The Dinner Guest Read online

  ‘What?’ Matthew asked. He knew I was a little pissed about the whole exchange; well, pissed was the wrong word, really. Bemused, maybe. Anyhow, I just found the whole thing a bit … fast. And there was something a little odd about the way she’d immediately leaped on the idea of joining a book club, to the point of arranging to come over to our house in two weeks’ time.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, with a little shake of my head. I saw him roll his eyes at this point, which riled me a little more.

  We walked the shopping back to the house in near silence. The only words Matthew came out with were a comment that the Croftfield family across the same square as us had just got a new BMW hybrid. Inside, we found Titus had baked two cakes as well as a tray of cookies and my mother was already enjoying a slice of the lemon drizzle, settled on one of the breakfast-bar seats, with Desert Island Discs blasting out of the sound system in the lounge.

  ‘Grandma did the icing,’ Titus declared, pushing the stand holding the cake towards me as I came towards her. ‘But I did the cakes of course.’

  ‘It all looks delicious,’ I said. ‘Can we have a photo?’

  I heard my mother sniff disapprovingly.

  ‘You don’t have to actually be in the photo,’ I said, sighing a little. ‘You can take it, if you prefer.’

  She didn’t reply to this, but instead tilted her head on one side towards the radio, as if she genuinely cared what the washed-up old pop star was saying to Lauren Laverne about his battle with alcoholism. She doesn’t like the idea of Instagram. She uses Facebook, but that’s it, and that’s only so she and the rest of her SW1 neighbours can moan about immigrant taxi drivers and the homeless from the safety of a private group – the new curtain twitching for the upper classes.

  Instagram is a bit of a thing with us. It was just me, to start with. I thought I’d been late to the party when all my mates at the office started using it and telling me I was out of the loop. Archie and the rest of the lads from school were right on it. It actually gave me flashbacks to our school days, where one person was left out of a gang because of some trivial detail. Suddenly it was like we were back – I wasn’t part of the ‘cool gang’ because I didn’t have Instagram. I didn’t take pictures of my French toast or eggs benedict on Sunday morning; I didn’t get someone to snap my ripped torso on the beach as I casually stepped off a speed boat, glass of something bubbling in one hand and the other draped over whoever I was dating. And then, quite suddenly, that’s exactly what I was doing. I downloaded it one Friday night when I had a cold and couldn’t join the boys for a night of pills and pounding music. It was 2013, just before Matthew and I started dating. I was single and bored and I just downloaded the app to see what all the fuss was about. My first photo was of a massive burger I’d made out of hashbrowns, thick slices of cheddar, bacon, and a slice of fried chicken. Hashtag food porn. People liked it.

  So I carried on in the weeks and months that followed. Got a bit of teasing from the guys about being a hypocrite. Then got some jealousy from them too because what I was posting was working. People were liking it. I admit it helped that I was good looking. That’s what a lot of the comments were about. That and my physique. It wasn’t long before people started to refer to me as ‘Hot Charlie’, send me messages to ask me out on dates, even tag me in posts where they’d profess to love me and want to have my babies. It does things to you, that sort of attention. Makes you not want to stop. And I carried on. Everything in my life became documented. Well, almost everything. A certain, very photogenic slice of my life. One that was prepped and colour-toned and filtered to fuck before being posted at the best time of day for ‘my audience’.

  I was a bit more daring in those early days. There were some mildly risqué shots, or me waking up looking oh-so-perfectly dishevelled in another guy’s bed with hashtag morning-after-the-night-before as the caption. One or two shots of Archie and me with our arses out on top of a mountain somewhere on one of our holidays. But I cleaned it up completely when I started going out with Matthew. He just seemed so polished. So perfectly presented. It actually made me look at the photos on my feed with embarrassment, ashamed I had ever thought such childish silliness was attractive or likeable. I was suddenly entirely about presenting a very rose-tinted, picture-perfect portrayal of a young couple’s life in London. Especially since Matthew came pre-loaded, so-to-speak, with little Titus, not quite nine at that point, and every bit as adorable as any child could be. I’d never really factored kids into my life-plan that much … until I saw Matthew with Titus. And I knew I needed that. Needed to be part of that. Needed to belong to a unit like that. And so I became Daddy, like he was Daddy, and before long, Titus had two perfect daddies and we were the cute same-sex kings of Instagram.

