by Pippa Wright
I knew it.
The door to one cubicle is closed, and I can hear stifled giggles from inside it. So he’s got a partner in crime, has he? What kind of friends does Randy have that they’d jeopardize everything by doing this in public? If any one of those journalists had come in here instead of me, Randy could lose everything. I tiptoe towards the cubicle, but they must know someone’s here as I hear a muffled ‘shhhh’. Just in case I had any doubt that Randy was inside, the knotted ends of his leopardskin scarf trail out from under the door.
I go into the next cubicle and lower the toilet lid as slowly and as silently as I can. Taking off my shoes, I step on to the lid and lean over to look into his cubicle, ready to catch him in the act.
But I’m wrong.
Randy Jones isn’t doing coke. He’s doing Jemima Morgan. From behind.
25
I really should state, for the record, that I’m not proud of myself for throwing a kiwi fruit at them, but there they are at the bottom of my handbag, which is still slung over my shoulder, and before I know what I’m doing I’ve hurled one to splat with a shockingly loud thump on the cubicle wall. Two horrified faces, satisfyingly spotted with tiny black seeds, stare up at me. So I throw another one for good measure before getting a grip of myself and running out of the room. Despite Jemima’s later accusations, there is no way I could have anticipated that the next person to enter the gents that night would be Declan Costelloe, nor that the sight of the splattered kiwis would be enough to set him off on a dramatic panic attack that meant an ambulance had to be called.
Unknown to me, this rather effectively disguises both my exit and Randy and Jemima’s indiscretion.
Truly the universe moves in mysterious ways.
Even though it’s warm outside, I feel suddenly freezing. Perhaps it’s shock, but I shiver on the steps of Savoy Street as the photographers begin to circle, scenting a story.
‘Everything okay, Lizzy, love?’ one shouts. ‘Where’s Randy?’
‘Just need a breath of fresh air,’ I mumble. ‘So hot in there.’ I fan my face as nonchalantly as I can, but a suspicious volley of shouts and screams rises up from downstairs, and the photographers begin to move closer. Later I will learn that this is Declan in a kiwi-induced frenzy, but, not knowing this, I begin to panic. I don’t know if I’m more afraid that Randy will chase after me, or that he won’t. All I know is that I have to get out of here fast.
Ignoring the shouts of the photographers, I walk as speedily as I can in my high heels, head down, towards the warren of little side streets that lead from Savoy Street to Embankment station. I know they won’t follow me for more than a few steps – the big story is clearly still going on inside, and a picture of me without Randy is practically worthless. Especially if it’s a picture of my back. In the dark and quiet streets of tall Georgian townhouses I allow myself a few hot tears now that no one can see them. But it isn’t until I find myself on Villiers Street, surrounded by Saturday-night crowds, that I realize I have nowhere to go.
The keys in my bag are to Randy’s house, and for all I know he’s heading there himself. With Jemima. I feel sick. The keys to my own flat are on the dresser in an upstairs bedroom in Belsize Park; I haven’t touched them for weeks. I can’t face telling Lulu the whole story yet, especially so soon after her warning about Randy, and anyway, it’s gone eleven on a Saturday night – if she’s not out herself, she’s going to be busy with Laurent. I just want to get as far away as possible from all of this. To somewhere no celebrity can find me. To somewhere Randy would never think to look.
Guildford.
My brother takes my somewhat incoherent phone call with surprising calm, despite the fact that I’m only capable of gibbering ‘Randy Jones’ and ‘need to come tonight’, and that it’s past eleven and ten o’clock is considered a bit of a late one at Ben and Jenny’s. Sometimes I’m so grateful my brother isn’t one for meaningful conversations. Tonight is one of those times. He doesn’t ask what’s happened, he doesn’t tell me to get a grip, he doesn’t say I told you so – he just tells me to call him from the train and he’ll pick me up from the station. He even says he’s glad I’m coming.
