Page 8 of Read My Lips

In the back of the cab, my head swam like I had vertigo, all my beer-blurry edges making themselves known again. Watching a posh twat have better sex, more successfully than me in the back-seat with my boss while my hangover birthed itself in real time: exactly what every evening needed.

On screen – further back in the shot – a lamp on a table behind the couch clattered down, casting long shadows across the sprawl of limbs and skin, shoulders and hands. Making everything harder to figure out.

Two men, I figured, from the muscles alone. But whoever put this up as definitively Richard was reaching. Nothing showed above the neck. There was a white guy with more muscle and heft, and a skinnier guy with darker skin. Longer limbed, more lithe. Tall-looking. Kind of like I imagined Simon might be underneath his clothes. Except, only really shitty interpreters would spend all day perving on their demonstrably uninterested clients.

The probably-mixed-race, might-be-Desi guy (who was definitely-not-Simon) shoved the white guy – the one the internet had labelled Richard – down, pushing him almost out of shot.

I nudged Simon’s knee to get his attention. “You can’t even tell who this is.”

There better be something for me to see. I could have been failing to have sex with Luke right at that moment.

“Look closer.” Simon redirected me to the screen.

And there it was. At the back, on the wall – a moustachioed, goggle-eyed horse staring out at me, skewed in its gilt-edged frame.

Ah. I knew that horse. Everybody on the internet knew that bloody horse.

I knew what the sofa fabric felt like too – the knap of the dusty, olive green velvet. And I knew the colour of the walls, even though the lamp-light dulled the tone. Everything beyond my phone started shuttling backwards and forwards. Or maybe my eyes were playing tricks.

The driver took a corner more sharply than my balance organs agreed with. My stomach sloshed.

I’d been in that room. With Simon. On a Beau Monde photoshoot, back in April. Whittaker had blathered on, downplaying the harrowing trials of schooling at Eton – such struggles – refocusing the interviewer towards his hilarious escapades. He really was so misunderstood. One of the lads. Like all the rest of the country house owning multi-millionaires.

Sweat crept up the back of my neck.

That oil painting – a rare example of some dead bloke’s early work – had been worth six figures before Richard sodding Whittaker and his mates got to it with a permanent marker, a penknife and a pair of wobbly stick-on eyes. Sprawled on the same sofa for the cameras doing his vlog, he’d shrugged off the accusation of cultural vandalism. “Bloody improvement, if you ask me.”

Enter Simon. With two off-screen sentences and a whip-fast stranglehold on his social media feed #thisisnotahorse* went viral.

(*It’s a criticism of antiquated, elite institutions commissioning paintings of horses over portraits of their household staff. Didn’t you know?)

Beau Monde bought it. The world bought it. A forum-based squabble erupted over whether to call the horse Albert or Jeeves. When Simon was your publicist, it was the opposite of being cancelled. This was not just vandalism. It was socially aware, upper-middle-class vandalism.

Tate Modern requested a loan of the piece as part of a temporary exhibition on New Voices in the Modern Art World. Mugs were sold. I got given three. T-shirts were printed. Richard Whittaker: the next artistic genius.

My pale arse.

Yeah, I knew that horse. And the oversized goldfish-bowl vase full of stripey red and cream tulips Sev had put on the coffee table to balance the shot from exactly the angle I was looking at now.

I stared at the tangled limbs on Simon’s phone screen, my brain fizzing with static blankness. Richard – so very into it. The other guy too.

In the back seat of the taxi Simon’s skin was darker. Or was that the lighting? There had to be a hundred other people this could be. Richard must have had those flowers for days.

It made no sense for it to be Simon. Apart from the fact Richard was all classically, stereotypically Prince-Charming-handsome, with none of the markers of inbreeding you might hope to level the field between him and the rest of humanity. And I bloody would if I could too.

But Simon was all about protecting his clients’ reputations. And Richard Whittaker had been playing house with Phoebe Huntley-Templeton for as long as I’d known they existed. No, it didn’t make sense. It wasn’t him. It couldn’t be. I had my beer goggles on too tightly.

Definitely-Not-Simon flicked a tie into the shot. The driver braked, and my stomach turned over at the splay of bright rust and cinnamon flecked with green.

Fuck me. That tie. I’d given him that tie.

The one spooled messily on Richard Whittaker’s chest, signposting all the things he’d no doubt done to him. All the things he was never going to do to me, because my rubbish Not-So-Secret-Santa gift didn’t do anything to tell him how much I cared.

“Simon.” Rattling through the run of letters of his name was a dance I’d never forget the steps to. “This is you, isn’t it?

He’d never offered me his sign name, so I spelled it out every time. No matter how well I thought I knew him, only someone Deaf had the right to give him one. And it seemed like I barely bloody knew him at all.

“Richard Whittaker?” Did it have to be that arsehole?