“It’s going really well, actually,” I said. “This weekend’s been totally mad. I’ve got loads of new subscribers – more than I ever, ever thought I’d have. Sloane – my agent – thinks I’m on track to hit half a million this month. It’s awesome, but it’s – I don’t know. A bit scary, too. Daunting, I guess. So I guess I’ll be baring my make-up bag a bit more and my soul a bit less.”
“But that’s amazing,” Raffy said. “You know, it must put you in a really powerful position. Being able to influence so many people.”
I thought about that for a second. “Maybe influence them to try different make-up, or drink green smoothies. It’s no big deal, really. I’m not changing the world, or even a bit of it, like that woman today was.”
“Yeah,” Raffy said. “She’s a great campaigner. But how many people were here tonight? A hundred and fifty? A hundred and seventy-five maybe. And maybe one of them was a journalist from the local paper, and maybe one works for a local radio station, and maybe a handful of them have big Twitter followings. If she had a platform like yours…”
“But the people who watch my platform don’t watch it for stuff like this,” I said. “They want to know about my clothes and my hair and my boyfriend…”
I stopped. Raffy looked at me curiously. “Boyfriend?”
I felt a blush creeping up my neck. “Yeah, that’s kind of what’s changed everything. I’ve got together with this guy – I met him at a vlogging party thing – and he’s got a massive following. So now lots of them follow me too. It’s really weird.”
“I see,” Raffy said. “That’s great. I’m pleased it’s going so well.”
I pushed the last chair into its proper place and looked around the room. Everything was back to normal, but it was too late for me to settle down and start working – the last customers were leaving and Luke had turned off the coffee machine and was wiping down the bar.
“I should go,” I said.
Luke said, “Thanks for helping out, Gemma, I really appreciate it. Your next coffee’s on the house.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“We’re all meeting here on Saturday morning,” Luke said. “Doing a leaflet drop around the area, if you fancy coming along.”
I thought of the lie-in I was already longing for, even though it was only Tuesday, and the four vlogs I’d promised Sloane I’d upload before the weekend, and Charlie’s promise to call me and see me soon. I looked at Luke’s open, smiling face and Raffy’s, suddenly still and not smiling.
“I’d love to,” I said. “I’ll try, but I’m pretty busy.” And I knew, even as I said the words, that it wasn’t going to happen.
“So, yeah, it was total chaos,” Amy said, tipping tuna out of its can into a bowl and squirting mayo over it. “Just like you’d expect from A&E on a Saturday night. But eventually I got seen and they stitched me up – look.”
She pushed her hair aside and showed me the shaved place on her head.
“That looks really sore, you poor thing,” I said.
“Yeah, well, I was so out of it at the time, I hardly knew what they were doing,” she said. “My head hurt like crazy the next day, but that was mostly hangover. What am I like? I’m totally mortified about it, and I’m so sorry you got left with all the clearing up.”
“It really wasn’t a problem,” I said, “and it was so sweet of you to get me flowers. You didn’t have to do that.”
It was the first time I’d seen Amy since the drama of Saturday night. I’d arrived home from Daily Grind to find a big bunch of pink roses on the kitchen table and, at first I’d thought they might be from Charlie. Then I noticed that Amy was hovering anxiously around, and read the card.
“You want some of this?” She scooped tuna mayonnaise on to a piece of toast and grated cheese on top. “I’ve made loads.”
“I’m good thanks. I’m going to make myself a salad in a bit.” I remembered the stern advice Sloane had given me about modelling healthy living, and thought without enthusiasm of the ingredients I’d picked up at Whole Foods in my lunch break. I’d filmed myself filling a basket with micro herbs and sprouted pulses, so there was no going back now.
“So was it really bad? The state of the house, I mean?” Amy took a huge bite of her tuna melt. “God, that’s so good.”
“It was pretty bad,” I admitted. “Your poor coleslaw – what a waste! But it was okay, because the weirdest thing happened.”
I told her about Charlie and Gus turning up and rescuing me in my hour of cleaning need. I didn’t tell her how they’d found the house, or who they were, or mention the newly official nature of Charlie’s and my relationship.
