It Would Be Wrong to Steal My Sister's Boyfriend (16 page)

Obviously that was the end of my fond ambitions about being an actress, and I’ve
even thought that if I ever get married, I’ll have to ask all the guests to close their eyes when I walk up the aisle, because otherwise the experience will be too terrifying. So since starting the job at YEESH, I’d dodged any suggestion that I might like to represent the organisation on ‘national television’, as it’s always called.

“It won’t be so bad,” Ruth said. “They’re happy to send a camera crew round to the office, it’s not a live audience or anything like that.”

“Go on, Ellie, you’ll be brilliant,” said Russell again, a one-man cheerleading squad.

“Okay,” I said. “Tell them I’ll do it.”

“You’re a lifesaver.” Ruth reached for the phone and I finished my coffee and felt sick.

Of course I got no work done while we waited for the appointed hour to arrive. Ruth and I wrote a few sound-bites and printed them out, and once she’d gone off to collect Chessie I got Russell to pretend to be the interviewer and I rehearsed them over and over until I was word perfect. Then I dashed off to Boots and bought a load of makeup and troweled it on.

When I got back to the office there were wires trailing everywhere and lights being set up. Russell was standing in front of the camera holding a piece of A4 paper up next to his face and looking important. “Here’s Ellie now,” he said. “We’re just checking the white balance.” Bless him – clearly he was wishing he was going to be on telly as passionately as I was wishing I wasn’t.

“I’m Karen, the producer,” said a pretty, dark-haired girl in a navy-blue suit. “And Paul’s our cameraman. Now if you don’t mind just stepping over here,” she ushered Russell out of the way and I noticed him give a last, longing look at the camera, “we’ll get
started. Could you say your name so we can check the sound levels?”

I opened my mouth and a strangled squeak came out. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Ellie Mottram.” My voice sounded thin and high.

“Thanks Ellie,” said Karen. “Okay to go, Paul?”

“Okay,” said Paul.

“Great. Ellie, just relax and try to address your answers to me, not to the camera.”

I nodded, feeling as if my mouth was stuffed with cotton wool.

“Ellie, YEESH’s recently launched campaign to raise awareness of the increasing rate of STIs in young people has been labelled offensive and scaremongering. How would you respond to that?”

I swallowed and took a trembly breath. I could feel cold sweat springing out on my palms. “The campaign has attracted some negative comment,” I squeaked, and cleared my throat again, “but they say there’s no such thing as bad publicity. And although it’s been criticised in some sectors, there has been a huge amount of praise from others, particularly from some influential medical bloggers.”

I was starting to relax. Imagine you’re talking to Rose, I told myself firmly.

“And even if people don’t like the message,” I went on, “the fact remains that it needs to be heard. Rates of infection are increasing in young people at a rate higher than at any time since…” And I was off. All the words Ruth and I had prepared were neatly lining up in my head, waiting for their turn. I could hear my voice returning to more or less its normal level as I trotted out the statistics and figures. Karen asked a couple more questions about the funding of the campaign and I answered them easily.

“Great,” she said, “I think we have enough now. You’ll be on at six and ten this evening provided nothing huge comes up.”

She thanked me, and Paul packed up all his wires and lights, and they both left, and I collapsed into my chair.

“How was I?” I said needily to Russell.

“Fab,” he assured me. “Brilliant. Like you did it every day.”

I couldn’t face watching the news that night, but my Twitter feed was full of friends saying kind things about how well I’d come across, and when I checked my email there was a message from Vanessa’s boss Barri.

“Saw you tonight on BBC1 – very impressive. You are a highly credible candidate and project the image we’re looking for at Black & White. I’d very much like to see you for an interview later in the week. My PA will be in touch to agree a convenient time.”

There was no message from Ben, nor Claire, nor Rose. But Oliver had written on my wall on Facebook. “Congratulations – just seen you on the box and you were brilliant. You were as dazzling as you were compelling. Hope to see you soon.” He’d finished the message with a couple of kisses, and – oh my God – invited me to his thirty-fifth birthday party in six weeks’ time, along with Rose and about forty other people whose names I didn’t recognise. His birthday was a week before Pers’s first, and I couldn’t help feeling that that must be some sort of omen, although of what I couldn’t say.

