by Lindsey Kelk
She threw herself at me in a massive hug and beamed happily. ‘There’s got to be a million people you could ask.’
‘I’m going to have to come up with someone soon,’ I said, clambering upright and trying not to vom. I would just run it off, the cramp and the brother/best-friend-related nausea. Run it off all the way to Starbucks and drown my sorrow in muffins. ‘Any ideas?’
‘A million.’ Em nodded at me to start walking. Bloody leg. Bloody exercise. Bloody list. ‘I could take you to a bar tonight, get a drink and you could go home with absolutely any man in there. Picking up boys isn’t hard – it’s one hundred per cent confidence. But walking up to a stranger and saying, “Hey, want to be my date to my father’s wedding in less than two weeks?” isn’t exactly a big turn-on to most men. Unless you pitch it in stockings and suspenders and pair it with blow-job vouchers. Even then—’
‘But I put it on the list,’ I whined. ‘I have to do it.’
‘How’s that going?’ she asked. ‘The list? Where are we?’
Pulling a face, I tried to pick up my pace a little. Nope. Not a natural runner after all. Shit.
‘It was great on Sunday,’ I said. ‘With the hair and the clothes and everything, I felt amazing. Every time I get dressed in my new stuff it’s like, yeah, I can do this today. And I know it sounds stupid but I really don’t think I’d have told Dan exactly what I thought of him if I hadn’t done it. And I found Ethan on Facebook last night, that was cool.’
‘Wedding date candidate?’
‘Probably a bit far for him to come from Toronto.’
‘Ahh, a fellow Canadian.’ She tightened her giant ponytail. ‘Did you message him?’
I shook my head. ‘What’s the point? The list said I had to hunt him down, that’s all. And honestly, just looking at his photo was enough to send me head over heels in crush with him; I don’t think I could cope with actually talking to him. And it’s not like we were best friends or anything. Wouldn’t it be weird?’
‘Not at all, a little online crush could be just what you need,’ she reasoned. ‘Clear the emotional decks, a little flirting practice.’
‘Maybe.’ I was getting much better at being noncommittal. ‘I’ve got a lot of other stuff to worry about anyway. We only have ten days for me to get a tattoo, bungee jump, break the law, find a real live date to my dad’s wedding, write Simon a letter explaining what a knob he is, buy something obscenely expensive with no money and travel to a country I’ve never visited before.’
‘Nothing dramatic then,’ she suddenly sprinted off ahead. ‘We’d better get cracking, hadn’t we?’
Running lasted exactly seven more minutes before Emelie declared she’d had enough and diverted our course from Regent’s Park to the bus stop. I couldn’t say I was against the idea; there was a slight chance I wasn’t quite the natural runner I’d hoped. And besides, today was going to be a busy day. Today was all about the list. Since Matthew had cleared out everything tainted with Simon’s influence, my flat felt incredibly empty, but at least it meant I could actually sit at the desk in the spare bedroom without tripping over his trainers, a half-empty bottle of vodka or, god forbid, twice-worn pants. Why were men incapable of finding their own way to the washing machine? I’d heard terrible rumours that in New York they didn’t have washing machines in their apartments. I pitied the poor girls forced to date boys who had to actually go out to a laundrette to wash their underwear. They probably crawled down the street all on their own. Pulling aside the curtain so I could see the summer sunshine outside, I set my to-do list, my laptop and a steaming cup of tea down on the desk. OK, I meant business. I felt like tying back my hair and putting on some glasses, only my vision was twenty-twenty and my hair was too short to tie back now.
‘Right, where am I?’ I studied the list carefully. Nope, hadn’t changed. Sipping my tea, I pulled my best Carrie Bradshaw pondering face and peered out into the garden. The point of the list was to catch me up on everything I’d missed out on, to show me how much fun it could be to be single and widen my horizons. So far, it had drained my bank balance, stained three white pillowcases red and given me the subconscious horn. Maybe they were important milestones on the road to becoming successfully single. I wasn’t entirely sure where getting fired for the first time in my life came into it but, surely, there was a lesson to be learnt somewhere. I wanted to believe it was ‘I’m mad as hell and not going to take it any more’ but ‘keep your mouth shut or you’ll be bankrupt and homeless within six months, you complete mental’ was more likely.
