Me, You and Tiramisu

by Charlotte Butterfield

  Is leaning on the counter a little bit twattish? he wondered. He straightened up and put his right hand, which had never bothered him before but that now felt like a weird swinging appendage, on his hip. Too camp. Leaning it is. He ran his tongue over his teeth for the tenth time and smiled a toothy grin. Too desperate. Lips closed. Too creepy.

  ‘Have you got Tourette’s?’ Jayne asked from behind the camera, blowing her hair out of her face as she battled to adjust the height of the tripod.

  ‘I don’t know what to do with my hand. Or my face.’

  ‘If you want more hits, then stick it in your pants.’ Rachel said, swinging round and round on her bar stool. Will wished that she wasn’t there to witness his filming failure, where his on-screen career was doomed to last less than seven seconds. He knew that falling in love with a twin meant you were essentially going out with two people, but only sleeping with one of them, unless you were Hugh Hefner or Charlie Sheen, but in situations like this he wished he’d put a bolt on the outside of Rachel’s door.

  ‘I’m serious!’ He flapped his hand around in the air, ‘Look, I don’t know where to put it!’

  ‘Will, you’ve lived with that hand for thirty-one years, it’s not a new thing.’ A click and the war with the tripod was won, ‘Okay baby, ready when you are.’

  Will ran his hand through his hair, cracked his neck from shoulder to shoulder and took a deep breath. This was crazy, he thought. Jayne had already agreed that if it was rubbish they’d have a good laugh and destroy the tape, so why was he so nervous? The red light on the camera blinked at him, taunting him.

  ‘Will.’

  ‘I know, I know, I’m just getting ready.’ He puffed out his cheeks and slowly exhaled. ‘Hi there, I’m Will Scarlet, and this is the first of eight short films showing you how to make every mealtime an occasion to remember – from fluffy, fabulous pancakes and honey-soaked granola to bring that special someone in bed, to easy, yet impressive, dinner-party fayre to share with friends. I hope you enjoy the series as we embark on this fabulous culinary adventure together.’

  For the next twenty minutes he chopped, he stirred and he flirted; he baked, he flipped and he smouldered. Occasionally looking up to the camera to grin lopsidedly, roll his eyes as he spilled something, or to give a few words of gentle explanation as to what he was doing. He finally slipped the pile of buttery pancakes onto a plate and spooned over the glistening berry compote. Finishing the decadent stack with a sensually squeezed trickle of maple syrup he looked up from beneath his eyelashes and tried to gauge the sisters’ reactions. They both stared back at him in silence, open-mouthed. The red light still glared at him, slightly less menacingly now that he’d managed to do the intro without vomiting, but still intimidating none the less.

  ‘What? Say something!’

  ‘Wow.’ Rachel had stopped spinning around and just stared at him. He could feel his neck starting to colour, which is where the angry pink blotches always started before they seeped upwards to his cheeks, a cruel reminder telling him maliciously that he was a shopkeeper not a film star. What was he thinking? Pure arrogance that’s what it was. Why would anyone want to see a video of him anyway? Jayne was still mute, one hand resting on the camera, her eyes wide and unblinking. Jesus, was he that bad? Without saying anything, Jayne slowly walked to the other side of the breakfast bar, leant over to where he was standing, cupped either side of his face in her hands and gave him a long, lingering kiss.

  They filmed four more episodes that afternoon and uploaded them that evening after Jayne had painstakingly faded Jack Johnson’s ‘Banana Pancakes’, Van Morrison’s ‘Days Like This’ and Caro Emerald’s ‘Liquid Lunch’ around his words. Will emailed the URL link to all his students; Jayne sat on the floor of their living room with a bottle of cold Corona by her side and pasted the links onto all three of their Facebook pages.

  ‘Remind me why the world needs to see me make a prat of myself?’ Will asked.

  ‘It’s not the whole world, Will, it’s our friends, and it’s a good way to drum up business. And for the record, you’re a very handsome prat.’

  As soft snores replaced their low moans and whispered words of sentimentality, Jayne nestling into the crook of his arm, his leg overlapping hers, the uploaded videos were watched and shared; posted and savoured, re-watched and re-tweeted.

