by Zoe Cook
It was impressive how much wine could be swept from a room after an awards ceremony; the team was laden with bottles and bottles of red and white, and a few had found the ultimate prize – unopened bottles of champagne. As it was strict hotel policy that no wine should leave the room after the ceremony, the smuggling out to the after-party had to be conducted with confidence and poise to avoid any suspicion amongst the Metropolis’s staff. Lucy considered herself an expert at this and took two bottles from Jenny, one of the runners, slipping one upright into her handbag, and the other under the flap of her black jacket before heading up the stairs and through the huge doors. Inside, the party was in full flow, a few merry authors and agents were dancing in the middle of the room while most people opted to continue their drinking and were gathered in groups around the edge of the dance floor, or sat in the crushed- velvet booths along the walls.
Lucy, Warren, Camilla and Katie stationed themselves at a booth at the far end of the room. Lucy skimmed across the plush fabric and sat next to the window, looking onto the twinkling car lights and street lamps of Park Lane. A stream of orange beams flowing one way, blinking red the other. An assortment of wine bottles was magicked onto the table and Katie passed around glasses. Lucy settled into the back of the cushioned bench, her back aching in appreciation of the support. Warren began his usual commentary on the scenes unfolding on the dance floor. A well-known screenwriter was performing an elaborate, and puzzling, finger dance, and an ageing agent, who Lucy had earlier seen stroking his neighbour’s leg as she crawled past their table, was now dancing up against her in what was presumably intended to be an erotic style.
More wine was poured and Lucy shut her eyes briefly, remembering she had promised to call Scott. It was nearly midnight and the drinks were filling her with a warm sense of impending fun, so she pushed away the thought of her boyfriend waiting at home and finished her glass. She’d pop to the toilets in a while with Warren, who’d brought a supply for a few of them who were always ready for a party. She fancied a little pick-me-up.
‘Dancing time?’ she suggested, and the group, which had now grown to eight of the Spectrum team, left their bags and coats in ownership of the booth and moved a few yards into the room to start dancing to the R&B set the DJ was playing.
The noise in the room was growing louder with each song, more and more bodies joining them on the dance floor. Camilla appeared with a tray full of glistening shot glasses and the team expertly applied salt to the base of their thumbs, downed the sour liquid and squealed for lemons, which Camilla had forgotten to bring. Lucy slipped back to the table and downed a large glass of wine to wash away the taste. Her head spun as she turned and made her way back to the group, who were having a dance-off, throwing her hands in the air and shimmying in to join them. She flung her head back, laughing at Warren’s moves, and feeling the rush from the alcohol.
6
Hideaway Bay, 2003
Nina and Kristian were on another break, and Nina could barely stand being in the same room as her on-off boyfriend of two years.
‘I hate him, Lucy,’ she whispered in Lucy’s direction, eyes locked on Kristian and loud enough for him to hear her across the table. They were sitting on the small terrace at the back of the Beach Café, Tom’s parents’ place.
‘I know, he’s been a prat,’ Lucy comforted Nina. She’d learned a long time ago that it wasn’t worth pointing out that they were both at fault.
‘I can hear you both,’ Kristian said, pulling away from his conversation with Tom, probably about surfing. Tom grinned at Lucy, who tried to make a face at him that told him to look like he was taking this seriously.
‘Oh why don’t you text your little girlfriend about it, then, poor little Kristian,’ Nina said mockingly.
‘For goodness’ sake,’ Kristian rolled his eyes. Not a good move, thought Lucy.
‘She is a friend,’ continued Kristian. ‘In fact, she’s not even a friend, she had a surf lesson. She texted me to say thank you. You’re out of your mind!’
This was not going to end well, Lucy realised. She made eyes at Tom to signify that they should extract themselves from the impending explosion.
‘Oh you are SUCH A GENTLEMAN!’ Nina shouted, causing other customers to stop their conversations and pretend not to look at them all.
‘Hey, calm it down, okay?’ Lucy tried to reason with them. ‘It’s not fair on Tom’s folks to make a scene here.’
The café was their regular hangout and they’d already pushed their luck this summer with Tom’s parents. Sarah and Neil were far more laid-back than any of the other parents, having recently forgiven them for breaking in one evening after a drunken barbecue on the beach. Tom had been instructed to pay for the broken glass by working an extra few shifts, and the embarrassment of Tom’s mum looking at Lucy and Nina with surprise and disappointment had been the hardest punishment they could have been dealt. Sarah was wonderful, especially to the girls. Tom was her only child and she made no secret of how much she had longed for a daughter. She’d swept Lucy and Nina into their family within a few months of year seven and their friendship with Tom and Kristian. Lucy had known Sarah and Neil vaguely for years. They owned a few places around Hideaway Bay: the café, the fish-and-chip shop and the pub across the bay at New Hideaway. They were friendly with her parents and she’d heard Sarah’s laughter ringing out over dinner-party chatter a fair few times. And then she’d met Tom. They had been at different primary schools; Tom at the private school half an hour away and Lucy at the village primary. Her dad didn’t see the need to pay for primary school. It was when she joined Davenport Heights Independent at age eleven that they first met. Tom had been instantly friendly: Lucy terrified of the new surroundings and at a real disadvantage to the children who were already familiar with the senior school from their primary days. They both got the number 121 bus from the top of the hill to school, and each day Tom sat next to Lucy and asked her questions while she blushed, laughed and eventually looked up at him and realised he was rather lovely.
