Max stopped lolling in his seat and sat up straight. ‘Mandy,’ he repeated impatiently.
‘I can’t quite place the name,’ Neve said. ‘Is she one of those very famous people who don’t need to have a surname?’
He made a tiny scoffing noise. ‘Yeah, right. Mandy McIntyre. She’s only the most famous WAG in Britain.’
‘Hmmm – what does WAG stand for again?’ Neve asked. ‘I always forget but I know it’s something that doesn’t make sense.’
‘You don’t know what a WAG is? For real?’ Max asked incredulously. ‘Wives and girlfriends. Footballers’ wives and girlfriends.’
‘Oh! See, that’s the bit that I don’t understand. If they’re footballers’ wives and girlfriends, then really they should be called FWAGs. Though it doesn’t really roll off the tongue that easily.’ Neve mouthed the unwieldy acronym to herself a couple more times as Max stared at her. ‘No, it really doesn’t work. Anyway, I’ve never heard of her but I don’t watch much TV. So she writes novels, does she? Or you write them for her?’
Neve was trying not to sound too disapproving that some girlfriend of a footballer could get a book deal, when she knew of at least three would-be novelists with good degrees from good universities who were working for minimum wage and couldn’t even get a short story published. She guessed that she’d managed to keep her outrage to herself because a faint smile was tugging at the corners of Max’s mouth.
‘Well, Mandy and I go way back,’ he said. ‘I interviewed her for Skirt and we really hit it off so she asked me to ghost her memoirs.’
‘Oh, she must be quite old if she’s already had a memoir published.’
‘She’s twenty-two,’ Max said. ‘Then, after Mand’s autobiography, we wrote a Style Guide and now I’m working on her fourth novel.’
‘But I thought you said that you wrote them together?’ It was all very confusing, especially when you’d had too many white-wine spritzers.
‘The publisher came up with an idea about a young girl who’s working in a supermarket when she starts dating a footballer, then Mandy and I brainstormed some scenarios, I fleshed it out and three novels later, we’ve sold over a million books. The series has been translated into twenty-three different languages and it’s in development with a film production company,’ Max said proudly. ‘You must have read one of them. Every woman I know has secretly read at least one of them.’
‘Look, I don’t read that kind of novel,’ Neve said – and immediately realised how snotty she sounded, if the curl of Max’s top lip was a good indicator. She frantically tried to backtrack. ‘Well, that doesn’t sound very fair; I mean, you do all the work and she gets all the credit and the royalties.’
‘Not all the royalties,’ Max demurred. He shook his head. ‘Why don’t you know who she is? Have you just come out from under a large rock?’
‘The truth is, I’m not really that interested in celebrities,’ Neve explained carefully. ‘It just all seems rather superficial, and anyway, I have to do a lot of serious reading for my job, so—’
‘What is your job?’ Max demanded rather belligerently. ‘I suppose it’s something completely worthy and unsuperficial, like finding a cure for cancer or solving world hunger.’
She hadn’t said that he was superficial so there was no need for Max to be quite so snippy. ‘I work at a literary archive,’ Neve informed him coldly. ‘I’m the senior archivist.’
‘What? Like a library or something?’
‘It’s not the least bit like a library,’ Neve snapped. ‘And safeguarding literary papers for future generations is actually a very worthwhile and rewarding job.’
‘If you say so,’ Max said dismissively. ‘Sounds kinda boring to me.’
Neve was saved from having to tell Max she didn’t appreciate his philistine views on her choice of career by the train pulling into Finsbury Park station.
As soon as the train came to a halt she was out of her seat and through the doors before they’d even finished opening. She then lurched up the stairs in shoes which had now officially become Instruments of Torture, and would have tried to run down the long tunnel that led to the street if she wasn’t stuck behind a man wheeling a large suitcase behind him.
It wasn’t long before Max caught up with her, though Neve couldn’t imagine why. If their positions were reversed, she’d have skulked on the platform for several minutes until she was sure he’d gone.
