by Jane Fallon
‘You okay?’ he said, putting his arms around me from behind.
‘You heard what happened, then?’
‘Pia crashed on my floor.’
I wiped my hands down the front of my T-shirt, turned around and buried my face in his chest.
‘It’s not your fault,’ he said gently. For all his front, Kieron could be very sweet sometimes.
‘But she’s my friend. She wouldn’t have even been here if it wasn’t for me,’ I snivelled.
He stroked my hair. ‘Al’s an adult. She might have hit on him, but he went along with it.’
‘He never would have, though, not in a million years, unless she had made all the running.’
‘She’s a complete bitch, don’t get me wrong. I’m just saying, don’t blame yourself.’
‘I know.’
He broke away, weighed the water in the kettle. ‘I’m making tea for everyone. There were nine people in my room at the last count. Want one?’
‘Thanks.’ I sat down at the kitchen table. I knew I wasn’t to blame but I felt wretched. I made a decision there and then. Mel and I were done. We might have a long history, but history wasn’t everything. In the past two years, I’d found a family. A bunch of people for whom someone else’s success was a thing to be celebrated, not a threat. Who supported and encouraged each other. I felt happier and more confident than I’d ever felt – well, not this morning, obviously, but in general. I didn’t need Mel belittling me. I didn’t need to always play the role of wing girl to her life. I had my own to get on with.
And then Pia walked into the kitchen, eyes red raw. She stopped dead when she saw me.
‘She’s gone,’ I said. I felt as if I needed to let her know that right away.
Pia just stared at me, a look of absolute loathing on her face. Then she turned and walked out again without saying a word.
43
‘What does Mel care most about?’ Kat is sitting on the sofa, knees curled under her, baby-blue-and-white polka-dot pyjamas on. I’m staying at theirs because I can’t go blowing all my non-existent money on cabs up to north London from Bloomsbury every time we have an evening out and I’d really rather not negotiate the night buses on my own.
‘Herself,’ Greg says. He puts a cup of peppermint tea in front of me, and one in front of Kat. We’re revisiting our favourite topic, although I’m struggling to care. I just want to move on, forget about her.
‘Status, money, being better than everyone else,’ Kat counts off on her fingers.
‘Okay, maybe we should look at it like this. What do we have on her?’ Greg sets his tea down and flops on to the armchair. Because it’s an austere G-Plan design with seemingly no give, he more or less bounces straight up again. On a happier evening, I’d laugh. ‘We know about her and Jack, and she obviously now knows we know …’
Kat pushes her glasses up her nose. ‘There’s her and John. We could make her work life very miserable …’
‘Her work life already is miserable,’ I say unenthusiastically. ‘She hates her job. She’d probably just leave and live off the cash she’s going to get when the flat sells.’
‘And Jack would dump her, let’s not forget that.’
‘I don’t honestly think she’d care that much,’ I say, warming to my theme. ‘She only wanted him because I had him.’
‘We have a copy of the email she sent Shaz telling her about John,’ Kat says. ‘And the cringy DMs between her and Jack. I still have a set of keys to her flat. It doesn’t add up to much.’
My mobile suddenly bursts into life. I grab it. ‘Fuck, it’s her again.’
Kat and Greg both look at me, wide-eyed. ‘I still haven’t called her back since the other day.’
‘We could …’ Kat waves at the door, as if to say, ‘We could leave you to it.’ I can’t face talking to her, though. What’s the point? Why go through with the charade when we both know that’s what it is?
‘No.’
So we all sit there, staring at my phone until it rings out. A few seconds later, it beeps to say I have a message. I assume it’s just Mel leaving a voicemail but then I glance at the screen and see she’s sent me a photo. I pick it up.
‘Hi, hun, I’m thinking about getting some work done on the flat before I sell,’ it says. ‘I thought about using this guy.’
I jab at the screen to see the large version of the picture. It’s a business card. Simon’s business card. Simon Rigby Interior Design.
‘What the …?’
