"Hey, you look great this evening," she says to someone just out of view behind a pillar. I look round to see who it is and recognise her instantly. Instead of appearing flattered, the weather woman looks alarmed by Nora's compliment and moves away quickly.
After the speeches I congratulate Zac, who has made no effort in his dress at all tonight - baggy combats and tie-dyed sleeveless green T-shirt with the words 'Eat the Poor' on it. He mutters something and crams some food into his mouth as if he hasn't eaten for a week. Then I try and find Lauren. She and Peter are also getting some food so I grab a plate and join them.
"What do you think?" I ask casually.
"Pretty bloody amazing," says Lauren. "That film is incredible - I didn't know it was possible to do that."
I smile modestly. I wait for her to kiss me but she just shakes her head in wonderment.
"Very impressive," says Peter. "Is that PictureMark they're using?"
"Is is what?"
"For those lap dissolves in between the stills and the principle sequences - is it PictureMark they've used there? I'd heard it can do things like that, even in an off-line edit."
"It's PictureMark Super," I lie blithely, chasing a giant tiger prawn around my plate and catching it elegantly before I stab it, feeling the fork push its way in and the flesh giving way to the sharp metal. "Do you want to dance, babe?" I suggest. "They've imported this guy ‘specially from New York. He's only here for a few hours then he's off to Ibiza. We're paying him fifty grand for it. Can you believe it?"
"Not yet," she says. "Peter wants me to meet this woman from...where was she from?"
"Channel Five. They're looking for new programme talent."
"I'll introduce you if you want," I say. "I've just been talking to her. She wants to do a promotion with us."
"Don't worry," says Peter. "We were at Cambridge together; she's an old, old mate."
"Sure," I say and walk off. There must be a way to separate Lauren from him - perhaps with a crow bar - I think as I wonder around the room. I suddenly realise that the girls on the soundtrack arranged by the ultra cool DJ are groaning:
"Hey, babe.
Do you wanna ride me?
Do you wanna come inside me?"
Perhaps I'm just getting old but that is bloody rude isn't it? Suddenly someone slaps me on the back.
"How's it going?"
It's Piers.
"Great," I reply miserably.
"Splendid," he bawls.
I find myself talking to a woman from an expensive shoe company.
"Think Jimmy Choo on acid," she says.
"OK," I don't think I could do that even if I was on acid.
"Think classic with a surrealist twist."
"Right."
"We're talking deconstructionism taken to its logical, terrifying conclusion – in terms of sling backs anyway."
"I see." I wish I did have some acid now. Suddenly she takes a step closer towards me and says: "After all, you know what they say: 'Shoes are the windows of the soul'."
"It is all pretty impressive isn't it?" I say to Lauren as she nestles under my shoulder in the car on our way home. It's gone four and we were almost the last to leave. Guy and Piers are still chatting up the remaining potential investors and partners. Peter is talking to some 'old mates' from the beeb and Nora must have gone without saying goodbye to me.
"Oh yes, it's amazing. Your friend Guy certainly knows his stuff."
"He's brilliant - so, what's the word? Cerebral. I think that's why they like him. They sense that here is someone with something new, something different to offer. Did you have a good time?"
"Oh, we did, yeah."
We? What's with this we?
"Peter enjoyed himself too did he?"
"Oh, yes. It turned out he knew quite a few people there. Mind you he knows so many people." Now that his name has been introduced again it feels as if he is in the car with us, crammed on the back seat. The atmosphere is suddenly soured. My arm's going to sleep a bit anyway so I pull it out from under Lauren's head - perhaps a bit more roughly than I had intended. We sit in silence as the car speeds along Knightsbridge.
Finally Lauren says: "Who was that strange looking girl you were talking to?"
"Which strange looking girl?" I ask unnecessarily.
"The one in the maroon dress. You seemed to be having a great laugh at one point."
"Oh, her. That's that journalist who wrote the piece in the Post."
