All About Us: Escape with the bestselling, most gorgeously romantic debut love story of 2020!

by Tom Ellen

  ‘Are you OK, Ben?’ Becky asks, leaning forward from her sofa. ‘You do look a little peaky.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ I say. ‘Just … tired.’

  ‘Merry Christmas, fuckos!’

  ‘Marek!’ Becky squeals, and suddenly, the director, writer and star of The Carol Revisited is standing right in front of me, pumping my hand. His hair is still as wild as it was at his wedding three and a half years ago, but it’s now almost entirely grey to match his neatly trimmed goatee beard. He’s wearing a thick black polo neck and clear-framed glasses, looking like a bizarre mash-up of David Brent, Richard Ayoade and Steve Jobs.

  His wife Dipal – Dee – pecks me hurriedly on both cheeks before shrieking and running across to manhandle Becky’s bump.

  Marek accepts a glass of Cava from Alice. ‘So. How are you then, Benjamin?’ he asks me.

  ‘Good, thanks,’ I lie. ‘You?’

  He nods, swallowing a large gulp of wine. ‘Yup. Tons of directing gigs at the mo, so it’s busy, busy, busy. But that’s how we like it.’

  In 2023, Marek is apparently exploring previously uncharted levels of pretentiousness by referring to himself in the majestic plural.

  ‘Saw your latest masterpiece on telly last night, mate,’ Phil laughs, putting on a jokey All-American accent. ‘McCain Oven Chips: for a happy, healthy family!’

  Marek smiles back tightly, and I get the impression that Alice v Becky won’t be the only passive-aggressive grudge match on today’s docket.

  ‘No, fair play, not exactly Oscar-winning fodder,’ he says with his jaw clenched. ‘Still, I got a fucking good pay cheque for it, which I can use to fund something a little more creatively nourishing, if you know what I mean. That’s how it works in this industry,’ he adds snootily. ‘One for them, one for you.’

  ‘It’s been more like twenty for them, none for you, hasn’t it, mate?’ Phil chuckles, to snickering laughter from Becky and Alice.

  Marek soaks up their giggles with apparent good humour, and answers with a question of his own. ‘And how’s the fascinating world of accountancy then, Philip? Sitting behind a desk tapping away at your calculator: sounds fucking mind-blowing.’

  Phil grins and punches Marek’s shoulder. ‘Whatever, mate.’

  Becky squeezes Dee’s arm. ‘Oh, I love it when the boys go all alpha.’

  There’s more laughter at this – from ‘the boys’, too – and I see Marek smirk as he reaches for a vol-au-vent.

  It’s weird, really, how little he’s changed since uni. That spark and arrogance he had at nineteen are still very much there, despite the fact that he clearly hasn’t lived up to his own – and everyone else’s – expectations. At York, the one thing we all knew for certain was that Marek would go on to be a superstar. The next Tarantino, the next Shane Meadows – at the very least, the next Guy Ritchie. The next someone, anyway.

  After he graduated, though, nothing seemed to quite fall into place. Film school turned out to be a dead end, so he went into advertising. It was supposed to be a stopgap: a way to earn a bit of cash to fund his own independent movies. As the years went by, he clung to this idea tightly, retaining the dress sense and swagger of a critically acclaimed auteur when he was actually spending most of his time directing fast-food commercials. At his wedding, back in 2020, he was quick to tell me he was ‘making shitloads’ doing this kind of work, but I could tell that his guard was up. He was spiky and defensive about it; like he suspected I might be about to remind him of our student days, when he used to swan into pubs drunkenly bellowing that Bill Hicks line: ‘If anyone here is in advertising or marketing … kill yourself.’

  I guess none of us turned out how we thought we would at nineteen. We all made mistakes and concessions and wrong turnings.

  I realise I’ve zoned out slightly, and as I tune back into the conversation, I find that the chat about my and Alice’s wedding has now somehow segued into the story of how Phil proposed to Becky. It’s an anecdote everyone here is clearly already familiar with, but you can tell the protagonists get a massive kick out of rehashing it.

  ‘Show them the photo again, Phil!’ Becky squeals.

  ‘There you go.’ Phil passes me his iPhone – an iPhone 14, I notice – and I squint down at the picture. It’s taken from far away, like a long-lens paparazzi shot, and it shows Phil and Becky on a swanky-looking speedboat. He’s down on one knee holding a velvet box open as Becky does her best Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone impression: shrieking with both hands clasped to her face.

