The Cupid Effect Read online

  Dorothy Koomson penned her first, unpublished novel when she was thirteen – and has been making up stories ever since. Her third novel, My Best Friend’s Girl, was chosen for the Richard and Judy Book Club Summer Reads of 2006 and reached Number Two on the Sunday Times Bestseller List. Dorothy has lived and worked in both London and Sydney, Australia, and is currently trying to do something else exciting to add to her bio. The Cupid Effect is her first published novel.

  You can visit Dorothy’s website at www.dorothykoomson.co.uk

  Praise for My Best Friend’s Girl

  ‘I was laughing and crying from page one. Koomson deals with grown-up issues: friendship, death, betrayal and forgiveness – a very moving read’

  Adele Parks

  ‘I enjoyed it immensely and I did have to dab away a little tear as early as page two’

  Richard Madeley

  ‘Both funny and moving, this will have you reaching for the tissues . . . A heartbreaking tale’

  Closer

  ‘An enjoyable, easy read that might even make you shed the odd tear’

  Star

  ‘When a novel breezes along as lightly as this, you simply cannot put it down’

  What’s On in London

  ‘Funny and touching’

  Image

  Praise for Dorothy Koomson

  ‘Totally enjoyable . . . Full of believable characters and situations’

  New Woman

  ‘A funny, quirky read’

  Company

  ‘Colourful characters and witty writing’

  Heat

  ‘Chatty and heaving with funny lines’

  Closer

  ‘Hilarious’

  Hot Stars

  By Dorothy Koomson

  The Cupid Effect

  My Best Friend’s Girl

  Marshmallows for Breakfast

  The Chocolate Run

  THE CUPID EFFECT

  Dorothy Koomson

  Hachette Digital

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  Published by Hachette Digital 2008

  Copyright © Dorothy Koomson 2003

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 0 7481 0980 7

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Grangemouth, Stirlingshire

  Hachette Digital

  An imprint of

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DY

  An Hachette UK Company

  For

  my twelve little samurai

  (you know who you are )

  the luvvie bit . . .

  Heartfelt thanks to:

  Colette Harris; Sharon Wright and David Jacobson; Marian and Gordon Ndumbe; Graeme Delap; Ginny and Paul Baillie; Sharon Percival; Maria Owen; Stella Eleftheriades; Rhian Clugston; Mark Barrowcliffe; Martin and Sachiko O’Neill; Christian Lewis; Tracy Jurd; Selina Bromley; Tasha Harrison; the Cunniffs; and lovely Janet, for inspiring this story.

  Also:

  Thank you to my parents, Agnes and Samuel; my sibs, Sameer, Kathleen and David; Maryam, Dawood, Maraam, Muneerah, Yusuf, Ahmad and Ameerah; Liah, Skye, Aysah and Joshua; Luc; Jonathan and Rachel; Connor; and Habiba, David and Jade. Your love and support has kept me going.

  prologue

  Good Intentions

  Thou shalt sort out thy cardiovascular system

  Thou shalt NOT get involved in other people’s lives

  Even if they’re really, really nice thou shalt remember Commandment 2

  Thou shalt think before thy speaks

  Thou shalt think again before thy speaks

  Thou shalt watch less Angel

  Thou shalt remember that Angel is a 250-year-old vampire who dated Buffy The Vampire Slayer, not the man you’re going to be with for ever and ever.

  Simple. No? Easy. No? And I’ve broken two of them within, oooh, four hours.

  chapter one

  Heart’s Desire

  I blame Oprah.

  This is all her fault.

  I mean, if it wasn’t for her, I’d be waking up to ‘just’ another weekend, right about now. The usual: Saturday morning telly, wander round Bromley shopping centre, battle for food in the Savacentre.

  Instead, I’m stood at Leeds train station with my worldly goods at my feet.

  I’ve really done it this time, haven’t I? I’ve done some stupid things in my life, most of them either involving sex or money or shoes, but this time I’ve truly surpassed myself. And it’s all down to Oprah Winfrey.

  Oh, it started innocently enough. I woke up one morning and I couldn’t get.

  I couldn’t get up, get showered, get dressed, get to the station, get on a train, get to work. I couldn’t get, so I pulled a sickie and I saw Oprah. My life went pear-shaped right after that.

  Up to that point, any doubts I had about my life were formless. Just floating around at the back of my consciousness. After my sickie, though, these doubts and insecurities had a voice. An American talk show host’s voice.

  First, I was taping Oprah’s show. Every day. Next, terms like ‘heart’s desire’ and ‘you can’t change what you don’t acknowledge’ were never far from my lips. Then came the books. I became the Noah of self-help manuals. I was hoarding them two by two as though, instead of a flood, there was a predicted self-help drought coming and yea, verily, it was almost upon us. A few moments after that – or maybe it was months – I was headed for Leeds clutching a one-way ticket. Because that’s where my heart’s desire was. Supposedly. Two hundred miles away from everything I knew and loved.

  I glanced down at my suitcase and holdall.

  WHAT THE HELL HAVE I DONE?

