Waiting for Doggo (20 page)

‘Hey,’ chides Edie. ‘I can whip something up for us.’

We get cheese soufflé and a green salad, which we eat by candlelight at the small circular dining table.

‘I’ve never seen anyone die before,’ says Edie eventually.

‘Me neither.’ I lay my fork on my plate. ‘It didn’t seem like dying, more like she just floated off somewhere else.’

‘Like a balloon.’

‘Like he gave her a little nudge and off she went.’

Edie glances at Doggo curled on the sofa. ‘I really don’t think he should be moved, not tonight.’

‘No?’

‘Stay,’ she says.

‘I can crash on the sofa with him. Do you have a blanket?’

‘Sorry, no blankets. You’ll have to come in with me.’ She smiles. ‘I promise to keep my hands to myself.’

‘If Tristan finds out …’

‘He won’t. And it’s a chance to fine-tune our pitch.’

What with the events of the past few hours, it has completely slipped my mind: we’re presenting our take on the Vargo TV ad to Ralph and Tristan tomorrow afternoon.

We lie there on our backs in the darkness, she in a T-shirt and knickers, me in my boxer shorts (no shirt, because I’ll only crease it and I’ve got to wear it again tomorrow). We do indeed discuss our pitch, refining it, coming up with a couple of additional slick phrases of the kind that will appeal to Tristan. It’s not late, but we’re both drained, and I can feel myself beginning to drift off. I keep dragging myself back from the brink, wanting to stretch out the pleasure, to revel in the strangely suppressed intimacy of staring at the ceiling together.

‘I’m glad it worked out.’

‘What’s that?’ she asks.

‘The job.’

‘Me too. Everyone is. You’ve gone down well with the troops.’

‘Megan aside.’

‘True.’

‘She asked me for the recording yesterday,’ I say.

‘What did you tell her?’

‘That I’d already deleted it.’

‘Insurance?’

I only know I’m going to say it a split second before the words tumble out of my mouth. ‘I lied to you too … about the lunch with my mother.’

She turns her head to look at me. ‘Oh Dan, you poor thing.’

‘No, it’s okay.’ The tremor in my voice suggests otherwise.

She swivels on to her side. ‘Who?’

I can’t give her a name because I don’t have one. I tell her everything else I know, though, calmly fielding her questions. When I’m done, she slips out of bed and closes the door.

‘I’m not sure he could take it in his current condition,’ she says as she slides back beneath the duvet.

‘What’s that?’

‘Here, I’ll show you.’

She wriggles closer, and a moment later I feel the soft, searching pressure of her lips on mine.

G
OD ONLY KNOWS
what Doggo makes of it all. He has witnessed me sleep with three different women in little more than a month. I want to tell him that three women in four years is a much more accurate indicator of my sexual promiscuity.

He’s better this morning, though not by much, just enough to wag his tail weakly when I dump myself next to him on the sofa. I’m still not convinced we did the right thing. Yes, he got to say goodbye to his beloved Zsa Zsa, but what consolation is that to a dog? I’m not sure they appreciate the finer points of closure.

We’ve been sitting solemnly beside each other for ten minutes when Edie appears, padding down the corridor in bare feet and a T-shirt that’s just too short to conceal everything.

‘Morning, boys.’ Her voice is still husky with sleep.

‘Oh God, look at you …’ I say, winded by a sudden stab of desire.

She kneels in front of us and kisses Doggo on the top of his head. She then takes my face in her hands and kisses me gently on the lips. ‘Coffee?’ she asks.

‘Sounds good.’

‘Toast?’

‘I don’t do toast.’

‘Well I do.’

She also does freshly squeezed orange juice and ripe mango. Doggo gets a tin of tuna mashed up with some bread that’s been soaked to a pulp in milk. It’s good to see his appetite has returned. Given how little I’ve slept, my head should be thrumming with exhaustion, but I feel remarkably alert, as if someone has turned up a secret dial on all my senses. I watch Edie going about her business in the kitchen and I wonder if I’m observing a routine that will one day be a part of my life. I’m entitled to hope, at least a little, after what she told me in the early hours of the morning.

‘I haven’t slept with Tristan since the first time we met.’

‘Hmmm?’ I grunted, half asleep.

‘I think I knew even then that I wanted to be able to tell you that one day. Now I have.’

‘I had no idea.’

‘That’s because I was scared.’

‘Scared?’

