It was Olivia’s friend Shivvy, who’d defriended me on Facebook shortly after Jack and Olivia got together. In different circumstances, I might have found the strength to look through her as if she wasn’t there and go swishing out, but now my head was full of thoughts of Jack, it felt so comforting to see a familiar face in this haven of over-the-top luxury, and anyway I still needed to dust loose powder over my nose to take the shine off.
So I tried to put on a puzzled expression, as if I’d just been reminded of a fragment of my distant past, and said, “Hi! It’s Sherri, isn’t it? How are you?”
She looked briefly disconcerted, then said, “Shivvy! Haha, everyone always gets it wrong. You look so amazing! I saw you last week in Heat magazine. Like, wow! Your boyfriend’s, like, an actor?”
“Something like that,” I said. “And how are you?”
She burbled on a bit about how she was teaching yogalates at a studio in Kensington, but I didn’t pay much attention. I’d never been her friend really, on or off Facebook, and she hadn’t been mine, as her speedy defection following Olivia’s had made clear.
Then, after a bit, she said, “So, I heard from Liv the other day. Bless her, she’s being so brave, even though it’s like her heart is in tiny pieces.”
I said, “What do you mean?”
“Oh my God, you don’t know?” Shivvy said. She stopped brushing her curtain of impossibly shiny black hair, which hadn’t needed brushing anyway, and turned to look at me. “It didn’t work out with her and Jack. Everyone is, like, broken for them.”
Funny how you weren’t broken when he dumped me for her, was my first thought. But then I thought, Hold on. It hadn’t worked out with Jack and Olivia?
“Oh no,” I said. “That’s just the worst thing. I’m so sad for them both. But what about their plans? They were going to see the world together and everything.”
Shivvy shook her head, making her hair swish in the same way she’d always made it swish, which I’d always found incredibly annoying.
“Liv is so strong,” she said. “Nothing, not even this, could destroy her dream. But Jack’s coming home. I’m surprised you hadn’t heard.”
I don’t know where I found the self-control, but I did find it. I finished dusting highlighter over my brow bones, and I said, “I don’t follow him on social media any more. You know how you move on? Anyway, tell them both I said hi. Laters, mwah!”
And then I went back to our private room. Gus and Lola were at the mic, doing Echosmith.
“You’re back!” Charlie said, as if I’d been gone for eight hours not eight minutes. I sat next to him and held his hand, and he leaned over and whispered in my ear, “I love you, Gemma.”
I realised I’d been thinking about things that were nothing at all to do with him.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I was sitting at my desk as usual, drinking coffee and looking at pictures of cats, when a message popped up on my screen from Jim.
Hi Gemma – just wondered if you’ve got half an hour to spare for a chat with Sarah and me? Cheers, J.
I felt all the blood drain from my face and apparently fill my hands, which suddenly felt huge and clumsy on my keyboard. What had I done? I cast desperately through the past few days. I’d been ten minutes late yesterday, after the karaoke evening, and certainly hungover. But I’d kept my head down and posted not one but two cat articles, one of which had made it to second place on the content leaderboard, and I’d worked an hour late to make up for it.
I’d done my share of coffee runs. I’d participated constructively in the editorial team meetings, even though I spent every minute dreading Jim asking Callista what was happening in the world of celebrity gossip and Callista saying, “So, you know Charlie Berry, right? He’s only got a girlfriend, and the internet is going totally cray about it.”
But Callista hadn’t, and gradually I’d stopped worrying – or stopped worrying quite so much. After all, although Charlie was incredibly famous if you were a teenage girl, he was also only famous if you were a teenage girl (or a certain type of teenage boy, I supposed). And there hadn’t exactly been a shortage of gossip about proper celebrities (Thank you, Celebrity Big Brother and Strictly Come Dancing. Thank you, Brangelina, for splitting up, even though I’m gutted for you. Thank you for having sex with your wife, Prince William, and thank you, K Middy, for taking seriously cute photos of your babies, I said to myself in silent relief as each meeting came to an end with no mention of Charlie, Gus or me).
