However, this Tuesday, I’d ordered a curry. I hadn’t been shopping over the weekend – another result of having sex – (I’d forgotten how much was involved in sex. It wasn’t simply a meeting of two bodies, it was not having time or energy to buy food. Not having the inclination to do your work. And a hell of a lot of tidying up) so my cupboards were Old Mother Hubbard bare. We’d eaten so now it was down to the heavy talk. ‘To be totally honest, Jenna,’ I said gravely, then checked she wanted the truth by adding: ‘Total honesty, right?’
She nodded, bit her lip, her eyes cloaked in apprehension and terror: we had this habit of asking for total honesty of each other and then being struck with fear because we knew we’d get it.
‘I never thought he’d do it. I never thought he’d make such a bold move, it’s so unlike him. I know, I know, I’ve spent two years telling you I thought he would but that’s because it was what you wanted to hear. Deep down, I thought he’d never do it. But he did, so that’s great. Fantastic, even.’
Jen tossed her wavy blonde hair, exposing her beautiful face. I didn’t think she was beautiful simply because she was my best friend, but because she was. Her skin was naturally blemish-free, her slightly prominent cheekbones only needed a hint of blusher. And her eyes were such an unusual shade of blue you could never be sure what colour they really were. Sometimes they were pale blue, sometimes sapphire blue, sometimes topaz blue, and other days, like today, they were summer sky blue. If anything let her down, though, it was the shape of her eyes. They, no matter how well she shaped her eyebrows, seemed slightly too big. They were oval and not pinched enough at the ends to make them perfect, like the rest of her face. I often wanted to lend her my eyes – mine were the shape of bay leaves with finely tapered edges and huge, black-brown pupils – because she’d be ‘finished’, 100 per cent perfect with them.
Jen sipped her wine. ‘Neither did I,’ she replied and pulled her legs up under her on the sofa. ‘I never thought Matt would settle down because he’s like you.’
‘Excuse me?!’ I replied. If someone was going to fling the ultimate insult at me, that was it. Me, like Matt. Me, like that proverbial lump of toffee?
‘You and Matt are so alike it’s scary. Whenever the future’s mentioned you both get cagey. You’ll either clam up or make a joke out of it, anything to avoid thinking or talking seriously about settling down. It used to infuriate me because I never knew where I stood when it came to getting a house or booking a holiday, but then I was glad you were like that when I met Matt. I realised he wasn’t going to run away because even though you made no plans for the future you stuck around.’
‘You know what, I’ll let you off because you’re my best mate, any other person would get kicked out for that.’
‘Oh, you want examples?’ Jen said. ‘Sean.’
‘We do not talk about Sean,’ I reminded.
‘I have never known a man adore a woman like he did you,’ Jen continued as though she hadn’t heard the warning note in my voice. ‘He was sooooo in love with you, the way he gazed at yo—’
‘We are not having this conversation,’ I cut in.
Jen observed me long and cool, trying to calculate if she could say what else was on her mind. She opened her mouth.
‘And if you do try to have this conversation you can piss off home.’
She shrugged, sat back on the sofa. ‘I reckon it’s because your family’s as deformed as mine,’ Jen said.
‘Listen, teacher features, just because you sort out five-yearolds’ problems, don’t think you can analyse me. I’m the one with the psychology degree, remember?’
‘Doesn’t mean I don’t know a thing or two about it. Or, for that matter, Ambs, that I don’t know you.’
Jen and I met in the first year of college. I was in Room 29, she was in Room 30 in our halls of residence.
I remember the exact moment I saw her walking from her room to the kitchen on our floor: she was tall, wearing a stone-washed denim skirt and sensible black polo neck. Her hair, pinned back with an Alice band, cascaded down her back, stopping at her waist. She had a perfectly oval face with cheekbones that threatened to make an appearance the older she got. She walked with the kind of straight-backed poise they taught in finishing school. Everything about her screamed sophistication, which immediately intimidated me. I’d been wearing baggy jeans with a long-sleeved T-shirt and had a nineteen-year-old’s slouch, my plaits were pulled back into a ponytail with a towelling scrunchy. I was everything that Jen wasn’t.
