The Chocolate Run

by Dorothy Koomson

Genres: Romance; Contemporary Romance; Romantic Comedy

Synopsis

A funny and uplifting romantic comedy with plenty of love, lust and chocolate!

'I didn't mean to, honest to goodness I didn't. It just happened.'

Amber Salpone doesn't mean to keep ending up in bed with her friend Greg Walterson, but she can't help herself. And after every time it 'just happens' their secret affair moves closer to being a real relationship, which is a big problem when he's a womaniser and she's a commitment-phobe.

While Amber struggles to accept her new feelings for Greg, she also realises that her closeness to Jen, her best friend, is slipping away and the two of them are becoming virtual strangers. Slowly but surely, as the stark truths of all their lives are revealed, Amber has to confront the fact that chocolate can't cure everything and sometimes running away isn't an option...

(P)2023 Headline Publishing Group Ltd

Release date: August 9, 2018

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 389

Sample

chapter one

give us a break

You’re floating on a sea of chocolate.

Soft, warm, sweet, sensual chocolate . . . soothing, calming, velvety chocolate. It’s lapping over your tired, naked body. Covering it. Caressing it. Taking away all your aches and troubles. Everything, the world, reality, people, washed away by the fluttering of chocolate against your skin. Peacefully, mil—

‘I’ll, er, be off then.’

That doesn’t sound like part of my chocolate nirvana. I cracked open a sleep-deprived eye, checked my surroundings.

Oh. I wasn’t drifting on a creamy, cocoa-based ocean after all. I was hunched up on my sofa with my knees pulled up to my chest, my forehead resting on my knees, and my off-white towelling dressing gown pulled around my naked body. I didn’t need a mirror to know my face was saggy from lack of rest; my black-brown eyes were ringed with crusts of sleep; and my usually neat, cheek-length black hair stood up in so many peaks and spikes it resembled a Gothic wrought iron sculpture. Nope, couldn’t get further from my heaven if I tried. Especially when there’s a man stood in my living room yammering on about leaving.

Moving like a woman approaching the gallows, I lifted my head and turned to face him.

Greg was dressed: midnight-blue, wide-rib jumper under a knee-length coat. Navy blue jeans. Black record bag slung across his body. Dressed. Fully dressed. Why am I surprised? If he’s leaving, he’d hardly be stood in his underpants, would he?

He looked back at me, obviously waiting for me to speak. To respond to his statement of intent to leave.

I played for time by lowering my legs, careful not to flash anything under my dressing gown. I started to fiddle with a spike of my black hair, winding it around my index finger as I tried to make eye contact without looking at him.

How am I supposed to act? It’s been so long since I’ve done this, I’ve forgotten how it goes. Am I meant to be casual? Blasé? Keen? Serene? Desperate?

Then there’s the speaking thing. What am I supposed to say? ‘So long and thanks for all the sex?’ or ‘Go away and never darken my bedroom again?’

And what about breakfast? I’m pretty sure you’re meant to offer it. But that’s, what, another hour or so. Surely he wouldn’t want to prolong this by staying for breakfast. Or would he? But if he leaves now, what do we do on Monday? How do we behave – be – if we leave things up in the air?

There were so many questions that needed answering you’d think someone would’ve written an instruction manual on this, wouldn’t yer? The Little Guide to Big Mistakes or something. They’d be raking it in.

Maybe I should go for a compromise. Not breakfast, not door . . . Cab! I’ll offer him a cab. That way, he’ll hang around long enough for one of us to blurt out, ‘It never happened, OK?’ Then we’d agree to never mention it again. Ever. And then he’d do the decent thing and go away.

I cleared my throat, forced myself to make eye contact. The lock of hair was twisted so tightly around my index finger the tip throbbed. ‘Do you want me to call you a cab?’ I asked, sounding pleasant and calm. Nobody would guess I was having trouble breathing, would continue to have trouble breathing until he’d gone.