  I’ve given up everything to go back to college, that’s what.

  Two hundred miles away, in London, I had a life. I had my own flat. Two televisions, a sofa, a wardrobe, bookcases, video shelves, a bed made from reclaimed antique wood. Not some cheapo self-assembly job. It was actually made for me from antique wood. How many people could say that? Not many, that’s how many.

  And, down south, I had friends. Hoards of them. I couldn’t go down the end of my street without tripping over them. Up here, I had my best mate Jessica and . . . and . . .

  The breath caught in my chest, my heart started flinging itself against my rib cage. Oh God. I’m insane. I’m actually insane. (That revelation was on a par with finding out I was never going to marry Arnold Schwarzenegger. Except I’d cried quite a lot then.)

  This was what everyone said. My family, my friends, my colleagues. They’d all reminded me how I’d struggled to pay off my student debts and buy a flat and decorate it and become respected in my career. ‘And you’re giving it all up to go back to living out of one room? Why exactly?’

  ‘Because Oprah told me to,’ would’ve been the short answer.

  I explained, though, that I was leaving because life is too long, not too short. What if I get to ninety with my memory intact? Wouldn’t I be more pissed off if I got to that ripe old age and realis
ed I’d not had the courage to follow my true heart’s desire and do what I really wanted with my life instead of carrying on with the day to day because it was easier not to rock the boat? Life’s too long not to do it; not to be true to myself. Most people understood when I spelt it out like that. Either that, or they lost interest halfway through and agreed with me to shut me up.

  But why didn’t anyone stop me? If I really thought someone was going to do what I’d done on the strength of an American chat show and a few self-help tomes, I’d have gone in for a spot of kidnapping and self-help deprogramming. But that’s just me, obviously.

  Anyway, it’s too late now, isn’t it, Ceri D’Altroy? You’re here now, they’re expecting you on Monday, and someone else is living in your flat. Might as well get on with it. Start dealing with the now. (Dealing with the now? Dealing with the now?! I was even thinking like an Oprah guest. The pre-Oprah me would’ve said, ‘Right Ceri, move your bloomin’ arse.’)

  I hoisted my holdall onto my shoulder, gripped my suitcase handle with renewed purpose and vigour then headed for the taxi rank outside.

  As I staggered towards the station exit, I kept my line of sight firmly lowered, with my head down, my chin-length black hair hiding my face. I often walked like this, as though I had the weight of the world, as well as half my flat, on my shoulders. I wasn’t a miserable old cow, I’d actually trained myself to not look up. To not look anyone in the face or initiate eye contact. The last thing I needed at this stage of the game, when I was already fragile, was to make eye contact with a stranger. Catch someone’s eye and you soon found yourself signing up for a credit card, giving some freak a fake phone number or hearing about some old dear’s gall bladder operation. At least, that’s what happened to me. Regularly. More regularly than should’ve been statistically possible. Most people didn’t get on a bus and get off fifteen minutes later knowing the entire life story of the woman next to them. I did. There were whole bus routes where I knew most of the passengers by their ailments, not their names.

  This was my talent; my gift. Unintentionally eliciting personal info from perfect strangers. I never did have the brass front to tell these people to get lost or even ignore them. The best I could do was not make eye contact in the first place. And I’d found it perfectly feasible to go about ninety-two per cent of my daily business without looking anyone in the eye.

  I wrestled my slipping holdall back onto my left shoulder, ignoring how my rucksack lacerated that soft, fleshy bit between my neck and shoulders. I can do this. I can do this,I repeated in my head.

  I hadn’t got past the entrance of Menzies when a body stepped into my path. Shite. This happened sometimes. The ‘no eye contact’ thing didn’t work. People approached me anyway. But, I could still get out of this if I kept my head down and moved on.

  ‘Sorry,’ I mumbled, and stepped to my left without looking up.

  The body stepped with me.

  I stepped to the right, the body stepped to the right.

  Left, the body went left. We danced on – right and left, left and right – like this for a few more seconds, then I attempted a double-bluff, left step, but actually went to the right.

  But my escape plan was foiled by a fiendish body block. This person had me bang to rights. And I was going to be signing up to be a Jehovah’s Witness in, oooh, three minutes.

  With a silent sigh, I looked up.

  I wasn’t greeted by a magazine promising to save my soul (but let me die if I needed a blood transfusion), instead, a cardboard sign with:

  Kerry Dalboy

  was thrust in my face.

  My eyes shot to above the sign. Jess grinned back at me so wide I could hardly see her face.

  ‘Welcome home sweetie,’ Jess cried and threw her arms around my neck. As she did so, our combined weight tipped back onto my overstuffed rucksack and before either of us could do anything, we both went tumbling to the ground.

  chapter two

  Student Country

  In the short-stay car park across from the station, Jess stood behind me as I struggled out of my black rucksack. Her legs buckled as she took the strain. We both then huffed and puffed as we pushed the rucksack onto the back seat of the car. We’d silently agreed never to mention again what had just happened in the station. Ever.

