Faking Friends

by Jane Fallon

  ‘So they definitely know this wasn’t me fucking up?’

  ‘Definitely. Go and get yourself a massage or something to make you feel better. And don’t worry about it.’

  I nearly say, ‘I can’t afford a massage because I haven’t got any work,’ but, thankfully, I stop myself. I need to keep her on side.

  28

  Simon and I are lounging in my bed. It’s two in the afternoon and he’s supposed to be at work but, luckily for me, because he’s the boss, he can suit himself. To a certain extent. He has a meeting with a potential new client at six. A contract that, if he secures it, would take him right through the summer and beyond. And it’s in Hampstead, so close enough for him to sneak off for a few hours here and there and end up at my flat.

  We’re looking up at the damp patch on the ceiling, where water has started dripping through. I don’t possess a bucket or even a washing-up bowl, so I’ve put a saucepan under there to catch the drips and, every now and then, one of us jumps out of bed to check that it’s not about to overflow. It’s a high-class date, what can I say? Although, in truth, one that I wouldn’t change a single detail of.

  ‘You need to get someone to look at that,’ he says lazily.

  ‘I went downstairs to ask Mrs Lam in the shop, but as she doesn’t speak English it’s no surprise I couldn’t make her understand.’

  ‘I could take –’

  I cut him off. ‘No, Simon. Honestly, you’ve done enough already. I’ll call the woman at the letting agency. There must be a crack in the roof or something. It’s their responsibility.’

  He pulls me into him, kisses the top of my head, and we go back to watching it drip.

  ‘I don’t understand why I haven’t heard about that audition.’ I’ve filled him in on the whole horror. Once I got to the bit about them promising to reschedule he’d said, ‘Oh, thank God. Can I laugh about it now?’

  ‘It wasn’t funny, really,’ I said, a smile creeping over my face because, objectively, it actually was.

  ‘It wouldn’t have been if it had lost you the job but, now you know you’re still in with a shot, it was really. Wasn’t it?’

  ‘Okay, yes it was. You have my permission to laugh.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He made an overexaggerated ‘haha!’ noise. ‘Next time, maybe scout it out the day before.’

  ‘Whatever time my audition is, I’m going to aim to get there three hours early.’

  ‘Get there the day before. Take a tent.’

  Now I sit up on my elbows and look down at him.

  ‘It’s stressing me out that they haven’t called yet.’

  ‘They have to find another venue. That could take a couple of days. Stop worrying.’

  ‘I will. I have.’

  He rolls over on to his side to face me, peels the duvet off my shoulders. ‘I have a guaranteed method of taking your mind off things.’

  ‘That’ll work.’

  He leans forward, pulls me towards him and kisses me, and I feel myself sink into it. There’s an indignant yowl and something heavy lands on the bed beside me. Simon pulls away, laughs.

  ‘Oh, good. That’s not offputting at all.’

  Oscar sits there staring at us. Meows plaintively.

  ‘Get off, Osk,’ I say, flapping my hand at him, but he doesn’t budge.

  ‘Aah, leave him be, he just wants company,’ Simon says, leaning over and stroking him, the moment broken. And all I can think is how nice he is, which should be an insult, like damning him with faint praise. Nice isn’t sexy. Nice isn’t exciting. Except that, in Simon’s case, it’s all of those things.

  ‘Maybe we should meet at your place next time,’ I say, nestling into Simon’s side. If he didn’t have a meeting to go to, I’d happily stay here all afternoon.

  ‘Too far for me in the middle of a work day,’ he says. ‘One evening, maybe. I like it here, though. I like the element of danger. The ceiling might cave in any moment. I might be savaged by a jealous feline. Those two in the flat downstairs could come up and finish us off. It’s non-stop drama.’

  ‘Oh God, if I get this job, I can move. Buy somewhere, even. Shit, why haven’t I heard?’

  ‘You will,’ he says, kissing my forehead. ‘Stop thinking about it.’

  Once he’s left, at about five, I call Sara. I already called her first thing, but I can’t let the day end without checking in again.

