Good at Games

by Jill Mansell

  “Some bloke last week asked me if she was our groupie.” Vince, the bass guitarist, joined in. “Jaz, I’m serious, she’s fucking up our image. People are starting to mock us.”

  “You ungrateful bastards. What’s the matter with you?” Jaz was fairly drunk, but he defended Fee as he always did. “We’d be nowhere without her. She’s keeping this show on the road practically single-handed.”

  “Don’t tell me you fancy her,” jeered Vince.

  “Of course not,” lied Jaz. Because he did, quite. “I’m just saying, she does a bloody good job.”

  It was Jaz’s dream to become famous, so it became Fee’s dream too. But instead of trusting to luck like the rest of the band, who felt that—rather like love at first sight—being spotted and signed to a label should somehow just miraculously happen, Fee sent copies of Fireball’s six best songs to every A&R manager at every record company in London and told them that if they thought the tape was good, they should see the band playing live.

  SellOut Records signed up Fireball a fortnight later.

  “Makes a change from the van, doesn’t it?” said Jaz, arriving at Fee’s house the following evening in a chauffeur-driven white limo. “C’mon then, are we going out on the town or what?”

  “You’ve arranged all this for me?” Running her fingers through her dark red hair, her eyes like saucers, Fee was both astonished and overjoyed.

  Jaz grinned and took her trembling hand. “Why not? You’re worth it.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Bloody everywhere, seeing as it cost me eighty quid and now I’m broke.” Jaz was rueful. “That’s the trouble with these record companies, they don’t shower you with money the moment you sign the contract. Sadly, you have to earn it first.”

  They drove down to Burnham-on-Sea, ate fish and chips and drank Blackthorn Cider—paid for by Fee—in the back of the limo, and later made love among the sand dunes, while the chauffeur stayed in the car and listened to Radio 2.

  It was the happiest night of Fee’s life. Having spent the last six months being quietly envious of the miniskirted girls who flocked around Jaz and all too often disappeared into the back of the van with him, she now knew that what she’d been missing out on all this time was every bit as wonderful as she’d imagined.

  Even if the sand was a bit…well, sandy.

  “I can’t believe this is happening,” Fee whispered afterward, lying back and gazing up at the stars.

  “Me neither. We’re going to be the biggest band in the world.” Jaz reached for the bottle of Blackthorn he had brought along with him. “And it’s all thanks to you.”

  This wasn’t quite what she’d meant, but Fee didn’t mind. Tears of happiness filled her eyes.

  “I love you.” There, she’d said it. She knew she wasn’t supposed to, but who cared?

  “We could be playing Wembley before Christmas. Imagine jetting off around the world—hearing your stuff on the radio…going to the same parties as Bono.”

  Fee bit her lip. She really wished she hadn’t said it now. A cool breeze swept across her bare legs, breaking her out in goose bumps.

  “What? You’ve gone quiet,” said Jaz. He put his warm hand on her thigh. “Don’t you think it’ll be great?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Aren’t you excited?” Frowning, he half sat up. “Don’t you like Bono?”

  “Does it matter if I do or not? I’m not going to be the one meeting him.” Tipping her head away so he couldn’t see, Fee wiped her eyes. “But I’m excited for you, really I am.”

  With his fingers on her chin, Jaz gently tilted her face back toward him.

  “Why are you crying? Do you think I did this tonight for a bet, or something?”

  “No. Well, not a bet, exactly. But maybe as a kind of thank-you,” admitted Fee.

  “As in, thank you for getting us a record deal?” Jaz smiled down at her. “Oh dear. You must have a pretty low opinion of me.”

  “Wrong,” said Fee. “I have a high opinion of you and a low one of me.”

  He couldn’t bear to think of her being unhappy. They owed her everything. And she was worth twenty of the blond miniskirted bimbos who eyed him so hungrily each time he stepped onto the stage.

  “Well, stop it.” Jaz stroked her dark red hair away from her face. “You’re my girlfriend now. You and me, we’re a couple. A team.”

