The Other Side of the Story Read online

  ‘Sweets, I’ll skip it. But I’ll see you later.’

  12.10 Saturday afternoon

  ‘Shayna, your dinner party tonight? I know I blew you off but can I change my mind? Sorry about screwing your placements but I’d be glad to eat chicken nuggets at the card table with the kids.’

  ‘Again,’ Shayna said.

  ‘Yeah, again.’

  One of the side-effects of seeing a married man was having to force yourself on people at the last minute and not always being a comfortable fit.

  ‘You shouldn’t take this shit from him,’ said Shayna, who took shit from no one.

  ‘Do you hear me complaining?’

  Shayna kissed her teeth. ‘Chah! Anyway, no kids tonight, so you get to sit at the big table.’

  ‘Yay.’

  Shayna was Becky’s childhood chum and when Jojo came to live in England, she became Jojo’s pal also. She was off-the-scale fabulous. She was the first black – and female – partner at the management consultancy firm where she worked and she earned more than Brandon, her barrister husband who did everything she told him to. Though she’d had two children her stomach was flat and hard and her bum showed no sign of slipping off her back and towards the floor. Home was a big three-storey house in Stoke Newington which they’d bought for seven pounds fifty or some such negligible sum. They’d fixed the dry rot, the wet rot, the damp and the dodgy plumbing and restored the crumbling house to beauty – just in time for property values to start rising in that area.

  And Shayna gave sophisticated dinner parties. At least they were sophisticated to begin with but she plied her guests with so much drink that by the end of the evening they were dishevelled and a lot closer to the table than they had been at the start.

  2.10 Saturday afternoon, Kensington High Street

  Jojo liked to shop alone – it meant she could change her mind whenever she liked without anyone getting snippy with her. See, her plan for the afternoon had been to trawl for household stuff, like nice bed linen and exotic bath oils, something she’d done all the time when she’d first bought her apartment twenty months ago – she’d lavished love and money on it; she’d swapped reading normal magazines for interiors ones; out of nowhere she was more interested in paint colours than nail colours; she spent more on picture frames than shoes; she’d bought a huge comfy sofa and repro Indian furniture and considered a Laz-E-Boy recliner with built-in ashtray and beer cooler until Becky advised her not to. In short, she’d experienced New Flat Madness.

  Then it all settled down, she started buying Harpers&Queen again – until she started seeing Mark. As they never really went out, her flat had become love-nest central and buying things like scented candles and Egyptian cotton sheets made her feel more in control.

  But this afternoon suddenly she saw no point buying another pair of sheets – his wife and family were not going to disappear – and she had enough scratchy ‘sexy’ underwear to open her own shop, so she exercised the prerogative of the lone shopper and Changed her Mind. Bed linen was toast and clothes were the thing. Ten minutes in Barkers and she’d found a pair of trousers, so pricey that she yelped at the tag.

  ‘Something wrong, madam?’ An assistant shimmered from nowhere.

  Jojo laughed in embarrassment. ‘No wonder you say Americans are loud. This is the price, right? Like, not the style number?’

  ‘They’re beautiful on. Why don’t you try them?’

  Jojo looked at the assistant’s namebadge, ‘But Wendy, that’s just what they’ll be expecting.’

  She should have walked away quickly, sprinting down the escalator and out into the safety of the street. Instead she followed Wendy to a changing room and with the whizz of a zip became taller, flat-stomached, long-legged and curvy-hipped.

  ‘They’re perfect,’ Wendy observed.

  Jojo sighed, did a quick survey of her finances, knew she shouldn’t, and said, ‘What the hell? You take your chances where you find them.’

  She changed back into her own clothes and handed over the trousers. ‘Do they come in any other colours? No? OK, now I’m really going to scare you – do you have any more of the same?’

  ‘Perhaps, but wouldn’t you like to try something different?’

  Jojo shook her head. ‘I do this a lot. They laugh at me, but the thing is, with my shape, when you find something that fits well, you go for it, you know? Once I bought five identical bras. They were five different colours but like my friend Shayna said they were still the same bra.’

  Still talking, Jojo followed Wendy to the till.

