Come Again Read online

  ‘I don’t see why. I mean, look at you. You’re from a happy background. You get on with your sister. Your Mum and Dad are happy.’

  ‘I fail to see what my background’s got to do with—’

  ‘It’s got everything to do with it,’ he interrupts.

  ‘Everything, how?’

  ‘Everything, in that if someone like me, whose parents hate the sight of each other, can fall in love and want to settle down, then someone like you must have a pretty good chance of wanting to do the same thing.’

  ‘Whoa.’ I hold up my hand. I know Jack means well, but quite frankly, I can do without his analysis of the long-term social ramifications of the disintegration of the nuclear family unit right now. Feeling insecure about being single is one thing, but feeling guilty about not being married yet is quite another. ‘It may have escaped your notice, Jack, but wanting and doing are two separate things. And finding’s something separate again.’

  Jack narrows his eyes. ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning that there’s little point in us sitting here discussing the hypothetical compatibility of Matt Davies and the institute of marriage, if there’s absolutely no chance of this hypothesis shifting from the realms of fantasy into the realms of reality in the near future.’

  Jack narrows his eyes further. ‘The English translation of which is . . .’

  ‘. . . that I don’t have a girlfriend, Jack, let alone a girlfriend that I love, let alone a girlfriend that loves me back enough to spend the rest of her life with me.’

  Jack considers this for a moment, then sits back in his chair and folds his arms. ‘So find one,’ he finally ventures.

  ‘Find one what?’

  ‘A girlfriend you can fall in love with.’

  I eye him suspiciously. The echo in his voice is too loud to ignore. ‘Have you been talking to Amy since I met her for lunch?’

  Jack smiles innocently. ‘Might have,’ he chimes knowingly, ‘but that’s beside the point. Why not? That’s the question. Why not get yourself a girlfriend? Lots of advantages . . . don’t you think? Think of all the money you’ll save on baby oil and Kleenex . . . and that’s just for starters . . .’

  I stare at him for a few seconds in disbelief, before replying. ‘Do you want to know what I think?’ I ask, pressing straight on. ‘I think you’re stark raving mad, that’s what I think. I can’t just go out there and find myself someone to fall in love with just because I feel like it.’

  ‘Why not?’ He looks at me like I’m stupid.

  ‘Because it doesn’t happen like that, that’s why bloody not,’ I splutter. ‘The odds against it must be—’

  He waves his hand dismissively. ‘Nah,’ he says, ‘you don’t want to go believing all that crap.’

  ‘All what crap?’

  ‘All that crap about there only being one person out’ there for you.’ He lights another cigarette. ‘I mean, look at me and Amy. All that Überbabe shit I used to bang on about last year. All that waiting for my perfect woman to come along, when Amy was there, staring me in the face the whole time. All I had to do was look. Just give things a go . . .’ He glances round nervously, before leaning forward and shielding his mouth. ‘It’s like the X-Files,’ he whispers, ‘they’re out there somewhere. It’s just a matter of sussing out where.’

  ‘OK, smartarse,’ I tell him, figuring I’ve got nothing to lose. ‘Where do you suggest I start?’

  ‘Easy,’ he says, not batting an eyelid. ‘H.’

  I give Jack a complicated problem that’s troubled mankind since the birth of time and he, in return, gives me a letter of the alphabet. Great. ‘What are you talking about?’ I demand.

  ‘Not what,’ he corrects, ‘who. I’ve got it all worked out. Amy’s best mate, H.’ He waves his hand. ‘You know, the girl she was with at Zanzibar that night. Helen. Short, dark hair. Totally Winona. A complete babe. Really easygoing. You two clicked straight off.’

  Oh, yeah. I remember H. I have a definite memory of her telling me, in no uncertain terms, to get the hell away when I attempted to get a snog off her at the end of the night in Zanzibar. I feel myself blushing, remembering my excruciatingly embarrassing failed move. I wonder if Jack’s clocked the fact that I’ve bailed out on every social event that H might have been at since.

  ‘That H. Oh, yes, Jack. Very smart,’ I say with a rueful smile, ‘but forget it. She gave me the brush-off, remember? Had some long-term boyfriend, she told me.’

  Jack nods his head enthusiastically. ‘Sure, but times change. She’s single now. What?’ he asks, catching my expression. ‘Didn’t I tell you?’

