ZOE COOK
One Last Summer at Hideaway Bay

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HarperCollinsPublishers

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First published in Great Britain by HarperImpulse 2016

Copyright © Zoe Cook 2016

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Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

Cover design by Alex Allden

Zoe Cook asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are

the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to

actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is

entirely coincidental.

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Ebook Edition © July 2016 ISBN: 9780008194451

Version 2016-06-27

For James and Lara, the loves of my life.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 33

Chapter 21

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Acknowledgements

Zoe Cook

About HarperImpulse

About the Publisher

Prologue

September, 2005

Can you believe that after all these years I have to write this in a letter because I can’t say it to you, can’t get the words out right?

I know you think I’m running away. You’re probably right. But what do you think I have if I stay here? There are too many ghosts here, Tom, too many memories. It’s like walking around in my own nightmare sometimes, and it will drive me mad.

I wish we weren’t fighting about this. I don’t know what I expected you to think or to say about it all, but I didn’t expect you to be so angry with me. I feel like you’re taking it the wrong way. It’s not you I want to leave; it’s this place.

If you knew how many hours I’ve spent thinking about what the hell to do – honestly, the thought of being without you is unbearable. But I didn’t want to put you in this position, to do what I’m about to do now. I didn’t want to ask you to come with me, to leave everything you have here. This place means so much to you, and you have so many reasons to stay.

But I guess I am selfish, like you say I am. Because I want you to come with me, Tom. I can’t do the London thing on my own, I don’t want to. I don’t want a life that doesn’t have you in it. I can’t really see the point in that. Is that pathetic? You are everything that’s good in my life.

I know you’ll need time, but can you think about it? About coming with me? Starting a life away from here? It would be the adventure we’ve always talked about, wouldn’t it? I mean I know it’s not exactly South America or Thailand, but you know…

I’m doing that jokey thing you get cross with me for, aren’t I? Trivialising things because I’m nervous and awkward.

I’m rambling now. And I don’t even know if I’ll ever give this to you. Part of me thinks I should just go and leave you here to live your life without me. I think you might be better off that way. I want you to be happy, Tom. I love you more than words. If nothing else, I hope you always know that.

Lucy

1

London, July, 2010

Lucy tipped the white powder from a carefully folded lottery ticket onto the mirror of her compact. She scraped it into a neat line with her credit card and took the rolled bank note from the back of her wallet. She sniffed quickly and quietly, pausing for a second to feel the immediate hit of energy. She placed the folded paper and card in the zipped section of her purse, straightened herself up and walked out of the toilet cubicle back to her desk.

It was 5:55pm before Lucy had time to check her personal emails on Tuesday. Work was manic, as it always was in the lead-up to an awards ceremony. For Spectrum, the Screenies were the event of the year, a real prestige project and a massive money-spinner. The grand-scale, live-broadcast awards show at the Metropolis on Park Lane, which celebrated all things TV, dominated spring at Spectrum, with a huge production team recruited, doubling the number of people in the office for the months leading up to the show. Emma had too many meetings to fit into each day and, as her PA, it was Lucy’s job to make them all happen – somehow. Emma’s mood alternated between manic happiness at the prospect of an evening of guaranteed attention, and sudden bursts of furious disappointment at the team she employed to run Spectrum TV’s events. Lucy had mostly escaped her wrath, instead taking the role of confidante, which she actually felt even less comfortable with. Every time she was called into Emma’s office she dreaded the instruction to ‘close the door’, which signaled an imminent verbal assassination. Lucy hated how Emma dragged her into her bitter inner world of hatred towards the production team, most of whom had absolutely no idea they had done anything to upset her. Already this week she’d heard how angry Emma was with Frankie, the lovely associate producer working on the awards, because she’d cut her long hair short so close to the event.

‘II would never have employed her looking so butch,’ Emma had spat.

