‘Except he was innocent,’ I blurt out.
She starts whimpering.
‘Look, this is going to be fine,’ I reassure her. ‘I’ll go and check out his car subtly. Then I’ll come back and we can talk it over.’ And I’ll hopefully persuade her to come clean.
I slip out of the ladies as Sadie makes her way back to her desk, glancing round anxiously. I take the front staircase into the car park and the double doors open. It’s one of those hazy mornings, hot and heavy, that gives the climbing flowers an over-sweet fragrance, almost like marijuana.
‘Gemma!’
I spin round to see Sebastian jogging up behind me. ‘Oh . . . hello, Sebastian. Just getting something from my car.’
‘Me too,’ he grins. ‘Forgot my SAD lamp.’
‘Your what?’
‘My SAD lamp. I get Seasonal Affective Disorder. I’m in bits without it.’
I decide not to point out that it’s May. ‘I just forgot my lunch,’ I mutter, wondering why I’m sharing this.
‘What have you got?’ he asks.
‘Hmm?’
‘For your packed lunch?’
My mind goes entirely blank. ‘Spam.’
He looks me up and down. ‘Ah. Okay. Don’t have too much though. All that processed meat’ll kill you.’
‘It’s a salad,’ I add, my subconscious clearly very bothered about ensuring Sebastian knows I’m a five-a-day girl. ‘A Spam salad.’
‘Right.’ He frowns. ‘You haven’t got any keys.’
‘Hmm?’
‘Keys. How are you going to open your car without any keys?’
I look at my hands. ‘Oh. Bugg— damn! You’re right. Duh!’ I hit my head on my hand in the manner of Homer Simpson after he’s dropped a doughnut in his Duff beer.
And it’s at that point that Conrad Bexton, one of our sales managers, fires up his people-carrier and drives away, revealing Sebastian’s car.
The gash in its side is like the open wound in a slaughtered dolphin: large, gaping, if not fatal then near enough. There are shards of paint from Sadie’s car all over it. It’s difficult to see how it could be worse if she’d parked a tank in front of it and pressed a big red button that said
Destroy
.
I am suddenly devoid of ideas for small talk: not Spam, not SAD lamps, not a damn thing.
‘Well,’ Sebastian grins, oblivious. ‘See you at the meeting.’
‘Yes. Better go and get those keys!’ I turn and walk away from him and have my foot on the first step at the exact moment that the damage becomes apparent.
‘JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!’
I turn round briefly, long enough to see him falling to his knees and banging his head against the tarmac.
Chapter 21
Gemma
I get no sense out of Sadie for the rest of the day, such is the magnitude of her meltdown. The worst moment is during a meeting with one of our new clients, an organic food company called Good Honest Soup. She sits, mute, for almost two hours until Sebastian, whose mood is so foul you can almost smell it, asks her acidly if she’d care to contribute to the discussion. At which point she offers the client some biscuits.
I work late that evening and drive home, trying and failing to think of a solution to her mess. At least it keeps my mind off other matters. When I arrive at Buddington, Dan is at the kitchen table, scowling at Belinda’s laptop, as she stands over his shoulder with her arms crossed. He’d told me he was planning to come home early after last week’s
Fight Club
re-enactment, but I assured him that the whole thing had blown over as quickly as it started.
‘Hi there.’ I lean down to kiss him and he holds my face against his briefly, as if seeking momentary comfort in the midst of some ongoing horror. ‘What are you up to?’
‘Some IT for Mum,’ he replies grimly.
‘There!’ she shrieks, pointing at the screen over his shoulder. ‘That’s it! That stupid message keeps appearing. I told you it was broken.’
He sighs. ‘Mum, it’s an update. It’s nothing.’
‘But I don’t want an update. I never asked for an update.’
‘You don’t ask for them,’ he replies patiently. ‘They just appear.’
‘Well, how dare they? It’s my computer. I like it as it is. Tell it to go away,’ she instructs, waving her hand about as if shooing away a mangy cat. Then she reaches over and prods a button.
‘Mum. Just leave this to me,’ Dan says calmly, as a little vein throbs on his neck. ‘It’s an update – it’ll take about a minute, then the message will go away.’
‘And it won’t come back?’
‘I can’t promise that,’ he sighs.
‘I thought you said you could fix it.’
