by Carmen Reid
‘Shut up, Jeff,’ Tilly replied. ‘Do I need your advice? What you know about fashion could be written in capitals on the back of a molecule. Anyway, rain, no problem, we’ll do miniskirts and see-through macs. Everything dark is out, everything light is in. That’s all you need to know.’
Which perhaps explained why Tilly was dressed head to toe in complicated white items but they were still tame compared with what the other women in her department wore, or rather didn’t wear: belt-sized skirts, crop tops and the kind of heels you wouldn’t exactly be able to sprint about London in. Not that fashion writers did much sprinting – unless it was opening day of the Marc Jacobs sale, of course.
‘Right, bugger off everyone and get me something decent for the front page,’ was Spikey’s final remark. Class was dismissed for another day.
Jo headed for the Ladies, not because she needed to go, but because this was where she and Tilly liked to hold their private post-conference meetings and Jo had to catch up with at least the most important elements of two weeks’ worth of office gossip.
‘You know about Declan, of course?’ was Tilly’s opener.
‘Oh yeah, the bored wife is off.’
‘With another woman.’
‘Oh, ouch, that’s harsh.’
‘Yeah, and the wife’s been commissioned to write a piece about it for Marie Claire.’
‘No!’
‘Oh yes, Mrs Declan comes out in the July issue.’
‘That’s terrible.’
‘Hilarious. And Vince has finally worn Binah down. They left together on Friday night.’
‘Eeeugh, how could she?’
‘Well, she’s run out, she’s done everyone else.’
‘Not everyone.’
‘No, to my knowledge Spikey and Jeff are just about the only men left standing.’
‘Aidan?’
‘Oh God no. Her car, his second week.’
‘Why didn’t I know that?’
‘We didn’t want to spoil your little crush,’ Tilly said, scrunching her steely grey bob up in the mirror. She took off her half-moon spectacles and began to polish them.
‘Oh please!’ was Jo’s response. ‘Anyway, how’s your department?’
‘Fine, fine. But I’m fitting a new lock to the clothes cupboard. Yet another designer dress loaned to us has walked. Causes me such a bloody headache. If anyone is going to steal expensive clothes from this office, it’s going to be me, on an entirely occasional and acceptable level, so I can’t tolerate any further pilfering. There are going to be lots of high street spreads for the next few months while I suffer designer penance.’
‘Love life?’ Jo asked.
‘Still bonking the banker . . . with the help of the little blue pills.’
‘Him or you?’ Jo snorted.
‘Both of us, of course. He’s taking me to Mauritius for Easter. I’ll stick around for that, but then – who knows? Still seeing the Little Chef?’ Tilly asked. ‘Bet he doesn’t need Viagra. Bet he does a nice breakfast too. You’ll have to watch your waistline. Mind you, I’m sure you’re working it all off.’
‘Thank you, Tilly. Love you too. I’m not seeing him, I’m just dabbling,’ Jo said. ‘I’m Bridget Jones in reverse,’ she added, putting on a fresh coat of lipstick in front of the mirror. ‘I’ve spent fourteen years of my life with one man and now I want to be single. Well, single-ish. Uncommitted.’
‘The grass is always greener,’ Tilly reminded her, then couldn’t help herself from adding: ‘That’s an awful shade on you. Ageing. You need light pink or apricot.’
‘Thank you, bitch.’
‘You’re finally part of a fashionable new trend, Jo. Yes, darling, you, in your sensible mid-height heels.’
‘I have to leave the office, you know, walk places, go on the tube,’ Jo snapped, ‘I can’t just totter about in my Christian Louboutins or whatever it is you’re into these days. Anyway, what trend?’
‘The kids have left home . . .’
‘What? Aged seven and three,’ Jo interrupted, but this didn’t put Tilly off.
‘You’ve got shot of your boring old husband. All of a sudden you want to wear kinky underwear, smoke, drink and have affairs. Not sure we have a label for it yet. The “gay divorcee” doesn’t work, does it?’
