“My God, it’s like a riot out there,” Jim said.
“A riot of teenage girls,” Ruby said.
“There must be, like, five hundred people outside our office,” said Callista in bewilderment.
“It’s worse than when Five Guys opened,” said Tom.
“It’s worse than when some idiot tweeted they’d seen Beyoncé shopping in Hollister,” Ruby said. “I mean, as if. That was totally insane, remember, Tom?”
“They closed the Tube station and everything,” Tom said.
“Someone’s phone’s ringing in the office,” Jim said.
I said, “I’ll go and see. Shit, it’s mine.”
I legged it back to my desk and snatched up the handset.
“Gemma?” It was Martin, the downstairs receptionist, and he sounded narky as hell. “There’s a gentleman here to see you. And a mob of young women following him. I’ve had to call the police.”
I said, “Oh my God. I’m so sorry. Is it Charlie?”
“Mr Berry, he says,” Martin said. “Shall I send him up?”
“Yes, please.” I put down the phone, my face flaming with mortification, and hurried to the lift. What was Charlie doing, turning up at my work? He’d never been here before. As far as I was aware, he didn’t even know the address.
The lift doors slid open and out stepped the familiar blond figure. He was holding a large white box and a bunch of roses, except the cellophane wrapping was all crumpled and torn, the flowers were squashed and several of them had been decapitated. When he handed them to me, a shower of red petals drifted down on to the carpet.
“God, Gemma,” he said. “What a fucking nightmare. I went into Liberty to get you these and I was browsing the Bigelow counter and I put a pic up on Snapchat, and then I wandered round some more and tried on some shoes, and then when I came out there were all these girls waiting. Bloody hell. That was actually quite scary. It took me half an hour to get here and it’s only just round the corner. Sorry about your flowers.”
Except it wasn’t Charlie. It was Gus.
I said, “That’s okay. I guess we’d better sit down.”
He followed me through to the smallest, empty meeting room and I gave him a glass of water. He looked a bit pale and I could see streaks of lipstick on his white T-shirt. This, I realised, was why he and Charlie had never, ever got the Tube, never gone out anywhere without a draconian door policy… quite often, for days at a time, never been anywhere at all. This was why Sloane planned their signings and meet-and-greets with such military precision – except, of course, when Gus escaped and went off on his own, to do his own thing, which had meant the end of the Berry Boys.
This was what it meant to have eight million followers on YouTube. This was what my life might be like, one day. I looked out of the window. The crowd was still there. I could hear the furious beeping of many cars’ hooters and the distant sound of a siren.
“It doesn’t look like that was much fun,” I said.
“No,” Gus said. “It wasn’t. It was horrible, actually. Next time I want to buy someone flowers, I’m getting them delivered.”
I laughed, then I remembered how furious I ought to be with him about what he’d done, and stopped.
I thought about my faltering attempts to make friends with him, and whether it would have made any difference to what happened if I’d succeeded. I wondered whether, if Gus had apologised for what he’d said to me the day they got the puppy, Charlie and I would have carried on being together and everything would still be the same as it had been three months ago. Before the Halloween party. Before Raffy. I wondered whether, if I hadn’t been home and seen what Richard had done to Hannah, I would ever have found the courage to vlog about things other than make-up and scented candles.
I couldn’t be sure. Thinking about it, about the whole complex tangle of possibilities and what-ifs, made my brain go all funny, like when I read about alternate realities, quantum interference and the nature of causality in Terry Pratchett novels when I was a teenager. But I was as sure as I could be that the way things had turned out was the right way.
And I supposed that, in spite of everything, I was quite grateful to Gus.
So I reached out and touched his hand, and said, “How are you? Where have you been?”
“Wales,” Gus said.
“Wales?” I said, as incredulously as if he’d said the planet Neptune, although given his and Charlie’s brief passion for virtual space exploration, Neptune was actually quite a bit more likely. “What’s in Wales?”
