Friend of the Family

by Tasmina Perry

  ‘I was called in to see Douglas. But when he told me he was suspending me, I should have kept my dignity. Instead, I saw Josie looking smug outside his office door and I just lost it.’

  Amy leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees, clasping her fingers together to stop them from shaking.

  ‘She’s trying to destroy me, Claire. She goes after my husband, my job . . .’

  ‘They’re hardly going to give her the editorship of Mode.’

  ‘No, but it’s enough for her to see me not get the job. Which is why she set out to discredit me. The drugs accusations . . . even the Fashion 500 party was constantly beset by problems.’

  ‘Sweetheart, you can’t seriously think that Josie was behind that. I remember planning Max’s fortieth at that castle in Scotland. Everything that could have gone wrong did. It’s what happens with large-scale events.’

  Amy was disappointed that Claire hadn’t sided with her completely, but a voice in her head told that she was beginning to sound paranoid. She picked up her cup of tea and it rattled against the saucer.

  ‘Look,’ Claire said, ‘Josie may have flirted with David on holiday. It might even have gone further, although honestly, I don’t believe it did. Perhaps she hustled her way into the job with Douglas Proctor, and good luck to him if he chooses to recruit someone like that. But any glitches with the gala were down to bloody bad luck, and if someone has been spreading rumours about drug use, about syringes, it’s more likely to be someone who wants you out of the running for the Mode job so that they can have a clear run.’

  Amy had to admit that what Claire was saying made sense.

  ‘Whoever started the drugs rumour had to have known about the vitamin shots. Who else knows about BlissVit?’

  Amy shrugged. ‘Only you and Juliet. But I think Josie saw the syringes in my bag.’

  ‘Anyone in your office?’

  ‘Probably Chrissie, my PA. I kept the vials in the office fridge, so she could very well have seen them. But putting aside the fact that I’d trust Chrissie with my life, why would she do anything to hurt me?’

  ‘What about your deputy? The fashion director?’

  ‘I’m not sure either of them would be in contention for the Mode job.’

  ‘But they might get the Verve job if that became available.’

  Amy refused to believe that Tracey or Janice would be so duplicitous. She forced herself to think hard. That day she came out of Dr Al Saraf’s with her syringes and vials.

  ‘Suzanne Black,’ she said, with sinking realisation.

  ‘The editor of Silk magazine?’ asked Claire.

  Suzanne was certainly poisonous enough to do something this underhand, and it would make sense in a professional sense. She was in pole position for the Mode job; getting Amy fired from the parent company would have her doing backflips.

  ‘I bumped into her when I was coming out of the clinic.’

  ‘Then you should talk to her,’ said Claire.

  Chapter 32

  Amy was nervous and she didn’t know why. If Denton Scoles were to draw her paranoia on one of his graphs, her jumpiness would be a jagged red line shooting upwards like a rocket. She should have been excited; overjoyed, in fact. She hadn’t seen Pog for two years and this was one of his rare flying visits to the capital. But although she had been looking forward to their lunch for weeks, suddenly it did not feel like the day for a casual catch-up. She was hardly going to be good company. She hadn’t even told David yet what had happened. She wanted to do that face to face, but first she needed to calm down and try to wash Josie Price out of her thoughts before the conversation about her suspension from Genesis turned back to what had happened in Provence.

  She settled down in the booth and tried deep breathing. The choice of venue didn’t help either. Simpkins was an establishment institution. It was perfect for Pog, with his old-school accent and stripy ties. The fact that he had spent his life as an explorer was even more fitting; she’d always felt he should have been born 150 years earlier. But what was perfect for Pog made Amy jittery. She felt like an impostor here; she was an impostor, just a girl from a council estate whose idea of fine dining for the first twenty years of her life was the all you can eat buffet at Pizza Hut.

  She looked around, checking her watch. Typical of Pog to be late; he’d always marched to the beat of his own drum. Even back in Oxford, he’d always been late for work in the Bear. She supposed living most of your adult life in places where no one had even seen a clock would only make your timekeeping worse.

