Could It Be I'm Falling in Love? (3 page)

Tentatively she placed her hand over her eyes and tried to remember if she had any paracetamol. She resisted the urge to phone for an ambulance (the stomach pumps on
Holby
made her icky). But the Fire Brigade? If cats up trees were emergencies, then why not booze-poisoned blondes? Half a dozen burly firemen in her bedroom were bound to make her feel better. But she didn’t ring. She knew the help she needed, and it wasn’t from professional beefcake. When faced with adversity, whatever its nature, there was only one thing to do … It was time to consult the golden triangle.

Over the years, Roxy had made it her mission to be at the forefront of every cultural zeitgeist and passing trendy fad. She’d had a boho summer, a Dukan diet month and had even flirted with Kabbalah. But one of her lengthier fads had been yoga. Every week for eighteen months she’d forced herself to a Notting Hill class, enslaved by the promise of biceps like Madonna and the tantalising hope that this might be the week she inadvertently placed her mat next to an off-duty TV producer on the lookout for a hot new face to present their next programme. It hadn’t worked. By the end of it all she was still Roxy-shaped, and hadn’t downward dogged with a single TV exec. All of the standing on one leg had been a complete waste of effort, and if she’d had to endure the instructor urging her one more time to imagine a green triangle, with herself floating in it, weightless, worriless and free, she’d have rolled up her mat and forced him to eat it.
The only green triangle she could ever picture was a giant, seductive Quality Street, and her compulsion to leg it out of the studio and into the nearest confectionery counter was almost intolerable. So she’d substituted the instructor’s green triangle for a golden one. And, rather than filling it with herself and her worries, she’d stocked it with a triumvirate of women – three sexy, sassy role models she could call upon whenever she needed help to kick the arse of her problems or bitch-slap away her self-doubt. Sod
Charlie’s Angels
– these gorgeous ladies were Roxy’s Angels: her oracle of lip-glossed cool.

Summoning every ounce of will in her body, Roxy zoned out her hangover and visualised the golden triangle. Immediately, her throbbing head eased and she was greeted by the pouts of her friends.

Mossy was there, of course, spanning the triangle’s bottom left corner like the main stage at Glastonbury festival. With her rock ‘n’ roll style and God-given ability to make a hangover look sexy, Mossy’s place within the triangle was assured. After all, she
had
single-handedly granted women licence to party
and
not give a stuff if their hair needed washing whilst they did it. If Roxy ever needed an outfit – or inspiration to turn any-old-night into a blinder – Mossy was always on hand.

In the bottom right corner was Debbie Harry – circa 1979, and ‘Heart Of Glass’. This was when Debs was at the peak of her perfection and cooler than any other human alive! She was the ultimate frontwoman, combining sex, attitude and a perpetual expression of ‘so what?’. Roxy might only have been
one at the time (although technically she hadn’t been born, her showbiz birth year being fluid), but she was sure there couldn’t have been a person on the planet who didn’t fancy getting dirty with Harry.

And finally – perched at the pinnacle of the triangle – was Hurley.

Some people thought Elizabeth II was the Queen of Great Britain, but Roxy reckoned it was Liz. OK, so she was a bit posh and ‘dad-totty’, but nobody rocked a white jean quite like Liz Hurley! She’d tried her immaculately manicured hand at everything from acting to modelling, from pig-rearing to celebrity best-friending Pamela Anderson – and made a fragrant success of it all. She’d been a constant high-glamour presence on red carpets for – well –
ever
and, via the power of Estée Lauder alone, had single-handedly halted the aging process. This wasn’t to say that Liz’s life had always been easy (the call girl, the DNA test, the embarrassment of nabbing a bloke called Shane …) but Queen Liz never lost her cool – or her makeup bag – in a crisis.

All this was reason alone for Roxy to love Liz Hurley more than anyone she’d never actually met … but it didn’t even touch upon the
main
reason why Hurley was the closest thing planet earth had to a goddess: Liz’s undeniable genius for lexicon.

Of all the new words to have been accepted into the Oxford English Dictionary –
sexting, jeggings, mankini
– Liz’s redefinition of ‘civilian’ trumped them all. Roxy was a call-a-spade-a-spade kind of girl, and political correctness bored her arse
off. So when Liz had split the world into ‘celebs’ and ‘civilians’, Roxy had fallen in love. Who cared that the public was outraged … Liz had spoken the truth! Celebrities looked better, dressed better and got paid better than civilians. They ate in better restaurants, never had problems hailing cabs and
always
shagged the best-looking person at the party. They weren’t ordinary people – they were super people, leading luckier, prettier lives.

‘Civilians’ instantly catapulted Liz to the top of Roxy’s lust list and granted her residency at the peak of the golden triangle. Roxy had always been a lover of mantras, with a catchphrase for every occasion
(If at first you don’t succeed
 …
Where there’s a will there’s a way
 …
Fame costs
 …). But if all her other mantras failed, there was one she could always fall back on – the single most important piece of wisdom to live her life by. When Roxy needed answers, she always asked herself this:
What would Liz do?

So, from beneath the heat of her duvet, Roxy pondered:

What would Liz do if she had a hangover so stonking her brain had begun to dribble out of her ears?

And then the answer hit her. It was obvious, really. Liz would hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. And then she’d do a seventy-two hour cabbage-soup detox, ensuring that the blinds were kept down and her public kept waiting, right up until the moment she was restored to full red-carpet fabulousness and ready to face the cameras again.

