Charlotte Street (32 page)

I hugged her goodbye and thought about what I had to do next.

Number 1: What to do at Damien’s own Forest Laskin PR launch next week.

Number 2: Get my iPod out of my pocket and listen to the tracks I’d secretly imported from a recordable CD I’d nabbed from a backpack late last night. That would bring its own fun.

Life was good!

It wouldn’t be for much longer.

I had never seen Dev so absolutely insistent that he have a full English breakfast.

‘I heard a rumour,’ he said, conspiratorially. ‘Pawel said Tomasz said Marcin told him.’

‘Who’s Marcin?’

‘Marcin. Marcin with the ankles.’

‘I’m not sure what that means.’

‘It means there’s a
chance
!’

We sat outside the café, as his head bobbed and weaved, trying to catch sight of where Pamela might be. I was sure if Pamela could see him do this she would fall instantly in love with him, providing she was looking for love with a meerkat.

But Pamela wasn’t here. It was her boss working a shift, instead.

He was a hard-looking man we’d see every now and again, reading a Polish newspaper in the corner, scratching a strange blue tattoo he didn’t seem to want any more. He had the air about him of the drunk in the pub who walked that wide-eyed tightrope between telling you you were all right and slamming your head into the table. We tended not to talk to him too much for this and maybe six other reasons.

But today Dev felt different.

‘Um … where is Pamela?’ he asked.

‘Ha ha ha,’ said the man, who I’m not convinced understood the question. He slid our plates onto the table. The eggs now covered the bacon, slopping over it, shimmying in the sun.

‘The girl?’ said Dev. ‘Uh … Pam
-eh
-lah?’

‘Ah!’ said the manager. ‘Yeh! Pamela. Yeh.’

He made a grumpy face and put his hands on his hips, hitting a new low in international mime.

‘She here?’ asked Dev, pointing at the café. ‘
Où est
Pamela?’

‘No,’ said the manager. Then he rubbed his eyes and pretended to cry for a second.

Then: ‘Ha ha ha!’

He turned and walked off.

‘That was odd,’ I said.

‘Was he saying I was sad, or she was?’ asked Dev. ‘Because if he was saying she was sad, the rumours could be true!’

‘Maybe he was saying you were both a little sad, but in different ways.’

He nodded, a little lost.

‘So what’s the invite?’ he asked, because that morning, quite unexpectedly, I’d received an envelope in the post, all cream and embossed and linen, like my gas bill’s pompous cousin.

‘Sarah’s wedding,’ I replied, patting my pocket to make sure it was still there. ‘I obviously passed the grown-up test. They’re just cracking on. Gary wants to be married by the time their kid pops out.’

‘Yeah, not that invite. I saw that invite.
The
invite. The
exciting
invite.’

Aha.
The
invite.

The email had been marked ‘Tropicana – Urgent’ and as such I nearly ignored it (because really, unless there’s a Tropicana
Monster, how urgent can anything about Tropicana really be?) until I’d looked once more and finally taken in whom it was actually from.

‘Say it’s a Grand Prix or something. Or a premiere! Or the launch of a new vodka. That’d have models at it, I bet, all dressed in silver and handing out vodka. Or the Golden Joysticks! Let it be silver models or the Golden Joysticks!’

Dev has always wanted to go to the Golden Joystick Awards. He says he thinks it’s probably magical. I think it’s probably in the basement of a Hilton.

‘It’s like the Oscars of the videogames world. Everyone’s there. All the big names.’

‘Like who?’

‘You wouldn’t have heard of them. These are not that type of big name.’

‘Well, it’s not the Golden Joysticks. It is in fact—’ I showed him the email and made a little
ta-dah
noise ‘—the launch of the new Tropicana Acai Berry range!’

He nodded at me, willing it to be better news than it was.

‘Tropicana,’ he said, taking it in.

‘Apparently acai berries contain ninety per cent more anti – oxidants than previously thought,’ I said.

‘Well, I suppose that’s good news.’

‘It’s at a manor house in the countryside. I imagine there’ll be models dressed as berries.’

Dev suddenly looked very interested indeed.