  ‘My cousin Becky does the same as me, could be it’s a family thing. Except sometimes Becky is so embarrassed that she pretends to the assistant that the extra ones are for her sisters. And she hasn’t got any sisters.’

  Wendy studied the screen, checking the stock list for an extra pair.

  ‘But could be I’m embarrassed too,’ Jojo admitted. ‘Else why am I telling you all this?’

  Wendy continued clicking and said nothing. She was a shop girl, not a psycho-bloody-analyst. She wasn’t paid enough for this.

  8.15 Saturday evening

  When Jojo arrived, Shayna was flitting around in a tight white ensemble that displayed three inches of shining mahogany stomach and plying people with a killer rum-based concoction. ‘My own recipe. I call it Life Support Machine.’

  The guests were a mix of opinionated know-alls from Brandon’s work, go-getters from Shayna’s and a couple of right-on neighbours. Then there were old friends like Becky and Andy.

  Jojo accepted a drink, said hi to the others and realized – with a little shock – that she was already just the teensiest bit bored.

  The dining room was lit by the flickering of fat wax candles, casting shadows on the distempered white walls. On the gleaming cabinets stood fashionable flower arrangements – twigs and stuff. Nothing so gauche as petals.

  ‘When I grow up,’ Becky said, ‘I want to be Shayna.’

  ‘Mmm,’ said Jojo. Not exactly bored. But I’d prefer to be with Mark.

  Her world had shrunk – no matter who she was with, she’d prefer to be with Mark. That’s what happened when you fell in love – you only want to see them.

  And it had taken her all of five seconds to notice that everyone else was two-by-two: Shayna had obedient Brandon, Becky had Andy – it was like the Ark. But because Mark was married she was in a twilight zone where she was neither single nor paired off.

  Yikes. This is not a good way to think.

  Suddenly Becky was toe-to-toe in front of Jojo. She leant even closer and exhaled a big ‘Hah!’ right into her face. ‘Does my breath smell OK?’

  Earlier in the day her dentist had told her that her gums were slightly receding, that an electric toothbrush would take care of the problem, but Becky – who was anxious about the state of her teeth at the best of times – was afraid she was in the grip of full-blown gingivitis.

  ‘Smells fine. What does Andy think?’

  ‘He’s so used to me that he wouldn’t notice if I swallowed a skunk.’

  Another pang. Would she and Mark ever have the chance to get so used to each other that he wouldn’t notice if she swallowed a skunk?

  Then she noticed the long darkwood dining table: it was set with twelve antique Weeping Willow plates, twelve handmade silver cutlery sets, twelve Murano wine glasses – and one plastic Teletubbies bowl, a Bob the Builder beaker and a Peter Rabbit knife and fork. Jojo’s place. Shayna was making a point.

  When they sat down to eat Shayna, point made, took the Teletubbies bowl for herself and passed Jojo a Weeping Willow plate piled high with down-home food: jerk chicken, rice’n’peas, Johnny cakes. Jojo took a deep breath, then tucked in.

  ‘Good Christ,’ said the man beside her. Ambrose was his name – some guy from Brandon’s work. ‘You can really put it away.’

  ‘It’s food,’ Jojo said. ‘What am I supposed to do with it? Weave baskets?’

  The man watched another mouthful of food d
isappear into Jojo’s mouth and breathed, ‘Blimey,’ loud enough for everyone to hear.

  Jojo hunched lower over her plate. What a prince. Some men just took exception to her – her appetite? her height? –something, anyway. But knowing they were assholes didn’t mean it didn’t get to her.

  ‘Jojo never diets,’ Shayna said proudly.

  Well, she’d tried it once when she was seventeen and didn’t even last a day.

  ‘That’s obvious.’

  ‘Ambrose, apologize, for God’s sake!’ exclaimed the woman opposite. She was so thin she was almost transparent and Jojo deduced she was Ambrose’s girl.

  ‘For what? I simply endorsed a fact.’

  ‘Fucking barristers.’ Shayna closed her eyes.

  Unabashed, Ambrose nodded at Skeletor. ‘Look at Cecily. She eats nothing and she’s well fit.’

