Girl 99 Page 5

  Some bastard has stolen my car.

  That’s the first thought that enters my head as I stare stupidly at the place where I’m pretty certain I parked it yesterday afternoon. People don’t move other people’s cars to the opposite side of the road or to nearby streets, but I zig-zag-zig up and down Poets’ Corner, checking Spenser, Byron and Tennyson Roads just in case. If the Mini had a name, I’d probably call it out as if summoning a lost dog.

  When I get back to the flat I’m hot and hoarse and sweaty so, before I call the police, I stop in the kitchen for a glass of water. Where, despite matters more pressing, I’m surprised to see that I’ve left the milk out – that’s Sadie’s trick, not mine. I am also reasonably confident that I didn’t use the pink mug with a cat printed on it. And that if I had, I would have put it in the dishwasher afterwards. Not left it on the countertop next to . . .

  Fuck.

  . . . my little red diary.

  Which I’m pretty certain I left in the living room.

  Maybe, I tell myself, I inadvertently left the diary here last night. The way you might, when tired and distracted, put a knife in the fork drawer, milk in the bathroom cabinet, the remote in the fridge. There’s a chance, I reason, that Sadie . . .

  What the hell was she doing letting herself into the flat, anyway?!

  . . . while drinking coffee in plain sight of an open diary in her ex-boyfriend’s kitchen, wasn’t in the slightest bit tempted to take a peek.

  I approach the counter and pick up the diary as if it might be booby-trapped.

  When there is no explosion, I open my eyes. When I see Sadie’s red-inked handwriting, I nearly drop the book and run. Gouged into the paper, beneath 8adie-Five, 7/10, are these words:

  Eighty-six, fuck your sad self. PTO.

  I turn the page: The car’s at the airport.

  Next page: Borrowed your snowboard.

  Followed by: Your boots were too small. Connor’s an 11. Happy New Year, Sadie-Five X

  There are no more entries.

  I guess Sadie decided not to take her sister skiing after all, opting instead for Connor, whoever the hell he is, although I can make a pretty good guess. Connor on my holiday, that I paid for, with my ex-girlfriend. Connor drinking my champagne in my snow. Connor with his big bastarding feet all over my snowboard.

  Now I see what I have so far somehow missed.

  Perhaps I should be thankful that Sadie thought to place my snowboard boots in the sink before filling each with a bottle of expensive Shiraz Cabernet. But I’m not.

  Turning my back on the mess, I walk through to the living room, find my phone and send a text to El:

  You’re on.

  MAY

  A LITTLE MORE THAN FOUR MONTHS LATER

  Chapter Five

  Holly is still singing but she’s relocated from the shower to the kitchen and segued from ‘Lovely Day’ to ‘Do That to Me One More Time’. Talk about a theme tune. True to El’s prediction, Holly was the eighty-sixth name on my list. She has also made guest appearances in between 88 and 89; 89 and 90; 91 and 92; and, after last night’s antics, between 94 and whoever comes next.

  Hanging on the wall in front of the rowing machine is a motivational poster of the sort normally found in gyms or advertising agency corridors. The framed print features a wide-angled shot of a single-man skull ploughing a furrow across an airbrushed lake. It’s early and the shadows are long. Printed in italicised script across the dawn sky are the words: Obstacles are what we see when we take our eyes off the goal.

  Naff, to be sure, but it’s a nice picture and – annoying really – the thought does spur me on during the last five hundred metres of a 10k pull. It was a birthday present from Douglas, and I imagine he was pretty pleased with himself when he found it. Sadie would have hated it, and every time there was a knock at the door I’d have had to retrieve the picture from under the bed and hang it just in case the person at the door was Douglas asking could he use the rower for twenty minutes. He never has, but it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility.

  Holly – wet-haired, towel knotted around her cleavage – pads into the room, carrying two mugs of coffee in one hand and a plate of toast in the other.

  ‘Milk no sugar, two slices, one jam one peanut butter.’

  ‘Oh, right, thanks,’ I say, not wanting to seem ungracious but at the same time not wanting to appear too comfortable with Holly knowing how I like my coffee or where I keep the peanut butter.