‘Guess who’s about to win his first major comedy competition?’ said Clem, beaming, pointing at himself with both hands.

‘Is it you, Clem?’

‘It is indeed, sir! Yes, sir! Well, I say “win”, I mean “enter”, really, but I’ve got a veeery good feeling about it.’

Clem seemed to be one of those people who could remain entirely oblivious to the mood of the room around him. I wasn’t. I pick up on these things – take my mood from whatever’s going on in the room. And right now, unlike a booming Clem, I was quiet.

Zoe wasn’t in this morning. Sam said she thought Zoe was on a course, but people who work at
London Now
don’t get sent on courses. Someone else thought she was meeting with Daryl Channing, the swaggering, one-of-the-boys owner of
Manchester Now, London Now
, and, until he closed it just before Christmas,
Glasgow Nights
.

Clem stared at his flyer for the Chuckle Cabin’s New Act of the Year award, perhaps imagining himself holding the novelty plastic banana they hand out to whichever comedian goes best on the night and making a funny speech.

I put my feet up and leafed through the latest edition of
London Now
. I found the right page and smiled to myself.

She was going to
love
this.

Indeed, that night,
I can’t believe you did that!
, was the text I got from Abbey.

Ha!
I replied, and waited for her to text something else.

But nothing came, so I wrote again.

Did you like the picture? It was off Dev’s phone!

Again, nothing. Nothing for hours and hours.

So I pottered about, attended to my business. I wrote a review of the Scala gig, and put new batteries in the TV remote control. I fixed myself a sandwich, took the bins out, bought fresh milk. And started to wonder why I still hadn’t heard from Abbey.

So I looked once more at her text. And realised I’d made a mistake.

It didn’t say,
I can’t believe you did that!

It said,
I can’t believe you did that
. Flat, and with no exclamation mark.

That was how it began, this five-star review of an album no one could possibly hear yet. No one but Abbey and me. This was supposed to be a gift. A nod of understanding to a girl who claimed she had no dream but clearly did. Because this was her dream, surely, and the best thing was: she was good at it. It was achievable! Okay, so the recording left something to be desired, and there was no production to speak of, just real-time recordings of her with an acoustic guitar or sometimes a mate with an accordion or something … but that just made it better, for me. More real, and more live, and more like life.

Abbey had kept this quiet, this CD of songs and hope and love, but why? It seemed ridiculous. She had the power to go places, and I didn’t understand why she didn’t grab it. Was she just scared? In my head, this review – my generous intervention – was all she needed. Outside acknowledgement. A friend telling her she was good, making it okay to take the next step, and I would be that friend. But I would do it in a spectacular way. I would do it in the pages of
London Now
, and give her her first press quotes, something to cut out and stick on the front of CDs, just like The Kicks had done. Force her to take this further.

That had been the plan.

The plan did not appear to be working.

‘You’ve
embarrassed
me,’ she said, that night, on the phone, hurt, angry.

‘I didn’t mean to,’ I said, and I was desperate for her to believe me. I spoke urgently and with care. ‘It was supposed to be a
nice
thing. I swear I thought it’d—’

‘You go in my bag, you steal my songs—’

‘I didn’t steal them, I just listened …’

‘You stole them. You made copies. You stole them because they were mine and now they’re not.’

‘What? Yes, they are!’

‘You took my diary, basically, and you read it and you made copies of it and you wrote about it in your paper.’

‘Abbey, no, look – I saw the CD and—’

‘That stuff you wrote – about my relationship with Paul …’

‘I didn’t write about it. I just said that there was one song in there about being trapped, and—’

‘I’m not trapped! And it’s not about Paul. You were clearly implying it was about Paul.’

I kept schtumm. I
had
thought it was about Paul.

‘Paul read it. He got angry; he wanted to know what was wrong with me. He didn’t know about the songs. Now I’ve had to show him. Do you know how embarrassing that was for me? You took something from me. I don’t know why. You’re so selfish. Why would you do that? You were taking
massive
liberties!’

