Remember My Name Read online

  ‘I can’t even believe you’re saying you don’t know. That either means you think so little about me that you don’t even remember discussing me in an interview, or you’re lying. Either way, it all spells bitch. I don’t know why I even waited out there for you …’

  I stared at him, feeling fragments of memory bind together in the confusion soup that was my brain. Discussing him in an interview? I did discuss him in an interview—the one that Vogue had said had gone online. The one about our night out after the single launch. The one that used a picture of us outside McDonald’s. Could that be it? Could that be what had upset him so much?

  ‘Erm … do your friends think you’re a vegetarian?’ I asked, realising as the words tumbled from my mouth how ridiculous they sounded.

  ‘NO!’ he shouted, standing up tall and waving his hands at me. It probably would have looked a little more intimidating if he wasn’t so short, but he made up for it with his absolute fury. His eyes were full of tears as well, and I guessed he suffered from the same disease as me—crying when he was angry as well as crying when he was sad.

  ‘You said I was gay! In an interview! With a national newspaper!’

  ‘But … you are gay, aren’t you? Surely you are—you snogged about four people that night, and they were all blokes!’

  He sighed, completely exasperated with me, and I felt really sorry for him. I knew I was drunk, and being dense, and making things even worse, but I didn’t quite have the mental wherewithal to pull myself back together.

  ‘Yes, Jess. I am gay. But my parents—my extremely religious, extremely conservative parents—don’t know that. Or, they didn’t know that—until they started getting calls from friends asking if they’d seen the story about their Neale. Now they do know—and they might never talk to me again! How dare you discuss me like that?’

  I sat down heavily, feeling the horror of what he was saying seep through me bit by bit. It wouldn’t be a big deal in my house if one of us was gay; but clearly, Neale’s house was a different kettle of fish.

  ‘Okay … right. But, how did they not know? It’s so completely obvious …’

  ‘Does that even matter, Jess? Maybe I’m less of a flaming queen when I’m at home. Maybe they don’t know any gay people and aren’t quite sure what the signs are. Maybe you should have just kept your big, fat mouth shut!’

  ‘Couldn’t this be, I don’t know, a good thing? I mean, my mum and dad would still love me if I told them I was a lesbian … surely they won’t mind that much?’

  He stared at me, as though he couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing, and I suddenly wished I was recording this whole conversation on my phone so I could listen to it the next morning. I knew I was going to wake up with that horrible, vague self-worth problem, knowing I’d said loads of stupid things but not quite sure what, and having to piece it all together as the flashbacks came.

  ‘You are unbelievable, Jess. Completely unbelievable. My relationship with my parents is absolutely none of your business—and it’s certainly not your place to decide to break the news to them that their only son is gay. I might have told them, one day, when I felt it was the right time. But that would have been when I decided—not you, Jess! It’s nothing to do with you—you’ve created this whole stinking drama, and now you’re trying to convince me it could be a good thing? And somehow judging my parents for not being as cool as yours?’

  I really wanted to say something in return, but couldn’t think of a single thing that made sense and that wouldn’t make the situation worse. Not a single word. Instead, I just flapped my lips like a goldfish, and tried to look contrite.

  After a few seconds of me not replying, Neale threw his coffee mug at the sink. An arc of black liquid sloshed out of it and splattered all over the wall, and the mug itself shattered as it landed. We both jumped at the noise.

  ‘You,’ he said, pointing his finger at me accusingly, ‘need to learn when to keep your mouth shut. You also need to find yourself a new stylist, because I’m out.’

  As he stalked towards the door, slamming it behind him as hard as he could, a single word finally came to mind. The one I should simply have said to start with.

  Sorry.

  Chapter 32

  The next few days were among the weirdest I’d ever experienced in my entire life. I had an official number one single; I had a massive row with my parents; and I took blackmail photos of my cheating scumbag boyfriend. I also had to get to know a brand new stylist, as Neale had disappeared home for a few days, and wasn’t returning my calls. No matter how many messages I left, he ignored me—and part of me didn’t blame him. I’d let my big mouth run away with me again, and he was the one dealing with the consequences.

