Who's That Girl?

by Mhairi McFarlane

  Usually, Edie would be very pleased to find herself with what amounted to a paid day off. Time tooling around by herself felt a lot less appealing now she had huge anxieties and a guilty conscience, with no online rabbit hole to tumble into, either. She wanted to be busy-busy-busy to avoid all the bad thoughts.

  Also, while she appreciated he was an important man, she suspected she’d had her first taste of the behaviour that caused the previous biographer to exit stage left from the Elliot Owen Story. Edie had a very nasty feeling she was going to fare no better, and be what Boddywinkle was to Ninbert.

  14

  Edie finally had a reply from Jack. Six days after he’d unpinned a grenade and lobbed it into the middle of several lives at once, then scattered before the smoke had cleared.

  She was getting ready for what could be grandly called ‘an evening out’, applying her make-up, peering into the old milky mirror of her youth with the plastic red frame, rummaging around in a cosmetics basket that had a topsoil of shattered kohl pencils and lidless grey eye shadows.

  The name that used to give her such a sting of excitement appeared on her phone screen. Now it just stung. Involuntarily, Edie recalled how his lips felt on hers before she pulled away. She hadn’t allowed herself to think about that until now.

  Hi you. So. Sorry about everything. Hear you’re up north for now? Take care. Jx

  That was it?!

  Trembling slightly, Edie hammered out three different replies of varying sarcastic rage, and deleted each of them in turn. This man had dabbled with her heart like it was a finger- painting kit and he never ever took responsibility for the consequences of his actions.

  But if she got too emotional, he could simply drop the conversation. How did Jack always manage to shield himself from feedback? Actually, he couldn’t, not without her help. She needed to breathe deeply and be smart, here.

  Hi yourself. ‘What were you thinking’ might be a cliché but, what were you thinking?

  Near-insta ping back.

  I wasn’t, clearly. I know you weren’t either. Apologies for inviting you to a wedding that had an ‘aftermath’ in place of a ‘reception’. Man alive. Jx

  And this was how Jack’s wiles had sent her slowly mad. Within seconds of receiving this ostensibly self-deprecating reply, Edie realised he’d apologised, but neatly stopped her screen-grabbing the conversation and using it as proof of his guilt. To her, it worked as Jack’s usual easy charm: ‘I assume nothing from your momentary reciprocation’. To anyone else, it read as if they were equally to blame.

  She had to find a direct question to ask that he couldn’t wriggle out of. She steeled herself and typed:

  But why decide to kiss me?!

  ‘Edie! Time to get going?’ her dad called from downstairs. He’d volunteered to drive them to their dinner. Edie had thought the best way to get her dad and Meg out was to promise to pay but let them choose the restaurant. Which meant, Meg choosing.

  As they crushed into the back of her dad’s old Volvo, footwells lined with old newspapers, Edie wondered why her dad burning a fossil fuel was OK with Meg, but taxi drivers doing it was not.

  Meg also gave them a long explanation about rewarding venues that offered solid vegan options, to justify picking Annie’s Burger Shack. Edie suspected the ethical reasoning boiled down to Meg fancying a burger. She was just relieved that Meg hadn’t found some café full of nubbly seed-filled discs of tempeh and hemp burgers that looked like something you’d leave on a bird feeder table.

  It took a lot longer to get a response from Jack this time and given the starkness of her question, Edie wasn’t surprised. Evade THAT, motherfucker. She tried not to twitch her phone out of her pocket every sixteen seconds as they rumbled towards the city centre, to see if Jack had replied.

  By the time they were seated at Annie’s, had the menus and ordered drinks, bingo, a reply finally limped in. Edie had started to grind her teeth that he’d simply ignore her.

  I was drunk and all over the place & I thought we had a special connection. Events overtook me with the wedding, I didn’t have my head straight. Honestly, E.T., I can’t say sorry enough. You don’t deserve any of this.

  Nicely played. ‘I thought we had a special connection.’ The nickname. Once again, nothing that could be easily passed on, without people who’d already made up their minds taking it as tacit confirmation that Edie was pursuing Jack. But was she reading too much into it? Did Jack realise he was safety- proofing it? Edie wondered if she was paranoid. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean everyone isn’t out to get you.

