Sheer Abandon (2 page)

AUGUST
1985

         They sat there in the departure lounge, on two separate benches, consulting the same departure board: three girls, strangers to one another, the faded jeans, the long hair, the beaded friendship bracelets, the sneakers, the small rucksacks (vastly bigger ones already checked in) all marking them out as backpackers, and about-to-be undergraduates. With school and parents shaken off, a few hundred pounds in their new bank accounts, round-the-world tickets in their wallets, they were moving off to travel a route that would take in one or all of a clearly defined set of destinations: Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Nepal and the Himalayas, and even the States.

They were very excited, slightly nervous, above all impatient for the journey to begin; constantly exchanging looks, half smiles with one another, moving slowly physically closer as more and more people filled the lounge and the space surrounding them.

It was the announcement that brought them finally together: the announcement that their flight to Bangkok had been delayed for three hours. Their eyes met, eyebrows raised, and they all stood, picking up their bags, moving towards one another, smiling, annoyed at so early an interruption to their journey, and yet welcoming it as an excuse to meet. They settled at a table, and, over some fairly unpleasant coffee, began to talk. Jocasta Forbes, tall and skinny with wild blond hair, opened the discussion; she was travelling, she said, with her brother Josh, “If he ever turns up. He’s the baby of the family, totally hopeless.”

“Like me. I’m the baby too,” said the second, “pretty hopeless as well I’d say…Clio,” she added, “spelt with an ‘i.’ Clio Scott.” She was neither tall nor skinny, distinctly plump indeed, but extremely pretty with dark curly hair and big sparkly brown eyes.

“And I’m the eldest,” said the third. “Martha Hartley…Not sure if I’m hopeless or not.” She smiled at the other two; studying her they felt sure she was not. Martha was not pretty in the conventional sense; she was small and pale with long straight brown hair, but she carried an air of quiet assurance with her that Jocasta with all her wild beauty lacked.

They chatted easily after that, discovering one another, liking one another increasingly; interrupted by Jocasta waving furiously across the room. “At last. You made it. Wow. Well there he is, everybody, my brother Josh.”

Martha and Clio watched him coming towards them; he looked so like Jocasta it was almost shocking. The same wild blond hair, the same dark blue eyes, the same just slightly crooked smile.

Edgy suddenly, Jocasta introduced him. “You’re incredibly alike,” said Clio, “you could be—”

“We know, we know. Twins. Everyone says so. But we’re not. Josh, why are you so late?”

“I lost my passport.”

“Josh, you’re so hopeless. And fancy only looking for it this morning.”

“I know, I know. Sorry.”

“Was Mum OK, saying goodbye to you? He’s her baby,” she added to the others, “can’t bear to let him out of her sight.”

“She was fine. How was your dinner with Dad?”

“It never took place. He didn’t get back till twelve. And this morning he had to rush to a meeting in Paris, so he couldn’t see me off either. What a surprise.”

“So how did you get here?”

“Oh, he put me in a cab.” Her expression was hard; her tone didn’t quite match it.

“Our parents are divorced,” Josh explained. “Usually we live with our mother but my dad wanted—”

“
Said
he wanted,” said Jocasta, “to spend yesterday evening with me. Anyway, very boring, let’s change the subject. I’m going to the loo.”

She walked away rather quickly.

There was a silence. Josh offered a pack of cigarettes, and Martha and Clio each took one. Josh’s arrival had brought a tension into the group that was a little uncomfortable. Time to withdraw, at least until the flight…

Their seats were far apart, but they managed to spend some of the flight together, standing in the aisles, chatting, swapping magazines, comparing routes and plans. They would all be going in different directions after a short time in Bangkok; even Josh and Jocasta were splitting, starting out together only to make their parents happy. They spent three days together in Bangkok, three extraordinary days in which they bonded absolutely, adjusting to the souplike heat, the polluted air, the uniquely invasive smell—“I’d call it a mix of rotting vegetables, traffic fumes, and poo,” said Clio cheerfully—staying in the same bleak guesthouse on the Khao San Road. It was an incredible and wonderful culture shock—hot, noisy, heaving with people, alight with Technicolor flashing signs, lined with massage and tattoo parlours and stalls selling everything from T-shirts to fake Rolexes and illicit CDs. Every other building was a guesthouse, and all along the street neon-lit cafés showed endless videos.