‘We’ll have to reassign her role for the evening, she can’t be talent-facing now,’ she’d sighed, as if Frankie’s new hairstyle might prove too much for any delicate celebrity-type unfortunate enough to set eyes on her at the ceremony. Lucy hated herself for not standing up for anyone, for just sitting there listening to it all, making herself complicit by her inaction. She wanted an easy life with Emma, she’d seen what happened to people who dared to disagree and she valued her career too much to be the next person bullied out of their job. She needed it, needed the money. It had taken so long to earn a wage that meant she could afford her own flat, or near enough afford it, at least; she couldn’t entertain the prospect of having to start on a lower salary elsewhere. So she sat there, like the baddy’s little lap dog, being stroked and kicked alternately, depending on the day, Emma’s mood, the weather – taking whatever shit Emma threw her way and never standing up for anything or anyone.

Emma was having one of her good days today. Lucy had found it relatively easy to juggle her schedule, field her calls and keep her happy. She hadn’t sat down at her desk for more than five minutes at a time and her feet hurt like hell in her new heels, but that didn’t matter too much. The day was nearly done, Emma was due at an event at 7pm, so a car would be picking her up at 6:30pm and Lucy could get out at a reasonable hour for the first time in weeks. She scanned through her inbox, deleting junky emails and opening a couple of ‘funny’ round robins – was she the only person in the world who hated those cat videos? Her eyes were drawn to the email sent at 11:47pm the night before. Subject line: ‘Hello’, from: Thomas Barton.

Her first thought was that it couldn’t be him, that it was a coincidence. Tom never called himself ‘Thomas’, he thought it sounded stuffy and old. Clicking the bold ‘Hello’, her heart began to race at the possibility that it was him, and she ran her eyes over the long email that opened on her screen to the bottom of the page. ‘I still think about you and I hope you’re okay,’ she read. It was signed off ‘Tom’.

Emma called for Lucy to help her into her dress before she could read his words. She guiltily shut her MacBook at the call of her name, afraid of being caught reading something from Tom, something personal. Not that Emma would have had a clue who he was, no one in the office would, but Lucy felt exposed, made vulnerable, even, by his electronic presence. In Emma’s office, sounds and voices appeared as if she was under water and she remembered the sensation of noise bursting into technicolour each time she came up for breath in swimming galas as a young girl. She desperately wanted to get outside for some fresh air, or to the toilets for another line to sharpen her thoughts.

‘Anyway it just won’t do,’ she finally tuned in to Emma’s snapping voice, ‘You’ll have to tell her tomorrow that it’s not her job to do that.’ Emma had finished and Lucy had no idea what, or who, she had been talking about. ‘Absolutely,’ Lucy smiled at her boss in what she hoped was a normal manner.

‘How do I look?’ Emma spun around, her dress lifting far too high with the hideously girlish action, revealing her black underwear and cellulite at the tops of her thighs. ‘Fantastic,’ Lucy lied, ‘Really great.’

Lucy walked to the station too fast, she was breathless and clammy by the time she reached her platform. Her heart raced and she felt a familiar pang of fear about just how much damage she might be doing to herself with her habit. She forced the thoughts aside and focused instead on the rare victory of securing a seat, which she slipped into self-consciously. The drugs always made her feel a little paranoid. As they pulled out of the platform towards Scott’s flat, Lucy hovered over Tom’s email, debating half-heartedly whether to read it now or later. She opened it, unable to resist, and read his words, hearing his voice rather than her own.

From: Thomas Barton

To: Lucy Robertson

Subject: Hello

Lucy, hi, it’s Tom. How are you? It’s been a while. I hope you’re really good. I’ve been meaning to get in touch for a while. It’s hard to know how to after so much time has passed. I’m sure you understand that more than most. Nina tells me you’re doing really well up there. I knew you would be, good on you. You did it!

Everything’s good down here, same as ever, really, but good. Mum and Dad send their love. The café’s doing well, just starting to get busy now with the good old tourists. God bless them.

You should come here, come and see everyone, see how little it’s all changed. That’s why I’m writing to you, actually. I know you’re busy, Nina tells me you’re some kind of TV high-flyer, which sounds fun, but definitely busy, so I know it’s probably difficult. But you should come, Luce. Nina and Kristian are up for it, we’ve been speaking loads recently and we all want to get the gang back together again one more time. They’re coming for August, staying here in the house, and you should come too. The four of us, a summer on the beach, like old times. We all want you here for it. I want you here for it. It’s been so long since I saw you.

