The Wish List (7 page)

‘They look like they’re having fun,’ I say.

He laughs. ‘Whether Jeremy will be as enthusiastic in the morning has yet to be found out.’

There’s something about the way he says this that alarms me. A tone that isn’t disapproving exactly . . . but hints that this isn’t the sort of thing you’d catch him
doing.

The second this doubt enters my mind, it takes on a life of its own. What makes me assume he’s single anyway? Or straight? Or – most fundamentally – interested?

I take a deep breath. If I’m going to go through with this, I need to get down to business and come on to him, at least a little. But, suddenly, I feel stupidly self-conscious, and the
lack of inhibition that’s required for this endeavour deserts me.

‘Are you all right?’ he asks.

I’m about to respond when I get a waft of his aftershave and it sends a flash of heat across my chest that nearly sets my bra straps on fire.

I reach out and put my hand behind his neck, pulling him into me as I stand on my tiptoes. Then I place my lips languorously on his cheek, noting how much softer than expected his stubble is.
‘I feel great,’ I whisper. ‘But I can think of something that’d make me feel even better.’

Waking up after my first ever one-night stand is an experience that I will never, ever forget. From the painful shafts of sunlight to every swirl in that heinous orange and
brown carpet – it’ll be there with me until the day I die.

Nor will I forget running from the flat. Or rather, attempting to run – with one broken shoe and every tiny, rancid cell in my body pleading for mercy. I hobble down a set of stairs, down
a strange street and don’t stop until I’ve turned several corners and am certain I’m not being followed. At that point, I pause, breathless, aching and on the verge of vomiting,
as I scan the street for any landmarks.

It’s then that I spot Crosby Cinema and know exactly where I am – miles from home.

Deep breaths.

A taxi will cost a fortune from here but I don’t care. Only, as I look in my purse and realise I have precisely four pounds twenty-seven and a handful of Tesco Clubcard vouchers to my
name, it becomes apparent that the train’s the only option, unless I find a cashpoint. Which, in the event, I don’t.

The trek to the station takes approximately eight minutes, but it’s one of the most unremittingly miserable experiences of my life. Not a single car is capable of whizzing past without its
passengers rubbernecking at this heap of a human being, its broken heels, tangle of hair and asbestos eyes.

I arrive at the station, pay for my ticket and head for a bench on the platform, desperate to take the weight off my feet. The only available seat is next to a handsome, straight-backed woman in
her early sixties, who is wearing a chic cashmere throw and taupe wide-legged trousers. She is reading the
Mail on Sunday
, from which she pauses, looks up briefly, then sniffs and returns
to the article.

My eyes surreptitiously dart to the page, which boasts the headline:

Next to it, with a nice blue border, there is a panel about genital warts; apparently these have reached epidemic proportions among eighteen-to-thirty-year-olds – a category I remain part
of – just.

She looks up again and catches my eye. I glance away and straighten my back, as if sitting up nicely is going to alter the fact that, currently, I could be mistaken for someone heading home to
pay her pimp then breakfast on a crack pipe.

I board the train and avoid sitting near her, not because I resent her disapproving looks, but because I deserve them. The headline flashes into my brain and my throat goes dry, before I open
the clasp on my clutch bag and carefully unzip the side pocket. I pull out a small cardboard packet marked ‘Durex’ and my stomach turns over.

It is unopened.

And I want to cry.

When you earn your living conjuring up heart-warming stories to make small children smile, it can be difficult to focus when you’re convinced you’ve contracted
chlamydia – or worse.

‘Would it breach the brand guidelines to make a Bingbah ride a bicycle?’ Giles muses, knocking back an espresso the colour of Marmite.

‘Not sure,’ I reply distractedly.

‘Can you check while you’ve got it open?’

‘What open?’ I barely register his voice.

‘The brand book. You said you had it open, twenty seconds ago.’

I shift in my seat. ‘Oh. Sorry, I shut it down.’

Giles scratches his head. ‘Forget it, I’ll look. Though I don’t know why I’m bothering. Our new unofficial creative director will no doubt take one look at the script and
suggest I turn it into a frigging solar-panelled spaceship.’

