by Jane Fallon
‘I don’t have much of an appetite, to be honest.’
‘Tough luck. There’ll be no getting down from the table until you’ve finished what’s on your plate.’
She takes my case from me and stashes it in a corner. ‘Come and have a cup of tea at least.’
I allow myself to be led into the living room, stopping on the way to say hi to Greg. From the sympathetic expression on his face, I know Kat’s filled him in on all the gory details.
‘So what happened this morning?’ she asks, pouring tea from a floral teapot into a waiting cup as I perch on the mustard G-plan sofa. Only Kat would still be using loose tea and china cups and saucers.
‘Nothing. I left before he woke up.’
She opens her perfectly batwing-lined eyes wide.
‘So they still don’t know you know?’
I shake my head. ‘I couldn’t face it. I don’t know … what’s the point?’
‘To get it out of your system?’
‘I’d have killed him.’
She shrugs as if to say, ‘And …?’
‘And as for Mel … Jesus. She gave me such a hard time about my not being able to come to the party. And then she acted so surprised to see me there, but she must have known. No way would Jack not have told her. He managed to get her top back to her somehow, so he must have seen her at some point.’
Kat purses her lips. ‘I’ve known Mel long enough to know that she comes first and sod everyone else.’
I find myself reaching for my default defence. I’ve never let anyone get away with badmouthing Mel. I check myself, though. ‘Maybe.’
‘No “maybe” about it.’
‘How could she do this to me? I mean, it’s one thing being a bit self-obsessed …’
‘I told you, she’s jealous of you, always has been. Well, I don’t know about when you were kids …’
‘As if …’
She sits back and looks at me. ‘What? You don’t think she’d like to be doing what you’re doing?’
I’ve thought about this over the years, of course I have. But the reality of my career hardly matches up to Mel’s former ambitions. ‘Playing a bit part?’
‘Making a living from acting. Working in New York. Rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous. While she works in an insurance office.’
‘So you think she deliberately set out to seduce my boyfriend? Come on, Kat, that’s a bit far-fetched.’
‘Maybe not, but I think, when it happened, she didn’t spend too much time worrying about you.’
‘She’s my best friend.’
‘She’s got a fucking weird way of showing it.’
I rub my eyes with the heels of my hands. ‘I’m moving back here in two weeks.’
Kat says, ‘What?’ just as Greg pops his head out of the kitchen and says, ‘Great! I mean … it is, isn’t it … or …?’
‘I suppose. I need to find somewhere to live.’
They both bombard me with questions and I answer as many as I can, repeating my mantra that this remain between us. I don’t know why I’m being so loyal to the production that’s just fired me. Fear, I think. As if they might have a team of lawyers scouring the globe for the source of any plot leaks.
‘You can’t just let Jack keep the flat,’ Kat says once I’ve finished.
‘I don’t have any choice. It’s his.’
‘But …’ she splutters. ‘It’s in your name, too, right?’
I’m tempted not to tell her, because I know exactly how she’ll react. Here goes. ‘We never got around to it. I pay half the mortgage and the idea always was that we’d go and see the bank and have me added …’
‘You are kidding me.’
‘I know. It just didn’t feel like a priority. And then we were talking about selling up next year and buying somewhere together anyway …’
She’s looking at me like you might look at your sixty-five-year-old aunt who’s trying to convince you the twenty-year-old local boy she met on her holiday really is in love with her, just as she signs over her life savings to him.
‘How long had he lived there before you moved in?’
I look at the floor. ‘A couple of months. He was in the process of buying it when I met him.’ I feel a lump come up in my throat. ‘I helped him choose everything. I even painted all the walls. I grouted the fucking bathroom.’
‘So you’ve basically paid half the mortgage the whole time he’s had the flat?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘Shit, Amy. Maybe he’ll do the decent thing and sell up and split the profits with you anyway.’
It would be fair, but I know it won’t happen. ‘He won’t. I know what he’s like. The minute I accuse him, he’ll go on the defensive. He hates being backed into a corner.’