‘What about the “whay-hay divorcee”?’ Jo offered, peering critically at the lipstick. Bloody Tilly, she was always right. It was too dark. She needed pink. Hell. And this was the most expensive lipstick she’d ever bought. Arse.
Back at her desk, Jo left another message for Tony, who was now ‘tied up in a meeting’, she briefed Aidan and Dominique about the wind farm investigation and began with the thing she really wanted to get stuck into – whooping cough.
‘All the cuts on the whooping cough story, can you ping them over to me?’ she asked George in the research library on the phone, ‘And how was Marbella?’
‘Hot. Too hot,’ he moaned.
‘In May?’
‘Global warming,’ he shot back. ‘You should know all about that.’
‘Well, we were in Suffolk for a week, me and the girls, and we could have done with a bit of bloody global warming, I can tell you.’
Jo clicked into her email basket and looked at the list of messages that had arrived in the forty minutes she’d been away.
There was the one she’d been expecting from Jayne, the leader of the support group for ‘vaccine damaged’ children.
Jo, how are you? Called last week, but you were away. Need to speak to you about this whooping cough thing. Do not want parents with vulnerable kids to rush for Quintet. Can provide your paper with a list of considerations. Latest US research info etc. Lots of angry parents wanting to speak to you.
Love Jayne
Jo opened her address book and dialled Jayne’s office number.
‘So, tell me the latest?’ she asked when their friendly preamble was over.
‘OK. US researchers have found a link between a hereditary condition and susceptibility to the kind of brain damage we’re seeing in some of our children.’
Jo liked the way she said ‘our’. Every one of the hundreds of kids Jayne knew about was ‘our’. Yes, she had an autistic child herself, but she fought just as hard for everyone else’s kids.
‘If people know they have this condition running in their family, they must not, on any account, let their child have a vaccination until a full risk assessment is done.’
‘Does the government know about this?’
‘Of course it does. We’ve told them, we’ve sent the Department of Health all the papers, all the contact details of the scientists. But they don’t give a damn. They’re “considering all the evidence”, apparently. They’re quite happy to let other children be harmed, while they consider. They’re prepared to wait for hell to freeze over before they act.’
‘OK, calm, calm,’ Jo soothed, but then asked: ‘Should I have my daughter vaccinated against this whooping cough outbreak?’ Not particularly professional, but she and Jayne had discussed this several times already. ‘Should I let her have Quintet?’
‘How old is she now?’ Jayne asked.
‘Three years and two months.’ Jo’s eyes moved to the little silver-framed photo of her girls on her desk. It was a year old now: Mel laughing hysterically as her two-year-old sister, chubby and pretty as a doll, waved hands clad in giant oven gloves – she should get an updated snap, although it was lovely to remember them like this too.
‘Get a single whooping cough vaccine, if you’re worried. That’s what I’d do, if you don’t want to risk her catching it. And I have to say this one’s a bit nasty, isn’t it? The children are getting really ill. . .’
‘And at least one of them had already been vaccinated . . . so I really don’t know,’ Jo added.
Dominique was holding a piece of paper up in front of her nose. Tony Jarvis on line 2’ was scribbled across it.
‘Jayne, I have to go, sorry, another call. Why don’t you send me that info over? I
’ll see if I can do something with it. Also, I’d like to do some fresh interviews. Some parents who’ve joined you recently. Don’t suppose you’ve got anyone who’s contacted you about a bad reaction to Quintet yet, have you?’
She was doing the ‘just one second’ wave to Dominique.
‘Funny you should ask that,’ Jayne said, ‘I was just coming to that bit. I had parents on the line yesterday. IVF twins. They’re only two years old, they had Quintet the week it was introduced and are suffering all sorts of problems now.’
‘Good grief.’ There was nothing but sympathy in Jo’s voice, but she could feel her story muscles flexing. IVF twins.
My vaccine heartbreak by mum of twins.
This could be cracking.
‘Why don’t you ask them if they’d like to talk to me about it? I’ll call you later. OK. You’re a star, Jayne, really. Bye, darling.’
‘Bye.’
‘Tony,’ Jo clicked to line two.
