Altar Ego (24 page)

‘Your husband makes Liberace look heterosexual,’ Kate said, exasperated. ‘I’ve been watching him for days.’

‘I had no idea …’ Anouska stammered.

I placed an arm tenderly about her thin shoulders. ‘Didn’t wearing the bridesmaid’s dress to the wedding rehearsal kind of give you a clue?’

‘I just thought it was some kind of public-school thing,’ she snivelled. ‘He said they were always dressing up as women at school.’ She dabbed at her eyes with her sweat towel.

‘Has sex been a bit of a game of Orifice Roulette?’ I prompted.

‘I just thought his aim was off,’ Anouska whimpered.

I rolled my eyes. That’s definitely the trouble with upper-class Englishmen – they just can’t drive past a perversion without pulling over.

‘What are you going to do now?’ I asked Anouska soothingly. ‘You know, besides putting in a call to Jeffrey Dahmer?’

‘Come to think of it,
Priscilla Queen of the Desert
,
The Way We Were
and
Maurice
are his three favourite films. Do you think it’s grounds for divorce?’ Anouska queried, pitifully.

‘What? Liking
The Way We Were
? I think it’s grounds for manslaughter,’ I told her.

‘But my “thank-you” letters for the wedding presents are still warm!’ she sobbed. ‘Besides, the social embarrassment of it! Maybe we can go on as if nothing’s happened?’

‘Anouska, your husband is coming out,’ Kate remonstrated.

‘Well, I’ll just push him back in again!’

‘Anouska, Kate’s right. Can you imagine what it’ll be like having sex with someone when you know that you’re both fantasizing about the same person?’

‘Tom Cruise,’ she clarified, absent-mindedly.

‘Just divorce him. Rebecca sure as hell makes it sound easy enough.’

‘I can’t. He’ll take me for every penny I’ve got.’

‘He’ll screw you for palimony, no doubt about it. Money can’t buy love, but it can definitely rent it by the hour,’ I said, inclining my head in Darius’s direction. The trainer was kneeling between Anouska’s husband’s legs. On the pretext of checking the strain on abdominal muscles during sit-ups, he pressed his hand lower and lower on Darius’s dank belly, surreptitiously tweaking his penis at every opportunity.

Anouska burst through the door. Kate and I followed at a sprint, but couldn’t catch up with her. It was the first time I’d ever actually seen her take any exercise. By the time we got to the Nautilus machines,
a
shame-faced Darius was stammering out the usual excuses. 1) I was thinking of a girl – of
you
, I mean – the whole time! 2) You’re not gay if you don’t kiss. 3) It’s just there are so few women in the Y. 4) I was just curious. 5) Every man has at least one gay encounter: Voltaire, Tolstoy, Winston Churchill, Tiny Tim … 6) I’m calling my lawyer.

That made two of us. I only knew one thing for sure. Marriage was definitely the chief cause of divorce.

25
Warning. The Following Sexual Positions Are Not For Amateurs. Do Not Try This In Your Own Home

THE GOOD THING
about rock and roll, is that having the charisma of a crash dummy and being the offspring of two siblings, only enhances your chances of being a thunderous success.

This is what I thought as I was formally introduced to Zachary’s band for the first time. Besides Zack, there was lead guitarist Ace (the mandatory Vaguely Sinister One); bass guitarist Mr Dee (the compulsory Deep and Earnest One) and Skunk the drummer (the obligatory Prankster). Between them they were wearing enough mousse to sprout antlers. As I entered Rotty’s office, they blinked and recoiled from the light like nocturnal worms dug up with a garden trowel. This wasn’t a band. This was an eight-legged intestinal parasite. This was Journey To The Centre Of The Earth.

‘Have you seen Zachary?’

Their befogged synapses tried to communicate with each other, bogging down in a linguistic quagmire of grunts and ‘yeah man’s’ and ‘got any blow?’s. Only Rock and Roll English spoken here.

Having given up on trying to bring Zachary’s flat up to sanitary standards, I’d talked him into a move. When he’d missed our rendezvous at an estate agent’s office in St John’s Wood, I’d tracked him here. Rotterman single-handedly ruled over his musical fiefdom from an office in Soho that could only be reached by picking your way up a tottery staircase over needles and crisp packets and towards a door with ‘ROTTWEILER RECORDS’ written on it in wonky purple felt tip. When I knocked, my knuckles came away sticky with paint. Oh, this was definitely Big Time.

‘Um … Have you seen him or not?’ I painstakingly enunciated.

The band’s springy black cowlicks boinged about as their brains broiled … Five minutes later, after a great deal of wiry-armed semaphore and ‘fugedabowdit’s I was still none the wiser.