Just think about it, anyway. Promise me that much. Promise me you won’t just stubbornly decide ‘no’ and refuse to consider it. Maybe it’s a stupid idea – we both know I have plenty of those, but it would be fun, wouldn’t it? Humour an old friend?

I know we haven’t spoken in a really long time, but I still think about you and I hope you’re okay.

Tom

When she reached the bottom of the email Lucy took a deep breath and counted to ten; she’d done that ever since she was little when she felt like she might cry. It had been five years since she’d spoken to Tom, five years since she’d seen him. She knew he was still in Hideaway Bay; Nina had kept her vaguely informed with updates. But Nina had left too, with Kristian – travelled the world with him after university, and although those two were still in touch with Tom, they knew better than to talk much about him to Lucy.

The idea of going to Cornwall was preposterous, of course. She had a job, responsibilities, a flat, for Christ’s sake. The idea that she could take August off work for some nostalgic road trip to her home town and a reunion with her ex-boyfriend would almost be laughable if it wasn’t so bloody annoying that he’d even thought he could ask. Who the hell did he think he was, suggesting she just ditch all of her own plans to fit in with his pipe dream of a summer reunion? Asking her to promise him things. What did he actually want? To relive their happy summers before she’d left and he’d refused to come with her, the summers before he’d given up on them and let her leave without ever looking back?

How had Nina not told her about this? They’d only spoken a few days ago and seemingly she knew all about this stupid plan. Had Nina thought it was a good idea for Tom to get in touch, go for the weak spot and perhaps Lucy would just melt into a pathetic little puddle at the sound of his name all over again? She wouldn’t go. She’d ignore the email; maybe send a polite response in a couple of days to show that she wasn’t petty, that she was over it. She looked out of the window as the train doors bleeped shut and swore out loud, too loudly, judging by the shocked faces glaring at her from around the busy carriage. She’d just missed her stop.

2

Hideaway Bay, 2003

Tom took Lucy’s hand in his as they walked up the hill to her parents’ house. She could feel his eyes on her, but pretended she didn’t know he was watching her; he had a habit of observing her doing the most mundane things. ‘You look beautiful today,’ he said, kissing her on the cheek.

‘I’m sweaty,’ she replied, laughing. ‘You’re mad.’

‘You’re sweaty and beautiful,’ he said, lifting her arm and spinning her into him. She groaned and then smiled as she nuzzled into his chest, stopping now to kiss him properly.

‘That view,’ he said, turning towards the sea. ‘It still gets me every time.’

‘I know,’ Lucy said. She couldn’t imagine anyone failing to be stunned by the sight, the vast expanse of blue, soaring from a pale crystal at the sand’s edge to deep navy where it met the sky. You could still hear the buzz of the beach, the squeals of delighted children over the gentle roar of the pulling tide. It was the most calming sound in the world, somehow blending the magnificence of nature perfectly with the human pursuit of pleasure.

‘Are your parents in?’ Tom asked, as they began walking again.

‘I don’t think so,’ Lucy said, ‘Dad wanted to take the boat out to “make the most of the weather”.’ She did her best impersonation of her father.

‘Richie?’ Tom asked.

‘Don’t know,’ Lucy said, ‘Why, are you hoping we’ll have the place to ourselves?’ She nudged him gently and skipped ahead of him slightly. Tom reached out for her hand again and smiled at her. ‘Well, I could deal with that,’ he said. Lucy kissed him again, before opening the gate with a code on the keypad.

‘No cars,’ she said, ‘looks like you’re in luck.’

3

London, 2010

In the lobby of the glass and stainless-steel building, home to Scott’s very expensive waterfront flat, Lucy took the lift to the fourteenth floor and knocked on the heavy, dark door. Scott’s face was a more welcome sight than Lucy had imagined, and he held his arms out for her suddenly weary body as she leaned into his arms and let him kiss her hair.

‘Hello, darling girl,’ he said, ‘Come in, I’ve cooked for you.’

In his lounge Scott had set the table and put flowers in a silver-rimmed glass vase. She smiled at the gesture and leant down to smell the purple and pink hyacinths – her favourite.

