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

Edie made noises of thanks and, envelope clamped under one arm, began huffing her giant case up the stairway, made narrower by the books lining each step. The books were on their way to or from a bookcase, stuck in mid-flight.

She felt Meg watch her progress, suspiciously and sullenly. Edie could explain she wasn’t back at home to mess up her life, or to show off, and that her own life had gone spectacularly to shit.

But what would be the point? Even if Meg believed her, she’d no doubt think Edie brought it all on herself by being a sex puppet of the patriarchy, or whatever.

It wasn’t that Edie violently disagreed with most of Meg’s principles, even if she didn’t want to be vegan herself. The fact was there was no point agreeing with Meg about anything – because Meg’s views existed to establish the difference between herself and most of the rest of the world, specifically her older sister. When Edie concurred, it was viewed by her sister as some sort of spoiling and tarnishing gambit.

Edie flubbed down on the bed – she was touched to notice her dad had put clean sheets on it, and old blue faded ones from her childhood, too – and considered unpacking. But it was too much like accepting the length of her visit.

She had hoped that, if nothing else, Nottingham would make her feel better about what had happened to her life in London. Sat staring at the old built-in wardrobes, from the days her dad still did carpentry, and the bare emptiness of this box room without her things in it – bar a few old musty dresses on plastic hangers inside the wardrobes – she felt worse.

In a vacuum, there was nothing to stop her howling, no routine to cling to. She put her toilet bags in front of the mirror, the one she’d gazed into a thousand times while applying copious amounts of kohl before a teenage night out drinking an illicit concoction she and Hannah had devised, ‘Poke’, a blend of port and Coke.

She dug her phone out of her coat pocket and saw she had a text from Louis.

Hey babe, how you doing? Xx

Not great, but thanks for asking. You spoke to Richard? X

Yeah, I wanted to save you the hassle. He was cool about everything, as always. How long are you off for? Everyone misses you, you know <3

Hah! Yeah, Edie betted that was what everyone was saying. Louis was such a snake on wheels. This was his dream: a catastrophe that overlapped on the personal and professional Venn diagram. He could be excited onlooker and major political fixer, whispering in everyone’s ears, with the sole hotline to the villain of the piece. This was Edie’s Vietnam and his House of Cards. He’d deleted the Instagram picture to distance himself from Edie, and called Richard purely to stir and get a measure of her fate. Now he wanted Edie to tell him whether she’d been sacked, so he could be bearer of that news, too.

That’s nice. Three months.

OMFG, three months! Paid leave?

Did Louis think she was stupid? Did he not realise she knew he’d look up from his phone and say ‘My God, listen to this, she only got a three-month holiday out of ruining Jack and Charlotte’s wedding’? Louis knew what Edie knew, that a false friend was the only kind of friend she had left in that office.

Not leave, on a project in Nottingham. How’s Charlotte?

No reply. Of course not. Edie asking after Charlotte didn’t fit the story and there was nothing in answering it for Louis.

Edie got up off the bed, and thundered down the stairs. Her dad was fishing a tea bag out of a mug in the kitchen.

‘I meant to say, dinner’s on me tonight, as thanks for having me! We could go out. Or get fish and chips. Or, chips for Meg. Whatever you like.’

‘I’m cooking,’ Meg called, from the front room. ‘The kidney beans are already soaking. Also that chip shop doesn’t use separate preparation areas. I asked them and everything’s contaminated. And I don’t want to give them more profit anyway.’

You wouldn’t be, would you, Edie thought.

‘Uh, OK. Maybe tomorrow?’ Edie said, heart plummeting, as her dad nodded. Meg was an awful cook. That wasn’t anti-veganism, just a fact. Meg had never met a seasoning she liked to use. The one consistency all her curries, stews, hotpots and casseroles achieved was ‘non-toothsome sludge’. She eschewed recipes as creative constraint, and generally just mashed some stuff into other stuff.

Most terrible cooks were aware they were terrible, and limited people’s exposure to it, thus they weren’t a danger to the public. Meg was either blissfully unaware or strangely sadistic – the more Edie pushed it round her plate or her dad declared himself ‘pleasantly full’, the more she’d heap spoonfuls of it out and say, ‘This is full of iron,’ or similar.

There was an aggressive piety to forcing it on them: it wasn’t for the food to get nicer, it was for their minds to get wider.

She trudged back up the stairs thinking she’d eat Meg’s Sewage Slurry tonight to make nice, then tomorrow, go to Sainsbury’s and try to fill a cupboard with edible items. She might even hide a packet of Polish sausages inside a large bag of rice.

Back in her room, she was at a loss about what to do in the middle of a Monday afternoon, when not at work. She physically ached for the life she couldn’t go back to. She wasn’t only separated by geography from it now. She couldn’t even indulge herself with a crying jag, and come down for dinner pink-eyed and puffy, and have to explain what was up. The envelope with her name scrawled on it sat in the middle of the bed.

Sod it. There was no avoiding Elliot Owen. She was probably one of the few women in the country that this opportunity was wasted on.

12 (#ulink_00da6d41-367c-556c-a231-2d722c09ebe5)

It was strange to get to know someone through their press before meeting them, but Edie guessed it had been a while since Elliot had met anyone who hadn’t met him in print first.

What was that quote about Paul Newman, something about, ‘He was as nice as you could expect for a man who hadn’t heard the word “no” for twenty-five years’?

