Oh, is it? Really!
I put my mini kimono on and head to the bathroom, where I spritz my weave with some cold water then finger-comb the tiniest splodge of shampoo through. I then turn the shower on and lean backwards so I just wet the hair, then run my fingers through it to clean it off any leftover egg. Shower off, I finger comb some conditioner through it and repeat the process. I then cover my head with a towel and squeeze dry the hair, saying all the time my favourite mantra: A weave . . . you squeeze. You squeeze . . . your weave.
The thing you must never do with a weave is rub your scalp as if it were your own hair, and by squeezing into a towel and not rubbing vigorously, you hopefully avoid getting the weave tangled. I’m lucky, I can afford proper hair. I joke that it’s made from virgin nuns in Guatemala, but actually the truth is probably just as bizarre. I leave the towel on for a while and go and sit in the living room. On a sunny day like this, it’s like sitting in a greenhouse.
I put the TV on for a while, but again, he’s there. Mark Reynolds. He’s not even an MP, and yet they wheel him out as a political commentator all the time. He’s been on Newsnight that often, they’ve given him his own swivel chair. He’s aged well. Men don’t, as a rule. But he’s slightly built, and that’s a bonus for any man. I don’t know if he dyes his hair, but he hasn’t got a grey hair on his head. He doesn’t strike me as vain enough to dye his hair. And his clothes say Morrissey fan, not Jeremy Paxman wannabe.
I switch the TV off. Too many memories, and they should remain buried.
An hour or so later, Ross is back with Finty. They sit side by side on one of my sofas as I look lazily out of the window. I think it never pays to look too excited or nervous. Make them impress me. Make them work for their bloody money. Finty burbles a few apologies about getting egg in my weave. I ignore her at first, so she carries on. I enjoy the power I have over her. I turn to tell her it’s OK, but don’t do it again, but I can tell Ross is bored, as he butts in.
‘So . . . here’s the pitch.’
‘Anyway, sorry about the egg thing, Jossy,’ coos Finty, one last time.
‘Shut up.’ Ross snaps. He’s in full-on manager mode.
‘Soz.’
Finty has an annoying habit of abbreviating everything like she’s texting you and not speaking to you. I hate it when she calls me Jossy. I know she’s only shortening Jocelyn but it feels like she’s taking the piss, making a joke out of everything. I just ignore her.
‘So. We have quite a quiet May.’
‘We do,’ I say nonchalantly, as if this is none of my fault, which of course it isn’t. I stare at a pigeon wrestling with a bit of bread on the roof of the low-rise block beneath me. How the bread got up there is anyone’s guess.
‘So. Here’s the thing.’
I keep looking out of the window. Is everything about my life a performance these days?
‘In May, the press reveal . . . that I have left you for Finty.’
I swing round and look at the pair of them. I must be looking furious, as they both seem to cower.
‘Sorry?’ And that is so unlike me, I rarely apologize.
‘I mean, he hasn’t,’ Finty says. ‘It’s just a story we put out there.’
‘You get some sympathy, some hatred. Acres of press about how the mighty have fallen, how you had it coming, you’re defiant, columns columns columns, and then . . . the pièce de résistance. You take me back.’
I look back out of the window.
‘Imagine the headlines, Jocelyn.’
And I do. I can see them. The I-told-you-sos, the she’s-past-its. But they have a point. It would keep me in the press. I’d just have to work out what to say without looking too stupid or – heaven forfend – undesirable! The thought makes me burst out laughing. Quickly I stop. I need to take myself more seriously, not show Finty that mostly this is a performance.
‘It could really fit into your Women Beware Women thing, we thought,’ Finty says salaciously.
And she’s right, of course. My manager-stroke-boyfriend running off with the PA is my equivalent of hubby going off with the nanny.
I’ve already written a lot about that.
It’s rich territory.
I like it.
I like it a lot, actually.
And it might even engender some sympathy for me.
I look back at them. Smile imperiously.
‘Good work, guys.’
Then I stand up and excuse myself.
I walk into my bedroom and shut the door.
I slump on the bed and consider my appearance in the full-length mirror on the wall.
