Love Is A Thief

‘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’teaten 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 Anneka

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.

Challenge 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.

the pianist—beatrice van de broeck—90 years old

What didn’t I do because of love? Well, I didn’t study piano. It was 1936 and I was offered a place at the Juilliard School in New York. You’ve probably never heard of it but Juilliard was already one of the greatest music schools in the world. Some of the most successful pianists of our time have graduated from that school.

Well, my father, a very conservative Belgian man, toyed with the idea of allowing me to go but the school couldn’t guarantee I’d be able to find work after graduation. To have a daughter move to America was one thing, but for her to become an unemployed musician, well, that was quite another. Ultimately he gave me the choice. To do what was expected of me and marry a wonderful man who I was very fond of, or to go. Of course I agreed to marry. That was the right thing to do, the proper thing. And my husband bought me the most beautiful Steinway piano as a wedding gift. I played it every day until the day he died, God rest his soul.

But after passing up my place at Juilliard I never took another piano lesson. I stayed just as I was; good but notgreat; a pianist but not a musician, not a performer. So if there had been no husband, if there had been less of an obligation to marry and settle down, if I had been free as a bird like you are now, you beautiful young girl, that is the first place I would go. That would be my love-stolen dream. And if I was there I would cross my fingers and all my toes and hope that love never showed up so I could stay there forever.

grandma’s villa | pepperpots life sanctuary

‘We will do everything possible to make sure you keep your job. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to the ghostwriting team at True Love. Your writing equals a young Barbara Cartland,’ and other such platitudes had spouted from the mouth of Federico as soon as we realised the trouble I was in. Then we’d jumped in my car and driven straight to see Grandma Josephine at Pepperpots Life Sanctuary, the most exclusive old people’s home in Western Europe

. There’d been no mention of Federico’s involvement in my current predicament. No, we’d skipped over that like Dorothy sprint-hurdling down the Yellow Brick Road. But within seconds of actually arriving at Grandma’s villa Team Kate had fractured, with Federico knocking me to the floor as he pelted down the hallway diving head first into Grandma’s impressive walk-in wardrobe. He re-emerged a few seconds later screaming, ‘Where’s the Chanel?’ before dragging most of the contents into the middle of Grandma’s enormous open-plan lounge. He spent the rest of the afternoon trying on an assortment of different furs, spinning backwards and forwards on the spot like one of those figurines in a music box.

‘Well, I told her to start small,’ Federico said, trying on his third fur. ‘Didn’t I, Kat-kins? I said, “Make Chad think it was his idea,” but she went ahead and did it anyway, yes she did, like a boisterous young bullock filled with his first flush of hormones.’ He took a sip from a large Margarita and threw on another fur. And just for the record he’d done no such thing. He’d said, ‘Go big, Kat-kins!’ high-fived me, poured an Appletini down my throat then substituted my diligently ghost-written True Love reader story for a two-page advert inviting the readers to get in touch and share their Love-Stolen Dreams. But apparently the truth held no place in Grandma’s colossal lakeside villa.

‘What we don’t understand,’ Grandma began, her best friend Beatrice nodding along, ‘is why Chad will just assume it was Kate.’ Beatrice and Grandma were dressed head-to-foot in black Lycra Parkour

outfits and looked like Bond girls for the over-80s. ‘Federico, you must tell this Chad someone else submitted the advert. He’ll listen to you.’

‘I see your point, Josephine, yes, I do,’ Federico said, collapsing into a pile of dark brown furs, looking like the walnut on top of a giant Walnut Whip. ‘But if we are stood in Truth Town, Josephine, and it feels like we are, Chad doesn’t always listen to me in the work environment, no he does not. In fact sometimes that handsome mountain of a man doesn’t listen to me at all. But that is a totally different work drama of mine and today isn’t about me, it’s about Kat-kins, but let’s just say if we are touching on the subject, and it feels like we are, that I need to work on establishing better boundaries; emotionally, professionally and sexually.’ He whispered that last word before sipping on yet another Margarita. I was still dry as a pre-ignited bush fire. ‘And Chad thinks it’s Kat-kins because she presented the idea to him a few months ago.’ He passed Grandma a piece of paper that I recognised as my colourful and mostly felt-tip-based A3 presentation. Grandma unrolled the paper then shielded her eyes.

