by Jane Fallon
"Please don't. Please," he said, grabbing onto her arm. "I'm too old to start again. I couldn't cope. I'm telling you, I'd do something stupid."
She was struggling to recognize the powerful, rational man who had always been so in charge of their relationship in this pitiful sobbing wreck. Oh, God, she thought, I've done this to him. She tried to stand rigid and unmoved as he pawed at her, completely floored by what she'd just said, but it was hopeless. Fuck it, she didn't have the strength to stand up to him. She began to stroke his head and he realized there had been a sea change and threw himself on her, arms around her neck.
She knew she should tell him to get off her and pack his bags. She couldn't.
"It's OK," she said. "It'll be OK."
22
HELEN WAS DREADING meeting Sophie on Wednesday evening. She knew that Leo would have talked to her—about the fact that she couldn't handle his contract if nothing else—and she knew she'd have to explain herself somehow. She thought about canceling, but with Rachel watching videos at home with Neil and a Chinese takeout, not to go would mean spending yet another evening on the sofa with Matthew, something she just couldn't face. Besides, the masochistic side of her was desperate to hear exactly what Leo had said.
She'd passed the day in a kind of trance. She was living a nightmare and what made it worse was that it was a nightmare of her own making, and one which seemed to have no obvious end. She had been so close. She had gotten as far as telling Matthew that it was over, that she didn't love him after all. If she could have just held her ground for a few minutes more—but maybe the fact that she couldn't meant that she was kinder than she thought. Great, it's taken all this to realize I'm quite a nice person. Hallelujah. Give me a medal and let me get back to being my usual, hard-edged self, kicking sand in children's faces, treading on puppies' tails, and dumping a boyfriend I no longer feel anything for. She toyed with the idea of running away, but what good would that do? She'd have nowhere to live, no money, no job.
Laura had warned her that Leo was coming in to the office the next day for a preliminary meeting. Twelve thirty. She'd asked to be able to take an early lunch, and Laura had reluctantly agreed. She had half expected to hear from him, she couldn't imagine on what pretext, but it upset her that he'd been put off so easily, even though it would have made her life far more difficult if he hadn't. Oh, well, she told herself, it obviously wasn't a big deal to him, I shouldn't flatter myself that it was. All the same, it irked her.
The office was quiet. The Helen-from-Accounts versus the coven war had died down, or at least was in a lull, and Helen was getting used to being more or less ignored by her coworkers. Every now and then, an odd comment was thrown her way, but they were getting bored now. There was still a flurry of hysteria every time Matthew visited the general office, but he remained oblivious and carried on flirting clumsily with all the girls. Two and a half more weeks to go and they could all go fuck themselves, she thought, looking around and thinking there was no one there she would miss.
To take her mind off the train wreck that passed for her life, she tried to concentrate on the Sandra Hepburn problem. Sandra was hoping for a nomination in the "Most Fanciable Female" category at the Ace Awards, having no discernible talent to speak of, but that was a field that spawned fierce competition. She needed to do something to make herself stand out from the crowd of pretty but pointless girls. Helen made a list.
Sandra's plus points:
1. Tits
She chewed on her pencil and tried but failed to think of anything else. So she started another sheet of paper headed Negatives and began to write:
1. No talent
2. No career
3. Unpopular
4. Ugly
Great start, she thought. Then she scribbled out ugly and replaced it with unattractive.
She tried to analyze Sandra's problem, making notes as she went. The way she saw it, the main competition would be young actresses from soaps and the odd pop singer. There were hundreds of good-looking girls around. The trouble with Sandra, if one were to be brutally honest, was that she was neither good-looking nor was she blessed with a stunning personality. She was just a girl who had large breasts and liked to show them off, along with any other bits of her that conveniently dropped out whenever there were photographers around. If she didn't, then no one would ever notice her, because there was nothing to notice. Her desperation was what made her famous, but it was the worst kind of fame, she was despised by women and laughed at by men who made a lot of mantelpiece and fire comments while they passed around pictures of her as "whoops," her straps came undone, and "Oh my God, I was so embarrassed," her chest was on show again. Sandra liked to describe herself as a model, by which she meant she had done several full-frontal spreads in one of the more downmarket porn mags, legs akimbo, no money for airbrushing, accompanied by her thoughts: "I'd love to have a threesome with two other hot babes" or "I'm a four-times-a-night girl." Basically she was just a big cliché eking a living out of not very much.
Since Helen had been at Global, scores of these girls had passed through on the client list. You could smell the ambition on them, but in a way they were a PR company's dream, because they would do anything and everything to get in the papers. It always turned sour in the end, though, when the next one came along and the public turned their attention to them. Then there would be months of angry phone calls ("What am I paying you for?"). Then the tears ("Please, please, what else am I going to do?"), until finally they were put out of their misery and never heard from again. Sandra was approaching the end of her shelf life, but Helen had a soft spot for her; she was always polite, never lost her temper, and was completely honest about the lengths she would go to to avoid having to get a real job. The sum total of her ambition was to be famous and popular. So far, she'd only achieved the first.