  ‘Where were you again?’ I ask Phil.

  ‘Cancún, mate,’ he says smugly.

  ‘Right, yeah. So who took the photo?’

  ‘They’ve told you this so many times, Ben,’ Alice mutters.

  ‘I’d hired a guy beforehand,’ Phil explains. ‘Gave the doorman at our hotel twenty pesos to snap a few pics with my Nikon as soon as I got down on one knee.’

  I look at Becky. ‘So the whole day, there was a random bloke on the shore watching you through a camera without you knowing about it?’

  ‘Yes!’ Becky tilts her head at Phil. ‘It’s so romantic, isn’t it?’

  Everyone murmurs in agreement, although ‘romantic’ isn’t exactly the word I’d use. It sounds like the kind of stunt the Walking Dead guy might pull if there’s ever a Love Actually sequel.

  ‘How did you pop the question again, Ben?’ Marek asks me.

  Becky claps her hands. ‘Oh yes! I love this story.’

  All five of them are staring at me now, their smiles withering fast as I gape back in silent panic.

  ‘Ha! He can’t bloody remember!’ Phil booms.

  ‘I, er … No, of course I can … I just …’ I can feel myself going bright red. I glance over at Alice. ‘You tell the story so much better, babe.’

  Babe. What the hell is happening to me?

  Confusion and fury are fighting for territory in Alice’s eyes, but she manages to compose herself. ‘What is my fiancé like, honestly?’ There’s a tinkle of polite laughter. She continues. ‘Well … we were in New York, on Broadway, about to go and see Legally Blonde: The Musical, and Ben did this whole sweet little routine, pretending to bend down and tie his shoelaces, and then suddenly he was looking up at me and holding a box …’

  ‘Aw,’ says Dee.

  ‘Bless,’ says Becky.

  ‘Classic,’ says Phil.

  Alice nods. ‘Yeah. It was a total surprise, and I just—’

  ‘Oh come on, Ali,’ Becky scoffs. ‘You’d been dropping hints for months.’

  There’s laughter again at this, though you can feel the tension in it.

  ‘No I hadn’t!’ Alice says, her voice suddenly a pitch higher. ‘Had I, babe?’

  She looks at me and I shake my head. ‘No, not at all. Babe.’

  ‘I was totally surprised,’ she says again.

  ‘I think we all were!’ Phil nudges me with his shoulder. ‘We thought you were still moping over your ex!’

  This time, there’s no laughter.

  Dee looks at the floor. Marek coughs.

  ‘Phil,’ Becky says. But you can see a smile flickering on her lips.

  ‘Sorry.’ Phil holds his hands up. ‘It was just a joke. Backfired!’

  Alice laughs tightly. ‘No, it’s fine.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I agree, though it is currently taking everything I’ve got not to grab Phil by his Ralph Lauren shirt and demand that he expand on that comment. What did it mean? How did I get from ‘moping’ over Daphne to proposing to Alice on Broadway?

  ‘Anyway. Such a romantic story,’ Dee says finally.

  ‘So sweet,’ Becky agrees, the ghost of a smirk still lingering.

  ‘Anywhere I can smoke, Alice?’ Marek asks, jiggling a packet of cigarettes.

  Becky clasps her bump protectively, and Alice frowns. I’m guessing her Parisian Gauloises-puffing days are now long behind her. ‘You can go out in the garden if you like,’ she tells him.

  I see my chance for som
e fresh air, and a much-needed break from this dystopian nightmare.

  ‘Hang on, Marek … I’ll keep you company.’

  We stand shivering in the little back garden as Marek lights his cigarette.

  ‘Do you want one?’ he says, offering me the pack.

  ‘No. Actually … yeah. All right.’ I haven’t smoked in about fifteen years, but right now, I feel like I need one.

  He gives me a strange look as he hands it over and lights it. We both exhale and watch the smoke drift up towards the white-grey sky.

  ‘God, Phil can be such a dickhead sometimes, don’t you think?’ Marek says.

  ‘Er, yeah, I guess.’ Still moping over your ex. What did he mean by that?

  ‘I honestly don’t know how you can see those two all the time. I’d go mental.’

