Kept (3 page)

I stumbled out of the offices in pure shock, desperately
trying to blink back my tears because Penelope Whitter did not deserve them.
She was a monster – a horrible, vile monster – but I was not going to allow
myself to cry pointlessly over her and her warped behaviour. I may have been
upset, but even in my shock I had twigged I was powerless to do anything about
her bizarre interview.

It was so frustrating though; I couldn’t understand what had
made her hate me with such venom, but I understood that the job wasn’t mine.
Well, not unless she’d been that amused by my torture she decided she’d quite
like to continue her
Ariel
-torture.
Psychotic cow.

I blinked back more tears and sniffled instinctively as
people scurried past me, people who were not paying me the slightest bit of
attention. Well, why should they have been? I was insignificant – Penelope
Whitter had just proved that to me.

Actually, it was more than mere sniffing. My nose was
streaming
and, not caring who was
watching me – no one – I wiped it on my suit jacket, reminiscent of the school
girl I once was that had the detention-gaining habit of doing just that on my
blazer. If this was school though – if Penelope was a bullying peer – I could
have reported her. In this situation I was defenceless; it would have looked
like sour grapes for getting rejected. She’d won.

With that thought, I looked up and tried to collect myself.
Given that I’d hurried out of their offices, I’d left with no care for where I
was heading. Only now as I took in my unfamiliar surroundings did I realise
that I had headed in the opposite direction to the Tube – an understandable
error seeing as my main concern had been to put as much distance between me and
the demon MD’s HQ as I could.

Right, where was I? Ah, yes. Squinting ahead I blearily
clocked one of the signs announcing that I was about to enter the one square
mile that hosted the City of London. Catching sight of some hot City boys would
certainly cheer me up
once
I had
retouched my make-up. I was probably looking far from fresh since the tears had
rolled fierce and fast, the first time I had cried in six years, and I knew I
wouldn’t even get the smallest glance from the City boys if I didn’t look
pristine.

Given I desperately needed a flirty smile or two to get me
back on track, followed maybe by a quick look around the shops before it was
time for the train home – purely for medicinal purposes, of course – I needed
to pop into the nearest ladies’ loo to touch up or, more likely, redo the
extensive damage to my face.

I never found it. Suddenly I was flat on my back with the
overwhelming smell of chlorine hitting my nostrils...

A voice was muttering somewhere in the distance but, truth
be told, even though I was lying in the middle of the City I didn’t care to get
up. It was likely I was flashing my knickers to the world – wait, was I even
wearing any to avoid VPL? – but I still didn’t want to move. I was even
ignoring the worry that my bag was no longer dangling from my arm. It had gone
flying with the hefty impact and was probably halfway to Hackney by now when
I’d hit something, or someone, very solid. My day was going from bad to worse
and it hadn’t finished either.

‘Excuse me. Excuse me miss,’ a voice was saying urgently as
a figure crouched down to shake my arm slightly. ‘Are you OK? I’m so sorry...
Miss?’

I groaned. I guessed it was a
someone
then. A very solid
male
someone judging by that voice. At least I hadn’t walked into a lamppost.
That
would have been embarrassing.

‘Oh my goodness. Can someone call an ambulance, please?’ I
heard, as I felt the man move from his position near my face, to lower down my
body. Pervert.

Despite my suspicions of perversion though, his voice
sounded clear-cut in that certain way that makes girls melt, or maybe just me.
However, this was not an appropriate time to melt; those tones were
not
worth me opening my tightly shut
eyes to sneak a peek because a hum suggested a crowd was now forming to watch
my nightmarish train wreck taking place. Great. Still, I reasoned that if I
kept my eyes closed and couldn’t see them, then they couldn’t see me.
Obviously
. At that moment I really
wondered why I’d even bothered getting out of bed with the day I was having.

And had I heard him say
ambulance
?
That seemed extreme. I felt fine. Well I felt numb, but surely numbness was too
trivial for an ambulance? Granted the impact had been hefty and I’d fallen
strangely sideways before collapsing, but there wasn’t anything wrong with me.
I mean, I hadn’t opened my mouth to say I felt unwell, although little groans
were involuntarily escaping me. Why were they phoning for an
ambulance
? This all seemed a little
extreme.