  * * *

  He meant it too. The more people sneered and said it wouldn’t last, the more absolutely determined Jaz became to make sure it did. And when Fireball’s first single rocketed to the top of the charts, he celebrated by drinking a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and asking Fee to marry him. Fee, no longer working at the bank, busied herself finding them somewhere to live. With the money that had started to roll in, they acquired a huge Victorian town house on Sian Hill in Clifton, with stunning views over the Suspension Bridge and the Avon Gorge. The neighbors, a retired army colonel and his wife, were horrified when they discovered who was moving in next door to them. They were even more horrified when Jaz and Fee held a housewarming party for five hundred guests, and the colonel found a couple of dozen passed out in his garden the next morning.

  In the three years that followed, Fireball had another four number-one singles, plus two chart-topping albums. The parties got wilder, and Jaz’s drinking spiraled out of control. When Fee tried to tell him to slow down, he called her a spoilsport. When she threatened to leave him, he gazed at her through bloodshot eyes and said coldly, “Don’t lecture me. I’m not a kid.”

  The colonel and his wife had had enough. They put their house on the market, but by this time, Jaz’s exploits were so legendary that nobody else wanted to buy it.

  “He’s going to sue you,” said Fee, reading the letter from their neighbors’ lawyer, “for devaluing his property.”

  It was ten o’clock in the morning, and Jaz was drinking Stolichnaya, poured into a can of 7UP so that Fee wouldn’t notice and start nagging again.

  He closed his eyes. “How can I get this bloke off my back?”

  “You could buy the house,” Fee suggested.

  Would that solve all his problems? Somewhat hazily, Jaz decided that it would.

  “OK, let’s do it. You sort it out.”

  * * *

  On their fourth wedding anniversary, and at her wits’ end, Fee gave him her ultimatum.

  “You’re always drunk. I can’t carry on like this. Either you sort yourself out or I’m leaving you.”

  “Nag nag nag.” Jaz sighed. “And you wonder why I’d rather be with my friends than with you.”

  Trembling, Fee stood her ground. “You’re killing yourself. Will you stop drinking? Please?”

  He pulled a face. Why did she always have to do this? “I don’t want to stop. I’m having fun.”

  Looking down at Jaz in bed, Fee said sadly, “Are you sure?”

  * * *

  Fee moved out of the house…and into the one next door. This raised a few eyebrows, but since it suited her purposes and was convenient, she ignored them and carried on regardless. To occupy herself, she set about having the place converted into luxury apartments.

  Jaz, vaguely put out by his wife’s defection, decided she’d only done it to annoy him. To get his own back, he taunted her with a succession of groupies, pretty young girls with bleached blond hair and adoring smiles.

  “If you’re trying to make me jealous,” Fee told him wearily one day, “it isn’t working. I feel sorry for them, and I feel sorry for you. I certainly don’t feel sorry for me.”

  Chapter 3

  Curtis and Co., Real Estate Agents, occupied a prime position in the heart of Clifton. With ten minutes to spare before her next appointment, Suzy was perched on the edge of her desk licking the icing off a white chocolate éclair from Charlotte’s Patisserie when Jaz stuck his head arou
nd the door.

  “Is that how you recruit your customers nowadays?” He grinned and waved briefly at Donna, tap-tapping away at her computer.

  “Certainly is.” Suzy bit into the éclair. Her eyes sparkled as she licked cream from her fingers. “Want to buy a house, sir?”

  “Thanks, but I’ve got plenty already, what with me being so rich.”

  “You can never have too many houses, sir.”

  “Go on then, I’ll take a dozen,” said Jaz. “Actually, I’m on my way to the gym. Maeve asked me to drop by and invite you over for dinner tonight. She’s doing one of her specials.”

  Suzy raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Maeve asked you?”

  “OK, slip of the tongue. She told me. And you aren’t invited around, you’re coming around,” Jaz amended. “Seven o’clock, don’t be late.” He paused. “You all right?”