“So he’s your boyfriend?” she said.
“I guess he is,” I said.
“Is he the one you were with the other night, when you did the walk of shame home at five in the morning? I was just getting ready for my shift and I heard you come in.”
“That’s him,” I said, ducking my head in embarrassment. But Amy didn’t seem to care.
“Cool. Where did you two meet?”
“At a work thing,” I said. I thought how much I’d like to tell the story to someone, to describe Charlie’s flat and the hot tub and how surreal the whole night had been, and unburden myself about how ambivalent I still felt about it all. But I couldn’t – I’d promised Sloane that I must stick to the party line: that Charlie and I had met by chance several weeks before, when we’d both been arriving for appointments at the Ripple Effect offices. So although I wasn’t lying to Amy, I wasn’t telling her the full truth, either. She was fast becoming a friend, and my instinct was to trust her, but I couldn’t be sure. The ink on my contract with Ripple Effect was barely dry, so to speak, and I was determined to be on my best behaviour.
“Right.” Amy stood up and slotted her plate into the dishwasher. “I’d better make a move – I’m on shift in half an hour. I might stay over at Kian’s tomorrow – he’s on nights this week too, and we can’t go breaking the rule about no gentleman callers, can we?” She winked at me, and I knew she knew I’d already broken it.
“They’re meant to be getting back tonight, aren’t they?” I said.
“That’s what they said. Therefore, I’m out.” Amy shouldered her bag and headed for the door. “Thanks again, Gemma, for what you did. It was immense. We should go for a drink sometime, me and Kian and you and your Charlie.”
“I’d love that,” I said.
I waited until she’d gone, waited five more minutes, then hurried upstairs and fetched my camera. I’d done extensive Googling of superfood salad recipes earlier and although none of them were exactly appealing, they were certainly quick to make.
“So, it’s Tuesday evening now,” I told the lens, “and I’ve got all my wonderful, nourishing ingredients ready for my dinner. Charlie’s busy tonight so I’m all on my own, which means I get to have girl food. You know how it is!”
Since when did food even have a gender? I wondered. But Sloane’s instructions had been clear.
“Why don’t you have a quiet, girly night in tonight, Gemma? I’m off to Birmingham with the boys for a book signing, so take it easy, make a healthy dinner, put on a face mask, go to bed early with Glamour magazine. It’ll be great if they can see you’re a fan – I might approach them about doing a shoot with you in a few months.”
“I’m making a dressing with lime juice, peanut butter and honey,” I said. “I know it sounds weird, but it’s really yummy and high in protein too. If you have a nut allergy, there are loads of delicious seed butters available too. I particularly like pumpkin, but you can get hemp, sunflower – all sorts. But I’m going for good old fashioned peanut butter tonight.”
I showed the camera the label on the jar, making sure the Whole Foods bag was visible in the background too.
“We’ll start getting you product placement deals very soon,” Sloane had said. “But it helps if you show you’re amenable to that sort of thing. And obviously, keep telling your viewers about t
he products you already use and love.”
“And to give even more protein power to this, I like adding a few sprouted grains. You can grow your own, and I quite often do, but I’ve been a bit short of time lately.” I gave the camera a coy smile, “So I bought these in.”
Thank you, Google, I thought. Until today, I hadn’t known sprouted grains even existed. Or seed butter, either. I thought hemp was like skunk, only milder.
“I’m just going to tumble these into a bowl with some kale and radicchio leaves – I just love this, it’s the most gorgeous colour.” It was. How it tasted, I had yet to discover. “And I’m going to mix the dressing through, and then I’m going to do something to make it even tastier and add more goodness.”
I pulled another pack out of the brown paper bag and held it up to the camera, hoping I didn’t look as dubious as I felt.
