Lizzy Harrison Loses Control (28 page)

Ignoring the shouts of the photographers, I walk as speedily as I can in my high heels, head down, towards the warren of little side streets that lead from Savoy Street to Embankment station. I know they won’t follow me for more than a few steps – the big story is clearly still going on inside, and a picture of me without Randy is practically worthless. Especially if it’s a picture of my back. In the dark and quiet streets of tall Georgian townhouses I allow myself a few hot tears now that no one can see them. But it isn’t until I find myself on Villiers Street, surrounded by Saturday-night crowds, that I realize I have nowhere to go.

The keys in my bag are to Randy’s house, and for all I know he’s heading there himself. With Jemima. I feel sick. The keys to my own flat are on the dresser in an upstairs bedroom in Belsize Park; I haven’t touched them for weeks. I can’t face telling Lulu the whole story yet, especially so soon after her warning about Randy, and anyway, it’s gone eleven on a Saturday night – if she’s not out herself, she’s going to be busy with Laurent. I just want to get as far away as possible from all of this. To somewhere no celebrity can find me. To somewhere Randy would never think to look.

Guildford.

My brother takes my somewhat incoherent phone call with surprising calm, despite the fact that I’m only capable of gibbering ‘Randy Jones’ and ‘need to come tonight’, and that it’s past eleven and ten o’clock is considered a bit of a late one at Ben and Jenny’s. Sometimes I’m so grateful my brother isn’t one for meaningful conversations. Tonight is one of those times. He doesn’t ask what’s happened, he doesn’t tell me to get a grip, he doesn’t say I told you so – he just tells me to call him from the train and he’ll pick me up from the station. He even says he’s glad I’m coming.

As I cross Hungerford Bridge towards Waterloo, I finally let myself properly cry. The approaching lights of the South Bank are a wavering blur as I hiccup and sob my way to the station. With my back to Savoy Street, to Belsize Park, to Soho, to Mayfair, to Regent’s Park, to Randy, I feel I’m turning away from the London I’ve been living in for the last few weeks. Who was I to think that I, sensible Lizzy Harrison from Guildford, lately of Peckham, could ever make it as the girlfriend of Randy Jones? Mine is the world of the suburbs, of planning in advance, of Ocado deliveries and middle-class gastropubs, of monogamous relationships and fixed-rate mortgages. Of course I never meant anything to Randy Jones, superstar Shagger of the Millennium. How could I have let myself believe that any of it was true? I sob. He was just using me. A tiny part of me thinks perhaps you were just using him too, Lizzy Harrison. But I swiftly silence it; if you can’t feel sorry for yourself when you’ve just caught your boyfriend shagging your Lego-haired nemesis, then when can you?

When we get back to Ben’s house, it’s past one in the morning. He closes the front door behind him, wrestles with a series of Chubb locks and flicks on the hall light as I stumble noisily over Graham’s buggy. Next to the buggy lie three pairs of wellies, one pair of slippers in the shape of rabbits and two battered shoes that resemble a pair of crimped Cornish pasties in earthy red. They’re adorned with thick gold and green laces, and, though I can’t detect it from here, I know that if I bend down lower they’ll smell of joss sticks.

‘Mum’s here?’ I say, turning to Ben in shock. I’m not sure I can handle any more surprises. ‘But . . . but she’s not due back until next week.’

‘Change of plan,’ says Ben with a maddeningly calm shrug. ‘Now go to bed.’

So I do.

I’m woken at seven-thirty by an insistent tapping on my forehead which, when I open my eyes, turns out to be coming from the plastic arm of a small plastic bunny wielded by my nephew.

The door of the study opens a crack and Jenny pokes her head round it. Even at this hour she looks as healthy and fresh as a shiny apple, her cheeks scrubbed, her hair pulled back in a colourful scrunchie. ‘Oh God – sorry, Lizzy. I thought he must have come in here. Is he bothering you?’

‘No, no, it’s fine,’ I say, sitting up and pulling the duvet towards me to cover up the fact that I’m wearing only my expensive, Randy-bestowed and, frankly, rather slutty bra and French knickers. I push my tangled hair off my face, suspecting that I’m probably exposing the smeared remains of the make-up I didn’t wash off last night. I feel as if we’re a Hogarth sketch in which she represents Motherly Purity while I am Urban Vice fresh off the pavement at Gin Lane.

