Paradise City (25 page)

‘You don’t think there’s any more to it than that?’ Esme asked, hoping he might be impressed. Assumption, he had once told her, was the mother of all fuck-ups.

Dave glanced at her sharply.

‘You don’t need to be asking that,’ he said. ‘Just concentrate on the interview and let the newsdesk worry about the rest. We don’t want to scare him off when he’s more or less put a fucking great exclusive on your lap like a purring little pussycat.’ Dave stretched back in his office chair, his arms forming a giant figure-of-eight behind his head. The navy fleece rode up his stomach, revealing a strip of white material underneath. She wondered idly if this denoted a T-shirt or a vest. In her fantasies, Dave has always worn crisp boxer shorts in pale blue. The thought of Dave in jockey shorts or – worse – Y-fronts makes her wince.

‘You should be flattered he wants to talk to you,’ he carried on. ‘You need to think hard about your questions, how you want to structure them.’

He coughed. ‘We could have a chat about it now if you don’t have anywhere you need to be?’

She shook her head. ‘No.’ A heat spread over her chest. ‘I’m free as a bird,’ she said and then wondered why she’d used that expression. Oh get a grip, she told herself, simultaneously irritated and mortified.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s go for a drink. Get out of the office.’ He stood, unhooked his coat from the door and held it open for her. Esme brushed past him. He smelled of Davidoff Cool Water. It was an unashamedly naff aftershave, redolent of oversexed adolescent schoolboys. Perhaps someone gave it to him for Christmas.

She thinks of this now, of the musty smell of him, as she walks down High Street Kensington towards Howard Pink’s home. Esme has replayed the afternoon in her mind an incalculable number of times, recalling every tiny detail. They had sat in the corner of the pub, sharing a bag of roasted peanuts, so that occasionally their fingers would touch and Esme had to concentrate on not embarrassing herself by blurting out something stupid. Dave had been good company: entertaining and relaxed, teasing her gently and cracking jokes about their colleagues. It was the first time she’d had a proper conversation with him, without feeling he was about to ask her when she was going to file. She had made him laugh a couple of times too; actual belly-laughter rather than a polite titter. He had asked a bit about where she grew up, her parents, that sort of thing. When she told him about her father dying, he had stopped talking abruptly and looked so uncomfortable she wanted to reach out and touch his face and tell him it hadn’t turned out that badly, not really.

‘Jesus, I’m sorry,’ he’d said.

‘It’s fine,’ she said, even though it wasn’t. She waved her hand, shooing the thought away. ‘Honestly. Ages ago now. I don’t remember him that well.’

‘I can’t believe I never knew that about you.’

‘Why would you?’ Esme watched him take a sip from his pint, the light-flecked foam forming a tidal line across the top of his mouth. Stubble, she noticed. He hadn’t shaved. ‘It’s not something I tend to just blurt out.’ She remembered, with a jolt, the lunch at Alain Ducasse and how easily she had shared this buried-down piece of her. ‘Although, having said that, I did tell Howard Pink for some reason.’

Dave smirked. ‘Must have been that famed “connection” he was talking about,’ he said, making the quotation marks with his hands.

‘Mmm,’ she said, downing the last of her glass of tepid white wine.

And then there had been an odd moment where they had looked at each other for at least ten unbroken seconds. Her eyes on his. She remembers blinking, slowly, breaking the stare in case he was embarrassed. But when she raised her eyes again, Dave was still looking at her and she was unable to do anything other than surrender herself to the examination, as if it were a test of some sort. Kids in a playground. Whoever glanced away first lost. The strength of his gaze was such that it felt more intense than if he had been touching her or kissing her or holding her head in his hands.

‘Esme.’ He said her name, drawing out each languid syllable. ‘What am I going to do about you?’

She wasn’t sure what to make of that, what he meant by it. Was he . . . no, surely not . . . he’d never shown any interest and yet . . . and yet . . . if she weren’t worrying so much about the subtle inflection of his voice and what it signified, if she were in a different situation with a different man, she would be sure that he was trying to flirt with her.