‘No, I’ll just be going. Get out of your way,’ he replied and didn’t move.

‘Are you sure?’ I persisted.

He nodded and still didn’t move, showed no sign of knowing how to move.

‘Really, it’s no trouble,’ I said. ‘You stand there, I point at you and go, “You’re a cab.” Dead easy. I do it all the time.’

He simply stared at me.

I stared at him.

Breakfast it is then.

chapter two

messy

Greg opened the lower cupboard of the unit nearest the kitchen door, pulled out the white chopping board. Next, he opened the drawer above that cupboard and rummaged through it, searching for the right knife.

I stood watching him. He moved with such ease in my red and white kitchen I was mildly surprised he didn’t live here. That it was my kitchen, not his.

He unhooked my red apron from behind the kitchen door, slipped it over his head, tied it around his middle, then hoiked up his jumper sleeves. Hang on, is this my kitchen? Did I really own an apron? One that said . . . Dream Stuffing? The irony wasn’t lost on me as Greg grinned above the words on his chest and rubbed his hands expectantly.

I opened the fridge and my eye fell immediately upon the giant bar of chocolate sitting on the top shelf. What I’d do for a couple of squares right now. I’d just discovered I couldn’t work under pressure without it. That when the going got tough, I needed chocolate. But, nobody could ever know I sometimes ate chocolate for breakfast. I fished an onion and the last tomato from the vegetable crisper and tossed them to him. We were going to have an omelette for breakfast. You know, breakfast, this travesty of a meal I’d been manipulated into. (Yes, it was me who’d uttered the damn joke but he could’ve done what I’ve heard most men do in these situations and leave me choking on the dust thrown up by his legging it into the sunset.)

Greg caught the onion one-handed then caught the tomato with the other hand, but instead of getting down to work, he grabbed the chopping knife and a wooden spoon. ‘Watch this,’ he said and, one by one, tossed them in the air.

Absently, I tightened my dressing gown tie, cutting off most of the circulation to my legs, then flattened a few of the black spikes by dragging a hand through my hair. I watched the onion, tomato, wooden spoon and knife dance through the air while Greg juggled. The knife crossed the onion on its way up, the spoon crossed the tomato on its way down. The knife went up again, as did the onion. My eyes followed the smooth lines the items carved in the atmosphere. I was mesmerised. By its contradictory grace; by the natural elegance of the juggler. Chucking things about shouldn’t be so beautiful, exquisite. I’d always wanted to juggle, to make things float and dance but I didn’t have the co-ordination for it. Greg was perfect. Cocky git.

Tosser.

That’d been my first thought of Gregory Walterson when we met. Absolute tosser.

He’d been sat in a pub with his best friend, Matt, at the time. Matt had been seeing Jen, my best friend, for a few weeks and they were treating Greg and me to a meal so we could all get to know each other. Jen was desperate for me to like Matt and thought meeting Matt’s best mate – who, by all accounts, was usually Velcroed to his side – would assist the liking process, hence the meal.

I’d had to work on a Saturday and entered the pub at almost a run, flustered and pissed off at being late.

‘Ambs, this is Greg, Matt’s best mate,’ Jen said, grinning insanely as her gaze flitted between the pair of us. ‘Greg, this is my best friend, Amber. Don’t call her Ambs, ever, she hates that. Thinks it’s too personal, especially when you don’t know her. Only I’m allowed to call her Ambs. But Greg doesn’t mind being called Greg or Gregory. He’s easy-going about his name.’

While Jen babbled on, I took a gander at this Gregory who didn’t mind being called Greg, and internally flinched – it was like being slapped in the face. Matt was attractive, but Greg . . . Greg had been created by someone who didn’t know when to stop; someone who when presented with top-quality ingredients, chose to endow one man with them rather than dishing them out fairly amongst the rest of the male populace. Greg’s eyes, for example, were like Minstrels, were like shiny discs of hard, dark chocolate. His hair was so black it was blue-black and hung like long curls of liquorice around his face. His slightly olive skin was lovingly moulded onto his strong bone structure. And his lips . . . his lips were as succulent as pink Jelly Babies.

