Year of Being Single (22 page)

‘Oh God,’ groaned Greg sardonically as they handed over their shoes at the outdoor counter and were given heavy, multi-coloured skates with unfathomable laces.

‘Think of it as a kind of initiation.’ Grace giggled. ‘I’m preparing you for all the weird and wonderful things you’ll have to do as an escort.’

‘But I’m really looking forward to Ascot!’ joked Greg.

As well as booking Greg for roller-skating, Grace had booked him for a day’s racing at Royal Ascot in June. Every year she sent dozens of lucky women off to the races in beautiful hats. This year
she
was going. She’d bought the tickets – Saturday the 20th of June – and had booked their train fares. She couldn’t wait.

‘Come on then,’ Greg said, grabbing her hand. ‘If you want roller-skating, I’ll give you roller-staking. I can’t guarantee I won’t fall flat on my bum, though.’

‘Now that I’d like to see,’ she laughed.

He was actually good, really, really good. She found it hard to keep up with him.

‘You’ve done this before,’ she shouted after him. ‘Cheat!’

‘I didn’t
actually
say I hadn’t done it before,’ he called over his right shoulder as he sped in front of her looking annoyingly graceful and accomplished. All he needed were knee and elbow pads and a pair of giant headphones and it could be 1982.

There was a boy in a lime green T-shirt, who kept staggering right across the middle of the rink. Everyone was avoiding him. On his next foray to the centre, chopping along like a stilted flamingo, Grace had the misfortune to be coming out of the bend. She saw he was in her path, tried to swerve to avoid him, but he lurched the same way and they collided. His splaying, Bambi legs went under hers, upending her, and she landed with a painful thwack on her bottom. She didn’t have the best padding there. James always said she had a scrawny backside. Her eyes sprang with tears, which she rapidly blinked away. Greg, swooping by, came to a professional-looking gliding stop by them.

‘I’m all right,’ spluttered the kid, and he grappled to his feet and lolloped over to the side of the rink. Greg grabbed both Grace’s hands and pulled her up, while she had an urge to pull him down on the rink and just lie there with him for a while, in the sun. Greg looked over to where the annoying kid was hanging off the side rail.

‘You sure you’re okay?’ he called out.

‘Yes, I’m okay,’ shouted the boy, fiercely brushing away tears with his fist.

‘Where’s your mum?’ called Greg.

He pointed to a woman at the other side of the rink. She’d seen the kerfuffle and was standing up from a camping chair and gesturing for the boy to come to her. Then, to Grace’s horror, she looked towards Greg and Grace and her face froze with recognition. Not at seeing Grace, but at seeing
Greg
. She smiled, shyly, then looked away, back to the boy, who was making his way over to her.

‘Do you know her?’ asked Grace, her heart chilled and afraid.

Yes,’ said Greg, in a way that decisively said, ‘Don’t ask any more,’ and Grace immediately knew she was a client.
Another
client of his. It made her feel ill. He’d been busy in the last few weeks, then.

‘Okay,’ she said, lightly. But as she took to the rink again for another circuit, she purposely skated past the woman, her heart pounding, and slyly studied her. She was plain. With brown hair, and wearing a navy T-shirt and some sort of beige trousers. She looked…ordinary. Mousey. She didn’t look like a woman who hired male escorts.

Grace had a million questions for him. Where had he taken her? What did they do? What was she like? Was she nice? Was she married? What did they
do
? She knew she shouldn’t be asking any of them; it was none of her business. So she asked just one, the one she really wanted to know the answer to. She caught him up and pulled at his arm.

‘Have you had sex with her?’ She felt sick as she said the words.

‘Gosh!’ he said. ‘You can’t ask questions like that! Here, of all places. Think of the children! And,’ he dropped his voice to a smiling whisper, ‘I don’t know who you’re talking about.’

‘You know exactly who I’m talking about. That woman. So have you?’ She
had
to know.

‘That would be telling. If I told you, I’d have to kill you.’

‘Very funny. Can’t you just tell me without killing me afterwards?
The Apprentice
is on tonight.’ She was attempting to smile but it hurt her.

Greg sighed. ‘If you must know, no I haven’t. I haven’t slept with a client yet.’