  ‘No, not that it matters. Times change, but tastes don’t,’ I point out. ‘She gave me the brush-off then, so she’ll give me the brush-off now.’

  Jack wags his finger at me. ‘Some people have morals, Matt. Consider the possibility – no matter how outlandish it might first appear – that the reason she blew you out was because she was in a monogamous relationship at the time, and not because she didn’t fancy the pants off you.’

  Two pertinent points from Jack Rossiter in one evening. It’s not like him to blow his annual allowance just like that. I’m intrigued. Perhaps he’s on a roll. Perhaps he will be able to give me some sound advice. ‘Has she said something to you?’ I ask, and as I do, I can’t help feeling that playground rush of excitement and hope.

  ‘Not exactly,’ Jack says.

  My rush freezes. ‘Oh.’ I take a couple of seconds to recover. ‘So, when you say she might fancy the pants off me, you mean just that.’

  ‘No, I have a hunch.’

  I consider this for a moment. H was fun that night in Zanzibar. Really good fun. But what’s the use? Boyfriend or no boyfriend, when it came to the crunch, the chemistry just wasn’t there.

  ‘Forget it,’ I tell Jack. ‘Once bitten, twice shy. Let’s leave it there. Save both of us the embarrassment.’ He stares at me levelly, the kind of stare a schoolteacher gives you when you claim your homework’s been eaten by the dog for the fifth day running. ‘Come off it, Jack,’ I continue. ‘Think of the practicalities . . .’

  ‘What practicalities?’

  ‘Well, Zanzibar was a year ago, wasn’t it? It would look pretty weird, me calling her up now and asking her out for a date.’ I hold my fist to my ear, mimicking a telephone. ‘Hi, H. Matt, here. No, no. Matt who you met in Zanzibar last year. No, not the island in the Indian Ocean. The night-club. I was the guy who came on to you like a twelve year old, slap-bang in the middle of the dance floor. Yes, the arsehole. Ha, ha. Yes, that Matt. Well, I wanted to know if you fancied coming out for dinner some time. I was going to call you last year, only I’ve been kind of busy and didn’t get round to it till now. Yes. Yes, that is pretty warped, isn’t it? What? Psychiatric help? Well, it’s not something I’ve ever really considered before. Hello? Hello?’ I lower my fist and frown at Jack. ‘Can you believe it?’ I ask him. ‘She hung up.’

  Jack raises an eyebrow, unimpressed. ‘You don’t need to ask her out on a date,’ he states.

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘She’s coming along to the lunch tomorrow.’

  ‘What lunch?’

  ‘The test lunch for the wedding,’ he explains with a grimace. ‘The, er, massive test lunch that Stringer’s organized so we can all tryout the food and decide what we want on the actual day. The massive and terribly tasty test lunch that I was going to tell you about last week, only I sort of forgot, which is why I’m telling you about it now . . .’

  I stare at him in disbelief. ‘You’re not serious, are you?’

  He screws up his face. ‘Yeah. And it’s really important you’re there. Best man and all that . . .’

  ‘Forget it. I’m up to my eyeballs in work. You should have told me about it earlier, and—’

  Jack looks at me imploringly. ‘Please . . .’

  I’m about to tell him to go jump, but something stops me. It could be the news that H is now single. It could even be the cute, hang-dog exp
ression that Jack’s wearing right now in an attempt to emotionally blackmail me. Most likely of all, though, the swaying factor is that Jack ate my pizza.

  ‘When you say massive lunch,’ I finally ask, ‘just how big are we talking?’

  Stringer

  Wednesday, 11.10

  ‘What about you, Stringer?’ KC calls out.

  I’m trapped in the Epicentre of the Vortex of Chaos, otherwise known as Unit 3, Sark Industrial Estate, Chichi’s West London base. It consists of a warren of offices, dining-rooms, kitchens, walk-in fridges and freezers.

  From the outside, it looks like any other low-rent, prefabricated two-storey building. A passing innocent might assume that inside regular people are carrying out regulated tasks as part of their regular working existences. A passing innocent, however, would be wrong – utterly wrong – because a passing innocent would never have met Freddie DeRoth, owner of Unit 3 and master of all therein, and a passing innocent would never have met Greg Stringer, owner of very little indeed, and Master of Keeping the Whole Ship Afloat.

