“That sounds great,” I said, my heart sinking slightly at the thought of spending an entire Saturday shopping with a girl I didn’t even know, and then another Saturday taking back everything I’d bought, because I couldn’t afford to keep any of it.
“And I see you were chatting with Lola on her wardrobe tour video – how about you follow that up with one of your own? Your viewers love to get the inside track into your fashion secrets, and of course they love seeing a little more of your home than you show in your regular vlogs.”
“Cool,” I said. “I’ll do my best to film that tonight. I’m not sure whether Charlie…”
“Ah, yes, of course,” Sloane said. “You might have plans together. Don’t stress about it, Gemma, I know you need your ideas to flow organically, and it’s so important to nurture your relationship as well. You two! So adorable!”
I smiled. She was right – well, about Charlie, anyway. He was adorable. Adorable, and hot, and funny. And there was a sweetness about him – almost a vulnerability. It was always Charlie who called me, Charlie who wanted to arrange to meet up, Charlie who texted me last thing at night when I wasn’t staying over (which, to be fair, meant about three o’clock in the morning for him) to wish me sweet dreams and tell me he was thinking about me.
I know it sounds as if I was taking him for granted, and perhaps I was, a bit. But a huge part of me still couldn’t actually believe that this man, who was not only breathtakingly gorgeous but an actual celebrity (at least if you were under sixteen) seemed to genuinely like me, to want a relationship with me. That was the part of me that held back just a little – the part that expected that it could all fall apart at any time; that Charlie would burst out laughing and tell me it was all a prank, another of his and Gus’s elaborately set up jokes.
At last, I said my goodbyes to Sloane and hurried out, conscious that our meeting had overrun by almost ten minutes, so I was going to have to leg it back to work in order to avoid being late for a meeting with the promo team there. But as I hurried down the street, I heard a voice behind me calling, “Gemma! It’s Gemma! SparklyGems!”
I stopped and turned around. Two teenage girls were following me, both brandishing their phones and smiling eagerly.
“We love your videos!” one of them said.
“We can’t believe you’re dating Charlie Berry,” said her friend. “We’re well jel. What’s he like in real life?”
“You’re so tall,” the first girl said. “Even taller than you look online. I love your shoes.”
“Can we take a selfie with you?”
“We’ve been waiting out here for, like, two hours and you’re the first YouTuber we’ve seen.”
“Someone said you’re launching a make-up line. Is it true?”
“Are you and Charlie going to get married?”
I couldn’t not stop and talk to them. It was important, obviously – it was part of my job – part of one of my jobs. But also, they were so sweet, their enthusiasm so infectious that I found myself smiling and chatting away for a few minutes, and taking selfies with them and even posting one on Instagram while they watched. That would keep Sloane happy for a bit, anyway.
By the time we said goodbye, I was well and truly, irretrievably late for the meeting, and had to make up a not-very-plausible excuse about getting caught up in a Hare Krishna parade on Oxford Street. And then, to make matters worse, I found myself nodding off while Tom was talking about choosing keywords that would keep us one step ahead of the Google algorithms, and Emily had to kick my ankle under the boardroom table to wake me up.
“Do you guys own a food processor?” I asked Charlie.
“A what?”
“A food processor. I’m making low-carb sushi for a video. Apparently it’s a thing.”
“Low-carb sushi?” Gus said. “That sounds gross.”
“I know, right? But I need to post something tonight and this was all I could think of. So I need to make processed cauliflower.”
“Cauliflower? You’re totally not selling this to us, Gemma,” Charlie said.
I said, “But it’s packed with vital nutrients, including B-complex vitamins and essential fatty acids, and just think about it – when you eat regular white rice you may as well just be eating sugar.”
“What’s wrong with sugar?” Charlie said. “I had Frosties for lunch and I’m still alive.”
“Why don’t you ever make videos of nice food?” Gus said.
“Like mac and cheese,” Charlie said. “Or pizza? You always do healthy stuff, and it’s always rank.”
