Greatest Love Story of All Time (28 page)

Was
there a drink thing? Guiltily I thought about the weekend. There had definitely been a drink thing this weekend. Leonie and I had agreed that a Bloody Mary seemed like a reasonable start to the day when we’d arrived at the Grand Union for a hearty burger yesterday. But while she’d gone home at four, ready
to get on with some work-related thing, I’d stayed for another. And then another. I’d excused myself on the grounds that Leonie, who was a charity mugger, clearly didn’t have any ‘work things’ to be doing on a Sunday and was thus going to meet Alex to Finally Have Sex. Bloody Mary was my antidote to this terrible possibility.

Later on yesterday, when I’d returned at seven o’clock to feed Duke Ellington and have some therapeutic banter with Freddy, Stefania had arrived in my kitchen looking very pretty with newly washed hair hanging over her shoulders. ‘Vhat in ze name of Guru Nanak are you
doing
?’ she had asked, as she stood in my doorway. It was a reasonable question: I had tried to open a bottle of wine by pushing the cork into the bottle with a pencil because I had lost the corkscrew, but unfortunately the pencil had splintered at the last minute so I was now sieving the wine into a bowl.

‘I’m filtering for bits of pencil,’ I explained.

Stefania shook her head. ‘I have come to take you to my lodgings,’ she said. ‘It is time you consumed something healthy. Dave told me you ate a sack of doughnuts and now I find you eating pencils and vine on a Sunday night. Come,’ she said pityingly.

‘Dave told you I ate a bag of Krispy Kremes?’ I said. ‘Why are you lot talking about me behind my back? Bloody Gestapo! Stop it!’

‘Ve are merely concerned for you. Come viz me.’

I brought the bowl of pencil-filtered wine with me,
accepting that Stefania was quite right to pity me. I was pathetic. Drinking pencil wine when my mother had just celebrated three whole days of sobriety after nearly twenty years of chronic dependency? I was disgusting.

‘Er, morning, Fran.’

I snapped out of my ponder, paracetamol still halfway to my mouth. Alex was standing next to my desk looking very uncomfortable. In one hand he held a thimble of designer coffee and in the other a copy of the
Independent.
I stared at it with horror, half expecting a front-page announcement about Michael and Nellie’s engagement. Then I stared up at him, mute. The agony of Michael’s engagement had left me incapable of speech.

‘Um, I need to talk to you about something,’ Alex began awkwardly.

‘NO!’ I yelled, my vocal cords miraculously restored. ‘There’s no need to say
anything
about Michael. I just found out.’

Alex looked even more uncomfortable. ‘Er, OK. Are you all right? I can’t believe it, Fran. It’s just terrible.’

I nodded glumly.

As he stared at me, cringing like a frightened dog, I marvelled at the bizarre turnaround that Leonie had effected by letting Alex into her life. Gone was the repellent confidence of News Producer Alex who would have revelled in my misery: here instead was
Gawky Teen Alex, who seemed genuinely anguished about my horrible situation.

‘Sorry again for accusing you of selling Mum to the press, Alex,’ I said eventually. ‘And for the, erm, rude message.’

We both smiled awkwardly.

‘Not at all. I’d have done the same. And I just want you to know the tape had nothing to do with me,’ he said.

‘OK. Fair enough. Let’s just get on, yeah?’

Alex’s pointy features broke into a genuine smile. ‘I agree! Do you want to go for lunch, maybe?’

One thing at a time, Ratty
. ‘Er … Not sure. It feels weird, Alex. What with this Michael stuff going on.’

Alex looked wounded. ‘It’s terrible, Fran. I met up with him yesterday and he told me. I got really angry with him and said –’

I cut him off. ‘Thanks. I hear you. I’ll survive this somehow but I don’t think I’m ready to have lunch with his best friend just yet.’

Alex sipped his coffee sheepishly. ‘Yes. I understand.’ He glanced awkwardly at the burgeoning election team. ‘Well, better go. Lots to do.’

‘I’m sure there is,’ I said politely. I didn’t want to hear about his busy job. It should have been mine.

‘You could … um, well, if you don’t hate me so much you could always come and get involved,’ he said.

I raised an eyebrow, trying not to look too keen.

‘I could clear it with Hugh. He didn’t really want me to do the Nick Bennett interview on Friday, Fran, he wanted you to do it.’

‘Thanks,’ I said slowly. ‘That would … That would be great. Let me know once you’ve got the go-ahead.’

