The Truth About Gemma Grey: A feel-good, romantic comedy you won't be able to put down

by Sophie Ranald

  “Who the hell’s there?”

  It was Sloane.

  “Oh my God,” we both said, our words colliding and jumbling together. “Shit, you gave me such a fright. Thank fuck it’s only you. Jesus, I thought…”

  “I came to pick up Charlie’s mobile phone charger,” Sloane said.

  “I came to see him,” I said. “But what… where are they?”

  “I think we both need a drink,” Sloane said. “But close that door, it’s Arctic out.”

  I did as she asked, then sat down on the sofa, my legs feeling too rubbery and strange to support me. I watched as she opened the fridge, found two glasses in a cupboard and sloshed vodka into them. Sloane was wearing jeans and a checked shirt – it was the first time I’d seen her in anything other than the waisted fifties-style dresses she favoured. In trainers, she was much shorter than she was in my head. Her hair was scraped back in a ponytail and her face looked different – softer, somehow, and younger, but shadowed with fatigue. She bit her lip and I realised that I’d never seen her without her trademark scarlet lipstick.

  She flopped down next to me, handed me my drink and took a deep gulp of her own, spilling some of it down her front and wiping her chin with the back of her hand.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’m all over the place. It’s been one hell of a day.”

  I said, “What’s going on? Where are Charlie and Gus? Are they okay?”

  “They’re fine,” Sloane said. “Honest. We just thought it would be best if they moved out. Just in case there’s any… media attention.”

  “But there’s always media attention,” I said. “Social media, anyway. They have girls turning up all the time, wanting selfies.”

  “Tell me about it!” Sloane said. “This isn’t that, though.”

  “What is it then?” I said. “Please, Sloane, you need to tell me.”

  “Oh God, I don’t even know if I can,” she said. “Our client confidentiality clauses… but I guess this involves you, too.”

  “How? What did I do?”

  “You know Raphael Roden, right?” Sloane said.

  There it was again – Raffy’s name, being used by someone who until a couple of days ago I wouldn’t have expected to even know of his existence. Hell, until a couple of days ago I hadn’t even known his full name myself.

  “He was just Raffy,” I said. “The guy who worked in the coffee shop. I had no idea he was planning to do some massive investigative… thing… about YouTubers. I would never, ever have told him anything if I’d known. And what I did tell him was totally harmless, anyway. I just said stuff about feeling sometimes that I was recommending products I didn’t really like, and that I wasn’t sure where I was going with the whole thing, and… I’m sorry.”

  “You’ve got nothing to apologise for,” Sloane said. “Well, apart from maybe not confiding in me if you were having doubts about where your career was going. Because that’s what we’re here for, right? I mean, we promote our clients and their brands, we broker partnerships, we manage reputations, but we also like to think of ourselves as friends.”

  “I know,” I said. “I guess it was all just happening too fast, and stuff was going on with Jack – my ex-boyfriend – and I just needed someone to talk to. I’d had a few drinks, and…”

  “Gemma, it doesn’t matter. Seriously, this isn’t about you.”

  “Then what… What’s Charlie done?” The way she’d said “manage reputations”, almost wincing at the words, filled me with dread. I imagined some horrible scandal enveloping Charlie – but what? Drugs? I’d have known, surely, if it was that. Charlie had never shown any signs of using any recreational substance stronger than a cocktail, not once in all the nights I’d spent with him.

  “Not Charlie,” Sloane said. “Gus.”

  Suddenly, things started to make sense. All the nights Gus had gone off out on his own. The times Charlie and I had come home without him, because he said the night was young and he wanted to carry on partying. The times I’d heard him come back to the flat in the early hours of the morning, or even passed him on the stairs on my way to work. The total lack of any girls in Gus’s life since his brief, apparently totally unserious thing with Maddie.

