Page 30 of The Typo

‘It’s a date,’ I repeated, sure that the thrill in my voice must be obvious. And then I remembered what he’d said just before kind of asking me ‘out’. ‘And I hope your meeting goes well, whatever it is. I’m sorry you’ve got something challenging hanging over you. You know you can talk to me about it. If you want to, that is. Don’t feel you have to. But sometimes it helps to say things out loud. And I’m a decent listener, or at least, I hope I am.’

‘Thanks, Amy, that’s really kind of you.’ There was a pause. ‘Look, I don’t want you to think I’m the sort of person who goes round gossiping about others, but I am feeling pretty bad about something, and I can’t really talk to anyone here about it.’

His voice was suddenly strained.

‘I promise I’ll be the soul of discretion. You can trust me,’ I said.

‘I know I can.’ I tried to ignore the pang of guilt which his certainty provoked. ‘The thing is,’ he continued, ‘I’m having to be a witness tomorrow morning for an HR thing. The captain found out one of the stewards had lied on their CV and he’s decided he’s going to terminate their contract tomorrow. He called me in this evening to ask me to be an independent observer.’

‘That’s a really tough thing to be part of,’ I said, my heart thudding against my ribs. I’d promised Cameron he could trust me, but he couldn’t really, could he? Because like the CV-embellishing steward, I had also been lying by giving him a false perspective of my life.

‘Yep. The really frustrating thing is that the guy was great at his job. If he’d only been honest in the first place about his lack of qualifications, I’m sure he’d have been able to prove himself anyway through hard work. But because he lied…’ His voice tailed off.

‘That seems like a real shame,’ I said, fighting to keep my voice steady. ‘Can’t the captain let him off with a warning? Especially as he’s obviously a valued member of the crew.’

‘It’s not great, but our hands are tied by the rules. The captain says there’s no going back from that kind of thing, and integrity’s even more important at sea. The crew’s small and everyone has to be able to trust each other completely.’

Despite the fact that my central heating had long since gone off, I felt hot all over. Had Cameron discovered my secret? Was this his subtle way of trying to get me to ’fess up? Logically, I knew I was under no obligation to be completely open with a man I’d never even met, and at such an early stage in our interaction, but I had massaged the truth and failed to act with the integrity which I also prized. Why had I gone down that route and got myself into this situation? My low self-esteem had a lot to answer for. But I was stuck now. I’d made my bad choices, and I had to deal with the consequences.

‘I…’ My voice tailed off. Should I admit what I’d been doing, and risk the end of our interaction for good? Or should I continue the charade?

‘Sorry, what was that?’ said Cameron. ‘The phone cut out for a second. There’s a lot of static on the line again; the storm’s back overhead. Are you still there?’

Thanking the weather for its excellent timing. I took the coward’s way out and hung up.

ChapterSixteen

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Date: 4 Feb, 02:02

Subject: Phone call

Hi Cameron,

I have something to confess to you

Istared at the words on the screen for a solid minute before I lost courage, hit the delete button, and slammed my laptop shut. Perhaps it was better to sleep on it before I rushed into doing something I might later regret. I gently scooped up Eliza, who was still out for the count on my lap, and deposited her on the sofa next to her brother. He blearily opened an eye to see what was going on, let out a dainty but pointed yawn so I knew that he didn’t approve of me disturbing him, and then went back to sleep.

Alas, it wasn’t so easy for me to switch off. I lay in bed, as wide awake as if it was the middle of the day, replaying my conversation with Cameron and wondering what I should do now. My guilt had grown exponentially. Throughout the email exchanges, I’d somehow managed to gloss over the fact that it was a real human being I’d been communicating with, someone with the capacity to get hurt through my thoughtless behaviour. Now that I’d heard his voice and felt the things I’d felt, the situation was different. I liked the guy. Really liked him. And he’d seemed to like me too. But whatever we had or could have, friendship, or perhaps even something more, it was built on false foundations. He valued honesty and I had been lying pretty much from the start.

I should probably say something. But what exactly? That the person he’d been communicating with was a work of fiction? That the real Amy Cameron was a shadow of the person she should be, too frightened to achieve any of the accomplishments that had been so casually talked about, too trapped in her ways to know how to make things better. That was guaranteed to frighten him off, if the very act of confessing to having been deceitful wasn’t enough to make him block my email address and never want to hear from me again. I knew I owed him the truth, but how to bring it up without the danger of losing him altogether?

By the time my alarm went off to signal it was time to get up and get ready for work, I’d come to a decision. I couldn’t bear the thought of my correspondence with Cameron ending in this way. But equally, it was not right for me to carry on playing so freely with the truth. I was going to be honest from now on. No more pretending I was Miss Violin Big Shot, no more references to amazing fictional nights out. Whatever I told Cameron from now on was going to be one hundred percent true, no marketing exaggerations, no positive spin. And if that meant that he lost interest in me, then that was the way things had to be. But coward that I was, my new policy of honesty wouldn’t include confessing to my previous glossy depictions of my life. And the way that I justified this to myself was that I was going to make them come true.

Despite having had a terrible night’s sleep, I set off to work with a veritable spring in my step. The brand new and improved Amy was determined to make a fresh start, with a positive can-do attitude, and she was not going to let fear get in her way anymore. I knew it was easier said than done, but during the wee small hours, I’d berated myself for how much time I’d wasted through fearing the ‘what ifs’ and believing the negative voice of my own self-doubt. I wasn’t naïve enough to believe that acknowledging the problem was going to stop it and make everything instantly better, but I had to start somewhere. If I didn’t have faith in myself, nobody else was going to.

I passed the bagpiper who was in his usual spot by the Scott Monument, and experienced a wave of queasiness when I remembered that I’d told Cameron I had been busking. I swallowed and forced myself to step back and examine the problem dispassionately. Most people were hurrying past the bagpiper, wrapped up in their own little worlds, headphones on, or deep in conversation with friends. Even those who stopped to listen only hung around for a few moments, and when the player let slip the occasional wrong note, they gave no sign of noticing it. For them, it was an enjoyable but brief interlude in their busy lives. It was nothing like performing on stage in front of a paying audience, and there was absolutely no reason why I couldn’t have a go.

I promised myself that when I got to work, I’d choose a date to go busking and I’d write it in permanent marker on the calendar on my office wall so there was no wriggling out of it. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust myself, but I knew I needed all the help I could get to find the courage to follow through on my good intentions.

‘Good morning, Amy,’ said Colin, pouncing on me as soon as I stepped foot over the threshold of the Variety. ‘You’ve got a twinkle in your eye this fine day. Good night? I bet I could have made it better.’ He looked me up and down, the suggestive implication clear in his gaze.

I ignored my natural impulse to shrink in on myself and instead stared back at him in what I hoped was a cool, unbothered attitude.

‘It was a wonderful night, thank you so much for asking, Col. Not that I did much sleeping, of course.’ Let him make of that what he will. ‘I doubt there’s anything you could have done to improve upon it.’

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