The Other Side of the Story (29 page)

7

On Wednesday morning, by exchanging low meaningful words with desk-boys sporting labour-intensive hair, a suited and booted Cody managed to get us upgraded
and
into a lounge.

'How do you know all those boys?' I asked.

Disdainfully Cody was discarding
Today's Golfer
and
Finance Now
. 'Jesus, would it kill them to have a copy of
Heat
? Oh, just from around.'

As we boarded the plane a male steward noticed Cody and flamed an immediate scarlet. 'Cody?'

'That's my name. At least it is today. But who knows which one of my multiple personalities will be in charge tomorrow?' Cody turned to me. 'Strap yourself in, my dear. Well, would you look at that, I can't seem to buckle my own belt.'

'It's piss easy, you thick, it jus —'

'Excuse me, sir,' Cody shoved away my helping hand and summoned Scarlet Boy. 'Could you help me with this?' He gestured towards his crotch.

'What appears to be the problem?' Poor Scarlet Boy's mortification was manifesting itself in extreme heat.

'I need to be strapped in, if you wouldn't mind… whoops, butter fingers… that's it, nice and snug. Niiiiiccce and snnnugg.'

'Just from around,' I murmured. 'You get around a lot.'

'Better than living in purdah and taking a vow of misery.'

'I'm not in purdah any more.' Suddenly I was finding this funny. 'And you're a smelly pig.'

'What do you mean you're not in purdah any more?' He looked at me suspiciously, then his eyes went 'ping!' 'It's the blokein the chemist.'

'No.' I strung it out a little, just to make him suffer. 'It's Owen.'

'Owen the
cutie
?

On the night of Cody's birthday, Owen had approached him and said, 'Excuse me, is your lady friend spoken for?' As a result Cody thought Owen was delightful.

'Owen the cutie,' I confirmed.

'Have you slept with him?'

I was astonished. 'Of course.'

'You never told me.'

'I haven't had the chance. I haven't exactly seen you, have I?'

'God Almighty. Tell us more.'

'He makes me feel young.' Quickly I forestalled Cody before he started to coo, 'Not always in a good way. Since I've been seeing him I've… one —' I counted out on my fingers — 'look aren't my nails a lovely colour? Anyway one, I've had a drunken row with him in the street. Two, felt his mickey in a taxi. Three, snuck out on my mammy on Sunday afternoon just to have sex with him.'

'Just to have sex?' Cody echoed.

'I did it again last night,' I said. 'On the way home from work.'

Owen had called me at the office at about six-thirty and asked, 'What are you doing tonight?'

'I'm going home and you're going to a gig.'

'Not for an hour and a half. Come over.'

Immediately I closed all my files and left. As soon as I rang Owen's bell, the front door opened, he pulled me in and within seconds we were going at it, me pressed against the door, my clothes half off, my legs around his waist.

'What colour are his eyes?' Cody asked, with interest. 'I don't know —
eye
colour. It's not like that. I'm just having a good time and, anyway, Owen's still hung up on his ex-girlfriend.'

'But this is the first person you've slept with since Anton. How does he measure up?'

'That's not fair,' I said. 'I love Anton, it would be like comparing fast food with dinner at the Ivy.' I thought about it some more. 'Mind you… I must admit, there are times when a Big Mac is exactly what you want -'

The pilot interrupted. 'We'll be landing at Heathrow in forty-five minutes.'

Owen was instantly forgotten as it hit me what I was heading into in London; the
potential
of it. My mouth went dry as I considered the best possible outcome: if I got published and was successful and I became a human glitter ball… But how likely was that?

Instantly sombre I said to Cody, 'Probably nothing will come of all this agent stuff.'

'That's the attitude.'

'No, I'm serious. Probably nothing
will
come of all this.'

'I'm agreeing with you.'

'Oh sorry, I forgot it was you.'

A moment or two of silence.

'Why shouldn't anything happen?' I asked. 'You're so bloody defeatist.'

He sighed and rattled his free
Irish Times
. 'Kettles, pots, etc.

From the moment we landed in Heathrow ninety minutes later — the pilot was a lying bastard - every blonde woman was Lily, every man over five foot four was Anton.

'It's a city of eight million people,' Cody hissed, when I dug my nails into his arm one time too many. 'We'll never, ever meet them.'

'Sorry,' I whispered. Since Anton and Lily had got together I'd been to London only twice — this was the third time — and being on their territory always reduced me to jelly. While I dreaded bumping into them, I also had a gruesome, voyeuristic desire to see them.