I hand my mobile over to Greg, who’s sitting nearest to me. He peers at the screen.
‘Fucking hell, what’s she up to now?’
‘She just wants me to know she knows about him,’ I say, although I feel there must be more to it than that. ‘Maybe she’s going to tell Jack, but she must know I wouldn’t care about that any more.’
‘Or she’s going to try and seduce him herself,’ Kat pipes up. ‘That’s her style, right?’
I let out a half-laugh. It’s so childish. So teenage. ‘Well, good luck to her. There’s no way –’
‘Of course not,’ Greg says. ‘Simon would never …’ He doesn’t seem able to finish the sentence.
‘He already knows she’s a psycho. I just need to tell him she might be getting in touch with him. He’ll avoid her like the plague.’ Even as I’m saying it, I feel uneasy. Thrown back to my insecure self at fifteen, at twenty. I’ve seen the power of Mel in action when she’s decided she wants someone. It was one of the things I first loved about Jack, I remember now. That he seemed immune to her charms. At least, for a few years. I remember the first time I introduced them, nervous because I wanted her to like him but also because I knew she’d go into flirt overdrive, as she always did whenever she met one of my boyfriends. And she did. Jack, though, had seemed oblivious. He’d been friendly and polite but he’d kept all his attention on me. Later, when we were having a debrief about how the evening had gone, he’d said, ‘I know she’s your best mate, but she’s a bit full on,’ and I’d realized that he hadn’t been oblivious at all, he’d just chosen not to acknowledge what she was doing.
And Simon is a grown-up. He’s not about to have his head turned by some woman throwing herself at him.
Kat must catch the expression on my face. ‘He would never,’ she echoes emphatically.
‘Why don’t you ring him and warn him?’ Greg says, as if Mel were a crazed knife woman skulking about in the bushes outside his house.
‘He’ll be with his sister and her kid.’
‘So? Just so he can give his office the heads-up.’
‘You’re right,’ I say. I hit Simon’s number, but it rings and rings. Eventually, voicemail kicks in. I don’t want to leave a message because I don’t really know what to say. Watch out, Mel’s after you? Don’t let your office book you any appointments with strange women? Run away!!!?
‘I’ll talk to him in the morning.’
‘If it wasn’t for the fact she’s clearly barking, this would actually be funny,’ Kat says as we say goodnight. ‘The fact that she still thinks making a play for someone’s boyfriend is the ultimate revenge.’
‘No one could accuse her of being emotionally mature,’ Greg says, knocking back the last of his tea.
‘How can she do this, though? How can she hate me so much? Do you think she always did?’
Kat leans over and hugs me, a very unKatlike gesture. ‘She doesn’t hate you. She just knows she’s been caught out so she’s using every weapon in her arsenal to defend herself.’
Later, in Kat and Greg’s spare bed, I think about the perfect flat I had been about to move into, the job I thought I was just about to begin that wouldn’t just have sorted out my financial woes but would have jumpstarted my career back into life, about the fact that I can’t even enjoy the tiny bit of success I’ve just had with Murder in Manhattan, because Mel has made sure of that. About how my life since I first met her in form 1A has been all about showing her off to her best advantage, dimming any lig
ht that might accidentally come my way and retraining it towards her.
And about how, now, she’s trying to mess with my new relationship.
And I decide that’s it. Enough is enough. It’s time for me to be the grown-up.
44
Pia moved out within days. Alistair moped about, looking haunted, trying and failing to make contact with her, hanging around outside her lectures and then, when he found out where she’d moved to, her new shared flat. She wanted nothing to do with him. With any of us. She stopped coming to rehearsals and, on the rare occasion when our paths crossed, she would nod a terse hello and walk off quickly before I could say any more. I tried to speak to her several times but she made it clear she wasn’t interested.
I offered to go, too, but the others wouldn’t hear of it. They made it very clear that Mel wasn’t welcome, though, and I didn’t argue. For the first time since I first met her, I had no interest in seeing her.
