Whatever Happened to Vicky Hope's Back Up Man? Read online

  WHATEVER HAPPENED TO VICKY HOPE’S BACK UP MAN?

  Laura Kemp

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  About this Book

  About the Author

  Table of Contents

  www.ariafiction.com

  About Whatever Happened to Vicky Hope’s Back Up Man?

  A tender, funny and haunting coming-of-age novel which asks if the past can ever be part of your future.

  Twenty-one and insecure, Vicky Hope comes up with a plan on the eve of travelling the world with her high flying friend, Kat Lloyd: if she isn’t married by the time she’s thirty, she’ll marry her geeky best mate Mikey Murphy.

  Fast-forward eight-and-a-bit years, Vicky, now Vee wakes up on her thirtieth birthday in Brighton, expecting a proposal of marriage from her arty boyfriend Jez. Instead he tells her their relationship is over and she has no choice but to return to her parents’ home.

  Devastated and alone in her childhood bedroom, she decides she has nothing to lose and tracks down her two old mates. With shock, she discovers Mikey, now Murphy, is a successful app designer driven by his tragic upbringing. Kat, or Kate, never made it – but she hides a devastating secret, which threatens the happiness of all three.

  For LK, who has my unyielding devotion – in other words, I’m totes devotes

  Contents

  Cover

  Welcome Page

  About Whatever Happened to Vicky Hope’s Back Up Man?

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About Laura Kemp

  Also by Laura Kemp

  Become an Aria Addict

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Roath, Cardiff, September 2007

  Lying flat on her back, Vicky Hope screwed up one eye and waited for the orangey night sky to stop spinning.

  When it didn’t, she groaned, reached out across her parents’ manicured lawn for Mikey Murphy’s hand and squeezed it hard.

  ‘Ow! What in the name of Britney Spears was that for?’ he said, yanking back his arm.

  ‘Everything’s whirling and I can’t stop it,’ she wailed as the street light in the top right of her vision pogoed up and down. This was not how she had wanted to look back on the farewell barbecue held in her honour for family and neighbours the night before she left home and travelled the world. She’d intended to behave seeing as Mum had pulled out the stops, having bought the posh burgers from the supermarket.

  ‘That’s five hours of sinking everything in your Dad’s drinks cabinet, that is,’ he smirked, splayed out beside her, blowing smoke rings into the for-once still Indian summer air. ‘Maybe you shouldn’t have had that last one. The green concoction that tasted of melon with an umbrella and a glacé cherry. That made you sick. That ended the party.’

  ‘Not helping,’ she gulped, panicking at the prospect of her six-month tour with their friend Kat Lloyd, beginning with boarding British Airways flight 548 from Heathrow to La Paz, Bolivia via Miami at 11.25 a.m. tomorrow. Twenty-one hours in transit – not including Dad’s painfully sensible driving from Cardiff to the airport – was bad enough when you’d never gone further than the Mediterranean but with a hangover? Vicky felt panty and light-headed at the thought of Kat in bed already after a tame family supper. ‘And I’ve got to get up in about four hours and Kat says she’s taking far less than me and that I’ve overpacked. But I think five pairs of shoes is fine, don’t you?’

  Mikey gave a loud snort.

  ‘What?’ Vicky said, turning her head to face him.

  Mikey, being Mikey, deliberately kept looking upwards, his face expressionless, the profile of his heavy brow, strong nose and defiant lips as inscrutable as Snowdon.

  But having been best mates with him for eight years, Vicky knew exactly what he was thinking: she was ridiculous. So she elbowed his skinny ribcage.

  ‘Oi!’ he barked, making to sit up before giving in to gravity and collapsing alongside her. Vicky watched as he stretched to stub out the last burning embers of his fag on the edge of the patio. Knowing the drill, he pocketed the butt – funny how he followed the rules here at Mum and Dad’s but nowhere else.

  ‘It’s not enough to leave me – yet again. Oh no, you have to go and duff me up,’ he said, pouting for effect, which sent Vicky wild.

  ‘You were invited!’ she screeched. ‘Me and Kat always said we’d go travelling after uni and we always asked you to come.’

  Vicky’s indignation evaporated then when she realized it was no longer an idea but an actual happening. She was frightened of the food, the toilets, the language barrier – and of being The Plain Friend. Vicky loved Kat dearly: they’d wished they were twins in primary and that the corridors would swallow them up in secondary. With Vicky’s ginger hair and puppy fat and Kat’s towering height and thick specs, they’d stood out in Cardiff High for all the wrong reasons. Then when Mikey had turned up from a rough estate in Llanedeyrn with long black hair in Year Nine he’d had no other choice but to join their gang.

  Now though, Kat wasn’t the square in glasses anymore. She had contact lenses, a thigh gap, perky boobs and glossy Angelina Jolie hair as well as a first-class degree and a career in banking waiting for her when they got back. With her pale podge, ‘strawberry’ blonde hair, a 2:2 and that clueless gawp if asked what she was going to do for a job, Vicky was still hoping to have her ta-da moment of transformation.

