Читать книгу Emma Ever After: A feel-good romantic comedy with a hilarious modern re-telling of Jane Austen - Brigid Coady - Страница 13

Chapter Five

‘Oi, Ems. Why do I have a calendar alert saying we’re having a party next weekend?’ Gee called from the front door as he walked through, letting it slam shut.

Emma flinched, which was more movement than she wanted to make in this blistering Indian summer heatwave. The fan in the corner moved the sluggish air round.

Surely, she thought, when planning a party, it was better to just do it without telling your anti-social housemate and beg forgiveness afterwards? Leave it as a fait accompli.

‘It is only a tiny party, positively bijou, more of a soiree in fact. Not much for you to worry about. A few work colleagues…’ The heat was making her less than concise.

His head popped round the door to the living room.

‘Work? Really? All those fake arse publicity types who wouldn’t know the truth or proper talent if it leapt up and bit them on the bottom?’

Here we go again, she thought, rolling her eyes to the ceiling – Gee getting on his high horse about the purity of the music, and how music wasn’t a commodity and that the business was ruined by all the lies.

‘It’s bad enough that you work for the dark side, but now you want to bring it home? You know I hate all those fake smiles and schmoozing.’

‘Gee, you work in the music business too. All you do is hang round with the same sort of people.’

‘Hold on, my sort of people are not your sort of people. Mine are the people you make stories up about. When I see them it isn’t fake, they don’t bring their pretend partners out. And no one is trying to be someone they’re not. Or making other people something they’re not.’

And there it was. Gee having a dig at her job. Again.

It always came down to this. He didn’t respect what she did, because of his experience he had painted all PR and publicity at all management companies as awful.

Things had moved on from ten years ago. He knew that.

‘Look Gee, I know you and Johnnie had a rough time of it. But Mega! isn’t like your old management company. We don’t make someone pretend to be something they aren’t, we just give them a storyline to showcase who they are in a better way, one that works with their brand strategy. And we make sure all our clients are fully bought into any of our plans. They all have a choice, if they didn’t want to do it they wouldn’t.’

‘Ems…’ Gee started.

‘No, I get it.’ She interrupted. ‘Johnnie should never have been blackmailed into having to pretend he was straight or get engaged or any of that horrible mess he went through.’

She shuddered when she thought back to the headlines after his fall from grace, when all the lies were exposed and the blame firmly shifted off the record company.

‘But if you pick it apart intellectually, you could see why it happened. There was a marketing strategy and if all the players had done their part…’

Emma couldn’t finish.

‘Still can’t say it?’ He sighed. ‘How the record company and my own management company were using my sexuality as a weapon? Forcing me to stay quiet along with Johnnie. Making us lie. But you don’t ever seem to get it.’ He sighed as if he were exhausted. Which was probably true, they seemed to have picked over the carcass of this particular argument for years.

‘But I don’t understand.’ She couldn’t help going back over it, maybe one day she’d get it. ‘What was wrong with telling a little white lie, and saying you weren’t bisexual? It wasn’t that big a deal, surely? You could’ve hidden it and then, when you needed to, told people later. It wasn’t about lying, it was more a matter of timing. Because announcing it right before the start of your US tour was, well… And you were dating that girl, whatshername, then anyway so no one needed to know.’

She felt herself wince. No one usually mentioned the tour that never was. It was amazing how many parents in Middle America didn’t want their daughters idolising a band which included two guys who weren’t completely straight.

Tickets stopped selling, and Status Single were ‘has-beens’ almost the next month and the month after that the record company quietly jettisoned them.

‘Her name was Felicity, as you well know.’ He frowned at her. So sue her if she always pretended to forget the names of his girlfriends and boyfriends. She knew it was petty but it relegated them to the insignificant pile, where they wouldn’t encroach on their life.

‘I’m not having this argument with you again, Ems. A lie is a lie. They wanted to deny my identity, is that something you can swear Mega! would never do?’

Mega! wouldn’t. She knew they wouldn’t. Not that any of their acts were LGBT, but if they were…

‘They wouldn’t,’ she said with certainty. ‘Don’t judge me or my job because of something that happened a decade ago. The business has changed, no one has a problem with an out gay artist now. Look at Sam Smith.’ She could feel her hands curl into fists.

Sometimes she wanted to punch him. He was only three years older than her but he always did this holier than thou spiel about how he knew more because he’d been in the industry for years.

There was a pause, the tension between them quivering. Was he going to walk off, with his superior face in place?

She watched as the tension flowed out of him, his wide shoulders in the grey faded T-shirt falling. He reached his hand out, and it engulfed her fist, making her feel small.