‘About what I was feeling. About Clara coming back. And I could see you weren’t ready, which isn’t surprising after what she did to you. So I waited. I didn’t mind. It was good for me, a kind of penance. Let’s face it, I haven’t exactly been a good girl. I only wavered once, after the wedding.’

‘The wedding?’

‘When Barbara said you told her you could never have a relationship with a co-worker because it would be too claustrophobic.’

‘That was confidential. She told you that?’

‘Not me – my mother. They’re old friends.’

‘Edie …’

That’s when she pressed her finger to my lips, silencing me. ‘No, don’t. I understand. And I think you’re right. I’m not sure I could either. But at least we know now.’

‘What?’

‘Just how good it could be if we didn’t work together.’

‘But I love working with you. I love the bus ride in every morning, knowing I’m going to be seeing you soon, wondering what you’ll be wearing.’

‘You notice what I wear?’

‘Sure.’

‘Good,’ she said.

Time is tight. We shower separately, significantly, as if already rehearsing for the charade we’re about to play out. Edie offers me a shirt from her closet. Douglas left it behind when he moved out, and although it’s not exactly me (I don’t do stripes, or stitched detailing for that matter), it’s better than showing up for work in the same one I wore yesterday. That’s the sort of thing that might not be missed by eagle-eyed Margaret in Accounts.

There’s no park near Edie’s place, so Doggo does his morning business on the pavement right by Pimlico tube station. I bag it and bin it, which is when Edie suggests it’s probably best if we part company now. A couple of people at work live south of the river, not least of all Tristan, and she sometimes bumps into them on the Victoria Line through to Oxford Circus.

‘Don’t worry,’ I say. ‘We’ll jump on a bus.’

‘You can take the 88 from right over there.’

Hordes of weary commuters are streaming past us into the station. I can sense a public kiss is out of the question, so I offer my hand and say with mock formality, ‘Thank you, that was a pleasure.’

She smiles. ‘Indeed it was.’

M
EGAN HAS BEEN
pleasingly subdued, even withdrawn, since the Turdgate incident. The prospect of the pitch later seems to have brought her back to her loud, uninhibited and generally insufferable self. I can smell the bullish confidence coming off her. I suspect she wants us all to smell it. She’s a boxer strutting her stuff at the press conference before the fight, looking to unsettle her opponent, score a psychological point or two.

The meeting is set for noon, and whether it’s Megan’s doing or just simple nerves, Edie suddenly decides to rework all our storyboards beforehand.

‘They’re not strong enough.’

‘Edie, they’re fine.’

‘Exactly. Fine. But no more than that.’

I don’t put up too much of a fight; it’s a chance to sit beside her at her desk, to press my thigh against hers, to breathe her in while she sketches away. We’re interrupted after an hour by Josh. He’s so excited he can barely speak.

‘They went for it. The cartoon. They want it!’

‘Who?’

‘
Private Eye
.’ They don’t just want it; they want more of the same. They think it can be a comic strip: a study of the lives of well-meaning liberal thirty-somethings through the eyes of their worldly-wise pet. ‘The dog was the clincher. They love the dog.’

We turn as one and look at Doggo, whose head is hanging over the edge of the sofa. ‘Is he all right?’ asks Josh, frowning.

‘He had a tough night.’

It’s not the time to celebrate or figure out what this means for Josh, Doggo and me, but I can sense a door opening. Well, not so much a door as an escape hatch.

With fifteen minutes to go, Tristan drops by the creative department to say that Ralph is still out so the meeting has been put back by half an hour. He looks at me in a strange fashion, as if puzzled by my presence, before asking me to join him in his office.

‘Shut the door,’ he says. ‘Grab a pew.’ I settle down opposite him.

‘Nice shirt,’ he observes.

‘Thanks.’

‘Where did you get it?’

The lie comes easily. ‘It was a present from Clara.’

‘Clara, huh? Must have been tough, her walking out on you like that.’ There’s something slightly manic in his eyes.

‘It wasn’t easy.’

‘So you can guess how I’m feeling right now.’ He leans forward in his chair. ‘The thing is, I know that shirt, I’ve seen it before.’

‘Where?’

‘Don’t fuck with me, Dan. You know where.’

I take a moment to weigh his words before replying as calmly as I can, ‘It’s not what you think.’

‘Since when do you know what I think, my friend?’

‘I’m not your friend, Tristan.’

‘No, but you could have been … you
should
have been … because you’re about to find out what it’s like to have me as an enemy. You are
so
going down. Both of you.’ I figure it’s best not to answer but to stare and let him stew in his sneering contempt. ‘What?’ he asks eventually.

