How To Lose Weight And Alienate People. Ollie Quain

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СКАЧАТЬ seven o’clock the next morning, Luke’s flatmate Warren – the only living organism to make Scott Disick look complicated – returns home from a night out with his mates. Banging dance music starts pounding through the wall. Simultaneously, the washing machine in the flat above kicks into the planet’s clunkiest spin cycle, so I give up trying to sleep and make a cup of tea. Luke has stuck a note on the kettle.

       Happy birthday! As they say in The Outback, ‘Rinse it like a drongo!’ So here’s the plan. From now until 8 p.m. I want you to remember you’re awesome, because you are. Then, at 8 p.m. meet me outside that Spanish place round the back of Bethnal Green Road. We’re going for tapas …

      I freeze and immediately stop reading. Christ, really? Tapas is a ridiculous way of eating. Multiple dishes come to the table at random times and nothing on the menu is straightforward, i.e., plain brown, white or green. Bar the olives, I suppose, but even they could be stuffed with an insurgent pimento. I take my tea back to bed and pull the duvet around me. Luke’s room hasn’t got the same kind of feel about it in the cold light of day, with no twinkling tea lights or post-coital glow to bathe in. (Spotting the almost full tape in my video camera makes me cringe slightly.) I listen to the bass pounding away through the wall, and as much as I wouldn’t want to be hanging out with Warren and his gang, I am jealous that they have all been out having fun. The thought of not going to Ibiza this summer – the Promised Land of Fun – makes me disgruntled.

      I look over to the mantelpiece. Propped up behind a photo of Luke’s family is the acting card my agent, Terry, uses to send out to casting directors. For someone who resolutely avoided a single picture to be taken of them between the age of ten and twenty, it’s weird how relaxed I appear. The shot is in black and white and I am looking directly into the camera whilst pulling my best smiley yet pouty, serious but light-hearted, angelically devilish face … to show I have a fantastically varied range. I lean forward and try to figure out how old I look in the picture but it’s difficult to tell. I certainly don’t look my age, but then I’m not, not really. According to my birth certificate I am thirty-five today, but in a sense I’m only twenty-five. That dark side period … it obliterated a whole decade of my life. Losing me to it, looking for me, giving up on me to create the new me, getting used to this me … took close to ten years.

      My eyes wander back to the picture of Luke with his family; he is laughing as his father pretends to plonk a large prawn on his mother’s head with some barbecue tongs. He must be seventeen, nearly eighteen, at the time that picture was taken – round about the same age I was when I left home. The scene looks like something out of a summer TV commercial for outside grilling equipment, with Luke’s parents cast as the perfect mum and dad. But then Luke thinks his parents are perfect. One of the first things he ever said to me was that the greatest lesson he learnt from them was to be honest with yourself … because then you will be honest with other people. I murmured something resembling an agreement – as I do every time he imparts any other words of wisdom his ‘folks’ have bestowed upon him – because it’s the easiest thing to do. But frankly, their inspirational fridge-magnet approach to life doesn’t sound that far up the well-meaning-but-delusional scale from my mother’s biblical one. Proverbs Chapter 10 Verse 9: Honest people are safe and secure, but the dishonest will be caught … She couldn’t have been more wrong.

      I flop back against the head rest. The bed snaps in two like a Venus fly trap, ensnaring me in the middle and sending my tea flying. Wriggling out, I catch my hair on one of the broken springs, which causes unhelpful tangling. So I switch on the do-gooding styling irons Luke gave me last night. But even after a minute they don’t heat up to a level anywhere near as powerful as my own ones that I bought off that stylist. It just goes to show you can’t save lives and achieve a catwalk-ready look. I crawl over some electric leads to get my own straighteners out of my bag. But whilst rummaging, I stop, grab my Nokia instead and quickly scroll down the list of received calls. I find the number I need and before I give myself a moment to change my mind, I phone it. The call is answered on the third ring – I knew she would be up.

      ‘Ha!’ cackles Barb Silver. ‘You do have a bit of freakin’ ambition after all, kiddo. Maxy will be freakin’ pleased you’re coming. Listen, I’m mid Gyrotonic … I’ll shoot you over the details in five minutes.’

      They ping through in three. I am back at home in forty. I am ready in two hundred and twenty-six … and waiting by the window in the lounge for my cab. Whilst I am there, I text Adele, tell her I’m going to a party and ask if I can go into her closet and borrow some accessories – namely, the ones I have already stolen. Monday watches me from the sofa, blinking. He blinks a few more times then wraps his big orange tail tight round him, and settles down amongst the cushions with his back to me.

       CHAPTER TWELVE

      The Rexingham Hotel car park is teeming with coordinators and assistants buzzing around wearing Prada pumps, headsets and stoic expressions at having a job that is so all consuming it would make a student nurse feel positively overrun with leisure time. A bank of photographers are positioned either side of the entrance steps, where they are being monitored by security guards in dark suits. Not that the press are likely to get out of hand today. On an event like this, which is supposedly not about the stars, there probably won’t be any outrageous outfits on display for the paps to get in a frenzy over, which is a shame. I like female celebrities to always go the whole hog – I want to see them sucked in by Spanx, splattered in Swarovski crystals, feet scrunched into podiatrist-baiting high heels and heading for the ‘What Was She Thinking?’ pages of a trashy magazine. Otherwise, what’s the point of them?

      I wait in a holding area for ten minutes before the people carrier draws up with Payton at the wheel. Nicholas sticks his head out the front passenger window.

      ‘You’ve scrubbed up more than adequately, darling,’ he says, eyeballing me.

      I eyeball him back, knowing that I have scrubbed up way more than ‘adequately’ in a clingy, short, charcoal-grey dress (a decent – if you don’t come too close – Alexander McQueen rip-off from ASOS for £39) worn with no hosiery (my legs are smothered in that chip-fat style body grease the models in the Versace adverts are always varnished with), smoky eyes, nude lips and just-got-out-of-bed-hair (which took an hour and a half to perfect two hours after I initially got out of bed). On my feet I am wearing truffle-coloured Marni shoe boots (Adele’s) and in my hand I am holding a flat leather clutch (ditto), which is more of a yellowy beige. Nothing is more damaging than ‘matchy-matchy’ accessorising – it can make an outfit look very cheap. Especially when it is.

      ‘Let’s get one thing straight,’ I tell Nicholas. ‘I’m not here because of your lecture on being some sort of desperate old husk.’

      ‘No?’ He smirks at me as the window whirs up. ‘Of course, you aren’t.’

      The back door of the people carrier slides open and Barb lowers herself onto the tarmac. She is wearing a metallic dress that coils down into a twisted fish tail, with stilettos and a feathered head-dress. That’s more like it.

      She whistles at me. ‘Check you out. Cinder-freakin’-ella is certainly going to the ball.’

      ‘Cheers.’ I smile. ‘Although, I can’t afford to lose one of these shoes. They’re not mine.’

      ‘Lose? Ha!’ Barb cackles. ‘Cinderella didn’t lose that goddamn slipper. Girlfriend clearly had an agenda. Can’t blame her though … did what she could to get out of a bad situation. You have to admire that.’

      Maximilian СКАЧАТЬ