  “Gus is gay!” I said. “Thank God it’s only that. I mean, poor guy, being closeted and everything, but it’s no big deal, right? People come out on YouTube all the time. It’s, like, a thing. People might talk about it for a bit, but no one cares. It’s not like this is the 1980s. Boy bands don’t even happen any more unless one of them’s gay. Those girls who subscribe to their channel all have gay best friends. Half of them will probably come out as non-binary in six months’ time, because just being gay is so over. It’s…”

  “Gus isn’t gay,” Sloane said. Then she added, almost under her breath, “I bloody wish he was.”

  “Then what…”

  “When you went off with him the other night,” Sloane said. “Where did you go?”

  “Nowhere,” I said. “I mean, we got an Uber, Gus dropped me home and went off somewhere on his own. He does that sometimes. I never asked, because, well, it’s none of my business really, is it?”

  “That’s what I thought, too,” Sloane said. “None of my business, he’s a big boy, I can’t nanny my clients 24/7. When I realised he did need nannying – well, they pulled that stupid prank at the party. For God’s sake. How could I have been so dumb as to have been taken in by that? I’ve worked with those boys for years. I should have known.”

  “I should have known,” I said, blushing at the memory of that all-too-public kiss.

  “Yes, well,” Sloane said. “So I spent the entire evening thinking I was keeping an eye on Gus, when really I was keeping an eye on Charlie, and how much of a fool did I look when he did his big reveal at midnight? But I thought it didn’t matter, it was just another of their hilair pranks. Then just as I was leaving – I had to stay right until the end – one of the barmen accosted me and told me he was the guy who’s been hounding me for months, wanting to know stuff about my clients for some film he’s making.”

  “Raffy,” I said. “Raphael Roden.”

  “Raphael Roden.” Sloane practically spat the name out. “He told me he knew about Gus. He said he had evidence – video evidence. And he’d spoken to Maddie and Maddie told him she knew, too. And he’d told Gus he knew and Gus, the stupid idiot, went off anyway and…”

  I waited. Sloane took another gulp of vodka, and so did I. I had a feeling I was going to need it.

  “And what? What did Raffy know? Sloane, what’s Gus done?”

  “He’s been meeting viewers,” Sloane said.

  Part of me wanted to protest, to say that wasn’t a big deal any more than Gus being gay would have been – that meeting viewers was a thing that happened all the time. But I knew that wasn’t what she meant.

  “You mean, like…”

  “Hooking up,” Sloane said. “Sending messages on Twitter and Facebook and meeting girls in hotels for sex. Lots of girls. His fans.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “Do you mean they were…”

  “Not underage. Thank God. Christ, if he’d broken the law… But still, young girls – seventeen, eighteen, meeting up with him and… It’s just so sordid. Sordid and irresponsible and – well, exploitative. Because even though they were throwing themselves at him – there’s no question that anyone wasn’t consenting to anything – it’s an appalling breach of trust. If it were to come out – if people think he can’t be trusted around his fans…”

  I thought of myself at seventeen, of the huge crush I’d had on Tom Fletcher from McFly, and imagined what I’d have done if Tom had sent me a private message on Facebook and said he wanted to meet me. I imagined how giddily star-struck I would have been, how reckless, how utterly incapable of saying no to anything. I wondered how I would have felt afterwards – used, ashamed, dirty. Or perhaps not – perhaps just proud to have a story of spending the night in a hotel with a megastar to tell all my friends. Pe
rhaps I’d have imagined I was going to be his girlfriend, and that I’d become famous too. And when I realised it would never happen, how would I have felt then? Used, ashamed and dirty. There was no getting away from it.

  “That’s awful,” I said. “My God. I should have known. I should have…”

  “Should have what? Grounded him? Locked him in his bedroom? Do you think I haven’t been telling myself exactly the same thing? But there was nothing I could do, except hang around and just be there, because obviously even though he wasn’t doing anything illegal, he didn’t want me to know about it. I didn’t know – well, I suspected, but what could I do? He’s an adult, the girls are adults – in theory, anyway. And it wasn’t… I mean, if he went on the occasional date with a girl I thought he’d probably met through their channel, it was easy to turn a blind eye. But in the last few months he’s been doing it more and more. Since he broke up with Maddie, and since…”

  Since I came on the scene, I thought. Since Gus didn’t have Charlie to himself any more.