  Film me and post it on YouTube, he said. Let’s upload it onto the internet, she said. And then let’s stand back and watch our world come crashing down around us.

  Chapter 10

  The Week Their World Changed …

  Monday

  Each Charlie and Lola episode is eleven minutes and thirty-three seconds, which Sara reckoned was just enough time to regain a modicum of her sanity by having a sneaky glass of rosé wine and a flick through Facebook while the baby slept. She used to feel a sharp stabbing of guilt every time she resorted to a few sips of the potent pink stuff before the kids were in bed, but she had bypassed self-reproach a long time ago and was now firmly in the ‘whatever gets you through the day’ camp. Scrolling through her feed she saw that her sister had posted up a new album of her perfect brood all lined up in front of some dinosaur remains at the Natural History Museum. Sophie and Oliver were even holding hands. The only time Sara’s own children had skin-to-skin contact with each other was to attempt murder. Maybe if she took them to museums instead of relying on CBeebies for their entertainment they’d morph into their cousins. She might try that. One day.

  The rest of the updates were of the ‘Well I didn’t expect that!’ and ‘Only 4 sleeps!!’ variety that tried desperately to elicit responses of enquiry, but just served to annoy her. If you have something to say, say it. Further on down the page, posted yesterday was a status update from Jayne Brady. She hadn’t seen Jayne since they worked together on Saturdays at a second-hand bookshop when they were teenagers. She was a fun girl, always laughing, but quite podgy, she remembered, mind you, she was tall enough to carry it off. When they were studying the BFG at school one of the boys had shouted out that it was about Jayne. Everyone laughed, and Jayne had been absent for a few days after that. Funny, she’d forgotten about that until now.

  It was rare to see Jayne active on Facebook, she was actually quite surprised when Jayne had accepted her as a friend a few months ago as it had been over fifteen years since they’d seen each other. Jayne had one of those profiles that had maximum privacy on it, so she couldn’t snoop through albums or anything, although it didn’t look like she’d made any anyway. Her profile picture was a fairly innocuous photo of half of her face in a shadow, so you could barely make out her features, but she looked happy, if a bit tubby still.

  Jayne Brady

  20 hours. West London, United Kingdom

  Don’t know what to have for dinner? Check out Will Scarlet’s new series of delicious recipes to accompany his cooking school – and remember to buy all the ingredients at his deli in Richmond!

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpbDHxCV28B

  She must be in PR or something and this is one of her clients, Sara thought, as she glanced up at the clock. Four minutes of peace left. She clicked the link.

  **

  Tuesday

  The baby’s tiny rosebud lips pulsed with each sip of her mother’s milk as Caroline tried to get used to the unfamiliar sensation of breastfeeding. The angry red throb of the bedside clock taunted her with the fact that it was only an hour and a half since the last feed had ended. Her husband was cosily ensconced under his duvet, dreaming in the spare room next door. She knew he had an early meeting, like he did most mornings. Like she used to. She picked up her Kindle to try to stay awake until the baby had finished; she’d heard stories about babies rolling off their dozing mothers and falling to the floor and didn’t want to be the next example calmly used as a precautionary tale at an ante-natal class. The night-light wasn’t bright enough to see the screen and she’d decided against buying the one with the backlit screen, as it was thirty pounds more. Sighing,
she picked up her phone and turned on her 3G. It buzzed immediately. All the mums from her NCT class had set up a WhatsApp group and most nights a few of them were awake and lonely in the half-dark at the same time. There was a certain solace in knowing that at this exact moment, spread across a city, or a country, other new mums were also propped up in bed, one pillow bent in half, supporting an arm that supported a little head, a half-drunk glass of water on the bedside table, a stack of well-thumbed baby manuals next to the bed where a supportive husband should be.

  Sara Blackwell

  Girls, just saw this video on my friend’s fbook – you HAVE to see it! Every woman HAS to see it!

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpbDHxCV28B

  12:17

  Watching it re-awakened something in Caroline’s large maternity pants that she hadn’t felt for many months – in fact, after her difficult forceps delivery she’d woefully suspected she would never experience again. She watched it three times, the volume on one bar above mute, less for her newborn’s sake and more to hide her furtive perving from the man she’d agreed to forsake all others for. Imagine being presented with that in bed every morning. And the pancakes looked good too. Sara was right; they needed to spread the cheer. With her one free hand she logged into her Mumsnet account.

