Then Claire said, “Obviously trying to steal your sister’s boyfriend would be bad and wrong, but…”
“But what?” I said.
“If you were to decide to just sort of gently entice him away a bit, which would obviously make you a really horrible person…”
“Then what?” I said.
“Then it might help if you had a friend who was a really bad person too, and had a brilliant, evil master plan that could help you do it.”
I said, “I know you’re breastfeeding, but shall we open another bottle of wine?”
“My midwife reckons that unless you get so pissed you forget you even have a baby, it’s all good,” Claire said. “There’s some Viognier in the fridge.”
CHAPTER FOUR
“Night out tonight at mystery venue?” I texted to Ben. “Meet at mine at 8 for warm-up drinks. Dress like you’re auditioning for Made in Chelsea. E xx.”
It was the last working day of the year and Rose and I were getting the train to Buckinghamshire the next day to spent Christmas with Dad and Serena. But, as you generally do at this time of year, I felt the need for one last big night out before we left London. Usually I would have met a group of mates and headed to Brixton or Camden for a gig, or to the South Bank if we felt the need to imbibe some culture with our drinks, or out for dinner if we were feeling flush. Tonight, though, I had a different plan.
I’d picked Rose’s brains earlier in the day.
“Where do your flash friends hang out these days?” I’d asked as we walked to the station together, Rose to head north to St James’s, where Quinn’s has its palatial headquarters; I to get the train to Waterloo and then the tube to London Bridge and the considerably shabbier offices of YEESH.
“Which ones?” Rose asked. “The media ones, or the art ones, or the bankers, or the young and trendy?”
“The young and trendy, I guess,” I said. “I want to show Ben how the other half lives.”
“Then Mahiki, probably,” she said. “It’s not new but it’s still on trend. Prince Harry goes there sometimes, and loads of models and football players.”
“That sounds perfect,” I said. “I suppose I need to book?”
“Book?” Rose laughed. “Too late for that, I think. You’ll have to turn up and queue with the commoners and get turned away by the door bitch. Their entrance policy is brutal. Borrow my Louis Vuitton bag if you like – it’s no guarantee but it won’t hurt.”
“Really?” I said. The Louis Vuitton bag was new – an early Christmas present from one of her art-loving admirers, and it was very close to Rose’s heart. “Thanks. You’re an angel. I promise I’ll look after it.” By this stage we’d reached the station and we said goodbye, and I went up to platform three and Rose walked into the tunnel in the direction of the coffee shop and platform twelve.
Normally nothing – but nothing – would persuade me to try and get into a place that had a door policy based on anything other than making a reservation or first come first served. The idea that someone can get to queue-jump on the basis of who they are or what they look like is absolute anathema to me – and of course as a committed republican the idea of hanging out in Prince Harry’s favourite haunts doesn’t exactly float my boat either. But I had decided to dip my toe into Rose’s world – the world I would have to inhabit if I were to appear as more than the faintest blip on Oliver’s radar – and besides, I had a secret weapon.
My friend Ashira works on the arts and ents pages of the Evening Standard, and she’s always saying that they can get in absolutely anywhere, places are competing so desperately for favourable publicity. Ashira’s job involves reviewing films, plays and world music by unknown directors and artists, but the clubs and restaurants don’t know that, and as soon as she mentions the paper’s name, she’s in, she says. So when I got to the office, while I was in that drinking coffee, checking emails, chatting to colleagues about last night’s X Factor stage of the morning during which nothing important ever gets done, I sent her an email asking her to get me and Ben into Mahiki.
“Mahiki??!!” she emailed back. “Are you having a giraffe? You don’t want to go to Mahiki, it’s full of pretentious wankers in blazers.”
So I hastily made up some story about a callow ex-university friend of Ben’s who was up in London from the provinces and whose life ambition it was to see Rosie Huntington-Whiteley in the flesh, and we’d said we would try and sort it. I considered saying that the friend had some terrible disease and Ben and I were acting as a two-person Reach for a Dream foundation, but I thought that might be a bit much, so I left it there, and a few minutes later Ash mailed me back to say it was all sorted and there would be a table for three booked in my name at eleven that evening, and I finished my coffee and punched the air and went “Yessss!” and Ruth and Duncan stopped their conversation on the other side of the office and looked at me as if I was barking mad. Then I texted Ben and told him to prepare for my magical mystery evening.