‘Is this going to be the pattern for our relationship?’ he asked, body-blocking the Oyster card reader so Neve had to yank him away before somebody intent on swiping their ticket hit him. ‘I say something mildly controversial, you storm off in a huff and then I’m forced to chase after you so I can say I’m sorry?’
‘We’re not in a relationship,’ Neve reminded him. She was resolved that this time, she wouldn’t smile or let herself by swayed by Max’s effortless but considerable charm, but God help her, she found herself smiling.
‘Fine. You’ve apologised. Again. Isn’t that your bus?’
They both watched the W7 sail around the corner. ‘Of course, instead of apologising, we could kiss and make up instead?’ Max suggested lightly.
They were standing in front of the London Underground map, hands shoved into respective pockets. Neve looked up at Max to see if he was joking, because, quite frankly, he had to be joking. Men who looked like Max and had glamorous jobs and were on first-name terms with WAGs didn’t kiss girls like her. ‘You want to kiss me?’ she asked tremulously.
‘Well, it will be a nice ending when I tell little Tommy the story of how we first met,’ Max said, and Neve wasn’t just smiling, she was giggling, even though, as a rule, she didn’t giggle. ‘The question is, do I kiss you here or at your front door after I’ve walked you home and just before you invite me in for a coffee?’
Neve frowned. This whole situation was running away from her. She was just starting to get the hang of light flirtation and now Max had raced ahead to kissing and … ‘For a coffee?’
‘Are we really doing this?’ Max sounded exasperated. ‘Not for a coffee. For this.’
His hands were out of his pockets and around her waist before Neve had time to blink or pull in her tummy. All she could do was watch Max’s face get nearer and nearer. The kiss was inevitable but she still thought she was imagining it when Max’s lips brushed against hers.
Neve didn’t pull away, but she didn’t move closer; she just stayed absolutely statue-still to see where this was going to lead.
‘I love your red lipstick,’ Max murmured, as if they were already alone in her flat and not standing outside a tube station with the wind whistling around them and discarded take-away containers and fag ends at their feet. ‘It’s so sexy.’
Neve knew it was just a line to get into her knickers, though if Max could see the firm-control reality of them, then he’d have wished he hadn’t bothered, she thought sadly. She opened her mouth to say something, to tell Max the red lipstick was just false advertising, supplied by Celia, but her words got lost when Max lifted his thumb to her mouth and slowly and deliberately wiped it away.
‘What did you do that for?’ Neve touched her fingers to her lips, which were tingling as if he’d been kissing her for hours.
‘Because I want to kiss you again and I don’t think red’s my colour. I usually go for the pinker shades,’ Max said, and Neve wondered how many girls he’d practised on before the right words came tumbling out of his mouth without him even having to think about it. He’d undoubtedly kissed a lot of women, really knew what he was doing, so why not treat this whole confusing encounter as an educational experience?
‘Well, go on then,’ she said in what she hoped was a challenging tone. ‘Kiss me if you want to.’
This time Neve was ready, tilting her head back as Max cupped her cheek and slowly kissed her. Just his lips on her lips, nothing more than friction, but it sent a thousand sparks shooting down her arms and legs so Neve was flexing her fingers and trying to curl he
r toes in her too-tight shoes. It was only her third ever kiss. There’d been an horrific collision with her second cousin’s tongue at a wedding where she’d also got drunk for the first time, and there’d been the dreadlocked Philosophy student who may or may not have taken her virginity, and that was after she’d consumed a huge number of fudge brownies, which she’d later discovered had been heavily laced with marijuana. They barely counted. Whereas this was stellar kissing, the kind of kissing that she’d only read about in the lurid bodice-rippers she’d sneaked from her grandmother’s bookshelves.
Neve did what any self-respecting Regency heroine would do and wound her arms around Max’s neck with a rapturous little sigh so the kisses could get deeper, more heated, and they only stopped when someone across the street bellowed, ‘Get a fucking room!’
Her hat had fallen off in all the excitement. Max crouched down to pick it up, as Neve tried to get her breathing under control. She really had to try to be more blasé about this.
‘So, what do you think?’ Max asked as he placed the hat back on Neve’s head, pulling it over her eyes and grinning when she scowled and adjusted it. ‘Back to yours or am I catching the last bus home?’
