Читать книгу Love Is A Thief - Claire Garber - Страница 6

It’s the thing I hate most in the world, after eating noises. First place definitely goes to the noises people make when they eat; mostly it’s the chewing-swallowing noises I hate, but also the preparation noises: the chinking of knives and forks against plates in a quiet room; the noise as someone opens their saliva-filled mouth; and Lord forbid if someone actually clinks their fork against their teeth when placing food into their noisy gob. But after that, after the food-noise thing, the thing I hate most in the world is heartbreak, and I am surrounded by it every single day at work, because after the ‘incident’ at Heathrow Terminal Five my friend Federico invited me to work with him at True Love magazine.

It was Grandma Josephine’s idea originally. She’d said it was important to keep oneself busy when one was feeling broken and empty on the inside. Then she’d said something about paying one’s own rent and there were mutterings about inflation and pints of milk. So now I go to work every day, Federico by my side, and once there I am exposed to a multitude of grotesque eating noises and bucketloads of daily heartbreak, although we never let our readers know about the heartbreak. No, True Love makes everything look love-covered and golden, and I hate that. I hate the love-covered golden heartbreak.

‘Well, it’s a twatting mystery is what it is,’ Chad said, pacing around the huge heart-shaped table in the middle of the huge heart-shaped boardroom. ‘When was the last time we had this much post?’ he said on his second circuit of the room. Loosie, his officious 24-year-old American assistant, strode after him flicking through her notebook like an obnoxious linesman.

‘Two thousand and one, Chad,’ she said, flipping to the correct page. ‘Just after 9/11.’

‘So what the fuck am I missing?’ Chad said, looking to everyone in the room. ‘Why are there 27 sackfuls of post? What the fuck did we write about last month?’ It was common knowledge that Chad never read his own magazine. He didn’t even check the copy before sending it to print. ‘Well? What did we advertise?’ he asked the room. ‘Have Royal Mail fucked up and forgotten to deliver the post for the last 11 years?’ He looked from face to face. ‘What-the-twat was so exciting about last month’s edition?’

Every face in the room turned to me. It was like white-faced choreographed mime at its most terrifying. I say every face turned; Chad’s didn’t. He’d started on his third circuit of the room, tearing around the enormous table, which was bright pink, glass-topped and viciously sharp-edged. In fact that table was more unexpected than the postal situation and had injured 11 members of staff in the last week alone: nine on the jagged edge of its glass top; the tip of the glass heart had drawn blood twice, and Mark from Marketing cracked his knee on it two weeks ago and still walked with a noticeable limp.

‘It’s not just the post, Chad,’ Loosie said, scowling at me, flipping over another page of her notebook as Federico emitted a strange squeaking noise from the other side of the room. If he could have climbed inside his Nespresso machine and drowned himself he would have done. I knew the minute the postman arrived we were in 27 sackfuls of trouble and I’d deliberately positioned myself next to the boardroom exit. And excuse me, but I’m not one of those girls who’s ashamed of running away. I’m not ashamed of anything after being forcefully removed from Heathrow Airport by mental health professionals.

Loosie opened her mouth to speak and Federico crouched down as if he were expecting an explosion. I leant forward and rested my forehead on the cool surface of the dangerous glass heart. There was absolutely no way we were going to get away with it.

You see, my job at True Love was supposed to be the easiest at the magazine, and by that I mean it should in theory be impossible to mess it up. All I have to do is read the letters our readers send us then rewrite them into something more interesting. That’s it. Our readers write in (normally in their hundreds) and share stories with us: stories of how they met their one true love; or how much they gave up to save their one true love; or perhaps how they reignited their one true love. I then pick the best ones, call them up, interview them, then rewrite their special intimate moment into a thousand words of tear-jerking genius for an insubstantial salary and absolutely no writing credit. In the writing world I am the lowest of the low. They call me the ghost-writer. I’m a ghost, in the literary sense of course.

Now before we go any further I just want to state, for the record, that I am a hopeless romantic. I am a love lover. I am a princess waiting patiently for her Prince Charming to arrive, on a horse, or a donkey, or even in a London black cab. Or at least I was. Prince Charming was supposed to whisk me off my feet, take me somewhere super and tell me not to worry about the impossibly high house prices or how I will fund my retirement. He was also supposed to be handsome, funny, an emotional mind-reader and have an average to large penis. But the readers of True Love kept telling me that getting Prince to turn up at all was pretty difficult, and only the beginning of your prince-related troubles. Because Princey may not possess the above clearly defined characteristics; in fact some readers told me their prince didn’t possess any at all. But they fall in love regardless only to discover love involves focus; love involves compromise; love involves sacrifice. It’s hard to maintain it, difficult to look after, impossible to control. Eventually, almost all our readers lost the bloody thing and became Waiting Princesses again.

Not that we let the public know this. We only showed them the end result, when all the pieces were perfectly back in place. But I saw the void in between. I heard about ‘the time I lost him’ or ‘why wasn’t I enough for him?’ or ‘I gave up 15 years of my life for him; he didn’t want kids; I gave up my place at university; delayed something; didn’t travel somewhere; he doesn’t eat spicy food so I haven’t eaten Indian for 12 years; he prefers me blonde, skinny, fat, tanned, waxed, hairy.’