  “And the girls talked, on those forums. No one believed them at first. People make shit up all the time about YouTubers. Everyone imagines they’re much closer to you than they really are – it’s how the medium works, why it’s so powerful. But then the same stories started coming up again and again. About twelve girls, all saying the same thing. And that Raphael told me he’d met one of them, and she told him what had happened, and he filmed her telling him for his bloody documentary.”

  I said, “What’s going to happen? When it comes out, I mean.”

  “It’s not going to,” Sloane said. “That’s what Roden said, anyway. He said he’s not going to release the film. He said it would hurt too many people. He said he didn’t want to hurt you. I didn’t realise he even knew you. But he said Gus can’t be allowed to carry on, and he’s right.”

  “But you said you can’t stop him,” I said.

  “I can’t,” Sloane said. “But if there’s no Berry Boys channel, there won’t be any girls queueing up to meet Gus. Well, there might be for a bit. But it’ll stop by itself. Our audience is fickle, as I keep telling you. So we’re shutting it down, and the boys are going to lie low for a bit while they think things through.”

  I needed to think things through myself. My mind was whirring like a blender when you switch it on by mistake with nothing in. Raffy wasn’t making his film – the film that would have ruined Gus, and by association Charlie, and perhaps also me. He wasn’t making it because of me. The Berry Boys were over. What would Charlie do now? He loved vlogging. Even though he complained about his schedule, and about Sloane, he loved it. It was his life. It had been his idea, I remembered Gus telling me. “I’m just his bitch,” he’d said. And I wondered whether, maybe, Gus had deliberately set out to cause a crisis that would bring it all crashing down – while having his own particular kind of fun at the same time.

  I said, “I came here tonight because I was going to end things with Charlie.”

  “I figured,” Sloane said. “I’m sorry. You two seemed so happy together – I really hoped it was all going to work out.”

  “I did too,” I said. “But then… This is going to sound really stupid.”

  And I told her about Stanley being mauled by the puppy. About halfway through I started to cry.

  “Oh, sweetie,” Sloane said, wrapping her arms around me and patting my back. “It’s not stupid at all. I totally get it. It’s the selfishness. I love those boys, I really do, but we let them get away with murder because they’re such big stars, and this is the result.”

  I said, “I’ll call Charlie tonight. I’ve been putting it off for too long. But it’s such a bad time…”

  Sloane said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if Charlie’s expecting it. Bite the bullet, Gemma. There’s never a good time for these things.”

  I blew my nose, and we both stood up. Sloane put the much-depleted vodka bottle back in the fridge.

  “I’ll lock up,” she said. “I’ll call you in the morning, okay?”

  I turned to leave, then said, “Sloane? About my channel. I know it’s not a big deal, especially not now, but do you think I’m going to have to stop vlogging, too?”

  “Don’t you dare!” Sloane said, then added hastily, “Unless you want to, of course. You’re doing so well. We’re all so proud of you. I was going to say, when we talk tomorrow, we need to discuss your strategy for Vlogmas.”

  “Great,” I said. “That’ll be great.” But I wasn’t thinking about Vlogmas. I was thinking, as I pressed the button for the lift and took my phone out of my bag, about what I was about to say to Charlie. By the time I got home, I’d made the call. Charlie Berry and Gemma Grey were over.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “So, what happened next?” Hermione asked gently.

  “He said he was sorry,” the woman whispered. Her name was Siobhan, and she was in her mid-twenties, a couple of years older than me. She was pretty, with dark hair in a shiny bob and a scattering of freckles across her nose. But it wasn’t the freckles I noticed when I looked at her. The crookedness, the mismatch between the left and the right side of her face, was slight but once you knew it was there, and why, you couldn’t un-see it. Our viewers wouldn’t see it though. Siobhan had asked not to be shown on camera, because she was too frightened. She was sitting by the window, silhouetted against the bright light.