  ‘Yeah …’ I shrug. ‘They’re not so bad.’ Why the hell am I defending them? I take another puff. The cigarette is making me nauseous. I don’t know why I even asked for it. I feel like I’m not fully in control of my own actions. I wonder if I can just drop it on the floor. Would Marek notice?

  He continues with what seems to be a pre-prepared monologue. ‘Just annoys me, that’s all. It’s so frustrating to talk about your work with people who have no idea what it’s like to be creative. Like, the stuff we’re doing right now with McCain is actually pretty ground-breaking. No one’s ever been this irreverent and playful and just fucking … surreal in the history of oven-chip marketing. We’re in totally unexplored territory here. So it pisses me off that Phil thinks he can just belittle my work like that when he doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about.’ He exhales another plume of smoke and looks at me. ‘I mean, you get it because you’re … Well, you were sort of a writer, weren’t you? For a bit. Or you tried to be.’

  ‘Uh huh.’ At another time, in another life, this jab would probably have stung. But right now, I hardly feel it. I hardly feel anything.

  I have to find out more about what Phil said. How long exactly was I moping over Daphne? Does Marek know what happened between us?

  ‘The guy’s a fucking accountant,’ Marek sighs. ‘It’s like: mate, just because your career’s unbelievably dull doesn’t mean you have to shit on everyone else’s.’

  ‘Yeah.’ I can’t take this any longer, and before I know what I’m doing, I force out what I hope is a casual chuckle. ‘Hey, it was funny what Phil said back there. About me moping over Daphne!’

  Marek looks at the floor. ‘Ha. Yeah.’ A pause while he takes a drag on his Camel Blue. ‘Well. You did mope about a fair bit by the sound of it. But Alice got her way in the end!’

  ‘How d’you mean?’ I ask.

  I’m aware that I’m now staring at him with what is probably an unsettling intensity. But I’m beyond caring how mad or odd I must look. I just need answers.

  Marek clears his throat and fidgets on the spot. ‘No, nothing. Just … I think when you and Daphne split up, and then Alice moved back down from Manchester, we all thought that the two of you would probably get together. I mean, we all know she’s got serious staying power, that girl. Plus, she’d only split up with Seb a few months earlier, too, so y’know …’ He grins. ‘She was obviously on the lookout for a new fiancé. She ground you down eventually!’

  He nudges me with his elbow as he says it: it’s clearly meant as a joke. But like every other comment at this godawful party, it feels like there’s something darker lurking behind it.

  Is that actually what happened? When I saw her at Marek’s wedding, Alice had just split up with Seb, the bloke she was about to marry up in Manchester. Was she scrambling for a replacement and I just happened to be there?

  I feel light-headed all of a sudden. I have to see Daphne. I just have to.

  I put a hand against the wall to steady myself.

  ‘Ben? You all right?’ Marek is frowning at me. ‘You dropped your cigarette.’

  ‘Oh, shit. Sorry.’

  ‘’S’OK …’ He takes a final drag on his and then squashes it under his shoe. ‘Are you still in touch with Daphne?’ he asks suddenly.

  I shake my head.

  ‘I always liked her,’ Marek says simply. ‘She was … nice.’ It’s the first time he’s sounded genuine all morning, and it tears something open inside me. How can I see her? I have to see her.

  He opens the door and steps back into the flat. ‘Still. You and Alice got there in the end, eh?’

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Over the next few hours, the urge to speak to Daphne – to just hear her voice – snowballs into a kind of desperation.

  I’m torn between the agonising desire to call her and the awful fear of what she might say when she answers. If she answers: that text message exchange shows she’s clearly in no hurry to speak to me.

  In some ways, then, it’s a blessing that I don’t even get the chance to try.

  As soon as Marek and I re-enter the living room, we are shuffled straight into our coats and out of the front door. Since Christmas lunch is – as Alice points out – ‘a total ball-ache to cook’, it transpires that we’ve booked a table for six at a posh gastropub on the cusp of Queen’s Park.

  Twenty minutes later, we’re there: settling down in the oak-panelled back room in front of a roaring log fire, plates of steaming roast goose with all the trimmings being set down before us. The red wine starts flowing freely, and as midday bleeds into late afternoon, any hope I had of nipping away to phone Daphne fades into the ether.

