Ask natalie, p.1
Ask Natalie, page 1
ASK NATALIE
NATASHA BOYDELL
Copyright © 2022 Natasha Boydell
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The right of Natasha Boydell to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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First published in 2022 by Bloodhound Books.
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Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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www.bloodhoundbooks.com
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Print ISBN: 978-1-5040-8243-3
CONTENTS
Also by Natasha Boydell
The one that got away
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Acknowledgements
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A note from the publisher
Love best-selling fiction?
ALSO BY NATASHA BOYDELL
This Missing Husband
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THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY
BY NATALIE BROWN, CHIEF FEATURES WRITER FOR THE DAILY
It all started with Friends Reunited.
Before that, you could walk out of the gates at the end of your school sentence and disappear into the proverbial sunset. It was the ideal scenario for those who hated school/were not particularly popular/had had their heart broken and had been left a quivering, deflated wreck.1
The keen beans who really wanted to keep in touch always found a way. They sent letters and organised reunions. They called each other’s landlines. Later, they discovered mobile phones and text messages. Then they started writing perky emails to each other: Hiyeeee! How fabulous is this! It’s like tomorrow’s world! We must stay in touch even more now that we have the World Wide Web!
But the rest of us could bury the memories of our tormented past in the depths of our minds where they belonged. We could rise from the ruins and construct a new persona, free from cringeworthy reminders of embarrassment, rejection, failure, and unflattering haircuts. Oh, what bliss! Our old friends, frenemies, crushes or bullies might think, I wonder what became of X? Are they happy? Successful? Did they become a millionaire? Do they now live in an exotic country, surrounded by camels?
Here was the beauty of it. They would never know.
Then Friends Reunited was invented and suddenly the ghosts from our past returned to haunt us; invading our digital space, asking how we were, where we lived, what we were up to (translation: is your life better than mine?). For successful actors or prize-winning paediatricians, this was a fantastic opportunity to show off while feigning modesty. But for the rest of us, it was a stark reminder of how little we had achieved.
Before we knew it, the papers were full of stories about former childhood sweethearts who reconnected online years later, rekindled their romance and were now blissfully married with seventeen delightful children. And we all started thinking, OMG, could this be on the cards for me and Bradley Pickering?2 I loved him so much even though he puked on me at a house party and then ignored me and snogged my friend. I’ve always thought he was the one that got away. But what if he didn’t get away after all? What if we are, in fact, destined to be together forever?
It was almost enough to make one start doodling love-hearts on a notepad again.
And that was just the start of the dot com reunion boom. MySpace followed and we all became private detectives; eagerly clicking on the profiles of our old friends, exes and unrequited loves, scrolling obsessively through their photographs and trying to work out which pub they drank in so that we could accidentally on purpose bump into them. On our own profiles we posed for selfies, grinning or pouting seductively, so that everyone knew we were living our best life. Evenings out became more about keeping a photographic record than enjoying the event itself.
Soon, MySpace was overshadowed by the new, legally permitted stalking platform on the block, Facebook. And Twitter. LinkedIn. Instagram. Pick your poison.
Now it’s almost impossible to go through life without a digital footprint. Those who have managed to avoid it are the exception, not the rule. The vast majority of us have, at some point, signed up to at least one social media platform. And most of us have, whether we care to admit it or not, searched for people from our past; usually the ones we loved or hated most intensely.
It’s turned us into voyeurs, no longer being haunted by ghosts but actively seeking them out, and for what end? To hope that one day they’ll ‘poke’ us and it will be the start of something magic? To determine if they have a better life than us? Our hearts soar when we see that the bully who put our hand in cold water so we’d wet ourselves at a sleepover is divorced and lonely. They sink when we see the adorable new baby photos posted by our old college boyfriend, who ended up marrying a beautiful and successful size-ten woman with perfect hair.
Of course, it’s not all doom and gloom. Social media has enabled us to find and connect with people we want to connect with too; family living around the world, old friends who we genuinely wish we’d kept in touch with, and new ones who share the same interests as us. Long-term friendships have been made, lovers found, life partners discovered. If used as a tool to improve or enhance our lives, then it’s a positive thing. The problem is that too often we use these platforms to our detriment rather than to our benefit. To compare ourselves to others and decide that we are lacking. To make public declarations of happiness when we would do better to admit that we’re struggling. To cling to people from the past when we should let them go. Because, let’s face it, the one that got away was rarely forcibly removed. They usually left of their own free will.