  The funeral was tomorrow. Hence Maeve’s concern, bless her. Suzy nodded.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Actually, you’re not,” he told her cheerfully. “You’ve got icing on your chin.”

  “Now I remember why I divorced you,” said Suzy, picking a pen off her desk and throwing it at him.

  “I’ve worked here for six months now,” said Donna when Jaz had left, “and I still don’t know how you two first met.”

  “No? It was all thanks to my mother actually. Which annoyed her no end.” Suzy crossed one leg over the other and jiggled a high heel. “We were in the car having this massive argument, and I jumped out. As you do. So she drove off and left me, like a lemon, at the side of the road.”

  “Where were you?” Donna interrupted, clearly trying to picture the scene.

  “On the M4. Somewhere between Reading and Swindon.”

  “God, the highway…”

  “Anyhow, I was crying my eyes out. My shoes were still in the car, and I didn’t know what on earth I was going to do next. Then a white Porsche pulled up ahead of me and Jaz got out. He was on his way back from London—it was pretty miraculously one of his sober days—and he asked me if I’d broken down. So I howled for a bit and told him all about the fight with my mother, and he offered me a lift home.”

  “Cool,” said Donna, impressed. “Nothing like that ever happens to me.”

  “So on the way back, he found out that I lived in Bristol too, only a couple of miles from him. And he was so sweet, when I kept blubbing and saying I never wanted to see my hateful mother again, he offered to take me back to his place until I’d calmed down.”

  “Double cool.” Donna sighed. “And then I guess he just seduced you.”

  Suzy’s smile was wry. “Well, I like to think I seduced him, but what can I tell you? I was eighteen.” She shrugged. “I thought I was in love with Jaz Dreyfuss.”

  “Weren’t you?”

  “Lust.” Suzy paused, struggling to be honest. “Or more likely in love with the idea of getting out of my mother’s house for good.”

  Mystified, Donna said, “Couldn’t you have just moved into a studio apartment?”

  “I could have, but it wouldn’t have irritated her nearly so much.”

  Donna was struggling to find a speck of romance among the debris. “But you liked him, surely?”

  “Oh, of course I did, I fancied him rotten.” Smiling, Suzy remembered that feeling in the pit of her stomach, like an aviary full of hummingbirds. “He was lovely to me, he was gorgeous-looking, he was rich and a famous rock star…crikey, who wouldn’t?”

  “And he liked you.” Donna was hopeful.

  “Oh, he liked me all right. Almost as much as he liked drinking.”

  “Was it really awful? I can’t imagine what he was like.”

  “Jaz?” Suzy paused; this was something else she remembered only too clearly. “Well, he drank. And drank. And drank and drank and drank. And then he drank some more. What you have to understand is that back then I was quite innocent in that respect. I’d never known an alcoholic before. For a while, I didn’t realize how bad it actually was. Half the time, I just thought he was lying around unconscious because he was a rock star and…basically, that’s what rock stars do.”

  Donna blinked her heavily mascaraed eyelashes. “And then you married him.”

  “I was nineteen. People shouldn’t be allowed to marry when they’re nineteen and hell-bent on getting back at their mothers. They should have pretend marriages,” said Suzy, “like little kids have pretend shops, with Monopoly money and packets of candies and little plastic tills that go ding.”

  “It must have been glamorous, though,” Donna persisted. “Jetting off all over the world, brilliant vacations, meeting famous people.”

  Suzy gave her a you-must-be-joking look.

  “There’s nothing glamorous about living with a drunk. It wears you down. And it drives you absolutely mad, knowing that it could be brilliant, if only he didn’t drink. Jaz was lovely when he was sober,” Suzy said sadly. “I can’t tell you how many fights we had about it. One night I actually got down on my knees and begged him to stop. I’d booked him into a clinic, the taxi was waiting outside, and Maeve was threatening to carry him down three flights of stairs and throw him into it…”

  “And?”

  “He refused to go. We couldn’t force him. It was hopeless.”

  “So you left him,” said Donna.

  Suzy nodded.