Jenny sits down on the side of the sofa bed and Graham launches himself into her lap with a shriek.

‘Is everything okay, Lizzy? Ben said something about Randy Jones.’

If this was anyone else, I’d think they were after gossip. But Jenny, for all her reading of
Woman’s Own
at the hairdresser’s, is no more interested in celebrity gossip than she is in astrophysics. In fact astrophysics is probably far more her thing. She wouldn’t even recognize half the people in
Hot Slebs
, and I know she’s asking out of genuine concern for me rather than for something to tell her friends later. As it begins to dawn on me that this isn’t going to be true of everyone in the coming days, I feel the tears start up again.

‘Oh, Lizzy – don’t cry. I’m so sorry – I didn’t mean to upset you,’ she says, alarmed, and reaches out to hug me to her fleece-clad chest. Graham forces his way into the hug, squeezing me so tightly I fear I might have a bunny-shaped indentation on my chest for ever.

‘I’m . . . I’m okay,’ I sob into Graham’s blond curls.

‘Bloody Randy,’ says Jenny with a fierce loyalty that surprises me, seeing as she doesn’t even know what’s happened yet. ‘Well, you stay here for a bit,’ she says, getting up with Graham in her arms. ‘We’re all going to take Graham out for a walk, and maybe when we’re back we can all have breakfast together. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ I sniff, wiping my eyes.

‘Buh-bye,’ says Graham with a wave from the door.

‘Bye, Gray,’ I wave back, and then collapse on to the pillows with my eyes closed. I can only have been lying there for a few seconds when I smell the distinctive whiff of Nag Champa incense.

Mum.

My eyes fly open to see her leaning over the bed with a frown of concern, wrapped in what appears to be several layers of blue and purple cloth indistinguishable as individual items of clothing. Her grey hair is cut close to her skull in a crop that thankfully owes more to Judi Dench than the shaven-headed monks she’s been spending her time with lately. She flings her arms wide and envelops me in a tight hold, squeezing my face into her joss-stick-fragranced wrappings. I can feel her slow, steady breaths as she holds me without saying a word, and I suspect she’s trying to do something self-consciously spiritual and odd like heal me with the power of breathing. I suppose I should be grateful she isn’t chanting over me or whispering positive affirmations in my ear. I don’t know if the special ashram breaths are working their magic, or if it’s just the presence of Mum after these crazy few months without her, but I do actually start to feel a bit better. Randy and Savoy Street and Camilla and Jemima all feel a long way away from Ben and Jenny’s sofa bed and the presence of my family.

‘Mum, I—’

‘Shh, darling,’ she says, finally letting go. ‘All in good time. You go and have a shower while we go for a walk. We’ll all have a talk over breakfast.’

She kisses me once on the forehead and glides out of the room so smoothly it’s as if there are little castors under her Cornish-pasty shoes.

After a few moments I hear the front door slam and the house is silent. Silent except for a beep from my phone. I know I should have turned it off, but I have a perverse desire to see if it’s a message from Randy. Not that any of the others have been. I texted Camilla from the train, just an innocuous message that I’d decided to go home, and she’s sent a few anxious messages since. Apart from that the phone’s been tauntingly mute since I left Savoy Street. I leap on it and open the text. It’s from a number I don’t recognize.

As if things couldn’t get any worse. I turn my phone off. I don’t want to hear what anyone else has to say about this.

By the time the others come back from their walk, I’ve had a shower and got dressed in a pair of Jenny’s combat trousers and a long-sleeved British Trust for Conservation Volunteers T-shirt, although I drew the line at the pair of yellow Crocs that had also been left outside the bedroom door. I’m still feeling sick enough to think I may never eat again, but for the others I’ve set the kitchen table with cereals, bread and jar after jar of Jenny’s home-made preserves. I’m attempting to force down a cup of milky Earl Grey tea when they all burst through the front door, Graham clutching a handful of leaves which he deposits in my lap before dragging Mum off to the living room and the television.

