Bad Friends

by Seeber, Claire

  Exhausted suddenly, I flopped into the small armchair opposite my grandmother and accepted the tea Susan passed me. ‘Thank you. How weird.’

  Gar suddenly turned and smiled at me, and her eyes held that lucid light that I had come to long for. ‘Is Alex with you?’

  My stomach lurched again. ‘No, Gar.’ I tried to smile. ‘Not today, I’m afraid.’

  ‘He was here the other day, you know. Such a dear boy.’ She leaned back and closed her eyes again. ‘He read me something.’

  I looked at Susan and smiled sadly. ‘She gets more and more confused, doesn’t she?’

  ‘She’s right actually. He did come.’

  ‘What?’ I sat bolt upright. ‘Alex was here?’

  ‘He’s come a few times, bless his heart. Actually, it was after he left the other night that these turned up.’ Susan moved over to the lilies and pulled off a broken stem. ‘I mean, they’re lovely, aren’t they, cheer the room up no end – but it did seem a bit odd.’

  ‘You’ve lost me, Susan.’

  ‘To leave them here. I suppose he’s shy. Now you’ve split up. You know, to say how he still feels.’ She dug down into her pocket and came up with a half-packet of Tunes, a stub of a pencil –and a small envelope, instantly recognisable. My stomach turned over as if someone had flipped it like a pancake. ‘It’s addressed to you, lovie.’

  I glanced at my grandmother, nodding back off to sleep, as oblivious to this threat as a newborn baby, and I wiped my damp eyes resolutely. I’d kill anyone who laid a finger on my grandmother. With unsteady hands, I opened the sealed envelope –but I already knew what it would reveal.

  ‘In Loving Memory,’ it said, next to a badly printed spray of purple flowers. ‘In Loving Memory of Maggie – and Vera.’

  That night I slept in Gar’s armchair again, after accidentally polishing off the end of her sherry. I didn’t turn the light off till I woke up the next morning.

  Chapter Twenty

  I arrived at work with a cricked neck, a sherry hangover and a truly foul mood. Sally was waiting outside my office, flicking through Hello!.

  ‘Your friend’s in here.’ She waved the magazine under my nose.

  ‘What friend?’ I scrabbled in my bag for my key.

  ‘That Fay girl, at some perfume launch. She’s very photogenic, isn’t she?’ Sally pointed at a small photo. ‘She looks a bit like you in this picture.’

  I shuddered. Donna shot past, snarling into her phone. ‘You cannot be serious, Max. You promised me Kerry was hot to trot, not about to bloody OD.’

  ‘We need to talk about Joseph Blake, Mag.’ Sally dropped her voice theatrically. ‘You’ll never guess what he’s done now –’

  The post-boy knocked on my door, bearing a beautifully wrapped basket of fruit and champagne with a glossy white envelope. My heart beat faster, my instinct screeched don’t open it – but to my huge relief, inside were two tickets to a concert at the Festival Hall that night and a handwritten note from Seb.

  ‘Guess what? Gershwin’s playing tonight,’ specially for you. Come with me, please.’

  I wondered if he knew Gershwin was long dead. At the foot of the note there was a PTO.

  ‘I want to lick every inch of you,’ he’d written. Lord! I blushed as hot as the boiling radiator and shoved the card into my bag, knocking the grapes and lychees all over the carpet in my haste.

  ‘Clumsy Maggie!’ Sally picked up a peach, already bruised, and handed it to me, her broad face intrigued. ‘You’ve gone all red.’

  ‘I have not.’ I blushed hotter.

  ‘Who’s that little lot from then? Lover boy?’

  Donna flounced into the office without knocking. ‘It’s him or me, all right?’

  ‘Fine, thanks, Donna,’ I said dryly, ‘and how are you today?’

  ‘You don’t want to know. That flipping PR’s giving me brain-ache.’

  ‘Right.’ I switched my computer on. ‘So what’s the problem?’

  ‘It’s not the PR – it’s bloody Blake. He’s been going through my drawers.’

  ‘How exciting.’ I raised an eyebrow. ‘Lucky you.’

  Sally giggled. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’ She shut the door behind her.