“Mountains, mostly,” he said. “At least, in the bit where I am. And sheep. And our nana and grandad.”
I gawped at him a bit more, and then said, “But what are you doing there?”
“Well, mostly, right now, I’m thinking. And playing the fiddle. There’s no broadband where our grandparents live and hardly any mobile reception. They only got satnav in their car a year ago and they listen to Classic FM all the time. Nan plays the violin – it was her who got me into it. I expect we’ll do duets in the village hall. It’s boring as fuck and I’m loving it. Coming up to London today was so weird. I’d forgotten how crowded the Tube gets. I literally got lost changing at King’s Cross.”
It had been a lot longer than just a few weeks since Gus had been a regular commuter on London Underground, but I didn’t want to remind him of that. “It is kind of busy,” I muttered.
“It’s great for Taylor, too,” Gus went on. “Grandad is obsessed with dogs. He’s teaching her manners and about chasing rabbits. She loves it there.”
I finally untied my tongue from around my tonsils, where it appeared to have got stuck, and said, “But what about vlogging? I mean, don’t you miss it?”
Gus said, “Gemma, we’re going to be twenty-five next month. I did the YouTube thing for seven years and I’m getting a bit too old to spend my time playing games and pranking my brother. Don’t you think?”
I thought. I thought about the condom challenge and the food fights and the Korean sweets, and the feral, studenty lifestyle they both lived. I thought about Hannah and what had happened to her, and about how different the way I felt about Raffy was from the way I’d felt about Charlie, or even about Jack, and I understood exactly what he meant.
I said, “Yeah, I guess so. But what about the flat? What about Charlie?”
“Sloane managed everything,” Gus said. He sounded a bit angry, and very tired. “She told us what to do. She set Charlie up with a shiny new channel all of his own, and he’s signed up to be a brand ambassador for Topman. Apparently she’s talking to MTV about him fronting a show. Our Charles isn’t finished with celebrity, not by a long shot. But I am.”
I looked at him. He looked just the same – a duplicate of the hot blond boy I’d fallen for, only slightly different. But the difference now was more pronounced – under his bright blue eyes there were shadows I couldn’t remember being there before. There was a loose flake of skin on his lip, as if he’d been biting it and not using chapstick. He looked tired – not in the yawny, up-all-night way I was used to seeing, but a different kind of tiredness, one I suppose would take a long time for a person to notice, and a long time to get better from.
I said, “You hated it, didn’t you?”
“Not at first,” Gus said. “At first it was all a bit of a laugh. And once I realised I was never going to be a famous classical musician, it was another way of getting what I’d wanted from that, I guess. The adulation. But getting that from a bunch of teenage girls is a whole lot different from getting it from an audience at the Barbican, like I thought I would when I started college. And I hated them, Gemma. I hated the fans. I couldn’t get past it. I couldn’t get my head around why they loved us when what we were doing was so totally pointless.”
“But you…” I began, but I couldn’t bring myself to finish saying it.
Gus did it for me. “Shagged them anyway? Yes, I did. And believe me, I’m not proud of it. It’s the shittest thing I’ve ever done – even shitte
r than snogging you that night, and that was a shit thing, too. I guess I thought that if they were making me live this life I hated – and I know they weren’t, not really – then they could pay for it in a way that gave me some pleasure, at least. And afterwards, every time, I hated myself so much. So I focused on hating them, and that justified doing it again.”
The shock I felt must have showed in my face, because Gus said, “Like I said, I’m not proud. You know, one day, I’m going to meet someone special, and I’m going to have to decide whether to tell her about what I did. If I do, and I lose her, maybe that will be my payback. And if I don’t, I’ll always know, and I’ll always worry that somehow she’ll find out.”
But that wouldn’t be Gus’s only payback for what he’d done, I realised. Whatever happened, even if he fell in love with a girl and found a way to make her feel okay about this short, grubby series of events in his past, there was one thing that had changed forever: he and Charlie would always be twins, always be brothers, but them being a double act, perfect reflections of each other, was over. The mirror they’d been able to look into and see each other had smashed and it could never be repaired.
