The noises coming from Room 16 are really not what I want to hear. They consist of long, guttural snores that are audible from the other end of the corridor and bear an uncanny resemblance to a heavy-duty pneumatic drill. They can only mean one thing: Jack
must
be in there with Valentina.
I take a deep breath and wonder what the hell I am going to do. Coming face to face with a couple who’ve obviously just spent the night shagging like two randy racehorses–what else explains the fact that they’re still sleeping it off at 11 a.m.?–is not an attractive prospect.
And even less so, given who the couple in question are.
I bend down to study the bottom of the door and see if there is a gap big enough for me to just slide the phone under and run. But you wouldn’t fit a credit card under it. There is no way around this. I’m going to have to knock and get it over with.
Closing my eyes, I give a number of short, sharp thuds before standing back, my heart jumping with the sort of anxiety only dentists usually have the ability to provoke.
But nobody comes to the door–and the snoring continues at a volume that would rival a volcanic eruption. Taking
another deep breath, I try again, this time hammering with more conviction, before standing back and waiting.
But after another minute of vainly hoping that the snoring will stop and someone will come to the door, I realise a more direct approach is in order.
‘Valentina! Jack!’ I shout, pounding on the door with my fist.
The snores come to an abrupt halt and are replaced by a series of grunts. Someone is stirring.
‘Jack!’ I say through the door, feeling like a complete idiot but at least wanting to warn him what to expect when we come face to face. ‘Er, I’ve got your phone here. I’ve just come to drop it off.’
The ensuing commotion inside Room 16 involves so many crashes, bangs and other bizarre noises that anyone could be forgiven for thinking it was occupied by a hippopotamus with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
As the door swings open, I steel myself to get this over with as quickly as possible.
‘Jack—’ I begin.
But it isn’t Jack who’s opened the door at all.
‘
What?
Oooh. What time is it?’
Valentina looks as if she has spent the night in the darker recesses of hell. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say her hair had been backcombed by a chimpanzee. Her eye make-up is smeared down both of her cheeks and would make Marilyn Manson appear a fan of the natural look by comparison. But worse than that is her skin. It’s not even grey. It’s
off grey
.
‘Valentina,’ I say. ‘I wonder if you could give this to Jack for me? He left it at the Inn at Whitewell last night.’
‘
What?
’ she says. ‘Oooh. Come in.’
‘Oh God, no–no, really,’ I say, unwilling to come face to face with a post-coital Jack rolling around Valentina’s bed. ‘Can’t you just give it to him for me?’
But as she grabs me by the arm and hoists me into the room, I have very little choice in the matter. Inside is a scene of utter devastation. There are so many clothes, shoes and bags draped over the furniture that it looks as if a bomb has gone off in Dolce & Gabbana.
The bedclothes are tangled up in a ball at the bottom of the bed, the bedside lamp has fallen over, and a G-string so tiny you could mistake it for dental floss is hanging on the bathroom door.
As for Jack, he’s nowhere to be seen.
‘Ohhh,’ groans Valentina, throwing herself down on the edge of the bed. ‘Something doesn’t feel right. I mean, I’m never at my best in the morning, but something
really
doesn’t feel right today.’
‘Are you okay?’ I ask, genuinely never having seen such dramatic effects of a hangover before.
‘It’s my mouth,’ she whimpers. ‘There’s something wrong with my mouth. Oh my God, it’s…it’s…
furry
. And it tastes like…like I’ve been licking a pavement. Ohhh no, it’s not just my mouth, it’s my head as well. My head is
throbbing
.’
‘Well, you won’t be the only one who feels as if their lives has been pickled this morning,’ I point out.
Valentina tries to prise her right eye open, but it’s cemented together with a gruesome combination of sleep and four layers of mascara.
‘Are you suggesting I’m hungover?’ she says indignantly.
I pause for a second.
‘Valentina,’ I begin, ‘you single-handedly drank more than the average rugby team yesterday, you look like you’ve spent the night sleeping rough, and it’s taken me precisely eight
and a half minutes of banging on the door to wake you up. Call me Miss Marple, but, yes, I think you’ve got a hangover.’
