Chapter 21 #2
‘Soooo… you and Jake?’ she says.
I raise an eyebrow. I can totally do this. I’ve acted before. I was one of the three witches in Macbeth in my Year 8 school play. This is just a bit of acting for a couple of minutes.
‘Me and Jake?’ I repeat in my best guileless tone.
‘Exactly,’ Sonja says.
I frown innocently. ‘You mean us coming on the show today?’
‘What have you been up to since the team-building weekend?’
This time I frown thoughtfully, like I’m trying to recall facts. ‘I’ve been really busy,’ I say. ‘Work. Friends. Family. You know. Busy. As we all are.’
‘And Jake?’
‘I presume he’s been busy too,’ I say.
Sonja shakes her head. ‘Honestly,’ she says. And then she gets up and leaves and I sit and worry until the make-up woman barrels into the room and tells me she’s going to have her work cut out sorting out the bags under my eyes and says could she suggest that I try to get more sleep.
I’m reunited with Jake when I’m deemed okay to go on air, hair and make-up-wise. I really want to ask him what he said to Sonja, but I feel that walls might have ears and daren’t say anything at all to him.
He clearly feels the same way, because he greets me with a handshake and is now asking, ‘How have you been?’
‘Great, thanks,’ I say. ‘You?’
‘Yeah, good, thanks.’
And then we sit at opposite ends of our sofa not looking at each other, while Sonja announces us, and then we’re ushered on set by Soraya.
Sonja asks how we’ve been and we do small talk very briefly before she says, ‘So let’s have a recap.
’ And she summarises our previous appearance and shows yet another video of us edited to include the most argumentative bits of our dispute.
Yay. Then she summarises the challenge and where we got to, with some video footage.
Then she talks through the team-building weekend.
I’m beginning to relax; it really does seem as though we’re here almost just as extras: what’s actually happening is that Sonja’s showing videos of us doing stuff and she’s basically doing a voiceover.
It’s actually quite interesting seeing the footage of the weekend.
It was well over twenty-four hours of activities, and we were busy most of the time, so by the time they’ve finished showing it all and we’ve all agreed that we basically both lost the love challenge, it should be time for us all to smile and say yes the team-building weekend did work reasonably well and we’ve agreed to differ, shake hands and leave and get on with our Sonja-free lives.
During the extended footage, I’m pleased to say that I look less ridiculous than I thought I might, even during the non-abseiling debacle and the ice bath.
It’s all fine.
I’m just thinking that I really shouldn’t have wasted time dreading this, when Sonja turns to us both, and says, ‘How did you two get on that weekend? How did the team-building go?’
She looks at me first. I’m suddenly goose-bumpy scared, because we’ve already covered this, and she’s looking at me with gimlet eyes now. What if she knows something? No. She doesn’t. And if she does, it doesn’t really matter. There’s no need to be scared. We just need to stick to our story.
I say, ‘Actually not too bad. As you saw, Jake did very kindly help me on the assault course, which was really thoughtful. We basically ended up agreeing to differ and aren’t arguing any more.’
‘Jake?’ Sonja asks.
‘Yep, everything Freya said,’ he confirms.
‘Nothing else?’ she asks.
We both shake our heads.
My goose-bump feeling of dread is growing.
It’s just occurred to me that viewers might not take kindly to us having lied to them about nothing having happened between us.
And Sonja’s smiling the way she did when she told me what activities we’d be doing during the team-building weekend, kind of slyly, like she has it in for us. I’m beginning to feel very queasy.
‘Interesting,’ Sonja says. ‘Have a look at this.’ She points at the screen where all the footage has been shown and a video begins to play.
And oh no. Oh no, no, no.
It’s night-time. The camera pans in on a window where two people… oh fuck. Oh fuck, fuck, fuck.
It’s unmistakably me and Jake. Kissing, hands everywhere, ripping each other’s clothes off…
They have, naturally, edited the footage – in a PG, pre-watershed kind of way – to make it look like we immediately got naked rather than having the lovely long kiss I remember us beginning with.
