BEX
Supposing Jen was to have another breakdown, who would help? Was there anyone else I could call on? I run through the list of Jen’s friends – Sarah, Lydia, David, Veronica, Laura – realising that she’d alienated most of them by writing about them in her column. There is Penelope, of course, but she’s the kind of person who would tell Jen that I was asking questions about her. Could I contact Laurence? Perhaps. And what was the name of her previous boyfriend, the one who dumped her just before they were due to be married? That was it, Chris. Or, as Jen called him in her column, Chris the Bastard. I’d heard that since that debacle he had actually married another woman, a solicitor called Steph, and that he was living very happily with her and their young son in Muswell Hill. Jen had told me Steph wouldn’t let her husband have anything more to do with her – she didn’t want Chris or herself to appear in ‘Being Jen Hunter’.
Jen didn’t have any family left. She had told me that her aunt, Kathleen, who had cared for her after the death of her parents, was herself dead now. So Jen really has no one to help her in times of crisis.
So for the time being, I will have to try to shoulder all the responsibility myself. Which is fine by me, as I enjoy looking after her and keeping her close. I was the one who held her head in my arms after she lost her job. I still remember the feel of her wet tears on my neck, the night she came round to my flat to tell me what had happened. After the wine-fuelled bravado had melted away she started to sob, great big ugly sobs that sounded like the cries of a dying animal. At first, what she was saying didn’t make sense. Her eyes were red from the constant stream of tears. Her voice cracked as she tried to spit out the words.
‘I w-was only giving them what they w-wanted,’ she said, wiping a stream of snot away from her nose.
I stood up and went to get her some more loo roll. ‘Here, use this,’ I said, handing it to her. ‘You need to start from the beginning and tell me what happened.’
She blew her nose, but instead of putting the damp paper to one side she gathered it together in her hands, using her fingers to pull apart the tissue into a pile of white shreds that fell by her feet. ‘I was in the office – Fridays are the days I go, well … used to go into the office,’ she said, trying to choke back another sob. ‘I was sitting at my desk, I’d just filed my column and was waiting for any queries to come back when my phone rang. It was Debbie, the editor’s secretary – Jonathan wanted to see me. I stopped to say hello to her, but she was on another call, her head turned away from me. Of course, now I know she couldn’t … she couldn’t meet my eye.’
Jen stopped as she tried to control her breathing.
‘Take your time,’ I said, squeezing her hand.
‘I went into the office and saw Jonathan there, with the managing editor, Janice, and the head of HR. There was no small talk or funny banter. Instead, Jonathan told me to sit down and he held up a sheet of paper from his desk. He cleared his throat and told me that they’d received a letter from a reader, making a series of allegations about me. I asked what kind of allegations and he replied, “That you’ve lied in your column. About something significant in your life.” I felt like I was going to be sick, but I had to try to control myself. I think I managed to laugh, say that it was absurd, but then I felt tears begin to well up in my eyes.’
‘Oh, Jen, I’m so sorry,’ I said.
‘Jonathan said that the reader – the reader was a he, he said – had gone through my columns and picked up various anomalies. He thought these might have been genuine errors, at first. But then he started to check, and discovered there was something more … sinister going on.’
‘What kind of things?’ I asked.
‘Oh God, I feel so bad about it all,’ she said.
‘What do you mean – you’re saying that—’
‘You know how hard it’s been for me, you know the level of detail they wanted at the paper,’ she said. ‘The desperate need for me to tell the readers everything about my life, the more fucked-up the better. It started out with those dates, those evenings out that always ended in disaster. I’d told them all about my grim northern childhood. My bulimia. How I hated the way I looked. I wrote everything about my relationship with Chris, my love for him, the ecstatic build-up to the wedding, and then the humiliation of him dumping me. But no, that wasn’t enough for them!’ She snorted, a bubble of snot ballooning out of her nose. ‘Anyway, Jonathan said that they’d done their own investigation. He singled out a number of my columns and asked whether I could explain certain … discrepancies.’
‘Such as what?’
She looked absolutely broken.