  ‘Girls, phones away now, please.’ Jayne barked at the gaggle of giggling sixth-formers crowded around Nicola Blake’s iPhone. She dropped her bag onto the floor next to the desk and wriggled out of her coat for the fourth time that morning. It was so annoying, it used to be that the teachers stayed put in their toasty classrooms and the kids tramped all over the school to each new lesson, but then the head unwisely decreed that it was a much more productive use of everyone’s time for the students to stay warm and cosy in their classrooms while the teachers scuttled along corridors, between buildings and up and down the stairs, every forty-five minutes. The only upside to this was the potential for weight loss, Jayne thought, but then the extra exercise has seen a proportional increase in her appetite too, thus so far a lose-lose situation. Taking a swig of tepid coffee from her thermos, she repeated. ‘Nicola, I’ve asked you to put that away, or you can come and get it from me at the end of the day.’

  ‘Sorry, Miss. I was just showing them a new film of this sexy chef bloke.’

  ‘Does it have anything to do with E.M. Forster and his Passage to India? No? Then my class is neither the time nor the place for it. Now last session we discussed the different representations of religion in the text: Christianity, Islam and Hinduism, but this lesson we’re going to look at the unity of all the living things in the novel and why this is a strong recurrent theme. Seriously, Nicola, bring me the phone. I did warn you. Come to the staffroom at 3.30 and you can get it back then.’

  Forty minutes later, when the bell went and every inch of the whiteboard was filled with scribbled words and arrows linking all the main themes and quotes, Jayne shrugged her coat back on and gave her students a cheery wave before setting off across the quad for her next lesson. As she trudged, head down, as if butting the bitter November wind away, the words ‘sexy chef bloke’ popped into her head. She shook her head as if this would make the thought fly out of her ears. It couldn’t be. They’d only uploaded the videos two days ago, and it was only meant to be to help Will’s students catch up with missed lessons and be a little bit of extra marketing for the deli, not for hormone-ravaged seventeen-year-olds to salivate over. It must be something else they were talking about.

  The only two seats in the staffroom were next to Gary Brown, one of the games teachers. Oh well, Jayne thought with a barely disguised shudder, better next to than opposite. He had this unfortunate habit of wearing loose shorts, a few inches above being publicly decent, and anyone sitting across from him could often inadvertently glimpse the mouse escaping his house.

  ‘Shift up, Gaz, there’s a good lad.’ Abi plonked herself in between them with a theatrical sigh and a crinkled nose.

  ‘So how’s Dirk?’ Jayne asked.

  ‘Wonderful. Well, really great. Good. He’s fine. Everything’s fine. Well, if I’m honest, he’s starting to get on my nerves a bit. He’s got this whole ‘Cor Blimey Guv’nor’ thing going on, when he knows and I know that he grew up in a detached house in Buckinghamshire. He’s one shiny suit away from being a parody of himself, except he’d think parody was a funny parrot.’

  Jayne laughed, ‘So remind me why you’re with him?’

  ‘I know, I know, I’m shallow and I’m bored and the sex is amazing. A-mazing.’ She fished out her tea bag and dripped little tea droplets across the patchy threadbare carpet tiles to the bin next to the sofa.

  ‘Well, you’ve given it a good shot – three months isn’t it?’

  ‘Five. If you count the first two months when we weren’t exclusive.’

  ‘You were, he wasn’t.’

  ‘Well, yes, technically he was the only one who wasn’t being exclusive.’

  ‘I guess if you have a gift you have to share it.’ Jayne said, making no attempt to veil her sarcasm.

  ‘Funny, that’s almost to the word what he said.’

  ‘Well, if you can tear yourself away from Dirk and his limited talents for an evening, Will has a class tonight and I really want to see that new Cameron Diaz romcom film – it’s on at 7.45, do you fancy it?’