By the time eight o’clock rolled round I was feeling a bit less chipper. My wardrobe had revealed its shortcomings yet again, especially as I’d realised that jeans for women in smart nightclubs simply are not done. I’d checked the Heat magazine website and every single Z-list celebrity photographed arriving at or falling out of Mahiki had been wearing a dress, presumably to allow the long lenses of the paparazzi easier access to their knickers. So I’d had to do an emergency dash to Debenhams at lunchtime, and all I had managed to find was a rather dull black dress that made me look like I was going to a funeral, but was at least slimming. But it kept gaping open at the front, revealing my cleavage-boosting yet in itself terribly unattractive flesh-coloured bra, and the copious amounts of Rose’s tit tape I’d used kept sticking to strands of my hair, and I’d got a bit sweaty wrestling into control-top pants in my overheated bedroom and my nose had gone all shiny and in short I was feeling about as far from a young and trendy nightclub-goer as it’s possible to get.
But when Ben turned up at the door he did a huge double-take and said, “Wow, Ellie, you look gorgeous!” Bless Ben, he always can make me feel better about myself. And actually he was looking not un-hot himself, in a long tweed overcoat that almost brushed his Converse high-tops, a black jumper and jeans that – I had to lean over and peer at his bottom to check, which is never a hardship – had a designer label.
“True Religion?” I said, “Get you!” And he explained that they were actually the result of a lunchtime panic-buying trip to TK Maxx, and I explained about my lunchtime panic-buying trip to Debenhams, and we ripped the piss out of each other about our fashion failure while Ben opened a bottle of fizz and poured us both a glass.
“So,” he said, “Am I allowed to ask where we’re going?”
“Mahiki,” I said.
“Mahiki?” Ben used exactly the same incredulous tone that had come across in Ash’s email. “Isn’t that full of cunts?”
I looked at him, my mate Ben, with his champagne glass frozen half way to his lips. I thought how nice it would be to tell him everything: my stupid crush on Oliver, how I’d told Claire about it and the advice she’d given me, trusting that I wasn’t going to follow it, how I’d got Ash to blag us on to the guest list because I thought it was the kind of place where people like Oliver might go, and since I’d become friends with Oliver on Facebook I wanted to post status updates that made me sound as if I lived his and Rose’s kind of life. But it was all too complicated, and it made me sound like the kind of person Ben wouldn’t much like, and nor would I for that matter, so I just said, “I need to broaden my horizons.” I did tell him about his mythical friend with the crush on Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, though, and we had a good laugh about that while we finished the bottle of cava and a tub of cheese footballs. Then we put on our coats and I picked up Rose’s bag – a really beautiful, floppy envelope made of soft gold leather – and checked I had keys, phone and lipstick, and we headed out into the frosty night.
When I saw the queue outside the door
I almost grabbed Ben and legged it. I don’t know when I’ve felt more intimidated than I did walking past that crowd of designer-clad, swishy-haired lovelies – and that was just the men. All of them gazed covetously at Ben as we passed, or perhaps they were looking at Rose’s handbag, or resenting our ability to stride to the front of the queue while they waited in the cold. I was expecting a hard hand to land on my shoulder at any moment and a sinister voice to say something like, “You don’t belong here, missus. Your hair is all wrong and your frock is from Debenhams and we know that bag isn’t yours and we’ve heard reports that you read the Guardian. Now come quietly, we don’t want any trouble.” But we reached the door unmolested, gave our names to the beautiful, reed-thin blonde girl who wielded the Clipboard of Power, and we were admitted and shown to our table, which was behind a gigantic fern-like plant next to the loos, so clearly there were limits to Ash’s miracle-working.
Ben peered at the cocktail menu in the gloom. “Is your name Vicky?” he said.