But the conversations about our collective future, about keeping the house on and staying together, ended abruptly. I knew that they were still planning on sharing, the three of them – Kieron, Tom and Alistair – because I would walk in on them talking about who they might ask to move in to make up the numbers. On the surface, everything between us was fine but their hushed silence spoke volumes.
Eventually, as the Easter holidays loomed and so did my finals, they plucked up the courage to tell me. Tom was the nominated spokesman and, over a cup of tea at our kitchen table, he broke it to me gently that two of the first year Dram Soc members, a couple, were going to be joining them in the house in July. When I say he broke it to me gently, what he actually said was:
‘So, Johnny and Caroline are moving in. Sorry. You can stay until the end of June, though.’
I was grateful for his honesty. It was easier than trying to pussyfoot about, throwing around platitudes about how we’d all stay friends and nothing would change. I already knew how much it had.
I knew I had to let any fantasies I’d been harbouring about him and me die a natural death.
I had the lead in the end-of-term production of Hedda Gabler – the last one I would be eligible to appear in, as summer-term shows were traditionally for first and second years only. The rest of us were supposed to be concentrating on our finals. Tom had a part, too, which could have been awkward but, in actual fact, was fine. Because they were nice people. They didn’t bear a grudge. They just didn’t want to live with me any more in case I invited my vindictive loose-cannon mate up again.
I mostly stayed in my room, studying for my exams and going over my lines. I arranged to move into a tiny box room in a house in Cricklewood with four girls from my course I had barely exchanged two words with in three years. I wrote countless letters to agents, asking them to come and watch my final performance, followed them up with phone calls, got nowhere.
In the end, not one came to see me, but someone who Tom had persuaded to watch him offered to sign me up instead. They were a tiny company and Christian was only just starting out, having worked there as an assistant for three years, but I didn’t care. They were a bona fide theatrical agency and Christian was a bona fide agent. I happily agreed to pay them twelve per cent of the fee for any acting job they ever got me – which, as it turned out, added up to a big fat nothing in the four years they represented me, because everything they found me was either unpaid or a split of a profit so pitiful they couldn’t bring themselves to ask for any of it. Not that it mattered. It was experience, and I could, and did, earn a basic living in other ways.
Elated as I was, I realized I had no one to celebrate with. Kieron, Alistair and Tom congratulated me in a way that seemed heartfelt (and also slightly awkward, because Christian had not extended his offer of representation to Tom and neither had anyone else), but they didn’t suggest we throw a party or even all get drunk in the Student Union together. I mentioned my stroke of luck to one of my soon-to-be new housemates and she just looked at me blankly and said, ‘What does an agent do?’ and then, when I explained, she looked as interested as if I’d just read her the specifications from the back of a manual for a fridge freezer. I felt horribly alone.
I hadn’t seen Mel since Christmas and had avoided all her calls and emails for months now, except for the most perfunctory responses here and there. I’d sent her a card on her birthday and received a gushing response. It was obvious she wanted to make it up with me and I started to think that maybe she had learned her lesson. I needed a friend and, with Pia gone and my college days about to be over any second, it was suddenly clear to me that I had no one. That is, I had lots of friends, but no soulmate. I started to remember all the good stuff about Mel and, gradually, to forget the bad. In her absence, I rewrote her into the friend I had always wished she was.
I started to panic about my new, square, neat room with square, neat Karen, Ann, Jenny and Sue. Their names were as dull as they were. They had already tried to engage me in conversations about cooking rotas and drawing up a schedule for household chores. I seemed to spend half my life abruptly turning corners when I saw them approaching from the other direction, and that was before we’d even moved in together. I could feel my exciting new bohemian life – a budding actress in one of the coolest cities in the world – slipping out of my grasp. Karen, Ann, Jenny and Sue would wear me down, chipping away at my soul until the next thing I knew I’d be working in a bank, wearing court shoes and engaged to a middle manager named Ian.
