Extract 8

Never had a day been so designed to test Jane’s patience to the full. She returned from the sandwich shop to find a letter from the BBC asking Champagne to go on Desert Island Discs and recommending she choose a mixture of contemporary and classical music. Jane snorted. Probably as far as Champagne was aware, Ravel was a shoe shop, Telemann someone who came to fix the video and Handel something that her bulging designer shopping bags were suspended from. None of this improved the fact that top of her list of jobs this afternoon was getting more column inches out of Champagne.

Jane delayed the evil moment as long as possible, rummaging about her desk and returning telephone calls, sometimes to people who hadn’t even called in the first place. Eventually, however, she bowed to the inevitable.

‘What are you doing calling this early?’ barked the sleepy, furious voice at the other end. Jane looked at the clock. ‘It’s ten past three, Champagne,’ she said with exaggerated patience. ‘In the afternoon, that is.’

‘Is it? Oh. Had no idea. Bloody late night last night,’ honked Champagne.

Jane hardly dared breathe, let alone say anything that might knock Champagne off this particular train of thought. Like a truffling pig, she had caught the first tantalising whiffs of that rare and precious commodity Anecdote. ‘Really?’ she asked gently. ‘What were you doing?’

‘Went to the races with Conal. Bloody good fun, actually.’

‘Which ones? Sandown? Kempton Park?’

‘No, the East End somewhere.’

Jane frowned. Which of the racecourses was actually in London? None, as far as she knew.

‘Bloody funny horses,’ Champagne continued. ‘Really weird and small-looking. Went bloody fast, though.’

The penny dropped. ‘Do you mean you’ve been to Walthamstow?’ Jane gasped. ‘The dog track?’ Conal O’Shaughnessy had clearly been attempting to inculcate Champagne into working-class culture. Jane was not sure how successful he’d been.

‘Yah, and then we went for supper,’ Champagne recalled after a few minutes’ hard thought. ‘Conal tried to make me have a green Thai curry but I told him no way was I going to eat anything made out of ties. Particularly green ones. Hermes ones I might have considered.’

Extract 9

‘What’s bitten you?’ Jane asked. She had just arrived in the office to find Josh with a face like thunder.

‘Only that Luke Skywalker’s had an accident ski-ing,’ Josh grumbled. Luke Skywalker was the Gorgeous astro­loger. Or, rather, the astrologer for Gorgeous. Even the most flattering of byline pictures had not succeeded in making Luke’s unkempt, stringy hair, large nose and doleful eyes appealing. And he probably looked much worse now.

‘Oh, poor Luke,’ said Jane. ‘Is he OK?’

‘Not really,’ said Josh irritably. ‘The clumsy bastard mashed into a rock and now he’s got amnesia. Can’t even remember the past, let alone predict the future. You’d have thought he’d have seen it coming.’

Jane raised her eyebrows as she sat down and started to poke about her desk. In an attempt to impose some order on the chaos of her life, she had recently taken to noting down the next day’s most important tasks on a Post It before she left the office the evening before. This morning, she gazed at the little primrose sticker and sighed. Top of the list was ringing Champagne.

She tried the mobile last. It ground away, unanswered. Jane had just decided to put it down when someone at the other end picked it up.

‘Yah?’ barked Champagne, over what sounded like loud banging and sloshing sounds in the background.

‘It’s Jane. How are you?’ asked Jane, trying to sound enthusiastic.

‘Fine. Just got back from shooting, in fact,’ honked Champagne. ‘With the Sisse-Pooles in Scotland. Bloody awful.’

‘Oh, I hate blood sports too,’ agreed Jane, starting to scribble down the conversation for the column. ‘So dreadfully cruel.’

‘Hideously cruel,’ Champagne agreed, much to Jane’s surprise. ‘Making people stagger over the moors in the peeing rain wearing clothes the colour of snot is absolutely the worst, the most inhuman thing you can do to anyone. Let’s face it,’ Champagne added, in the face of Jane’s stunned silence, ‘I’m just not an outdoor type of girl. The only hills I care about are Beverly.’

And the only kind of shoots you care about are movie ones, the only Moores you’re interested are Demi and Roger and the only bags that grab you are by Prada, thought Jane, working up the theme for the new column and scribbling furiously. And we all know whose butts you’re most interested in at the moment. Unless, that is, you’ve been poached by a loaded gun.

That, at least, was a thought worth probing. ‘Who were you shooting with?’ Jane asked. It didn’t sound like a very O’Shaughnessy activity. Perhaps Champagne had dumped him for some vague, weatherbeaten blond lord with a faceful of broken veins, a labrador and vast tracts of Yorkshire. Tim Nice Butt Dim.

‘Well, Conal, of course, who the hell do you think?’ came the booming honk. Slosh, slosh went the mystery background noise. ‘The Sisse-Pooles asked him along as well. He had a blast, actually. Haw haw haw. God, I’m runny.’

Jane gritted her teeth. ‘How did he do?’ she asked, trying to imagine the determinedly working-class O’Shaughnessy stumbling around a moor with a collection of portly patricians in plus fours.

‘Only thing he shot was one of the beaters,’ boomed Champagne. ‘But that didn’t matter. Bloke was as old as the hills anyway. Oh yes,’ hollered Champagne over the noise, ‘Conal had a great time. He likes a good bang as much as the next man. Haw haw haw.’

‘So you’re still together?’ The relationship with O’Shaughnessy had now lurched past the fortnight mark. In Champagne’s book, that was practically the equivalent of a diamond wedding.

‘Bloody right we are,’ bawled Champagne. ‘More than that, we’re getting married!’

Jane’s pen dropped with a clatter to the floor. ‘Married?’ Despite being separated from the conversation by the glass wall of his office, Josh’s head shot up like Apollo 9.

‘Yah, Conal asked me last night,’ screeched Champagne excitedly. At least, I think that’s what he said. Might have said “Will you carry me” as he was a bit out of it at the time. But by the time he came round, I’d dragged him into Tiffany’s. Couldn’t go back on his word then!’ She roared with laughter.

The banging and swishing seemed to reach a climax. Champagne’s voice was now barely audible over the terrific sloshing noise, as if she was caught in a terrible storm, Jane finally decided to voice the suspicion that had been building for some time. ‘Champagne,’ she asked, ‘are you filing your column from the shower?’

‘Not exactly,’ bellowed Champagne. ‘I’m just test-driving my new whirlpool bath. It’s amazing. Some of the jets do frankly thrilling things.’

Jane put down the phone feeling sick. Champagne’s wedding was a nauseating prospect. Day after day, Jane realised, she would be forcibly reminded of her own single status as Champagne banged on relentlessly about what would most certainly be the Media Wedding of The Year. The only bright side to it was the fact that if her wedding was splashed all over Hello!, even Champagne might be able to remember something about it for the column.