Greg’s Minstrel eyes held my brown-black eyes a fraction longer than necessary before his Jelly Baby mouth parted into a smile and he said, ‘Hi.’ Long and slow and overtly sexual.

Tosser, I’d thought, before I smiled a tight-lipped, sarcastic hello in return. Absolute tosser. No matter how tasty he looked, no matter how much I wanted to lick his eyes and his lips and his hair, it was abundantly clear: Greg was gorgeous. Greg knew it. Greg used it at every given opportunity. But, I had to be nice. Jen was madly in love with Matt even though they’d only met three weeks earlier (‘Ambs, I think he’s The One, I really do’), so this man was going to be in my life for a while. I had to get on with him.

We started off seeing each other occasionally with Matt and Jen, then he rather disconcertingly started to make an effort (emailing, calling me at work, asking me to meet him for lunch because we worked near each other in town) meaning I had to – make an effort that is.

I went along to lunch the first time because I was open-minded enough to know he’d spend the hour talking about himself and checking his reflection in any shiny surface, thus confirming beyond a shadow of a doubt what a tosser he was. Unfortunately, I left lunch grudgingly impressed because he had the kind of wit, knowledge and intelligence I’d only encountered a few times in my life, plus he didn’t once check himself out in the butter knife.

We regularly went out alone after that. And, three years later, Gregory ‘Tosser’ Walterson had become my second-best mate. He was number two on all my phone speed dials; the second person I called when anything big happened; the person I spent most time with after Jen. We talked and emailed every day. He was Greg, after all. My mate. Still a tosser, but now my mate who happened to be a tosser. Nothing more. Honestly, nothing more, until last night.

‘Huh? Huh? Whaddaya think?’ he asked, turning to show me his juggling properly. Before I could reply, he miscalculated a catch and everything was thrown off balance and suddenly the blade end of the knife was hurtling towards his hand. He jerked his hand away with a fraction of a second to spare and the knife fell to the floor, closely followed by the rest of his tools. The spoon clattered away across the kitchen, the onion rolling behind it. But the tomato, which had been overripe and spoiling for a fight anyway, exploded with a damp splodge, juice and flesh and seeds oozing out on the red and white lino tiles.

Greg grimaced at the splattered tomato, then glanced up at me. ‘Oops,’ he said.

‘“Oops”?’ I replied. ‘What do you mean “Oops”?’

He shrugged. ‘Oops.’

‘Cloth, water.’ I pointed at the sink. ‘Get cleaning.’

‘Sorry, mate, you’ve seen my bedroom, you know I don’t clean.’

He then picked up the onion, went back to the cupboard, took out a clean knife, returned to the chopping board, and sliced the top off the onion. He even started whistling as he stripped the onion of its outer layer.

‘“I don’t clean”, indeed,’ I said above his out-of-tune whistling. ‘You’re lucky I don’t batter you with a teaspoon, yer cheeky get.’

Greg laughed. A laugh so warm and easy that I’d long suspected it came from somewhere deep in his heart. Hearing it was like having sunshine poured directly into your ears, feeling it radiate throughout your body. His laugh often made me laugh. Right then, I could only rustle up a small smile.

A few seconds later, I bobbed down with a damp J-cloth to clean up the tomato explosion.

This is so weird, I thought. It’s like every other morning he’s spent here. Anyone looking in at us, at how he’s chopping and I’m cleaning, wouldn’t guess we’d . . .

I lifted the lid on the bin but paused before dropping in the tomato-soiled cloth – it’d gone suspiciously quiet at Greg’s end of the kitchen. And ‘quiet’ meant he’d broken something and was trying to hide the evidence. My ‘Director’ mug had gone that way, as had the scary cat mugs my mum bought me. (That was a bonus seeing as I’d tried a few times to ‘accidentally’ end their existence and they seemed to be protected by some kind of force field.) I glanced around to check what he was up to.

