‘Now don’t go getting all huffy.’ Max wagged his finger again. ‘Let’s face it, I’m the best offer you’re going to get when it comes to pancake boyfriends. At least I’m not an estate agent and I don’t have any suicidal tendencies. By the way, your sister really needs to remember that her voice carries from one end of the office to another.’
She was going to kill Celia. ‘So, I had a few bad dates, but I just have to keep applying myself and I’m bound to have a good date eventually,’ Neve said defensively.
‘Applying yourself? Going on dates isn’t meant to be such an ordeal.’ Max pursed his lips. ‘You’re twenty-five, right? You are the oldest twenty-five year old I’ve ever met.’
‘I can’t help it if I’m mature for my age.’ Though Neve preferred to think that she just had a very old soul. ‘Maybe I should have spent a few years getting drunk and having lots of meaningless sex, but I didn’t.’
‘Look, are you absolutely certain that this Billy bloke is your one true love?’ Max asked, as if the whole notion of William and even having a one true love wasn’t to be taken seriously.
Neve immediately bristled. ‘His name’s William,’ she reminded Max coldly. ‘And yes – yes, he is – and you don’t have to be so snarky about it.’
Max shrugged. ‘I’m just saying that before you settle down with William, or whatever his name is, you should have some fun, and I am the god of having some fun.’ Max was actually being serious, even though it was the most ridiculous thing Neve had ever heard anyone say. Then again, the whole point of all those excruciating first dates had been to inject a little fun and romance into her life, and both the fun and the romance had been sorely lacking. Sometimes Neve thought that fun should come with a bullet-pointed action plan and some handy diagrams.
‘Well, when you put it like that, I suppose I can have some fun,’ Neve said brightly. Brightly was what she was aiming for, but the actual execution was more grimly determined, as something very important occurred to her. ‘But I need you to promise that we are definitely not having sex.’
‘No sex unless you absolutely beg me for it.’ Max grinned at the acid-drop look on Neve’s face. ‘And I won’t even use tongue when we’re kissing. Not unless you do first.’
There were so many objectionable things about that statement that Neve didn’t know where to begin, but while they were establishing some ground rules … ‘I don’t think we should hold hands either,’ she blurted out.
‘You don’t?’ Max asked mildly.
‘Well, it’s just we need to have some kind of reminder that this is a pancake relationship and not a proper one. So, if by some miracle, we were getting on really well and I went to hold your hand, I’d have to stop and remember that we don’t hold hands because we’re not a proper couple,’ Neve babbled while Max just sat there and looked at her like she was having some kind of psychotic break. ‘Don’t you see? Not holding hands would be like a safety word.’
‘What do you know about safety words?’ Max drawled very slowly, and before Neve could take umbrage because being inexperienced didn’t mean she was completely uninformed, he shrugged and said, ‘Fine. No sex. No holding hands and we’ll take the stuff in between sex and holding hands under advisement, OK?’
Neve nodded. ‘Shall we just take this on a date-by-date basis?’
Max looked at her blankly. ‘I suppose that would work.’ He suddenly put his head in his hands and yawned. ‘Sorry, don’t know where Maria is with my next espresso. Haven’t been to bed yet and I think my second wind has just upped and left.’
It was time to wrest some control back. Neve shoved her purse back in her bag and stood up. ‘Well, I’m glad we’ve got that all cleared up,’ she said officiously. ‘I can usually do Monday, Thursday and Friday evenings so, um … I’ll call you.’
‘Or I’ll call you,’ Max offered, but his voice was quiet and his eyelids were drooping down as if it was taking all his energy not to rest his head on the table and fall asleep right there.
‘Right, well, I’m glad that’s all sorted then.’ Before there could be a painfully protracted goodbye, Neve crouched down to pet Keith, smiled tightly at Max and walked away.
PART TWO
Little By Little
Chapter Eleven
Neve had imagined that dating would be evening after evening in the pub making slightly forced conversation as they listened to each other’s back stories but it wasn’t like that at all. Or dating Max wasn’t like that.