So I’d begun to feel confident that the two separate bits of my life would be able to stay separate, and that even if my relationship with Charlie was as public as a very public thing, it was of no interest to the people I worked with. But maybe I was wrong? Maybe I was going to get told off for bringing Clickfrenzy into disrepute. Maybe I was going to get sacked. I might complain about having to get up early in the mornings, I might roll my eyes about the cats, I might wish that Tom would stop making that incredibly annoying humming sound under his breath when he was thinking, but I didn’t want to lose my job. The thought filled me with horror – I imagined walking out of Sarah’s office, everyone turning to look at me, and carrying on looking at me as I packed my hand cream, my Panadol and my tissues into my bag and walked the long, lonely walk of shame to the lift, never to return.
“Gemma?” Jim had evidently got tired of waiting for me to message him back, and was hovering by my desk. “I know you’re busy, but Sarah’s got a meeting in half an hour, so maybe we could… Or if now’s not a good time, could we book something in the diary for tomorrow?”
“It’s okay,” I said, standing up and hoping that my trembling legs would support me. “Now’s fine.”
Jim said, “There’s nothing to worry about – we won’t bite, I promise.”
Biting, I thought, was the least of my worries.
I followed Jim into Sarah’s office and we sat on two identical white chairs facing the glass desk. Sarah was tapping intently at her keyboard. Her brow would have been furrowed with concentration if it wasn’t Botoxed into immobility. Jim and I watched silently as she pressed the delete key a few times, then typed a bit more, then paused, stared at the screen for a bit, then clicked the mouse and looked up at us.
“Right! Sorry about that, minor crisis with a client. Thanks for dropping everything and dropping in, I know how stacked you are.”
“That’s okay,” I croaked.
“We should really have had this meeting a few weeks ago,” Sarah went on, “back in August. But of course, I was away on annual leave, and everyone’s stretched so thin, housekeeping stuff tends to get overlooked.”
Housekeeping? I remembered with a lurch of guilt that it had been my turn to clean the coffee machine the previous week, but I’d forgotten and even though I’d done it first thing the next morning, it had been too late to stop the milk clotting sourly on the frothing spout thing. Did people get sacked for that?
“Yes, so this meeting is overdue,” Jim said. “We normally conduct a review after three months with the company – well, not a review exactly, as you know from the procedures section of the intranet, we don’t really do formal performance appraisals here.”
“We phased them out a couple of years back,” Sarah said. “We did a survey and found that staff hated them and team leaders find them unnecessarily time-consuming. We prefer to have ongoing conversations with our colleagues, and of course, as you know, my door is always open.”
Which was true, although mostly the office behind it was empty, because Sarah was so seldom there. But I didn’t say anything – I just nodded and tried to look as if I was listening actively rather than gibbering with fear.
“Anyway,” Jim said, “It’s been three and a half months since you joined us. You’re basically part of the furniture now, aren’t you?”
I tried to laugh, and said, “I guess so.”
“So we just wanted to catch up,” Sarah said, “And get a sense of how you’re getting on, whether there are any is
sues we should be aware of, and talk about how you see your career here progressing.”
I felt the tight band of fear around my ribs relax slightly. I’d been sacked before, more than once, and in my experience the phrase “career here progressing” was not one that tended to be used.
I said, “I’m really enjoying it. I love the people, and I’m learning so much all the time. I’m still just so excited that you gave me this opportunity.”
Hopefully, I thought, that would be enough to bring the meeting to a close, and I could go back to my desk and my status as the newest, most junior person on the editorial team.
But Sarah said, “You’re having fun with the cats, then?”
Shit, I thought. Was there a right answer to that? If I told the truth and said that if I never saw another cross, whiskery face on my screen or typed the word ‘cattitude’ again, my life would be richer and fuller, would they tell me that in that case I could pack my bags and have a rich, full life elsewhere? But if I said yes, would they think that I’d found my vocation and consign me to writing about cats and nothing but cats, forever and ever?