  I wasn’t naïve: I knew a lot of people loved us because we were gay parents, and may not have bothered to like our photos if we’d been a guy and a girl. And it came with the occasional bit of nastiness too – some comments, now and then, that bothered me at first but which now I greeted with an eyeroll and a shrug. But it was all just so easy. The photos of us having ‘fun days out’ took a bit of hard work. Some of them needed to be meticulously staged so as to look off-the-cuff natural. My followers lapped it up, liking pics of the single, adorable playboy-turned-family-man, with a family life so perfect it could have been designed in a lab.

  Not perfect enough for my mother, though. She thought it empty and shallow, and as I took that photo of Titus grinning, holding up a slice of cake, Matthew leaning in opened-mouthed to take a bite out of it with mock-greed, I could see her give a little shake of her head. ‘People like it, Mum,’ I said, flicking through the resulting snaps, picking the ones with just the right amount of natural happiness in Titus’s eyes. ‘It’s cute. It’s sweet. It’s funny.’

  ‘If you say so,’ Mum said, picking up my copy of the Observer, discarded on one of the sofas, to browse through its food monthly supplement. She never read the actual paper. She saw it as a left-wing rag. ‘Did you have a good shop?’ she said, whilst scanning an article on Nigel Slater’s allotment tips.

  I walked past her and sat on the opposite sofa, two cookies on a plate in my hand. ‘Yeah, just got the book I wanted and picked up some food for dinner.’

  ‘And we made a new friend,’ Matthew called out from the kitchen.

  I shifted a little in the sofa, pulling out one of Matthew’s jumpers from behind a cushion and draping it over the arm.

  ‘A new friend?’ she said, her interest piqued. ‘You were only out just over an hour!’ She peered over the top of her reading glasses to look back over at Matthew, coming in from the kitchen area, wiping icing sugar off his hands with a tea towel. I saw his eyes clock the fact I still had my shoes on – he was always keen to preserve the cream carpet – but he didn’t nag me for it in front of my mum.

  ‘Yes, a lovely young woman named Rachel. Practically collided with her in M&S, although Charlie had met her before. She’s going to join my book club.’

  I felt my brow crease a little at his words. The way he’d worded it sounded like Rachel and I were established friends. ‘We’d only bumped into each other in Waterstones a few minutes earlier. I don’t know her.’ The last bit sounded slightly defensive and I think my mother noticed.

  ‘Maybe you should join the book club, too,’ she said to me. ‘Give you something to do.’

  This was the kind of comment from my mother that regularly irritated me. Just because I worked from home a couple of days a week, she often made out I was practically unemployed.

  ‘I think I’ve already got enough to do,’ I said, shortly. Matthew came over to me and sat down on the sofa, also holding a plate of food, although his one was loaded with the large slice of cake Titus had used in the photo. His warm frame, the smell of his Ralph Lauren aftershave mingling with the scent of freshly baked cake, instantly made me feel less tense. He let an arm fall around me and said, ‘Why don’t you come to our next meeting? It would be nice for Rachel to see anoth
er face she knows.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, offering a vague nod, and extricated myself from Matthew’s embrace, muttering about putting some washing on. Once we’d got off the subject of the book club, we continued our Sunday in our usual peaceful way – a walk in the park, dinner out in the evening – blissfully unaware that we had walked straight into a trap.