Max had such a full and varied social calendar that their dates doubled up as work events that he simply had to attend. Over the course of three weeks, he’d taken Neve dog-racing for the album launch of a band who all had moptop hairdos and mockney accents. There had been the swank first-night party of a photographic exhibition at the V&A, with waiters drifting past carrying laden trays of champagne and canapés. They’d been to the opening of a shop, which had featured burlesque dancers, a magician and a goody bag stuffed full of premium cosmetics, spa vouchers and a pair of cashmere pyjamas, which Neve had passed on to a grateful Chloe. There were film screenings, cocktail parties and band showcases, and Neve went to each one accompanied by Max and no fewer than twenty of his close personal friends.
Neve had never felt more out of her depth in this strange new world of press events and after-show parties and the party after the after-show party, and though she could hardly admit it to herself, she found comfort in the fact that Max kept his arm draped loosely around her shoulders most of the time. First they’d work the room; usually it took them an hour to do a full circuit because no sooner had they taken a step than they’d bump into someone Max knew and there’d be a flurry of air kisses, hugs and breathless compliments.
There was no earthly reason for the publicists or journalists or models, or actresses or reality TV stars to do anything more than smile vaguely in Neve’s direction, but Max would take her arm to bring her forward from where she was cowering behind him to say, ‘This is my very good friend, Neve.’ Then he’d follow up the introduction with, ‘Neve was just saying that she was thinking of taking a burlesque class.’ Or, ‘Help me out here. Neve insists that the film was just sub-par Tarantino.’ Usually she’d been saying no such thing, but it got the conversation started; a conversation that she was part of, which was a novelty after all those years of sitting in a corner while her slimmer, prettier, less tongue-tied friends were being chatted up and having drinks bought for them.
After working the room, they’d sit down and within five minutes they’d be surrounded on all sides and Neve would sit there with the comfortable weight of Max’s arm still around her and smile and nod and murmur, ‘Really? Well, I never knew that,’ as the conversation roared around her. It didn’t matter that she never really joined in or that she didn’t know the people they were talking about, because no one really listened to anyone else. It was a competition to talk the loudest, to say the most shocking thing, to brag about their latest work freebie and at the centre of it all, the sun around which everyone satellited, was Max.
Max’s charm was so obvious, so in one’s face, such an obvious mix of flirtation and flattery that Neve hadn’t appreciated its subtle nuances before. That just by lowering his voice and staring at someone with a steady, unblinking gaze Max seemed to exert some kind of sexual thrall over people – male or female, gay or straight, it didn’t matter. Then he’d touch them: tuck a stray lock of hair behind an ear, hook a finger into the strap of a dress where it had slipped off one tanned, toned shoulder and put it back in place, and suddenly he had a willing victim only too happy to do anything to please him.
Neve had even seen (though she really wished she hadn’t) one of those male models that Celia was always harping on about drop his trousers to show everyone the results of his back, sack and crack wax after Max had drawled, ‘Don’t believe you had the stones to get it done, not when you cried like a baby when you were getting the world’s smallest tattoo.’
All Neve could do was stay
on her guard, ready to run shrieking into the night, in case Max directed the full force of his attention on to her. But apart from the arm around her shoulder and the constant endearments, he’d decided to use his power for her greater good.
The moment that Neve finally realised this, which was the same moment that she actually started to enjoy herself, was about two weeks into their pancake relationship. They were at the launch of an iPhone app (a concept that Neve had difficulty processing) and had spent the last ten minutes talking to an actress who Neve vaguely recognised from a BBC dramatisation of The Mill on the Floss. She was the official face of the app (again Neve was having immense difficulty understanding how some device on an iPhone could have an official face) and was desperate to be profiled in Skirt. Neve knew this because the other woman kept mentioning it every time she opened her mouth.
‘I’m up for a part in the new Sam Mendes film and it would really help me out, Maxie,’ she pouted. She looked even more beautiful when she pouted than when she was throwing her head back and laughing at every single thing Max said. ‘And if you need a fashion angle, a friend and I are thinking of starting up a little accessories line.’