“Everyone loves halloumi cheese, right? I do, anyway.” And Jack did, too. I felt a sudden pang of nostalgia for the nights we used to spend at our local Turkish restaurant, gorging on grilled cheese, bread and dips, so we had no room for the enormous lamb kebabs he always insisted on ordering too. “But the problem is, even if you’re not avoiding dairy, it’s really, really high in salt. So tempeh makes a great alternative. This is made from organic soy, and it’s flavoured with seaweed, so it’s got a great savoury flavour with not too much salt.”
I slit open the package and a block of what looked like wet polystyrene slid out on to the chopping board.
“That looks absolutely fucking bogging,” I said, before I could stop myself. Shit. But I’d have to edit the video anyway – no lasting harm was done. “It looks a bit weird, I know. But when you slice it up and sauté it in a little olive oil, it’s really delicious.”
It took me ages to work out how to work the fancy induction hob, which I realised I’d never used before. It looked like pretending to be a health food fanatic might actually force me to acquire some cooking skills, and that would be no bad thing. But given how much the ingredients for my simple, solitary supper had cost, it might bankrupt me first.
I carried on chatting to the camera as I finished assembling my salad, finally saying, “So there you have it. Organic leaves, sprouts and tempeh with a lime and peanut dressing. I’m going to have a glass of cold-pressed apple juice with this – I always dilute it fifty-fifty with sparkling water, because it is very high in sugar.” Not as high in sugar as the Coke I was longing for, I thought. And that was totally off limits now – thanks to Charlie’s contractual obligations it was Pepsi or nothing. I hated Pepsi even more than organic cold-pressed apple juice.
I sat down on the chair Amy had recently vacated, plate in front of me and glass by my side. “Bon appetit,” I said. Then, at last, I was able to switch off the camera.
Five minutes later, I was still staring morosely at my salad in between checking my YouTube channel. As I’d said to Raffy, it had all gone a bit mental since I’d posted the video of Charlie and me on Sunday. Actually, it had all gone completely mental. I had more than a hundred thousand followers on my vlog and fifty thousand on Twitter and Instagram. More than three million people had watched us on Charlie’s second channel as we laughed at monkeys, admired flamingos, ate smoked salmon bagels on the picnic blanket Sloane had purchased for the occasion, kissed each other in a rowing boat and strolled around market stalls, our tasteful wicker picnic hamper having been stowed away in Sloane’s car.
The numbers were so mind-bogglingly, frighteningly huge that my mind sort of shied away whenever I tried to think about them. But they were nothing to the numbers of subscribers Charlie and Gus had on their main channel, and Sloane was what she described as “quietly confident” that this was “only the beginning” for me.
When I was with Charlie, or when I was talking to the camera, there was no chance to think about it all. When I was at work, it seemed so remote, so utterly alien, that it could be happening to someone else. When Sloane was there, the sheer force of her personality erased my doubts. But now I was alone, the enormity of it all descended, weighing me down with a strange, formless apprehension.
I speared a bit of tempeh with my fork and ate it. To my amazement it wasn’t too awful, and the peanut butter dressing was actually quite nice. But I couldn’t summon up the enthusiasm to carry on eating. I poured my apple juice down the sink and switched the kettle on.
Then I heard the front door open, a sort of scraping crash, and Hannah’s voice say, “Oh bugger.”
I hurried through to the hallway. Hannah was pulling two suitcases backwards through the door, and one of them had tipped over, upsetting the little table where we all left our keys.
“Do you need a hand?” I said.
“Please,” she said. “Richard had to go straight from the airport to work – there was some crisis with one of the servers. So I’ve dragged this lot from Gatwick on my own.”
She turned around, and I couldn’t stop myself from saying, “Jesus Christ, what happened to your face?” even though it was obvious what had happened.
“I know, right?” Hannah said. “I forgot my sunblock. It was so stupid of me – I was sure I’d checked. But then the pharmacy didn’t open until after we needed to leave for our tour of the petrified forest. And I’m such an idiot, I thought, petrified forest, trees, shade… As if! We were out in the sun all morning and I got fried. Fortunately, temples and things are cool, and I bought some factor fifty the next day, but that was it for me lying on beaches.”
