Why Does it Taste so Sweet?

by PJ Adams

She nodded. Things really were good.

  “He called, you know.” For a moment Emily was thrown, thinking that Ray must have called for some reason. Then she realized Marcia had returned to their previous conversation. Thom. It was Thom who had called.

  “Really? Are you still in his little black book?”

  “Fuck off.” Marcia reached for the bottle and used it to gesture at Emily’s glass.

  “What did he want?” Emily leaned over for a refill.

  “You.”

  “Me?”

  “He’s desperate to fix things. He wanted me to persuade you to go back to him.”

  “He still thinks that’s on the cards?”

  “He does,” said Marcia. “Poor bastard. Doesn’t get it at all, does he?”

  4

  When she walked back into the office at just after nine the next day, it reminded her of walking through the airport with Ray. They weren’t exactly gathering around her and taking photos on their phones, but it wasn’t far off that.

  Liz and Suchita on Reception fixed their eyes on her and leaned together, their heads almost touching, talking softly. In the big open plan office people broke off in mid-conversation to watch her thread her way through to her desk. In the glass-fronted offices suited men peered up from their computers.

  All this attention, and she didn’t even have an international rock star at her side.

  For a moment she thought she must have tucked her skirt into her panties, or spilt coffee down her blouse, but no: they were just looking at her. Exhibit A. Ray Sandler’s girlfriend.

  She quite liked that. It made her smile. Made her head fill with a rush of memories of the weekend and before. Made her chest swell with all those positive vibes, the confidence he instilled in her, the knowledge that someone like him saw something in someone like her.

  She said a few hellos, but nobody seemed to want to be the first to strike up conversation. That initial moment of novelty shifted quickly into freakshow awkwardness.

  She lost herself in her inbox. So much rubbish to delete, but also so much to catch up on. She’d only been away for a few days... She had no meetings lined up for this morning, which was good for now. She’d need to schedule some for later in the week, though: time to catch up on a number of projects she’d let slip.

  Douglas Hamilton didn’t give her long.

  He’d been on the phone when she walked in. He’d held it, a hand over the mouthpiece, as he paused to watch her find her way to her desk, then he’d looked back at his monitor and resumed his conversation. Now, though, he caught her eye through the glass wall of his office, raised an eyebrow and then raised a finger as if summoning a waiter.

  She nodded, pressed Send on an email, and then went through.

  He didn’t indicate that she should sit, so she stood awkwardly by the door, suddenly realizing that this was not right, that things had changed.

  “I wasn’t expecting you back so soon,” he said.

  Was that all? Should she have messaged ahead to say she’d be back today?

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have let you know. I have a lot to catch up on, so I thought–”

  “This isn’t working, Emily.”

  Those words were fatal, she knew. Irreversible. The work equivalent of a lover’s It’s not you, it’s me. She swallowed, but said nothing.

  “Last week I advised you to take some time out to get your life in order. I didn’t think I needed to spell it out for you. I didn’t think... Well, shall we say that being plastered all over the papers with a prospective client’s husband is not what I had mind? Ms Flaherty is not happy.”

  Ms Flaherty. He meant Róisín. She’d come to the office once before and made things difficult for Emily. “The papers,” said Emily. “I didn’t know.” She remembered the press photographers gathered outside Kayleigh’s wedding, but she hadn’t seen anything in the papers. She’d been in France; she’d been ignoring her phone. “I... I didn’t know Ms Flaherty was a prospective client.”

  “Does that matter?” Hamilton always presented himself as a slightly bumbling, very middle-class Englishman, but now there was a real steel to his tone. “We have our credibility to consider at Hamilton and Chambers.”

  “I’m sorry. What can I do?”

  The look in his eyes.

  “Am I being fired?”

  He’d already warned her for being distracted and under-performing. Was this the final blow?

  He looked away. “I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t know, Emily. We’ll work it out after things have calmed down. You still have leave to use: I suggest you take it, so we don’t have to force the issue now.”

  §

  She sat in the window seat of the Costa near her office. This was where she came to think. She would slip away from her desk with a laptop and work here, have teleconferences here, even meet clients here. When things had been good, Hamilton and Chambers were fine with that: she could work wherever she wanted, and whatever hours she chose, as long as she delivered. But when things had become bad, without her even realizing, her irregular hours at her desk had become something that was noticed, noted and, ultimately, used against her.

  She texted Marcia.

  I’m screwed. I think I’m in the process of being fired. xx

  She didn’t say anything to Ray. Didn’t call him, or send him a text message.

  She wasn’t sure what to say, right now. Didn’t want to admit that she might have screwed up. Didn’t want to get angry with him that his ex-wife – no: his wife, damn it! – was sabotaging her. She wasn’t ready to confront what that might actually mean, not now, in the heat of the moment. She remembered her first and only encounter with Róisín: Raymond and me: our world is different. The rules are different. Do you understand? He always comes back. Always.

  She hesitated, then called Mo.

  She didn’t know what to make of him. At first she’d thought he was some kind of security man, and then she’d learned that he ran a lot of the PR for Ray and the Angry Cans. He was Ray’s trusted sidekick, his sounding board and, more than anything, one of his few genuine friends.