The girls all kept diaries, writing in them earnestly each night, and evolved a plan to meet in a year’s time to read of one another’s adventures.

Jocasta inevitably took hers particularly seriously. Reading it many years later, even while wincing at a rather mannered style, she was transported back to those early days, as they moved around the filthy, teeming, fascinating city. She felt the heat again, the nervousness, and along with it, the sense of total intrigue.

She tasted again the food, sold from stalls on the street, tiny chickens, “the size of a tenpence piece,” stuck four in a row on sticks, to be eaten bones and all, kebabs, even cockroaches and locusts, deep-fried in woks; she stared out again at the waterfalls of warm rain hitting the streets vertically, which, in five minutes, would have them ankle-deep in water—“Bangkok has the opposite of drainage”—shuddered again at the shantytown ghettos by the river, and smiled at the incredible near-standstill of traffic which filled the vast streets all day long, the overflowing buses, the tuk tuks—motorised three-wheel taxis—hurtling through the traffic, and the motor scooters transporting families of five, or occasionally glamorous young couples, snogging happily as they sat in the midst of the fumes.

They went to Pat Pong, the red-light district, and watched the lady-boys plying their trade—“You can tell they’re men, they’re much better turned out than the women”—to the post office to write to their parents and tell them where they were, checked the poste restante desk where a horde of backpackers queued to pick up letters from home, messages from friends arranging meetings; they water-taxied through the stinking canals, shocked at the poverty of the hovels where the river people lived, wondered at the gilded and bejewelled palace and temples, and visited the shopping centre, packed with Gucci and Chanel—“This is mostly for rich men’s mistresses apparently, and you can get real tea, not the endless Lipton’s, wonderful!”

What none of them wrote about—with that year-off meeting in mind—was the other girls, or even Josh, but they learned a great deal about one another very quickly in those three days. That Jocasta had fought a lifelong battle with Josh to gain her father’s affection and attention; that Clio had grown up miserably envious of her older sisters’ beauty and brilliance; that Martha’s jokey complaints about her straitlaced family masked a fierce defensiveness of them; and that Josh, easily charming, brilliant Josh, was both arrogant and lazy. They learnt that Jocasta for all her wild beauty lacked self-confidence; that Clio felt herself acutely dull; that Martha longed above all things for money.

“I do plan to be really rich,” she said one night as they sat in one of the endless bars, drinking one cocktail after another, daring one another to eat the deep-fried bugs. “And I mean
really
rich.”

And when they parted, Clio and Jocasta on their way down to Koh Samui, Josh for his trip north, and Martha for a couple more days in Bangkok while deciding exactly what to do, they felt they had been friends for years.

“We’ll ring each other when we get back,” said Jocasta, giving Martha a last hug, “but if one of us doesn’t, we’ll track her down somehow. There’ll be no escape.”

But they knew there would be no need for tracking down; it would be a race to the phone. They would want to see one another again more than anything in the world.

Chapter 1

AUGUST
2000

         She always felt exactly the same. It surprised her. Relieved. Excited. And a bit ashamed. Walking away, knowing she’d done it, resisting the temptation to look back, carefully subdued—she could still remember old Bob at the news agency telling her one of the prime qualities for a good reporter was acting ability. Of course, the shame was pretty rare, but if it was a real tragedy, then it did lurk about, the feeling that she was a parasite, making capital out of someone else’s unhappiness.

This had been a horror to do; a baby in its pushchair, hit by a stolen car; the driver hadn’t stopped, had been caught by the police fifty miles away. The baby was in intensive care and it was touch and go whether he would live; the parents had been angry as well as grief-stricken, sitting, clutching each other’s hands on the bench just outside the hospital door.