As I cross Hungerford Bridge towards Waterloo, I finally let myself properly cry. The approaching lights of the South Bank are a wavering blur as I hiccup and sob my way to the station. With my back to Savoy Street, to Belsize Park, to Soho, to Mayfair, to Regent’s Park, to Randy, I feel I’m turning away from the London I’ve been living in for the last few weeks. Who was I to think that I, sensible Lizzy Harrison from Guildford, lately of Peckham, could ever make it as the girlfriend of Randy Jones? Mine is the world of the suburbs, of planning in advance, of Ocado deliveries and middle-class gastropubs, of monogamous relationships and fixed-rate mortgages. Of course I never meant anything to Randy Jones, superstar Shagger of the Millennium. How could I have let myself believe that any of it was true? I sob. He was just using me. A tiny part of me thinks perhaps you were just using him too, Lizzy Harrison. But I swiftly silence it; if you can’t feel sorry for yourself when you’ve just caught your boyfriend shagging your Lego-haired nemesis, then when can you?
When we get back to Ben’s house, it’s past one in the morning. He closes the front door behind him, wrestles with a series of Chubb locks and flicks on the hall light as I stumble noisily over Graham’s buggy. Next to the buggy lie three pairs of wellies, one pair of slippers in the shape of rabbits and two battered shoes that resemble a pair of crimped Cornish pasties in earthy red. They’re adorned with thick gold and green laces, and, though I can’t detect it from here, I know that if I bend down lower they’ll smell of joss sticks.
‘Mum’s here?’ I say, turning to Ben in shock. I’m not sure I can handle any more surprises. ‘But . . . but she’s not due back until next week.’
‘Change of plan,’ says Ben with a maddeningly calm shrug. ‘Now go to bed.’
So I do.
I’m woken at seven-thirty by an insistent tapping on my forehead which, when I open my eyes, turns out to be coming from the plastic arm of a small plastic bunny wielded by my nephew.
The door of the study opens a crack and Jenny pokes her head round it. Even at this hour she looks as healthy and fresh as a shiny apple, her cheeks scrubbed, her hair pulled back in a colourful scrunchie. ‘Oh God – sorry, Lizzy. I thought he must have come in here. Is he bothering you?’
‘No, no, it’s fine,’ I say, sitting up and pulling the duvet towards me to cover up the fact that I’m wearing only my expensive, Randy-bestowed and, frankly, rather slutty bra and French knickers. I push my tangled hair off my face, suspecting that I’m probably exposing the smeared remains of the make-up I didn’t wash off last night. I feel as if we’re a Hogarth sketch in which she represents Motherly Purity while I am Urban Vice fresh off the pavement at Gin Lane.
Jenny sits down on the side of the sofa bed and Graham launches himself into her lap with a shriek.
‘Is everything okay, Lizzy? Ben said something about Randy Jones.’
If this was anyone else, I’d think they were after gossip. But Jenny, for all her reading of Woman’s Own at the hairdresser’s, is no more interested in celebrity gossip than she is in astrophysics. In fact astrophysics is probably far more her thing. She wouldn’t even recognize half the people in Hot Slebs, and I know she’s asking out of genuine concern for me rather than for something to tell her friends later. As it begins to dawn on me that this isn’t going to be true of everyone in the coming days, I feel the tears start up again.
‘Oh, Lizzy – don’t cry. I’m so sorry – I didn’t mean to upset you,’ she says, alarmed, and reaches out to hug me to her fleece-clad chest. Graham forces his way into the hug, squeezing me so tightly I fear I might have a bunny-shaped indentation on my chest for ever.
‘I’m . . . I’m okay,’ I sob into Graham’s blond curls.
‘Bloody Randy,’ says Jenny with a fierce loyalty that surprises me, seeing as she doesn’t even know what’s happ
ened yet. ‘Well, you stay here for a bit,’ she says, getting up with Graham in her arms. ‘We’re all going to take Graham out for a walk, and maybe when we’re back we can all have breakfast together. Okay?’
‘Okay,’ I sniff, wiping my eyes.
‘Buh-bye,’ says Graham with a wave from the door.
‘Bye, Gray,’ I wave back, and then collapse on to the pillows with my eyes closed. I can only have been lying there for a few seconds when I smell the distinctive whiff of Nag Champa incense.
Mum.
