Leanne squinted through the smoke at me. ‘You’re not that keen on Joshu, are you?’
I shrugged. ‘He wouldn’t be my choice of a life partner. But Scarlett obviously sees something in him that I’m missing.’
Leanne sipped at her cigarette like she didn’t really mean it. ‘That’s kind of my problem,’ she said.
‘Has he been coming on to you?’ It wasn’t much of a reach.
‘No. He wouldn’t dare. I made that totally clear right from the off. When Scarlett first came up with the idea, we all sat down and thrashed it out. We have to, like, hold hands and have the odd kiss for the cameras. But I told him, any more than that, any tongues, any hands where they shouldn’t be and I’d cut his cock off. And Scarlett said she’d have his balls for earrings. When she does put her foot down, she can be well scary.’
‘So he’s been a good boy?’
‘With me, yeah.’ She dropped her half-smoked cigarette and ground it out. ‘Trouble is, I’m not the only woman out there, if you get my drift?’
I closed my eyes momentarily. I got her drift, in spades. What I wanted to know was how bad things were. ‘Tell me what you know. And then we’ll figure out what’s the best way to go,’ I said.
Leanne’s face crumpled in relief. She might look spookily like her cousin, but she had none of the iron in the soul that had lifted Scarlett out of the shit and into the glitz. What she wanted was to hand off responsibility for what she knew, and I was the lucky patsy. ‘When we’re out, we’re always in the VIP areas, yeah? You see a lot of the same faces. A lot of them are total slappers on the make. Once or twice, I noticed women starting to come over to Joshu then noticing me and backing off. I reckoned it was because they saw I was with him and realised he was spoken for. Then it dawned on me that they couldn’t not know he was spoken for, if you get my meaning?’
I nodded. Women like that read the red-tops and the slag mags as religiously as a nun reads her missal. It’s their guide to who’s in and who’s out, who’s single and who’s taken, who’s irredeemably fucked up and who’s still worth a go. They’d have read all about the wedding and the baby and the game of happy families being played out at the hacienda. They’d know Joshu was off limits.
Unless of course they had reason to know otherwise.
‘That must have made you wonder.’
‘You could say that. It made me start watching him a lot more closely. I cut back my drinking a bit, you know? Just to stay more alert, like. Tried to fade into the background. And I started to think that some of those slags were a bit too touchy-feely with him, if you catch my drift? Too much flirting. Too much touching. It’s hard to explain. Hard to pin down. But it’s the way you are with somebody you’ve slept with, as opposed to somebody you just fancy. Or somebody you’re pals with. Do you know what I mean?’
‘I think I do.’ I’ve seen it at publishers’ parties sometimes. People stand a bit too close to each other. They contrive to touch in apparently innocuous ways. Except they do it a lot more than friends or colleagues do. It’s hard to pinpoint anything you could confront them with, but it’s there if you’re looking. I even remember watching one series of Masterchef where I was convinced two of the contenders were having a fling based purely on the way they touched in passing. Maybe I’m living on fantasy island, but I don’t think so. I’m good at reading people. It’s part of the reason I’m successful at my job. ‘I don’t think you’re imagining things.’
Leanne pulled a scornful face. ‘I know I’m not. I thought I was, to begin with. But now I know I’m not. A couple of nights ago, I had a bit of an upset tummy. I was in the bathroom for about ten minutes. In this club, right, you come down the hall to the main VIP area and there’s like a lobby off to the side before the main area. And there was a lass there who hadn’t been around when I left. Anyway, she didn’t see me come back and neither did Joshu. And they were going at it hammer and tongs, out there away from the main room. She was telling him he couldn’t just pick her up and drop her like she was a packet of fags. That she was fed up of hearing about other women he’d shagged, fed up of hearing him bullshitting about leaving his wife, fed up of him being Mr Unreliable.’ She stopped, visibly shaken at the memory, and lit another cigarette.
‘What did you do?’
‘I wanted to rip the bitch’s hair out, for our Scarlett’s sake. But I knew if I did that, it would turn into a major ruck and it’d end up all over the papers. And our Scarlett doesn’t deserve that. If anybody deserves to be humiliated, it’s that little shit Joshu, not her. So I sneaked back down the hall to the loo then made loads of noise coming back. I pretended I was shouting back at somebody in the bathroom. And when I got to the lobby, they were gone. She was in the VIP area, but I think Joshu must have gone down into the main part of the club because he turned up on the decks about twenty minutes later. Did a guest rideout, all scratching and scribbling and generally showing off like the prize pillock he is.’
Elbows on her knees, Leanne sighed and stared gloomily across the pond. ‘I can’t stand that he’s making a fool out of her.’
‘You’re going to have to tell her.’
She gave me an ‘are you crazy?’ look then shook her head vigorously. ‘No way. She wouldn’t believe me. She’d think I was after him for myself or some muppet thing like that.’
‘You have to tell her because if there’s a loose cannon bitch out there, it’s going to come out in the press. It’s going to come at her out of the blue. It’s going to be sensationalised and exaggerated and she’s going to be utterly humiliated. That would be so much worse. Not to mention the fact that she’s going to realise you must have known about it. She’ll end up feeling stupid and humiliated and betrayed twice over – by Joshu and by you. And you’ll come off worse, because he might be a twat but she loves him.’
Leanne muttered, ‘Fuck’s sake,’ under her breath.
‘I don’t see that you have any alternative. And you need to do it sooner rather than later. Because that bitch is out there and she’s not going away.’
20
I really tried to get out of holding Leanne’s hand while she told Scarlett the tacky truth about her husband. But gradually I realised that if I wasn’t there to lend moral support, Leanne was going to bottle it. I can’t say I blamed her. The news she had to deliver was the sort of thing nobody wants to hear. When Marina came back from the toddler group, I dug into my wallet and paid her extra to take Jimmy up to his nursery for the evening.
It was almost seven when the studio car brought Scarlett home. She was on a high after an afternoon of being pinned and tacked into a succession of sexy dresses. My presence was a bonus, she said, heading straight for the fridge and opening a bottle of Prosecco. She poured three glasses in spite of my protestations and gave me a kiss on the forehead as she handed mine to me. ‘Chill, sister,’ she said. ‘You can always stay over if you want to have a drink with me and Leanne. Right, Lee?’
There was no point in holding back. This was not a conversation that would improve with keeping. ‘You might not want either of us in the house when you hear what we’ve got to say,’ I said.
Scarlett stopped in her tracks and frowned. ‘That doesn’t sound good.’ She looked from me to Leanne and back again. A flare of panic lit her eyes. ‘It’s not Jimmy, is it? I mean, I’m assuming he’s gone down for the night, yeah?’
‘No, Jimmy’s fine. Marina’s got him up in the nursery. We didn’t want him to see you upset.’
‘That only leaves Joshu.’ She sat down heavily, her mouth a hard line. ‘Spill it, then. Has he wrapped that stupid bloody car round a tree?’