Page 5

Chapter Four

Where am I? I don’t recognise the wallpaper. It’s not the patterned paper of the North Stars house, the lilies climbing up the walls. I would joke to Damon that the closed ones were like little vaginas, tiny vaginas on a vine. Damon! Is he…? Am I…? Did we…?

There’s someone beside me, I can hear their breathing, the hot little puffs of booze-scented air they’re expelling.

Very gently, so as not to wake whoever-the-fuck-it-is beside me, I turn in their direction.

The lump their figure forms is hench, Damon-like, but as he rolls over I see a flash of alabaster-white skin.

Damon would never leave the house without a tan.

My stomach drops, there’s a dark feeling squirming inside of me, whispering and trying to tell me that I’m no good.

Damn Samantha and that damn pill, leaving me like this, questioning everything.

What goes up, must come down and all that.

Oh, that’s given me a flashback! This guy beside me, his willy went up, but just for a second, and then it went down, down, down.

Too many tequilas, he’d shrugged and rolled over, and that meant we didn’t have sex.

Phew. I’ve got enough to worry about today than having to walk like John Wayne.

It all clicks at last. Of course, it’s the big launch day, with all the press.

I’m in London, that’s my hotel room’s wallpaper and, wait, is that Layla, curled up and snoring in my bathtub?

My brain is not functioning yet. What happened last night?

I pat my face, one rogue falsie has tumbled down my cheek, settling itself just above my lip, like my own dodgy moustache.

“You don’t belong there,” I say to it, peeling it off and dropping it to the floor.

But my words unsettle the gentleman (wishful thinking) beside me and he begins to mutter something.

“Ssshhhh,” I say, tapping his head like my mam used to do.

“Go back to sleep.” I have absolutely no intention to ever see him again, particularly as I haven’t the foggiest who he actually is, but still, I don’t want him to wake up and see me missing one eyelash with my (once backcombed to perfection) hair now, by the feel of it, a big ball of tumbleweed on my head.

I gently tiptoe into the bathroom, and begin to prod Layla.

She’s so little she fits in the tub perfectly, reminding me of one of my old Polly Pockets, perfectly tucked up in her case.

“Layla,” I whisper, but she doesn’t stir.

“LAYLA,” I bellow. “Don’t make me fart in your face!

” Confession: I did do that a couple of times in the house.

She creaks one eye open. “Where am I?”

“You’re in my hotel room, don’t ask me how we got here.”

“Cause it’s a tragic story, or because you don’t know?”

“Because I don’t know.”

“Well, why have you even woken me up, if you’re not going to tell me a funny story? Wait, did you bring a guy back? I woke up in the night and could hear you at it.”

“Yeah nearly, but if you must know, we didn’t shag. Anyway, that can wait – we have to be at this press junket thing, remember?”

Realisation flashes across Layla’s face. “Oh shit, what time?”

“I…can’t remember. One o’clock maybe?”

It’s at that moment that the hotel room phone rings. And the guy, the mystery one, is answering it. Layla and I exchange a look. She also has an eyelash stuck to her cheek, which I pluck off her.

“Alright, chill out man,” the mystery man is saying. “I’ll just get her, errrrrmmm,” There’s a pause. “Ange? Angela?”

There’s going to be a time where I’m so famous no man ever forgets my name.

Now there’s a life goal. I dash through, deciding I have to not care how this man sees me, plus my ass looks great in this pair of hot pink knickers.

“They sound mad,” he whispers to me, handing over the phone.

At least now I can see his face, not bad, but wait a minute, is that a… whisper of a moustache?

“Angelica Clarke.” It’s one of the producers.

Gerald. The strict one. The one you get when you’ve done something really bad.

I only spoke to him once in the house, but I’ll never forget telling off I got.

“It’s half past eleven. The driver for your car has been waiting in the lobby for you for half an hour.

Your phone is dead. I presume you’ve kidnapped Layla as she is also nowhere to be found. ”

There’s something about Layla’s size, and those big blue angelic eyes of hers.

No matter what she does, she gets away with it.

I swear, Layla could go to Gerald and say there’s a dead man in the hot tub, I killed him by stuffing my knickers in his mouth, and Gerald would say ‘did Angelica put you up to that?’

