‘Why are you moving again?’ I prompted.
Greg rustled the paper. ‘Well . . .’ he cleared his throat. ‘I don’t want to live with Rocky any more. I’m a grown-up. I should have my own place. It’s, like, now I’ve got a proper girlfriend, I’ve looked at other parts of my life and found them wanting. I’m basically living like a superannuated student. And,’ he looked at me from under his long eyelashes, ‘and now I’ve got a girlfriend, I want to have her over whenever I want without worrying who’ll find out.’
Sure, blame it on me. ‘If you feel pressurised into moving, then you probably shouldn’t do it. Especially if you’ve got a reasonable deal at the moment and you’re not a hundred per cent committed to moving.’
‘I am committed. It’d just be easier if someone would move with me. You know, share the responsibility of finding a place, setting up home, decorating, that kind of thing.’
‘I guess, but I did it alone. It was fine. Actually, it’s a lot easier doing it alone, you avoid the rows about what colour to paint everything, what walls to knock through, what flooring, etc., etc., etc.,’ I replied.
‘So you’re not planning on sharing your space with anyone soon,’ Greg stated.
I flopped my hands up and down in frustration, the psychologist in me had given it her best shot, now the woman who didn’t like flat hunting was taking over. ‘Don’t know, haven’t thought about it. How did this become about me? We’re trying to find you a place to live.’
‘And you wouldn’t think of moving in with me?’ Greg said.
I smirked, glanced at him, then swallowed the smirk before it evolved into a laugh. His face was set in the more mature version of the way he’d looked when he’d first kissed me all those years ago. No, not years. Three months ago. Which meant he wanted me to move in with him after three months. Nah. Course not. He couldn’t be serious. My eyes met his big dark browns. Could he? Then I remembered, Greg was the original tart with a heart. Course he was serious. As serious as wearing that heart of his on his sleeve. He’d brandished his heart at bicep level when he kissed me. He’d done it again when he asked if I was sure I wanted to sleep with him. He’d done it again when he wanted me to go out with him. And now, he was doing it again with . . .
‘I’ve scared you, haven’t I?’ he said.
‘More, surprised,’ I said. If surprised means absolutely terrified.
‘I’ve only been hinting at it for days. Weeks, actually. And, of course, most of today.’
‘Have you?’ I asked. This is what surprised is.
‘I forgot how perceptive you are. How many times have I said, “I want to be with you all the time”? Or, remember, “Every night for the past week I’ve gone to sleep wishing that coming home meant coming home to you”? Or, how about, “It’s mad me paying rent at Rocky’s when I’m hardly ever there”? And, you might remember this from about five minutes ago, “It’d just be easier if someone would move with me. You know, share the responsibility of finding a place, setting up home, decorating, that kind of thing”. Any of these phrases sound familiar to you?’
‘Yes, all right, I get the picture. But I’m not used to people, well, you, being so subtle. I expect you to say what you think.’
‘I just did.’
‘We’ve only been together three months.’
‘Three months, three weeks, one day, but who’s counting?’
Greg counted the time we were together. He wanted something it’d taken Jen three years to extract from Matt. And, all right, we were older now, but still, three months. Nobody knew about us; we hadn’t even done the ‘I love you’ bit.
‘You don’t like me as much as I like you, do you?’ Greg observed.
Why did he say that? Hadn’t he been there these past three months? Wasn’t he there when I fell asleep on him after he told me a story? That he told me stories anyway? Is that what Mum had been trying to tell me? That even though things are different now, if I slept with Greg he wouldn’t trust me? That he’d need other, big gestures to prove he was special? ‘Why do you say that?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I don’t know, something to do with you not exactly looking thrilled about the whole idea. You don’t even like the possibility, do you? Most women I’ve been with would be overjoyed to be asked. You look as though I’ve asked you to run down Briggate naked.’
‘Greg, this whole thing is mad . . .’ Greg’s face fell and he stared dejectedly at the pavement. ‘Not us, I like us,’ I said quickly, ‘us is fantastic. But I’m still getting my head around the idea of having a boyfriend.’