‘Interesting,’ says Sonja. She must have been trying to get me to tell her about this when she – clearly – pretended that Jake had told her something.
‘Ha, yes, the ultimate in team-building. Yeah. We had a cheeky one-night stand. Not something you want to tell anyone, which is why we… didn’t,’ says Jake. ‘Whoops. Should obviously have closed the curtains.’
I’m very impressed by the way he’s risen to the occasion. I nod a lot, judging it better not to say anything at this point.
And, actually, it isn’t that bad. Just a bit embarrassing.
It doesn’t matter that Sonja and the nation know now that we had sex that weekend.
Really, who cares? It means nothing to us that they know.
If we stay together forever and, yep, I was completely wrong about relationships, because I do love Jake very much and I really hope that we do have a happily-ever-after together, then at some point everyone will know.
They can laugh with us about how we got together.
Except… Sonja is shaking her head sorrowfully, and that is terrifying.
‘I’m not sure you’ve been straight with me.’ She points at the screen and we all turn to look at it.
And there we see a montage of us in our real lives.
Some of the footage is a bit grainy, but it’s unmistakably us.
Together. Holding hands in the park, kissing, arms wrapped round each other in a cinema foyer.
And a delightful shot of me naked on Jake’s sofa the first time we had sex again, with pixellated boobs.
‘That’s completely unacceptable.’ Jake’s using his hard lawyer voice all of a sudden. ‘How did you get that footage? We clearly did not consent to any of that being taken.’
‘We did a social media request and our lovely viewers were only too happy to help. And once we realised how big a story this was, the paparazzi wanted to get involved.’
‘Because you instructed them,’ Jake says. ‘Or they would not have known.’
‘You’ve had people stalking us,’ I say.
‘Freya, it’s in the public interest,’ Sonja tells me, eyes wide and fake-soulful. ‘We need our romance authors and our divorce lawyers to be straight with us.’
I want to rant at her, because it is not pleasant discovering that you’ve been followed and videoed so much, but decide that our best bet is to say nothing further.
Jake is also currently silent. His expression is extremely forbidding and I’m glad I’m not the person on the end of it.
Sonja seems unaffected by the stern look.
‘How would you say the challenge actually went for you?’ she asks.
Okay, I am not going to announce on national television that I am now if I’m honest hoping to spend the rest of my life with Jake. It’s very soon to feel this way, anyway, and I certainly wouldn’t want to terrify him by saying it now, so I’m not saying it to anyone else.
‘Early days,’ I say, forcing a laugh. ‘We’ll have to come back to you on that one.’
Jake nods.
‘Oh, really?’ Sonja goes all wide-eyed faux-innocent. ‘Because you look pretty loved-up to me. Pretty much as though Jake has won the challenge.’
‘Listen to this.’ She indicates the screen again, and Jake and I both turn to it.
Jake’s looking even more tight-lipped and I’m internally panicking big time, my mind on a what-now-what-now-what-now loop.
And then she plays us a video, with sound, of us from last night, clearly taken through Jake’s window by some stranger, on Jake’s sofa, exchanging I-love-yous.
I’m stunned. It’s so beyond intrusive it’s untrue.
‘A little more than early days, wouldn’t you say?’ Sonja’s smiling very widely now.
Jake and I both say nothing.
And then Sonja turns to Jake. ‘Have you been straight with Freya, Jake?’
‘Yep,’ he says, very shortly.
‘Really?’ she says. ‘Let’s have a look, shall we?’
We all turn to the screen yet again.
I feel very cold and shivery, like flu has suddenly set in. I don’t know what Sonja’s about to show us, but I’m certain it isn’t going to be good.
It’s footage of Jake talking to his friend Pete. Who of course agreed to be videoed, unlike our other friends. It’s from after the karaoke night.
‘You could still win,’ Pete says. ‘Soften her up on the team-building weekend.’ There’s a bleep during which Sonja mouths ‘shag’ at me. ‘—her. Get her to fall in love with you. Then you’ve won.’
