If This Is Paradise, I Want My Money Back (2 page)

‘. . . and I am so fed up with Mum’s heavy hints about how much she’s dying to be a grandmother. The other day she asked me was I was putting it off so I could concentrate on “scaling the heights in my career”? I felt like screaming at her, “And what ‘career’ would that be, exactly?” I’m a part-time receptionist in a health club, for God’s sake, and my sole contribution since I started there was to get two new treadmills put in. I only took the bloody gig because I thought I’d easily be pregnant by now, and that it might just suit me to do a doss job. Then on top of everything else, we’ve to go to a christening next weekend. Which means I get to spend the entire day surrounded by mothers who have at least two perfect kids each, all looking at me with pity, wondering what the hell is wrong with me. Rock bottom, that’s where I’m at right now.’

That’s your rock bottom? That’s my retirement plan. Kate, you’re only thirty-three; you’ve done everything you were supposed to do in life. You’ve got Perfect Paul and a showroom home. You’ve a downstairs bathroom that no one’s allowed to use because it’s so new, and you’ve a spare room that you probably have the Farrow & Ball nursery-wall colours already picked out for. Of course, when the time’s right, you’ll be a yummy mummy in a four-wheel-drive jeep, along with the rest of them. Now go away, I want some peace.

But it’s not to be. There’s a string of visitors tonight, including my boss, Anna, who smells of stale cigarettes and tells me in a voice like aquarium gravel that all our clients keep asking about me, and when I’m coming back? She’s an actor’s agent, by the way, and I’m her lowly assistant, which basically means she swans off to opening nights and award shows with all her big-name actors, then spends the next day lying in bed with a minging hangover while I hold the fort and spend my time trying to convince her non-A-list clients that things are just really quiet right now, but that their big break is only around the corner.

‘. . . and you know, the phone hasn’t stopped ringing once since you’ve been out. It’s literally been non-stop.’

It always is, Anna. You’re just never there, that’s all.

‘All these actors I haven’t spoken to in months demanding to know why they haven’t been seen for that Henry the Eighth series. Quite snippy with me, too, some of them, as if I hadn’t enough on my plate . . .’

You have to be nice to them. For some of these people, getting caught on a security camera is not exactly the kind of media coverage they’re looking for. Believe it or not.

‘. . . then there’s that big commercial for some detergent that’s casting next week, and I haven’t a clue where you keep all the CV shots . . .’

In the CV filing cabinet, in a big drawer with ‘CV shots’ written in black and white across it. Not brain surgery, Anna.

‘. . . I mean, the day-to-day running of the office isn’t really my thing. I’m more the face of the business, really . . .’

Allow me to translate. This means that while you take your favoured clients out for afternoon-long, boozy lunches, I actually do all the donkey work for you. For roughly about a third of what you should be paying me.

‘So I really need you back, Charlotte. The place is falling apart without you.’

You know what? Not tempting. Go hire yourself a temp and leave me alone. Some of us have real problems, and compared with me, your life is Euro Disney.

God, this coma is making me an awful lot braver than I normally would be.

More noise and chat and kerfuffle, almost like there’s a little social gathering going on all around me that I’m the reason for, but not a part of. The noise is getting louder and louder, and I’m hearing a cacophony of voices all chattering over me, then, suddenly, without warning . . . total and utter silence.

I’m just thinking that it’s about time some bossy nurse came in and told them all to keep it down to a dull roar, but then I get the strongest whiff of Burberry aftershave and there’s only one person I know who wears that . . . oh shit, I do not believe this.

It’s him. James.

Has to be. I’d know even by the way the temperature in the room has dropped by about twenty degrees. Here’s me in a coma, and I can still sense the tension. There’s a rustle of cellophane and a smell of lilies, and I can hear Anna being nice to him and saying something about how divine the flowers are, but then she was always very skilled at arselicking producers. Next thing, for absolutely no reason, I get a flashback to when we first met.