‘Ems, please.’ His overly mobile brows scrunched up in a plea, ‘I don’t want to fight.’

Damn it, why did he pull out the big guns? She was incapable of staying angry when he brought out the puppy dog look.

‘Let’s agree to disagree?’ She hated fighting with him too. ‘So, the party?’ She made her eyes big and blinked slowly. She knew she wasn’t in the same league as Gee in terms of physical beauty or charisma but…

‘Damn it, Woodhouse. You know I can’t take it when you do the Bambi eye blink.’ He reeled back from the door, throwing his arm over his eyes as if hiding from Medusa. ‘Not today, Satan,’ he howled dramatically.

And just like that the tension faded, and was blown out of the room by the fan whirring in the corner.

‘That wasn’t an answer, Knightley?’ she called into the hall.

‘Fine,’ he said coming back into the room. ‘You can have your party. But if anyone starts doing karaoke with Status Single songs, I will not be responsible for my actions.’

‘You should probably take the Brit award out of the loo and the Teen Choice surfboard off the landing then,’ she said. He threw himself on the other sofa, landing with a grunt.

Differences of opinion on her job aside, Gee was a great housemate.

Make that landlord.

She stared at him as he slumped across from her, trying to angle his body to get a blast of air when the fan rotated back in his direction.

Their house was in a terrace near Victoria Park in Hackney, and the area had gradually become full of professionals and yummy mummies the longer they’d lived here. Gee had bought it back when he’d been in the band and it was one of the few things he had hung on to, and with the music studio he’d built at the bottom of the large garden, it meant security.

‘It’s my pension,’ he’d explained to her, ‘because god knows I didn’t make much money. Enough to buy this outright, build the studio. The rest of it…’ Gee had made a whooshing gesture with his hand.

He’d told her this a few months into their first year at university, when Emma had come around to work on a project.

Compared to her cramped halls of residence, it had made Gee seem like a grown up. With a plan and a structured life. So far removed from her experience.

Any structure in her childhood she’d put there herself.

And when it was time move out of halls… well, there had been a bit of a mix up but Gee had pulled through and made one of his spare rooms ready for her. Saved her. Maybe it was weird that she was still living in the same house she had lived in all the way through uni, but it was the longest she’d ever stayed anywhere.

It gave her roots that she’d always craved.

She’d made him up the rent as soon as she’d started earning some money. Just because he could afford the house without a tenant didn’t mean she could freeload. There were some things you didn’t do and that was mooch off your famous best friend.

And now that he was one of the most sought after music engineers in the business, he didn’t really need the pension. She couldn’t help but smile, she was so proud of him.

She loved their house – the way it was spread over five floors, with the kitchen in the basement and the living/dining room running from the front of the house to the back on the ground floor; the two battered leather sofas diagonal to each other facing a massive flatscreen TV mounted above the fireplace.

Home.

It meant they had a sofa each. And whoever got into the room first was in charge of the remote control, that was the rule. If there were still wrestling matches and sofa cushions flung on occasions then that was kept between themselves and these four walls.

Filled bookshelves lined the walls either side of the chimney breast.

‘Have you been mucking around with my books again?’ Gee said from his prone position on the sofa.

Emma groaned. This happened every time she picked any book off the shelf, and she was pretty sure she’d put it back exactly where she’d found it.

‘You are so OCD,’ she said, wondering if Amazon could deliver an extra fan in the next hour? How did September end up being this hot? June had been a soggy mess.

‘Little Miss Planner has no cause to throw stones in glass houses, I’ve seen what you can do with a spreadsheet,’ he said as he leveraged himself off the sofa and moved a book from one shelf to another. He stepped back and scanned it before nodding his head.

It looked like too much effort for her, she was sweating just looking at him. And not in a good way.

‘It has been ten years, Ems. When are you going to remember I don’t like my fiction and non-fiction to get mixed up. Fiction on these shelves,’ he pointed, ‘in alphabetical order by author – not title.’ He glared at her.

‘I did that once, when I thought I was being helpful,’ she squawked, some people were so ungrateful.

‘It took me a whole weekend to sort it out.’ He pointed to the upper shelves. ‘And this is where the non-fiction goes.’

‘I know, Gee. You go through it every time.’

‘Well, I’d expect it to stick. Maybe it’s because you don’t know the difference between fact and fiction at work.’

‘Ha, very funny,’ she said. ‘Sit down, I’ve ordered Turkish because I’m not going anywhere near an oven and we’re marathoning the latest season of Ten Peaks.’

‘Ah, the rock and roll way we spend our Friday nights.’ He pulled his T-shirt up to get some of the air underneath it.

Had he been waxing his chest again, she thought?

He usually only did that when he wanted to impress someone. It always seemed to happen just before Emma would start falling over some random woman, or more unusually a man, coming out of his room, who would then use her Nutella and not replace it.

Damn.

She should be happy. She should, no, she was. Of course, she wanted Gee to be happy and if that meant dating, then so be it. Just because her plan wasn’t about prioritising dating at the moment.

Gee worked too hard, he needed someone nice. But… he would have less time for her. Instead of the two of them, there would be three. And other than when it was musketeers, Hanson or Destiny’s Child, three was a crowd.

‘Earth to Ems.’ He chucked a pillow across at her, she was too slow and it smacked her in the face. She couldn’t complain as the displaced air cooled her for an instant before it hit.

‘What?’ She said, letting the cushion fall to the floor without stopping it.

‘Turn on the TV, and there are some tissues on the side table to wipe up your drool as soon as Austen Wentworth comes on.’

‘I don’t drool.’

Gee laughed.

‘You drool just as much,’ Emma muttered as she picked up the remote and clicked onto Netflix. ‘That is the reason Harry won’t invite us to meet Austen,’ she said, mentioning their friend, Harry Harville, who also starred in the show. His husband Lewis worked with Gee.

‘No, Lewis was very clear it was because of your high-pitched squealing when you caught sight of the topless photo of Austen on his phone.’

She turned on the episode and turned up the volume. He didn’t know what he was talking about. She had merely gasped in surprise.

Half an hour later they paused the show when the Turkish takeout arrived.

‘Do you think we’re stuck in a rut?’ Gee asked around a mouthful of carrot dipped in humus.

What did he mean? There was no point her going out on the town and getting drunk for at least another twelve months. Then she’d have to put some serious thought into finding ‘the one’.

The hummus was a bit drier than normal, she thought as she struggled to swallow.

‘What do you mean a rut?’ she answered.

He definitely was dating, that was what this was about. Or he wanted to. Who was it? No, she didn’t want to know. There was no point in her getting attached to them.

As if she ever did.

Maybe she could make sure her next clients needed someone to travel with them? Then at least she wouldn’t be around. And by the time she was back it would be over.

But then they would have a clear run at him, she thought, they wouldn’t know that Emma and Gee came as a pair.

‘I mean, it’s a Friday night and we’re staying in with takeout and Netflix. And we aren’t even using it as a euphemism. You’re not yet thirty and I have a Brit Award and a VMA in the downstairs toilet. What has happened to us?’

Okay, maybe he wasn’t dating. But he was obviously having a midlife crisis. Early.

‘See, this is all because you don’t have a life plan,’ she said as she found the energy to wrap her kebab up tighter, so she didn’t lose any. She watched in fascination as Gee stuck his tongue out to lick the juice travelling over his hand. It was disgust she was feeling, definitely disgust. It couldn’t be anything else, she thought, as she watched, mesmerised.

‘What has a life plan got to do with us being stuck in a rut?’ He gestured with his kebab, another stream of juice starting to coat his fingers.

She had to stop staring. She shook her head. Life plan. That is what she needed to think about.

She swallowed her mouthful of kebab. How many times had she had this conversation with him?

‘Okay, you map out your life, right. Break it down first by year. Then work out where the big milestones are going to be. When you want to be promoted at work, when you want to get married, when you want to have kids, that sort of thing. Then you make sure that you put in month by month all the stuff you need to do to get to achieve it.’

Why didn’t he get that it was as simple as that? Everything plotted out.

‘So, you’re telling me you have a calendar entry for September 3^rd that says “Netflix and takeout with Gee”? Because that is weird and slightly scary. And I’m not sure how that adds up to you getting your life plan done?’

He put his feet up on the large battered coffee table and actually started eating his kebab instead of waving it around.

‘No, it isn’t that detailed. Well, only in places.’ Was he seriously asking this? Maybe he wanted to make it up to her since their earlier fight about her job.

If only she could get him to understand. She put her kebab down, wiped her fingers with a napkin, because she wasn’t a savage, and picked up her phone so she could illustrate her points.

‘See, at the moment I’m in my career growth period.’ She waved the graphs on the Google doc that she checked every morning and updated weekly at him. ‘All social events that I go to need to be focused towards growing my professional network or be somehow related to work. Anything else would be a waste of time and energy. But if we move forward to next year, that is the beginning of my professional and personal period. I’ll start having to go out socially, I’ll probably join a dating service. Then after a period of three months, I should find Mr Right. I give it another six months before we move in, then engaged a year after that…’

She looked up.

Gee was staring at her with his mouth open, his kebab halted halfway to it.