It got worse.

‘Is she breathing?’ I heard a woman call out.

I didn’t know how to shut my ears without putting headphones
in; if I did that the game would be up. Not that I could do that with my
missing bag so I just needed to ignore the comments the best I could, even
though all I could think was: I’m breathing. I’m fine. Leave me alone. Go away.
Please
.

But, they couldn’t hear my thoughts; they couldn’t leave a
girl in peace to lie on a pavement and flash her knickers – potentially – to
the world either. Whoever had told me London was an unfriendly city – a city
where people would leave you to die on the street – clearly they didn’t have a
clue.

‘Oh crikey.’

There was
that
clear-cut voice again. I was almost tempted to open my eyes and sneak a peek –
who actually said
crikey
? – but his
next sentence stopped me.

‘Do I need to give her mouth-to-mouth?’

That snapped me out of my funk. I wasn’t having some
chinless wonder force his City boy mouth into mine, teasing me with his caviar
and Cristal breath. At that remark I figured it was about time to sit up, which
I did abruptly, not even bothering to open my eyes.

Big mistake.

If I had opened my eyes, I would have seen said City boy
leaning down to check my breathing. The resulting crack of our heads had me
back down on the floor quicker than I could say, well anything.

‘Oh my. I’m so sorry. Again.’

It was that clear-cut voice.
Again
.

This time I decided it would probably be best to lie back
and not move a muscle until the arrival of this ambulance. Only my body felt
numb now; my head was sharply pulsating from the second impact with the owner
of
that
voice.

‘Out of the way people, out of the way,’ a voice boomed,
interrupting our conversation. ‘Give her some room to breathe. Don’t crowd
her.’

The paramedics. Finally. In the past thirty minutes I had
become well-acquainted with the pavement
and
had managed to breathe perfectly fine despite the crowd gathered around me. If
anyone, it was the man with
that
voice who was sending me breathless.

At first I couldn’t believe how many people would waste
their time watching someone lie injured on the ground, but
anything
to delay their return to the office was seen as an
acceptable excuse to stand around in the early autumn sun.
Some
people had left, muttering under their breath when they
realised I wasn’t a piece of artwork, but they hadn’t been the bored regular
worker bees.

As one woman explained to me before she rushed off upon
discovering I wasn’t art, merely an accident, London’s art scene was thriving
with human interactive art scattered around the city and people had assumed I
was one of them. Move over Banksy. Part of the charm of this new-found craze
was that the locations were unknown. It was up to the art fanatic to emerge on
his or her own quest “to discover the hidden joys and self-satisfaction of
London’s next big thing” and it was proving immensely popular, generating a
new-found appreciation of art
and
it
was a form of exercise. This was according to the
Time Out
she had left behind for us anyway which deemed these as
marvellous plaudits to achieve in today’s cultureless, obesity-obsessed world.
It sounded pretentious to me. Sort of like Piers really.

Piers, the man with
that
voice, the man who hadn’t left my side since he’d knocked me over. He’d kept my
mind off the pain by sharing his amusing anecdotes but I think he was afraid
I’d sue him or something for this – I suspected American relatives because who
really sues anyone in Britain? – and seeing as he’d lost a fortune on the stock
market that morning, heavens, he didn’t want to have to sell off one of his
vintage cars or holiday pads to pay me off. Not that he said that explicitly,
but he seemed the sort. Not that I’d ever met the “sort” before.

What he did say though when I told him I could wait for the
ambulance on my own was that he was a gentleman. He couldn’t have left me
especially
after causing the accident
like he gallantly, and repeatedly, insisted he had done. Like I said,
pretentious, yet highly entertaining, considering the circumstances.

I would later discover that his gentleman persona was the
mask he hid behind. I was wrong – he had no American relatives – but back when
we first met he oddly reminded me of a pervy uncle at a family party. One who
you just can’t help but be amused by, despite the true nature of his lewd
comments. But, he kept my mind off my plight – the mortifying fact that I was
lying on a cold pavement, feeling numb, being mistaken for a piece of human
interactive artwork – and he kept me company. He also had my bag and, I
confess, he wasn’t displeasing on the eye either.

‘One, two, three, lift.’

I was popped onto a stretcher.