My stomach lurched to find him watching me. Openly, blatantly staring at me.

His Minstrel eyes, which had been intensely fixed on me, jerked into huge circles of fear. Recovering his composure, he struggled with a small, shy smile, lowered his eyes, then spun back to continue chopping.

I turned back to the bin with my heart galloping in my chest and my whole body aflame. I flung the tomato and cloth into the bin, let the lid fall into place.

It was only a look, a glance, a mere expression, I told myself. It didn’t mean anything. Yeah, and you can walk on water.

RRRIINGGG!

Like an unwelcome alarm clock the phone shattered my late Saturday morning peace.

I was showered, pyjamaed, and curled up under my duvet on my sofa. I’d attempted to go back to bed after Greg left, but had been poleaxed by the state of my bedroom. The rumpled bedclothes, the condom wrappers on the floor, the wicker bin with used condoms in it, clothes I’d been wearing last night flung to the four corners. Worst of all, it reeked of it. Us. What we’d done. Even after I’d opened the large sash window and let in the frosty February air, the smell was there. As though it’d seeped into the paintwork and carpet and ceiling cornicing and wasn’t ever going to leave.

So, I’d done the decent thing and ignored it, knowing that if I ignored it long and hard enough, it’d magically tidy itself. I’d trooped off to the shower, returned to find it wasn’t tidied, and promptly upped the level and severity of blanking (it really was going to work). I’d been drifting off with a film on the TV when the phone rang. I picked up the receiver and mumbled a hello.

‘Hi, Ambs.’

Jen.

JEN!

My eyes flew open and I sat bolt upright on the sofa. What the hell am I going to tell her? Am I going to tell her? I told Jen everything but this was different. This was, in a word, stupid. In two words: bloody stupid. In fourteen words: this was so bloody stupid, I still couldn’t believe it and I’d been there.

‘Hello, lovely,’ I said, now more panicked than sleepy. There was always the possibility that I’d blurt it out. She’d ask some innocuous question and I’d get a bout of confessional Tourette’s and scream out the awful truth.

‘Oh, sorry, did I wake you?’ Jen paused, obviously to check the time. ‘Your Saturday mornings are precious, aren’t they?’ She only remembered my Saturday mornings were precious after she’d got me on the phone.

Matt, her boyfriend, aka Greg’s best friend, played football on Saturday mornings with Greg and some other lads down at Woodhouse Moor, the park near where Greg and Matt lived. Even though Jen lived all the way over the other side of town in Allerton and he spent a lot of time there, Matt still drove across Leeds to play with the boys, as it were. As soon as Matt pulled off in his car, Jen would be on the phone to me. We’d chat until Matt came back, then I’d dive back under the covers for a couple more hours of shut-eye. That’s if Greg didn’t call to give me a blow-by-blow account of the football game or his latest conquest. Or, as was most likely, both.

‘It’s all right,’ I said, stretching my body in a deep arc, trying to unkink my back. ‘I’ve been up for ages.’

‘Really?’ Jen’s voice perked up. ‘Why?’

‘Erm, couldn’t sleep.’

‘Ah. How was last night?’ she asked.

She knows. Greg, who hadn’t talked to me about what had happened, had already told them and she’s ringing to see how long I hold out on her. The big-mouthed get. First he stayed for breakfast, then he was looking at me, now he was spreading rumours. True rumours. To our friends. But rumours is rumours. ‘Erm, what was last night?’ I replied cautiously.

‘Duh! Greg went to the film with you, didn’t he?’

‘Oh, yeah. Yeah. Sorry.’

‘How was it?’

‘Fine. He was fine.’

‘Double duh! I mean the film.’

‘Oh, sorry, yeah. It was all right. Greg liked it, but then Greg likes Carry On movies, so there you go. I thought it was mediocre.’