  Predictably enough, the morning after the night before was hellish. I had a hangover the size of Mount Everest, coffee stains on my kitchen wall, and a massive dose of man-related misery. That thing happened where for just a few seconds, after you first wake up, you forget how sad you’re feeling and everything seems normal—and then you remember and it all crashes in on you like an avalanche of pain.

  I couldn’t believe what Jack had done to me. What he’d done to Vogue. That we’d both fallen for it, both fallen for him. Everything I thought I’d loved about him was now soured. Even remembering the great sex made me feel a bit sick—knowing now, as I did, that it wasn’t in any way exclusive. At least not on his side—I might have cast a few curious glances in Daniel’s direction, but I’d never done anything about it. I just wasn’t that person.

  I felt so violated and betrayed, and cursed with vivid images of Jack with me, and Jack with her, and Jack with God-knows-who. In the end, I had to try not to ponder it too deeply—I was sure, if I tried hard enough, I’d be able to pinpoint days where he went from me to her or vice versa, but I’d probably go mad in the process.

  It was all just too disgusting to contemplate, and I couldn’t think of a single time I’d spent with him without it being tainted. Even the innocent stuff—the walks around Hyde Park, the coffee shop dates, the Italian meals—felt ruined now. It had all been a lie—everything he’d claimed to feel about me had been a lie. Presumably he lied for sex, or for control, or just because he was a psycho bastard—I had no idea.

  None of it was making me feel good about myself. My last boyfriend, Evan the window cleaner, had cheated on me as well. There was a pattern emerging. I spent hours feeling sorry for myself, thinking that maybe it was something to do with me. Maybe I was crap in bed, or ugly, or boring. There must be something wrong, if this kept happening to me—I must be defective in some way. And maybe it would keep on happening—perhaps I was just one of those women, fated never to be able to keep a man loyal.

  Plus, if the situation with Neale was anything to go by, I wasn’t even capable of keeping a friend either. In fact, I was an all-round loser—even my own family was pissed off with me.

  I’d called home later in the afternoon the day after, following a cathartic scrubbing session where I’d cleaned the coffee marks from the kitchen paintwork. I don’t know what I’d hoped for—perhaps to tell them something of what was going on. Tell them my heart was broken. Tell them about Neale. Tell them I felt sad and lonely and lost and blue.

  Except it didn’t quite work out like that. My mum answered, and at first it was fine—the usual chit chat about life in general, catching up on neighbourhood gossip that now seemed to have no relevance to my world, discussing Becky’s birth plan, Nan’s latest trip to the diabetes clinic, and a few digs about the fact that I’d bothered to call at all.

  I suppose that put me on the defensive—I knew she was right. I hadn’t called for days, hadn’t even messaged them or sent one of my traditional selfies. There had been reasons for that, but she didn’t know them. Being blatantly, horribly honest, I’d called her because I needed a shoulder to cry on, and I wasn’t that interested in what was going on at their end. It all sounded a bit petty and pointless compared to what I was going through—which tells y
ou a lot about how messed up my head was.

  ‘So,’ she’d said, after filling me in on everything I wasn’t bothered about, ‘when are you coming up for Christmas, love? We can’t wait to see you, especially your nan. She saw a picture of you on the front page of the Echo, at a film premiere or something—Becky tells me you were wearing Prada, but your nan’s convinced you bought the entire outfit with her Matalan gift voucher.’

  I laughed at that one, and promised not to tell her otherwise. The conversation went downhill from that point on, when I had to break the news that, actually, I wouldn’t be making it home for Christmas at all. I’d been booked to film a live TV broadcast from London, along with Vogue and several other big names in music. I was the newest and the least famous of all of them, and it was quite a big break to have even been invited—plus, I would be getting paid a ludicrous amount of money.

  The only problem was, of course, that I’d have to be here. In London. Not in Liverpool with my family.

