When we met, the attraction was instant and absolute. I can’t explain how complete my surrender was. I thought he was everything. A goal to aim for, a reason to live. A rule to live by. A family. Love. I just couldn’t live without him, even though all along I had a sense that I was putting the brakes on my possibilities. Sacrificing multiple opportunities to cling tightly to one. But it was what I wanted. It was electric. I didn’t believe in soulmates then, and I don’t now, but there was a time, those first few years, when I believed in us in that romantic, passionate way young people believe in each other. Before they realise it doesn’t matter what you feel; that comes second to what you do, and what you do is all tied up with what you earn. How you live. That’s basically growing up. Understanding that.
Sometimes he really bores and annoys me, just because we’ve been together for so long. Other times I think he’s as hot as hell and I want to fuck him in the street. Like when he agreed to this plan, that was one of those times. Because not every man would have the balls. Not every man could pull it off. I’ll give him credit where credit is due, he’s been very convincing.
Too convincing? The thought shimmies into my consciousness, shakes itself like a wet dog. Annoying.
It was all my idea. So I should be thrilled that he’s gone along with it. And I am. Mostly. Of course I am. There is a shitload of cash at play here. A. Shit. Load. I’m talking millions. And more than that too – there’s justice, revenge. Call it what you will. The whole nine yards. I’m owed.
I’ve shared him before, which is possibly why the plan occurred to me in the first place. I think most women would baulk at the idea. Possessive, protectionist, limited. I’ve had to get past all that. True, the first time I shared him wasn’t intentional, and it hurt. A sharp knife slides in swiftly and you almost don’t feel it until the damage is done. We’d been together two years. I was at the height of my career. I’d secured a few very big advertising contracts. One for skincare, another for jeans, a third for sparkling water. I was making a lot of money and attracting attention. Occasionally people stopped me on the street, asked for selfies, and sometimes after shows people asked me to autograph their catalogues. Once, someone tried to cut off a bit of my hair. She said it was to take to her hairdresser to get her to colour-match because she wanted to look just like me. Weird shit. I loved it. He was looking for work, not finding any. He had sex with another wannabe actress who, I guess, also needed to feel validated. She wasn’t a stranger; she was someone he’d met at drama school, who’d been trying to get her nails into him for a while. I’d spotted her when I visited him once. I knew she was trouble. I’m good at spotting trouble. And causing it too, if necessary.
He confessed everything to me. He rang me up and cried over the phone. I think that was worse than the actual betrayal. If it was a one-off as he claimed, he’d got away with it, I didn’t need to know. But he wanted to tell me. I wonder was that part of it for him? Me knowing, me seeing him. I was so hurt, like ripped-in-two hurt. Want-to-vomit hurt. Can’t-understand-the-world hurt. And I was furious too. I told him he could fuck right off, that I didn’t want anything to do with him and that I never would again. I don’t think I even meant it as I said it, but you have to make them suffer a bit. There must be consequences. For weeks, months, he kept calling me. He threw out all the predictable bullshit – told me he was sorry, told me it meant nothing, told me that he’d do anything at all to get me back. That he would do anything for me from now on.
To be fair, he’s been good as his word on that.
Obviously I asked all the questions every wronged woman has ever asked.
‘Do you love her?’
‘Of course not. It was just sex.’
‘So was it good sex?’
‘No, no, it was just …’
‘Just what?’
‘Different sex.’ He was twenty-two. Of course he wanted different sex. ‘I love you, Becky. I already know that one day we’ll get married. You are my one. This was just curiosity. And I know it was a mistake. I’m sorry. Look, I know it sounds like a cop-out, but I’m a trained actor and I have no – or at least little – world experience. Can’t you just think of this as process or something? You know, to help me access my range?’
‘How do I know you won’t make the same mistake again?’ I demanded.
‘You don’t,’ he replied.
I respected his honesty. With himself, with me. It’s a rare enough commodity, that level of self-awareness. Look, I was mad about him. The break-up I’d insisted on was hurting me as much as him. I missed him, and if I was totally honest with myself, I found the idea of him having a bit more experience surprisingly exciting. I wanted to take him back. I just had to find a way that was sustainable. Something that would allow me to cultivate self-respect, keeping in mind the possibility – no, the probability – that at some point in the future he was once again going to be curious to know what else was out there. My childhood was such that I had grown up to be self-reliant, unconventional and realistic; I combine that with being passionate, competitive and ambitious. So I gave a lot of careful thought to our predicament. We were kids, but we wanted to grow old together. What were the odds of us doing that faithfully? Slim. And even if we succeeded in being faithful for the next sixty years, I reasoned that it would be so fucking boring for us both.
‘How was it different?’ I asked.
