How Not to Fall in Love, Actually

by Catherine Bennetto

  I nodded my understanding. I was familiar with the hide-away-with-your-misery process.

  ‘So where’ve you been staying?’

  ‘Hotels. The floor of a pub one night. Mates’ couches.’ He looked at me. ‘A very kind stranger’s couch.’

  We smiled at each other. He didn’t know my situation and I didn’t fully know his, but we could sense a rawness in each other.

  A rapid, rhythmic knock at the door propelled Joe off the sofa.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ he said, tightening the towel round his waist.

  ‘Ah . . . OK.’

  ‘Hello. And who are you?’ Helen’s impertinent voice travelled from the front door.

  I’d forgotten she was coming over to tell me what she’d found out about Ned and Sophie.

  ‘I’m Joe. A friend of Emma’s.’

  ‘He’s not my friend!’ I called out.

  ‘Emma’s on the sofa, I’ve been watching her dribble and she’s a little upset.’

  Helen appeared in the living room unbelting her coat, a suggestive look on her face.

  ‘He’s not my friend,’ I said to her raised eyebrows. ‘I only met him last night.’

  ‘Oh really.’ Helen turned to Joe who arrived behind her, collecting his clothes from the radiator.

  She looked him up and down slowly and deliberately then turned to me, eyes gleaming.

  ‘Very nice.’

  ‘OK,’ Joe said, not at all offended. ‘I’m going to get dressed because, suddenly, I feel a bit like a piece of meat. Nice to meet you . . .?’

  ‘Helen,’ I offered.

  ‘Nice to meet you, Helen.’ He looked her up and down deliberately. ‘Also very nice.’ He left the room grinning.

  ‘I like him!’ Helen dumped her bag on the kitchen table and emptied out a stack of DVDs. ‘Now, tell me everything.’

  I quickly updated Helen on the appearance of Joe.

  ‘It’s not fair.’ Helen shook her head.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said, getting up and looking through the DVD collection.

  ‘This never happens to me. You didn’t have to leave the house, get your legs, lips and ladybits waxed, dance all night to crap DJ music in killer heels and a tight dress with your tits straining to get out. You’re wearing trackies, it looks like Gordon Brown did your ponytail and you have dried dribble on your cheek. And yet here he is. God delivered a gorgeous man, drunk and vulnerable to your front door. It’s like winning the sexual lottery.’

  ‘Gross,’ I said, rubbing my cheek.

  Joe emerged from the bathroom, dressed for the first time since last night, and walked over to the pile of DVDs.

  ‘What’re we watching?’ He flicked through the stack then looked up.

  I thought I could read a small plea in his face. Helen was smirking and making grabbing motions at his bottom. His smile dropped. He seemed to be reading my silence as an indication to leave. His eyes went to the DVD in his hand. About Time. Richard Curtis.

  I grabbed it. ‘Let’s watch this!’

  Joe looked up, his expression grateful. ‘And get pizza?’ He turned to Helen, who immediately dropped her groping motion.

  ‘Pizza’s good.’ Helen twisted her ruby mouth into a salacious smile. ‘Now, come take a seat and tell me all about yourself.’

  Later, after Helen had left and as I was padding down the hall turning lights off, my phone rang.

  ‘I didn’t see that young man leave,’ Harriet said.

  ‘No, he’s still here.’ I tucked the phone under my chin and pulled the duvet out of the hall closet.

  ‘Are you in some kind of a hostage situation? If you are, say the code word “apple flapjack” and I’ll be over with Brutus. Say it now. Use it in a sentence, like maybe—’

  ‘Harriet, I’m fine.’ I suppressed a snigger. ‘He’s just staying another night. He’s got nowhere else to go. I’ll come over tomorrow and tell you all about it.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘There’s nothing to worry about. He’s actually a nice guy.’

  ‘If you’re sure, dear.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘OK, well, you know the code word now.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Apple flapjack.’

  ‘Apple flapjack.’

  ‘Good, good.’ Harriet clicked her tongue. ‘Make sure you do pop over tomorrow. Arthur’s made you a key lime pie.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘You’re a good girl, Emma dear.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, touched.