Esme had wanted his attentions for so long, had pined after Dave so ineffectively for so many months, that his sudden declaration of interest took her aback. She felt panicked. She wasn’t sure she actually wanting anything real to happen. Not when she thought about him as a definite prospect rather than a reassuringly familiar daydream. Not when she thought about his reputation as a shagger, or the fact of his wife, his children – the tawdriness of it all. Not when she thought about her career. There was nothing more damaging for a young female reporter than the accusation that she’d shagged her boss to get ahead. Especially when it was true. She remembers, without wanting to, the online commenter who had accused her of sleeping her way to the middle.

But at the same time, there was this sense of
wanting
him that was so deeply confusing. It wasn’t logical for her to feel like this. Her brief relationships up to this point had been tame, controlled affairs. She was the one who did the dumping. She had never felt anything to excess. She had never wanted to make her happiness dependent on the vagaries of someone else’s affection. Perhaps this was why she had chosen to hanker after a man she knew was unavailable, a man so unsuitable there was no danger of anything ever happening.

But now she was starkly horrified at the thought Dave might act, that he might lunge over the pub table and pounce on her in the middle of the day and then she would have the reality of his kiss to compare with all the projected fantasies. She realised, with the sickening thud of an obviously dropped penny, that it was the idea of him she loved. Esme wasn’t sure she wanted the real thing.

‘Dave, I—’ she started.

He reached across, placed his hand over hers. He stroked the side of her thumb with his. And then, as though nothing had happened, Dave tapped her knuckles briskly, got up, put on his coat and smiled at her.

‘Best be getting back,’ he said. ‘You’ll do a great job with Howard Pink. I know you will.’

She nodded. She felt the beginning of a tear form in the corner of one eye. Not because she was upset by Dave but because she had been confronted by her own absurdity, by all the things about herself she most disliked. She felt stupid and naïve and embarrassed at the thought that her feelings must have been so clear to him when she thought she had kept them discreetly veiled from his attention in the office. She wondered who else must have known and her thoughts fixated on Cathy. Cathy was always talking disparagingly about ‘the work-experience flibbertigibbets’ traipsing through the office in too-short skirts and too-high heels, loitering around the photocopier with transparent flirtatious intent.

‘Teens with tits,’ Cathy called them in her unkinder moments. Cathy would hate it if Esme had an affair with Dave. She’d spread gossip and bile around the office. Esme knew: she’d seen it happen before.

She watched Dave walk away with a tightness inside her. He strode towards the door, head bent down, hands in his pockets, the hairline at the nape of his neck raggedly cut as if by an amateur hand. His wife, she thought automatically. His wife would have cut it.

Esme stared at the half-empty glass of beer, willing the blurriness of her vision to recede and refusing, resolutely, to look at him as he left the pub. And for no reason that she could explain, her mind was suddenly full not of Dave but of her father. She could see her dad, with complete clarity, wearing a knitted yellow jumper, laughing and bending to put a piece of gold tinsel on the lowest branch of the Christmas tree.

The glass of beer. Let me look at that, she thought. Let me concentrate all my energies on that glass. That was all that she wanted to deal with right now.

The glass of beer.

How would she describe this pint, she thought, taking refuge in a familiar game. What words would she use? How would she express the essence of it in a way that hadn’t been used before?

Liquid the colour of a varnished conker.

Droplets of white.

Cloudy fingerprints where it had been gripped.

Then, remembered: her father in corduroy trousers with a buckle at the back, laughing, helping her decorate the Christmas tree.

And the strange thing was that when she left the pub, half an hour later, Esme felt an overwhelming need to call her mother.

‘Hello, darling?’ Lilian’s tone was inquisitive, a touch surprised.

‘Hi Mum. I . . . just wanted to hear your voice.’

‘Oh sweetheart. What’s wrong?’

Because the thing about Lilian was that, for all the petty irritation, when it counted, she instinctively knew exactly how to be.