  The conversation over lunch is less a discussion and more a Royal Rumble of one-upmanship. Becky and Dee sweetly tell Alice that she must visit this new restaurant in Soho, because ‘anyone who’s anyone’ has been there – including the two of them. Becky delivers a long monologue about the best nurseries and school catchment areas, and when Dee and Alice offer differing opinions, she politely suggests that her research might be a little fuller because she’s actually expecting.

  Phil and Marek trade consistent blows too, their voices getting louder as the empty wine bottles stack up. Phil ‘seriously cannot believe’ that Marek has never been to South America – he and Becky spent three weeks in Argentina last summer, and it was ‘iconic’. Marek retaliates with a blitzkrieg of name-dropping: he had an ‘epic’ meeting last week about shooting a soft drink campaign with Tim Henman (‘a bloody good guy’). Plus an encouraging Skype call about a cufflink commercial with Piers Morgan, who apparently is surprisingly down-to-earth.

  As the meal goes on, I watch them all closely – my new partner and my new friends – and it strikes me that they’re not really talking to each other; they’re just taking it in turns to speak, each gearing up for their latest pitch about why they’ve got the best job, or the best house, or the best taste in restaurants or TV shows or holidays.

  The scariest thing is that Alice is competing the hardest. She interrupts excitedly whenever she can trump an anecdote, and twitches with annoyance whenever someone trumps one of hers.

  I do my best to make an effort and join in, but it gets harder and harder as the afternoon draws on. Not just because my thoughts keep flying back to Daphne, but also because Alice seems to jump on pretty much every comment I make, either dismissing it out of hand or using it as a springboard to wring a laugh from the others.

  At one point, Phil presses me for further information on Wyndham’s, and I mumble something neutral about how I’m ‘getting along OK there’. Alice cuts in sharply and snaps, ‘Don’t be stupid, Ben, you’re doing amazingly.’ She turns to Becky and Dee: ‘Dad says he’s actually in line for a promotion pretty soon.’

  Phil smirks at this. ‘Dad says …’ he chuckles under his breath.

  Alice shoots me an irritated glance before turning away again. She seems to take my self-deprecation as a personal slight, as if it reflects badly on her. It’s like she wants our friends to believe I’m a success because it makes her a success for being with me.

  On the other hand, though, she also seems to relish any chance to put me down in
front of them. When Marek starts laying into some ‘massively pretentious’ new novel he’s reading, Alice groans and looks over at me.

  ‘Oh my God, Ben, do you remember your novel?’ She puts her head in her hands, miming utter mortification.

  ‘That bad, was it?’ Phil booms over the laughter.

  Alice sets her teeth and winces at me. ‘Sorry, babe. I’m being mean. But it was a bit cringe.’

  ‘No, it’s true,’ I say quietly. ‘It was pretty terrible.’

  ‘Aw, sweet that you let her see it, though,’ Dee says, reading my mind – although I’d have swapped the word ‘sweet’ for ‘insane’.

  Alice adopts a cartoonish expression of guilt. ‘Actually … I just found it in one of his boxes when we moved into the flat.’ She grimaces. ‘He came into the room and found me laughing my head off reading it.’ A beat, and then: ‘It wasn’t a comedy.’

  Laughter rings around the table, and I do my best to add mine to it.

  ‘Good thing you found your niche in the end, Ben,’ Marek chuckles. ‘I’d say management consultants earn a few bob more than wannabe novelists.’

  Alice nods. ‘Mmm. And press-release writers, thank God.’

  There’s more laughter at this – though mostly from Alice and Marek. It’s strange: I’m only starting to remember it now, but during the first term at uni, the two of them used to do this a lot. Team up to take casual swipes at me after a few drinks in the student bar. We were a tight little trio, and I was usually the butt of our jokes. It was another reason I felt so much more comfortable with Daphne and Harv from the second term onwards.

  Pretty soon, our plates are taken away and heaps of steaming Christmas pudding are set down in their place. As the meal comes to an end, I lapse into silence, nodding at whatever’s being said while getting steadily drunker and drunker. I can see Alice’s glare sharpening every time I refill my glass, and I remember her comment earlier about how we should take it easy on the alcohol. But I can’t bring myself to stop. The thought that this might be it – that this might be my life from now on – sits like a lead weight on my shoulders. I can almost feel myself sinking into the ground as I contemplate it.