‘Yeah, nice,’ Jake says.
‘Two hundred quid says you can’t do it.’
Jake laughs. ‘You never know.’
‘A serious bet?’
‘Sure.’ Jake sticks his hand out and they shake.
I myself am now shaking, all over, and my stomach’s churning.
I really don’t want to throw up here and I also don’t want to deal with this now. I just want to get through the rest of this hellish morning and get home and crawl under my duvet.
‘That’s some seriously misleading editing you’ve done there.’ Jake’s looking almost white with what I assume is anger. Anger that he’s been found out.
‘Not that misleading,’ says Sonja, with the air of a woman about to play a gigantic trump card. ‘Look at this.’
I don’t want to look. I can’t bear any more of this. But of course I do look.
And there’s a screenshot of a two-hundred-pound donation by J Stone to Battersea Dogs Home.
‘Sorry, what? How is that legal?’ says Jake.
‘Fully legal,’ Sonja says. ‘We consult our lawyers on everything.’
‘They’re wrong,’ Jake says shortly. Like the invasion of his privacy is the most important thing here.
I want to scream at him. Find out more. Find out nothing. Tell him that I trusted him fully and how much I’m hurting right now. And scream again.
I can’t do any of that now, though. I do not want to do any of it on national television, or in front of Sonja.
I produce a genuine-sounding laugh, and speak over Sonja, who’s just begun spouting more of her poison, to say, ‘Sonja, congratulations on all your detective work, although I’m not totally sure that the British public will think it’s appropriate to spy on people in their private lives like that.
I’ll leave the legal side of things to Jake. ’
‘Jake won, didn’t he?’ Sonja says.
I do another excellent laugh (I should have had a way bigger part in Macbeth) and say, ‘Ha, are we still talking about the challenge? I think we both won; it was a great weekend away and we’ve had a lovely time since.’
Jake follows my lead and we bat everything that she says away, until eventually the hideous, hideous, hideous stupid live experience draws to an end.
We do platitudes while we’re leaving, and then we’re finally outside.
‘See you this evening?’ Jake says, as he begins a speed walk in the direction of a cab, aiming a kiss at my lips.
The kiss misses because I turn my head away, and lands half on my ear, half on my hair.
He stops. ‘Freya?’
I don’t care who’s looking or videoing us now.
‘See me this evening? Are you insane? You slept with me for a bet.’
‘I what? No, I didn’t. Obviously.’
‘Er, you won two hundred pounds?’
‘I didn’t win two hundred pounds. That was all a joke. But a week or two ago, when Pete realised we were staying over at each other’s places a lot and deduced from that that we were having sex, he insisted that I’d won the bet and forced the cash on me, so in the end I gave the money to charity.’
‘Fuck you,’ I say, very clearly.
And then I wave down a black cab and get into it. ‘That stuff was edited very misleadingly,’ Jake yells, ‘and also saying something doesn’t mean anything. The bet meant nothing. It was a joke before I got to know you. I love you.’
‘Fuck you,’ I repeat as I slam the door.
My phone rings just as I’ve given the driver my address.
It’s Jake.
‘What?’ I hiss into the phone.
‘Why are you so ready to believe the worst?’ he says. ‘That footage was heavily edited. Like all the other footage.’
‘You know what?’ I say. ‘You need to give the two hundred pounds back. You’ve actually lost the challenge. Because you’ve just proved to me that, yes, all my relationships do fail. Even when I fall in love. There is no happily-ever-after for me.’
‘And you know what?’ he yells. ‘I’ve lost too.
Because you have just proved to me that there can be no happily-ever-after for me either.
Because I’m never going to meet anyone again who I love like I love you, and you’ve just accepted the word of an evil, amoral, shit-stirring woman over mine, without listening to me at all. Goodbye.’ And he ends the call.
I sniff all the way home and then when I get there I crawl into bed and just howl.