Could It Be I'm Falling in Love? (11 page)

‘A very prestigious channel!’

‘Which channel?’

‘A BBC channel.’

Simon’s tummy began to tingle.

‘Which
BBC channel?’

‘CBeebies.’

‘Oh.’ His tummy stilled with a thud. He groped for some equanimity. ‘CBeebies isn’t
so
bad. I mean, if it’s good enough for Jacobi with all that
Night Garden
stuff, right?’ And then he remembered … hadn’t some big names read the CBeebies bedtime stories? Yes, he was sure Kenneth Branagh had done one. And Bonneville. Maybe even Mirren! He imagined the name of Drennan joining the line-up of thesps.

‘It’s a non-speaking role,’ Barrington continued in a rush. ‘A fabulous opportunity to showcase your mime and movement skills. The auditions are next week.’

‘Next week, no problem,’ Simon agreed automatically. And then his ears caught up. ‘Hang on … Are you saying, I need to audition for CBeebies? For a
non-speaking
role? But I used to scare fourteen million people a week!’

Surely he hadn’t got it so wrong, Simon thought bleakly as he dropped line-caught cod, pine nuts and organic pesto into his basket. Every actor had their moments of self-doubt, but at his core he’d always believed he had talent. And it wasn’t just vanity; there was evidence. He’d received two commendations at RADA
and
he’d recieved warm reviews for the plays he’d been in, in the brief gap between drama school and the soap. ‘One to watch,’ is how
The Stage
had described
him. He’d been steadily working his way up the ladder of support roles towards the ultimate prize of a lead. But then fate had intervened and suddenly treading the boards for four hundred people wasn’t so important. He was destined for bigger things.

Simon contemplated a bag of muesli. Sometimes he wondered if
Down Town
had been such a good thing after all. It was supposed to have been his springboard. When Barrington had told him he’d passed his – was it seventh? – audition for the role of Nick Fletcher, he and Linda had been beside themselves with excitement. His stage work had barely kept them in mortgage payments and nappies, but soap wages meant Linda could take proper time off from her legal training to look after the baby twins. Life had suddenly rocketed upwards.

For the first year, Nick Fletcher had lurked in the background, propping up the bar and contributing a few lines whilst the producers decided if Simon could cut the mustard. Then, slowly, he started getting storylines. Bit by bit, Nick got creepier. He struck up friendships with young girls; he offered to help them with their school projects, lent them money, gave them lifts in his car. And then he’d begun to sniff. Not so as the girls could see him, but when they turned their backs he’d sensuously inhale their hair. He was ‘making the nation’s skin creep’, the producers announced gleefully. And once the papers dubbed him ‘Sick Nick’ and he got heckled by the public on his days off, the producers knew they were on to a big thing. The storylines came thick and fast: the begging from his wife to start a family; his inexplicable refusal;
his wife trying to leave him; Nick beating her in reply; his cruel treatment of his Alzheimer’s-suffering mother; Nick using her illness to steal her savings and torture her by continually breaking the news of her husband’s death – even though he’d died decades ago. And then, finally, his predatory pursuit of his best friend’s teenage daughter: frightening off her young boyfriend, surprising her at the school gates, touching her too often, too intimately.

But eventually – as all soap villains do – Nick went too far. His wife packed her bags and fled; his mother kicked the bucket. Suddenly there was nothing left to curtail his behaviour. At his mother’s wake he laced the teenage girl’s drink before using his grief to coerce her back to the graveyard and force himself evilly upon her. But she fought back, using the last remains of her intoxicated strength to strike him with the designer handbag his own money had bought her. She knocked him so hard that he fell into his mother’s open grave, smashing his head on the coffin. The last the world saw of Sick Nick, he was glassy-eyed and spread-eagled – sprawled dead across his mother’s coffin in a deathly parody of an embrace.

