One in a Million

Sam considered the deal while I watched the handsome man from the office pretend not to see his dog taking a dump. Fine, they were all as bad as each other.

‘How exactly was I selected for this bet?’ he asked.

I smiled and pinched my shoulders together. ‘You walked through the door at the right time.’

‘Or the wrong time,’ he said, rubbing his palms along his long legs. ‘Fine. What would I have to do? To help you?’

‘Practically nothing,’ I replied, although the truth was I had yet to work that part out. ‘Couple of photos maybe, nothing too sexy, no dick-pics.’

His eyes snapped open behind his glasses. I saw for the first time, they were a beautiful shade of almost cornflower blue. He looked lovely when he was terrified.

‘I’m joking. Obviously.’

It was possible I’d gone too far too fast. It was also possible he had no sense of humour.

‘I take what I do very seriously. I have to give lectures, I have to collaborate with other academics. I don’t want to be turned into a joke and plastered all over the internet,’ he said, breathing out heavily. ‘The logic of social media is something that escapes me entirely.’

‘You absolutely, one hundred per cent will not be a joke of any kind,’ I told him, adding a conditional ‘probably’ in my head. ‘We don’t even have to put you in the pictures if you don’t want to be.’

‘I wouldn’t have to be in any of the pictures?’ he asked, interest piqued.

An unforeseen wrinkle but hardly a dealbreaker. There were lots of successful accounts that didn’t show their creators.

‘You won’t have to be in any of the pictures,’ I promised. ‘I can work around that.’

‘And if I agree to this, you won’t be letting yourself into my office morning, noon and night, demanding I do this, that and the other? I do still have a book to write.’

‘All right, Dad.’ I hid my smile at his negotiation tactics. ‘But I am going to need some time and effort from you. Otherwise boyfriend bootcamp is going to be a bust, isn’t it?’

He fell silent for what felt like hours. Point number one in his training programme was going to be easy. When someone says something to you, they usually want you to say something back in a timely fashion. It was called a conversation.

‘This all feels like a terrible mistake,’ he said finally as my phone vibrated. It was a text from Miranda, she needed me back at the office. ‘Maybe Elaine was right. Maybe I should crawl back into my hole and stay there.’

I sucked the sticky summer air in through my teeth, suddenly wondering which part of this deal was going to be the most difficult.

‘Crawling back into your hole is rarely the best solution to a problem,’ I said. ‘Trust me, I’ve done it loads. You can do better, Sam. Now, who wants to sell some books and get their girlfriend back?’

I thrust my arm high into the air.

‘Hmm,’ he said, standing up and shoving his hands deep into his baggy pockets. ‘We’ll see. I’m trying to get through my footnotes for the last chapter before the end of the week and they’re hardly going to write themselves.’

‘Sam?’ I lowered my arm slowly to my side as he walked away. ‘Don’t leave a girl hanging. Do we have a deal?’

‘I need to think about it,’ he said, glancing back and then turning around and setting off without me. ‘I’ll give you my answer on Monday.’

I sank back onto the bench and watched him walk hurriedly out of the square onto the street, rapid-fire sneezes soundtracking him on his way.

CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_00a22033-7e16-5639-8525-7d3f0e6b6c3d)

Saturday, 7 July: Twenty-Seven Days to Go

East London was a strange place. When Rebecca and I were younger, it felt so dangerous to venture out past Old Street. When she was a student and I was still in secondary school, this was where we’d come to do things we couldn’t tell our mum about. Gigs at the Macbeth, dancing at 93 Feet East, never-ending dumplings at the Drunken Monkey. But now the area was just a giant bundle of contradiction. Old and new, shitty and expensive. You want a bit of genuine exposed brick with your macchiato? That’ll be five pounds, please, and yes we can do a babyccino, will that be with cow, goat, almond or oat milk? Where me and Becks had run full throttle down the dark streets just in time to catch the night bus, mums and babies strolled happily with their three-wheeler pushchairs on their way back from the gym. I could hardly remember a time when Shoreditch felt dangerous.