I was shaking when we got out of the tube at Leicester Square and Cody guided us towards Soho — Anton worked somewhere around here but Cody wouldn't tell me which street. 'No stalking!' he chided. 'Remember why you're here.'

You'd want to have seen Jojo Harvey. She was about ten foot tall, pouty and dark-lashed and had auburn wavy hair to her shoulders. If she was in a film, a sax would play mournful, sexy notes whenever she appeared. She was
gorgeous
. But not skinny, you know? There was plenty of her.

Cody said he'd wait in reception so she took me down a corridor and into her office. There were lots of books on her shelves and when I saw
Mimi's
poxing
Remedies
, I was punched with a bundle of longing and hatred and about sixty other emotions.
I want that for me
.

Jojo waved an untidy sheaf of paper and said, 'Your pages. We laughed so hard, I swear to God.'

'Um, good.'

'All that stuff about going to the chemist. And the dad growing sideburns. It's great!'

'Thanks.'

'So any ideas on format? Fact or fiction?'

'Definitely not fact.' I was horrified.

'Fiction then.'

'But I can't,' I said. 'It's all about my mam and dad.'

'Even that stuff about Helmut? Or the girl - Colette? - dancing around the trouser press in her underpants?

Hey,I loved that.'

'Well, no,
that
was made up. But the basic story, the one of my father leaving my mother, that's true.'

'You know, call me unsympathetic —' she swung her feet up on the desk — nice boots, I noticed - 'but it's the oldest story in the book—man leaving wife for younger model.' With a big smile she said, 'Who's going to sue you for stealing their plot-line?'

Easy for her to say.

'You could change the details a bit.'

'How?'

'The father could work in a different industry — although I love all that stuff about the chocolate — the mom could be different.'

'How?'

'Lots of ways. Look at all the moms you know and see how different they all are.'

'Everyone would still know it was my parents.'

'They say everyone's first novel is autobiographical.' I wanted her to keep saying things, to convince me, to talk me into it, I wanted to keep coming up with objections and for her to keep batting them away. It was nice to be wanted and I was happy to stay there for hours.

But, next thing she was swinging her long legs off her desk, getting to her feet and sticking out her hand. 'Gemma, I'm not going to talk you into something you don't want to do.'

'Oh! Right…'

'Sorry we've both had our time wasted.'

That stung. But I suppose she was important and busy. Nevertheless I'd enjoyed being courted and persuaded and I didn't like her so much now.

Then as she walked me back out to Cody, I see this
ride
coming down the corridor towards us, lovely long limbs moving in a lovely suit. Hair as black and shiny as a raven's wing and eyes as blue as ambulance sirens. (A simile I wasn't entirely sure about.)

He nodded a hello at me and said, 'Jojo, will you be long?'

'No, I'll be right back.

'That's Jim Sweetman,' she said. 'Head of our media section.'

On the tube back out to Heathrow, Cody was disgusted with me and I was super-subdued. An agent, a
literary
agent, had been interested in something I'd written - an event that was rarer, by all accounts, than an eclipse of the sun. Now it was all over. I sighed. And I bet Jojo was having a mad affair with that ridey Jim Sweetman.

It was at me like an itch. I'd wasted a day of precious sick leave — and there was worse to come. At Heathrow I went to the newsagent's to buy magazines to take my mind off myself on the journey home and from six feet away I saw it. From the way my hair follicles prickled, I knew that something very bad had happened. Even before my brain had translated the words in the newspaper into something meaningful, dread had got there first. It was a photo of Lily - on the front page of the
Evening Standard
. Featuring — this is the worst bit — in big, black type, the description,
The Unknown Londoner Who's Been Taking the Literary World by Storm.

The full story was on page nine. I snatched it up and crackled through the pages until I got to a quarter-page picture of Lily in her sumptuous home (in fairness, you could only see a corner of her couch) with her sumptuous man, talking about her sumptuous best-selling (crappy) book. It pains me to say it, but she looked great, all fragile and ethereal and unbald. Mucho, mucho air-brushing, I suspect.

Anton also looked amazing, far more beautiful than her actually, especially as his hair was his own and not a Burt Reynolds-style weave. I was shocked by the sameness — he looked just like my Anton — and affronted by the differences; his hair had got longer and his shirt was all sharp creases and smooth cotton - a far cry from when his clothes used to look like they'd been through a mangle. (This hadn't added to his charm, I'm not that bad.)

I gazed at the photo and let his laughing eyes look directly into mine.
He's smiling at me
. Stop! You looper! Next I'd be thinking he was communicating with me in code.