‘This is so fucked up.’
‘Tell me about it.’
We sit there in silence for a moment.
‘Okay.’ She snaps into business mode. ‘You need somewhere to live before you tell him you’re on to him. That way, you can make a clean break. I’ll help you find somewhere this week.’ Kat is an estate agent. How she ended up doing this and not curating a museum of sixties art or running a diner escapes me. It always seems so unlikely. It comes back to me now that, these days, she’s a property consultant, which means she helps rich people find houses and steers them through the tricky negotiations for a percentage of the value.
‘I can’t afford you,’ I say, in an attempt to make a joke, and she rolls her eyes at me. ‘Anyway, I was going to try and change my ticket to go home tomorrow.’
‘You have way too much to sort out.’
‘I genuinely can’t afford much, actually.’ I’ve been hiding my head in the sand about my loss of income. It didn’t really matter when I had a roof over my head and a boyfriend who could afford to cover the mortgage while I readjusted. God knows when I’ll get another acting job, and call-centre wages aren’t going to cover my rent for long. ‘Oh, Jesus, I’m too old to flat-share with random strangers.’
‘You won’t have to. We’ll find something. You’re going to have to confront Jack at some point, though, you know that. Even if you decide never to speak to Mel again – and who would blame you? – you have to disentangle your life from his. Take what’s yours.’
‘Damn. I should have taken my file with all my personal stuff in. I have some money in an ISA I could take out …’
Kat looks at me intently. ‘You still have the keys, don’t you?’
Which is how we find ourselves on Monday morning, Kat and I, sneaking into my flat like a pair of burglars who just happen to have keys. I’m afraid one of the neighbours will see me and unthinkingly mention something to Jack, but Kat is all for brazening it out. Last night, once I worked out that my plane should have landed at JFK and I could feasibly be through Customs and heading for Manhattan, I sent him a text. Luckily, the fact that it was nearly 1 a.m. in London meant he wouldn’t be expecting a call, not to mention that he was probably already getting down to it with Mel. In my bed. I kept it to the basics: ‘Just landed. Call you tomorrow xx’
When I got up this morning there was a reply: ‘Later xx’.
Bastard.
Oscar heads out of the bedroom as we let ourselves in, happy but confused at company arriving so early in the day.
‘Oskie!’ Kat shrieks, and makes a grab for him. She loves him. It’s mutual.
‘Mel hates cats,’ I say. ‘She’d better be being fucking nice to him.’
A quick glance tells me that Mel and her case are back. I’m tempted to open it and leave it open, because Oscar has a tendency to find a soft surface much more appealing than his litter tray when nature calls. It would be too much of a giveaway, though. Mel is a neat freak and I know she wouldn’t leave for work in the morning without checking everything was in perfect order first. Plus, she might shout at him and I really can’t bear to think of that happening.
I head for the large wooden chest where both Jack and I keep all the impo
rtant stuff: chequebooks, bank statements, birth certificates. I start rooting through, sorting out my stuff from his.
‘It’s so annoying that most of my savings are in our joint account. I don’t want to take them out yet because he’ll wonder why.’ I look around as I say this. ‘What the hell are you doing?’
Kat has Jack’s laptop open and is calmly browsing through. ‘Nothing. Just looking. You never know. Don’t you want questions answered? Like when they got together or who else knows?’
‘Kat! No. I mean … yes, but, no. I can’t believe he’d be stupid enough to email her, anyway.’
She barely breaks her stride. ‘No, they’ve been using direct messages on Twitter, look.’
I stomp over, meaning to stop her in her tracks, when she says, ‘Eew!’ so, of course, I say, ‘What?’ and she slams down the lid and says, ‘It just got rather phone-sexy.’
‘Let me see.’ I try to grab the laptop but she pulls it back, and it all gets a bit Laurel and Hardy while we wrestle back and forth.
‘I don’t think you should read it.’
