The Chocolate Run (2 page)

We regularly went out alone after that. And, three years later, Gregory ‘Tosser’ Walterson had become my second-best mate. He was number two on all my phone speed dials; the second person I called when anything big happened; the person I spent most time with after Jen. We talked and emailed every day. He was Greg, after all. My mate. Still a tosser, but now my mate who happened to be a tosser. Nothing more. Honestly, nothing more, until last night.

‘Huh? Huh? Whaddaya think?’ he asked, turning to show me his juggling properly. Before I could reply, he miscalculated a catch and everything was thrown off balance and suddenly the blade end of the knife was hurtling towards his hand. He jerked his hand away with a fraction of a second to spare and the knife fell to the floor, closely followed by the rest of his tools. The spoon clattered away across the kitchen, the onion rolling behind it. But the tomato, which had been overripe and spoiling for a fight anyway, exploded with a damp splodge, juice and flesh and seeds oozing out on the red and white lino tiles.

Greg grimaced at the splattered tomato, then glanced up at me. ‘Oops,’ he said.

‘“Oops”?’ I replied. ‘What do you mean “Oops”?’

He shrugged. ‘Oops.’

‘Cloth, water.’ I pointed at the sink. ‘Get cleaning.’

‘Sorry, mate, you’ve seen my bedroom, you know I don’t clean.’

He then picked up the onion, went back to the cupboard, took out a clean knife, returned to the chopping board, and sliced the top off the onion. He even started whistling as he stripped the onion of its outer layer.

‘“I don’t clean”, indeed,’ I said above his out-of-tune whistling. ‘You’re lucky I don’t batter you with a teaspoon, yer cheeky
get
.’

Greg laughed. A laugh so warm and easy that I’d long suspected it came from somewhere deep in his heart. Hearing it was like having sunshine poured directly into your ears, feeling it radiate throughout your body. His laugh often made me laugh. Right then, I could only rustle up a small smile.

A few seconds later, I bobbed down with a damp J-cloth to clean up the tomato explosion.

This is so weird
, I thought.
It’s like every other morning he’s spent here. Anyone looking in at us, at how he’s chopping and I’m cleaning, wouldn’t guess we’d
. . .

I lifted the lid on the bin but paused before dropping in the tomato-soiled cloth – it’d gone suspiciously quiet at Greg’s end of the kitchen. And ‘quiet’ meant he’d broken something and was trying to hide the evidence. My ‘Director’ mug had gone that way, as had the scary cat mugs my mum bought me. (That was a bonus seeing as I’d tried a few times to ‘accidentally’ end their existence and they seemed to be protected by some kind of force field.) I glanced around to check what he was up to.

My stomach lurched to find him watching me. Openly, blatantly staring at me.

His Minstrel eyes, which had been intensely fixed on me, jerked into huge circles of fear. Recovering his composure, he struggled with a small, shy smile, lowered his eyes, then spun back to continue chopping.

I turned back to the bin with my heart galloping in my chest and my whole body aflame. I flung the tomato and cloth into the bin, let the lid fall into place.

It was only a look, a glance, a mere expression
, I told myself.
It didn’t mean anything. Yeah, and you can walk on water.

RRRIINGGG!

Like an unwelcome alarm clock the phone shattered my late Saturday morning peace.

I was showered, pyjamaed, and curled up under my duvet on my sofa. I’d attempted to go back to bed after Greg left, but had been poleaxed by the state of my bedroom. The rumpled bedclothes, the condom wrappers on the floor, the wicker bin with used condoms in it, clothes I’d been wearing last night flung to the four corners. Worst of all, it reeked of it. Us. What we’d done. Even after I’d opened the large sash window and let in the frosty February air, the smell was there. As though it’d seeped into the paintwork and carpet and ceiling cornicing and wasn’t ever going to leave.

So, I’d done the decent thing and ignored it, knowing that if I ignored it long and hard enough, it’d magically tidy itself. I’d trooped off to the shower, returned to find it wasn’t tidied, and promptly upped the level and severity of blanking (it really was going to work). I’d been drifting off with a film on the TV when the phone rang. I picked up the receiver and mumbled a hello.

‘Hi, Ambs.’

Jen.

JEN!

My eyes flew open and I sat bolt upright on the sofa.
What the hell am I going to tell her?
Am
I going to tell her?
I told Jen everything but this was different. This was, in a word, stupid. In two words: bloody stupid. In fourteen words: this was so bloody stupid, I still couldn’t believe it and I’d been there.