  She asked herself whether she should care what those people thought. She did, though. She couldn’t help it. Could she ask ano—

  ‘Ahem,’ her dad coughed, and nodded towards her phone, as Edie listlessly fiddled, eyes straying to it for the umpteenth time. ‘Something interesting?’

  ‘Hah no!’ Edie turned her phone over, with some effort, screen facing down. She wasn’t going to discuss Boy Trouble with her baffled father and hostile sister, and especially not when the story hinged on her own awful transgression. And Edie badly needed a space where everything was business as usual, even if that meant, ‘still not great’. ‘It’s nice in here,’ she said, with polite-fake enthusiasm.

  Annie’s was in a grand, high-ceilinged old lace warehouse in the Lace Market, quite a glamorous room for fast food, filled with the clatter of shoes on stripped wood and the burble of background music vibrating on wrought-iron fittings. As Edie glanced round the table, her dad in a faded cable- knit jumper, Meg in her denim dungarees, she realised how long it was since the three of them had been anywhere together.

  On her birthdays, she usually took them to the local pub and vigorously batted away her dad’s offers of meals, pretending she didn’t want the fuss, knowing he wasn’t well off enough and it would be too awkward for Edie to stand the bill on that occasion.

  Three bottles of beer arrived and Edie felt the pressure, despite her low mood, to jolly it all along. She had suggested they go out, after all.

  ‘Good choice, Meg,’ she said, making them clink glasses, cheers.

  Meg looked at her impassively, obviously figuring out what stripe of bullshit this was. Edie considered her enthusiasm might contaminate Annie’s, so quickly added: ‘Do you, er, come here often?’ She laughed at herself.

  ‘No, I can’t afford it. I’ve been once, when the home did a day out.’

  Meg worked for three days a week at a holiday care home for the elderly, ill and extremely infirm. It was a noble and decent thing to do, but Meg thought her three-day-a-week work for very little money conferred sainthood upon her, and her saintliness came at a price she didn’t pay. She drew state benefits to which she wasn’t – in Edie’s view – strictly entitled, while her dad picked up the rest of the slack, financially. Edie had tried to nudge Meg to look for a full-time or better-paid job in the voluntary sector, but it was like trying to lion tame wearing Lady Gaga’s meat dress.

  Thus I can’t afford it was imbued with her usual sanctimony and implied Edie had no idea, living high on the hog. It wasn’t an act of God that meant Edie had more money. It wasn’t a secret of the elite, the whole ‘working five days a week’ trick, was it?

  ‘Did they have a nice time?’ her dad asked Meg, pouring some more beer out of his bottle.

  ‘It was a bit of a ’mare. Roy came, you know the one with the bone tumours? He got brain freeze from drinking his root-beer float too fast and ate too many onion rings and started puking everywhere. The next table were totally out of order about it.’

  From Meg, ‘totally out of order’ translated as anything from calling for Roy’s execution to ‘preferred to move out of the range of the spray’.

  ‘Maybe they didn’t realise he was poorly,’ their dad said.

  ‘Oh my God, of course someone’s poorly when they’re yakking chunks everywhere.’

  ‘I meant his cancer. Vomiting in public is quite a tearing up of the social contract.’ Edi
e’s dad gave her a wry look and she thought, Oh no you don’t, I’m not getting involved.

  ‘It was INVOLUNTARY, it’s not like he wanted to huey,’ Meg said, eyes blazing, and her dad clucked and soothed and said he was only kidding. Meg turned her gaze on Edie and Edie knew she was thinking, He’s only like this when you’re here.

  Edie edgily checked her phone and saw she had a text message from Louis. Almost certainly something she should leave for later, but she didn’t have the restraint. She’d only fidget and fret about its contents otherwise.

  Hola E. How’s home? OK BIG news … Jack & Charlotte are BACK TOGETHER. Can you believe it? X

  Edie stared, put her phone back down with a bump, and gulped her beer. Yes, she could believe it. She realised now she’d half expected it. What did Louis say about Jack, he was a kind of smooth-talking Houdini? You could tie his hands and drop him in a tank and he’d be out by the end of the show.

