2-24（在线收听）

24.

Flack, they called her.

She was funny. And sweet. And cool. I met her at a restaurant with some mates, months afterChels and I had gone our separate ways.

Spike, this is Flack.

Hi. What do you do, Flack?

She was on TV, she explained. She was a presenter.

Sorry, I said. I don’t watch much TV.

She wasn’t taken aback that I didn’t recognize her, which I liked. She didn’t have a big ego.

Even after she explained who she was and what she did, I still wasn’t certain. What’s your fullname again?

Caroline Flack.

Days later we met for dinner and games. Poker night at Marko’s flat, Bramham Gardens. Afteran hour or so I stepped outside, disguised in one of Marko’s cowboy hats, to speak with Billy theRock. As I exited the building I lit a cigarette and looked right. There, behind a parked car…twosets of feet.

And two bobbing heads.

Whoever it was didn’t recognize me in Marko’s hat. So I was able to stroll casually down toBilly and lean into his police car and whisper: Bogey at three o’clock.

What? No!

Billy, how could they have known?

Search me.

No one knows I’m here. Are they tracking me? Are they getting into my phone? Or Flack’s?

Billy bolted from the car, ran around the corner, surprised the two paps. He screamed at them.

But they screamed right back. Entitled. Emboldened.

They didn’t get their photo that night—small victory. But very soon after they papped me andFlack, and those photos set off a frenzy. Within hours a mob was camped outside Flack’s parents’

house, and all her friends’ houses, and her grandmother’s house. She was described in one paperas my “bit of rough,” because she’d once worked in a factory or something.

Jesus, I thought, are we really such a country of insufferable snobs?

I continued to see Flack on and off, but we didn’t feel free anymore. We kept on, I think,because we genuinely enjoyed each other’s company, and because we didn’t want to admit defeatat the hands of these arseholes. But the relationship was tainted, irredeemably, and in time weagreed that it just wasn’t worth the grief and harassment.

Especially for her family.

Goodbye, we said. Goodbye and good luck.