  Holly has stayed here often enough now that she has a favourite mug – printed on the side is an image of the Loch Ness monster rearing up from the water. The words One Day We’ll Find It are printed in curving script above a bright rainbow. Sadie picked it out as a souvenir from one of the many gift shops in the area. I chose a pen with an image of woman inside the top half of the barrel – when tipped a certain way, her kilt slips down to her knees. Printed on the bottom half of the barrel is the line I saw it at Loch Ness! The mug is one of the last remaining relics of Sadie’s occupancy. In the four months since she left, I have gradually cleared away old papers, odd socks and dropped hair slides. But not the mug. I like the mug, the souvenir reminding me of more than a body of water in the Scottish Highlands. Sadie and I may not have been a match made in heaven, but we had more than a few good times, and this mug makes me remember them fondly.

  The Mini, however, is a different matter. We are still joint owners of the car, and its presence – or absence, on the occasions when Sadie takes it – serve as a two-ton reminder of everything that went wrong. Around two weeks after Sadie emptied two bottles of wine into my ski boots, she came to take the car for a weekend, filling its boot with a few items she had left behind. She still has my snowboard, of course, but I’m too embarrassed to mention it, given the circumstances surrounding her taking it. We drank a cup of coffee at the kitchen table, making official what we already knew. Voices were raised, but only so far; there were tears, but only a couple of slow rollers; nothing was thrown, no one was slapped. We hugged on the doorstep, a kiss on the cheek as articulate as anything we’d said in anger or apology around the table.

  After Sadie left I washed up the mugs, hers with a green monster grinning on the side. Whether she left it deliberately or not I don’t know, and it makes me slightly uneasy watching Holly slowly appropriate my ex-girlfriend’s mug. As if she is taking her place, which she isn’t and which she won’t.

  I like Holly. There is nothing to dislike about her. Except, perhaps, for her indefatigable vigour, which isn’t in itself a flaw but is nevertheless exhausting and occasionally irritating. Like a fairground – fun for a few hours while tipsy, but you can do without it first thing in the morning with a hangover.

  Holly sits on the bed and the towel slips from her boobs. ‘Oopsy.’

  ‘Blimey,’ I say, nodding at the bedside clock, ‘is that really the time?’

  ‘Not trying to get rid of me, are you?’ says Holly in a tone of voice that suggests she doesn’t for one second believe this to be the case.

  ‘Don’t be daft. Just don’t want to make you late.’

  Holly kisses my cheek. ‘Sweet. Are you going in?’

  ‘Yeah. Later. Just got to’ – I hold an invisible phone to my ear – ‘make a few calls. I’ll be in before lunchtime.’

  And not be seen walking in with the secretary-slash-runner who happens to be wearing the same T-shirt she was wearing last night.

  Holly takes off the towel, envelops her head in its folds and dries her hair with unnerving vigour. Her breasts jounce and bounce like a pair of sugar-rushed babies.

  This is the thing with Holly. She has an easy, guileless sexuality. And it’s . . . well, sexy. The morning after the night before, I come across all modest and hide behind a towel, dressing gown, pair of undies – all three. Holly, on the other hand, it’s not so much that she’s comfortable with her nakedness, but that she’s entirely oblivious to it. I can imagine her leaving the house for work and forgetting her clothes the way you mig
ht forget a watch or a woolly hat – an optional but non-essential accessory – and only realising she’s naked when she goes to put her hand in her pocket for her bus pass. And she is as uninhibited in bed (or the kitchen or the hallway stairs or an empty tube carriage or on the rowing machine) as she is singing along to the office radio. She’s twenty-three, healthy, maybe ten maybe twenty pounds overweight, but they’re well-proportioned, springy, twenty-three-year-old, puppy-fattish pounds. She has a little tummy and more than a little bum, but she wears it well and probably would if there were another ten pounds on top. Riding cowgirl with reckless enthusiasm, her bottom lip between her teeth and hair sweat-stuck to her face, just when you think she’s going to catapult the pair of you clean off the bed, Holly smiles in that way, says ‘brace yourself’ and bounces even harder.

  But, as much fun as a fumble with Holly undoubtedly is, it has to stop. In the four months since Christmas, I have slept with one colleague, one colleague of a friend, one friend of a friend, one friend of a friend’s wife, two Sues, one jogger, one supermarket cashier, and one pregnant lady whom I helped home with her shopping. It is roughly ten weeks until C-day, and I’m still six away from one hundred. So if I’m going to sleep with the wrong person, I owe it to myself to make it someone new.