Jostled and bumped by other travellers, Cody at my shoulder, I skittered over the story of Lily Wright's rise to bestseller-dominance and I was afraid that I was going to throw up in public.

I rounded on Cody. 'I thought you said she wasn't setting the world on fire.'

'She wasn't.' He was raging that he'd missed a trick. 'Don't take it out on me. It's yourself you should be angry with.' Cody never says sorry; he just shifts the blame. 'Look at the chance you threw away today.'

He nodded at the smiling image in the paper. 'See that? It could have been you.'

I didn't buy the paper - I couldn't - but I thought about Anton all the way home. This was the first time I'd even seen him in over two years but his photo affected me as if we'd split up only last week. And I'd come so close to him today. I might have passed by his very office, I could have been within feet of him. It must mean something.

8

We slipped quietly into the fifth month of Dad's absence. I managed to keep it from myself for a couple of days because I was so depressed about other things, mostly my stillborn writing career.

Jojo was right — a husband leaving a wife for a younger woman really was the oldest story in the book. Even though my novel wasn't going to happen, it all began to unfold in my head, especially since I'd started waking again at five in the morning.

In the book I could have a different job — in fact, I didn't have to have a job at all: I could be a housewife (oh, the happiness!) with maybe a couple of children of my own.

I could give myself two sisters, or maybe a brother and a sister; I played around with various scenarios and in the end I settled for an older sister called Monica. A nice, capable person, who'd lent me her clothes during our teenage years but who now lived a life of constant on-call in a big, four-square house with four square children and she was too far away (Belfast? Birmingham? still hadn't decided) for her to be any kind of practical help.

I also gave myself a baby brother, a charmer called Ben, who had a posse of girls after him. Every time the phone rang he'd rattle instructions to Mam, 'If that's Mia tell her I'm out, if it's Cara again, tell her I'm sorry but she'll get over me - eventually.' Pause for laughter. 'And if it's Jackie I'm on my way. I left ten minutes ago.'

I'd quickly gone off him. The fictional mam wasn't a fan either, which I knew was swimming against the tide; usually mothers are besotted with their selfish, 'charming' sons, pretending to tut-tut as they treat their girlfriends like shite, but secretly delighted, both of them convinced that no woman was good enough for him.

Ben didn't really impact on my plot-line — far too irresponsible and selfish to be of any help to 'our' freshly deserted mammy. I was still left carrying the can and was, to all intents and purposes, an only child.

'My' name is Izzy and I have chin-length corkscrew curls in great condition. Much as I'd have loved it, I couldn't imagine being a housewife so I thought long and hard about Izzy's job. My first choice was a personal shopper but in the interests of realism and popularity — everyone would hate her for having such a jammy job — I decided against it. Instead — and this will probably come as no surprise — she works in PR, and yes, she organizes events.

Izzy also shared a similar romantic history to mine:

1) myriad unrequited teenage crushes

2)
a passionate drunken ridiculous thing between the ages of nineteen to twenty-one, which I thought I'd never get over

3) a relationship from twenty-five to twenty-eight with a man everyone thought I should marry — but I just didn't feel 'ready' (in fact every time poor Bryan popped the question I felt like I was choking).

But I didn't give Izzy an Anton, a love of her life who was cruelly snatched from under her nose by her best friend. What if… I mean… what if Anton read it?

Instead Izzy was having a love/hate flirtation thing with one of her clients. He was called Emmet, a grand sexy name, and he wasn't a film director/farmer because the book was set in Dublin. He ran his own business (still undecided as to exact nature thereof) and Izzy was organizing a sales conference for him. He was a bit narky — but only because he fancied her - and when she booked all the delegates into the wrong hotel because she was upset about her ice-cream salesman dad leaving her mother, Emmet didn't sack her as would
so
happen in real life. For a while he had a scar on his right cheek, then I got a grip and fixed him. Then for another while, Izzy was beautiful but didn't realize it, but she started to get on my nerves, so I changed her back to being ordinary.

Other modifications: the dad wasn't having an affair with his secretary, that was too much of a cliche. Instead it was with his golf-partner's eldest daughter. And the mammy wasn't quite as incapable as my mother — I suspected that people simply wouldn't believe it.

Some things stayed the same: my car, for instance. And I kept the nice man in the chemist but changed his name to Will.

It was a funny exercise — like being a different version of me, or perhaps knowing what it was like to be someone else. Either way, when I woke into the acid-bright early morning, paralysed with screaming despair, it took my mind off things.