My eyes fly open to see her leaning over the bed with a frown of concern, wrapped in what appears to be several layers of blue and purple cloth indistinguishable as individual items of clothing. Her grey hair is cut close to her skull in a crop that thankfully owes more to Judi Dench than the shaven-headed monks she’s been spending her time with lately. She flings her arms wide and envelops me in a tight hold, squeezing my face into her joss-stick-fragranced wrappings. I can feel her slow, steady breaths as she holds me without saying a word, and I suspect she’s trying to do something self-consciously spiritual and odd like heal me with the power of breathing. I suppose I should be grateful she isn’t chanting over me or whispering positive affirmations in my ear. I don’t know if the special ashram breaths are working their magic, or if it’s just the presence of Mum after these crazy few months without her, but I do actually start to feel a bit better. Randy and Savoy Street and Camilla and Jemima all feel a long way away from Ben and Jenny’s sofa bed and the presence of my family.
‘Mum, I—’
‘Shh, darling,’ she says, finally letting go. ‘All in good time. You go and have a shower while we go for a walk. We’ll all have a talk over breakfast.’
She kisses me once on the forehead and glides out of the room so smoothly it’s as if there are little castors under her Cornish-pasty shoes.
After a few moments I hear the front door slam and the house is silent. Silent except for a beep from my phone. I know I should have turned it off, but I have a perverse desire to see if it’s a message from Randy. Not that any of the others have been. I texted Camilla from the train, just an innocuous message that I’d decided to go home, and she’s sent a few anxious messages since. Apart from that the phone’s been tauntingly mute since I left Savoy Street. I leap on it and open the text. It’s from a number I don’t recognize.
Sorry u had 2 find out lyk dis, i tryed 2 tell u B4. Sun Reporter p 4,5,6, + sidebar p7 + Hot Slebs Weds. Jazmeen.
As if things couldn’t get any worse. I turn my phone off. I don’t want to hear what anyone else has to say about this.
By the time the others come back from their walk, I’ve had a shower and got dressed in a pair of Jenny’s combat trousers and a long-sleeved British Trust for Conservation Volunteers T-shirt, although I drew the line at the pair of yellow Crocs that had also been left outside the bedroom door. I’m still feeling sick enough to think I may never eat again, but for the others I’ve set the kitchen table with cereals, bread and jar after jar of Jenny’s home-made preserves. I’m attempting to force down a cup of milky Earl Grey tea when they all burst through the front door, Graham clutching a handful of leaves which he deposits in my lap before dragging Mum off to the living room and the television.
Ben approaches the table cautiously as if fearing I might burst into tears at any moment.
‘All right, Lizzy?’ he says.
‘Well, go on,’ says Jenny, appearing from the hallway. ‘Show her.’
‘I thought we said—’ Ben turns to his wife, trying to silence her, but I’ve already seen the copy of the Sunday Reporter poking out from behind his back.
‘It’s Jazmeen Marie, isn’t it?’ I say wearily.
‘So this is what last night was about?’ says Ben, laying the paper on the table in front of me.
‘I don’t exactly know,’ I say, reaching for the paper and turning straight to page four.
I’M CARRYING RANDY JONES’S LOVE CHILD, SAYS STUNNER JAZMEEN
With my brother and sister-in-law breathing heavily over my shoulder, I learn for the first time that Randy is due to become a father in four months. No detail is spared: the nights they spent in a London hotel, Randy’s five-times-a-night appetite, his penchant for a rose-quartz dildo with a fox-brush tail (so that’s where it went). How he’d told her she was different from all the other girls. How Randy was in rehab when she found out she was pregnant. How he’d ignored her desperate messages. How she’d even tried to contact Randy’s new girlfriend for help. But Jazmeen, posing in nothing but a pair of knickers, and what I believe the lad mags call an ‘arm bra’, in which one’s nipples are barely covered by one’s forearm, is proud to be pregnant. Indeed she has already named the child, a daughter, Tiffany Blue.
The sidebar on page seven turns out to be an exclusive interview with me, conducted last night by Daz ‘Dazzler’ Davies, in which I tell him that, despite Jazmeen’s news, ‘it’s all good’ between me and Randy. Which I do remember saying. And ‘I love him and stand by him no matter what’. Which I don’t. A ‘source’, by which I assume they mean Daz himself, is quoted as saying that Lizzy Harrison is telling friends no love child is going to get between her and her man.
My shoulders start shaking.
