The Chocolate Run (22 page)

His face registered something. Possibly surprise, possibly anxiety. Hard to read his feelings. I wasn’t used to this part. Nobody walked out then came back to tell me off. They generally told me off, then walked out and I rarely saw them again. Sean being the exception, for I saw him loads of times after a falling out, and we simply never talked about it. With Sean and me, any one-sided argument we had was generally forgotten the second we saw each other again. Not the case with Gregory and me, apparently.

‘This is a new relationship, but it’s still a relationship. You’re my girlfriend, so I think I’ve got the right to expect you to not put other people before me.’

I went to say, ‘But it was Jen,’ then closed my mouth as my better judgement took over. His face suggested this was not the thing to do, interrupt – no matter how valid the defence. That
was
what being told off was like.

‘All you had to do was say, “I’m on my way out” and she’d have understood. And even if she didn’t, so what? You don’t treat me like that. I don’t care if it’s Jen or Keanu fucking Reeves, if we’re doing something then you don’t tell anyone you’re not busy. You wouldn’t do it to Jen, so don’t do it to me.

‘If you’re having trouble understanding what I’m on about, then I’ll put it this way: you’ve come to see me during the Festival. You’re so knackered you can hardly keep your eyes open and you know you’ve got to get up at the crack of dawn the next day to go meet some director at the airport. But, you’re gagging to see me because you haven’t seen me for what seems like ages. And then two minutes after you’ve got there, Matt calls me and says, “Mate, let’s go out and get pissed, you’re not up to owt, are you?” and I say, “Nah, just about to shag some bird, she can wait.” What would you do? Be understanding? I don’t think so. You’d have my balls on a stick before the sentence was out of my mouth.’

True. I looked down at my hands, which hurt from being tightly clenched in my lap. It was either clenching or wringing.

‘I’ve known Matt a lot longer than you’ve known Jen. He’s closer to me than my own brother. Even then I wouldn’t dump you for him.’

All righ
t
, no need to use a sledgehammer to put in a drawing pin. I get the message
.

‘Amber, look . . .’ Greg slid off his seat, crawled across the carpet to me. He, with trouble, unclenched my fingers and took my hands in his. ‘I don’t want us to fall out. I just want you to put us first. I’ve not felt like this in ages. I can be totally honest with you, which is why I didn’t apologise so we could have “make up” sex. I want us to be . . .’ He stopped, searching for the right words. ‘Solid.’

‘It won’t happen again,’ I mumbled. It was the best I could manage. I should probably be throwing myself on his mercy, but that wasn’t going to happen. As I wasn’t known for arguing, I wasn’t known for the mercy throwing, either. I’d found that those two things were entwined: you rowed, mercy generally expected to find you flinging yourself about its person. In this case, though, I should be gearing myself up for a bit of that flinging, seeing as I was in the wrong. No matter which way I tried to twist it, I was wrong to tell Jen I wasn’t doing anything.

‘I adore you,’ Greg said. ‘Even when we were only friends I adored you. I want to be with you all the time. Every night for the past week I’ve gone to sleep wishing that coming home meant coming home to you. I’ve woken up and wished I could be with you all the time. I don’t want to be pissed off with you.’

‘I don’t want you to be pissed off with me either.’

‘I sound awful, don’t I? Like I’m trying to cut you off from your friends. If it were a genuine emergency I wouldn’t mind. And I suppose I was out of order getting so stressed out. Jen is my friend and one of the reasons I adore you is because you put other people first. Fucking hell, the amount of times you’ve dropped everything to come look after me . . .’ Greg grimaced, hung his head. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Why are you apologising?’

He lifted his head, bluey-black tendrils obscured his face so he flicked them out of the way. ‘For being a hypocritical git.’

‘I know that. Apart from that, why are you apologising?’ I said with a smile.

Greg was such a grown-up. Now he’d said his piece, he was that balanced he saw how out of order he’d been too and said so. Had I thrown myself on his mercy he would’ve said so. Had I done what I did and not thrown myself on his mercy he would’ve said so. He was like that: balanced. I was the sculpted-in-stone type. Once I thought I was in the right it took a feat of almost superhuman strength and reason to convince me otherwise. Had the roles been reversed, I would still be glaring at Greg expecting some kind of blood sacrifice to confirm how sorry he was. I wouldn’t have said my piece, I would have gone through life, gnashing my teeth about it and bringing it up in my head every time Greg pissed me off. Greg was such a grown-up.

