Worst Idea Ever

by Jane Fallon

  Jane Fallon

  * * *

  WORST IDEA EVER

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part 1 Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part 2 Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Jane Fallon is the multi-award-winning television producer behind shows such as This Life, Teachers and 20 Things to Do Before You’re 30. Her Sunday Times bestselling books – Getting Rid of Matthew, Got You Back, Foursome, The Ugly Sister, Skeletons, Strictly Between Us, My Sweet Revenge, Faking Friends, Tell Me a Secret and Queen Bee – have sold over a million copies in the UK.

  By the same author

  Getting Rid of Matthew

  Got You Back

  Foursome

  The Ugly Sister

  Skeletons

  Strictly Between Us

  My Sweet Revenge

  Faking Friends

  Tell Me a Secret

  Queen Bee

  Dedicated to the wonderful staff of Mayhew for their tireless work with animals

  https://themayhew.org/

  Prologue

  I stare at the message. Read it again.

  ‘No good ever came from listening at closed doors,’ my mum always said. ‘If you were meant to hear what was being said about you behind your back then the door wouldn’t be closed in the first place, would it?’

  My mum is a living, breathing encyclopaedia of pointless sayings. An idiom for every occasion.

  But sometimes she’s wrong. Sometimes you can never really know a person until you hear the way they speak about you when they assume you can’t hear. Sometimes the lure of an insight into what someone really thinks about you is too much. It’s irresistible. Not that any of this started out with that intention. I thought that I was doing a good thing. I wanted to help, to support my friend.

  That was my first mistake.

  Part 1

  * * *

  CHAPTER 1

  Three weeks earlier

  ‘All I want is something that’s mine. I mean, is that too much to ask?’ Lydia dabs at the underneath of her eyes with the heel of her hand. We’re drinking in the Princess Louise, near her Holborn office, crammed in with the after-work crowd, valiantly clinging on to the corner of a table that is slowly being taken over by twenty-somethings intent on getting noisily wasted. Every now and then one of them gives us a hungry stare, willing us to leave so they can achieve total table domination, but scared to actually say anything because one of the middle-aged ladies seems to be crying into her Pinot Noir. Lydia flaps her hands at her face like a primitive air dryer. She’s always telling me off for rubbing my eyes. ‘You’ll give yourself wrinkles,’ she says, as if they’re a disease that can be avoided with a little self-restraint.

  Lydia is my longest-standing friend. My surrogate sister. We have an unbreakable partnership that began more than twenty years ago when we were art students together, a stone’s throw from here. Both studying illustration. A double act from the moment we first met, although I’d never understood why she even noticed me among our cool, confident contemporaries. We’d both chosen the sensible art path. One that could actually lead to a career. Later Lydia had landed on a steady road upwards at a small publisher producing educational books. Not doing the illustrations but commissioning and overseeing those who did. I had played the role of starving artist in a garret to perfection for a few years before somehow lucking out when the animations I sometimes placed on Twitter, featuring a wallaby with a penchant for filling up his pouch with random shopping, caught the eye of an editor whose kid loved it. There have now been six books featuring Wilbur. They make no sense. Wilbur is clearly a boy, but he has a pouch. He spends most of his time at the shops. He apparently has an endless supply of money. None of this seems to matter in the children’s publishing world. Cats become mayors. Dogs work in offices. It’s a world we’d all love to live in, let’s be honest. They’ve all sold well. I’m by no means rich but I’m doing OK. More than OK. And I’m managing to make what I love my full-time job. I know that’s enviable. My problems are firmly in the First World.

  I just have terrible imposter’s guilt.

  They’re the most simplistic drawings I’ve ever done. No real skill necessary. Wilbur is a few strokes of the pen – as are his friends Walter the wombat and Olga the opossum – no perspective, no elaborate backdrops. There are very few words. And those that there are are mostly lists of goods he’s decided to purchase, but in rhyming form. I have basically turned my weekly shop into a living, with added marsupials. I am better than this. I have talent. More to the point, other people – Lydia included – have way more talent than me. But apparently no one has noticed.

  I’ve just signed a contract for books seven and eight. Life is good.

  Lydia, on the other hand, hates her job. She loathes the relentless routine. The lack of any creativity. ‘When you’ve seen one illustration of the ventricles of the heart you’ve seen them all,’ she said to me once. Her company produces a lot of medical textbooks. She hates having to get up in the mornings, having to get on the tube, having to eat a sandwich lunch at her desk to avoid the small talk of her colleagues. She hates not getting home till quarter to seven on a good day, knowing she has to do it all again tomorrow. Whenever I moan about the fact that I think I’m selling myself short – which I try not to do too often – she tells me she’d kill to be in my position.