It started with Friends Reunited. But where will it end? Some experts say that social media is just a trend and, like all trends, it will have its time and fade away again, replaced by a new fad. Others say it’s well and truly here to stay, in one form or another.
In the end it’s our choice whether we choose to embrace social media fully, occasionally or not at all. But remember, it’s not mandated by law. We can hit that deactivate button at any time and the world won’t implode. We can make ourselves visible only to the people who we genuinely want in our lives. Even if that means deleting the friend request from Bradley Pickering.
We can’t change our past, but we can change our future. Perhaps we would do better to stop worrying about how happy we look to the people we used to know and focus instead on what – and who – makes us happy now. The rest, as they say, is history.
1 Delete as appropriate
2 False name used to protect identity of true school heartthrob.
CHAPTER ONE
‘Holy mother of God, this is the worst thing I’ve ever read in my life.’
These were not the words that Natalie had been hoping to hear from her editor when she filed her article twenty minutes previously. She’d been in the middle of having a wee when the office junior had stumbled breathlessly into the ladies, slamming the door against the wall in her haste and calling out to Natalie that Bob King wanted to see her immediately.
Natalie had stormed from the cubicle, ranting that she couldn’t even piss in peace, and the poor junior had looked like she might cry. Remembering her own, terrifying days as the work experience kid in a busy newsroom, Natalie had handed her a tissue and thanked her for passing on the message. Then she had marched back through the newsroom and into Bob’s fishbowl of an office.
‘What’s up, Bob?’
That was the moment when he had delivered his damning verdict on the article that Natalie had stayed up until two o’clock in the morning to finish.
‘I can’t run this, Natalie.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s shit.’
‘That’s not very motivational, Bob. Did you not partake in the mandatory effective leadership training that HR organised last week?’
He ignored her. ‘What about that other piece you were working on? The new generation of WAGs? Weren’t you sorting out an interview with the new England player’s missus?’
Natalie rolled her eyes. ‘No one cares about footballers’ wives and girlfriends anymore, Bob.’
‘The readers care about WAGs, thus I care about WAGs. Thus you care about WAGs.’
‘I’ll call her agent again now.’
‘Fine.’
Bob turned back to his computer, indicating that she was dismissed. She hovered in front of his desk for a moment longer, until he looked at her again with an expression akin to exasperation.
‘Can I help you with something?’
She shook her head. It probably wasn’t the best time to ask him exactly what it was that he hadn’t liked about her articl e. ‘No.’
He nodded and returned to his screen, and she turned and made her way back out of the office towards her desk on the other side of the newsroom.
Her colleague, Christina, raised an eyebrow. ‘Bob on the warpath again?’
Natalie grunted in response and sat down, wiggling her mouse impatiently until her inbox reappeared on the screen, displaying her depressingly growing pile of spam emails.
A new message appeared at the top from Bob. It was marked urgent and the subject line was WAGs WAGs WAGs. She scowled and deleted the email. And then deleted it from her deleted items in a tiny yet satisfying protest against his tyranny.
‘I need a coffee,’ she told Christina. ‘A proper one. I’m going to Gio’s. Want one?’
Christina gave her a thumbs-up and Natalie picked up her purse and made her way towards the lift.
Just as the doors were closing Nick Walker, the crime correspondent, pushed them open again, and barged his way into the confined space. He gave Natalie a sideways glance. ‘All right Natalie, how’s the fluffy and pointless world of features?’
‘Fine thanks Nick, how’s the miserable and soul-destroying world of crime?’
‘Life affirming, as always. I hear Bob’s spiked your page seven for tomorrow.’
Natalie grimaced. ‘Jesus, nothing’s sacred in this place.’
‘Don’t worry about it. I’ve got a great little piece all lined up to replace it. I’ve just sent it over to Bob now. I don’t like to gloat, but I think the word that he used was saviour.’
‘Show-off, more like.’
A life of crime wasn’t for her, but sometimes she envied Nick’s constant access to stories. With London as his patch, and several coppers as his drinking buddies, he had an endless supply of leads to follow up on and he got more by-lines in the paper than anyone else.
For her it was getting increasingly difficult to secure decent exclusives, which were the only type of story that Bob got excited about. Most of the time it came down to which newspaper, magazine or website could afford to pay the most money for the story and The Daily hadn’t won a bidding war yet. Bob wanted her to compete with the big titles but with ever-shrinking budgets he couldn’t put his money where his mouth was and even Natalie’s well-oiled charm and persuasion had limits.