  “Hey, it’s Marcia’s friend.” Mo always seemed to have a smile in his voice, and his greeting made Emily smile, too: it was how he’d first referred to her, back at the gig at the Roxette, and now that she was actually speaking to Marcia again it had even lost the ironic twist. “What can I do for you, Emily? The man says he’ll be back in a couple of days.”

  “Mo, tell me,” she said. “Where does Róisín fit into all this?”

  It was hard not to start reading things into the pause that followed. At the very least Mo was thinking carefully about his answer before committing anything to words.

  “Róisín’s family,” he said, finally.

  That wasn’t something Emily had expected to hear – an odd way of putting it.

  “When you break up with someone, it can go one of three ways,” he went on. “You somehow manage to make a clean break. Your lives head off in different directions, you lose contact, it’s over. Or you carry on fighting for years afterwards. That’s the second way. And the third way, you still actually give a shit. You’re not friends, and you’re sure as Hell not lovers, but there’s still something special there. You’re family. That’s what Róisín is to Ray. She cares. He cares. But there’s nothing more than that.”

  Now it was Emily’s turn to think carefully about her words. “You’re sure that’s all?” she said. “She’s been... interfering at work. She’s been talking to the senior partners. I think she might have just got me fired.”

  It was a conversation with too many silences.

  “Shit, Emily. I don’t know what to say. Is there anything I can do?” Then, after another pause: “Are you sure? Maybe she’s over-protective of Ray sometimes, but she wouldn’t have done anything to mess things up for you at work. Maybe they’re just over-reacting.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.” Maybe he was right: other than that first
visit to the office – a warning shot – she didn’t know what more, if anything, Róisín had done. Maybe Hamilton had just over-reacted to her out-of-work activities, and it was nothing more than that.

  “You want me to track Ray down and have him call you?”

  More than anything.

  “No. Thank you, Mo, but no. He’s busy. We’ll talk when he’s free. It’s okay. I just wanted to fill in a bit of the background, that’s all.”

  “’Kay, Emily. You take care, you hear?”

  “I will. And you, too, Mo.”

  5

  She had dinner with Marcia that evening, at a small Italian place close to the apartment.

  They talked about work and what a shit Douglas Hamilton was. They talked about Róisín and what she might – or very probably might not – be up to: they agreed she was a bitch, but she probably wasn’t as evil and manipulative as Emily’s paranoia made her out to be. They talked about Marcia’s day and the traffic and the weather.

  And Emily tried very hard not to dwell on why it was that Ray hadn’t answered her call, or the voicemail she’d left, earlier that evening. He’d be in the studio with Rake, probably working all hours now that she wasn’t there to distract him. Even if he’d checked his phone, she’d deliberately kept the tone of her message light: no hurry, just wanted to say Hi¸ no mention of Róisín’s interference or her maybe having just been fired from a position she’d worked so hard and long to achieve.

  A message would have been nice, though. Just a simple text. An I love you or I miss you. A Good night would do.

  Something.

  §

  She Googled him.

  It came to something when you had to resort to search engines and gossip sites to find out what your lover was up to.

  She realized straight away that it was a mistake.

  Just how many million results was that?

  Alongside the list of top results, there was a bank of photographs on the right accompanied by a biography, a list of songs, a set of album thumbnails. She clicked through to ‘More images’.

  At the top there were categories, with more thumbnails: album covers, photographs of Ray when he was younger, the Angry Cans, more recent images. The rest of the page was devoted to a sprawling, scrolling bank of photographs. Publicity shots, photos from Angry Cans gigs, a Ray Sandler doll – Emily guiltily recalled that she’d had one of those! – and the paparazzi shots: Ray at awards events and parties, at premieres, on the beach. Shots of Ray with other members of the Cans, and shot after shot of Ray with Róisín – and other women – over the years.

  And there: a photo from Saturday, Ray with his arm protectively around the waist of a woman a head shorter than him and twice the width, or so the angle implied. Her hair was pinned up under a small blue fascinator, her expression anxious, her smile forced. So that was what Emily looked like to the paparazzi, and therefore to the world.

  She clicked and a larger version of the image popped up. She regretted this instantly, not just because magnification didn’t do her any favors but because it was accompanied by a bank of related images, none of which improved on the original. There was a link to a headline, too, from one of the celebrity gossip blogs. She fought down the urge to keep clicking...

  She closed the browser and checked her phone again for messages, but nothing.

  Goodnight my love xxx

  She pressed Send and switched her phone to silent, then settled down not to sleep.

  §

  Darkness was not her friend that night. She tossed and turned, dozing fitfully and then waking from vivid, confusing dreams. She lay awake for long spells, her mind circling round and round events of the day, and of the past few days.

  It wasn’t doing her any good at all, but she couldn’t just switch off.

  She had to have a plan.

  With no work tomorrow, she couldn’t just sit around the apartment, doing nothing but dwell on what was happening. She wasn’t the kind of person who would just sit there waiting for some kind of contact.

