As Ellie and I lay in bed together, I knew that I could never breathe a word about what I’d done, to Meg or anybody else. It was my secret, I understood the lesson, but it had to remain hidden from Meg. I was certain that Ellie would keep that pact, she had as much at stake as I did.
As we stood at the bar waiting to place our orders, the chat flowed easily between us. Ellie worked in TV, she was quite a celebrity in Bristol, often asked to host business awards and local ceremonies. It was one step up the minor celebrity ladder from my position. I was WI meetings and school assemblies. Ellie was official events and posh dinners. My radio audience was measured in the hundreds of thousands, Ellie’s broke the two million mark. She was famous enough to be recognised for all the right reasons when walking down the street.
‘You look like that Ellie Turner off the TV!’ they’d say. We both laughed at that one, but Ellie had got past being flattered by it and had moved on to the stage where it had become a bit tiresome.
I’d get, ‘Blimey, you don’t half sound like that Peter Bailey fella off the radio!’ though it was easier for me to hide, only the diehard listeners who procured presenter photos knew what I looked like. I wasn’t even a presenter, but because I appeared on air on a regular basis they got presenter postcards printed. The print run was only a thousand for me, they got five thousand of the proper presenters. See, a minor celebrity.
‘It’s actually a relief to be in Newcastle where nobody knows me,’ Ellie had said, then, suggestively, ‘Nobody knows what I’m getting up to this weekend.’
That one hung there for a moment. I studied her face for a clue, but it was definitely an initial come-on, she didn’t cover her tracks. She was putting out feelers. I felt a prickle of excitement the way I did when Meg showered immediately before bedtime. It was a promise of something to come. Ellie was testing the water.
Although broadcasting is an incestuous industry, I’d never met Ellie before, or even heard of her. She had changed her career. She’d started her working life as a nurse, hated it, and gone back to university to get a postgraduate qualification in TV and radio.
‘I couldn’t face wiping arses and scraping shit off my uniform for the rest of my life,’ she laughed, then followed it up immediately with the hint of something more sinister. ‘Only it didn’t quite work out that way, there’s still plenty of shit flying around in my life.’
I wasn’t sure how to take that one. It was a bit of a mood dampener after her previous flirtation. She sensed it too and changed the tone fast.
‘I always feel a bit naughty when I come on these training events. What goes on in Newcastle and all that!’
‘I know what you mean,’ I agreed. ‘I always seem to end up in some sort of mischief at these things. It’s the heady combination of an expenses tab, a night in the OverNight Inn and being away from home.’
‘We never got weekends like this when I was a nurse, it’s still fresh enough to be exciting to me. I know we have to sit through all the corporate crap on Saturday and Sunday, but there are worse people to be locked up with in prison.’
She was right. Being away all weekend, all expenses paid, albeit within strict HR-defined guidelines, was a bit of a First World problem. It was a break from routine, a chance to get away from the relentless grind of IVF and marriage guidance. My beer arrived and I took a long cool sip, marking the weekend’s socialising officially open. Ellie had wine. She held up her glass and clinked it gently against my pint.
‘To a weekend of fun and adventure,’ she smiled.
I shudder now when I think back to Meg’s boyfriend walking into her flat. It wasn’t as if she was forbidden from having a boyfriend. But Christ, I’d nearly shit myself when he walked through the door. She hadn’t mentioned that. She hadn’t had time and I hadn’t asked, of course. What a way to start a relationship.
We were lying naked in bed, crumpled sheets thrown onto the floor, clothes all over the place, dishevelled and totally guilty. The door to the flat banged shut. Meg jumped up in bed, I was stirred by her movement and all I heard was ‘Oh shit!’ muttered several times.
It was too late to try to cover up, besides he’d have seen what was going on the minute he walked into the living room. My boxers were hanging off one of the chairs in the dining area, there was no chance of talking our way out of it.
I wince to think of it, even now. Me sitting stark naked in bed while Daniel talked to Meg as if I wasn’t even there. She was naked too, but had at least managed to find a T-shirt on the floor at her side of the bed, one of Daniel’s with a Queen album cover on it. An excellent way to add insult to injury.
It didn’t take long for me to learn what Meg probably should have mentioned the night before: Daniel worked nights, Meg worked days. But the relationship had run its course. Daniel’s ego was hurt, but they both knew it was coming. It was Meg’s flat, Daniel was a bit of a freeloader, so it was he who had to pack his bags and leave. He huffed and puffed, cursed and stomped, but he left surprisingly quickly. He didn’t even acknowledge me until he was leaving the flat, all of his possessions thrown into two suitcases.
‘Screw you!’ was all he said, and he gave me the finger.
‘And damn you too, Meg!’ he shouted, throwing his keys across the room then melodramatically storming through the door and slamming it shut.
‘Hell, sorry!’ said Meg. ‘I meant to tell you, I thought you’d be out of here before he came back. I’m so sorry, I know that’s really slutty. I didn’t think I’d be so tired this morning, I’m usually awake before seven.’
We looked at each other and I smiled at her cautiously, not sure which way the wind was blowing.
