Me, You and Tiramisu

by Charlotte Butterfield

  ‘Rach? What are you doing here? When did you get here? Why are you here?’

  ‘We’ll give you girls a bit of space to talk. Abigail, my dear, come on through and leave them to it. There’s tea in the pot.’ Mrs Sheeran flapped Abi out of the kitchen with both hands and discreetly closed the door behind them.

  The sisters stood facing each other, both leaning against opposite kitchen counters. Jayne stared down at the floor, concentrating on a half-filled dog bowl that sat on the worn-out lino. ‘What’s happening to you, J?’ Rachel finally said, her voice a mixture of disbelief and compassion. ‘This isn’t you.’

  ‘It’s not what you think,’ Jayne sullenly ran her toe along the line where two halves of lino met.

  ‘We all seem to be saying that a lot to each other lately.’

  ‘This is different. It actually isn’t what it looks like.’

  ‘Just like the picture in the paper of Will and Kyra.’

  Hearing Kyra’s name linked to Will’s with just an ‘and’ in the middle of it made Jayne involuntarily shudder. ‘It’s nothing like that,’ she spat defiantly, raising her eyes to stare at her sister.

  ‘What exactly do you think happened that night?’

  Jayne shrugged her shoulders and pursed her lips. ‘It’s there in print.’

  ‘And we both know how reliable that can be.’

  ‘So you’re telling me that he wasn’t nuzzling her neck? That I’m mistaken – he just lost his footing and fell into her hair? That you were standing there laughing about it because someone had told a joke that you found funny? Is that what was happening? Oh, silly me, do I feel stupid?’

  ‘Sarcasm is an ugly defense mechanism, Jayne, it doesn’t suit you. Will is in bits about this, you know.’

  ‘Yeah, he sounded really cut up about it on the phone last night,’ Jayne sarcastically retorted.

  ‘That’s why I’m here. He came off the phone in tears. I’ve never seen him like that. And now you’re off shagging about with God knows who. Will’s going to be devastated.’

  Jayne’s voice went up an octave as she blurted out, ‘You can’t tell him! I mean, nothing happened, but he can’t know about this!’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I tell him, Jayne? You’ve been a right bitch to him for months! Are you jealous? Is that it? Do you look at him making a success of himself and you can’t handle it?’

  Jayne gasped, ‘Do you really think that? That I begrudge him this success? It’s not that at all, it’s not about me, it’s him, and all the craziness that now surrounds him. Do you have any idea what it’s like to have everyone you meet wonder what on earth your boyfriend sees in you? To have every outfit you wear scrutinised and laughed about by strangers? To feel like you should be grateful that he picked you?’

  She knew that she was being hysterical now, but couldn’t stop herself. Rachel was quiet, letting her sister getting worked up, knowing that her frenzy would reach a crescendo before it started ebbing away, and she just leant back and let it happen.

  ‘Do you know what? I thought we could get over this, that somehow he would say, you know what, Jayne, I love you more than I love fame, and I’m going to give it all up for you, and then we’d go back to being the way we were. I actually thought that could happen, and then I saw the picture in the paper and I realised that it’s impossible to go back, it’s gone too far. If he can do that with her just hours after I leave, and then not even be sorry about it, then he’s not the man I love.’

  Very calmly, and with a composure Jayne was lacking at that moment, Rachel walked across the small kitchen until she was standing shoulder to shoulder with her twin, both of them facing the breakfast table, which was still littered with cereal boxes and bowls with milk pooling in the bottom of them. ‘You know the calendar that’s on the wall in our kitchen?’

  ‘What?’ Jayne said, not understanding the turn the conversation had taken.

  ‘Our calendar. The 26th July had been circled for a few months, with the word Anniversary Party on it. Do you remember seeing that? Or me asking you a while back to keep the date free?’

  It was vaguely ringing bells for Jayne, ‘Um, sort of. Why?’

  ‘Kyra had hired out a bar in Chiswick to celebrate her one-year anniversary and she wanted you and Will to come. You stormed out the morning of that party. Will wasn’t going to go, actually. He was sitting staring into space for hours after you left and I made him get washed, dressed and literally booted him out of the door to come to the party with me, because he knew it meant a lot to me.’