“He’ll get what—three years?” the young father had said, lighting his ninth cigarette of the interview—Jocasta always counted things like that, it helped add colour. “And then get on with his life. Our little chap’s only had eight months and he could be gone forever. It makes me sick. I tell you, they should lock them up forever for this sort of thing, lock them up and throw away the key—”

She could see her headline then, and hated herself for seeing it.

While she was in the middle of writing her story, she got an e-mail from the office: could she do a quick piece on Pauline Prescott’s hair (a hot topic ever since her husband had made it his excuse for taking the car out to drive a hundred yards); they would send a picture down the line to her. Jocasta, wrenching her mind off the desperately injured baby, wondered if any other job in the world imposed such extraordinarily diverse stress at such short notice. She filed that copy via her mobile and had just returned to the baby when her phone rang.

“Is that you, Miss—”

“Jocasta, yes,” she said, recognising the voice of the baby’s father. “Yes, Dave, it’s me. Any news?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, he’s going to be all right, he’s going to pull through, we just saw him, he actually managed a smile!”

“Dave, I’m so glad, so very glad,” said Jocasta, hugely relieved, not only that the baby was going to live but that she was so touched by it, looking at her screen through a blur of tears.

Not a granite-hearted reporter yet, then.

She filed the story, and checked her e-mails; there was an assortment of junk, one from her brother telling her their mother was missing her and to phone her, a couple from friends—and one that made her smile. “Hello, Heavenly Creature. Meet me at the House when you’re back. Nick.”

She mailed Nick back, telling him she’d be there by nine, then, rather reluctantly, dialled her mother’s number. And flicking through her diary, knowing her mother would want to make some arrangement for the week, realised it was exactly fifteen years to the day since she had set off for Thailand, in search of adventure. She always remembered it. Well, of course she would. Always. She wondered if the other two did. And what they might be doing. They’d never had their promised reunion. She thought that every year as well, how they had promised one another—and never kept the promise. Probably just as well, though. Given everything that had happened…

Nick Marshall was the political editor on the
Sketch
, Jocasta’s paper; he worked not in the glossy building on Canary Wharf but in one of the shabby offices above the press galleries at the House of Commons. “More like what newsrooms used to be,” one of the old-timers had told Jocasta. And indeed many journalists, who remembered Fleet Street when it had been a genuine, rather than a notional, location for newspapers, envied the political writers for working at the heart of things, rather than in shining towers a long cab ride away.

It always seemed to Jocasta that political and newspaper life were extraordinarily similar; both being male orientated, run on gossip and booze (there was no time in the day or night when it was not possible to get a drink at the House of Commons), and with a culture of great and genuine camaraderie between rivals as well as colleagues. She loved them both.

Nick met her in Central Lobby and took her down to Annie’s Bar in the bowels of the House, the preserve of MPs, lobby correspondents, and sketch writers. He ushered her towards a small group in the middle; Jocasta grinned round at them.

“Hi, guys. So what’s new here? Any hot stories?”

“Pretty lukewarm,” said Euan Gregory, sketch writer on the
Sunday News
. “Labour lead shrinking, Blair losing touch, shades of Maggie, too much spin—you name it, we’ve heard it before. Isn’t that right, Nick?”

“’Fraid so.” He handed her a glass of wine. “Pleased to see me?”

“Of course.” And she was, she was.

“Good thing somebody loves him,” said Gregory. “He’s in trouble here.”

“Really, Nick? Why?”

“Over-frank on lunchtime radio. Spin doctors very cross!”

“I wish I’d heard you.”

“I’ve got it on tape,” said Nick with a grin. “Good. I’m going to take you out to dinner.”

“My God. What have I done to deserve this?”

“Nothing. I’m hungry and I can see nothing interesting’s going to happen here.”

“You’re such a gentleman, you know that?” said Jocasta, draining her glass.