  She’s recently opened an Etsy shop. A sideline to try to keep her sanity rather than a money-making scheme. She wants to be able to show she’s more than just someone who works in an office showcasing other people’s talent. Her speciality is line drawings in ink. Scratchy, darkly beautiful depictions of faeries and trolls. Nothing cutesy. They’re gnarly and more than a little evil-looking. Underworld spirits. Beneath her polished exterior Lydia hides murky waters. Deeper than you’d think on first glance. It’s one of the things about her that I love. She’s created a whole world of intricate detail: family trees, relationships, maps of her creatures’ homes in the forest. They deserve a book of their own. Instead, they are printed to order on T-shirts and greetings cards. Hours of artistic endeavour embossed on a tea towel: £7.95 plus postage and packing.

  The Etsy shop was my id
ea. I thought it might get Lyd’s work noticed. At least get her some kind feedback. What it has actually got her is nothing. So far she hasn’t sold a single item. I set her up with a Twitter account so that she could promote it – she’s Instagram through and through, but she doesn’t think it fits with her ‘brand’ to be trying to flog stuff on there. I have no idea what that means. ‘How are you a brand if you’re not flogging stuff?’ I’d asked her. But she told me in all seriousness that you need to stay on message. ‘It’s not real life,’ she said. ‘It’s a fantasy you’re selling.’ I restrained myself from reminding her that she wasn’t actually selling anything, that was the point – but so far she only has seven followers, and that includes me and my eighteen-year-old twins Edie and Joe, both of whom think Twitter is lame and never look at it. I thought about placing an order but she gave me a stern lecture about not patronizing her, so I didn’t dare. It hurt me to see how disappointed she was, though. I don’t think she thought she was suddenly going to be Tracey Emin, but she did hope she might get a bit of affirmation. Nothing.

  ‘It’ll get better. These things just take a while. Word of mouth and all that …’ To be fair I don’t really know what to say. I have no idea how to help.

  Lydia sniffs. ‘Word of mouth between who? You and Joe?’

  She’s got a point. ‘What about the other four?’ I say, referring to those of her followers who aren’t basically family.

  ‘My yoga teacher, Kira who does my nails, my hairdresser and my auntie Susan’s dog walker.’

  ‘Dog walkers need greetings cards too,’ I say, in an effort to be funny. Lydia just rolls her eyes.

  ‘It was a stupid idea. I don’t know why I thought it would work.’

  I hate it when she gets like this. She has a tendency to put herself down. Be defeatist. It’s as if all the fight has been knocked out of her over the years. I know she compares herself to me – dream career, happy marriage, kids – and I know it hurts. Not that she would ever want me not to have any of those things, or that she even wants the same – well, apart from the career – but she wants her own version of fulfilment. And I want that for her too.

  Which is why I’ve just had what might turn out to be the worst idea of my life.

  CHAPTER 2

  Meet Patricia.

  Patricia has just followed Lydia on Twitter.

  Told her that her art was exceptional.

  Ohhed and aahed over every piece she’s ever posted.

  Said she was dying to place an order, she just had to wait for payday.

  Lydia has responded with happy emojis. Hearts.

  Told me happily – and only half jokingly – how she has a fan.

  The only problem being that Patricia is me.

  I created her on a slightly drunken whim, three pub-sized glasses of Merlot down. After we left the Princess Louise – out into the freezing early-January night, misty rain clinging to our faces, coating our clothes, forlorn Christmas decorations still dangling limply from the trees – we said goodbye at the corner of High Holborn and went our separate ways, she to Hammersmith, me north to the leafy gentility of Primrose Hill. The house that Wilbur built. Or bought.

  I fretted about Lydia’s mood. I watched as she headed down into the tube, belting her chic raincoat tightly around her already too tiny waist, her shoulders slumped. I hated seeing her so down. If I’m being honest, not just because I felt bad for her but also because I no longer felt I could celebrate my own success when I was with her. I would hesitate before I told her any work-related good news, play it down, try not to show the excitement I was feeling that there was talk of Wilbur becoming a TV animation or that the Japanese translations were apparently flying off the shelves in Tokyo. I couldn’t be honest with my best friend. So how did I handle it? By creating a whole other layer of deception.

  Here’s what I decided about Patricia. I knew I had to get her story straight in my head if this was to work. She’s a couple of years older than Lydia and me. Forty-seven to our forty-five. She works in retail. Divorced. No kids because her husband never wanted them and she cared more about making him happy than being a mum – he now has three under six with his inappropriately young wife, aka his former assistant. Lives in Buckinghamshire. Two cats. Not that I was probably ever going to share any of this information with Lydia, but I’d watched enough episodes of Catfish with Edie to know how important it is to keep track of any info you let slip. Consistency leads to believability. And one thing I was sure of, if I was actually going to do this, was that I would never want Lydia to find out it was me. It was a crime of compassion, but one she would find it hard to forgive.

