How To Lose Weight And Alienate People. Ollie Quain

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       CHAPTER SIX

      I immediately notice two things about ‘Maxy’s place’. Firstly, it looks like something out of the hardback book on hip hotels that Adele bought for the upstairs neighbours last Christmas; full of expensive design details like marble flooring, leather padded walls, giant neon crystal chandeliers and the odd piece of slightly risqué art – including a semi-nude photograph in the hallway of Zoe Dano, only her ridiculously long, lustrous, unassisted hair retaining her modesty. Secondly, it is spotless. Not in a quick-whip-round-with-some-antibacterial-spray-on-a-wet-cloth kind of way but clinically clean, like a hospital operating theatre. Every surface is bare and all the walls are painted white. As Barb guides me down the hallway into an immaculate kitchen with pristine stainless-steel worktops I get the impression that Maximilian Fry clearly feels that the home shouldn’t necessarily be where the heart is but more somewhere you could potentially transplant one.

      ‘Right,’ says Barb. ‘You stay here, kiddo. I’ll go and find him.’

      She leaves the room, her heels clip-clopping across the marble. I walk over to the kitchen window and look out onto the garden. From this angle I can see an ivy gazebo sheltering a raised multicoloured platform where there is another Buddha on a podium. It is scattered with flower petals. That’s probably a meditation area. This thought makes me squirm a bit. There’s something rather embarrassing about celebrities who are seeking a higher meaning – especially those who wear a wristband to prove it. Luke was right. What a pretentious wanker.

      ‘Yeah, yeah, I know … I’m a pretentious wanker.’

      I spin round. Standing in the doorway of the kitchen wearing a pair of worn grey tracksuit bottoms with a T-shirt tucked in the pocket and a white towel draped round his neck is … Maximilian Fry. Now, I had always thought he had shown potential – even as a ‘wolf-boy’ in The Orc’s Progress and badly wounded in Victim X – way before everyone fancied him as Jack Chase in The Simple Truth. But nothing could have prepared me for this … the live version. Like all actors he is smaller than he looks on film, probably no more than five foot ten-ish, but he is a lot broader and his features are much more intense. His eyes are a velvety brown. His cheekbones are sharper, his jaw line is squarer and the jagged scar that runs down his right cheek is much deeper, giving his face a kind of brooding darkness. He has obviously just finished some sort of exercise session because his body is covered in a thin sheen of perspiration, making him look sort of … not simply sweaty, more basted. My eyes fall to his torso. Parts of it are so defined that I never even knew were an official muscle group. I force myself to jump past the pelvic area and scan down to his feet. Like the rest of him they are immaculately groomed – the nails on each toe are buffed and shaped to perfection, a world away from the pterodactyl-like claws that most men tended to reveal at the beginning of every summer. A lemony, woody scent fills the space between us. I have a feeling it’s Issey Miyake. The visual and nasal stimulus is so intense that I totally forget to do my (heavily rehearsed) casual greeting, cowering as if I am expecting him to hit me again. Instead, I find myself giving him a wave as if I’m setting off on a cruise. He gives me a confused but half-hearted wave back as though he is unsure as to why I am departing these shores, but isn’t that fussed if I do go.

      ‘A pretentious wanker?’ I repeat.

      ‘Well, that’s what the press makes me out to be, isn’t it?’ His voice is posher than I was expecting, but it isn’t luvvie-ish. It’s got a kind of lazy lilt to it.

      ‘But that doesn’t mean everyone accepts what they say.’

      ‘Most people do.’

      ‘Why do you think that is?’

      ‘It’s easier to take the piss out of someone than to try to understand them. Any form of spirituality is only wanting to be at peace with yourself and the world around you, but it’s hard to explain that without sounding even more of a …’ He drifts off, as if he can’t be bothered.

      ‘Why talk about it, then?’

      ‘I wish I hadn’t, but I had to give them something. They need those sorts of details to manufacture the image of … “the” Maximilian Fry.’

      I pull a face at him. ‘Did you just place an italic ‘the’ before your name and imaginary parentheses around it?’

      ‘Not purposefully,’ he replies. ‘I’m severely dyslexic – so that all sounds rather complex.’

      I realise the lilt in Maximilian’s voice is not laziness, it’s guardedness mixed with arrogance … plus a tinge of self-persecution. Or possibly self-righteousness. Definitely self-indulgence.

      ‘Give them something else, then,’ I tell him. ‘Lose the spiritual stuff and find another party piece.’

      He СКАЧАТЬ