They had slept together once, back in university. It had been good, but not good enough to pursue, and it seemed not to have damaged the closeness of their friendship although occasionally she still thought of him, and the thought of him turned her on sometimes, which she had never told him. He smelled of tobacco and Red Bull.
‘Thanks,’ she said, standing back to do a little curtsey and losing her balance. She was drunker than she’d thought. He put his arm around her waist to steady her.
‘Meet my mates.’ Ajesh ushered the two men forward. They were both in suits.
‘You’re both in suits,’ Kate said, stupidly.
‘That’s because they’re very important, and – unlike us – proper grown-ups with proper jobs, isn’t it fellas?’
The taller suited man bent forwards and gave her a bright yellow box containing a brand of expensive champagne.
‘I hope you don’t mind us gatecrashing,’ he said. He had a nice face and his smile reached the corners of his eyes, which wrinkled in a satisfying way.
‘Thank you. This is much better than the stuff I normally drink.’
‘I told you, Katie. They’re classy as fuck.’
‘So how doyouknow them then?’
Ajesh still had his arm around her waist and was stroking her hip with his hand. She was enjoying it, knowing that she looked good, that this was her night.
‘Well, Jake and Steve here’ – the shorter suited man winked at her – ‘are financing my next film.’
‘Not all of it,’ Jake said, still smiling. ‘Just enough of it to get invited to a beautiful woman’s thirtieth birthday party.’
She raised her eyebrows. She felt herself loosen, as if all her muscles were relaxing under the steady weight of Jake’s gaze. Carefully, in casethe moment broke, she took Ajesh’s hand in hers and removed it from her hip. She took a single step forward, moving towards Jake. She needed, she realised, to be close to him. His suit, which she had previously thought was black, turned out to be a dark navy. He wasn’t wearing a tie – she would discover later that he had taken it off and folded it into his jacket pocket. The top two buttons of his shirt were undone, revealing a triangle of skin she wanted immediately to lick. She wanted to reach up on her tiptoes, lean into the big, safe bulk of his body and press her lips against every inch of him. She had never felt such a conspicuous physical urge and in that single quick moment, Kate realised that all of the sex she had had up to that point, all of the flirtations and relationships and kisses, had been a superficial precursor to this. She had been doing it wrong all this time. She had been playing in the sandpit, when there was a wild expanse of beach to explore.
The odd thing was, they didn’t even talk that much. It was as if there had been a tacit agreement as soon as Jake walked through the pub door and into her party, that this was simply how things would be. It was inevitable in its recklessness.
She can’t remember much after that initial burst of excitement. The rest of the evening comes to her in flashes. The two of them dancing to ‘Mr. Brightside’, jumping up and down, sweaty and grinning, Jake’s shirt half untucked from his trousers, the suit jacket long ago abandoned. Drinking the champagne he had brought from the neck of the bottle, Jake tipping the bottom up so that she could get the final dregs, his eyes meeting hers over the yellow-labelled glass. She made a speech and welled up when she saw all her friends in front of her, but really she had just wanted to impress Jake with what she said as he stood at the very back of the room, tall enough to see over everyone else’s heads. Licking the tip of her finger as Ajesh handed her a tiny plastic packet of powder and dunking it in. The lights and the music and the feeling of utter rightness. And then, when everyone was high or drunk or both, the sensation of Jake grabbing her hand and pulling her out into the corridor, pushing her against the wall and holding the back of her head in his large palm as he kissed her, his tongue deep, pressing the weight of his body into hers.
The kiss was long and when he pulled back, he cupped her face with his hands, running the tips of his thumbs across the soft skin underneath her eyes.
‘There you are,’ he said. ‘Hello.’
He spent a lot of time at her flat. She lived in a one-bed and there wasn’t really room for a 6ft4 man to move in permanently. He said he didn’t mind, and he left his clothes in a neat pile at the bottom of her wardrobe, never complaining that his shirts would be creased when he lifted them out each morning to get dressed for work. She would watch him put on his trousers, do up his belt and shrug his arms into his jacket before looping his tie into a perfect Windsor knot, and she would be amazed at how adult he seemed.
There were only three years between them, but Kate’s work did not require her to wear formal clothes or act like a grown-up. Quite the opposite, in fact. In film, it was a positive asset to seem as though you were perpetually in your early twenties. Her offices were in the heart of Soho and most nights of the week, she would still go out for drinks with her colleagues – the men in heavy-framed spectacles and box-fresh trainers thinking they were hip-hop stars; the women in combat trousers and straightened hair thinking they were athleisure models. Once or twice a week, the drinks would turn into all-nighters and a rag-tag group of them would end up in the Groucho in the early hours, eyes glittering, noses twitching as they piled into a single toilet cubicle and shared out lines of coke, despite the sign hanging on the wall that said ‘This Club Operates A Strict No-Drugs Policy’.
Afterwards, they would stagger through the streets arm in arm, walking in the middle of the road with youthful bluster as black cabbies beeped their horns and shouted at them to get out of the way. They waited for the night bus as street-cleaners started clearing the pavements and they would go home, get a couple of hours’ sleep, and then go back into work, wearing dark glasses and leopard-print and eyeliner, still out of it from the night before. Speckles of last night’s glitter on their faces, sticking like burrs to the hem of a skirt.
They were inviolable. They were having fun – so much conscious, declarative, necessaryfun– that it seemed the only way to live. They pitied the men in suits, the ‘fat cats’, the chief executives, the wage slaves, the bankers and the management consultants and defined themselves in opposition to them. Never mind that they got paid less, that they had no pensions, that their bosses used them as glorified student interns. It was the principle of the thing that counted, whatever that principle was. The personal was political, they would say to each other, nodding fervently but not really sure what it meant. They were anarchists, re-writing the rules of work, of life, of the world their parents had inherited. Except they were also just producing movies and marketing the make-believe and going to free private screenings with miniature bottles of mineral water and triangular sandwiches from Pret on plastic trays where they would ask journalists to sign non-disclosure agreements and email them afterwards to ask them their thoughts. But the moral worth of their work or the inherent contradictions in their position never seemed questionable as long as they voted Labour and did their recycling.
Part of Kate’s role when she had first joined the company was to help organise the junkets where a hotel suite would be booked for two days and the actors, accompanied by their entourage of assistants and trainers and scented-candle-lighters, would sit in an overstuffed armchair, enveloped in a mist of unlikely glamour, as interviewers from newspapers and magazines and radio and television would come and ask the same questions over and over again.
‘What was it like to work with so-and-so?’
‘How did you prepare for the role?’
‘Why did you and [insert name of celebrity spouse here] break up?’
And, exclusively to the women with children: ‘How do you manage to juggle it all?’
And, exclusively to the women without children: ‘Do you want a family?’
Kate would listen discreetly from the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the marble-lined basin, keeping an ear out for questions that hadbeen specifically banned beforehand by the celebrity’s team. It was awkward. She wasn’t meant to be sitting in on the interview, and yet everyone involved knew she would be and if she heard the journalist straying into uncomfortable territory, she had to appear from the bathroom like a hologram and shut the interview down. Kate hated doing this and always felt nervous beforehand. Often, the journalists were much older than she was and it felt strange telling them off, as if she were denying free speech, not that she wanted to get all deep about it. But why shouldn’t they be able to ask what they wanted, and why wasn’t the celebrity capable of saying they didn’t want to answer?
She had asked her boss, Mica, the head of the marketing department, about this once and Mica had looked her straight in the eye and said, ‘Because celebrities are like overgrown babies and need other people to do everything for them. They lose the capacity to make their own decisions.’
