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Copyright
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London, SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
Copyright © Lindsey Kelk 2011.
Lindsey Kelk asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
ISBN: 9780007345632
Ebook Edition © April 2011 ISBN: 9780007383757
Version: 2020-10-09
Dedication
To all the single girls who gave hours of their lives,
livers and lipgloss to research the ultimate to-do list,
especially Rachael Wright, Sarah Donovan, Sarah
Benton, Emma Ingram and Alicia Romano. Your
sacrifice will not be in vain.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
‘If someone had told you, ten years ago, you’d be…
Chapter Two
Because no plan can succeed without the assistance of reliable…
Chapter Three
By the time the cab dropped me off at home,…
Chapter Four
‘I’m going to kill him,’
Chapter Five
After six bags of crisps, three bottles of wine and…
Chapter Six
‘Morning.’
Chapter Seven
‘Come on, Red, get up.’
Chapter Eight
‘That arsehole.’ My mum dropped a slightly floppy slice of…
Chapter Nine
‘I can’t believe we’re doing this,’ Emelie groaned, her head…
Chapter Ten
‘Raaaa-cheeeeel.’ I felt a hand lightly tapping the top of…
Chapter Eleven
‘I can’t believe we’re doing this,’ I said, hobbling slightly…
Chapter Twelve
Matthew had been delighted when we’d called him from the…
Chapter Thirteen
‘Hi.’ Dan stood in front of me, back in his…
Chapter Fourteen
‘Oh, you know me so well,’ Matthew shouted over the…
Chapter Fifteen
Between the events on the sofa, the row, and a…
Chapter Sixteen
Fourteen hours, one first-class flight and several glasses of champagne…
Chapter Seventeen
‘I can’t believe you’re actually going on a date with…
Chapter Eighteen
I crawled into bed, still in my sundress, and got…
Chapter Nineteen
‘ohmygodthatwasamazing,’ I exhaled, as Dougie Howser’s backward brother released me…
Chapter Twenty
‘I’m coming!’ I yelled, dashing up the hallway in my…
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Keep Reading …
About the Author
Other Books by Lindsey Kelk
About the Publisher
Prologue
Four weeks earlier …
It had been an odd Sunday.
My boyfriend, Simon, had got up and vamoosed for football before I’d even considered rolling out of bed and onto the sofa for a three-hour Friends-a-thon. Even though it was late July, the weather was pretty mediocre and there was nothing compelling me to get up off the sofa other than a judgemental cat staring through the window and the intermittent need to pee. Usually I was mega-motivated on a Sunday. It wasn’t too often I worked a regular five-day week, so Sundays were all together too often the only day I had to get anything done; but on that particular day, I couldn’t bring myself to do anything more strenuous than to repeatedly text my gay best friend Matthew to ask ‘how you doin’?’
I didn’t care if it was a fifteen-year-old joke. It was still funny.
And so it was to me in my faded-to-grey Juicy Couture trackie bottoms, a Pokémon T-shirt I’d worn semi-ironically at university and a greasy topknot that Simon arrived home at four in the afternoon. I rolled onto my back and gave him a sexy grunt. Rowr. Rachel Sexpot Summers.
I knew things weren’t right when, instead of giving me the standard kiss on the cheek and vanishing into the shower, Si sat down on the settee, elbows on knees, staring straight ahead and breathing loudly. After a couple of minutes, I muted Monica and shoved myself into a sitting position.
‘You all right?’ I asked.
‘Do you want to go to the cinema or something?’ He carried on staring at the fireplace. Not into it, just in front of it. As though he could see something I couldn’t.
‘I’m a bit knackered actually.’
So sue me. I wasn’t being that lazy; I’d been working fourteen-hour days all week long. No rest for the wicked, or the make-up artist. ‘Why don’t we get a Chinese and watch a DVD or something?’
He was quiet for another minute. My finger hovered over the volume button while I waited for confirmation. Or at least the suggestion of an Indian.
Eventually, he spoke. ‘OK. So I’ve been thinking.’ Whatever was in front of the fireplace continued to entrance him. ‘We should take a break.’
