by Lisa Jewell
She couldn’t quite place the familiarity at first. Underwood Street, she thought, why have I heard of Underwood Street? And then she remembered. That was where Joel had seen Ralph going into a chapel.
She saw the small building up ahead, its windows lit up from within. This was the place, she thought, approaching it slowly, this was the place where Ralph had come after they’d lost the baby. He’d come in here and he’d prayed. And suddenly Jem wanted to know, she wanted to understand. The door was ajar and she pushed it open gently. She felt slightly nervous. Not about the prospect of a face-to-face hook-up with God, but because she had no idea what sort of people hung out in quiet chapels on Thursday afternoons. Strangely, she didn’t feel quite safe. She scanned her memory for newspaper headlines about women being raped in chapels but couldn’t think of such a case. But still she felt unreassured.
She headed through the entrance and walked between the tiny pews. The chapel was empty. She was alone. She sat down on a pew towards the back, closer to the exit, just in case. She rested her hands in her lap and she looked around her. Screens, candles, tombstones, plaques, hymn-books, kneeling cushions. She shut her eyes and waited for a feeling, a sense of something tangible that she would be able to take away from here, something real and substantial enough for her to begin to understand, even just a tiny bit.
She pulled her eyelids tighter together and she let all her hopes and dreams, fears and fantasies fill her head. She thought about that awful moment in the registry office months earlier, a moment that haunted her every moment of every day, she thought about Ralph’s face on the front doorstep when she’d moved out of their home and she thought about the other family now living in that house, a family like hers used to be, a man, a woman, two small children, occupying the space that had once been hers. She thought about Ralph, living alone in his slightly depressing new flat and she thought about herself and her small migrant family staking out the spare corners of her sister’s house and she wondered what it was all about. What had stopped her that day in the registry office? Why had it felt so wrong? She found it painful living with Walter and Lulu, with the moment-by-moment reminders that not everyone cocked it up, that not everyone felt too small and too flighty to commit to the concept of a life spent for ever with the same person. Because that’s what it felt like now, from her new clearer perspective on the other side of her emotional meltdown. She’d been too small for it all. And now she’d been given space to grow and that was what she was doing, day by day, growing back into herself, and as the days went by she felt more and more that one day soon she might be big enough to walk back into Ralph’s arms and stay with him for ever. And as these thoughts went through her mind, the clearest, brightest thoughts she’d had in weeks, she felt it: tiny, but there, a small sense of peace. An iota of release. It wasn’t religious, it was therapeutic. But it was nothing to be scared of.
She sat for another ten minutes and did her best to pray.
And then she got up, looked around one more time and headed away from the chapel, away from God and towards the new boutique round the corner.
8 November 2008
Hi Rosey,
Wow, not sure where those last few weeks went. There was half-term and I took the children up to Scotland for the week, stayed with Gil and his sister, who’s an ex-nun – yeah, a real ex-nun! The kids loved Gil but weren’t that struck on the ex-nun. Scarlett said she had a weird face, which she did, I guess, but think it was more to do with the fact that she had very old-fashioned ideas about children. They always do, people who haven’t had any. Anyway, it was a fun week, lots of long walks on the beach and painting al fresco and was a bit gutting having to come back to London and the flat and real life.
And can you get ITV in the States? Jem’s client is going into the jungle tonight, big fanfare, big deal. I can’t tell you his name, but given that he’s only ‘famous’ (and I use the term loosely) in this country and you’ll never have heard of him, I guess I can tell you that his initials, just for identification purposes, are KK. She’s in Sydney already, so I’ve got the kids, certainly for a few days, possibly for two weeks, depending on how long KK spends in the jungle before being kicked out, which is brilliant. I’m finding the time I spend with them more and more absorbing and fulfilling. Blake in particular right now is totally compelling. He’ll be one next month. And so much personality. He feels like he’s my little buddy, my pal. When he’s not there, I feel cut adrift. I hate not living with my kids. I really, really hate it.
And I still keep expecting Jem to walk back in through the door any minute and tell me it was all a terrible mistake. To tell me that she still loves me. To tell me that she wants to start again. On a day-to-day basis, life is manageable. Taken as a whole, though, it’s a living fucking nightmare.
Lots of love, R x
22 November 2008
Rosey, shit. Look at this:
www.bbc.co.uk/news/imacelebcontroversy/5480.htm
God, poor Jem. She’s coming home with him tomorrow. I’ll report back more then.
R x
London DJ Arrested on Reality Show
23 November 2008
London Radio DJ, Karl Kasparov, 47, was today being held in police custody in Sydney after being filmed sexually assaulting fellow jungle contestant, former Jubilee Road actress, Melanie David, 27. He was seen on live TV kissing the actress on the cheek and fondling her breasts despite her protestations. He is heard whispering into her ear, ‘That’ll give the tabloids at home something to talk about.’ It is thought that following a conversation earlier on in the day during which the contestants had talked about the boost to former contestants’ careers after forming romantic attachments in the jungle-based show, he was misguidedly hoping to increase the actress’s profile. No charges have been brought yet against the Irish-born DJ. His agent was today unavailable for comment.
