Kate had given a short, nervous laugh. ‘That’s a bit of a generalisation, isn’t it?’
Mica looked at her. She wore big gold hoop earrings and matt coral lipstick and her hair was close-cropped against her skull and she was intimidating, in her way.
‘Babe, it’s not your job to question why it’s done the way it’s done,’ Mica said. ‘It’s your job to do it. OK?’
‘OK, but—’
‘No. You see, that’s what we’renotdoing, babe. We’re not making this into a two-way discussion. We don’t want all our lovely film publicity being hijacked by some airhead saying she … I don’t know … Hitler wasn’t all bad.’
Kate snorted. ‘As if.’
‘You’d be surprised, babe,’ Mica said, standing up from her desk and crossing her arms so that her gold bracelets jangled. ‘You’d be surprised.’
Kate took Mica’s advice and did as she was told, working her way up through the marketing department until she replaced her old boss, who left to found a lifestyle brand producing high-end leggings and crystal face-rollers, saying she had ‘burned out’ and needed to live a slower paced, more meaningful existence. Kate had bought some stufffrom the website once. It was nice, if overpriced. The leggings, when they came, had vertical gold zips at the ankles.
A few months later, one of the company’s films had tanked at the box office after the director gave a press conference in which he said he thought a book written by a notorious holocaust denier was ‘not without merit’ and Kate remembered what Mica had said. She hadn’t even been shocked, as she drafted a crisis management memo to the film’s distributors, at what the director had said. Kate’s entire focus had been handling the fallout, distracting the press and drafting an apology that the director would later sign without having read. They posted the apology on Twitter and it got 25,000 likes.
Now, Kate saw girls like her starting out with similar idealism and cluelessness, and she realised how annoying Mica must have found her and that she, too, had become hardened to the business – imperceptibly at first, and then all at once, so it seemed to happen overnight. She lost her love for mainstream film and forgot about her previous beliefs in the power of art to change people and she became cynical about the publicity stunts and the gross expense of the junket hotel suites and the endless lobbying at film festivals and the stupid requests from Hollywood A-listers to find a macrobiotic chef at 3 a.m. in Soho. Which is why, when Ajesh had asked her to help withBadolescent, she’d leaped at the chance. She had enjoyed caring about something; working late into the night on the fold-away table in the front room that doubled up as a desk. She had stopped going out as much with her colleagues and found that she didn’t miss it. She was older now, and lacked the energy, and the coke was getting tiring and she was ready for something to shift, as if she were playing a computer game and waiting for the next level to unlock. When Jake had walked into her thirtieth birthday party, she knew. She knew that this was the thing she had been waiting for. It wasn’t just him. It was everything he represented. Adulthood. Togetherness. Settling down. Opting out.
He was so sincere, and this is what she liked. He didn’t operate in her world, didn’t understand it. He was not swayed by the glitz or impressed by the names. He liked numbers and spreadsheets and mathematical sums that made sense. But he also liked her a lot, thismuch was obvious. After three months, he asked her to move in with him. Her flat was only rented but Jake, being sensible, had bought his before the property market boom. It was a split-level in a mansion block in Battersea near the park. The old Kate would have turned her nose up at it, believing it to be far too posh and establishment: a part of south-west London populated by young men in red trousers and puffy gilets who studied chartered surveying with the express purpose of one day managing their family estate. But thirty-year-old Kate decided not to be as judgemental as twenty-five-year-old Kate would have been. Besides, Jake’s salary dwarfed hers and he was offering to pay most of the mortgage, asking for only a nominal contribution from her.
The flat itself was nicer than she had imagined: low ceilings but big windows; two bedrooms and one en-suite; the floors strewn with Moroccan rugs; a kitchen with floating white shelves filled with patterned crockery that Jake’s mother had given him. The main bathroom had a huge shower which Jake called a ‘wet room’.
‘It’s a shower, Jake,’ Kate insisted when she moved in.
‘It’s a wet room,’ he said, grabbing her lightly by the shoulders and pressing his thumbs into her back, massaging the knots loose. ‘That’s what the estate agent called it.’
She laughed.
‘Oh well, inthatcase … I mean, estate agents always tell the truth, so …’
He bent his head down and kissed her and she pressed herself against him, feeling the hard warmth of him and the dependable beat of his heart.
‘I love you,’ she said, and she had never meant it so much.
The sex was good. It wasn’t, if she were going to be brutally honest, the best sex she had ever had but contextually, it worked. The context being that this was a good man who loved her. When she’d had amazing sex in the past, it had always been with unreliable narcissists who prided themselves on their performance and showed little interest in emotional attachment. She had mistaken the bubbles of anxiety in her stomach for a simmering romantic passion, wrongly believing that lovefelt unsettled, like a half-packed suitcase awaiting a trip that never comes.
Jake, by contrast, was home. He felt safe. He was solicitous in the bedroom, always asking what she wanted, always concerned in case he was hurting her or making her uncomfortable or in some way not pleasing her, whereas really what Kate wanted was to be dominated and fucked, cleanly and without any conversation. She had too much conversation in her normal life to want it to continue in the bedroom. She was so sick of negotiation, so sick of people not knowing what they needed. But she felt this was shameful of her and her feminist self was appalled by her secret desires. So the normality of sex with Jake turned into its own kind of relief.
The biggest turn-on about Jake was that he wanted her so much and this made her feel sensual and desired. The sex got better the more time they spent together. Jake began to learn how her body responded to his touch and Kate tried to switch off her thoughts until she existed as much as she could as a pure physical entity, and in this way, it worked. For a while, at least.
14
Looking back later, after their life imploded, Kate would challenge herself to pinpoint a moment in time when it had started to go awry. She wasn’t aware of the significance of it then, but in retrospect she eventually came to the conclusion that it was when she had met Jake’s mother. That was the first time there had been any tension between them, and it had stayed there, this discomfort, like a speck on the kitchen floor from a long-ago broken glass: unnoticeable until you stepped on it with your bare morning feet and the sharpness of it lodged under your skin.
They had been together for six months when the invitation was issued from Annabelle. Jake’s mother called him every Sunday night at 5 p.m. for ‘a catch-up’. Kate could hear the strident tinkle of her voice on the other end of the phone when he chatted to her on the sofa in the living room and Jake would sound different when he talked to her. More needy, somehow, as if he were still craving approval.
Kate found it odd that a grown man should have such a regimented yet cloying relationship with his mother. On the rare occasion that Jake would forget the 5 p.m. slot, Annabelle would be defensive and hurt. Once, Kate and Jake had been to the cinema on Sunday evening and when they emerged into the night, he had turned on his phone to four missed calls and three messages from Annabelle, each one increasingly frantic about his whereabouts.
‘Fuck,’ Jake had said. ‘I’d better call her. She’ll worry otherwise.’
‘OK,’ Kate replied, removing herself from his arm. She wasn’t going to interfere but she still wanted him to know it was weird.
He had called, and Annabelle had been mollified, and the next day he had arranged to send her a bouquet of flowers, which Kate definitely thought was overkill.
‘I guess I should be glad that the only other woman in your life is your mother,’ she joked, even though it wasn’t really a joke.
‘You’re the only one I want to have sex with.’
