Me, You and Tiramisu

by Charlotte Butterfield

  She had been so shocked at her own outburst; it was the first time in her life that she’d ever lost her temper, let alone used so many swear words in one sentence. And at a child. A child. It didn’t matter that the child was a notorious bully, or that she hadn’t been in the right head space to deal with it. She’d lashed out at a child. In one instant, one badly timed, completely out-of-character moment, she’d flushed thirteen years of teaching down the toilet, along with any semblance of empathy anyone might have had towards her. A child.

  ‘I’ve really done it now, Bernard,’ she ventured weakly.

  ‘Tea or wine?’ was his compassionate response. He knew Jayne well enough to know that she’d reached her breaking point. No amount of clucking or pity was going to hoist her out of it. There was only room for practicalities now. ‘Maybe we’ll start with tea and then move on to something stronger when the sun goes over the yard-arm, yes?’

  Jayne could hear Bernard busying himself in the kitchen. The clank of cups and the kettle boiling were interspersed with the sound of him leaving urgent messages with a variety of people for Will and Rachel to return home ‘quick as you can’.

  Chapter 20

  Three days passed. Three days of not leaving the flat. Three days of wearing pyjamas during the day. Three days of headlines like, ‘Plain Jayne Assaults Pupil’ and ‘Scarlet’s Woman in Abuse Shocker’. Three days of Rachel chaperoning her in the bath, checking that she didn’t keep her head submerged for too long.

  Michelle Whittaker’s parents had threatened to sue on grounds of their daughter’s ‘distress’, a threat that was swiftly and sanctimoniously replaced with offers involving the words ‘out of court’ and ‘settlement’. Will was on his way back from a meeting with Michaela’s solicitors now to confirm if there was anything to be concerned about in their ludicrous claim. Jayne could see that his stoicism was beginning to wear a little thin; he didn’t understand at all why she’d let everything build up to such a crescendo, but then, why would he?

  ‘So as a gesture of goodwill, the solicitor called them to offer a thousand pounds–’ Will raised his hand to stop Jayne from furiously interrupting – ‘to the charity of their choice, and their reply was even fruitier than the words you called their daughter, which obviously the solicitor recorded, which means that we won’t be hearing from them again.’

  It was a relief; she knew that they were just chancing it, but the thought of potentially going to court on top of everything was just too much to bear. Will obviously thought that this news would be an end to her ‘blues’, and wrongly deemed the time right to merrily mention a new luxurious block of flats in Kew that had just started to be marketed. The white-gloved doorman and twenty-four-hour manned reception desk had proved too difficult to ignore as he airily slid the glossy estate agents brochure across the breakfast bar to her.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘A brochure of a new development near here. It looks pretty good.’

  ‘These are nearly a million pounds! We can’t afford a million pounds, Will!’

  ‘We could with a mortgage based on my projected earnings this year.’

  ‘But the deposit alone would be hundreds of thousands. We don’t have that kind of money in the bank!’

  ‘We could do if we accepted the magazine deal, which, thank God, they haven’t retracted yet …’

  ‘Are we still talking about this? I thought we agreed that we wanted to keep the day private.’

  ‘We do. Which is why I think it’s a good idea to sign up with just one magazine, so we don’t have loads of different photographers all jostling for a picture. If we agree to be exclusive with just one publication then it puts everyone else off. Seriously, that’s the way it works. Michaela told me.’

  ‘Oh. It must be true if Michaela told you.’ She knew that it had been Michaela who had generously offered her lawyer’s services on the company account this afternoon, but even that wasn’t enough to stop Jayne wanting to kick a wall every time her name was mentioned. Michaela. Michaela.

  Just then the front door slammed and feet started clumping up the stairs, fused with excited chatter and laughter. Rachel burst through the kitchen door with Marco and Kyra in tow. Jayne’s stomach lurched. Cue a round of air kisses – although the air between Marco’s lips and Will’s cheek miraculously vanished when it was their turn to greet each other. ‘I haven’t seen you for ages, Jayne! How are you?’ The ‘how’ and the ‘you’ were voiced as if in italics, Kyra’s head tilted to the side as she said it, a thousand other words of pseudo-sympathy hung in the air.