He spends the next hour trying to clean up the disaster zone that is Belinda’s computer. He’s always been good with this sort of stuff: patient, capable, enthusiastic about technology. She seems to think this makes him Mark Zuckerberg.
On the plus side, while Belinda is doing her best to make Dan’s hair fall out prematurely, it gives me an excuse to offer to cook dinner. I’m no Nigella, but I can at least whip up a lasagne that doesn’t dislodge any dentalwork.
‘What are you two up to at the weekend?’ Belinda asks.
‘We’ll be staying in,’ I reply. ‘The budget’s very tight.’
Dan flashes me a look that says, ‘she doesn’t know the half of it.’ I glance away, refusing to maintain eye-contact. Because the fact is, the extra £4,000 to which I’ve committed us is weighing increasingly heavily on my mind. I’ve spent the last three and a half weeks trying to think of a solution – and have singularly failed. Yet I stand by my assertion: in the scheme of things this is not a massive amount. Not the kind of amount you’d let ruin your only chance of living in the house of your dreams. I can’t deny that the answer eludes me though.
‘Doesn’t sound much fun,’ Belinda frowns. ‘Why don’t you let me pay for a night out?’
‘That’s really kind, but you’re already doing enough by letting us stay here,’ I insist. Dan looks at me gratefully as Belinda takes a slug of wine.
‘Maybe I should have a party here then,’ she says.
‘Not on our account,’ Dan says immediately.
‘It’s been ages since I threw one,’ she goes on. ‘My bashes were legendary. Curiosity Killed the Cat on the stereo. Slippery Nipple in the punchbowl . . . Hey, we could have one for Grandma’s birthday! I’ve been wondering what to do.’
‘I’m sure she’d prefer dinner somewhere,’ Dan says.
‘Oh no she wouldn’t, not for her eightieth.’ Belinda thinks for a minute. ‘I’ve got an idea. I’ll organise the party – you two can do a dance for her. You know, a
Strictly
type of dance. She’d
love
it. I can get Bobby to teach you. He can get you in the lake, just like in
Dirty Dancing
.’
Dan rolls his eyes and studies the computer screen, pretending not to hear.
Six weeks after I failed to get talking to Dan after the big Lake Windermere swim, I couldn’t get him out of my mind. I could list a dozen things about him that I liked, but in truth none really explained why he’d made such a sweeping impression on me.
Then when Allie went to her second Lake District swim and said she’d seen him – and his club – again, I knew that the only chance I’d have of getting close to him was going to watch her at the next race. Only, there was a problem.
‘This one doesn’t start and finish next to a pub, so I have no idea how you’re going to manufacture meeting him. It’s only a small race, in Buttermere.’
‘Maybe I could just come and say hello when he gets out of the water,’ I mused.
‘Yes, like his groupie . . .’
‘Hmm. I take your point. What can I do to make this look natural?’
‘Easy,’ she replied. ‘You can take part in the swim.’
I knew in the depths of my very being that it was a bad idea, for reasons that went beyond the fact that my wetsuit made me look like a massive black pudding.
I wasn’t terrible in water – I’m not saying I still needed my rubber ring – but I was a long way from being a championship swimmer. I’d done a bit of wild swimming, if you can count a couple of practice sessions – both cut short by bad weather – and a university trip to Wales during which a few of us (after several Bacardi Breezers) stripped to our underwear and went for a dip. But my recent experience of swimming was confined to a sedate breaststroke in the pool of my gym, which I’d undertake in the manner of a blue-rinsed elderly lady who’d prefer to risk death by drowning than break into a front crawl and get her hair wet.
But I’ve always been an optimist. Even if on this occasion I was an optimist of the blind, stupid variety – one who shouldn’t have believed a word of Allie’s encouragement. In the light of what came next, it’s a wonder we’re still on speaking terms.
When we arrived at the race start, it was already overflowing with people.
‘I thought it was a small event?’
‘It’s a little bigger than I’d thought, I must admit,’ she replied shiftily.
I suddenly felt a bit ill. ‘I should back out. This is not going to go well, I know it.’
‘Oh, you’ll be great! Think of how impressed your man will be.’
Impressing him seemed far-fetched, but equally, having come all this way, I didn’t want him to think I was some sort of malingering spectator.
‘Fine. But that’s not why I’m doing it, just for the record.’