But West London … now there was a case for concern. I clambered up the steps at St Margaret’s station, turning my head to avoid making eye contact with the Tesco Express in the corner. Too much temptation to fill my pockets with Haribo like I would on my way home from school. In East London, people were at pains to tell you everything about themselves from the very first time you laid eyes on them. Here, everything was camouflaged with matching sofas from Heals, Le Creuset cookware and the very finest ensembles Boden had to offer. I didn’t even know where my top was from. I’d borrowed it from Miranda which meant it could be anything from haute couture or handmade. Hopefully no one would ask.

When we were kids, Becks was the rebel. She was the one who bleached her hair, the one who stayed out all night, got caught shoplifting, stole a full bottle of Malibu from the drinks cabinet, and yet here we were, twenty years later and she was living in a lovely three-bedroom semi, two roads over from where we grew up. Complete with a perfectly trimmed privet hedge, glossy red front door and a battered Cozy Coupe parked outside. She was living the suburban dream, just like the house next door and the house next door and the house next door and the house next door. And she claimed I was the one who had never dealt with our parents’ divorce.

‘Annie!’

Alan, Rebecca’s perfect husband, opened the front door before I could knock and pulled me inside the dark hallway with a slightly manic look on his face.

‘The baby is sleeping,’ he whispered loudly, pushing me through the tastefully decorated house. ‘Rebecca is in the back garden with your dad and Gina.’

I was twenty minutes early and I was still late. Brilliant.

‘There she is,’ my dad called from behind his giant Ray-Bans as I blinked, blinded, back out into the sunshine. ‘What time do you call this?’

‘Twenty to one,’ I replied, leaning down for a half-hug and kiss on the cheek before smiling politely at my latest stepmother. She did not get the kiss or the half-hug. It had only been two years, I liked to wait until he’d made it past three years of marriage before I committed. I’d learned my lesson. ‘Aren’t I early?’

‘Dinner was supposed to be at one,’ Rebecca called from the outdoor dining table she’d set up at the end of the garden. ‘I thought you’d be here earlier.’

My carefully set little sister smile did not budge.

‘I brought wine.’ I held up two bottles, one white, one red, both of which I’d nicked from the office. ‘Shall I put it in the kitchen?’

Becks frowned, tucking her curly hair behind her ears. A morning slaving over the stove had left it frizzy, but this didn’t seem like an opportune moment to mention the bottle of fancy hair serum I’d left in her bathroom last month.

Before anyone else could make me regret my decision to get up and drag myself across London on a Saturday morning, Alice, my wonderful niece and one of the top five people in the world, stuck her head out of her Wendy house and hit me with a massive, toothless grin.

‘Auntie Annie!’ she squealed, barrelling across the garden and spearing me into the grass. ‘Mummy said you weren’t coming.’

‘I said you might not come,’ Becks corrected on her way back into the kitchen. ‘Not that you definitely weren’t coming.’

‘We were almost late ourselves,’ Gina said, all confessional and apologetic when there was no need. ‘There was a nasty accident on the A3. Sat there for half an hour, didn’t we, Mal?’

My dad nodded his agreement from his fancy wooden lawn chair. My sister’s garden furniture was nicer than anything I had in my actual living room, I realised with shame.

‘At least we’re all here now,’ I replied, forcing my smile out wider from my prone position on the grass.

I’d promised Becks I’d try harder with Gina but, really, she didn’t make it easy. You’d never seen a woman so basted with fake tan. You might think you had but it wasn’t possible. In fact, I wasn’t even sure there was any fake tan left in the world because Gina appeared to be wearing all of it.

‘Is the baby still asleep?’ she asked, dropping her voice an octave and over-enunciating each word, the way people do when they’re talking about babies. ‘I’m desperate to see him. We haven’t been over since before Kefalonia, have we, Mal?’

My dad shook his head.

Worryingly, next to my dad, Gina looked quite pale only his tan wasn’t fake. It had been a long time since I’d touched his face but I had to assume it had transcended skin and become hide some time ago.

‘He’s asleep,’ Alice replied, still lying on top of me. ‘He’s always asleep. I’m not allowed to sleep as much as him, ever.’