I hate myself.
As this wave of self-loathing washes over me, I do what I always do to distract myself.
I open my laptop. It springs into life.
I log into Facebook. I have created a false profile. I am a white teenage girl with hair extensions called Jamie-Lee Davenport. I don’t have many friends on there.
But I have him.
I click on his name.
I see his profile picture smiling back at me. The bronzed skin. The small dreadlocks. The green eyes. So handsome. That gap-toothed smile. I know without looking that he has three large freckles on his neck. But I look anyway.
He’s thirty now. Thirty. But I don’t mind that that makes me feel old.
I smile. I feel better. But that feeling passes too, and the wave comes again.
I close the laptop.
Why would that make me feel better?
I look in the mirror. Does he look like me?
I look away. Can’t even bear to see myself today.
I wait for the wave to pass.
It often takes a while.
My phone buzzes. I know that buzz. It means someone has sent Jamie-Lee a message on Facebook. How weird. No-one ever sends Jamie-Lee a message on there.
I grab the phone. Open the Facebook app. I do indeed have a message. Well. Jamie-Lee does. Maybe it’s some spotty teenager saying I FANCY YOU N TING. That has happened before.
I see the message has come from someone called Darius D’Eath.
It immediately makes me think of that God-awful Darius from Popstars all those years ago. Was that his name? Then I remember: it was Darius Danesh.
I open the message. It’s a picture message. Of a baseball bat with nails hammered into the end of it. It’s a chilling image. The text accompanying the picture reads:
Jocelyn I know this is you and this is what I am going to shove up you you vile whore.
The picture is shaking.
And then I realize.
The picture isn’t shaking.
My hand is.
London, 1995
It was a nice feeling, knowing no-one could hurt you. You could feel protected, that no-one could ever, ever get to you, no matter how hard they tried. But it was a hard-won feeling, one that had taken years of practice to perfect. I was proud that I’d finally achieved it, but it hadn’t always been easy. I’d look around at other people, I’d see people crying in the street, people rowing and think . . . why? Why should they care? There was another way. My way.
It had all started when I was a teenager, when bad things had happened to me, when I felt there was no control in my life, pushed pillar to post by a mother who wanted me more than anything to achieve, ACHIEVE, goddammit, to fill a hollow in her life, do the things she could never do. The academic version of the pushy showbiz mum. Not so much Sing out, Louise! as Work hard, Jocelyn! Moving me from the Wirral to Liverpool on her next big whim, or little whim, rather; teasmade company here, cleaning empire there. All of them doomed to failure. And all the time I knew. I knew that each time she let a new boyfriend through the door, I was destined for better than that. It was not the life I wanted.
Maybe it’s because my mum always taught me that at school, and in life, if I wanted to get on I had to be twice as good as the white girls. I never quite believed I was. But Mum seemed to have that belief intrinsically, so we had to be. No say in the ma
tter, we HAD TO BE. And so maybe it rubbed off. And as bad things happened, so it became easier, in fact somewhat necessary possibly, to close myself off and stop myself from being hurt by the world. And it was possible. Look at me now. And that’s where it started. With my mum. She pushed me so hard that it felt like she’d pushed me away, somewhere where normal people didn’t exist. In a hinterland that had stood me in good stead for now. Apart from the world, not part of it. An observer rather than a participant.
There was something rather delicious about lying in a bed, stretching out your legs and arms as far as they would go, really pointing your toes out, and still feeling the bed just went on forever. Not so much a bed, but a country. And God, these sheets were clean. Even though I’d spent a night in them, getting up to all sorts with Mr Love, they still smelt Lenor summer meadows fresh.
The other good thing about this particular bed was the view. OK, so looking up at the ceiling was like looking at any other ceiling, but if I crooked my head down and stared out beyond the rise in the duvet where my feet were . . . that view. That VIEW!
Mr Love’s apartment was on Park Lane, and on the other side of my feet were the tops of the trees in Hyde Park. If I lifted my feet, they vanished. They were erased, gone. They didn’t exist.