‘Sit down, Luce,’ Scott called from the kitchen, ‘Dinner’s just coming. I hope you’re hungry.’

He’d cooked what looked like a very good lasagna, which Lucy’s heart dropped at the sight of. She couldn’t eat it. She knew immediately, her body filling with panic at the sight of all that pasta and cheese. She took a slice and filled her plate with salad.

‘This looks absolutely delicious,’ she said, looking at Scott and his lovely face, his chiseled jawline and cute, perfect nose. He was so bloody handsome. Lucy acknowledged this often, but he was just a bit too keen to be truly sexy. She knew this thought made her a bitch and she wished she was less of a cliché. The sad truth was that she knew she’d like him more if he didn’t like her.

She spent dinner cutting up pieces of lasagna and pushing them around her plate and under her salad, listening to Scott talk about his clients, the office politics at his city law firm and about the football match he was looking forward to at the weekend. When he went to get a second bottle of wine, Lucy reached for her handbag, took a tissue from a packet and wrapped as much of her lasagna as she could fit in it, and put it in her bag, praying it wouldn’t seep through. She was drunk, she realised now, her movements were clumsy and it felt like her hands were too big for her arms. It was a feeling she loved, that warm fuzz of wine running through her body, numbing all the sparking connections in her brain, dulling everything down enough to make life feel easy.

Scott poured her another glass of red before taking her nearly empty plate away.

‘You really liked that, huh?’ He kissed her on the mouth, hard, and Lucy realised he was drunk too. He put her plate back down on the table and kissed her again, stroking his hand through her hair, pulling her head back slightly and running his tongue down her neck. Lucy unbuttoned his shirt. He looked good in his work clothes; his body was beautiful. She put her hands on his smooth chest and reached for his jeans. Scott lifted her up from her chair and sat her on the dining table.

In bed, Lucy wore Scott’s t-shirt, her hair tied up, her neck still hot. She took her phone from her handbag and set an alarm for 6am. She had a missed call, from Nina, and the wine fuzz began to turn to more of an ache as she recalled the email on the train. She leant over to kiss Scott goodnight. ‘I love you, Lucy,’ he said, rolling towards her and putting his arm across her empty stomach.

‘Goodnight sweetheart,’ she replied, hurting at her inability to tell him she loved him too. Scott fell asleep with an immediacy that always made Lucy envious. Sleep was not her friend. She lay completely still, staring at the ceiling, trying to make out shapes in the plaster, trying not to think about Tom. This was the curse of her habit. Well, one of them. She needed to stop doing it so late into the evening. No amount of wine could totally take the edge off, and once things were quiet and it was dark, the fear could creep in. Her heart raced and she began to feel hot, as though someone was pressing down onto her chest. She reached for the glass of water on the bedside table and watched it shake as she pulled it to her lips. Lying back down, she tried to calm herself by breathing slowly and steadily. Eventually her heart seemed to settle, she felt her eyelids begin to become heavy, her thoughts start to spiral into sleep.

They came to her again in her dream. All of them, this time. There was always Richie, and this time he ran towards her, beaming. This time her parents stood quietly behind him, waving. She was so happy to see them, reaching out for Richie’s warm little body, his spindly arms and crazy hair. She kept looking up to check that her parents were still there too, so pleased that they looked happy. She began to realise that it was taking too long for Richie to reach her. She looked again and could see now that he was running almost as if in slow motion. His arms and legs were moving strangely, as if he was being pulled down, wading through something thick. She tried to call out to him, to move towards him, but she was suddenly sinking into the ground too, it had turned to marsh beneath her feet. She felt panic rising as she looked around for her parents now. They were further away than before and their faces were wretched with despair. They weren’t waving any more, they were desperately pleading for her help. But she couldn’t move. Richie was crying now and drifting further away from her. Lucy tried to scream for help but her voice wouldn’t come; instead the screams seemed to stab sharp pains through her chest. Her eyesight began to fail her, as if a thick fog had fallen on them all. She couldn’t breathe now, and she couldn’t see her parents.