“Like those boiled bones you made last week,” Gus said. “The flat stank for ages afterwards. Who eats boiled bones, anyway?”
I chucked a tea towel across the room at him, and missed. “You don’t eat the bones, you muppet. You drink the stuff they’re boiled in. Bone broth. It’s even more of a thing than low-carb sushi. And Sloane wants me to do healthy stuff. She says I need to be a role model for a healthy lifestyle.”
“But you’re not,” Charlie pointed out. “You make all this paleo shit and then you eat toast.”
I couldn’t really argue with that. The bone broth experiment hadn’t exactly been successful. I hadn’t read the recipe properly before I started, so I hadn’t realised that it needed to cook for eight hours, and then be strained multiple times, and by the time I’d filmed all that (not the whole eight hours of gentle simmering, obviously – that wouldn’t have made for compelling viewing) and cleaned up the kitchen and edited and posted the video, I was so sick of the sight and smell of the stuff I hadn’t been able to face even tasting it, and it was three o’clock in the morning anyway, so I’d tipped it wearily down the plughole and gone to bed.
Still, the video had been made – that was the main thing. And tonight’s was going to have to be made too. I dug around in the kitchen drawers and eventually located a cheese grater, which didn’t look as if it had ever seen active service, and set to work on the cauliflower.
“So here we have it,” I told the camera, two hours later. “Crab and avocado rolls, spicy tuna rolls, salmon and cucumber rolls and egg and spring onion rolls. Delicious and so easy to make!”
I looked around at the kitchen. The ‘easy to make’ bit was a lie, obviously, and I wasn’t even going to talk about the mess I’d made. Bits of cauliflower, salmon skin and rolls that hadn’t ended up camera-ready were scattered all over the normally pristine white worktop – pristine, obviously, because nothing more complicated than a fish finger sandwich had ever been made in this kitchen before I arrived on the scene.
“I don’t suppose you two want to try some of this?” I said.
“Thanks for offering, Gemma, but we’re a bit busy right now,” Gus said.
“Careful! Jesus, you almost crashed into that asteroid,” Charlie said.
“Asteroid?” I said, looking more closely at the screen the two of them had been staring at all evening.
“It’s a new game,” Charlie said. “It’s called Elite Dangerous.”
“It’s space exploration,” Gus said. “There! Look, that’s where we need to land.”
“So, we’ve arrived here on Uranus,” Charlie said, for the benefit of the camera. “After narrowly avoiding a black hole.”
“Oo er, missus,” Gus said, and they both started to giggle.
“So, what, you can land on actual planets?” I said.
“Correct,” Charlie said.
“And the best thing is, there are four hundred billion solar systems to explore,” Gus said.
“So we won’t have to think about new ideas for gaming videos for, like, several millennia,” Charlie said.
“God, I wish there was something like that for healthy eating,” I said.
“Anyway, I’ve had enough for tonight,” Gus said. “Are we going out? I want to go out.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but said nothing. I had realised that staying over at Charlie’s meant fitting in with his and Gus’s lifestyle. Most nights, at ar
ound nine thirty, Gus announced that he wanted to go out. Often Charlie and I went too, which meant getting home at two in the morning; when we said no, Gus went on his own and got home even later.
I sometimes wondered where he went, setting off in an Uber on his own. He was always on his phone or his laptop first, so I guessed me must be arranging to see friends – other vloggers, probably, who shared his penchant for expensive cocktail bars with concealed entrances so their fans couldn’t hang around outside wanting selfies. He never said anything about his nights out afterwards – but then, I didn’t ask. My attempts to make friends with Gus were having limited success, to say the least.
On the nights when Gus wasn’t home, Charlie would sit up all night listening to music, playing games and desultorily editing videos until the sun was coming up, and he’d want me to keep him company. If I insisted I needed to go to sleep, he’d wake me up when he eventually came to bed and we’d have sex, and then when my alarm went off at half seven, he’d reach for me again, amorously and sleepily, so I ended up being late for work.
So when Charlie said, “Want to head out somewhere, Gemma?” I genuinely didn’t know how to respond.