‘Oh well, never mind. What did you do afterwards?’

‘Erm . . . had dinner then he stayed over.’ In my bed. While we had sex. All night.

‘That’s where he was! Matt called him to say he wasn’t going to footie this morning and Greg wasn’t home and his mobile was off. We thought he must’ve pulled and stayed in Sheffield.’

‘Why isn’t Matt at footie?’ I asked, seizing this opportunity to change the subject – the less she talked about Greg, the less chance there was of me confessing.

Jen lowered her voice. ‘He’s going to kill me but I have to tell you. Matt asked me what I wanted for my birthday and I said, “You to move in here” and he said yes. We’re going to move in together.’

I screamed. ‘OHMIGOD!’ I yelled into the receiver. ‘I can’t believe it’s finally happened! FINALLY! And I can’t believe it’s taken you six million years to tell me! So? So? Details.’

Jen lowered her voice some more: ‘Can’t. Tell you Monday night, when it’s all official. Don’t tell anyone. Especially not Greg if you see him.’

‘Why would I see Greg?’ I said defensively. I wasn’t being at all suspicious, was I?

‘You might go to lunch or something?’ Jen said carefully, as though trying to talk me down from chucking myself off a building. ‘You do go to lunch with Greg quite often, don’t you?’

‘Oh. Right.’

‘Are you all right, sweetie? You seem a bit . . .’

‘Out of it? It’s the whole lack of sleep thing. Not as young as I used to be, you know.’

‘OK. Well, you try and sleep now. Matt’s here, we’re going shopping. So, I’ll see you Monday, all right? Six-thirtyish at The Conservatory.’

‘Yup, see ya there. Bye.’

If I hadn’t been so comfy where I was, I would’ve done a lap of honour around my living room once I’d hung up. In my current condition, I settled for punching the air with my arms and legs, going, ‘Yesss! Yessss! Yeeesss!’

She’d finally got it. A big commitment from Matt. A real, tangible declaration that he thought of their relationship as something permanent. This was big stuff for Matt – this man was sometimes reticent about breathing because of the effort involved. I never, ever thought he’d commit.

The last time Jen and I had dissected this very subject – and it had to be admitted we dissected it a lot – Jen had said, ‘I want to get to the point where I can tell Matt anything and everything, like I tell you everything.’

That thought made me tug the duvet over my head. In less than twenty-four hours I’d done two unbelievable things: slept with Greg; held out on Jen.

All I had to do was donate all my savings to the Conservative Party and everyone would know the invasion of the Body Snatchers had begun.

chapter three

the big bang

Silence. Everything was silence.

Pure, perfect silence. The kind of silence that is invariably followed by trouble. The kind of silence, I’d imagine, that came before the Big Bang that created our universe. (Or, if you believe in creation theories, the kind of silence that came while God scratched His head and wondered if He should make the oceans blue or a nice peachy colour.) Our office had that silence. Everyone held their breath. Everyone was waiting for the Big Bang.

The five of us in the office were expecting it, but when it happened, when the explosion came, four of us jumped. I, being closest to the epicentre of the blow-up, jumped the least – I was immediately caught in the blast and couldn’t physically move, even if I wanted to.

‘WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED THE FILMS? WHAT, NONE OF THEM?’ the Big Bang screamed.

This was Renée. My boss, The Boss. She was lovely. Honest. I’ve always liked Renée, have always had a deep respect for her. Even when, at times like this, she was shouting at me.

I’d just told her I hadn’t done my ‘homework’ over the weekend and because I hadn’t done my homework, the meeting she had scheduled for that afternoon wasn’t going to go the way she expected. I’d let her down and rather than sit there slowly imploding while giving me the full-on, pursed-lipped, teeth-gnashing silent treatment, she’d chosen to explode.

On paper, on my CV, I’d worked for West Yorkshire International Film Festival (WYIFF) for nearly eleven years.