  ‘Why would you care if he went to Kyra’s party? And I didn’t even know she was seeing anyone. Who’s her partner, anyway?’

  Quietly Rachel replied, ‘I am.’

  ‘You’re a lesbian?’ Jayne cried, swivelling around to face her sister, ‘When did that happen?’

  ‘About thirty-two years ago, in theory, but only a year in practice.’

  ‘But how can you be a lesbian?!’ Jayne was incredulous, how could she not have known this? She knew that her sister was a lot more private than she was, but hiding her sexuality from her own twin for their whole lives was not possible. ‘You love men!’

  ‘I tried to love men, which sounds like a massive cliché, but I tried to convince myself that it was just because I hadn’t met the right man, but it wasn’t, and I’ve been with enough men to know that.’

  ‘But a year? You and Kyra have been together for a year?’

  ‘I was going to tell you after a few months, when I realised that she was pretty special to me, but then the longer it went on I couldn’t find the words to tell you, and then everything started kicking off with Will and then you got yourself all worked up and became so insular, and I didn’t feel like I could talk to you about what was going on with me when you had so much going on in your own life.’

  ‘You and Kyra?’

  ‘Me and Kyra.’

  ‘Together?’

  ‘Yep.’

  Jayne opened her arms and Rachel nestled into them, squeezed tight against her sister’s body. They stayed like that for some time, each taking in the enormity of what this meant. The implied, but unsaid, accusation that Jayne had been too self-absorbed to see what was under her nose the whole time was crushing to her. They were all each other had, and for Rachel to feel that she couldn’t confide in her the single-most important detail of her life was too much for Jayne’s already fragile state and she allowed fresh tears to cascade down her cheeks.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Rach, so sorry.’

  ‘So in that picture, Will wasn’t nuzzling, he was actually just saying goodbye as he wanted to go home in case you came back. And as for me laughing, yes, I probably was – because, for the first time in my life, I felt free and light, and unfettered, and able to just be me.’ Rachel wiped a tear away from her sister’s cheek, ‘You’ve always been the more outgoing one, the cleverer one, the one who makes people laugh by doing something daft, and I’ve always just tagged along behind. You think I’m so strong and capable, but it’s all a façade, Jayne, I’m only like that because I know that you need me to be.’

  ‘What a frickin’ mess I’ve made of everything.’

  ‘No arguments here.’

  They shared a rueful smile. ‘How can I make it all better?’

  ‘Well, you can start by having a shower and getting changed, the mermaid-sequin look is a little too glam for eleven o’ clock in the morning.’

  ‘Wow, the old Rachel would never have said no to sequins before lunch. Now you’re a lesbian are you going to be all Doc Martins and dungarees?’

  Rachel gave her a playful shove. ‘Well, if I am, I know whose wardrobe to raid.’

  ‘Touché.’

  ‘And while you’re in the shower, I’m going to book us both on a flight home. The sooner you and Will talk to each other the better. You were both put on this planet to be with each other, there’s no question about that, and this is a tiny blip in an otherwise very nearly perfect life together.’

&nbs
p; ‘Very nearly perfect. I like that.’

  ‘Now go! You stink. You’re never going to win back the man of your dreams smelling like a boozed-up harlot.’

  ‘Sir, yes sir.’

  Chapter 25

  The cabin crew had just finished their half-hearted attempt at informing a planeful of disinterested passengers about the brace position when Jayne’s mind started to wander.

  Rachel’s head rested on her shoulder; the early start and belated soul-cleansing had obviously exhausted her into a peaceful slumber. Her words ‘when you had so much going on in your own life’ kept floating to the forefront of Jayne’s thoughts, jabbing at her conscience. While she had been so wrapped up in the changes in her own life, she’d completely ignored everyone else. If anything, Will used to accuse her of being too attentive to others, too involved in people’s lives, telling her to butt out and mind her own on quite a few occasions, and look at her now. To know that Rachel had been going through such a huge turmoil of emotions while she’d been prattling on about uneaten dough balls was horrifying.

