Cover Story - 3

On a solid piece of guesswork, Bel rang the doorbell at her flat instead of using her key.

The fearsomely expensive duplex she was renting was a stunner. She’d dipped into her ISA to afford the first six months upfront, with a discount because the last occupant had done a midnight flit and the owner – she could see why, at this rate – didn’t want any vacancy. Financially wasteful, yes, yet Bel didn’t feel it was a waste when she walked the twenty minutes home from Deansgate to her street in Ancoats.

She’d been reliably informed by Aaron that the fashionable area north of the city centre was, in fairly recent memory, tatty, crime ridden and neglected. ‘Rough as arseholes, doll face. The gentrifying Fairy Godmother has waved her magic money wand.’

It was now a thriving, trendy bohemia, old mills converted into apartments like hers, small plates restaurants with their names in swirling fonts on their picture windows. The sort of pubs that had fairy lights, skin contact wine and seasonal produce chalkboard menus.

Bel needed the sense of a fresh start, of being picked up and carried along by a different sort of life in her new neighbourhood, and so far it had delivered in spades.

Her exorbitantly priced residence had exposed thick red brick walls and original windows, burnt black timber, floor-to-ceiling white curtains that ran on heavy, industrial-looking railings. It was very boutique urban hotel, the recessed lights set to permanent low glow, the diner-kitchen illuminated by a modern candelabra of industrial pendant lampshades on looped cord.

The heavy metal door swung open, Shilpa on the other side. Her long, straight hair was in two plaits, a style that always provoked racially insensitive beery lads to shout ‘Pocahontas’ at her. She was eating a bowl of Frosties.

‘I’ve got bad news, I’m still here,’ she said, through a mouthful of cereal, standing aside to let Bel pass.

‘Definitely looks like you’re still here?’ Bel said.

Shilpa had been her best friend since they were teenagers. There was an anecdote she always told to best summarise the Shilpaness of Shilpa – indeed, it was the one Bel told as her bridesmaid at Shilpa’s wedding. When they were nineteen and completely skint, Shilpa bought a wedding dress from a charity shop for a fiver, added a tiara and veil from Claire’s Accessories, and led them round local nightspots getting bought drinks all night.

When it came to real marriages, and a groom she met on a Ryanair flight, it lasted three years – Shilpa and Rufus were now divorced. ‘Did I superstitiously curse it with that fake runaway bride stunt?’ she’d mused. Before concluding: ‘No, it was the raging incompatibilities.’

‘I am going to cut you a deal,’ Shilpa said, putting her Frosties bowl in the double sink and vaguely waving the boiling water tap at it. ‘Wait, did you go to work dressed like that?’

‘I didn’t have any meetings today, no one can see me! Well, only my top half in the Teams meeting.’

‘Fair do’s but your face still says “open casket”. My deal is, I hang around for another evening but I pay for a huge takeaway. Like, colossal. The size where you can eat it tomorrow too. A Chinese banquet.’

‘Agreed,’ Bel said, collapsing onto the sofa. ‘Tell you what I did forget, dressing like this – the new intern was starting. One “Connor Adams”, swags in with a nuclear winter attitude, sees my dreggy ensemble and gives me this look like …’ Bel scrunched her nose up and pushed her chin down and re-enacted an ‘ewww’ face while scanning.

‘Hahahaha.’

‘He went out on a sandwich run at lunch so we were free to gossip about him. Aaron tells me our boss Toby says he’s had an unusual career path, used to work in the Square Mile. We Googled him and he was in private equity, trading floor, a real Wolf of Wall Street type of world. God knows why he’s slumming it in journalism, his pay slips now must look like the tips they left in restaurants.’

‘Why’s he not doing financial journalism at the FT ?’ Shilpa said, flopping down next to her.

‘Exactly what we said. Aaron’s got a theory he’s a mole, a plant for the pinstripe boys to do insider trading. Maybe we’re the misdirection part of his CV. Also, he’s handsome in a completely obnoxious way, so you can be absolutely sure he’s going to fail upward so fast it’ll look like The Rapture in a two-grand suit.’

‘ Is he?’ Shilpa paused, rummaging in a bag of Skittles she’d secreted somewhere in the sofa cushions. Bel personally tacked savoury with a hangover. ‘Let the dog see the rabbit, please.’