Women seemed to be constantly subjecting themselves to men, not that the men asked them to, I never heard that, just that women seemed to do it anyway.

My grandma always says, ‘Don’t subject yourself to a man, Kate, subject them to you!’ and I think what she means by that is decide what you want in life and get the man to fit to that, not focus on the man’s needs and try to accommodate, mould, shape, change, compromise yourself to please him. I always found it a bit confusing because I thought subjects were things we studied at school. But subjects or rather subjecting yourself is apparently a universal force, like some kind of giant whip, or invisible force field that humans can apply to one another. My grandma knows this stuff because she’s a world-renowned feminist, and a prolifically productive one at that. She’s written books and papers on just about everything to do to with women, and men, and force fields of oppression. Living with her as a child, I was constantly surrounded by paper towers of manuscripts and books. I ran around them with my best friend, Peter, and we pretended the towers were actually paper trees in paper forests, which was odd because they were trees before they were chopped down by a burger company wanting to graze cattle on the newly deforested land, then made into paper for us to build paper trees with …

And that’s what I wanted True Love to write about—not the cows and the trees and global deforestation; that’s more Time Magazine than True Love. No, I wanted True Love to write about the things love took away. I wanted to help women go out and get those things back. I wanted to help them reclaim all the things that love had stolen. And I wanted to ask what they’d do if they were me, a 30-year-old girl who found herself at relationship and life Ground Zero having well and truly missed her own love boat. So I’d suggested this to Chad. I’d said, ‘Chad, I want to go out and get back all the things love stole. It’s going to be like Challenge Anneka¹ but with love and boats and the occasional high five. Please let me do it, Chad, please. Give me something to believe in after my bed for two became a bed for one.’

And I had planned to do that every day. I was going to help people reclaim their love-stolen dreams until the pain in my heart went away and the word Gabriel, or Gabe, or on the odd occasion the ‘Ga’ sound no longer brought me to tears. Because as Prince Charmings go mine turned out to be gut-wrenchingly rubbish, and I don’t think I’m the first girl in the world to think their allocated prince was a little bit shit, but Chad had said, ‘No.’

Then I’d starting crying, because since the break-up I’ve become something of a continuous weeper. Prior to this I thought us Brits were stoic and watertight, but now the tears come fast, in plentiful supply and with the most minimal of provocation.

And since then the most controversial thing the magazine had published was 400 words on the physical effects of heartbreak being directly comparable to Class A drug withdrawal (which is totally true, by the way, for any of you feeling violently ill after a recent break-up). No, True Love had continued to eulogise the positive benefits of love, teaching readers how to secure as much of it as possible, often through purchasing one of the many products Chad sold advertising space for, and, when they finally did get it, encouraging them to write in and share it with a love-hungry world. Or at least that was our position until last Friday…

And just for the record, before that Loosie starts speaking again, you should probably know that she’s had it in for me since I made fun of her funny American accent, and the fact that she speaks with the speed and intonation of a concrete-cracking power drill, and the silly spelling of her name …

‘As I said, Chad, it’s not just the post.’ She glared at me. ‘We’ve received an unusual amount of voicemails; three hundred on the main phone line, a hundred and twenty on the back-up line, and there’s something called a facsimile machine that keeps ejecting pieces of paper with what looks like handwritten messages. I’ve called IT and asked them to take it away. We’ve also received various gift boxes from motivational speakers; have been contacted by the publishers of almost every self-help author in Europe; and the BBC called, three times; and Kate, well, Kate seems to have received an awful lot of messages today too.’ You see, I told you. She hates me. ‘Yes, lots of people have called saying they want to speak to Pirate Kate.’ Oh no. ‘And most of the post seems to be addressed to Pirate Kate—’ I looked across the room but Federico was quietly humming to himself and looking the other way ‘—and everyone seems to want to talk about their love-stolen dreams.’

‘Their what?’ Chad said, spinning on the spot to face me.

‘Their love-stolen dreams, Chad,’ Loosie repeated, even though Chad had heard perfectly well the first time. At that moment, thankfully, Mark from Marketing burst in the room. Actually he hobbled on account of his knee injury from the giant heart-shaped table, but that sounds less dramatic, so imagine he burst.

‘The servers are down!’ he yelled, after bursting.

‘The servers are down for what?’ Chad said, super irritated, with me.

‘For everything, Chad, for everything, the main site, the micro-sites, client side—everything’s crashed. Too many people are trying to access them at the same time.’ Mark’s voice sounds as if he’s got an apple pip stuck up his nostril, if you know what I mean.

Chad looked between me, Federico and Mark.

‘Everyone, back here, tomorrow, 9 a.m.,’ he yelled before marching out of the boardroom followed by Mark, who, for the sake of the dramatic content of this scene, also marched out.

¹Challenge Anneka - British television show. Aired in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Anneka (tall, bottom-length hair, wore jumpsuits and used mobile telephones way before the rest of the world) would be set a challenge. Anneka and her helicopter-flying, mobile-phone-wielding team would then have a limited amount of time to complete the task. Anneka managed such things as repainting a Romanian orphanage, building a seal pool and ‘finding’ 10 double-decker buses for the National Playbus Association. She was a bit cool, super charitable and also a really really fast runner.