  ‘This is serious, man.’ Donna scowled at me. ‘He’s been nicking all my contacts.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘First of all my Rolodex went missing, and so did Lisa’s. Then we found them in the bogs. God knows why. Some of the pages are missing.’

  ‘How do you know it’s him?’

  ‘Because then my address book, the one I keep everything in – email addresses, private mobiles – it went missing last night, out of my desk drawer.’ Donna slumped onto the sofa. ‘God, there’s numbers in there I’ve had to do you-don’t-wanna-know-what to get hold of. There’s all sorts in there, and Christ, if any of them lot find out their numbers are floating around London, they’re going to go NUTS!’ She was practically crying now, her head in her hands. ‘I’m talking big celebs, agents, addicts, politicians, convicted paedos. The blinking lot.’

  ‘All right, Don, calm down.’ I sat beside her on the sofa. ‘So why do you think it’s Joseph?’

  ‘Because he was the only one here with me last night. He said he was doing some “extra research”. God knows on what, cos he’s so bloody whack anyway.’ She looked disgusted. ‘My drawer’s always locked – but I left my keys on my desk when I went downstairs to have a fag. When I came back, he’d gone, and so had the book when I came to look for it.’

  ‘And the keys? Are they missing?’ I felt like DI Fox.

  She shrugged. ‘No. They were still on my desk.’

  ‘And you’re sure the book was in your drawer?’

  She sucked her teeth. ‘Positive. Come on, Maggie, you know what he’s like.’

  I sighed. ‘Okay, granted, he’s a bit of an – oddball –’

  ‘That’s an understatement. And I caught him skulking around your office.’

  ‘Really? When?’ I frowned.

  ‘The other day. He said he was finding some file, but he looked proper guilty.’

  ‘Well, maybe, but that doesn’t mean he’s a thief. Are you absolutely sure your book’s not at home?’

  ‘I checked. Believe me, I turned the place upside-down. I didn’t get to bed till two.’ Judging by the state of her desk, she’d turned that upside-down too.

  Joseph Blake walked into the main office at that moment, wearing brothel-creepers and a huge pair of earphones, clutching his brown leather briefcase. He’d quiffed his floppy hair today; he looked like a ten-year-old Teddy boy wearing his father’s clothes.

  ‘Bloody bastard.’

  I restrained Donna from marching straight out and confronting him. But, gazing at Joseph thoughtfully, I wondered again why Charlie didn’t want to let him go. ‘It could be him, I guess.’

  We watched an oblivious Joseph take off his Crombie coat and hang it carefully on the coat-stand in the corner. He smoothed back his hair and sat down at his desk, opening up a copy of the Daily Telegraph.

  ‘Jus’ take a look, man. He’s well pretentious. There’s a name for types like him down my way.’ Donna glowered at him through the glass. ‘I’m going to give him a piece of –’

  ‘Let me deal with this, Donna, okay? It’s not good, I know – but it’s hardly the crime of the century.’

  ‘Whatever,’ she shrugged. ‘It’s just – he makes me properly uncomfortable, d’you know what I mean? It’s not the same vibe out there since he came back.’

  ‘Look, go and get yourself a coffee. I’ll have a chat with him.’

  ‘I can’t leave now. I’m waiting for Fergie’s people to call back.’

  So in the end I took Joseph out with me, dodging the black cabs and the couriers, back to Crepey Lips’s café on The Cut.

  ‘Are your eggs free-range?’ Joseph asked the waitress, whose roots were oily-black against the bright peroxide.

  She smirked. ‘They’re out of a box
, pet, that’s all I know.’

  ‘Yes, but is it a free-range box?’

  ‘Joseph, it’s a caff, not the flipping Ivy.’ I suddenly felt like a mother with a truculent teenager in tow. ‘Have something else. Have a bacon roll.’

  He looked at me like I was mad. ‘I don’t eat meat. I’ll just have tea and toast. Brown toast, green tea, please.’

  ‘You can have white bread and brown tea or none at all, pet.’

  I fumbled for my cigarettes to hide my smile. He looked at them pointedly and gave a little cough. Every bit of sympathy I had left for him flew out the door.

  ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I was thinking, we could do a show about intensive farming.’

  The waitress plonked my coffee down in front of me.

