Where Have All the Boys Gone? (19 page)

‘I don’t
think
so.’

‘And you like him, right?’

‘Oh yes. He’s cute and he has lovely eyes.’

‘Well then. You’ll just have to take a deep breath and get stuck in. It’s like puppy training.’

Katie nodded. ‘It’s not that. You know, he hasn’t called all day. No call, no flowers, nothing. What if he doesn’t want to see me again?’

‘Of course he wants to see you again! It’s you or a sock in this town! Now, do you think Richard and Judy will fly us down first class?’

‘What do you mean, “they need a man”?’

Harry was looking perturbed, but Katie thought she could detect a note of excitement underneath.

‘I spoke to the researcher today. She said I have to bring a man to talk about how there aren’t any women around, and make an appeal.’

‘That doesn’t sound like the kind of thing I’d want to do,’ said Harry.

‘It’s for a good cause – loads of women will come to the ball. You’ll be famous! It’ll be great! Just think about the greater good!’

‘Isn’t there anyone else?’

Katie had considered this, and thought that while Iain
would be brilliant on telly, it probably didn’t give him the right message that she wanted him to advertise for other women, plus she wasn’t quite confident about taking him to London – her home. After all, what would it mean if they were travelling down to London together? And, of course, it would make Harry livid, which might have seemed a good idea a week ago, but she didn’t want to threaten their rapprochement now. Oh, and he still hadn’t called. She was starting to get an unpleasant suspicion over how long it was taking him to get in touch. She was less concerned, now, about teething troubles in the bedroom – all she could think of was his sweetness, how lovely he was to look at. She had a pretty bad case of the Iains in fact. She shook herself back to attention.

‘Well, Craig the Vet volunteered, but I don’t think he’s the kind of person we want – he looks like a farmer, and if you were a girl, you’d think he just wanted a hearty pair of hands to get up at four-thirty in the morning and milk the cows.’

‘Nothing wrong with that,’ said Harry.

‘You think that,’ said Katie. ‘And Lachlan, but…he’s a bit old.’

‘You mean, he’s a midget.’

‘He’s vertically challenged.’

‘Oh, so you’re the one using the poncey language, but you’re also the one not letting him be on television.’

‘I know,’ said Katie. ‘I feel bad about it. But what can I do? I’m a PR person and thus a bit shallow, you know, and stuff.’

‘And I’m shallow enough for you?’

‘Oh, come on. And nobody else can leave their animals, except for the technogeeks down at the research plant, and there’s plenty of them in London already and every
time they get excited they start doing
Lord of the Rings
impersonations.’

‘So, by a process of elimination of every man in a seventy-mile radius, you got to me.’

‘Yes.’

‘Can Francis come?’

‘No.’

Harry sighed. ‘Oh well. I guess. I’ve never been to London before.’

Katie’s eyes widened.
‘Exsqueeze
me?’

‘I mean, I’ve been through Heathrow before. On my way to other places. Places I actually wanted to go to. But London…no, it’s just never come up.’

Katie just stared at him.

‘I can’t believe you’ve never been to London.’

‘Why not? It’s not the centre of the universe you know.’

‘Actually, it is, as it happens. That’s why the GMT line is there.’

‘Hmm,’ said Harry, sounding unconvinced.

‘Oh my God. Well, we can show you London.’

‘I’ve seen
EastEnders,
thanks. I’ll probably do without.’

‘You big snot!’ said Katie. ‘You never know, you might love it.’

It is a completely irreversible law that states that if you are really looking forward to showing off about something – your town, a film you love or a great piece of music – it will undoubtedly appear in its worst possible light. The film suddenly won’t seem half so funny, or the person will get distracted halfway through the music and start talking about something else, or they’ll come to your town and it will piss down with rain and they’ll get mugged immediately.

Harry hadn’t been mugged yet (that was more Katie’s arena), but, annoyingly, when they’d set off on the Monday morning (after a weekend completely Iain-free, not that Katie was frantically checking for his calls or anything), it had been an uncharacteristically glorious day in Fairlish. The sun had glinted off the hills and onto the shining sea, making the whitewashed buildings look clean and fresh, and the painted fishing boats jolly and homely.