  She wasn’t.

  §

  She went to the gym.

  She hadn’t been for weeks, and within seconds everything hurt and she wondered why she had ever thought this was a good idea. Ten minutes on the treadmill with her music up loud did wonders to stop the mind-rush, though. All she could do was focus on lifting and placing her feet, battling through the burn in her thigh muscles and the aches in her hips and ankles.

  She did some free weights in a corner, as far away from the grunting men as possible, then three whole minutes on the elliptical trainer before deciding that a swim would be just as effective.

  She didn’t care really. She wasn’t going to beat herself up about finding it hard when she hadn’t been in so long. She’d got herself out of the apartment and she’d stopped her head from spiraling out of control for the morning.

  She’d done well.

  Afterwards, she went for a coffee and watched the world go by from a window-seat. Logged on to the free wifi, she checked her personal mail, resisting the urge to go through her Hamilton and Chambers inbox. She opened the Facebook app and idly scrolled. An old photo of the Angry Cans caught her attention and she clicked through, and before she realized she was on the Cans Fans page.

  The photo was from an old gig, but immediately below it there was a much more recent picture of Ray and Rake, faces bleached out by flashlight. They were in the thick of a crowd, outside a nightclub or a bar, by the look of it.

  The story had been shared from a gossip site, with the headline Cans Can? She clicked through and skimmed the story. Ray and Rake photographed out on an all-nighter in Paris last night. Claims that this confirmed rumors of an Angry Cans reunion.

  She really didn’t know what to make of this. She wasn’t prepared... she wasn’t equipped to process it.

  Ray had said Rake was clean, but the report said they’d been drinking all night, and hinted that if this was like the old days then there would be more than just alcohol involved. It was clear now why he hadn’t answered her messages, at least.

  And an Angry Cans reunion? Where had that come from? Ray was just about to relaunch his solo career; he’d never once mentioned the possibility that the band might get back together.

  Much as she was a diehard Cans fan, the prospect of a reunion disturbed her. She knew all the stories of the wild lifestyle the band had shared. The drug-fueled scrapes with death and near-tragedy, the groupies, the trashed hotel rooms. As a young fan that had all been part of the image but now... That wasn’t the Ray she knew. It wasn’t the Ray she’d fallen in love with.

  In love.

  She’d skirted around that. Shied away from it. Said it to him out loud only a handful of times.

  Why was it only now, when events seemed to be chasing madly away from her, that she came to think automatically in those terms?

  §

  She called, and he answered on the second ring.

  No: not Ray. A woman’s voice, a thick French accent. Justine.

  “Hello? How may I help?”

  “It’s Emily.” Justine should have seen that on the screen of Ray’s phone before answering; she shouldn’t have sounded as if she was answering to a stranger.

  “Ah, hello. How may I help?”

  “Is Ray there? I’d like a word.”

  “Ah, pardon. No. He is not available for the telephone right now. He is in the studio. May I help?”

  That was a quick turnaround: from wasted in Paris to working in the studio.

  “I... would you let him know I called, please?”

  Should she feel jealous that Justine could see him when she could not? Should her mind rush to make connections that were not there? Justine was just a member of his team. A member of staff. No more.

  “Yes, I will do that. Is there anything else?”

  In her head: all kinds of images. The two of them in bed together, Justine propping herself up on one elbow while she took the call. Ray with an arm casu
ally draped across her naked thighs, those dark eyes fixed on the young French woman as she spoke. Or Justine taking the call while Ray slept off his binge on a sofa, his clothes a mess, a sick bowl resting precariously in his lap.

  She didn’t know which was worse.

  “Is he... is he okay?”

  “He is fine,” said Justine, and there was a warmth to her tone that made Emily feel instantly guilty. “You know how he is: the music, the muse.” Her accent was almost comedy French: Ze music, ze muse...

  Emily chose not to mention the pictures she’d seen online. Was she even sure they were from last night?

  “Thank you.”

  “It is fine. I will tell him you called, yes?”

  “Thank you. Goodbye.”

  She rang off, and checked that gossip site again, confirming that it claimed the pictures were from the night before. Maybe she should just fly back out, now that she had no work commitments and all. There was no reason not to be with him now.

  She was being stupid. Finding ways to feed her own paranoia. Scaring herself by convincing herself that Ray had gone back to his old ways, led there by Rake; that the man she had fallen for had only been an interlude, a blip in a life that was normally very different.

  Stupid.

  About as stupid as being the woman who sat in the window table of a high street Costa with tears spilling over and sliding down her cheeks.

  Stupid.

  §

  She didn’t even realize she was hearing it at first.

  It was just one of those things. An ear-worm. The song had gone round and round her head often enough since she’d first heard it at the Roxette.

  “I never knew I could.

  I knew I didn’t should.”

  She remembered that moment when he’d just let the opening chord fade to nothing and he’d broken out into a slightly raucous croon with those first lines.

  It was a song he’d never planned to play that night – one he hadn’t even written until it came to him as he walked off stage. And all, he had later told her, inspired by the moment early in the show when he’d caught sight of her for the first time in the audience.