  Whenever Vicky admired her friend’s new looks, Kat would make sure she returned the compliment: Kat knew what it was like to feel unattractive. But that didn’t change the fact that Vicky was going to spend the next six months in Kat’s shadow.

  If only Mikey was coming, he always made her feel special. Sort of interesting, funny, clever, kind and not the big idiot she considered herself to be. Oh, God, she thought, shutting her eyes, she was going to miss him madly. He was her constant, her ally and her teammate – even more so than Kat, who’d been put in a different form and was whisked off at home-time to her smart semi overlooking the park for after-school tuition, leaving Vicky and Mikey to deal with the bullies alone.

  He’d been moved by his mum and dad from the ‘interfering’ catholic school at a time when she was having one of what Mikey called her ‘mad attacks’. With drainpipe school trousers and both ears pierced, he stood out a mile and from day one he was ‘a poof’ and ‘a queer’. A mouse of a student who, at best, was called a plodder, Vicky had no hope: hanging out with him meant she was tainted by association.

  When everyone else had been sorting themselves into their tribes, whether they were indie kids or trendies, she and him had been on the periphery, united by not being like
everyone else. They paired up because no one would sit next to them. That was when they bonded; over their pencil cases scrawled with Pulp and the Manic Street Preachers; class war; and their hatred of Tony ‘Tory’ Blair. Being singled out as weird, they took it and turned it on its head, thriving on their otherness: there was comfort in their in-jokes, secret codes, latest activist causes and understanding that they were different. Kat, or Katherine back then, flitted in and out of their world when she had a second away from her heavily scheduled ‘free’ time of music and maths. Everyone else followed the crowd: the girls all had Rachel from Friends haircuts while the boys tried to look like Baywatch extras with blond highlights.

  Those clones had no hope: Mikey and Vicky however were destined to make it, whatever ‘it’ was. Vicky would listen enraptured, her heart beating wildly, as Mikey talked of the future, desperate to get away from his drunk of a dad: how he’d tread the roofs of the identical new-build estates like stepping stones and pick his way to London, paving the way for a better life. The others, he’d scoffed, could only see as far as ten minutes up the A48.

  Vicky didn’t have the same motivation – unlike Mikey, her family was boringly normal. The weekly shop was always done on a Wednesday. Dad drove an executive Ford. Mum dreamed of having a side-return extension to their Victorian terrace round the corner from Roath Park. And her big brother Gavin was scaling the grades in the finance department of the National Assembly for Wales.

  But that was precisely why Vicky yearned to fly. Because she was so ordinary, she had an emotional need to make herself stand out, be accepted, be someone. To be interesting.

  Disappointingly, Reading Uni hadn’t done that for her. Mikey was supposed to have gone with her – she was going to do sociology while he did computer science, Kat, of course, was going to Oxford – but he’d spectacularly failed his A Levels after yet another bout of ‘trouble at home’ and as soon as she left home, he started working nine to five at the phone shop. It was a horrible first in Vicky’s life, leaving him behind and going it alone.

  She’d felt on the back foot right from the start. There’d been plenty of going out and all that, the girls in her house ‘loved a giggle’ and ‘I Will Survive’ by Gloria Gaynor, but there was no one she clicked with on such a level as Mikey. When she’d pop back home for the weekend to see him, people would ask her why they weren’t together as a couple. But it was never like that: they were best mates, she’d explain, they didn’t fancy each other. Boyfriends and girlfriends let you down – bezzies didn’t. They’d seen it first-hand with each other’s rubbish relationships, which generally lasted a fortnight, much to their relief: for who would the other hang out with? And while Vicky had never admitted it, she didn’t like his attention going elsewhere - it wasn't out of jealousy, definitely not, it was his choice of heavy eye-linered girls who she thought looked ‘tarty'.

  When Kat came home for the holidays, it was obvious to Vicky and Mikey that she had blossomed at Oxford, where she was reading maths. She was out of her mother’s control and so she began to learn her own likes and dislikes. Here was a girl who’d only known set bed times and curfews and then discovered she could stay up as late as she liked. While she didn’t go the whole sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll route, Vicky saw when she visited her that she was dabbling a bit with boys, booze and gigs. Her work didn’t suffer though because she was conditioned to study, she had an innate thirst for knowledge, it was just that she’d found her own voice.

  When they’d graduated in July, Vicky had got swept up in Kat’s desire to see the world: it was her reward for getting a first and having a job in the City lined up.

  But Vicky had no plans – she would go because she had nothing better to do. Neither a career nor a calling; not even a pleading boyfriend asking her to stay. Unlike Kat who’d ditched the sporty spunk, who’d ruined it all by getting needy, a few weeks before their departure.

  Vicky had got caught up in the excitement of reading up on their route during quiet times at the bar at Dad’s golf club where she’d worked to save up. She hadn’t really thought about the consequence of being thousands of miles away in a different time zone from Mikey. She’d assumed he’d get swept along in their travelling chatter, jack in his job and come for the ride. But he never cracked.

