Jane had been rather bemused to be met at Heathrow by a limo, but when she got to the flat and saw Sorcha she gradually began to relax. She needed to be there, even if Sorcha was ultimately pretty neutral on the subject. They had been there before, and although Sorcha still found it odd, she also half-knew that within limits it was almost certainly easier being the patient than being the one left flapping around uselessly on the wrong side of the Atlantic.
Jane had also been slightly surprised to be presented with a small picnic hamper containing breakfast for the two of them as she had unloaded her bags from the car. Sorcha had looked slightly bashful, and explained that when Jake had checked out her fridge the day before it would have contained an unopened bottle of sauvignon blanc, an end of butter with marmite crumbs in it and a slightly lonely, stale cupcake. This time the juice frenzy was limited to a blueberry, apple and celery combination, again helpfully labelled, which was actually surprisingly palatable. She had texted him a thank you, explaining that she had now been taken in hand by Jane who was more than capable of finding Sainsbury’s, and hoping that the rest of the tour went well. It was odd, but there didn’t seem to be much else to say.
In fact, it was all going swimmingly until Jane settled into one of the armchairs and started working her way through the heap of trash mags that she had picked up at the airport. Sorcha was propped up on the sofa, staring into space and thinking of nothing in particular. Not that it mattered: the noise which Jane made on turning idly through the pages of Heat would have easily carried through to the bedroom, and possibly to the next door flat. It started as a sharp intake of breath, and turned into something which sounded not entirely unlike an amplified cartoon hiccough.
Most of the double page was pictures from the hotel lobby, both during the attack and shortly afterwards. They had added in a small picture of Jake, in rock-God mode; one of Stephen and Marty collecting yet another award; and her nasty official photo from the Goodmans website, in matching yellow oval frames. There was a rather good picture of Jake seemingly in mid-air, a picture of the air-ambulance crew looking dramatic, and even a picture of Stephen fleeing the scene. The centrepiece, however, was a picture in which she was slumped on the ground, bleeding heavily from her shoulder, with her Bridget Jones knickers fully visible for the entirety of the readership of Heat to see, and Jake very clearly turning from the sight in revulsion. The headline was in a sort of custard-yellow colour, splashed across the centre of the pages, saying “Lump it!”
Moments after being sent smashing into city lawyer Sorcha Brompton (34), pop prince Jake McDonald STUNNED hotel staff who were fighting to save her life by refusing to help move her away from a broken window which was in danger of shattering and showering her with broken glass. McDonald, one of the recently reunited BackBeat boys, turned in disgust from the seriously injured woman, and announced that she was “TOO HUGE” for him to be able to lift her. In a prima donna mood more worthy of former bandmate Marty King, McDonald also REFUSED all medical treatment for cuts and bruises sustained in the attack after keeping paramedics waiting for nearly an hour.
Police are still looking for Marty King’s housemate and writing partner, Stephen Warren, who witnesses identified as being responsible for the attack. Marty King is still missing, with police in Tucson, Arizona, saying that they believe he has been abducted. Ms Brompton is understood to be making a good recovery, despite having suffered multiple lacerations and a fractured skull. Oh, and Jake McDonald took to the stage at Wembley on Saturday to an ovation from 50,000 adoring fans… just don’t expect him to come rushing to help you, girls!
Sorcha just stared at it, her unlacerated hand covering her mouth and half of her face, almost unable to react. Her incredulity lurched around, spoilt for things to latch on to. He hadn’t said that; had he? They hadn’t written that; had they? She hadn’t looked like that; had she? They hadn’t printed that; had they? Not really printed it, thousands and thousands and thousands of times? Had they?
She tried not to think of everyone who would be opening the magazine; not to think about how they would quickly glance over the pictures and then start turning the page around a bit to get the full impact of that photo, before tutting a bit and turning over to get the latest on Britney Spears. There would be hundreds and hundreds of people out there who would know nothing about her other than the fact that she wore huge knickers and weighed a ton. It would presumably be possible to compute the probability that the next time she went to meet a new potential client, all they would be thinking about was pop stars and her knickers, and it would almost certainly be just impossibly high. And would clients still be willing to pay the same fee rates once they had seen her knickers? Billings were bad enough without having to give discounts because of your knickers: £500 per hour for a fully clothed partner, or £400 for the one spotted unconscious and semi-clothed in the pages of Heat magazine… was that how it would work? Or would they just not work with her at all? Could she even be thrown out of the Law Society? Did the Law Society even have an underwear protocol? She had sat through days and days of training on professional ethics in her career, and even though she hadn’t been awake for all of it not once did she remember anyone even raising the topic of knickers.
“I knew those sodding knickers were a bad omen. Shit.”
Sorcha was almost but not quite laughing; and Jane was totally and utterly at sea, mostly because she had been headed in a completely different direction and wondering how best to finish what Stephen Warren had started and wring Jake McDonald’s worthless, scrawny neck.
“What?”
“The knickers. I hadn’t intended to wear them but the dress didn’t hang right. The hospital actually had to cut me out of them as well, did I tell you that?” Now she really was laughing, and starting to cry as well. “Not even Bridget Jones had to have her knickers surgically removed, did she? My whole life ruined by one huge stupid pair of pants!”
“Are you seriously saying you would rather that you hadn’t been wearing them? Can you even imagine what that picture would have looked liked without them? It’s bad as it is, but knicker-less…”
Sorcha almost howled through her hand, which was still in front of her mouth. Laughing hurt: it made it feel as if her head didn’t fit and someone was stabbing her shoulder with a carving knife.
