Brigid Coady - Emma Ever After - A feel-good romantic comedy with a hilarious modern re-telling of Jane Austen

Surely, she thought, when planning a party, it was better to just do it without telling your anti-social housemate and beg forgiveness afterwards? Leave it as a fait accompli.

‘It is only a tiny party, positively bijou, more of a soiree in fact. Not much for you to worry about. A few work colleagues…’ The heat was making her less than concise.

His head popped round the door to the living room.

‘Work? Really? All those fake arse publicity types who wouldn’t know the truth or proper talent if it leapt up and bit them on the bottom?’

Here we go again, she thought, rolling her eyes to the ceiling – Gee getting on his high horse about the purity of the music, and how music wasn’t a commodity and that the business was ruined by all the lies.

‘It’s bad enough that you work for the dark side, but now you want to bring it home? You know I hate all those fake smiles and schmoozing.’

‘Gee, you work in the music business too. All you do is hang round with the same sort of people.’

‘Hold on, my sort of people are not your sort of people. Mine are the people you make stories up about. When I see them it isn’t fake, they don’t bring their pretend partners out. And no one is trying to be someone they’re not. Or making other people something they’re not.’

And there it was. Gee having a dig at her job. Again.

It always came down to this. He didn’t respect what she did, because of his experience he had painted all PR and publicity at all management companies as awful.

Things had moved on from ten years ago. He knew that.

‘Look Gee, I know you and Johnnie had a rough time of it. But Mega! isn’t like your old management company. We don’t make someone pretend to be something they aren’t, we just give them a storyline to showcase who they are in a better way, one that works with their brand strategy. And we make sure all our clients are fully bought into any of our plans. They all have a choice, if they didn’t want to do it they wouldn’t.’

‘Ems…’ Gee started.

‘No, I get it.’ She interrupted. ‘Johnnie should never have been blackmailed into having to pretend he was straight or get engaged or any of that horrible mess he went through.’

She shuddered when she thought back to the headlines after his fall from grace, when all the lies were exposed and the blame firmly shifted off the record company.

‘But if you pick it apart intellectually, you could see why it happened. There was a marketing strategy and if all the players had done their part…’

Emma couldn’t finish.

‘Still can’t say it?’ He sighed. ‘How the record company and my own management company were using my sexuality as a weapon? Forcing me to stay quiet along with Johnnie. Making us lie. But you don’t ever seem to get it.’ He sighed as if he were exhausted. Which was probably true, they seemed to have picked over the carcass of this particular argument for years.

‘But I don’t understand.’ She couldn’t help going back over it, maybe one day she’d get it. ‘What was wrong with telling a little white lie, and saying you weren’t bisexual? It wasn’t that big a deal, surely? You could’ve hidden it and then, when you needed to, told people later. It wasn’t about lying, it was more a matter of timing. Because announcing it right before the start of your US tour was, well… And you were dating that girl, whatshername, then anyway so no one needed to know.’

She felt herself wince. No one usually mentioned the tour that never was. It was amazing how many parents in Middle America didn’t want their daughters idolising a band which included two guys who weren’t completely straight.

Tickets stopped selling, and Status Single were ‘has-beens’ almost the next month and the month after that the record company quietly jettisoned them.

‘Her name was Felicity, as you well know.’ He frowned at her. So sue her if she always pretended to forget the names of his girlfriends and boyfriends. She knew it was petty but it relegated them to the insignificant pile, where they wouldn’t encroach on their life.

‘I’m not having this argument with you again, Ems. A lie is a lie. They wanted to deny my identity, is that something you can swear Mega! would never do?’

Mega! wouldn’t. She knew they wouldn’t. Not that any of their acts were LGBT, but if they were…

‘They wouldn’t,’ she said with certainty. ‘Don’t judge me or my job because of something that happened a decade ago. The business has changed, no one has a problem with an out gay artist now. Look at Sam Smith.’ She could feel her hands curl into fists.

Sometimes she wanted to punch him. He was only three years older than her but he always did this holier than thou spiel about how he knew more because he’d been in the industry for years.

There was a pause, the tension between them quivering. Was he going to walk off, with his superior face in place?

She watched as the tension flowed out of him, his wide shoulders in the grey faded T-shirt falling. He reached his hand out, and it engulfed her fist, making her feel small.

‘Ems, please.’ His overly mobile brows scrunched up in a plea, ‘I don’t want to fight.’

Damn it, why did he pull out the big guns? She was incapable of staying angry when he brought out the puppy dog look.

‘Let’s agree to disagree?’ She hated fighting with him too. ‘So, the party?’ She made her eyes big and blinked slowly. She knew she wasn’t in the same league as Gee in terms of physical beauty or charisma but…

‘Damn it, Woodhouse. You know I can’t take it when you do the Bambi eye blink.’ He reeled back from the door, throwing his arm over his eyes as if hiding from Medusa. ‘Not today, Satan,’ he howled dramatically.

And just like that the tension faded, and was blown out of the room by the fan whirring in the corner.

‘That wasn’t an answer, Knightley?’ she called into the hall.

‘Fine,’ he said coming back into the room. ‘You can have your party. But if anyone starts doing karaoke with Status Single songs, I will not be responsible for my actions.’

‘You should probably take the Brit award out of the loo and the Teen Choice surfboard off the landing then,’ she said. He threw himself on the other sofa, landing with a grunt.

Differences of opinion on her job aside, Gee was a great housemate.

Make that landlord.

She stared at him as he slumped across from her, trying to angle his body to get a blast of air when the fan rotated back in his direction.

Their house was in a terrace near Victoria Park in Hackney, and the area had gradually become full of professionals and yummy mummies the longer they’d lived here. Gee had bought it back when he’d been in the band and it was one of the few things he had hung on to, and with the music studio he’d built at the bottom of the large garden, it meant security.

‘It’s my pension,’ he’d explained to her, ‘because god knows I didn’t make much money. Enough to buy this outright, build the studio. The rest of it…’ Gee had made a whooshing gesture with his hand.

He’d told her this a few months into their first year at university, when Emma had come around to work on a project.

Compared to her cramped halls of residence, it had made Gee seem like a grown up. With a plan and a structured life. So far removed from her experience.

Any structure in her childhood she’d put there herself.

And when it was time move out of halls… well, there had been a bit of a mix up but Gee had pulled through and made one of his spare rooms ready for her. Saved her. Maybe it was weird that she was still living in the same house she had lived in all the way through uni, but it was the longest she’d ever stayed anywhere.