As I watched his skinny legs scamper away it occurred to me that he’d probably be best man at Michael and Nellie’s wedding.

Michael and Nellie’s wedding. The idea sliced through me like a butcher’s knife. Sharp, precise, deadly.
Michael and Nellie’s wedding.

‘Coolest blogs in London,’ I typed furiously into Google, determined to get through the day without giving in to the wedding-shaped dark cloud of despair that was lurking dangerously at the periphery of my mind.

But it was out of my hands. Two seconds later, as I opened the clublondon blog, my phone delivered a message from Michael. Fran, there’s something I need to tell you. Can we please meet up as soon as possible.

I slammed my phone down on the table. And then picked it up, suddenly calm. I thought of what Mum had said last Wednesday
. It stops here
. If Mum was brave enough to take responsibility for her mental wellbeing, so was I.

I hit reply.

I know what’s going on, Michael. Please leave me alone and don’t contact me ever again. Fran.

Fancy a game of pin the cock in the arsehole? Mickey xxxxx

‘NO NEWS FROM CAMDEN,’ Stefania yelled. I winced and held my mobile away from my face. Even through the music and beery chatter at Smiths of Smithfield I could hear her as clear as a bell. This was because, according to her usual custom, Stefania was conducting our phone conversation in an out-and-out roar.

My heart sank. Where was my little furry prince? Duke Ellington had failed to come in for his breakfast this morning, a completely out-of-character occurrence. Even in the event of a nuclear fall-out he would come in for his breakfast. It was his chance to reassert his reign of terror over our yard each day.

But nothing. I’d bashed away at his can and called him for more than ten minutes to no avail. Stefania, doing yoga on a mat in the yard in spite of the eight-degrees temperature, had seemed genuinely worried and had even scampered up the tree, like a mad little
elf, to check that he wasn’t stuck on either of our roofs.

He wasn’t. I’d given her my keys and asked her to come and check later on in the day. Judging by the frequency with which she’d called me, she’d spent the whole day in my house waiting for him.

I couldn’t help but feel horribly afraid. Duke Ellington was like my child. ‘OK, well, let me know if you see him,’ I said miserably. ‘And thanks. You’re a good friend.’

But she was off, chanting some sort of cat-finding prayer.

‘Pint of Asahi,’ I said, to the nice Brazilian barman. He smiled crisply and said, ‘Be careful with beer. You have good physique. Do not ruin it.’

‘Seconded,’ said Dave, as he arrived next to me and pulled up a stool. ‘Since when did you drink draught beer?’

I smiled wanly. ‘Well, you kept bollocking me about drinking so I thought I’d transfer to something a bit softer.’ I took a sip and promptly belched. ‘Not sure it’s for me, though. I forgot about my belching. Do you want this? I can get some wine.’

Dave looked down at his hands. He seemed to be struggling to say something. ‘Dave?’ I prompted. He was running them up and down his worn old jeans, exhaling slowly. After a few seconds he looked at me and smiled.

‘OK, Franny Fannybaws. Here’s the deal.’

I sighed and took off my duffel coat. ‘Go on,’ I said, resignedly. There was a ladder in my tights. Glam Fran was a bit sketchy today.

He coughed, then said, ‘You’re going to stop drinking and I’m going to do it with you. As of now. We’re going to stop drinking together.’

This, I had not expected. I looked at Dave, who had obviously been subjected to a severe haircut by his mum over the weekend. He looked tired, but his face seemed a lot younger now that it wasn’t so obscured by his mane. ‘How old are you?’ I asked suddenly.

‘Thirty-eight. That’s not the answer I was looking for, Fannybaws,’ he added, with a smile. ‘Back to this deal, please.’

I studied the pint of lager in front of me and realized that, in the last week, three of the people I cared about most had begged me to stop drinking.

And at that moment the thought fluttered gently into my head that they might actually be
right.
It flew around like a timid butterfly, refusing to settle, but it didn’t leave.

Had my judgement been up to much of late? No. And if I really
didn’t
have a problem with alcohol, what was the harm in trying a few weeks without it? Apart from anything else, I felt confident that it would do wonders for my skin and would get everyone off my back.

‘OK,’ I said slowly, biting my lip. ‘But it’ll be hard.
I like booze. How will I do Gin Thursdays without gin?’

