Simply Divine (20 page)

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dinner, Jane would have established that he was single some considerable time before she was two gins and tonics, a bottle and a half of wine and three ports the worse for wear. At that randy, fuzzy-headed stage even Sholto was beginning to look promising, so Mark's whispered revelation during the coffee that he was still looking for the girl of his dreams had naturally had an electric effect.

Jane had accepted his offer of a lift home with alacrity and, after ten minutes' exposure to the low, thrilling purr of his Porsche Carrera, had jumped at the chance to come up and admire the mosaics in his bathroom. His flat had been extremely glamorous, Jane remembered dimly. It had been more of a loft, with a very fast lift that opened straight into the sitting room. Or perhaps that was just how it had felt.

Jane groaned. The whole ghastly, embarrassing experience could not have been more different than her night with Tom. She sighed, as she always did, at the thought of her by now completely imaginary-seeming lover, so utterly without a trace had he vanished. Recently, she'd even tried tracking him down through his work — if she found his publisher, she thought, then surely she could get his address. She had combed the shelves of every bookshop she came across for writers called Tom, and scoured their book jackets in the hope there might be a photograph of him. There wasn't.

Tom knew where
she
was, of course. But he thought she was living with her long-term boyfriend. Jane's heart sank as she pulled up outside the dingy Clapham flat.

Sliding her key into the lock, Jane felt more of a sense of doom than usual. For starters, some thrash metal band seemed to be playing loud and live directly above her sitting room. Damn Jarvis, she thought, coughing so

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loudly it hurt her throat, in the hope he would hear her and turn it down. He didn't.

In the corner, the answering machine was winking like a lecher with a twitch. Someone had been leaving a lot of messages. Jane's heart sank as the first one crackled on. It was Champagne.

'Help me. Oh God, help me.' Jane froze to the spot. The familiar, patrician tones sounded weak and desperate. Racking sobs boomed out of the machine's microphone, followed by several loud sniffs and choking coughs. 'Help me. For fuck's sake,' gasped Champagne, 'get over here, quick.' The suspicion that it might be another nail crisis crossed Jane's mind. Failing that, too deep a fake tan? A botched bikini line? On the other hand, did Champagne's desperate state have anything to do with the fact that the relationship with Saul Dewsbury was apparently over and he seemed to be quite happy about it?

The agonised sobs started again. The situation did not sound promising. Jane checked the time the last message was taken — fifteen minutes before. She picked up the phone, called 999 to give them Champagne's address and rushed back out to her car.

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It was not, Jane thought, exactly unusual to see Champagne in the arms of a muscular man. The difference this time was that the man was a paramedic. Draped helplessly across his broad, green boiler-suited chest, Champagnes tiny frame looked infinitely fragile and vulnerable.

'Na, 's all right. She don't weigh
nothing,'
said the paramedic, refusing offers of help from his colleagues. As he lowered Champagne on to the stretcher in the columned entrance hall, Jane felt tears prick the back of her eyes. Her throat ached from suppressed weeping. Champagne, admittedly, had had her irritating side, but not even her worst enemy would have wished her to die like this.

Champagne's head lolled back as the burly paramedic settled her body carefully on the stretcher. He pressed a freckled hand over Champagne's breast and began pumping her chest. Then he gave her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Watching his capable, businesslike actions, Jane reflected sadly how having one hand clamped on Champagne's bosom while their lips were locked on hers had once been the stuff of most men's fantasies. It didn't look like a dream come true from where she was standing.

'Well, you called us just in time, love,' said the paramedic, finally seizing the end of the stretcher and preparing

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to shift Champagne into the ambulance outside. 'Another ten minutes and I reckon she'd have been a goner.'

'You mean she isn't?' asked Jane, who had been convinced she was looking her last on her one-time tormentor. As relief swept over her, she realised how numb she had been feeling before.

'Well, she's taken a massive overdose, but if we get her stomach pumped in time, there may be a chance.' The paramedic looked up at Jane without smiling. 'Well, better get 'er down to A and E. Coming? You 'er next of kin?'

'Er, no,' said Jane, flattered despite the circumstances that anyone could think she and Champagne were related. But then again, looking at Champagne's exhausted, bruised and make-up-less face, perhaps it wasn't such a compliment. Til follow in the car,' she said.

As the ambulance wailed off through the square, Jane did an automatic tour of the flat to make sure doors and windows were shut against burglars. Stooping to check that the curling tongs on the floor beneath the hall mirror were turned off, it struck Jane that any activity in the interests of Champagne's safety should be filed, at least for the moment, under Stable Door, Late Closing Of.

In the stuffy, airless bedroom, the entire contents of Champagne's wardrobe lay scattered about, although whether this was evidence of recent turbulence or Champagne's usual idea of orderliness, Jane could not be sure. Jimmy Choo shoes lay caught in Agent Provocateur underwear; Chanel suits were heaped upon piles of screwed-up pashminas. Selina Blow had fallen, Blow on Blow, and a rainbow tide of shoes ebbed and flowed around the edges of the pile.
Anyone who says money cant buy happiness doesn't know where to shop,
read an embroidered cushion lying amid the unmade bed. It

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sounded a hollow assertion now. As if in confirmation, a Coutts chequebook lay open on the floor, empty apart from the unfllled-in stubs.