Ben approaches the table cautiously as if fearing I might burst into tears at any moment.

‘All right, Lizzy?’ he says.

‘Well, go on,’ says Jenny, appearing from the hallway. ‘Show her.’

‘I thought we said—’ Ben turns to his wife, trying to silence her, but I’ve already seen the copy of the
Sunday Reporter
poking out from behind his back.

‘It’s Jazmeen Marie, isn’t it?’ I say wearily.

‘So this is what last night was about?’ says Ben, laying the paper on the table in front of me.

‘I don’t exactly know,’ I say, reaching for the paper and turning straight to page four.

With my brother and sister-in-law breathing heavily over my shoulder, I learn for the first time that Randy is due to become a father in four months. No detail is spared: the nights they spent in a London hotel, Randy’s five-times-a-night appetite, his penchant for a rose-quartz dildo with a fox-brush tail (so that’s where it went). How he’d told her she was different from all the other girls. How Randy was in rehab when she found out she was pregnant. How he’d ignored her desperate messages. How she’d even tried to contact Randy’s new girlfriend for help. But Jazmeen, posing in nothing but a pair of knickers, and what I believe the lad mags call an ‘arm bra’, in which one’s nipples are barely covered by one’s forearm, is proud to be pregnant. Indeed she has already named the child, a daughter, Tiffany Blue.

The sidebar on page seven turns out to be an exclusive interview with me, conducted last night by Daz ‘Dazzler’ Davies, in which I tell him that, despite Jazmeen’s news, ‘it’s all good’ between me and Randy. Which I do remember saying. And ‘I love him and stand by him no matter what’. Which I don’t. A ‘source’, by which I assume they mean Daz himself, is quoted as saying that Lizzy Harrison is telling friends no love child is going to get between her and her man.

My shoulders start shaking.

‘Lizzy,’ says Ben. ‘Oh God, Lizzy, this is awful.’

Jenny pats my back awkwardly. ‘Lizzy, I’m so sorry.’

‘Oh God,’ I say, clutching on to the table for support. ‘Oh my God.’

‘You’re . . . laughing?’ Ben says.

But I can’t help it. Jazmeen’s baby, Randy and Jemima’s kiwi-splattered faces last night, the idea that I ever thought I was in control of this situation for a moment – it’s too ludicrous. All the anxiety and stress of trying to keep Randy within the bounds of media-acceptable behaviour, of helping Camilla without her even knowing, of keeping the relationship secret from my friends and family; how did I ever think I’d get away with it? How did Randy? I laugh myself into weeping, hiccupping hysteria.

Later, Mum takes me out for a walk. As she’s already been on one today, I suspect it’s really a ruse to bestow the wisdom of the ashram on me, but I let her do it anyway. We take the muddy path that leads from Ben and Jenny’s cul-de-sac up to the woods behind their estate. Although it’s still August – just – the leaves are already beginning to lose their glossy greenness. Conkers hang from the heavy branches of the horse chestnut trees, preparing to fall. The brambles around us glisten with blackberries. In a few weeks it will be autumn.

‘You know, this time of year was always Daddy’s favourite,’ she says.

‘It was?’ I ask. I don’t remember. ‘Even though school was about to start?’ It sounds so unlikely that my teacher father would have looked forward to the beginning of term. Wouldn’t the summer holidays have been more appealing?

‘Oh yes,’ she says. ‘I think he never lost that feeling of new beginnings and a clean slate that you get at the start of the school year. He always used to say it was a chance to start over.’ She links her arm with mine and looks up into the canopy of leaves above us. ‘And autumn is so beautiful, too.’

‘It is beautiful,’ I say.

‘Did you love him?’ she asks suddenly.

‘Daddy?’ I say, in surprise.

‘No, darling, of course you loved Daddy. I mean Randy.’

‘I – I think I thought I did. For a while. I think I really wanted to – because, well, it’s been so long since Joe, and I think I just—’

‘You wanted it to be real,’ says Mum.

‘I did. I got scared that I was too closed off to being in a relationship, or love, or anything. Lulu said—’

‘Oh, darling, you didn’t take relationship advice from Lulu, did you?’ Mum laughs. ‘You two are so different!’