Gus knew that, I realised. I wondered whether Charlie did too, and whether he understood that he was partly responsible for it.
“Don’t worry about me, Gemma,” Gus said. “I’m okay. The book’s still selling loads, so I won’t starve. I’ll be happy, somehow, I guess. I’ve got Taylor, and music.”
I turned towards the window again. The noise outside had died down, and when I looked I could see just a handful of girls waiting on the corner.
I said, “It looks like the coast is going to be clear soon.”
“Thank God for that,” Gus said. “Listen, Gemma, I need to say something else before I go – and I’m going to get an Uber this time, don’t worry. I won’t make your man downstairs call the peelers again. How mental was that? He’s one hard bastard, though. I thought for a bit he might be going to arrest me, but then I told him I was here to see you and he backed off.”
I said, “Martin is kind of terrifying. But when you get to know him he’s a real softy.”
“Maybe he is,” Gus said. “But he scared the shit out of me anyway. Post-traumatic stress disorder, here I come. But anyway, I was saying…”
“You were saying?”
“I was jealous of you,” Gus said. “Charlie fell for you, big time. You two were good together.”
I said, “I guess just because something’s good, doesn’t mean it’s meant to last.”
Gus took a deep breath, as if he was inhaling a fag, and blew it slowly out again. He said, “I know that, now. And I should have let it run its course. But I didn’t. I wanted it to end, and I helped end it.”
I said, “I know how hard it must have been, me suddenly being there, like, all the time. When the two of you were used to it just being you.”
Gus said, “Yeah. And now it’s just me.”
I reached across the table and gave his hand a squeeze. “It’s going to be okay. Whatever’s happening, you’ll be okay.”
He brightened, and said, “And I’m staying over at the flat tonight. It’s way too late to get the last train back to Bangor. Charles will probably want to go out on the town, now he’s free and single again. Shoreditch House maybe.”
I said, “Gus…!”
He laughed. “Don’t worry, Gemma. That chapter in my life is over. We’ll stay in and get a takeaway. I expect Charles will be glued to his laptop all night, editing videos. Anyway.” He pushed the white box across the table towards me. “I nearly forgot. You need to open this. Merry Christmas.”
I’d almost forgotten about it too, even though it had been on the table between us the whole time we were talking. It was a plain box, tied with a blue ribbon. I thought about what might be inside, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out.
But he said, “Go on, open it.”
I said, “Gus, I don’t want to hurt your feelings or anything, but I don’t think you understand.”
He said, “I think I do.”
He had sort of half-smile on his face, the look people have when they desperately want to have got something right, but aren’t sure they have – a look of almost puppyish eagerness. But I definitely, definitely didn’t want to think about puppies at that particular moment. I didn’t want to know what Gus might have brought me to make up for the loss of Stanley.
But then I looked at him again, and saw his tired eyes and knew that even though the Berry Boys were finished, even though it was all over between me and Charlie, he needed me to do this one last thing for him, to pretend he’d got it right even if he hadn’t.
I untied the ribbon and lifted up the lid of the box. There was a layer of crisp white tissue paper inside, and I lifted that up too.
And then I gasped.
There, lying on his back as if nothing had happened to him, was Stanley. Not another teddy like him. Not a replacement. Stanley. His fur was worn away in the same places it had been for as long as I could remember. His smile was still a bit wonky, although the loose thread at the corner of his mouth had been stitched back into place. The dangly eye I’d kept meaning and forgetting to sew back on was now securely attached to his face. And his arms and legs, which I’d watched the puppy chewing off, were reattached as good as new.
I lifted him out of the box and held him close to my chest. He smelled a bit different, but not in a bad way – even I had to admit, he’d become a less than fragrant bear over the years.
I said, “Oh my God. Gus. I can’t believe you did this.”