  Chapter Two

  Rachel

  Twelve months to go

  It was better for everyone that I was leaving Yorkshire. The shit general-dogsbody job I had at a depressing garden centre wasn’t exactly a dream come true, and I still hadn’t decided what to do with my mum’s inheritance. The idea of it sitting in a bank account, unused, while I rented a spare room above my manager’s garage, made me feel ill. Squandered potential. A waste. Some would love to have a heap of cash sitting there, ready and waiting whenever they wanted it. Not me. Each pound and penny of it would be painted with the shitshow of the past. And using it would mean facing up to those demons. So I hadn’t properly decided what to do with it, until the day I opened up Instagram to have a quick flick through during a quiet moment in between stacking up tubs of fertiliser. And on that day, my life changed for ever.

  It was a hashtag. That’s how I saw it. #WeekendBaking. I’d clicked on it after seeing a photo of a delicious-looking banana and toffee cake come up on my feed, and fancied having a scroll through similar items. And there, suddenly, he was. The man from my dreams. My nightmares. My waking thoughts. He was older, of course. And age suited him. He was one of those lucky people that seem to wear their slight wrinkles in a comfortable way – a way that says to the world ‘aren’t I loveable and look at me enjoying life’ rather than ‘I’m approaching forty with the speed of a runaway train’. In the photo, he was standing with another man and a teenage boy, who must have been about fourteen or fifteen. He had his arm on his shoulder, and in front of them were about four different cakes, with different toppings. #SaturdayBaking. They looked so … perfect. The kitchen was clearly beautiful, with a shiny marble top, a sleek-looking American fridge-freezer behind them and one of those expensive standing-mixers to the side of the countertop. And the three of them dressed in those sorts of soft, pricy fabrics that beg to be touched. All these details made me fall to my knees, and then properly to the ground, so that I was sitting, like a strange child, awkwardly cross-legged next to the tubs of fertiliser, while the rain pattered loudly on the roof of the garden centre overhead.

  ‘Are you quite all right?’

  I looked up, bleary-eyed, to see a middle-aged woman staring down at me. She was clasping a small terracotta pot in one hand and a closed umbrella in the other, and appeared to be baffled to find me sitting there on the floor in the corner, phone out, my uniform making it clear I was a member of staff and should therefore be busy. I stared back up at her, quickly sussing out the type of customer she was – the sort of middle-aged middle-class visitor we often got at this time of the week. The type whose husband earned enough for them to float around garden centres in the middle of a working day, buying the odd geranium or accessory they didn’t really need before meeting a friend for lunch in the connecting café.

  ‘Hello? Can you hear me?’

  The woman was still bending over me, and the look on her face – probably a reaction to the distant look I had on mine – suggested that she feared I was insane in some way. I saw one hand float subconsciously to her handbag, as if I might make a sudden grab for it and leg it out the door.

  ‘I can hear you,’ I said, not as politely as a member of staff should. But I couldn’t focus on her right now. I just needed to get back to my phone. Make sure what I’d discovered was real rather than something I’d imagined. I felt the smooth surface of it clutched in my hand and brought it close to me as I stood up.

  ‘Well, OK, I just wanted to check. In that case, I’ve got a question you could help with: a few weeks ago you were selling those little palm-tree ornaments that you could put tea lights in and I bought one and Otis, my labrador, had one of his tempers and sent the thing flying and I wanted to get another, only now I see the display has been taken down…’

  I tried to stand still while she told me all this, even though I could feel myself swaying a little. ‘Yes, well, that was a summer display. We’re now putting in Christmas things, so…’

  The woman’s face remained blank. ‘Christmas?’

  I nodded. ‘Yes, Christmas.’ I looked down at my phone screen. Over an hour until I could go home. How I hated being tied into shift work like this. I longed to be a free spirit again. My own boss. Do what I wanted. Go where I wanted. Not clock in, clock out, remember to be deferential to a boss who I also paid rent to. I’d been feeling trapped for months, and now, this silly woman spoiling what should be an important life-changing moment, was causing it all to rush to the surface. All the frustration, all the anger, all the pain.

  ‘I’m sorry, but it’s still August,’ she said, looking at me now like I was an alien. ‘I really don’t think we need to worry about Christmas just yet, do we?’