She was stupidly pleased. Relieved. She took off away from him. Started to glide. She felt satisfyingly warm, but at the same time there was a nice breeze going through her hair. A song she loved was on – ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ by Deep Blue Something. She’d loved that song when she was young, when her life still stretched out before her, unwritten. She felt strangely free, at this moment. Free of James, free of stress and misery.

After her third lap, she realised she didn’t know where Greg was. Oh, there he was. Over at one of the side railings, sandwiched between a gangly teenager and a little girl with neon safety pads on.

‘You were enjoying yourself,’ he said.

‘I was.’

‘Shall we get a drink?’

‘Okay.’

There were some wooden trestle tables round the edge of the rink. They sat at one, in dappled sunlight and as leaves rustled gently in the trees above them, they drank from Coke bottles with straws. She’d paid for them, of course.

‘So how is it all going, with your ex?’ They were sitting across from each other. Grace hoped the dappled sunlight was flattering, like candlelight. She remembered he had called her gorgeous, after their first date, and wanted him to think it again.

‘He’s being pretty awful still,’ she said, ‘but it’s okay.
I’ll
be okay.’

‘You deserve more,’ said Greg. His hands were wrapped round his Coke bottle. He was tapping one of his index fingers on it. ‘I know we don’t know each other very well, but I’m certain you do. I think you’re a lovely person.’

‘I bet you say that to all the girls, women, whoever.’ She laughed.

‘No, actually. I’m saying it to you.’

She lowered her eyes, suddenly bashful. And, yet again, she wished she was on a real date with him. That he’d asked her out. That he’d
chosen
her, not that she picked him up online for a fee. But then James had chosen her, James had asked her out – that winter’s day when he’d wandered into John Lewis and she’d helped him pick out a hat for his mum – and look how
that
had worked out. It was better this way.

‘Thank you, Greg. Where do I send the cheque?’

He laughed. They both knew it was bank transfer.

‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘how do you know I’m lovely? I might be awful. It might all just be an act.’

‘I’m a good judge of character,’ he replied. ‘I just know. Right,’ he said, draining the last of his Coke. ‘One final spin on the ring of death?’

As they skated a final circuit, he slipped his hand into hers. His hand was warm, firm, comforting. She felt secure. Holding hands at the roller-skating rink! They were like a teenage couple. Or a grown-up couple enjoying a silly afternoon of childhood nostalgia. Except they weren’t any kind of couple, were they? One of them was soon going to be having sex with women for money and the other was a sad woman in her thirties who had only this – dates with a male escort – to cling to.

Don’t forget, she told herself, it’s all false.

But it was better that way.

Chapter Sixteen: Imogen

Imogen closed her desk drawer and sighed for about the two hundredth time that week. She was alone in the office – Marcia was out for a ‘blue sky meeting’ with Tarquin, whatever that was. It probably involved a big old nosh-up and several bottles of plonk. Tarquin was on the brink of a second audition with
EastEnders
and Marcia had gone off with a book on cockney rhyming slang and a leather jacket catalogue.

Imogen’s sighs were deep and huffy, often accompanied by an unhappy shrug of the shoulders. Thoughts of her aborted lunch with Richard – even after six weeks – were driving her crazy.

She felt so ashamed about running out on him like that. She was mortified she’d fled after he’d kissed her. But she’d had to. The man, the kiss… She had to run, and run for her life. She’d wrestled with it for weeks, but the truth was – and the truth really,
really
hurt – she was in love with Richard.

Damn, damn, damn – this was
not
supposed to happen. She had been in love once before and it had been catastrophic.

When she told people she didn’t date actors it wasn’t strictly true. When she was nineteen, and working at her first agency, she careered from her sensible path of finding a ‘great man’ and embarked on a passionate, whirlwind two-month love affair with an actor called Sebastian. Yes, ‘The Blip’. He was twenty-five. He was long-haired and ambitious. Wildly romantic. Impoverished and poetic. All the clichés. She’d fallen hard, she thought he had too, and she didn’t doubt he loved her (‘You’re the one for me, Immy,’ he always said, while brushing his hair from his eyes), but there was a problem. She wasn’t the
only
one. Sebastian was enjoying a rather large ‘overlap’ with a ballerina who was away training in St Petersburg. A woman he called ‘incredibly special’ and didn’t want to give up, no matter how hard Imogen begged. He’d had to choose, eventually, and he hadn’t chosen Imogen. She’d been devastated. Absolutely devastated. She’d cried for five months, she’d sworn she’d never fall in love again. She wouldn’t let herself. And she never told anyone about Sebastian.