I was not.

Greg smiled at my little quip. ‘I do like going out with you, you know,’ I added, before the moment left me. All right, it wasn’t, ‘I adore you’ but it was the best I could do when he was an enigma to me. A code I couldn’t crack. He was inscrutable in that I was never sure of what was going on. There never seemed a clear gain for him. That sounded like Martha’s balance-sheet theory, but I’d thought this before she verbalised it. I could never pinpoint the ‘What’s In It For Me?’ factor for him. Apart from the sex, what did he really get out of it? He made me breakfast almost every morning, he made me tea in a special mug with a lid so I could drink it on the train to work, he ran me baths, he treated me like I was Cleopatra, Julia Roberts and Jennifer Aniston rolled into one. He also told me fairy stories and wanted to know everything about me.

I just had sex with him.

So I was steeling myself for him to tell me that this wasn’t going to last, to say he preferred the good life as averse to the girlfriend life. I suppose this wasn’t exclusive to Greg. I never trusted any man not to find someone else; to stay with me if he had another option. To not find something in me that would have him heading for the hills. That was the other reason for not thinking long-term – when someone walked out, as they invariably did, it wasn’t too big a shock. A disappointment, but nothing I hadn’t been expecting.

‘Are we OK now?’ he asked. From this close I could see how bloodshot his eyes were, how tiredness was tugging at his skin, how even his hair seemed limp.

I nodded.
We were OK
. I stroked hair out of his face and gazed into his Minstrel eyes.
OK until the next time
.

‘Can we continue where we left off before I fall asleep?’ he asked.

‘ask yourself this: would you be the person you are today without chocolate?’

chapter eighteen

impostor

‘Let’s go to Harvey Nics first,’ Jen decreed.

We’d finally,
finally
managed to meet up to go shopping. She’d called and begged me to meet her in town for a shopping fest on a Friday afternoon because she had a training seminar in the morning, so could I bunk off work after lunch and come shopping with her? Renée was in Cannes and Martha certainly wouldn’t grass me up so I half-heartedly agreed.

After that night last weekend when Greg walked out, I’d been forced to confront the truth about Jen and me. We’d changed. We’d become Flakes. Two things separate. That’d been obvious when I didn’t tell her about me and Greg. I had the opportunity, but didn’t. I wasn’t prone to sharing secrets, to confessing things in my heart, but Jen was usually the exception. She was the one, probably the only one, I could trust and even then I hadn’t. I’d had to finally confront the truth that we weren’t JenAndAmber any more. One word that signified the closeness of our relationship, now it was three words. Jen. And. Amber. We existed as separate entities. Jen. Amber. Sometimes the And joined us.

The other night had been an anomaly. A Twix moment – its gold and red packaging an odd patch among the yellow, gaudy vista of Flakes our lives had become.

It was like always having a Twix. Whenever you had chocolate, you had a Twix. And then, for no reason whatsoever, you decide to have something else. So you start trying new chocolates. One day you try a Mars. Then you buy a Snack. Then you get Maltesers. Then you get a Twirl. Finally, you settle on a Flake. You might not necessarily like Flake, but you know what, you’ve got into the habit of eating it, so whenever you pass a shop, whenever someone goes off on a chocolate run, you always get a Flake. Until that one day you say, ‘Actually, I’ll have a Twix,’ when someone asks if you fancy a Flake. You enjoy the Twix, it stirs up good memories as it crumbles and disintegrates over your tongue, but the next day, you go back to your diet of Flake because that’s what you’ve settled on.

That’s what it was like with me and Jen. We’d had our Twix moment – our back to being close time – the other night but were back to being Flakes.

Even when she’d met Matt we’d been close, we’d been a packet of Twix. Despite what Matt intimated about me and Jen being too close, we’d grown apart. I suspected it was because I was with Greg. Which meant
I’d
become a total girlfriend. Something I swore I’d never do. I had to do whatever it took to get her back in my life.

‘Harvey Nics it is,’ I agreed. Yup, anything to get her back into my life. Even if it meant going into a shop where I wouldn’t be getting a dress for £8.99.

Jen had lost weight.