I picked up my phone and scrolled through the missed calls. One from my mum, accompanied by a well-meaning voicemail; one from the bank, presumably to ask why I thought it was a good idea to spend All My Money on Sunday, and three from my agent, the first one dating back to precisely one hour post-Anagate. I could do this. I was a big girl. I was in control of my life. I was master of my own destiny. I was ready. Taking a very deep breath and then a sip of tea and then scrolling through a few pages of Asos.com and then another deep breath and one more sip of tea for luck, I pressed redial.
Then hung up immediately and opened Facebook.
Ethan’s profile hadn’t changed in the slightest in the last twelve hours but, given that I could only see one picture and see that he lived in Toronto, that was hardly surprising. The ‘send message’ button on the right-hand side of the screen winked at me.
‘Go on,’ it whispered. ‘What’s the worst that can happen? Worst-case scenario, he doesn’t reply. Best-case scenario, he could be the one!’
My finger was poised on the wireless mouse. One click. One message. It was just a message. How many Facebook messages had I had from people I went to school with? People I went to primary school with? And yes, I’d ignored most of them, but still, I hadn’t shared a Twix with them during a trip to see the London Philharmonic on the fourteenth of August, twelve years ago. That was something. He’d remember that. He’d remember me sitting across the aisle and two rows behind him on the bus. He wouldn’t think I was a freak. But, just in case, I immediately went through my Facebook pictures and untagged any and everything that could be conceivably considered to be unattractive. Gone were the Halloween pictures of me dressed as a Fraggle. Gone were the pictures of me tossed over Matthew’s shoulder. Gone were the pictures of me in a bikini – he could make his mind up about that situation as and when he came to it. Just one message.
I opened up the dialogue box and typed ‘hi’ into the subject. Hi. That was OK, wasn’t it? There was nothing potentially crazy about hi? There was nothing bunny boiler about a simple hello.
Now, for the message. Hi Ethan, I began, I don’t know if you remember me, we were in orchestra together when we were kids.
‘Eurgh,’ delete, delete, delete. When we were kids? Because now I’m a dried-up old crone whom no one wants and so I’ve been reduced to hunting you down online because you’re my last chance at love! How’s it going?
‘They’re always saying Facebook ruins marriages in the Daily Mail,’ I whined out loud. ‘Why is this so hard?’ Maybe Matthew was right; perhaps photos of genitals were the way forward. Hey Ethan, Check these out – they’re my boobs. Love Rachel xoxo. This was just too difficult. There was no way to send a message without looking like an obsessive stalker or a sad loser. Until I’d decided which of those was preferable, I’d just keep looking at his manly photo. And keep opening a photo of me right next to it so I could see what we’d look like together. We looked good. And this would be a funny story to tell the grandkids, wouldn’t it? Guess what, before your nana and granddad got together, your nana may or may not have cut herself out of a picture from her dad’s second wedding where her bridesmaid dress looked a bit like a wedding dress and then pasted it into a picture of your dad. Simon once told me loads of guys he knew used Facebook as a porno substitute when they were having ‘a quiet five minutes alone’. I wasn’t sure which was worse, masturbating over the girl in accounts’ holiday photos or Photoshopping
pretend wedding photos. Yes I did. Yes I did.
Thoroughly ashamed, I accepted that it was time for my punishment. I picked up the phone.
‘Veronica Mantle,’ she answered right away. ‘Can I help you?’
Uh-oh.
Now, I knew for a fact that Veronica recognized my number. And for the six years she had been my agent, her response to seeing that number on her screen was exclusively ‘what the fuck do you want?’ or ‘darling, I have fantastic news’, so either she’d had a recent head trauma and developed a completely new personality, or this was some hilarious joke. That only she was in on.
‘Veronica? It’s Rachel.’
Nothing.
‘Rachel Summers?’
‘No, it can’t be,’ she replied. ‘She’s dead.’
Double uh-oh.
