The Chocolate Run (13 page)

‘I don’t mind,’ I replied.

‘Why don’t you put your bag and coat in my room while I get us some beers.’ Greg tossed the van keys onto the little wooden table beside the door and wandered towards the kitchen without offering me so much as a cuddle. He wasn’t going to be drawn into a row and he obviously wasn’t going to snog me, either.

I climbed the steep, narrow stairs, each one covered in a hideous red and blue Paisley carpet that Rocky’s mum had chosen, but the lads had been too lame to argue with her about. At the top I took a right to Greg’s room. He’d got the biggest room when they’d tossed for it. I assumed they meant tossed a coin, but seeing as there were three of them and two sides to a coin . . . well, I didn’t like to think it through too deeply.

In the past few years Rocky had converted the attic into his bedroom and the bathroom was moved up from the basement to his old bedroom. The basement then became the boys’ playroom with a snooker table, dartboard, cards table and small fridge with nothing but beer in it. Anyone else would’ve rented out the room – Rocky, Matt and Greg wanted a playroom. They lived such masculine lives I still maintained it a modern miracle that any of them had girlfriends.

I opened the door of Greg’s room, stood in the doorway, dropped my black rucksack, then stopped in the middle of slipping off my jacket. Slowly, my mouth fell open. Greg
had
tidied up. The floor was clear, all the pictures of airbrushed women had been taken down, each surface had been polished. The bed was made with pure white bedlinen and he’d sprinkled red and pink rose petals on top. Around the room, draped on the bookcases, along the mantelpiece and around the window sill were fairy lights.

The whole thing was dressed up like something from a movie. It put me in mind of that moment in a romantic comedy when the hero wins the heart of every woman in the audience by doing something like converting his meagre accommodation into a fairy grotto or selling his prized possession so he can be with the heroine for ever and ever. I’d never fallen for such acts in films.
What man would waste his time doing all that
, I used to think,
when he knows he’s going to get laid anyway?
This one, obviously.

‘Do you like it?’ Greg whispered, coming up behind me and enveloping me in his arms. The tug in my body, the physical manifestation of fancying him, surged through me again. He drew slow circles on my abdomen and each stroke made my body tug harder.

I nodded, unable to speak because the lump had returned to my throat. If he kept this up I could grow to feel more than ‘fancy’ about him. A lot more. And that would mean . . .

Are you sure you want to do this?
I asked myself. This is another step along that road to the unknown.
Are you sure you want to start down there?

In our fairy-lit room we lay entwined, laughing, giggling, chatting quietly like two people in a movie – all we lacked was a strategically placed sheet. I was calm and warm and satisfied. He was like a fleece blanket in which I’d been wrapped up. My usually frantic brain was at rest. I wasn’t thinking about shopping, or cleaning, or work, or joining a gym, or visiting my family . . . I was in the here and now.

Greg stroked my cheek so softly it was how I’d imagined a butterfly’s wing would feel, a whisper of a touch. ‘Are you asleep?’ he asked.

‘Not quite,’ I murmured back.

‘Do you want to talk?’

‘We are talking,’ I said, my eyes closed.

‘I mean talk about stuff.’

‘Like what?’ I mumbled, allowing sleep to seep into my senses.

‘You, um, know everything about my past, but I know virtually nothing about yours. Like how many people you’ve slept with.’

‘More than ten, less than twenty-two,’ I mumbled, my stock answer.

‘Or why your last relationship ended.’

‘Mmmmm . . .’

‘So . . . why did your last relationship end?’ Greg prompted.

‘Hmmm,’ I said, trying to concentrate. ‘Ummm,
Jackie Brown
.’

‘What?’ Greg said, knocking silk rose petals onto the floor as he sat up.

I exhaled in frustration.
Now
I was awake. ‘All right, you tell me who my last relationship was with, and I’ll tell you why it ended.’

‘Um . . . I remember a few months after Jen and Matt got together you weren’t around as much because you had a boyfriend. And I know he didn’t particularly like me because we were friends. But I never knew who he was.’

