Jemima J Read online

  Jemima is so immersed in Anna’s world she doesn’t see that on the other side of the room, standing almost exactly parallel to where she is now, is Ben Williams. Ben is also immersed in a book, back to the room, facing the bookshelf; he is reading the first few pages of a thriller, rocking gently on the balls of his feet as he reads.

  But before we start assuming this must be fate, I have to point out that although Ben likes Jemima, he doesn’t like Jemima, so perhaps now is not the time to start jumping to conclusions.

  But it is rather strange that both of them should be in Waterstone’s at exactly the same time. Ben, it has to be said, comes to Waterstone’s once every couple of weeks, but rarely does he take advantage of the fact that Waterstone’s is open until 10 P.M., rarely does he venture into this bookstore after work. Ben usually makes his journey on a Saturday, he will pop in on his way to meet some friends for a drink at a sidewalk café.

  Tonight, however, Ben is not going out. Nor is he watching the news. Tonight Ben has nothing to do, and this is why he is in the same place as Jemima Jones, at the same time. And because Ben didn’t jump in a cab, he got the tube, Ben has only just arrived.

  So here they are, Jemima and Ben, these two colleagues, both with their backs towards one another, both lost in their respective handheld worlds of academia and dodgy dealing in the City, both completely unaware of their proximity.

  All it will take for Jemima to turn around and see Ben is a tiny twist of fate, a decision to buy the book, to add it to the first, to perhaps turn and look for another one, and, in turning, note that the man of her daydreams is standing opposite her. But fate can be cruel, or possibly in this case understanding, because what, after all, would Jemima do if she saw Ben?

  And Ben? Ben would be surprised and pleased to see her, as he would if he bumped into any of his colleagues unexpectedly, but that would be the sum of it.

  Luckily we don’t have to worry about what either will do, because neither has the slightest idea the other is there. Jemima carries on reading, while Ben closes his book firmly and takes it to the till. He gives the dowdy girl behind the till a winning smile, and she takes the book and places it in a plastic bag, melting while she does so. Please come back in again, she thinks, please come back tomorrow, when perhaps we’ll have a conversation, which may lead to coffee, which may lead to . . . anything. Everything.

  But Ben just pockets the book and walks out, with not a backward glance. Jemima decides to buy the book, and then looks around for one more. She goes to yet another table and suddenly her eye lands on the perfect book: The Idiot’s Guide to the Internet.

  Well, I may not be an idiot, but flicking through the book I realize that there are hundreds of things I don’t know, thousands of sites I might want to visit. Yes, this is the final book. Time to go.

  I wander over to the till and hand my pile of three to the dowdy girl looking bored. I try and catch her eye to give her a friendly smile, but she’s not interested, she doesn’t even look at me when she hands me my books, safely encased in a plastic bag, and when I thank her she just scowls and turns away. Honestly. Some people are just so rude.

  I walk back outside, and linger for a moment on the pavement, because I’m not ready to go home and it’s such a beautiful evening, and for the first time in ages I don’t care that I don’t look like the beautiful people milling around me, I want to do something, go somewhere, have a life.

  I don’t know quite where to go, so I wander down the hill, looking in every window I pass, all the main street chains that line the main street, and even though the windows are filled with garish, high-fashion clothes, size 6 bits of cloth that would normally serve only to emphasize my inadequacies, tonight I don’t care, and anyway, a girl can dream, can’t she?

  On the other side of the road strolls Ben Williams. He too is looking into shop windows, admiring the shirts, the suits, wishing he had a bit more money so he could afford them, but not wishing with quite the same zeal as Jemima, because after all he is a man, and men do not share women’s excitement about clothes. Have we ever heard of a male shopaholic? Exactly.

  Ben turns round and stops, about to cross the road, and there, standing exactly opposite him on the other side of the road, is Jemima. Ben looks to his left, Jemima looks to her left. Ben starts to cross as a big truck trundles up then stops, sitting slap-bang in the middle of the road, obstructing the view because the road has become too narrow for the truck to pass down due to the early evening shoppers double-parked.