‘I’m going to miss this,’ said Harry sadly.

‘You’re going away for
three days,’
said Katie. ‘Nothing has changed here for a hundred years!’

‘You are joking?’

‘Um, why?’

‘Well, I mean, look at that tree over there. Notice anything about it?’

Now she looked at it, with some irritation she noticed that whilst the previous week it had been in full pink blossom, now the ground beneath was carpeted with petals, and green shoots were crawling out of the twigs.

‘What about it?’ said Katie, purely to be annoying.

‘It’s got a new single out,’ said Harry sarcastically. ‘You have no soul. The land never stops changing if you bother to look.’

‘Ahh, it must be National Pomposity Week,’ said Katie.

Then, to make matters worse, as they circled around Heathrow, the rain was coming down in sheets.

‘So this is the softy South is it?’ said Harry, clearly gearing himself up to a long session of remarks like that. Katie decided the best way to deal with it was to ignore him. Instead, she kept an eye on Louise, who was huddled into the window seat, with some concern. She hadn’t said a word during the journey, just stared out of the window, seeming more down with every passing mile. Katie hoped she wasn’t regretting coming with them. Although they hadn’t packed all of her stuff – Katie could bring it down in the car – there was a sense, unspoken between them, that her time in the Highlands was over. She had a job to get back to, a life to pick up the pieces of. It just wasn’t realistic to play at buxom country lass, as Olivia had repeatedly pointed out.

Katie had had several more wittering emails from Clara, but had kept them from Louise. They were hardly going to help. She had sent back a noncommittal congratulations note, and reassured her mother on the phone that everything was just fine, that she knew Max very well (which was of course true) and that the hospitals in India
were first-rate (or the one she’d pay to get Clara into would be, of that much she was determined).

But that didn’t change the fact that Louise was coming back to a town full of ghosts, and it certainly looked bleak this morning.

So, Katie was especially pleased to see a driver and a very petite blonde girl holding a sign up for them at the airport.

‘Hello!’ she said, introducing them all.

‘Wow, great to meet you!’ said the young girl reflexively. Katie guessed that she spent her life, unpaid, as a runner picking up people from airports and was doing her best, but Harry seemed completely charmed and fascinated.

‘So, you work in telly then?’ he asked. ‘Is it terribly exciting?’

‘Oh yes,’ said the girl, dully, whose name was Hortense, meaning she must be under twenty, as Katie could age the generation of Mauds, Stanleys and Hepzibahs by crazily retro names. ‘It’s incredibly exciting.’ She put a handful of change into the parking machine. ‘Sixth floor – the lift’s out, I’m afraid.’

‘Where are we staying?’ asked Katie. She hoped they got somewhere good, like a Marriott. She doubted they stretched to the Savoy.

The girl gave her a bored look. ‘Well, he’s staying in the Thistle,’ she said. ‘We thought your PR company was London-based.’

‘Well, it is…’ said Katie. She’d planned on going home, of course, but had still secretly hoped there might be a bit of fluffy bathrobes and room service in between. It had been a while since fluffy bathrobes. Mind you, it had been a while since she’d had her own room, so she supposed she could thank heaven for small mercies.

Louise was still staring out of the window. Katie touched her knee gently, but didn’t receive much of a response.

‘Ha ha ha,’ said Harry. ‘I’ve got a hotel.’

‘Yes, you’ll need it for all the groupies you get after the show,’ Katie retorted, which made him blush and cough immediately.

‘So, are you the siblings who want to carry their mother’s surrogate baby?’ asked Hortense in a bored voice.

Harry and Katie looked at each other.

‘Are
we?’ asked Harry.

‘No,’ said Katie. ‘He’s the man from the men-only village.’

‘You don’t look gay,’ said Hortense.

Having been stop-starting through the traffic at three miles an hour, they stopped at yet another traffic light. Immediately, a woman carrying a baby started banging on their window asking for money. Hortense, the driver and Katie ignored her reflexively. Harry looked at them in consternation.

‘The village where there aren’t any women living there,’ prodded Katie. ‘Where they’re trying to save the trees!’