They did the hellos, how are yous, how was your holiday thing. Then he went straight into: ‘Someone who may well be the first Green MP to get into Westminster wants to do a talk.’
‘Oh yesssss!’ She couldn’t stop the grin.
‘Talented, committed, good-looking, passionate . . . with a great story to tell . . .’
‘Yessssssss! I’m going to stand up and shout this to Jeff, if you don’t mind.’
‘He’s called Finlay Logan,’ Tony went on quickly, before she could do that. ‘He’s standing for election in Glasgow and you’ll love him.’
‘Er. . . he?? Finlay Logan? . . . Glasgow?! No, no, no!
No Tony!’ She was annoyed now, not least because Aidan and Dominique’s eyes had swivelled to her when she’d uttered the first excited ‘yes’.
‘Look Tone, you and I, we go way back, we have history, I came and covered Green Party meetings when only two hippies and their dog turned up. Don’t take the mickey. I can’t profile everyone who’s scraped together a deposit and got themselves nominated.’
‘Jo. There’s another by-election in Glasgow next month. The hope is he’ll achieve an even better result than Savannah.’
‘So, I’ll give you the number of our Scottish desk, they can do Finlay. I want Savannah.’
The Scottish papers have done him. We want him to go national now.’
Then Jo had an idea: ‘I’ll do him with Savannah,’ she said. ‘The Green Team . . . the Green duo set to storm into Westminster. How about that?’
Tony paused. He was obviously imagining headlines along the lines of:
Double Green Whammy, Green Dream Team
while Jo pictured the huge
Savannah Talks exclusive!
With, as a tiny insert, by the way, this is Finlay and he’s quite good too.
‘I like that, Jo. Why didn’t we think of it before?’
Tony asked.
‘Because you’re a bunch of amateurs,’ she teased. ‘I’m meeting Savannah tomorrow, I’ll put this to her. OK? Meanwhile, you look up the cuts on Finlay. You’d like him, you really would. He’s single,’ Tony added cheekily.
‘Thanks, yes, thanks Tone, when I run out of men to date in London, I will come straight to you for advice.’
‘You do that.’
‘Bye bye.’
‘Wind farms—’ She shooed her trainees’ glances back to their screens. ‘Got anything good for me on wind farms yet?’
Chapter Five
University of Warwick researchers found four- and five-year-olds whose families kept animals had less illnesses and school attendance levels 18% higher than their peers without pets.
The Independent
Tuesday: 8.15 p.m.
‘And do you think we can get a kitten? Josie has a kitten. Could I get a kitten for my birthday? Pleeeeeeeease,’ Mel made a last bid to further the conversation, to keep her mother in the bedroom for just a tiny bit longer. Jo had done suppertime and bathtime with her girls, then stories, tucked-up snuggles and now it really was bedtime. And the kitten conversation . . . it was one she didn’t want to have. Not again.
Her children really should have a pet. Of course they should, that was how children were supposed to learn about love, care, sex and death, wasn’t it? From pets. Not from the TV.
And other friends had reported the transforming power of pets. Suddenly their tinies had forgotten all about the collected set of Thomas the Tank and his overpriced plastic friends, the latest Disney DVD release and all sorts of previously pressing requirements and they had played – yes, just played – for hours on end, with their new pet.
So why was it she couldn’t commit to a cat? She didn’t have good cat experiences. She recalled animals that landed heavily on your lap, were soft and purring until they dug their claws in, sinking them in even further when you yelped.
Then there was cat litter, cat food . . . the all-pervasive cat hair, the inconvenience of not being able to go away whenever they wanted to . . . but then, how often did they do that?
Cat care: the anxiety that she didn’t know enough about cat care . . . apparently you had to brush their teeth, de-flea them. It worried her. Was it just that she couldn’t bear to take on responsibility for one more thing? That a kitten was too much? One tiny cat life was going to tip the load, upset the cart? Or was she just being too control-freaky? A cat could look after itself more or less, couldn’t it? It would just come to them for food or company when it wanted to, wasn’t that the point with cats?
‘A kitten . . . I wish for a kitten,’ Annette said with a great, theatrically deep sigh from her pink pillow.