Since I was a little girl I’d been obsessed with films and television; I wasn’t allowed to play out much as a child, or party at all as a teenager, so I experienced life through the world on my TV; saw the wonders of life, love and everything through the box in the corner. That fascination with the moving image never left me.

During the first year of college we had to do a four-month work placement in a profession that we were interested in working in. I asked to work at a Hollywood film studio – I got the WYIFF.

I spent most of March to June as WYIFF’s unpaid skivvy, researching and photocopying for the brochure, and I loved it. Most people whinged about not being paid; about being given menial tasks; about people treating them like fourth-class citizens. Not me. So what if I had to make the tea and do photocopying and run errands? I got to sit in an office with a group of people who knew an incredible amount about films and one of whom had snogged a rather famous American film director. And another of whom had been a very famous actress during her teens. After the placement was over, I kept ‘dropping by’ the office – in the same manner you ‘dropped by’ the places you knew someone you fancied frequented – helping out.

That following September, during the two weeks of the actual Festival, I was there again. I stood at venues, proudly wearing a WYIFF T-shirt, taking people to their seats, ripping tickets, handing out brochures that had my name in it. My name. That was it for me. I signed myself over. Pledged my soul to the god of WYIFF. Had basically walked into my idea of job heaven and didn’t want to leave. So, I didn’t. Every Easter, every summer, every Festival, every chance when I wasn’t earning money to pay my rent or eat for the following five years, I was there, lurking around the office, offering to help. Eventually, they took pity on me and paid me to compile their brochure. Even more eventually after that they offered me a full-time position as Festival Assistant. After a proper, full-time year I became Senior Festival Assistant. And a year after that, I became Deputy Festival Director. That was four years ago.

In real terms that meant diddly-squat because there were now only three full-time members of WYIFF – Renée, the Festival Director; Martha, the Festival Administrator and me.

Me. The person who had a pile of vids stacked in her living room that she was meant to watch and report back to Renée on before her meeting with the film production company, that afternoon. From our little office, the huge, star-studded event in mid-September that showcased West Yorkshire as an area of outstanding artistic interest was executed. We organised it, came up with the themes, invited people, arranged the programme. Also, big film premieres that were held up here were organised by us – including sending out invites to getting press interest and organising the stay of any actors.

On top of that, we sometimes undertook consultancy work. If we saw a production company had potential or if we had time, we’d give people advice on getting funding, editing their work, casting and scripts. That was what Renée would be doing that afternoon, if not for me.

But, but, Saturday was a write-off once I’d put on my pyjamas. I couldn’t face watching what could potentially be a shite film, and the title – Welcome to Vomit Central – didn’t exactly inspire confidence in the product. Sunday, in between T4, EastEnders and running around town putting the finishing touches to Jen’s birthday present, there wasn’t enough time.

I gazed up at Renée with what I hoped were big sorrowful eyes; pleading, beseeching if you will, for sympathy. Renée looked back at me with murder glinting in the windows to her soul.

She usually looked like a teen-actress-turned-producerturned-important-name-in-Northern-England’s-film-industry. She was head to toe sophistication: sleek black hair, carefully kohled and mascaraed eyes, expensively cleansed, toned and moisturised olive skin, neutrally coloured lips. Her clothes were always designer, and crease- and bobble-free, obviously. Her shoes always matched her bags. When she wore it, her nail varnish matched her lipstick.

‘I AM GOING TO LOOK TOTALLY STUPID IN THAT MEETING!’ Renée ranted. ‘I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU’VE DONE THIS TO ME.’ Like her body, her fingers were long and thin. Her fingers always reminded me of Cadbury’s Chocolate Fingers, very little knuckle to spoil the length and shape of them. And wouldn’t you know it, those fingers made a very loud noise as they pounded on the desk, emphasising her words – probably the biscuit centre.

‘I REALLY [bang] CAN’T [bang] BELIEVE [bang] YOU’VE [bang] DONE THIS [bang].’