I said, “I’m having loads of fun in my job. Coming up with new content that’s fresh and shareable and has the Clickfrenzy edge is really, like, rewarding. And cats are cute. I’ve always loved cats.”
Sarah laughed. “That was very diplomatic, Gemma. We all know the cat brief can be tough. Call it an ordeal by fire, if you like. But Jim says you’ve risen to the challenge.”
“For sure,” Jim said. “Gemma’s stories are getting loads of hits.”
“Almost as many hits as Gemma’s vlogs,” Sarah said, with another little smile.
I tried not to let the shock show on my face as I realised I’d been lulled into a false sense of security. I was being played. If this was Reddit, someone would post one of those memes that start, ‘Only a fool would trust…’ One of those gifs that only lasts a few seconds, and ends in bloody carnage.
“Obviously, your personal life is totally personal,” Jim said.
“But we have been wondering,” Sarah said, “at board level, whether there’s potential for some sort of synergy.”
Jim said, “You’re the expert here, Gemma, of course. We know viral content, and how to monetise it. But your area is specialised, and it’s got all sorts of rules of its own.”
I thought, It certainly does. A whole book of rules, even more dense and specific than the bound document Hannah and Richard had presented to me when I moved in – except those rules were fixed, and even if they seemed petty and trivial, at least you could understand them, and choose to comply or break them and face the consequences. But the rules of vlogging were new to me – I was only just beginning to work them out, and try to understand how they applied to my own channel, my relationship with Charlie – my entire life. And now the bit that I’d thought was compartmentalised and safe, where all I had to do was turn up in the mornings and sit quietly looking at cats and making coffee, was being invaded by them too.
I remembered how I’d told Jack, over a glass of Prosecco that horrible night, that I’d impressed Clickfrenzy with my YouTube savvy. I wished I’d had the sense to shut up about the whole thing.
I said, “I’m not quite sure what you mean.”
“We were thinking,” Jim said. “Lots of YouTubers have second channels, right? Like, you have one where you post your formal vlogs, and one where you just chat about your life and stuff?”
“Yes,” I said. “Lots of them – lots of us do. It’s because doing haul videos and stuff like that takes a lot of time and planning, and viewers want more content than people have time to create. So, like, Charlie – my boyfriend – he and his brother post game reviews and pranks about twice a week, but they vlog every day about them just hanging out.”
“That’s what I thought,” Sarah said. “So we wondered, what if you were to start a second channel, and include content about your work here at Clickfrenzy, and host it on our site as well as on YouTube?”
I had to bite my tongue to stop myself shouting, “No! I don’t want to! That’s a terrible idea!”
I imagined walking through the office with my camera, filming myself cleaning the coffee machine and trying not to fall asleep at my desk. I imagined even more details about my life being available for my colleagues to see – for Sarah and Jim to see. I imagined my fans, or Charlie’s, waiting downstairs for me to go out for lunch, and asking me to sign things and pose for selfies with me. I imagined the fragile barrier that separated the two parts of my life crumbling and falling.
“Of course, we know you’re short of time,” Jim said. “But we could get you some help with the cat content.”
“And we’d figure out a way of making it viable for you financially, as well,” Sarah said. “Some sort of profit-share, we thought. But we wanted to get a sense of whether you actually liked the idea before we hammered out the details.”
Great, I thought – they were offering me two things they knew I’d find it hard to refuse: more money and fewer cats. And I had to admit to myself that both were very, very tempting. But were they tempting enough? I thought about it for a moment and realised that they weren’t – not even close. But then, how could I say no? I was still the newest member of the team. I was being offered an exciting opportunity to make my work more interesting and my vlog more profitable – after all, Clickfrenzy had millions of viewers and subscribers, far more even than the Berry Boys channel did.
I cast desperately around for a way to say no, or a way to say yes that was actually no.