  I hung up and took the duvet into the living room. Joe had fallen asleep on the sofa during About Time and was on his back, breathing gently, a different man to the snoring, smelly one from the night before. His hair, now clean, dried in loose curls round his head. His lashes rested on his cheeks and curled upward and his beard had grown thicker. His broad chest rose and fell with his breath. Who would cheat on a man with a chest like that? I’d been surprised when he’d told Helen he was a graphic designer. He looked more outdoorsy-lifty-lifty than indoorsy-clicky-clicky. Joe snuffled and turned, making me jump. I laid the duvet over him, turned off the light and headed to bed.

  At three thirty in the morning I got up to pee for the 348th time. Then shuffled to the kitchen, got a glass of juice and two chocolate-chip cookies and snuck back past Joe. He was on his side with the duvet pulled up tight to his chin looking sweet and vulnerable. Unable to watch my predawn infomercials because of the sleeping, broken-hearted man on my sofa, I crept back to bed and flicked on my bedside lamp.

  So.

  Ned and Sophie were really happy together. Or so Helen had said. They’d bumped into each other on the tube after my grandma’s wake and ended up going to the same bar. Sophie spent most of the night with Ned, as he’d seemed so depressed. They’d talked about the baby, about me and about life in general. But nothing physical happened that night, Helen had said patting my knee. Like that was any consolation. Oh goody for them, they managed not to get together on the night of my grandmother’s funeral. Let’s give them the Nobel Peace Prize and a box of kittens. A few weeks later they bumped into each other at another bar and Ned had been far less depressed and much more fun and Sophie had been very drunk. They danced and drank and kissed. And then went home together. Yuck. I’d called Sophie the next morning and it had been him I’d heard in the background, not her sick cat. I’d felt faint when Helen told me. He was there, next to her. Naked, probably. With that freshly fucked, contented, droopy-eye thing he gets after sex while I chatted on the other end of the phone. I thought back to the times after that when Sophie had been practically floating two inches above the ground, heading out on dates with a mystery man while we speculated on who it could be. She’d not said a word but had smiled and radiated that ‘new love’ joy girls get where your skin glows and you lose weight without even trying. And it had been Ned making her feel that way. I was beyond understanding. Apparently Sophie had had conniptions when Helen told her I’d seen them kissing. She was already quite a connip-tious soul. I can only imagine the state she’d been in. Helen had physically restrained her from jumping into her Ford Fiesta (with the ridiculous eyelashes on the headlights) and driving over to beg forgiveness. Joe had listened quietly to the conversation from the armchair, masticating methodically through a bowl of buttered popcorn.

  I slunk down in bed and picked up my weekly forward-planning schedule for the movie. In a week we were heading to the Isle of Anglesey for six weeks to shoot the camping and zombie cat scenes. We’d be leaving behind Melody and meeting Scott Vander, the ‘campers’ and a pack of, I hoped, well-trained cats. Bradley Manor was the name of the estate we’d be filming at. It was also our accommodation for the six weeks. I tossed the schedule to the side and picked up a piece of paper with a scrawled ad for a lodger I’d made after I’d seen Ned and Sophie kissing and realised I would not be contacting him to get my money back. I was dreading the rounds of interviews and viewings I’d have to endure. But I needed the money. Having told Mum Ned wa
s in the process of selling the ice cream van, I was forced to hand her a healthy portion of my chaperone wage each week as ‘instalments’.

  Joe coughed.

  I glanced at the scruffy paper in my hand.

  I nibbled on my cookie.

  I was being rash . . .

  I hardly knew Joe. He could be an identity thief who brings in a Russian girl to pose as me and then runs an international arms ring from my cottage before jumping on a cruise to the Caymans and leaving me with a global criminal record. Or I could come home to find he was trafficking Albanian teenagers into the sex industry and using my cottage as a heroin-administering centre for the girls before sending them to a brothel in Croydon.

  Nah.

  I shoved the rest of the cookie in my mouth and decided to present Joe with the option in the morning.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  A week later I was about to be picked up to leave for Anglesey when I got a facetime call from a breathless Alex.

  ‘Guess what?’ Her beaming face took up the whole screen.

  ‘What?’ I said, zipping up my toiletries bag with one hand and holding the phone with the other.

  ‘Guess!’