‘Well, I’d love to but we’re working on the August issue so it probably wouldn’t be much help with Sam,’ Max mused, idly stroking the top of Neve’s arm. ‘Don’t get me wrong, you’re gorgeous, but I need something a little bit more than gorgeous to convince my Editor.’
The woman licked her lips and stared meaningfully at Max. ‘I’d be ever so grateful.’
‘Ah, that’s what they all say.’ Max tugged on a strand of Neve’s hair. ‘What do you think?’
Neve looked doubtfully up at Max. What did she know about his criteria for choosing celebrities to shoot for Skirt? Especially actresses who didn’t think there was anything morally wrong with coming on to a man who had his arm around another girl. ‘I did like you in The Mill on the Floss,’ she said diplomatically, ‘but I don’t understand this whole business of apps and what they do and how they’re put on an iPhone.’
‘You don’t have an iPhone?’ the actress breathed, her eyes widening in consternation. ‘Oh my God. Wait here.’
‘Am I going to get ejected because I don’t have an iPhone?’ Neve asked Max, who looked up to the ceiling and sighed because he knew she wasn’t joking.
But the actress was back within two minutes with a publicist who presented a gold box to Neve with great ceremony and when she looked inside, there was a shiny black iPhone ‘with the app already pre-installed on it’.
Neve had barely stuttered her thanks before the actress turned to Max. ‘So?’
Max made her wait a good twenty seconds. ‘Well, I guess I’ll see what I can do.’
It was then that Neve understood that his charm and his connections were Max’s social currency – he couldn’t have one without the other. Then she had another startling revelation: Max was her social currency. It didn’t matter that her party outfits consisted of a variety of shapeless black dresses, which were only slightly too big on her, but not so big that Neve felt as if she deserved to buy any clothes, or that she had a complete lack of conversational skills – she had Max.
After that, Neve stopped being terrified and began to enjoy herself. It was like finding herself in the middle of an Evelyn Waugh novel, but one set in twenty-first-century London where the Bright Young Things all did something in the media and would tell Neve that she was a darling and ‘my new very best friend’ just for giving someone a spare tampon, or letting one of Max’s mates have the condoms from her latest goody bag, because she certainly wasn’t going to be needing them. And they all came back from their frequent trips to the loo with a hard, glittery look in their eyes and their chatter got louder and more animated. At first, Neve thought the constant bathroom breaks were due to the huge amount of free drinks they all consumed, until she was waiting in line for the Ladies with one of her new very best friends who asked if she wanted to do a line.
‘A line of what?’ Neve asked without thinking, because it was so outside her realm of experience that she hadn’t ever expected to meet anyone who did Class A narcotics, much less be offered any herself.
‘Shit, sorry,’ the girl had said. ‘Max mentioned something about you being in rehab for years. God, that must have sucked.’
‘It was very tiresome,’ Neve had agreed, and she couldn’t even summon up the faintest whiff of indignation at how Max had found a way to explain her abstemious habits that didn’t embarrass either of them.
Max’s friends thought she had an interesting past and Max didn’t suffer the ignominy of having a girlfriend who’d only drink one white-wine spritzer before she switched to lime and soda. It was win/win.
On the dot of midnight, Neve would always leave and Max would always offer to pay for a cab, before walking her to the tube station. ‘Are you having fun yet?’ he’d ask.
Neve would praise the goody bag or the canapés or the actor she’d talked to who’d done a season with the Royal Shakespeare Company and Max would shake his head and sigh.
‘If you think that’s fun, then you’re not having fun yet,’ he’d say, before asking the next question. ‘But now you have to admit that I’m the most charming and likeable person you’ve ever met, aren’t I?’