  My mum had gone silent, and I waited for the barrage of abuse that was about to come my way—I even held the phone away from the side of my head just in case the noise levels exploded my ear drums.

  Instead, she was just quiet, which was kind of even worse. Eventually, just as I thought maybe she’d passed out and I should be calling 999 and ordering an ambulance, she spoke.

  ‘I see, love. Well, if that’s what’s best for your career, then that’s what you’d better do. Your nan will be disappointed, though. She’s not really well enough to travel down there and see you, like we are. And I don’t want to be a drama queen, but she might not have those many Christmases left, you know.’

  ‘I’ll make it up to her,’ I said, feeling even worse than I had when I picked up the phone. ‘I’ll get her a brill pressie.’

  That, apparently, was the wrong thing to say. Which was fast becoming my specialist subject.

  ‘I don’t think she really needs anything, Jessy. She’s eighty-five and lives in sheltered accommodation—what are you going to get her, a Mercedes mobility scooter? All she really wants from you is your time, which seems to be the one thing you’re not willing to give.’

  ‘I can’t help it, Mum! It’s not my fault!’

  ‘Well, we all make our choices, love. We all do what we think is best—but I’m telling you now, living with those choices afterwards is the real challenge. Saying things weren’t your fault doesn’t really help when you realise how much you regret something.’

  Right then, the only thing I regretted was calling my mum in the first place. Or at least calling my mum and not bursting into tears straight away. This hadn’t gone the way I’d planned at all—which meant it fitted in perfectly with the rest of the disaster zone that was my life. I hadn’t planned to fall in love with a man who was already in a relationship with one of my friends. I hadn’t planned to alienate my family, or Ruby. And I hadn’t planned to destroy Neale’s entire life. Maybe, I thought, it was time to actually start planning—and not just keep stumbling along hoping everything would be all right.

  ‘Okay, Mum. Message received and understood. I’ll see you in the New Year.’

  I’d hung up before the tears started. I knew they were coming, and I knew they were because I was angry as well as suffering on account of Jack. I also knew that I had to start taking some action, and I texted Vogue straight away.

  We arranged to meet at her place, both of us looking and feeling like microwaved crap, and set up a battle station at her kitchen table.

  She sympathised about the situation with Neale, saying that one of the biggest lessons you had to learn once you were famous was ‘how to think before you open your mouth’, and encouraged me to try and make up with my family. I understood where she was coming from on that one—but at the end of the day, just as Neale had said to me, my relationship with my family was my business, and nobody else’s.

  I was more than happy, though, to listen to her ideas about Jack Duncan—and how we could both make ourselves feel better by giving him a dose of some very nasty medicine.

  Once we had all our plans in place—which happened pretty quickly, as being screwed over by your boyfriend seems to be a great motivator—we high fived each other and agreed to put the dastardly deed into action the night after.

  Jack, bless him, made it all very easy for us. I spoke to him on the phone, and invited him round to the flat for a ‘special night in’. After that, there was a spate of saucy messages between us all day, with the tone getting racier and racier with each one. Little did he know that far from me sitting there getting turned on, I was actually sitting there crying, and wondering if I’d ever trust a man again. It was hard to keep the façade up all day—but I managed it.

  I had a lot riding on my ability to make this work—we didn’t just want to pay Jack back, we wanted to make sure he couldn’t ever hurt us. At the end of the day, neither Vogue nor I could simply cut him out of our lives—he existed. Starmaker existed. We needed Starmaker for our careers—so killing Jack and mincing his body up in a sausage machine wasn’t going to be possible.

  By the time he arrived, I was in a state of absolute madness. I’d had two glasses of wine, changed into a flimsy black baby-doll outfit that I’d bought for the occasion, and done my hair and make-up to the very best of my abilities. The negligée was all sheer net and lace, and I was wearing matching fishnet stockings and suspenders—I needed to look like a knock out. I needed to look so good, he wouldn’t notice there was anything wrong with the way I was behaving.