It’s all Anna’s fault really: she introduced me to him at a film festival and I remember immediately writing him off into the mad, bad and dangerous to know category. Charisma you could surf on, but I just instinctively knew he was the type of fella that, if you were dating him, you’d probably end up on about a hundred milligrams of Valium a day. Back then, he wore a leather jacket, rode a Harley and looked a bit like James Dean, if he’d ever made it to his thirties. Mean, moody and magnificent. A hard dog to keep on the porch, as Hillary Clinton once famously said about Bill. Somehow always managed to look like he’d just been in a fight. There was also a rumour doing the rounds about him that he’d once thrown a sofa over a balcony and into the pool of some five-star hotel in Cannes, the kind of place where no one says a word, just discreetly adds ‘replacement sofa’ to the bill.

Yes, I fancied the arse off him, as any woman with a working pulse would, but not for one nanosecond did I ever consider him as nice, suitable boyfriend/potential future husband material; I really, honestly, genuinely was
NOT
interested. In fact, I distinctly remember only googling him once after I first met him. To put this in context, I’d have checked out my horoscope plus this fab website I found for designer knock-off handbags far,
far
more; that’s how disinterested I was. Anyway, I sometimes think that must have been part of the turn-on for him. So he did all the running.

Producers persuade, that’s what they do. They persuade actors to star in their movies, then they persuade investors to pay for it, then they persuade the public that it’s a smash hit; and that’s pretty much the tactic he used on me. Persuaded me to go out with him, then to fall in love with him, then, a ridiculously short time later, to move into his house with him. Like the walking cliché that I am, I really, truly believed that I’d be the one to tame the bad boy and turn him into something cuter than a fluffy little kitten sitting on a sofa watching
Love Actually
. And look where it got me. My God, single women the world over should be made to study my dating history as a lesson in what not, under any circumstances,
ever
to do.

He’s very close to me now; I can feel his hand gripping mine, icy cold.

‘You look so beautiful, Charlotte.’

Clearly, this is too much for Kate, who’s very intolerant of bullshit, ’cos I can hear her snapping back at him. ‘James, she has a fractured skull, a dislocated shoulder, forty-eight stitches, a broken fibula, and you think she looks well? Trust me, it’s the lighting.’

This is what passes for wit in our family.

‘I just can’t believe that God could let this happen,’ he goes on, I’m guessing for Mum’s benefit. In fact, I can almost picture him rearranging his face into a look of religious faux-concern, purely on account of her being here.

‘Oh really?’ Kate snaps back. ‘Haven’t you read the Old Testament? He’s pretty ruthless.’

Another awkward silence, but by now, I’m actually starting to enjoy them. I mean, here’s James stuck in the same room with probably the only three women on the planet who are completely immune to his legendary magnetic appeal. His charm assaults, for the record, come in distinct phases: first he focuses on you so intently with his laser gaze that you tend to forget there’s anyone else on the planet; second, he asks keen yet insightful questions, somehow managing to cut right to the heart of whatever the conversation subject-matter is; then, the
pièce de
résistance
, he’ll manage to unearth something from left field, to make you roar laughing about. I’ve seen him beguile his way out of a thousand tricky situations with this strategy before, but he won’t here, not now, and certainly not in front of this audience. In fact, if it wasn’t for the coma, I’d probably be lying here having a great aul titter at his discomfort.

Serves him bloody right.

‘You know, you look exhausted, Kate,’ he says to her, so sincerely that it’s actually disarming. ‘And you too, Mrs Grey. You must be worn out with worry. Why not go down to the canteen and have a coffee or a bite to eat? I’ll stay here with Charlotte. I’d . . . I’d really love a moment alone with her, but only if that’s OK with you all.’

NO! Don’t, repeat DO NOT go! I don’t want to be left on my own with him!

But he gets his way. Like he always does. After much reluctant mumbling and grabbing of handbags, I hear Mum bristling like a Brillo Pad and very distinctly saying all right then, but that she’ll be back in ten minutes, her clear implication being, ‘So you’d better be gone by then.’

‘And FYI,’ is Kate’s parting shot, ‘I don’t mind you coming to see her just this once, but from now on, we’d prefer it if just immediate family visited. Immediate family and Fiona, that is. I’ll be round to pick up some of her stuff soon.’

‘No problem. Any idea when?’

‘Whenever it bloody suits me.’

A door slam, then I know we’re alone because he immediately lets go of my hand.

