After Peroxide’s sudden and brutal ejection from
Chart Throb
Georgia had become convinced that they had failed because she hadn’t been thin enough. The more people expressed surprise that she and ’Chelle had failed to advance to the Pop School stage of the competition, the more she believed that it was her fault.
In the weeks following the ejection Georgia’s parents had watched in despair as their beautiful daughter had gone to war with her own body. At first they had hoped that as the notoriety faded she would regain some sense of balance in her life, but the extinguishing of the media spotlight served only to increase Georgia’s self-loathing. The comments in the street went from support to pity to contempt and finally to indifference, and it was this last that seemed to hurt Georgia most. For a moment she had imagined that she meant something and then she had discovered that she didn’t. It was all the fault of her traitorous body.
It had taken six months of family pain, together with the money for private help that her parents could ill afford, to bring Georgia back from the brink, and now it was all beginning again.
‘Hi, Georgie!’ Emma chirruped. ‘How’s it all going with Peroxide? We
love
Peroxide.’
Nothing had been promised. Emma had been extremely careful not to commit herself or her employers in any way but nonetheless she was gently encouraging. Subtle hints were dropped that everybody on the team thought an injustice had been done the previous year and that the girls owed it to themselves not to be beaten by it. They were two strong ladies and it was up to them to come back fighting.
’Chelle and Georgia had been thrilled. ’Chelle had gone straight to the local Ann Summers shop to start work on their new costumes and Georgia, whose breasts had only recently returned to their normal shape and whose periods had still not become regular again, had gone straight to the toilet to begin the process of getting back into shape.
And so her parents sat and watched as the same old signs crashed back into their lives. The gorging, the flushing, the ever-present smell of toothpaste on her breath. It was Georgia’s way of maintaining control: if she could influence nothing else in her life she could at least hold sway over her own body, forcing it to shrink, consume itself, punish it for having failed the last time and showing it what would happen if it failed again.
A Royal Request
Three hundred envelopes, four coffees and two cigarettes on from Peroxide and Emma’s head was seriously beginning to spin with too many hopes and dreams when suddenly she picked up an envelope that brought her up short. It was such a surprise, a shock even, and for Emma a deeply depressing one. The envelope was marked Balmoral and had been franked by the Buckingham Palace Post Office. It was embossed with a triple-feathered crest.
The Prince of Wales was applying to be a Chart Throb.
She could hardly believe her eyes when she saw the name on the application form and read the personal description beneath it.
Organic farmer. Charity worker. Heir to throne.
Emma felt like she wanted to cry. This was simply
too much.
It wasn’t that she was a fervent monarchist but she had a real affection for an institution that had lasted so many hundreds of years and was in any number of ways unique in the world. When Emma had been a little girl, the Queen had visited her school and everyone had had the most splendid day. All the little girls had carried flowers and felt themselves to be princesses in the presence of a real queen. Of course that had been nearly twenty years before and nowadays the monarchy was no longer the stuff of fairy tales. Nonetheless in a world of enormous breast implants, radical facelifts and reality television, Emma had continued to respect what the royal family stood for. And now . . . now the
Prince of Wales
was applying to be a Chart Throb.
‘Fuck!’ she could not help exclaiming. ‘My
God
!’
‘What’s up?’ Trent enquired as everybody around the big paper-strewn table turned to look.
‘Nothing,’ Emma replied.
In an instant she had made her decision. She would not put him through. She would save him from himself. Hiding the monogrammed envelope, she casually tossed the royal application on to the recycling pile.
‘It’s nothing at all,’ she repeated.
But it was too late.
‘What was that?’ Trent enquired.
‘Nothing, I said.’
‘So why shout “fuck” and “my God”? Come on, Emma, what’s on that form? Your mum?’
‘Oh, it’s just a stupid hoax, somebody pretending to be the Prince of Wales of all people. I’m binning it.’
‘Show me the envelope.’
Attempting a shrug of indifference, Emma handed over the envelope with its embossed fleur-de-lis and royal franking. Trent studied it carefully.
‘I think this is fucking genuine,’ he said at last.
‘Oh come
on
. . .’ Emma began.
‘Because if it is a hoax it could only come from somebody with access to the Buckingham Palace post room and what would they have to gain? Either way we need to find out. Get me the number of the Prince of Wales’s office.’
Fifteen minutes later the story was confirmed. His Royal Highness had indeed decided to volunteer for the experience of
Chart Throb
and hoped to be selected for audition. It was stressed that he wished to be treated in exactly the same manner as all the other applicants and that if he wasn’t he would withdraw.
‘The clever bastard,’ Trent exclaimed.
‘What do you mean?’ Emma replied. ‘It’s simply ridiculous. How could he possibly be a pop star?’
‘It’s a last throw of the dice, isn’t it? The guy’s finished anyway, every single poll says
everybody
wants him to stand aside for the next generation. So what does he do? He applies to
join
the next generation. It’s so audacious it isn’t funny! The clever, clever
bastard.’
The more Emma thought about it the less she wanted any part of it. She was a girl who went to museums and visited castles. She was a member of the National Trust and the History Society. Tradition and the past
meant
something, surely? Except if the heir to the throne was to appear on
Chart Throb
, clearly they didn’t.
‘Let’s reject him,’ she said, trying to sound cool and casual.
‘What?’ Trent demanded, astonished.
‘He’ll just turn himself into even more of a laughing stock.’
‘And?’
‘Well . . . I mean, it might make us look stupid too.’
‘Uhm, I don’t
think
so, Emma. You have clearly lost the plot. This will be
brilliant.
