The Chocolate Run (19 page)

‘Thanks, officer,’ I said. And before I could stop myself, ‘It won’t happen again, I promise,’ was coming out of my mouth.

‘It’d better not,’ she replied. ‘Because for some people, it’ll be third time unlucky.’ She flashed me a fake smile and for one moment I thought about punching her. Right in her smug little face. I could probably take her. Probably.
Are you simply out of your mind?
I asked myself.
Or are you developing a taste for police cars and police stations?

Greg slipped his arm around my shoulders as we walked down the road to hail a taxi.

‘You slept with her, didn’t you?’ I said, between huge gulps of water. I slammed the Hoegaarden glass onto the table and leant on the table glaring at Greg who, having taken a seat at the dining table, was staring down at the table top. All we needed was a uniform and a solicitor and we could be in a police station. I immediately straightened up.

Greg stayed silent, knowing that anything said would be used against him.

I shook my head incredulously, stalked back across my red and white lino to the sink and refilled my glass. I was so traumatised I was drinking tap water, the fact it seemed to have a slight beige hue to it forgotten under all the pressure.

I leant back against the sink counter top, glaring at the thick, liquorice-black locks that hid his face. What self-respecting man had hair longer than his girlfriend? Longer than most women he knew? When the fashion was for men to have shaved heads, Greg had long hair. He didn’t even have the decency to be balding, which would explain the need to cling to every follicle. ‘After everything. Me going across town when I was knackered, reminding you she was married, destroying her number, getting grief from Sean, you
still
slept with her.’

Greg’s head snapped up, his Minstrel eyes flashing with indignation. ‘If I hadn’t we’d both be sat in cells right now.’

I glared at him, not willing to concede this point. ‘Are you going?’

‘Going where?’ he replied.

‘Are you going to meet her?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Don’t. Just don’t, all right?’ I warned, my South-East London accent suddenly asserting itself. ‘I know you weren’t stood there getting a lecture on public decency. She wants to meet you, doesn’t she? I just want the truth. Are you going to meet her? The truth. That’s all I want.’

Greg shook his head. ‘No. I told her that you’re my girlfriend.’

‘Awww, course you did. Oh, sorry, dear, I’m a thick cow, aren’t I? There I am, all worried about you once
again
shagging some woman to whom the binding vows of matrimony are clearly so important. I should’ve known all you had to say was “I’ve got a girlfriend” and she’d not think it was a possibility. Actually, let’s circulate that on the Internet. “Women, don’t worry, if your bloke is about to cheat on you, all he has to do is say to the woman he’s about to screw, I’ve got a girlfriend and it’ll be fine.” We’ll win awards for that, we will. A genuine public service announcement. Come on, I’ll boot up the computer, you use your journalism skills to tart up my language.’

I could’ve said, ‘She’s married, why would she care that you’ve got a girlfriend?’ but that’s not me. If I’m going to make a point, I’ve got to labour it into submission.

‘I told her that it’d taken me a year to get you to go out with me so I didn’t want to screw it up,’ he said quietly.

I gulped down more water. ‘And she was all right with that, was she? This married policewoman was all right with that?’

‘No. Yes. I don’t know. She said to call her if it doesn’t work out.’

‘Only she said something like, “If you change your mind, you know where I am. Call me any time,” didn’t she?’

Greg looked down at the table top as he nodded.

‘Whore!’ I whispered against the rim of the glass, teetering on that precipice of insanity, midway between getting things out of proportion and reality. Who, in all of this, was the real whore? And who was I mentally shoving in tar and sprinkling with feathers?

‘What is your problem?’ Greg demanded, getting to his feet. (Think it was the ‘whore’ comment that did it.) He sounded much more Yorkshire Boyish now – probably a defence mechanism against me suddenly becoming a London hard girl. ‘It’s not like you didn’t know what I was like before. You of all people know what I was like.’

‘You want to know what my problem is?’ I said, raising my voice a notch.

‘Yes,’ he said at the same level.

‘You really want to know what my problem is?’ I cranked my voice up another notch.

‘Yes!’ His voice matched mine.

I slammed the Hoegaarden glass onto the dining table. Another of my points was about to submit under the weight of its labours.