  ‘I’ve spoken to Carrie,’ she says cheerfully. ‘They should know tomorrow.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll stop panicking. Well, I won’t, but I’ll stop bothering you with it.’

  ‘Talk tomorrow. I’ll call you the second I hear, I promise.’

  I remind myself it’s just an audition. There will be at least twenty other actresses in the frame, possibly more. And even if they dismiss all of them, that doesn’t mean they’ll definitely offer the part to me. They could start another search, bring in twenty more. And then twenty more. It’s perfect, though. It’s the job that could save me from selling magazine subscriptions, trailing around to auditions for monosyllabic unnamed Women, living in a flat that will never feel like home, however many rugs Simon scavenges for me. It’s the job that could change my life.

  29

  Mel

  You realize that was me, right? I’m Carrie from Sunflower Productions. Except that there is no Sunflower Productions, no hard-to-find building at the back of Stables Market, no Blood Ties. Just me with a pay-as-you-go mobile and a lot of front.

  I’ve never been good with people assuming I’m stupid. I’ve always felt my lack of formal qualifications marks me out as someone they think isn’t the sharpest tool in the box, especially these days, when everyone and their dog seems to have a degree and the second thing anyone asks when you meet them, after, ‘What do you do?’ is, invariably, ‘Where did you go to uni?’

  Centre Stage School of Drama and Dance in Maidenhead just does not cut it.

  But Amy really should know better. Amy really shouldn’t be underestimating my intelligence by thinking I haven’t worked out what’s going on.

  I know that she’s back in London, for a start. And I know that she’s the one who messed with my Facebook page. What I don’t know – yet – is what the fuck she’s up to.

  I’m sure you think I should be feeling guilty. Beating myself up about the fact that Amy has found out the truth about me and Jack. But what I actually feel is furious. Where the fuck does she get off, trying to ruin my life? Because I know it’s her. Why else is she skulking about pretending to be in New York when, in actual fact, she’s in London? She thinks she’s being really clever, sneaking around, thinking Jack and I are stupid. Well, to be fair, he is a bit, because he’s still oblivious. He’s still talking about them getting married one day, for example. Like I’m interested. Like we’re all in this together. Well, he’s in for a bit of a shock.

  I’m going to find out what she’s playing at. I don’t know how, because I’m fucked if I have any clue at the moment. But if she thinks she has the upper hand, she’s wrong.

  Very, very wrong.

  Of course, I felt wretched when me and Jack first got together. Amy was my best friend. And, no matter what she might think, it wasn’t pre-planned. I didn’t seduce him. Tell the truth, I have no recollection of what happened. We just both got hammered and the next thing I knew we were in their bed, clothes off, having some of the best sex of my life (and, he assured me, of his).

  And that’s all it ever was, sex. And we had no intention of ever doing it again once we sobered up, but then, you know how it is, the first time is like the gateway drug. And then you just think, What the hell? If she ever finds out we’ve even done it once, nothing will ever be the same again, so what’s the difference? Not that I ever contemplated my friendship with her being over. I always assumed that, if all went tits up, I could win her over, throw Jack under the bus and find a way to get her to forgive me. It seems, however, that I was being a bit over-optimistic.

  It was pure coincidence that
I saw her. Well, it was and it wasn’t. Jack and I had just had a disastrous weekend. He had had to bail out of the trip to Iceland because he couldn’t find his passport. I mean, what kind of a fuckwit …? We’d ended up having a huge row and I’d even threatened to go without him, until he told me someone else from his firm was going to use the hotel room. And, besides, I had absolutely no interest in going to Reykjavik. It’s not somewhere I’ve ever even thought of going. Give me Barcelona any day. Or Rome. It was the weekend with Jack I wanted.

  It was our first big fight, and it was odd, but it was that that made me feel as if we were actually a couple now.