I don’t want to give you the idea that my work at YEESH was one long round of fabulousness, all being on the telly and getting to buy new lipstick on expenses – nothing could be further form the truth. In fact, just two days later, I was up at five in the morning to catch the first train into the office and there load up the minge bus with about a ton of information leaflets, posters, medical supplies, our rather festive ‘You’re the boss of your
body’ bunting and a gross of condoms, and head off to a college in Enfield for one of our mobile clinics. Duncan was back from holiday (looking ridiculously tanned in contrast to everyone else’s February pallor) and Leda back from Scotland, so I’d offered to stand in for Ruth as meeter and greeter and let her hold the fort at the office and have a lie-in for once.

By the time we’d set ourselves up in two empty classrooms, arranged all the literature about the HPV vaccine and the contraceptive implant and ‘No means No’ and all the rest on a table and baited it with bowls of mini Mars bars, it was nine thirty. The punters were already beginning to loiter about, the boys kicking the floor and turning up the music on their MP3 players and trying to look like they knew it all already; the girls stood in little giggling groups, nudging one another and going, “You first, Kaylee.” “No, you first, Lily.” I sat down behind the table, ready to direct the boys one way to Duncan and the girls the other way to Leda, and braced myself for the onslaught.

After eight unrelenting hours of saying, “Hi, my name’s Ellie. Would you just like to grab some brochures or would you like to chat to someone?” and explaining that I was totally unqualified to answer any questions and they’d have to wait, and dealing with the odd smart arse trying to embarrass me by saying, “Miss, my mate’s bust his wrist. If he wanks with the other hand, will it feel like someone else doing it?” and smiling nicely and saying I was sure Duncan would be able to help, I felt like I never wanted to see a teenager again.

Alongside the brash, confident, sassy kids were so many sad, shy ones in shabby clothes who looked like they had no one at home to listen to their problems or give them advice, and who couldn’t meet my eye as they whispered why they were there. Such were Duncan and Leda’s tact and skill that they all walked out looking less frightened, bewildered and embarrassed than they had walking in, and it was honestly quite humbling to think that in the few minutes they spent with each boy or girl, they might be making a real difference to
their lives.

At last five o’clock arrived and we drove in silence back to the office, where we performed the morning’s routine all over again in reverse – the bunting folded up, the much-depleted stocks of condoms and brochures returned to the stationery cupboard, the stocks of the Pill and the MAP and all the rest placed back under lock and key. Leda and Duncan headed wearily home, and I said I’d just send a few emails then lock up. But as soon as all was quiet, I sat at my desk, took out my mobile and called Ben.

“Oh, hi, it’s me,” I babbled as soon as he answered. “I’m sure you’re terribly busy but I’m passing through north London” – well, the minge bus had done so, about two hours before – “and I wondered if you fancied a drink?”

There was a pause, then Ben said, “I’m sorry, Ellie, but I don’t think I can.”

I waited for him to say, “Until later…” or “Tonight, because…” or suggest meeting up another time, but he didn’t. He stayed quiet. And the next thing I knew, I was blurting out, “Ben. Is this about you and Claire?”

There was another long pause, before Ben said, “Ellie, I’m not free to meet you tonight.”

I felt almost as if I’d been hit. Tears pricked my eyes and I struggled to catch my breath, and when I did my voice sounded all croaky. “Okay,” I said. “I guess we’ll talk sometime. Bye.” I ended the call and stared for a few seconds at the blank, unhelpful screen of my phone. I looked around the shabby, cluttered office of YEESH, and thought of the job offer from Black & White that had arrived in my inbox that afternoon, and I found I had made a decision. I needed to move on – from my job, from Ben, towards a future that held different things and perhaps even a different me. You know what it’s like when you get a new job. For about the first week you’re figuring out where the loo is and where to get decent coffee, and eating your lunch at your desk like Billy No-mates, and not saying much in meetings because you don’t want to say the wrong thing, and mixing up Jackie from accounts with Lauren from HR, and all that stuff. Then all of a sudden you start feeling like part of the furniture and you can start doing some proper work. That’s what it was like for me when I started at Black & White, anyway.