"Oh right." There is a pause as shop windows fly past, their reflections dancing over us - late night stragglers, a few walking backwards looking for cabs and night buses, or joking with their mates while others stagger around drunk. "Well you seemed to be giving her a good talking to like you said you would".
Lauren's sarcasm hangs in the air like a challenge. I try to neutralise it: "We discussed the piece and she explained why she'd written it."
Silence.
"And that's that?"
Silence.
"What do you want me to say? We discussed it. I told her what I thought of it, she told me why she'd written it the way she had and that was that. Piers asked her to do it like that apparently."
Silence. With Peter and Nora in the car with us now things are getting very cramped - and very uncomfortable.
"I see."
Silence.
"Look I've got to keep her onside. She'll be very useful"
"Huh. What for?"
"For promoting the site. Now let's leave it shall we?"
"What's her name again?"
"Nora. Nora Bentall."
"Never heard of her," says Lauren. "She's obviously slept her way to the bottom."
Lauren and I get ready for bed in silence. When I get in she has her back to me. I wriggle over to her and put an arm round her. She mutters something about being tired.
Chapter Ten
It takes me ages to get to sleep. My mind is still buzzing from the party. I've got lunches arranged from now until the end of my life and there is a stack of business cards on the dressing table. I can still hear the voices: "So exciting", "Excellent product", "So looking forward to doing business with you", "You certainly have a wonderful proposition here", "Tremendous opportunities for developing synergies". Or something like that. Smart people, rich people, powerful people, famous people asking for a piece of the action, a piece of me.
The light wakes me up. I reach round instinctively for Lauren, looking for some lazy Saturday morning sex. The kind where you don't mind if you come or not. But she's not there. The curtains are open already. I squint my eyes up against the harsh, unforgiving light. I can smell coffee. I fumble for my watch and check the time: just before eleven. I get up and stumble into the kitchen. Lauren is chewing on a piece of toast and flicking through the newspaper. I come up behind her and put my arms round her, nestling into her hair and kissing her neck.
"Morning, hon," she says quietly, still reading the paper.
"You're up early," I say, wandering over to the fridge.
"Mmm? Yeah, I know, we've got access to a studio today, so I'm going to do some autocue practice."
"What? Today? But you were at it last Saturday."
"Yes. That's when the studio's free. Do you know how much these things cost to rent? Thousands. Thank goodness Peter knows someone who said we could borrow it for nothing."
"So you're going to a studio this Saturday as well?" A pretty pointless summary of the situation, I admit, but I want her to understand how ridiculous it is that she's working all day given that we've seen so little of each other over the last week or so. Instead she takes the opposite view.
"Yes, like I say, it makes obvious sense."
"When will you be finished?"
"I don't know. When I've had enough. When Peter thinks I've done all I can."
"Will be you back by five?" I ask, drinking orange juice out of the carton because I know it will annoy her.
"I don't know, Charlie, please don't pressurise me." I turn up th
e sulk meter a bit more. She comes over to me and studies me for a moment then she laughs. "You look like a little boy with your hair all messed up." I narrow my eyes at her with mock crossness. She laughs again, takes the carton out of my hand, puts it back and then says: "What am I going to do with you?"
I look into her eyes, pull her towards me and say: "I can think of one thing."
She pinches my cheek and giggles.
"That'll have to wait." She pulls away. "I'm going to be late."
I catch her arm but, instead of asking her what she wants to do tonight, I find myself saying: "Do you love me?"
She pushes my hair out of my eyes.
"Course I do."
