Chapter Twenty-six‘Oh my god.’ Rob opened the front door on Monday morning and shut it again. A sea of faces stood outside and he blinked as dozens of cameras flashed. ‘Mark, have you seen how many reporters are in the front garden?’
‘Oh shit.’ Mark opened the door himself and was met with a barrage of questions. ‘Have you anything to say about the weekend, Mr Davies?’ ‘What was her name?’ ‘Did she give good head?’ The laughter was raucous, jeering. Mark slammed the door shut and sat down in the lounge in disbelief. How could this be happening to him? He looked out of the lounge window to see someone with a long-lens camera in the garden. Enraged, he raced to the back door, flung it wide open and yelled, ‘Why don't you just piss off or I'll call the police.’
‘You have to admit it's funny.’ Rob hadn't stopped laughing since he'd seen Mark's picture all over the papers.
‘No it bloody well isn't,’ said Mark. ‘I've got to get through that lot to get to work. Fuck knows what sort of trouble I'm going to be in there, but I'm really not looking forward to finding out.’
The phone rang. Mark snatched it up and yelled, ‘If you're that runt of a journalist you can just bog off – oh, hi Sam.’
‘How could you be such a prat?’ Sam launched into a tirade. Mark held the phone away from his ear. She hadn't had so much to berate him with since before the divorce. ‘… And if
you think I am going to let the kids near you with all this going on, you can think again, Mark Davies,’ she finished with a flourish.‘Sam, you can't do that –’ protested Mark, but she'd put the phone down.
‘What did she want?’ asked Rob.
‘To tell me what a prat I've been and ban me from seeing my children. Can this day get any worse?’
‘Well, you have been a prat,’ said Rob. ‘I mean, how on earth did you get so drunk that you didn't see that one coming?’
‘Actually, that's the weird thing,’ said Mark. ‘I honestly don't know. We didn't drink at all during the day because we were gokarting. And then we had a couple of pints in the pub, I had maybe three glasses of wine with my dinner, and then perhaps two more pints. It was hardly excessive – I should have been merry but not like that.’
Rob frowned. Despite his joshing, there was a serious point to this. He remembered all too well his own brush with the media after Wales. Luckily, he and Suzie had missed out on most of the aggro – that had fallen on the shoulders of Janet, the hapless organiser of the camp. But still, it hadn't been pleasant.
‘You don't think someone could have spiked your drink?’
‘I suppose it's possible,’ said Mark. ‘But I don't know who'd do such a thing. It's all a bit blurry after the pub. I remember going to the club, and chatting to some bloke. And the next thing I knew I was on the dance floor with my trousers round my ankles. After that it's blank again till I woke up with that sodding doll.’
‘What did the rest of them say?’
‘Well, according to Spike, who was the instigator of the joke, one minute I was fine and the next thing I was putty in their hands. You know how I used to get when we were students, when I'd get so drunk that anyone could do pretty much anything to me? Apparently I was just like that.’
Mark put his head in his hands.
‘I just can't believe this is happening to me,’ he said. ‘It was bad enough being sued for breaching confidentiality, but now I could lose my job. No one will see this as blokes pratting about, which is what it pretty much was; not after the way they've stitched me up.’
‘
Debauched dentist goes on rampant orgy
isn't truly indicative of your professionalism,’ agreed Rob. ‘Have you spoken to your rep yet?’‘I've arranged an urgent meeting with him this week,’ said Mark. ‘I just hope he can actually help me.’
‘I'm curious, though,’ said Rob. ‘How did they get all that stuff about you and Emily? Or should I call her your “mystery woman”?’
‘I don't know,’ said Mark. ‘I may have blabbed my mouth off. I wasn't exactly in any fit state to remember.’
He looked thoroughly woebegone.
‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘I suppose I should also tell my parents what's going on before they read about it. I feel like I'm living a nightmare.’
Emily was reading the
Evening Standard
on the way home. She had read and reread every sordid detail, but still she felt compelled to read the
Standard
's regurgitating of it.Shamed dentist and dad of two, Mark Davies, wasted no
time on Saturday night. After a hard day's drinking with
his other dental chums, he went on to an evening of total
debauchery, during which he:
Visited a lap-dancing club.