“Ms Sorcha Brompton, displaying to the world her down to earth fundamentals. Even when she’s dying, she does it in serious knickers. They are always talking about sodding gravitas in partner appraisals: I can go in there and tell them that every check-out girl in the country knows that I am deathly serious right down to my very, very big knickers.”
It took quite a while before either of them made any sense at all. Any hint of any part of the word “knickers” was enough to set them off again; and then there were a lot of half-sentences involving bloomers which dissolved back into a general muddle of hysteria. They both had tears streaming down their faces and laughter-pains in their sides, and Sorcha’s head was thumping in multiple dimensions; but eventually they were both left sitting where they had started, staring at the page again. Jane felt excluded, horribly aware of how little she knew of exactly what had happened; whereas Sorcha felt like she had been beaten up again, and wished it would all just stop.
“Is he really that much of an arrogant idiot?”
“Who?”
Jane looked across sharply at Sorcha just to be absolutely sure that she wasn’t joking: her faced betrayed nothing except a few residual tear-smudges, and confusion. Her first thought was of brain damage.
“What do you mean “who”?” incredulity was straining at the sides of every syllable, “Did you actually read that article? Mr Jake I’m-so-perfect McDonald, that’s who.”
While Sorcha had read the article at the level of looking at and recognising most of the words, all she had really taken in was the photo. As Jane made her frustration clear, the rest of it slowly began to filter through to her and she wished that it hadn’t: the room suddenly seemed to have got a degree or two colder. She found herself trying to summon up Jake’s calmness, and not think too much about the irony of doing so.
“No. No, that’s actually not how he came across at all.”
Sorcha seemed to be trying to think of something more to say but not quite getting there, and Jane was struggling to read her reactions.
“Could he just have been creeping round you because he knew he’s been an idiot and the press were likely to get hold of it?”
“Maybe. I don’t think so.” Sorcha couldn’t begin to reconcile the suggestion with her idea of Jake, but that idea felt suddenly very personal and private. It wasn’t ready to be subjected to Jane’s scrutiny. “This really isn’t very nice to him at all, is it? I mean, the poor guy had just been pretty badly beaten up, and that barely rates a mention, and they don’t even mention the fact that he was injured. Why the hell would they just decide to go for him like that?”
“Come off it, he barely has a scratch on him. They are going for him because he’s a complete and utter arsehole.”
“You know bugger all about him, Jane! And just because he doesn’t have blood pouring down his face or limbs hanging off doesn’t mean that he’s not hurt. He was in a hell of a mess by anyone’s standards when he came to the hospital.”
Sorcha still didn’t know how much of that had simply been because she had spooked him, but that would have been too complicated to try to explain.
“Oh, so the fact that he said this about you; and that he wanted to leave you unconscious and possibly bleeding to death somewhere where you could easily have been showered with large chunks of glass is all just a lie someone made up to sell magazines is it? The poor, stupid, scrawny little pop star, couldn’t possibly have done such a thing? What the hell’s got into you?”
Sorcha felt stuck in a kind of frantic limbo, in which things couldn’t be made to fit together. She didn’t want to think about the article. She wanted to think of Jake standing in front of the wall-hanging, embarrassed and smiling, and to keep him there. Failing that, she at least needed Jane to stop staring at her as if she was an exhibit in a zoo. Perhaps more a circus freak-show than a zoo, on reflection: Jane was looking increasingly suspicious as to exactly what was going on.
“The couple of times I’ve met him, he just seemed like very nice, normal, quite shy kind of guy. Not like a pop star at all, really; although I guess I don’t have a huge amount of experience as to how pop stars generally behave,”
“I don’t believe you! Random famous guy crashes into you and lands you in hospital, and you decide to develop some kind of weird schoolgirl crush.” Jane was heading back in the general direction of hysterics, “I thought Norman was bad, but this really, really does it.”
Sorcha wanted to hide; mostly from herself.
“I haven’t, I promise I haven’t. He’s clearly as thick as two short planks, and I even sent him away yesterday afternoon when he seemed to want to hang around a bit longer.” That wasn’t quite fair, but it would pass, “Although I did dream about him last night.”
“What? Jake or Norman? I’m struggling to keep up here.”
“Jake. We were having sex; very bad, muddly first-date sex. We kept bumping noses and getting elbows in the wrong place; and all the cushions kept on getting in the way.”
“Oh yuk, that just sounds grim.”
“Actually, it was kind of fun”
“Stop it! You know very well that sex in dreams doesn’t mean sex. It just means that you want something, and want it quite badly.”
“And it is out of the question that what I might want, really quite badly, is bad first date sex with Jake McDonald, I suppose?”
“Absolutely; unless I take it as further evidence of extensive brain trauma and use it as a basis to get you sectioned, or at least readmitted. You are probably the brightest person I know, and you are fantasizing about a man who has publicly insulted you and whose Wikipedia entry says he failed four CSEs.”
Jane had no idea why she had suggested sectioning, and hoped that she had corrected herself quickly enough, but Sorcha was suddenly struggling to keep a straight face again. Even if they had actually wanted to have sex (which clearly they hadn’t) she couldn’t see how it would have been physically possible given the mess that they were both in. It had the potential to be like something out of a Carry On film, only much, much more graphic. Although there was just about a possibility that they might have been able to do it standing up, so long as Jake had something to lean on and didn’t put too much pressure on his dodgy knee and he had avoided any contact with her right shoulder area and the right side of her neck. Or perhaps sitting down, although she had never been particularly good at that. Maybe sitting with her on his lap, half-buried in the mountain of pillows… She carried on working through alternatives for a moment or two, before she caught herself, and caught Jane staring at her so hard that she seemed to be trying to drill holes in the side of her head.
What the hell was she thinking? She needed to get back to reality, and fast.