‘Well, where do you think I learnt to do that, Abbey? Who was it that walked into my flat and deleted my ex-girlfriend? “Oh, you don’t need this,” you said. Maybe I thought this was something you
did
need!’

‘You’re just another one of those people, Jason.’

‘What people?’

‘You’re just another face in the crowd, aren’t you?’

‘Abbey, I’m your mate, I’m—’

And I listened, as the receiver clattered against something – the table, I guess – and was picked up, and placed heavily back on the phone.

I kicked myself for what I’d done. Of course she’d be angry. If she’d wanted people to know about her songs, she’d … well … she’d have sung them. Something about that night – the way the CD had been poking out of her bag, willing itself seen, and all right after we’d talked of life, and ambition and dreams – had made me feel like what I was doing was undeniably right.

And, sod it, it was, wasn’t it? This was the kind of over-reaction you’d expect from girls like Abbey. I’m not saying she’s flighty, or ditzy, because she’s actually one of the most together people I’ve met, but she’s emotional, isn’t she? Led by her heart. Actually, that should mean she’d
get
me doing something like this. This was for her. All completely from the right place, straight from the heart, and if anything she should be grateful she’s got someone looking out for her like this. I mean, yeah, maybe I should’ve left Paul out of things, I accept that now as I did then. I hadn’t named him, of course; I’d just mentioned somewhere in the review that Abbey’s sly, light lyrics showed a woman who’d lived or was living within a relationship that might not be entirely good for her. That may have given things away, as far as Paul was concerned.

That, and the fact that I said it was a song about not living your life as someone else’s puppet.

I didn’t know what to do. The review was out. Right there, in a hundred thousand copies of a freesheet, swirling around the capital, on benches, bars and buses, with five stars and a black-and-white picture taken on a phone.

So I picked up my mobile and I sent a text.

I’m really sorry
, is all I could say.

And I sat by my phone and waited for a reply.

Three days later, and Mackenzie Hall was a full-on Tropicana celebration.

I have no idea where the money comes from for events like this. Or how you go about planning it. My list would, I imagine, start at balloons and end at cake, like I was planning a toddler’s birthday party. But these people were pros.

There were the Tropicana Girls for a start. A dozen or so students/models in white cat suits and capes – capes! – holding trays of spiked juices.

Dev suddenly became a huge fan of Tropicana.

‘You need to slow down,’ I said, as he plucked another boozie smoothie from a moving silver tray.

‘They’re free and I’m nervous. There are women in capes here. Do you know how that makes me feel? That makes me feel like I’m around superheroes.’

‘They’re models, not cat lady.’

‘Cat
Woman
. It’s Cat
Woman
. Do you think I’d be nervous if they looked like cat
ladies
?’

Forest Laskin had arranged a fleet of luxury cars – all Audi R8s and walnut dashboards and black leather bucket seats – and invited us to drive around the grounds, imagining a life that’d never be ours. Some of the more important journalists had been picked up from Bath in blacked-out alloyed-up Range Rovers, allowed for an hour to picture themselves as bona-fide VIPs, rather than the people who write the RDA! section of
Good Food
, or the picture captions in the Sainsbury’s magazine.

A few announcements had been made already, by the girl who does the entertainment reports on
Wake Up Call
. You
know the one. She’s in Cannes one week, then suddenly on a jet ski with Gary Barlow the next. Came third on
Strictly
. Anyway, she was a big fan of the new Tropicana range, luckily, ‘because Tropicana has sixty years’ experience in blending fruit, so perhaps it’s the knowledge that goes into every carton that makes Tropicana taste so good!’. I liked that about her. Professional. On-message. She’d be around later for a Q&A and on another note has a new fitness DVD out in the autumn, which was news to Dev, who likes to keep his eye on these things.

Ocean Colour Scene would be playing tonight in the marquee. Someone stood the chance to win business class flights to New York in the raffle. There was a small bottle of champagne in every room (forty-two, since you ask – thirty-three in the main and coach house, six family holiday rooms for the big hitters, and three in the lodge, for Laskin and Co.). Some people seemed excited by the free spa treatments in the Cowshed Sanctuary; the others muttered they’d make do with the mixologists in the library.