‘What were you thinking of? I’ve told you I want an up-market show. Which bit of the word up-market is it that you don’t understand?’ I snap. Somewhere I can hear someone say, ‘Thirty seconds to live.’
‘You told me to deal with the detail,’ she defends.
I’m not in the mood for debating. ‘I want him off the show by next week, Fi.’ The voice in my earpiece says, ‘Twenty seconds.’ I tune back in to the fat man.
‘It’s a live show tonight, so if you are sitting next to somebody you shouldn’t be, move.’ The audience finally begins to smirk. ‘Ten seconds.’
‘Did you see anyone move, Fi?’ I ask. I’m always thinking about potentially adulterous relationships. ‘Eight, seven, six.’ There is a swell of expectancy.
‘Now a big hand for Katie Hunt, this evening’s presenter.’ The audience starts to clap their hands raw for the remote chance that there may be a nanosecond mug shot on TV. The fat man tries to get Katie to twirl like a modern-day Anthea. This is proof, if we needed it, that he has had his day. Katie wouldn’t twirl if Robbie Williams asked her to. Katie casts him a withering look. I’m relieved – at least she understands what type of show I’m making here.
Three, two, one – we are on air.’ The roving camera sweeps magnificently across the audience and set. The camera reminds me of an internal. It must do the same for Fi, as I notice she writes ‘smear’ on her hand with a felt tip. The emergence of the cameras acts as an aphrodisiac on the audience. Everyone visibly brightens; they grow a couple of inches, smile a bit wider.
‘Hello, and welcome to the very first Sex with an Ex.’ The stage manager initiates more applause; the audience catches on quickly and begins to cheer. Katie smiles back at the camera, appreciating their appreciation.
‘You smell the same.’
‘Smell? What do I smell of? ‘He is mildly irritated. Scrupulously clean at all times, he has made a particular effort tonight.
‘My youth.’ She smiles.
She leans closer to inhale him again. She notices he is quivering. She notices she is. He turns a fraction and he is staring into her eyes, straight past the pupils, and directly hitting her mind and soul. She is sixteen again. Which makes him eighteen. She has been propelled back to the doorstep of her parental home. The season is irrelevant; she feels warm and safe. It’s late at night, very late, because although they abide by the curfew and get her home by 10.45 p.m., they are literal: she is home but not in her home. It’s past midnight and they are still sitting on the step. They can’t go in because her mother is waiting up in her nylon dressing gown. Her mum will want to know what the film was like, and she’ll make a cup of coffee and stay up and drink it with them. They don’t want to talk to anyone else. They never do.
Did. ‘Did’ is the correct verb because she’s not sixteen, she’s twenty-six and she’s not on the step of her mum and dad’s house in Croydon. She’s actually just bumped into Declan outside Pronuptia bridal shop.
‘Big box,’ he comments, grinning, and he’s just the same. The grin is just the same; it lights up her stomach and a bit lower.
‘Er, yes. ‘She hesitates. The natural thing to say next is, ‘It’s my wedding dress,’ but Abbie doesn’t say the natural thing. She says, ‘Wow, it’s been a long time.’
‘Yes. Ten years.’ He pauses for a moment and then adds, ‘Four months, two weeks and about eight days.’
‘Delighted and shocked, Abbie blushes and glances both ways up the street. She’s not sure what or who she’s looking for. But she’s relieved not to see anyone she knows. ‘I don’t believe you’ve been counting.’
‘Fair cop. I haven’t. I just made up the stuff about months and weeks.’ They both laugh because it always was easy for him to make her laugh.
‘Fancy a drink?’ he adds casually. And why shouldn’t she? It’s just a drink. She hasn’t anything else planned except a night in with a face pack. Lawrence is out tonight – rugby practice.
They make their way to a nearby wine bar that he knows. She is impressed with the way he takes charge and really he couldn’t have chosen better. As she pushes open the door, she is overwhelmed by the smell of fags and booze, by the litter of noise and dark suits. Money and irresponsibility, the most potent aphrodisiacs. The wine bar is packed. Smart bods forcing their way to the bar, into each other’s psyches and beds. The suits are Armani and the bed linen will be Egyptian cotton. It’s Abbie’s kind of bar, full of deeply attractive and arrogant media types, all of whom have disposable incomes matched only by their disposable lifestyles. She hasn’t been to a bar like this for ages. It was in a bar like this that she met Lawrence. But once they’d been together for a few months such dens of sin were superfluous. It was easier to sin on the settee in his flat.
The music pumps through Abbie and Declan’s brains and rushes to her knickers and his cock. Music just does that. No one is dancing, it’s a bar not a club, and although Abbie is tempted to sculpt out a space on the designer scuffed wooden floor, she’s far too shy to do so. Besides which she’s still carrying her huge box with her bridal dress and six-foot veil. Where would she put it? What is she thinking of? Bringing her dress into a smoky bar? She notes that she’s tapping her foot. In fact, her leg is jerking almost uncontrollably. She wants to dance. She needs to whoosh and swirl. Suddenly she understands stripping. Music does equate to sex. It thumps and jars and consumes and fills and ultimately relieves. Abbie prefers to make love to music, rather than in silence. It helps to create the mood. Whichever mood she wants. Fast and frantic or slow and seductive. Abbie shakes her head. What is she thinking of? Sex, that’s what. Why is she thinking of sex? She’s not out with her fiance; she’s with Declan. She should not be thinking of sex.
‘Drink?’ she yells. She orders him a Becks and herself two gin and tonics. She downs one at the bar and then returns to her seat with the other. She doesn’t normally try to calm her nerves with drink. Then again she’s not normally nervous with men. She’s been with Lawrence for three years so she can’t remember the last time she felt flirtatious or sexy. But she is nervous with Declan.
And flirty.
And sexy.
‘So you don’t drink Bacardi and Coke any more?’ He smiles.
‘No.’ She smiles back. ‘And I assumed you’d moved on from Woodpecker cider. Cheers.’
They clink glasses. They fall silent, as they have so much to say. She wants to ask him why he never wrote once he went to university. Why didn’t he reply to any of her letters ? She remembers the endless waiting for the postman, the fruitless, pointless hoping. The answer is he met a girl from Nottingham in Freshers’ Week. For the first two terms it seemed like love. He reads her mind and says, ‘I never was much of a letterwriter.’
He wants to ask her who she lost her virginity to and was it good. The answer is that, furious and bored with waiting for his letters and calls, she eventually climbed into bed with his cousin within hours of blowing out the candles on her seventeenth birthday cake. Yes, it was good, very good.
She reads his mind and assures him, ‘Pretty average, really. Like everyone’s first time.’
They both start to laugh at the cosmic connection that seems undamaged by the years of neglect. They had always found talk easy. Indulging in endless outpouring of thoughts, views, dreams and emotions. Now they exchange suppositions, opinions, histories and sentiments. They don’t notice the difference. It is still there, the familiar but indefinable sense of possibility. He’d always filled her with such a pure sense of adventure. She loves Lawrence dearly, but he doesn’t create that sense of future possibilities; he brings with him a sense of future stability. She thought it was impossible to feel sixteen unless you were sixteen, but now she is within inches of Declan, it’s back, that overwhelming sense of YESness. Her mood is buoyant as she drinks those first few G&Ts. Quickly they pass a respectable G&T hour, so they swap to red wine.
‘Aren’t you hot?’ he yells over the crowd.
‘Hot?’ she asks with feigned nonchalance.
‘You are still wearing your gloves.’
‘Slowly she peels them off, revealing her engagement ring.