“I don’t mind,” I said. “Whatever you guys want to do is cool with me.”
Because, of course, I couldn’t say what I really wanted, which was to go to bed, with or without Charlie, and sleep for ten solid hours.
“We could go to Fanny Nelson’s,” Charlie said.
“Nah,” Gus said. “I’m bored of that now. It’s totally over.”
“Untitled?”
“I’m bored of that too. I’m bored of just sitting in bars drinking cocktails.”
“We could go and get some food, then?”
“I’m not hungry.”
I left them to their conversation, which I knew would go on for ages and involve much searching on Instagram to see where the people who mattered were hanging out this week, and endless digressions while they discussed whose opinion was worth bothering about and whose wasn’t. It always left me feeling deeply conscious of my own cluelessness and lack of cool, and aware that, left to my own devices, I’d probably suggest All Bar One or the local Odeon or somewhere else where Charlie and Gus wouldn’t be seen dead.
I took my make-up bag through to the bathroom and looked despondently at my face in the mirror. I knew I should take off the day’s slap and start over, but it seemed like way too much effort. Instead, I rooted out a concealer stick and did my best to hide the blemishes on my chin and the shadows under my eyes before doing some aggressive contouring and sticking on a pair of false eyelashes, which for once went on straight. I brushed my hair and changed my top for a new one I’d bought a couple of days ago in the All Saints sale, vlogged about and meant to return. I could still return it, so long as I managed not to spill anything on it, I thought, but then guiltily dismissed the idea – my finances might be in dire straits, but they weren’t dire enough to resort to what was basically stealing.
“Come on, Gemma,” Charlie called. “Cab’s on its way.”
“So what’s the plan?” I pulled off my trainers and rummaged through my bag for a pair of high heels. The polish on my toenails was chipped and my socks had left ridges on my ankles, but there was no time to do anything about that.
“Karaoke,” Gus said. “Maddie and Lola and a few others are at this place in Soho – they say it’s brilliant. So we’re going to join them there.”
“What?” I said. “But I can’t sing.”
“That’s the whole point of karaoke,” Charlie said. “No one can sing.”
“I can,” Gus said.
“Well, I can’t,” Charlie said. “And do I care? Hell, no.”
“No, but I really, really can’t sing,” I said. “I sound like Cheryl Cole – or Cheryl whatever she’s called this month – when the autotune goes wrong on The X Factor, only even worse than that.”
“You couldn’t possibly sound worse than that,” Gus said.
I said, “Trust me, I can and I do.”
I thought longingly of Charlie’s bed, and of curling up with Stanley in my arms for the sleep I craved. Every bit of my body ached with fatigue – I felt like I had the one and only time Jack had persuaded me to go hillwalking with him, except that I wasn’t wet or covered in mud. I imagined Maddie and Lola, Gus and Charlie and whoever else was going to be there listening to me sing, then starting to laugh with a mixture of horror and pity. I didn’t want to look like a fool in front of Charlie – not again.
And then I realised that Charlie didn’t care. He and Gus made fools of each other and posted the results online all the time. They didn’t care – at least, they didn’t seem to care. It was part of what being a YouTuber was about: casting aside inhibitions, filming yourself with no make-up on or making stupid faces for the camera, eating things you knew would be so disgusting you’d spit them out. I’d had no problem baring my soul for the whole internet to see after Jack and I had split up – why should I mind if people knew I sounded like a crow with a forty-a-day fag habit when I sang?
I needed to not care. I needed to learn to laugh at myself, and look like I was enjoying doing it.
“Coming, Gemma?” Gus said.
“Of course I’m coming,” I said. “It’ll be fun.” And if it isn’t, I told myself, I’ll just have to give an Oscar-winning performance pretending it is.