At sixteen they were best friends and totally in love. They felt unbreakable to Lucy, unlike Nina and Kristian, who had a relationship so volatile that Kristian sending a message to another girl sent them into a tailspin. Lucy often wondered whether Nina, her best friend since they were five, had been almost forced into a relationship with Kristian because of their proximity to her and Tom. Kristian was a lovely, lovely boy, but he was totally hapless when it came to managing Nina’s fierce temper and tendency for jealousy. Even Lucy had fallen foul of Nina’s wrath when it came to Kristian, although she had surprised herself at the ferocity of her defence when Nina once tried to imply she had flirted with Kristian at a party. The idea was totally absurd and had shown Lucy how bloody hard it must be being Kristian at times. She looked at him now, the same look of disbelief and confusion that she’d see on his face a hundred times before as he watched his girlfriend twist herself into a venomous tangle of rage over almost nothing.
‘What are we doing tonight?’ Tom asked, trying to break the tension.
‘Can we come to yours, mate?’ Kristian asked. ‘A few beers, a game of pool, swim?’ Tom’s house was the largest not only of the group’s but also in the whole town. Neil and Sarah were widely considered to own Hideaway, their house sitting at the top of the Bay, overlooking their business empire. Their landscaped gardens sprawled out from the back of the huge property, gradually sloping down to a lower level with a huge infinity pool, which looked straight out across the sea.
‘Sure,’ Tom replied. ‘My dad will probably want us to help with something, though. You know what he’s like.’
‘That’s fine,’ Lucy said, perusing the menu on the table, wondering whether to order another coffee. ‘It’s the least we could do, really.’ She didn’t mind helping Sarah and Neil, and in fact she quite enjoyed folding napkins, helping Sarah to design sandwich menus, and deep-cleaning the pristine white coffee cups ahead of the impending summer high-season.
It was hot already in Hideaway, the sea just about managing to take the edge off the midday scorch. Lucy was tanned and happy; this was how she liked it. All of them together, good weather, lots of time and no school. GCSEs were done and she didn’t need to think about her results for a while yet. The summer stretched out ahead of them, full of promise. She looked across at Tom and met his eyes. He smiled and winked at her. Kristian was out of his seat and had moved close to Nina, attempting to cuddle her. Nina almost gave in to him, before standing up and storming off, tears in her eyes.
‘I’d better go and check she’s okay,’ Lucy said to Tom and Kristian. This was a familiar drill.
‘Tell her I’m sorry,’ Kristian called after her. Lucy stopped. ‘What for?’ she asked.
‘Whatever she thinks I’ve done,’ Kristian said, looking wounded. Lucy stepped back to the table and planted a kiss on Kristian’s cheek. ‘She’s being a twat,’ she said to him, quietly. ‘I’ll sort it out.’
7
London, 2010
Lucy woke to the sound of her alarm. She opened her eyes slowly, in anticipation of pain and suffering. Sitting up, she took in Scott’s meticulous apartment, the crisp, white sheets, which had been ironed and smelled of washing powder; the tasteful, understated mahogany furniture; the delicate scent of vanilla drifting in from the Jo Malone diffuser that his mum had put in the lounge. She switched off the terrible noise bleeping next to her head and held her temples to try and soothe the throbbing. Scott had placed a glass of water by her bed before he’d left for work and her thirst came like a tidal wave at the sight of it. She finished the glass in five clumsy swallows, water trickling down her chin. Lucy glimpsed the mirror to her left and opened her eyes widely in the hope of waking herself up to survey this sight of herself. She was still wearing the lace dress she’d been in last night, and her make-up was smudged into two grey circles around bloodshot eyes. She looked like an extra from a low-budget horror film. She glanced down at her pillow and took in the black streaks and tidemarks of what must be a mixture of sweat, fake tan and foundation, which had seeped up the now-greasy white fabric in a hideous rainbow of dark brown to dirty beige.
Out of the shower, and after three sessions of tooth-brushing, gagging at each stroke to the back of her mouth, Lucy found the outfit she’d folded over the back of Scott’s chair last week. She slipped on the black leggings, grey cashmere jumper and leather biker boots. She considered applying make-up, but her skin felt as though it was coated in some kind of hangover wax that no amount of scrubbing could remove and which make-up would merely sit on top of like scum on pond water. She sprayed herself with perfume from her handbag and looked again in the mirror. It was not a pretty sight, but it was an improvement, and probably passable for a post-awards day.
In the office, the people who had made it in on time were a scale of grey faces. ‘I was sick on the tube,’ Warren announced as he appeared at the top of the stairs, ‘And it was pink.’ Lucy’s stomach lurched at the image.