Neve was never very good at making split-second decisions. Even choosing a DVD from Blockbuster could be a fraught experience and she needed at least a week to debate this question, but Max was tapping his foot impatiently.
‘Well, I … I don’t … I think you’ve already missed the last bus,’ she choked out, staring at the top button on Max’s black wool coat because she’d lose her nerve if she had to look at his face. She’d give him coffee and have another half-hour of those dark velvet kisses, then she’d kick him out. ‘I suppose that would be all right.’
Max nodded. ‘Cool.’ He paused. ‘By the way, I don’t think I ever caught your name.’
Chapter Three
Finsbury Park was an area of London that was meant to be up-and-coming but still hadn’t quite up and come. If you turned right when you came out of the tube station and walked under the bridge, it was a soulless morass of minicab offices, fast-food joints and gangs of hoodies.
But Neve always turned left and walked past the little supermarkets, their stalls displaying exotic fruit and vegetables, the Afro-Caribbean beauty store that had row after row of be-wigged mannequin heads in the window, the fishmonger’s and up to the Old Dairy, which was now a gastro pub. When Neve’s parents had first got married and moved into a maisonette a couple of streets away from her grandmother’s pub on the Stroud Green Road, the area was a grimy collection of betting shops, off-licences and crumbling terraces converted into poky flats; the sort of place where one didn’t linger too late after dark. In the last ten years though, the streets of solidly built Victorian terraced houses, the huge park and the ten-minute trip on the Victoria line to Oxford Circus had reeled in the middle classes.
Neve could never imagine living anywhere else. She’d spent three years at Oxford, but the dreaming spires, medieval churches and punts bobbing on the river had completely lacked the poetry of the roar of the crowds spilling out of the station when Arsenal played a home game or the sun falling in dappled shadows on the Parkland Walk. Besides, who’d want to live anywhere where you couldn’t get a can of Coke and a bag of chips after midnight within two minutes of opening your front door?
It was, however, the first time Neve had walked these familiar streets with a man who wasn’t a member of her immediate family or gay. Neve wasn’t sure what a suitable topic of conversation would be for an almost stranger that you were taking back to your house solely for kissing and possibly some of the other things that went hand-in-hand with the kissing. But then Max started talking about the tramp who could usually be seen under the railway bridge swigging from a bottle of cider and, ‘Have you ever been in that charity shop? It smells like the bowels of hell.’
All too soon they came to her gate. Max paused for a moment as if he was giving her time to back out, but Neve simply unlatched the gate and hurried up the path to the house that had once been her grandmother’s. When she’d died, her son, Neve’s father, had converted the property into three flats and divvied them up between his three children. Celia was still seething that she’d been in New York when the conversion was completed and so she’d got stuck with the ground-floor flat.
Celia was currently pickling her liver somewhere in Soho and the house was dark and silent, but Neve didn’t turn on the hall light, and as soon as Max stepped through the door he crashed into her bike, which was propped against the wall.
Neve’s heart shuddered. She looked fearfully upwards, expecting the landing light to snap on and a shrill voice to start screaming. When nothing happened, except Max swearing under his breath, she sagged in relief.
‘Um, can you take your shoes off?’ she whispered.
‘Why?’ Max asked in his normal voice, which sounded loud enough to wake the dead.
‘You have to keep your voice down,’ Neve hissed. ‘My brother and my sister-in-law own the first-floor flat and she’s … an evil psycho bitch … very noise sensitive. Please, Max.’
It was too dark to see anything, but Neve was sure she could hear Max rolling his eyes with great force. ‘OK,’ he said in a stage whisper, toeing off his Converses.
They crept up the stairs, Neve holding her breath until they’d cleared the first-floor landing and she could exhale very quietly. When they reached her door, she carefully inched her key into the lock.
‘This reminds me of being sneaked into girls’ homes when I was a teenager and their parents were asleep upstairs,’ Max grumbled as Neve frantically shushed him and pushed him through her front door.
