Page 47

Chapter Twenty-Five

“Ugh, it absolutely stinks in here.”

“Well, breathe through your mouth then, and smile . Remember there’s a photographer here. Besides, it’s not even that bad.”

The smell is certainly peculiar, Damon is right.

It’s a mixture of over-boiled cabbage, TCP and, well, farts.

But I was used to it when I worked here and at least it’s stopped my hunger in its tracks, I had to take Damon’s cock in my mouth again this morning, quite simply to give it something to do, before my hunger took a over and walked me to KFC.

He said it was the best blow-job he’s had in ages. I must be really hungry.

Following Samantha’s soup kitchen visit, I’d been persuaded I should share my cause more publicly.

It makes me feel slightly icky, I think charity work shouldn’t be done to get one-up on someone and it certainly shouldn’t be done to help win you an award.

But, I reasoned, if I do win the award, the ￡10K the prize brings could really change things here.

And anyway, it’s nice to be back at Oakdene.

Without the backing of my guys and gals here, I’d have never done the North Stars audition.

So coming back to visit with Damon, even just for a day, feels right.

A curly-haired, smiley woman called Deborah (“you can call me Deb”) who started after my time is showing us around, forgetting I used to work here.

She keeps stopping to talk every few minutes to the various nurses, staff members and porters, explaining who we are, as if we aren’t standing right beside her.

“They’re from that show , North Stars , you know with all the drinking and the shagging, yeaaah, that one, yeah that was probably her, yeah, you probably did see her do that. ”

I’d find it annoying if Damon wasn’t beside me, taking the piss, making faces and impersonating Deb.

He’s been holding my hand the whole time, showering me with little kisses, basically behaving how I always dreamed that he would.

If only Layla and Madison could see him now!

Except there is one little niggle: they will be able to see him, as we’ve had a photographer trail us this whole time.

It’s been a week since the party and Damon has practically been living at mine, playing the perfect boyfriend and plotting out our future together.

He’s even mentioned a wedding (without actually proposing, of course), although I don’t know if that’s because he really wants to get married or because he knows the coverage would be wild.

“I reckon brands would even fork out and pay for the most mental stag-do, for me and the lads,” he’d said and, despite myself, I’d got excited at the thought of Damon and me getting married, imagining all the sweet things he’d say to me in the speech.

It’s this whole ‘wholesome content’ thing that helped persuade Damon to come to this old people’s home (except apparently we’re not meant to call them that anymore, and instead it’s recently rebranded as a ‘retirement village’) as he was dead against the idea at first. “I’ve got a bad boy image, you know,” he’d said, sitting on my cream sofa, hugging a pink fluffy cushion and wearing a face mask.

“I can’t be seen with old, stinky people.

Can’t we do cooler charity work?” I’d asked him to name ‘cool’ charity work, and he hadn’t been able to come up with a single suggestion, and besides, as I explained to him, we’d been able to care for my beloved nana at home, up until her death, and she was so funny and wise, my favourite person ever.

That was what had made me so good at working here.

I hated to think of the people whose family couldn’t take them in, or those who didn’t have many people to visit them or take care of them.

Yes, the work had been messy and hard at times, heartbreaking at others, but I used to have a genuine laugh with some of the residents, sneaking in a bit of Beyonce among the Vera Lynn and Nancy Sinatra numbers I used to perform in our Tuesday afternoon singalong sessions.

Annoyingly, it was Ben that managed to convince Damon to fully agree to come with me today.

I overheard snippets of their conversation, Ben saying things like “overhauling image” and “family man” and then something that mentioned my name multiple times, but I couldn’t properly hear in what context.

So now we’re here, photographer in tow, and I’m so excited to get chatting to people.

Sadly, not all my favourites are still here but I make my way to the communal living area hoping to see some of the old crew.

Deb says to make the most of our time we should split up and spend time with different groups, and she introduces Damon to an old man sitting in the corner who I don’t recognise.

He’s wearing brown corduroys and his face is moon-shaped, with a permanent smile stamped across it.

I notice that Damon doesn’t shake his hand, he just sits down beside him and asks for a selfie.