Well, that was that, then – decided.

Groaning like a woman of one hundred and three, Roxy
rolled out of bed and on to all fours. The movement made her head pound and her eyes pulsate in their sockets. She took a deep breath. If she crawled really slowly, she could inch down the stairs, into the kitchen and over to the tap in twenty-five minutes. If only that extra thumping in her head would stop. Speaking of which – why had it just got louder? And why were there more bangs than usual? Had her heart begun to echo? Or was it …? Surely not! Oh, bollocking bollocks –
rock off!
Someone was knocking on her door! That wasn’t on, that wasn’t on at all. Didn’t they know what bloody time it was?

Keys in hand, Sue scuttled up the driveway and threw herself into her hallway. She slammed her front door behind her and then leant against it, her heart palpitating in her chest.

Why had she said yes to tonight? The very thought made her throat go tight.

It wasn’t Woody’s fault – well, not exactly. He meant well. But would it
really
make her feel better?
That
part of her – the sexy part – was gone. Dead. Buried. Kaput. Wrapped up like fish-and-chip paper and thrown in the bin. Dragging it into the light wouldn’t be healing – it would be humiliating!

Tea; that was what she needed. A nice cup of ginseng and a biscuit. She hurried into the kitchen.

Some people turn to alcohol in moments of crisis, but Sue had always preferred tea and biscuits. Over the years she’d discovered that there was a flavour of tea and variety of biscuit for every problem in life. Making a perfect tea-biscuit match was like alchemy – a science – and Sue was a dedicated student. For instance, a trip to the supermarket never seemed as daunting after a vitalising pot of Lapsang Souchong and a
Garibaldi. The prospect of a phone call to a utility helpdesk was eased by a pre-emptive cup of lavender and a ginger snap. And the trauma of having to scuttle past the photographers who sometimes camped at the end of her driveway, by the gate to that Hollywood actor’s house, could only be soothed by a calming Earl Grey and some shortbread. But tonight …? That required something special: a large pot of ginseng and the most powerful pinnacle of the biscuiting world – a packet of Marks & Spencer’s Extremely Chocolatey Dark Chocolate Rounds.

Still wearing her coat, she flicked on the kettle, opened the biscuit tin and started to power-eat.

As she hastily shoved a second biscuit into her mouth, she remembered that Woody had asked her to bring some old photos. God knew why. It would only add insult to injury, but she couldn’t let him down. She might as well bring her scrapbook, although the idea made her throat close even tighter. She had to swallow really hard to get the biscuit down.

Sue had a strange relationship with her scrapbook. It was like a sore she couldn’t stop scratching. She still looked at it every day. It was her daily dose of self-flagellation: an ongoing self-administered torture to remind her of the embarrassment and shame, and that nasty feeling of something precious being taken from her, which still wouldn’t go away. Over the years the scrapbook had made her feel many negative things, but nowadays, if she was being honest, what it made her feel most was
fat
.

The kettle came to the boil. She poured the water on to the tea leaves and reached for another biscuit. As she munched,
she miserably looked down at her middle, crushed against the kitchen cabinet. Although hidden under loose black layers, she could still feel her tummy splodging over the rim of her knickers like a huge rubber ring of flab. A flashback of her perfectly-proportioned former figure swam before her. Why had she ever thought she needed to lose weight? She must have been mad! She’d lived on a self-imposed diet of black coffee, cigarettes and Ryvita, but there’d been nothing of her. And, as everyone from the milkman to her mother had seen, her curves had been in all the right places.

Sue eyed the remnants of the Extremely Chocolatey Dark Chocolate Rounds, their crumbs spread across her copy of
The Times
. She couldn’t believe she’d finished the packet so quickly – her tea wasn’t yet brewed!

Tonight was going to be terrible.

It wasn’t
just
having to reveal all the intimate things she’d spent so many years trying to hide. It was that inevitable moment when Woody would look up from the scrapbook and see her as she was now, and that brief glimmer of marvel would die. She didn’t need to be a psychologist to read his face. There’d be a split second and then he’d force his expression back to normal, and Sue would want to slink home, never to set foot out of her front door again.

And that wasn’t even the worst bit. The worst bit was doing it in front of Cressida.

Sue’s heart beat even faster and her armpits started to prickle. She threw off her coat and flapped at her dress, trying to put air in its folds.

Oh, Woody – why did you have to be so nice?
She’d just begun to enjoy their Thursday evenings. But then he’d brought Cressida, with her stiff upper lip. Sue had felt her disapproval and heard her barely-audible tuts, and Thursdays with Woody had never been the same.

And now there was
this
.

Sue suddenly realised she was pacing her kitchen. She needed to calm down and breathe, otherwise she might not make the meeting at all – and then what would Woody think? She fixed her eyes beyond the biscuit crumbs, to
The Times
underneath. The crossword was peeking out. She loved crosswords; they were one of the few things she was actually good at. It didn’t matter what you looked like doing crosswords. And if you had your paper delivered, you didn’t even have to leave the house! She exhaled deeply and tried to block out her panic. Twelve across:
Noun. Acclivity, incline (8)
. Something, something, A, something, something, E, something, something.

‘Bloody hell! What are
you
doing here?’

Roxy clung to her front door, goggle-eyed.

The man on her doorstep laughed, rubbed his head and looked embarrassed.