It felt really weird on my first day, getting the train into Victoria instead of Waterloo, making my way through Mayfair to the splendid Regency building and going round the back to the staff entrance instead of pushing through the imposing glass doors. I had to sign in and be given a temporary pass, then wait at security watching various motorbike couriers dropping off and collecting important-looking parcels, waiting for Barri to turn up. When eventually he did, he was even shorter, camper and more Australian than I remembered. Ever since I was old enough to devote much thought to important, abstract things, I’ve known that prejudice is bad and wrong, but I’m sure we all have little corners of our minds where ideas and assumptions that really don’t belong there lurk in little dust-covered heaps, and every now and then something happens to make you realise they are there, and meeting Barri made me realise I had stereotyped Antipodeans in my head as being macho and tall.

Instead, Barri was a plump little man of about five foot three, with expensively cut hair and expensively cut suits that he wore just a bit too padded about the shoulders, and his hand when I shook it was as soft as a child’s. He ushered me up to the marketing department’s sumptuous office, which had a deep dove- grey carpet on the floor and was lit by huge black chandeliers, and showed me to a sleek white desk in the middle of a row of other, identical sleek white desks.

Nine thirty came and the other people in the department started to drift into the office, and honestly it was like watching a fashion show. One after another they pushed open the door, paused to make an entrance, then sashayed towards their desks, carefully putting one foot directly in front of the other as they walked, so their hips swayed elegantly and their legs looked very, very thin. One after another they came up to me and offered cool, soft hands for me to shake, and introduced themselves.

“Isla, creative services.”

“Odette, e-commerce.”

“Daisy, events management.”

“Piper, copywriter.”

And so on and on, a seemingly endless parade of posh, groomed girls. In my head I nicknamed them the Barriettes. Finally in bustled one boy, who looked plump and harassed and barely old enough to be out of school, and he was, “Torquil, admin bitch.” And so my first day began with me feeling lumpy and out of place – although not badly dressed, thanks to Vanessa. But as the days went by I realised that Piper was actually quite a good laugh, and that no one liked Daisy so it didn’t really matter that I thought she was totally up herself, and, as I say, gradually I stopped feeling quite so much like the new girl. I even managed to push to the back of my mind the horrible guilt I felt about letting Ruth, Duncan and my friends at YEESH down, especially as Barri had wanted me to start ASAP, so I’d taken some of my outstanding holiday in lieu of part of my notice period. But what with all the settling in, and a few evening functions I had to go to, I didn’t have much time to think about anything but the new job for a while.

On my second Friday there I was surreptitiously looking at my phone, wondering whether I should text Rose to find out what she was up to and guiltily noticing a missed call
from Dad from three days before that I hadn’t returned, when it rang, and Ben’s brother Alex’s name flashed up on the screen. That’s literally how I have him saved on my phone – “Alex (B’s bro)”. Although I’ve known Alex for ages, almost as long as I’ve known Ben, we’ve never made a habit of ringing each other, because we’ve always been in touch via Ben, so I knew he must have vital intelligence to impart.

After we’d exchanged a few random pleasantries, Alex said, “Ellie, I fear the phantom menace has returned.” He’s a bit of a sci-fi nut, is Alex – I’ve sometimes thought this may be why he doesn’t have a girlfriend. I knew straight away what he meant, though.

I said, “Nina?”

Alex said, “Yes.”

I said, “How?”

He said, “Facebook.”

I said, “Shit.”

My first thought was of Claire. I had no idea how her relationship with Ben was panning out, not having spoken to either of them for almost a month. Well, I’d spoken to Claire once, but told her I was terribly busy in my new job and would call her back, but I hadn’t. Thinking about that made me feel as sick with guilt as remembering Dad’s missed call did, so I was trying not to. But if Nina was back on the scene, Claire was going to need my friendship like she never had before. She stood no chance against Nina, who would suck Ben into herself like some sort of dark matter, consuming him just like she did six years before.

When Ben and Nina got together, Ben and I had been in a routine of seeing each other two or three times a week. We’d meet up for drinks or go and see a film or I’d go round to his and scrounge dinner – even back then, he was a much better cook that I’ve ever been.
Occasionally we’d sleep together, but I told myself I wasn’t in the market for a relationship, I was young and free and had no intention of settling down, and we were friends, companions, partners in crime. But then Nina came along, and all that stopped.