‘It’s been on the cards for a long time,’ Meg began to explain. ‘I should have ended it a long time ago. I ought to have told you, I know I should, but in my mind, we’ve been over for months. I should have put him out of his misery sooner.’
‘Is that the end of it?’ I asked. ‘Will he make life difficult for you?’
‘I doubt it,’ she said, moving her hand to the bottom of her T-shirt. Daniel’s T-shirt. She started to work it up over her shoulders. In spite of the gravity of the situation with Daniel, I’d noticed how tantalisingly high its hem sat on her legs. Every time she moved her hands, it would pull up slightly, just revealing a provocative glimpse of pubic hair. Holding my gaze, she let it drop to the floor. I’d barely had time the night before to take in just how stunning she was. She was absolutely beautiful, I felt myself hardening. She looked down at me and smiled.
‘Let’s see what we can do with that,’ she said. I felt a surge of excitement and guilt, fuelled by the adrenalin of the skirmish with Daniel. I was enjoying the most exciting sex of my life with this woman, who clearly felt the same passion for me as I felt for her.
It was only as we lay in bed afterwards, having both phoned into work sick, that it occurred to me. This woman who had created such a sudden and urgent need in me had just cheated on her partner.
Had she done this before? When the time came, if the circumstances were right, would Meg do the same to me?
After a while, Ellie and I guiltily decided that we’d better join the main group. We’d been chatting at the bar for quite a time. Back with the others, we were now separated, unable to continue our conversation.
They were a good bunch of people, it didn’t take long until we were all gossiping away exchanging journalistic tales across the table as if we were old friends. That’s the thing about corporate events, you all have a certain amount of common experience, and as long as you keep things work-based, the conversations are easy. There were five teams gathered for our weekend of brakes-off thinking, it was quite a shindig. Two of the teams were from TV, the rest from radio.
It was our task to come up with ways that we could supercharge our output to harness the force of social media and the web. The penny was beginning to drop with senior management that our days were numbered if we didn’t learn some new tricks fast. Internet radios were being inst
alled in cars, everybody had a smartphone glued to their ears; nobody would tolerate the intermittent signals from regional radio for much longer.
You could usually rely on the grey-hair brigade to keep the listening figures strong, but even the pensioners were adopting the new technology. Before long, Ethel from the old folks’ home would be tuning into non-stop songs from the fifties on some 24/7 streaming station based in the USA. When that happened, there would be nobody left to hang onto every word of the mart prices and the local share price fluctuations. It was touch and go as to whether I’d make it to pension age before it all caved in on us. My pensionable age kept getting further off and the imminent demise of radio got closer and closer, the spectre of Netflix and Spotify casting their dark shadow over my future mortgage payments.
There was a touch of gallows humour about the whole occasion, among the staff that is, not the managers. I had a foot in both camps. I was low-level management, I was still allowed to drink with the troops and poke fun at our bosses. So long as your shift still entailed working on the shop floor, you remained one of the guys.
It was an uproarious alcohol-fuelled evening, cooking up spoof social media campaigns to revive our broadcasting fortunes. Ellie was really rude, she almost made me blush, but she’d look over at me every time something risqué emerged from her mouth, and I knew that she was marking us out for later. It was for my benefit as much as anybody else’s, she was letting me know that she was no prude.
As the evening progressed and the numbers around the table began to dwindle, Ellie and I edged nearer and nearer until at long last we were sitting next to each other. Her leg brushed mine. She was wearing a short skirt. I imagined what it would be like to stroke her long, smooth, athletic legs and have them wrapped around me.
Immediately I felt guilty, thinking of Meg, and dismissed the thought from my mind. But Ellie kept moving her leg against mine, and each time she did so, I got a little jump of excitement.
There were only a few diehards left at the table, the time was rapidly approaching when I’d have to make my final call with Ellie. She’d started to touch my arm when we were speaking, we were so close that I could feel her breath on my face. It was an intoxicating closeness as if I only had to say the word and we would fall into each other’s arms.
I thought about Meg and how we’d met. What I was feeling with Ellie at that moment was conjuring up that enticing cocktail of sexual promise and excitement. For a moment, Meg felt like the enemy. She was driving me to this. I was desperate for physical contact, for the warmth and closeness of my wife. Yet she denied me that, I was frustrated, lonely, in a corner. I wanted my wife, but she wouldn’t let me get close to her.
I knew it was treacherous as I was doing it, there’s no excuse for what happened. I even convinced myself that it would be therapeutic for us, that sleeping with Ellie would release some of the tension around the counselling and IVF, it would give me the impetus to keep trying to work things out.
My deception grew closer and more certain every time that Ellie’s leg moved nearer to mine and with every touch of my arm. She had small, soft and really feminine hands, Meg’s were much more functional, I’d never found a person’s hands so sexy before. I imagined her holding me in those hands and taking me in her mouth. She looked at me and smiled. Ellie knew that she’d got me.
Chapter Four
I should have spotted the signs before I got in too deep. It’s only in looking back that I can see the hazard lights flashing all around me in the lead up to those events. I was blind to them, and in the state of mind I was in I’m not sure I even cared.