  ‘Have you seen the way animals are treated in this country? The hormones the cattle and pigs are injected with, the terrible cruel transportation, the –’

  Crepey-Lips slammed my bacon roll and Joseph’s mug down with such gusto that tea sloshed onto the Formica top. ‘One brown tea. With white milk in it.’

  I smiled at her politely.

  ‘White sugar, brown and red sauce are on the side.’

  Joseph rattled on oblivious. ‘The immoral pens, the fat on the animals that shouldn’t be there. I mean, bacon’s a prime example. They’re given such high-energy food that they swell to twice their size.’

  I looked down at my roll miserably, and had a slug of coffee instead. ‘It’s an admirable idea, Joseph, but can you actually see Renee going for it? It’s not really her style.’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’

  ‘Why don’t you make a list of your ideas for me?’ I put my mug down carefully. ‘But look, what we really need to do is talk about your future at Double-decker.’ I tapped my fingers against the china. ‘I mean, it’s not really working out, is it?’

  He paled visibly. ‘Don’t sack me, Maggie, please.’

  My heart went out to him. He really was pathetic. ‘I don’t want to sack you, Joseph, really I don’t – but I am worried. There’s been a few allegations against you now.’

  ‘What kind of allegations?’

  ‘Have you been – borrowing stuff? Like the girls’ address books?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’ He wouldn’t look at me.

  ‘Is that the truth?’

  ‘Yes, seriously.’ He looked up at me defiantly. ‘Why would I steal phone numbers?’

  ‘I don’t know. You tell me.’

  ‘I can’t, because I didn’t.’ But he was screwing a twist of sugar very tight. There was a pause. ‘You should be nice to me.’ It sounded rather like a threat.

  ‘Should I? Why?’

  ‘You know why.’

  ‘Remind me.’

  ‘Because my uncle will be furious if you don’t treat me correctly,’ he declared. It was a threat.

  ‘Your uncle?’

  ‘That’s right, my uncle.’

  ‘And he is…?’

  ‘Philip Lyons. But you knew that.’

  I thought of Lyons, Double-decker’s MD; of his unprepossessing ways, his lack of social skills, his love of a fast dollar, the utter moral vacuum that he was. I remembered Charlie’s reticence to let Joseph go. It all fitted suddenly.

  ‘Oh, I see.’ I caught Joseph’s rather protuberant eye. Steadily we regarded one another. ‘I suppose there is a family resemblance, now you mention it.’

  ‘Had you forgotten, Maggie? Just like you’ve forgotten everything else.’

  ‘What everything else?’ I frowned.

  ‘If you can’t remember it’s not my place to remind you.’ He stared me out. ‘Can I go now?’

  ‘Joseph, just because you’ve got relatives in high places, it doesn’t mean you can just do whatever you fancy. It doesn’t work like that.’

  He smiled. ‘Doesn’t it?’ It was a greasy, queasy kind of smile.

  ‘No.’ I ploughed on. ‘You still have to work hard, you still have to earn respect.’

  With a great ache, I thought suddenly of Alex. He’d been so desperate for Malcolm to be proud of him for his own achievements – whereas his younger brother Tom had taken the easy route, going straight into Malcolm’s business out of school. Malcolm’s inexplicable contempt had only served to fuel Alex’s demons.

  ‘I do work hard.’

  I pulled myself back to the present. ‘Not hard enough really, Joseph. You have to start at the bottom. We all did.’ I tried for schoolmarmish jolliness now. ‘So come on,’ I patted his hand awkwardly, ‘show me you can do it, okay?’

  He shrugged morosely. ‘S’pose.’

  ‘And if you did take that book, Donna’s book, just put it back, all right?’

  ‘I didn’t, Maggie, seriously.’ He glared at me. ‘I said I didn’t and you should believe me.’

  I considered my bacon roll for a moment, then reached for my cigarettes. ‘All right, Joseph. You go on back. I’ll be over in a bit.’

  He stood up. ‘You smoke too much. I told you that in the summer.’

  My stomach plunged. ‘I don’t remember that.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I’m seriously not surprised.’

  I looked up at him. His old Crombie coat smelled of mothballs, pungent and acrid. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Forget it.’ He made a big play of doing his buttons up.