‘You’re a married man, Tristan.’

‘Are you threatening me?’

‘I’m just saying it would be unfortunate if your wife got wind of all this.’

He sizes me up with narrowed eyes. ‘You wouldn’t. A good person like her who’s done you no harm? No, I don’t see it, not someone like you.’

He’s right; I wouldn’t ruin her life, even believing I’d be doing her a favour. I spread my hands and ask casually, ‘Are we done here?’

‘We’re very far from done. But yes, you can get the hell out of my office.’

‘Shit,’ says Edie, pacing around. ‘He must have gone through my stuff when I wasn’t looking.’ She stops and turns to me. ‘I’m sorry, I just didn’t figure him for a snooper.’

I push aside the nauseating image of a naked Tristan rifling her bedroom closet while she takes a shower. ‘It’s only a problem if you want him back.’

Edie stops pacing. ‘I didn’t lie to you, Dan. I haven’t wanted him from the moment you showed up in my life.’

Does she have any idea how good that makes me feel?

‘Then we’ll just have to weather the shit-storm together, won’t we?’ Edie looks grim-faced at the prospect. ‘You’re up and running with the SWOSH! account. He can’t touch you.’

‘You reckon?’

It’s my cue to say something cheesily heroic, like ‘I won’t let him,’ but I’m not sure I can prevent him wreaking a subtle and sustained revenge from the shadows once he has set his mind on it.

Tristan is all smiles and hail-fellow-well-met as we file into the conference room, although his eyes linger on mine just long enough to reinforce the threat he made earlier. I haven’t been in the conference room since Tristan and Ralph (and Edie too, I suppose) first interviewed me, and I’m struck by a sudden sense of how much has happened to me in the intervening weeks. After years of benign inertia, and for reasons I can’t quite identify, my life seems suddenly to have broken into a gallop. I’m a rider hauling on the reins, but also enjoying the heady mix of terror and exhilaration, the wind in my face. I feel as if nothing can touch me, at least not in the places that matter, and I’m not sure I’ve ever felt quite that way before.

Ralph is in a mischievous mood. It may have been billed as a brainstorming session, but he knows full well that he’s pegged out a battlefield. ‘Okay, let’s see if you bastards are worth what I’m paying you.’

It’s probably nothing, but he would usually say ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ out of respect to Tristan, and I can tell from the flicker in Tristan’s expression that the same thought occurs to him.

Clive and Connor are first up. Paradoxically, the endless hours of violent and foul-mouthed exchanges behind the closed door of their office have produced a softly-softly take. Their vision for the TV ad – told through Clive’s storyboards, and accompanied by a mellow, synthy soundtrack they’ve brought along with them – is a slow-motion narrative of a young couple (our target market) cruising around in a Vargo. The central conceit is that the world outside keeps morphing into something new as they interact with the vehicle. When the heated seats are turned on, winter gives way to springtime, the sunroof retracts, and outside the trees miraculously sprout leaves. White blossom falls all around, turning to snowflakes as the air con is activated. And when a destination is tapped into the touch-screen satnav, they find themselves transported as if by magic to a wild clifftop location, where the giant orb of the sun is sinking into the sea, silhouetting an armada of ancient galleons in full sail. ‘Vargo. Feel Free to Dream.’

Not quite there, but not bad, not bad at all. The deal is that we wait until everyone has presented before throwing the thing open to discussion, and I nod my congratulations to them. Megan doesn’t. She’s looking quietly confident as she and Seth take the floor. Their approach is way down the other end of the spectrum: a frenetic blitz of snapshots detailing the crazy weekend lifestyle of the Vargo’s uber-hip owners: waking up in their funky loft apartment (done to death, or a homage to the seminal ads of the late 1980s, depending on how you look at it); tearing off to Borough Market, where the Vargo’s spacious boot easily swallows everything from home-baked pies to bunches of flowers; communicating with friends via the hands-free Bluetooth as they weave through some attractively distressed parts of the urban jungle; then breaking out into the countryside, where the satnav guides them to their final destination – a remote spot on the banks of a tree-trimmed river. They set up an elaborate picnic for four (not two, note) while glancing expectantly downriver. And here’s the twist – it’s the River Severn, known for its tidal bore, and their friends (an equally attractive young couple, of course) turn up to join them on surfboards, riding the freak wave upstream. Cue lots of jollity and laughter, then a final crane shot at dusk of the four friends leaving in the Vargo, the surfboards strapped to the roof rails. ‘Vargo. Why Settle for Less?’