“I’m so sorry, time…um…” My slow head is scrambling for a decent excuse but all I can come up with is that my watch broke. I don’t own a watch. And it’s not 1995, it’s 2011, we have phones now.

“I couldn’t give a shit, just get your ass down here, and bring Layla. Now.”

With that, he hangs up. Rude. There was no need to bring my ass into it.

“Layla! We have to be downstairs. The car’s waiting for us.”

“When do we need to be downstairs by?”

“Half an hour ago.”

Cue a mad dash from the pair of us, as we attempt to make ourselves look respectable, while last night’s pube-moustache guy just sits on the edge of the bed, watching, baffled.

Layla’s scrambling through my suitcase, trying to find a dress of mine that doesn’t come down to her knees and I’m slapping on so much highlighter, to try to look fresh, dewy and like I’ve had eight hours sleep, that I end up going too far the other way.

“I look like an embalmed corpse,” I say sadly to my reflection.

“A tanned, fit corpse,” Layla yells back at me. This is why you need your girls. They always offer the much-needed confidence boost, at just the right time, but don’t let you get big-headed.

It takes us ten minutes (OK, fifteen) but we manage to make ourselves look semi-decent, hustle this strange man out the door, with a (fake) number of mine inserted in his phone before we’re down in the lobby, where our sweet driver tells us that we’re “very beautiful ladies.”

When we get to the hotel where the press view is, Gerald is waiting in the lobby.

He takes one look at me and says “Jesus Christ” while kissing Layla on both cheeks.

Fuming. As he ushers us along the corridor he fills us in on how everything is “actually absolutely fine because Samantha swooped in and saved the day, by chatting with each journalist one by one and totally, totally charming them.”

Sure enough, when we get into the press room Samantha’s there, her hair done perfectly, beaming at everyone and generally looking like butter wouldn’t melt. How does she look so glowing? She was out last night with the rest of us.

“Round of applause for them,” she says, at the sight of us.

“Though I think we could smell you before we could see ya. Eau de J?gerbomb is it?” But I can’t even be mad at her, that’ll have to wait, because there he is.

Damon. Laughing with Marc, his gleaming white teeth shining like a light bulb across the room.

When’s he had time to have his gnashers done?

It’s worked though. My stomach flips and I curse it, and my damn heart which begins to pitter patter once more.

Bloody attention-seeking heart. I can’t help it.

I just crave being near him. He spots me, and waves.

God, I’m so weak for that man I could suck him off in a club bathroom and kid myself it counts as romantic. In fact, come to think of it, I have.

Now that the gang’s assembled, we begin to walk to the cinema where they’re screening the first episode, plus a montage of the rest of the season. I catch up with Samantha. She isn’t exuding alcohol from her pores like me and the girls. No, she smells fantastic, like candy floss mixed with coconut.

“Where did you go last night?” I ask. “How come you’re not hanging like the rest of us?”

She turns and smiles that perfected fake smile of hers and says, “What do you mean? I opted for a sensible early night, unlike some people.”

As if it wasn’t her conning me into getting off my tits!

“But you gave me…a pill?” I drop my voice to a whisper, but still determined to let her know that I know what she did.

Sam thrives on knowing more than everyone else.

I began to notice this during filming, she’d spend days watching the rushes and filming voiceovers, then come out on the town with us at night, pleased as punch that she’d already seen all the footage, practically hopping with knowing what everyone had said.

Not that she always used her knowledge for good.

Sometimes Samantha would massage the truth, hoping that the amount of shooters we’d downed would blur our memory of how things happened.

She’d drop little hints about things caught on camera that had been edited out, or she’d exaggerate the embarrassing things I’d done to make me feel bad.

But tough luck on her, I embarrass myself so much it takes an awful lot to make me feel that way!

This time though, it’s just confusing. She’s always been proud of being able to get hold of uppers and downers and even uses it against us sometimes, claiming she’s the one that always gets the party started.

“Pills? I didn’t have any pills last night,” she looks at me quizzically, the picture of innocence. “Why would I give out drugs the night before the big launch? That’s just loser behaviour.”

“But you did! You gave me one…”