Read A Funny Thing About Love Online
Authors: Rebecca Farnworth
A Funny Thing About Love
rebecca
farnworth
For J
Also by Rebecca Farnworth
Valentine
Rebecca Farnworth has worked as a celebrity ghost-writer. She lives in Brighton with her husband and three children.
A Funny Thing About Love
is her second novel.
Thank you to everyone at Random House, particularly my editor Gillian Holmes and Kate Elton for all their input and enthusiasm for the book. And thanks to Amelia Harvell and all in publicity, marketing and sales.
Thank you to my wonderful agent, Maggie Hanbury, clever, witty and wise and always to be relied on and of course to her team Stuart and Henry (Wobbly Worms and Peanut Grigiot all round!).
Thank you to my family for keeping my feet well and truly on the ground and for making me realise what's important.
And thank you to Brighton, a brilliant city.
Carmen Miller was horribly late for work. Late and hungover. She'd been up until two the night before getting outrageously drunk with Sadie, one of her closest friends. She should have known that ending the night on sambucas would be a major mistake. She was thirty-three for goodness' sake! She didn't even like sambuca! Where were reason and common sense when the decision was made to crack open the bottle? On a mini break together apparently, leaving Carmen free to throw caution to the wind and enter that state of drunkenness where you feel invincible. That king-of-the-world, Leonardo di Caprio standing-behind-you, emotive-music-playing feeling. She certainly didn't feel invincible right now. She had hit the iceberg and gone down.
She adjusted her sunglasses. It was a breezeblock-grey cloudy day with no hint of sun at the end of September, but Carmen needed the cover-up. She crossed Oxford Street, narrowly avoiding being squished by a bendy bus, and headed up Great Portland Street W1, towards Fox Nicholson where she worked as a comedy agent. According to their kick-ass blurb, Fox Nicholson were one of the âcutting-edge agencies,
specialising in representing talent in comedy and drama'. There was nothing kick-ass or cutting-edge about Carmen today. Her mind was a woolly fog with only three thoughts bleating in it: coffee, can of coke and croissant.
She stumbled into her favourite Italian café which had been run by the same family for donkey's years. As soon as Rico, the shiny black-haired, good-looking-and-he-knew-it eldest son, clocked her staggering through the door he started firing up the chrome coffee machine for her skinny latte. Not that she was a creature of habit or anything. Well, not much. She'd been coming to the café for the last four years and always had the exact same thing â skinny latte and a croissant. No doubt the croissant cancelled out any benefit of the skinny latte, but Carmen loathed cereal and figured that if slim-hipped French women lived off croissants and coffee then it couldn't do that much harm. She neglected to recall that they probably didn't eat anything else for the rest of the day, whereas she would be back at Rico's at lunchtime ordering a jacket potato and cheese.
â
Ciao, bella!
' Rico called out. Rico carried something of a torch for Carmen, which at times threatened to burst into a towering inferno, but then again as he flirted with all his female customers she didn't take it personally. She certainly did not feel terribly
bella
at this moment. What was the Italian for raddled old hag with seriously dehydrated skin?
Hagissima
?
â
Ciao
,' she mumbled, then opened the fridge and
grabbed a can of coke and put it on top of the glass counter, trying to avoid looking at the array of sandwich fillings. The sight of the lurid yellow egg mayonnaise next to the tuna and sweetcorn was turning her stomach quicker than a ride on a waltzer.
âRough night?' Rico asked. God, even her sandwich man could read her like a book! And she'd spent bloody ages doing her make-up, piling on practically every single product she owned to conceal the dark shadows, brighten her eyes and put some colour into her pallid complexion in an attempt to look more girl-about-town and less night-of-the-living-dead.
âI did get a bit carried away,' Carmen admitted, handing over the money.
âLucky him,' Rico replied wistfully. Ever since he had found out that Carmen was separated from her husband he had become blatantly inquisitive about her love life.
âThere is no lucky him, Rico,' Carmen corrected. âJust single, embittered me and my mad friend.'
Rico popped a croissant into a brown paper bag and snapped the lid down on Carmen's coffee. âYou know, I could take you out sometime,' he said quietly, a hopeful edge to his voice. He shot an anxious look in the direction of his mother, a vast, fifty-something woman, perpetually dressed in black, who occupied the seat by the till and who was rumoured to be psychic.
