Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination (2 page)

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F
ifty-eight minutes later she emerged, breathless, from the elevator, scrubbed and polished. A line of white limos stretched from the front of the lobby all the way up the avenue, horns blaring. The hotel bouncers were in their bossiest of elements, throwing their weight around in little white shorts and talking into headsets with the gravitas of FBI agents. Two girls with huge breasts and no hips were posing with rather desperate grins on a red carpet. They looked like weird man-woman hybrids—the upper part buxom female, the lower adolescent boy. They were striking identical poses, standing side-on to the flashbulbs, one leg in front of the other, bodies forced into an
S
shape, as if they were trying to duplicate a diagram from
InStyle
magazine or were desperate to go to the loo.

The greeting table displayed a precarious pyramid of tubs of Devorée—Crème de Phylgie, very surgical-looking, plain white with plain green writing. Olivia gave her name, took one of the glossy press packs and headed, reading it, towards the throng, shuddering at the list of repulsive-sounding algae and sea-critter-based ingredients.

A woman in a black trouser suit powered over, arranging her face into the sort of frightening white-toothed smile that looks like that of an angry monkey. “Hi! You’re Olivia? Melissa from Century PR. Welcome. How was your trip over? How was the weather in London?” She marched Olivia towards the terrace, asking inane
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and ceaseless questions without pause for answer. “How is your hotel room? How’s Sally at
Elan?
Will you give her my regards?”

They stepped out on the deck where
le tout
fashionista and musico Miami
monde
was artfully arranged around a selection of wrong-sized furniture, and spilling down some steps into the garden below, where white-covered comfy chairs, giant indoor table lamps and cabanas surrounded the turquoise-lit pool.

“Have you tried the Devorée martini? You got the press release about the chef who’s prepared the special dishes we’ll be sampling tonight?” Olivia let Melissa’s autowitter wash over her. Usually, she tried to let annoying people do their thing and hoped they’d buzz off as soon as possible. Night had fallen with tropical suddenness. The landscaping was lit with flaming torches, and beyond was the ocean, crashing in the darkness. Or maybe, she thought, it was an air-conditioning unit. There was something odd about this party. It felt controlling and tense, like Melissa. The wind was lifting press releases and serviettes, ruffling dresses and hair. There were people around who didn’t fit, moving and watching too anxiously for Party Funland. She focused on a group in the far corner, trying to figure them out. The women were actress slash model types: big hair, long legs, small dresses. The men were harder to place: dark-haired, olive-skinned, high mustache quotient. They were making a show of being rich, but they weren’t quite getting it right. They looked like an advert from Debenham’s in-house magazine.

“If you’ll excuse me, there’s someone I need to bring over. Oh look, there’s Jennifer . . .” Melissa powered off, still talking, leaving Olivia standing on her own.

For a throwback second, she felt residual feelings of insecurity. She stamped on them hard, as if they were a beetle or cockroach. Olivia used to hate going to parties. She was too sensitive to the signals given off by other people to glide through any social gathering unscathed. She liked to have proper conversations, not mindless insincere moments, and she could never quite master the art of moving smoothly from group to group. As a result, she used to
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spend entire evenings feeling either hurt or rude. Dramatic events, however, made her decide she would no longer give a shit about anything. Over time, she had painstakingly erased all womanly urges to question her shape, looks, role in life, or effect upon other people. She would watch, analyze and conform to codes as she observed them, without allowing them to affect or compromise her own identity.

One of her favorites on her Rules for Living list was “No one is thinking about you. They’re thinking about themselves, just like you.” This was a particularly useful rule at parties. It meant, by implication, that no one was watching you either. Therefore, you could just stand on your own and observe, and no one would think you were a sad act. No one, for example, was thinking now that she was Olivia-no-mates-Joules just because she was on her own. Or worse, Rachel-no-mates-Pixley. No one would say, “Rachel Pixley, you’re a dropout from Worksop Comprehensive. Leave the Delano Hotel this instant and go to the Post House Hotel on the Nottingham bypass.”