  And Abi and Bernard. Bernard. She’d toasted so many new relationships with Abi over the years with a lukewarm glass of cheap white and a handful of pub cashews, but when it really mattered, when she’d met someone who actually made her glow from the inside, Jayne was too absorbed in her own drama to even notice.

  She ran through, for the hundredth time, the speech that she wanted to say to Will, about her decision to support him in whatever he wanted to do, and how she was going to grow a skin so thick a hundred voodoo dolls couldn’t do her any damage. How she was going to take a step forward and be with him every step of the way on this new adventure. Whatever he wanted to do, she was going to be right there next to him, holding his hand, because she knew that if the situation was reversed, he’d be her loudest cheerleader. She just hoped it wasn’t too late.

  Their flat was so still Jayne had a sudden horrifying thought that he’d packed up and left already. There was no hum from the radio or low buzz of the TV that usually signalled Will’s presence in the apartment. Passing a square little watercolour on the stairs Jayne allowed herself a sigh of relief. Will would never leave behind the last canvas that his mum had ever painted.

  She then had a horrible premonition of walking in and finding him in bed with someone else. After all, she’d found herself in a similar, albeit completely innocent, position that very morning – a fact that Rachel and Abi had thankfully agreed that no one else ever needed to know about. She’d made Abi swear on Ronan Keating’s life that Jim wasn’t going to try and supplement his paltry teaching and guitar-playing income by going to the papers about his night of no-passion, but Abi was adamant that an ageing lothario he might be, but he was as decent as they come. She’d followed that up with, ‘like Will.’

  Hearing the front door rub against the fraying piece of carpet held down by layers of masking tape that he’d been meaning to fix for years, Will peered over the bannister. ‘Hey.’

  ‘Hey.’ As reunions go, this one was slightly more sombre than she was expecting, but then she could hardly blame him. In the last twenty-four hours she’d accused him of being a megalomaniac adulterer; maybe it was going to be slightly harder to get him to overlook that than she’d thought.

  Putting her bag down on the floor beside her, they both stood on the landing. Jayne noticed how bloodshot his eyes were, and the beginnings of dark circles blemished his usually flawless skin. His hands were in the pockets of his tracksuit bottoms, which Jayne had only ever seen him wear when he had flu. ‘I’m sorry,’ Jayne said simply.

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘I said some horrible things.’

  ‘Yes, you did.’

  ‘I didn’t mean them.’

  ‘Yes, you did.’

  ‘Okay, well, maybe I meant them at the time, but I was being irrational, and I see that now.’

  ‘So now you’re being entirely rational?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So if we were to talk about all this, and I mean properly talk about all of this, you wouldn’t go crazy again and storm out, or accuse me of kissing someone else, or paint me as any kind of villain?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t.’ In response to his arched eyebrow she added, ‘I promise.’

  He described the attention as intoxicating, which she thought was a good word for it, covering as it did all the emotions from euphoria to overwhelming paranoia. Up until the picture with Kyra, the press and public loved him. He’d felt that he was infallible, universally adored, which he didn’t think would have affected him so much, but he couldn’t help but like his newfound celebrity persona, and she couldn’t blame him, either.

  Part of the reason she’d toyed with the idea of acting way back when was to pretend to be a person that people admired, or fleetingly thought had talent. But like a trip switch that suddenly plunges everything into darkness, that one blurry shot in a backstreet bar in Chiswick catapulted him from England’s darling to a two-timing slut in the space of an hour. That’s all it took for the nation’s opinion of him to nosedive and he suddenly had a glimpse of what she’d been dealing with for the last few months.

  He’d tried so hard to ignore the hateful comments tagged onto the end of all the articles, each of them variations of, ‘the next picture we see of Will Scarlet he’ll be snorting coke off a hooker’s belly, watch this space’. Even the mildest ones offended him deeply, insinuating that he was nothing more than a heartless playboy and that he was clearly the reason for his fiancée having a nervous breakdown.