“What?” I leaned forward. The chairs were the kind that sort of trap you in a semi-recumbent position so you’re closer to the people at the next-door table than you are to the person at your own, and the music was so loud I’d be willing to bet people carried on conversations all night without hearing a word. Or perhaps I’m just getting old, deaf and carmudgeonly.
“I said, what the hell’s tiki?” Ben shouted.
I explained, mostly by the medium of sign language, that it involved tropical islands and lots of rum, and we ordered some absurd cocktails that came in hollowed-out pineapples, and sat sipping and observing the crowd.
Whenever Rose told me about nights out with her friends, she made them sound like the best fun ever. Whether or not you care about Tara getting off with Tristram and Pippa Middleton being seen fixing a ladder in her tights in the ladies’, Rose and her mates always seemed to spend nights out dancing until their feet were killing them and laughing until their stomachs ached and generally having a fantastic time. But all I could see around us were groups of people trying to look achingly cool and hence looking like they weren’t having much fun at all, ordering bottles of vodka and champagne and bellowing conversations at one another. All the girls were impossibly thin and beautiful and had glossy, artfully tousled hair and the sort of make-up that’s meant to be shiny, as opposed to getting that way towards the end of the night, as mine does. They might not have looked like they were enjoying themselves, but my god, they looked good. Even if I spent the next month being starved, plucked, scrubbed and styled, I didn’t think I could look like that. The men seemed to fall into two categories: those wearing suits with no ties, lounging against pillars holding glasses of vodka, and the loud, lairy, sweaty rugby-player types, dragging girls on to the dance floor. I looked at Ben and wondered if he was feeling as out of place as I was, but he was drinking his pina colada with apparent relish and looking around grinning like he was having the time of his life.
I noticed that in between looking cool and indifferent, lots of people were frantically tapping away at high-end iPhones and Blackberries, presumably reassuring themselves that this was, in fact, the very coolest place to be at that particular moment and there wasn’t a much better party taking place a few hundred yards down the road. I wondered what would happen if Kate Moss or Peaches Geldof or someone were spotted elsewhere – presumably the news would spread like wildfire on Twitter and there would be a run on the place, possibly with fatalities as everyone tried to get to the door at once. I considered testing the theory but I didn’t actually know the names of anywhere nearby where I could pretend to have spotted them, and anyway only about twenty of my friends follow me on Twitter.
I got my phone out of Rose’s bag anyway, and tweeted, “At Mahiki with @BenedictTheRed. Have complicated cocktail and designer bag. No selebs spotted yet – boo hiss.” I’m sure I am not alone in observing that mobile phone use is contagious. It’s like when you’re with someone and they yawn, and seconds later you can’t help yawning too. Anyway, as I typed I looked over at Ben and saw him fight for self-control and lose, then, compelled by an irresistible force, take out his own phone and start tapping away.
To be fair to Ben, he does have a very good reason to be surgically attached to his phone. I think I mentioned that he works as an adviser to Lucille Field, the MP. Anyone who takes an interest in politics will have followed the story of her fall from grace with horrified relish – it was widely reported in the press as one of the first casualties of social media use. Lucille was a shadow cabinet minister with responsibility for children and the family or some such – basically a role covering soft issues that most politicians don’t actually think are all that important but which they have to be seen to care about because the electorate does. But she’s considered to be very brilliant and was tipped to have a bright future ahead of her. Then she launched herself on to the Twitterverse. Lucille thought this would be a great way to communicate with her constituents whilst appearing to be down with the kids, and before you knew it she had loads of random voters and the more technically savvy MPs following her. All went well for a while until Lucille had a disagreement with the Leader of the Opposition over something or other, and posted a tweet saying, “I don’t so much mind our dear leader’s lack of policy – it’s his eyewatering halitosis (never to be mentioned) that brings shame upon us all” – exactly one hundred and forty characters, which I thought showed commendable accuracy. Unfortunately Lucille didn’t send the tweet in reply to one of her trusted allies, but to all her fourteen thousand followers, all of whom instantly went off to Google images of people recoiling from close contact with said dear leader, and attach them to retweets of Lucille’s trenchant words, and the story even made the front pages of the tabloids for a couple of days. The net result was she was shuffled off the shadow cabinet sharpish, and poor Ben spends an awful lot of time on Twitter pretending to be Lucille, because he won’t allow her to send her own tweets any more. I’m just waiting for the day when he too slips up and tweets something like “Off to meet @EllieMottram to get off our tits on Stella and have a curry” from Lucille’s account instead of his own, but I think he is probably too technically proficient to make such a rookie error, and anyway he’s really discreet about his personal life.
