So I couldn’t check her bill. I paced, both of us silent on the phone.
‘Can’t you trace iPhones?’ she said, a beat later.
‘Tried it,’ I said. ‘She’s turned that off. But I know where she is. She sent me a postcard.’
‘Oh, that’s … thoughtful?’
‘She’s in Paris.’
A pause.
‘Paris,’ said Pippy. ‘Someone mentioned Paris the other day. Who was it?’
‘What?’
‘Someone mentioned Paris just the other day. I’m certain of it. Because I remember thinking, “Oh, Paris”.’
‘Lots of people mention Paris. It’s pretty famous.’
‘Yes, but this was some kind of special mention,’ she said.
‘Who mentioned Paris?’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘Think. Who mentioned Paris?’
Another pause.
‘I think it was you.’
Why would I mention Paris? I would remember mentioning Paris. Perhaps she’d confused me with someone else. Maybe I was going mad. I still wasn’t sleeping properly. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d slept well.
I’d phoned Calum. I needed his take. He didn’t answer. I guess it was maybe bath time for the kids, or story time, or bedtime. But he’d texted back.
jesus, man. did i not tell you she was an oddball? did i not call it? are you still up?
I didn’t want to talk, now, two hours later. Calum hadn’t been a huge fan of Hayley. I reasoned some people just don’t gel. But now came the self-pity. I felt ashamed. I felt embarrassed.
I leaned against the wall of the living room, slid down, sat in silence.
I should probably tidy up the magazines. That’s what Calum would have done. Calum with his sorted life and his flexible mortgage and his Waitrose home delivery. I flicked a page or two, pages Hayley had highlighted. Outfits she liked, I guess. Retailer numbers. Website addresses. Shoes. A few things I recognised, too – a navy blue top, some bright yellow heels. Stuff she’d bought for her trip, maybe. I flicked to the next marked page.
Another list of numbers. Phone numbers.
Retailers?
But no, hang on, because these were 07 numbers. Mobiles?
These belonged to people.
So why were they on a bright pink Post-it on page forty-seven of Harper’s Bazaar?
‘It’s 6.01 on June 19th, I’m Tom Adoyo with the stories you’re waking up to …’
Autopilot.
Phone numbers. Post-its. Postcards. Paris. Psychos.
Leslie was barely looking at me. He was fuming. There was an email open on his computer.
* * *
From: MAUREEN THOMAS
To: ALL
ONCE AGAIN: CUPBOARD’S MUST BE KEPT EMPTY AT ALL TIMES. These are not YOU’RE cupboards, they are the COMPANY’S CUPBOARD’S and must be treated AS SUCH.
* * *
He was shaking his head, his fingers hovering over a keyboard, priming themselves, warming up, ready to respond with a sharp shot of sarcasm and bile.
‘Sir Alex Ferguson wades in to Manchester United referee storm …’
I was pleased he wasn’t looking at me. Imagine how he’ll look at me when he finds out about the postcard. Oh, God, he’ll love it.
‘Child protection system “creaking” say MPs …’
My phone was off, as is studio etiquette. You just do it automatically, you don’t need to be asked; the way a man clambering up a cherry picker doesn’t need that sign to tell him to pop his hard hat on.
‘… and police chiefs call for “drunk tanks” in the capital …’
Was she depressed? People hide depression from their partners. They can find sneaky ways of distracting from it. They can mask it. They can act in hugely unusual ways. Maybe she was depressed and this was her solution. She’d had a breakdown. That had to be it.
‘… highs of nineteen in the city this morning …’
No one had replied last night, when I’d sent the texts out. Why not?
‘… and now you’re up to date.’
I stared at the screen. Blinked.
Was I done?
Sweeper. Ads. Yes, done. All done.
‘These fucking cupboard NAZIS,’ said Leslie, eyes on his laptop, barely moving his head to the left to indicate he was addressing me. ‘I’d happily see every one of those cunts up against a wall and shot if it meant I could keep my fucking jam in my fucking cupboard.’