  ‘Ah . . . the sky is blue, the sea is hot, you’re going for a swim and I am not?’

  ‘Oh, very good. But no. I’m engaged! Cal flew to Vanuatu and proposed!’ She let out an excited squeal.

  ‘Oh my god. That is so exciting!’ My head said ‘be happy’ but my stomach dropped to the floor. I sat on my bed.

  Why do you get everything? I wanted to yell. I’m pregnant by a skinny freckle farm and you get proposed to on a tropical island by a lovely investment banker with a perfect arse? They’d invest in condos and travel the world donating to charities. And they’d visit me with their pert-arsed children at Mum’s house and I’d show them my new Wizard of Oz teapot I bought on eBay.

  Cal’s face appeared in the frame. ‘Hey, Em!’ he said, his straight white teeth massive on my screen.

  ‘Congratulations!’ I chirped. ‘Decided to join the family, did you? Mum hasn’t put you off?’

  ‘That charmer?’ he said with a laugh. ‘No chance. You, on the other hand . . .’

  ‘Oh, ha ha.’

  Alex, laughing, came back into the frame, and with their two faces mushed together within the constraints of an iPhone I could see their future. Happy, tanned, philanthropic and well off. Cute babies, a well-trained beagle pup and family trips to mind-expanding destinations like Nepal, Machu Picchu and the Galapagos while the baby and I saved up for our annual week at Center Parcs.

  ‘OK, get out now – I want to talk to my sister.’ Alex gave Cal a fond shove out of the frame.

  ‘Bye!’ his disembodied voice said. ‘Hope all’s going well with the pregnancy!’ Alex grinned in his direction then turned back towards the screen, her face shining with joy.

  ‘So how did he propose? When did he get there? Tell me everything!’ I said, forcing enthusiasm.

  ‘I had no idea at all,’ she said, grinning. ‘I got this knock at my cottage door last night and it was him! I couldn’t believe it! We went to the beach, where one of the locals had started a bonfire, and we sat round drinking rum out of coconuts then he pulled out this amazing ring and I said yes and the local kids all started singing and it was just . . . amazing!’ She heaved a huge sigh.

  I had never heard Alex so thrilled and girlish.

  ‘That sounds . . . amazing,’ I said, jealous to the point of turning solid with it. ‘Show me the ring!’

  ‘Oh, yeah!’ She moved the phone and her ring came into view.

  ‘It was my grandmother’s!’ Cal’s voice said.

  The image moved again and Alex came back into the frame, Cal’s arm visible over her tanned bare shoulder.

  ‘Em, I’m so happy,’ she said.

  Cal kissed her cheek, making her already wide smile wider.

  ‘Well, you deserve it,’ I said, and I really meant it.

  ‘You’ll help me plan the wedding?’

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘You know you’re my head bridesmaid, don’t you?’

  ‘I’d better be.’ I angled the phone away briefly and wiped a tear from my cheek. I was unsure whether it was a happy tear or a sad tear; I was feeling both emotions simultaneously.

  ‘How’s my baby?’ Alex said, changing tack.

  ‘Oh, good. I’m quite big now.’ I moved the phone to show my large frame.

  ‘Wow! I wish I could be there with you.’

  ‘I do too,’ I said, looking at a photo on the wall of Alex and me in our swimmers at Bournemouth beach aged five and eight.

  ‘I’d better go, though. The Alliance Française group are throwing us an engagement party on the beach – it’s already started and we’re not there!’

  ‘OK, have fun. I miss you,’ I said, feeling guilty that I was glad to be getting off the phone.

  ‘Miss you too!’

  An hour later my ride to Anglesey arrived.

  ‘And don’t forget to put the recycling out on Fridays,’ I said, shuffling behind Joe as he carried my suitcase to the waiting four-by-four.

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘And you know how to record Graham Norton?’

  ‘Yes. I have worked a television before.’

  ‘And you’ll wash the Ungaro towels separately? Mum will kill me if—’

  ‘I won’t even use the Ungaro towels. Emma, I’ll be fine. I remember all the rules.’ He hefted the suitcase into the boot and walked me to the car door. ‘No sluts, no wet towels on the floor, no smelly socks under the sofa, no drugs, no parties, do not mess with your plastics drawer and . . . ummm . . . that’s it!’

