‘This isn’t fair …’ Ben was struggling to be heard among the jeers and the catcalls ‘… on the people I’d be talking about, is it?’
People. There it was, the plural that signified a vast hinterland of conquests. The Drambuie sat uneasy in my gut.
‘Fuck’s sake. We’re not asking for a blow-by-blow – haha,’ Patrick said. ‘No need to be coy. If you’re a good hunter, you hang a stag’s head on your wall.’
‘I’ll start you off, there was Noisy Louise in the first week …’ Andy said, with a cackle. I gripped my chair harder, knuckles whitening.
Ben flicked a beer mat across the table. ‘No. I’m not doing any of this bullshit.’
‘Oh, don’t make us punish you,’ Andy said. ‘You don’t want to discover the punishment but it does involve being upside down in that bin without your clothes.’
There were a lot of them, and Ben’s fight club numbered only me. I started to feel genuinely worried for him. I didn’t want the extent of my protectiveness to be revealed. I was bothered enough that it had been revealed to me. As an only child, I’d never had a sibling to look after in the playground, but I guessed this was how it might feel if someone threatened them. Quite primal.
‘Do the dare,’ I nudged Ben in the ribs, acting casual, ‘I don’t care.’
‘Don’t you?’ he said, looking vaguely horrified. OK, my feelings were definitely hurt. I was offering him a spade and he was reacting it as if it was digging his grave, rather than an escape tunnel?
‘Ahahhha!’ Andy whooped and the table-banging recommenced.
‘Ben, who gives a shit, really?’ I hissed. ‘It’s only a kiss, we know it doesn’t matter. If you can face it …’
I nodded in encouragement as he stared at me, weighed things up.
He leant down, swiftly, and gave me a closed-mouth, firm kiss on the lips that lasted only seconds. Despite its brevity, I responded, kissing him back with a bit more passion, lips slightly apart. (After all that, didn’t want him to think I was a rubbish kisser.)
He pulled back a small distance, as if he was going to stop. Then he unexpectedly moved forward and kissed me again, something more like a proper kiss, open mouths, tips of the tongues touching. I felt his hand on the side of my midriff as he steadied himself.
He tasted of alcohol with the tang of salt, and oh God, completely unexpectedly, I dissolved like a teaspoon of sugar in a mug of hot tea. While my brain stayed fairly on-message, my body rebelled. It was as if it registered superior genetic material and issued immediate instructions to my nerve endings to have thirteen of this person’s babies and sod whether I liked his CD collection. In seconds, I crossed the line where I didn’t know if my willingness to collaborate to a respectable standard was authentic passion. Ah. Life lesson. This is why you don’t kiss friends for dares.
Ben broke away again abruptly, making no eye contact at all. We quickly started assembling tequila slammers to stay busy and take the taste of each other away, while everyone clapped. So, I thought, regrouping: the problem wasn’t a bad kiss, it was a good kiss. Perhaps even a spectacular one. I couldn’t deny there was some kind of technical physical chemistry thing there, even if I didn’t fancy Ben. I felt like I needed to go sit in an ice bath.
I also knew I’d committed my first crime against Rhys, the sort he’d sternly warned me about when I left Sheffield. Is a kiss still a kiss when it’s a functional, enforced kiss, to save someone from a naked violent prank? Surely I was only as guilty as women who get captured by the villain and forced to wear a bikini/evening gown until the hero arrives to save the day …? I mean, Han Solo never gave Leia any crap – it was gratitude for being defrosted and no blame attached. Leaving aside the point about who exactly was Mr Solo in my scenario.
‘Good effort,’ Andy said, determined to keep stirring. ‘You two ever thought about it?’
‘I know you find this hard to comprehend, but we’re friends,’ Ben said, scathingly. ‘Like kissing a sister. Dare done.’
‘Ooh, ouch,’ Andy said, glancing to me for a reaction. Yep, it had hit its mark. Hard. I hid the twinge with a cowboy swig from my shot glass.
Under the table, to my surprise, I felt Ben grasp for my free hand and squeeze it, supportively. I tried to calculate precisely what had passed between us, in my impaired state. I knew I was vibrating like a tuning fork.
As the evening came to a messy close, Ben walked me the few yards to my block of halls. We were both finding an awful lot of neutral conversation topics quite fascinating, speech overlapping, with no silences allowed to develop.
‘Hey, I’m so sorry about what happened with that bunch of idiots,’ he said, in parting. ‘I should’ve bailed as soon as the game started. Blame the booze. And sorry, for, you know. What I said.’
‘No problem!’ I said, desperate for him not to repeat or expand on it, adding a hearty: ‘Night!’
Apparently Ben had suffered that experience, but I only knew that for the period our mouths were connected, I hadn’t. The long summer break had arrived just in time.
21
‘I didn’t want to admit to the extent of my ignorance in company,’ Caroline says, in the taxi home, while I try to quell car sickness by concentrating on the troll figure in Man City strip dangling from the rear view mirror. The seats are covered in de-stress wooden massage beads, presumably to compensate for the effect of the driving. ‘But I’m guessing the Natalie Shale interview is a big deal then?’
‘It’d be great to get it. You remember the case?’
‘Only that it wasn’t very nice, really.’
‘An armed robbery at a security depot, the guard got thumped with the butt of a gun and lost an eye. The case against Lucas Shale was mostly circumstantial. No one on the press benches thought he’d done it, anyway. He’d been straight for twenty years, gorgeous wife, cute little twin daughters, and everyone thought her evidence that they were at home that night would get him off. The feeling at the time was that the police were under pressure to find someone fast because it was so violent.’
‘Why didn’t she talk before?’
‘I suppose she’s had no reason to, till the appeal. Other than money, and it doesn’t look like she’s bothered. That’s the thing, I see a lot of people in court and both of them came across really well.’
‘Well, I’m pleased for you. Nice to have something to take your mind off … everything else.’
‘Yes,’ I say, thinking it won’t be the case on my mind as I go to sleep tonight.
‘And Simon’s single? Good job, good-looking, smart …’ Caroline ticks them off on her fingers.
A pause.
‘You’re not serious?’
‘Why not?’
‘Because,’ I splutter, as if she’s announced the world’s run by a coalition of lizards in a bunker, ‘for one thing, he’s not my type.’
‘Talk of “types” should probably end around the same time you stop having pin-ups on your wall. I like to think I have a happy marriage, and I never watched Take That thinking “I wish there was a prematurely grey one who wears loafers”.’
‘I know, but I mean, come on. Simon’s a million miles from Rhys.’
‘Do I have to point out that a plan to find someone like your ex contains a fatal flaw?’
‘You’re wasting your time. I don’t fancy him and men like him don’t fancy women like me, they fancy women like you. Or they marry women like you and fancy slim-hipped Cuban boys.’
‘This is typical.’
‘What?’
‘You spend one evening with a perfectly charming man and because his background’s different to yours you don’t just rule him out, you accuse him of being a closet case or a paedophile. You’re a raging inverted snob.’
‘I didn’t literally mean he’s a paedophile! And “different background” hardly covers it. He says “hello” as if it’s got all five vowels in it. He’s got one of those drawls where it sounds like his batteries are running out.’
‘It’s harder to meet people at our age. I mean, is there anyone with potential at work?’
‘Huh. Not without leaping the species barrier.’
‘Ben, though. Wooooh,’ Caroline makes a low whistle. ‘Forgive me for using Mindy lexicon, but, please serve me a slice of that.’
I grind my teeth.
‘Were you never tempted?’ she adds.
‘By Ben?’ I snort, over-acting a little.
‘Yes. I mean, I know he doesn’t look like he needs a good wash, as per your usual type, as we were just saying.’
‘Oh, no. More like the brother I never had.’ The brother I never had if we were raised in a cult in the Fens, under surveillance by the vice squad.
‘You were the perfect friend for him, then. Shame you didn’t stay in touch. Why didn’t you?’
‘Is it that strange?’
‘I suppose not. You’re normally good at that sort of thing, that’s all, and he seems fond of you.’
I say nothing, replying both too risky and too painful.
‘So if we can establish Simon’s at least AC/DC, there’s still no potential?’ Caroline asks.
‘Don’t let me be single for more than five minutes before you try to pair me off, will you. Jeez-us.’
‘Kidding,’ Caroline says. She’s trying to lean over to nudge me playfully when the car takes a corner and she gets thrown back against the door.
22
My anticipation of announcing the Natalie Shale exclusive to my news editor, Ken, is put on hold when Vicky spies me as soon as I put foot on carpet inside the hum of the newsroom. Vicky is a news desk deputy, and a kind of half-maiden, half-serpent creature, like something out of Greek mythology.
‘Rachel!’ she barks.
Duly summoned, I pick my way through the desks to her side.
‘Your story about the cripple fraud trial that finally ended,’ she asks, tapping the screen with her pen, employing her usual charming turn of phrase, voice all honey laced with arsenic, ‘limped to the finish line, I should say. Why does Michael Tallack turn into Christopher, five paras down?’
I feel my face grow hot.
‘Does he?’ I say, a light sweat breaking out on my top lip. I’ve recently emerged from a sentencing for manslaughter, this story already a distant memory. ‘Sorry.’
‘Yes. Hopalong Cassidy’s brother was cleared of any involvement, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes, sorry …’ Shit, shit.
‘Try to not to put actionable defamations in your copy, if it’s not too much trouble.’
‘Really sorry, Vicky, I don’t know what I was thinking.’
‘It’s lucky I spotted it,’ Vicky concludes.
‘Yes, thanks.’ I bet she didn’t, and a sub-editor brought it to her. Certain members of news desk are known for dishing out bollockings, not their ferocious work rate. ‘A riding crop in one hand and an éclair in the other’ is how my friend Dougie once put it. He eventually tired of grumping and went off to Scotland to be a successful crime correspondent. Not for the first time, I have the feeling of being a barnacle-clad rock that time has flowed around like water.
Journalism, probably like most jobs, comes with the paradox that the more successful you get, the less you do the stuff that initially appealed: namely, finding stories and writing them. I could apply for news desk positions but I’d answer phones and argue with people all day. And have to sit next to people like Vicky.
‘Is Ken about?’
‘Yeah, somewhere.’ Vicky loses interest in me and picks up on a flashing phone line.
‘What up, Woodford? To what do we owe the honour?’
I turn to see Ken, the news editor, fishing in a bag of Wotsits, a copy of the paper tucked under one arm. He has a thatch of wiry grey hair that looks as if it’s clipped into a cube shape with shears. I’m sure it gets squarer every time I see him. He could wear a box as a hat.
‘I popped by to tell you some good news.’
‘Christ. You’re not pregnant, are you?’
‘No …’ Possibly the least pregnant I’ve ever been, cheers, Ken.
‘Thank God for that.’
Ken Baggaley is known for being ‘firm but fair’, even though he’s more than firm and not particularly fair. In newspaper-speak, it’s because his rages are reactions to actual events, rather than tremors in a psychological fault line.
‘I’ve got an interview with Natalie Shale,’ I conclude.
He looks unmoved. ‘She’s doing a press conference?’
‘No, just us. An exclusive. Her solicitor’s a contact.’
Ken lifts eyebrows, grunts, and I sense I am briefly Number 1 in interest stakes over cheese-flavoured puffed corn.
‘Good stuff. When?’
‘Date’s being finalised but it’ll be in the bag soon, before Lucas Shale’s appeal is heard.’
‘Let me know how it goes. Well done, Woodford.’
Ken drops into a chair and continues his assault on the Wotsits. I walk out of the office with a spring in my step: now that was Ken gushing. Ben’s a lucky charm.
On the way back to court, I decide to make a detour via Marks & Spencer. It was impressed upon me when I unpacked my rancid collection of underwear (from the ‘L’Amour Longtemps’ extra complacency range) that an upgrade is required. At first I thought ‘But who’s gonna see it anytime soon anyway?’, then I mentioned it to Mindy. She explained the feng shui of lingerie: that if I’m in old cotton faded saggy things, a size too small, good things will not come to me, even if I’m not looking. I’m not sure I accept her reasoning.
I don’t feel any degrees more sexually energised once I’m gingerly fiddling with turquoise lace balcony cups. I’m wondering if anyone will ever want to see me naked again, or more to the point, see me naked the first time and then want to see me naked regularly, on a rolling basis, going forward, as Ken would say.
