How Not to Fall in Love, Actually

by Catherine Bennetto

  ‘It’s kind of early for a Saturday morning, Em.’ Helen answered the phone with a croaky but not unfriendly voice. ‘I do hope you’re phoning me with good news. The I’ve-just-seen-Scott-Vander’s-knob-and-it’s-the-size-of-an-oil-tanker-and-I-got-you-a-photo type news.’

  I laughed. ‘Well, I did see a knob, but not Scott Vander’s.’

  ‘Do tell,’ Helen said, intrigued.

  I regaled her with the previous night’s events while Helen gave satisfying gasps of disgust. Then we discussed the hotness scale of the rest of the men on set, beginning with Andrew at the top: tanned, taut and lusty, to Steve at the bottom: droopy, dreadlock-y and defiled by Martha. As we were getting to the finer points (if by some extremely unlikely chance Andrew decided a pregnant single girl was just his cup of tea), namely which sexual positions would be possible and, importantly, flattering while five months pregnant, Martha shoved her flushed face into mine.

  ‘Archie’s finished in Wardrobe and needs to go to Make-up.’ She glared at my phone.

  I raised my index finger in a ‘one minute’ gesture and got an irate nostril-flare in return. I walked behind a rack of zombie camper costumes.

  ‘So . . .’ I said, knowing I shouldn’t ask but unable to stop myself, ‘what’s the latest with . . . you know?’

  Helen let out an exasperated sigh. ‘God! That idiot.’

  I didn’t know if she was referring to Ned or Sophie.

  ‘She’s given him money.’

  ‘Oh. That’s . . . quite sad really,’ I said, realising the strongest feeling I had was one of pity. Poor, gullible Sophie. ‘That’s how it all begins. Another girlfriend-funded get-rich-quick scheme. It’s ice cream now; next month it’ll be an online version of The Voice but for parrots, or a dissolvable toothbrush.’ I sighed. ‘She’ll never get it back. Did she lend him much?’

  ‘A few thousand, I think.’

  ‘A few thousand?!’ I shrieked. ‘What is she thinking?’

  ‘Apparently she believes in him. They’ve ordered another three vans. She thinks this ice cream idea could actually work if he has the money to get organic vodka and hand-churned cream, or something. I don’t know, Em,’ she said in a disinterested manner. ‘I stopped listening after she started yapping about profit margins, decorating the vans in “flavour themes” and fair-trade cows, or whatever.’

  The clothing rack I was behind swung back to reveal Martha, hands on fleshy hips.

  ‘I have to go,’ I said.

  I hung up, pushed past Martha, ignoring her indignant huffs and puffs, and took Archie off to Make-up to get some zombie cat gouges on his face.

  Poor Sophie. It was not going to work out well for her. I wanted to call and warn her. I even brought her number up on my phone before switching it off and shoving it deep, deep in the bottom of my bag.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  A week later I was back in London, a mug of tea in my hand, with Joe proudly showing me my new herb garden and the raised beds he was preparing for the summer vegetables I’d be growing. I’d coached Archie the whole way down from Anglesey not to mention he’d recently shot a scene at night where he comes across a writhing half-torso on the forest floor, and he was most certainly not to use the words ‘massacre’, ‘rip his head off’, ‘zombie motherfucker’ or any other violent or death-orientated terms.

  ‘Can I show him this?’ He held up my phone, a picture of him holding a prosthetic head filling the screen.

  ‘No.’ I grabbed my phone and started the process of assigning it a new pin number.

  ‘Can I tell him about the blood bags?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about—?’

  ‘Just tell Daddy what we talked about. You do lots of scenes with chihuahuas pretending to be cats, you’ve made a bunch of friends and you like the free doughnuts. OK?’

  Archie had nodded, then asked if zombies could be killed with a nail bomb and I made a mental note to be present for all future conversations with Sinn Féin Brian.

  The crew driver had dropped me off after delivering Archie to the outstretched arms of his wet-eyed mother. Despite sometimes appearing to feel otherwise, Sinead was mad about her children.

  I’d gone home and had a gloriously undisturbed sleep (i.e. no porn for the plus-sized in the next room) in my own bed.

  It was a beautiful crisp March morning, and while Joe primped and prettied the herbs, straightening their terracotta label stakes, I told him about life on the film set. Martha, it turned out, was a super-whore. In the last week she’d slept with Steve another two times, both loudly and dangerously (there had been another ornament death) and one of the extras who played Male Zombie Camper Number Three. That had been a much quieter affair but had gone on for a very, very long time. I’d looked at Male Zombie Camper Number Three with admiration the next day. Anyone who could stand hours of physical activity with Martha astride them was an athlete of extraordinary ability.