‘Charlotte . . . Christ, it’s so hard for me to see you like this . . .’

Oh please, do we have to do the movie scene?

‘You know, I keep replaying that terrible row in my head and . . . well, I can’t help but feel partly responsible for what happened to you.’

Did you just say PARTLY?

‘You were so upset when you bolted out of the house that night, and I’m kicking myself for letting you drive off into a bloody thunderstorm, the state you were in . . .’

Good. Hope you kick yourself to death.

‘I feel so bad about everything . . .’

Serves you right. In fact, that’s the best news I think I’ve heard all day.

‘It’s not you, you know, it’s me.’

Oh, give me a break. In fact, I’m pretty certain I recognize that line from one of your crappy B movies. Unimaginative bastard.

‘I know I should have come to you sooner and told you how I was feeling but . . . well, the thing is, I just hated this cosy coupley existence that we’d settled into, doing the crossword together, fighting over the Sunday supplements, all of that . . . I used to sit beside you on the couch watching reruns of
Lost
for about the thousandth time and thinking, this is not who I am.’

No, of course, you wanted to go back to throwing sofas out of hotel room windows.

‘And I know I made a right pig’s ear of trying to explain myself the other night, but it’s just for a while now, I’ve been feeling a bit detached from you, and that . . . well . . . that I needed a bit of space . . .’

And that’s when it happens. Right then, just as he’s spewing on and on and on with more of his self-justification shite.

Suddenly, and completely without warning, memories begin to surface. The night of the accident, me driving home, the rumour having reached me in work.

Now
I remember.

Heavy traffic, rain pelting, a dark sky, the windscreen wipers going full blast, and my heart rate almost keeping pace with them. I remember hot, angry tears stinging at the back of my eyes. Not being able to catch my breath, mouth dry, gulping – and my hands trembling, like I was having a full-blown anxiety attack. I even remember trying to ring his mobile for about the fortieth time, and him not answering. I remember vomit rising at the back of my throat, and willing myself not to be sick, because the only thing I had in the car I could possibly throw up into was an empty tube of Pringles on the passenger seat beside me.

I knew full well there’d be a confrontation when I got home, and was already doing a mental dress-rehearsal of all my arguments well in advance of it. James is brilliant in arguments, and I’m rubbish because I just get emotional; so, like a good prosecution lawyer, I always had to be two steps ahead of him in any row. I even remember making a list in my head of all the reasons why, if what I’d heard
was
true, and if we did break up over it, it mightn’t necessarily be the worse thing that could possibly happen to me. I had it all worked out on that long, miserable drive home, all the pros and all the cons.

Like I said, none of my nearest and dearest ever really liked James. In fact, something Fiona said a long time ago came back to haunt me: she predicted that this would all end in tears. Mine, not his. She used to reckon that James’s ideal woman was one with no last name. And that his Jack Nicholsonesque grin would unnerve a shark. Plus, after a few glasses of Pinot Grigio, she’d always be at pains to point out that as long as I continued to live in
his
house, under
his
roof, he held all the aces in the relationship. And what did I do? Forgot the first principle of dating: love is blind, but friendship is clairvoyant. I didn’t listen to her, and look where it got me.

Funny, but as I sat in the gridlock that wild, stormy night, thinking that if it was true and if this was it, The End for me and him, I remember, in a surge of positivity, making up my mind that I WOULD move on and I WOULD meet someone else. Furthermore, that somehow along the way, I’d set up as a producer myself, and manage to become very rich and successful, and
then
he’d really be sorry. I’d probably end up on the
Late Late Show
and on the
Sunday Times
Rich List, and that’d completely finish him off, given how important money is to him. And, in my little fantasy world, I’d be famous too, so famous that I’d even have my very own stalker, the hallmark of the true celeb. And every time I’d talk to a journalist, I’d graciously tell them that, yes, although I wasted five precious years of my dating life on a worthless, faithless git, I still managed to turn my whole life around and become a huge success, with an adoring husband and kids, and everything I ever wanted out of life. Even if I can only pass for young, gorgeous and nubile in a power cut. Even if I now have a biological clock that, at this stage, honestly might as well have Roman numerals on it and be carved in stone.