Namedropper by Emma Forrest

Author:Emma Forrest
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

We drove to Brighton. I felt sick all the way. Ray’s car is full of empty cheese and onion crisp packets and his radio is jammed to Capital FM, which fades to a hiss once you get past Burgh Heath. I put my feet on the dashboard and he snapped at me to sit up properly or he would take me home.

I went very quiet for half an hour. Then I pulled my eyebrows down over my eyes and whimpered, “I want to see the hotel where he was drinking,” with the same voice and expression I used at age four to demand ice cream.

He should have told me off, but instead he chose to ignore me. He doesn’t even find me cute anymore. When I first met Ray, he thought I was adorable, just about the cutest thing he ever did see.

“Fucking hell, Viva. I could be back in London, at a party or having a shag. I’ve met a girl.”

“Congratulations. I’ve met a girl before in my life too.” I stared at his ear, behind which he had tucked his shiny hair and a half-smoked cigarette.

Then he shut up for half an hour until we were in Brighton, when he suddenly banged his hand against the wheel and exclaimed, “God. You bring so much baggage with you.”

“I haven’t brought anything,” I smirked.

“I mean, emotional.”

“I know what you mean.”

“I know you know.”

He was being so boring. “Oh God, shut up, Harold Pinter. Enough with the pregnant pauses. Fine. I don’t see why this whole thing should be such hard work. If you’re really my friend, you must want to help me find out what happened to the love of my life.”

“The love of your life?” he screeched.

“Yes. I know you think I’m being a teenage girl. Well, you’re right. That’s exactly what I’m being. Okay, it’s out of character and you find it a bit unsettling, but I think it’s my right. People who work in offices are allowed five weeks’ holiday a year. Five weeks a year I should be allowed to behave like a teenage girl and not like Norman Mailer, or whoever it is you keep confusing me with. You picked the wrong self-obsessed Jew.”

He kept one arm on the steering wheel and looked slyly over at me, probably to check whether I was Viva and not Norman Mailer. “Fine, you’ve decided you’re in love. Whatever. But this is serious. A man has taken his own life. Viva, it’s not a picnic. You’re talking like a cross between Ruth Rendell and Enid Blyton. You want murder and chips.”

“I don’t bloody want murder. That’s the last thing I want. I hadn’t even thought of it. Damn, now I have to wonder about that too. Thanks a lot, Ray. By the way, I do want chips.”

We parked in Ship Street and found a good chip shop, which is not hard to do in Brighton, and sat on the pebbles with our two-pronged forks.

“Pebbles. How stupid,” Ray muttered through a mouth full of potato squish.

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