It had been Simon’s choice for Nick to die. He’d wanted to leave unequivocally; with no escape route back, should his post
-Down Town
career fail. He was hot, Barrington had promised him. At thirty-two years old, the time was right and the world was his oyster. Sick Nick was the trampoline that would ping him out of the small screen and on to the big. Barrington had a plan: a lead in a quality BBC drama, before a career
of chilling baddies, unhinged criminals and evil-genius psychopaths. He was going to be the British Christopher Walken, the new Dennis Hopper, the scariest Bond villain ever.

But whilst Simon agreed with the scale of Barrington’s plans, he disagreed with their direction. He’d always felt cursed by his naturally maudlin expression; the nose that had stopped him getting girlfriends until – mercifully – Linda had come along. He knew his features were what had made Nick seem so haunted, but he wanted the world to see him differently. Playing a sicko was depressing. Besides, he was fed up with being heckled as a ‘kiddy-fiddling pervert’ whenever he was out with the twins.

What Simon
really
wanted was a romantic lead. He wanted comedy and feel-good, heart-warming fluff. He didn’t want housewives spurning him as he waited at the school gates, discreetly turning their daughters away. He wanted housewives to
love
him, to literally
fall in love
with him up on the screen. Sod being the nation’s pariah – he wanted to be its sweetheart, like Firth striding out of the lake, or Grant bumbling at the weddings, or Austin bloody Jones being cute with puppies. What he really,
really
wanted was a Richard Curtis rom-com.

‘A Richard Curtis rom-com?’ Barrington had laughed. ‘Really, Simon; the audience would never swallow it. And besides, playing a psycho didn’t do Anthony Hopkins any harm!’

‘But I want to be the good guy,’ Simon had protested bleakly. ‘I want to get the girl, and I don’t want her to be underage.’

‘Trust me, sweetie,’ Barrington had soothed.

And so here he was, clinging to the craggy rock face of thirty-nine, peering into the career abyss of forty … the lush nirvana of a Richard Curtis rom-com as far away as the moon.

Trying not to feel depressed, Simon shuffled up to the checkout. Peering into his basket, he counted how many of the five a day tonight’s meal would provide. The home-cooked delivery of the family’s nutrition had recently become his obsession – far nicer to think about than his so-called career. Five a day was something he
could
deliver. If he couldn’t bring home the bacon, he could at least cook it.

His mission was given added importance because the twins couldn’t be relied upon to eat healthily in school, despite Simon and Linda scraping together the exorbitant fees for them to attend a plush private school. Their previous school’s canteen had been far better, but Scarlet had insisted on leaving, the state school playground apparently too unforgiving for the kids of ‘Sick Nick’.

‘But I stopped playing Nick seven years ago! Your classmates would’ve been too young to watch!’

‘Once a sicko, always a sicko,’ Scarlet had countered smartly.

He’d reluctantly acquiesced, although the suspicion remained that the switch was motivated more by the new school’s funky lilac uniform than her classmates’ inability to distinguish fiction from fact.

Simon handed his basket to the checkout girl and pulled out his wallet. A fountain of loose coins cascaded out of his pocket, rolling across the supermarket floor. Simon bent down
to retrieve them. A pound coin had rolled behind the swollen ankles of an old woman queueing behind him.

‘I beg your pardon,’ he apologised politely as he reached for his coin.

Despite her age, the old woman nimbly threw herself backwards.

‘Keep your hands to yourself!’ she scolded loudly as she placed her foot squarely over his pound. ‘I know
exactly
where they’ve been, thank you. You should be ashamed of yourself.’

‘Isn’t he supposed to be dead?’ her friend piped up.

‘They’re all the same, these sexual predators,’ the old woman announced to the shop floor. ‘They see a woman and they just can’t help themselves.’

Simon sagged in exhausted frustration. He should have listened to Linda; she’d told him to get their groceries online. He’d lost count of how many times he’d been hassled in supermarkets. He felt himself shake with embarrassed indignation.

‘I’m Simon Drennan, the actor,’ he projected with as much dignity as he could muster on all fours on the floor. ‘I used to play a character in the soap opera,
Down Town
. I am
not
Nick Fletcher, the fictional, morally-flawed villain. I’m a law-abiding, happily married,
real
person who just wants to buy his family’s dinner.’