  But Jemima doesn’t cross, because surely then they would meet in the middle. Jemima sees a crêperie stand on her right, and instead of walking into Ben, of whose presence she is unaware, she turns right and walks down to the crêperie.

  And so once again they miss one another. But Jemima’s being a good girl, she decides against the thick crêpe dripping with butter and oozing chocolate sauce. She heads instead for a café, which, to her delight, is almost empty.

  She squeezes into a corner table by the window and orders a cappuccino, then pulls out the first of her books and submerges herself, in comfort this time, in Anna’s world.

  Ben, meanwhile, is dying for a drink. He walks past a café and stops, peering in the window to see what it’s like. Nope, he thinks, too empty, I need something busier, buzzier, and of course he is looking too far into the restaurant, well beyond the corner table by the window, the corner table at which Jemima is sitting, head buried, lost in another world.

  So close but yet so far, Jemima. I wish we could tell you that Ben Williams is standing but feet away from you, but it’s not our place, I’m afraid. Fate will just have to continue taking its course.

  And fate, as usual, is shining on Ben Williams. He crosses the road and walks into a bar that’s more his scene. Large plate-glass windows on to the street, a smooth polished cherrywood bar sweeping round the center of the room, with young, good-looking bartenders chatting idly by the glasses. Small round wooden tables with cast-iron legs and twirly iron chairs contain Hampstead’s better-looking people, and right at the back is a sofa, a couple of old, beaten-up leather armchairs, and a huge fireplace which is not yet roaring, too early in the year for that, but is alight, casting a golden glow on the people sitting near the back.

  Ben pushes open the door, immediately assaulted by noise, heat, animated chatter. Yes, he thinks, this is where I’ll have a drink. He goes up to the bartender and orders a bottle of imported beer, then looks around for the most comfortable place to sit, and heads towards the sofa at the back.

  He’s slightly out of place in his dark navy suit, but he sinks into the sofa, drapes his jacket along the back, and exhales loudly. Good place, he thinks, looking around. He takes a swig of beer, pulls the book from his pocket and settles back, one elbow leaning on the arm of the sofa, his hand resting just above his forehead, pushing his hair back, the other holding the book. The beer rests on the table.

  If a photographer from GQ were to walk in now, he would not be able to resist this little tableau. For Ben looks quite amazing, his right ankle resting on his left knee, long legs, well-built body, handsome face. He looks like a set-up, too good to be true, too good for any woman to resist.

  So can we blame the tall, slim brunette sitting at one of the tables for taking the initiative? She’s with her two girlfriends, all equally stunning, all dressed in the latest fashions, the clothes that Jemima Jones can only dream of wearing. Hip-hugging trousers with tiny bootleg flares at the bottom. Soft leather boots with square toes and center stitching, tiny little tank tops squeezed over perfect, pert breasts.

  The brunette and her friends noticed Ben the moment he walked in. Too much of a suit? they asked themselves. “With a face like that,” said the brunette, “who cares.”

  They sit there watching Ben, who is completely unaware of their presence, of their giggles as they try and decide what he does for a living. “Way too handsome for a real estate agent,” they decide, “maybe an investment banker?”

  The
brunette, who is killing time by working in a shop until she finds a husband to sweep her off her feet and carry her into the sunset on his white horse, calls over one of the waiters, whom naturally she knows, because every evening she is in this bar with her friends.

  “Do you know that guy?” she whispers, pointing to Ben.

  The waiter shrugs. “Never seen him before.”

  “Look,” she says. “Do me a favor. Will you take him over another bottle of beer, I’ll pay for it, and tell him I’m buying him a drink.”

  The waiter smiles. The brunette’s girlfriends laugh at her audacity, but with looks like hers, she can afford to be audacious.

  The girls watch in silence as the waiter takes a bottle of beer over to Ben on a tray. The waiter bends down in front of Ben and murmurs something, pointing at the brunette, before walking away while Ben, bless him, blushes.