Part of the pact of long-term relationships is that they’re sometimes as much about the things they take out of your life as put in. If it’s no longer a rollercoaster, more of a monorail, that means you avoid the lows as well as the highs. If your loved one barges into the bathroom and catches you bending over with a gut like an apron made of Babybel cheese, they don’t go off you, or expect you to slink about in deep plunge this and Tanga that, waxed into the middle of next Wednesday. They’ve taken you on, bought the product. Singledom, a new relationship: you have to repackage your contents and sell them all over again, body and soul.
These not very inspiring thoughts are rolling round my mind as I twang a violet triangle of something that appears to be made out of fishing net and an elastic band. My phone goes. Ben. Now his number has his name. There’s that shiver.
‘Hi, Rachel! How are you? I wanted to say thanks for helping Simon out with that story.’
I’m blushing. I’m actually standing here, looking at tiny pants, with a burning face because they’re juxtaposed with Ben’s voice. Sex and the City this ain’t.
‘Good thanks. And no, thank you for introducing us. That’s a great story and it’s not done me any harm at work. I owe you.’
‘No worries, it solved a problem for Simon. He didn’t know how to go about contacting your paper. He thinks journalists are feral creatures. He was scared stiff.’
Crazily confident Simon?
‘I’m struggling to imagine Simon being scared stiff.’
‘Imagine him being scared flaccid then.’
‘Nooo, my eyes are bleeding!’ I giggle, aware of the firework of happiness that starts fizzing in my chest at the slightest return of our old rapport.
Ben laughs. ‘He was quite complimentary about you. He said you had “sass”.’
‘He means I was rude.’
‘I told you, he needs a bit of fight. He likes it. Anyway, I have something else to ask of you.’
‘You do?’
‘Yeah, I was wondering if you were free to come to ours on Saturday night. Liv wants to do a “meeting people in Manchester” dinner party. W
e’re bourgeois bastards nowadays, y’know. Liv particularly wants to meet you.’
‘Right,’ I say, feeling the fear. Why would Olivia particularly want to meet me, unless it was to do a risk assessment? He could tell her she absolutely doesn’t need to worry. MI5 Threat Level: Brew Up, Kick Back. Oh God, oh God – what does she know? Reason tells me she has the official history, and this invite is proof of that. Emotions are telling me to use this thong as a slingshot to fire my mobile into the bargain briefs bin and run for the Peaks.
‘You will come?’ Ben says, into my silence.
‘Sure.’
‘I don’t want to kill your cool single Saturday night stone dead. I know we’re old boring marrieds.’
‘Are you kidding? I’d love to come.’
‘Honestly? That’s great.’
Although I meant love with a substantial dollop of bloody shitting self, Ben sounds so pleased that it almost becomes true.
‘I’m a fan of eating. And I’m in awe of anyone who’s prepared to make food for visitors,’ I say.
‘You’re a good cook, aren’t you?’
‘Nah. I gave up when I moved in with Rhys. He was the cook.’
‘Ah.’ Awkward pause. ‘And Liv asked, do you want to bring anyone? A date?’
This is the moment where I’m supposed to have a wacky idea about hiring an escort for appearances’ sake. I consider it for the maddest of moments, then firmly dismiss it. One of Mindy’s chiselled internet Romeos, it transpired, used to work as an escort. Worse, he wore the ‘Canadian tuxedo/Texas two-piece’ of double denim. With cowboy boots. And awful shirts. Ivor nickname: Bri-Nylon Adams.
‘Er. No.’
After I ring off, I guesstimate my sizes and buy a handful of stuff in safe black. It’s a beginning.
23
I returned for the second year with a light tan that I was trying to prolong with Nivea tinted body lotion. It was from a fortnight in Paxos, a gift from Rhys.
While my friends from home had boyfriends the same age who were pot-washing and berry-picking, I had a grown-up one with an actual real proper full-time income who whisked me away for impromptu package holidays. My parents were less delighted: Rhys turned up at our local with a bag packed for me, losing me a week’s pay in hand and a job for walking out mid-shift. He’d forgotten I needed my passport though, so we still had to run the gauntlet of my mum and dad’s disapproval at the devil-may-care attitude to temporary employment and foreign travel.
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