My overriding memory of that day was standing at the edge of the lake trembling as if I’d had both sets of fibulas surgically removed. I spotted Dan a little way down and my heart swooped as he noticed me and smiled.
‘Isn’t the atmosphere amazing?’ Allie gushed.
I hadn’t actually noticed the atmosphere. All I’d noticed was the massive stretch of opaque water. The fact that it wasn’t turquoise with a neat black stripe down it like in David Lloyd. And that there were very probably
creatures
underneath. Real creatures. I had never hated nature more.
Meanwhile, the entrants were multiplying like the armies of Middle Earth, jostling and pushing in a manner that didn’t bode well for the moment we plunged in the lake.
Then a whistle blew.
I could be romantic about my first lake race – tell you I slipped in and was at one with the beauty of the mountains, the overarching sky, the warm camaraderie between competitors. I’d love to tell you about the music in my pulsating heart, the euphoria that engulfed me as I made it to the end, incandescent with sporting triumph.
But that would be bollocks.
While I could happily swim for twenty minutes in a nice pool, being in this cold, horrible, unchlorinated water was something quite different.
I told myself I just had to stay calm.
I told myself I just had to get to the other side.
I told myself I just had to
swim
.
But as I thrashed in the water, all I could think about was what was brushing my legs: the vegetation, the insects, the fish. Then I started to think bigger, more sinister. By the time I was halfway across, I wasn’t worried about fish – I was thinking sharks, piranha, prehistoric plesiosaurs . . . all with their sights set on my juicy limbs.
Every time I quelled one of these lunatic thoughts, another popped in, until – convinced that the tail of a blue whale was about to rise up in front of me – I decided to flip over and try a backstroke instead. It had an instant and dramatic effect: namely, to make me hyperventilate and fling my arms and legs about as if I was attached to the jump leads for a 1978 Cortina.
But none of this compared with the indignity – and horror – of the awareness that someone had grabbed my arm. I was being rescued.
I should’ve been grateful really.
But, delirious and virtually hallucinating from the volume of lake water I’d swallowed, all I could focus on was the reason I’d done this in the first place. I was meant to be dazzling someone with my best impression of
Action Girl
, a water-borne version of Lara Croft, all tough but sexy and infinitely capable.
Emerging from the lake under the arm of some big bearded bloke from St John’s Ambulance was NOT part of the plan.
So I told the guy rescuing me, ‘I’m fine, honestly – I might look like I don’t know what I’m doing, but it’s all part of a technique I’ve been mastering.’
At least, that’s what I said in my head.
It came out like this:-‘Blgueerrurghhhh . . . (* GASP *) . . . bhleghobhhhrrrr (* GASP GASP *) BHAFOENOjonfon!!!!!.
I gulped in another mouthful of liquid – which couldn’t have tasted worse if I’d swallowed a camel’s fart – and gave up.
I knew he’d seen me. I was stumbling up the bank of the lake attempting to pull vegetation from between my teeth when I spotted him and realised he was looking at me. It struck me that he might have been amused, but he was actually something far worse: concerned.
He began heading towards me, but the thought of talking to him after my humiliation, particularly when my lips were now blue, was too much to bear. So I darted away to find Allie, who had our car key and access to towels and dry clothes.
I would discover later that she’d been looking for me too, after a fit of warped thinking had made her assume I’d finished before she did. But for now I was left to search, dejected and alone, having never felt a greater urge to cry in my life.
‘The first time’s always the worst.’ I knew it was Dan before I even looked up, registered his heart-stopping handsomeness and wished I’d never come.
‘Like losing your virginity?’ I was relieved when he laughed because I regretted the words as soon as they left my mouth.
‘Here,’ he said, wrapping a clean dry towel around me. ‘You look like you need to warm up.’
And how I felt right then was something I’ll never forget: warm, safe and as though my limitless capacity for unintentional hilarity didn’t matter a jot.
Chapter 22
Dan
We arrived at Mum’s house nearly two months ago and haven’t had a single night out since. There is, quite simply, no cash with which to do so – and in our frantic attempts to scrape together the extra £4k Gemma’s committed us to, there isn’t likely to be in the near future.
It’s not like we spent every night living it up in piano bars and casinos before. But it’s only when you’ve missed out on nights out with the boys, the girls and more importantly each other, that you realise how much they keep you going.