Helen saw with surprise that the past fifteen minutes had flown by and that she was actually enjoying herself. She had always wanted to have a job she could get totally absorbed in, had always envied those people, like Matthew, who said the days motored by, they were so engaged by what they were doing. She started to drift off into her usual self-pitying "I should've been a contender" thought process, but pulled herself back just in time. Concentrate, she thought.
OK, so Sandra was never going to win a nomination in a fair fight. She'd become a kind of national joke, and even if anyone out there did fancy her, they'd be hard-pressed to admit it for fear of people laughing in their face. So Global's job, Helen scribbled on her notepad, was to remarket her as someone it was OK to find attractive. They had a couple of weeks in which to get people saying, "Actually…when you look at her closely, she's not bad." She couldn't sing, she couldn't act, she could barely speak, for God's sake. The only thing she had was her looks—well, to be fair, her looks from the neck down, and even they were nothing to write home about, but still, they could work on giving her model claims some kind of legitimacy. After all, if the papers said often enough that she was a model, then people would start to believe it, however unlikely it seemed. So they had to get her an upmarket modeling shoot. Clearly, no photographer was ever going to be interested in taking pictures of her with her clothes on; it would draw too much attention to her face and none of the chic magazines would touch her with a fork. Unless, that is…
Helen smiled to herself. She loved this feeling, when you systematically trawled through the problems and came up with a solution. It was like being a detective; you just looked at all the clues and up popped the answer. One phone call later, she was ready to go in and present her idea to Laura, but when she stood up and turned away from her desk, she nearly walked straight into Helen-from-Accounts, who was loitering nervously behind her. Helen forced a smile.
"You all right?"
"Yes," said Helen-from-Accounts nervously, "but I was wondering if you wanted to come and have lunch with me, if you're free."
Helen's heart sank. Her mood, which had lightened considerably over the past half
hour, dropped down to the carpet again. She immediately scrabbled around on the floor of her brain for an excuse.
"Oh, Helen, I'd love to but…I have to go and speak to Laura, it's important, and this is the only time she's got all day…"
"Listen, if you don't want to, just say so," Helen-from-Accounts was saying, "but Laura's gone out for a sandwich with Matthew, I just saw them."
"Oh!" Helen's face fell and she tried to pick it up and rearrange it into something happy with a reasonable degree of success.
"She must've forgotten to tell me. Great! I'll meet you downstairs in two minutes, I just need to use the ladies'," she said, anxious that the others didn't see the two of them—the office pariahs—leaving together.
* * *
Helen surreptitiously looked at her watch as Helen-from-Accounts droned through her account of what had happened to her and Geoff since she had thrown him out at the weekend.
"So when he got home, I'd got a bottle of champagne and some strawberries, and I was lying on the sofa with my best underwear on, Caprices from Debenhams in Lakeside, and nothing else…"
"OK, you can stop now…" Helen said, starting to feel queasy and trying not to think about Helen-from-Accounts' pasty pink skin encased in Caprice underwear while she ate her tuna sandwich.
Helen-from-Accounts laughed. "You're so funny."
"No, really, I don't want the details. In fact, that's a good rule generally. Helen, keep stuff like Sergeant Sweeney and his liking for peanuts to yourself. You know, just for you and Geoff."
She stood up, stuffing the last of her sandwich into her mouth.
"Have you got to go already?" Helen-from-Accounts still had half a plateful of food left.
Helen immediately felt guilty. It wasn't Helen-from-Accounts' fault that she was such dull company. She was trying her hardest, and she had been through a shit time in the past couple of weeks. Plus, she was about the only person at Global, apart from Laura, who had been even halfway civil to her recently.
"Actually, I've got a few more minutes," she said more kindly, sitting back down.
* * *
"That is genius."
Laura sat down behind her desk, smiling at Helen. "No, really, it's fucking genius. And she'll love it."
Helen's idea was beautifully simple. She knew that if the papers referred to Sandra as a model often enough, then people would start to believe it. She'd seen enough Global press releases which referred to a client's new girlfriend as a "former model" when, in fact, all they had ever done was a catalog shoot when they were eight. The tabloids always picked up on it. It was obviously too late with Sandra to start claiming some kind of glamorous past, but what if they could issue a statement saying she had gone away on a modeling assignment with a photographer from Vogue? What if they could leak some of the pictures—ones from a suitable distance, of course, to avoid showing up too many of Sandra's faults, but clearly showing it as a fashion, not a porn shoot?
OK, so Vogue was never going to print the pictures—in fact they wouldn't even know about it. OK, so the photographer, Ben Demano, was a Global client who had just gotten out of rehab and was struggling to get anyone to take a risk on hiring him. OK, so Sandra would be paying for the privilege of being photographed by him. But as long as they were vague about the date of publication, by the time anyone realized that the photos were never going to be printed within a mile of a top fashion magazine, the awards would be over and it wouldn't matter. All it needed was for Sandra to agree to cough up three thousand pounds, the price of Ben's soul.
