Chapter 3
CHAPTER
THREE
A still room with an empty button-backed sofa centred perfectly in the middle of the shot made up the first frame.
Somehow I wasn’t prepared when they came in from the side, waking up a photograph to real life, slamming into the couch with a jolt, knocking the camera over on its side, tilting the world at a sudden, sharp angle.
Two bodies, too close up, sloped downhill at a sea-sick kind of incline, writhed over each other, faces firmly out of view.
In the back of the cab, my head swam like I had vertigo, all my beer-blurry edges making themselves known again. Watching a posh twat have better sex, more successfully than me in the back-seat with my boss while my hangover birthed itself in real time: exactly what every evening needed.
On screen – further back in the shot – a lamp on a table behind the couch clattered down, casting long shadows across the sprawl of limbs and skin, shoulders and hands. Making everything harder to figure out.
Two men, I figured, from the muscles alone.
But whoever put this up as definitively Richard was reaching.
Nothing showed above the neck. There was a white guy with more muscle and heft, and a skinnier guy with darker skin.
Longer limbed, more lithe. Tall-looking.
Kind of like I imagined Simon might be underneath his clothes.
Except, only really shitty interpreters would spend all day perving on their demonstrably uninterested clients.
The probably-mixed-race, might-be-Desi guy (who was definitely-not-Simon) shoved the white guy – the one the internet had labelled Richard – down, pushing him almost out of shot.
I nudged Simon’s knee to get his attention. “You can’t even tell who this is.”
There better be something for me to see. I could have been failing to have sex with Luke right at that moment.
“Look closer.” Simon redirected me to the screen.
And there it was. At the back, on the wall – a moustachioed, goggle-eyed horse staring out at me, skewed in its gilt-edged frame.
Ah. I knew that horse. Everybody on the internet knew that bloody horse.
I knew what the sofa fabric felt like too – the knap of the dusty, olive green velvet. And I knew the colour of the walls, even though the lamp-light dulled the tone. Everything beyond my phone started shuttling backwards and forwards. Or maybe my eyes were playing tricks.
The driver took a corner more sharply than my balance organs agreed with. My stomach sloshed.
I’d been in that room. With Simon. On a Beau Monde photoshoot, back in April.
Whittaker had blathered on, downplaying the harrowing trials of schooling at Eton – such struggles – refocusing the interviewer towards his hilarious escapades.
He really was so misunderstood. One of the lads.
Like all the rest of the country house owning multi-millionaires.
Sweat crept up the back of my neck.
That oil painting – a rare example of some dead bloke’s early work – had been worth six figures before Richard sodding Whittaker and his mates got to it with a permanent marker, a penknife and a pair of wobbly stick-on eyes.
Sprawled on the same sofa for the cameras doing his vlog, he’d shrugged off the accusation of cultural vandalism. “Bloody improvement, if you ask me.”
Enter Simon. With two off-screen sentences and a whip-fast stranglehold on his social media feed #thisisnotahorse* went viral.
(*It’s a criticism of antiquated, elite institutions commissioning paintings of horses over portraits of their household staff. Didn’t you know?)
Beau Monde bought it. The world bought it. A forum-based squabble erupted over whether to call the horse Albert or Jeeves. When Simon was your publicist, it was the opposite of being cancelled. This was not just vandalism. It was socially aware, upper-middle-class vandalism.
Tate Modern requested a loan of the piece as part of a temporary exhibition on New Voices in the Modern Art World. Mugs were sold. I got given three. T-shirts were printed. Richard Whittaker: the next artistic genius.
My pale arse.
Yeah, I knew that horse. And the oversized goldfish-bowl vase full of stripey red and cream tulips Sev had put on the coffee table to balance the shot from exactly the angle I was looking at now.
I stared at the tangled limbs on Simon’s phone screen, my brain fizzing with static blankness. Richard – so very into it. The other guy too.
In the back seat of the taxi Simon’s skin was darker. Or was that the lighting? There had to be a hundred other people this could be. Richard must have had those flowers for days.
It made no sense for it to be Simon. Apart from the fact Richard was all classically, stereotypically Prince-Charming-handsome, with none of the markers of inbreeding you might hope to level the field between him and the rest of humanity. And I bloody would if I could too.
But Simon was all about protecting his clients’ reputations. And Richard Whittaker had been playing house with Phoebe Huntley-Templeton for as long as I’d known they existed. No, it didn’t make sense. It wasn’t him. It couldn’t be. I had my beer goggles on too tightly.