I checked Rose’s Twitter feed and saw that she was at her work end-of-year party, and checked Oliver’s but it was full of incomprehensible stuff about the futures market. Then I put my phone away and we ordered another cocktail – one that came in a coconut shell this time, with two straws so that we could share it. We drank it and looked around at the beautiful people some more, and tried to have a conversation about them over the music, and I realised that I was terribly bored. There – I said it. I was with one of my favourite people in a fabulous place, and all I could think was how much more fun we’d be having if we were drinking pints of lager or rough red wine in a low-key bar, chatting about a film or exhibition we’d just seen. This is what it must be like to be a proper socialite, I thought – not only do you have to put a huge amount of effort into the way you look, but you have to turn up to places where you don’t necessarily want to be and talk to people who you don’t want to talk to. Thankfully I was spared that fate, because I didn’t know anyone there except Ben, but I thought about all the parties Rose has been to over the years with the sole purpose of ‘networking’, and I wondered how on earth she found the stamina for it. That’s Rose for you though – when she sets out to achieve something, she doesn’t give up. The room was warm and I was actually feeling quite sleepy from the two cocktails – it was after one in the morning, too, the night starts late when you are a socialite, I suppose, and have nothing more important to get up for in the morning than an eleven o’clock with your pedicurist. I felt my jaw creak and the next thing my face split in a huge yawn, and when I looked sideways at Ben I saw him yawn too. I stretched my leg out and poked his thigh with the pointy toe of my shoe.
“Shall we go?” I mouthed.
&nb
sp; Ben nodded with undisguised enthusiasm and stood up, and we ploughed a path through the beautiful people towards the door, and there, at the heart of a cluster of the most beautiful people of all, was Oliver. He was in the suit-with-no-tie camp, his hair was flopping over his forehead, and his long, elegant fingers were wrapped around the stem of a cocktail glass. No coconuts or pineapples for Oliver, I noticed – he was drinking a martini with olives in it. I instantly resolved to shun sweet, pink drinks forthwith and learn to like dry martinis if it killed me, which it probably would because, let’s face it, they are bloody horrible things. I’d like to say that the music faded to silence and the crowds melted away, leaving us alone as our eyes locked together and our lips met in a kiss that seemed to last forever, but that would obviously be ridiculous. I stopped in my tracks when I saw him, and said lamely, “Hello! Fancy bumping into you here,” and we kissed each other’s cheeks, or rather sort of clashed jaws, like you do, and Oliver said, “What a coincidence,” and then he winked at me, so I knew he’d seen my tweet and wasn’t surprised to see me at all. I wondered whether, just maybe, it was knowing that I’d be there that had made Oliver decide to come, but that was way too far-fetched. He probably dropped in all the time.
“What would you like to drink?” Oliver asked.
I opened my mouth to say I’d love a dry martini, but Ben said, “Nothing, thanks, we were just leaving actually.” He didn’t look particularly pleased to see Oliver. I’d have thought the two of them would get on quite well, both being bright and more or less the same age and having so much else in common, but they didn’t appear to be hitting it off much.
“Are you sure?” Oliver said. “Ellie?”
“No, really, we ought to be going,” I said. “I’ve an early start tomorrow. Rose and I are off to spend Christmas with our dad and stepmum.” Which of course made me sound dull, prim and about twelve years old.
It Would Be Wrong to Steal My Sister's Boyfriend Page 4