‘Oh God, Warren. That’s terrible, have some water and eat some food,’ she said. As a runner, the lowliest position at any production company, Jenny had been tasked with the early-morning breakfast run and had returned with a mammoth pile of greasy paper-wrapped baps and sandwiches, smelling of crispy fat and white flour. In a rare act of generosity, Emma paid for this post-awards ceremony tradition from her own wallet as she, like everyone else in the office, was always in need of fried breakfast items and carbs the morning after. Lucy cautiously took a bite from her bacon sandwich – white bread, buttered, brown sauce – offering it up as a gift to her stomach, aware it might be rejected. It tasted good, the salt kissed her cheeks and each chew released more and more smoky juice into her mouth. She could’ve cried at the pleasure of eating.
It was nearly lunchtime before conversations really started in the office. Everyone had made it in to work this year. There was normally one casualty who overslept, couldn’t move or had woken up in another town and couldn’t get in to the office. This was the ultimate crime at Spectrum. It was accepted, encouraged actually, to join in and party after a big event, to ‘let your hair down’ by drinking to excess. The only rule was that you made it in to work the next day. Regardless of what state you arrived in, you had to arrive, you had to be there, and you had to get on with it. Julia, an associate producer on Make My Dinner, Spectrum’s long-running ‘hilarious’ celebrity cooking show, had been sacked last year after calling in sick the morning after the Food and Drink Awards, Lucy remembered. Perhaps that had helped to motivate everyone to get in today.
Stories from the after-show party were beginning to emerge as the communal hangover level was reduced from a solid seven to a more manageable three or four post-feed. It emerged that Charlie had told Emma she loved her, which was mildly amusing but not really news, as she did this each year, as far as Lucy could recall. More interestingly, and depressingly, Teresa, one of the runners who had just been promoted to junior researcher on a baking programme, had been caught kissing a recently engaged production manager and was vehemently denying the incident. Lucy felt sorry for her, as she seemed so desperate to make it not true with her refusals and protests. That guy is a total creep, she thought to herself. Everyone who worked at Spectrum knew what Matt got up to, and he had cheated on his fiancée at least five times that Lucy knew of: once, classily, in the disabled toilet at a wrap party. His post-incident tactic, and perhaps this was what was inspiring Teresa, was to flatly deny every single thing, regardless of who had caught, seen, or heard him and his prey, until eventually everyone pretended to forget.
It annoyed Lucy how it had become something of a joke amongst the team, and how there was now an eye-rolling sense of ‘oh what’s he like’ about the whole thing. A sleazy prick, Lucy always thought, but didn’t ever offer up. He somehow remained a truly popular and powerful member of staff. It was the girls who became the laughing stock each time, and they were bloody stupid to get involved, Lucy thought. She couldn’t figure out how on earth he even managed to do it – what his appeal was. He was a balding, slightly overweight man, the wrong side of forty. She had concluded that it was simply because of the tiny number of men in TV and the huge amount of single girls. Nice odds for a midlife-crisis-wielding sex pest.
‘And what about YOU?’ Laura turned to Lucy with a devilish look of glee pasted across her wide, stupid, pale face. Laura, a researcher who’d really worked there long enough to have been promoted by now, was one of those terrible people who was always there on a night out, wouldn’t miss it for the world, but who, judging by her chronic lack of hangovers, never actually drank along with everyone else, choosing instead to sit back and observe. She collected stories from drunken nights and loved drip-feeding them the next day.
‘What?’ Lucy asked, trying to think back through the evening to what she had done.
‘You don’t remember?’ Laura trilled. This was the best-case scenario for a serial shamer.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Just leave it, okay?’ Lucy replied, trying to sound casual and laid-back.
‘Oh, this is hilarious!’ Laura continued, and people from the other side of the office were listening now, sensing the shift in tone.
‘Do you honestly not remember? That’s amazing! You gave that guy a LAP DANCE!’ Laura exclaimed really loudly, unnaturally loudly, Lucy thought. Lucy’s face filled so quickly with blood she imagined she had turned purple.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Laura. Just shut up, will you?’ she snapped back, shocking herself with the force of her words.
‘Touchy, touchy,’ Laura sniggered, turning around to check her audience’s reaction. The office was quiet. It wasn’t just Lucy who couldn’t stand Laura. She’d made herself an unpopular figure many times over for snitching on people and generally stirring up trouble so she could sit back and watch the fallout. Lucy racked her brain for any memory involving anything resembling a lap dance. And then it came, an image of herself, wine in one hand, the
other outstretched over the shoulder of a man, seated on the edge of a booth, and her laugh ringing out over the music as she wriggled her hips and rippled her body over him as people watched and laughed. She turned to Warren, who looked embarrassed for her and gave just the slightest head movement that confirmed her fears. Yep, you did. Lucy stood and walked quickly to the toilets. Locking the door, she felt the tears come: big, hot, heavy tears that ran down her face silently and blocked her sore nose – and just would not stop.