‘Hello, lovely,’ I said, now more panicked than sleepy. There was always the possibility that I’d blurt it out. She’d ask some innocuous question and I’d get a bout of confessional Tourette’s and scream out the awful truth.

‘Oh, sorry, did I wake you?’ Jen paused, obviously to check the time. ‘Your Saturday mornings are precious, aren’t they?’ She only remembered my Saturday mornings were precious after she’d got me on the phone.

Matt, her boyfriend, aka Greg’s best friend, played football on Saturday mornings with Greg and some other lads down at Woodhouse Moor, the park near where Greg and Matt lived. Even though Jen lived all the way over the other side of town in Allerton and he spent a lot of time there, Matt still drove across Leeds to play with the boys, as it were. As soon as Matt pulled off in his car, Jen would be on the phone to me. We’d chat until Matt came back, then I’d dive back under the covers for a couple more hours of shut-eye. That’s if Greg didn’t call to give me a blow-by-blow account of the football game or his latest conquest. Or, as was most likely, both.

‘It’s all right,’ I said, stretching my body in a deep arc, trying to unkink my back. ‘I’ve been up for ages.’

‘
Really?
’ Jen’s voice perked up. ‘Why?’

‘Erm, couldn’t sleep.’

‘Ah. How was last night?’ she asked.

She knows. Greg, who hadn’t talked to me about what had happened, had already told them and she’s ringing to see how long I hold out on her. The big-mouthed
get
. First he stayed for breakfast, then he was looking at me, now he was spreading rumours. True rumours. To our friends. But rumours is rumours
. ‘Erm, what was last night?’ I replied cautiously.

‘Duh! Greg went to the film with you, didn’t he?’

‘Oh, yeah. Yeah. Sorry.’

‘How was it?’

‘Fine. He was fine.’

‘Double duh! I mean the film.’

‘Oh, sorry, yeah. It was all right. Greg liked it, but then Greg likes
Carry On
movies, so there you go. I thought it was mediocre.’

‘Oh well, never mind. What did you do afterwards?’

‘Erm . . . had dinner then he stayed over.’
In my bed. While we had sex. All night
.

‘That’s where he was! Matt called him to say he wasn’t going to footie this morning and Greg wasn’t home and his mobile was off. We thought he must’ve pulled and stayed in Sheffield.’

‘Why isn’t Matt at footie?’ I asked, seizing this opportunity to change the subject – the less she talked about Greg, the less chance there was of me confessing.

Jen lowered her voice. ‘He’s going to kill me but I have to tell you. Matt asked me what I wanted for my birthday and I said, “You to move in here” and he said yes. We’re going to move in together.’

I screamed. ‘OHMIGOD!’ I yelled into the receiver. ‘I can’t believe it’s finally happened! FINALLY! And I can’t believe it’s taken you six million years to tell me! So? So? Details.’

Jen lowered her voice some more: ‘Can’t. Tell you Monday night, when it’s all official. Don’t tell anyone. Especially not Greg if you see him.’

‘Why would I see Greg?’ I said defensively. I wasn’t being at all suspicious, was I?

‘You might go to lunch or something?’ Jen said carefully, as though trying to talk me down from chucking myself off a building. ‘You do go to lunch with Greg quite often, don’t you?’

‘Oh. Right.’

‘Are you all right, sweetie? You seem a bit . . .’

‘Out of it? It’s the whole lack of sleep thing. Not as young as I used to be, you know.’

‘OK. Well, you try and sleep now. Matt’s here, we’re going shopping. So, I’ll see you Monday, all right? Six-thirtyish at The Conservatory.’

‘Yup, see ya there. Bye.’

If I hadn’t been so comfy where I was, I would’ve done a lap of honour around my living room once I’d hung up. In my current condition, I settled for punching the air with my arms and legs, going, ‘Yesss! Yessss! Yeeesss!’

She’d finally got it. A big commitment from Matt. A real, tangible declaration that he thought of their relationship as something permanent. This was big stuff for Matt – this man was sometimes reticent about breathing because of the effort involved. I never, ever thought he’d commit.

The last time Jen and I had dissected this very subject – and it had to be admitted we dissected it a lot – Jen had said, ‘I want to get to the point where I can tell Matt anything and everything, like I tell you everything.’