‘We’re going to Croatia in September.’ I gave him a nonplussed stare and draped my legs across his.
‘Yeah.’ He stretched the word out almost all the way through an Asda commercial. ‘No. I meant from … like … us.’
Now he had my attention.
‘We should take a break?’
Whatever it was that was so fascinating in the empty space in front of the fireplace had apparently just started doing a jig. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him concentrate on something with such intensity that wasn’t attached to an Xbox.
‘Are you dumping me?’ I pulled my legs up off his knee and curled into a semi-foetal position. I really wanted to brush my hair.
‘No,’ Simon shook his head. ‘It’s not that, I just need a bit of a break.’
‘Sounds like you’re dumping me.’ I was trying very, very hard not to cry. I already looked bloody awful; tears were not going to help my case. But then, neither was talking in a voice so high and squeaky that it made dolphins sound like they were smoking twenty a day. ‘What are you saying?’
‘Stop freaking out. I just need to sort some stuff out in my head. I’m not breaking up with you.’
‘Is there someone else?’
Oh my god, there was someone else. Five years, a mortgage, a co-signed car loan for a crappy secondhand Renault Mégane and he was seeing someone else.
‘No,’ he practically shouted. ‘Of course there’s not someone else.’
Fair enough.
‘Is this because I don’t want to go to the cinema?’ I wrapped my arms around my knees.
‘Do you want to go to the cinema?’
I shrugged, not knowing what else to do. ‘I might.’
And that was it. We ended up going to see the new Pirates of the Caribbean film but, to be honest, it was a bit difficult to concentrate. And when Johnny Depp can’t hold your attention, what chance does anyone else have? When we got home, I ran a bath and Simon moved his stuff into the spare room.
The next night, I got home from work to find a note on the bed to say he needed a bit of time to think and he was going to stay with a friend for a couple of days. But he did come home. Just as soon as I went away to work in Manchester for a week. And when I got back, he’d gone away on a business trip. Then I spent a week at my mum’s while she got to grips with a nasty broken leg. After that, he was off on a stag do. And then, one night, he just didn’t come home.
But we weren’t broken up. It was just a break.
A break that was rounding the four-week mark.
But still, it was just a break …
Four weeks later …
CHAPTER ONE
‘If someone had told you, ten years ago, you’d be standing here doing this, you wouldn’t have believed them, would you?’ Anastasia asked, adjusting the strap of her lacy bra. She piled a mass of artificial blonde curls onto the top of her head before letting them fall perfectly around her slender shoulders. ‘I mean, modelling? It’s not something your career adviser usually recommends, is it?’
I glanced up from the ridiculously painful kneeling position I’d been locked in for the last fifteen minutes and stared daggers at the clueless blonde.
‘Well, no, it’s not,’ I shuffled from side to side, trying to ignore the shooting pains in my kneecaps. ‘But, to be fair, if someone had sat me down and told me I’d be spending most of my life covering bite marks on your arse, I might have found “model” more believable.’
‘Yeah, sorry about that.’ She shuffled her boobs around while I fought the urge to scrawl ‘slag’ across her bum cheeks in Ruby Woo lipstick. ‘This new bloke’s a bit kinky. Think I’m just going to stick with one boyfriend from now on. I mean, it might be dull as shit, but I’m thinking go with the one who isn’t into all that weird stuff, you know? Thank god we didn’t have this shoot last week – you’d never have been able to cover up the rope burns on my wrists …’
Breathing out, I blocked Anastasia’s mid-Atlantic, Eastern-Europe-via-Essex drawl and focused on the job at hand. If there was one thing I was good at, it was focusing on the job at hand. Rachel ‘Blinkers’ Summers, make-up artist extraordinaire and queen of elective deafness. It was one of those jobs that sounded super fancy and terribly exciting but, in reality, being a make-up artist boiled down to getting up very early, standing around for hours, making someone else look beautiful and then going home very late. Glamorous.