  The rest of the room was bright, too. It was sunny and warm, with assorted cushions scattered on the beige sofas, children’s art on the walls and their toys on the floor. I’d had to clear a space for the massive box of make-up and toiletries, which I’d brought because I’d read on the charity’s website that things like that were desperately needed.

  We’d been speaking to Siobhan for the past half-hour, in the living room of this sprawling 1930s house in west London that had been her home for the past two months. It had taken three weeks to set up the interviews with Siobhan and two of the other women who lived there. The charity had been reluctant to give us access at first, because its location was secret – and, from the outside, it looked entirely anonymous, indistinguishable from its neighbours, with its well-tended front garden and phalanx of wheelie bins standing outside the door. Hermione, the camera crew and I had walked past about three times before saying to each other, “This has to be the place, right?” and steeling ourselves to knock on the door.

  The women were reluctant to talk, too, but once they began their stories were chilling. Martine had described how her husband first hit her on their wedding night, after a whirlwind romance that had felt like a dream come true.

  “I lay there on the floor of the hotel room, and I thought I must be imagining things,” she said. “I literally thought I was going to wake up and find that it hadn’t really happened. And then I saw the blood on my wedding dress – the dress I was going to pack away in acid-free tissue paper and keep in case my daughter wanted to wear it one day. I thought, I need to soak that in cold water. Then I remembered it was meant to go to a specialist dry cleaner. It’s funny how your mind works, isn’t it?”

  We never found out what happened to Martine’s wedding dress. Instead, we heard how her new husband had begged for forgiveness, told her he loved her so much he sometimes couldn’t control his feelings, promised her over and over that it would never happen again. The next time it did, he said the same things. And the time after that, and over and over again, until Martine stopped believing him – and stopped believing in herself, too.

  “I knew it must be my fault,” she said. “Because that was what he told me, and he was never wrong about stuff. He’s a clever man, he’s got three degrees, and I worked in a shop. After that first night, he never hit me where it showed. When he hurt me so badly I had to go to hospital, he came with me and told them that I’d fallen down the stairs when I was drunk. And they believed him, because I was drunk. I was drinking all the time. It was the only way I could get through the day. I tried to hide it from him but he’d always know,
and then he’d punish me for it.”

  It took ten years for Martine to leave, and when she did, it meant uprooting herself and her children from their home in Exeter and moving to London.

  “I still worry that he’ll find me,” she said. “I still worry that he’ll get the kids taken away from me, because I’m an unfit mother. I must be, to allow my kids to see what he did.”

  Ann talked to us next. Her story was different from Martine’s. Mark never hit her, she said. What he did was more subtle, more insidious – perhaps even more frightening.

  “My mum passed away and left me some money,” she said. “Not a lot, but Mark said it was enough for us to buy a house and for him to start his own business, like he’d always dreamed of doing. We couldn’t afford to be here, near my sister and my friends, so we moved to a little village in Northumberland. Mark’s a software developer – he could work anywhere. But there was nothing there for me to do. I cooked and cleaned and ironed his clothes, but nothing was ever good enough. He was just so angry, all the time. The work wasn’t coming in and we were skint, and he used to just fly into these terrible rages, blaming me for everything. He said I was lucky to have him, that no one else would want me – and it was true. He was all I had in the whole world, even though he terrified me.”

  Ann told us how, over four years, she’d become more and more isolated. “I couldn’t drive, and the car was his anyway. He always promised to teach me but he never did. The one time he tried I stalled the engine and he went mental at me, so I never asked again. It just wasn’t worth it. I couldn’t even use the internet, because he said there wasn’t enough bandwidth and he needed to work. There was no money for anything, so I couldn’t even top up my phone to text my friends. One day I checked my diary and realised I hadn’t spoken to anyone except him for six months. When the man came to read the gas meter I let him in and I couldn’t think of a single thing to say, not even to offer him a cup of tea. I just stood there staring at him until Mark came downstairs and took over. It was like being buried alive. But I didn’t know it was abuse – I couldn’t put that name to it, because he never laid a finger on me, you see.”