‘Your boyfriend’s a friend. You’ve known me for years. I’ve spent more time at your place than most couples spend together, we do almost everything together, we practically live together already but . . . We never talk about the future.’
‘The future?’ I echoed.
‘The future. The long-term. It’s been three months, but we still haven’t talked about long-term contraception, like possibly you going on the Pill.’
‘I can’t take the Pill, it makes me wheeze.’
‘You see? I don’t know that.’ Greg talked quickly, nervously. ‘How am I supposed to know? You never tell me things like that. So, you know, I think we’re still just dating, seeing how things go, not having a relationship, building something together. Like you’ve never asked to meet my family.’
‘I have to ask?’ I replied. ‘You didn’t ask to meet mine.’
‘I wanted to. But I knew you’d get freaked out like you always do when the future’s mentioned.’
‘I wasn’t aware that we talked about the future.’ You just said we didn’t. Make up your mind. ‘Or that I freaked out.’
‘OK, I’ll give you an example: do you know why I always ask what we’re doing at the weekend on a Wednesday?’
I shook my head.
‘Once, when we were just mates, I asked you if you wanted to go to some exhibition in London with me a couple of weeks beforehand and you went all weird on me. You completely blanked me for a week then didn’t come to the exhibition. It happened a few times after that until I worked out that Wednesday night was the earliest I could bring up the weekend without you freaking out.’ Greg had obviously forgotten that he’d subsequently told me that he’d asked me to come to an exhibition in London with him because he’d been planning on seducing me, then turning me into his sex slave so I would satisfy his every sick pleasure. All right, the sex slave bit wasn’t exactly uttered, it was simply implicit in how he’d said it. I should probably not be retreating into humour at a time like this, I should be concentrating on what my boyfriend is trying to tell me.
He dragged a hand through his thick black locks, frustration flashed across his features. ‘I want a commitment.’
Maybe I shouldn’t be concentrating on what my boyfriend is trying to tell me. Not if he is telling me things like that. Bloody hell. How did this happen? We were meant to spend the day walking around Headingley, crossing flats and houses off the list. Then we’d buy food, go home, have sex. Maybe go to the cinema later.
Instead, we were having ‘The Talk’. And it wasn’t fair. With any other man, bringing this up after three months would result in being drop-kicked out of his life quicker than a rugby ball in the Five Nations. You’d be lucky if you got a ‘you want too much from me’ conversation, it was most likely he’d just stop returning your calls, emails and texts. So why wasn’t I making like a man in this situation and telling him he wanted too much from me? Why wasn’t I telling him that I couldn’t give him what he wanted because it wasn’t in me to give? That he’d gotten more from me than any other person on earth had got and that’s where it ended. Why wasn’t I saying this? Because . . . Because.
Greg stared at me. I stared at Greg. Time ticked on.
‘Let’s go see this flat down on School View, it sounds quite nice from the description,’ he eventually said, dropping his eyes to the paper. ‘But then, most things do, don’t they?’
He got up and headed off to
wards Burley Park train station. I watched his trainer-covered feet, his firm, jean-sheathed legs, his leather-jacketed back and his long hair irritatingly caressing his collar as he walked away.
There were no doors, but he’d done it anyway. He’d walked out on me.
chapter twenty-five
moving on up
‘Hi, girls, sorry I’m late,’ Renée called as she wandered into the office, laden with carrier bags. Since when did we or anyone qualify as ‘girls’ in Renée’s universe? was my first thought. Why is she apologising, she’s the boss? was my second thought.
Renée was laidback about time-keeping mainly because when the Festival began we rarely got to work after six in the morning and we rarely left before one in the morning. We were in the run-up to the Festival so, as it was, our hours were getting longer – I was at my desk by nine and didn’t leave much before eight.
The Festival basically took over our lives as surely as it took over all the cinemas and some of the galleries in Leeds for two weeks solid. From opening on a Friday night with some premiere blockbuster to closing two Fridays later with an equally large blockbuster and a gala night ball.
