My Fake Wedding(12)

‘Hi,’ he says politely, before turning his attention to me. I blush with pleasure, noticing that everyone else in the office, especially Serena and Mel, have turned the colour of mange-tout with envy.

‘Good Christmas?’ he asks me.

There’s a collective intake of breath as I give everyone that smug ‘Yes, he’s asked Me a question’ sort of look.

‘The usual,’ I reply. ‘Crap weather, crap presents and crappier telly. If I hear the theme tune to Only Fools And Horses one more time I’ll scream. What about you?’

‘What’s Only Fools And Horses?’

‘Never mind. What about you?’

‘The usual.’ He grins, showing a neat row of sparkling white teeth. ‘Gorgeous weather, great presents and no telly at all.’

‘You haven’t got a telly?’ I’m incredulous.

‘I was too busy sunbathing.’

‘It was back to the land of barbies, beaches and brilliant sunshine, was it?’ I treat him to my flirtiest smile, secure in the knowledge that everyone else in the office is watching, jealous as hell. ‘Thought you were looking sickeningly brown.’

‘Just for a week.’

‘Well, there’s no need to get cocky,’ I warn him. ‘You might get all the nice weather over there, but just remember, you guys are responsible for giving us Prisoner Cell Block H and Rolf Harris. It can’t be all good.’

We chat on about holidays for a few minutes then David’s phone rings. Now, when this happens, I take it as my personal responsibility to ear-bog as much as I can. None of us have, as yet, managed to find out whether or not David has a girlfriend. But this time, disappointingly, he seems to be talking about work. And he’s taking ages about it, so I bang off a couple of personal emails and resign myself to writing the article I was supposed to have handed in before Christmas. A piece on crème brûlée. It’s my job to invent and test recipes for the Posh Nosh section at the back of the magazine. It’s the least prestigious section, of course, next to all the celebrity interviews and the reportage. It’s even lower down the ranks than the pages and pages of photos of spilt nail varnish and chopped-up lipstick, which pass for the Best Beauty Buys of the month. Actually, it’s not what I thought I’d end up doing at all. I wanted to be a chef when I was at school. But when I left catering college, I didn’t realise that if you wanted something badly you were supposed to go out and grab it, instead of waiting for it to land in your lap. So I drifted. And after months of temping, I ended up here.

Writing about food instead of cooking it.

‘Concocting the perfect crème brûlée is rather like building the perfect relationship,’ I type gloomily. ‘If the luscious vanilla custard goo on the bottom is not strong enough to support the brittle, golden caramel crust, the whole structure will cave in on itself like a floppy, flaccid…’

God, now that makes me think of penises. Must concentrate.

On second thoughts— I look longingly at David—who cares?

I spent so long over the holidays testing recipes, I’ve got caramel oozing out of my ears. But I think I’ve got the ingredients and the timing right now. Unfortunately, relationships are a tad more complicated. If I had a foolproof recipe regarding that side of life, I’d be laughing all the way to Snatch West. But how could I? I can’t even follow in the footsteps of parental example. My own father buggered off when I was fourteen. I wasn’t surprised. The alarm bells of mid-life crisis had been ringing for months. It was 1984. He’d given up mowing the lawn at weekends and started wearing stretch jeans and leg-warmers instead. Howard Jones and Nik Kershaw records started to appear in our front room with alarming regularity. One Saturday, I arrived home from the cinema (Ghostbusters, if you’re interested), to discover he’d disappeared while he and Mum were out looking at chest freezers. He’d vanished into the ether just north of Finsbury Park with a mail order Filipino. Mum was devastated. She prided herself on never having bought anything from a catalogue in her life.

I finish writing the introduction to my article then ring Janice.

She’s depressed. Poor old Janice. She does work really, really hard. She lived in a shithole, went to school in a shithole and gritted her teeth through A levels so she could claw her way up and out to university. Where she met me. We got through our first year in halls together then shared an old Victorian house near Southsea seafront, where she really opened up to me about her past. Every week we’d have those silly girlie occasions, when we’d sit for hours, putting the world to rights with mudpacks on our faces, henna slathered over our hair and huge glasses of wine in our hands. Now, she’s so glossy and polished, you’d never know she grew up on a council estate rougher than a badger’s bum. And that’s just the way she wants it to stay.