Free Remember My Name by Abbey Clancy Page A

usually made me feel brilliant about myself. When he was around, at least. Which wasn’t all that often.
    After we’d spent our first night together, I hadn’t seen him properly for another five days. He’d texted me, something cute and slightly rude that tided me over and stopped me taking a detour into crazy town, but we’d not actually got together again for what felt like a lifetime.
    By the time we did—a walk along the river, drinks, back to his place—I’d given myself a good talking to. I was taking it all too seriously—I was clinging on to what might happen with Jack because the rest of my life was so empty and depressing. And that wasn’t fair to either of us—it put too much pressure on him, and it made me feel like a great big loser, with a capital L.
    I didn’t want to be the kind of woman who sat around all day mooning over some bloke. The kind of woman who was constantly checking if her phone had run out of charge because she hadn’t heard from a man. I wanted to be the kind of woman who treated it all as fun, who was carefree and light-hearted and good to be around.
    In the end, I kind of became both. When I was with him,I managed the carefree and light-hearted—and he was such good company, he made that easy. It was hard to be miserable with Jack around, and even if I was, he could whisk me off to bed and make me forget all about it. He could even make me forget about bread, it was that good.
    But when I was on my own? Trekking back from the office after a long, exhausting day, hungry and tired and lonely? After not seeing him or hearing from him and wondering what he was up to and who he was up to it with? That’s when I took out my L plate, and stuck that loser sign on my forehead, and wallowed in it.
    It was one of the reasons I’d been so made up when Becky said she was coming to stay for a couple of nights—seeing her would distract me, and take my mind off everything I was worried about. Now, though, I felt suddenly self-conscious.
    ‘Well … you just look a bit tired, Jessy,’ she said tactfully, picking up on how sensitive I was feeling. ‘And a bit like you need to eat some doughnuts.’
    ‘I’m fine,’ I said quickly, standing up and throwing the rest of the kebab in the bin, where it joined its long-lost bread family.
    ‘I don’t think you are,’ Becky answered, looking around at the flat as I sat back down next to her. I’d spent days scrubbing and tidying before she came, and bought fresh flowers that I’d arranged around the place in old wine bottles, and one of those floral plug-ins to try to mask the eau de kebab that pretty much always wafted up from the shop downstairs. But looking at it through her eyes, I saw it for what it was: small, shabby, and a little bit sad.
    ‘You seem a bit lonely, love. And those cows you work with don’t seem to be helping.’
    I’d taken Becky into the Starmaker offices that day to introduce her to people, hoping, I suppose, to impress her with my glamorous new life. Patty had just looked her up and down, listened to her talk, and said: ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand a word you’re saying,’ before flouncing off to meet someone from the
Star
for brunch.
    After that, it had just got worse—the whole PR department seemed to have chosen that day to have some communal meltdown, and Becky had to sit in reception waiting for me, while I did emergency photocopying and made vats of coffee and generally ran round like a blue-arsed fly.
    The only highlight had been bumping into Vogue in the lifts. Vogue was a megastar—and came across as a total diva on stage. But in the flesh, she couldn’t be nicer. She was about six-foot tall and looked a bit like Naomi Campbell, and she should have been scary. I’d seen her in interviews, and sometimes she definitely seemed scary.
    In real life, though, she was a babe. She’d remembered my name—pretty much a first at Starmaker—and asked when Becky’s baby was due, and even asked her