  ‘Well, fat-bottomed girls do make the rockin’ world go round,’ Joe said, breaking off a stalk of mint and holding it out. ‘Freddie Mercury said so.’

  ‘Freddie Mercury was gay, therefore unqualified to comment on super-sized super-whores.’ I took the stalk from Joe, crushed the leaves in my fingers and relished the potent scent that conjured up images of mojitos and beaches.

  ‘It sounds like you’re a little fattist.’ Joe squinted at me in the morning sun. His eyes crinkled and the apples of his cheeks rose charmingly. ‘Or are you jealous she’s getting all the hot guys?’

  ‘They are not hot, and I am not fattist!’

  Joe had shaved his ‘sad man’ beard off while I’d been away, and underneath was a wide grin and an enchanting single dimple on his left cheek. He was actually quite decent-looking. In a sandy-haired, sparkly-eyed, naughty uni student kind of way. He had the kind of wicked grin that made you check to see if he’d stuck a WHISTLE IF YOU’RE HORNY sign on your back. I wondered why his fiancée had cheated on him. Maybe he had some kind of dark side I’d yet to see. Like he collected babies’ skulls, or liked to go dogging but only if his girlfriend would dress as his old male physics teacher and carry a handbag full of dead bats. Or something.

  ‘She’s horrible to me all day, and at night I have to listen to her having her loud way with anything with an erect appendage and low standards.’

  Joe laughed and dug a pile of dirt. I ambled down the garden wall looking at his green-fingered handiwork. Grandma’s roses were trimmed and neat. Freshly turned earth lay in raised mounds with terracotta label stakes at the end of each one. Spring onions, spinach, peas and broad beans. Joe was clearly not a man accustomed to lolling idly around in a fug of self-pity. Shame; I’d quite enjoyed the weeks I’d wasted in front of the TV with my doughnuts. Men will never know the small amount of pleasure a girl gets from being shat on in the love department and the consequent ‘pity party for one’ they have after. Skulking around in your pyjamas and eating items that barely qualify as a food group is completely acceptable when you’re heartbroken. And deep down beneath the broken heart and wounded pride, there’s a tiny part of us that enjoys the self-focus. Halfway round the garden my phone rang. Alex. My stomach sank at the sight of her name on the screen. I didn’t think I could have another conversation about her winter-wonderland wedding, my one-twenty-seventh life crisis or how I was such an incompetent loser her fiancé needed to pay for my mistakes. I switched it to silent and slid it in my pocket just as a clattering noise and a screech of feedback sounded from Harriet’s side of the fence.

  ‘IS THAT EMMA I HEAR?’ Harriet’s tinny voice came through the loud-hailer. A moment later her inquisitive face popped over the wall. ‘Ah! You’re back! Hello, dear.’ She grinned, wrinkles furrowing in their hundreds.

  ‘Hi Harriet,’ I said. ‘You’re up early.’

  ‘Yes, I am rather,’ she said, her eyes flicking between Joe and me. ‘Arthur wheeled out to get parsley for our coddled eggs and didn’t come back for half an hour. His wheels got stuck in the
lawn. I told him to take the loud-hailer, but he never listens.’ She tutted and glanced over her shoulder. ‘He’s fine.’ She turned back to us. ‘Well, I haven’t moved him yet. I’ll have to dig him out but I’ve misplaced my kneepads.’

  Joe and I exchanged looks.

  ‘We manage.’ She waved our concerned faces away with her knobbled hand.

  ‘I’ll come over,’ Joe said, dropping his three-pronged diggy thing and brushing his hands on his jeans.

  ‘He’s a lovely young man, isn’t he?’ Harriet said, smiling after him as he walked back through the cottage. ‘Now, Emma dear, something came for you yesterday. Joe wasn’t in so I told that Chinaman courier I’d take it. He took a bit of convincing but I told him where to and what for, I did. I’ll just pop inside and get it. Stay there.’ Her wintry hair disappeared behind the wall. I heard her welcome Joe, give him a handful of wheelchair-digging directives, then Joe’s voice boomed as he greeted the mostly deaf, mud-confined Arthur.

  Moments later a ripped plastic casing with hunks of raw meat hanging from its ragged openings appeared over the wall. In two shunts it was on top of the wall in its plasticky, meaty entirety and Harriet’s face popped up behind it.

  ‘What on earth is that?!’

  At my look of horror Harriet assessed the carnage.

