Who’s That Girl?: A laugh-out-loud sparky romcom!

‘I’m not clear which half of the unhappy couple will be reporting in yet. Am I supposed to have two staff on gardening leave, and a third functioning from behind a vale of tears?’

‘Sorry,’ Edie said, in a small voice.

Richard sighed.

‘Why did I break the no couples rule? Mind you, even when your employees aren’t a couple, it’s no guarantee, eh.’

Edie said nothing.

‘Look, your extra-curriculars are none of my business, except when it affects my business.’

‘Richard, I’m sorry. If there was any way I could come back I would, but I can’t.’ Edie tried not to sob.

‘I don’t want decisions made about that, yet. It so happens I have a suggestion for a solution that might suit us both. A very short-notice job has come in, I was going to talk to you about it tomorrow. Have you heard of the actor, Elliot Owen?’

‘Er. Yes. From that swords and sandals show?’

The conversation had taken a surreal turn.

‘That’s him. A friend at a publishing house has on their knees begged me to spare a copywriter as a replacement to ghost-write his autobiog, after the last guy walked at the last minute. Or the first minute, the one where they met each other.’

‘OK …’ Edie grimaced.

‘He’s back home in Nottingham to do some TV thing. “One for the cred not the bread,” I’m told. There’s a three- month window starting now to get all his hilarious stories out of him, before he’s off to America. Then four to six weeks to type the thing up. You’re from Nottingham too, am I right? So, go. See the folks. It’s good money. Then afterwards, we’ll look at how the land lies in the office.’

‘I’ve never ghost-written a book before,’ Edie said. ‘I don’t know how.’

‘No, but how hard can it be? This will be one of those “separate kids from their pocket money” jobs where you pretend this vacuous pretty boy has amassed a lifetime of wisdom at twenty-five and everyone just looks at the pictures. You’re plenty literate enough to make him sound halfway articulate.’

Edie fell silent.

‘Seriously, it’s stenography. He talks, you marshal his self-aggrandising drivel into something vaguely coherent.’

Edie swithered. On the one hand, this sounded fairly mad. On the other hand, her boss was offering her a way of paying her rent for the near future. And Richard was right: as an alternative, he could contractually insist she worked her notice in the office. Anything was better than that.

‘OK,’ Edie said. ‘Thanks for the chance.’

‘Great. I said Tuesday to start, his people will be in touch. They’ll courier the cuttings over to you, so drop me a text with your folks’ address. By the way - I pass this on with a wry eyebrow raise – they, and I quote, want you to “really get under his skin and get some real meat out of this”. Try to ignore ground that’s been covered already in his press.’

‘Mmm-hmmm,’ said Edie, with the firm assurance of someone agreeing to do something they had no idea how to do.

‘Check in with me, every so often.’

‘Will do.’

There was a pause where Richard heavy sighed again.

‘And this part of the conversation is strictly off the record. I couldn’t care less about the rights and wrongs and who-did-whats of your superannuated game of kiss chase with Jack Marshall. But I’m disappointed in your taste.’

Edie was surprised at this, and could only say:

‘Oh?’

‘You’ve always struck me as a bright woman, with a lot about herself. He’s an irrelevant person. Learn to spot irrelevant people. Don’t expect someone who doesn’t know who they are to care who you are.’

Edie, surprised, nodded meekly and then remembered he couldn’t see her.

‘OK. Thank you.’

‘Oh, and Edie. I’m sure it’s not necessary to say this, but in the circumstances I’m going to go belt and braces.’

‘Yes?’

‘The advice was about getting under his skin, not his clothes, and let’s set aside the “real meat” thing entirely. For fuck’s sake, don’t get off with Elliot Owen.’

10 (#ulink_5f2239db-bcd1-564b-a2e1-6f3de6f3b46d)

Edie paid first class to get back to Nottingham, even though it was an extravagant amount extra, travelling on a Monday. The last luxury for the condemned woman, a Big Mac and large fries on Death Row.

It was tough, she knew, to equate her native city with the Electric Chair. Nevertheless.

In their twenties, everyone who’d escaped to The Smoke had shuddered at the thought of moving back to wherever they’d come from. Edie had fitted right in. They were the ones who’d got away, and they revelled in their success every weekend. On Fridays, when Edie drank in Soho pubs, everyone spilling out of the doorways, she felt she was at the centre of the universe.

Then slowly but surely, the tide turned. People married and planned babies, and wanted good schools and a garden. They didn’t go out to explore the capital’s cultural riches and superior shopping at the weekends anyway. Even those who didn’t have families got sick of the commute, the cut-throat competitiveness, the gargantuan property prices, the way London geography made social spontaneity impossible.

Gradually, the very same people who’d proclaim loudly after a few pints that the rest of the country was a backward dump full of UKIPers, began to romanticise home. Being in striking distance of the grandparents, being able to have a dog, a friendly local where everyone knew your name. It taking ten minutes to get into town was a desirable convenience, not a sign you were in Shitsville, Nowhereshire.

As Charlotte said, when justifying St Albans, Now you can get a decent coffee and a cocktail most places, you don’t need to be in London.

And Edie once again was the odd one out, because she didn’t feel like that. London wasn’t about drinks. It had always felt a huge achievement to her, and carried on feeling like one. London was anonymity, London was freedom. London was where Edie had reinvented herself. A London address, albeit a cramped one-bed rented flat in Stockwell, was almost everything she had to show for living, aged thirty-five. Yes, every friend she’d made at the agency prior to Ad Hoc had moved out. It became a social exodus, after thirty. But Edie stood firm.

As the countryside sped past the train window, she kept thinking: STOP. You’re heading in the wrong direction.

She only went home at Christmas, if she could get away with it. It was bleak, for Edie. It was particularly hard as it felt as if everyone else she knew returned to some Cotswolds vision from a supermarket advert, in holly-wreathed timber-beamed farmhouses with spray-on frost edging the windows. There was excited discussion about traditions: smoked salmon and fresh pyjamas on Christmas Eve, Frank Sinatra while you opened your presents, champagne and blinis and Monopoly and snowflakes on smug kittens.

Standard procedure for Edie went like this: she would invent a reason why she had to work until Christmas Eve morning (cursing the years where it fell on a weekend, and elongated her agony).

She’d feel guilt at the disappointment in her dad’s voice when he’d say: ‘Oh, can you not get away any earlier? Oh, OK.’

Richard would have to shoo her out when he saw her in the office.

‘I don’t want to go,’ she’d lament.

‘You’re condemned to a green and pleasant city with a university boating lake, not fucking Mordor. Now get lost – you’re only reading the BBC News site, and the cleaners want to get in.’

Edie would catch the train at St Pancras, ending up on the service that was crammed with inebriated last-minuters. On arrival in Nottingham, she’d go straight to Marks & Spencer, buy as much food as she could carry and a large bunch of flowers. Then she’d clamber into a taxi to Forest Fields, about ten minutes’ drive north of the city centre.

She’d get the cab to drop her at the end of the street, so her sister Meg didn’t hear the rumble of a Hackney engine and give her a lecture on how it was ecologically much better to get a bus, here, LOOK. (Having the timetable thrust into her hands as soon as she was through the door made Edie want to go everywhere on a motorised golden throne powered by unicorn tears.)