“That looks really sore, though,” I said. Her fair, freckly skin was tomato-red. Big patches were already peeling, with raw, new skin showing through. “Come on, let’s take your bags upstairs. I’m sure I’ve got some stuff somewhere that might help.”
It was simple enough carrying Richard’s case up to their room, but it was still pretty heavy. I wondered why she’d manhandled both bags on the Tube instead of getting a cab, but it was none of my business, so I didn’t ask. I just left the bag outside their door, went down to my own bedroom and found a tube of aloe vera gel I’d been sent in one of the PR company hauls and almost forgotten about, and took it back to Hannah.
“Here you go,” I said. “It’s probably too late, if I’m being honest, but it can’t do any harm.”
“Thanks,” Hannah said. Even her smile looked painful, making new bits of damaged skin detach from her cheeks.
“No worries,” I said. “I’ll just clear up downstairs, then I was going to go to bed. Would you like a tea, or anything?”
Hannah shook her head. “I’m going to have a shower and go to bed, too. I’m still feeling a bit weird. It wasn’t much of a holiday, to be honest. What a numpty.”
I looked at her for a moment. She didn’t look like someone who’d just got home from a weekend away with her boyfriend, all glowing with sun and sex and feeling a bit guilty about having eaten and drunk too much. She looked bloody miserable. If I’d known her better, I would have wanted to give her a huge hug and make her tell me what was really wrong.
But she said, “Thanks for helping with the bag, Gemma,” and turned away. I saw a flake of dead skin drift off her face on to the carpet as she pushed back her hair.
“Okay,” I said. “Hope the aloe stuff helps. Sleep well.”
I left her there, cleared up the remains of my dinner, and spent a couple of hours in my room editing my video. It might have been, as Sloane had put it, disingenuous, but I was pleased with it, and uploaded it well before midnight.
Stanley in my arms, I fell asleep almost as soon as I turned out the light, but then I was half-woken again by the sound of Richard’s feet on the stairs. I turned over, pulling the duvet over my head. Amy was right. Those two were fricking weird.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I didn’t see very much of Hannah for the rest of that week, and I didn’t see Amy or Richard at all. When I left for work the next day I took an overnight bag containing a couple of changes of clothes. I went to Boots in my lunch break and bought a toothbrush, razor and
deodorant, and at half past five I left the office and went back to The Factory, not home to Hackney.
I felt oddly shy, finding my way to the apartment block from the station, turning up on my own and announcing myself to the concierge – the two nights I’d spent there before, I’d arrived with Charlie in a cab.
“Hi,” I said, hovering at the reception desk.
“Good evening, madam. What number, please?”
“Three D.”
“And your name, madam?”
“It’s Gemma. Gemma Grey.” I remembered what Charlie had told me about groupies turning up and being turned away again, and felt an absurd rush of fear that that was going to happen to me, even though I’d spoken to him on WhatsApp just that morning and I knew he was expecting me.
But after phoning and saying, “I have Gemma Grey downstairs,” the concierge waved me through to the lift without demur.
The lift swooshed open and I stepped out, feeling my heart beating harder, as if I’d walked up the three flights of stairs. I was going to see Charlie. Charlie was my boyfriend. I was going to hang out with him for the evening, and then I was going to go to bed with him. A totally mundane night, then – but still new, thrilling and a bit nerve-wracking.
I paused outside the door, steeling myself to knock. I could hear music coming faintly but clearly through the orange-painted wood – a violin, something classical, I supposed. My musical knowledge didn’t extend much beyond whatever was in the top forty, but I knew this was something special, haunting and sad. I waited and listened for a bit longer, then I saw the CCTV camera in a corner and imagined the concierge downstairs watching me, wondering why the hell I was loitering in the corridor instead of going in, and I imagined Charlie wondering where I was, coming out to find me and seeing me standing there like a total plonker. So I raised my hand and tapped on the door. The music stopped immediately, and a few seconds later the door swung open.
“Hi, Gemma,” Gus said.
“Hi,” I said. “Sorry – did I interrupt something?”
The Truth About Gemma Grey: A feel-good, romantic comedy you won't be able to put down Page 16