  ‘Yes, well, it didn’t arrive like this, dear,’ she patted the mess. ‘Brutus and I have been watching our programmes, you know. CSI and the other one, the one with that lovely writer and the pretty girl with lots of emotional baggage.’

  ‘Castle?’

  ‘Yes, that’s the one. Dishy, isn’t he? Do you like him? I said to Arthur, if I were forty years younger and he didn’t have that ginger daughter—’

  ‘Harriet, the meat?’

  ‘Oh yes. So Brutus has learnt a lot from our crime programmes, and I think he thought it might have been drugs, you see. It came in one of those cooler boxes, you know, the polystyrene ones, but ahh . . .’ She picked some bobbles of polystyrene out of a drying chunk of meat and looked at me sheepishly. ‘Well, there doesn’t seem to be much of that left.’ She lifted a slab and inspected its every angle. ‘It seems to be, yes, it’s mostly gone, eaten, really . . .’

  ‘It could have been a human heart in there, you know,’ I said, mocking her only slightly.

  ‘Exactly!’ she said, her frame straightening like a startled meerkat. ‘Black market harvested organs! That kind of thing is rife these days. Especially with those Chinamen.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  I heard Arthur giving Joe hollered instructions on the care of green beans.

  ‘But it was just organic meat.’ Harriet looked down at me, her cheeks flushing. ‘Brutus is very sorry, dear. He made you a card. I’ll send it home with Joe.’

  ‘That’s very thoughtful of . . . Brutus.’

  Harriet gave a noble nod. ‘It is, yes. No harm in being cautious though, is it, hmmm?’ She smiled down at me.

  ‘I guess not. Are you sure it’s for me, though? I didn’t order any meat. Did it have a delivery slip?’

  ‘It came with a note!’ She reached into her cardigan pocket, pulled out a partially eaten wad of paper and squinted at it. ‘It’s from someone called Sophie, and it says she’s very sorry.’

  My smile dropped. Harriet continued to read.

  ‘And “she hopes you can forgive her”. Then there are, well, a few holes . . .’ She looked at me sheepishly. I frowned and she quickly turned her attention back to the scrunch of paper. ‘Yes, anyway, here it says “something something organic” and . . . and this bit here is blurred.’ She glanced up again. ‘That’s on account of the drool . . . then over here it says something about iron being good for the baby. Then more drool. This part of the paper is missing and, ah . . . something else here, I can’t quite make it out.’ She looked at me again. I scowled. ‘Probably not important.’ She shook her head, then peered at the paper again. ‘Then another blurred bit and then . . . yes, then it says “love Sophie”.’ She made a futile attempt to fold the note with belated care, then tucked it into a ragged cavity in the meat pack. ‘So there you go. Lovely thought, isn’t it? To think of the baby like that? Shall I send it over with Joe?’ She adjusted her glasses and smiled.

  ‘Just give it to Brutus,’ I said, feeling my shoulders edge up at the thought of Sophie reading up on pregnancy and making dietary choices for me.

  ‘Oh no, he can’t eat it. It’s got polystyrene in it. Very bad for his tummy.’ She pursed her lips and shook her head. ‘You make a nice stew out of . . .’ She glanced down at the horrible mess. ‘Out of what’s left, yes?’

  A short while later, Harriet and Arthur were inside eating their coddled eggs and Joe had come back with the ruined meat pack, a home-made card with a Brutus-sized stamped paw print on the front and a massive grin. We’d binned the meaty horror and he’d continued digging while I’d recommenced my tour of the garden.

  ‘How about I make dinner tonight?’ I said, circling back after my horticultural appraisal. ‘Nothing meaty, though.’ I gave a mock shudder.

  Joe stood. He seemed to be assessing me, as if he thought I might be asking him out on some sort of date. Which I certainly was not. I was about to clarify this to him when he spoke.

  ‘I’d love that. I’ll do dessert.’

  He spent the rest of the day attempting to teach me how to care for each and every herb and plant. I listened, nodded and promptly forgot almost everything. Some needed trimming and some needed feeding; a kind of unpleasant, violent mixture called blood and bone. For which I asked, thinking myself rather funny, if I was growing Serial Killer Spinach or Homicidal Herbs. Joe had given me a charitable little smile and continued, telling me that tomatoes needed regular fertilising and to be read excerpts from any Stephen Fry book, and asparagus crowns wanted well-rotted manure and to be told knock-knock jokes at dusk. Or the other way round. As I said, I hadn’t really the mind for gardening.