  ‘Aw, sorry honey, I’ve got plans tonight; one of Ma’s neighbour’s nephews is new in London and she volunteered my services as tour guide. I’m meeting him at five, so if I can ditch him earlier, I’ll give you a buzz.’

  They both paused to sip their tea and momentarily tuned in to the conversation two young teachers were loudly having in the seats behind them.

  ‘Then he does this stirring thing with his hand, while he looks up at you and smiles, but not like a full-on smile with teeth, a sort of flirty lip curl.’

  ‘Was that the one with the bruschetta? I loved it when he licked some balsamic off his finger.’

  ‘You would, you dirty mare. Does Craig know?’

  ‘As if–’

  Abi grinned and looked back at Jayne, whose eyes had widened in disbelief, and she was leaning her head back to hear more. ‘What’s wrong?’ she mouthed. Jayne shook her head and reached into the deep pocket of her coat, which was haphazardly folded by her feet. She took out Nicola’s iPhone and tapped the screen to life. Frozen in time was the last face she saw each night and the one she woke up to every morning.

  Will could feel his phone vibrating in his pocket and smiled when he saw Jayne’s face flash up. It was a photo that he’d taken of her in Richmond Park one crisp sunny day, when her scarf was pulled up over her mouth and you could sense her wide grin beneath it only through the shape of her eyes. Her hair was in its usual frenzied disarray and her cheeks blushed with the cold. ‘Afternoon, light of my life, my one true love and reason for being.’

  ‘Will, the weirdest things are happening here, I’ve heard two different groups of people talking about you and your videos. The first were some sixth-formers, and then some teachers. People are watching them, like real people, not just our friends and your students.’

  ‘I know!’ He cradled the phone under his chin as he motioned for Bernard to take over serving his customer, lest he be the bad guy in someone’s story again. ‘The phone has not stopped ringing; I’ve had to make a waiting list for the courses. I might even think about hiring some more people to help out, because the shop’s been rammed all day, we’re completely out of most of the fresh stuff, I’ve had to double tomorrow’s orders already. It’s madness!’

  ‘But don’t you think it’s weird that people we don’t know are watching you and talking about you? I mean, these are my students and colleagues.’

  ‘Are they giving you gyp?’

  ‘No, not at all, no one apart from Abi and a few of the others know that you’re my boyfriend, so it’s not that. It’s just a bit cringy that women I know are perving over you.’

  ‘Perving, eh?’ Will couldn’t he
lp being amused at Jayne’s uncharacteristic jealousy, ‘was it my bulging biceps or my eyes that are as azure as the ocean?’

  He could sense her rolling her eyes as she replied sarcastically, ‘I think it was maybe your modesty.’

  **

  Wednesday

  Samantha wasn’t yet at the stage of desperation whereby she’d ring a celebrity at random and ask if they were homosexual, when invariably they’d shout ‘No!’ and fling down the phone, so she could then file the story under the headline ‘XXX Denies Being Gay’ but she was close. She’d put in calls to all of the guerilla photographers to see if anyone of note was snapped going in or coming out of Mahiki, Nobu or the Wellington Club. Heck, she’d even settle for The Harvester tonight, but it seemed that with the excesses of Christmas just around the corner all celebs, major and minor, had undertaken a mass retreat back behind their front doors, even the cast of TOWIE, which was unheard of.

  She’d written up just eleven pieces today, all way below the Lifestyle Editor’s expectations, more poop than scoop. The highlights being a Big Brother reject frolicking in the Dubai surf; a boy from Rochdale who found an eyelash in his Petit Filou and pictures of Kate Moss and her daughter ambling along Covent Garden’s Neal Street arm in arm, but as Kate Moss is one of the celebrities who would sue the arse off anyone who printed her daughter’s face, it was a non-story. It’s a supermodel nearing the end of her career walking next to a big blur. Hold the front page. Even the British weather, which could normally be relied on for a couple of top stories had let her down – heat waves equalled overweight D-listers and their muffin tops; flooding provoked awkward politicians to buy wellies and wade into people’s houses looking concerned, and snow prompted a whole swathe of amateur photographers to send in their blanketed landscapes, which was a ready-made photo gallery begging to be posted, but sadly you didn’t get any prizes for overcast greyness.