  ‘And if my mother comes over with anything neon, do not let her in.’

  ‘I’ll tell her you moved.’

  I looked up at him and my doubts reared again. Sure, he’d been staying at my place for the past week and had seemed perfectly normal. He did his dishes, he left the bathroom cleaner than I did and he proved to be a worthy competitor at Swear Word Scrabble. He’d taken to answering the phone in case it was Sophie, and on the one occasion it was her produced an inconsistent accent and told her she had ‘zee vrong nemberz, aye mon’. He’d even graduated from the couch to the upstairs bedroom, but I didn’t really know him. What if he brought different girls home every night and used my grandma’s cottage as a sexual adventure playground, or I came home to find him wearing my knickers and hosting a PowerPoint seminar on cross-dressing?

  ‘You’re looking at me weirdly,’ Joe said, a knowing smile playing at the edges of his lips. ‘I’m not an amateur porn director, I will not steal all your stuff and you won’t come home to find me wearing your knickers.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking that,’ I said, averting my guilty eyes.

  Joe uh-huhed.

  ‘You don’t need to worry about me, I’m normal.’ He pulled a funny face. ‘Now get in the car.’

  I climbed into the back seat of the four-by-four with a degree of difficulty. At five months pregnant I could not bend in the middle without worrying about severing a foetal limb.

  ‘It’s very kind of you to let me stay,’ Joe said, shutting the door and talking through the open window. ‘And if I really must wear your knickers I’ll make sure they’re your worst pair, the ones with holes and no elastic. And I’ll wash them thoroughly afterwards.’

  ‘Just throw them out,’ I said.

  He grinned.

  I waved goodbye as the driver pulled away and navigated the narrow lane filled with soccer mum estates and kids on tricycles and headed round the corner to Uncle Mike and Sinead’s to collect Archie. I was sure Joe was who he seemed to be. A good guy. The cottage would be fine. And all my knickers would be unworn, where I left them.

  After seven long hours Archie and I drove over the Britannia Bridge to the Isle of Anglesey. Archie had been the perfect travelling companion. He’d stayed to his side of the car (mostly because he was strapped into a technical-looking safety seat
that had taken the driver and I twenty minutes to get him back into after our first toilet stop) and only asked the dreaded ‘how long till we get there’ question once, three minutes after Sinead had buckled him in and run back into her house shouting, ‘One kid down, three to go!’

  A few minutes after leaving the bridge we were in country lanes. We came to the crest of a hill where the driver nosed the four-by-four off the lane and onto what looked like a farm track down a steep paddock. He shifted a few gears, then we lurched over the top and jolted roughly down the hill. I never had been one for extreme sports, preferring the safety of a couch or bar stool to that of a mountain bike or jet ski. I gripped the handle on the door with one hand and the edge of the seat with the other as the car bumped and dipped over the uneven terrain.

  ‘This is fun,’ Archie said, looking out of the window, his soft cheeks bouncing with each plunge of the tyres.

  ‘Hmmm,’ was all I could manage.

  It was a few minutes later when we reached a level-ish area at the edge of a dense forest. I decided I was going to sue the film company if my baby came out with its ears on back to front. Darkness had fallen completely by the time we broke through the trees and drove up the gravel drive to Bradley Manor. Although we were arriving from the back the building was still grand. The walls were a grey stone and multiple chimneys clustered on the peaked rooftops wafting the comforting smell of log fires. Lights glimmered in the diamond-paned windows and people bustled in and out of the manor.

  The busyness made me itch with excitement. Lighting and generator trucks, camera vans, people movers and expensive four-by-fours congested the courtyard. Our driver parked up beside the camera van. Andrew stood at the back with an assistant, sorting gear. He turned as we parked and gave me a grin that sent flurries through my chest.

  ‘Hi,’ he said as I slipped as elegantly as I could from the car. ‘Good trip?’

  ‘Yeah, fine thanks,’ I said, covertly dislodging my skirt from my knickers. But before I could think of anything to say that displayed my sparkling intelligence and/or wit, the assistant had recaptured his attention with an important bit of cable that should or should not have been attached to another important bit of cable.