Could It Be I'm Falling in Love? (5 page)

It was hot under his wig and the nylon costume wasn’t helping. Beneath the high-collared cloak and thigh boots, Simon was beginning to sweat. That was the problem with man-made fibres: no absorption. He needed to be careful. If he carried on perspiring at this rate, his eyebrows might slide off.

‘Oh, no there isn’t!’ he bellowed wickedly at the sea of faces before him.

‘Oh, yes there is!’ they yelled back, their pre-pubescent voices several octaves higher than his. Simon evil-eyed the audience, making sure his gaze lingered on the mouthier seven-year-olds.

‘Oh, no there isn’t!’ He struck an exaggerated pose, which was the cue for the crocodile to finally get one up on the Demon King and sneak up to bite him on the bottom. But the crocodile wasn’t on the ball. It missed its cue and the audience fell about laughing.

‘OH, NO THERE ISN’T!’ Simon repeated knowingly, sticking his bottom out even further to show
he
knew
they
knew there’d been a fluff. There was nothing a panto audience liked more
than a cock-up. Simon often wondered why they ever bothered with scripts. No matter how many crap jokes the writer shoehorned in, the kids always laughed loudest when the lines were forgotten. Or when someone accidentally fell over. Or, best of all, when someone forgot their lines, fell over and swore. In fact, unscripted X-rated profanities were panto comedy gold. And then there was always the bring-the-house-down comedy chestnut of the flying—

‘Arghhhhh!’ Simon yelped, as pain suddenly bit – not via a crocodile on his backside, but in a sharp smack on his temple. Only years of steely professionalism stopped him from letting rip with the F-word. He saw the blue and white wrapper of a mini-Bounty at his feet. He remembered throwing it into the audience a few minutes earlier. Some bugger with a strong throwing arm must have caught it. Not one of the seven-year-olds; one of the sullen-faced teens, who sat crossed-armed and sneering, right up until the moment an unexpected opportunity to inflict pain and humiliation landed in their laps in the form of an individually wrapped mini chocolate bar. Teenagers were a panto actor’s worst nightmare. And teenagers armed with confectionery were even worse.

Why did it have to be a mini-Bounty?
Simon pondered wistfully. Airborne, the mini-Bounty was surprisingly painful; it was something to do with the coconut. A mini-Crunchie would have been better. Or if it
had
to be a mini-Bounty, why couldn’t it have landed a bit lower? At least then the blow would have been cushioned by his nylon eyebrows. His forehead throbbed angrily.

‘Right, you ‘orrible lot,’ he improvised, shaking a fist. ‘If I find out which one of you scallywags threw that, I’m going to get Demon Dave ‘ere to pull off your pretty little fingers so I can wear ‘em as earrings!’

He pointed towards Demon Dave, who was leaning unthreat-eningly against a piece of painted scenery. Some demonic henchman he was proving to be.

Am I cursed?
Simon wondered as he watched the audience scramble to find things to throw at him. Year after year it was the same. Despite pleading with his agent to find him a proper role – a quality BBC drama – he found himself stuck yet again in the career-desert of panto. He was RADA trained, for heaven’s sake! He’d trodden the boards, done the Bard! He’d spent eight years playing the most hated villain on the UK’s leading soap. He had man-on-the-street recognition and a tabloid nickname. Yet here he was –
a thespian
– reduced to earning his living in a spit-flecked beard, playing a sitting-duck target for teens.

‘Ffff—!’ Simon had forgotten the crocodile. He jumped, inwardly cursing the surprisingly painful jaw action of gloss-painted papier-mâché. As his backside smarted, he was only dimly aware of the arm lifting above the audience, stage right. He heard Demon Dave improvise them back to the script. And then, as if in slow motion, he saw another confectionery missile hurtle through the air towards him, spinning like a Wimbledon ace. Out of the corner of his eye, he noted the heavier-than-normal shape – the whirr of yellows, purples and reds. With a flash he recognised the brand, and several thoughts crashed through his head at once: how the supermarkets were stocking
Easter chocolate earlier and earlier; how he must buy one for Linda when next in Waitrose; and how some bugger must have brought this to the theatre especially, and that this was taking the joke too far. And then, with a thud, it hit him – closer to his groin than a speeding Creme Egg should ever comfortably get.