"She'll jump at it, I know she will," Laura was saying. "Well done, honestly, really well done."
For the rest of the day, Helen's mood swung between elation for her pitch having gone down so well—Laura had called Sandra, who didn't bat an eyelid at the amount of money she was being asked to pay out, although God knew where she was going to get it (probably another full frontal, Helen thought)—and despair at the mess she'd gotten herself into. Throwing herself into her work like that had reminded her that she really needed to start applying for jobs.
* * *
Sophie was already there when she arrived at the wine bar near Russell Square station. Helen had stopped questioning why she was meeting her ex-rival for drinks and a chat, it had simply become part of her routine. Something she looked forward to, even. They greeted each other pleasantly enough, but Helen could tell that Sophie was not quite herself and in fact, as soon as they'd ordered drinks, Sophie came straight to the point.
"I just need to get this out of the way," she said ominously. "I'm sure you've got your reasons, but why did you tell Leo you've got a boyfriend?"
Helen had been expecting a conversation about why she was no longer doing Leo's PR, but not this. She had to think fast.
"Erm…because I do, sort of. Well, not really, it's over and I've told him that, but he won't accept it. I totally consider myself single—that's why I never told you about him—but it's too messy a situation to expect anyone else to get involved in. Certainly not anyone I like."
Relief showed on Sophie's face. She accepted what Helen was telling her immediately, because that was Sophie, she took everyone at face value and always wanted to think the best of those she was fond of—which, of course, sometimes backfired.
"I knew that you weren't just messing him around. Oh, God, Eleanor, I hope I didn't make things worse by telling him I thought you were single, but I was just so surprised when he told me what you'd said…"
"It's OK," Helen said, feeling miserable. "It wouldn't make any difference anyway. Until I sort myself out, I think I should just keep out of Leo's way. So that we don't start getting close, you know."
"So is that why you can't do the work for him? Or are you genuinely too busy?"
"I just don't think we should put ourselves in a potentially tricky situation. So, yes, that was a lie, I'm afraid. But I thought it was less messy that way. I'm really sorry if I've upset him…or if I've put you in an awkward situation…"
"I really care about Leo, that's the thing," said Sophie. "And I'd love to see him happy in a relationship—especially with someone I could be friends with—but I've got to stop trying to pair him off. Listen, I'll tell him, you know, that the boyfriend thing is true. Just so he doesn't think badly of you…"
"Thanks." This should have made Helen feel better, but it didn't. What difference did it make if Leo liked or hated her? She could never have a relationship with him now.
"So," Sophie was saying, "tell me about this man. What's his name? What's he like?"
Oh, fuck. Oh, God. Oh, fuck.
"I hate talking about it, to be honest," said Helen unconvincingly.
"Well, I've gathered that. Does he live with you?"
"Erm…sort of. I'd like him to leave."
How the fuck did this become about me? Helen thought, frantically trying to come up with a way to steer the conversation onto another topic.
"God." Sophie was still enthralled. "Can't you just throw his stuff out on the street and change the locks?"
"I wish. But I can't. He's done nothing wrong, I just don't…want to be with him anymore. It's not his fault."
"You're too nice," Sophie said, completely unaware of the irony of her words.
"So what's up with you?" said Helen, in an attempt to change the subject. She tried to remember whether Sophie had mentioned parents' evening coming up last time she'd seen her, but decided not to risk it. As it happened, it didn't matter, because it was the first thing Sophie told her about.
"What, this Helen actually said she hated the girls going over there?" Helen was incredulous. The fucker. Painting her as the bad guy (yes, yes, yes, she was, she knew that, but still) just so he could get some sympathy.
"Well, that's what he implied. I mean, fair enough, it's tough to get to know someone else's kids, but even so…To be honest, though, I'll be glad if they don't see her for a while. I get the feeling she's trying to buy them, and it makes me nervous—what if she succeeds?"
>
"Maybe she's not very experienced with kids. You know, sometimes people aren't quite sure what to do for the best—not that I'm trying to defend her," said Helen, who was doing just that.
"Well, anyway, now I don't know what's going to happen. He'll have to take them to the zoo or something."
"What, every week?"
"I don't know…the park, then."
"Why don't you let him visit them at yours?" Helen could see it now, long afternoons stretched out in front of the TV, peace and quiet and no more sullen pre-teenage sulks.
"No way," Sophie said, shattering Helen's daydream. "I don't want to have to go out every Sunday afternoon for the next ten years."
"You don't have to. Listen, surely it's better for the kids if they can see the two of you, together, not at each other's throats…"
"But we would be…it's too soon."
"You said yourself you were getting on better—it's only one afternoon a week. What's the alternative?"
"That my children get brought up in McDonald's or by a wicked stepmother who hates them," Sophie said reluctantly. "Maybe you're right. We don't have to do it every time, I guess—maybe I'll try it this Sunday and see how it goes. I can always hide in the kitchen if he's getting on my nerves."