Carmen raised an eyebrow. âYeah, right, I'm sure your wife would love that.'
âShe wouldn't mind,' Rico persisted.
Carmen picked up her coffee and stuffed the croissant and coke into her bag. âYep, she would.
Ciao
.'
âQuite right, Carmen, of course she would!' came a booming voice. It was the Italian
mamma
, whom everyone unoriginally called Mamma Mia behind her back. Her real name was Carla. She must have hearing like a bat or else she really was psychic.
Rico looked startled and his â
Ciao
' had a slightly nervous ring.
Carmen had loved working for Fox Nicholson when it had just been Nicholson, one of the smaller agencies representing comics and also a select number of actors. Carmen specialised in comics. She'd become a comedy agent completely by chance after meeting Matthew Nicholson, the owner of the agency, at the Edinburgh festival in the late nineties where her boyfriend Nick, later to be her husband, had been performing as a comic. Matthew had signed Nick up and offered Carmen a job as PA at his agency.
Back then she'd had no real idea of what she wanted to do. After her English degree she'd done TEFL and the travelling thing, and had even appeared on stage with Nick in a comedy sketch show. Her secret ambition had always been to write her own comedy drama. She'd even written the first episode, but she'd never been confident enough to take time off paid work to complete it and somehow she had never got round to working on it in the evening â there was always a comedy gig to go to or a DVD to collapse in front of
with a bottle of wine. God only knew how T.S. Eilliot had written
The Waste Land
while working in a bank. Sheer will power, no doubt, and being a better person with no addiction to DVD box sets. And while Nick had encouraged her writing, he had always seen it as a hobby and never really taken it seriously.
After a couple of years as a PA Carmen worked her way to the position of agent. Once there, she discovered that she didn't especially like it. She lacked the killer instinct and thick layer of skin that were the essential requisites of being a good agent. However, there were compensations. Matthew was a brilliantly witty bon viveur who was great fun to be around. He had always run the small agency as an eccentric extended family, and whenever Carmen was having a tough time negotiating fees, she could always rely on Matthew to step in for her, leaving her free to do the nicer, less stressful parts of the job, like spotting talent and reading scripts. But then the recession had changed everything. Matthew had been forced to accept a buyout from Fox, a much larger, more corporate-style management company, whose sole mantra seemed to be money.
Since then Matthew had been sidelined and the company had grown from just five agents to twelve, who had to account for practically every minute of their day. The clients were given new terms and some of them left, including Nick, which was probably for the best as it had been more than slightly awkward since the break-up. Marcus Taylor, a comic Carmen had championed, had also left and gone on to be huge
in TV. Now her boss was a scary, tiny, thirty-something Australian called Tiana, who was one of those passive-aggressive types who seem to be lovely on the surface but underneath have all the compassion of a great white shark smelling blood. She knew very little about performers. All she cared about was the bottom line.
Wearily Carmen pushed open the heavy glass front door and walked into the minimalist lobby, which had recently been refurbished. Despite being the size of a small football pitch, it was furnished only with one blood-red leather sofa and a glass coffee table at one end for visitors and a white glass reception at the other. There was an enormous, stainless-steel light fitting, which resembled a series of knives radiating out from the ceiling. No doubt it was supposed to act as a visual metaphor for how cutting-edge the company was, but to Carmen it looked like a piece of rather dangerous scrap metal. She always avoided walking underneath it, fearing that it would fall and she would be impaled by one of the vicious-looking spikes. Tiana had been behind the design, which to Carmen said everything you needed to know about her new boss. She privately thought that if Tiana had deliberately set out to design an intimidating space for the lobby she could not have done a more effective job. Not that some of the comics who came to the agency didn't deserve a bit of intimidating â in fact, many of them deserved a lot more. Mild torture, perhaps, if such a thing existed.
âHiya,' she called out to Daisy, one of the girls on reception â her favourite, in fact â a pixie-haired blonde
who always wore black and who hated the general public. Carmen knew for a fact that she had a card pinned to her computer screen that read, âDo I look like a fucking people person?' Daisy did not. She did not look like a Daisy either. She had recently morphed from a goth to an emo. Carmen wasn't entirely sure what the difference was, but as she had already asked Daisy twice to explain it to her and had forgotten the answer, she hardly felt able to ask her again. Daisy raised her hand in greeting but didn't take her eyes off her computer screen, where she was most likely playing
Grand Theft Auto
.