Chapter 3
Jem dropped her suitcase on to the sofa in the hotel room and began unpacking. She was home. At last. The longest week of her life was almost over. The actress had not brought charges in the end. Karl had been let go with a caution. Jem and Karl had spent three days in a hotel room sorting out the PR disaster and now she was staying in a hotel in Hyde Park for two more nights, just to try to get the whole thing well and truly put to bed before going home and seeing her children. It wasn’t fair to bring this circus into Lulu’s house. It wasn’t fair on anyone.
Karl had gone back to his flat, despite being offered a room in the same hotel. He was adamant that he wanted to go home. The press were camped out on Almanac Road and it sent shivers down Jem’s spine every time she switched on the news or opened a paper and saw it, her old home, 31 Almanac Road. The place where it had all started. The house in her dreams. Only now it was in her nightmares. They’d managed to snap Karl only once, leaving the house in a smart black suit that hung a little loose on him. He hadn’t left the house again since, and the same photo kept appearing, again and again.
Number 31 Almanac Road.
Infamous.
She placed the photos of her children on the bedside table and then she pulled open the curtains and stared at the view across the park. The air was cold and fresh against her skin through the open window. It was good to be back in London. Sydney had been crazy. Hot, high octane and intense. And that had been before Karl had squeezed that girl’s tits in front of twenty cameras and five million viewers.
She shook the thought out of her head. It had spent way too long in her head these past few days.
She replayed it, over and over and over again, Karl’s big, shiny face, his lips heading for the young girl’s cheeks, sliding against her skin, the girl’s look of amused surprise, her hands coming towards his chest, to push him away, but then, almost as though it were in slow motion, his big hands landing on her bikini top, his huge fingers sliding under the tiny triangle of fabric, the girl saying, get off, Karl, get the fuck OFF, but no, he continued, a quick squeeze, his eyes closing for just a split second,
the words drawled in her ear as she propelled herself away from him: That’ll give the tabloids at home something to talk about. Her hand across his cheek. You fucking arsehole, Karl, you fucking arsehole. Karl left sitting there, on a rock, slightly bemused, but worse still, more than a bit amused.
Jem had watched the whole thing in her hotel bedroom on the live feed they provided friends and family with. Within less than two hours Karl was out of the jungle and in a police station. The news had broken worldwide before it had even been broadcast. Jem had not slept for nearly forty-eight hours, because of the time difference. Her boss, Jarvis, had arrived on the first flight over, aware that Jem, for all her years of experience as a theatrical agent, was going to be totally out of her depth handling the fallout from this.
Karl was contrite. He’d given up drink for a month before going into the jungle to help him lose weight. They’d given them champagne that night for winning a task. He’d had three glasses and he’d lost his perspective entirely. He’d genuinely thought that the actress would appreciate the controversy. He hadn’t even fancied her, or so he said, though she had won the Most Fanciable Female at the British Soap Awards the previous year so Jem presumed he was being slightly dishonest, not only with her, but also with himself.
He was prepared to face any charges brought against him. He admitted that what he’d done had been indefensible. There had been a desperate twenty-four-hour wait while the producers and the police spoke to Melanie, until eventually she’d decided, after seeing the clip of the assault, not to press charges. She delivered a statement to the press stating how disappointed she had been by Karl’s totally inappropriate behaviour, but how she believed everyone deserve a second chance and that she truly believed that Karl had learned his lesson. And then the show resumed.
A moment. That’s all it could take sometimes. Just one, brief, shimmering moment and everything could change, just like that. So it had been four months ago when Ralph had told her about finding God. And so it was for Karl Kasparov. It had happened to him once before when he’d lost his mind live on the airwaves after his girlfriend dumped him and the country had been enchanted by his honesty and his emotional realness. Now the country despised him. He was an animal. A pig. A beast. He was fit for nothing. His career, as tiny and as inconsequential as it had been, was effectively over. It would take years to repair the damage. Jem’s first client. As good as dead.
And now another moment was about to leap out of nowhere and change things for ever. A beep on her phone. Another text message. Her phone had never made as much noise as it had made over the past few days. Call after call. Text after text. Beep. Beep. Ring. Ring. Hello, Jemima Catterick speaking. Hello, Jemima Catterick speaking …
She picked up her phone with a sigh. It was a number she didn’t know. She opened it and read it.
‘Hi there. It’s me, Lucas. I nicked your number off my dad’s phone. I just wanted to say that it sounds like you’re having a really shitty time and that I’m thinking of you. Take care x.’
Jem blinked and read the message again.
Lucas. She hadn’t thought about Lucas for a long time. Well, that wasn’t strictly true. She had thought about Lucas. She’d thought about the last time she’d seen him, at the festival in Brockwell Park, back in the summer, the week before her ill-fated wedding day. She’d thought about his confident easy manner, his air of belonging wherever he found himself, that thing he’d said to her, about how anything she did would be interesting. She’d thought about it plenty of times. But not so much now. Life had moved on and other things had happened. Her whole life had been wrapped around a lamp post, written off and repaired. It wasn’t the same. It was strange and other. It had different contours and different rhythms. She was single. Thinking about twenty-four-year-old men now that she was free to do as she wished with twenty-four-year-old men didn’t feel the same. It felt too close for comfort.
