Altar Ego (22 page)

‘He ain’t nothin’ without a celebrity girlfriend, see? Some leggy supermodel. A celebrity chick is as much of an accessory as a Prada bag. Somethin’ yer change each season. Then when they break up, they each get fifty per cent of the publicity. Geddit? Rock stars don’t marry for life, only until they get a new record label. Don’cha want him to be bigger ‘n’ better ’n all the rest? To make it in America?’ His jabbering suddenly stopped. ‘Holy Mamma! Now
that’s
fuckable.’ Celestia, the free-fall vegetarian, meandered past our table. ‘Now,
she’s
in the give-her-one category … what a bod.’

‘That’s not a body,’ I sulked. ‘It’s a biro.’ Apart from her breasts, that is. Celestia’s mammary glands were encased in bra cups big enough to house Pavarotti and his twin brother.

The awards being given out in the background (Most Creative Nipple Realignment on a Back-Up Singer; Best Penis Bulge in Tight Pants Amounting to Nothing More than Sheer Technology) were so bum-numbingly interminable that I missed the moment when Zack’s career took a precipitate leap from controversial debutante to Best Newcomer. It was only the fact that he was Pompeii-ed in a lava flood of fans, that I knew at all.

‘Oh, darling … Sweetie … You are soooo
fab
ulous,’
came
the glissando of sycophantic reassurances as he left the stage. Lips sucked at his face from the left. Lips sucked at his face from the right. It must have been like falling into a vat of leeches. Moving back towards our table he left trails of saliva; whole rivulets.

The evening wrapped up for the televisual audience. Zack, swept me up on his way to the
VIP
VIP party where the winners were being corralled.

‘Gosh,’ I teased him, looking at my watch. ‘Are you sure we’re going to be late enough. I mean it is only
midnight
.’ Unlike everyone else in the room I had to work in the morning. The autumn budget meeting. Missing it would mean the sack. Though tempted to go out in a final blaze of incompetence, I couldn’t let Kate down.

As Zack opened his lovely mouth to retort, he was whisked from my presence by a ferocious PA into a convoy of fake fur, cigar smoke, vinyl pants and peroxided hair for an urgent press call. As she was bundling off into the exclusive zone, he managed to shove his two allotted
VIP
VIP tickets into Rotterman’s grubby, outstretched hand.

Once Zack was safely out of earshot, Rotterman vipered in my direction. ‘So are yer gonna make nice and fuck off back to hubby?’

I picked up some china from the table. ‘How would you like a second plate in your head?’ I said,
nicely
.

But if I wasn’t going to give up Zack voluntarily, Rotty had a secret weapon. She came in a size 8 with a
flawlessly
waxed bikini line, unchipped nail varnish, a pliant smile and ‘beg for it, baby’ breasts. As we approached the bouncer-flanked, velvet-roped barrier to the inner sanctum, his eyes glittered maliciously. When the bouncer, frills foaming down the front of his shirt, asked for the
VIP
VIP passes, Rotty shoved me aside and tugged Celestia from the giant cobweb of the crowd, and over the privileged threshold.

‘Hey. That ticket was meant for me!’

‘Forget it, babe!’ Her voice was a car-alarm whine and she talked in exclamation marks!

‘You know, Celestia, Rotterman is only nice to women if he has a weird sexual request to make later. If it’s really weird, he’ll offer coke and a recording contract.’

‘Bye-bye …’ Rotterman mouthed, waving limply.

And so I stood there in exile with the other nonetities as the Illiterati – the micro-celebs and cokehooverers, all with an excess of ill-conceived hairstyles – sauntered by me. A rock star in an ‘Urban Decay, Stop Poverty’ T-shirt was loudly boasting about how he books a seat for his guitar on Concorde. Pseudo Hard Men from Manchester bragged about drug busts and Borstal stretches; when driving an uninsured car would be their only brush with the law. Looking like extras who’d escaped from a Stephen King novel, they stared dismissively as they stepped right over me.

This was toe-plaitingly embarrassing. ‘Okay,’ I whispered, ‘what will it take to get in?’

The bouncer waggled his preposterous Groucho Marx eyebrows. ‘Hey – anyone game enough to wear that outfit deserves to get in.’

The cobweb vibrated with taunting laughter. Other performers, among whom Elton John shall remain nameless, were also busily committing fashion
faux pas
, but
they
didn’t have bouncers pointing it out to them in BOOMING BASS BARITONES.