I needed an antidote. I needed a Mel in my life. So, when she sent me an email saying she thought Centre Stage had taught her everything it could and she was thinking of leaving a year early, I found myself suggesting she move up to London and we live together, just like we’d always planned, before I’d even thought about what I was doing. She sent me a reply within seconds.
‘Yes! Me and you against the world! I love it!’
And that was it. We were best friends again.
45
‘She actually sent you a photo of my card?’ Simon says, picking up on what, to me, is the least important point in the whole scenario. I have to admit I’m a bit irritated. We should just be able to laugh off the fact that Mel has more or less announced she’s going to make a play for him. If he’s taking it seriously, then I’m going to start to feel as if I should.
‘Well, yeah, but she could have got hold of that easily if she’s been watching what I’ve been doing –’
‘She’s not a redhead, is she? Skinny? Lives in Kingston?’
I put the latte I’ve just bought – from a little coffee shop that I’ve found in the row of shops I can see from the roof, an oasis of civilization that also includes an organic grocer’s and what must be one of the last independent bookshops known to man – on the wall in front of a house to give him my full attention. ‘You’ve met her?’
‘She got me round last week. Said she wanted to give her flat a radical makeover.’
‘You didn’t end up in bed with her, did you?’ I say, attempting a joke. He doesn’t laugh.
‘Of course I didn’t.’
‘I know. Jesus, lighten up.’
I hear him sigh down the phone and I imagine him pressing the heel of his hand into his forehead, the way he does when he’s stressing about something. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘It’s just … I mean, I’m not being unsympathetic, but I don’t really want to be dragged into your feud.’
‘You won’t be. I was only telling you so you could avoid her if she called.’
‘Bit late for that,’ he says, but thankfully with a laugh.
‘But … if she gets in touch again, you’ll know. I don’t think she will. She’s just trying to freak me out.’
A day later, and I’m standing outside Jack’s office on Paul Street, trying to pluck up the courage to go in. It’s time. This whole thing has gone on long enough and I need to bring it all to an end. Starting with Jack.
Lately, I’ve almost forgotten all about Jack, in the face of Hurricane Melissa. I certainly can’t
find it in me to be angry with him any more because I just don’t care enough. What he did – is doing – is disloyal, mean, thoughtless, but I can’t even say it’s hurtful because I don’t feel hurt by him. He’s just a man I never should have stayed with for so long, I never should have agreed to marry. I can’t even imagine what I was thinking.
I’ve been here so many times before, the tall, pale stone building with the big cartoonish sculptures of brightly coloured fish in the foyer windows. It screams ‘We’re creative, we don’t take ourselves too seriously!’ Jack’s office is on the fifth floor, but I’m hoping I don’t have to go up. I don’t want to have to play this scene out in front of his colleagues.
As I’m standing outside, plucking up courage, a young couple walk past and do a double take. I see them talking excitedly to one another, looking back, and I remember again that I’m temporarily a tiny bit famous. Among a certain, very small demographic. It’s bizarre, to say the least. I’m about to head into the building when I see they’ve turned around and they’re now heading towards me. I have to make that split-second decision: do I carry on going where I was going and leave them hanging (and possibly look rude), or do I wait, thus looking as if I expect them to be on their way to ask me for a selfie (and therefore full of myself), or, even worse, like an idiot when they walk straight past me with no idea who I am. Luckily, I’m spared when the girl says:
‘Are you her? You are, aren’t you?’ I should point out that this happened to me once in New York and I said, ‘Yes,’ and it turned out they thought I was someone off Game of Thrones. They were quite pissed off with me when they realized, as if it had been me who’d stopped them and demanded we all take a picture together. So this time I go with, ‘Maybe.’
‘You are. You’re Yvon from Murder in Manhattan. Oh my God, we love that show …’
She burbles on while her boyfriend fumbles with his phone, and then they wrestle me into position between them and he holds his hand out and snaps a shot of the three of us. It’s all over in a few seconds and then I’m dumped back down in the middle of my real life.