Nearer the time, volunteers came in to help, which meant that next week the office, which most of the time was an agoraphobic’s worst nightmare, became a claustrophobic hell, even for people who didn’t mind crowds and confined spaces. Phones would be ringing non-stop, people would be running around, packages would be arriving and others being sent off, wranglings going on about who was in charge of which screening, someone crying. And that was before something went wrong.
That was also when Renée came into her element. She became the calmest, most centred person on earth. Nothing fazed her. Not even the time one of our prints got stuck in Spain – the day before it was meant to be shown at the Showcase Cinema just outside the city centre. We couldn’t find another print of it anywhere in the UK and when we got the call saying we couldn’t get it for another week, I, the Festival Assistant, knew this would be the final straw. The Deputy Festival Director, a hysterical man who knew more about films than the woman he’d worked with for a couple of years, started to unravel when he got the call and sat staring into space, on the verge of tears. It would’ve helped his case more if he’d started swearing or cursing someone’s parentage, but no, he looked like he was going to cry. When Renée saw him, she said in her calmest – and therefore scariest – voice, ‘If you tell me one more time that we can’t get this print, I will kill you.’
He’d looked up at her with tears forming in his eyes. ‘But . . .’
‘I will kill you,’ she insisted.
I’d stepped in. Angry, violent energy crackled around Renée and Terry looked as if he hadn’t worked out what to do about stopping it.
‘Well, Terry did have an idea,’ I said, knowing that despite my fear at causing a fuss, at speaking up, I couldn’t let Terry be dismembered. ‘I’ve, um, got my passport with me. If you bought me a ticket to Spain, I could fly out there and bring it back. It’d be tomorrow, but I’d be back in time.’
‘Why have you got your passport with you?’ Renée asked archly.
‘I, erm, just have?’ I replied. Didn’t like to say that during every Festival I carried my passport with me in case I met a gorgeous actor and he wanted to take me off to Paris or Monte Carlo or Las Vegas at the drop of a hat. It hadn’t happened yet, but I was still hoping.
‘And you’d go?’ Renée asked.
‘Yes. I’ve got nothing planned for the next couple of days.
‘Terry will buy you a ticket, since it was his idea, and then you can go. We’ll pay your expenses, of course.’
I went, got the print, was a hero for all of two minutes. It was exciting and scary because I could’ve been locked up at either end and it was the closest thing to bad I’d done. Right after that Festival Terry went off to spend more time with his family, which consisted of a pet hamster, a new Deputy Festival Director was installed for what turned out to be a year, and I got the job of Senior Festival Assistant.
But Renée was right about her being late – it was going on for eleven-thirty. Renée’s carrier bags clinked as she put them on the meeting table.
‘Don’t let it happen again,’ I said.
Renée laughed at my little quip, but didn’t bother to take off her white PVC coat as she headed for the middle filing cabinet along the wall. She went for the bottom drawer and fished out three of the twelve champagne flutes we kept in there for emergencies. (A champagne emergency was something like Halle Berry being in town and dropping by. We’d seem pretty amateurish if all we could offer her was warm wine in tea-stained mugs. All right, like the passport thing, it was a fantasy, but it was my fantasy and I loved it. Or, rather, I lived it.)
Renée clinked the glasses onto the meeting table, opened a carrier bag and took out a bottle of champagne. ‘You know I’ve been having a few days off recently and I’ve had a number of meetings with the big boys?’ she began, as her ultra-slender fingers unfoiled the champagne.
‘Yes,’ Martha and I replied.
‘Well, darlings, I’ve got two bits of news about that.’
She uncorked the champagne with a small pop, white wisps of vapour escaped before she poured the pale liquid into the glasses.
‘OK,’ Renée handed a glass to each of us, then picked up hers. ‘The first bit of news is that,’ she beamed, ‘I’m pregnant.’
My jaw hit the ground, scraping away the skin on my chin. I’d never thought of Renée as anything other than ‘The Boss’. And ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’. Not a mother.
‘That’s amazing!’ I screamed.
‘Fantastic!’ Martha squealed.
