It’s like the opposite of prostitution – they’re paying me to go away, and we’re nearly at the club anyway.
‘Very well.’ I take the money and shoulder my bag. ‘But next time, remember your place in the queue. And don’t be such selfish bellends.’
This is all very liberating. I have no idea where it’s coming from, but it’s extremely useful to be able to tell it like it is, without worrying about the consequences. I should really phone our useless roofer, give him a piece of my mind. Both boys dip their heads, chastened; the driver stops, and I get out, giving him a thumbs up as I slam the door and wave them off. I bet they wear salmon-pink chinos at the weekend and go round to each other’s houses to have barbecues and eye up each other’s wives. Pair of planks.
As the cab pulls away, Dee or Dum, I really don’t know which, leans out the window and yells ‘Slapper!’ which is totally unoriginal and childish. So I yell ‘Wall Street wanker,’ with the appropriate accompanying hand gesture, shrugging as a passing pedestrian tuts in disapproval. Normally an altercation like this would leave me trembling, with weak legs and palpitations. But now I feel strangely energized by the encounter. This is going to be a great day.
I cut through Birdcage Walk, a lovely arboreal tunnel that leads to Clifton Hill, the curved branches shading me from the sun. Clifton is so chichi; I wish we could afford to live here but we’d have to be richer than Jeff Bezos. Or Oswald Phillips. Mind you, according to local legend, the highly desirable properties round these parts were likely built with the dubious profits of some very dodgy traders, so maybe we’re better off in our tumbledown Keynsham farmhouse which at least has a more innocent history. I tell myself that when I feel the urge to get on Rightmove.
Arriving at the club, I can see Susie down the road, getting distracted by estate agents’ windows. At nearly six foot, with a mane of ginger hair, pale freckled skin and black lashes she has dyed at a salon in Swindon called Glamour Puss, she’s the shire horse to my pit pony. With my mousy-brown locks and slightly sallow complexion, I always feel distinctly beige around her, but I have straighter teeth so it’s not all bad. We’re both around a 7, but if you put us together – the best bits – we’d be a 10. I mean, technically, we’d be a 14 but you can’t have a 14 out of 10, can you? Not unless you’re on WeRateDogs. The point is, together we kick ass.
When she finally reaches me, Susie puts her hands on her hips, eyes narrowed suspiciously. ‘What’s this about?’
‘Just fancied a swim.’
‘In there?’ She jerks her head towards the entrance. ‘I thought it was a knob magnet?’
‘It is, but the pool is nice.’
Avon House is an old hospital that a very rich and mysterious businessman bought at a knockdown price because after years of neglect everyone said it was haunted. It’s funny how an extremely expensive refurb can banish ghostly presences, almost like spooks prefer to live in squalid, empty ruins. If I was dead, I’d hang round in busy upmarket establishments, throwing valuable items and unnerving the well-off. I’d be a ghost with a taste for the finer things in life. Imagining myself as a naughty phantom makes me think of how Susie and I first met, and I smile at the memory.
As we get the lift up, Susie scrutinizes me. ‘I’m sensing something different about you.’
‘Hmm.’ Staring at my grinning reflection in the mirrored wall, I do look different. Ironed out. Thinner. ‘Just for today.’ Our eyes meet in the mirror. Susie knows me, knows everything. She’s known me since we worked on our first show together – before Red Eye, before Robbie, before anything. I was in my first year out of university, living in a basement flat near Earl’s Court that was riddled with silverfish. My room was officially the living room, and whenever the landlord came round, I had to turn my bed into a sofa and pretend I was just visiting. It was miserable there of course, because anyone in their early twenties with no money in London is quietly or loudly having a devastating quarter-life crisis. Susie was my salvation.
We met when I was a junior researcher on a show called Ghostly Goings On. My job was to visit owners who said their homes were haunted, to ascertain whether or not it was true . . . Like the window-dream, I didn’t really question it, just dutifully took myself round the houses to ‘get a feel’ for them, much like Susie does now, but with an EMF meter. When Susie joined the production team, she started coming with me and we clicked. Location-scouting immediately became much more fun. In many ways, it was the best job I ever had, even though salary-wise, ‘hobby’ would have been a better description. We found a poltergeist terrorizing a semi in Basingstoke, a grey lady in a cottage near Deal, strange knocking from the attic of a terraced house on the Welsh border, and a phantom dog on a farm in the Peak District. We measured the electromagnetic field of every pub in the vicinity.