‘I was thinking about Dad. I just remembered him decorating the Christmas tree and . . .’ Esme felt a sob rising in her gullet but caught it and swallowed it back down. She could hear her mother exhale gently on the other end of the line.

‘He loved Christmas,’ Lilian said. ‘He got so excited, like a little child!’

Esme let her continue. Listening to her mother’s voice made her calmer. She somehow knew what to say.

‘And there was one year that he got you a remote-control truck – do you remember?’ Lilian asked gently. ‘It was red and you said it was your favourite present ever. I can remember him saying to me, “Esme isn’t your average girl, you know,” and so he got you a boy’s present. Rob was so jealous!’

‘I remember.’ And she did. She could visualise the truck: square-backed and shiny, zooming around the living-room carpet as she twisted the remote-control dials, careening into a sideboard and chipping away a flake of paint.

‘He loved you, darling,’ Lilian said. ‘Whatever else happened, he really did love you both. He’d be so proud of you.’

Esme tried to take in what her mother was saying, tried to store the feeling of reassurance away for the next time she needed it.

‘Thanks, Mum.’

‘And you know, don’t you, Esme, that I love you very much too. And I’m so very proud of you even if I find it hard to show it. You mean the world to me. You and your brother.’

‘I know.’ Esme bit her lip. ‘I love you too. I’m sorry I was a bit . . . distracted this weekend.’

‘Darling, don’t worry about it. I know what pressure you’re under. Young women these days have a much harder time of it than we ever did. We just got married and had babies.’ Lilian laughed. ‘I’m so . . . admiring of what you’ve achieved,’ she added quietly. ‘Probably a bit jealous too.’

Esme felt a wash of affection for her mother. Sometimes, Lilian was capable of such clear-sightedness that Esme wondered if all the jittery tension she thought lay between them was simply a product of her own imagination. Was she projecting her own dissatisfaction onto her mother? Or maybe, she thought, it was just that she didn’t allow her mother the same leniency she would anyone else. Instead, she picked over Lilian’s faults like carrion.

Howard Pink lives on one of the moneyed roads off the High Street, a pocket of exclusivity denoted by automatic gates, security systems and glossy four-wheel drives with tinted windows parked nose-to-nose along the kerb. The Pink abode is set apart from the main thoroughfare behind a high wall with small purple flowers growing from the cracks between the bricks. Esme leans against the wall to change her shoes, slipping out the L.K. Bennett heels from a dirty white canvas bag filled with shorthand notepads and plastic document wallets containing thick pages of cuttings.

She pushes her feet into the patent leather, puts the trainers in the bag, and straightens up, immediately feeling the benefit of four extra inches of height. The smart shoes gleam and tip-tap along the pavement. Her BlackBerry beeps with a message from Les, the photographer, who says he’ll be there in half an hour, which is good because it gives her time to warm Howard up. She suspects he’ll be nervous about giving his first interview on such an emotive subject. For all his bluster and self-confidence, Esme knows from past journalistic experience that there is a deep seam of insecurity running through most famous men.

A few months ago, she’d been sent to interview a stand-up comedian who was promoting a big-budget Hollywood film in which he had a small cameo. It was the kind of film the critics called ‘gross-out’ – lots of jokes about breasts, a scene involving a plate of blancmange and an extended comic riff on the precise chemical formulation of excrement. The comedian had recently married a perky American singer. He was good-looking, charming and widely tipped to be the next host of a prime-time chat show. But when Esme had asked the comedian what had made him want to become famous, he replied without having to think, ‘To get my own back.’

On who? she’d wondered.

‘School bullies,’ he’d said with a sneer. ‘The fuckers.’

They’d all been bullied in one way or another, she thinks. The film stars, the pop singers, the CEOs. They all secretly felt like fraudulent outsiders, these supposed alpha males, all of them desperate to make their mark, to silence the anonymous nagging voice that told them they weren’t good enough. She realised at their lunch that Howard Pink was no different.