I was just pleased he hadn’t noticed I’d ended with ‘now you’re up to date’, and as I spilled back in my chair and looked round to murmur some vague notion of support I caught Janice’s eye behind the glass.
She looked terrified.
Properly terrified.
She’d just walked back in, coffee in hand. She’d been away from her side of the desk.
I guess that was quite a word for Leslie to use – the worst – but acting offended? This was something else. She was on another level. Eyes wide, her hands clutching papers, now raised to her head, barking something to someone. Urgent.
I frowned.
How had she heard us from behind the glass?
‘Absolute fucking Nazis,’ said Leslie again, oblivious, and as my eyes searched the room, searched for the source of the fear, I saw, just above his head, on the wall, by the clock … the bright red light.
Lit.
eight
Leslie and I were suspended on full pay before the papers could make the decision themselves. Janice received a formal warning and now couldn’t look anyone in the eye or herself in the mirror.
‘You cretin,’ Leslie had spat, inches from my face, so close I could inhale the Weetabix from his teeth. ‘You absolute bloody cretin!’
I wanted to defend myself. The light was on! The fader was up! You could’ve seen it! But it was my mic. My fader. My responsibility. If Janice had had a chance to slap the Dump button she’d missed it when she hot-tapped a coffee. I could sympathise. The news was on. None of them listened to the news. It was just a break for them. What could happen when the news was on? They’d caught the end of it, of course, but the main meat – the word – that had slipped out of the studio and into half a million little radios, in homes, in cafés, on school runs …
And out of the studio Leslie had stormed, his agent already dialled, and I watched him as he paced back and forth, one arm on his forehead, the veins in his neck strained and blue, angry fingers pointing every now and again at me through the port-hole window, not quite sound-proofed enough to mute his rage.
He apologised straight away on air – profusely, professionally – but Twitter wasn’t on his side. Radio Today tweeted a link minutes later. The Media Guardian jumped on it with glee. Radiofail preserved it for all eternity and the Standard managed to get it on the streets, in black-and-white, irreversible, unchangeable, by the end of the day.
TALK LONDON LESLIE’S MAD NAZI JAM RANT
Leslie was mainly concerned they kept referring to him as a ‘local DJ’.
‘London’s as good as national,’ he kept saying, over and over. ‘We’re on DAB! We’re online! It’s pretty much international.’
That didn’t really help his cause. All it meant was, he’d sworn all over the world.
He’d been summoned to the fifth floor in minutes, and it wasn’t to look at the roof garden. Mike Brundell was told to start his show two hours early, and I could hear him now, sitting outside Jenny Gardener’s office, talking about immigration through a sleek walnut Revo, just opposite a poster of a grinning Leslie wearing acid-washed jeans and a waistcoat and giving two thumbs-up.
I knew I’d be back on in a week. It was my mistake. I’d do a studio etiquette refreshers course and sign some forms to say I had, but I wasn’t the one who’d said the ‘C’ word on air, and it turned out that was the element a lot of people had chosen to focus on.
I could hear nothing from the office in which Leslie now sat, where no doubt he’d be explaining himsel
f to Jenny Gardener. Janice should’ve been on hand to stop the offending moment go out, he’d be saying, so why was she making a coffee when the news was on?
But it was still him that had said it.
By the end of the first day, fourteen complaints had been filed with OFCOM.
Two hundred and sixty-six by the time the Mail had made its outrage known the next morning.
Leslie’s suspension was over.
Leslie had done his last show.
It had distracted me from the wait for replies from people, I’ll give it that.
Problem was, waiting for replies had distracted me from my job.
I’d remembered Pippy’s text, the night before.
Number Unknown.
Here’s my new number.
And it struck me how people trust that kind of text. You accept it. You just do. No one bats an eyelid. This must be my friend. How could it not? It’s come to me!
So I’d tapped it out, to see how it looked.