Once inside, I seemed to be a castaway in a sea of Celestia-clones; attention-craving, cheekbone-owning, talented model types with visible hip bones who were also athletic. I tried to console myself with the thought that JFK and John Lennon had wanted to be the centre of attention, too.

‘Exactly how long have you had that outfit?’ the real Celestia asked – she dropped the vocal exclamation marks, I noticed, when there were no men around. ‘I mean, what exactly is it saying?’

I eyed Celestia’s outfit. She was wearing what looked like a red lurex condom. ‘I don’t know. But
yours
seems to be saying “I’m going straight from here to an orgy and there’s no time to stop off at my brothel on the way”.’

‘At least it’s in fashion,’ she bitched, in her Essex twang.

‘Yes, but fashionable clothes do date one so quickly,’ I retorted.

‘As do
some dates
,’ she touchéd.

Celestia sashayed on to the dance floor, immediately
grabbing
the limelight with some high-risk bottom manoeuvres. A tension headache began to throb in my mid-temple, in time to the music. The other guests seemed to be having a group hallucination that the music was good. I started a frantic search through the jouncing bodies for Zack. I glimpsed him finally, at the far end of the dance floor. He was moving so quickly the silver heels of his boots were only a metallic flash, the flick of a fish’s tail in the sun. When he saw me, cringing on the sidelines, he boogied over.

‘Dance with me, Beck.’

‘That’s not dancing. That’s a contact sport.’

‘Come on, girl.’

‘There’s no winners out there, only survivors. Besides, I only know two types of dances. One of them is the go-go and the other isn’t.’
Where had I heard that before?

‘I’ll dance with you!’ It was Celestia. I glanced at her red lurex condom. It was the kind of dress designed to ‘accidentally’ expose your breasts while jiving.

Immediately I led Zack in between the heaving flesh and began a few preliminary gyrations. I tried to copy Zack’s movements. One, two, swivel, shake … One, two, swivel … It was like chess with sweat; I could actually hear my feet thinking. On either side of me women danced as though they had Tina Turner trapped in their knickers. Celestia was effortlessly executing some sort of synchronized quadruple reverse pike with a lot of sticky-out-pelvis-manoeuvres thrown in. It was
like
finding yourself standing naked next to Kate Moss in a communal changing room – and you’re both trying on the same dress. Just as Zack was distracted by the sight of Celestia’s breasts accidentally popping out, she also accidentally impaled my arch on the steel of her stiletto, tripping me up and sending me sprawling.

As my nose grazed the parquet, I catalogued my woes. I had ‘clubber’s nipple’ – the dancer’s equivalent to jogger’s nipple, caused by constant friction against the mesh panelling of my top. I had PVC bottom – from crotch-hugging hot pants with no knickers in that tropical clime. I had curvature of the spine from wearing orthopaedic nightmare, sky-rise footwear and now an instep as crushed as my ego.

‘It’s been nice, Zack,’ I whimpered, staggering to standing. ‘But I really have to go and have a nervous breakdown now.’ I limped towards the exit.

He caught me up. ‘Wassup?’

I rubbed my wounded foot. ‘That woman! I can’t believe you slept with her. Her main lamentation in life is that she has only ten toenails to varnish.’

Zack cackled. ‘Love the way you sisters stick together.’

A PR lit up with hostess wattage. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she purred as we moved out into the street.

‘She certainly
should
thank us for coming.’

‘You Brits don’t need etiquette books on how to behave well,’ Zachary chided. ‘You need etiquette
books
on how to behave
badly
. Stay. Come on.’

Outside, black cabs swarmed the street like an outbreak of beetles. I flagged one down. ‘I’ve got to work tomorrow. I mean what are you people? … Vampires?’
Where’d I heard that before?

‘J’mind if I hang?’

‘Of course not.’ I hoped my smile was on straight. Watching Zack dwindling in the rear-vision mirror I reflected on the fun, relaxing night I’d envisaged … Watching Zack relax was exhausting. The whole night had been about as relaxing as amateur ovarian cyst removal. But it was positively painless compared to what happened next …

23
Liberated, Hip, Post-Feminist …? Or Amoral Slut? Defend Your Answer

UNTIL I FELL
in love with Zachary Burne, I thought ‘paparazzi’ was some fancy pizza topping. The irony of being famous is that celebrities spend half their careers fighting to get their faces
in
the paper, then the second half fighting to keep them
out
.