In fact Nick
was
a gentleman; nobody was quite sure what he was doing in the world of the tabloid press. His father was a very rich farmer and Nick had got a double first in classics at Oxford. He had rather old-fashioned manners—at any rate, with the older generation—and was much mocked for standing when a grown-up, as he put it, came into the room. But he had developed an early passion for politics and after an initial foray into the real thing had decided he could move into the corridors of power faster via the political pages of a newspaper. He was a brilliant investigative journalist, and came up with scoop after scoop, the most famous, if least important, of which was the revelation that a prominent Tory minister bought all his socks and underpants at charity shops.

It had been love at first sight, Jocasta always said, for her. Nick had walked into the newsroom of the
Sketch
on her first day there, fresh from a news agency in the west country, and she had gone literally weak at the knees. Told he was the political editor, she had assumed, joyfully, that she would see him every day; the discovery that he only came in for the occasional editors’ conference, or one-to-one meetings with Chris Pollock, the editor, was a serious blow. As was the news that he had a girlfriend on every paper. She wasn’t surprised; he was (as well as extremely tall: about six foot four) very good-looking in an untidy sort of way, with shaggy brown hair, large mournful brown eyes set deep beneath equally shaggy brows, a long and straight nose, and what she could only describe rather helplessly as a completely sexy mouth. He was very thin and slightly ungainly with large hands and feet, altogether a bit like an overgrown schoolboy; he was hopeless at all games, but he was a fine runner and had already done the New York as well as the London marathon, and could be seen early every morning, no matter how drunk he had been the night before, loping round Hampstead Heath where he lived.

It was not entirely true that he had a girlfriend on every paper, but women adored him. His secret was that he adored them back; he found them intriguing, entertaining, and treated them, certainly initially, with a rather old-world courtesy. When Jocasta Forbes arrived on the
Sketch
he rather miraculously had no one permanent in his life.

She had pursued him fervently and shamelessly for several months; she would feel she was really making progress, having flirted manically through evening after evening and been told how absolutely gorgeous he thought she was, only to hear nothing from him for weeks until some newspaper happening brought them together again. She had been in despair until one night, about a year previously, when they had both got extremely drunk at a
Spectator
party, and she had decided a proactive approach was the only one that was going to get her anywhere and started to kiss him with great determination. Unwilling, this time, to leave anything to chance, she then suggested they go back to her place. Nick declared himself hooked.

“I’ve admired you for so long, you have absolutely no idea.”

“No,” she said crossly, “I haven’t. I’ve made it very clear I admired you, though.”

“I know, but I thought you were just being kind. I thought a girl who looked like you was bound to have a dozen boyfriends.”

“Oh for God’s sake,” said Jocasta, and got into bed beside him and their relationship had been finally—and happily—sealed.

Although certainly not signed. And it troubled Jocasta. She stayed at his flat sometimes, and he at hers (in which case it was Clapham Common he loped across), but they were very much an item, recognising that the next step would be moving in together. Nick said repeatedly that there was absolutely no hurry for this: “We both work horrendous hours, and we’re perfectly happy, why change things?”

Jocasta could see several reasons for changing things, the strongest being that they had been together for well over a year and if they were so happy, then that was a very good reason indeed to change things. There was also the fact that she was thirty-three, which meant that next birthday she would be thirty-four and everyone knew that thirty-five was the age when being single stopped being a statement of independence and started being a worry. She loved Nick, and she was fairly sure he loved her, although he seldom said so, and usually then with that preface so hated by women: “Of course.” And she felt, with increasing intensity, that the time had come for some proper commitment. At the moment, it seemed no nearer; and it was beginning to worry her. Quite a lot.

“Where are you taking me then?” she said, as they walked into the long corridor.

“Covent Garden,” he said. “Mon Plaisir. I don’t want to see anyone in the business tonight.”

This was unusual; one of the downsides of having a romantic evening with Nick was that he was so in love with his job and so deeply fond of everyone he worked with that she often thought if he ever did get around to proposing to her, and was down on his knees and he saw Trevor Kavanagh from the
Sun
or Eben Black of the
Sunday Times
across the room, he would call them over to join them.