Me, You and Tiramisu

by Charlotte Butterfield

  ‘A heffalump or woozle is very confusel

  The heffalump or woozle is very sly

  – sly – sly – sly

  They come in ones and twoosels

  but if they so choosels

  before your eyes you’ll see them multiply

  – ply – ply – ply …’

  ‘Have I mentioned lately just quite how much I adore you, Jayne Brady?’

  ‘Not lately, no.’

  ‘Well I do.’

  At that moment the cab pulled up outside a fairly innocuous restaurant in China Town. In its window was an array of cheap golden cats with their left paws rocking rhythmically back and forth and a collection of dusty red parasols and paper lanterns suspended from the ceiling with yellowing sticky tape. They’d decided to choose privacy over pretension for this meal, knowing that it wouldn’t even be on the paparazzi’s radar. And after all, a spot of food poisoning was a small price to pay for an evening without camera lenses.

  Duncan and Erica were already seated in the small windowless basement room that masqueraded as a private dining area. Erica swiftly rearranged her features from disdain to delight when they walked through the door. It was obvious that she’d assumed having a famous friend meant dinners at The Ivy, not The Golden Duck.

  ‘You look amazing, Jayne! What a gorgeous lipstick! It really suits you! Will, darling, come here, you look divine as usual! Give me a kiss, you gorgeous man.’ Erica pulled Will in for a hug that lasted a couple of seconds too long.

  ‘I need to apologise for my lush of a wife. We were in such a hurry to leave the kids we arrived here an hour early and we’re already onto our second bottle,’ Duncan beamed as he leant across and kissed Jayne’s cheek. ‘But she’s probably only got another hour in her before she passes out in the corner, so bear with her in the meantime,’ he added amiably.

  ‘Shut up!’ Erica replied, ‘How are you both?’ her expression turned to theatrical pity as she then looked at Jayne, her bottom lip protruding and her forehead deeply furrowed. ‘And how are you? You poor thing.’

  Jayne smiled the polite smile that she’d now perfected. A smile that turned upwards at the edges but that didn’t quite reach her eyes. ‘I’m fine. Good, I’m good. We looked at wedding venues today,’ she said, brightly side-stepping Erica’s obvious probing. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to open up a conversation about how utterly rubbish the last couple of weeks had been, in fact she could have waxed lyrical about the crappiness of the fortnight all night, but she preferred to save her tales of wretchedness for Rachel whose loyalty to her was so fierce it was sometimes scary. Not that she didn’t trust Erica. Jayne didn’t doubt that her concern was heartfelt, but even Abi had been receiving the watered-down, heavily edited version of ‘woe is me’ lately.

  Wedding talk accompanied heaped plates of surprisingly tasty spring rolls, spare ribs and prawn crackers. Will relayed the pros and cons of the five hotels they’d seen that morning to a rapturous Erica and vaguely interested Duncan, who nodded in all the right places before enquiring whether there would be a free bar.

  A lull in the conversation as the waiter cleared the plates gave Erica the chance to revert to what was clearly her plan for the evening – making Jayne talk. Reaching across the table to put her hand over Jayne’s she gushed, ‘It must be so hard for you.’

  ‘Um, not really. Weddings are fun, aren’t they?’ Jayne replied, deliberately misunderstanding.

  ‘I have so much admiration for you facing these vicious people on the internet. What are they called again, Duncan?’

  ‘Trolls.’

  ‘Yes, trolls. The things they are saying about you. I would die. I would quite literally die.’

  Jayne inwardly winced at the un-literal use of the word literally before shrugging and shaking her head. ‘I’m trying not to let it bother me.’

  ‘We’re choosing not to read too much, actually, Erica,’ Will interjected.

  ‘Yes, that’s probably for the best. I mean, I was just devastated for you reading all the horrific abuse on Twitter about you. Calling you all those horrible names, and those blogs that have been set up with the only intention of being nasty about you. What was one of them called Dunc – you know the one with the picture of Jayne as a voodoo doll with pins sticking out of her?’