‘I know the camera never lies,’ I told myself on the tube on the way to work next morning, ‘but couldn’t it be a little bit
discreet
now and then?’

Two of the tabloids were carrying the same picture of my face contorted in pain at the precise moment Celestia had shish-kebabed my foot. She, however, had been captured at her most radiantly beautiful with her arm snugly around the waist of my boyfriend.

Worse than the picture was the prose. The
Express
described Celestia as Zachary’s girlfriend and me as Celestia’s
mother
.

If I ever saw Celestia again, believe me, air heads would roll.

Despite the overcast autumnal weather, I slipped on my dark shades. Invasion of privacy was a side of life with Zachary which I hadn’t counted on. Put it this way, I was now too frightened to have a cervical smear test in case they published the slides.

I slunk into my third-floor office two hours late, shed my glasses and poured stale coffee from the pot.

‘Well,’ said Kate, ‘it could be worse. You could be Fergie.’ She glared at her watch. I’d missed the budget meeting. Since falling for Zack I’d been spectacularly lax about work attendance. Having worn out the bad cold/waited in for plumbers/dental appointment run-of-the-mill excuses, my alibis had become weirder and wilder. I’d been kidnapped by extraterrestrials. I’d been held at knife point by Mafia hitmen in a Bizarre Mistaken-Identity Accident. But I couldn’t fly by the seat of my hot pants today, as I was pictured wearing them in the papers.

‘Um … remember how I couldn’t come into work yesterday because I went into an unexpected coma and was in Intensive Care being read the Last Rites? Well, last night I made the most amazing recovery just in time to attend the British Music Awards.’

‘Gee, just think,’ said Kate sardonically. ‘Somewhere right now
your next lover
is being potty-trained.’

‘Look, I know you and Zack got off to a bad start, but I’m working on him. I’m helping to
kindle
his appreciation for the finer things in life …’

‘Like what? Doing his homework? Just stop acting like a brain-dead dag and ditch him. Otherwise you may have to find a more suitable career, say,
Life-Saver at a sewage plant
.’

All morning I lectured myself that the age difference shouldn’t get to me – while secretly poring over magazines for beauty tips, haemorrhoid cream to tighten eye bags; a flesh-eating virus for immediate weight loss.

During my lunch break, I was just squeezing the life out of a tea bag with a fork on the side of a mug when I heard Zack’s voice in the hall.

‘She’s not in,’ Kate declared. ‘Would you like to leave your fingerprints?’

With the restraint of an Exocet missile, I was around the partition and into his arms. Kate groaned in disgust as we kissed. ‘New lovers really should have a minimum isolation period of say, six months so as not to nauseate everyone they meet.’

Coming up for air, Zack handed me another newspaper plastered with photographs of us embracing. I scanned the article. The gossip columnist maliciously described me as a ‘cradle snatcher’ and Zack as a ‘grave robber’. ‘Wife stealer’ and ‘Home wrecker’ Zack had circled in red ink. Although personally I was more exercised by ‘mutton dressed as lamb’.

‘Yer know what this means, don’cha? … It means yer gotta get a divorce.’

‘A
what
?’

‘I ain’t … I’m
not
,’ he corrected himself, ‘going to sleep in some other dude’s crib, okay. Yer gotta put a stop to it.’

‘What? Straight away? Do you have to be so exigent?’

‘Do you have to be so married?’

‘Ahhmmm.’ Kate cleared her throat, ostentatiously. ‘Rebecca, can I talk to you for a moment.
Exigently!
’

With great reluctance I trailed her downstairs to Reception – to see Julian standing by the ticket office, a bouquet of roses in his arms.

‘I just came to say goodbye. Despite all you’ve done to me, I do still love you.’

‘Goodbye?’

He looked at me with bruised, sorrowful eyes. ‘I have bowel cancer.’

My heart lurched. ‘You have what?’

‘Well it
could
be cancer … or maybe another anal fissure.’

‘Your ability to cheat death is awesome,’ I said flippantly. ‘You just have haemorrhoids, Julian, because you won’t exercise.’

‘Could I have a glass of water?’ he asked weakly. I fetched him one from the bar. ‘To take my pills,’ he volunteered feebly. When I didn’t ask what for, he added, ‘It’s probably nothing, but on my chest X-ray I seem to be missing a bit of lung.’ When I folded my arms but made no comment, he proffered more
information
. ‘The doctor has made me an urgent appointment with a specialist, so, you know …’ He put a finger to his temples as if to blow his brains out.