  ‘Everything okay?’ asks Holly.

  ‘Sure, why?’

  ‘You’re biting your thumb.’

  ‘Bad habit,’ I say.

  Holly takes hold of my thumb and runs her finger over the indented teeth marks. She kisses it better and I trace the forefinger of my free hand along the under-curve of her thigh.

  ‘We’ll have to be quick,’ Holly says.

  ‘Shouldn’t be a problem.’

  Holly pushes me flat and straddles my hips in one fluid motion. ‘Brace yourself.’

  Chapter Six

  The Blank Slate office is an open-plan, warehouse-style space on the top floor of a four-storey slab just off Tottenham Court Road. The walls are bare brick hung with classic movie posters, and beside Holly’s reception desk stands a glass cabinet containing minuscule film canisters, scaled-down director’s chairs, dinky cameras on tripods, and other trinkets of industry recognition.

  The most recent addition to this collection is a silver clapperboard bearing the name Ben Nicholson, awarded in the category of best director for a food commercial under thirty seconds with a budget under one hundred thousand pounds. It’s probably unprofessional to have a favourite director, but I do and his name begins with ‘B’. Ben and I have known each other since we were both runners, and this was his first award. It’s not the Cannes Grand Prix, but the way we celebrated that night, it might as well have been. Although, in retrospect, this may have been a mistake. In the six weeks since, we’ve been offered a range of scripts. Slightly bigger budgets, slightly bigger brands, but Ben – an award-winning director now – is holding out for something he can be ‘proud of’. Problem is, this is advertising, and those scripts don’t come around all that often, and when they do, they tend to go to the guy who won the Cannes Grand Prix. Meanwhile, we all have bills to pay. It’s my job – not only as Ben’s producer, but as his friend – to snap him the fuck out of it. For one thing, I’m afraid of his wife. Sophie is currently on maternity leave from a big American bank; she earns more than Ben and me put together and is on full pay for a year. Ben sees this as a licence to procrastinate and demur. Sophie sees that as an affront to everything she has worked for. And she is holding me responsible.

  I have four scripts in my bag that will pay him more than he’s earned in the past six months added together, and I’m not going home until he agrees to shoot them.

  ‘Hey, Tom,’ says Holly as I walk through the door, as if she wasn’t singing in my shower just three hours ago. ‘And how are you today?’ As if she hadn’t been bouncing on my lap fit to break the bedsprings.

  ‘I’m very well, Holly. Bright-tailed and bushy-eyed.’

  ‘Hungover, then?’ Ben says, typing at his keyboard.

  ‘And a good day to you too, Benjamin.’

  Rob, a junior director straight out of film school, looks up from a magazine. ‘Tomster,’ he says, making me grind my teeth. ‘How’s the head? Mine is min-ging.’

  ‘Clear as a bell,’ I lie.

  ‘What time were you out till?’ Ben asks, still not deigning to look at me.

  ‘I’m not sure, Daddy. Did you wait up?’

  Holly snorts.

  ‘You were still there when I left,’ says Rob helpfully. ‘Weren’t you, Tom? You and Holly.’

  Now Ben looks at me.

  Holly does a ‘naughty me’ face: Aren’t I crazy?

  ‘Really?’ I say. ‘You left before us, did you?’

  ‘You were well pissed,’ says Rob.

  I frown with incredulity.

  ‘You were,’ Rob persists. ‘Well wrecked.’

  Holly mimes downing a pint and pulls cross-eyes.

  It’s not fair to hate Rob for this apparent whistle-blowing; he isn’t criticising me, he’s lauding me. No, I hate him for his boundless exuberance. What with him and Holly, this place should have a wicker basket and a rubber bone in the corner.

  ‘Ben,’ I say, holding my bag aloft, ‘ready for a little tête-à-tête, or did you just come in to watch cat videos?’

  ‘Five minutes,’ says Ben.

  ‘Fine,’ I say. ‘I’ll be in the Fishbone.’