  Now, Vicky was overwhelmed by the realization of not being able to pop home to see Mikey until March. For he was, and always would be, the most awesome person in the world.

  ‘It’s not too late, you know. You can get a ticket and join us. Go on, please come,’ she begged.

  This time he turned to her. In the warmth of Mum’s new garden pathway lights, bought especially for Vicky’s farewell barbecue, she saw his eyes flicker with emotion.

  ‘No, ta,’ he said, covering it up with his bored voice as his fingertips fiddled with the sweep of his thick black bob.

  ‘Come on, Mikey, this is our chance to escape!’ she implored, ‘Like we always said we would. To get away from suburbia. To cheat death by conservatory. To beat everything we’ve always raged against – crisp packets on the pavements, grey multi-storey car parks, people washing their cars on Sundays, anonymous shopping centres, beer guts, gravy with a wrinkled skin, service stations, people talking about the weather.’

  ‘Don’t. I’m still going to have to live with all of that.’ He spread his sarcasm thick but she knew he was speaking from his heart.

  ‘Exactly, so come! You hate working in the phone shop! Think of that stupid corporate red tie they make you wear. And hey, guess what? You might not die if you swap your Doc Martens for flip-flops. We’ll find ourselves. Together.’

  ‘I can’t think of anything worse,’ he spat, still the rebellious teenager. ‘Toffee-nosed kids having experiences when all they’re doing is going on an extended package holiday, conforming. Plus I hate the sun.’

  Vicky clamped her mouth shut into a thin line. He didn’t have to make it sound quite so, well, conventional. But when his voice cracked she recognized his regret at snapping at her.

  ‘My mam… my sister, I can’t leave them with Dad.’ His eyes blinked slowly, protectively.

  ‘I know,’ she said, laying a reassuring hand on him but feeling terrible that she’d forced him to admit what she already understood. There, that tug between them then was what only they had.

  ‘It’s just…’ Vicky said, ‘I’ll have never been so far away from you, for so long, and I wish I could take you away from all of this.’

  ‘When I leave here I don’t want to be running away.’ His glassy stare had focused on something behind her left ear. It was his ‘thinking things’ face.

  Then he fixed his eyes on her: the excitement, a rarity these days, made them glow like conkers. ‘I’ve got plans. There’s this thing called an iPhone,’ he said, waving his hands. ‘It’s just come out, and it’s going to change the world. Mobile applications. The Internet. And I want to be in on it, I think that might be the way for me to get out.’

  Vicky hadn’t a bloody clue what he was on about. She had a pay-as-you-go phone and was the only person apparently in the world not on Facebook. But he definitely had enough intelligence, wit and techie skills to make a go of whatever it was – he’d been stripping and reassembling computers ever since she’d known him. And the dark techy side of things gave him camouflage: it was somewhere he could hide, create, be anonymous or anybody. She just hoped this iPhone thingy worked out and was worth it.

  ‘God, I wish I had the same ambition as you,’ she said. All she’d ever desired was to find something that inspired her, but she didn’t know what. She suspected that the something might actually turn out to be a someone and babies, but she would never admit it, what with her being a feminist and all. ‘That’s why I’m going. Because I’ve got nothing else. No direction. That’s what… Pete said when he dumped me.’

  Tears came to her eyes then and her shoulders began to shake.

  Pete. The so-called dependable scientific boyfriend she’d spent her final year wi
th at uni. They were going to live together. She’d come home from some job or other to find him cooking a wholesome meal after he’d spent the day examining hamster populations in the Sahara or whatever it was he was going to be researching for his Masters. Then they’d get married and have kids. But unfortunately she hadn’t discussed any of that with him. And now he was going to a university in Scotland. And she wasn’t invited. He loved her but he wasn’t sure they’d make it when real life started.

  She’d been crushed. It wasn’t because she was convinced he was The One. It was because he was her only chance of a relationship. He’d been her first proper boyfriend after two rubbish blokes, one of whom had treated her mean while the other had been overkeen, in a suffocating, clammy palms kind of way.

  Now the worry that she’d never find anyone, that most private thought which haunted her, which she wasn’t supposed to feel because she was young and carefree, came dashing to the surface.

  ‘I’m going to be alone forever, Mikey,’ she blubbed into his shoulder, her tongue loosened by the drinks cabinet.

  ‘Pete was one boring fucker, Vicky,’ he said into her hair as he put an arm around her. ‘He did you a favour.’

  Mikey had disliked him from the off - an awkward introduction when she brought him home at Easter ended up with both of the men in her life moaning about the other.

  ‘But what if that’s it? What if I never meet anyone else? That’s what I’m scared of.’ Loneliness – or being left out – was what she wanted to run from: she’d had enough of it through school, always the last-but-one to be picked for anything (thank God for Terri ‘Smelly’ Matthews). It was made worse because her parents were so loved up: they did everything together, from popping out for a few bits of shopping to going upstairs to bed. It made her feel in the way at times, which she knew was dumb, because as twee as they were, it was sweet how they followed each other around. But it set the bar too high on relationships and some days seeing her parents smooching made her feel that she would never find her perfect fit.