‘I want to go somewhere and not meet someone you’ve slept with. If they’re not ringing me up at work, they’re taking my place in the pub. If they’re not taking my place in the pub, they’re arresting me in the street. I can’t go into half the pubs in Headingley because you’ve slept with some member of staff and to get you out of a jam I’ve made out I’m your girlfriend. We can’t go into half the pubs in Hyde Park because you shagged some landlord’s daughter and now he’s issued a death warrant against you, me, Jen and Matt. And let’s not even start on the uni bars.

‘My problem is, I can’t turn around without bumping into one of your conquests.’

Greg let my words stain the air, aware that he had no magic cleaner that would remove them. Nothing would erase the truth that he was, in fact, a tart. And that I was, in fact, a hypocrite because I didn’t have this monumental problem with it before I started sleeping with him.

He’s going to leave me
, I realised as he stared down at the table in silence.
He’s going to tell me to fuck off because I’ve raised my voice and got cross
.

‘With Mimi,’ Greg’s other gift, apart from being good at sex, was to remember the names of every woman he’d had sex with, quite a feat, ‘she made me realise that you’re the most precious friend. You risked your job for me and the way you got so angry made me wonder if you weren’t a little jealous. That gave me hope, made me think that I did maybe have a chance with you.’

Greg came around the table to me. ‘When I met Alyson, the policewoman, as I told you before, that was the first time I realised that I wanted something special with you. With her it was only sex and we both knew it.

‘And with Nina, I tried to make a go of it with her because when I realised how I felt about you, I knew it’d cause all sorts of problems. I thought I was probably missing the security of a relationship, so I tried to make a go of it with her, but when she wanted a commitment I panicked because I knew deep down I wanted you.

‘That night she attacked me, I kept thinking, I have to get to Amber, she’ll make it all right. And you did. You patched me up and didn’t once say, “I told you so” or, “You deserve that”, even though I obviously did.

‘So, to be totally honest, I don’t regret those three because all of them, in their way, played a part in me and you getting together.

‘With the rest of them . . .’ he paused. His Yorkshire accent wasn’t as strong when he said: ‘There’s nothing I can do. I can’t change the past, I can only promise that I’m not doing it any more. And as long as we’re together I won’t do it. There’s nothing more I can say. Except I’m sorry. And I’ll hate myself if it’s going to cause us problems.’

I had no comeback for that. You can’t change the past. You can rewrite it for your own convenience, you can retell it so it sounds better, feels better, seems better. So that you are the hero of the piece and not a bona fide bastard. But you can’t change the events. If you made a pass at someone, you made that pass at them – telling them it didn’t happen won’t change the fact you did it. If you shagged around, you shagged around. Pretending you’re as pure as the driven snow isn’t going to change that. For that matter, you can’t change the future. All you can change is the here and now. That’s why people are always banging on about living in the moment because that’s the only thing you have control over.

But all this theorising was too much for a night that started off being a birthday celebration. ‘Tonight never happened, all right?’ I said to Greg, my way of saying we weren’t going to row about this any more.

Relief washed over his face, relaxed his body before he laughed a sunshine laugh. ‘You should’ve seen your face when you were sat in the back of the police car, though. Classic.’

‘What police car? I’ve never been in a police car in my life,’ I replied, my London accent had subsided now.

‘Oh, yeah, sorry, never happened.’

chapter fifteen

done shagging

Who knew you could get so many different coloured sex toys?

Not me, that’s for certain. Jen bought me my fluorescent pink vibrator as a joke when I’d hit the sixth month of celibacy. I wasn’t naive, but it was a shock to find rows and rows of the things. Different shapes, sizes, colours. Boxed ones, ones in cellophane, ones just stood there. My eyes couldn’t help but gawk at them. And the prices . . . Jen’s joke had been quite expensive.

I was standing in a sex shop looking at sex toys. Why? Because Martha needed ‘marry me’ underwear and I preferred looking at the toys to the underwear because with my imagination, I could envisage Martha in every creation she picked up. I could see her in those crotchless knickers and peephole bra. There are some things you can go to your grave without conjuring up about the people you saw five out of seven days a week.

Renée had the day off so Martha had persuaded me to come shopping with her. Even though I was in charge, and therefore should know better, I’d leapt at the chance because I hadn’t done it with Jen in yonks. I was missing girly company . . . I was missing Jen.

She had fallen off my world. It was like going to the local shop and discovering they were out of Mars bars. And they would be for the foreseeable future. You kept going in, just in case, but always found they were out of stock. Same with me and Jen. I’d constantly ring her in the hope we’d have a deep conversation or a laugh, but it didn’t happen. Any chat was forced, punctuated with, ‘So how are you?’, the preserve of small talk. Small talk with my closest pal, now there was something alien. Rather than confront it, though, I kept pushing it to the back of my mind, hoping it’d sort itself out. Most things did, didn’t they?

‘Surely “marry me” underwear would come from John Lewis or La Senza,’ I said to Martha over my shoulder.

‘No, that’s “propose to me” underwear,’ Martha said.

‘And the difference is . . .’

‘A wedding ceremony.’

Martha came to stand in front of me. She’d slicked her brown hair back and up into a high, dominatrix-style ponytail, heavily kohled up her eyes and put on a shiny black plastic mac to suit the occasion (those probably should’ve been clues we weren’t going to any old shop to get her undies). Currently, she held red crotchless knickers in one hand, red bra with chain mail where the cups should be in the other.

I averted my eyes. Martha stepped into that averted line of sight. I averted my eyes to the right; she stepped there too. I caught another glimpse of the red undies. Swift as a bullet, an image of her in it, standing at the end of the bed, whip in one hand, her man on his knees, bolted through my head.

‘You see,’ Martha explained, ‘you can buy your pretty, rosecoloured lacy bits, and sure the guy’s gonna propose. But things like these little beauties,’ she thrust them into my face, I flinched back, ‘will make him realise that he’s got a sex goddess
and
a friend
and
a good laugh
and
a woman to make love to
and
someone he can take home to his parents all in one. In short, when you’re wearing this kind of gear, he has to find a reason
NOT
to marry you.’

Martha’s logic had some logic to it although I wasn’t sure it was so simple. I’d never worn such underwear.

‘I’m glad you’re knocking off Greg,’ Martha said, going back to her underwear.

‘Could you please say that a bit louder? I don’t think my best friend, who I haven’t told yet, heard you that time.’

Martha laughed in a carefree, ‘it doesn’t matter to me if this irreparably damages your relationship with Jen for keeping this from her’ way. ‘You’re so much more fun now,’ she continued at the same volume.

‘Oi!’

‘Well, it’s true. Before, you were so uptight. No, that’s not the right word because you were a laugh before. Now, it’s like you’ve chilled out a bit. Even when you were going out with that other bloke . . .’

‘Sean,’ I supplied. (Why could nobody remember his name? When I was with him, Renée – who’d met him loads of times – called him ‘Your Boyfriend’, like that was his name. She called Martha’s man by his given name. She and Martha remembered ‘Greg’. But nobody could remember ‘Sean’.)

‘Yeah, him, you were still so tense. Yeah, that’s it. Tense. You were tense. On edge. Like you were waiting for a war to break out.’

‘Are you surprised with you and Renée?’

‘Me and Renée, pah! We’re nothing compared to me and Tony. I gave him a black eye once. It’s just the way we are.’

‘Have you got your underwear yet?’ I asked.

‘This can’t be rushed. If I don’t get it right, I’ll scare him, not get him to marry me. Well, not get him to ask me to marry him.’

‘Why don’t you just ask him?’ I said.

‘I’m an old-fashioned girl,’ she said indignantly. ‘He has to do the asking.’

‘But you’re not going to wait any longer?’

‘There’s no point. He wants to propose, he just doesn’t realise it yet.’

‘I see, and what if this doesn’t work?’

‘There is no, “what if this doesn’t work”,’ Martha said. ‘We’ve been together three years. Now’s the time to get married. I’m no spring chicken, you know.’

Martha was coming up to twenty-six, I was thirty-one this autumn.

‘I want to have children soon but I have to be married first. It’s the right way to do things.’

‘Says who?’ I asked.

‘Says me, of course. Why don’t you get yourself a little something to treat Greg with?’ Martha asked over her shoulder.