But I don’t have enough time to watch what Damon is doing as I spot three ladies all huddled together in the corner.

One has a ball of wool on her lap and is knitting away, nodding every now and then, another has her hair dyed an icy blue and is wearing hot pink lipstick, while the third is drinking tea out of a mug that says THANK GOD I’M FABULOUS on it.

This legend is Mavis. She’d not long moved into Oakdene when I quit to go on the show but even in the few weeks I’d met her, I could tell she was a firecracker.

I love this girl gang straight away. Deb pulls up a seat and does her usual introduction which pretty much implies I’ve been shagging a queue of men on national TV.

Mavis smiles at me and says, “that sounds a lot of fun, was it?”

“Oh the best time, honestly, we were just being so silly and wild.”

“Fun is what matters most,” her friend with the knitting nods. “I’m Carla,” she gives a little wave and then introduces the others. “I hear you already know this wildcard, our Mavis, and then this,” she says, pointing to the woman with the blue hair, who extends her hand for a kiss, “is Beryl.”

Beryl grins and tells me I’m pretty and that she loves my hair.

“Deb,” Carla asks. “Will you be a dear and fetch us a pot of tea?”

“And maybe some vodka,” Mavis adds, before whispering to me and saying, “oh she’s a right judgy madam that one, your replacement, but don’t let her get under your skin. I can’t stand her but Carla has her wrapped around her finger so she’s always getting us the best stuff.”

“You have to know who to make friends with,” Beryl says, tapping her nose. “That one treats us like pathetic, frail old ladies, when we’re nothing of the sort, but I like to play it to my advantage.”

“Oh you should see it,” Carla says. “We’ll be walking down the corridor, on our way back from Zumba—”

“—in chairs but still, Zumba.”

“You should see the instructor…”

“And Beryl will see Deb coming and straight away hunch herself over and begin saying ‘owww, owww’, and when Deb comes rushing over she somehow manages to persuade her that the thing that will help her most is a cigarette! Deb then goes into her own stash—”

“—as we all know she’s got a secret stash, they’re not Vogues but they’ll do…”

“And we all get to go for a cheeky ciggie!”

They all want to know about life in the North Stars house and what I’ve been up to since.

“A TV star!” exclaims Mavis. “Oh, I’d have loved that! When we were younger there weren’t that many options for women, you could be a secretary, or a teacher. I wanted to be an actress and, you might not believe it now, but I had the face for it—”

“And the body!” says Beryl. “She was like a Mancunian Marilyn Monroe.”

I learn then that they’ve been friends since they were 21, as their husbands worked together. “My first, of course,” Mavis says, and Beryl whispers to me, “she’s had four.”

“Looking back, he was maybe the best one,” Mavis says, her eyes going misty.

“But I was so young, I thought I deserved richer, more handsome. I had an affair and, let me tell you, the shunning you got back then for having an affair. But this new fella, Richard, he had it all – a yacht in France, a house in Mallorca. He was my passport to adventure.”

“If you wanted adventure, back then you had to have a man really, for the money, the means, you know, it was so hard any other way,” Beryl explains.

“I married the love of my life early, had my kids, had a content life but Mavis and Carla, they craved adventure and they both found it, in different ways.”

“We were all rebels, in our own ways,” says Carla, telling me how she also left her first husband, and went off to be a nanny for a rich family in San Francisco right after the war. “It’s what bonded us.”

“I wasn’t that much of a rebel,” Beryl says.

“Maybe not, but you kept us two grounded—”

“And you stuck by us when everyone else didn’t.”

“I remember, now, was it my second, or was it my third husband, anyway,” Mavis says.

“I can’t remember which husband but what I do remember is he left, and I was devastated.

I’d thought we were going to have a child together, that he was my happy-ever-after.

Beryl was living miles and miles away and I’d been crying all day and all night, and then there she was, on my doorstep with a bag of homegrown vegetables from her garden and three bottles of white wine.

That’s friendship. Some people will say to you, after you’ve suffered serious heartbreak, ‘is there anything you need’ but my best friends, these girls, they know what I need, without me even having to say it. ”