When I was a young girl, one of my favourite things in the whole wide world was this daft little eraser that sat at the top of my pencil. It was pink and looked like the end of a finger. You could buy them loose from Woolworth’s, and then attach them to the end of any pencil. It wasn’t so much the eraser I liked, it was what you could do with it. Make any mistake on the page and you could just upturn your pencil and, in a couple of strokes, completely obliterate where you had gone wrong. A perfectionist like me took great pleasure in every long, slow swipe of that rubber.
Lying here, in Mr Love’s crisp bed, it was as if I had done that with my life. It was as if every morning I could wake up and pretend that nothing had ever happened in the past. Fresh start. Blank page. Tabula rasa.
It was as if I had been born fully formed this morning. Slap bang in the middle of the nineties. Slap bang in the middle of 1995, in fact. As if the only music I had ever heard was this burgeoning Britpop they kept talking about on the radio. Lennon and McCartney? Who the hell were they? I only knew the Gallagher brothers and the girly-looking Mr Albarn. They’d been fighting it out for the top spot in the album charts, didn’t you know? And cheeky suburban Albarn had pipped the naughty minstrels La Famille Gallagher to the top spot. The working-class Mancunians had been beaten by the middle-of-the-road nice boys singing about having a house in the country. Exactly. Said all you needed to know about Britain today.
‘Baby girl?’
I turned to see Mr Love had popped his head round the door. His hair was wet and his bangs were clinging to his forehead; clearly he’d just stepped out of the shower.
I loved the word bangs. Everyone else described this latest haircut as curtains. I’d heard an American on TV call them bangs. So I did too. I thought it marked me out as exotic.
Nevertheless, my hackles rose – as much as they could while lying in a lap-of-luxury bed. He only usually called me baby girl when there was a problem, or he wanted something.
‘Mr Love?’ I replied coolly, showing I was aware a problem might be hovering overhead.
‘You about tonight? Something I want to talk to you about.’
Interesting.
‘Sure. We could . . . rent a video or . . . something.’
That seemed to throw him. We never rented videos. I didn’t even know why I’d suggested it. Mr Love worked for a film company, and as such often brought the new releases back on video for us to watch anyway.
‘Erm . . . sure . . . or I could get Bolshy to cook.’
Bolshy was his housekeeper. I knew this was an old family nickname, because she had been rather left-wing in her youth.
‘Sure. That’d be great.’
‘See you tonight.’
What on earth did he want to talk to me about?
I slipped out of the bed and into a kimono he kept on the back of the bedroom door.
‘Is Bolshy here today?’ I asked breezily as he mooched about his galley kitchen. These apartments may well have had views to kill for, but some of the rooms were tiny.
‘Yah, she’ll be over to clean and whatnot.’
Whatnot. Forgetting for once that this was the first day of the rest of my life, I compared Mr Love to all the guys I’d known back in Liverpool, or when I’d been on the glamour modelling circuit. Not a single one of them would have utilized the word whatnot. And possibly with good reason. It made him appear at once effete and effeminate.
Still, that was one of the many surprises about Mr Love. For ages I’d thought he was a gay Sloane, when actually he was one of the most rampant red-blooded males I’d ever met. Although describing him as red-blooded felt more like a red herring than anything else. His blood definitely had hues of blue, related as he was – although somewhat distantly – to the Royal Family themselves. In fact, one of his first jaunts abroad as a child had been holidaying with Princess Margaret in Mustique.
Funnily enough, I had met Mr Love for the first time five years previously. I had been to that tiny theatre in Shepherd’s Bush to see Adam’s terrible play based upon our teenage years. Had I not been averse even back then to wrapping myself up in a protective blanket so that no-one could hurt me, I would have been affronted by what he presented as entertainment. His take on the teenage years of myself, him and poor Kathleen. But I found his outrageousness appealing. The effrontery of portraying us like that, his brass neck, his impudence. I’d found Kathleen crying in the toilets at the interval.
‘Why?’ she said. ‘Why does he have to do this?’
And as the words left my mouth I decided to use my ‘off the top of my head wisdom’ as my own sage advice too.
‘It’s a play,’ I said, trying to sound as emboldened and unfazed as I could. ‘The clue’s in the name.’