I was about to start checking under the floorboards when Rotterman crashed through the door with a demonic swagger. Registering my presence, he pulled up short. An excess of unconvincing toupee sat askew on his cranium. Bald, Rotterman was homely. But now, he was uglier than a caravan park.

I laughed out loud. ‘What the hell have you got on your head? It looks like a bit of road kill scraped off the pavement and then glued on!’

Rotterman’s slobbering mouth eroded a cigar as he spoke. ‘Zack’s busy … like
for the rest of his life
, yer know?
This
,’ he informed the band, hooking a gnarled thumb in my direction, ‘is Zack’s screw. I’m sure yer noticed her in the budget for quite some time now.’

‘I am
not
an unremunerative outlay of capital, thank you very much. I’m an independent career woman,’ I said huffily.

Suffice to say that Rotterman and I were still finding each other spectacularly unendearing.

Rotterman threw a thick leg over the arm of his beige easy chair. ‘Do the words “Yoko Ono” mean anything to you?’ he drawled.

‘Do the words “agent rip off?” mean anything to you?’ I sat on the vinyl lounger puckered with plastic blisters opposite his desk.

‘Shaddup. I’m peddlin’ a whole Lenny Kravitz lifestyle here and an old douchebag ain’t it. Yer saw the tabloids.’

‘The tabloids, yes. But the eye of the real press is not that short-sighted.’

‘Yer can blow me, okay? I’ve been told by the record company at the most senior goddamn levels that Zack needs Image. For starters, we gotta take all the seventh chords and all the minor chords outta his songs. Get in ghost writers for the lyrics. Then I can go the
cross
-promotional Pepsi and Nike mega-endorsement route. Maybe even change his nose. Do his lips. Lighten his skin a little.’ I looked at him aghast. Honestly, it was all I could do to keep from spewing on his shoes. ‘Hell. The Bee Gees underwent castration as a career move.’ He re-fired his cigar.

‘Dumb him down and you’ll be cutting off his dick, too, metaphorically speaking. Gives a whole new meaning to severance pay,’ I shot back. ‘Speaking of pay, why is it that Zack’s records are selling but he’s still on subsistence wages? A complimentary prawn sandwich seems scant compensation for the merciless grind you subject him to. If you’re so obsessed with Image then you can pay for the Big Fuck Off Rock-Star Residence I intend moving us into.’

Rotterman snapped his fingers and it suddenly got very Jurassic Park in there. Danny (the Dog Fondler) de Litto blundered to his side. His body looked even more pumped up than last time I’d seen it. It was Invasion of the Michelin Man.

‘The bottom of the Thames is a notoriously cold kinda place, yer know,’ Rotterman remarked, digging last night’s meal out from between his yellow fangs. No kidding. Zachary’s agent has all the charm of a Mafia hitman – possibly because he
is
one.

‘Keep your polyester pants on. Why don’t we let Zack decide for himself?’

I barged my way into an inner lair, calling out Zack’s name. I located him seated at a desk staring at a legal
contract
of some kind. Two men in Armani suits with strenuously flamboyant ties were hovering: Suit No. One, clutching a pen like a hypodermic needle, jabbed it in Zack’s direction.

‘Oh, your record contract.’ I picked it up between my fingertips as though it were radioactive. ‘So
that’s
what an oily rag smells like. I wouldn’t sign that until you get a lawyer to read it from covert to covert.’

‘Yeah,’ panted Rotterman, behind me. ‘Not if yer don’t wanna sell, like, a gazillion records.’ He snatched it back and slapped it on to the table. ‘Sign the sonofabitch.’

Zack looked from me to Rotterman, uncertainty flickering in his eyes.

‘She’s Delilah to your Samson, ja’know that? You’re losing yer edge, yer animal magnetism …’

‘But not the fleas it attracts,’ I interjected, glowering at Rotterman.

‘Well?’ Suit No. Two demanded impatiently.

‘I dunno, Beck. Rotty’s my main man … He has heaps of contacts an’ that …’

‘Yes. I’m sure – like Satan’s unlisted phone number.’

‘Sign, for Chrissakes,’ Rotterman hissed. ‘No sonofabitch artist has ever found difficulty in selling fewer albums, yer know.’

‘Sign and you’ll have an ulcer from saying Yes Sir, No Sir, Lick your bum, Sir,’ I warned Zack.

‘Shaddup! …’ He shoved Zack back into his chair. ‘Sign!’

‘They want a ghost writer … so you can write without moving your lips. If you really do love me, Zack, you won’t do it.’

Rotterman ground his prognathous jaw. ‘How could you screw such a dog?’