‘That’s why I’ve been such a bitch over the past few months. First of all we were trying and it didn’t seem to be happening. I thought I’d never get pregnant and it was driving me crazy, which is why I was so on edge. And then when it finally happened, I couldn’t tell you because of the three-month thing and in that time I did become a little crazy because of my hormones.’ Renée waved her hand dismissively. ‘Anyway, I’m officially apologising for the way I was, especially “the stapler thing”, Martha, and the “I don’t know why I employed you thing”, Amber. It was my hormones and I’m sorry.
‘I want you both to be godmothers,’ Renée continued. ‘Seeing as, apart from my husband, I’ve put you two through the most incarnations of hell, I think you deserve it.’
‘Us? Haven’t you got any real friends?’ Martha said.
‘Isn’t this funny? Time was I would’ve bawled Martha out for that comment, but now,’ Renée moved her bony shoulders up and down in a shrug, ‘I don’t care.’ She grinned. ‘I guess I haven’t got any friends who are closer than you two. Even if I did, I’d still want you to be godmothers to my child. My children. You know, when I have more, you’ll be godmothers to them all.’
‘I’m so pleased for you. And honoured you want us to be godmothers,’ I said, making up for Martha’s Marthaness. ‘When’s he or she due?’
‘End of October.’
My heart skipped a beat. That was only six weeks after the Festival.
‘Which brings me to my next piece of news. It’s been agreed that Amber will take over while I’m away.’
I sprayed champagne through my mouth and nose. ‘That’s a joke, right?’
‘No. I’m not going on maternity leave until after the Festival, but I might go into labour early, so you need to be prepared. You can do the job standing on your head, I told them that. They had no real doubts, they were just worried who would replace you. So Martha’s going to get the joint title of Administrator and Senior Festival Assistant.’
Martha sprayed even more champagne.
‘We’ll then get a temp administrator, who Martha will oversee and a temp Festival Assistant. Amber, as Acting Festival Director, will oversee everyone.’
‘That’s really funny, Renée, I know they’re going to be getting someone in to oversee things,’ I laughed
.
‘No they’re not,’ Renée said. ‘Don’t be so modest, Amber, you’re great at this. You’ve got so much sponsorship over the years, even when it seemed some companies weren’t interested, you found a way to wheedle cash out of them. You’re a great scheduler, you have a great imagination. You’re fantastic. You both are.’ Renée raised her glass. ‘Let’s make a toast, raise our glasses to my baby and your promotions. To us.’
Martha looked at me. I looked at Martha. ‘To us,’ we chorused. ‘I’m still not going to Cannes,’ Martha added before she drank her champagne.
I’ve been promoted. I had been promoted. I’d never thought this would happen. I’d thought it was a miracle that I’d been promoted to the inflated position of Deputy Festival Director. (So had Mum, Dad and Dad2. They’d all been so grateful to Renée for giving me a job in the first place, then giving me an important-sounding title, I sometimes wondered if they’d paid her to do it.) I’d never had a real career plan. As I told Greg, my dreams, my ambitions were so impossible I never seriously considered realising them; I never thought about ‘what next’. ‘What next’ would probably be a promotion to Festival Director, but that would mean Renée wouldn’t be around and that wasn’t something I liked to think about. For all her hysteria and beauty, I did like Renée. I loved her, in fact. Loved her like the brandy liqueur truffle she was. She was a constant in my life.
I’d once been offered a job as Senior Festival Assistant with the London Film Festival, which would’ve meant a pay rise; working with more people; schmoozing with a different class of celeb; and being far more high profile but I’d turned it down because I couldn’t bear the look on Renée’s face as I went to tell her I was leaving. Naturally, when Renée pissed me off, as she often did, I wished I’d taken the job.
Now, I’d got a promotion. And Renée wasn’t going to be gone for too long. It was the perfect solution. BLOODY HELL! I’VE BEEN PROMOTED.
‘Right, you two, drink up, lunch is on me today,’ Renée said.
‘Where are we going?’ Martha asked, necking her champagne.
The Chocolate Run Page 25