  Duncan shifted uncomfortably in his seat, ‘Um, Eric, I don’t think anyone wants–’

  ‘Or the one that’s a cartoon of a boxing glove going into your face, which they called The Brady Punch. I mean that’s just horrible. And after your mother did that interview, I know Will has told us that it’s all lies, but everyone has picked up on what she said, calling you Plain Jayne SuperLame. I am in so much awe of you, even leaving the house with all this going on.’ Little tears started forming in Erica’s glassy, kohl-rimmed eyes, ‘You need to stay strong, Jayne. Stay strong. That’s the only way to beat the bastards.’

  ‘Wow, look at the duck! That looks lovely,’ Will almost applauded the entrance of the duck and pancakes. He moved his leg under the table so it brushed Jayne’s in a silent show of intimate solidarity, but the gesture came too late. Jayne’s heart had quickened and she felt as though the walls were closing in on her, the deep-red walls slowly moving forward to squeeze her into a smaller and tighter space.

  She reached out for her water and saw her hand shaking uncontrollably. It knocked the delicate stem of her wine glass, sending the red liquid gushing over the tablecloth onto her pale-blue skirt. She jumped up as everyone frantically started patting her and the table. ‘White wine, we need white wine!’ ‘Salt!’ were the last things she heard as she ran from the room and locked herself in the toilet cubicle seconds before huge heaving sobs escaped her body.

  She tried to slow her breathing down, to release the tightness in her chest. Amidst her panic, a lucid thought of not wanting to pass out on the germ-ridden floor of a backstreet Chinese restaurant in Soho floated to the surface of her mind and enabled her to gain a modicum of control.

  Her face and neck were wet with tears and sweat patches had started to form under her arms, staining her new silk camisole. She didn’t blame Erica for what she said; she knew she wasn’t being malicious, just drunk and tactless. Since as far back as Jayne could remember she’d dealt with any kind of controversy by simply blocking it out, humming a happy tune and pretending it wasn’t there. Never quite managing to cultivate the full-body armour that Rachel donned every morning, she had had to resort to pure, plain avoidance of anything that wasn’t rosy. And now, at the age of thirty-two she was still doing it. It was just a shame that her friends weren’t.

  Jayne splashed water on her skirt, trying to avoid her reflection in the mirror above the small sink. She knew she must look awful; she didn’t need to see the streaks of foundation and her panda eyes to know that they were there.

  ‘Baby? Are you okay?’ Will’s concern was audible through the door. ‘You’ve been in there ages. Are you alright?’

  ‘I’m fine!’ Jayne called back perkily. ‘I’ll be out in a sec. The wine’s not coming out.’

  ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Sure, wait a sec.’ She tried to dab away the most stubborn mascara stains and pinched her cheeks to give them their colour back. ‘Hi!’ She flung open the door and smiled.

  Tilting her chin up he asked tenderly, ‘Have you been crying?’

  ‘Maybe a little.’

  ‘About the wine or what my best friend’s socially inept wife said?’

  ‘Bit of both,’ Jayne softly admitted. ‘Mainly the wine. I liked this skirt.’

  ‘I liked it too. But I like you more.’ He gently kissed her lips. ‘Don’t take any notice of her. Do you not think that there are thousands of people who think that I’m a complete prat? Do you see me upset about it? No, because I only give a toss what a tiny handful of people think about me. If you start worrying what complete strangers, who you’ll never meet, think about you, you’ll drive yourself insane.’

  ‘I know. I know that. B
ut it’s really difficult to just ignore the fact that these things are out there. Voodoo dolls of me? Cartoons where you can punch me in the face? What have I ever done to anybody? That’s sick. Really, really sick.’

  ‘I know. But just put it out of your mind. I’ve made some ready-rolled pancakes for you, with lots of hoisin sauce, just how you like them. Come and eat them before Dunc does.’

  ‘Do they think I’m stupid?’

  ‘Of course not! We’ll just tell them it took ages to get the stain out.’

  ‘But it hasn’t come out, look.’ The wine had stained the blue fabric a putrid brown colour.

  ‘Oh. Um, I don’t really know what to suggest. Have you got a petticoat on that might pass as a skirt?’

  ‘No. Just my knickers, and nobody really wants to see me in my knickers.’

  ‘I’d like to see you in your knickers … No? Okay, do you want me to pop out to a shop to buy you a new skirt?’

  He’d only been gone about two minutes before he arrived back in the basement bathroom breathless. ‘There’s a few photographers and people upstairs. Someone must have tipped them off.’ He ran his hand through his hair and chewed his bottom lip, ‘I don’t know what to do. We’re sort of trapped down here, and you look like you’ve been at a murder scene.’