At first, he was embarrassed explaining it, awkward. He didn’t really have the vocabulary or the balls to tell me about their sex, but eventually I wheedled it out of him. I thought it might hurt me more to hear the details, but it didn’t. Talking about it somehow demystified the encounter, and then it turned me on. So we started doing the threesome thing – this was fourteen years ago, right? We were very ahead of our time. Points for that, at least.
It was always the same combination: me, him and another girl. Usually I picked the girl, made eye contact in a club or a bar, wherever. I approached her. Two reasons. Firstly, I have higher aesthetic standards. Not really a surprise; for most men every hole is a goal, up to a point, and I couldn’t trust him to pick the sort of woman I considered beautiful or sexy. Secondly, if the girl wasn’t into it, it was easier for me to pretend there was some sort of mix-up, a miscommunication, and I wasn’t seriously propositioning her for a threesome. If Mattie had approached these women, he would have been called out as a creep a number of times. Even if he is super-hot, sharing is just not everyone’s thing.
I stayed in control, I managed everything. I had to for my own peace of mind. I never left him alone with the girls I picked up, so they couldn’t make any sort of private connection, or worse, swap numbers. I never allowed us to meet up with the same girl more than three times. Three was a good limit. By then we’d worked out where everyone fitted, who was most suited where. A plethora of arms and legs, bums, tits, lips and hips; there’s a lot to consider in a threesome, and like all sex, it takes a bit of practice with each person who comes along. People have preferences and physical capabilities that need to be taken into account. It is a carefully choreographed dance. In my experience, if sex is ever going to be good, it’s good by the third try. More often than that, though, and there’s a risk that good tips into compelling or meaningful. I didn’t allow much chat before or after. I’d call her a taxi within ten minutes of him coming.
It went on that way for five years, until he’d got other women out of his system, until he realised that variety might be the spice of life, but fidelity and loyalty are the main ingredients; let’s say, the protein that makes you grow. I remember the night he called it quits, said I was enough, more than enough. We were in Amsterdam for his birthday. We’d gone there specifically to tick off a new first: something we could pay for, come by easily, no risk of any follow-up or emotional entanglement. We went for dinner first, just the two of us, and he ordered the taster menu. Seven courses. It took forever to get through them. I kept pointing out that it was getting late, that if we were going to do this thing then we had better get moving. He kept telling me that we had plenty of time. After we’d paid, he slung his arm around my neck and said, ‘Shall we just go back to our hotel? Just the two of us.’
‘Have you got a headache?’ I joked.
‘Something like that.’
That was the night he told me he didn’t want to share me any more and he didn’t want to be shared. He wanted us to be each other’s everything. His acting career hadn’t amounted to anything. I’m not sure why, he’s talented. Maybe he had the wrong representation. Maybe it was just bad luck. He’d got a few bit parts in shows like Casualty – who hasn’t? Some adverts and low-budget films. He was in a Jane Austen adaptation once. I can’t remember which one. He looks good in breeches and he had a line about sandwiches. I think maybe the problem is he’s charming and talented but unfortunately these attributes have made him a bit lazy. He’ll take whatever falls into his lap, but he doesn’t have it in him to relentlessly pursue. His tendency to follow me around the world to my shoots meant he often blew out casting calls. It’s not realistic to expect anyone to hand you anything on a plate. I learnt that to be true a long time ago, which is why I’ve never missed a casting call. His loving but clueless parents hadn’t taught him that lesson. He just wasn’t hungry enough. Successful actors have to be either extremely lucky and connected or utterly relentless, ruthless and resilient. Mattie isn’t any of these things.
That night, on the eve of his twenty-eighth birthday, he told me he wanted to give up the acting dream too. He was scared he was likely to fall into porn or end up playing the part of a medieval executioner at the London Dungeons. I wasn’t sorry to let the dream die. It was time for a change.
29
Photographers, agents, newspaper articles, cab drivers and bouncers in nightclubs all said the same thing: investing money in property was the thing to do. We listened. It was our dream to have a home in London, of course; that is the basic model/actor life map. Mattie wanted us to buy a neat top-floor flat somewhere like Clapham or Fulham. I had bigger plans, and as I was forking out 85 per cent of the deposit, I got the final say. So we bought the Old Schoolhouse. Eight hundred square metres. The mortgage was fucking massive, but we weren’t overly concerned about the stretch. I had loads of work, we were young and couldn’t imagine anything other.
Idiots.
The Old Schoolhouse was originally a canal-side warehouse, until it was converted into a ragged school for some of London’s poorest in 1843. Somewhere kids went as a salve to poverty, overcrowding and disease for a few hours a day of their miserable lives. Once there were enough government schools, ragged schools closed their doors. For the next century, the building went through a variety of industrial uses before falling into disrepair and being threatened with demolition. A developer bought it in the mid-eighties but the boom-and-bust nature of that decade meant he lost all his money and jumped from a bridge to a watery grave before he did anything with it. The history is all very tragic if you think about it. We didn’t think about it, or anything much. We bought it from that man’s granddaughter. She seemed relieved to get rid of it. ‘It’s been ruinously expensive, a black hole,’ she told us the day we picked up the keys. ‘Good luck.’ We didn’t hear the warning. We hugged one another, drunk on the thought of owning so many square metres of real estate in London.
We had plans to fix the roof, install central heating, bathrooms, kitchens, strip back the floors, sweep chimneys, restore all original features, divide it into four flats. Live in one, sell the other three. We were sure they’d go for upwards of a million each. We’d make an absolute killing.
A week after we bought the Old Schoolhouse, I lost two of my three major modelling contracts. I was shocked by suddenly being dropped, but I shouldn’t have been. I was twenty-seven by then. You can’t stop time or market dynamics. Getting older in my line of business is the equivalent of a middle-aged president getting a blow job from an intern. In fact, ageing is even more of a crime. My agent suggested I find work on smaller campaigns. I envisaged advertising dandruff shampoo, or slacks in the back of Sunday supplements. It didn’t work out. I turned up for countless auditions, only to be told I was too pretty, not pretty enough, too young, too old. The truth is, this sort of work is fiercely competitive. Ageing models and up-and-coming models are chasing the same spots. Besides, the pay was laughable. There are so many pretty women who are happy to do this sort of thing for next to nothing, just so they can say they’re models. My agent dropped me. I tried not to panic, told myself that the Old Schoolhouse would offer an alternative income, and as Mattie had given up his dream to be an actor, he could get a regular job and help towards the mortgage. I was sure we’d be fine. There was a fortune to be made. London flats only ever increase in value.
Only we didn’t own flats. We owned a draughty, leaking warehouse that flooded every time it rained. The floorboards were rotten; I twice put my foot through them. Woodworm attacked the beams; I feared if I didn’t fall through the floor, then the ceiling would fall in on me. We saved up to get architectural plans drawn up, then called in estimates to see how much the conversion would cost. It was eye-watering. Mattie turned pale and said, ‘I’m reading that incorrectly. There’s an extra nought on the end, that just can’t be right.’
‘It is right. Well, if not right, it’s what they’re saying it will cost,’ I commented, peering over his shoulder.
We had no idea how expensive everything would be. It wasn’t just the materials; the labour was prohibitive too. Mattie said he’d go to college and learn some practical skills so he could make a start on the conversion, or even just the salvation, of the property. The course cost more money and time, and he was far from a natural when it came to building or plumbing or anything practical. I thought maybe he’d start doing some work while he was studying, but apparently the main thing he learnt was that we had to secure the roof as an urgent priority, a job too big for a novice DIY-er. We extended the mortgage, but even so, we couldn’t afford to go with the roofer who had presented glowing references. The guy we could afford did a botch job and then disappeared. We resorted to relying on plastic buckets catching the rainfall in at least three places. In order to save every penny we could, we moved out of the flat we were renting. I wasn’t willing to spend on rent when we had a roof elsewhere, even a leaky one. It was my decision. Matthew argued, ‘Well yes, the Schoolhouse offers a roof, just about, but nothing else. No hot water, no lighting, no bathroom or kitchen.’
‘It won’t be forever,’ I reasoned. ‘We can save enough to convert part of it and then live in that. We can develop one flat at a time.’
‘But we haven’t the money to start on even one flat. We should just sell.’
‘But who to? The market has crashed. We wouldn’t get what we bought it for, we’d lose what we put in as a deposit. We must wait it out. The market will recover. Property always does in London.’
Only the rats found it comfortable; they settled in swarms.
We lived like squatters in our own property. I got the water and electricity turned on. We managed to reconnect a small kitchenette and a filthy loo and basin that had been installed for builders to use when the space was last going to be renovated in the eighties. In order to do this much, and pay the mortgage, I sold nearly everything I owned. First to go was the Audi A5 convertible, then designer shoes, bags and clothes I’d been gifted on shoots. I didn’t wear any of them regularly any more, as we could no longer afford to go out to the sort of place that warranted them. I told myself I didn’t need jewellery or even my GHD tongs. Matthew didn’t have anything of value to sell. We couldn’t afford to install central heating throughout, but made do with a blow heater that was so expensive to run we rarely dared turn on. We used hot water bottles and lived not dissimilarly to the original occupants of the ragged school. I envisaged a day when we’d take up the floorboards and get underfloor heating, and then relay the boards. I was very respectful of the history. Matthew didn’t get it.
