‘Oh, do stop it,’ Beryl snapped. ‘So the record stiffed. Get over it.’
‘The record stiffed,’ Lisa Marie echoed. ‘Didn’t even make the top forty.’
‘Shut up, dork. At least I made an album. What did you ever do except eat?’ Priscilla snapped back.
‘At least I’m good at what I do,’ Lisa Marie countered. ‘I eat, I get fat, it works. You make an album, all you get is nothing.’
‘Behave!’ Beryl shouted. ‘I cannot put up with you guys bickering for the next fourteen hours.’
‘Hey, bickering made us famous, Dad.’
‘Mum! You fucking bitch. I am not your dad, I am your other mother!’
‘Whatever. Bickering’s what me and my sister do. We bicker. Fox Network
pays
us to fucking bicker. It’s one of the most popular parts of our show.’
‘Nearly as big as the pigs shitting on the floor and Mom’s lips getting stuck in doorways,’ Lisa Marie added.
‘Yes and it pays for your first-class lifestyle, darling. Don’t forget that.’
‘Oh, come on,
Mom
,’ Priscilla sneered. ‘You had a squillion dollars anyway from dickhead metal nuts still buying your albums.’
‘Whatever,’ said Beryl, gathering together her papers. ‘Now I’m going to be very, very busy over the next few months with
Chart Throb
so you two need to behave, OK? No drug busts, and
please
steer clear of grunge rock morons you meet in clubs . . .’
‘Did you see they’re at thirty-two now?’ Lisa Marie sneered. ‘Congratulations, you can’t get on the chart yourself, Priscilla, but the guy who fucked you can!’
‘Bitch!’
Priscilla swung a punch at Lisa Marie and caught her hard on the ear which she had recently had pierced right up through the cartilage so it was sore already. Lisa Marie shouted in pain and whacked Priscilla with the magazine she had been holding. Priscilla kicked her, she kicked Priscilla back and suddenly they were wrestling on the floor of the Humvee.
‘Stop it, you bloody morons,’ Beryl shouted. ‘We are working here.’
When order was restored and Lisa Marie banished to the other end of the stretch to watch TV, Priscilla and Beryl compared diaries.
‘So we finally got a one-week postponement on
The Blenheims
,’ Beryl said. ‘We start back in LA with the new lawn-mower episode one week after the
Chart Throb
final in London.’
‘That’s very tight, Mom.’
‘Well, I only need a little lift around the eyes and a few more nerves stitched into my clit.’
‘
Please
, I do
not
want to know. That is so gross.’
‘I am a
woman
now, Priscilla, I deserve to feel what a woman feels. Anyway the whole thing should only take a morning. That gives me six days to heal. It should be OK. I thought you said your guy was good.’
‘He is, all the girls are using him.’
‘Did he do those tits?’ Lisa Marie called from the other end of the Humvee. ‘You want to talk about gross, Priscilla, those are gross. They are
so
dumb! They look like two fucking space hoppers.’
‘She’s right, you know,’ Beryl said, adopting a gentler tone. ‘A boob job that radical isn’t right for a teenager, Priscilla. You should have them reduced.’
‘No way,’ Priscilla replied defiantly. ‘They empower me as a woman.’
‘Oh
please
,’ Lisa Marie sneered.
‘Shut
up
, bitch! Who asked you? I
like
huge tits. There is more room for tattoos. If you want to talk to someone about reductions, Mom, how about talking to Lisa Marie about her fat fucking gut!’
‘I like being fat!’ Lisa Marie shouted, defiantly pushing cookies into her mouth.
‘Don’t do that!’ Beryl snapped. ‘A little puppy cuddle is fine but . . .’
‘Puppy cuddle!’
Priscilla exploded. ‘She’s a whale! A fucking
moose
!’
Beryl looked at her other stepdaughter critically.
‘Actually, you know, dear, your gut really is getting out of hand. You don’t need to stop eating, just get some work done.’
‘Mom! I’m seventeen.’
‘Well, don’t leave it till late like I did. You should consider getting your appendix knotted now.’
‘I’m comfy being porky, Mom.’
‘You’re a celebrity. It’s your duty to be thin. You won’t be a teen for ever.’
‘Sure she’ll be a teen for ever, Mom,’ Priscilla said. ‘We both will, you saw to that. We’re stuck in a
Blenheims
time warp. I’ll be eighty and people will still remember me the way I was when I was fourteen.’
All for Love
Emma finally agreed to meet Calvin.
She told her friends it was either that or change her mobile phone number which she was damned if she was going to do because she hated it when other people did that. Her friends all thought she was mad not to meet him anyway: after all, here was this fabulously rich man whom she had already been dreaming about positively
pursuing
her yet she was avoiding him.
‘So he sacked you. So what? Now he wants you back and
you
have the control,’ Mel and Tom assured her.
‘You don’t understand,’ Emma would reply.
She knew that it was precisely
because
she had been dreaming about him that she should now put him from her mind for ever. He had given her a very clear lesson in just what a dangerous person he was to have feelings for and every atom of her instinct was warning her to avoid him at all costs.
‘He’s a bastard,’ she kept reminding herself and her friends. ‘I don’t need to invite bastards into my life. He actually admitted that he only wanted to sleep with me in order to be able to forget about me. Like a notch on his fucking bedpost! I don’t like men who twist their emotions into exit strategies.’
‘Ah
yes
,’ her friends would say, nodding wisely. ‘Of course.’
And Emma knew they were thinking of her father, which of course they were. The worst thing about having a father whom you both loved and hated and who had walked out on you and your mother was that everybody always thought that everything in your life from that point on which had
anything at all
to do with men was really all about your dad. Which, of course, in some ways it was.