  Her reaction was stronger than she expected. Not because she still wanted Jack herself. Or, she didn’t think she did. This development made her inwardly howl with frustrated anger. They’d made it up. Jack had been forgiven. Once again, his misdemeanours had cost him nothing. (Well, unless you counted the wedding, but it sounded as if the bride’s family picked up that tab.) And kissing her had no more meaning than a moment’s confusion.

  Jack’s timing in making peace with her wasn’t accidental. He must’ve known she’d hear about this, and hate him for it.

  Wow. So all is forgiven? Ex

  Not sure ALL. But he’s back in St Albans. Apparently he went up to Harrogate to see her parents and sisters to apologise. He’s mounted the full-scale I’m Sorry I Don’t Know What Came Over Me tour, we’ve not seen the like since Hugh Grant after the prostitute. (Not saying you’re a prostitute lol)

  LOL OF COURSE NOT. Thanks, Louis. Always one to give the knife a quick twist. Edie could’ve cried, screamed, thrown her phone across the room. Her life had been trashed by Jack’s actions, but there would be no forgiveness or reconciliation for her.

  ‘What’re you having?’ said the friendly, buxom young waitress with the nose ring and magenta hair tied up in one of those Dig For Victory poster headscarves, pen poised above pad.

  Edie could barely focus.

  ‘Uh. A cheeseburger, please,’ she said.

  A pause while the waitress looked perplexed and said: ‘A plain burger, with cheese?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Meat?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Do you want a meat burger rather than veggie or vegan?’

  ‘Oh. Yes.’

  ‘And for your sides?’

  ‘Just … chips?’

  ‘We do curly fries, Cajun wedges or just wedges?’

  ‘That’s fine,’ Edie said. ‘I mean, the fries are fine.’

  ‘Any sauces?’

  Dear God, stop demanding things of me.

  ‘Just ketchup, thanks.’

  ‘Ketchup’s on the table.’

  The waitress gestured with her pen.

  ‘Oh yes. Thanks.’

  Her dad looked baffled and Meg frowned suspiciously at Edie, as if she might be doing the space cadet thing as London aloofness. They went on to give more detailed orders – ‘The Lemmy, vegan, plain wedges, American mustard side’ – that made Edie realise she hadn’t got into the spirit of the thing at all. She had ground to make up already.

  ‘And a portion of onion rings,’ she volunteered. ‘For the table.’

  ‘For the tapeworm,’ her dad said.

  Don’t think about Jack, Edie instructed herself. He doesn’t deserve to be thought about.

  15

  Edie was thinking about him. Jack and Charlotte were back together. It wasn’t only that Edie resented them sorting it out and sparing Jack’s arse. It was that she knew what this meant for her.

  If Jack had been restored by Charlotte, it’d make Edie the only real bad guy. Friends might mutter about Jack in private, but in public, it was disloyal to Charlotte. They’d have to redistribute the weight of their disapprobation and put it all on her. So now the official story would go: reunited against all odds, once the scourge of that hussy was eradicated. Charlotte could forgive Jack, but not Edie?

  Ping, another Louis text.

  PS Listen, I don’t know when the best time tell you this is but in wake of J & C sorting it out, Lucie put an email round everyone at work asking them to print out and sign a petition for you to be sacked. No one’s signed it though. Xx

  … Yet. Edie sagged with the weight and shame of it. She couldn’t go back, no matter what Richard said. Even if Jack and/or Charlotte left of their own accord, she’d be hissed at. Why should she lose her job and not Jack, though? So he walked away with the job and the wife?

  ‘Do your work really need to get hold of you this often?’ Edie’s dad said, as she turned the phone face down on the table again.

  ‘It’s not work, Dad, at half seven at night,’ Meg said, faux-sweetly.

  ‘Oh.’ Her dad’s eyes widened. ‘Are you courting?’

  ‘No,’ Edie said, forcefully.

  Then, with not inconsiderable effort:

  ‘Sorry. Being hassled about something work-related, by a friend. How was everyone’s day?’

  ‘Not bad, thank you,’ her dad said. ‘Radio Four and pottering. Have you clapped eyes on the elusive star yet?’

  ‘He’s saying he’ll see me at his parents’ house in West Bridgford on Sunday. Well, his PA says he’s seeing me. Believe it when I see it. Or him.’