  She was so deep in thought, she didn’t hear her name called until the second time. When she looked up, there he was: tall and suntanned, his lopsided smile the same and his hug still as big as a bear’s.

  ‘Oh gosh, Pog,’ she said into his shoulder, ‘it’s so good to see you.’

  ‘You too, old girl,’ he laughed. ‘Now if you’ll just let me go, maybe I can actually have a proper look . . . Yes – still in one piece,’ he said with a smile.

  ‘So Max told you.’

  Pog nodded. ‘He wanted to come and join us, but I managed to hold him off.’

  ‘Actually he’s been a great help,’ said Amy, inspecting a bottle of red wine from the sommelier.

  ‘How things have changed,’ grinned Pog.

  They each took a sip of claret and Amy felt her shoulders relax.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it,’ Pog said, ‘or do you want to hear about my time in Papua New Guinea?’

  ‘I want to hear all about life in the jungle, of course,’ she smiled.

  Pog returned a knowing look. They’d been friends for too long for her to pull the wool over his eyes.

  ‘Why don’t you go first,’ he said, so Amy told him everything, from the plan to have a work-free holiday at Max’s villa to the ensuing and inevitable blow-up. ‘Hey, hey,’ said Pog, passing his napkin across. ‘It’s not that bad.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ she snapped, feeling bad but unable to stop herself. She used the napkin to wipe at her face, then looked up, eyes sparkling.

  ‘You seem to have got things back on track with David. You take him on a hot date on the Orient Express and he ends up in A and E.’

  ‘I know how to show a guy a good time.’ She laughed despite her emotion.

  He tried to top up her wine glass, but she shook her head. Claret was not the answer, no matter what the vintage.

  ‘Go on,’ smiled Pog. ‘It’s not like you’ve got work in the morning.’

  Amy laughed. Pog always knew the right thing to say, even back when they had spent their evenings serving up cider and black to the students of Oxford. Whenever Amy had a problem with a truculent boyfriend, a rude customer at the Bear or an unbending tutor, Pog could always lift her spirits. And come to think of it, drinking had often been the medicine he’d prescribed back then too.

  He took a thoughtful sip of his own drink. ‘You know, I find myself in the unusual situation of agreeing with Max for the first time in my life,’ he said just as the waiter brought their starters: potted shrimp for Pog, salad for Amy. ‘Get his Rottweiler lawyer friends onto them and twist a year’s salary out of them. But you’re talented, experienced, you’ll find something else. The most important thing is that your marriage is still intact.’

  ‘But how can I let her get away with this, Pog?’

  ‘Let it go, Amy. She’s not worth it. And if you keep banging the drum, blaming it all on her, you’re in danger of looking like you’re having a childish fit of pique. What do you want? Revenge? How is that going to help? There’s no way this Douglas Proctor is going to backtrack and reinstate you: too much loss of face. And I suspect there’s some office politics going on that you don’t know about. Otherwise why resort to such questionable methods?’

  Amy allowed herself a smile. ‘Like you know about office politics.’

  Pog grin
ned back. ‘It’s been a while since I had a boss, but you’d be surprised what goes on behind the grass huts in the jungle: people wanting to be in charge, people wanting more than the next guy, whether it’s status or wives or chickens.’

  He speared a prawn and waved it at Amy.

  ‘You always have to ask yourself in these situations: who profits? What’s the motivation for someone to push you out of the nest? Usually it comes down to someone wanting what you have.’

  ‘Josie,’ whispered Amy. It all came back to her.

  ‘Who is she?’ said Pog after a moment.

  ‘She’s the daughter of my friend Karen from Bristol. You remember Karen: she stayed at the house and went to the Commem Ball with Max. I don’t think Josie had it easy growing up. Her father Lee was a violent bully. He and Karen never married and I don’t think he was part of Josie’s life when she was growing up. It must have been tough for Karen, a single parent on a low income, but she’s a good, decent person. It’s hard to believe she’d have such a psycho for a daughter.’