  He stares at the bottle, too embarrassed to look around the room, to look at the brunette, and the brunette, much like the dowdy woman in Waterstone’s, melts.

  “Oh my God,” she whispers to her girlfriends. “Did you see that? He blushed! I think I’m in love!”

  Ben’s face cools down and he looks at the brunette, amazement in his eyes, for she is truly gorgeous, and he smiles and raises the bottle to her, a silent toast.

  “Guys,” she says to her girlfriends as she stands up, “I’m going in there.”

  “Good luck,” they say, unable to take their eyes off Ben. “Don’t do anything we wouldn’t do.”

  She walks, no, sashays over to where Ben’s sitting. “Do you mind if I join you?”

  “Um, no,” says Ben, thinking this doesn’t happen in real life, surely? Surely this only happens in the movies. “Please sit down. Thank you for the drink.”

  “I bet it’s not the first time a woman’s bought you a drink.”

  She’s wrong. It is. “Um, actually, yes. It is.”

  “Oh.” She shrugs her shoulders and laughs. “Oh well, there’s a first time for everything. I’m Sam,” she says, extending her hand, using the handshake as an excuse to get closer to him.

  “I’m Ben,” he says, shaking her hand.

  “My favorite name,” she laughs, and Ben laughs back.

  Jemima Jones finished her cappuccino a long time ago, but she stays in her little café for a while, reading, except she is not comfortable, squeezed into this tiny hard chair, and after a while she thinks she would be far more comfortable at home, lying on her bed.

  She pays, walks out of the café, and starts down the hill, feeling ridiculously happy for no reason at all. She goes past the bar and looks in at the beautiful people, thinking that one day she will be slim enough to join them.

  And then she sees them. Ben and Sam, sitting on the sofa at the back, and she freezes, her mouth open in a gasp of shock. Ben and Sam are getting on as famously as two people who have nothing in common other than a mutual attraction can get on. Sam is flirting outrageously, and Ben is enjoying having a gorgeous woman flirt with him. Already he knows that he will not be going out with her, because already she has proved to be indescribably stupid, but Jesus does he fancy her.

  He realizes he may have to take her out a couple of times before getting her into bed, but he is sure it will be worth it, and so they sit, closer and closer, touching one another more and more, Sam resting her hand on his arm as she talks to him, Ben leaning in towards her to hear more clearly. It is only a matter of time.

  How can your moods change so suddenly? I mean, I was feeling so good, so happy, so optimistic, and now I’m rooted to the spot, trying hard to suppress a growing wave of nausea. It’s Ben. The love of my life, and he’s with a woman, and she’s beautiful, and she’s skinny, and I hate her, and I love him. I love him, I love him, I love him.

  And I can’t move, but I have to, because I don’t want him to see me, and as I turn and walk away the cloud I’ve been floating on for the past two weeks disappears into thin air, and in its place it feels like there’s a large black rain cloud. I walk slowly down the main street, and call me pathetic, call me a loser, but I can’t help it. I can’t stop the two fat tears that work their way slowly down my cheeks.

  Chapter 7

  Jemima Jones is not having a good day. The rain cloud followed her home last night, dropping tears into her eyes, removing the hopes from her heart.

  She trudged down the street, aware that people were looking at her, and not caring whether they were looking at her size or her tears. Nobody dared ask what was wrong, and Jemima had never felt so alone in her whole life.

  She went home, back to an empty flat, lay on her bed and cried, and when the tears had passed she just lay, staring up at the ceiling, wondering why nothing good ever seemed to happen to her.

  I know I’m overweight, she thought, but I’m not a bad person. I love animals, and children, and I’m kind to people and why does no one ever fall in love with me, why can’t Ben see through the weight and fall in love with me as a person.

  Because Jemima knows that Ben is a good person. She knows better than most about judging books by their covers. She knows that people judge her instantly on her appearance, and she knows that people do the same thing with Ben.

  Single women of an appropriate age do one of two things when they meet Ben. They either fall instantly in lust with him, or, if they suspect Ben is the kind of man they could never hope to attain, they choose the second option and hate him instead, hate him for being arrogant, vain, self-important.