She woke, sweating, out of breath. She reached to her side to feel Scott, still fast asleep, as if touching another human being would confirm that she was real and this was real and the dream was over. She felt sick and her heart ached. She pressed her fingers into her eyes to stop the tears that began to form. She’d been having this dream, or versions of it, for years. It never got any easier to cope with. It always knocked her more heavily than she felt was reasonable after all this time. Looking at her phone she saw it was 5am and decided that wasn’t too early to get up for the day. She’d only had around four hours’ sleep, but that was better than the prospect of closing her eyes and returning to her nightmares.

She stepped out of Scott’s bed quietly, still shaking slightly and cold now. It was the day of the awards and she felt like utter shit. It was going to be a long, long day.

4

Park Lane was as busy as ever, six lanes of traffic coughing out hot fumes into the hazy blue sky. Hyde Park was filled with the usual mixture of tourists meandering and office workers rushing on their way to work. As Lucy stepped out of her Addison Lee car in front of the Metropolis Hotel she had an unwelcome flashback of last year’s awards ceremony and the A-list – well, lower A-list, maybe B-list, really – celebrity getting papped, up-skirt, by the scummy photographer who lay on the floor as she got out of the car. The fallout from those pictures breaking in the red tops the next day had led to some seriously awkward calls from the agent about Spectrum’s ‘failure to safeguard’. Lucy entered the hotel, smiling at the doorman, and was greeted by the familiar smell of marble, dark old wood, and something she couldn’t pinpoint but which, judging by the surroundings, might well have been the smell of money. The atmosphere of the Metropolis still excited her, even after all these years of working on Spectrum’s televised events at the hotel. The bar was littered with small groups of ladies drinking tea, with fine china plates of pastel-coloured cakes decorating the tables, their feet obscured by an assortment of sturdy, ribbon-handled shopping bags from New Bond Street’s boutiques. It felt like a place full of possibilities, of secret meetings, and of a life she’d probably never be able to afford.

In the production suite people had dumped piles of coats and bags in the corner, and a rail of evening dresses was already nearly full. Lucy hung her black-lace dress, grabbed a copy of the running order, a polystyrene cup of grainy coffee from the machine and headed to the script meeting in the ballroom. It was Lucy’s third awards ceremony as Emma’s PA, and it became more and more difficult to concentrate during the longwinded script read-through. It was a point of pride for Emma that she ran this meeting in such a unique way. She insisted on a full run-through in which she took the role of both the main presenters, all of the individual awards’ presenters and every winner, often delivering Oscar-worthy acceptance speeches, which, it struck Lucy, seemed to roll off her tongue as if practised in advance. By the time the final award was played out, culminating in Emma’s impression of a middle-aged Swedish male winner (not one of her finest), Lucy’s mind had wandered and she was taken by surprise at the sound of her name.

‘I asked if there was anything I’d forgotten’, Emma looked at her with the familiar look of disdain and disappointment. ‘What was I meant to remember?’ she asked Lucy.

‘I think that was everything,’ Lucy smiled hopefully, trawling through her brain for anything she was supposed to be prompting her boss with. At that moment a commotion of suit carriers and blonde hair tumbled through the door, met with sniggers and a collective chorus of ‘Oh, Warren!’ from the Spectrum team sitting around the large table.

‘Oh my GOD, I’m so sorry I’m late!’ Warren did, in fact, look sorry enough that he might actually cry. A flamboyant, yet sensitive, character, Warren had been at Spectrum media for a couple of years before Lucy had joined, and had worked his way up to the coveted role of Entertainment Producer, meaning his job was to book celebrities to appear on the company’s shows. Being outlandishly emotional was apparently a necessary characteristic for anyone working on the Entertainment team, who dedicatedly lived up to their job titles and entertained the office with their many dramas, fallouts, reconciliations and public breakdowns. One of Warren’s particular character traits was to seek Emma’s approval at all times and at almost any cost. Arriving late to the production meeting of the biggest awards show of the year was probably up there with Warren’s worst nightmares, met only, perhaps, by an international Dermalogica shortage, or his cleaner accidentally machine-washing one of his ‘statement’ cashmere jumpers.