I pick up the paper after Lauren has gone and begin to flick through it, making my way towards the sport to see whether Chelsea are at home. Halfway through there is an article by Nora along with a picture of her, looking cheekily over her black framed glasses. It's called "Why I'll never marry a man who waxes his behind." I have to read the title twice to make sure I've got it right. The piece is about how women hate male vanity and how she and her friends (who are her friends? Other clever, barmy women with strange names? Or does she just invent them too?) would rather have a man with shaggy nose hair than one who spent hours in the bathroom cutting it with their nail scissors. It seems that her friend Amanda who works in marketing once went out with a bloke who waxed his bum - hence the headline. My buttocks clench at the thought of it. They clench even tighter as I read on:
"Male models shave their chests" Nora informs the nation. "Can you imagine a greater turn off? Most women I know like curling their fingers around a light dusting of chest hair. The idea of a waxed, fake tanned chest is about as attractive as low calorie, frozen risotto compared to the real thing, oozing wicked butter and parmesan and eaten overlooking the Canale Grande."
I finish the paper and wander into the living room. Now where did Nora get the inspiration for that? I'm not being vain, it's just an obvious connection. Actually I did know a guy who shaved his chest. Gary had the kind of body that looked like it had been carved out of granite at the dawn of time. Underpants were his speciality. I still see him, well his six pack and lovingly sculpted (and shaved) pecs on packets in department stores. He told me that he was once doing a shoot and just as the client arrived he felt himself getting a hard on. Desperately he tried to think about his tax return or Alan Titchmarsh but it had no effect. As six women from the client company entered the room he found himself saluting them through their soon-to-be-launched cotton and lycra microfiber mix knitted trunks.
I flick on children's Saturday morning television and watch, feeling rather confused and out of it. After a phone-in, in which Leanne from Burnley correctly identifies Ronan Keating's star sign and wins a baseball cap and a CD, a girl band comes on:
"Oh babe, the cat's out of the bag.
Your love's become a drag."
I rub my chin trying to decide whether to have a shave. Sod it. It's Saturday.
At about seven I ring Lauren on her mobile. I've been avoiding doing it all day, not wanting to pester her like the good boy that I am but now I've had enough. I want to know what we're going to do this evening. I want to spend it with her.
I get her voicemail and, with super human effort, manage to sound casual and friendly. "Hi babe, just wondered what time you thought you'd be finished." I wait nearly an hour and then decide to go for a run because I can feel anger rising from deep within me and I can't think how else to release it, other than yelling at her when she rings or just throwing things around the flat but that would just make things worse and I simply can't bear to do that, although part of me feels that I should. Perhaps I would if I were a real man, not just an ex-male model now working in the virtual glamour business.
I only run for twenty minutes or so, just round the block, but laziness - and the sight of other couples walking along hand in hand - draws me back home. It's just long enough, though, for Lauren to have called: "Hi babe are you there....Charlie....Charlie? OK, well, just to say sorry I couldn't talk to you just now, had to turn my phone off. But listen, babe, we've bumped into some friends of Peter's and they've offered to take us to dinner so I'm just going to have a quick bite to eat with them but I won't be late. Sorry about this, but I'll make it up to you tomorrow night I promise. Love you."
She rings off. She might as well have said: "I'm in bed with Peter, see you tomorrow perhaps" for all the comfort it brings me.
I have a shower during which I find myself singing that stupid girl band song from the children's television show. I knew it would get stuck in my mind when I heard it.
I put my bathrobe on to go into the kitchen. There is no wine in the fridge and the only stuff in the cupboard is a Chateauneuf du Pape which we bought last year in France and promised to drink on a special occasion. I shut the cupboard and begin to wonder whether I can be arsed to get dressed and go up the road to the off license and buy another.
I can't so I open the cupboard again and take the expensive, slightly dusty bottle out.
I don't bother to get a coaster and, glass in hand, I flop down on the settee and switch on the telly. I flick between channels and watch Davina McCall explaining to a group of lads with viciously gelled hair and River Island shirts and girls with diamond nose studs exactly how they can earn points and what they can do with them. "But," she explains from behind a huge perspex lectern bathed in a ghostly blue light, "if someone from the opposing team gets the answer before you then you have to give them half as many points as your total so far, although, you can of course challenge them to gamble their bonus points provided they haven't earned any bonus points this round. OK?"