  ‘Sunday? Funny hours you have to work.’

  ‘I have to be available whenever he’s available. I spent today reading more cuttings about him. God knows how you get a book’s worth of words out of a thirty-one-year-old’s life story. I’m going to have to do a lot of padding.’

  ‘It’s so stupid that we write books about people who’ve been in films rather than aid workers, and people who’ve actually contributed to society,’ Meg said.

  ‘Hmm yeah,’ Edie said, nodding. ‘It is. Or anyone who’s thirty-one, really.’

  She said this before she realised it sounded like a dig at Meg.

  ‘Alright, Yoda.’

  It was tiring, being around someone who not-so-secretly despised her.

  The food arrived and Edie was glad of something that could unite them, the simple pleasure of stuffing your face. They carried trivial conversation through food and a second round of beers, with Edie asking a string of questions about things and people she’d missed in Nottingham. There was no foothold for Meg to complain about her being lordly.

  ‘Oof. I feel as if my innards are trying to knit me a beef vest,’ her dad said, exhaling and patting his stomach.

  ‘Your colon will be sluggish with decomposing animal protein,’ Meg said.

  ‘Not my colon,’ her dad said. ‘Business is brisk, let me promise you. Nice frock, Edith,’ he added, as the plates were cleared away. Edie was in a dark blue, long-sleeved cheap-buy dress that she’d pulled, crumpled, from her case. She’d not worn it much as it had a wide strip of lacy material across the bosom that acted as a cleavage viewing window. She reasoned no one here would be interested in taking the opportunity.

  In a misguided attempt at paternal even-handedness, her dad added: ‘You’d look nice in that too, Meg.’

  Meg wrinkled her nose. ‘No thanks, that’s a very Edie dress.’

  ‘Oh, an EDIE dress,’ Edie said, doing shock-horror palms. ‘What could be worse?’

  ‘You know. It’s a bit “Have you met my breasts?’’’

  ‘Megan!’ her dad said. ‘Settle down.’

  Of all the things to mock Edie about at the moment, the idea she was a showy tart really was going to hurt the most. In front of their dad, too: cringe. She took a deep breath.

  ‘Why do you have to be so horrible, Meg? Do I ever say anything critical about your clothes? No.’

  ‘God, it was only a joke,’ Meg muttered. ‘Chill out, Cranky McCrankerson.’


  ‘And I’d have thought it’s not totally feminist ethics to comment on another woman’s chest like that, is it? Didn’t you just “slut shame” me?’

  ‘Oh, here we go.’

  ‘No, there you went.’

  Meg squeezed the American diner style tomato-shaped tomato sauce holder and said, reflectively: ‘As George Monbiot said, if hypocrisy is the shortfall between our principles and our behaviour, it’s easy to never be a hypocrite, by having no principles.’

  ‘I have no principles?’

  ‘You called me a hypocrite.’

  ‘Well. Cheers. Thanks for dinner, Edie!’ Edie said, in sing-song voice.

  ‘Oh, what a surprise, you had to throw that in my face. I didn’t ask to come here.’

  ‘Actually, you did.’

  Meg scowled and Edie tried to regain self-control because she was angry enough to say plenty more.

  This had escalated quickly.

  ‘Sod this, I’m having a smoke,’ Meg said, pushing her chair back with a loud scrape.

  She disappeared off, digging the Rizlas out of her kangaroo-like dungarees front pocket for her roll-up. The waitress reappeared and Edie muttered: ‘We’ll have the bill please,’ as her dad looked uncomfortable.

  Edie felt bad for him. It surely wasn’t nice, having children that couldn’t stand each other. Edie wasn’t able to face a sullen car journey and the four walls of her bedroom yet.

  ‘Dad, you keep the peace and take Meg home. I’ve texted a friend and I’m going to meet them round the corner, so I’ll be back home in an hour or two,’ she lied smoothly, as smooth as when she was fourteen and sneaking off to meet boys.

  Her dad nodded, as Edie tapped her pin number into the card reader and handed it back.

  ‘Tonight was a nice idea, you know,’ he said, and leaned over and gave her shoulder a squeeze, with the unspoken addendum, just terrible execution.