Emma cast her eyes up and down Warren’s body, from the toes of his gleaming patent loafers, to the highest point of his highlighted quiff, and Lucy recognised the flash in her eyes of something noted and worthy of comment.

‘Warren,’ she started, ‘I can overlook the late arrival, given the fact it is entirely out of character and, I’m sure, due to circumstances beyond your control.’

Lucy watched Warren half relax before sensing that the exchange was not over. ‘What I can’t overlook is the fact that you are the colour of an imitation mahogany table. What the HELL have you done to yourself?’

Now that she looked properly it was true that Warren had been a little heavy handed with the fake tan, but Lucy still cringed internally at the public remonstration, recalling their conversation a few nights ago in the pub, when he’d listed the many beauty treatments he was going to undergo in preparation for today. He had only wanted, Lucy remembered clearly, to look his very best for the occasion. She wanted to say something in his defence, but there really was no denying he looked totally, ludicrously brown the more she looked at him.

‘It’s developing,’ Warren explained, ‘I can’t stop it. I don’t know what to do. I’ve showered, I’ve exfoliated, but I’m sure it’s still developing. I wasn’t this brown an hour ago.’ His voice wobbled at the end of this statement, threatening tears. Emma had already lost interest in this conversation, however, and was piling papers and pens into her oversized Prada bag.

Warren took the seat next to Lucy as Emma left the room, his big eyes searching for comfort.

‘It’s okay,’ she lied. ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s not that bad.’

It was dreadful. Up close, particles of tan were sitting in each pore, line and blemish; his face reminded Lucy of those olde-worlde maps you made at school by staining a piece of paper with instant coffee and burning the edges.

‘I have the keys to make-up anyway,’ Lucy offered. ‘We can go and find some foundation.’

Warren held out his arms and grabbed Lucy in a bear hug. She patted him on the back and tried to wriggle down away from his face slightly to avoid any possible staining.

Awards ceremonies at the Metropolis were always fun; they had an atmosphere that Lucy never felt anywhere else. It was all about getting through the ceremony itself and then the party really began. Lucy had been allocated a role that only Emma’s most valued staff were trusted with on the night; she was to be, yet again, a spotter. A spotter’s job was perhaps the least dignified role you could be given at a glitzy event, consisting of crawling around on the floor with a camera crew, pointing out the beautiful people to be filmed. Each year when the roles were being handed out Lucy prayed that she might be spared, and each time she was painfully disappointed. In Emma’s eyes it was such an important role that it needed to be carried out by experienced, responsible people like Lucy who had spent years working fourteen- hour days in hope of one day being taken seriously in the TV world. As Lucy changed into her short, black, bodycon lace dress and tried to fix her hair up with Kirby grips and hairspray, she raged momentarily at the absurdity of the ‘cocktail dress’ dress code for all Spectrum staff, and realised that the only thing less dignified than crawling around on the carpet all evening was doing so dressed as if you were expecting to be sitting at a table drinking champagne.

Lucy was surprised each time at how quickly two hours of spotting passed; it actually became quite addictive trying to make it round to the next table in the twenty-second VTs played on screen between each award. She was quietly delighted to have avoided being yelled at over the headset each spotter was wearing. Emma’s scream of ‘Sophie, that’s NOT Paul Mulryan, that’s a short-haired WOMAN’, was probably a highlight for everyone on talkback except Sophie. In her defense, that woman did look a lot like crime writer Paul Mulryan; Lucy had checked afterwards when crawling past to get to the star of an International Series of the Year contender after the mishap.

The final award of the evening was the Lifetime Achievement award and the winner was Lucy’s to find and get a camera pointed at in time. She was already at the right table, with her target in view, hanging back until the last minute so as not to give the game away. As the music fired up Lucy moved in with the camera crew following behind waiting for her instruction. As she reached the side of Mrs Dorian Briar, ninety years old, an OBE, writer of over fifty novels and twenty adaptations for the small and big screen, Mrs Briar spotted her and turned away from the table towards Lucy. Lucy tried to make herself invisible, the presenters were about to announce Mrs Briar’s name and she needed to be looking up at the room, not down at Lucy on the floor. But Mrs Briar wouldn’t give up. ‘There’s a girl on the floor!’ she exclaimed remarkably loudly to the rest of her table, pointing at Lucy. ‘Excuse me, young lady, are you okay down there?’