  ‘There’s no way I can go out there looking like this. Can you imagine? If the world thinks I’m a fat, ugly witch at the best of times, seeing me like this is going to make the internet melt.’

  ‘Wait here. I’ll talk to the manager and sort something out.’ As it turned out, he didn’t need to. Duncan had arranged for them to sneak through the kitchens into the back alley, where a car driven by his brother’s friend was waiting to pick them up.

  Jayne and Will were bundled into the back seat, keeping their heads low under Erica’s coat as they edged through the baying crowd of hungry camera-wielding snappers and autograph-hunters lining the road. One or two people looked in through the rear windows as the car glided past and saw their two bodies doubled over in the back and started banging on the glass and pulling at the locked handles. ‘Just drive!’ Duncan ordered. The engine’s sudden rough roar, coupled with adrenaline-filled whooping from everyone else, covered Jayne’s sobs from where she lay huddled in the dirty foot-well of the stranger’s car.

  ‘That was insane!’ Duncan shouted, twisting around in the passenger seat as the car sped along the river. ‘Jesus H Christ, is it always like that with you, Will?’

  ‘That was particularly mental. Jeez, my heart’s still pounding!’ Will replied. Shrugging off Erica’s coat, he pulled himself up on to the back seat. ‘Jayne, baby, baby,’ he nudged Jayne with his feet, ‘You can get up now.’ Reluctantly Jayne slid up onto the seat, bringing her knees up to her chest and huddling into the door. If anyone noticed her reticence or caginess it was ignored as everyone else in the car relived the great escape with delighted hoots and yells. She blocked out everything except the sound of the blood pumping loudly in her ears and the rhythmic hum of the engine.

  It was alright for them, she thought. To them, this was fun.

  This wasn’t fun.

  Chapter 19

  Jayne had tumbled from car to back door to bed, not even bothering to take the remains of her make-up off or brush her teeth. Surprisingly she’d slept a dreamless sleep until a wide shaft of daylight found the crack between the hastily closed curtains and announced that it was morning. Her face felt stiff, taut with caked foundation and salt water. Running her tongue over her teeth made her grimace and flashbacks of last night reignited the hammering in her chest again.

  Will was still sleeping, lying spread-eagled in his boxer shorts, the duvet consigned to the floor, his mouth slightly ajar. It was easy to see why he’d garnered such an intense fan-base so quickly. He was incredibly handsome, much more so than most normal people you see on the street. But part of his appeal was that he had seemed so totally oblivious of it. Less so now, but then she couldn’t blame him; being flattered all day by make-up artists fawning over your bone structure would do that to you. He was told the other day that he had the longest eyelashes one stylist had ever seen. Up until that point, Jayne wasn’t sure that Will was even aware he had eyelashes.

  If she was completely honest, the new, and supposedly improved, Will was not really an improvement in her eyes. She had actually liked the greying temples that Fernando had painted over, one hair at a time. And whereas before his hair had that ‘just got out of bed look’ because he had actually just got out of bed, now it had that quality due to about twenty minutes in front of the mirror and four different expensive products.

  He’d stubbornly refused to have a manicure for about three months, before finally kowtowing to Michaela’s supposed better judgement. ‘It does make sense, I suppose, when I have close-ups of my hands all the time,’ he’d reasoned afterwards, while surreptitiously admiring his cuticles whenever he thought Jayne wasn’t looking. He drew the line at fake tan, but he had that gorgeous olive skin tone that darkened to a honey caramel within seconds of seeing sunshine, so he never needed to have that particular battle anyway.

  What must it be like, she wondered, to be so beautiful that people have to have a second look just to make sure that their first impression was right? To know that whichever room you were in, you were the best-looking thing in it. Even if the attention was good attention, not the vitriolic hatred she was now experiencing, but the kind of grovelling adulation Will enjoyed, she was sure she’d find it claustrophobic. But he didn’t seem to. He still swore that he wasn’t really aware of it most of the time, but to Jayne that line was starting to feel a little practised.