  ‘OK, one, two, three . . . hnnnugh!’ We both heaved my suitcase into the boot. I had, of course, managed to travel across London and nigh on two hundred miles with this stuff on my own, but the grunting and straining made my efforts seem all the more heroic.

  ‘I thought you’d be bringing more stuff,’ Jess said as she squashed my holdall on top of the suitcase. She knew I could-n’t pack light if my house was on fire. And I’d never packed a two bedroom flat into three luggage items before. Which is why I’d been up half the night packing and repacking and repacking. I’d finally fallen asleep at about three a.m., still wondering if I should take everything out and start again. I’d never had to pack for twelve months before. Not even when I was in college – it’d always been packing for a few months until I went back to London.

  I haven’t brought that much with me, have I? Maybe I’d been a bit too ruthless in deciding what I couldn’t live without. Clothes, shoes, books, videos, my photo albums, my beloved iBook, toothbrush, beauty shelf or two. But not enough for twelve months away from home. ‘I’ll probably go back next weekend for more,’ I said.

  ‘Oh Ceri,’ Jess said, she paused in the driver’s open doorway, ‘that’ll cost you a fortune.’

  ‘It won’t cost that much, I’ll get an Apex,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll be knackered though.’

  ‘Yes, Mum.’

  ‘Oi, watch it, Cockney.’

  ‘That’s the sort of thing you’d say to your kids, isn’t it? “You’ll be knackered.”’

  ‘I don’t know, you show a person a bit of concern and she just flings it back in your face.’ Jess sounded hurt. ‘Well, if you don’t want my concern . . .’

  ‘I’m surprised you ain’t got fake tears to go with that fake upset.’

  She laughed and started the car. ‘You’re all heart, you.’

  ‘I learnt it from you, Teach.’

  My life path had crossed with Jessica Breakfield’s life path when I was a first year psychology and media student at college in Leeds and she was a psychology lecturer. So that should be, Dr Jessica Breakfield. She hated me calling her that, though. ‘You use it like mothers use middle names,’ she’d once said. ‘It always sounds vaguely insulting or like I’m in trouble.’

  She terrified me when I first met her. Jessica was the first woman doctor of psychology I met who looked and was under thirty-five. She had theories to her name, she was young and she made lectures interesting.

  Jess remembered me as prone to hiding behind my waist-length hair and not talking very much. Probably something to do with me staring at her in wide-eyed, nineteen-year-old awe.

  I’d done a comedy gulp when she was assigned as my personal tutor, but as I got to know her and began to relax around her, she began to see my face because my veil-like hair got shorter and shorter. (The shortest being the crop, and cleanly shaved at the back, which resulted in my parents not speaking to me till it grew back.)

  It was at the end of college, though, when I decided to do a PhD that Jess and I became proper mates. She helped with my PhD proposal and the more time we spent together, the more we found that we had loads in common: a love of television, a worship of chocolate and an almost fanatical obsession with not getting out of our pyjamas on a Sunday unless we really, really needed to buy food. But these were only the tips of the icebergs floating in our sea of similarity.

  Our connection went far deeper than was first visible to the naked eye. It was as if Jess and I were separated at birth – twelve years apart. She had a husband – Fred, teenage twin daughters Sharon and Colette – and grew up in Harrogate. I didn’t. She was five foot ten, slenderish with waves and waves of auburn hair and a Yorkshire accent.
I was five foot four-and-a-bit, nearly five foot five, actually, curvyish, with a shiny black bob and a posh Sarf London drawl. (Yes, that sounded like an oxymoron, but there I was, saying ‘scowns’ (scones) and ‘cheeky caaa’ (cheeky cow) in the same sentence. Well, I’m pretty sure I’ve said them in the same sentence.) We were definitely the odd couple on the outside. Had you to pick out the two partners in crime in a line-up you’d never put the two of us together. Age, height, looks, background, nothing went together. But when Jess and I were together we were one person. We thought alike, we argued alike, we were scathing on demand. Under it, though, was a deep understanding. Jess was the only person who hadn’t said, ‘You’re mad you’ when I told her what I was doing. She’d been extremely supportive. Actually, what she said was, ‘Awww, honey, that’s fantastic! I knew you could do it. But you can’t live with me. And you can’t live within walking distance of me. I’ll never sleep if you do.’

  I never did get on that PhD course, but I did get the most honest, caring, strangest best mate known to womankind.

  Jessica parked Fred’s metallic blue Mondeo outside the orange-brick house, slap bang in the middle of Stanmore Vale, Burley Park. I’d lived near here, in Burley Park, when I was a Leeds student the first time. This area was unofficially Student Country.

  You had to leave your maturity, dress sense and need to keep regular hours at the various border checkpoints around here. Student Country was made up of Hyde Park, Headingley, Burley Park and Kirkstall; it was where most of the students who went to Leeds Uni, Leeds Met, All Souls and the other colleges in Leeds lived, loved and drank. It’d occurred to me more than once that you could wipe out at least seventy per cent of the student population by napalming that relatively small area of West Yorkshire.