Page 73 of Under Your Spell

There’s a beat, two, and then Theo asks, quietly, ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’

I nod, gesture to the sofa. Theo gets up and sits beside me. I pull my knees up to my chest, wrap my arms around them. ‘I think I should have told you earlier,’ I say. ‘Should have explained…’

Theo stops me. ‘You don’t owe me an explanation. You don’t owe me anything. If you want to tell me I’d like to understand, but if you don’t, then there’s no pressure. None.’

I smile quaveringly at that. ‘It’s not a big secret, exactly,’ I sigh. ‘It’s just not a very nice story, and I don’t like telling it.’ I think about it. ‘And to be honest, part of me feels, I don’t know… foolish to still be carrying it around. I don’t know why I can’t let go of it, something that happened so long ago. It’s obvious Sam doesn’t even remember it.’

‘I don’t know what happened,’ Theo says, ‘but I know there’s nothing foolish about the way you think or feel.’

‘I’d better tell you the whole story before you go making assumptions like that.’

Theo shakes his head. ‘I don’t need to hear it to know whose side I’m on, Clemmie. I’m on your side, always.’

I swallow past the lump in my throat and decide it’s best just to jump straight in, not to give myself an excuse to chicken out. ‘I met Sam when I was seventeen,’ I begin, nervously wetting my lips. ‘I was on a night out with Serena and Lil and he came over to chat with us, but somehow it ended up being just the two of us, sitting in a corner, talking until two in the morning.’

I think back to that night, to the way it had felt, Sam singling me out. The weight of his full attention had been powerful, had made me feel important.

‘He was good-looking, charming, and – though I didn’t know it then – he was the drummer in this up-and-coming indie band, just starting to get noticed. He had a magnetism about him, people were drawn to him, and he was interested in me. Shy, bookish, ordinary me.’

Theo makes a noise of protest at this and it makes me smile. ‘As I saw myself at the time, anyway. And you have no idea what seventeen-year-old Clemmie was like.’

‘She loved weirdly sexy medieval literature and she had an unhealthy interest in Ryan Gosling despite his extremely average looks, which speaks to her benevolence. And seventeen-year-old me would have been her best friend,’ Theo says firmly.

I laugh then, a proper laugh, and some of the heaviness I’m feeling shifts. It makes it easier to carry on.

I take a deep breath. ‘I gave him my number that first night and he called me the next day and the next and the next. He made me feel like I was the most amazing, desirable girl in the world.

‘Even when I found out he was a musician it didn’t bother me. I thought he was nothing like Ripp. He was so considerate; he listened to me, talked to me about books and music and art. He was a few years older and everything felt so grown-up. First love I suppose.’ I wince. Theo stays quiet, his expression hard to read.

‘Then he started taking me out, partying more. I was underage but no one ever checked when I was with the band. They would play and I’d watch and then afterwards Sam would come and put his arm around me, call me his girl, let everyone know how lucky he was to have me. God, I bought into it completely,’ I scoff, thinking – for maybe the billionth time at this point – that I must have been an idiot.

‘Why wouldn’t you?’ Theo asks. ‘From what you’re telling me anyone would have. We’re all romantic disasters at seventeen.’

I eye him doubtfully and Theo clearly reads my expression.

‘Hey, just wait until I tell you about my first girlfriend who was so nice when she was breaking up with me that I still thought we were together three weeks later when she stuck her tongue down Darryl Simmons’s throat,’ Theo says. ‘But there’s plenty of time for my romantic disasters. We’re talking about you.’

‘Right,’ I nod, making a mental note to get the full story later, and feeling an irrational gut punch of jealousy and anger towards a nameless teenage girl.

‘So, we were going out a lot. Sam always insisted I went with them, said he didn’t want to spend time away from me, said it was no fun for him if I wasn’t there too.’ I fiddle with the hem of my shorts, remember how stunned I’d been by the idea that there was someone who simply couldn’t bear to be parted from me. I mean, you didn’t need the years of therapy I had undergone to hear the foghorns screaming ‘DADDY ISSUES!!!!!’, but hindsight is a bitch, isn’t it?

‘At first it was fun,’ I continue. ‘Then, one day the paparazzi started turning up, taking Sam’s picture when we arrived or when we left. Just a photographer or two, not a big deal. Like I said, his band was taking off. They had fans. I didn’t love it, but I understood. I tried to just stay out the way, hide behind Sam when the cameras flashed.’ My palms are starting to sweat now, knowing we’re approaching the more difficult bit.

‘Then, one night there were more paparazzi there than usual, and one of the photographers shouted my name… well, actually, not my name, but Clementine Harris, and the next day I was there, in the papers. I remember the headline: A RIPP OFF THE OLD BLOCK’.

Theo makes a sound somewhere between a laugh and an outraged splutter.

‘I know!’ I wince. ‘Actually offensively bad writing apart from anything else. But there it was: this whole story about how Ripp’s daughter was a party girl, shagging a musician. After that there were more pictures, more cameras everywhere we went and honestly it was just so messed up. In ways that I didn’t fully understand at seventeen, but now…’ I blow out a breath. ‘They’d try and take pictures up my skirt, catcall me, or shout questions about my sex life, anything to get a reaction out of me. At the time I didn’t think of myself as a child, but I was, really, only seventeen. You’re so vulnerable, aren’t you? Right on the edge of adulthood and not sure what to do with it. The way they talked to me…’

Theo’s stoic look is strained now.

‘It was awful. I was so unhappy. It really messed me up. I started having crippling panic attacks, didn’t want to leave the house, and Sam kept saying they were all bastards but that we shouldn’t let it stop us living our lives, that we knew it was all bullshit, so who cared? I wanted so badly to keep him that I just agreed, and it kept happening and it got worse and worse.’ I’m talking faster now, the words pouring out of me.

‘They kept taking more and more pictures, choosing shots where Sam would be holding my arm looking like he was supporting me, or where I’d be looking wild and upset by them. I stopped eating, made myself ill. Eventually they ran this story about how I had a drug problem, and how my dad was distraught about it all and trying to get me into rehab.’ I blink indignantly at Theo here. ‘And I never touched drugs. I mean, once I ate a hash cookie with Lil and Serena and I spent the whole night curled up in a ball thinking that words were shapes that were trying to squash me, and every time Lil or Serena spoke it was a deliberate act of attempted murder. So that pretty much soured me on the whole experience.’

Theo clears his throat. ‘What happened after that story came out?’

‘I mean, thank God this was before social media really took off, but I was still scared that the university I was going to were going to hear about it, that it was going to completely destroy my life, so I went to Ripp.’ I grimace. ‘Big mistake. I begged him to talk to the papers, get them to back off, tell them that none of the stories were true. He just shrugged it off and told me it would all die down soon enough and not to let it bother me. He even made a joke about how I was finally showing everyone that I was my father’s daughter, as if at last I’d done something to make him proud. I felt like I was going mad.’