  One way of putting it, Jojo thought, wondering when Skeletor had last had a period.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ Cecily apologized across the table. ‘He’s not normally so rude.’

  ‘Hey, no need for yo u to apologize.’ Jojo smiled through her upset. This moron wasn’t worth causing a scene over.

  ‘He’s an idiot. Please ignore him.’ Cecily was very taken with Jojo; she’d been watching her since she’d arrived. Jojo was a big girl – bigger than Cecily could imagine being in her worst Maltesers-filled nightmares – but she was gorgeous. Luscious and ripe in those fabulous black trousers and clingy burgundy top, her decolletage and shoulders satin-smooth and luminous. (Actually thanks to pearlescent body lotion, Jojo would have happily told her if she’d asked.)

  But it was the way Jojo seemed so comfortable in her own skin that most entranced Cecily. To the point where she’d wondered tentatively about cancelling her gym membership. Even – dammit! – eating whatever she wanted. If it worked for this Jojo, couldn’t it work for her?

  Occasionally this happened to women around Jojo. While they were with her, they saw through the advertising industry’s lies and believed that size didn’t matter, that it was intangibles like joie de vivre and confidence that counted. But then they went home and discovered, to their great disappointment, that they weren’t Jojo Harvey and couldn’t understand why they’d felt what they’d felt at the time.

  11.45 Saturday evening

  When the first of the noisy drunken discussions about politics began, Jojo thought, Right! That’s enough. Suddenly she couldn’t bear being with people who weren’t Mark and just wanted out. She always seemed to be the first to leave things these days.

  Shayna and Brandon tried to make her wait while they rang a taxi, warning her that the area hadn’t upped and come so much that she’d be safe wandering through it on a Saturday night, but she wanted to be gone. A trapped panicky feeling grew until amid a flurry of hugs and kisses she was finally permitted to leave. Out on the silent road, she gulped in lungfuls of lovely, cold night air, then saw the yellow light of an approaching cab. Yay!

  Half an hour later she arrived in her silent flat, poured herself a glass of merlot, switched on the TV at the foot of her bed and got under the duvet to watch her video about meerkats in the Kalahari. Olga Fisher had lent it to her. Olga Fisher was one of Lipman Haigh’s seven partners – the only woman – and she and Jojo shared a mutual fondness for wildlife programmes. Everyone else laughed at them about it, so they swapped their David Attenborough videos as furtively as if they were pornography.

  Olga was in her late forties, single, wore pearls and elegantly draped scarves and because she negotiated good terms for her authors she was known as a ballbreaker. If she were a man, Jojo thought scornfully, they’d simply call her ‘a great agent’. She wondered if they called her a ballbreaker too. Probably. Assholes.

  She settled into bed and chuckled as a macho meerkat, keeping lookout high in a tree – paws on hips, eyes on the middle distance – lost his balance and tumbled to the ground, where he picked himself up and dusted himself off, looking dreadfully embarrassed. He glared at the camera, like Robbie Williams facing down the paparazzi.

  Suddenly Jojo stopped laughing and thought, I’m a woman in my prime. I shouldn’t be spending Saturday night in bed alone, watching videos about meerkats falling out of trees.

  She turned to her wallet, which was lying beside her on the pillow. ‘This is not right,’ she said. But she already knew that.

  22

  I should never have started this thing with him, Jojo thought. I could be in love with someone else right now, someone who wasn’t married. Well, shoulda woulda coulda…

  If only it was just about sex, she thought regretfully. If only it was about thrillingly dangerous bonks. Relationship gurus always said that an attraction based on friendship and mutual respect was far more likely to stay the course – and the bastards were right.

  Even before Jojo had come to work at Lipman Haigh, she’d respected Mark; he was well known in the industry as a visionary. Five years previously, when he had come in as Managing Partner, Lipman Haigh had been a sleepy little agency and some of the partners were so old they made Jocelyn Forsyth look like a surly adolescent. Mark’s first act had been to headhunt several young snappy agents and make three of them partners as soon as the three most doddery incumbents could be persuaded to retire. Then he’d added a foreign rights department and a vibrant media arm and within eighteen months Lipman Haigh had gone from being a bunch that no one bothered much with to being the hot ‘new’ London agency.