Dave grinned and gave me a double thumbs-up. ‘Because I’ll be with you,’ he replied. ‘You’ll be doing your mum a huge favour by not drinking. And your head’ll be in far better shape for your Eight Date Deal.’

How I loved Dave. Quite why a big hairy scary man like him, with his legendary career and legendarily beautiful partner, gave a flying fuck about me and my pathetic gin-drinking, doughnut-munching habits was beyond me. I jumped off the stool and hugged him, knocking him into a group of suited money types who were buying cocktails behind him. He gave me a brief squeeze and pushed me away, picking up my coat, which had gone flying in the assault. ‘How’s about we leave this pint behind and go upstairs for some scran? You could do with a square meal.’

As I followed Dave up the stairs, I gazed happily down at the bar spread out below me. Framed neatly by industrial steel and exposed brick, the after-work crowd roared on, oblivious to whether or not I had a drink in my hand.
No one cares,
I mused.
The only person who gives a shit whether or not I’m drinking is me. And that’s not enough.
Feeling overwhelmed but a lot happier, I surveyed the crowd one last time before turning the corner of the stairs.

And as I did so, my eye was caught by a burst of
beauty. A pair of people so attractive that the drinkers parted before them, like the Red Sea before Moses. I swear the music was even turned down.

It was, of course, Nellie Daniels.

Why not? And she was with a really exquisite man. She was flushed and happy and, dear God, she was clinging to his arm as if her life depended on it. A fairly sizeable rock sparkled visibly from her left hand, which was curled round his arm in a way that said,
We are going to have sex later
. What the blazes … ? I shuffled sideways to the turn in the stairs and peered round the corner as they headed towards the bar.

There, the man ostentatiously picked up a handful of Nellie’s shiny hair and moved it reverently over her shoulder to her back. His hand remained on her neck and he whispered intimately in her ear before raising his hand to call over the barman.

‘Fannybaws?’ Dave said, coming back down the stairs next to me. ‘What are you doing now, you mental?’

I pushed him back up the stairs. ‘Don’t move another
inch
, Dave Brennan!’

Dave put his hands in his pockets and watched me from a couple of stairs above. ‘Will you explain this to me or am I to stand here for the rest of the night?’

‘It’s Nellie! She’s here with some hot bloke and, Dave, I swear, they’re having an affair! He’s all over her! And she looks like she’s having some sort of orgasm!’

‘Fuck’s sake, Fran, is that why you wanted to come here? Are we on a fucking stalking mission? Thanks a lot.’

‘No! I had no idea they were coming.’

Dave got a packet of Golden Virginia out of his pocket. ‘Whatever. I’m going outside to have a fag. By the time I get back I want you sitting down and minding your own fuckin’ business, OK?’

I grabbed him. ‘No! Nellie can’t know I’m here … Dave this is big – look at them!’ Nellie and the man were standing at the bar with their faces less than a foot apart. Nellie was grinning coyly into his face and he had her left hand in his. He was staring at her ring. Then he said something in her ear, which made her laugh uproariously. Were they laughing at Michael’s taste in rings? Then he silenced her by kissing her.

I glanced sideways at Dave, who was really quite shocked. ‘Fuck,’ he said after a few seconds. ‘Fuck, that’s really bad. She can’t seriously be after marrying Michael with this going on?’

I shrugged. Dave withdrew and sat on the stairs next to me. He looked pissed off.

‘Why are you cross?’ I asked him, confused.

‘It’s not looking good for Michael, is it?’ he said eventually.

‘What do you care about Michael?’

He shrugged. ‘I guess I just don’t like infidelity much. Never had time for it.’ I watched his face, which was pitted with real irritation. It was quite
touching. Freya’s fear of Dave’s foreign travels was obviously misplaced.

Then I had a thought that made my stomach slide out of my bowels. ‘Oh, God, Dave. Maybe Michael proposed to her because she got pregnant. Maybe they were never that into each other but he’s marrying her out of honour. That’s
exactly
the sort of thing I’d expect him to do. That’s why he sounds so sad in his messages! But how can I take him back if he has a child? With The DANIELS?’ I clutched the banister for support as my mind raced.

Dave resumed rolling. ‘Get a grip, Fannybaws. And stay out of it. Whatever’s going on it’s got nothing to do with you, you hear?’

I peered round the corner again but Nellie and the man had gone. I scanned the floor, looking for Nellie’s wall of shining hair, and suddenly located it, about five metres from me, advancing up the stairs.