A high-pitched squeaking noise was coming from the unhooked telephone which lay across the bed. Jane softly replaced it. As she did so, her eye was caught by the empty bottle of Krug which had rolled into the corner, its last drops soaking into the carpet. Beside it, a battered childhood teddy bear stood drunkenly on its head. An image of the laughing, blonde, pampered child Champagne had once been flashed before Jane's eyes. How sad that all that had come to all this. And how much sadder, Jane thought, that Champagne apparently had had no one to ask for help apart from herself. If, when in extremis, the only person the It Girl could turn to was the Shit Girl, things had come to a pretty pass. And not a celebrity backstage one at that.

Sitting in the hospital waiting room, Jane tried not to stare at the array of oddly-twisted limbs, bleeding heads and hanging-off fingernails hoping to be treated this side of Christmas. She buried herself instead in a creased and greasy issue of the local freesheet whose main source of stories seemed to be the local police station. Accordingly, the editorial consisted almost entirely of reports of attacks on pensioners, murders, robberies and fights, and did not make for particularly cheerful reading. Looking again at her companions in the waiting room, some of whom seemed to have clashed with something big and angry, Jane realised that she was probably getting a preview of what would be in next week's edition.

When she was finally ushered in to see Champagne, hidden behind bilious green screens in a narrow hospital

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bed, Jane stifled a gasp. Champagne looked dreadful. Seen in the harsh light of a hospital ward, the emerald eyes looked sunk and defeated and the famous six-seater lips were no more than a camp stool. The even more celebrated breasts looked saggy and deflated, apparently incapable of filling a trainer bra.

'Hello,' Jane whispered as the doctor pushed the screens back together behind her. There didn't seem much point asking Champagne how she was. Jane had often seen Champagne with a drip on her arm, but had never before seen her with one in it.

Champagne opened her eyes and looked straight into Jane's. There was, Jane was relieved to see, a hint of the old boldness there, but something else besides, almost anger, as if Champagne had finally come to realise what a sham her life was and how short-changed she had been by glamour and fame. Their relationship was going to be interesting from now on. Jane tried to imagine life with a chastened Champagne being grateful to her for saving, as she almost certainly had done, her life.

'What the
fuck
took you so long?' rasped out Champagne suddenly. The voice may have been weaker, but its imperiousness was not diminished one jot. Jane almost jumped a foot in the air with shock. It's the drugs talking, she told herself. Whatever were they pumping into her?

'Well, they kept me in the waiting room,' faltered Jane, surprised. 'It took a long time to get whatever it was out of you, the doctor told me. You could have died, you know.'

'Almost bloody did, thanks to you,' Champagne barked. 'Rang you hours ago, but you didn't bother to turn up until I'd practically snuffed it.'

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'I don't understand,' Jane stammered. 'You tried to kill yourself. I saved your life. It's not me you should be blaming, it's that bastard Saul Dewsbury. He's the one who dumped you. He's the one who brought you to this.' She was, she knew, jumping to conclusions. But what other explanation was there?

It was Champagne's turn to look amazed. 'Kill myself?' she echoed.
'Him
dump
me?
You must be joking. I dumped
him.
Yesterday morning, in fact.'

'Dumped
him?
stammered Jane, struggling to comprehend. Her head was already spinning with lack of sleep and the pitiless strip lighting. So Dewsbury had been lying.

'Too right I dumped him,' rasped Champagne, rolling her eyes. 'He's been boring the arse off me with his ghastly yawnsville businesses for weeks now. I'm sick of the sight of him. Anyway, I found out he hasn't any money. In debt up to his eyeballs. Especially now he's been running
me
for a month.' Her cackling laugh dissolved into a hacking cough.

'So why did you take an overdose? I don't understand.' Jane stared at her.

'For Christ's sake, you don't think I took those pills because of
Saul,
do you?' Champagne looked incredulous. 'They were
sleeping pills,'
she snarled. 'It's an exhausting business, being me, you know. I'm worked into the ground and I need my eight hours' beauty sleep. How the hell was I supposed to know how many pills you should take?'

'How many
did
you take?'

'No idea. Loads, I suppose. Just kept stuffing them in until I felt sleepy. But then I started to feel a bit weird so I rang you.'

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Jane stared at the chipped vinyl floor. To think she had actually imagined, even for a second, that Champagne had any capacity for despair, any self-knowledge whatsoever. She should have known. The only deep thing about Champagne was her cleavage.

'But now you mention it,' said Jane, 'why did you ring
met
There must be lots of other people you, er,' she groped for a phrase, 'urn, know better.'

'Oh, yah, quite,' said Champagne airily. 'Stacks. Loads, in fact.' She looked calmly back at Jane.

'So why didn't you tell
them?

'I can't
believe
you're asking me this,' Champagne spluttered. 'Surely you don't think I'm stupid enough to risk anyone I know
socially
seeing me zonked out of my head? I didn't even have any
make-up
on. I'd never get asked anywhere again.' She shot Jane a withering look. 'I couldn't have called them anyway,' she added. 'Everyone I know goes out in the evenings. Apart from you.'

'I see,' said Jane, getting to her feet before the urge to pull the drip out of Champagne s arm overwhelmed her. 'I'm afraid I have to leave now,' she muttered.

'Oh, well, thanks for dropping by,' said Champagne sarcastically. 'Eventually,' she added.

'Yes, well, I'll try and be earlier next time,' said Jane -with suppressed fury, trying not to think of the wasted six, no, seven hours she had just spent in the hospital and for which she would pay dearly at work tomorrow. Later today, in fact.

Til talk to you later this week,' Champagne said airily, byway of farewell. Insulting Jane seemed to have done her the world of good. 'Lots to report. New man, for a start. Met him last night. Footballer, Welsh international who plays for Chelsea. Thighs so huge he can't cross his legs.'