Lucy felt her face burn with panic. ‘Fine thanks,’ she mouthed, and prayed that this would appease the legendary author about to be honoured with the most prestigious award of the night.

‘Would you like some wine, dear?’ Mrs Briar leant across the table, picking up a glass of, surely someone else’s, wine, and stretched down and sideways to try and reach Lucy on the floor.

‘THE INIMITABLE DORIAN BRIAR’, boomed one of the presenters, and Lucy felt the room around her, all 400 guests, getting to their feet with applause, as the big screen flashed to a live picture of Dorian Briar stretching away from the table, then falling off her chair clutching a glass of cabernet sauvignon, squealing in horror. The other guests at her table leapt into action, scooping her off the floor, horrified at the sight of this little old lady now drenched in red wine. Dorian was, to her credit, still smiling, but looked a little confused by the whole thing. Lucy moved, quicker than seemed possible on all-fours in a skintight dress, away from the scene, glaring at her camera crew with a look that she hoped conveyed ‘let’s never talk about what happened at that table’.

5

The production office’s transformation into a fully laid-out dining room marked the end of the Spectrum team’s working duties. There were already ten people scattered around the tables eating plates of roast chicken and vegetables, and pouring large glasses of wine. Lucy walked in with Warren and Sophie, fellow spotters, laughing about the Paul Mulryan confusion, and she placed a concessionary piece of chicken on her plate from the large silver warmer on the buffet table.

‘Is that all you’re eating?’ Warren asked, filling his own plate with potatoes, carrots and chicken thighs before drowning it in gravy. Lucy didn’t answer, but just smiled and took a seat at an empty table. Picking up a bottle of white wine that wasn’t quite as cold as she’d have hoped, I deserve this, she thought, and poured out three glasses.

‘What the hell happened with poor Dorian?’ Sophie asked, her little brown bob tipping quizzically to the side, like a Cairn terrier, Lucy always thought.

‘No idea,’ Lucy took a first blissful swig of wine. It had dawned on her very quickly after the incident that no one else on the production team actually had any way of knowing why ‘poor Dorian’, as she was quickly becoming known, had fallen off her chair. Anyway, Emma had already been overheard rejoicing about what fantastic television it was seeing a national treasure tumbling to the ground in a fountain of red wine, so Lucy didn’t feel too bad about keeping quiet about her role in the scene.

The room filled quickly with colleagues removing high heels and rubbing their feet between glasses of wine, and exchanging Emma stories in a sort of top trumps game of ‘well you think that’s bad, wait ‘til you hear what she did in the green room when I was working on Catch it, Cook it, in 2010…’

Lucy retrieved her mobile from her bag and read a message from Scott sent an hour earlier: Hey you, hope it’s all gone well. You coming to mine tonight? Lucy sent a quick reply saying she’d call him later; she half wanted to leave there and then and get back to his place. It would, she knew, be the most sensible thing to do; these nights always got so bloody messy. But the first two glasses of wine had slipped down easily and she was in that early wine daze, where everything felt slightly wonderful and it felt too early to leave.

Dinner was followed by the traditional ‘sweep’ of the ceremony room for bottles of wine that had been purchased by TV big-wigs to impress their tables, but which hadn’t been drunk. Emma didn’t like wasting money by, say, paying for wine for her staff, and the sweep was one of her ways of ‘winning’, as she saw it. Lucy hung back slightly after the incident last year where she and Natalie from the Entertainment team had swiped a bottle of champagne from the Sherbet TV table only to be stopped on their way out by the purchaser of the bottle on his way back to retrieve the fizz, who accused them of stealing: awkward didn’t really cover it.