  Thank God there were only two more days of term left; the word ‘exhausted’ did a disservice to the way Jayne felt. It had been a month since Crystal’s article and interest had started to ebb away from her onto the next victim, so the photographers had gradually peeled away, been sent onto other assignments, but one solitary man, with a Marlboro in one hand and a camera lens in the other, persisted in turning up every day with only a pack of twenty and a Racing Post to keep him occupied until she arrived. His familiar leer had even started haunting her dreams – when she managed to sleep. Her misery was obvious. It was etched on her face as though with an indelible marker, and yet still he raised the camera to his face and clicked away with gay abandon as she hurried past every day. Today was no different.

  Kyra had given Rachel a relaxation CD filled with ‘positive reinforcement messages’ and ‘affirmations for a happy life’ to pass on to her, and it was testament to just how insular Jayne had become that she hadn’t even questioned why Kyra had ever needed to be in possession of such a CD in the first place, she’d just wordlessly accepted it. Apparently she was meant to breathe in for four counts and out for eight while picturing a rainbow emerging from behind the clouds, bathing her in its magical light. She’d listened to the whole CD on the journey in, trying desperately to find a rainbow amongst the clouds and to slow down her quickening pulse with longer breaths, but it was impossible.

  She knew what this was. She’d seen her A-level students have them before an important exam; she just needed to calm down, to inhale and exhale. The worst thing you can do is to give in to the rising sense of panic, she knew that. She’d said it often enough. Just close your eyes and breathe. And search for that blasted rainbow. It didn’t help that Abi wasn’t around; she’d left school a few days early to go back to Ireland for a family party – so Jayne was well and truly on her own.

  She’d just about got through the morning, well, almost. One more lesson to go and then lunch. She really hoped that Will and Rachel wouldn’t be out again tonight; she didn’t want to only have the clouds for company. Again.

  ‘Morning all,’ she greeted her class. She could really have done with some eager year sevens to round the first half of the day off, not this group of beligerant year elevens. She wasn’t in the right frame of mind to go into battle against a room of raging hormones.

 
She’d snapped, ‘because I told you to,’ to one girl, who questioned why she had to be the one to read aloud. But instead of doing it in her normal friendly, but authoritative, tone, which normally put an end to teenage whining, she’d let a note of desperation seep into her voice. A note that made thirty-two pairs of ears prick up; a red rag of a note that shouted ‘let the games commence’.

  ‘You think you’re so special, don’t you, Miss?’

  The irony of juxtaposing the insult in the first half of the statement with the term of respect in the second part didn’t escape Jayne and she resignedly sighed, ‘No, Michelle, I don’t.’ Which was true. Jayne had never harboured any pretensions of being special. Growing up with Crystal had put paid to any illusions that she was in some way different to any of the other seven billion people who walked the planet just trying to get through the day.

  ‘You do. But even your own family didn’t want you, did they? You think that you’re so much better than everyone else because you’ve managed to con someone as hot as Will Scarlet into being with you.’

  Jayne kept her eyes down, staring at the open book in front of her. Her vision started to blur. Don’t cry, she willed herself, don’t cry, not in here, not now.

  ‘Do you pay him? Is that it? That’s what even your mum says. She said that you’re paying him to be with you because there’s no way you could pull him if you weren’t.’

  The room laughed, big, bolshy, mocking laughs. If Michelle hadn’t quoted Crystal, if Michelle had chosen some other taunt or line of bullying she’d have been okay. Jayne would have been able to shrug it off, to stare her down, to rise above it and see it for what it was. But Michelle didn’t, and now Jayne couldn’t. Her breath quickened, her heart hammered against her ribs and she heard herself give an ear-piercing scream.

  The head had called it ‘taking a well-earned rest’, but the real term was ‘suspended with pay’. It had taken thirty-seven seconds, basically the time it took the class to type 140 characters into Twitter, for the ‘incident’ to be on its way to going viral. By the time Jayne had reached the deli there was a crowd of braying parents and photographers outside. Even the rear entrance was no longer sacred, with a smaller, but just as angry, mob lying in wait for her. Bernard was standing in the middle of them, a friendly face in the midst of such anger. He opened her car door and bundled her inside the shop. He could see immediately that any type of fight or resistance had left Jayne’s body. She’d felt smaller, frailer in his arms, letting him guide her up the stairs to the flat, shaking her head weakly at him as he lifted her feet up on to the sofa so that she was lying flat.