Definitely-Not-Simon flicked a tie into the shot. The driver braked, and my stomach turned over at the splay of bright rust and cinnamon flecked with green.
Fuck me. That tie. I’d given him that tie.
The one spooled messily on Richard Whittaker’s chest, signposting all the things he’d no doubt done to him. All the things he was never going to do to me, because my rubbish Not-So-Secret-Santa gift didn’t do anything to tell him how much I cared.
“Simon.” Rattling through the run of letters of his name was a dance I’d never forget the steps to. “This is you, isn’t it?
He’d never offered me his sign name, so I spelled it out every time. No matter how well I thought I knew him, only someone Deaf had the right to give him one. And it seemed like I barely bloody knew him at all.
“Richard Whittaker?” Did it have to be that arsehole?
Simon grimaced.
The grim line of his mouth crumpled my last hope like an empty coke can under the heel of his perfectly ombre-toed shoe. A wall of silence where he should have been scrabbling for denial.
“I gave you that tie.” Undigested beer swilled in my stomach, all acid and wrong, and the back of the car shuttled back and forth behind my eyelids, slow motion and horrendous. Sweat prickled onto my forehead.
“Ben, don’t.” Simon’s face hardened, solidifying the line of None of my Business. Bit late to pull down the steel trap on professional and personal now.
“I gave you that tie.”
“I know you did.” Simon almost looked guilty. Almost. “I forgot I’d been wearing it.”
Wearing wasn’t the word. He only cared because it meant I’d caught him out. No doubt it was Simon giving Richard such thorough seeing to, now. How excellent for both of them.
What a wake-up call. No one went from banging an ex-rugby playing underwear model with off-shore accounts and a country mansion, to thinking their vertically stunted, hit-by-a-frying-pan-chic interpreter with a bus pass and a buzz cut was a bit of alright.
Simon had never been going to wake up one fine day and realise I was who he’d been looking for all of his life. I was never in the running.
Dots danced behind my eyes. I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t want to. Tugging at my strangling collar didn’t help. The car was too hot. Too sticky.
“Ben are you alright?”
Cold saliva welled around my tongue. What if I was never in anybody’s running?
Shit.
Snapping the release button for the seatbelt, I lurched forward, death-gripping the driver’s headrest. “Can you pull over?”
Shit. Shit. Shit.
“Stop the bloody car!”
Robo-driver swooped in sharp to the kerb and I yanked the door open, tumbling out – less Mission: Impossible, more Impossibly Mullered. Grotty grey pavement ran up under my shaking legs, and I stumbled, catching myself against the grimy glass side of a bus shelter.
Buckling like I’d been sucker punched, I folded in the middle and heaved.
“Better?”
Behind me, the taxi’s engine idled. Standing next to the open car door, Simon’s face set into the kind of expression usually reserved for incontinent, scrabble-clawed, tumour-riddled Labradors. Or maybe just drunk idiots like me.
Woof.
“Not really.”
He didn’t get to look at me like I was the only screw up here. I could already see the headline.
Shameless PR Company Employee Shags hot Peer-to-Be and blows up his Entire Life in Mad Gay Sex Scandal!
Or something much more catchy. There was a reason Simon did the words.
I slumped hard on the narrow, plasticated bench inside the shelter. Everything was brighter in the circle of the street light, and I didn’t want it to be.
Mapp and Green were going to throw him under one of these buses. Then reverse it, drive over him again, twice. Then bury him. In concrete. And double-speak everyone into believing he never existed. You did not mess with Mel Booker’s company reputation. She cancelled people for breakfast.
“Cherry menthol Fisherman’s Friend?”
My eyelid twitched. “No I don’t want a sodding Fisherman’s Friend.”
The little striped paper packet he held out sagged in his hand. He could read my lips here then.
“At what point were you planning on telling me I won’t have a job on Monday?”
Simon hovered – probably checking for pigeon poo – then settled himself next to me on the bum-shelf of a bench. Crossing one leg over the other, he swivelled. The toe of his shoe aimed at my shin.
One hundred signs he likes you. Well, that was a crock of shit, wasn’t it, Cosmo?
“Are you sure you don’t want one?”
I snarled at the little stripy packet. “Do I look like a fisherman, or his friend?”
He tipped his head, opened his mouth.
“Don’t answer that.”
“Menthol’s very invigorating. And they’re sugar free.”
“Simon!”
He wasn’t wearing any socks. The pattern of little holes in the leather I didn’t see the point of swirled across the top of the shiny, tan shoe. I counted them, all the way up to fifteen.