‘Um, no, definitely not dead.’ I tried a nervous laugh but it just came out as a faint squawk. ‘Felt it yesterday though.’
‘Right.’ Veronica did not return my squawk. ‘But if Rachel wasn’t dead, she would have returned my calls before now. Or fled the country before I came over to her house to kill her.’
The last two words were so carefully enunciated, I actually turned in my seat to see if there was a Tarantino-esque hit man at the door.
‘Yeah,’ I mumbled into a steadying sip of tea. ‘Not dead. Dumped, not dead.’
‘I haven’t dumped you yet.’ Her voice was worryingly breezy. ‘Oh god no. If this in fact is Rachel and she isn’t dead, I won’t be dumping her until she’s had the mother of all roastings, cried like a baby and begged for my forgiveness. Then, if she’s really lucky, then I’ll dump her sorry arse and she won’t fucking work another day in her hopefully very short life. Have you got any fucking idea what sort of damage limitation I’ve had to do because of your fucking temper tantrum? How many arses I’ve had to kiss? I thought I was going to have to suck Ana’s dick to calm her down at one point. And she doesn’t have a dick, Rachel. So how was I going to do that? Tell me how?’
Veronica never had been one to mince words.
‘I don’t know?’
‘So no, I haven’t dumped you yet. I suggest you start your grovelling apology now and I’ll let you know when to stop, you fucking knob.’
‘I meant Simon dumped me,’ I whispered. And I’m sorry. Very, very, very, very, very, very, very—’
‘What the fuck?’
Was cutting me off mid-apology the same as letting me know when to stop?
‘Rachel, what did you just say?’
‘Simon dumped me?’
‘When?’
‘Saturday?’
‘And you went to work on Monday?’
‘I did.’
‘Even though you knew you were going to have to work with that ridiculous twat?’
Did she mean Dan or Ana?
‘Yes.’
‘In that case, what can I do for you today, my love?’
I held my phone away from my ear to check the number. Had I just redialled my mum by mistake?
‘Really?’ It wasn’t that I wanted to push my luck, just make sure I hadn’t been whacked and then slipped into some sort of personal heaven where life suddenly became easy.
‘You should have fucking called me before now.’ She dialled her volume down from eleven to somewhere around eight and a half. A good sign. ‘And you should never have fucking gone in the first place but since you haven’t fucked up ever before and that, as of right now, you are my own personal bitch, I’ll let this one go. Did you know she’s fucking Dan?’
‘I did.’ I stopped waiting for the barrel of the rifle to pop through the letterbox and turned my attention back to my tea. ‘They’re going to have to come up with a new kind of STD for them to give each other.’
‘Well, you owe him a thank you,’ Veronica replied. ‘He talked her down. I’d say send flowers but maybe a box of assorted condoms would be better. Barbed-wired for her pleasure.’
‘Nice,’ I winced and crossed my legs.
‘You’ve also got a “let’s go out and get twatted on expenses” voucher to redeem. You free later?’
She really was a great agent. If it weren’t for the fact she’d told my mum that all she really needed was to go out and get properly shagged at my twenty-fifth birthday party before blasting out ‘I Touch Myself’ on karaoke, I’d have even called her my friend.
‘I think I’m still hungover from Saturday. And Sunday.’ Still far too soon for alcohol. ‘But there is something you could help me with.’
‘You do know I can’t actually have anyone killed, don’t you?’ She lowered her voice. ‘Not that I want that getting out to the masses.’
‘I assumed people just killed themselves on your command.’ I touched the list for good luck. ‘No, I was hoping you could get me some international work. I really want to travel for a bit.’
‘Hmm.’ The keys of her keyboard clicked for a few moments. ‘I’m not just going to be able to pull something out of my arse for you on this, you know? There aren’t that many people out there who know you. Which is entirely your own fucking fault.’
‘I know,’ I said, turning my profanity filter up a notch. I hardly ever even heard it any more. ‘But I really want to get out there. I don’t care if it’s shows or shoots, studio, location, whatever.’
‘You haven’t done anything on location in years.’