  Now, I’m not slagging Freddie off. Far from it. He’s an industry legend. The party planner’s party planner, so to speak. A genius, no less, when it comes to showing other people how to have a good time. He practically introduced the concept of party theming to the UK. Give him the right budget and he’ll create anything you desire, from a Romanesque orgy for four hundred, complete with toga-dad slaves bearing whole roast deer, to a simple picnic in the park for ten.

  It’s just that Freddie is an ideas man, and Freddie’s ideas don’t stoop so low as to the practicalities of actually running a business. He likes to plan the events and to be there, front of house, to bask in the glory. This is perfectly understandable. It is, after all, his glory. The boring side of the business, however – the logistics of staff, transport, venues and supplies – he leaves to me. Some days, this is a challenge. At other times, it’s like being tossed a live hand grenade: all you want to do is throw it back, curl up in a ball, and wait for the explosion to pass.

  Today is one of those days.

  I’ve been sitting here at my desk in the tiny admin office by the kitchens since seven thirty this morning with the phone practically glued to my ear. I’ve got Jack and Amy booked in here for their test lunch at one thirty. Tamara’s managing a two-hundred-guest television-awards bash at the National History Museum tonight, and Freddie and Tiff are down in Wiltshire, theming a diamond heiress’s fiftieth birthday party. The whereabouts and wellbeing of eighty-six staff, four fridge vans, sixty cases of vintage champagne and a performing goat called Gerald, whose speciality is loudly bleating whilst standing on his hind legs, are merely a sample of the prize-winning turds today has decided to dump on my doorstep.

  Thus far, it’s SNAFU (Situation Normal: All Fucked Up). I’m a grand total of twelve waiters/resses short for tonight. Freddie, Tiff and their respective convoy of catering and staff vehicles are running two hours late, stuck in a five-mile tailback on the M4. Dave Donovan of One Man and His Fish caterers has reliably informed me that if I want fifty lobsters for tonight’s NHM bash, then I’d ‘better get fucking swimming’. Through tears and anguished sobs, Tamara has confessed that Gerald slipped his tether half an hour ago, and was last seen charging maniacally around Hyde Park, terrorizing pigeons and poodles alike.

  ‘Yo, Stringer,’ KC shouts again. ‘What about you?’

  I’ve been vaguely aware of intermittent laughter coming from the kitchen for the last twenty minutes or so, and can only assume that KC has once again been chairing a lewd and lascivious debate amongst the kitchen staff. Oh well, any distraction is welcome right now. I walk over to the open door.

  ‘What about me, what?’ I ask, leaning cross-armed against the doorframe.

  Long-haired, bloodshot and scruffy beyond belief, KC is both a consummate chef and a highly regarded hashish aficionado. He’s been working for Freddie for three years now – ever since he moved over from Australia on his thirtieth birthday. He looks up from the vast table of canapés he’s been prepping for tonight’s television awards. He’s wearing baggy trousers, a T-shirt and has a blue-and-white apron tied around his waist. The T-shirt has a picture of the Pope with a superimposed spliff sticking out of his mouth, and bears the legend: I like the Pope. The Pope smokes dope.

  I like him (KC, that is – I’ve never met the Pope), but I don’t think he’s quite made up his mind about me yet. I also don’t think that asking him to cook a test lunch today for what he regards as me and five of my mates has helped much either. However, we haven’t come to blows yet and – he stands upright, all six foot four of him – I hope we never do.

  ‘Virginity, mate,’ he says, his accent coming on strong. He wipes his hand down the side of his apron. ‘We’ve just been discussing when we all lost ours. Jodie here,’ he continues, nodding at a pretty graduate who’s been working for Chichi for the past few months in an attempt to payoff some debts, ‘got her cherry plucked when she was sixteen by her bloody guitar teacher at school.’ He waggles a knife between his two other helpers, a teenaged boy and girl sent round by the staffing agency this morning. ‘And Mickey and Alison plucked each other’s the weekend before last. The weekend before last,’ he reflects with a rueful smile, watching the two of them exchange coy glances. ‘I ask you, mate, how bloody old does that make you feel?’

  ‘Ancient,’ I tell him, turning to go.

