Guilty Feet (18 page)

As it was I arrived twenty minutes late, which under normal circumstances would already be a hanging offence as far as Cass was concerned, so I was grateful to find her looking so chilled. The really big surprise, though, was Sid. He was smiling and chatting happily away as if he smiled and chatted happily away all the time.

I looked from one to the other and then focused my attention on Cass. She was looking particularly good, I thought, in a black sleeveless dress with a silver cardigan draped loosely over her shoulders—quite daring for her. Only her hair let her down a bit. It was so annoyingly neat I was tempted to ruffle it for her, but then it occurred to me that there was something quite sexy about her naughty-librarian-out-on-the-pull look.

She looked up at me, surprised. They both did. Then they looked back at each other and frowned in puzzlement.

‘We don’t know each other,’ Sid yelled back at me. ‘We’ve only just met.’

‘But this is Cass,’ I said. ‘The friend that I wanted you to meet. And this is Sid.’ I added quickly to Cass, ‘who’s hopefully going to be my new boss.’ Because she was beginning to look suspicious, I cut to the chase. ‘Sid’s looking for someone with your sort of experience to join us, so I suggested he came along as well.’

I smiled widely at them both and they looked at each other again, shyly now. Then, when Sid turned to the bar to get me a drink, I apologised to Cass.

‘I thought if I told you that you wouldn’t want to come,’ I mouthed.

‘He seems very nice,’ she mouthed back, with a definite twinkle in her eye.

‘He is,’ I said, ‘and I think he’s going to do really well. It could be a great chance for us all,’ I added, even as my mind drifted back to my mother’s bombshell. I was dying to tell someone about it, but this was neither the time nor the place.

Just then Sid passed me a glass of white wine, and as I took my first sip I was already wondering how soon I could leave.

‘I realise you probably won’t be interested,’ I said to Cass, yelling again now so that Sid could hear what I was saying, ‘but I thought it might be worth a try.’

‘I was thinking about moving on somewhere quieter,’ Sid bellowed back, but he was looking at Cass.

‘Good idea,’ Cass bawled, and then they both looked at me. I shrugged.

‘I just need to go to the loo first,’ I said, knocking back the contents of my glass in one. I’ll meet you outside.’

I pushed my way through the pulsating throng and eventually made my way into the cloakroom. I was resigned now to spending the evening with Cass and Sid, but that didn’t mean I was happy about it. I still had a lot of brooding to do and I’d far sooner have got on with it straight away.

There were about five or six other women in there, in different stages of their ablutions, and I was just washing my hands when I noticed that I was standing right next to Aisling Carter. She noticed me at about the same time and we looked at each other through the mirror over the sink for a moment before she spoke.

‘It
is
you,’ she said, clearly as embarrassed as I was but just as intent on not showing it.

‘How’s it going?’ I asked as I flipped off the tap. She was the last person I wanted to see but I had my dignity to maintain.

‘Great,’ she said, full of what sounded like false cheer to me—but it was hard to be certain with Aisling. ‘I’m here with Steve and a couple of friends.’

She was just about wearing a fluffy red thing that could loosely be described as a dress, I supposed, but looked to me rather more like stretched snood. And I don’t know why but her dress was suddenly not the only red thing in the ladies’ toilets. My eyes were filled with it briefly as all the resentment I felt about Aisling turned to hot anger.

‘So what happened to Dan?’ I said. I could feel my dignity falling apart, but I couldn’t stop myself now, ‘Did he finish with you or did you just fancy a change?’

Everyone in the cloakroom had stopped what they were doing now, and were looking at me. Well, I had raised my voice quite a lot.

Aisling looked at me too, in what seemed like genuine puzzlement.

‘How could Dan finish with me when I’ve never been out with him?’ she said, clearly a lot less conscious than I was of people staring at us.

I was beginning to feel a little less certain of my ground, and I couldn’t speak for a moment. Her tap was still running, and because I hate waste I was tempted to reach over and turn it off.