Stripped on the dance floor.
Ended up naked next to a blow-up doll.
He and his drinking partners are a disgrace to their
profession.Is there no end to his shame? Jasmine Symonds, who is suing Davies over breach of confidentiality, says, ‘This confirms all my fears about Dr Davies. I always knew there was something odd about him.’
Kayla Symonds, Jasmine's mother, agrees. ‘I never trusted him right from the start …’
Emily threw down the paper in disgust. It was more of the same.
Part of her was absolutely horrified by what Mark had done. That sort of behaviour she might have expected from Callum, but surely not Mark. He didn't seem the type. But one of his friends, Spike someone, was quoted as saying he was always like this. And Emily was distraught over the way he had spoken about her – although luckily she was only identified as his mysterious lady friend, it must have been her to whom Mark was referring when he said that he'd been badly let down and would never trust another woman again.
And yet, between her shock and anger, Emily also felt appalled on Mark's behalf. Someone had clearly set him up. He'd gone out for an evening with his mates – a stag weekend, the papers said – and someone had alerted the press to what was happening. It was a pretty shitty thing to do, even if Mark had behaved badly. Emily wanted to contact Mark, to let him know that she was thinking about him, but she knew Maniac Mel wouldn't be impressed if she did. And, given how much money Emily now needed to send her mum on a regular basis, for the moment she had no choice but to let it lie.
‘So what are my options?’ asked Mark as he sat down with James, feeling that, quite frankly, things were so bad now they couldn't get much worse. He'd definitely noted a cooling off in James's hitherto friendly attitude. Mark couldn't say he blamed him really. It was one thing representing someone who was being
sued by a patient who may or may not be telling the truth, but the events of the weekend had painted Mark's situation in a whole different light.James looked very uncomfortable. ‘Christ, Mark, what on earth were you thinking?’ he said. ‘Didn't you think about how your behaviour would come across? Have you never heard of the
Sun
rule?’Mark looked blank.
‘How would this look as a
Sun
headline?’ James clarified. ‘Well, now you know.’‘To be honest,’ said Mark, ‘by the time the blow-up doll incident happened I was well past the place of rational thought. But hell. I was on a weekend away with my mates. What the fuck were the press doing there in the first place? I'm a nobody, why should anyone be interested in me?’
‘That is a very good point,’ said James. ‘We'll get someone to check that side of things out.’
‘I know I don't have a leg to stand on,’ said Mark, ‘but seriously, I hadn't had that much to drink. I think someone spiked my drink.’
James looked sceptical, and Mark couldn't honestly blame him. He knew he was clutching at straws, but what other explanation was there?
‘I'll look into that too,’ said James. ‘But, to be honest, it does sound a bit far-fetched.’
It was the best Mark could hope for, he supposed. All the way home on the train he felt absurdly self-conscious – as if at any moment someone would point him out and say, ‘Look, it's the Debauched Dentist!’
Thankfully, his parents had been incredibly understanding
– not exactly thrilled to have their son plastered all over the papers, but not overly worried either. After two days of doorstepping, in which Mark and Rob had had to run the gauntlet of press and photographers every morning, Mark had
seriously considered going to stay with them for a bit, just till everything calmed down. He'd had to call the police when he found one reporter looking in his bins and another with their nose pressed against his front window. But, luckily, by the Wednesday the story had gone off the boil and though several reporters were still hanging around the house, none of them, thankfully, had followed him up to town.It was different at the surgery, where most of his patients had read or heard about what had happened. Some of them appeared so shocked by the story that they had requested to see other dentists, which, Mark felt, was fair enough, but in the main he was relieved to see they were pretty tolerant. A fact that did go some way to restoring his faith in human nature. Granny O' Leary had been the most forthright about it: ‘Those papers, they just print lies about people,’ she said. ‘We all know you wouldn't do anything wrong.’ Mark was touched by her faith in him, but doubted Granny O' Leary's testimony would cut much ice if the powers that be hauled him up for a hearing, which James had warned him was a distinct possibility.
‘All it will take is for one of your patients to make a complaint to them,’ James had said, ‘and then you'll be looking at a hearing for professional misconduct.’
Mark felt sick every time he thought about that. Suppose they found him guilty? What could he do if he was no longer a dentist?