  ‘Hang on,’ he says. ‘What about you?’

  ‘What about me?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, fair’s fair,’ he explains. ‘You can’t go listening in on other people’s intimate stories without trading in one of your own, can you?’

  ‘I haven’t been listening in on anything, KC,’ I point out. ‘You called me out here and spilt the beans on everyone, remember? If it’s anyone’s turn to dish the dirt, it’s probably yours.’

  A mistake. Rather than putting KC off the idea of continuing the conversation, all my request actually does is up his interest. No sooner have I issued my challenge to him, than he takes it up with a relish probably not hitherto witnessed in his life since his discovery that tobacco and hashish, when smoked together in sufficient quantities, were capable of inducing it lengthy and beneficial high.

  ‘So, Stringer,’ he drawls approximately ten minutes later, following the finale of an enthralling narrative, complete with a choreographed display of which the BBC’s dramatic reconstruction department would be proud, ‘fill us in on the scrubber who was stupid enough to get filled in by you the first time round.’

  At this exact moment, there’s a silence. It’s a silence of ignorance, and a silence of shame. It’s the silence of a schoolboy who’s been asked the easiest question in the world, but doesn’t know the answer.

  I feel sick and this sickness comes as no surprise. This isn’t the first time I’ve felt this way. It’s been going on since I was fourteen and Richard Lewis came back to our boarding-school on the first night of the summer term with a pair of white cotton knickers in his blazer pocket. I remember standing with him and about ten other teenagers in the yard at the back of our boarding-house before lights-out time, smoking cigarettes, passing the knickers from hand to hand, digging each other in the ribs, and giggling when Dave Tagg was caught stealing a sneaky sniff by pressing the gusset up against his face. I also remember studying Richard’s face as he told us about the previous Wednesday night when a girl he knew from home, Emma Roberts, had agreed to go down to the caravan at the bottom of his parents’ garden at their home in Berkshire. He told us how he’d curled up with her on the fold-down bed and slowly undressed and – and this was what we’d been waiting to hear – shagged her. Then he showed us the knickers again, because they were his proof, and because without them and without Emma Roberts’ name tag sewn in to them, we wouldn’t have believed a word he’d said.

  I’m not Richard Lewis, however. I’m Greg Stringer. I have no proof. All I have are lies.

  ‘The very first time?’ I query.


  ‘Yeah,’ KC presses.

  I walk over to the preparation table, pull up a chair and sit down. ‘Her name was Emily,’ I begin.

  Her name was Mrs Emily Warberg.

  ‘How old were you?’ Mickey asks.

  ‘She was twenty-one and I was seventeen. She was a student at Manchester University. I was in my last year at school.’

  She was forty-nine, the mother of Alan Warberg, a boy from home I used to hang out with in the school holidays. I’d known both her and him since they’d moved in to the street when I was twelve. Her husband’s name was Rob and he worked for an advertising agency.

  ‘An older woman, huh?’ KC exclaims. ‘You lucky bastard. What was she like?’

  ‘Emily was beautiful. Blonde hair, blue eyes. Five ten. A real stunner.’

  Mrs Warberg was the Bride of Frankenstein, a diet-junkie, and scrawny to the point of emaciation. Her legs were like broomsticks and her shoulderblades sharp. She smoked forty Rothmans a day and hadn’t exercised once in the time I’d known her. Her hair was bottle blonde and her roots cobweb grey. She wore padded bras and drank vodka neat from a bottle she kept on top of the fridge.

  KC puts down his knife and perches on the edge of the table, rapt. ‘Radical,’ he mutters. ‘Where d’you nail her?’

  ‘I called round at her house one Saturday night,’ I continue. ‘Emily lived down the street from me. It was the Easter holidays and I was at home revising for my A-levels. She was home from Manchester for the Easter break. I’d seen her at this party the weekend before and we’d chatted and kissed a little. Nothing more, though. Anyway, this Saturday night . . . Her mother was an economics teacher at the college down the road, and I needed some help on a mock paper I was doing, so round I went . . .’

  One Saturday night in the Easter holiday, I went round to Alan’s house for a spliff.

  KC guffaws and pulls his knee up to his chin. ‘Help you with your homework. Jeeze, man, how cheesy can you get?’