  ‘Good. I’m fine thanks, Kyra. You?’

  ‘Great, thanks, but then I’m not the one with my face all over the papers every day. Well done you for not going into hiding. If it was me you wouldn’t have been able to coax me out from under my bed, I don’t think!’ She laughed and placed a hand on Jayne’s arm. ‘Rach says you’re being a superstar about all of it.’

  ‘Jayne’s doing brilliantly,’ Rachel revealed supportively. ‘She knows it’s all a load of tripe, don’t you?’

  ‘Can I just say, and I know she’s your mother and everything, but what a bitch for starting all this,’ added Marco. ‘I felt really sorry for her at first, and then when Rachel told us the truth we were like, oh no she didn’t.’ His last few words were accompanied by a hand on the hip and a wagging finger. Trying not to revert to stereotype was a constant battle for Marco.

  ‘I was saying to Rachel whether you should maybe tell your side of the story, so that people know the truth?’ Kyra asked, ‘That way, you’ll get some of the sympathy and not your mum or this Whittaker girl.’

  Will leapt in at the same time as Rachel, both of them saying variations of no. ‘I don’t think that’s the right thing to do. It’ll just prolong the story being in the papers.’

  ‘Just be the bigger person and keep quiet. Don’t lower yourself to their depths,’ was Rachel’s argument.

  ‘But if you do an interview, it’ll be completely on your terms – you can choose which newspaper or magazine to speak to, you can decide the direction it goes in and what you say,’ Kyra reasoned. It pained Jayne to admit it, but Kyra actually talked sense and seemed genuinely on her side. She caught her sister glaring at Kyra, making it quite obvious that they’d been discussing this before.

  ‘Or, like Will said, it’ll keep you in the news far longer than you would be if you just lay low.’ Rachel added.

  ‘If I lie any lower I wouldn’t get out of bed. A woman actually spat at me when I came back from school that day. Can you believe that?’

  Marco and Kyra shook their heads sympathetically. Rachel and Will had spent a couple of hours calming her down that evening, so this wasn’t news to them. She’d wanted to call the police and lodge it as an assault, until they both convinced her not to. What was wrong with these people who had made snap judgments on her based on the way she looked and who she was dating? What did these psychopathic women think, that if she didn’t exist Will would be with them? These thoughts had tumbled out of her mouth, without even pausing for breath, and Will had just laughed them off, telling her not to be silly and over-react. She didn’t think it was over-reacting to be a little incensed at having a stranger’s spit in your hair. Rachel’s initial compassion had also morphed into frustration, telling her, albeit kindly, to ‘grow a pair.’ You know what? Jayne suddenly thought, I’m going to do it. I’m going to put the story straight and then everyone will leave me alone.

  The trouble was, she didn’t know how to go about speaking to the press. She was, had been, an English teacher, not a media guru, and she absolutely didn’t want to ask Michaela’s advice, because she knew that it would be the same as Will’s and Rachel’s – keep schtum. Jayne knew that the tabloids would love her to talk to them, but they would put their own spin on everything she said, having bought in so completely to Crystal’s and Michelle’s tales of sorrow. The weekly magazines would sandwich her interview between a story of a woman who had horns instea
d of ears and a feature on the latest diet tips that involved just eating puréed red cabbage. And the monthly magazines, which she would definitely prefer, would interview her now, yet not run the story for another two or three months, such was their lead time. And she couldn’t wait that long for her life to go back to normal.

  She suddenly remembered the young journalist who first interviewed Will back in November. Samantha something. She was really sweet and it was her article that made people fall in love with Will. Maybe she could do the same for her?

  It wasn’t difficult to find Samantha’s contact details; since her interview with Will was published her byline was on more and more stories nearer the top of the webpage, not buried a few screens down, like before.