I’d watched her return to her room from the kitchen and decided she wasn’t like any chocolate or sweet I’d ever encountered. She was one of those new chocolate bars that you spotted as you walked into a shop. Its wrapping was so effortlessly classy it made everything around it seem gaudy and cheap. This chocolate was unique. It was a real white chocolate. Not the creamy colour most white chocolate is, but snow white. It had lots of cream and milk and white sugar, but minimal cocoa. It was soft around the edges, very quick and easy to melt so you had to be careful how you handled it. And because of that, because of the element of risk involved, most people would ignore it, going instead for what they knew. Grabbing their Mars, Twix or Dairy Milk because, when it came down to it, most people tended to stick to what was familiar.
I couldn’t, though. I couldn’t ignore this unusual, sophisticated chocolate – find myself a Mars to befriend – because she was my neighbour. I had to get to know her. I bit the bullet and knocked on her door when her parents left.
‘Hi, I’m Amber, your next-door neighbour,’ I’d said to her.
‘I’m Jen,’ she said, and grinned. That grin dissolved my worries about her. You could fake a lot of things but not the warmth that came from that smile.
Once you bit into Jen by talking to her, by going beyond her looks, you found out how lovely she was. How her nose wrinkled up when she laughed. How her eyes sparkled when she was about to ask you something deeply personal. How silly she could be. Under that white chocolate bubbled real champagne. Fun, refreshing champagne, an experience you wanted to last and last.
We spent most of our time together after that. She was training to be a primary-school teacher with English as her main degree and I was studying Psychology with Press and Publicity as my professional training subject. It was Christmas, though, that cemented our friendship.
At Christmas, when everyone was getting excited about going home, seeing friends, spending time with their families, I started to get mini panic attacks. I sat staring into space, gnawing on my thumbnails, my heart almost visible, it was beating that hard in my chest. My parents had separated when I was ten and I was trying to work out which parent would get the 27 to 30 December visit. Which one would be giving me a long, frosty silence down the phone as I explained I wasn’t going to be spending the big day with them. Christmas was so fraught I often tried to ignore it. Then I discovered Jen was going through Christmas Anxiety too.
Jen’s mum was an ex-model, but her mother, with her fading beauty, was a bitter woman. And her bitterness fermented into a vindictiveness aimed primarily at her daughter.
When Jen was eight, her mother told her the man she thought of as her father wasn’t her father. When Jen was ten, her mother decided he was her biological father. As it turned out it didn’t matter because he left when Jen was eleven, never to be heard from again. Her mother then had a succession of boyfriends, none of whom liked Jen. Not Jen the person, Jen the reminder that her mother wasn’t footloose and fancy-free. The only one of her mum’s lovers she did get on with was the man her mother met six months before Jen left for uni. Her mother was still with him and Jen liked him a lot, possibly because he showed her and her mother a lot of respect.
The point is, Jen and I bonded because we knew we were different from our peers. Everyone around us didn’t seem to tread on eggshells around their families; we didn’t run home at every opportunity. So, Jenna Leigh Hartman from Reading and Amber Salpone from London clung to each other, two d
ysfunctional lifebuoys in a sea of normality.
‘You do like Matt, don’t you?’ Jen asked.
She was now lying on the patch of thick red carpet where, hours earlier, Greg’s body had been stretched out while he read the papers. Jen rested the wine glass on her flat stomach, her eyes closed, her knees pulled up so the flats of her feet rested on the ground. Her hair was like a golden glow that fanned out around her head. Jen could make a casual pose seem so effortless. Yes, a casual pose was always meant to be effortless, but I had trouble with it. Say I was doing the same thing: I’d invariably get an itch in my lower back but wouldn’t want to sit up to scratch it, so I’d jiggle and shift about on the floor, like a snake trying to move through shagpile. Then I’d spill some wine so I’d leap up and trip over takeaway cartons on my way to get a cloth. Or I’d be lying on the sofa under my duvet, watching telly, but couldn’t relax because I was fidgeting about searching for the remote. Jen, on the other hand, could be yoga-still in anything she did.