When I say ‘found’, of course I mean that in a TV sense, in that none of it was real or happened, but we somehow got a show out of it. Quite a good, successful show, which meant that we both got offered other jobs, and that was how we started out in showbiz. Susie doesn’t work in telly any more but, while our careers diverged, our friendship stayed on the same track. The track that means when she looks at me today, she sees something she’s never seen before, that she doesn’t recognize. Even I don’t know what it is, but I know that I want her here, briefly, to dip her toe in the water with this New Me. Like a baptism, after the event. I think of Father Stephen running down the aisle at my wedding, cassock flapping, as tears rolled down little Venetia’s cheeks, and then exorcise the image, in the same way I got rid of the woman on the train. In the same way I got rid of the jumbled letters. Run away from the box, don’t look inside.
‘What have you got on today?’ Susie is on a SOjourn jaunt. It’ll be some humongous pad with sixty-seven bedrooms and a palatial annexe for the au pair.
Susie smirks. ‘Mansion on Cheltenham Avenue, some art collector dude with a basement garage for his Ferraris.’
‘Right, we’d best get on so you can go and see his etchings.’
The lift doors open and we step out, ready to dive in.
6
On some level, there’s a constant reverberation in my brain, a warning demon whispering ‘What if . . .?’ Specifically, ‘What if something goes wrong?’ What if you do this, and this happens? What’s the worst that can happen? What if you step out into the road and there’s a car coming right for you? What if that headache is an aneurysm? What if you don’t cut up that grape? What if you open the box? The lost nail always leads to the lost kingdom.
My life is a litany of potential disaster scenarios, some of which are unlikely to the point of impossible. Once, before a meeting at ITV, I went to the toilet and became so distracted by the idea of a theoretical terrorist incident that I forgot to close the door of the cubicle and absent-mindedly pulled down my knickers before I realized an entertainment commissioner was washing her hands and staring at me bemusedly in the mirror. Worried about one catastrophic outcome, I’d generated another. From ‘What if a gunman suddenly burst in?’ to ‘What if I put my foo-foo on display in a professional environment?’ Hastily kicking the door shut with my foot, it struck me I’d almost rather the shoot-out, because at least I’d prepared for that, mentally, and it wasn’t my fault. Of my twin fears, embarrassment and death, the former is perhaps the most excruciating to contemplate.
Today that voice is still there, but he’s more of a mischievous imp. ‘What if . . .?’ becomes laced with possibility and innovation. The consequences could be intriguing, adventurous, fun. What if I leave the office? What if I get in the taxi? What if I go for a swim? What will happen next? Instead of quaking, I’m rubbing my hands.
Like the rest of the sprawling complex, the Avon House roof terrace has been extensively and expensively refurbished for its superior clientele. Susie would say it’s ‘a model of urban regeneration’. When we arrive, it’s fairly quiet, just a few people having cocktails on the sunloungers. A DJ is playing music that sounds like a gong bath. As usual, the pool is empty. Great, we have it to ourselves.
‘We can get changed in the toilets.’
‘Dammit, I didn’t think about a swimsuit. Have you got yours?’
‘We can just go in our undies.’
Her eyes narrow again. ‘You are different. What’s up?’
‘Nothing. I just want to have a swim.’
That’s all I want. To swim in the open air, inhale the faint scent of chlorine, maybe have a coffee after. Is that too much to ask? It appears it is, because when we emerge from the toilets, two of the staff are barring our way to the pool. For Old Me, this would have sent me into immediate panic mode, stuttering sorrys and backtracking to the bogs. But New Me is fired up. This skirmish is going to make my swim all the sweeter.
‘Are you members?’
‘I am. She’s my guest.’ I indicate Susie, who is vaguely attempting to cover her blue pants and crop top with her hands. I have no urge to conceal my dimpled flesh, not because I want to flaunt myself, but because it seems staggeringly irrelevant to be concerned by it. Who cares?
‘Is that a swimsuit?’ The female staff member points accusingly at my fraying black bra and big knickers, which I’m quite pleased with, because at least they match.
‘Yes.’ I give them a winning smile. ‘It’s my favourite bikini.’
‘It looks like underwear. We have a policy against customers wearing underwear.’
‘In the pool, or generally?’
Her lips twist. Susie starts to hum with anxiety. I’m quite intrigued as to where this conversation is going, but also keen to get on, because I have another booking at eleven.
‘We just want to have a swim.’ Reaching past the male staff member, who jumps back in alarm, I grab one of the striped towels from the pile on a shelf behind them.
‘You can’t use those.’ It’s her again, looking down her nose.
‘Why not?’