‘I never get hangovers,’ she says dismissively as she unsuccessfully attempts to stand up unaided. ‘Oh! Maybe I’ve developed some sort of illness that has caused my tongue to swell up and make me go half-blind. Maybe Jack gave it to me! He
has
just come back from one of his places in deepest Africa and could have brought anything with him. Now, where’s the bathroom?’
I help her up as she tries to make her way into the corner of the room. But Valentina takes a tumble and bangs her leg on a chair.
‘Argghhh!’ she screams.
‘Oh dear,’ I say.
‘Argghhh!’ she screams again.
‘Oh, come on, it can’t have hurt that much.’ I am starting to run out of patience.
‘It’s not the fact that it hurts that bothers me,’ she says, screwing up her face. ‘It’s that I’m going to have a huge bruise on my leg now, which means I’ll have to wear trousers. And I
hate
trousers.’
‘Well, I’m sure you can live with them for a few days if it means covering up such a horrendous disfigurement as…as a one-inch bruise,’ I say.
‘Evie,’ Valentina tells me, ‘I haven’t got the sort of legs that should be covered up.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ I answer. ‘The very idea is like putting polystyrene tiles on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, I suppose?’
When we get into the bathroom, she sits on the loo, unable to stand up in front of the mirror.
‘Pass me my make-up bag, will you?’ she croaks.
‘Who do you think I am, your bloody chambermaid?’ I sigh, but I pass it to her anyway.
Valentina starts rifling through her bag, throwing various items of cosmetic creams, powders and formulas onto the floor as she does so. I pick up one of them–an Estée Lauder cellulite serum–and idly examine the label.
‘I haven’t got cellulite, just for the record,’ Valentina tells me. ‘I’m taking precautions for later life.’
After surrounding herself in anti-wrinkle formulas, bronzing mitts, facial scrubs and God knows how many more cosmetic concoctions, she finally locates a bottle of Optrex and is about to start squirting it into her eyes.
‘Don’t you think you’d be better trying to get all that crap off your face first?’ I suggest.
‘What crap?’ she asks.
‘Your make-up,’ I tell her.
Valentina stops what she’s doing immediately.
‘What?’ she says, starting to hyperventilate. ‘What did you say?’
‘Calm down,’ I tell her, not sure why she’s getting so excited.
‘I left my make-up on last night? Is that what you’re saying? Surely not. No, I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. No way.
Never
.’
She leaps up, hysterical.
‘Oh my God!’
she squeals.
‘WHAT will it have done to my pores?!’
Valentina scrabbles to the sink and for the first time today is greeted by her own reflection. She gasps for air, speechless.
‘No…no…no…’ is all she can say. ‘This isn’t happening. Dear Lord God, tell me this isn’t happening.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I say, as I sit her down onto the loo again and pass her a wipe so she can start to take her make-up off.
She drags it across a cheek, her expression utterly dejected.
‘It’s not that bad,’ I say, wondering why I’m indulging her.
‘Do you really think so?’ she asks pathetically.
I sigh. ‘Well, you’re no Brigitte Bardot this morning, that’s for sure,’ I can’t help saying.
‘Ohhh!’
‘But look,’ I continue, desperate to shut her up. ‘A nice shower will sort you out, I’m sure.’ Privately, I think she needs significantly more than ten minutes of ablution under a Gainsborough shower.
‘What’s that?’ Valentina says suddenly, peering at the back of her leg.
‘Ah,’ I say. ‘You did the splits last night. I think that muck is from the dance floor.’
‘Not that,’ she whimpers, and peels something away from the sole of her foot. On closer inspection it turns out to be a cigarette butt.
She puts her head in her hands and starts to sob.
‘This,’ she says, ‘is the worst goddamn day of my whole goddamn life.’
Valentina has showered, dressed, and spent forty minutes applying concealer underneath her eyes. She looks much better than she did an hour ago, i.e. less like a zombie, but she’s still not in what you’d call a good mood.