  He was tough – he had to be – but he wore it with grace. In negotiations with publishers he could become as unmovable as cellulite, but he did it decently. Nothing personal, his manner said, but this just won’t do. I won’t be caving, so you’d better. Not stern, not slimy, just straight.

  And he had a sense of humour. Not a laugh-a-minute like his chosen one, Jim Sweetman, who certainly knew how to win friends and influence people, but there was plenty of mirth just beneath the surface.

  But what Jojo had admired most about Mark Avery was his incredible trouble-shooting abilities. His instincts were sure, nothing unnerved him and he was a man with all the answers: Don Corleone without the voice, the entourage and the paunch.

  But she hadn’t, like,fancied him. Then came the night outside the Hilton followed by the pupil-dilating stuff in the corridor and it all went weird. When Jojo did her Friday morning round-up, Mark listened to her while doing his thing of looking away and smiling – but without the smiling. He no longer flattened himself theatrically against the wall while she strode at high speed through the halls of Lipman Haigh. He addressed her only as ‘Jojo’ and there was no more cat’s-pyjamas-style banter.

  She didn’t like it but she could wait it out. She was good at waiting – a lot of practice with publishers – and could tune out the voices of fear and doubt in her head.

  But Mark hadn’t become Managing Partner of a literary agency without also having nerves of steel, so the stand-off endured.

  I can outwait anyone, Jojo thought, but with all that tension flying about, could she help it if she found herself wondering about him? Once she focused on him as a man rather than a boss, her imagination took flight and her resolve began to buckle. The meaningful look in the corridor was the start of a slide into a violent attraction to him and it really pissed her off. Eventually she admitted to Becky, ‘I keep thinking about what it would be like to sleep with Mark Avery.’

  ‘Crap. Bound to be. Old guy like him?’

  ‘He’s forty-six, not eighty-six.’

  Becky was concerned – could any good come of this? ‘It’s only because you haven’t had sex for nine months. Since Poor Craig. Maybe you should sleep with someone else.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Now you’re asking. Anyone.’

  ‘But I don’t want to go out looking for someone just to sleep with. That’s not who I am. I want to sleep with Mark. And not anyone else.’

  ‘Jojo, snap out of it. Please.’

  ‘And considering I already like, admire and respe
ct him, I’m doomed,’ she continued disconsolately.

  More prosaically, she had her career to consider. She hoped to be made partner some day soonish and how would that ever happen if her boss had decided to behave as if she didn’t exist?

  After five weeks she caved in and made an appointment to see him. She came into his office, shut the door firmly behind her and sat before him.

  ‘Jojo?’

  ‘Mark. Ah… I don’t know how to say this, but things have been, like, tense with us. Is it my work? Do you have a problem with it?’

  She knew it wasn’t that, but she wanted it clear.

  ‘No, no problems with your work.’

  ‘Riiight. So can we drop the weird stuff? Can we go back to the way we were?’

  He considered it. ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because… because… how can I put this?’ he said. ‘Because – please don’t laugh – because I’m in love with you.’

  ‘Please! How can you be?’

  ‘I’ve worked with you for two years. If I don’t know you by now…’

  After a period of silence Jojo looked up from her lap and said, ‘You’re married. I would never be with a married man.’

  ‘I know. It’s one of the reasons I feel how I feel about you.’

  ‘Well,’ she sighed, ‘ain’t that a kick in the head.’

  23

  It was only meant to be a one-off – to get it out of their systems so they could get back to being colleagues at ease with each other. This was a total lie, of course; Jojo knew it and Mark knew it. Neither of them was interested in getting anything out of their systems, but dressing it up as A Good Thing made it a little less appalling.

  After Mark had made the dramatic announcement that he was in love with Jojo, Jojo rang Becky and hissed the whole story down the phone.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Becky reassured. ‘It’s just a ploy to get you into bed.’

  ‘You think?’ Relieved and disappointed.