LITMIR.BIZ

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do,’ Cass replies, dabbing prettily at dry cheeks. ‘I do need a lie-down.’

      You have to give it to her (and Dillon, no doubt, will do exactly that), she’s good at this stuff. The Damsel in Distress act (when I’m the only one round here who’s got any reason to be in distress); the subtle hint that she’d rather be lying down than sitting …

      ‘I’m Dillon, by the way,’ Dillon is murmuring, putting a hand in the small of her back and steering her in the direction of the leap-frogging crew members on their way to Olly’s catering truck.

      ‘And I’m Cassidy …’

      Vanessa and I watch them go, united – for once – in irritation.

      ‘Your fucking sister,’ says Vanessa.

      To agree would be disloyal; to disagree would be rank hypocrisy. So I don’t say anything.

      ‘You’re all right?’ she asks, gesturing at my burnt hair. ‘Not actually injured or anything?’

      ‘No, I’m OK.’ I’m touched that she’s concerned. ‘But thanks, Vanessa, and I’m really sorry again about—’

      ‘Good,’ she says, briskly. ‘Then I don’t need to get the first-aid guys over before you leave.’

      ‘Leave?’

      ‘The shoot. The show, in fact.’

      I stare at her. ‘You’re … firing me?’

      ‘Well, of course I fucking well am. You’re lucky I’m not also charging you for the costume you’ve just wrecked.’

      ‘But I … this was meant to be my big … I mean, I need the money for my rent … And my mother is going to …’

      ‘None of that is my problem.’ She turns on her heel. ‘Sorry, Libby,’ she adds, in a flat tone of no regret whatsoever. ‘But can you please just return the costume to Wardrobe and get off my set?’

      There’s absolutely no point in arguing. All I can do now is do as she says and get out of here while I still have my dignity.

      OK, while I still have a shred of dignity.

      OK, before I annoy her any more and she decides to charge me six hundred quid into the bargain. Because, in all honesty, I think my dignity has pretty much gone the way of my hair. Along with the ability to pay the rent on my flat, and the long-awaited approval of my mother.

      Still, at least the Om-chanting crew are no longer around to witness my walk of shame. I suppose I have to be grateful for small mercies.

      

      I’m due to pick the keys up from my new landlord, Bogdan, at six o’clock this evening, but there are several things I need to get done before then.

      The first, and let’s face it, most important, being to buy a hat.

      This I accomplish by nipping in to the huge TK Maxx near Marble Arch tube, grabbing the largest straw sunhat I can find (thank God it’s a sunny day, so I have an obvious excuse to be wearing it) and taking off the label to wear it immediately after handing over the fiver it cost me.

      And it’s a good thing it was reasonably cheap, because my next stop is at the cheese shop on New Quebec Street, where I’m due to collect forty quid’s worth of eye-wateringly expensive (and probably just eye-watering, ha-ha) cheese that I ordered a couple of days ago. It’s for Olly, as a thank-you gift for all his help with the move and the furniture. I racked my brains for quite a while to come up with something I knew he’d love – a sci-fi movie box-set, a kitchen-y gadget for messing about with when he’s cooking (for fun, staggeringly) at home – but in the end I thought some serious cheese was a great gift for someone who’s … well, as serious about cheese as Olly is.

      As we both are, in fact. Cheese was one of the very first things we bonded over, and cheese has continued to play a front-and-centre role in our friendship ever since. We sometimes go to cheese-tasting evenings – right here, at Le Grand Fromage on New Quebec Street, or at Neal’s Yard Dairy in Covent Garden; we once went to an entire cheese festival, at some Nineties rock star’s country farm down in Somerset; when I was nineteen and he was turning twenty-one, we celebrated his significant birthday by taking the Eurostar over to Paris for the day, wandering around the first arrondissement, from fromagerie to fromagerie (with l’occasional stop-off at le bar on the way), buying more cheese than we could possibly afford, and eating most of it on the Eurostar on the way back home. Le Marathon de Cheese, we called it, and we’ve long talked about repeating the performance.

      The owner of Le Grand Fromage recognizes me by now, and waves to me from behind the counter as I make my way through the door and into her shop.

      ‘Hi, there! Libby, isn’t it?’

      ‘That’s right!’ I don’t know her name; she did mention it to me once, but I’ve forgotten it and now it’s too embarrassing to ask again. In my head I just call her The Big Cheese Woman. Which makes her sound like she’s made entirely from wheels of cheddar, with mini Babybels for her eyes and nose, when in fact she’s a pleasant-looking forty-something with a petite figure and an enviable choppy haircut. (Enviable even before I burnt half my hair off this morning. Right now, I might actually kill to have hair like hers.) ‘You called to say my cheese order was ready?’

      ‘That’s right! All cut and ready to go. The Brie de Meaux, the Fourme d’Ambert, and the aged Comté. Oh, and something else …’

      ‘No, no, nothing else,’ I say, hastily, because I’m not sure my precarious bank balance can take any more posher-than-posh cheese just now.

      ‘No, I was just going to say that I’m popping in a little sample of something for you to try. A goat’s cheese. Because don’t I remember you asking about a particular goat’s cheese the last time you were in? Something rolled in ash, with a cross shape printed in it?’

      Oh, my God.

      Is it possible that she’s found the ‘mystery cheese’ from Le Marathon?

      There was this one particular goat’s cheese, in all the cheeses we stuffed ourselves with on the way back home on the Eurostar that day, that Olly and I still talk about in mystic, hallowed terms, the way football nuts might talk about a incredible volleyed header that won a cup final. It was light as a soufflé and tangy on the tongue, it was rolled in ashes with a cross shape on the top, and we’ve never been able to track it down before or since.

      ‘Hold on a sec.’ The Big Cheese Woman is heading off the shop floor and into the cool, straw-lined room at the back where all the cheeses are kept.

      If this really is the mystery cheese, it will be a big moment. I know it sounds silly, but the search for this cheese has been a bit of a thing for me and Olly for the past decade.

      Though I suppose, if I’m being entirely honest, that some of our obsession with tracking down the cheese is – for both of us – our unspoken way of detracting attention from the Mistaken Thing that happened on that Paris trip, in a corner booth in a quiet bar somewhere on the Left Bank.

      Which is that, just after we ordered a second bottle of white, we suddenly, somehow, found ourselves kissing as if our lives depended on it. An extremely Mistaken Thing to do when you’ve been friends for years and when, thanks to your Best Friendship with his sister, his entire family have sort of unofficially adopted you as one of their own.

      I’m still not sure how it happened exactly. All I can really remember is that one minute we were talking about unrequited love, and Olly was telling me about the girl that he’d loved from afar for, well, it sounded like years, but I must have got that bit wrong and then the next minute we were snogging as if the

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