  At the end of a very relaxing, nanna-in-the-garden kind of day we settled on his bed under a fluffy blanket and loaded up Thelma and Louise. Die Hard 1 and 2 sat in their cases on the bedside table.

  ‘This is one of my favourite films.’ Joe ripped open a packet of peanut M&Ms, his face a picture of glee. ‘This and The NeverEnding Story’. His expression became serious. ‘If anyone from the graphics profession asks, though, you say my favourites are The Alien Trilogy, Gravity and Requiem for a Dream.’

  ‘OK . . .’

  ‘You, Katy and my mother are the only ones who know that.’

  ‘Ooh, I feel like I’m in some kind of club,’ I said with faux excitement.

  Joe gave me a derisory look.

  I grinned. ‘To be fair, it’s a relatively boring club.’

  Around the end of the first Die Hard I felt my eyes blink heavily a couple of times. I was partially aware of a packet of Maltesers being removed from my clutches and a blanket placed over me, then nothing.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  ‘EMMA! MY KEY DOESN’T WORK!’

  I opened my eyes. I was nose-to-nose with a bare-chested Joe. His dark lashes quivered on his cheeks. The digital alarm clock on the nightstand the other side of him said 6.41 a.m.

  ‘EMMA, WAKE UP YOU LAZY TART AND HELP ME OUT OF THIS BLOODY TREE!’

  Mum?

  I propped myself up on my elbows. Through the triangular loft window I saw my mother dangling like a marionette from an oak tree, seemingly by the waistband of her designer jeans.

  ‘MUM?!’ I shrieked, struggling under the weight of my baby bump to sit up.

  Joe woke, disorientated. ‘What’s going—?’ He stopped as he saw the madwoman hanging from the tree and frantically beckoning me outside.

  On seeing the half-naked man next to me, Mum stopped squirming and her mouth fell open. Before I could explain that the woman in the tree in suede Valentinos was, in fact, my mother, and was as mad as a box of frogs that fell down the stairs, the phone next to the bed rang.

  ‘Hello?’ I s
aid, holding my hand up to Mum to wait.

  She dropped her arms to her sides, exasperated, then reached into the handbag dangling on her wrist and started fiddling with her BlackBerry.

  ‘EMMA, MY GIRL,’ bellowed Arthur from next door. ‘I DON’T MEAN TO ALARM YOU BUT THERE’S A WOMAN IN THE TREE OUTSIDE YOUR HOUSE. HARRIET WANTS TO SET BRUTUS ON HER, BUT – OH, LOOK, HARRIET, IT’S DIANA. SHE SEEMS TO BE ON THE PHONE.’

  ‘What a strange place to take a call,’ Joe said. ‘Who is that?’

  ‘Arthur, I am so sorry—’

  ‘SPEAK UP, GIRL. IT’S NO USE MUMBLING!’

  Still loath to yell at an old man, and one in a wheelchair, no less, I raised my voice. ‘IT’S JUST MY MUM, MR SPENCER—’

  ‘Your mother?’ Joe jumped out of bed and took off down the stairs.

  ‘Joe, wait!’

  ‘WHAT WAS THAT? I CAN’T HEAR YOU!’

  ‘Nothing. Mr Spencer, I have to get my mother down—’

  ‘HARRIET, THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG WITH THE LINE.’

  ‘I’LL SPEAK TO YOU LATER!’ I hung up, waddled down the stairs and out the back door before Brutus bounded over the wall and got Mum’s Gucci tote in his maw. Brutus would certainly come off worst in the event of a fight over a handbag. I rounded the side of the cottage, my bare feet cold on the brick path, and found my mother on the phone, her palm up to Joe in a ‘wait a moment’ stance. Joe grinned.

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘I didn’t say anything,’ Joe said, noticeably appreciating the bizarre start to the day.

  He waved up at the Spencers, framed in their bedroom window. Harriet, in her quilted nightgown, adjusted her camera angle; Arthur peered over the windowsill.

  ‘Mum, get down.’

  ‘Oh, no, not brocade again.’ Mum covered the mouthpiece and whispered, ‘Darling, I’ll just be one minute, run inside and put the kettle on.’

  Joe sniggered. I punched him.

  ‘I know, darling . . . Bastards . . . Florence, tell them Florence . . . I know, darling. I know . . . I’ll fly out next week.’ Mum snapped her phone shut, slid it awkwardly into her jeans pocket and looked from me to Joe. ‘And who is this?’ She smiled, as if taking a business call at 6.45 a.m. in a tree outside your daughter’s house was really just perfectly normal, thank you very much.