Guys. Lost my phone! This is my new number. Hayley. Xxx
Anyone who got that would just think, ‘oh, Hayley’s lost her phone’. Not ‘oh, I appear to be about to engage with the disgruntled partner of a friend or acquaintance of mine adopting the guise of their loved one’. They’d just assume. I mean, I’d believe it, and I’m the one that typed it.
Then they’d reply, and if I played them right, by a process of elimination, I could work out which, if any of them, was Andy-from-the-place. Because one of them was bound to be Andy-from-the-place, right?
But nothing. Nothing at all. From any of them.
Sent home, staring at my phone, I wondered whether to text Leslie to apologise again. He’d left the building that afternoon and headed straight for the Nellie Dean with Janice. Apparently she’d sat wordlessly nursing a flat Pepsi while he hit the Macallan and railed against the industry, saying, ‘They’d been looking for a fucking excuse. Well, the listeners won’t stand for it. They want to see the revolution that’ll hit, come Monday morning. They won’t know what to make of it.’
Even before he’d stormed out of SoundHaus, I could sense his anger turning to glee. For Leslie, his sacking was just proof of the conspiracy against him. He was too old, he was too white, he was too experienced, he was too powerful, he was too expensive. They feared him. How do you contain fear? You crush it. Well, you don’t crush Leslie James. He’d be back. Maybe he’d start his own station. You only needed a microphone and some sort of equipment. He could do podcasts, set his own hours, do it from home. This could be the best thing that ever happened to him. And who would replace him? Mike Brundell? Good luck. No, they’d have to bring in a Titchmarsh or an Edmonds. Maybe poach Nick Ferrari, if he’d come back to local. But were any of those going to quell the uprising? Not on your Nellie Dean. Leslie was on fire. Leslie was fury.
So no, I didn’t text him in the end.
Instead, I picked up the home phone, and I dialled a number.
‘Hello?’
‘Don’t hang up.’
‘Who is this?’
‘It’s Tom, I’m ringing from home …’
‘I already—’
‘I cannot stress how much I need to meet with you right now.’
A pause. Uncertainty.
‘Please.’
nine
I checked my emails as the sun stretched across the table. Flies skimmed the water, lit as they chased through a calming amber.
The canal looked pretty tonight; ducks quietly bothering each other by the houseboats, the dull thunder of another train leaving King’s Cross a half-mile or so away. The tall, arched windows of the red-brick factories in the distance lined up, ordered, uniform.
* * *
FROM: MAUREEN THOMAS
TO: ALL STAFF
ALL STAFF PLEASE NOTE from 2pm tomorrow that ALL STAFF ARE EXPECTED TO ATTEND a STUDIO ETIQUETTE and BASIC DESKWORK WORKSHOP which ALL STAFF MUST ATTEND due to several indescretion’s of late which CANNOT be aloud thank you.
* * *
Did that mean me? I was suspended. Which rule should I respect? I’ll respect the suspended rule.
Laura had agreed to meet here after several assurances that we were on the same side. I suggested her place or mine: she chose this pub. It was unsaid, but clear she wanted to meet in public.
I hoped she had the sense that I now had a greater feeling for what she’d been talking about. And I wasn’t a wounded boyfriend any more. I wasn’t the victim I’d felt previously. It was odd, but I was almost a bystander now. A witness to a crime. And when she finally got there, forty minutes late, already I would guess a glass or two of wine in, I was quick to back that up.
‘I know what you mean by bloody psycho now,’ I said, swirling the last of the Coke in my glass.
She furrowed her brow. She hadn’t changed a bit. How reassuring that is, when someone doesn’t change a bit.
‘I think she’s had some kind of breakdown or something. But I know she’s in France now.’
‘She’s in France?’
‘Paris. She sent me a postcard. But I don’t know where and I don’t have a number for her apart from her mobile and she doesn’t reply to emails. And I think I sort of know why she went even though I don’t at all understand it, and—’
‘The problem is she hasn’t changed at all.’
I smiled a false smile, pretended to be distracted as a man threw some bread at the ducks.