But, here it was. Contact. He had made contact. And not just that but made very mature, very sweet contact at a point in her life when what she really overwhelmingly needed to do was to hug somebody.
She opened up the mini-bar and she extracted a bottle of white wine. She cracked it open and poured some into a stubby wine glass and she downed it. She sat on the edge of the firmly made bed and she stared again for a while through the heavy glass of the window overlooking Hyde Park. Her babies were out there somewhere, she thought, her beautiful babies, over there in the hidden streets of south London. They didn’t know she was here. She wondered what they were doing. She had missed them with every shred of her being, slept foetally, aching for them, imagining them in her arms, their scalps in her nose. And now she was home and still a million miles away from them.
A small tear leaked from her left eye and she rubbed it away. She drank some more wine and then she looked at her phone again. She started to type.
‘Nice to hear a friendly voice. What a total nightmare! Thanks so much for your lovely message. I hope you’re well.’ She pressed Send and breathed a sigh of relief. It was neutral. Totally neutral. And it was barely lunchtime. It was hardly a booty call.
A moment later the wine hit her jet lag head-on and the bed called her name and she slept in her clothes for half an hour before her phone rang again and she sprung upright like something automated and answered it and said: Hello, Jemima Catterick speaking.
It was Lucas.
‘I just got your message,’ he said, ‘you’re back.’
‘Yes,’ said Jem, smoothing her hair away from her face, ‘yes. I’m back.’
Jem and Lucas slept together that night. They also slept together the following night. When she woke up on the third morning and opened her eyes and looked at him, still half suspended inside her dreams and bleary-eyed, she thought for one bittersweet, twisted moment that he was Ralph. And for one bittersweet, twisted moment, her heart had leaped with joy and relief. On the third night she asked him to leave. She never saw him again.
Chapter 4
A funny thing happened to Jem towards the end of February. Scarlett was at nursery and Blake was asleep in his pram and she was on her way to have lunch with an old college friend in Battersea. She had not been to Battersea since the night all those months ago when she had tried so hard to reignite the pilot light of her bond with Ralph, the night she’d awoken to the fact that they were walking different paths. She felt sad wandering the streets that had once been their home at a time in her life when the possibility of this – separation from Ralph, prayer groups, split parenting – would have seemed preposterous. And it still did.
Jem had finally begun to reconcile herself to the presence of spirituality in Ralph’s life. She’d let him take the children up to the Moors with the man called Gil, whom he appeared to revere so much. Scarlett had come home full of talk of a scary lady with a pointy nose who’d told her off for walking on grass and banging her feet against table legs and saying the word ‘God’ when she was frustrated. But she’d also come home glowing with a kind of a freshness and wholesomeness, like a child from another era. Sometimes Jem took a deliberate detour to the chapel on Underwood Street, usually with the children in tow, to light candles for Ralph’s mum and the dead cat on Brixton Hill. She didn’t pray but she did think about things in a calm and meditative way, and really, she wondered, what was the difference anyway?
It just no longer seemed to make any sense, this trial separation. Now that the dust had settled Jem could look back on the last year of her life and see it as a series of separate and poignant moments rather than the blur of confusion, resentment and unhappiness that was how it had felt at the time. From this distance it was clear that she and Ralph had lost their way; after Blake was born, after they’d lost the baby, after Joel had made Jem doubt the very essence of her own true self, after Ralph had found some kind of peace and strength in a room full of prayer, and, she now realised, after the first time she’d slept with Lucas that crazy night at the Hyde Park Hotel all those months earlier. So many moments, so ma
ny opportunities to make sense of it all and to find their way back on to the path they’d been sharing. But they’d missed each and every one of them.
She turned a corner towards Northcote Road and saw a familiar face. A woman, tanned to an improbable shade of toast, vanilla hair, long shapely legs, Prada sunglasses, a leather shopper hanging from the crook of her arm. She wore tight black jeans and a fitted sweater in pale apple green. The woman stopped when she saw Jem and squinted at her from beneath her oversized sunglasses. Jem squinted back at her. They both slowed their pace as they neared each other and then Jem remembered: Cheri.
The woman’s face softened with recognition then too and she pulled her sunglasses from her face and smiled.
‘Jem!’ she cried.
‘Cheri!’ replied Jem.
‘Wow,’ said Cheri, ‘wow. I mean, I haven’t seen you for, what, ten years, more?’
‘More,’ said Jem. ‘Eleven, probably.’
‘Gosh, wow. You look great!’
Jem smiled. She considered the woman in front of her, still beautiful in her late thirties, still glamorous, but softer somehow, prettier. ‘So do you,’ she said. ‘You look amazing.’
‘And who is this?’ She peered down into the pushchair at the slumbering Blake.
‘This is Blake,’ said Jem, ‘my youngest.’
‘Oh, he’s divine,’ Cheri said, smiling softly. ‘You’ve got more?’
