Greatest Love Story of All Time (22 page)

‘Ah, the meditation teacher,’ Charlie observed. ‘Interesting. Well, these alternative types like a bit of
nudity, don’t they? Speaking of which, I do, too. Get back into the bedroom this minute, please.’

An hour later, Charlie left. I asked him what he was up to as I went round my room picking up underwear. ‘People to see, things to do,’ he said breezily. ‘I’d like nothing more than to do it again tonight, but needs must.’ He pulled me tightly to him and kissed my forehead.

I staggered back into bed, bow-legged and bruised, blushing as I caught sight of myself in the mirror. As I sank down into bed, my phone beeped.

My heart leaped: it was Michael again!

Franny. You probably hate me but I just want you to know I am sorry. I miss you. Xxx

What
was
this? Did he have cameras rigged up in here or something? I struggled hard not to punch the air. My boy wanted me back! I smirked, trying to drag a ‘Ha! Up yours, Daniels!’ out of myself. But I felt guilty. In spite of everything, Nellie was
actually quite nice
. And she was clearly in love with Michael.

So what was happening?

I needed to get to the bottom of this. If I didn’t do so soon I was at risk of texting Michael back and then it’d be game over – I’d be back at square one, staring morbidly at my phone, waiting impotently for a reply.

After the Chelsea club shoot I’d banned myself from any further Nellie-stalking – as Dave had pointed out, I could have lost my job using ITN’s equipment
for my covert Chelsea mission the other week – but desperate times called for desperate measures. And I knew exactly how, where and when I could carry out one final stalk. It would take place this week.

‘You’re a bloody genius!’ I told Stefania, when I strode into her shed five minutes later. ‘I love the Eight Date Deal! Charlie wants to have loads of sex with me, some bloke called Toni is counting down the days till our date next weekend, there’s a brilliant bloke called Freddy wanting a date with me and Michael is begging me to talk to him
behind Nellie’s back
! It’s amazing!’

‘GET OUT!’ she screamed. ‘Hose yourself down! You have been making ze sex all night! Do not touch anysing in my room!’ But she was smiling.

Later that day I had a long bath and tried to work out what I wanted from Charlie. He was glamorous, seemingly wealthy, well connected, flashy and stylish, all the things that Michael was not. And that, I was now quite sure, was what I needed. Moreover, he seemed genuinely nice. He’d woken up in the middle of the night and said, ‘Are you OK?’

‘Mmpfff,’ I’d replied, asleep. ‘Why?’

He kissed me. ‘I don’t know. I just wanted to check. I couldn’t hear you breathing.’

I smiled. ‘I’m alive. Just worn out. Some man broke into my house last night and shagged me till I couldn’t move.’

Charlie chuckled, and kissed me in the dark. ‘You make me laugh,’ he said softly.

But who was I trying to fool? It was the sexual chemistry I wanted more of. It was electric. I’d forgotten what it was like to be with someone who excited you in every sense of the word, who thrilled and frightened you in equal measure.

When I was eleven I’d started a band in the playground called Fran and the Bitches. I didn’t know what bitches meant, of course, but I knew it was edgy and fierce. And I was a fierce lead singer, a massive attention-seeker, bumping and grinding long before I learned what bumping and grinding actually was, screwing my face up in affected emotion and performing to the (largely uninterested) kids in the playground from atop the green Grundon bins while my bitches jived below me.

Daniel Ashcroft, the school hunk, a boy who used actual hair products and kept a picture of Madonna in a locket round his neck, put out a rumour that he wanted to go steady with me after he’d been to one of our lunchtime recitals. For three weeks, that summer, I was his girlfriend. We’d snog each other with our hands between our mouths; we’d exchange gifts (biscuits we’d stolen from our parents’ kitchens) and sometimes we’d sneak off and sit in the evergreen tree behind the kitchens and listen to the dinner ladies slagging off our headmaster while they washed up. He’d solemnly cup my non-existent breast while gazing
studiously into the middle distance and I’d cup his arse awkwardly while staring at his face, hoping he might look at me. Those were heavenly times. Everyone knew about me: I was Fran-Daniel’s-girlfriend-and-founder-of-Fran-and-the-Bitches. My
stock was up. Then the summer holidays came and, like all good childhood relationships, we forgot about each other for six weeks.