“Of course, it would all take time to set up, and we’d have to have a launch plan in place,” Sarah said.
“We don’t expect you to make a decision straight away,” Jim said.
Then I remembered. Those were almost the exact words Sloane had used when she signed me up to Ripple Effect. It was a lifeline.
I said, “Actually, the thing is, it’s not really my decision. If it was, of course I’d love to – I think it’s a fantastic idea. But I have a contract with my agent. Anything I do would need to be cleared with her first, and maybe even with their lawyers.”
I thought of the dense pages of type that I hadn’t even bothered to read before happily signing the rights to my content over to Ripple Effect. I had no idea which, if any, of the many clauses would affect my ability to host content on other platforms, but I was fairly sure that at least one paragraph would deal with the matter in dense, impenetrable detail.
“Of course,” Sarah said. “There is that.”
“Anyway,” Jim said. “Have a think, talk to your agent. It would be great if we could work something out. And in the meantime, consider your probation over.”
“And well done again, Gemma,” Sarah said. “It’s great having you on board and we hope you’ll be with us for a long time.”
Giddy with relief, I stood up, thanked them profusely and promised that I’d discuss their proposal with Sloane as soon as I could.
But in the event, that didn’t happen. Because that night, something else did, and it changed everything.
When I got to Charlie and Gus’s flat after work, I could tell as soon as I opened the door that something was up. For one thing, Sloane was there. This wasn’t unusual in itself – she often dropped in for meetings or, I was coming to realise, just to check up on them and make sure that no alcohol or ashtrays found their way into Berry Boys vlogs. But she was normally a relatively unobtrusive presence, couching her instructions in the form of diplomatic advice and masking criticism with compliments.
Today, though, she was standing in the middle of the living room, doing what I can only describe as haranguing them.
“Honestly, sometimes I wonder what you boys think you’re doing. Or rather, if you actually think at all before you do things. There’s impulsive and then there’s just plain…” She paused. I suspected she’d been about to say, “just plain stupid”. “Just plain reckless. With your schedule, living here, this is really, really n
ot a good idea.”
“But I’ve wanted a dog for ages,” Gus said. “We always had dogs when we were kids, we know what we’re doing, and she’s only small.”
“And look at her,” Charlie said. “She loves us already. We’ve called her Taylor.”
“After Taylor Swift,” Gus said. “Because she’s a greyhound. Only a miniature one. An Italian greyhound. Swift – geddit?”
As I approached the sofa, I could see that the bundle on Gus’s lap was a puppy. When it saw me, it jumped out of his arms and came scampering across the floor at speed, its claws slipping on the polished concrete. It skidded to a stop and looked up at me.
“Oh my God, she’s adorable,” I said. And it was true – the puppy was the soft, pale grey of an expensive suede handbag, with enormous dark eyes and paws that looked far too big for her tiny body. Her ears stuck comically out of the sides of her head. “She looks like Yoda.”
“She might be miniature, but that doesn’t mean she’s going to be low maintenance,” Sloane said. “Have you even thought how much care puppies need? You’ll have to take her out every couple of hours during the night, you know.”
“That’s okay,” Charlie said. “We’re up all night anyway.”
“And during the day,” Sloane said. “And you’re in bed all day.”
“We’ll take it in turns,” Gus said.
“We’ll do shifts,” Charlie said.
“And you’ll have to take her out for walks and to puppy classes and make sure she’s properly trained,” Sloane went on. “And she’ll chew everything, and I mean everything. We’ve already replaced that sofa twice.”
I felt blood rushing to my face as I remembered the first night I’d spent there, having sex with Charlie on the red suede, worrying that my wet skin and dripping hair would ruin it. I wondered if he’d told Sloane the reason for that most recent replacement, and what had happened the time before.
“We aren’t completely irresponsible, you know,” Gus said. “We’ve already bought her food and a bed and a load of toys.”
The Truth About Gemma Grey: A feel-good, romantic comedy you won't be able to put down Page 21