  Rachel had told him before she’d left for the airport that she’d be fine about him telling the media the truth, to explain that Kyra was monumentally not interested in him and she was the reason why, but he refused to bring their private relationship into a public forum just to save his skin, which made Jayne love him even more.

  ‘The thing is,’ he admitted, ‘I just love cooking, and you know what? I really do enjoy all the TV-presenting, inspiring people to cook more, teaching people how easy it actually is to mix a few ingredients together and come up with something so much cheaper and more delicious than you’d get from a packet from the freezer. But it’s just such a shame that so much crap comes with being on TV.’

  ‘But it doesn’t have to, does it?’ She innocently asked. ‘Call me naïve, but isn’t it possible to walk a middle road somewhere: one where you’re not going to the opening of a new nail bar just to get your name out there, and instead just concentrating on food-related stuff? Once the press realise that actually you’re pretty boring, really, they won’t hound you, or us, so much.’

  ‘So I’m pretty boring am I? I thought we weren’t name-calling?’

  ‘You know what I mean! Michaela’s agenda of fast-tracking you to super-stardom meant that you went into overdrive, making sure that you were everywhere a camera might be, and fair play to her, she really knew what she was doing, but somewhere along the way she, and you a bit, forgot that actually underneath the hair dye and clear mascara–’

  Will opened his mouth to object, and then decided, actually, it was a fair comment.

  ‘–underneath all that gumph, you’re a chef. A really passionate chef. So there’s no reason at all why you shouldn’t still do the TV. In fact, why not talk to the network about launching a programme that you really want to do, but for the love of all that’s holy we need to stop the public’s fascination with you, with us, because a woman needs to eat dough balls.’

  Will raised one eyebrow, ‘I’m not even going to try and decipher that last comment. But everything you said before makes a lot of sense. Who was I kidding? Poster-boy for Diesel? Cover of Esquire?’

  ‘You don’t need to pretend to me that it wasn’t fun, Will, it’s okay to say, ‘you know what, Jayne, I had a blast’.’ She shrugged, ‘And you know what? it wasn’t all miserable for me, either. I stood next to Hollywood royalty, for Christ’s sake, even if no picture exists to prove it. So don’t beat yourself up over any of it, but it was starti
ng to get out of hand, and I think if we’re going to come out the other side of this we just need to reassess what makes us happy.’

  They were sitting next to each other on their bar stools, choosing the less-confrontational side-by-side seating arrangement over sitting opposite each other and staring into each other’s eyes. Will slowly leaned and gently shoulder-barged Jayne. ‘You make me happy,’ he said finally. ‘Well, you did, before you started going loop-the-loop.’

  ‘And when you didn’t enjoy having the excess of your cuticles trimmed, you made me happy too.’ She barged him back.

  His voice became more serious as he quietly asked, ‘What do you want to do about the wedding?’

  ‘What do you want to do about it?

  ‘I asked you first.’

  ‘I asked you second.’

  ‘I made a banana cake earlier, why don’t we have a coffee and figure out what we’re going to do.’ He jumped off his bar stool, giving her head an affectionate ruffle as he passed. She watched him take the small Tupperware of ground coffee beans out of the fridge and set it alongside two matching mugs with comedy moustaches on them that they’d once bought each other as ‘just because’ presents, and right then she knew it was all going to be okay.

  Chapter 26

  Twelve months later

  Sitting still and contemplating life was not something Jayne had ever really felt comfortable doing. She wished she were one of those women who started each day with a fifteen-minute meditation that centred them and realigned their chakras, or whatever it was that sitting cross-legged and ‘omming’ was meant to do, but she wasn’t. The second her eyes closed she either fell fast asleep or the mother of all to-do lists floated stubbornly to the forefront of her brain, rendering any kind of relaxation impossible. Surrendering your consciousness to the universe was hopeless when there were smear tests to book and overdue dry cleaning to pick up. She couldn’t even visit the bathroom without a book, magazine, or the back of a bleach bottle to read, which showed just how much she despised having time to think. But this morning, being alone felt completely the right thing to do.