  It worked. As soon as I answered the door and he took one look at my outfit, he was all over me—there was no time for talking, no time for me to crack up and start swearing at him, and no time for me to look into those big, brown eyes of his and start sobbing. Instead, we started kissing, and I led him over to the bed and pushed him down onto it.

  He lay there looking up at me as I straddled him and started to undo his buttons, clearly thrilled beyond belief at this new dominatrix side of me. Every time he started to talk, I shut him up with a kiss—not that I wanted to kiss him, or ever touch him again, but it was better than engaging in a conversation with him. I didn’t trust myself that far.

  Within a few minutes, he was stark naked and chained to the bedpost by the pink fluffy handcuffs I’d been sent for free after my first gig at Panache. The ones I’d swiped before Patty could veto them, and had had in my wardrobe ever since, Just waiting for the right chance to use them. I hadn’t imagined this would be it—but there you go. Life is full of unexpected little twists, isn’t it?

  Once I had the cuffs on and I’d tied his ankles snugly with black silk scarves, I leapt off him, and took a moment to tidy myself up before I called my partner in crime.

  ‘Jess?’ he said, looking confused—his boy parts still bobbing around in excitement, his hair all messed up, and his wrists starting to pull at the cuffs. Only a few days ago, I’d have been pleased as punch to see his gorgeous body stretched out on my bed; now I just felt sad. ‘What are you doing? Where are you going?’

  ‘You know that newspaper article, Jack?’ I said, walking towards the bedroom door and opening it. ‘The one about me having a threesome?’

  He nodded, and I saw a flash of curiosity in his eyes and a smug smile curling his lips. Lips that had been on every part of my body, which now made me want to remove my skin with sandpaper. He looked so happy—he genuinely seemed to think that his wildest pervy dreams were about to come true, and I was going to bring out Ruby or some other friend, and all three of us would have wild, S&M-flavoured group sex.

  He was partly right—I did have a friend with me. Strangely enough, though, he didn’t look too happy when he saw who it was.

  For the first time ever, I saw Jack lost for words, as he gazed up at both of his girlfriends—both of his furious looking girlfriends—and realised that he was handcuffed to a bed with no way of escaping our wrath. He wasn’t just facing one woman scorned—he was facing two. He started to wriggle and tug at t
he bed post, trying to get away, and finally found a few words—really rubbish, predictable, pathetic ones along the lines of ‘Wait, wait, I can explain!’

  Vogue didn’t give him the chance to explain anything. She covered the distance between the door and the bed in two long strides, and was on top of him, grinning with way too much relish.

  ‘Now,’ she said, stroking his face in a scary parody of affection, ‘we can play this two ways. You can scream and wriggle and fight, and I’ll cut your balls off. No. Don’t argue. You know what my temper is like, Jack—you know I’ll do it. Jess and I have discussed this, and we’ll back each other up—we’ll say you wanted to play some kind of perverted sex game that went horribly and tragically wrong. I have no idea how long it’ll take you to bleed to death, because we won’t be in that much of a rush to call the paramedics … and even if you do survive, you’ll be living the rest of your life without your bollocks. How does that sound?’

  Jack had paled to the point where he resembled Casper the Ghost, and his lower lip was trembling as he tried to find words. I was actually a little worried about Vogue at that point, I have to admit—we had, in fact, never discussed our evil plan for a pretend sex-game-gone-wrong, although it wasn’t a bad idea. It was certainly working on Jack, whose crotch was looking a lot less happy than it had been a few minutes earlier.

  ‘Erm …’ he mumbled, eyes never leaving Vogue’s determined face. ‘What’s option number two?’

  ‘You apologise, nicely, to both of us. You promise to never, ever do anything like this again to any other woman. And you guarantee that this little exchange of views will have no effect at all on our careers. At some point, when we want something from you, we get it—no questions asked. Simply because you owe us, you cheating fuck.’

  ‘Yes!’ he snapped, quickly, desperately. ‘I agree! Yes!’

  ‘And,’ I added, getting our bag of goodies out of the wardrobe, ‘you take part in a little photoshoot with us, Jack … you know how important image is, right?’