Giles’s knickers have been in a terrible twist over the issue of Sarah’s replacement – and the fact that Perry is showing no urgency to appoint anyone. Nevertheless, he’s
slightly calmer today for a reason I can’t put my finger on, but it could be something to do with him consuming only twelve cups of coffee by two p.m. instead of the usual fifteen.

Yesterday was a different story.

Having presented a script to Perry – seeing as there’s nobody else to present it to – Giles was advised by our esteemed boss that he should inject a little more
‘oomph’ into his dialogue. At which point I was convinced the veins in Giles’s neck would burst, as if someone had attached him to a 12-volt tyre inflator and forgotten to turn it
off.

‘What are we going to do, Emma?’ he howls. ‘About Perry, I mean. It can’t go on like this. The place is . . . Em?’

‘Hmm?’

‘What are you working on?’ He leans over curiously.

I shut down my browser so rapidly I almost sprain my wrist, although I don’t know what I’m worried about; the only time Giles actually gets up and walks to my desk is when I’ve
got Hobnobs.

‘The usual,’ I grin.

I haven’t produced a jot of work since I sat in this seat at a quarter to eight this morning, having arrived early to try to make up for the work I failed to produce yesterday.

I have instead spent the day Googling sexually transmitted diseases, trying to work out the odds of me having contracted one – or, more likely, a suite of them – and, as a result,
how rapidly this will result in symptoms ranging from mild itching to certain death. And that is not something for which you can go to Boots and get the morning-after pill, as I did. Twice.

‘I thought you weren’t even sure you’d had sex with him?’ Cally says on the phone as I pace up and down Rodney Street later that afternoon, attempting to hear her over
the hum of traffic.

‘I’m now ninety-nine per cent certain that I did,’ I tell her despairingly. ‘I’m now itching. Plus, I’ve been on this medical website and—’

‘Oh
Emma
,’ she interrupts. ‘Steer clear of those websites.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you type in “mouth ulcer” and three clicks later you are convinced you’ve got throat cancer with six weeks to live.’

‘Did you know that incidences of chlamydia have more than doubled since 1999?’

‘That doesn’t mean
you’ve
got it!’

‘I’m bound to now, aren’t I?’ I huff. ‘Even you at the height of your sexual escapades never went out without a handbag bursting with prophylactics, did
you?’

‘Well, that’s true. The time that led to Zachary was my one and only misdemeanour.’

Cally’s little boy was the result of the briefest of liaisons (four hours from start to finish) that she had with a guy called Pete, whom she met in a bar nearly three years ago when she
and I were on a night out in Manchester.

He was tall but otherwise unremarkable, with blond hair, a faint Mancunian accent and, presumably, a soft spot for redheads with generous curves. Cally last set eyes on him the same night she
met him. She has no idea where he is, and he has no idea that Zachary exists.

‘Let me ask an indelicate question,’ Cally continues. ‘Did you
feel
like you’d had sex?
Down there
, I mean. You know . . . gynaecologically
speaking.’

For a reformed nymphomaniac, Cally can be surprisingly coy.

I take a deep breath. ‘I don’t know. I was asking myself the same on the way to the station and . . . sometimes I convinced myself I couldn’t feel anything . . . other times I
definitely could.’

‘Do you know who this person is?’

‘The man I slept with? No idea. His name was Mike. No – Matt.’

Marianne, clearly, does not have a clue about all this. As far as my sister’s concerned, I got in a taxi immediately after she did; there’s no way I’m prepared to discuss this
with her. It was bad enough when I was half cut and convinced I was right.

‘You didn’t get his number?’ Cally asks.

‘No – and there’s no way I’d contact him anyway.’

‘So knocking at his door is out of the question?’

‘I’m not turning up on his doorstep, like a double-glazing salesman, to say, “Why, hello again. Could you possibly disclose whether you and I exchanged bodily fluids at the
weekend?”’

‘Then all you can do is try to relax – and get yourself checked out.’

‘The incubation period for HIV is three months, chlamydia is three weeks and gonorrhoea a month. So, basically, I’ll be in purgatory for the foreseeable future.’

She sighs. ‘Emma – I need to run. I was due to be in a monthly forecast meeting with my boss three minutes ago. But do me a favour and stay off those websites, won’t
you?’