  Samantha answered by barking ‘Newsroom!’ down the phone, which gave Jayne a bit of a jolt. Her only experience of the media so far had been negative and upsetting, and yet here she was willingly calling a person whose greeting when picking up their phone is ‘Newsroom!’

  ‘Um, hello, Is this Samantha Carter? This is, um, Jayne Brady, Will Scarlet’s fiancée …’ There was a moment’s pause, and the sound of fumbling from the other end.

  ‘Hi, Jayne, how are you?’ In the nine months that had passed between her standing in their living room shrieking with excitement at getting her big break and now, Samantha’s naïve exhilaration had been replaced by a more mature worldliness, making her sound as if she’d been expecting Jayne to call.

  ‘I’m, well, I’m okay. I was just calling because there have been some stories about me recently that haven’t really been true, and so I wondered if I should, well, tell my side, and you’re the only reporter I’ve ever met, so I’m calling you first.’

  ‘Great. Yes, that’s great. But let me stop you there. I’ll need to talk to my boss to see what we can offer for this. So you haven’t approached anyone else? It’ll be an exclusive? We don’t want to get involved in a bidding war, so our offer will be final. Are you okay to hold or do you want me to call you back?’

  ‘Um, I don’t really know what you mean. I don’t want you to pay me for this. Is that what you mean? You think I’m doing this for money?’

  ‘Aren’t you?’ Samantha sounded shocked.

  ‘No! I just want to tell the truth and then be left alone.’

  ‘That’s very commendable Jayne, but I think it’s better to be honest and just say the amount you’re looking for so that neither of us wastes our time. Ten thousand? Twenty? Give me your ballpark.’

  ‘You’re not listening to me. I don’t want your money. I’m doing this to tell my side. I don’t want all these people, who don’t really know me, to influence what people think about me! I’m a nice person, I really am, I don’t hurt small animals or children, I just try and get on with my life and hope that people like me!’ Jayne’s voice had risen to near-hysteria, forgetting that she was talking to a journalist with a dictaphone held next to the receiver.

  ‘I don’t deserve this, people spitting at me in the street, shouting abuse at me wherever I go. Is it such a crime that I fell in love with someone prettier than I am? Hold the front page! I’m living in a frickin’ nightmare. I just want it to end!’ Shaking as the words tumbled out of her mouth, Jayne suddenly remembered who was on the other end of the line and her hand shot to her mouth. She panicked and slammed the phone down.

  The phone had been ringing continuously for half an hour and Jayne had just sat there staring at it, not knowing how to make this right. She hadn’t meant to go off on one like that, but the suggestion that she was anything like Crystal, or Dirk, trading secrets for cold, hard cash, just made her so angry. Was it so inconceivable that she’d want to just give an honest account of her life for no other reason than to speak the truth? She gingerly picked up the receiver, ‘Hello?’

  ‘Oh thank God! You had me worried.’

  ‘Hi Samantha, I’m sorry about that. It’s been a really tough few weeks and I just flipped out.’

  ‘It’s okay, completely understandable. Are you ready to talk now?’

  It had all spilled out. Jayne had attempted to keep Rachel out of it as much as possible. She knew that her sister didn’t approve of her even doing an interview, let alone being part of it, so she tried to use the words ‘I’ and ‘me’ instead of ‘us’ and ‘we’. It was a bit challenging remembering to speak in the singular rather than plural when her whole life had been entwined with Rachel’s, but she knew how intensely private her sister was.

  She heard herself unravelling her history – everything from always looking for the father who didn’t even know she existed, to what it was like growing up with a mother who pretended she was her sister. Fond memories of Helen’s part in her life were tearfully talked about, but it wasn’t until Jayne mentioned the summer when she met Will that Samantha’s interest really peaked.

  ‘So you say that his mother had just died?’