  ‘No, go on, Joseph, please.’

  ‘I just meant – well, I know what happened.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You can’t hide much from me. Though obviously you did try. You’re just lucky I didn’t tell my uncle.’

  I couldn’t tell if he was bluffing. ‘I’ll see you back at the office, Joseph.’ I was desperate for him to go now. I didn’t want to remember any more.

  Ordering another coffee, I watched Joseph scoot across the busy road, a solitary figure weaving between the camera-crews smoking outside our building, leaning on their tripods, joking with one another in a way I could never imagine Joseph ever being part of. I felt a sudden wave of nostalgia for the business I’d signed up for all those years ago, for the excitement and novelty and camaraderie.

  My telephone bleeped. Idly I opened the text message.

  I WAS RIGHT. YOU SLUT

  Oh God. I dropped the phone like it was hot. Then I cancelled the coffee and went across the road to the pub instead. Standing at the bar, I had a huge slug of nasty thin red wine and then I rang the bloody number back, just like I had each time before. But no one answered and of course there was no voicemail. The phone just rang and rang – until someone cut it off.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  ‘Bring Seb along,’ Bel said on the phone, evidently distracted. ‘Hang on a sec, Johnno, can you?…The more, the merrier, I say. It is the bloody Last Supper, after all – might cheer things up … That one next, please … And I’m dying to meet him properly before I go … Oh my God, no, not that one … Look, sorry, Mag, but I think the removal men have just packed Hannah in a crate as a truly hilarious joke. I’ll see you later, all right?’

  I put the phone down slowly. I wasn’t sure I was ready to introduce Seb to the curious throng at Bel’s farewell dinner. I was so dreading these goodbyes that I would have much preferred the Gershwin gig, but I couldn’t abandon my best friend on her last night in the country. Seb said he quite understood of course. I’d known he would, he just seemed that type of man. He said that rehearsals were over-running anyway, they were having problems with the blocking (whatever that was). I very nearly asked him to meet me when he finished but as I teetered Seb said, ‘I’ll call you soon’, and I said ‘Great’, when what I really meant was, ‘Wait’ – and by then he’d already gone.

  When I left work the rain had stopped at long last, the pavements glistening like molasses under the streetlights. It was freezing again, a proper winter chill cutting through the air, and for once I was glad, my masochistic side craving the cold tonight. My head felt fust
y, almost dirty, after the last few days’ events – the graffiti and the texts, the calls to Gar, coupled with creepy Joseph and Donna’s missing book. The icy bite outside roused me again. It wasn’t far to the gastropub Bel had booked for dinner. I stuck my headphones on and set off for Clerkenwell.

  I’d spent the afternoon in the office pretending to ignore that last text, although DI Fox’s sandy face kept popping up to chide me, my hand hovering over the phone constantly to call him until I decided not to be so weak. But now, tramping alongside the rush-hour traffic, the chill here thick with fumes, those vicious words resonated round and round my head … SLUT, WHORE, SLUT, WHORE.

  Who hated me enough to try to scare me witless? Whoever it might be, they were succeeding.

  I crossed the road, squeezing between a minibus and a small lorry, a cyclist skidding past in a luminous vest like a raver from the nineties. With Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E Minor soaring in my ears, I was starting to feel quite trippy myself, my mind speeding from one suspicion to the next. Joseph? Charlie? Philip Lyons? Don’t be ridiculous, Maggie. I shook my head again, impatient with myself. None of them, surely. But – Alex?

  I kept arriving painfully back at him.

  Mesmerised by my own feet, their steadfast tread belied my fears as I reached the junction and hesitated, unsure of the right way through the maze of Dickensian streets. With a nasty lurch I realised I was horribly near Malcolm’s office; the office where I’d first met his son. It was painful to find that everything still reminded me of Alex. Shoving my numb hands deep into my pockets, I chose a small alley on the right and marched on. I was going to have to face facts sooner or later; Alex was obviously punishing me. He might be a clown when comedy appealed, but I knew he was deeply hurt. And I’d started to remember more clearly the events of that terrible summer night; often in the early hours now I’d wake sweating and a little more would have clawed its way into my consciousness. And I’d bite my lip against the painful memories, praying they were just bad dreams.