‘I don’t know who you’ve been talking to,’ she went on, ‘but I’m telling the truth.’ She finally turned off the tap and shook hands. ‘I’ll admit I was keen on him for a while, but he made it clear from the start that I wasn’t his type.’ She looked me up and down then, curiously, as if trying to come to terms with the fact that I clearly
had
been his type. She moved over to the dryer then, and it droned into action as she rubbed her hands beneath the heat.

The spectators started moving off, bored now that the tension seemed to have gone out of our exchange. My own hands were practically dry now, and I rubbed the residue lightly on my dress.

‘They told me that it was serious,’ I said, bewildered still. ‘Then they said it was over suddenly.’

‘Well, who knows what that was about?’ she said, as if the matter was done with. She scowled at her reflection in the mirror and began fiddling with one of the hair extensions that looked in danger of coming adrift from her own hair. Suddenly she turned on me and looked me straight in the eye.

‘Where were you last night?’ she asked abruptly.

‘Last night?’ I repeated. ‘Why?’

‘Someone broke into Dan’s flat and smashed up some CDs. Libby thought that it might have been you.’

‘Me?’ I said, shocked. ‘Why the hell would I do that?’ She shrugged.

‘Revenge, I suppose. It would make sense if you thought Dan was seeing me.’

My mind was racing. I couldn’t believe what I was being accused of.

‘But I went to my mother’s place last night. I caught the train there straight after work.’ I thought of Nicola on the train and felt relieved. ‘And I can prove it too.’

Aisling shrugged her bony shoulders. ‘I didn’t think it was you anyway. Not really your style, I shouldn’t have thought.’

‘But Libby thinks it was me?’

‘So she says.’

I couldn’t take this all in. How could Libby possibly say such a terrible thing about me? Then I remembered what Nic had said about Libby—how she’d been talking about me—and Sid’s hints that my informant might not be reliable. And I felt such a fool.

Aisling was looking in the mirror again, applying red lipstick to match her dress.

‘Was it Libby who lied about me and Dan?’ she wanted to know.

Since I didn’t think Libby deserved my discretion, I nodded—yes.

‘I guessed as much,’ she said. She looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘She probably did it to keep you and Dan apart. If you thought he was seeing me, chances were that you wouldn’t make contact.’

She smiled at me wryly through the mirror, aware that she’d hit the nail right on the head.

‘Well, you didn’t exactly make a secret of your feelings for Dan while I was still with him,’ I said.

‘Guilty as charged. But you were perfectly safe. And, yes, OK, so I may have overstepped the mark—but things were already going sour between you when I moved in. You were out a lot, and I thought Dan deserved more attention than you seemed prepared to give him.’

I wanted to argue the toss about that, but there didn’t seem any point. Besides, I was more interested in Libby at the moment.

‘But that doesn’t explain
why
she wanted to keep me and Dan apart.’

Aisling pressed her lips together and put the lipstick back in her bag.

‘Because she wanted him for herself, of course.’

My heart sank.

‘Are you saying that Dan and Libby are together now?’

‘No. They’ve decided to stay friends. At least Dan has decided, after he spent the night with her.’

I was stunned.

‘Dan slept with Libby? When?’

‘Last Saturday.’

And Libby had been in to see me on Monday. She’d seemed excited, and then she’d gone a bit strange and had to rush off.

Aisling turned away from the mirror again and looked at me.

‘Between you and me, though, nothing happened. I suspect it’s just wishful thinking on Libby’s part.’

This was all very hard to take in. Libby’s lies, Dan’s CDs...

‘I hope Dan doesn’t think it was me that broke into his flat.’

‘I doubt it,’ Aisling said breezily as she snapped her fluffy red bag shut. ‘Now, are you ready?’

Feeling dazed now, I nodded, and she linked my arm like an old friend, and together we walked out of the cloakroom as if nothing of importance had happened.

The roar of the crowd felt as if it had been switched up a notch or two in our absence, and I was very glad to be leaving the place. I tapped Aisling’s bare shoulder and indicated with sign language that I was going. She shook her head, though, and hung onto my arm.