‘Lizzy,’ says Ben. ‘Oh God, Lizzy, this is awful.’
Jenny pats my back awkwardly. ‘Lizzy, I’m so sorry.’
‘Oh God,’ I say, clutching on to the table for support. ‘Oh my God.’
‘You’re . . . laughing?’ Ben says.
But I can’t help it. Jazmeen’s baby, Randy and Jemima’s kiwi-splattered faces last night, the idea that I ever thought I was in control of this situation for a moment – it’s too ludicrous. All the anxiety and stress of trying to keep Randy within the bounds of media-acceptable behaviour, of helping Camilla without her even knowing, of keeping the relationship secret from my friends and family; how did I ever think I’d get away with it? How did Randy? I laugh myself into weeping, hiccupping hysteria.
Later, Mum takes me out for a walk. As she’s already been on one today, I suspect it’s really a ruse to bestow the wisdom of the ashram on me, but I let her do it anyway. We take the muddy path that leads from Ben and Jenny’s cul-de-sac up to the woods behind their estate. Although it’s still August – just – the leaves are already beginning to lose their glossy greenness. Conkers hang from the heavy branches of the horse chestnut trees, preparing to fall. The brambles around us glisten with blackberries. In a few weeks it will be autumn.
‘You know, this time of year was always Daddy’s favourite,’ she says.
‘It was?’ I ask. I don’t remember. ‘Even though school was about to start?’ It sounds so unlikely that my teacher father would have looked forward to the beginning of term. Wouldn’t the summer holidays have been more appealing?
‘Oh yes,’ she says. ‘I think he never lost that feeling of new beginnings and a clean slate that you get at the start of the school year. He always used to say it was a chance to start over.’ She links her arm with mine and looks up into the canopy of leaves above us. ‘And autumn is so beautiful, too.’
‘It is beautiful,’ I say.
‘Did you love him?’ she asks suddenly.
‘Daddy?’ I say, in surprise.
‘No, darling, of course you loved Daddy. I mean Randy.’
‘I – I think I thought I did. For a while. I think I really wanted to – because, well, it’s been so long since Joe, and I think I just—’
‘You wanted it to be real,’ says Mum.
‘I did. I got scared that I was too closed off to being in a relationship, or love, or anything. Lulu said—’
‘Oh, darling, you didn’t take relationship advice from Lulu, did you?’ Mum laughs. ‘You two are so different!’
‘I know, Mum, but she said I was too uptight and in control, and I think I wanted to prove to her that I wasn’t. But then when I got involved with Randy, I kind of wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t. So I le
t myself fall for him.’
‘And do you think he fell for you?’ she asks.
‘I thought he did, but now I look back, it was one of those relationships where nothing was actually said. I . . . I suppose I just filled in the silences with what I wanted to hear. It – it was all in my head.’ My voice starts to wobble.
‘Maybe you thought if you spoke to him properly you’d hear something you didn’t want to hear,’ says Mum thoughtfully as we walk on through the woods, our strides falling into a gentle rhythm. ‘Maybe by not talking about it, you kept the illusion that you had some control over where it was going.’
‘No, Mum, that was the point – I was losing control with Randy,’ I say; it’s like she’s misunderstanding me on purpose.
‘You weren’t, darling,’ says Mum firmly. ‘You thought this was a safe way of falling in love; one that you could be in charge of and, well, if it didn’t work out then it didn’t matter because it wasn’t real anyway.’
I can’t answer straightaway and Mum doesn’t press me. We walk on silently, listening to the sounds of the woods: the drill of a woodpecker, the dry rustle of leaves as an animal moves through the undergrowth. The branches of the trees meet over our heads, forming a leafy tunnel as the path climbs upwards.
‘So,’ I begin, ‘you think that I never really did risk anything with Randy?’
‘Only you know that, darling,’ says Mum. ‘It just sounds to me like you didn’t really risk yourself. What do you think?’
I leave a long pause before answering.
‘I think you’re probably right,’ I say slowly, knowing Mum will hug this small victory to herself for days. It’s so rare that Ben or I allow her to be the enlightened sage she tries to be.
‘The thing is, Lizzy, we can’t control the things that really matter. People die, people fall out of love with us, people go away, people let us down. But that’s all part of—’