‘Hey,’ I shrugged. ‘I’m handy for sniffing luggage at airports … and …’

My retort was cut short as Zachary cut a swashbuckling swathe towards his wilting agent. Looming over Rotterman, his powerful torso seemed to occupy half the room. Up to this point, Rotterman had been acting so tough. Now, suddenly, it was trousers-down-and-face-the-carpet. He grovelled. He simpered. He blubberingly begged Zachary for forgiveness. Like all cruel men, Rotterman was the type to cry buckets at funerals and ‘This is Your Life’ reunions. No doubt he also adored animals.

‘We’re goin’ house huntin’,’ Zachary announced, turning his back on the sabre-toothed tapeworm and leading me to the door.

Round one – to me, I thought, and followed, relieved.

The rest of the day we spent poking through other people’s homes in St John’s Wood. We learnt a lot of things. That ‘cosy’ means small. That ‘deliciously cool in summer’ means dark and arctic. ‘That ‘retains excitingly authentic features’ decodes as an unrenovated cesspit. We also learnt that you could talk
the
estate agents into waiting in their cars and letting you view the house alone, ostensibly to get ‘a feel for it’. Or, more to the point, for each other.

On the kitchen table of a semi-detached in Circus Road, Zack dusted me with icing sugar then wrote love obscenities on my naked body with an ice cube. ‘We’ll have to put up a blue plaque to say that we slept here,’ I panted, as he propped up a mirror so I could watch him making love to me.

By the end of the afternoon, we would have to put up a lot of blue plaques.

Finally, within spitting distance of Abbey Road recording studios, serious house lust set in.

‘Four bathrooms! We’re going to have to get incontinent to enjoy them all. I’ll be the cleanest person you know,’ I told Zack.

‘Yeah, with the dirtiest mind.’

‘Do you think our relationship is just sex?’ I asked as he sat me naked and blindfolded on a chair, massaged peaches into my thighs and ate fruit salad off my flesh.

I even declined the joint Zack produced post-coitally, fearful that drugs would make me forget how happy I was.

‘Come. On the tour?’ Zack pleaded, as we taxied it back to Rotterman’s office to secure the deposit. (The estate agents wanted an advance that made Bill Clinton look celibate.)

‘Zachary, the only way I’d spend more of my leisure time with Rotterman would be if we were both
kidnapped
by Osama Bin Laden terrorists. Besides, I can’t just drop everything for a man.’ Nothing, I thought, would induce me to go.

‘Isn’t it exciting!’ Celestia exclaimed in her thin bat squeak as we entered the office unannounced to find her signing a contract to provide what Rotterman referred to as ‘backstage ambience’. ‘Our star signs are terrifically compatible. Great for when we’re on the road.’

‘On the road?’ I tried to keep the jealousy out of my voice.

‘Look, Zack,’ Celestia poked out her pink tongue to reveal a round metallic stud. ‘I got this for you.’

‘Um, a tongue stud weeping pus does not enhance fellatio, you know,’ I said redundantly, as every male in the office drooled in Celestia’s direction. ‘If you wanted to make a hole in your head, wouldn’t it have been easier for all concerned if you’d used an AK47?’

‘It’s so hard being beautiful,’ Celestia confided to the band. ‘Other women just want to kill you.’

‘Maybe that can be arranged while we’re on tour,’ I said cheerfully.

Rotterman’s grin soured with contempt. ‘
We’re?
… Well ’aint you the “independent career girl”,’ he taunted, flipping me the finger.

‘That’s great, babe.’ Zack kissed me. ‘Ain’t ya excited?’

‘Excited?’ I replied half-heartedly, as I imagined the
scene
when I told Kate. ‘Oh yeah, I think I have a goose bump.’

Round two, I thought despondently, to the Scum-Master General.

Kate was predictably scathing. ‘Make sure you get Zack a booster-seat for the tour bus. I imagine you’ll be on a bus, ’cause he can’t fly, of course. Well, not without Hostess Accompaniment.’

But as I packed for the tour later that night, excitement did bubble up. ‘On the road’ – it sounded so thrillingly Jack Kerouac. Wasn’t this every female’s fantasy? Turning the hotel swimming pool into a giant punch bowl, then diving in? Fully clothed. From the first-floor balcony. Tequila-fuelled fandangos at dawn whilst rhyming couplets which would be worked into lyrics later? Waking up at midday and complaining that we have to get up so early? How wild and rebellious … God, I hoped the rooms would have blow-dryers. Of course they would. Those penthouse toilets seat six!

Julian was on the phone before I’d finished packing. ‘Touring? With a remedial rock band? That’ll be about as interesting as Bulgarian daytime television.’