Fucking hell. He actually thinks he can
use
us. They all do, don’t they? All those desperates who go on
Celebrity Big Brother
and
I’m a Celebrity
and
Shag Me, I’m Famous
, they all think they can use the process to get what they want. Haven’t they learned yet? Don’t they remember George Galloway? We will
eat
them. We will chew them up, swallow them down and
shit them out
! This guy actually thinks we’ll make him popular. He probably thinks it will make him seem down with the kids! Is he going to get a shock when Calvin’s finished editing
his
stupid royal arse!’
Beryl Is (Briefly) There for Priscilla
Beryl perched gingerly on the very edge of the back seat of her black stretch Humvee truck, wearing no seat belt in order to be able to sit as far forward as she could. She was of course breaking a state law and putting herself at risk of being stopped and fined by the LAPD, but Beryl was rock ’n’ roll and played by her own rules. Besides which, the Humvee was equipped with reflective windows and so she was totally safe from detection.
Beryl was perching on the front of her seat because she had finally been able to fit her arse into her celebrity surgeon’s busy schedule, where it had been subjected to a particularly brutal treatment of lifting, underpinning and cellulite-sucking. The surgeon had thrown in a complimentary rectal bleaching, which had stung like hell. She had also had more work done on her false vagina, which had been an ongoing project ever since her sex-change operation. Further work had been done on the imitation clitoris the surgeons had built for her out of the nerve endings which had been left hanging about after her dick was removed. Beryl’s ambition (as she had confessed to Oprah) was one day to be in a position to pleasure herself with a big black dildo.
‘Honestly, Oprah, I haven’t had one off the wrist since I gave old John Thomas a last slap in pre-op before they cut it off.’
Such indulgences were, however, in the future for Beryl and currently she was reluctant even to trust her full weight upon her bruised and battered undercarriage. Not that that weight amounted to much, since in another part of her obsessive body-management programme Beryl consumed a weekly fat pill which absorbed almost everything she ate before emerging from her like a seal stuck in a sewage pipe.
Having recently had the fat sucked out of your buttocks and what had once been your dick nerves knotted into a small bun to make a clitoris is not likely to put a person in the best of moods, but Beryl would have been tetchy even without having to sit on a sucked-out arse. For a start she was stuck in traffic and, like most people of her phenomenal wealth and power, Beryl could never quite work out why it was that traffic jams applied as much to her as to the rest of the human race.
Why
did she have to sit in traffic? Every other aspect of her existence was improved by her wealth but the trip out to LAX remained a frustratingly egalitarian experience. That couldn’t be right. Surely something could be done? But drum her fingers, swear at the windows and wriggle her sore arse about on the rich leather upholstery though she might, Beryl could think of nothing. Even
she
could not afford to build a private road from her house out to the airport and so the freeway remained her only option.
And that was another point. Why was she on the freeway anyway? Because she was on her way back to the UK, which she absolutely hated. The UK was where she had come from and (as she never tired of telling people) she had come from a dark, dark place. Backward, parochial and frustratingly devoid of good and attentive staff.
‘So why are you going?’ her wife Serenity had mumbled through her obscenely inflated inner-tube-like lips as she bade Beryl farewell from the marble steps of their mansion that morning.
It was a good question. Why go and work in shitty old Britain when you have a huge career and a huge house in sun-drenched California?
Deep in her heart, just above the groaning fat pill and behind the breast implants, Beryl knew the reason. Vanity, vengeful vanity. It was payback time. She wanted all the sad, dowdy, permanent residents of the dark little island from which she had come to see just how big a deal she was these days. All the people who, in her own mind, had shat on her and on whom she had most certainly shat would have to eat it. That was why she was going back to Britain: hate it though she most certainly did, there was nowhere on earth where her success mattered more to her.
Unfortunately for Beryl she was going to miss her flight and if she had been in a bad mood on her way
out
to the airport, that mood was sunshine itself compared to how she felt on her way back into town, having been urgently summoned to return to Beverly Hills. The call had come just as Beryl was finally beginning to relax and to think about a gin and tonic in the VIP area.
The call was from Claude, her personal assistant.
‘It’s bad news, I’m afraid, Mrs Blenheim. Priscilla’s been caught on camera buying coke.’
‘Fuck,’ Beryl gasped. ‘How’s it spinning?’
‘Not great. Fox is trying to be nice . . .’
‘Of course they are. We’re all under contract to them. I suppose everybody else is going for the jugular.’
‘Kind of. Maybe just a tad,’ Claude replied, trying to project a grimace of sympathy over a cell phone. ‘She says she needed it for the pain of her new breasts.’
‘Priscilla had new breasts?’
‘Yeah.’
‘How do they look?’
‘OK . . . Kind of big.’
‘
Tacky
big?’
‘Sort of.’
Beryl pulled down the favourites menu on the car’s computer and clicked on Priscilla’s website. Sure enough, there was her stepdaughter, now augmented by two enormous new breasts.
‘Fuck. She got herself a couple of Pammies.’
‘And some.’
‘Takes after her mum. Serenity gets new tits like most girls get new bras . . . Actually, you know, they look OK. Tacky but kind of punk. Like Courtney Love or something. I always say if you’re going to get new tits, get “Fuck You” tits. I know I did. She’ll have them removed when she gets bored.’
‘What do you want me to do about the drugs thing?’
Beryl had momentarily forgotten about this added complication to her life.
‘That idiot. If she needed drugs why didn’t she ask her fucking mother! Juan!’ Beryl shouted, rapping on the glass partition that separated her from her driver. ‘Turn around!’