In the end, after ignoring a bombardment of text messages, flowers and bike-delivered notes for almost a week, Emma, who was still as attracted to Calvin as she had ever been, had gathered up her courage and texted back simply, ‘OK. When? Where? E.’ As an afterthought, she had sent a PS: ‘Daytime only.’
The meeting took place over morning coffee at Claridge’s Hotel and Calvin leaped straight in with his usual disarming honesty.
‘I can’t get you off my mind,’ he said. ‘It’s affecting my work. I’m a very, very busy man. I need to deal with this.’
‘That’s not my problem,’ Emma replied, trying to sound tough but secretly pleased.
‘It
is
your problem. You’re part of the team.’
‘You sacked me.’
‘And I’ve offered you your job back. A raise even. I’ll promote you.’
‘If I sleep with you.’
‘
Yes.
If you sleep with me. I’ve admitted that. You keep bringing it up as if I’ve committed some terrible moral crime.’
‘Which you have.’
‘Look, we’re going round in circles here. This isn’t about just
your
job, a lot of people’s lives and livelihoods depend on me having my shit together.’
‘Are you saying I have to screw you for the good of the team?’
‘Yes!
Exactly
. Is that so wrong? I’m fucking up here. I can’t stop thinking about you. That’s the truth of it and it’s very annoying . . . very inconvenient. It’s very . . . painful.’
Emma reddened. She always blushed so easily and so furiously at the slightest hint of emotion. She could feel her face burning and hoped it wouldn’t go blotchy.
‘Well, you’ve ruined it, haven’t you? Because, if you must know, I had been thinking about you as well and that was sort of painful too.’
Calvin leaped at this sudden chink in Emma’s armour.
‘But that’s
great
,’ he said, brightening hugely. ‘I had no idea! You
see
, there’s so much confusion going on here. We just need to get to know each other better. We could have dinner again and—’
‘Calvin, I know what you want. You want to shag me.’
‘Yes, yes,
obviously
. Of course I do. You can’t punish me for being honest. You’re very cute, not my type as it happens but very cute. Why shouldn’t I want to shag you? Wanting to shag you isn’t a crime. I’m sure lots of men want to shag you. Do you hate them all for it?’
‘No, because they’re not my boss abusing his position by sacking me unfairly and then demanding sex immediately afterwards in return for reinstatement.’
‘Oh, do stop
dwelling
on that. I played it wrong, I admit that, but we have to move on here. Yes, I want to sleep with you, what man wouldn’t, but I
like
you too, that’s the problem. It’s so unlike me to care about anyone very much but . . . I think you’re great.’
‘You don’t know me.’
‘I know you a bit and I’d like to have the opportunity to know you more . . .’
Emma finished her coffee and began to gather up her things. So much of her wanted to give him a second chance but she knew a great deal about giving men second chances. In the aftermath of her parents’ breakup she had watched her mother dole out second chances to her father on an almost weekly basis. Men didn’t change, she had learned that. If you took them back, you did it for what they
were
, not for what you wanted them to be. And she did not like what Calvin was.
‘I’m sorry, Calvin, but you’ve blown it. You really have, which is such a shame because I really did like you. But the truth is I know you a lot better than you could ever know me. I’ve worked for you. I know what you
do.
You’re a manipulator; you think you write the stories,
all
the stories, and now you want to write mine. You
use
people. You can’t help it; it’s the way you were born. It’s made you heaps of money and I have to admit it’s also very attractive. But no girl should ever be allowed anywhere near you.’
‘There’s more to me than you think. You have to trust me.’
‘After what’s happened, Calvin, I’m afraid that would be absolutely impossible.’
‘Look, I was having a bad day, I did some stupid things . . .’
‘Oh, come
on
, Calvin.’
‘All right, how about this?’
There was a long pause. Emma waited.
‘You can have your job back,’ Calvin said finally. ‘No strings attached. Then a bit later on, if you feel like it, maybe . . .’
‘I sleep with you.’
‘Yes.’
‘Just sort of delay it a bit, you mean.’
‘Uhm, yes.’
Emma seemed about to rise once more.
Calvin added quickly, ‘But I won’t make it dependent on that.’
Emma stayed seated, toying with her coffee spoon.
Calvin pressed on: ‘I’ll try . . . I’ll try and
win
you. In the coffee breaks. It will be up to you. We’ll start again. Come on, that’s fair.’
Emma played with the cutlery for a while before looking Calvin in the eye.
‘I don’t want my old job back.’
‘I’ve told you. No strings. I promise I’ll leave you alone.’
‘No, I mean it. It’s not about you. I don’t want it back anyway. Independently of you and your wolfish tendencies.’
‘Why on earth wouldn’t you want it back?’
‘You sacking me gave me a chance to look at everything differently. And now I’ve had a week to think about things I’ve come to realize that working on
Chart Throb
was turning me into something I didn’t want to be.’
‘You were bloody good at your job, our youngest senior.’
‘Exactly. Every day I got better at it. I got used to looking at people from a predatory point of view, wondering how we could
use
them, what we could
do
with them. And the funny thing was the more I did it, the more I believed that it was OK to do it. I know you’re not a wicked man, Calvin, I just think you’ve managed to persuade yourself that standards and principles don’t count. The end justifies the means. You have all this power, all this influence, all this
talent
, and what do you do with it? You make the most vapid and forgettable entertainment show in history.’
‘Is there anything wrong with entertainment being vapid and forgettable?’
‘I don’t know. No, not really. I mean, it’s great telly, I admit it. But also maybe yes. It’s corrosive, isn’t it? It undermines standards. I mean it used to be possible to be hugely entertaining without being crap as well, look at The Beatles.’