  “A week later, I’d had enough. However I felt about Jaz, I couldn’t live with him anymore. Oh, and you should have heard Julia and my mother. Between them, they must have said ‘told you so’ at least a million times. Worst of all, they automatically assumed I’d go running home to them. Tuh, I’d rather have stuck needles in my eyes than do that.” Suzy shuddered. “Anyway, I was pretty miserable, as you can imagine. So I moved in next door, into the apartment above Fee’s. She was brilliant.”

  “And Jaz stopped drinking,” said Donna.

  “Good grief no, nothing so flattering.” Suzy swung her legs, idly drumming her heels against the side of the desk and pushing back her hair. “If anything, he drank more. So that was it, our marriage was over, and I was single again. I went out on a few dates, half hoping it would make him jealous and kick-start him into getting his act together, but he was beyond all that. He couldn’t have cared less.” She paused and checked her watch; the client was late. “Anyhow, six months later, I’d started seeing this guy named Marcus, and one night, we bumped into Jaz in the bar at the Avon Gorge. He said he was glad I was happy and didn’t I think it was about time we got a divorce? And Marcus said he thought that was a great idea, so Jaz put his lawyers onto it. He told me he had to go over to the States for a couple of months to work on an album but that by the time he got back, it would be all done. We didn’t fight about money,” Suzy explained. “It was all very amicable. So Jaz disappeared, the divorce went through, and ten weeks later, he came back…and that was when we found out he hadn’t been working on an album at all. He’d booked himself into detox without telling a soul—some clinic in the middle of the Nevada desert. And he did it,” said Suzy. “He actually did it. And he hasn’t had a drink since.”

  “Just like that,” Donna marveled, her kohl-rimmed eyes wide. “Easy.”

  “Not easy at all. But he’d made the decision for himself, without being bullied and blackmailed into it. And look at him now. If there was anyone I’d have said could never do it in a million years, it’d be Jaz. But he did.”

  “And what happened to Marcus?”

  “Oh, him.” Suzy’s tone was dismissive. “He was only after me for my alimony. I chucked him a couple of months after Jaz got back.”

  “Weren’t you ever tempted? You know, to try again with Jaz?”

  “There was never really the opportunity.” Sighing, Suzy said, “It wasn’t long before he developed that malignant growth on his arm.”

  Donna’s eyes almost popped out
.

  “Malignant growth? I didn’t know he had a malignant growth!”

  Suzy pulled a face at her. “I’m talking about Celeste.”

  * * *

  The weird thing about putting a funeral notice in the paper was not having the faintest idea who would turn up. It was like sticking up posters advertising a rave, thought Suzy, and waiting to see what happened… Would the place be besieged by ten thousand teenagers ready to party, or would five grungy hippies pile out of a van, mumbling, “Hey, man. Like, where’s the action?”

  Still, there’d been a pretty decent turnout today. The chapel was full and no grungy hippies had turned up, which had to count as a bonus.

  Not that this had cheered up Julia, her incredibly proper older sister, who could always be relied on to find something new to be offended about. Although, strictly speaking, Suzy amended, the thing currently upsetting her wasn’t new at all; it must be thirty years old at least.

  Behind them the rest of the mourners sang “All Things Bright and Beautiful.” According to Julia, this had been one of their mother’s favorite hymns. Next to her in the front pew, Suzy knew, Julia was casting furious sidelong glances at her, tanned and voluptuous in her skin-tight red velvet dress.

  “For heaven’s sake,” she hissed agitatedly between verses, “take it off.”

  “I can’t,” Suzy whispered back. Now, which would bother her most? “There’s a big jam stain underneath.”

  “Cover it up, then. With your jacket. Otherwise, everyone’s going to think you’ve gone mad.”

  “It’s my mother’s funeral, and I can wear whatever I like.” Suzy gave her Donny Osmond badge a reassuring pat and glanced over her shoulder at Maeve and Jaz, several pews behind.

  “Stop ogling.” Julia gave her a sharp dig in the ribs. “You’re not a Japanese tourist.”