‘If this old fool doesn’t get me checked out sharpish,’ she hisses to me down at the reception, ‘I’m going to become very annoyed.’
‘Beautiful morning, isn’t it?’ smiles the elderly hotelier.
‘Hmm,’ she says, lifting up her Jackie O sunglasses briefly to flash him a look.
‘Have you managed to do any walking during your stay?’ he asks cheerily.
I stifle a giggle. Valentina is wearing a pair of £350 Gina shoes with Gucci jeans, and is carrying a top-of-the-range Louis Vuitton travel system. She couldn’t look less like a walker if she had no legs.
‘No,’ she says, without even the hint of a smile.
‘That’s a pity,’ he says. ‘The views in the Trough of Bowland are magnificent.’
‘Perhaps next time,’ I tell him, thinking someone’s got to fill the gap in conversation.
Now she shoots me a look.
‘Is my bill nearly ready?’ she asks tersely. ‘I really do have to get going.’
‘Oh, sorry, dear,’ he says. ‘Listen to me wittering on while you’re waiting. Things will be much better when my wife Edith is back on her feet. She’s just had her varicose veins done. Anyway, your bill’s just coming now.’
‘As a matter of interest,’ Valentina says, ‘the man I arrived with yesterday, Mr Williamson–
Jack
Williamson–has he checked out from his room yet?’
The hotelier thinks for a second. ‘The man you were with yesterday…yes, strapping fellow with dark hair, I know him. Oh, he checked out a long time ago. He was up bright and early, in fact.’
‘Was he now?’ says Valentina, obviously even less happy now.
‘So do you want to take his mobile?’ I ask when we get outside. ‘I mean, I presume you’re going to see him again soon?’
‘I doubt it,’ she says furiously. ‘If he’s checked out this morning he’s left without even saying goodbye to me. Never mind without
sleeping
with me. And I don’t know how you work, Evie, but that’s the sort of behaviour I just don’t tolerate on a second date.’
‘Right,’ I say, feeling a surge of optimism. ‘I’ll have to think of another way of getting it to him. Have you got his address? I’ll take it round there myself.’
She thinks for a second, then snatches the phone from me.
‘Now you mention it,’ she says, ‘I am going to have to go round to see him anyway. I need to arrange his next tennis session. So
I’ll
take the phone.’
‘Oh,’ I say, hating myself for feeling so disappointed and for not being able to think of a good reason to wrestle it back off her.
Valentina opens the boot of her car and starts piling her luggage into it.
‘So…do you think you’ll forgive him?’ I ask, unable to stop myself. ‘You know, for leaving without saying goodbye?’
She gets into her car, pulls down the visor to look in the mirror.
‘I may do,’ she says. ‘It depends on what happens when I go and see him. Which I’m going to do right now. Now, how do I look? Passable?’
‘Well, yes,’ I say reluctantly. ‘Definitely passable–but not your best. I mean, you said that yourself.’
I’d feel a bitch saying this to anyone else, but this is Valentina we’re talking about–and I don’t think a ram-raider driving a tank could dent her ego.
‘Well,’ she sighs, ‘given that most people would kill to look like my idea of passable, I think that’s probably good enough. Anyway, even Penelope Cruz gets bags under her eyes sometimes. Catch you later!’
And off she goes, with Jack’s phone on her passenger seat.
Red Cat Farm, Wirral, Friday, 9 March
‘So, when was it that your pig first started to speak French?’ I ask, my notebook and pen poised.
‘Ooh, it were a while ago,’ says the farmer, who looks as if it’s been a while since he washed. ‘We ’ad a farmhand from over there, see. We tried to tell ’im to speak proper, but he insisted on talking foreign. Well, Lizzie ’ere just seemed to pick it up.’
‘Right,’ I say, nodding in an attempt to hide the fact that I think this story is the biggest load of swill I’ve heard all year. ‘I don’t suppose there’s a chance he–sorry,
she
–could let us hear a few words?’