Unfortunately for me, Daniel Ashcroft hadn’t forgotten about me temporarily: he’d forgotten about me completely. When we came back to school the following September, he had moved on to Stella Cartwright, who was from a tower block in Bermondsey. She had an earring and a fake tattoo and patent leather shoes. She out-cooled me by a good 400 per cent and Daniel knew it.

My stock went down. My Bitches resigned from the band because they were fed up with my spotlight-hogging tendencies and, besides, Stella had offered to audition them for backing-singer roles in her new R&B group, which rehearsed at lunchtime in the car park.

I was toast. After two weeks’ wandering around completely on my own, I had to make emergency friends with Crispin Ghanaba, a quiet, studious Ghanaian who was popular with no one in particular because he was far too good at schoolwork to be cool. But Crispin and I had a wonderful time together. We’d talk from the start of lunchtime to the end, making dens in the dust and discussing eleven-
year-olds’ politics. I wanted to be Kate Adie, he wanted to go home and take over as president of Ghana. When he was sent to a private school the following term, I was secretly heartbroken. Crispin may have been radically uncool but he was the best boyfriend I’d ever had. So when Daniel Ashcroft tried it on again at the leavers’ disco, I punched him in the face and stalked off, spending the rest of the evening sitting on the toilet, writing a letter to Crispin.

The similarities with my current situation had not eluded me. Michael had always been like Crispin: clever, fascinating, warm, quiet, reserved. But Charlie was what the egotistical part of me had always longed for: danger, sexiness, popularity, style, unpredictability. The kind of man who’d always keep me guessing. Just one night with him and I’d already started to wonder if perhaps I’d spent the last two years in a comfortable coma.

There was only one way to find out, I thought.
Treat yourself to life in the fast lane with this man
.
Nellie Daniels lives in the fast lane. I bet she doesn’t sit around talking to her cat on a Saturday afternoon. And she sure as buggery doesn’t have a muff like a rainforest. This, Frances O’Callaghan, is what proper girls do. They dress up. They party. They have sex. They go to spas and their fridges contain organic produce. Are you serious about Glam Fran? Lemme hear you!
I punched the air and extinguished my candle with a tidal wave of bubbles.

By the time I’d got out of the bath and fed Duke
Ellington, I’d decided that things were probably going to be OK. Michael would come back, I’d get some sex with a divine and exciting man in the interim, and I’d sort my life out.

I reached for my phone to call Leonie and update her on my plans, only to discover that while I’d been in the bath I’d missed twenty-seven calls. All from Mum. And the text that had just arrived in my inbox was from her. It read: Please come to my house urgently. Emergency.

Fran, I think it is extremely rude of you not to have replied to my text messages since our date. However, having read the newspaper I am rather glad you haven’t replied and would ask you not to contact me again. Best, James

I ran to the tube as fast as I could, trying not to throw up last night’s cocktails and redialling Mum every few seconds, but her phone was switched off. Something serious had happened. Mum had trouble remembering to call me on my birthday, let alone twenty-seven times in one day.

So when I arrived at Victoria to get on a train to Cheam, I was strangely unsurprised to see her face staring out at me from the corner of the
Mirror
on a newsstand. ‘Bennett’s Bit,’ the headline yelled. ‘
Tory big hope forced to admit extra-marital affair
’. In slow motion I picked up the newspaper and turned to page four. There, clutching a bottle of champagne and staggering across a carpet at some posh reception with her hair in her eyes, was Mum. And next to the picture, above a caption that read ‘Like mother, like daughter:
Bennett’s bid for top cabinet post is in tatters’ was me, falling off the kerb outside the Brit Awards. My knickers were plainly visible. If you looked hard enough, you could even see my tropical muff.

I handed the newspaper vendor a fiver and wandered off, clutching the newspaper to my chest as waves of nausea washed through me. I stared at a man who appeared at my elbow, trying to give me money. Ah, the newspaper vendor. I smiled distractedly at him and took it, drifting on towards ThickCrust kiosk where I ordered a salami baguette.