‘Jesus Christ, Kat!’ I shout. ‘Give it to me.’
Shocked by my raised voice, she hands it over and I flop on to the sofa. She’s right, I probably shouldn’t look. I mean, really, who wants to read anyone’s tweet sex, let alone their boyfriend’s with their best friend?
Mel, Jack and I all joined Twitter at the same time, but none of us – I thought – were that into using it. Now I look at Jack (@jack_inthebox666) and Melissa (@redhairdontcare77) going back and forth on the screen about who wants to do what to who and with what part of their own body and I feel as if I don’t know these people. Written down, it seems laughable rather than erotic, but then I guess it’s all about being in the moment.
I scroll back in time and see arrangements to meet up, random declarations of lust. The earliest missive was just before Christmas, but it doesn’t feel like the beginning.
‘I’ll be wishing I was with you the whole time,’ Jack had written. And Mel had replied, ‘Me, too.’
That was the day I was due home – production had closed for just over a week. The day Jack and I had a tearful reunion (on both parts, I should add). The day before we went hunting for the perfect tree and I spent hours choosing a top in Sandro that I knew Mel would love, to go with the sunglasses I’d picked out for her in Barneys on Madison Avenue. The day before she and I got tipsy on mulled wine and she cried when she talked about how much she missed Sam and speculated about where he was and who with. I remember telling her he must have been insane to choose someone else over her. That any man should be so lucky.
Kat is sitting across from me, Oscar purring contentedly on her lap, looking as if she wishes she’d never started this. I feel bad for snapping at her.
‘It’s good,’ I say, wiping away a tear. ‘I needed to know that it was real.’
Relief washes over her. I see a hint of a smile. ‘Did you know she called her vag her minky?’
‘Definitely not.’
Kat snorts and I start to laugh. And then I can’t stop and neither can she. It’s as if someone has turned a tap on. So now I’m laughing and crying at the same time. I imagine it’s a good look.
‘Also, I’d like to make it clear that he and I have never done that whole, you know, smearing-on-the-face thing … not deliberately, anyway. Just in case you were wondering.’
‘Who has?’
‘Although I did once read it was meant to be good for your skin.’
She shrieks. ‘Eew!’
Eventually, we laugh ourselves out. I feel better. Well, not so much better as stronger. There is nothing left to salvage in either of these relationships. There’s nothing to mourn the loss of, because they weren’t the people I thought they were. I don’t need to mope around missing them, I can focus on hating them, and that feels like progress.
‘You should take a photo of those DMs,’ Kat is saying. ‘You never know when you might have access to them again.’
‘Good idea.’ I fish my phone out of my pocket, snap away. It takes nine pictures to capture the whole lot. I don’t know why I feel the need to preserve the evidence. Just because, one day, I might throw it in their faces and say, ‘See, I know everything.’
I click out of Twitter. ‘Let’s see what else we can find on here.’
9
It turns out it’s way too easy to feel at home in what, essentially, is your own home, even though you really shouldn’t be there. By lunchtime, Kat and I have had two coffees each, the first time assiduously washing and drying the mugs afterwards and stashing them in the cupboard before getting them out again and repeating the process. I have eaten a cereal bar I found in the cupboard – after convincing myself that neither Jack nor Mel would have counted how many were left – and then crawled around on my hands and knees, checking for giveaway crumbs. Kat has her feet up on the coffee table as she browses through Jack’s laptop, hunting for we don’t know what.
‘What if he checks his history?’ I ask, panicked, at one point, way too late to do anything about it if he did.
Kat shrugs. ‘He’ll think it was Mel. You’re in New York, remember? And then he might accuse her and she’ll deny it, but he’ll think she’s lying and that she doesn’t trust him.’
She’s right. ‘You’re right.’
I carry on rummaging through the wardrobe, looking for anything that’s precious to me but that he won’t notice has been removed. I already have a bag full of all my important personal stuff.