I head back into the office, unable to focus on anything except how utterly rubbish
being reckless
is, when I bump into Perry on the stairs.

‘Just the gal! I’ve got a brilliant idea I want you to work up. You’ll love it. It’s about a bunch of kids and a dog who travel round in an old van trying to solve spooky
mysteries. What do you think?’

I’m opening the door to Asha that night when I spot somebody coming out of Rita’s old flat with a clipboard. Stacey mentioned she’d heard a survey was being
done today. I watch the man, who’s in his fifties and balding, head to his Micra and get in, and I feel a shudder of resentment. To me, that apartment will always be Rita’s, and I feel
inexplicably apprehensive about her replacement.

I close the door and go to the kitchen, where Asha has flicked on the kettle. ‘How are you?’ she asks.

‘Apart from itchy?’

‘You could be imagining it,’ she offers. ‘Don’t give yourself too much of a hard time, Emma. Nobody can blame you for wanting a bit of action with the opposite sex. I was
single for over a year before I met Toby and I was nearly climbing the walls.’

We both pause, taking in her last sentence and the fact that Asha clearly doesn’t consider herself ‘single’ any longer, despite the circumstances.

‘Do you think he’ll leave his wife?’ I ask tentatively.

‘We’ve discussed it, but I’m trying not to even think about that at the moment,’ Asha says, lowering her head, ‘as certain as I am that I’m a symptom, rather
than a cause, of the marriage breakdown.’

Toby and his wife married after she accidentally fell pregnant at university only four months after they’d met
.
From what Asha’s told me, it was a match made in hell at the
beginning and hasn’t improved much since.

‘I still feel
terrible
about this situation, though,’ she adds, closing her eyes. ‘That’s despite knowing their marriage can’t continue while they’re
at each other’s throats. And despite knowing it’s surely better for the children to live with two separated but happy parents – rather than two who are together and at
war.’

‘What do you think is stopping him?’

‘He’s got to work things out before he takes a step like that – money matters, who’s going to get the house, how it would work with the kids. He wants to do the right
thing by all of them, not just disappear into the sunset. I’m not taking any of this lightly, Emma. But I love him. And I can’t live without him. It’s as simple as
that.’

‘I know,’ I reassure her, clutching her hand.

‘You know, part of me thinks Cally’s right. At the end of the day, I’ve been a mistress for the last six months. What sort of bitch does that make me? This goes against all my
principles.’

‘You’re not a bitch,’ I insist. ‘Some relationships in life just aren’t very straightforward, that’s all.’

She sighs. ‘Have I ever shown you a picture of Christina?’

‘You’ve got a picture of his wife?’ I ask, incredulous.

‘I mean on Facebook. Is your computer on?’

Reluctantly, I bring out my laptop. Asha logs onto her Facebook account and clicks onto to Toby’s profile. He hasn’t got many Facebook friends – only twenty-nine – and
it’s clear from the lack of any photos – of his family or anyone else – that he’s joined only recently and is no avid user.

Asha scrolls down his Friends list and clicks on the profile of a woman by the name of Christina Gregory.

I finally put a face to a woman we’ve heard so much about over the last half-year. It strikes me, as I take in her glossy black hair, slightly over-done lipstick and oval eyes, that she
knows nothing about me – but I know dozens more things about her than I ought to.

I know about her sex life. I know about her children. And I know that her husband is sleeping with another woman. It’s not a thought I feel at all comfortable with, certain as I am that
it’s an unworkable marriage.

Asha leans across and moves the cursor, stretching awkwardly as she navigates the site. ‘Some of her pictures are public . . .’ she begins, but I don’t want to see any
more.

I’m about to object when she emits the sort of gasp that you’d expect from someone who’s been underwater for two-and-a-half minutes.

‘What is it?’

‘Oh my God. Oh my God Almighty!
What the hell am I going
to do?
’

Asha’s face blanches and she stands up, then sits down, then stands up again, her mind clearly racing about something, and there are several minutes of hysteria and panic before I find out
what it is.

‘I’ve sent her a “friend request”,’ she shrieks. ‘I’ve sent a woman whose husband I’m having an affair with a bloody
friend
request
!’