I didn’t need to glance around the room to know that Martha, the administrator, was staring hard at her computer screen, and the two work experience girls were digging escape tunnels under their desks. This was the usual drill when Renée lost it. Which, it had to be said, she was doing quite a lot lately. Usually, Renée was on the highly strung side of normal – it didn’t take too much to launch her into a full-on head spin. Recently, though, even ‘Good morning’ could go either way: a ‘Hello’ back or a rant demanding to know what was so good about it.

I knew this. Which was clearly why I said, ‘At least I didn’t sleep with your husband.’ This was classic Amber. When a situation begins getting serious, be it seriously bad or seriously good, I’m obliged to lighten it with some attempt at humour. Obliged, mind you. I can’t just turn it on and off. (That was where the whole ‘you’re a cab’ thing had come from.) Many a near war situation has been averted by me trying to make people laugh, or at least titter. I can’t help myself. I think it evolved from a deep-seated belief that someone’s less likely to batter you as long as you’re trying to make them laugh.

Except what I said was in no way funny. Mere moments after my quip Renée’s sensibilities nosedived over the edge of reason.

‘What. Did. You. Say,’ she hissed, too shocked to shout or bang on my desk.

‘It’s only a meeting, not the second coming,’ I said, then winced. There really was no need to keep antagonising a woman whose head was 198 degrees into a 360-degree head spin but I couldn’t seem to stop.

Renée’s flawless skin filled up to her hairline with blood-red anger. I wasn’t aware humans could go that shade of red without passing out.

‘HOW CAN YOU SAY SUCH A THING? WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?’ she bellowed.

‘Oh, admit it, Renée, you know you wanna cancel the meeting anyway.’ We were in a ‘humour’ loop – the more incensed she became, the more I was trying to make her laugh, which led to more rage. Round and round.

‘I DON’T KNOW WHY I EMPLOYED YOU!’ Renée screamed.

‘Because the trained hamster turned you down?’

‘HOW DARE YOU. FOR TEN YEARS I’VE WATCHED YOU HANG ABOUT THE OFFICE, DOING NOTHING BUT EAT CHOCOLATE. WELL I’VE HAD ENOUGH OF IT. YOU ARE USELESS.’ With that, she grabbed her mobile and coat, and exited stage left. She shut the glass door with such force we all expected it to shatter in her wake.

Everything was silent and motionless after the slam of the door.

Renée had never gone for me like that before. She’d never gone for anyone like that before. Ever. Yeah, she shouted; yeah, she threw things, but in eleven years I’d never thought she was going to raise her hand to someone. And for one moment there I’d thought she was going to slap me.

Martha gave the two work experience girls one of her ‘looks’ until they realised they needed the loo – really rather desperately – and left. They too shut the glass door, which had a film reel and WYIFF frosted on it, behind them, but quietly.

Martha and I got up in unison then walked the length of our high-ceilinged office, which was filled with desks and filing cabinets and shelves of videos, to the windows. The expanse of windows took up almost a whole wall and had window sills wide enough for people to rest their bums on. Which is what Martha and I did. Out of all the offices in the West Yorkshire Council building, we had the best one. It had high white walls, the carpet wasn’t the regulation beige but royal blue. We even had framed film posters on the walls. When you worked there full-time you got to pick a poster. Renée had The Big Blue, Martha had Pretty Woman, and I had Terminator 2. Over the years other posters had come and gone, but the swimmer, the hooker and the cyborg had clung to the walls through thick, thin and Renée explosion.

‘She’s getting worse,’ Martha said, twisting slightly to see the panorama of Leeds we got from this height. Martha was far more human than Renée. She was my height with shoulder-length, mousy-brown hair, mousy-brown eyes, pale white skin – she even got the occasional spot. I liked Martha, but in a different way to how I liked Renée. Renée had employed me – eventually – and I’d helped employ Martha. Also, Renée had never invited herself to my place for dinner within a month of us worki