Katy Regan - One Thing Led to Another

Dee, 32, London

I stride into the atrium of Giant Publishing with, miraculously, fourteen minutes to spare. 9.16 and already the place looks like Piccadilly Circus only shinier.

I get into a lift with two people: one is Justine Lamb, the Editorial Director, head to toe in cream cashmere. The other is Brian Worsnop, owner of the lowest hairline in trichological history, currently devouring a Ginster’s Scotch Egg, very noisily.

He beams at me, revealing bits of sausage meat between his dentures.

‘Super night last Friday wasn’t it? You looked a little merry, to say the least, I particularly liked your…’

‘Yes, OK, Brian.’ I smile, tight-lipped. Justine Lamb does not need to know about my drunken impressions of Blanche Jewell, our MD, complete with a pair of enormous false teeth.

I landed my job as writer on Believe It! magazine in 2003, as soon as I got back from what turned out to be a pretty traumatic year travelling. It was the least glamorous title in Giant Publishing’s portfolio and was edited by Judith Hogg, a pigeon-chested tumour of a woman who couldn’t feel empathy if her life depended on it. However, it was a proper job in journalism and with stories like ‘ I lost my nose but still sniffed out love’ it was hard not to see the funny side. The relentless interviewing of people with such shit lives meant you couldn’t help but think your own was maybe not that bad. It was the perfect distraction from a broken heart, too. A heart broken by Laurence Cane.

Bing! The lift door opens and I stride out, into a pool of morning sun which drenches the office in an orange-pink glow.

‘Morning Tess.’

‘Morning Jocelyn.’

Jocelyn, our receptionist, is from Perth in Australia. She has a shocking-red bob that swings around her face when she walks or even moves (mainly due to a sort of wave effect brought on by her sheer size) and a bottom as wide as her homeland.

I feel I can say this and not sound fattist because Jocelyn is far from embarrassed about her body. In fact she accentuates her ‘womanly curves’ with sleeveless, bingo-wing-revealing tops in lurid prints and tight, white, cellulite-enhancing trousers.

‘May I say Tessa, you look fintistic today,’ she trills, biting into a ham and cheese croissant. ‘Off on a date tonight by any chance, met someone nice on the Internet again?’

Ever since I made the grave mistake of telling Jocelyn I had a date with a guy from Match.com, she has asked me this question on average twice a week.

‘No, not tonight, Jocelyn,’ I say, hanging up my coat. ‘I’ve gone off men from the Internet anyway, all they ever seem to be into is skydiving and bungee jumping if their photos are anything to go by.’

‘Quite right too,’ says Jocelyn. ‘I’ve never been one for adrenaline sports myself.’

Back at my desk, I hear Anne-Marie busily relaying the latest in the saga of Vegan Boyfriend to someone on the phone. ‘He won’t even kiss me if I’ve eaten a bacon sandwich, you know,’ she’s saying proudly, pop-sock-clad feet up on the desk. ‘ That’s how committed he is.’

I give her a little wave, she gives me one back. I turn on my computer and see the little red light is flashing on my phone.

‘You have two new messages,’ says the automated voice.

Beep.

‘Hiya…is that Tess? This is Keeley. You came to our house last week to interview me and Dean. Fing is, yeah, we woz a bit pissed when we did the interview. Dean had just bought me that bottle of Asti to help with the nerves and now we’re worried everyone’s gonna find out…’

Oh dear. Another second thoughts casualty. You’d think what with the tape running and the photographer turning up, people might realize the larger ramifications before they start blabbing about their boyfriend’s penis enlargement to the national press.

Next!

I try to concentrate but thoughts of Laurence are like a swarm of butterflies in my brain.

Next is a message from a woman from Dudley. Her husband is forty-three stone and bed-ridden, can we do a campaign to save his life?

‘Before I ballsed it up,’ he said. I can’t stop those words from circulating in my mind. Admittedly, there had been a brief moment when I felt like punching the air – it is only right he should have suffered a bit after what he did to me. But that was years ago now and anyway, let’s face it, I ballsed it up too. If I hadn’t been so flighty, if I hadn’t done a Tess special and buggered off around the world, assuming everything would be hunky dory when I got back, maybe we would be together now, in love, married, maybe even a baby on the way.

I’ve got seventeen things to do on my desktop To Do list but I all I can do is day-dream. The fact is, when I look back to my two and a half years with Laurence the entire era reverberates with a huge WHAT IF. What if I had engaged my head as well as my heart, what if I had not been so naïve, what if I had been thinner, more demure, more exotic. What if, for example, I had not got caught having sex with Laurence Cane the very first time I met him, by Mrs Cane herself? At her garden party. Maybe it was jinxed from the start.

I blame the sun. That and his liberal parents who plied us with an endless flow of Beaujolais. (My parents would have provided two boxes of Asda’s best, announcing, ‘and when that’s finished, it’s finished, Tessa.’) By three a.m. everyone who was going home had gone and Gina had passed out on the sofa-bed in the spare room. So, it was just the two of us, talking and drinking at the kitchen table.

‘Your mum’s so cool,’ I slurred, nursing about my eightieth glass of wine, my teeth black as a peasant’s. ‘So exotic and bohemian.’

Laurence laughed. ‘Everyone says that,’ he said. ‘And yeah, I suppose she is.’ Then he paused, hesitated, then said, ‘But she’s not as cool as you.’

That’s when he turned to me, took my face in his hands and started kissing me, passionately and urgently. ‘You’re funny,’ he said.

‘Funny?’

‘Yeah, and kinda sexy, you make me laugh.’

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of that. But what did it matter anyway? I was snogging a Thierry Henry look-alike.

He reached inside my top and placed his hand on my breast. ‘Come here,’ he whispered, fixing me with eyes that told me how much he wanted me. Then his hand was suddenly in my bra and he drew me close and we were kissing, harder this time, our tongues exploring each other’s mouths hungrily, hot, quick breath moist on my skin. He gestured for me to hold my arms up, he removed my top. He removed my bra. And not with a teenage fumble, but in one, smooth, masterful stroke, as if he undressed women for a living.

Then, pulling me upwards, never taking his lips from mine, he put his hands around my waist and picked me up, sitting me on the table in front of him. His hands were big and warm and as they explored me: my shoulders, my neck, my stomach, the nerves in my groin suddenly sparked into action.

‘Should we be doing this?’ I looked at him, eyes shining under the table lamp.

‘Don’t you want to?’

‘Yes, yes, of course I bloody want to!’ I said, which came out far more eager than I had anticipated.

‘Well that’s good then,’ he said, looking at me from under canopy-sized eyelashes.

He swept my hair back from my face, then gently pushed me back onto the table, never diverting from my gaze.

‘Stop it!’ I giggled. ‘Your parents might come down, your brothers might hear!’

‘So what,’ he said, ‘I don’t give a shit.’

He undid my jeans and I undid his, my hands trembling, and we were kissing all over each other’s faces and necks and he ran his hands through my hair, pushing it back from my face and kissing me again. Then he was flicking his tongue all over my nipples and I was moaning and half laughing at the same time and pulling him into me and we were going at it hammer and tongs over this huge oak table and I’d already decided it was true what they said about French men. And the lamp above us was creaking slightly with the motion of us, and I felt like Vanessa Paradis in one of those late-night saucy films. Then: