Hipgrave, Agent to the Stars. Call me Harry, if you prefer?’
I breathe a sigh of relief. It’s only Timothy’s professional agent. By his opening, I picture Harry wearing a burgundy cravat and black velvet smoking jacket. Having greasy hair and girly hands, to match his high-pitched squeal.
‘Gracie, you still there?’ To be fair, his voice is now respectably normal. Quite gravelly, in fact.
‘What can I do for you, Harry?’ I say, my voice, shockingly, sounding equally manly-like. I’m never smoking again.
‘Ah! Well, really, this is about what I can do for you, sweetheart,’ is Harrison Hipgrave’s smooth-as-smooth reply.
‘Enough with the sweetheart, Harry.’ With my husky throat, this sounds inadvertently sexy. ‘As you say, we haven’t yet met.’ Good Lord. Am I still drunk?
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