The photogenically brooding Elliot Owen couldn’t have heard the word no for at least five now. From women, possibly ever.

His bio details weren’t very colourful. He was thirty-one, not twenty-five, as Richard had said. Same age as Meg, though he’d been busier. Born to a comfortably middle-class family in the leafy Nottingham suburb of West Bridgford, went to a state school with a better OFSTED score than Edie’s, joined a local TV drama workshop, got spotted by a scout. He moved to London and ended up in a boring medical drama, did a bit of time in a soap, and a very quickly canned sitcom.

He was the love interest in a video by a terrible American emo-rock band for a song called ‘Crumple Zone’, which was a huge hit in the States and got his face known. It landed his breakout role in Blood & Gold.

As Prince Wulfroarer in the epic and boisterous fantasy series known for its stabbing, shouting, tits, scheming and tits, he was suddenly ‘sex in a wolf pelt’. A swaggering, high-born Northern warlord – rallying cry; ‘For the Blades of My Brothers!’ – he fell in love with a servant girl called Malleflead. Sadly that had proved his undoing, as Count Bragstard had also set his Machiavellian sights on her.

Prince Wulfy had therefore died on the end of a pointy weapon at the end of last series, uttering the heartbreaking words to his distraught shag-piece, before he bit on the fake blood capsule: ‘I am my Kingdom’ (his catchphrase), ‘but I would sacrifice it all for you.’ His demise prompted much speculation about whether female viewers would desert in droves.

Edie was resigned to Elliot being at best, boring, and at worst, an obnoxious brat. The fact the last ghost-writer had exited immediately was a very bad sign.

She didn’t think this expectation was prejudice on her part, it was straightforward logic. Take one male ego, rain down this much attention, employ someone whose sole job it was to blast his armpits with a hairdryer, and so on. Pay him millions, spooge a luge of adoration all over him. To come through that and not be an arsehole would take someone of spectacular character. Which meant you were gambling on a man not only being given his physical gifts, but also bestowed with Gandhi-esque substance.

You might as well pop down to the shop on the corner and expect your lotto ticket to pay off your mortgage.

Edie leafed through the photos of him on set in whichever raggedy-beautiful Eastern European country doubled for ‘Easterport’ or ‘Goldendale’. (Edie hadn’t seen much of Blood & Gold and could never keep the fictional geography straight.)

Elliot’s dark brown, slightly curly hair was dyed boot-polish black for Blood & Gold, and he wore dragon-green contact lenses. He had one of those squared-off jaws that a draughtsman could draw with three swipes of the pencil, and full lips that Edie envied, they were the sort she’d always wanted.

It was obvious why he’d been such a hit. It wasn’t sensible or interesting good looks, in Edie’s humble opinion. It was silly-to-the-point-of-ridiculous, pin-up handsomeness, to appeal to teenagers who hadn’t developed a more complex palate yet. The sexiness equivalent of strawberry milkshake.

She remembered Charlotte and others in her office all swooning and sighing over Elliot Owen, and Edie saying, ‘Meh, looks like the one in the TRAINEE BARISTA T-shirt who makes your cappuccino sour and gritty’, and Jack laughing in approval. Then Jack repeated the rumours he ‘played for Man City, not Man U’ and all the women chorused nooooooooo.

Edie had best buckle down to this homework – she also had a stack of celeb auto biogs, and they made drear reading – so she didn’t give him an excuse to kick off when she fumbled a question to which there was a well-known answer.

She’d start with a recent Sunday supplement profile. She flipped past moodily blue photos of Elliot resting his forehead on his forearm, with an expression as if he’d just been given terrible news. Headline: FANTASY CHAMPION.

It’s considered good manners to dip your headlights, at night, so as not to dazzle the oncoming traffic. When Elliot Owen strides casually into the dramatically under lit environs of the hip East Village restaurant he chose for our meeting, you can’t help wonder if he wishes he could flip his full beam off, at will. As he asks the waitresses for his table, they virtually crash and burn in the blazing glare.

Jesus wept, seriously?!

Raymond Chandler once described a ‘blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window’. In the 21st century, Owen’s a brunette who could leave a nunnery in smoking ruins.

Yes, that’s how religion works, Edie thought, nuns simply haven’t met sufficiently fit men and so married the Son of God as a fallback. These people.

With effortless good manners, Elliot inquires what I’m drinking. ‘Diet Coke, right?’ He summons the waitress, who is caught still staring at us. If Elliot’s noticed, he doesn’t let on: an old-fashioned gentleman, under the modern-casual shirt and jeans. ‘Can we have a Diet Coke, and which beers do you have?’ The waitress almost trembles as she offers Budweiser. ‘Ah, not a big fan of Budweiser. Clearly not spent enough time here yet,’ he says, with that sleepily devastating smile, as the waitress almost ovulates. ‘But that will be fine.’ And where is ‘here’? America, or the spotlight he’s now occupying? He’s seemingly come from nowhere … ‘Or Nottingham, as we like to call it,’ he corrects me, sharp as a tack. There’s that impossibly disarming smile again.

Christ, this is some hardcore drivel, Edie thought. Man In Ordering Beverage Shocker. He’s just a person who has to poo like the rest of us. Also, is that a dig at Nottingham? She flared with indignation, which was a bit hypocritical, she realised.