Call me old-fashioned, but when I hear the word karaoke, I think of the pub in Norwich that Jack and I used to go to sometimes – but only once on a Saturday, because that was karaoke night and it was so terrifying we never went again. There was an old geezer who dressed up as Elvis and legit murdered croony ballads until someone dragged him off the stage. There was a woman who wore sequinned dresses so short you could almost see her knickers, even though she was at least sixty and her knees were all wrinkly and saggy, and rasped out Celine Dion in a tuneless smoker’s croak. There were the girls and lads who were clearly only there to pull and went on stage in big groups and didn’t bother to follow the words on the screen at all. There was generally a fight of some kind at chucking-out time, as we noticed whenever we went past on the way from somewhere else and said to each other, “We are never. Going. There. On. A. Saturday. Again.”
This was nothing like that at all. Maybe it was London, maybe it was that karaoke had got all advanced in the year and a half since Jack’s and my ill-fated night at the Bearded Clam, or maybe it was just that the only places Charlie and Gus ever went were the kind that had cocktail menus and served scotch eggs ironically (there was nothing ironic about the scotch eggs at the Bearded Clam. The night Jack and I were there, when the fight broke out, someone twatted one at someone else and it did serious damage).
Anyway, You’re the Voice was karaoke, only posh. We were shown to a private room with purple velvet banquettes around the edges and gold lamé drapery covering the walls. There was a white baby grand piano in the middle of the room and a touch-screen controller for the music. There were ice buckets with bottles of champagne and shakers of cocktails in them, and trays of sushi that looked considerably more appetising than my earlier cauliflower-based efforts.
And there were YouTubers. About ten people, some of whom I recognised and some of whom I didn’t. But all of them recognised Charlie and Gus, and fell on them with cries of, “Oh my God, it’s totally amazing to see you! How are you?” And then they all returned to their drinks and their selfies and bickering about what song they were going to play next.
I poured myself a big glass of one of the cocktails and sat down to watch. Charlie sat next to me and put his hand on my leg.
Someone did ‘Uptown Funk’. Someone did ‘Love Me like You Do’. The beautiful girl I remembered seeing the night I met Charlie, whose I supposed must be Lola, did ‘Hold My Hand’. Maddie’s boyfriend did ‘Bad Blood’, and Maddie made Charlie go up and rap the Kendrick Lamar bits, and he was totally awesome. Then Gus sang ‘Thinking Out Loud’ and he was so good it made everyone cry.
&
nbsp; “Uplifting!” Lola said. “We need uplifting and we need it fast!”
“We need a power ballad!” Charlie said.
“I’m on it,” Maddie’s boyfriend said.
And the next second, I heard the beginning of a song I knew so well I could practically sing it in my sleep, because it had been Jack’s and my song. We’d discovered it when we started going out and talked about embarrassing things we were both into, and one of them was Glee. So basically, the first time Jack and I kissed, it was to ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’ – the old-school Journey version, not the new one with all the edges smoothed away. And that was playing right now.
I’d had too many cocktails, obviously, while I sat there watching everyone else have fun and not look stupid, and now I didn’t care if I looked stupid myself. I jumped up and grabbed the mic off Gus, and started belting out the lyrics I knew so well. And to my surprise, I didn’t sound too awful. I felt okay, standing there on my own with everyone watching me and then joining in with the chorus. It was almost like singing this song – the song that had been our song – now, with these new people, might mean a new beginning. But I couldn’t think about it too much, because I was too hazy from whatever ginny, lemony thing I’d been drinking and too focussed on not running out of breath and which bit I was meant to be singing at the end.
And so the whole thing seemed to last about thirty seconds, and it then was over and everyone was focussed on the next track, so I went to find the loo and fix my make-up, because inevitably the song had made me cry a bit.
The toilets – ‘Divas’, they were called, as opposed to ‘Maestros’ for the men – were just as plushy and fabulous as our private room, all purple and gold and white. I had a wee and then stood in front of the mirror taking in all the glamour and wishing I felt worthy of it, instead of being a bit shiny-faced and knotty-haired. I opened my bag and dug around for stuff to fix the damage, and just as I was reapplying my lipstick I heard a voice say, “Gemma! Oh my God, I thought it was you!”
The Truth About Gemma Grey: A feel-good, romantic comedy you won't be able to put down Page 20