Sebastian was the reason Imogen had done a one hundred and eighty degree turn and gone for a completely different type of man. Businessmen, city types, the Good on Paper men who could love her and make perfect husbands, but not hurt her. They couldn’t be further from the starving artiste in the garret, the
act-or
who pretended she was the only one. They were the safe choice who would ultimately disappoint her. Until Richard.

Richard was right, wasn’t he? She
was
the common denominator, but not in the way he’d meant. It wasn’t that she’d turned all her ex-men into disappointments; they were disappointments right from the start because she knew she was never going to fall in love with them. That’s why she picked them. None of them were
ever
going to be amazing.

Now Richard had come along and turned everything on its head. Her plan of safe smooth sailing with a man she couldn’t love had been chucked over the side of the boat. With Richard, she was on uncharted waters, but all the same she knew how it would go. She would love him and he would leave her. The fact that he lived in New York made it even more probable.

She couldn’t put herself into someone’s hands like that again. When she was dropped she knew it would be unbearable. With Sebastian it took her for ever to get over the hurt. She’d only been nineteen then, think how much harder she’d fall, how much harder she’d hurt now. Better to not see Richard again. Better to put him out of her mind. Keep well away. She could do this. She could resist. There. No Men. No Richard. Done. It was easy.

That’s what she’d decided and she was determined to stick to it, however much she huffed, and however much it went round and round in her head like knickers in a washing machine. She’d ignored Richard’s texts and calls until they petered to nothing and she felt empty and sad. She valiantly tried to erase him from her mind. On several occasions, especially after a few drinks, she had to sit on her hands to stop herself from calling him.

Imogen sighed again and stared blankly at her computer screen.

There was a clatter and a shuffle. Marcia was back, Tarquin ambling into the office behind her. They were both clearly three sheets to the wind. Marcia was doing that over-exaggerated shushing thing, a stubby finger to her lips. Their neighbouring office was an acupuncture treatment room – Marcia had been told off by them before, for loud screeching when someone was having their chakras or something done.

Once the pair of them were in, and the door was closed, the finger went down and the volume went up.

‘Tarqy, darling,’ she boomed, ‘be careful now. Keep a safe distance from Imogen – she’s put a hex on all men.’

Imogen, ignoring her, walked over to the tiny sink they had, and started pouring two large glasses of water. They looked in dire need of them.

‘You’re both drunk,’ she accused, taking on that old classic role of Superior Sober Person. ‘Did you get all the
EastEnders
stuff done?’

‘We’re Mitchells; you don’t mess wiv no Mitchells,’ growled Tarquin, showing his perfect, upper-class teeth and advancing towards Imogen in what he probably thought was a menacing manner. She shoved a glass of water into his hand.

‘Good,
great
.’ She nodded. ‘Well, it’s in the bag, certainly.’

Marcia threw her giant handbag on her desk and plomped down on her chair. The force of it made several papers on her desk waft onto the floor. She left them there. Then she grabbed her Dictaphone and went over to the window where she started whispering manically into it. It was a stream of near unconsciousness but Imogen could make out the odd thing: ‘doof doof’, ‘Prince Albert’ and ‘faaamily’.

Tarquin tried to plonk his bottom on Marcia’s vacated chair but missed and landed on the floor. Instead of trying to get up, he threw both legs in the air and pushed his bum up with his hands like he was attempting a move from BAGA 4.

‘What on earth have you been drinking?’ said Imogen.

‘Two bottles of vino blanco and a round of flaming Sambucas,’ said Marcia, returning to her desk.

‘At lunchtime?’

‘Oh, don’t be such an old killjoy,’ said Marcia, leaning on her desk for balance. ‘You and me used to get hammered all the time, in the good old bad old days. Just because you’re
over forty
–’ she sneered, doing quotation marks with her fingers ‘– there’s no reason to be so
boring
.’

Marcia was fifty-eight. Age was definitely just a number to her and the more the number increased the less attention she paid to what society expected of it. If society wanted a demure middle-class lady, they weren’t going to get it.