‘Oh yes!’ said the girl. She looked more closely at Harry. ‘Is that true? There are no girls?’

‘Not many,’ said Harry, going red again. ‘Mostly lads work around there.’

‘Gosh!’ said Hortense. ‘Well, there are NO men here. Are they all single and stuff?’

Harry nodded.

‘Wow. Are there many TV shows produced there?’

‘Not many, no.’

‘Shame,’ said the girl. Then she looked at him again, with a slightly hungry expression that Katie found
annoying for some reason. Eyeing Harry objectively, she supposed girls might go for that fit healthy black-haired sulky look – heck, she might have herself a few months ago. Before she got to know him of course. And met Iain…

‘So, it’s just full of horny farmer types?’

‘Actually, we’re on the show to talk about stopping a golf course,’ said Katie officiously. ‘Have you got the brief?’ And she handed over a booklet she’d spent some considerable time putting together, full of facts and information on the local wildlife, the environmental damage caused by a flurry of new building, and the superfluity of golfing in the area.

‘Yes,’ said Hortense, handing over her call sheet. Under ‘Heathrow Airport Pick-up’ it just said ‘The Town With No Totty’, and their names.

The flat looked weird, in the way that any place not lived in for any length of time seems peculiar. Mail, all bills and junk, was piled up on the floor. There was one lonely sausage in the fridge. The place smelled a little damp, and hadn’t got any bigger whilst they’d been away. In fact, if anything, it was worse. Mrs McClockerty might not exactly run the Ritz, but it was still a huge house, with views all the way to the horizon. Whereas here, from the kitchen window, Katie could practically touch the neighbour’s bottle of Fairy. There was no horizon at all. Why had she never noticed that before?

‘Come on!’ she shouted to Louise. ‘We’re going out.’

Louise, who was wandering around not doing anything, nodded. They were going to meet Olivia at Chi, a cocktail bar so new and trendy that it was getting them excited about paying twelve quid for two centimetres of liquid with an olive in it, which would then make them cough,
and, about two seconds later, fall off their stools. Katie would have secretly preferred a quiet wine bar, but couldn’t face missing out on this – Olivia had got them on the guest list, it was meant to be packed full of celebrities and was exactly what a smart girl about town like herself ought to be doing in this day and age, for goodness’ sake, not making cow eyes at local newspaper boys.

She pulled on her favourite stretchy D&G sale top and, whilst putting on her make-up in the unflattering bathroom mirror, realised she hadn’t put make-up on – at least not
this much
make-up – for absolutely ages. She put some glittery shadow on, just to make up for it. She didn’t trust Harry to make it through the wilds of North London by himself, so she was going to meet him at the Tube station and take him to hit London, then, after the show tomorrow, she could show him a few sights. Although she’d asked him what he wanted to see and he’d politely replied Stanfords, the travel bookshop in Covent Garden, she was sure they could do better than that, and he could see how much the capital had to offer. And tonight, of course, he could see how cool and stylish they all were and stop acting so damn superior the whole time.

‘Get ready, Louise!’ she said, seeing her chum still moping around.

‘Is there going to be a big queue for this and is it going to be overpriced and stuffed full of wankers shouting at each other about their bonuses?’

‘Yes,’ said Katie. ‘Everything you love.’

‘OK,’ said Louise. She pulled on a coat over her tattiest pair of jeans.

‘Are you going like that?’

‘Why, does it matter? What does any of this matter?’

Exasperated, Katie marched her in to the small bedroom. ‘Because, when we’re sad, we get dressed and
go out and have fun, OK? And that’s what we’re doing now. So sort yourself out into something pretty or I swear, Olivia’s going to kick you from here to next Thursday. And you don’t need a coat either. We’re back down South, and it’s summertime.’

Katie went next door, put on some Donna Summer very loudly and mixed Louise a strong gin (with flat tonic).

‘Drink this!’ she ordered. ‘If you think you’re going to avoid London for the rest of your life just because some tosser behaved like a dickhead…well, you know, we could all do that, or we could all go out and be fabulous. So drink that, and shut it.’