  I scrolled through my phone and picked out a generic photo of a pair of kittens, one ginger and one black and white, as Patricia’s profile pic. A blood-orange sunset as her header. Kept her bio short. Love animals, art and reading. Added a quirky detail – Wycombe Wanderers. Come on the Blues!! – for authenticity, spent way too long wondering whether I really believed Patricia would be a rabid football fan – and then deciding that was the point. It was so unlikely, why would anyone have made it up? – and hit the button to create the account just as Nick arrived home from his evening playing squash followed by a couple of pints with his best mate Dom. We’re not the kind of couple who socialize separately all the time. Our lives are completely blended, our friends shared; we’re happy in each other’s company. But Nick sometimes has to work in the evenings and every week or so he likes to play squash, something at which I am entirely useless, not to mention a somewhat dangerous liability, and so I usually meet up with Lyds either at one of our homes or in a bar or restaurant.

  I didn’t tell him what I was doing when he walked through the door. I don’t know why. Maybe because I thought he’d tell me it was a bad idea (it is). Despite my wholly good intentions it still felt like an underhand thing to do. Sneaky. Or maybe it was just because I still wasn’t sure myself whether I’d go through with it. It felt like a good plan to sleep on it. Reassess when I was 100 per cent sober.

  ‘Good game?’

  He leaned down and kissed the top of my head, stubble grazing my brow. Nick always has perfect three-day stubble. I have no idea how he achieves it. I haven’t seen his face fully shaven for about eight years. Every now and then he threatens to scrape it all off, buffing up his skin to shiny-apple consistency just to see my horrified reaction. He knows how much I love his artfully dishevelled look.

  ‘One set all.’ He smelt of shower gel. The Body Shop grapefruit he keeps in his squash bag. He unloaded a wet towel and sweaty clothes, wandering through to the utility room to deposit them on the laundry pile.

  ‘Did you eat?’ I shouted after him. ‘We didn’t. There’s a pizza in the fridge I could heat up.’

  ‘And that …’ he said as he came back in and reached over to the rustic wire rack for a bottle of wine, ‘… is why I love you. How was Lyds?’

  ‘Fed up,’ I said, rooting around in the cupboard for glasses. Our basement kitchen is that old cliché: the hub of the house. The place where the kids did their homework while Nick or I cooked (Nick usually, if I’m being honest), or sat with their friends round the big rough wooden table. It backs on to our tiny garden, patio doors allowing the afternoon sun to stream in in the summer months. I love it. It still blows my mind that I live here.

  ‘Still?’ Nick is by nature a kind soul, but he doesn’t really get Lydia’s frustration. He’s sympathetic but not empathetic. He has a good job – working in events for a downmarket but hugely successful holiday company – but he doesn’t need it to define him. He needs it to pay enough with hours that are not crippling and a commute that doesn’t kill him. He needs it as a foundation on which to build the life he wants. He could be doing anything that fulfilled those criteria; he doesn’t really care what. I used to find this frustrating – not because I thought he needed to do better, but because I couldn’t understand it. How could you be happy not having a passion? A drive? Now I find it enviable. Nick is as chilled, as
content as he is precisely because his job starts and ends during work hours. The minute he puts his coat on to come home it’s forgotten until the next day. His life is his own.

  ‘I get it,’ I said. ‘I just wish I could help her somehow.’

  He reached round me from behind to pour the wine and I leaned back into the comforting solidity of him. I know how lucky I am.

  When I woke up early next morning, before it was light, the first thing that popped into my head was Patricia. I was both relieved that I hadn’t sent a series of tipsy tweets to Lydia before bed, and excited that I had a plan to cheer her up. Usually once Nick has left for the office I potter around ‘working from home’. The truth is that each Wilbur first draft takes me only a matter of days to produce. What rhymes with aubergine, or is it irresponsible to have him carry a hot takeaway coffee in his pouch being the most challenging questions I face generally. That day I sat and tried to bring Patricia to life. I decided that she would follow a variety of arts and crafts people, some authors and a few well-chosen celebrities, some funny cat accounts and a couple of news feeds. A newspaper local to her supposed home town in Buckinghamshire. The interests of a nice woman. Bland and unthreatening. I composed a couple of anodyne tweets – her message to Lydia mustn’t be the first she’d written. Too suspicious. So she posted a cute picture of some cats, retweeted a funny dog video, admired the work of an artisan bag maker. That last one elicited a like. I whooped for joy.

  Buoyed up, I had her send a few more compliments to small-time artsy enterprises. When I returned from a break to make a cup of tea and hunt out a biscuit, one of them had followed her back. I exploded with pride like a mother on sports day. Patricia had a follower! She existed! It was that easy. I decided that she couldn’t contact Lydia until she had at least ten. Otherwise she’d just look like a desperate saddo. Patty no mates. Was she a Patty? I wondered. No. Nor a Pat. She was a Patricia through and through. Dignified.