She bickered good-naturedly with Nick all the way down to the ground floor before they went their separate ways; Nick to a press conference at Scotland Yard and Natalie to the local coffee shop, run by an impossibly cheerful Italian man whose face lit up every time he saw her. Natalie suspected that his business was fully funded by coffee-addicted journalists who worked around the clock to get a paper out each day.
‘Natalie! The usual?’
‘Yes please Gio, and a cappuccino for Christina too please,’ Natalie said, reaching for her phone and scrolling absentmindedly through Facebook while she waited for Gio to make the drinks. After a minute or so she moved on to Twitter and Instagram before pocketing her phone again with a sigh. As usual, her news feeds were uninspiring.
Taking the coffees gratefully from Gio, she made her way back towards the office, glancing as she always did at the imposing red and white sign outside that declared the building to be the home of The Daily. Natalie had worked in journalism for twenty years, but the buzz of walking into the office of a national newspaper and swiping her security card still hadn’t worn off.
Today, though, even that wasn’t enough to clear the mist of melancholy that had settled over her; the result of a bad night’s sleep and Bob’s scathing critique of her latest article. She couldn’t shake off the lingering feeling that she was on borrowed time, that one more spiked article could land her the sack, thinly veiled as a restructure. The newspaper industry was in decline, people were losing their jobs left, right and centre and the ones left behind were hanging on by a thread. It felt like survival of the fittest and she was painfully out of shape.
There was a time when Natalie was the golden girl of the newsroom, the one who could do no wrong. In her twenties she had been branded as one to watch after securing several impressive scoops which had caused sales of the paper to soar.
In her early thirties, she’d won an award after being the only journalist to get a sit-down interview with the family involved in a major court case. She’d even been interviewed on Channel 4 News about the story, the highlight of her career to date. There had been talk of a book deal, but in the end it hadn’t materialised.
But that was years ago and she felt like she’d been chasing her tail ever since. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d landed a front-page story and she seemed to spend most of her time writing what could only be described as page filler. Or, as Nick called it, fluff.
She was a good writer, an experienced and reliable member of the team, a safe pair of hands and well-respected by those she worked with, but it wasn’t enough. She knew it and Bob knew it.
As she emerged from the lift with a coffee in each hand, several pairs of eyes turned towards her and followed her as she walked across the newsroom. Feeling self-conscious, she balanced one coffee precariously on top of the other and patted her hair with her free hand. Had a bird pooed on her? Perhaps her skirt was caught in her knickers? But a quick check confirmed that everything was in order.
She glanced at one of the reporters and he looked away quickly. Why was everyone acting so strangely? She wondered if someone had overheard the earlier exchange between her and Bob and gossiped about it, but even if they had, a journalist getting a dressing down from the editor was not unusual and didn’t normally cause such intense interest.
Over by the window, she noticed a couple of people from the TV listings team muttering quietly across their desks and glancing in her direction. Whatever was going on, word had spread like wildfire and by the time Natalie reached her desk she was paranoid.
‘What’s going on?’ she hissed at Christina as she handed her one of the coffees.
‘Police are here,’ Christina hissed back. ‘To see you.’
Natalie’s eyes widened. Panic swelled within her as she began frantically running through the stories that she had worked on over the past few weeks. Had she written something libellous? Had her article about fake celebrities enraged a reality TV star who was now out for her blood? Sorry, Dr Alex, I love you really.
She was already in Bob’s bad books; legal action against the paper could sound the death knell on her career.
But, thinking rationally, the police wouldn’t turn up for a libel case, and she couldn’t think of anything she had written that amounted to a criminal offence.
Had she inadvertently done something terrible in her personal life? Her guilty conscience kicked in, accusing her of irrational and unforgivable crimes. Perhaps she’d hit a cyclist while driving without even realising? Oh God, what if she had? She could go to prison.
Her panic shifted again. What if it was nothing to do with her at all? What if someone had died? She could count the number of her nearest and dearest on one hand; Christina – who was currently sitting opposite her – her mother and her brother, Tom. And Tom had texted her an hour ago, so there definitely hadn’t been enough time for him to have met a grisly end in the interim. Her mother then. Oh my God.
Her palms were clammy now and she wiped them on her skirt before glancing nervously in the direction of Bob’s office. He was sitting at his desk, talking to two police officers. Sensing her gaze, he looked at Natalie and beckoned her over, and before she knew it the officers were staring at her too.
