a dignified amount of time after your “messy” bust-up and then approached me. You agreed to turn yourself into a media whore so that he’ll receive a hero’s welcome when he comes back. You did all this for him, didn’t you?’
Stifling a sob, I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth. ‘Yes.’
A1 whistled quietly, almost incandescent with anger. ‘What a sacrifice you made, Sadie. First he’s a rat, now you’re the bitch. First he’s a tired shock-jock-turned-TV-star who’s lost his edge, now he’s Britain’s lost misunderstood bower-boy everyone wants to come home. Nice one, Smack – the ultimate publicity stunt. Clever old Sadie and Bill. The press will go wild when you two finally get it back together. No wonder my career’s up in smoke. You made me look like an amateur, didn’t you?’
‘Faking a break up is no worse than faking relationships to get your clients in the headlines,’ I howled. ‘You do it all the time.’
‘And I did it once too often with you, didn’t I?’ he laughed. ‘Why couldn’t I say no to you? Why?’
I couldn’t answer that one.
‘So now that you’ve more or less wrecked my career, why refuse to call Bill home for the romantic reunion?’ His eyes blazed furiously. ‘At least give me the satisfaction of knowing that I helped Loved Up’s young dream team get back together.’
‘No! He needs more time,’ I sobbed. ‘He’s not ready to come back yet.’
Then A1 whistled again as the irony fist hit him in the face at last.
‘Oh Jesus. Oh poor Sadie,’ he shook his head, laughing bitterly. ‘It hasn’t worked, has it? You did all this for love and now you find out that he no longer needs you. He likes it in the States. He likes working with Ash – might be in love with her even. Is that it? Now he can bring her back here with him whenever he wants to and you’ve got zip-all except a zipped lip. He’s used you just like you’ve used me. Well, I hope you’re taking a cut, because I’m just taking a stab in the back here.’
‘It’s not like that,’ I muttered tearfully.
But Al wasn’t listening. He grabbed my hand and pulled it away from my face, blue eyes digging around for my tarnished soul. ‘You have to help me out here, Sadie. Can’t you see, I need you even if Bill doesn’t?’
Ducking my head away from the shafts of sunlight, I looked into those curious, quirky blue eyes and fell in. I fell so deeply that the blood rushed to my head, the oxygen was punched from my lungs and my vision tunnelled until all I could see was blue, blue, blue. Christ, it was like coming home.
‘What do you want me to do?’ I tried to blink, to look away, but I couldn’t.
‘Save me,’ he breathed, his mouth so close to mine that I could feel his breath on my lip, as warm and sweet as a patisserie. ‘Save me like you saved Bill.’
Frantically shaking off his gaze, I turned away. I knew what I had to do. Sadie the sacrificial lamb had one more task. It was about time she performed a striptease and showed off her mutton.
‘You’d better sit down,’ I closed the door behind him and whistled Carrot from the sofa. ‘There’s something I should show you.’
Feeling charred with self-hatred, I went back to the dresser and pulled out a drawer. It was cram-full with airmail envelopes. Letters from Bill, increasingly desperate, telling me how much he missed me, how lonely he was and how much Ash got on his nerves. They asked me how things were going, why I wouldn’t return his calls, when he could come home. The last few letters were the most heartbreaking, saying that he realized I no longer wanted to help him, that he could understand why, but begging me to reconsider.
Al read them in silence. When he finally looked up, his blue eyes were bewildered. ‘Why, Sadie?’
I scrunched my eyes tight shut. ‘Can’t you see? I don’t want him to come back to me, Al. I set him free. I did this so that he’d stop relying on me.’
I could hear his sharp intake of breath. ‘You went through all this to what – to chuck him? Jesus, Sadie! I mean, I know you’ve done his career no end of good, but wasn’t this all a bit elaborate, not to mention hurtful?’
‘You have no idea!’ I leapt up furiously, snatching the letters back. ‘Bill and I had an agreement from the start. Our relationship was always a sham – not the sort that lasts a few weeks or months like the ones you set up, but one that has lasted for years and years, one that almost destroyed me. You see, I committed the ultimate sin by believing the hype and starting to love him for real. I know him better than anyone; I think he’s wonderful and talented and warm and funny, but he could never love me in return, not in the way I wanted. God knows, he’s tried. Yes, I’m “chucking” him, if you want to put it that way. I’m chucking him because sooner or later, he’ll realize that he can live without me and he’ll move on, find real love – one that matters. I had to hurt him to do this. It was the only way short of – short of –’ I stopped myself short, knowing I’d said enough.
Al was mute with surprise.
‘Now you have your story,’ I opened the door. ‘Go and tell that to your tabloid friends. It’ll save your credibility, after all. Tell them Smack the Bitch dumped Bill Roth by sending him away to America to get famous there – she even paid Ash Numan to pretend to love him, which is why she’s boracic. You can’t make me look cheaper than I already do. Now fuck off and sell the story. If you want to double-up your PR while you’re at it, I’ll happily pose with a box of tissues. I’m sure one of your clients manufactures them. Why waste the opportunity to product place?’
‘This isn’t what I wanted, Sadie,’ he pleaded. ‘I don’t need this.’
‘Well, it’s all you’re getting,’ I screamed, pushing him outside.
Carrot was old and rheumatic, but he always rose to the occasion. Al left the cottage with a small terrier attached to one leg, gnawing frantically.
When I finally heard his car engine roar away, I turned back to the dresser and spotted the file that he’d left. To my amazement, it contained a large photograph of just one man. Al Matthews, PR Guru, smiled at the camera with his lop-sided could-be-beautiful face and dishevelled comb-me-with-your-fingers hair. That, it seemed, was the final favour he’d come here to beg. Al wanted me to fake-date him.
It suddenly made such horrible sense that I started to laugh. He was caught up in his own spin and it had started to snowball. The press no longer trusted him. They didn’t like the sham relationships, the client incest, or the manipulation. He’d had his fifteen minutes cubed and was now too famous to get away with a career as a Svengali. A future in panel shows or politics beckoned. And now that he’d been hoist by his own PR petard, he had to make himself even more notorious, more famous to survive and prosper. In his eyes, that meant hooking up with the most talked-about bitch in the country right now.
All he’d wanted was to trawl me around a few parties. Instead I’d told him my darkest secret. Shit.
I waited all week for the story to break. I bought the papers each day, scoured them obsessively. They reported that George Brian was now dating Ruby Red after her dramatic no-show at her wedding earlier in the year (yes, gratuitous photo of me at non-wedding). They reported that Mac’s Number One single ‘Older Woman’ had turned platinum (cue another photo of me), that Vizza was hotly tipped for Sports Celebrity of the Year and believed to be seeing a Spice Girl whose solo career had bombed (small shot of her, huge one of me). There was nothing about Bill. The letters kept flooding in from America, but I had stopped opening them. They hurt too much.
In anticipation of the hacks calling, I’d changed my telephone number and only passed it on to the select few I trusted. After a full fortnight, when I’d just started to believe I was safe and that Al had gone to live in an ashram, Sly called. It was early morning and I’d been up all night bingeing on ice cream.
‘What