  So I spent the weekend sulking, mostly, until he called me, grovelling and begging me to go over to his. But just before I left, Bella from work called. Bella never calls me. We get on okay, but we’re not actually friends, but thank God for her, because she was the only person who’d seen my Facebook status and assumed it might not be a big joke or some sort of confession. I mean, you can imagine how I felt. Someone knew about me and John – not that they’d named him, but who else could they mean? Bella was all sympathy. I don’t think for a minute she thought there might be any truth in what the hacker had put, she was more concerned about the fact that someone had done something that mean. She told me how to change my password and she promised she’d do damage limitation at work, if necessary.

  I was petrified. Not only about people at work finding out – sleeping with the boss is not exactly encouraged, and it’s even worse when he’s a pudgy bully with a face like a boxing glove. And one that’s just been through twelve rounds, at that. There would be no question in anyone’s mind that it had been cynical self-interest, not a passion I was powerless to control. I mean, do me a favour, if I was looking for casual sex for the fun of it, I could do much better. Much, much better.

  I almost didn’t go in at all. I mean, to be honest, it’s always hard. I hate my job. Forty years old and I process insurance claims for a living. I live in one of the most expensive cities in the world and I do a job you could do in any old provincial shithole.

  But then I thought it would be better to know what the damage was. Maybe none of them apart from Bella had seen it, and I trusted her not to spread it around. And, to be absolutely truthful, I wanted to look Shaz in the eye. She was the only person I had told about me and John. She had no way of knowing my password, in so far as I knew, but, given that it was Mel123, it was hardly the height of cyber sophistication. A few lucky guesses could have got her there. And she had probably seen me enter that same password into my computer at work countless times.

  Anyway, to cut a long and boring story short, I dragged myself in there. As soon as I got in, it was obvious everyone knew. You know that feeling you get that people have been talking about you because there’s an awkward silence as soon as you enter the room? Well, there was that, plus John glaring at me every time he stalked past. Although that was par for the course, until he finally got lucky. I’d had a few happy work weeks since then. At one point, I went off to hide in the loo, I felt so humiliated, and Shaz came to find me.

  ‘It’ll blow over,’ she said, putting her arm around me at the sink.

  I looked right at her and, I have to say, she didn’t flinch. ‘How did anyone know, though? I only told you.’

  ‘I don’t … shit, Mel, you don’t think this was me, do you?’

  ‘No. I don’t know. Did you tell anyone?’

  ‘Of course not! God, I can’t believe you’d think I’d do this to you.’

  ‘I don’t …’ And actually, now she was standing in front of me, I didn’t. Shaz can be a bitch but she’s one of those people that, if she likes you, she’s loyal to a fault. ‘Fuck, Shaz, I’m not thinking straight. When did you see it?’

  ‘Not until this morning. Otherwise, I would have told you. Obviously.’ She was pissed off with me, I could tell. ‘Andy took a screen shot. He’s emailed it to everyone this morning. Just so you know.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake.’ I thought I was going to cry, but I didn’t want to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing me red-eyed. ‘They don’t think it’s true, do they?’

  ‘No! I don’t think so. And I’ve spent the whole morning running around telling anyone who’ll listen that it isn’t.’

  ‘Sorry, I –’

  ‘It’s okay,’ she said, stroking my arm. She really can be sweet sometimes.

  ‘Who could have done it?’ I was feeling picked on. Singled out, and not in a good way.

  ‘It’s just a stupid joke. You need to try and look like you’re not bothered.’

  ‘I’ll fucking kill them when I find out who it was. I mean, isn’t that illegal, hacking into someone’s page?’

  She shrugged. ‘Probably. But I imagine the police have got more important things to worry about. And I doubt they hacked. It must be someone who knew your password. Or who could guess … oh … what about Sam?’

  As soon as she said it, it made sense. Not that he could know about me and John, but that could just have been a lucky guess.

  ‘Oh my God. It is. It must be. Shit. That fucker.’

  ‘You’ve changed your password now, right?’

  I nodded. ‘I’m still going to kill him, though.’

  I felt a bit better knowing it was most probably my vengeful ex and not one of my colleagues. It’s just the kind of thing that he would do. Sam was never one to let things go. My workmates would all forget about it soon enough, especially if I could bring myself to laugh it off and not give away that there was some truth in it. I took a few deep breaths and told Shaz I was ready to go back to my desk.