But at least there was the all-inclusive workout. My kit currently weighed in at over thirty pounds, and lugging it backwards and forwards on the Tube had more or less replaced my weekly run. And there was a chance you might meet the odd celebrity, but all that really meant was that you too could experience the wonder of covering up evidence of sexual exploits so sordid that you could never watch Coronation Street ever again. There wasn’t a soap star alive that wasn’t into something weird. Happily, most days, I was just locked up in a studio in exotic Parsons Green, powdering body parts from dawn till dusk. It was hardly conducive to going home, whacking on the false eyelashes and glamming myself up for a night out with the celebs I’d been rubbing shoulders with all day. In fact, it was mostly conducive to going home, running a bath and passing out by myself while my boyfriend, Simon, watched TV.
I could never date a chef, I thought, sponging on one last layer of body foundation. He might be the best cook in the whole world, but he’s not going to want to whip me up a seven-course tasting menu when he walks through the door. You’d be lucky to get spaghetti hoops on toast for two. Not that I even had that in the house, I lamented. It was Friday, which meant tomorrow was Saturday, and Saturday was food shopping day. It really didn’t feel like a weekend unless I’d had my blood pressure tested by a run around Sainsbury’s. Unfortunately that usually meant Friday-night dinner was a dodgy low-cal ready meal left over from my last diet, or pizza. Which explained why, on occasion, I needed the ready meals.
‘Raquel, you’re always so quiet,’ Ana said loudly, arching her back to get a look at my handiwork. ‘What are you thinking about?’
‘Nothing,’ I lied, stepping back to take a critical look at her now perfectly peachy arse. Not a trace of her sexploits to be seen; just as well seeing as this was a shoot for multipacks of high-street undies. I wasn’t sure my mum would want to buy a five-pack of knickers that enticed wannabe rock stars to gnaw on your rear end. Or maybe she would: she and dad had been divorced for twenty years, after all, so it had been a long time since anyone had rocked her kasbah. I hoped. Ew.
‘You’re done.’ I waved her off with one final flick of the bronzer brush. ‘Go on.’
Ana clapped her hands together and skipped over to her happy place. In front of a camera. Behind said camera, Photographer Dan called out words of encouragement, snapping away while Ana threw herself around the fake bedroom set with all the gusto that I guessed had resulted in her getting bitten on the backside in the first place. It was pretty impressive stuff. I tucked my long blonde hair behind my ears and tried not to be jealous. It was a while since I’d been thrown around a bedroom.
I shook my head at the cavorting occurring in front of me. What did ‘a break’ even mean? Both television and movies, my most trusted advisors in life, had shown us that breaks were never actually a good thing. Fingers crossed, Simon was staying away from copy girls. This was, after all, the relationship all of our friends were jealous of because we were so incredibly sorted. Five years in and we were all set with the mortgage, a proper car, irritating pet names used in public, everything. I was certain he was going to propose. I actually had the odd wedding magazine stashed in my work kit, hidden away like girl porn. What’s more, we still Did It relatively often, which as far as I could tell, was a pretty big achievement after five years. OK, so it wasn’t like a Dita von Teese show every night (you try rocking stockings and suspenders when you’ve been up since six trying to make the latest ‘celeb’ kicked off Strictly look as though they haven’t been on a forty-eight-hour bender), but it was good. We were still good. Or at least, I thought we were. It was possible my standards had lowered without me realizing.
‘Make-up?’ Photographer Dan shouted across the set.
Nodding obediently, I trotted over, wielding my powder brush, ignoring his elaborate tuts and sighs. Dan was one of my more regular partners in knicker-shooting crime and I was used to his ‘artistic’ temperament, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a massive pain in the arse. However, spending six hours together in the middle of a desert, waiting for a fading supermodel to vomit everything she’s eaten since 1996 so you can get one photo, really helps you bond with your work buddies. So I let it go.
‘Take your time, Raquel.’ Dan held his massive camera up in the air with one hand and gave me the filthiest look he could muster. ‘It’s not like anyone has anything else to do today, is it?’