Emma was already deep in the after-party – Lucy kept catching glimpses of her up the stairs though the glass doors. She was working the room like a pro. It was a quality you couldn’t help but admire; she was truly fantastic at making people listen to her and then give her what she wanted. She was also, Lucy knew, notorious for drinking far too much at events, and it looked like she was on her way already. She had changed into the red Donna Karan dress that Lucy had collected two days previously from Harvey Nichols and which Emma had taken great pleasure in telling the whole office the extortionate cost of. ‘I suppose you could say that £1,800 for a dress is too much…’ she’d mused loudly, before asking Lucy to bring it up on the Harvey Nicks website and show everyone just how beautiful it was. And it really was beautiful. Lucy had stroked it when she collected it from the store, before it was packaged with flair and precision into tissue paper, a box and then a bag for transfer back to the office. But Emma had a knack for making really expensive clothes look incredibly tacky. Lucy watched her move over to her next companion at the bar, clutching a glass of champagne in one hand and a fistful of the skirt of her dress in the other, struggling to work with the combination of billowing red fabric at ankle level and the high-heeled Prada shoes she’d opted for. It didn’t look to Lucy as if Emma was wearing a bra, which made the dress sit strangely across her chest and gape slightly at the side. Lucy could already see the potential for another breast-based moment later in the evening. These had become something of a signature for Emma, who had fallen out of more designer dresses in public than Lucy could remember. She recalled the time, a few years ago now, that Emma had conducted an entire conversation with an author at a book launch with her left nipple sitting proudly outside the ridiculously strappy low-cut dress she was wearing. The author’s eye had kept wandering down, and Lucy, standing next to Emma at the time, had wondered just how the hell Emma couldn’t, at the very least, feel the difference between the right side – cloaked in All Saints (God, she was far too old to be wearing All Saints), and the left side – hanging out free as a bird. It had never become clear at what point Emma had finally noticed, and later on everything was back in place, but nothing was ever mentioned.

It was impressive how much wine could be swept from a room after an awards ceremony; the team was laden with bottles and bottles of red and white, and a few had found the ultimate prize – unopened bottles of champagne. As it was strict hotel policy that no wine should leave the room after the ceremony, the smuggling out to the after-party had to be conducted with confidence and poise to avoid any suspicion amongst the Metropolis’s staff. Lucy considered herself an expert at this and took two bottles from Jenny, one of the runners, slipping one upright into her handbag, and the other under the flap of her black jacket before heading up the stairs and through the huge doors. Inside, the party was in full flow, a few merry authors and agents were dancing in the middle of the room while most people opted to continue their drinking and were gathered in groups around the edge of the dance floor, or sat in the crushed- velvet booths along the walls.

Lucy, Warren, Camilla and Katie stationed themselves at a booth at the far end of the room. Lucy skimmed across the plush fabric and sat next to the window, looking onto the twinkling car lights and street lamps of Park Lane. A stream of orange beams flowing one way, blinking red the other. An assortment of wine bottles was magicked onto the table and Katie passed around glasses. Lucy settled into the back of the cushioned bench, her back aching in appreciation of the support. Warren began his usual commentary on the scenes unfolding on the dance floor. A well-known screenwriter was performing an elaborate, and puzzling, finger dance, and an ageing agent, who Lucy had earlier seen stroking his neighbour’s leg as she crawled past their table, was now dancing up against her in what was presumably intended to be an erotic style.

More wine was poured and Lucy shut her eyes briefly, remembering she had promised to call Scott. It was nearly midnight and the drinks were filling her with a warm sense of impending fun, so she pushed away the thought of her boyfriend waiting at home and finished her glass. She’d pop to the toilets in a while with Warren, who’d brought a supply for a few of them who were always ready for a party. She fancied a little pick-me-up.

‘Dancing time?’ she suggested, and the group, which had now grown to eight of the Spectrum team, left their bags and coats in ownership of the booth and moved a few yards into the room to start dancing to the R&B set the DJ was playing.

The noise in the room was growing louder with each song, more and more bodies joining them on the dance floor. Camilla appeared with a tray full of glistening shot glasses and the team expertly applied salt to the base of their thumbs, downed the sour liquid and squealed for lemons, which Camilla had forgotten to bring. Lucy slipped back to the table and downed a large glass of wine to wash away the taste. Her head spun as she turned and made her way back to the group, who were having a dance-off, throwing her hands in the air and shimmying in to join them. She flung her head back, laughing at Warren’s moves, and feeling the rush from the alcohol.

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