  But we know that’s not true because we’ve got to know Ben a little bit, and Jemima knows it’s not true because she looked through his dimples and blue eyes (for she got it wrong when she described him to her flatmates, his eyes are actually the color of the English sky on a hot summer’s day) and saw that Ben, like her, was not a bad person.

  Ben too makes time for people. Even Jemima. He has the same winning smile and easy charm with everyone he meets, regardless of what they look like. In fact, the only time Ben is awkward is when he meets a woman he fancies, and then he’s not entirely sure of how to behave.

  Take last night, for example. Ben was wrong about having to take Sam out a couple of times before he would manage to sleep with her. Sam was a sure thing. Sam made this blatantly clear. Too blatant. Too clear. Her aggression, which became more and more apparent as the evening wore on, suddenly started to turn Ben off. He still fancied her, but could he be bothered, he wondered? Did he really want to go through the whole procedure of waking up in bed with a stranger who may or may not become obsessive? Ben got bored, and Ben said goodnight to Sam, although not without a long, slow kiss goodnight.

  And he was absolutely right not to have gone home with her, for Sam is exactly the kind of girl to get obsessive. She’s the kind of girl who regularly sleeps with men on the night she meets them and then wonders why they don’t call afterwards. But she doesn’t stop there. She phones them, and phones them, and phones them. She offers them tickets to concerts, dinner invitations, parties.

  At first they are flattered, what man, after all, wouldn’t be, with a stunning girl like Sam chasing them. But then they become bored. Where is the challenge? Where is the thrill of the chase? And inevitably they start making excuses, and Sam does what she always does. She shouts and screams at them on the phone, calls them bastards, like all the bastards she’s ever met. Ends with telling them she thought they were different, as if guilt, somehow, will make them come back, and then finally she slams the phone down.

  Then she goes out and repeats the whole scenario with someone new.

  Ben is perceptive enough to realize the sort of woman Sam is. A “bunny boiler” is how he would describe her to his friends, and they would all groan in recognition.

  But because Ben’s a nice guy masquerading as a bastard, Ben let her down gently by asking for her number after they kissed and promising he would call. This was perhaps not exactly the right thing to do because Sam wrote down her home number, her work number, and her mobile number. At this v
ery moment Sam is doing what thousands of women in her position have done. She is watching the phone at work and willing him to call. Every now and then she picks it up to check it’s still working, and she has been hovering by the phone all day, leaping on it should it dare to ring.

  But Ben won’t call, not least because girlfriends are not exactly a priority at the moment. The type of women Ben goes for are high-maintenance. They require picking up, being paid for, presents. Ben, at this very moment in time, has neither the funds nor the inclination to think about high-maintenance women in anything other than an abstract way.

  So while he fancies Geraldine, he knows that right now she’d never give him a chance, and quite frankly that’s okay with Ben. It’s enough that she brightens up his days at work. He’s happy not to take it further.

  Ben is far too busy thinking about his career to think about women. Sure, if someone uncomplicated came along who would be willing to fit in with Ben’s life, and just see him occasionally, i.e., on the occasions when he’s not working, working out, or seeing his friends, then great. But Ben hasn’t met this woman yet.

  So Jemima’s having a bad day, and Ben’s interviewing a local woman whose thirteen-year-old son has just stabbed a schoolteacher. Normally he wouldn’t, as the deputy news editor, be writing the stories himself, but this is the Kilburn Herald after all, and everyone has to muck in.

  Jemima has spent all day hoping for a glimpse of Ben, and each time footsteps come her way she turns, but it would appear that Ben is out of the office. She has spent the day making phone calls. She has discovered the best way of drying your nail polish quickly (dip the nails into a bowl of icy cold water), the best way of keeping lettuce fresh (put the lettuce into a bowl of iced water, add a slice of lemon and put it in the fridge) and the best way of storing tinned foods in the cupboard (buying plastic shelves, £5.99). Jemima is bored. Bored, fat, and unhappy. Not a good combination, I think we all agree.