LITMIR.BIZ

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      ‘You’re not in that room.’

      ‘I will be later.’

      ‘Then tell her that’s your room, too.’

      ‘Then she’ll know I lied about this room.’

      ‘Louis!’ Edie said, near-feral in desperation. ‘Tell her.’

      He grimaced and said, loudly: ‘Hi, Lucie, this is Louis. Not Edie.’

      ‘Where’s Evie? This is her room! The man on reception told me! Do not toy with me, I am in a VERY AGGRESSIVE STATE.’

      Louis made a middle-finger gesture with both hands at the door and sing-songed: ‘No, my room. Little Louis in here.’

      ‘… Let me in. You know this girl? You can tell me where to find her.’

      ‘I’d rather not. I’m naked.’

      ‘Put some clothes on, then.’

      ‘I’m naked, with someone else who is also naked. Get it?’

      ‘Is it her?’

      ‘No, it’s a man, man. Now if you don’t mind, we’d like to get on.’

      A pause.

      ‘Do you know where this slut is?’

      ‘No, I thought we’d established I’m otherwise engaged.’

      ‘Well if you do see her, tell her I’m going to be wearing her tits like they’re ear muffs.’

      ‘Will do!’

      Edie winced.

      Pause. ‘Also, can I just say I think it’s very bad taste to be having sex while a woman’s life is in ruins? We’re trying to help. And meanwhile you’re up here, naked.’

      ‘That’s me. Always naked in a crisis. It’s when I do my best work.’

      There was tutting and Lucie’s fearsome clomping stride retreated. In the depths of the despair, Louis and Edie couldn’t help small, stifled laughter.

      ‘How am I going to get out of here in one piece?’

      ‘Mmm. There may be scenes of a harridan nature. I’d check out early.’

      Edie had already formed this plan. The reception was staffed 24 hours, she could escape at dawn. She reasoned that even the very angriest were unlikely to be prowling around, fired up by fury, at half five. Although with Lucie, who knew.

      ‘Look on the bright side. No music Lucie can get you to face can be worse than the music she already made you face.’

      Edie laughed weakly and thought how that experience, where someone else was the centre of attention for the wrong reasons, seemed an era ago.

      ‘I think it’s safe for me to leave, now,’ Louis said.

      At the prospect of being alone again, Edie felt desolate.

      ‘Louis,’ Edie said, in a quiet, broken voice, ‘I know what I did was wrong but I’d never want any of this. I feel terrible. Everyone will hate me.’

      ‘They won’t hate you,’ Louis said, unconvincingly, ‘Just let them know Jack jumped you, not vice versa.’

      They both knew that a) it wouldn’t be possible to let everyone know this and b) no one was going to be inclined to absolve Edie and thus lose a key player in such compelling You’ll Never Guess What gossip. The narrative needed a vixen.

      ‘We’re still friends, aren’t we? I feel like I’ll have no friends.’

      ‘Babe,’ Louis squeezed her in a quick, hard, brusque hug, ‘Course we are.’

      After re-locking the door after him, Edie sank back down on the bed. Every bump or scuffle in the hotel startled her. She imagined a procession of people queuing up, Lucie Maguire having rejoined at the back, waiting to scream and rant at her and do horrible things to her tits.

      When she could bear it, she looked online. Again, nothing but a chilly calm. She couldn’t see any comments alluding to what had gone on, she hadn’t been unfriended on Facebook (though that was coming, obviously).

      And yet … as time ticked by, suddenly, an ugly, worrying notion gripped a panicky Edie. She wrestled with it. She was being paranoid. She didn’t need to check. Of course she was wrong.

      OK, Edie had to look. Just to reassure herself she was being paranoid. She fumbled with hot fingers on the touch screen. Oh, God. No. She blinked back tears and hit refresh and refresh again and willed herself to have made a mistake. But she hadn’t.

      Louis had deleted the picture of them together.

       6

      Edie never wanted to be this woman. The Other Woman. Who would? Who in their right mind wanted the heartache, the unsympathetic misery of playing that part? No one was the villain of their own story in their own mind, wasn’t that screenwriting law?

      Edie had a feeling for some time that her life had wandered badly off course, and she had to face facts now: it might never come back.

      It wasn’t always like this. After a romantically chaotic youth gadding about the capital in the post-university years, she’d settled down by her mid-twenties with her picture perfect soulmate: a difficult, intense, complicated young northern poet and Alain Delon lookalike, called Matt.

      He was the glorious culmination of a reinvention, where messy Edith became Edie, pretty, funny writer girl who was taking life in her stride and London by the scruff.

      Edie had tried to make the relationship as great on the inside as it looked on the outside. They matched. People envied them. She fantasised the wedding, even babies, but increasingly when faced with Matt’s moods, it was obvious to Edie that it was best kept as fantasy.

      After three years of wrestling with difficult, intense and complicated, Edie was thoroughly knackered with the effort of trying to work him out and cheer him up.

      They split, and while Edie was very sad, she was also twenty-nine. She wasn’t short of men hovering at the edges of the fall-out, willing to help pick up her pieces. She assumed that Mr Right was a few dalliances away, over the other side of the horizon of thirty, holding a bunch of flowers.

      Yet somehow, he never happened. Single went from a temporary glitch to a permanent state. There was no one worth falling for. Until Jack. Who she absolutely shouldn’t have fallen for.

      Do we ever choose who we fall for? Edie had many a long lonely evening in with only Netflix for company to contemplate that one.

      Edie often cast her mind back to that first meeting with Jack, at the advertising firm where she was a copywriter. Charlotte was an ambitious account executive and had successfully talked their boss, Richard, into hiring Jack, despite a strict No Partners rule.

      Edie hadn’t given the arrival of Jack Marshall much thought, beyond assuming he’d be another gym-before-work super over-achiever, like Charlotte.

      ‘Edie, this is my boyfriend!’ she had called across the table, late last summer, in the Italian wine bar they piled into every Friday. ‘You’ll love Edie, she’s the office clown.’ A mixed compliment, but Edie took it as one and smiled.

      Over the table, awkwardly pitched half on the pavement and half inside the restaurant, she stood up to shake the tips of Jack’s fingers in lieu of his hand. She’d later marvel at her total indifference at the time. Jack looked prima facie Charlotte business, with his sharp suit, sandy hair and slim build, and Edie returned to her conversation.

      In the weeks afterwards, Edie caught Jack throwing the odd stray glance her way, and assumed he was simply getting the measure of his new workplace. Charlotte

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