I returned the politest smile I could muster while mentally flashing him a great big wanker sign. He knew I hated it when Ana called me Raquel. It was so bloody affected. She knew my name, she wasn’t Eurotrash, she was from Basildon and her name was Anne Smith. I never bothered to point out that she’d gone to school with my cousin. Until she dropped out before her exams. Ten years on and she was lying about more than just her name. Twenty-two, Ana? I think not. Sadly, she and Dan were a frustrating combo, and killing them with kindness was the only way to get through the day. A row was usually exactly what Dan was looking for – he loved getting my back up, but I was nothing if not professional. Blowing the excess powder off my brush, I flicked it lightly across Ana’s glowing (but not even slightly 22-year-old) skin, while she and Dan giggled at each other. Behold, make-up-artist-slash-invisible woman.
‘Done?’ Dan asked, checking I’d powered her boobs sufficiently. I didn’t know for sure but I was pretty certain that, off set, Dan and Ana weren’t being quite so professional as me. In fact, I was pretty certain he was one of the men who had been nibbling on her jacksy. I recognized the bite marks from the last time he’d eaten half my sandwich without asking. Well, maybe he wasn’t the bottom-biter but he was definitely up to something with Ana. He was probably the dull one. Crazy sex romps with someone who was only interested in checking out his own biceps couldn’t be much fun for a supermodel.
‘Just a minute,’ I confirmed, looking my model over from every angle. I might think Ana was a vacuous slapper, but I did care about my job.
But no, I thought to myself, stepping out of the bright lights and back into the shadows, if someone had told me I’d be doing this in ten years, I really wouldn’t have believed them.
‘Goodbye, Raquel,’ Ana breezed by in a flurry of air kisses, swathed in at least three pashminas. In August. ‘And, Dan, it was so lovely to work with you again. I hope I will see you soon.’
The air kisses in his direction weren’t nearly so breezy, and the subtlety of her charade was somewhat undermined by the fact that the stylist, Dan’s assistant, Collin, and I all heard her ‘whisper’ that she’d be waiting for him in the car. Ah-ha. Suspicions confirmed. At least he had the decency to look embarrassed about it. I chose to take the high road and carried on packing away my kit. There was no way I was getting involved with this. In the six years we’d worked together, he must have shagged enough models to open his own branch of Victoria’s Secret, but Ana was actually a name. Good for Dan, finally made it into the Premiership after years in the lower leagues. He was dedicated to his cause, if nothing else.
‘Night, Rach,’ he shouted across the studio, sheepishly heading out after his latest conquest. I gave him a quick wave before settling down in the make-up chair and pulling out my notebook. Cue satisfied sigh. Whizzing through page after page of my own handwriting, I finally found today’s date, written in blue at the top of the page. My to-do list. Taking a black pen out of my handbag, I crossed off the tasks achieved with one straight, black line: drop off dry cleaning, buy toilet roll and knicker shoot. Still to go, buy wine, bikini wax, wash hair (it was almost down to my arse; honestly, it really was a task that warranted its own bullet point) and call my brother.
OK, so maybe my attachment to the lists was slightly unhealthy, and possibly the buzz I got when I crossed something off shouldn’t be quite so satisfying (another indication that my sex life wasn’t all that it should be?), but I had a system. Write in blue, cross it off in black, new list every day, don’t go to sleep until they’re all done or rolled over. I couldn’t help it; apparently I had some sort of genetic defect that prevented me from achieving anything unless it was written down. I blamed my GCSE science teacher, who told me making lists would help with my revision. I might have failed double modular science but I passed obsessive-compulsive order development with flying colours. To be honest, I knew which had come in more useful over the last twelve years and it wasn’t anything to do with a working knowledge of photosynthesis. Well, hopefully biology would come into play tonight because tonight I had bigger fish to fry.
Tonight, I was going to lure Simon back into the big bedroom.
CHAPTER TWO
Because no plan can succeed without the assistance of reliable wingmen, I had drafted in my best friends, Emelie and Matthew. Unfortunately, by the time we arrived at The Phoenix, Emelie was wasted. The queen of pre-partying had put away almost an entire bottle of red at my flat and was now trying to convince us to join her in a round of shots. And, for whatever reason, only known to himself, Matthew was encouraging her. Generally speaking, I didn’t drink. Hangovers really didn’t sit well with my job: there weren’t many models or celebs that wanted a make-up artist stinking of gin, breathing on them for an hour at a time, and applying liquid eye liner half cut is not something I’d recommend. That said, I was a pretty good drunk, more happy than emotional and, nine times out of ten, I managed to keep my kebab down. Emelie, however, was not blessed with that talent. Despite knowing that she was incapable of drinking so much as a shandy without vomming all over the night bus, she never gave up. Amazing tenacity, that girl.
‘Come on, Ray, it’s Friday,’ she said, brandishing a shot glass, brimming with thick, sticky-looking liquor. ‘And, you know, liquid courage.’
‘One shot,’ I warned, more an order for her than a promise to myself, then knocked it back in one. My throat scorched with sambuca afterburn and, by the time I’d prised my eyes open, she was ordering a second round. Too bad tonight would not be a night spent holding back her hair while she brought up half of Burger King.
‘If you leave me with her, I will destroy you,’ Matthew said, reading my mind. I shrugged, trying not to smile. He loved her really. Matthew (never Matt) and I had been friends ever since he walked out of a queer theory lecture at uni, declaring it ‘a great big bag of wank’.
As his brand-new flatmate, I felt obliged to chase after him, and we spent the afternoon, evening and much of the early morning in the union, drinking pints and making up our own queer theories. Mine hung on the idea that men were just greedy, Matthew’s on his belief that ‘touching a vagina would make him vomit’. There was evidence to back both schools of thought. After that, we were bonded for life. It was a win-win for me – I never had to worry about him trying to get in my pants and he had a stand-in girlfriend to keep his grandmother happy. His mother had known he was gay from birth, by his account, but his grandparents weren’t quite so accepting. Which was possibly why he wore a skintight, neon-pink T-shirt to his grandfather’s funeral.
The poor lamb hadn’t had an easy time of it as a kid. His dad had skidaddled before he was even born and only shown up again a year earlier, shortly before shuffling off his mortal coil and leaving Matthew an absolute ton of money, leading him to quit his air steward job and spend the last twelve months generally fannying around London with absolutely no aim in life. Even when he wasn’t rich, he was pretty much a catch, however you looked at it. The boy was huge, well over six feet tall, and broad with it. Handfuls of thick blond hair dropped into his dark blue eyes and his skin was always tanned, despite my constant sun-bed warnings. Looks-wise, he was somewhere between Hitler’s Aryan dream and Louis Walsh’s wet dream. Personality-wise, definitely erred more on the side of fascist dictator than Gary Barlow. Which was pretty much why I loved him. That and because he came over and killed my spiders when Simon wasn’t around.
It was still early, only just after ten thirty, but the club was already busy. Over in a dark corner of the small, sweaty basement, my brother and his friends were cooing over some guest DJ’s vinyl collection and debating which records to play. I raised a hand when he looked up. They ran this night every month, mostly so they could hang around the DJ booth and look cool to girls. The things boys did to get laid. Said the girl still trying to find a way to get comfortable after her speculative Brazilian.
‘Have you said hello to Paul yet?’ Em asked, distributing the second round and looking at my brother with puppy-dog eyes. ‘We really should.’
I threw back the shot and shuddered. ‘We really shouldn’t,’ I disagreed. ‘Actually, you really shouldn’t. Seriously, Em. No.’
‘I’m just saying we should say hello,’ Em said, absently licking a drop of sambuca from her little finger, completely oblivious to the fact that every man in the bar was waiting to offer to do that for her. ‘As if I fancy your brother.’
Emelie Stevens and I knew everything about each other. We were each other’s secret-keepers. She knew I hadn’t lost my virginity until I was 22. She knew I couldn’t get to sleep at night unless I knew where my childhood teddy bear was. She knew I accidentally ran over Matthew’s cat when I was supposed to be looking after it. I knew she had spent several years of her childhood starring on a Canadian children’s TV show. I knew she had got a pregnancy test in the first year of uni after she let John Donovan touch her up behind halls after the Halloween party. And I knew she’d had a crush on my brother since he came to collect me for Christmas break in the second year.