Perhaps this wasn’t really happening. Perhaps Charlie had drugged me last night and I was just entertaining an odd hallucination. Perhaps James from the Internet had been looking at crotch shots of someone else who just had the same name and knickers as me. I nibbled a mouse-sized portion off the end of the baguette only to find myself with a mouthful of armpit-flavoured salami. Past caring what people thought of me, I spat it into a bin and threw the rest of the baguette after it, leaning heavily on a pillar as another wave of sickness pummelled me.

Then I froze. Was some dirty little paparazzo following me right now? I pulled my hair over my face and glanced around furtively. The only person looking at me seemed to be the newspaper vendor, who was probably more interested in the fact that Knickers Girl from page four had just bought a paper from him than he was in my bin-hugging.

I breathed deeply and lurched off to Platform Nine where I curled up on a lurid red and orange train seat and hoped that everything would stop.

As the train pulled out of the station, I sat up and looked again at the paper.

It appeared, rather unfortunately, that this really
was
happening. There was Mum, drunk, half obscured by her champagne bottle. And there was me, drunk, half obscured by my pants, which were hogging most of the picture. The article was grim. I read it with an increasing sense of despair and humiliation.

Power-suited Eve O’Callaghan has been helping herself to Tory hopeful Bennett for nearly twenty years, we can reveal
.
The sordid affair has been conducted in O’Callaghan’s £400,000 semi in Cheam, right under the nose of Bennett‘s pretty wife Laura who is president of three local charities, mother of two, and pillar of the local community. Our source revealed that stiff-haired wine lover O’Callaghan often threatened to go to the press if Bennett ever left her. ‘It was pitiful,’ our insider told us. ‘She’d get wasted in the Prince of Wales and then leave crazed messages on his phone until he had no option but to go round.’

Who the fuck was this ‘source’?
No one
knew about the affair. It was possibly the best-kept secret in the history of politics! Nick’s wife knew, of course – she had done for at least ten years, but she would be the last person to tell the press. (Laura’s recent attempt to
upstage Mum’s Cheam in Bloom contribution was just the latest in a long line of suburban war tactics. My personal favourite had been when Laura had persuaded the director of the Cheam Players to demote Mum from the role of Hermia, in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, to Nick Bottom. Unfortunately Mum, drunk, had put up an unintentionally outstanding comic performance and received a standing ovation and several gushing local newspaper reviews.) Laura risked losing her husband and pride if she went to the press. It
couldn’t
have been her.

One of Nick’s colleagues? It felt unlikely. Nick had always been so sure that they knew nothing. He was almost as proud of his secret as he was of his wine cellar.

For months Bennett has feared that his dubious dealings might taint his political future, our source revealed, and so he recently started planning his escape from the toxic affair. It’s believed that his decision to leave booze hound O’Callaghan and her chip-off-the-old-block daughter were what prompted them both to go out and get slaughtered, as these pictures reveal.

If the Conservatives, widely tipped to win the General Election in May, aren’t able to form a scandal-free cabinet, then Cameron stands to lose widespread public support. Mother and daughter may be in need of help but
Mirror
readers have the right to know that there’s more to Bennett than meets the eye.

And there was the answer, right there in the text.
There’s more to Bennett than meets the eye.
I sat up and rested my head against the cold window, suddenly clear. ‘I’ve been spending a lot of time with his aides during my research,’ Alex had said pointedly. ‘I think there’s more to Nick Bennett than meets the eye.’ Then he’d winked.

Alex. Of course Alex. Alex who considered himself a
serious journalist.
Michael had said Alex would sell his own bloody mother if he believed she’d done something newsworthy. Instead, he’d sold mine. My vulnerable, confused, lonely mother, who would now lose the only person in her life she seemed to care about. My stomach churned furiously. How could he? How
could
he? What about
Michael
? Michael loved Mum!

Alex. The rotten, stinking
scumbag
. Hot tears gathered in my eyes as I began to scrabble around in my bag for my phone.

‘Hi, this is Alex Sutcliffe. You know what to do.’

I gathered all my strength, enough to sound like I wasn’t crying, and began to speak: ‘Alex, you are disgusting and despicable. I cannot believe you sold my mother to the press when you knew full well how vulnerable she was. Nick might be a fucking moron, Alex, but at least he loves her. But why would I expect you to know anything about love? If anything happens to her, you’ll have blood on your hands. You
scum
.’