Jem was the first red flag. We’d been friends for years, I’d known him before I met Meg. He’d started at the radio station a month or two before me; we’d both been recruited as radio producers so we had to work together closely.
I was grateful to Jem, he showed me the ropes at the new station and got me up to speed. He even saved my life on air a few times.
Mispronouncing a Middle Eastern politician’s name or making a pig’s ear of a Russian diplomat’s official title is an occupational hazard for a radio presenter, but get a local place name wrong and you’ll be lynched. Broadcasters can be right bastards too, they won’t warn you.
There was the time that once again I hadn’t read through my scripts before dashing into the studio for the news bulletin. The second item was an alleged assault in a local hotspot called Minge Street. Luckily the top story was an international incident, so it gave Jem ten seconds to leap into the studio while my microphone was closed and hiss ‘min-gay’.
As the short audio clip came to an end and my eyes returned to my script, I opened my microphone, and my eyes fell on the dreaded words, Minge Street. Surely it wasn’t as it looked? The penny dropped. Jem had given me warning, it was pronounced ‘min-gay’. He’d spotted the hazard while scanning the news scripts on his PC. I owed him one for that.
So Jem became an office pal early on in my life at the radio station. We were similar in age and we’d both been to the same university to get our broadcasting qualifications, even though he’d been there two years earlier than me.
We didn’t really socialise with wives and families, broadcasting is funny like that. We went out together when someone was leaving, for stag nights, birthday celebrations and so on, but spouses and partners tended to keep away most of the time. I guess it can be a bit intimidating to go on a night out with people who tell stories for a living.
I was aware of Sally, I knew about Jem’s kids, I’d absorbed the basics of his life, but we weren’t intimately acquainted. Looking back, I knew more about Jem’s liaisons with the nubile reporters than I did about his relationship with his wife. I don’t think he was unhappy with Sally, I suspect he was more unhappy with himself.
Jem had been destined for great things in broadcasting. He’d been the star of his year at university, securing a prestigious work placement in London and getting his voice on national radio before he was even clutching a qualification in his hand.
As a teenager, desperate to secure a place in the media, he’d worked his way through the ranks of hospital radio. The senior volunteers, who all had names like Geoff or Bill, blocked his path to the hospital radio airwaves for four years before they gave him a slot reading out dedications on somebody else’s show.
What a bunch of tossers. I’d heard Jem’s demo, which he’d recorded in his bedroom at the age of fourteen; he was brilliant even then, had a real feel for the medium. Geoff, Bill and Frederick – or whatever they were called – were just a bunch of grumpy old gits intent on stopping a talented youngster from getting his hand on their coveted show slots.
They probably thought the world would fall apart if Geoff’s Weekend Warblers or Bill’s Bandstand Extra were replaced by anything vaguely interesting that Jem might have produced.
I knew this story well, Jem had shared it many a time. It was often how he started bonding with the sexy young reporters – there’s nothing like a ‘how I got into broadcasting’ tale to loosen the elastic on even the securest pair of knickers.
Jem had really fought to get into radio. I’d just breezed in, though I had only a fraction of Jem’s talent. I’d done a short stint on student radio at university, got caught by the bug – and the women – and stuck with it. I was gifted with a decent voice and the ability to work accurately at speed.
I really believe that Jem loved Sally, but he also blamed her for his stalled career. They’d met at university, married and procreated, and he missed out on ‘the London thing’. He landed his first job in the north, got caught up young with houses and domestic life, and was then unable to make the move to London where all the best jobs were located. He’d missed his moment, and he knew it.
He would grumble to me about former reporters, who’d been attractive but fairly useless, moving through the ranks at a meteoric speed. When did you last see an ugly presenter? Never, is the answer to that question. In spite of diversity, quotas and equality, the day
you see a fat and unattractive presenter on screen, I’ll eat my recording equipment. That doesn’t count Eamon Holmes, he’s got a job already.
So for Jem, as a middle-aged bloke with a glorious radio voice and broadcasting instincts to die for, the world of radio was becoming dominated by trendy young things with posh names that were unpronounceable. And Jem was stuck on a regional radio station warning people like me of the hazards of a place called Minge Street and reporting on mid-weight crime stories with a peppering of escaped sheep news for added zest.
I understood his frustration, broadcasting is an ambitious world, it’s hard to watch people leaping ahead of you onto national radio and TV programmes. It’s difficult at times to keep jealousy at bay. If I pushed Jem he’d admit that he could never make the move to London, it was too late for him, they couldn’t afford it, and the family was too far entrenched in local life.
I think his dalliances with younger female reporters were an expression of his frustration and perhaps a taste of the glamorous life he might have known. Instead, he became one of the broadcasting world’s might-have-beens, only touching the robes of those destined for great things and never getting to wear them himself.
I didn’t condone his sleeping with the reporters, but I wasn’t going to condemn him for it either. He was a mate, he was great company, we laughed a lot and he pulled his weight in the office. It was up to him to deal with matters of conscience, not me.
When one of my colleagues handed me his phone saying that Jem wanted to speak to me, I was a little surprised.
Don't Tell Meg Trilogy Box Set Page 4