  Pog had gone quiet.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Amy, but he just grimaced and shook his head. He looked troubled, like he’d had a piece of bad news. ‘What aren’t you telling me?’

  ‘It’s about that night,’ he said finally. His face had lost some of its usual ruddiness. ‘Look, it’s only a theory, let me emphasise that. But something happened that night, the night of the ball, that I never told anyone about.’

  He took a deep breath, but didn’t seem to want to meet Amy’s eye.

  ‘I was dancing with Jules, out on the floor, you know.’

  ‘Shaking your stuff, huh?’ She didn’t know why, but Amy wanted to make light of the conversation. Pog, though, didn’t smile.

  ‘We were quite near the middle, right in the thick of it, and we saw, well, David and Karen. They were dancing, but, you know, getting pretty frisky.’

  Amy could see why Pog didn’t want to tell her. Your husband and your best friend? No one wants to hear that.

  ‘Go on,’ she said.

  ‘They pushed past us, don’t think they actually saw us, and went out into the grounds. I wondered what the hell David was doing. He’d told me once how he felt about you, and so I thought it was madness behaving like that with your best friend.’

  ‘You followed him?’

  Pog nodded.

  Amy felt the air around her grow hot. ‘What did you see?’

  He shrugged, embarrassed.

  ‘Pog, I have to know.’

  His eyes flicked up to hers, then down again. ‘I didn’t see anything else. They were kissing, I can say that much. And they were oblivious to us . . . they were pretty into it. I felt like a perv watching, so I left them to it.’

  ‘So they had sex?’

  Pog didn’t reply.

  ‘Pog, you have to tell me.’

  ‘It looked like that, yeah,’ he finally conceded. ‘You said Josie is twenty-one?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  She didn’t need him to ask her to do the maths. She was finding it hard to swallow, hard to breathe as the full horrific implication sank in.

  ‘Oh God,’ she whispered, a shaking hand covering her mouth. ‘So you’re saying that David . . .’ She looked at Pog, and he nodded.

  ‘Maybe David is Josie’s father.’

  Chapter 33

  The station looked the same as it ever did; it smelled the same too. As she stepped down onto Platform B, Amy felt the same feelings wash over her. Dread. Disappointment. That deflated feeling when you realised the party was over. The other platform always carried the opposite sentiments. Standing there, only a few yards across the tracks, she’d always felt happy, upbeat, excited. Because being on Platform A meant she was on her way east, heading out of town towards Bristol or London, heading to possibility and adventure.

  She looked down at the chewing-gum-pocked asphalt under her £400 shoes. Even now, decades later, with a career and a husband and a house in the capital – for now, at least – she still felt herself cloaked in a feeling of dread that there was nothing to look forward to except chip fat and dirt and shops that seemed to close half an hour before you got there.

  Sighing, she left the station, tearing her ticket in half, and walked along Sunderland Street, a ragged retail backwater of kebabs, phone shops and the lone bright beacon of Luv Me Do, Westmead’s one and only wedding outfitter. She flipped up her coat collar as she felt a spatter of rain. One thing you could say about the old neighbourhood: you never needed to look at a weather forecast. It was always shitty.

  She didn’t need to look at a map either, that was another plus. She knew exactly where the florists was. Past the bakery where Jenny from school had worked, across into Church Street, then past McDonald’s – they’d been so proud when that had finally opened – and the Red Lion on the left. She wasn’t at all surprised that the florists was still going after all these years: it was perfectly placed near the pub, the funeral home and the little Tesco car park. Guilt, grief and convenience. What did surprise her was the fact that Karen still worked there; that her best friend hadn’t moved far away.

  Amy paused on the other side of the road, letting the wind ripple her skirt. It had been a rash decision to head to Paddington after her lunch with Pog; rasher still to jump on a train to Bristol. But after leaving Pog, she hadn’t wanted to go home, unable to face seeing David, not after they had clawed their marriage back from the brink once already that week. It had taken over two hours to get to the florists at Westmead, and now, at a little after five o’clock, she wasn’t even sure if Karen would still be at work.