He sucks his teeth. ‘She don’t just do it on demand, love,’ he says.
I feel like saying that, given that a photographer and I have come all the way over here to interview the bugger, surely a little ‘
Oui
’ isn’t too much to ask.
‘Well,’ I say instead, ‘do you think we could do anything to help persuade her?’
‘A bit of cash might not go amiss,’ he says.
Great. So the pig will only speak French if I pay him. She’s obviously more skilled than I realised.
‘Sorry, but we don’t pay,’ I say. ‘We’re a local paper–we don’t have the budget.’ Which isn’t strictly true, but I can’t believe we’d pay anything for this story, short of the pig launching into a perfect version of Serge Gainsbourg’s
‘Je t’aime
…
moi non plus
’.
This really isn’t my week, and quite frankly, this story is just about the last straw. I’ve been a reporter with the
Daily Echo
now for almost eight months, and was starting to feel pretty optimistic about the way my career was progressing. Okay, so at first I was writing little more than two-paragraph ‘nibs’–that’s news in briefs (which is nothing to do with underwear)–about school fetes and car boot sales. None of which, in case you haven’t guessed, was threatening the shortlist for any major journalistic prizes.
But, gradually, the news desk started to trust me a bit more, and the two-para nibs became single columns, then the single columns became page leads, and somehow, I started to find my name on the front page every so often, covering everything from court cases to human interest stories.
This week, however, it all went wrong. Horribly wrong. Because this week was when our News Editor Christine–who described me as being ‘overflowing with enthusiasm and potential’ in my first company appraisal–went on maternity leave.
Her replacement is the terminally sleazy Simon, who can’t see my potential because he’s too busy looking at my arse. He has bombarded me with school fete nibs and picture stories for what he smirkingly refers to as his ‘soft news slots’. In fact, the stories have been so ridiculous, you’d have to be soft in the head to call them news.
Hence the reason for my being here in a farm ‘over the water’ at the far end of Wirral–and barely even on the
Daily Echo
’s patch–praying that Lizzie the Gloucester Old Spot will ask someone for a croissant.
New York Times
here I come!
Okay, so it’s not just this. It’s the fact that I have spent the last five days attempting to find out what happened when Valentina went round to Jack’s house–and failing miserably. Grace is away on honeymoon, so she’s out of the game as far as gossip is concerned. I’ve attempted to grill Charlotte about it but, bizarrely, Valentina doesn’t appear to have told her anything. And I’m certainly not going to ask Valentina herself about it.
So why am I so desperate to know?
God knows
.
I’ve spent the last five days asking myself that, in between hammering out pieces about bilingual pigs and dogs with eating disorders.
‘What a pile o’ shite this is,’ whispers Mickey, the photographer. Mickey isn’t known for his excessive amounts of patience, but in this case he’s undoubtedly right.
‘Listen,’ I tell him. ‘We both know this animal can’t speak French, any more than I can speak Mandarin. But the thing is, Simon wants a story about it and I can’t go home completely empty-handed. Shall we just try to get the photo done with and then go?’
‘She bloody well can speak French,’ protests the farmer, obviously having overheard me. ‘But she won’t do it if she’s under stress. And you coming in ’ere telling her she’s not capable won’t be helping.’
We eventually manage to persuade him to pose for a
photo with Lizzie in exchange for a few glossy copies of it to hang on his wall. Mickey, still muttering under his breath, takes it in record time.
‘I remember when this used to be a paper of record,’ he complains to me.
‘Don’t blame me,’ I reply. ‘I’m as chuffed to be here as you are.’
‘So,’ says the farmer, ‘when will it be in?’
‘I’m not sure yet,’ I say. ‘It’s one of those stories that we call “hold-able”. If the city centre is razed to the ground, I’m afraid it doesn’t go in until the next available slot.’
Which will be never, if I’ve got anything to do with it.
‘Only I’ve got the nationals interested too,’ he says, ‘so you’d better get in there quick.’
‘Thanks for the tip,’ I say, trying not to smirk. ‘Come on, Mickey, let’s go.’