I must be getting old because I can't understand a word of it so I switch off and throw the remote down next to me. The flat is suddenly silent. I get up and wander over to the music centre and flick through the CDs. Opera highlights, Ministry of Sound Chill Out sessions, Dido, the best of Frank Sinatra, jazz compilations. They're all Lauren's. Where did mine go? I go back into the bedroom and reach up to the top shelf of the wardrobe where there are some boxes of my stuff from before I moved in with Lauren. She didn't seem to like any of my music and so it all got tidied up into these cardboard boxes along with photographs from college and various other personal effects from Life Before Lauren.
I flick through the cassettes and find Suzanne Vega. I don't know why but I've always had a bit of a thing for a chick with an acoustic guitar. I stick the tape in the machine, turn up the volume and let her plaintiff, melancholy voice fill the room. Then I take a big gulp of expensive wine and lie back, committing aural adultery.
Chapter Eleven
Perhaps to get away from home, I'm the first in the office on Monday morning, just before nine. There are a pile of letters waiting on the mat. I scoop them up and put them onto Scarlett's desk. Then I realise that I might as well open them, partly because I am, after all, one of the team, so I have every right to, and partly because, well, I've got nothing else to do. There is nothing very exciting amongst them - just routine correspondence from the phone company, the computer people and the landlord.
There are also letters of welcome from the bank. Quite a few banks actually, including some in the Cayman Islands and Monte Carlo, thanking 2cool for using their services and promising that they are always on hand to help us. And there are some bills, lot of bills in fact, most of which come from the do on Friday night but also from taxi companies, stationers, a florist and even our masseur who I don't seem to have had the benefit of yet. There is something from a Paris chocolatier which seems a bit bizarre as well as invoices from The Communications Game and various Bond Street stores.
"Morning," says Guy, striding in with a coffee in his hand. "How are you, Charlie? Good weekend?"
"Yeah, great thanks," I lie. "You?"
"Erm, yes, yes good," he says, eyeing the pile of post.
"Recovered from Friday?" I say by way of conversation, suddenly feeling a bit shy of him now that t
here are just the two of us in the office.
"Eh? Friday, oh yes, of course. We had breakfast afterwards with some of those money men, most of them were still working on West Coast time and so they weren't that bothered about going to bed at all really - look why don't you just shove all that crap on Scarlett's desk, let her deal with it?" he says, snatching the sheaf of letters from in front of me and thrusting them into Scarlett's in tray.
"I don't mind going through them," I say. "At least until Scarlett gets in."
"No, don't you worry about that. Your time would be better spent chasing up some of the valuable contacts we made on Friday night. Look, let's work up a list of people to see - get some lunches planned, set up some meetings with some of the possible 2cool partner organisations, shall we?"
"Sure" I say.
Later that morning a range of specially imported Italian crockery and cutlery is delivered as is a huge cappuccino machine. We all look at it appreciatively as it's being plumbed in but then realise that we can't actually be arsed to use it and we'll just stick to Café Nero round the corner.
"I got you a wheatgrass shot," says Scarlett putting the tiny plastic container carefully down on my desk as she arrives just after half past ten. "I've already had a double."
"You're such a health freak." I tell her.
"Yeah, I know but I dropped two Es on Saturday night and I just cannot get my shit together today," she explains.
Piers bursts in at lunchtime. He's just driven up from Gloucestershire, he explains, where he’s been staying with friends who are all very excited about the new site. A girl called Suzie who does PR for a newly launched line of luxury French silks thinks they might be able to work together, he tells me, so will I ring her? He throws a business card at me but before I can ask exactly what he envisages us doing together Zac calls him over to show off some new visuals on the computer and he goes into paroxysms of delight. "Have you seen this, Guy?" he asks. "Here Charlie, look at this new gizmo our brilliant techno whiz here has cooked up. It's just...just..."
"2cool2btrue?" asks Scarlett.
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