  On another day I may have agreed with her, but on this day it was the wrong thing to say to me. I felt hot and a bit shaky, I glanced around, to see if I could pass her on to someone else, but the only other staff member I could see was Ruth at the other side of the building near the pet section helping an elderly man choose a dog lead.

  ‘Hello?’ the woman said. ‘Am I boring you?’

  That was the thing that made me snap. Am I boring you? I mean, she was kind of asking for it. ‘Yes, you are boring me. In fact, all of this bores me.’ I swept a hand around, gesturing at our surroundings. ‘And if I’m being honest, not everyone can afford to get all their Christmas shopping in December with a few days to spare and load it into their Range Rover in one big haul. Some people have to spread it out because they’re living paycheque to fucking paycheque with no hope of any lines of credit. So the next time you see some Christmas cards or chocolates or decorations for sale a little bit too early for you, just think, “Well, at least I’m lucky enough not to have to save up the pennies for a tub of Cadbury fucking Heroes.”’

  I finished my diatribe slightly out of breath. The woman looked stunned. Seconds passed that felt like lifetimes. The rain tap, tap, tapped on the glass ceiling above us. Then, at last, once the impact of my words had sunk in, she grabbed at the only line someone like her has to fall back on.

  ‘I’d like to make a formal complaint.’

  I kept very still, staring at her, trying to steady my breathing. After a few seconds, she continued.

  ‘May I have your name? I’ll need it for when I speak to your supervisor. Could you please send for him? I’d like to make my complaint straight away.’

  The fact she presumed my supervisor was a man riled me even more. But before I could respond with a biting comeback, a voice behind me said, ‘There’s no need to send for me. I’m here.’

  The normally kind voice of my manager, Allen, had a hard edge to it. More managerial than normal. ‘Rachel, could you please wait for me in my office. I’ll be with you in a moment.’

  I didn’t look at him. I couldn’t. I was embarrassed and angry, with both the woman and myself. I left through the doors at the wall to my right and let myself into his little office. Only once I was sitting on one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs inside did I unlock my phone and stare down again at the photo that had started it all.

  The photo of him.

  And I knew nothing Allen could do – no reprimand, no disciplinary action, no firing – could match the earth-shattering power of seeing that photo. From that day on, everything else in my life became background noise. Noise to be turned off, so I could start from scratch and refocus my life with one clear goal in mind.

  As soon as Allen walked in and lowered his overweight frame down behind the desk, I had made my decision. ‘I’d like to hand in my notice. I’m resigning.’

  His eyes widened a little. ‘Rachel, I don’t know what’s going on, but
whatever all this is about…’

  ‘It’s about nothing. I’d like to resign. And I’m going to move out of my room, too.’

  He looked more and more puzzled. ‘But … where are you going to go?’

  I took a deep breath, then said with conviction, ‘London. I’m moving to London.’

  Chapter Three

  Rachel

  Twelve months to go

  I cleared my flat in under an hour. That’s how long it took to scoop up my main possessions into my travel case and rucksack. The rest went in the recycling. I left a pile of food and an unopened bottle of skimmed milk at Allen’s front door. He was more baffled than angry that I was going so quickly, and he was a good man really, so I thought he could have these.

  I got a taxi to my dad’s house – my old family home – and dragged the bags from the pavement to the door, desperate to get inside and start my research.

  ‘Here, what on earth’s going on?’ he said, as soon as I got in the door.

  ‘Hi Dad,’ I said. ‘I’m stopping here, just for a few nights while I find somewhere new to live. That OK?’

  He stared at me with an open mouth as I started to haul the bags up the stairs.

  ‘But … but I don’t understand? I thought you said you were very comfortable in the flat above your manager’s house?’

  I sighed with the effort of the lifting, Dad still standing at the bottom of the stairs, too busy gawping at the situation to think of lending me a hand. ‘It didn’t work out. And anyway, flat is an overstatement, and it was above a garage, not a house. I’m better off out of there.’