Louise did as she was told.

‘And THINK how much more sex than Olivia you’ve been having since you’ve been away.’

Louise momentarily brightened.

They caught up with Harry at Green Park Tube, where there was already a line for the club nearly reaching around the block. He was wearing a thick fisherman’s jumper, even though it was much warmer in London, cloudy and muggy and a little unpleasant. He looked entirely out of place.

‘I don’t want to come across as a rube,’ he said, ‘but have you the faintest idea what I just paid for a taxi to get here?’

‘Complaining about the taxis! Rube error number one!’ said Katie. ‘We’re proud of having the priciest transport on planet earth.’

‘Error number one, huh? OK, what’s number two?’

They both watched as an entire folded-out newspaper bounced past them on the pavement, filthy pages taking flight, only to be trodden down by somebody else walking through them. Then they looked at each other.

‘The litter?’ asked Harry.

‘The litter,’ agreed Katie. ‘We’re tops at that too.’

‘Well, at least I catch on quickly.’

Olivia was standing at the front of the line, looking gorgeous in her usual mix of white and hippy new-age clothes.

‘DARLINGS!’ she screeched, causing everyone else in the queue – who were much more fashionably dressed – to turn around and eye them coldly as they walked to the front of the queue.

‘This isn’t nice,’ said Harry to Katie. ‘They’ve waited ages.’

‘It’s very nice,’ said Katie as Olivia signed them in at the door. ‘It’s called VIP.’

‘Ah,’ said Harry, apologising to everyone behind him, ‘I see.’

Inside was mobbed, heaving, with smoke wreathing the air. The bar was six deep and there was nowhere to sit except absurdly low couches that were already stuffed full of teenagers draped over each other in absurdly low trousers. Everyone else was standing or perched on stools, chattering wildly in tiny skirts and brightly coloured shoes. Katie’s heart sank. She’d wanted a quiet evening catching up with her friends, and introducing them to Harry, not a clusterfuck where you had to drink to make up for the fact that you couldn’t hear anyone’s conversation. The walls were made of jagged crystal and white velvet, and there were the most extraordinary spiralled mobiles hanging down from the ceiling that looked as though they could take somebody’s eye out.

‘Isn’t this great!’ Olivia was shrieking. ‘Damien Hirst made the ceiling.’

Katie wasn’t quite sure how great a recommendation
this was, and glanced at Harry. He was staring all around him as if he’d just stepped into Wonderland.

‘What do you think?’ she said, nodding at Olivia who was indicating four martinis to the barman.

‘Wow,’ said Harry. ‘I can’t…’

Despite herself, Katie couldn’t help feeling a little pleased. Mr Grumpy Boots did see London, after all. Well, she supposed he hadn’t seen much like this, if the only pub he’d ever been to was the Mermaid (and she hadn’t even seen him in there).

‘Great, isn’t it?’

‘I admit it. I’m a rube,’ said Harry, ‘but those girls have got
no clothes on
!’

‘They’ll catch their deaths,’ she smiled at him.

‘They’ll catch something,’ he said. ‘Sorry, that was completely uncalled for. This place is freaking me out. I mean, they look like they’ve just stepped out of a fashion magazine…not that I ever read fashion magazines of course. They’re Derek’s.’

‘Well, here they all are.’

Sure enough, there were many more women than men in the room, although there was a small complement of men in pinstriped suits looking satisfied with themselves, and a few men whose suits matched the décor. Harry’s eyes were wide.

‘Follow me!’ commanded Olivia, and they disappeared into a quieter side area with a large bouncer standing in front of it. Behind him were little Turkish-style seraglio booths, with embroidered cushions and pink lighting. The women were, if anything, even slimmer, and it was, thankfully, quieter.

‘Wow!’ said Harry, bouncing onto one of the beds. ‘I could get to like this.’

Various women turned around as if preparing themselves
to make supercilious expressions, but when they caught sight of the tall and rugged Harry, they clearly decided not to, and looked interested instead; even more so when Harry pulled off his sweater. Katie winced when she saw he was wearing a green checked shirt, but he certainly looked well-built underneath it.