‘Mmm-hmm,’ I replied, concurring that I did like Matt without actually saying yes.’ (I loved the mmm-hmm, it was so generic that you could lie without technically lying.)
I was reclining on the sofa, resting my wine glass on my stomach but holding onto it while desperately seeking the TV remote.
Me and Matt. It wasn’t a simple case of us not liking each other. Matt had problems smiling at me or, sometimes, even speaking to me because he thought Jen and I were too close. I knew her before him. I was a part of Jen’s life that he could never be a part of and that bugged him; stopped him sleeping sometimes. If we started to laugh about stuff we did in the past, a cloud would pass across his face and he’d slide into a sulk. He gave her a hard time if she told me something before him. And heaven forbid she be on the phone to me for more than ten minutes while he was there. Matt and I loved the same person and he wanted to guarantee she loved him more than she did me.
‘I do worry that you and he don’t get on as well as you and Greg,’ Jen continued.
You really don’t want me to get on with him as well as I do with Greg, I thought. ‘We’re different people,’ I explained.
‘You and Greg are different people!’ she screeched. ‘He’s a complete whore and you’re practically a nun, but you and him get on. He’s always round here or meeting you for lunch. Greg sees you more than I do sometimes.’
The mention of his name, talking about him, made stardust dance around my stomach like moonlight danced on water. ‘I’ll see more of Matt now that you’re going to live together. Jeez, you’re going to live with Matt. You’re going to become a cohabitee. Again.’
‘Funny, isn’t it? You’ve never lived with a bloke, whereas Matt will be my third one.’
‘I have lived with a bloke,’ I protested.
‘Who?’
‘Eric. And you don’t get more blokey than him.’
‘Brothers do not count. You could have lived wi—’
‘Book your cab home before you finish that sentence, OK, Jenna,’ I cut in.
She scrunched up her lips and pulled a face at the ceiling. ‘Do you think it’ll last with me and Matt?’ she asked. ‘I lived with Karl and Tommy and I thought it’d last. I really did, but it didn’t.’ She swivelled her head to survey me. ‘Do you think I’m doing the right thing?’
Why did everyone think I had the answers to everything today? First Greg was asking what was going on between us, then Jen was asking if she was doing the right thing. I wouldn’t be surprised if Indiana Jones showed up any moment asking if I knew where he’d left the Holy Grail.
‘You moved in too soon with Karl and Tommy. They were nice blokes,’ I added quickly, ‘but everything was rushed. Maybe it’s good that Matt’s been so reticent about settling down, because now you both know you’re ready. He does love you.’ It aggrieved me to admit this sometimes, but whenever Matt wasn’t off in Paris being International Marketing Director for his company, Jen was the centre of his world. I’d have loved it if he was a neglectful bastard and then I could have licence to dislike him as much as he hated me. ‘I could never say that so certainly about Tommy or Karl.’
‘But you’re still number one, you know,’ Jen said. ‘You’re still the one I tell everything to.’
‘Mmm-hmm,’ I replied. I told Jen everything too. Except this one thing. It was only a small thing. Anyway, it probably wouldn’t last with me and Greg. In fact, I give it two months. Three at the most.
‘hmmm, a man or chocolate – put it this way, you’ll never be sat around waiting for a bar of chocolate to ring you’
chapter eight
her!
‘Who are you?’ Renée’s voice said sharply across the office.
Martha didn’t flinch, didn’t even seem to notice. I did. I glanced away from my computer screen at my boss.
Renée’s professionally shaped eyebrows were hunched together; her red mouth was taut with indignation. ‘What?’ she barked into the phone.
Long pause as the other person spoke.
‘Why should I remember you? Did you save my life or something?’
Martha smirked, but she would. It was always me who panicked when Renée got like that on the phone because she was invariably talking to someone we should be aiming to be nice to.
‘You write for who?’