‘Sorry about that,’ she muttered, snapping on the hall light. She went to unbutton her coat and froze because now in her hall with Max looming over her, reality was beginning to sink in. She had a man in her flat who’d come home with her for the sole purpose of getting his hands on her body, and suddenly taking off her coat felt like getting naked. And though there was no way in hell she was having sex with Max, there’d still be touching, and the way she’d kissed him outside the station meant that Max would expect … God, she didn’t know what he’d expect, and in some ways that was the most frightening thing of all.
Neve didn’t even know what to do with her hands but just let them flutter helplessly as Max unwound his scarf and took off his coat. ‘Shall I hang them up here?’ he asked, gesturing at the wall hooks.
‘Yeah.’ Neve did a slow turn as if she’d never been inside her flat before and was trying to get her bearings. ‘The living room is through here.’
She imagined that she could feel Max’s breath on the back of her neck as she bustled into the lounge and turned on a couple of lamps; the only way she’d get through this with any measure of dignity still intact was with very subdued lighting.
Max sat on the sofa that Neve pointed at jerkily and looked around with interest. The lounge had originally been two bedrooms; now it was one huge room lined on two walls with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Neither Celia nor Douglas had wanted their grandmother’s old furniture so Neve had claimed the battered leather Chesterfield and the two threadbare red velvet armchairs. In the furthest corner of the room was her desk, pushed in front of the window so she could look out over the railway lines and the woods. And then there were the books, not just on the shelves but stacked on her desk and in piles on the scarred wooden floorboards, which her father had begged her to sand down and varnish, and even books fighting for space with the collection of Clarice Cliff pieces on the mantelpiece. The computer, television and iPod dock looked as if they’d been imported from another universe.
Max simply nodded and smiled. It was a secret sort of smile as if he wasn’t just pleased with the room but with something else that he didn’t feel like sharing. ‘I don’t know why your sister-in-law gets so bent out of shape by the completely reasonable noise levels of someone going up the stairs when you live right by a railway track,’ Max remarked. r />
Neve had often wondered the very same thing. ‘Apparently I’m very heavy-footed,’ she confessed, but Max snorted as if the notion that Neve could stomp up and down the stairs ‘like a herd of fucking elephants’ was ridiculous. Though at that moment, still wearing her coat and with her knickers and tights on the downward slide yet again, Neve felt more lumpen than she had done in months.
‘Have you got something to drink?’ Max asked, settling back on the couch. ‘And are you going to take your coat off?’
Neve was still standing in the middle of the room on her plush art deco replica rug from IKEA. ‘Yes, sorry, yes. Wine. I think I’ve only got white. Except there’s some red but it’s pretty nasty. It’s cooking wine …’
‘White will be great,’ Max assured her. ‘There’s no need to look so scared, by the way. I don’t bite.’
At least he hadn’t added unless you want me to, Neve thought as she took off her coat and stared at her reflection in the hall mirror. She had a severe case of hat-head, her hair a mass of static, and her flushed cheeks were a perfect match for her smeared lipstick, but her face would do; it was the rest of her that she was worried about.
Neve flipped up her skirt and hoisted her tights so high that they almost touched her bra band, then smoothed her dress back down and peered at herself critically. In profile her waist looked tiny, but that was only because of the wide flare of her hips, and even with the finest shapewear that Marks & Sparks had to offer, her belly still pooched out. The sweetheart neckline of her fitted, black vintage dress didn’t show much cleavage, which was just as well, and the tight sleeves were keeping her upper arms in check. Neve looked down at her stockinged feet; the hem of her dress swished pleasingly and covered her legs to mid-calf. Yes, fully clothed she passed muster so she’d just have to stay fully clothed but the tights would have to go, Neve decided, as they slowly began to unpeel for the gazillionth time that evening.
With the kitchen door shut firmly behind her, Neve pulled off her tights and stuffed them in the empty bread-bin to be dealt with at a later stage. There was an unopened bottle of Pinot Grigio in the fridge and Neve poured herself a glass, drained it, then, wedging the bottle under her arm, went back into the living room, where Max was lounging back on the sofa as if he ended up in some strange girl’s living room every night. Point of fact, he probably did.