If she hadn’t been an agent, Veronica would have made a fantastic mechanic. She was a teeth-sucking away from, ‘And I don’t like the look of that head gasket one little bit’.
‘Now, if Dan weren’t fucking furious with you, he’s got a job booked in Sydney in a couple of weeks. I could have pulled some strings and got you on that if he’d insisted. The editors love him.’
Oh, fuck a duck.
‘Give me a couple of days, yeah?’ She sounded confident enough. ‘And just take it easy until then. Go out, get twatted, shag some ridiculously fit moron who won’t be able to follow you home. Never been a better time to be single, Rachel. Women have the dicks now. We’re the men. We say who, we say when, we say where and we say how. Who wants a boyfriend when you’ve got bigger balls than they have?’
I said my goodbyes, chugged my cold tea and spent the rest of the afternoon trying not to think about the size of Veronica Mantle’s balls.
CHAPTER TEN
‘Raaaa-cheeeeel.’ I felt a hand lightly tapping the top of my head. ‘Waaaaaakey-waaaakey.’
As long as I lived, I would never, ever forgive Matthew for waking me up in the middle of a dream involving Ethan Harrison, a music stand and certain acts that 16-year-old Rachel would have been horrified by because her mum said they made you a loose woman. And that was when the term ‘loose women’ still meant you were just a bit of a slag, not Jane McDonald, a former Coronation Street barmaid or a Nolan.
I really didn’t feel like getting up. After speaking to Veronica, I’d spent the rest of the day cleaning out my cupboards, trekking all my crap down to the charity shop and carting three tins of emulsion, two roller trays and a selection of paintbrushes back from B&Q. Of course, by the time I’d got home and stuck masking tape all round the doorframe, I was too knackered to do anything else. I blamed my run. Marathon, practically.
‘What time is it?’
‘It’s almost ten.’ He pulled the cushion out of my hands and started bashing me over the head with it. ‘Get your arse up. We have to be there by half eleven; it was the only time they could fit us in.’
At least Matthew brought coffee to accompany his violence. I shuffled into a sitting position and held my hand out for caffeine-y goodness before I could even open my eyes properly.
‘Excellent work on the sugar-to-coffee ratio,’ I mumbled, glugging it down.
‘Since you’re still in the first few days of this process, you’re allowed a lie-in,’ Matthew grabbed an arm and pulled. ‘But really, we have an appointment.’
‘You’re not getting me fitted for some horrifying contraceptive device,
are you?’ I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes. ‘Where are we going?’
‘If I tell you, it won’t be a surprise, will it?’ He snatched my coffee and held it over his head.
Totally cheating.
If there was one thing Matthew loved, aside from doing it with boys, it was a surprise. Once he’d prised me out of bed and dragged Emelie away from her computer, he refused to part with any details of where we were headed. All we knew was that it was twenty minutes away and we were headed there on foot. I was so knackered by the time we came to a halt outside a pair of big black wooden doors, I was pretty certain I’d agree to whatever he had planned as long as it meant I could have a sit-down.
Which was a bit of luck actually.
The three of us were standing outside a tattoo parlour.
‘Am I really doing this?’ I asked, looking from one to the other. ‘Seriously?’
‘Totally serious,’ Matthew nodded. ‘But not you, us. I was thinking about the list and you’re right. There’s no joy in sitting around moping, so I wanted to help. This was pretty much the only one I could organize at short notice. Looks like bungee jumping is going to take a few days.’
I launched myself at him in a giant hug. ‘Jumping off a bridge with a skipping rope tied to my ankles aside, I’m actually really excited.’ I could feel all my hair giddiness rearing back up. Times a million. ‘I can’t believe we’re getting tattoos.’
‘Why do I have to get one?’ Emelie dug her hands into the pockets of her cardi. ‘I really, really don’t like needles.’
‘Because we’re doing this together.’ Matthew pulled her into the hug against her will. ‘And because you’ve already sodding well got one anyway.’
She responded with her middle finger.
‘So what are we getting?’ I asked, half desperate to get in there and get inked before I lost my nerve, half terrified. If Em already had a tat and was behaving like this, just how much was it going to hurt?