Didn’t particularly like you?
I thought.
That’s like saying the Grand Canyon is a pin-prick in the desert
. Sean
hated
Greg. Not ‘didn’t like’ or ‘resented’ – full-blooded, eye-narrowing, muscle-clenching hatred. I didn’t know it was possible to hate a person that much if you haven’t met them (apart from me and Tom Cruise, but that’s different). But Sean was living proof. He refused to meet Greg, not even so he could put a face to his hatred (‘Why would I want to meet that tosser?’ was his usual refrain) and became moody every time I met with Greg – even if Jen and Matt were going to be there. ‘I can tell he fancies you from the way he leaves messages on your answerphone,’ Sean constantly complained. Never mind I’d told him a million times I didn’t fancy Greg back.

Greg didn’t help matters. One time he’d walked in on me getting changed at Jen’s flat and got a flash of bare back, maybe a bit of bum and thigh, nothing more. Greg, in his infinite humour, rang my answerphone and sang ‘The Thong Song’ (I didn’t wear thongs, but there weren’t any songs that said, ‘Let me see those sensible black pants’) into it. I’d innocently played the message when Sean was there and felt the temperature in the room plummet. Sean’s soft features had hardened as he gritted his teeth, a muscle pulsating in his neck. Some bloke wanting to see your girlfriend’s pants wasn’t funny, especially when you hated the bloke doing the asking. I dived for the delete button and erased all evidence of Greg being interested in my underwear. ‘If he touches you, I’ll kill him,’ Sean said in that scary tone gangsters in
The Godfather
employ right before they sanction the murdering of someone’s kin.

‘But you were my friend, you were supposed to show an interest,’ I said to Greg in the here and now.

‘I was interested but I sort of fancied you, so didn’t want to know about you and another bloke, I couldn’t handle it.’

‘Why do you want to know now?’

‘You’re my girlfriend, I can handle it,’ he replied. Then added quietly: ‘Mostly.’

‘Do we have to talk about this now?’ I said.

‘Yes. Tell me why it ended and I’ll drop it.’

I sighed. ‘I told you.
Jackie Brown
.’

‘Is she a real person?’

‘No. The film. That piece of filth nonsense by Quentin Tarantino called
Jackie Brown
,’ I hissed. I paused, waiting for the heavens to come crashing in. ‘Wow! I said something by Tarantino was rubbish and the world didn’t end.’

Greg’s face fell. ‘But,
Pulp Fiction
—’

‘Had a horrific rape scene that didn’t need to be in it,’ I cut in before I got a thesis on how amazingly postmodern it was. I’d heard all arguments on that film from people inside and outside the industry and not one of them had managed to convince me that it or Tarantino was a genius. Just because something was postmodern didn’t stop it from being crap. ‘Everyone seems to think if you’re young and into film, you have to like Tarantino. Well, Sean – my boyfriend you didn’t want to know about because you sort of fancied me – thought that Tarantino was God and that
Jackie Brown
was something akin to the Holy Grail.

‘And that’s fair enough. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, even if it’s wrong. Except I told Sean what I thought so, the day he brought that film to my flat, I flipped. I said not to put it near my video, and he flipped in return. By the time he’d finished having a go at me, I was the Antichrist, I was crap in bed and I’d always be alone. And that’s why my relationship ended, because of
Jackie Brown
.’

‘Did you talk much about getting back together?’

‘After that day, we never spoke again.’

‘What, not at all?’

‘Not at all.’

‘Do you think he used
Jackie Brown
as an excuse to chuck you?’

‘To be honest, I try not to think about it, what with it being such a bloody stupid reason to break up and all.’

‘So, if he wanted you back, what would you say?’

‘We split up eighteen months ago, if he wanted me back, he’d have said something by now.’

‘No, but just say he did?’

‘He w—’

‘I want to know.’

I was reaching for the sarky answer, the one I’d normally give to Greg, my mate, when I caught his expression as reflections of the fairy lights twinkled in his eyes. He was worried. It hit me as hard as a lorry, he was genuinely scared. Maybe he didn’t think he’d be able to compete with someone from my past. Maybe he feared the idea of Sean being The One That Got Away. Whatever it was, he was scared. It wasn’t an emotion I’d ever associated with him when it came to women, but he was. He was, and I couldn’t add to that by being sarky. Besides, he was Greg, my lover, only sadistic bastards messed with their lover’s emotions.

‘I’d say, “Go back to
Jackie Brown
, boy.”’