  Ben’s grumpiness is part of his charm, and he has a six-month-old baby at home who is apparently allergic to sleep. But he seems particularly curmudgeonly today. He’s said little more than half a dozen words in ten minutes, and three of those were ‘pie and chips’. Which means I’ve been looking at the top of his head for five minutes now as he hunkers down over his steak and kidney. It’s a vaguely mesmerising view. Not long into his thirties, Ben is losing his hair the way a drunk loses his temper – rapidly and with a mixture of contempt, denial and defiance. Ben has updated the tradition of the comb-over by styling his hair upwards and inwards into a precarious, hollow quiff. The result is something like a bonfire built during a tree shortage, and I’d be doing him a favour if I struck a match and set the whole thing alight – it would be a brief and unspectacular blaze. As a friend, I should say something, but I’ve been hoping Sophie will spare me the embarrassment – after all, she’s the one who has to sleep next to it, she’s the one who vowed ‘for better or worse’.

  ‘How’s the pie?’ I ask.

  Ben barely takes his eyes off his lunch. ‘What happened with Holly last night?’

  ‘Nothing.’ I fork battered cod into my mouth.

  ‘Nothing nothing, or shagged her again nothing?’

  Everyone knows about me and Holly in January. Ben knows about me and Holly in February and March. But, as far as I’d hoped, only me and Holly know about me and Holly last night. Electing to brazen this challenge out, I shake my head in a way intended to convey righteous indignation.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well nothing,’ I say. ‘We left before closing, I gave Holly a lift in my taxi, end of story.’

  All of which, if you think about it from the right angle, is true. We did share a taxi, and I don’t intend expanding on events.

  ‘Anyway,’ I say, ‘I thought we were meant to be talking about the pitch.’

  ‘Have you called Flo?’

  ‘Jesus, Ben.’

  Ben puts his knife and fork down, all business. ‘So that’s a no, is it?’

  ‘Yes, Ben. It’s a no. No, I haven’t called Flo.’

  ‘And that’s that, is it?’

  ‘If you’re so concerned,’ I say, ‘why don’t you call her?’

  ‘Because I didn’t shag her?’

  Flo is a college friend of Sophie’s. And it was Sophie’s idea to set us up on a date.

  It was raining and I was early, so I found a table inside the designated bar and ordered a bottle of ostentatiously expensive red wine. Flo arrived half a glass later.

  I stood to greet her
, we shook hands, pecked cheeks. I filled Flo’s glass while she collapsed her umbrella, placed it on the table, shook the raindrops from her coat and draped it across the back of her chair. As Flo took her seat I picked up her umbrella and levelled it at her chest. ‘Stick ’em up,’ I said, thinking it would be a funny icebreaker. But in the process of aiming Flo’s umbrella, I must have clicked the trigger. The brolly telescoped towards Flo, unfolding and expanding in dreadful slow motion. I watched helplessly as the polka-dot canopy knocked the bottle from the table and the glass from Flo’s hand. To give Flo her due, she maintained some degree of composure, but it didn’t change the fact that her cream shirt (possibly new) was now soaked in Californian Pinot Noir.

  If it had been deliberate I’d be a genius.

  Flo needed to change so we took a cab back to her flat. And within fifteen minutes of walking through the front door we were naked on her sofa. From whence it progressed swiftly downhill – the sex was awkward, the post-sex conversation stilted and the takeaway pizza chewy. I didn’t stay the night, and in the cab home I was under no illusions about ever making the return journey. Nevertheless, I’d felt it was a touch too soon to call Flo and apprise her of my decision at that precise moment, just one hundred and sixty-eight minutes post-coitus. Ditto Sunday – who wants that kind of conversation on a day of rest? And if there’s one thing I learned from my relationship with Sadie, it’s that women do not appreciate being dumped by email while at work on a Monday morning. Not that it should even qualify as a dumping; that would imply we were in a relationship. And we weren’t. We never even made it into a bed.

  Flo called on the Wednesday, and I explained I had plans that weekend. And, sorry, the weekend after, too. You’d think that would be the end of it. Short of spelling it out – Listen, I know we had sex on your sofa and everything, but something about you just irritated the hell out of me – I couldn’t have been more explicit. And, hey, call me a bounder, but sometimes honesty is not the best policy.

  I set down my own cutlery. ‘Listen, Ben, what happened happened, and it’s not going to happen again. I haven’t spoken to Flo for two weeks and I reckon she’s got the message by now. So why are you being so slow on the uptake?’