‘I know,’ Federico said as he scurried to the other side of the room to try on what looked like a man’s dark blue blazer. ‘It’s like she’s taken it to the local preschool and asked a group of mentally challenged under-5s to create her important business proposal for her. Did you do that, Kat-kins, did you?’

‘I thought I’d brought you up better than this, Kate.’ Grandma tutted, holding the presentation in my face. Personally I think it’s hard to quantify whether Grandma brought me up better than a colourful A3 presentation. Certainly she brought me up better than my parents, but they are really odd and thankfully almost constantly away. They call themselves Peaceful Extreme Non-Violent Dangerous Environmental Activists (PENDEAs) but I know that they are not non-violent and last week I saw images of them on Channel 4 News. They were wielding machetes on the deck of a recently impounded aid ship entering the Gaza Strip. Dad had face paint on, Rambo-style. I don’t know you well enough to tell you what my mother was doing, but let’s just say that occasionally she feels exposing her breasts is the best way to evoke peace. So my upbringing was better than hanging about with them, but better than a colourful A3 presentation? I wasn’t 100% sure.

‘Well, Kate, there is only one way you can save your job,’ Grandma said as she threw my presentation in the fireplace and lit a match, the felt-tip-covered page burning with a greeny-orange flame. ‘You must find something impressive to write about so that Chad doesn’t want you to leave.’

‘By tomorrow?’ I guffawed. ‘I’ve got more chance of inventing a time machine and catapulting myself back into the past.’

‘Well, she could write about that lovely Delaware,’ Beatrice suggested. ‘People always like to hear news about her.’

‘Delaware!’ Grandma nodded before punching the air victoriously. ‘You must speak to Delaware O’Hunt!’

‘Why would Kate be able to interview Delaware O’Hunt?’ Federico said, grabbing hold of Beatrice’s shoulders. ‘Why, I ask you? Why?’ He was trying to stay calm but he was shaking her quite violently.

‘Because she lives next door,’ Grandma said, walking out to her terrace and peering over the fence, ‘and normally she pops in for vino before her jazz fusion rock dance class.’

‘How did we not know about this, Kat-kins?’ Federico shout-whispered. ‘The most media-shy actress from the golden age of film living here, next door to Grandma, and you let me come here, drink Margaritas, eat lovely sushi wraps, of which there doesn’t appear to be any today,’ he said, looking about the place, ‘and we never knew about Delaware? This is slapdash, Kat-kins! Totally slapdash!’ He placed his forehead against the window overlooking the next-door villa. ‘I love her,’ he quietly wailed to himself as his breath created misty patches on the glass. ‘I completely love her.’

You see, Delaware O’Hunt wasn’t just an actress. She’s a screen idol of the 1950s. She made more movies than any other actress, starred with all the greats, made plays, musicals, films, won an Oscar, got married, then divorced. She had a tumultuous love life and wore the most incredible clothes. In fact there is nothing in Delaware O’Hunt’s current wardrobe that I wouldn’t run over hot coals to wear even now she is a proper pensioner. But I can’t for a second imagine how love negatively affected the gorgeous Delaware. Love was all around her; love chased her down the street; love made posters of her; documentaries about her; sang about her. She was a world-famous actress, one of the greatest of the greats. It didn’t look as if love stole anything at all.

‘Darling, she doesn’t seem to be in so why don’t you pop back at the weekend and I’ll arrange for you to have a chat? Federico, if you come early we can go rock climbing together.’

‘Thank you, Josephine, thank you.’ He was speaking like a 1940s actor. ‘I’ll be back at the weekend, first thing, first thing I tell you.’ He punched the air with Delaware-inspired enthusiasm. ‘Oh, and Josephine,’ he said, extracting himself from the dark blue blazer that looked in my opinion to be from Hugo Boss Menswear, ‘I L.O.V.E. the jacket. It’s so on point. Try it, Kat-kins, try it,’ he said, passing it to me. ‘Girl in Boy is black to last season’s pattern on print.’

‘Oh, that’s not Josephine’s jacket,’ giggled Beatrice. ‘He thinks it’s your jacket! No, that’s Peter’s jacket, isn’t it? He left it here when he came for lunch. I remember because I thought it brought out the colour of his eyes. Well, it did, didn’t it?’ she said to Grandma, who looked uncharacteristically startled.