Greg physically relaxed. ‘Come here,’ he whispered, pulling me close and pressing his lips against my forehead. He then kissed me on the lips before snuggling back against the pillows and closing his eyes. That was all he needed to hear – that I wasn’t hankering after something from the past.

I listened to his breathing as it slowed and slowed the closer he got to sleep. His hold around me loosened slightly as he finally succumbed to slumber.

I wasn’t sleepy any more. I was wide awake. The fairy lights were still on.
How can I slip out of his arms without waking him and turn them off before I go to sleep? Sleep? Like I can sleep now
, I thought.
I wish Greg hadn’t dragged all that stuff out of me. Why did he have to bring up Sean? When things were so perfect, he had to bring up Sean. It’d meant I had to, well, not
lie,
lie. Just be economical with the truth
.

Greg wouldn’t be able to handle the truth. It was for his sake that I omitted a few details about Sean and me. They were salient details, but I did it for him. To protect him.

All right, so the lady doth protest too much. But it really was for the greater good.

‘when you buy chocolate you’re buying yourself a new best friend’

chapter eleven

the thing about cannes

‘I’m not going and that’s final.’

‘You are!’

I could hear Martha and Renée from the far end of the corridor. In fact, the second I stepped out of the lift, I heard Martha’s Yorkshire accent ‘explaining’ that she wasn’t open to the idea Renée had put to her, and Renée’s Yorkshire-tinged French accent trying to ‘persuade’ her into it. I spun on my heels to get back in the lift.

Unfortunately, the lift doors closed in my face.

My heart plummeted and settled around my ankles as I approached the office. I didn’t need a calendar to work out what time of the year it was. It’d started. The annual row that was who was going to Cannes.

‘It’s not in my job description. I am the administrator,’ Martha shouted like a teenager telling her parents she’d go out with whoever she liked. ‘I keep an eye on the accounts, I run the office, I tell you which films you can afford, I tell you how much you can spend on the brochure. Nowhere does it say I have to go to Cannes.’

See?

I slowed my walk.

‘It says in your contract that you have to do whatever extraduties we decide,’ Renée replied in the manner of a parent telling her daughter as long as she lived under her roof she’d do as she was told.

I paused beside the office next to ours so neither of them could see me. God knows what the people in the other two offices on this floor thought of the constant screaming that emanated from our office.

I hated rows. Even from a voyeuristic angle.
Particularly
from a voyeuristic angle. Arguments took me right back to being a girl. To what rowing meant. I couldn’t stand to listen to raised voices, unnecessary insults, words being scalded as they were issued. Waiting, just waiting for that one insult too far; that word that would send someone over the edge . . .

Renée loved arguing. I was convinced she had employed Martha because Martha had ‘bring it on’ written all over her and I wouldn’t give her the rows she wanted. If Renée went off on one, I’d say nothing ’til she finished. I’d say nothing when she finished. My basic plan of action was waiting for Renée’s temper to blow itself out, which it inevitably did.

Martha, on the other hand . . . Martha had an aggressive streak a mile wide. She’d worked with WYIFF for about twenty-one months and not one of those months had gone by without her and Renée having some kind of throw-down moment, where one of them would literally throw down the gauntlet and a big fight would follow. When they started, it’d be my job to stop them. Calm them down, play best mate to both of them, reassure them they were both right, agree the other was a bitch who really did deserve to have her hair ripped out from the roots, dispense tea and biscuits. Those were the big rows, every week they had some kind of spat. Even during Martha’s three-month probationary period she’d rowed with Renée, which was incredible to me. You’ve just started a new job, you could get fired at a week’s notice, so what do you do? Tell your boss to piss off at every given opportunity, of course. Still, she’d got the job so it worked for her.

I leant against the wall, started to gnaw on the edge of my thumbnail.

To be fair, though, this wasn’t just their argument – it’d gone on for all the eleven years I’d been involved with the Festival.

The Cannes Film Festival (Cannes, to those of us in the industry) seemed so glamorous when you first started working at the Festival that you never understood why nobody wanted to go. You got up close to all those actors, writers and directors. You sometimes got to be in the same picture as Denzil Washington or Susan Sarandon. That’s what working in the movie industry was all about, no? When you actually went . . . Put it this way, the first year I attended, I’d arrived with sunglasses and summer clothes packed, a script and a novel to read, plus a guidebook to see some sights when I wasn’t working . . .