Gus said, “I didn’t, Gemma. Come on. Sloane took him to a special toy repair place, after she’d given us the mother of all bollockings for letting the puppy chew your stuff. They took ages to fix him, but they did. I haven’t said sorry to you about that. But I am sorry.”
I said, “Thank you.”
And then we had the longest, most massive hug, which only stopped when Sarah turned up at the door for the meeting with her clients and alerted us to her presence with a discreet cough. I jumped like someone had chucked icy water over me and so did Gus, and we gathered up the box and the flowers and Stanley and hurried out, apologising profusely.
As we were leaving, I heard one of the clients say, “Was that…?”
I kept walking, knowing that the rest of his question would be whether one of the famous Berry Boys had graced Clickfrenzy HQ with his presence, and that Sarah would find a way to make it sound like he’d been there on official business.
But the client must have thought we were out of earshot, because he went on, loudly enough for me to hear quite easily, “That’s Gemma Grey, right?”
A NOTE TO MY READERS…
Dear reader
Over the page, I mention some of the amazing people who have helped me during the long and sometimes difficult process of writing The Truth About Gemma Grey. But first of all, I wanted to say thank you to the most important person of all – you. I know how many wonderful books there are out there, and I feel privileged and grateful when you choose mine. I read every single review you post on Amazon – long or short, good or bad – and I respond personally to every email sent by a reader to my mailing list. So please do get in touch and tell me what you think – I’d love to hear from you.
As a special thank-you to readers who join my mailing list, I’m offering a free copy of my third novel, Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire. I promise never to spam you or share your details with anyone else, sign up by clicking here?
Sophie
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing a novel is like having a baby, or so the cliché goes. Now I’ve never gone through pregnancy, but if I were to extend that analogy to my experience writing The Truth About Gemma Grey, it would involve morning sickness, swollen ankles, varicose veins, stretch marks, and then a doctor hacking away at my nether regions with a scalpel before saying he’d changed his mind and I’d have to wait another four months to meet my baby.
> Okay, who am I kidding – writing is nothing like giving birth! Nonetheless, the process of gestating The Truth About Gemma Grey was a long and, for me, unusually arduous one. Fortunately, I had help, inspiration and support from some amazing people.
The world of vlogging was completely new to me when I started writing Gemma Grey, and my research involved countless hours spent glued to YouTube, immersing myself in the channels and lives of Zoella, Tanya Burr, Estée Lalonde, Jim Chapman, Alfie Dayes and others. It’s left me with the greatest possible respect for these creators, who share often highly personal and sensitive aspects of their lives with their viewers, expose themselves to some seriously brutal sniping and trolling, then come back the next day, smile for the camera, and do it all again. It’s also left me with a much-increased make-up collection, some killer contouring skills, and a Christmas jumper I never knew I needed.
But there’s more to YouTube than Minecraft and make-up, as I discovered. Many content creators are passionate about raising awareness for causes they care about: politics, HIV prevention, online bullying, mental health – the list is endless. For Gemma, it was a realisation of the huge scale and insidious nature of domestic violence that inspired her to vlog about more than just make-up and clean eating. Women’s Aid, Refuge and a host of other charities do incredible work to support people in abusive relationships and help them to rebuild their lives – and do it in the face of ever-diminishing funding. We should all be thankful for the work they do. I’d also like to thank Clare Smith, who gave me some pointers from a police officer’s point of view about the process of reporting and arresting an offender.
My research then took me to Google’s palatial London HQ, where Tom Price and Thea O’Hear were kind enough to show me around and bring me up to speed on the practical and financial aspects of being a YouTuber. Any deviation from reality in Gemma’s experience is either poetic licence, or simple error on my part resulting from information overload! The writer Matt Whyman also provided invaluable insights into vlogging, and introduced me to the strange online underworld where YouTubers’ fans and ex-fans gather to discuss their idols in minute – and often malicious – detail.
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