‘Poor Nettie,’ Mel sympathized. ‘She doesn’t even have a school guinea pig to cuddle like me.’
That was so typically sweet of Mel. It never failed to move Jo how close her daughters were. Mel was protective and caring of Nettie and really didn’t take too much advantage of the fact that Nettie worshipped her and would gladly have acted as slave to her every whim.
Jo had expected all sorts of bad reactions to the marital split: tantrums, bed-wetting and bad behaviour. But so far, the girls seemed to be taking it as well as could be expected. Mel was maybe quieter, Nettie was clingy and hated to say goodbye when Jo left them with Simon. But she hoped it would settle down. The children had had to move house and they now spent almost every week in two new homes and two new bedrooms. Understandably, they were disrupted, a little bit at sea with it all.
‘I’ll think about the kitten, OK?’ Jo hovered at the door of their bedroom. A pink paradise, a tribute to Princess Barbie and her many cloned minions.
‘You’re always thinking about it,’ Mel groaned. ‘That’s just what Daddy says as well.’
Little stab in the side at the mention of Daddy. She was slightly surprised Daddy hadn’t caved in and bought the kitten just to win popularity points. She was supposed to phone him, wasn’t she?
She went over and kissed her little girls again, burying her nose in their warm skin. Annette’s fat fold of cheek, it was hard to resist giving it a gentle nibble . . . Mel’s silk-soft, creamy face.
‘Night, night,’ she told them.
She would go and phone Simon now . . . no, she would just do a few things around the house. Then she’d watch the news – oh and she’d phone her mother first.
Her mother was worrying her. Whenever Jo went to her parents’ little house, it seemed to be more and more empty. Her mother had discovered eBay and instead of buying more household goodies, the way she would once have done, she was selling everything that wasn’t nailed down. Anything that wasn’t sold was stored away in those bizarre, shrunken packages – Vacu-sacks.
‘I’m clearing out, getting rid of all my clutter,’ was her mother’s explanation. ‘I’m having a good old spring clean.’
But really, it had gone way beyond that. The sofa cushions had gone, Jo had noticed on the last visit and the rug that had once been underneath the coffee table.
‘Where are the cushions?’ she’d asked.
‘Oh
, I sold them. Didn’t need them any more. Just got in the way, and the rug too.’
‘Where did you sell them, eBay?’ Jo had asked, incredulously.
Her mother had nodded.
‘What did you get for them? Was it worth it, you know, by the time you’d paid for postage?’ Jo couldn’t help asking.
‘Four pounds apiece. That’s probably more than I paid for them. There’s no telling what will do well on eBay. There’s lots of lonely old souls sitting up at night spending too much money on things they don’t really need.’ This said with a mixture of sympathy and disapproval.
Runaway success of eBay caused by insomniac, shopaholic old ladies. Well, there was a surprise revelation.
‘I think your mum would like to Vacu-sack me,’ her dad had joked. ‘Put me in a big plastic bag, suck all the air out, shrink me down with the vacuum cleaner then put me out of sight at the top of the wardrobe for a season or two.’
The bed linen, duvets, towels, pretty well everything left in the house after the eBay clearances had been shrink-wrapped and put into the cupboards.
It was as if her mother was moving house, tying up loose ends, preparing for some sort of change . . . but nothing was on the cards. This was their retirement home. They’d taken the bold decision five years ago to uproot from the small town in Lancashire where they’d lived all their lives, where Jo and her younger brother Matt had grown up, and move to this quiet London suburb, so they could be close to her and the girls. No further moves were planned – so what was all the selling off and the shrink-wrapping about?
Her attention went back to the news: more whooping cough cases, along with some fairly unbelievable pseudo-science about traces of Prozac in the drinking water. Spikey would love that, wouldn’t he? Was that possible? That all the Prozac prescriptions taken every year were being peed out into our drinking supplies and dosing us all? Why weren’t we all much happier then? Why did survey after survey prove that we were all downright miserable?
Jo poured out another third of a glass of wine. How many thirds of a glass was that she’d drunk this evening? Somehow, most of the bottle seemed to have disappeared.