When Rachel Pixley was a normal schoolgirl, living with two parents in Worksop, coming home to tea in a warm house, she used to think that an orphan was a glamorous thing to be, like Alona the Wild One in
Bunty
or
Mandy
comics—an orphan who was wild and free and galloped her horse bareback along the shoreline. For a long time after it all happened, she thought she had been punished for this fantasy.

When Rachel was fourteen, her mother, father and brother were run over by a lorry on a zebra crossing. Rachel, having lagged behind buying sweets and a magazine, saw the whole thing. She was put in the care of her unmarried Auntie Monica, who had cats and read newspapers all day in her nightdress. Her flat smelt of something indefinable and bad, but despite the fag ash that festooned her like snow, and her eccentric and inaccurate application of lipstick, Auntie Monica was beautiful and had been brilliant. She had studied at Cambridge and still played the piano wonderfully—
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when she wasn’t drunk. Playing the piano when drunk, as Rachel came to realize during the time she spent
chez
Auntie Monica, was like driving when drunk—inadvisable, if not criminal.

Rachel had had a boyfriend at school who was a couple of years above her but seemed much older than everyone else. His father was a nightwatchman and a maniac. Roxby was not exactly good-looking, but he was his own man. He used to work nights as a bouncer in Romeo and Juliet’s. And when he came home—because by this time he and Rachel were living together in a room above the Hao Wah Chinese takeaway—he used to sit at the computer investing his bouncer earnings in stocks and shares.

Rachel, who had only ever understood money as something you earned in very small quantities by working, was initially resistant to the notion of making money out of money. “Money doesn’t buy happiness,” her hardworking father had told her. “If you work hard and you’re honest and kind, then nothing can harm you.” But it had. A lorry had run over him. So Rachel threw in her lot with Roxby and worked every weekend at Morrisons’ supermarket, and did evening shifts after school in a corner shop run by a Pakistani family, and let him invest the money for her. When she turned sixteen, her father’s life-insurance policy was turned over to her. She had twenty thousand pounds to invest. It was the beginning of the eighties. She was on the way to becoming, if not a rich woman, at least a woman of independent means.

When she was seventeen, Roxby announced that he was gay and moved to the canal district of Manchester. And Rachel, fed up with knock after knock, took a long hard look at life. She had seen her friends’ older sisters, radiant and triumphant, flashing minuscule H. Samuel’s solitaires on their engagement fingers, spending months obsessed with dresses, flowers and event-planning, only to be found a couple of years later in the shopping center, fat, broke and hassled, pushing prams through the rain, moaning about being hit, or belittled, or left. And she thought:
Sod that.
She started with her name. “Olivia” sounded glam. And the attractiveness of the word “Joules”
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was the only thing she remembered from physics lessons.
I’m all I’ve got,
she thought.
I’m going to be complete in myself. I’m going to work out my own good and bad. I’m going to be a top journalist or an explorer and do something that matters. I’m going to search this shitty world for some beauty and excitement and I’m going to have a bloody good time.

And this,
Olivia Joules thought, leaning back against the Delano pillar,
is a lot more beautiful and exciting than Worksop. No one is watching you, just go with the flow and enjoy it.
Unfortunately for the Rule for Living, however, somebody
was
watching her. As she continued to scan the party, a pair of eyes met hers in a second of highly charged interest, then looked away. She also looked away, then glanced back. The man was standing alone. He was dark and rather aristocratic-looking. He was wearing a suit that was a bit too black and a shirt that was a bit too white—too flash for the Delano. And yet he didn’t look like a flash person. There was a stillness about him. He turned, and suddenly his eyes met hers again with that thrilling unspoken message which sometimes transmits itself across a room and says, “I want to fuck you too.” That was all that was needed: a look. No need to flirt, to maneuver, to chat. Just that moment of recognition. Then all you had to do was follow, like in a dance.

“Everything going okay?” It was the hyperactive PR woman. Olivia, realizing she was staring lustfully into space, remembered that she had a piece to file by tomorrow and had better get on with it. “There’s lots of people I want you to meet,” said Melissa, starting to bustle Olivia along. “Have you had something to eat? Let me see if we’ve got some people for you to talk to. Have you met Devorée?”