  But as she looked into the window, past the display of cut flowers, she could see her, standing at the counter, a telephone clamped between ear and shoulder, presumably taking an order or arranging a delivery, just normal everyday things, what people did to get through the day. This was Karen’s life now: she lived here, worked here; did it really matter what had happened twenty years ago? Some drunken fumble in a doorway, just a bit of fun to pass the time. Why bring all that up now?

  Because sometimes sleeping dogs wake up, thought Amy. And sometimes they turn around and bite you.

  She crossed the road, hearing the tinkle as she pushed through the door, watching Karen look up, for a moment still lost in her conversation, not recognising her. When she did, there was surprise, yes, but no delight; no ‘Wow, my old friend is here, how nice!’ No, Karen looked scared, and that was all Amy needed to know.

  ‘Amy,’ she said, hanging up the phone. ‘What are you doing here?’

  It was cold in the shop and Amy pulled her jacket a little tighter around her to stop of sliver of icy freeze slip down her back.

  ‘I’ve come to talk,’ she said simply.

  Micro-expressions. She had seen something on the TV about it once. How the emotions work faster than the rational brain and how, caught off guard, people can’t help showing their true feelings. Fear, disgust, anger. And sadness. Amy saw them all pass across Karen’s face.

  ‘Talk? What about?’

  She inclined her head towards the door. ‘Shall we go to the Lion?’

  There was a tiny pause, then Karen nodded, her expression resigned now. ‘Just give me five minutes to close up. It’s time anyway.’

  Amy was surprised to find the pub so quiet. Just one old guy hunched over the fruit machine and a couple with shopping bags pooled around their feet. Only the barman, barely old enough to drink himself, looked up as she walked in. She resisted the urge to order a pint of cider and black – the great-grandmother of the alcopop, she supposed – and took two glasses of warm white wine to a table at the back.

  So many memories rushed in. The New Year’s piss-ups, when it was standing room only and it took a good five minutes to thread your way to the bar. Bryn’s birthday, when Mad Kev had let off a fire extinguisher, covering ev
eryone in foam, like some low-rent Ibiza rave. The endless powwows with Karen about who fancied who and who was shagging who and what to wear to which party. Carefree times, but it had never felt that way at the time; it was all so life-and-death.

  Maybe everything feels important at the time, thought Amy. It certainly did right now.

  She looked up and gave a half-wave as Karen walked in. Her old friend looked grave; no, she looked old. As though all those worries, all those struggles had been etched into her face. Do I look like that? wondered Amy as Karen sat down.

  ‘So what’s this all about?’ she said, taking a sip of her wine. ‘Josie, I guess.’

  Amy’s surprise must have shown, because Karen snorted.

  ‘I knew she’d do something stupid in the end. You’re going to fire her, right?’

  Amy frowned. ‘Why would you think that?’

  ‘Why else would you come all the way out here?’

  ‘Karen, I’m the one who’s been fired.’

  Karen looked at her wide-eyed. No micro-expressions, no evasion; it was all there to see. She wasn’t surprised to hear that Amy had been kicked out; in fact she had been expecting it.

  ‘She did it,’ she said, her voice almost a whisper.

  ‘Did what?’

  Karen gave her a look of disdain, one Amy recognised from all those years ago. She had always been the streetwise one, the cynic, and she reserved her most withering look for Amy: so easy to fool, always sucked in, innocent and trusting. ‘No one’s going to give you anything, Ames,’ she would say. ‘You have to take it for yourself.’ It was one of the things – along with French kissing and rolling fags – that Amy had learned from Karen, and the one thing she had packed in her suitcase when she had shipped out to Oxford. And of course Karen would have taught the very same lesson to her daughter, wouldn’t she? If nothing else, that would be the one thing Karen would pass on. Take it for yourself, Josie.

  ‘She got what she wanted.’

  Amy nodded to herself. She had been right all along, no matter what Pog or Claire or David or Max had said.