‘I’d take issue with that statement, I think,’ I said, as lightly as I could.
‘You serious?’ she said. ‘You didn’t notice? You never spoke about it?’
‘Please just say whatever you want to say.’
Laura leaned in, dropped her voice.
‘When Hayley met me she fell in love with me. That was how she put it. How long had we known each other by the time we met you in Bristol?’
I shrugged.
‘I don’t know. Ages.’
‘Two months. We’d known each other two months.’
That didn’t seem right.
‘I thought you’d, like, grown up together, or …’
‘Listen, I thought she was fantastic. We had exactly the same tastes. Hit it off brilliantly. It was like, I could say whatever, and we’d find a connection. Any old thing. Favourite film? You’ve Got Mail. Both of us.’
‘She hated You’ve Got Mail. She said she hated that film. I remember, it was on last Christmas, she said she hated it.’
Laura laughed, smacked the table, spilled her wine.
‘No – you hated You’ve Got Mail. You hated it.’
She rocked back in her chair, stared at me, waited for it to sink in.
‘What else did she hate?’ she said, as I sat there, stumped.
‘Tacos? Talent shows? Oh – rosé.’
‘And which of those do you hate?’
‘So you’re saying …’
‘She’s a pleaser. That’s what I think. She tries to please, she tries to fit in, she moulds her tastes around stronger personalities. And then she stays like that, for whatever reasons she has, until something else comes along. Something bigger. With me, it was you. Do you have any idea how much rosé we used to drink? Do you remember what you said when you saw us together in Bristol? You thought we were sisters.’
‘Or … or cousins, it’s—’
‘The hair, yeah? The clothes. The bloody sunglasses. Everyone thought it. Do. You. See. What. I. Am. Saying?’
But I was ignoring her now, because I was thinking of the walk we’d taken, the walk to the George in Bathampton, and the chats we’d had … deep and meaningful and staring straight into each other’s eyes and laughing at all the stuff we had in common, all the things we’d liked, all the plans we coyly shared in the hope the other might have the same …
‘I hated it when I realised. Because that’s not friendship, is it? That’s creepy and sociopathic. I told her where to go, and she just kept turning up everywhere she knew I was going to be. You two were going out at th
at time, thank God, and you have no idea how pleased I was when she found you, so that I could … well …’
‘Get rid of her.’
‘Yeah.’
‘She’s always been someone else,’ I said, and it hit me hard, and suddenly I wasn’t just a bystander any more, I was very directly affected by it. I felt … robbed of something.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ I said.
‘Move on,’ she said.
‘But how do I—’
‘Just move on. Don’t look back. Told you last time, I’ll tell you again. People like that aren’t good for you. You’re better off out. Especially after … well, the way you were.’
I waved that away, made it seem like nothing.
‘A girl who could do this to you after all that,’ she said. ‘After you credited her with getting you out of it. After you said she helped you.’
‘Okay.’
‘Well, I mean it. You used to say she saved you. And now look at her.’
A thought struck me.
‘I’ve forgotten how you two met?’
‘I was in Topshop. She was just suddenly there. She tapped me on the shoulder. Told me she loved my necklace.’
I felt sick. Was that her thing?
‘There’s something else to all this,’ I said. ‘I think there’s a guy involved.’
‘Oh, Tom,’ she said, sadly. ‘She’s capable of anything.’
Somewhere close by, a dog barked. Ducks took flight.
I walked up Caledonian Road and crossed over, towards Barnsbury, past the tall Victorian houses, now updated with slats and fake plants, too green to be convincingly British. Richmond Avenue, with the strange pyramids and coal-black sphinxes standing guard out front, though no one ever seemed to know why, or be curious enough to ask.
I’d left Laura upset. Part of her missed Hayley too. Or, at least, her version of Hayley. She’d texted me straight after, saying it was good to see me, and that we should meet up again sometime, but we both knew that we wouldn’t. Our link had been Hayley – at least I’d thought it had been. Now we didn’t even have that. We were just two people who’d met, once.