Two hours later, Simon was nearing Lavender Heath. He’d wiped off his make-up, peeled off his eyebrows and washed his beard, leaving it to drip-dry on a makeshift line over the sink. He’d climbed gratefully into his car and driven home through the dark country roads, lulling himself back to normality with the gentle babble of Radio Four. With each mile he put between himself and the theatre, his spirits rose. And by the time he’d reached the village, the ruts of his frown had finally levelled. He was looking forward to the evening ahead.

The one good thing about panto – other than that working in panto was better than not working at all – was the early finish. Not like real theatre. The panto audience was in bed by eight thirty, so he could be showered and home by nine. And tonight he felt boyish with excitement. The twins were sleeping at friends’ houses and he and Linda could languish in the blissful rarity of a few hours of privacy, curled up on the sofa with a bottle of wine. They might even get to do that thing married couples allegedly did. Simon stepped down on the accelerator and offered up thanks to the sleepover gods.

Sleepovers were the only saving grace of having children.

God knew there was nothing else. Palming your kids off on some other poor bugger was the only meagre relief from having two savage-tongued fifteen-year-olds in the house. The twins were a blur of attitude and acne, and Simon felt battered by their constant barrage of disdainful looks and savage put-downs. How had it all gone so wrong? They were cute when they were five – they’d loved him! But five had morphed into fifteen, and he’d morphed from Dad into Whipping Boy. And cuddles? The only physical contact he got from Euan and Scarlet now was when they mugged him for his wallet.

‘Hang on in there,’ Linda encouraged. ‘Another three years and they’ll have buggered off to university. They’ll appreciate us when they’ve gone.’

Simon was doubtful.

But..
. tonight wasn’t about the twins – it was about forgetting them.

Simon sighed contentedly as he drove down Lavender Heath High Street. He took a right at the Dog and Duck pub, and smiled at the immaculately trimmed hedges. He loved living here.

He’d almost kissed the estate agent who’d shown them the house. He’d just left the soap and had had his fill of trendy north London. OK, so it had delis from every corner of the globe, but he was fed up with living so near to other people. He was sick of hearing his name shouted in the street – or rather, Nick’s name, because the great British public seemed to have trouble realising that the character he played in the
soap wasn’t actually
real
. And he was sick, sick, sick of the tabloids. They knew his every movement. It was bad enough opening the paper to be confronted with a picture of himself putting out the rubbish, but it was off-the-scale infuriating when
they
called him Nick too. It was as though he,
Simon
, no longer existed. The real him had been turned into someone unreal – and a complete bastard, at that. It was like a nightmarish version of mistaken identity, and it had slowly but surely driven him mad.

Lavender Heath had been the antidote. For a start it was a full hour’s drive from London. And, unlike London’s dirty streets, it was postcard pretty: a chocolate-box village in immaculate countryside. The estate agent promised it was a private village, where everybody respected each other’s boundaries. Why else would so many rich and famous people live there? It was no coincidence that its properties came with long, winding driveways, obscuring their owners from prying eyes. Besides, who else could afford its huge rustic homes? Not the rustics. The estate agent had barely finished showing them the house before Simon had put in an offer.

Simon pulled into his own long, winding driveway, unlocked his obscured front door and soaked up the rare, peaceful silence.

Feeling relaxed at last, he stooped to pick up a business card from the mat. As he straightened up, he caught a glimpse of himself in the hall mirror. He was less keen on mirrors these days. There seemed to be some kind of conspiracy; the man who squinted back couldn’t possibly
be
him.
That
man
looked every one of his thirty-nine years: his hair was thinner and his nose was much bonier than his own. It was like a cartoonist’s version of himself.