‘I just want you to meet someone before you go,’ she mouthed, and because her grip was so firm I found myself being dragged along after her.

Luckily we were heading in the right direction, towards the exit, and just by the door she stopped and drew me into a small group of people that included Steve. We gave each other a what-a-surprise-great-to-see-you sort of hug, in the way people do who are a little embarrassed—though I wasn’t sure what we had to be embarrassed about. I didn’t catch the name of the young women Aisling introduced me to, but that may have been because I was feeling a little distracted by this time. I’d started to notice that people were staring, that there was a very distinct aura about this little gathering that seemed to have the attention of those crushed all around us. I didn’t have time to wonder why, because Aisling was already introducing me to the last member of the group, at which point everything was explained...

‘And this,’ Aisling said, in a tone that savoured a great deal of pride, ‘is Jamie.’

I didn’t know what surprised me most. The fact that Aisling really did know Jamie Astin, the latest pop sensation, or that I managed to appear as if nothing unusual was happening when he took hold of me with a sweeping motion, arched my back as if we were doing the tango, and then planted a kiss on my throat.

When I say I acted as if nothing unusual had happened, I mean that I didn’t giggle stupidly, or go all coy, or ask him for his autograph. I just nodded when he returned me to an upright position, told him how nice—yes,
nice
!—it was to meet him, and apologised for having to dash straight off. I said that someone was waiting for me outside, and that they weren’t going to thank me for leaving them hanging around in sub-zero temperatures, and he smiled that gorgeous smile of his that I’d seen on many a record shop poster.

I think I even managed to retain a sense of normality when I met up with Sid and Cass, and although I was desperate to tell them what had just happened—not with Jamie Astin, but about my conversation with Aisling Carter—the strong sense that I was interrupting something shut me up. I’d been expecting a serious ticking off from Cass for keeping them waiting so long, but she couldn’t have been more pleasant.

‘We’ve been thinking,’ she said, and I knew somehow that the ‘we’ really meant ‘If we’re going to talk properly about this proposition we should go back to my flat, where it’s quiet.’

‘But—’ I started, and then stopped again quickly. I was about to object, point out that this didn’t make any sense. That my place was just around the corner while hers was way across town—not far from Sid’s, come to think of it. And then I saw the glint in Cass’s eye, and the awkward shuffle of Sid’s feet, and I got it. And, despite the fact that I was greatly relieved, I was a little miffed as well, if the truth were known. This hadn’t been all about offering Cass a job. We were meant to be discussing Pisus as well, and my role in the company, which was a lot more important than Cass’s
possible
role. But it was clear now that my presence was not required. I was obsolete. Redundant. My best friend was dismissing me and my soon-to-be boss was backing her up.

‘You said you had something important to tell me,’ I said a bit stiffly to Sid. ‘I take it that everything’s going to plan?’

‘Couldn’t be better,’ he said, and yes, he was actually smiling again, which annoyed me intensely. ‘We’ve got seven certainties back on board now.’

‘So when do we start?’ I said, because I needed to get this straight. I needed to be certain he wasn’t thinking of cutting me out now and replacing me with ultra-efficient Cass. I was getting quite rattled, as a matter of fact.

‘Nine o’clock on Monday?’ he said, and my spirits lifted a little. He was beginning to sound his old gloomy self and I was a lot more comfortable with that. ‘I’m meeting the agent with the key to the old offices then,’ he went on, ‘and the quicker we get moving the better.’

Cass was sensibly wrapped in a thick overcoat, and although I was getting close to the teeth chattering stage by now, stood there as I was in my flimsy dress in temperatures that would have tested a South Pole explorer, there was still something I needed to know. By now I was beginning to accept that I was suffering from mild paranoia—that it was quite possible Cass fancied the pants off Sid and just wanted to get him alone in order to ravish him. I couldn’t see it myself, but then Cass always did have very strange tastes in men.