‘Errr …’ Bel opened her browser on her mobile, searched ‘Connor Adams investment’ and brought up his old LinkedIn headshot. Ugh. He was even giving her an arsey look in that image.

She turned her phone to face Shilpa.

‘Ooh, pass me my eclipse glasses! Retina burn. I wouldn’t mind exchanging my rupees for a strong pound from him.’

‘Vomit to infinity,’ Bel shuddered, putting her phone down. ‘He doesn’t need the ego boost of anyone fancying him. A self-saucing pudding if ever I met one.’

She’d thought of their office as a two-person canoe, but if they had interns forever, it was in fact always this: two people and a mulish interloper.

‘This place is an absolute sex parlour, by the way,’ Shilpa said, casting a look at their surroundings. ‘I’ve loved hanging around enjoying it, while you go to work to pay for it.’

She paused. Bel knew what was coming.

‘Heard from Anthony?’

‘Nope. Relieved. Maybe he’s finally got the message. Or rather, not got the message about where I live.’

Bel sounded confident and she wasn’t. She wasn’t fooling herself, or Shilpa, yet the pretence felt necessary.

‘If he finds a way to get in touch after this, I think you’ve got to do something about him,’ Shilpa said. ‘Prison door with spyhole’s a good start, though.’

‘I have!’

‘ Belly .’

Bel had never consented to Belly, but nicknames didn’t work that way.

‘You have nuked all your social media, blocked him, changed your phone number and taken a job in a different city. If I wasn’t personally convenienced by my best mate coming to live forty minutes away in an incredible apartment where I can crash regularly, I might have even advised you not to. But I’m a selfish little shit, as my ex-husband Rufus will tell you.’

‘There you go. In cowpats, daisies grow.’

Bel pulled her shoes off her feet and tucked them underneath her. It was a defensive foetal position.

‘… Actually, he’s not blocked on email. He can’t tell if I’ve read them, so given they’re long and rambling and make it clear he’s off his nut, maybe I’m best off hanging onto them as proof.’

‘Proof of …?’ Shilpa trailed off, eyes widening. ‘So you do think it could end up with the police?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never had relations with an obsessive harasser before.’

‘If he’s not going to leave his wife, what the fuck is he even offering you? Lifelong mistress?’

‘This is irrelevant, given my period of insanity is over and I’ve reclaimed my brain from the Lost Property bin.’

‘I know that, I’m trying to figure out what he’s asking you to do? Apart from the obvious.’

‘“Wait until my sixteen-year-old kid has left home”, was the line,’ Bel said, her heart and bones heavy with self-disgust at even repeating it. ‘He didn’t mean it. He thinks he means it. The weird thing with Anthony is he completely persuades himself before he attempts to persuade you, so he’s like an evangelist preacher of his own fantasies.’

‘What if you forwarded the emails to his wife?’

They’d been round these houses before, but Bel didn’t entirely mind retracing the route. She wanted the reassurance of running through it again, rehearsing her reasoning. Convincing herself.

‘Assuming his wife doesn’t know and hasn’t accepted infidelity in the package with being married to Ant, which is a big assume. If I do that, ratting to his wife is going to give him legitimate cause to come after me. Imagine if she threw him out and he was free to pursue me twenty-four seven.’

Bel shuddered.

‘I don’t get it,’ Shilpa said. ‘I really don’t get it. Does he think he’s going to hassle you into wanting him?’

Bel felt a little clammy.

‘He’s like a debt collection agency except I don’t know what the debt is or how I’m meant to pay it.’

‘What a maniac. If he’d wanted to be with you, he could’ve. He ended your relationship with Tim.’

‘No, I definitely did that,’ Bel said, mouth dry.

Anthony was her manic episode, a shaming lapse in judgment and morals that he wouldn’t let her forget. A horror film: I Know Who You Did Last Summer.

‘Most people would be so embarrassed to beg and plead. What does he think he’s achieving?! What’s the kick, when you’re telling him to get lost?’ Shilpa said.

Bel shrugged, though she didn’t feel casual.

‘Intimidation? And control, I suppose.’

‘Yeah. Well he doesn’t have that,’ Shilpa said, opening her phone to find spring rolls.

Bel thought that Shilpa’s description of how Bel had handled it so far made that debatable. A voice in her head told her: it’ll get worse before it gets better , and she was ignoring it.