See? I shoved my chair back, almost dislocating a couple of vertebrae in the process, and ran the distance to Renée’s desk. Three-quarters of the way there, I flung myself across the desk, narrowly missing the pencil holder and her precious stapler, and jabbed my finger on the ‘secrecy’ button on her phone.
‘Give me the phone,’ I said, with my hand outstretched. Time was when I could fling myself onto the desk and get the phone out of Renée’s grip before she could react, but over the last year she’d got very adept at snatching it out of reach while I was mid-air.
Renée clutched the receiver to her chest like it was her firstborn. ‘No.’
‘Renée,’ I cooed, ‘give Amber the phone.’
She shook her head. She hadn’t shouted since she went overboard on Monday. As I predicted, my day off gave her something to think about. So this journalist who had innocently picked up the phone to find out about our Festival was, in fact, dealing with a woman who had four days of anger simmering away, ready to boil over.
‘Give me the phone and I’ll let you slag off the new London Film Festival brochure all afternoon.’
Renée’s eyes flickered as she saw what was on offer: an afternoon of nit-picking, sneering and downright bitchiness that I wouldn’t temper. There’d be no ‘Come on, Renée, be fair,’ while she went on and on. It was tempting . . .
‘I’ll buy you chocolate and then make you coffee,’ I added.
Tempting, but not tempting enough, she still clung to the phone.
‘And,’ I said, playing my trump card, ‘you can critique their website.’
Words Renée longed to hear. I’d always stopped her having a go at their website because ours wasn’t much better. In fact, ours was in desperate need of resuscitation and I’d decreed we could only slag off the things that we did better than LFF. Renée’s hand shot out as she handed over the phone.
I hit the ‘secrecy’ button. ‘Hi, sorry about that, the Festival Director had to take another call, how can I help? I’m Amber, the Deputy Festival Director.’
‘Hi, Amber.’
Oh. Good. Grief. Her. HER!
I’d know that affected, nasal voice anywhere. I should’ve let Renée abuse her. I gave up my trump card for her. HER! Her, the journalist from hell. The nutter journalist from hell who’d tried to get me sacked.
Last year, in an almost identical incident, Renée’s phone had rung and Renée under sufferance had answered it. She’d been speechless when some woman had started prattling on about Renée’s past.
Renée had been the Bridget Bardot of her day, thankfully without the fascistic leanings, and had become famous when she was thirteen by playing Lolita in a French
arthouse film. She’d been an international overnight sensation, nominated for awards, starred in a number of films, blah, blah, blah, beautiful career ahead of her . . . But, Renée being Renée (and intrinsically contrary), had gotten bored of the limelight and gave it all up at twenty-one to learn about movie production. She moved from Paris to London and worked for a few film companies. She met her husband, a screenwriter, and they moved to Leeds, where he was from. She’d then got a job as Contributing Festival Assistant at WYIFF and within two years was running the whole shebang. This woman on the other end of the phone had, it seemed, called only to remind her of that.
I’d heard the silence after Renée’s ‘Allo, WYIFF?’, glanced up in time to see Renée’s face tighten, the sign she was about to start screaming. I’d thrown myself across her desk – unfortunately not missing the stapler that time – and wrestled the phone out of her hand before she invoked her tongue.
‘We’d like to interview,’ the woman on the end of the phone continued, and named a fairly well-known star who we’d got to attend the UK premiere of her new film in Leeds, ‘which I’m sure she’d love to do because we’re a glossy and the Yorkshire market is so limited. And we’d like to do a piece on how you went from being such a well-known teen star to running a festival in Leeds of all places.’
‘Probably not a good idea to upset the Festival Director by saying such things,’ I calmly told the caller. ‘This is Amber Salpone, the Deputy Festival Director. Let’s be honest, we don’t have to give you access to her and because you’re calling us, I’m sure you’ve discovered her agent is a nightmare. But if we can get it in writing that you’ll give the Festival and The Mates Of The Festival a plug with contact details and you’ll mention that,’ I reeled off a list of stars, ‘have previously attended the Festival, then I’ll put you on the interview list.’
‘Have they all really been to the Festival?’ she replied, rather insultingly impressed.