Seeing Other People Read Online Free PDF Page B

that we got off on the wrong foot. Anyway, I really do hope your time on the paper goes well.’
    She laughed, and tucked a stray strand of hair that had been caught by the wind back behind her ear. ‘How could it not after a start like this?’ she replied. A nearby car sounded its horn before I could reply. I turned to see Carl and his assistant waving at me to hurry up from the back of a black Addison Lee minivan.
    ‘I’d better go,’ I said. She nodded and gave me a smile that if I hadn’t known better I might have described as flirtatious, then headed back into work leaving me alone with my thoughts for the walk to the car.
    ‘Who was that then?’ asked Carl, leaning out of the window to get a better look at Bella. ‘The next Mrs Clarke?’
    ‘It was no one,’ I replied, climbing in. ‘Look, let’s get a move on if we’re not going to be late for this stupid shoot.’
     
    The studio we’d booked was in one of the few parts of East London yet to be gentrified but was as overpriced and overstyled as any I’d been in. Hair and make-up had arrived, the stylist was at the ready and now all we needed were the stars of our show who were nowhere to be seen. I couldn’t get a signal to call them from where we were set up and so cursing my brand-new state-of-the-art phone with its mega memory and superior processing power I headed out into the corridor to get a better signal when I saw a tubby guy in a stained sky-blue puffa jacket and grey supermarket tracksuit bottoms staring at me. He held an open bag of chips in his hands.
    ‘Can’t get a signal?’
    ‘Not for love nor money,’ I replied, assuming he was some kind of caretaker. ‘I don’t know what the point of these things is if you can’t actually make calls with them.’
    ‘I can’t seem to go a month without killing a phone,’ replied Tubby Guy. ‘I’m like a phone serial killer.’ He laughed, clearly amused by his own joke, and as I turned away to resume my signal search he coughed and said, ‘I don’t know if you can help me mate. I’m looking for Joe Clarke, a journalist. I don’t suppose you could point him out could you?’
    ‘That’s me,’ I replied. I looked at him again. Maybe he wasn’t the caretaker. Maybe he was some kind of delivery guy. ‘Do you need me to sign for something?’
    Tubby Guy looked puzzled. ‘I’m not sure I . . .’
    ‘You’re here to deliver something aren’t you?’ I wondered if I’d missed an accent that might explain why he didn’t understand English.
    Tubby Guy laughed. ‘No, I’m not delivering anything – I’m the star of the show!’ He wiped one of his greasy hands on his tracksuit bottoms and held it out for me to shake. ‘I’m Stew, I’m a neighbour of Gary Crossly from your IT department. I’m here for the shoot.’
    I immediately thought back to Camilla’s words on the day she’d commissioned the feature: Readers never getting tired of good-looking guys who have made a mess of their lives . When Tubby Guy’s friend, Gary from IT, had responded to my appeal for divorced dads he’d assured me that not only was his mate Stewart a recently separated father of two but also good-looking in a ‘poor man’s Hugh Grant’ kind of way. Even though my usual protocol was to demand a jpg upfront in order to verify the photogenic status of respondents, the studio, photographer, make-up artist and stylist had been booked and as I still had another two slots to fill I just said yes and decided to hope for the best. I looked at the lumpy, red-faced man smelling of vinegar standing in front of me. The only way he resembled Hugh Grant was that both he and Hugh had two eyes and a nose. I made a mental note to kill Gary from IT with my bare hands first thing in the morning.
    At this point there was literally nothing I could do other than usher Stewart through to hair and make-up and hope for the best. But as I was about to do that I noticed something else about him – other than the ketchup