Sam was also continuing to give him grief. She had rung him daily to berate him for his stupidity. Not, it turned out, with reference to the girls (who were Mark's main concern), though when it suited her Sam would throw in a ‘How could you have put your daughters in such an embarrassing position?’ to ensure he felt maximum guilt, but she was crosser, it seemed, about the fact that he might have caused complications in her job. ‘Jasmine is the face of
Smile, Please!
’ she said. ‘Didn't you think how that would affect me?’‘Yes, that was just what I was thinking as my career went down
the tubes,’ was Mark's sarcastic response, ‘and anyway, I thought you'd sacked Jasmine.’‘That was before all of this came out,’ said Sam smartly. ‘Your little efforts have meant Jasmine's been on the front page of the papers all week. There's considerable sympathy for her out there. We'd be mad to turn down such good publicity.’
‘It's nice to know the fact that my life is in freefall is helping your publicity,’ said Mark.
‘Well, you've only yourself to blame,’ Sam replied. ‘I have serious reservations about letting the girls come and stay while this is going on.’
Mark had serious reservations too, but only because he didn't want the kids to be exposed to the media scrum that was currently camped outside his house, so he let the comment go. But he felt sick to the pit of his stomach. He'd lost his wife, his girlfriend, and now he was in danger of losing his job. Were his children about to follow?
Katie wasn't a great reader of the tabloids, and she hadn't seen Emily, so she wouldn't have picked up on Mark's plight if she hadn't run into Mandy Allwick at scouts.
‘Ooh, did you hear the latest about Mark Davies?’ asked Mandy.
‘I can't say I did,’ said Katie, casting a look at Mandy, who was bursting out of a tight-fitting top and leather miniskirt. ‘What about him?’
Mandy happily obliged and filled in the gory details.
‘I always knew there was something pervy about him,’ said Mandy. ‘You'd better tell that friend of yours to watch out. He's bad news. I always knew it. I'm changing dentists straight away.’
Katie was utterly appalled. How could anyone be so judgemental? Apart from the fact that the Mark she knew wasn't anything like that, this was all hearsay.
‘I am sure there'll be an explanation for all of this,’ she said. ‘I just can't believe Mark would do anything like that. In fact, I'm sure he wouldn't.’
Mandy sniffed audibly and said nothing, but her body language said it all.
As she left, a hand tapped Katie on the shoulder, and she turned round to see Mark.
‘I heard that,’ he said. ‘Thanks. It's nice to know someone believes me.’
‘Apart from the fact that I would always take anything I heard from Mandy Allwick with huge dollops of salt,’ said Katie, ‘I never believe anything I read in the papers on principle. Particularly not the red-tops. So come on, tell me what happened. How on earth did you end up naked next to a blow-up doll?’
Mark sheepishly filled Katie in on the events of the weekend, and she roared with laughter when he finished.
‘You're not shocked?’ Mark asked. ‘You wouldn't believe some of the comments I've had.’
‘I live with someone who works in the City,’ said Katie. ‘I'm pretty unshockable. Besides, I dated a medic when I was a student. I know what you lot are like. I think it's funny.’
‘You might not if your career was on the line,’ said Mark. ‘Or if your ex-wife was threatening to stop you seeing your children.’
‘Oh no, she's not, is she?’ Katie was horrified. ‘Mark, I'm so sorry.’
‘It's fair enough, I suppose,’ said Mark, ‘there's been a fair bit of press activity at my house this week. Which is why we're going to my parents in Surrey for the weekend. Gemma's still at her mum's and I'm going to pick her up after scouts.’
‘Still,’ said Katie, ‘that's a bit steep. I'm sure this will all blow over eventually.’
‘I hope so,’ said Mark, but he looked uncertain and lonely. Katie felt immensely sorry for him.
‘Have you spoken to Emily about any of this?’ Mark asked.
‘I knew nothing about it till just now,’ said Katie. ‘But I will if you like.’
‘Thanks,’ Mark said. ‘I think I may have said one or two things about her that have been misquoted, and I don't want her thinking I'm some kind of weirdo.’
‘I'm sure she won't,’ said Katie. ‘Say hi to Rob for me.’