Putting thoughts of shagging strangers firmly to one side, she turned her attention to the business of quote-gathering. Everyone wanted to be in British
Elan
and the launch was easy pickings for sound bites. After an hour or so she had vaguely face-cream-based quotes from Devorée, Chris Blackwell, the manager of the Delano, a couple of handsome men whom she suspected were for hire, the
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guy who did the list at Tantra, the PR for Michael Kors and P. Diddy. It was more than enough for the solitary paragraph which would inevitably prove the sum total of
Elans
coverage. Moving on to the
Sunday Times
“Cool Miami” piece, she quickly filled her notebook with the grandmother of one of the models, who had lived on the South Shore Strip twenty years before it became fashionable again; a cop who claimed to have been on the scene after the Versace shooting and was plainly lying and—
la pièce de résistance
—Gianni Versace’s former cleaning lady.

“Olivia?” Damn, it was Melissa again. “Can I introduce you to the creator of Devorée’s Crème de Phylgie? Though, of course, Devorée has selected the ingredients personally herself.”

Olivia let out an odd noise. It was the man who had been watching her. He was a compelling mixture of soulful and powerful: finely drawn features, a straight nose, fine, arched brows, hooded brown eyes.

“This is Pierre Ferramo.” She was disappointed. The name sounded like something you’d find in gilt-plastic faux handwriting, pinned on an overpriced tie in a duty-free shop.

“Ms. Joules.” He was wearing a ridiculously over-the-top gold watch, but his hand was rougher than she expected and the handshake strong.

“Pleased to meet you,” she said. “Congratulations on Crème de Phylgie. Does it really contain sea slugs?”

He didn’t laugh, he glinted. “Not the sea slugs themselves, only an essence: an oil secreted by their skin.”

“It sounds like something you’d want to wipe off rather than put on.”

“Does it, indeed?” He raised his eyebrows.

“I hope you won’t be writing that in your piece,” trilled Melissa with a brittle laugh.

“I’m sure Ms. Joules will write with infinite subtlety and grace.”

“Infinite,” she said.

There was an extremely charged pause. Melissa looked from one
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to the other then started twittering. “Oh look, she’s leaving. Will you excuse us? Pierre, I just want you to say hello to one of our very special guests before she leaves.”

“Very well,” he said wearily, murmuring to Olivia as he left, “sea slugs indeed.”

Melissa introduced Olivia to more of her client base: two members of a boy band called Break whose gimmick was surfing and who had a “Beach Boys meets Radiohead fusion vibe.” Olivia had never heard of the band, but the two boys were rather sweet. Beneath the surf-white hair, their complexions displayed a fascinating mixture of sunburnt crispiness and acne. She listened as they chattered on about their careers, Beavis-and-Butthead-type nervous sniggers punctuating a fragile veneer of bored arrogance. “We’re auditioning for parts in this, like, movie? With surfers?” Their strange interrogatory intonation seemed to suggest that someone as old as Olivia might not understand words like “movie” or “surfers.” “It’s going to launch the single off the album?”

Two hits and they’d be off, but they didn’t know it. She felt like giving them a motherly chat, but instead she just listened and nodded, watching Pierre Ferramo out of the corner of her eye.

“That’s the guy who’s, like, the producer? Of the movie?” whispered one of the boys.

“Really?”

They all watched as Ferramo made his stately way towards a mysterious-looking group of dark men and models. He moved gracefully, languid almost to the point of being fey, but exuding a sense of tremendous latent power. He reminded her of someone. The group parted like the Red Sea to receive him, as if he were a guru or god rather than a face-cream creator slash producer slash whatever. He settled himself down gracefully, crossing one leg over the other, revealing an expanse of bare leg, black shiny slip-ons and thin silky gray socks. A couple close to the group rose to leave their sofa.

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“Shall we sit a bit nearer?” said Olivia, nodding towards the empty seats.

It was a silly, too-big sofa, so Olivia and the surf boys had almost to climb onto it, and then either virtually lie down or sit with their legs dangling like children. Ferramo looked up as she sat and graciously inclined his head. She felt her senses quicken and looked away. She breathed slowly, remembering her scuba-diving training: just keep breathing, deep breaths, be cool at all times.