‘You’ve got an intelligent face,’ Linda would reassure him, and she’d ruffle her fingers through his hair.

‘Sod intelligent – is it a romantic face?’ he’d neurotically cross-examine her. ‘Is it a Richard Curtis rom-com leading-man kind of face?’

Simon leant closer to the mirror. Sure enough, he could already see the purpling of a small bruise on his forehead.
Bloody mini-Bounties
, he thought dryly. Thank Christ his velvet pantaloons had cushioned the Creme Egg.

Out of the corner of his eye he could see the red button of the answerphone flashing. He pressed it and Linda’s voice filled the hall.

‘Simon, love, it’s me. Look, sorry, but something’s come up at work. I know the twins are out and it’s supposed to be our night, but this is really important. Sorry, sweetheart. I’ll be on the last train home. Don’t wait up. Love you!’

Simon’s shoulders slumped and he dropped his car keys into the key dish with a clank. He tried not to feel hard done by, but he felt a pang of longing for his wife. It wasn’t just the sex. He wanted to breathe in the smell of her conditioner as they cuddled up watching TV, to spoon gently behind her as they drifted off to sleep.

Idly, he looked at the business card. It had a picture of a ladder and a bucket. He turned it over. There was a message scrawled on the back.

And then …

Simon sighed and pictured the bottle of red he and Linda were supposed to be drinking. Then he pocketed the card, picked up his car keys and headed out.

Roxy had the nagging feeling she looked like a hooker.

Normally looking like a hooker wouldn’t bother her; you couldn’t so much as interrupt a paparazzo’s fag unless you were dressed like a tenner-a-trick slut. But, tottering past the manicured lawns and sculpted topiary of Lavender Heath, the hooker look made her feel twitchy.

The problem – she decided – was her coat. She wasn’t big on coats. It was her job to be out there and be seen. Hiding her wares wasn’t an option – even if the weather was arctic. A few years back she’d never noticed the temperature, warmed as she was by waves of heat from the photographers’ flash bulbs. But, lately she’d begun to get cold; and last night she’d been positively freezing. Woody’s place was on the opposite side of the village, a full seven minutes’ walk away. So she’d rummaged in the back of her wardrobe to find something suitably ‘coaty’. What did one wear when popping round to one’s friendly neighbourhood pop star for small talk and internet-movie-worthy sex? She could only find a trench coat. It was so thin she needen’t have bothered. And it was so short
she looked naked underneath. If Lavender Heath had been gauche enough to have nets, she was one hundred per cent sure they’d be twitching.

It hadn’t always been this way, she lamented as she clipclopped past a hedge trimmed into the shape of a swan. She could still remember the minimal maintenance of her first years of fame. Back then her every night out had made it into the papers, even just beers and a gig with mates, in nothing more raunchy than combats. She’d loved the just-got-out-of-bed look. Sometimes she yearned for her old collection of tight T-shirts, combat trousers and dance-all-night trainers. It had been her look – part of the new breed of fun-loving, hard-drinking blondes on TV.

But then the next breed of girl had arrived, and everyone wanted clean-living types with bodies that could bend into the lotus position; the kind whose beauty secrets were an early night with a bottle of triple-purified water (Roxy had once listed hers as gargling with Red Bull and an al fresco shag in stiff wind). And so Roxy had had to work her wardrobe harder and smaller. The only thing that had stayed big was her mouth.

Roxy finally arrived at Woody’s house, hurried up the drive (surprisingly short, she semi-registered) and knocked on his front door. Despite the cold night, she felt a hot wave of panic. She couldn’t be nervous – she’d been hanging out with celebs her whole life. But still, it’d been a while since she’d met anyone like Woody, and she was glad she was wearing her most indecent dress. Everyone knew Woody had red blood in his veins and Roxy was determined to work every inch of her
model-skinny curves. There had to be some payback for living off egg whites and edamame beans.