‘Supper with Sam?’
‘No.’ Gosh, she could be dense. ‘The word is play. They’re playing. And this game is nothing to do with us.’
But then something had happened. Something that had shaken me, momentarily. And later I made my excuses and left. And as I walked off into the night, I thought many things. But I thought . . . I am not the girl I was back then, the girl Adam thinks this play is about. And yet again, I find I have a choice in my life. Only my choice right now is not like the one I made all those years ago.
The old me could so easily have cried, stumbled onto Shepherd’s Bush Green with my pashmina around my shoulders and my dignity somewhere near my ankles. And I didn’t want to be that girl.
So I stopped myself from crying. I held my head high. And I walked away from the theatre feeling, shakily, invincible.
I thought, what would a strong, determined woman do right now?
Ahead I saw the hazy lights of a wine bar, glowing from a corner of the green. I headed towards it.
The Albertine was a cosy, ramshackle wooden affair full of men and women hunched over too-small tables, talking and drinking wine by candlelight. Some were eating. Lots were laughing. The room reeked of bonhomie. I pushed my way to the bar and surveyed the blackboard behind it. Back then I was new enough to London, and new enough to places like this, to not know my way through a wine list. And so I did what one should always do when one feels out of one’s depth. I leaned in to the couple next to me and said,
‘I’m so sorry to interrupt you. But might you be able to recommend me a decent rosé?’
It was Mr Love. And his pal Percy. And the rest, as they say, was history.
And indeed that particular night, as they also say, out of bad came good.
That night, my life changed.
‘I wonder what it is he wants?!’ I giggled excitedly to Adam, over lunch at Quaglino’s.
Adam put his knife and fork down, casting aside his tri-colore salad. ‘I’ve got it. Oh my God.
I’m gonna need a new hat!’
‘WHAT?!’ Even though I knew what was coming.
‘He’s gonna propose!’
We both giggled like the school girls we weren’t, and Adam demanded we have a glass of champagne to celebrate. When I demurred – I didn’t want to become squiffy ahead of any potential proposal tonight – he overruled me and ordered two glasses from a passing waiter.
‘Now, remind me why you call him Mr Love?’
‘Oh it’s silly, really. His first name’s St John and I just couldn’t bring myself to say that on a daily basis.’
‘Oh God, yes, I remember now.’
‘And when I told him that, he told me that when he was a baby his nanny used to call him Mr Love-a-Lot as he was always smiling.’
‘His nanny. Fucking hell, Jocelyn, what are you like?’
‘And I kind of ended up abbreviating it to Mr Love.’
‘And even more embarrassingly, it stuck!’ laughed Adam as two icy glasses of bubbles appeared at our table.
‘Cheers, Jocelyn.’
‘Cheers, baby.’ As we clinked glasses, I suddenly gasped, ‘Oh Christ, you said you had gossip about Kathleen. Come on. Spill!’
‘Not before you’ve shown me your new toy!’
‘Oh God. It’s in my handbag. Two secs.’
I had recently invested in my new pride and joy. I pulled it out of my handbag and passed it over for him to fawn.
‘Oh my God, it’s incredible. Will it work in here?’
‘I don’t know. You might have to pull the aerial up, but we’re underground, so probably not. But isn’t it gorgeous?’
‘And it works?’
‘Sure.’
‘You can actually phone people on it?’
‘I called you on it before.’
‘I know, but I wasn’t sure whether to believe you. Oh, can I make a call on it after lunch?’
‘Sure.’
‘Knocks spots off my pager.’
‘It’s my pride and joy.’
I loved saying that. I’d only had my new mobile phone a couple of days and had, I’m sure, racked up a whole lot of cash on its bill by phoning people non-stop on it as it was such a novelty. I’d phoned Mr Love so much at the office that he’d actually asked me to stop calling. Spoilsport. And I’d already managed to scratch its tiny, beautiful screen with over-enthusiastic yanking of it out of my handbag all the time to check no-one had called me on it. Thus far, they hadn’t. But someone would one day, I was sure of it.
The History of Us Page 17