That thought made me tug the duvet over my head. In less than twenty-four hours I’d done two unbelievable things: slept with Greg; held out on Jen.

All I had to do was donate all my savings to the Conservative Party and everyone would know the invasion of the Body Snatchers had begun.

chapter three

the big bang

Silence. Everything was silence.

Pure, perfect silence. The kind of silence that is invariably followed by trouble. The kind of silence, I’d imagine, that came before the Big Bang that created our universe. (Or, if you believe in creation theories, the kind of silence that came while God scratched His head and wondered if He should make the oceans blue or a nice peachy colour.) Our office had that silence. Everyone held their breath. Everyone was waiting for the Big Bang.

The five of us in the office were expecting it, but when it happened, when the explosion came, four of us jumped. I, being closest to the epicentre of the blow-up, jumped the least – I was immediately caught in the blast and couldn’t physically move, even if I wanted to.

‘WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED THE FILMS? WHAT, NONE OF THEM?’ the Big Bang screamed.

This was Renée. My boss,
The
Boss. She was lovely. Honest. I’ve always liked Renée, have always had a deep respect for her. Even when, at times like this, she was shouting at me.

I’d just told her I hadn’t done my ‘homework’ over the weekend and because I hadn’t done my homework, the meeting she had scheduled for that afternoon wasn’t going to go the way she expected. I’d let her down and rather than sit there slowly imploding while giving me the full-on, pursed-lipped, teeth-gnashing silent treatment, she’d chosen to explode.

On paper, on my CV, I’d worked for West Yorkshire International Film Festival (WYIFF) for nearly eleven years.

Since I was a little girl I’d been obsessed with films and television; I wasn’t allowed to play out much as a child, or party at all as a teenager, so I experienced life through the world on my TV; saw the wonders of life, love and everything through the box in the corner. That fascination with the moving image never left me.

During the first year of college we had to do a four-month work placement in a profession that we were interested in working in. I asked to work at a Hollywood film studio – I got the WYIFF.

I spent most of March to June as WYIFF’s unpaid skivvy, researching and photocopying for the brochure, and I loved it. Most people whinged about not being paid; about being given menial tasks; about people treating them like fourth-class citizens. Not me. So what if I had to make the tea and do photocopying and run errands? I got to sit in an office with a group of people who knew an incredible amount about films and one of whom had snogged a rather famous American film director. And another of whom had been a very famous actress during her teens. After the placement was over, I kept ‘dropping by’ the office – in the same manner you ‘dropped by’ the places you knew someone you fancied frequented – helping out.

That following September, during the two weeks of the actual Festival, I was there again. I stood at venues, proudly wearing a WYIFF T-shirt, taking people to their seats, ripping tickets, handing out brochures that had my name in it. My name. That was it for me. I signed myself over. Pledged my soul to the god of WYIFF. Had basically walked into my idea of job heaven and didn’t want to leave. So, I didn’t. Every Easter, every summer, every Festival, every chance when I wasn’t earning money to pay my rent or eat for the following five years, I was there, lurking around the office, offering to help. Eventually, they took pity on me and paid me to compile their brochure. Even more eventually after that they offered me a full-time position as Festival Assistant. After a proper, full-time year I became Senior Festival Assistant. And a year after that, I became Deputy Festival Director. That was four years ago.

In real terms that meant diddly-squat because there were now only three full-time members of WYIFF – Renée, the Festival Director; Martha, the Festival Administrator and me.

Me. The person who had a pile of vids stacked in her living room that she was meant to watch and report back to Renée on before her meeting with the film production company, that afternoon. From our little office, the huge, star-studded event in mid-September that showcased West Yorkshire as an area of outstanding artistic interest was executed. We organised it, came up with the themes, invited people, arranged the programme. Also, big film premieres that were held up here were organised by us – including sending out invites to getting press interest and organising the stay of any actors.

On top of that, we sometimes undertook consultancy work. If we saw a production company had potential or if we had time, we’d give people advice on getting funding, editing their work, casting and scripts. That was what Renée would be doing that afternoon, if not for me.

But, but, Saturday was a write-off once I’d put on my pyjamas. I couldn’t face watching what could potentially be a shite film, and the title –
Welcome to Vomit Central
– didn’t exactly inspire confidence in the product. Sunday, in between
T4
,
EastEnders
and running around town putting the finishing touches to Jen’s birthday present, there wasn’t enough time.