‘What are you looking for, anyway?’
She peers over the laptop at me, cats’-eye glasses perched on the end of her nose. ‘I don’t know. Anything. You never know when things might come in handy.’
‘Well, we can’t stay too much longer. What if one of them decides to take the rest of the day off?’
‘I’m just amusing myself till you finish. Anyway, we have two flats to look at this afternoon.’
‘We do?’
‘Don’t get too excited. You were right when you said you couldn’t afford much.’
‘Don’t you have work to do? Rich clients waiting for you impatiently?’
‘Today, you’re my client. I just won’t earn anything.’
‘Okay. Well, I think I’m done.’ I check through my bag again.
‘You can always come back again if you desperately need something.’
I roll my eyes at her. ‘I’m not making a habit of this. Once I’m back for good and I have somewhere to go I’m telling him it’s over, and we can sort the rest out like adults.’
‘Good luck with that.’ Kat, I have always suspected, has never been Jack’s greatest fan. Not that she’s ever really said anything to me but, once, when she’d had a few drinks, she did start quizzing me about whether or not I thought he was good enough for me. I got the impression she thought he was a bit full of himself. Which he is, but in a way I always put down to confidence, not arrogance. He has swagger, but not cockiness. And most of it is a front, anyway. I always liked the fact that he had – or, at least, I thought he had – a soft centre under there somewhere.
I ignore her comment. Take a last look around to make sure everything is as we found it.
‘Can you remember what was up on the screen when you first opened it?’
‘Of course.’ The computer pings. ‘Ooh, hello …’
Kat is looking at something intently.
‘What?’
She hits a couple of keys and the printer starts whirring.
‘He just got an email. Did you know he’d applied for a job at Colby Sachs? Senior account director?’
‘Yes. He was quite hopeful.’
Kat smiles. ‘Well, he got it.’
‘Right.’ I feel a stab of jealousy. Jack has been desperate to get some kind of a promotion, feels he’s stuck in a rut at the advertising agency where he works. But it won’t be me he’s celebrating with.
‘Shame he won’t know that.’
She sits back
and looks at me triumphantly.
‘Kat, what have you done?’
She raises a finely plucked brow. She looks excited and terrified at the same time. ‘I just deleted the email.’
‘No, you didn’t. We need to try and get it back.’
‘Too late. There’s no chance he’ll know because I did it almost as soon as it arrived. Unless he was hovering over his phone …’
‘Shit. Well, they’ll just contact him again in a few days when they don’t hear from him. Or … I know … we could ring them and tell them what happened and ask them to resend.’
‘Or’ – Kat says as she retrieves a piece of paper from the printer – ‘I could make Greg ring them and say he’s Jack. That he’s sorry but he doesn’t want the job any more because he’s decided to stay where he is. I have all the details here …’
‘No. Absolutely not.’ I snatch the paper out of her hand. Skim-read the letter. ‘Jesus, that’s a good salary. He’s not earning anything like that at the moment.’
‘Mel’ll be thrilled. He’ll be able to keep her in the style she’s always thought she deserved.’
‘We can’t, can we?’
‘Why not? After all, you’re in America, so it can’t have been anything to do with you, even if he does ever find out. Not that he will.’
I feel an adrenaline rush like I did the first time I did a bungee jump. Teetering on the lip of a bridge in Croatia, knowing that if I took even a tiny step forward there would be no return. That I’d be plunged into the unknown with no way of stopping myself. And, afterwards, feeling like the queen of the world, as if I could do anything. Invincible.
I take a long breath in, try to exhale slowly.
‘Sod it. Let’s do it.’
10
Surprisingly Greg isn’t as keen to break the law by impersonating someone else on the phone and turning down a job on their behalf as you might imagine. At least, I assume it must be breaking the law. If it isn’t, it should be. And it’s not even because he has such a strong moral compass that he thinks what we’re doing is wrong. Jack deserves everything he gets, Greg believes. He’s just scared of getting caught.