‘Looks broken.’ One of the paramedics grimaced.

I panicked at the word broken but what did they know? Surely
I would have known if my bone was broken? I watched
ER
.

‘Any wonder with shoes like those?’ the other muttered.

‘Leave them alone. I like them,’ I tartly replied. I wasn’t
deaf. I could hear their comments, and I would not accept fashion criticism
from anyone but Karl Lagerfeld himself. As far as I was aware, Karl hadn’t
jacked in the fashion world to become a London paramedic so their comments were
unfounded.

‘So do I, love, but there’s a time and a place for
everything.’

What was that supposed to mean? Before I could retort to
this, the first paramedic turned to Piers and asked him if he was taking a ride
with us. He was. The door slammed shut and we were on our own way to whatever
London hospital was closest.

The paramedic, the one who had chastised my choice of
footwear, was fussing over me, doing whatever it is they do in the back of
ambulances. I left him to it without much cause for concern. Since I couldn’t
hear the sirens wailing I assumed I wasn’t going to croak it. Anyway, my foot
felt fine. It all seemed a little excessive but no one cared about my
weakly-protested opinion. The paramedic chose to direct his questions to an
excited Piers instead – the same Piers who wildly declared as the ambulance
pulled out that he’d never been in an ambulance before, conscious anyway.

There
had
been the
time he’d had twenty-five Jaeger-bombs, predictably on his twenty-fifth
birthday, having downed beforehand a bottle of Bolly and several pints of
Guinness. He’d woken up two days later feeling like death but that was nothing
compared to the pain of missing out on the ambulance ride. I didn’t get it
either – must have been a rugger thing – and I assumed he must play something
because that would explain his manly bulk. And boy,
he was a
man
. I’d
experienced that first-hand when he knocked me over.
Nice
. The bulk part, that is. Not the subsequent mortifying
knicker-flashing – yes, I was wearing them – and intimate pavement time.

‘Her name?’ the paramedic asked, jerking his head at me.

‘Arielle.’

‘Ariel what?’

‘No,
Arielle
,’ he
corrected.

Oh my – he’d remembered how to pronounce my first name
properly, a rarity amongst the human race, and then he’d
corrected
the paramedic for me. My hero!

‘Fine. Ariel, what?’

I sighed. ‘Lockley,’ I answered, before Piers could profess
his ignorance.

‘You just lie there, love.’ The paramedic turned to me. ‘And
let your boyfriend answer the questions.’

‘He’s not my boyfriend,’ I said quickly, before Piers could
open his mouth, my face turning red at their error.

‘Yet,’ Piers answered wickedly.

‘Piers!’ I blushed even more. I barely knew this man, but
that didn’t mean I didn’t want to – far from it.

The paramedic sighed this time. ‘If you two could please
stop flirting for a second so
one
of
you can answer these questions,’ he snapped.

Yikes. I preferred him when he was chastising my footwear.

‘Better be, Miss Lockley.’ Piers winked at me.

‘Could be Mrs.’

‘No ring,’ he answered cheekily. ‘Besides, I had a squiz
through your wallet and looked at your driving licence. I like your wallet by
the way.’

That season’s Gucci, if you’re interested. Cruise
collection, though it was another purchase yet to be paid for. Still, I was
pleased he’d noticed. Major kudos to a man with an eye for fashion and the
finer things in life but then I had the heart-stopping realisation that he must
be gay. That could be the only reason to explain why he was being so helpful,
why he was accompanying me to the hospital, and how he knew to spot a Gucci
wallet when he saw one.
   

I blushed, cursing myself that I was so obviously pleased
with him, sexual orientation aside. Considering he had knocked me over it was
my injured right to act miffed. Besides, he looked like the sort of man who’d
had it easy all of his life, probably with the
entire population
if he was gay. I needed to play it cool and not
let his charms win me over much more than they already had done. He’d succeeded
quite a lot since I decided to open my eyes to talk to the man with
that
voice. The paramedic looked like he
wanted to slap us both.

I wasn’t concerned though. I was high from the flirting –
surely I wouldn’t be going gaga if he was gay, or maybe I was high from the
drugs kicking in? Whichever it was, I didn’t care. The day was finally
beginning to get a whole lot better because of some highly unexpected
circumstances.