‘You’re growing on me,’ Neve would say, which he was until he opened his mouth and his patented Max smarm oozed out. In the past three weeks, she’d seen him more than ten times and she didn’t know him any better than when they’d started. She didn’t know where he grew up (though he had a faint Northern accent) or what made him frightened. She didn’t know where he stood on Europe or his thoughts on Fair Trade. All she ever got from Max was a loop of, ‘You look gorgeous, we’re on the list, baby, darling, sweetheart, let’s go to the after-party,’ and of course, ‘Are you having fun yet?’ It wasn’t enough to form a friendship, let alone anything else, not by a long shot – but Neve could hardly tell Max that.
So he’d just sigh again, then he’d give Neve a quick peck on the side of her mouth, tell her he’d text her ‘the deets of our next fun-filled date’ and go back to the party to find a girl to spend the rest of the night with.
Neve often wondered what would happen if she suddenly declared that she’d had fun with a capital F and that Max was her new very best friend. She decided that either their pancake relationship would come to a very swift end because she was no longer a challenge, or that Max would move on to the next phase of his plan which involved Neve begging him to take her because she was desperate to know the feel of his hot, tight body against her naked flesh. Which was never, ever going to happen.
All in all though, dating Max was going better than Neve had expected until the night she was rumbled by Celia. It was a Thursday evening and they were attending the launch of a new ad campaign for … well, Neve wasn’t sure but she understood that it was something to do with a high street fashion chain and some up-and-coming new designer. She was sitting in another VIP area on another red velvet sofa. Max had disappeared momentarily to discover why the free drinks weren’t flowing like tapwater and Neve had actually found someone interesting to talk to – a middle-aged man who edited the lifestyle section of a Sunday paper and who had known Max since he was sixteen when he came down to London from Manchester to do two weeks’ work experience at a teen magazine.
Jeremy had been the Editor of the teen magazine and hadn’t thought much of Max when he arrived fresh off the train and brimming with boyish enthusiasm. ‘He got in everyone’s way,’ he recalled. ‘And if we had models come in for a casting, he’d turn bright red and start giggling.’
‘Really?’ Neve was hanging on to his every word.
‘I could not wait for his fortnight to be up,’ Jeremy said. ‘Then came the fateful day that the Features Editor was struck down by a dodgy prawn sandwich, minutes before he was due to do an interview with this appalling boy band … what were they called? Never mind. Anyway, Max stepped up to the plate and wangled a confessi
on from the lead singer that he’d shagged every single one of their backing dancers when he wasn’t necking five Ecstasy tabs a night.’
‘My goodness! Then what happened?’
‘Well, I offered Max a job on the spot, obviously.’ Jeremy smiled faintly. ‘And a legend was born. I even gave him his own gossip column, which we called Mad Max. The funny thing was that, as soon as his contract was signed, there was no more red-faced giggling. Couldn’t help but feel that I’d been played.’
Neve was practically sitting in Jeremy’s lap by now. ‘Do you think that Max might have tampered with the prawn sandwich?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t like to put money on it, but …’
Neve didn’t get to hear Jeremy’s theories on the dodgy prawn sandwich because all of a sudden she was hauled off the sofa by a strong determined hand belonging to her furious little sister.
‘Neevy, what the hell are you doing here?’ she demanded, dragging Neve across the room and into a secluded alcove. ‘Why are you bothering Jeremy Hancock? What is going on?’
‘I wasn’t bothering him,’ Neve insisted angrily. ‘We were having a nice chat about the play on Radio Four this week and then we talked about Max.’
She thought that was quite a skilful way to lead into the inevitable conversation they were going to have but Celia exploded all over again. ‘Why were you talking about Max? What are you doing all cosy in the VIP room when Grace and I had to wait for an hour to get in because the uppity girl on the door couldn’t read the other uppity girl on the door’s handwriting?’
‘I’m sorry about that,’ Neve said soothingly, but Celia’s face was all scrunched up in an unsoothable manner. ‘And we were talking about Max because well, um … I’m here with him. With Max. We’ve kind of been seeing a bit of each other.’
‘Max! MAX! Oh my God, you have got to be fucking kidding me!’