Don’t You Forget About Me(92)

With shaky hands, I flick through the pages. This would be hard to read at any time, but after the showdown with Lucas, it’s excruciating. Like peeling back a bandage and plunging your fingertips into the surgical incision underneath.

… I lose track of time when we’re Doing Stuff, I mean completely, three hours had passed and all I can remember about the entire time is thinking about where his left hand was. Got home and felt like everyone could see on my face what I’d been doing all afternoon. Rubbish tea, I hate lamb stew with the fatty speckly bits. George Best has died and Dad seems sad about it. Mum said, ‘He had it coming with his behaviour’ and Dad said, ‘Mr Best, where did it all go wrong?’ and they had one of their moods with each where they’ve pissed each other off at some special level Esther and I can’t understand …

… Persuaded Mum I needed new bras and pants and so we went to Marks and Sparks and she tried to have THE TALK with me after about being safe with boys after aaaaarggh noooo. I said, ‘I don’t have a boyfriend’ which would’ve worked like a dream with Dad, probably because he doesn’t want to think about it. But Mum just raised an eyebrow and said, ‘they’re not always your boyfriend.’ I knew what was coming next, some 1950s code for ‘don’t be a slag’ and YES there it was: ‘Georgina, remember nice boys want to date nice girls.’ …

… He is the most sexy boy to ever live, I’m sure of it, even though he’s my first and I’ve only been alive for 18 years. He is the personification of sexy and I don’t think he knows how beautiful he is. He says that to me! I keep trying to imagine what actual sex will be like. How are you supposed to know what to do? You have to patch it together from films, TV, the gross magazines that Gary Tate used to bring in to school and the awful ‘How A Baby Is Made’ video we were once shown in biology GCSE, when a man and a woman were smiling at each other, went up to a bedroom and then it cut to a ballet dancer leaping around with a ribbon and the whole class started laughing …

I slam it shut again and feel a wave of shame and disgrace and fury at this invasion.

How? I remember one time, no, maybe more than that, a few times, when Robin stayed in my room after I went to work. ‘Leave by the back door and pull it shut, it’s a Yale, then you don’t need my keys.’

Left unattended in here, he went through my things. He read my diary. Did he copy out sections from my diary? I wouldn’t put it past him, and from what I can tell he’s either got perfect recall (with the amount he smokes? Unlikely) or (so much more likely) took photos of the pages. And he put them into his act.

What did Lucas say? ‘If he has anything he can use against you’? Right now, Lucas doesn’t look smart so much as clairvoyant.

It takes a very large wine and five more re-readings of the preview on Chortle to come up with what I should do.

I may have been able to bounce Robin McNee’s agent into talking to me, but I’m not so Machiavellian as to work out how to get into Robin’s dressing room.

The Last Laugh is at City Hall and I arrive at 6 p.m., an hour before curtain up. From what I knew of Robin’s habits, he will be here, swilling a beer, scrolling on his laptop, eating a tub of his lucky guacamole with extra hot Doritos (I’m not kidding, he did this. ‘Performers have rituals,’ he told me, as if he was Nikki Sixx with a bottle of Wild Turkey).

I could say I’m somebody other than I am, but then that’s not going to help me when I don’t know who that somebody who’d get access might be. ‘I’m a girl who’d like to have sex with the famed wit Robin McNee,’ might get Robin to say yes, but the venue wouldn’t wear it.

I’ll simply have to hope that once again, the unexpected nature of my appearance bears fruit.

‘Got a Georgina Horse Poo here for you,’ says the pallid girl on the desk, into the phone. I am tense with worry. I have no Plan B if he says no. ‘Sure, go on down, it’s on the left,’ she says to me.

I’m vaguely stunned. Robin’s show is called My Ex’s Diary, and he doesn’t think I’m here to tear a strip? Then it dawns: he doesn’t think or care about my motivations all that much. Ironically. My Ex-Girlfriend Who I Was Never That Bothered About’s Diary.

‘It’s good to see you,’ Robin says, after I knock and push the door open. He’s positioned at his laptop, wearing a t-shirt that says You Versus The Guy She Told You Not To Worry About with cartoon characters underneath. A large bottle of chocolate milk is next to his rose gold MacBook. Pretty ironic he’s about to spend an hour and a half ripping the stuffing out of my adolescent nonsense. At least when I was behaving like one, I was one.

‘You look sensational in this lighting,’ he adds, pen in corner of his mouth. Obviously thinking that by being here, I’ve finally come to my senses, and might be up for some preshow warm-up.

Ugh.

‘You read my diary,’ I say, flatly.

‘Had a little scan through,’ Robin says, with a ‘Forgive Me’ teeth grit.

‘You absolutely despicable, evil, morality free, thought rapist,’ I say.

‘Thought rapist!’ Robin puts his pen down. He is half affronted, half whirring about whether he can use this encounter for his act, too.

‘Really. You piece of shit,’ I conclude. ‘I don’t know how you can live with yourself. Reading a woman’s diary, a woman you were in a relationship with. Then putting it in your act, and leaving her to find out by accident, hours before you entertain hundreds of strangers with it. Please at least tell me you know who and what you are?’