Jen, who always looked like a Hollywood starlet anyway, had lost weight that she didn’t need to lose. She had always been slender, the thinner side of a size ten. She was tallish with it, had shoulder-length hair with a slight wave, curves at the breasts, stomach and hips. Not that I purposely looked. We’d lived together for four years all together during college, and many a night after our college years we’d stayed over at each other’s places, it was impossible not to see her in at least her night clothes. I knew her body – and this body had lost a lot of itself. Her stomach was practically concave: her arms were spindle-like; her breasts were swimming around her bra.

‘Have you lost weight?’ I asked to her.

‘Yup,’ Jen said happily, and spun to show me. ‘It suits me, doesn’t it?’

‘Um, perhaps you’ve gone too far?’ I said, my voice full of the concern I felt for her. I hadn’t noticed until I spotted her body how ashen she looked. She’d lost that healthy glow she had when Matt moved in, now she was looking washed out. Almost like a faded version of Jen, as though someone had watered down her image. She wasn’t meant to be this thin. And if how she’d eaten – or rather not eaten – that time we’d had lunch was any indicator, she’d got to this unnatural weight by foul means. ‘Maybe you should stop now? Maybe even put on a few pounds?’

‘Is somebody a little jealous because they realise they could do with losing a few stone themselves?’ she said.

I froze.
Did she
. . .
? Did she just
. . .
?
If Jen didn’t like something I said she’d usually tell me to piss off. Not abuse me. Not call me . . . There was a thick black line dividing ‘Oi, piss off I’ll starve myself if I want’ abuse and ‘Hey fatty bum-bum’ abuse, and Jen had hurled herself bodily over that boundary. No woman called a friend fat. Even if you thought it, you didn’t say it to their faces.

‘What did you say?’ I replied, too shocked to be anything but shocked.

‘Nothing,’ Jen replied brightly. ‘Only joking. Matt likes me like this. [ Judging by his porn collection –
Big ’n’ Bouncy
;
Busty Betties
; and
Curves Galore
– she’d got the wrong end of the celery stick.] I do too. I can’t stand the thought of having excess body fat any more. It’s immoral, you know, Amber. When there are so many people who can’t afford to eat, overeating is immoral.’

Jen had deep-seated fears about food. Her mother, her unbalanced mother, would, whenever she’d been dumped by a man, go on a crash diet. It would literally involve not eating – so she’d starve Jen too. They wouldn’t have evening meals and Jen would be lucky if the crash diet started midweek because she’d have paid her school lunch money upfront. If not, she’d sometimes have to go without lunch then go to a friend’s house after school for tea. When she started getting pocket money Jen would spend it on things like bread and beans, but take it to school with her and bring it back because her mother would freak if she found it. That was what Jen’s life was like when she was young: either have her mother date some man who resented her existence, or have her mother be single and not eat.

Jen knew what it was like to starve and had been brainwashed into fearing being fat so was always very scared of eating. Until she met me. If there was one thing that I’d never gone without in my life it was food: my mother liked to cook; I loved to cook. I loved to eat. Which was why I’d never really been worried about weight. I wasn’t huge; I wasn’t a rake. I was sometimes a size twelve, sometimes a size fourteen, sometimes my top half needed a sixteen, depending on where I shopped. When Jen met me, I constantly ate around her, made her eat with me, basically made eating a non-issue. She still had her moments, usually when she’d been dumped and she’d want to go on a diet, but I coached her into eating more when she’d been chucked. Why add to your pain by denying yourself the comforts of things like chocolate? Because of that, though, we’d never been women who fretted about our weight. That’s why I’d been so worried when I saw her without her clothes on: she was doing to herself what her mother had done to the pair of them. Except she was trying to do it to me too – she was saying I was fat. I was fat.

Like the worst kind of attack, this had been unseen and it hit deep.

But, but, I stared at my reflection in the mirror, the pounds had melted off me since I’d been seeing Greg. A daily diet of sex and eating Greg-made breakfast worked like a diet and gym combo. I only knew I’d lost weight because my clothes were looser. Some of the clothes I hadn’t worn in years now fit. I wasn’t to be found climbing on scales, waiting for a countdown to ideal weight. To perfection.

Maybe I should be, though. Jen’s my best mate. If she thinks I need to lose weight, then maybe I’ve been fooling myself that I’m fine the way I am
.