‘Did he say
Downton?’
someone cooed from a few aisles along. ‘Oooo, I
love
Captain Crawley! Is it him?’

‘Down Town,’
somebody replied, disappointed. ‘It’s just that paedo who was mean to his mother.’

Meanwhile the old woman stared suspiciously down at Simon before reluctantly sucking her cheeks.

‘Keep your hair on,’ she muttered gracelessly, her foot still covering his pound. ‘I was only saying.’

Slowly, Simon stood up. The whole of Waitrose seemed to be staring in judgement. He threw a couple of twenty-pound notes at the checkout girl, grabbed his groceries and fled.

This would never have happened if he’d done a Richard Curtis movie, he thought as he bolted out of the supermarket and towards the safety of the people carrier. He bet Firth and Grant never got hassled in supermarkets. Not this kind of hassle, anyway. They probably just got ushered to the front of the queue where the till girl let them have their groceries for free, if they’d only agree to accept the bit of scrap receipt on which she’d scrawled her phone number and vital statistics.

‘Bloody Barrington,’ he cursed as he thrust his car into first and accelerated out of the car park with a skid. He’d probably never even emailed Richard Curtis his CV! Well, Simon had had enough. He was going straight home to find his old copy of
Spotlight
and ring all the agents he could find. Straight after he’d baked a fresh loaf of sourdough bread and tried out that new recipe for seafood chowder, that was. Mussels were in season and he didn’t want to miss his window. But after that, there’d be no stopping him …

10.45am @foxyroxy

Just binned fave trackie bottoms. Hurt, but had to be done. Trackies = dangerously addictive gateway drug disguised as comfort …

10.46am @foxyroxy

1 minute you’re sat watching TV, feeling comfy – next, you’re pushing trolley round Lidl with no foundation + split ends

10.47am @foxyroxy

Plus they add 20lbs + give bumslide down to knees.
#ROXYSAYS: Chuck out your trackies – keep your arse at your arse!

When she was little, there were many things Roxy imagined her grown-up self doing – parachuting out of an aeroplane, vogueing with Madonna, posing for Mario Testino … Spending a Thursday night at the home of a former government minister wasn’t one of them. But here she was, perched on the over-stuffed chesterfield sofa of the former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, doing her best to blank out a plate of Simon’s home-made mini cheesecakes, and concentrate instead on the self-pitying grumbles of a former TV weatherman.

‘One wrong forecast and I lost everything,’ Terence moaned. ‘My job, my income, my status …’

‘Yeah, but, be honest,’ Simon interrupted dryly. ‘It wasn’t just
one
wrong forecast.’

‘It wasn’t just the tornado?’ Roxy asked in surprise, the mini cheesecakes suddenly forgotten. She read the papers religiously – well, the showbiz pages – but this was news to her.

‘Let’s see …’ Simon made a show of remembering. ‘Well, there was the small matter of him failing to forecast the UK’s
heaviest-ever hail storm … the one that caved in the roof of that school bus.’

‘Nobody could have predicted that!’ Terence protested. ‘Besides, the children didn’t complain.’

‘The children were treated for shock.’

‘What about the London floods?’ Cressida piped up. ‘Sunshine, you told us. We had to evacuate Parliament. The Lords was slopping with wigs.’

‘And then there was the thunderstorm at the Royal Wedding,’ added Holly. ‘They’d never have used the open-top carriage if you’d said it would rain. Who knew white went so see-through?’

‘And let’s not forget the Telford Tornado!’ cried Simon. ‘Or the fact that you personally bankrupted thousands. People lost their life savings thanks to you!’

‘I never said my forecast for a white Christmas was one hundred per cent accurate.’

‘We could bet our houses on it, you said.’

‘It’s not my fault we’re a nation of gamblers!’

‘Four hundred families became homeless!’

‘But I lost things too: My job, my reputation, my wife …’