  ‘Um, yes, but don’t put that in. I don’t think he’d want me to talk about it,’

  ‘Did he cry a lot?’

  ‘Really, I don’t want you to write about that. I shouldn’t have–’

  ‘Did he have bad dreams about it? Wet the bed? Do you think he views you as the mother he didn’t have?’

  ‘We’re the same age! And no to all of your questions. I don’t want to talk about this. Do you know what? I don’t want to talk any more.’

  ‘But Jayne, it’s going so well. Please, keep talking–’

  ‘No, this was a bad idea. I shouldn’t have done this. I don’t want to do this article any more. Please forget I ever called.’

  ‘I can’t do that now, Jayne, my editor is very excited about this. We’re leading with it tomorrow.’

  ‘But I don’t want you to! I’m not taking part in this any more.’

  ‘You called me, Jayne. You called me and now the story is running.’

  ‘Can I at least see it before you print it? I need to see what you’re writing.’

  ‘Sorry, we don’t give editorial consent before publication to anyone. And anyway, it’s all your own words. I can’t make up what you didn’t say. I trust you’ve been recording this conversation as well, so you know what you said?’

  Jayne knew that Samantha knew that she hadn’t even thought of doing that. Why hadn’t she thought of doing that? Because she was stupid. A stupid, stupid woman who thought she could play this game. But she couldn’t. She was just a little pawn being shuffled around a board that other people controlled. Other people who were far cleverer and more together than she would ever be.

  Chapter 21

  Jayne Brady is a woman teetering on the brink of suicide, ‘I’m living in a f***ing nightmare, I just want it all to end,’ she emotionally confides to The Globe in this explosive exclusive interview. Talked back from the edge by our own Samantha Carter, Jayne opens up for the first time about the mental abuse and neglect she suffered at the hands of her mother; the father she yearns every day to meet; the estrangement from her twin sister and how she saved fiancé Will Scarlet from the grief that was set to destroy him.

  What the hell were you thinking?’ Jayne didn’t think she’d ever seen Will so angry. Veins were popping out on either side of his neck and his face was flushed red, ‘You weren’t, you weren’t thinking. You can’t have been, because no sane person in their right mind would have said this stuff.’ Jayne winced as he threw the paper at the living-room wall. She was sitting at the table like a naughty child, her head bowed low and hands clenched in front of her, while he paced the room behind her like an angry animal, flinging admonishments at her. You’re stupid. You’re careless. You’re insane. She knew she deserved every accusation. It was stupid, careless and insane.

  Downstairs the door slammed shut. ‘Where is she? Where is she?’ The fury in Rachel’s voice shook the walls as she came hurtling up the stairs. ‘What the fuck did you think you were doing?’ Rachel cried as she flung open the living-room door. ‘How did you think this would make anything better?

  �
��Please don’t shout at me. I know it was a mistake–’

  ‘A mistake? A mistake would be buying full-fat milk instead of skimmed. A mistake would be going out without a coat in October. This, this–’ Rachel thrust the newspaper inches from Jayne’s face. ‘This is a complete disaster.’

  Tears started running down Jayne’s cheeks. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know–’

  ‘No, you don’t know,’ Will jumped in, ‘you don’t know what massive damage you’ve done. I hadn’t told anybody about Mum dying, and then you just blurt it out – and to tell the world that I was falling apart–’ he picked up the crumpled paper from where he had thrown it down on the table and read out loud, ‘with grief so raw he had started walking down a path of self-destruction.’ What does that even mean?’

  ‘But I didn’t say that! I mentioned that she’d died and then as soon as I said it I told her not to write it!’

  ‘Oh that’s okay, then. You told a journalist something, but then told her not to write it. Because journalists do that. They ask you questions and then ignore your answers. Jesus, Jayne, how could you be so gullible?’

  ‘And what the hell is this ‘estranged twin sister’ garbage all about? Reading this article you wouldn’t even know you had a twin sister, it’s all ‘my childhood this, I did that, me, me, frickin’ me.’