Chapter Thirteen

Sorcha wasn’t a very good convalescent. She was no good at things which took time and which were not entirely within her control; and she thought of time spent asleep as time wasted. Given that most of her intellectual faculties seemed to be present and correct, she mostly just tried to ignore the fact that the rest of her was still not ready to try to keep up with them. The end result was a lot of frustration, and a lot of arguments with doctors about what she was or was not ready to do. Only much later did she wonder why on earth she had been in such a hurry: why she hadn’t just accepted the time as a gift and enjoyed a different perspective on the summer. As it was, Jane had to resort to cunning to keep her away from her laptop and blackberry, in between sleep and painkillers.

Jane was uncomfortably aware that she was Norman’s partner in crime in this. He seemed to be struggling to cope with Sorcha, although it was impossible to tell whether that was because of the accident, the pictures or his own extra-curricular activities. He was certainly in no hurry to get her back to client-facing work and seemed to have a preference for her to be kept well away from the office. Jane even spoke to him a couple of times, when Sorcha was asleep or didn’t want to answer the phone; and just about managed on each occasion not to tell him that he was a despicable cad, or tell him to cut the crap with the silly voice.

Pippa was a problem of an altogether different complexion. Even though Pip’s convention deadline ought to have passed, Jane was fielded by Daniel several times before she actually got to speak to her. Sorcha had never understood Pippa’s relationship with Dan: he was a very nervous librarian-type, who very rarely said anything particularly interesting, didn’t earn much money, and was often peculiarly stand-offish. The fact that he appointed himself as Pip’s gatekeeper whenever she decided to disappear from view had set the final seal on Sorcha’s general lack of patience as far as he was concerned: Jane had encountered him less, found him generally less irksome, and was rather more patient anyway.

Pippa generally disappeared at or around times of crisis; and sometimes in between crises as well. Afterwards, she would avoid the central player in whatever the particular drama had been for a while, circling around on the fringes until she was ready either to send herself up or brazen it out and pretend that nothing had happened. Even when contact was finally made, it took Jane a couple more conversations before Pippa really seemed to be fully present at the other end of the line, and still she couldn’t be coaxed up to Fulham. Eventually Jane managed to broker a call in which Pip would speak to Sorcha so long as it was all three of them on the line at the same time. Sorcha set up a starfish conference phone on her dining room table, reflecting that it wasn’t exactly what she had had in mind when she had bought it.

After all of the prevarication, and a slightly awkward beginning in which Pip had tried to force Sorcha to say that she was entirely recovered and Sorcha had responded as if she was being cross-examined, Jane was hugely relieved when Pip came out with all guns blazing.

“Right then. So how are we going to sort the stupid bastards out? We can’t let them get away with this!”

“Pip, hun, you’re going to need to be a bit more precise. I’ve been bashed on the head, remember, so my powers of divination aren’t quite what they used to be. Which particular bastards are we sorting out?.”

“Jake McDonald to start with. I don’t believe that he could say that about you, especially given he couldn’t even be bothered to put up a proper fight when Stephen thingy went for him! Who on earth does he think he is!”

“A much-loved and reasonably well respected popular entertainer, who happened to be being assaulted, maybe?”

“Careful Pip: someone’s developed a bit of a soft spot for Old McDonald.” Jane wasn’t sure that a warning would be heeded, but it was worth a try.

“What? Sorch, you haven’t, have you? He’s much, much too skinny. They say that’s why he doesn’t take off his top any more: he looks like he just got out of a concentration camp. And he sleeps with all of the dancers, anyway, and tries to pretend that he doesn’t. Well, not quite all of them: there’s one of the boys who’s straight. But he just works his way through the rest of them and then treats them as if he’s never met them before!”

Jane made a gesture of bemused uncertainty across the table, but Sorcha was finding it funnier than she had expected to.

“Wow! It’s OK you know. I wasn’t exactly planning on calling him up and suggesting a date, so you don’t need to do a total assassination job on the poor guy, Pip. You can leave bits of him intact.”

“But he’s really weird, Sorch! He travels around with his Dad, and his Dad then sleeps with the fans. Don’t you think that’s just freaky? There’s this one girl who Jake knew at school, who follows the band around and stays in the same hotels and stuff, and she goes leaping into bed with his Dad. I reckon that’s just sick. She sleeps with Duncan whatsisface as well, which isn’t much better. They’re just a bunch of stupid, skinny weirdos.”

“Where on earth are you coming up with this stuff from?”

“The internet, stupid. Did you know that there’s even a site where the fans who follow the band around are keeping a record of which dancer Jake takes to his room each night? Natalya’s in the lead, although the physio seems to be getting in the way a bit.”

“Evidently not.” Sorcha was feeling rather at sea, and unsure of which direction the tide was heading. She had filled in what she felt to be the gaps in her knowledge of who and what had happened to her with news bulletins, a couple of magazine features and bits of a documentary which she suspected Jane had foisted upon her just so she would be subjected to a much, much younger Jake in what had looked like a red PVC basque and cycling shorts. The internet was not so much a foreign country as a parallel dimension. “Sweets, this might all not mean what it says, you do know that don’t you? I mean, for all anyone knows he could be playing scrabble with them, or feeding them cabbage and aubergine smoothies.”

“Oh yeah. Because that’s exactly what pop stars on tour spend their time doing. Come off it Sorch! You really don’t have a clue, do you? Some of them were a bit rude about you, actually. Although they liked your shoes.”

Sorcha couldn’t begin to think what kind of mind set would look at the blood and knickers photo and even notice her shoes, but decided it was something that she ought to feel grateful for. Pip, however, had reserved the full force of her ire for Norman, to such an extent that Sorcha was very relieved that she was at least ten stops away on the District Line.

“I still can’t believe he did that, Sorch! He knew that you were expecting to see him, and to go off with those silly cows means he deserves… well, he deserves some kind of evil punishment anyway. Even if you hadn’t been dying. He’s a stupid, ugly, self-important bastard. I don’t think you should ever talk to him again. Can’t you sue him or something?”

She wasn’t about to explain to either Pippa or Jane that if Norman hadn’t done his disappearing act, she would never have been in the lobby in the first place. She’d save that one for the man himself, once normal machinations had been resumed.

“Sweets, I have to work with him, remember? And I’m not that kind of lawyer, although I am sure I will find ways of making him pay soon enough.”

“But Sorch, they all even had the same name. It’s even freakier than Jake thingy and his stupid fans and dancers and stuff. You need to get a new job: you mustn’t have anything to do with that scumbag again.”

Sorcha raised her eyebrows at Jane over the table, only to find that Jane had taken a deep breath and was staring suprisingly intently at the curtains. This wasn’t going to be good.

“Pip-Pop, who had the same name?”

It took a couple of minutes longer to extract the details in all their gory glory: both Pip and Jane suddenly seemed to have become peculiarly concerned that she might be in danger of over-exerting herself, and seemed reluctant to accept that the suspense was more likely to kill her than the rather tawdry punchline.

At the precise point when Jake had smashed into her in full view of a surprisingly high proportion of the nation’s tabloid press; Norman had been in one of the suites at the hotel with two members of the HR department and one of the secretaries, all of whom were conveniently called Caroline. Some, but not all, of the stories in circulation included reference to handcuffs.

Sorcha felt slightly sick at this, but tried to tell herself that she had spent so much of the previous couple of weeks feeling slightly sick that it really didn’t signify. It took a moment or two to realise that her secretary was called Caroline, which was presumably why the rumours hadn’t filtered through. She was tempted to go and hide, sobbing, under the duvet and to stay there for several weeks.