  But, when I got there, there was a Post-it note with a message from John. ‘Need a word. My office. ASAP.’

  I couldn’t face it. The look he had given me earlier told me he was furious that – I assume – I had told someone our secret and jeopardized both his authority and, potentially, his marriage. Although, to be fair, I’d probably have been doing his wife a favour. Imagine what it must be like waking up with that in your face every morning.

  I showed it to Shaz and then screwed it up and stuffed it in my pocket. I didn’t want anyone else to see it.

  ‘Will you tell him I’ve gone home sick?’

  I grabbed my bag from under my desk.

  ‘Are you sure?’ she said quietly.

  ‘I can’t face it. I’ll feel better tomorrow.’

  So that’s how I found myself walking from the Tube at Belsize Park in the middle of the day, towards Jack’s flat in Gospel Oak – where I knew the supplies would be better, because he did a big shop at the weekend, and, besides, he has Netflix – when I saw her. Amy. I was walking down Pond Street and there she was, coming up the hill the other way. I knew it was her instinctively, before my brain could tell me that I must be mistaken because she wasn’t even in the country. Something about the way she looped her hair behind her ear and then brushed it free again. I stopped dead in my tracks for a moment I was so confused but then, mercifully, I regained my composure and ducked into the path beside the hospital where, hopefully, she wouldn’t see me. She was looking down at her phone, texting, I think. I practically climbed into a bush to avoid her seeing me when she sauntered over to my side of the street. We were literally feet apart.

  At this point, apart from being confused, my only real thought was that I didn’t want her to ask me what I was doing so close to her and Jack’s flat. And if she was coming from there, which seemed likely, she would have seen all my stuff. My clothes and my make-up, my suitcase. You’d think we would have learned a lesson after the weekend of the party but, somehow, her coming home out of the blue then had made us even more confident she wouldn’t do it again. What were the chances? High, apparently.

  After she’d passed, I practically ran to the flat. I wanted to grab my things and get out of there. I didn’t even stop to call Jack. That could wait. With any luck, she hadn’t been able to identify who the offending articles belonged to – I mentally ran through a list of wha
t was there. Had I left anything that had my name on? I didn’t think so, but if she’d gone through forensically I suppose she might have seen red hairs in the comb or worked out that I was the only person she knew who bought factor-seventy sunscreen.

  In the flat – I have my own key; we resisted for a long time but then Jack got fed up of the constant need for coordination – there was no sign that she was home for a visit. That struck me as weird straight away. Her case wasn’t there – and when I’d just seen her in the street she hadn’t had anything with her, not even a jacket.

  I started to grab my clothes, and then I remembered my laptop. I don’t know what made me do it, but I checked the history. Blank. Even I know that’s not normal. She must have been sleuthing to try and work out who it was Jack was seeing. And if so, I was busted. I felt like I was going to throw up. This was it. My oldest friend had found out I was screwing her boyfriend. Her fiancé. I’m not stupid. I must have known, deep down, that this would happen one day, however much Jack and I kidded ourselves, but I hadn’t ever allowed myself to think what would happen then.

  Something was off, though. Even through the panic and the fear, I had a nagging feeling that there was more going on. And then it hit me. Amy had looked perfectly normal. She wasn’t crying or looking tormented. She wasn’t shouting at Jack on the phone or rushing to find a taxi to go and confront him at work. She had been strolling along the street as if she didn’t have a care in the world. I could swear I’d even seen her smile at something she saw on her phone at one point. No way had she just discovered her boyfriend was sleeping with someone.

  For a second, I thought maybe she hadn’t been to the flat yet. Perhaps she had just landed and she’d decided to go for a stroll in the old neighbourhood before coming home. But she’d had nothing with her. No case. No bag.

  Something wasn’t right. None of the facts added up. And what was it with my computer and the blank history?

  And then I clicked on Facebook. Just to be sure.