‘You know, I’ve got this job by the skin of my teeth, I have rent to pay and I didn’t move to London for … happy reasons. Losing me my job would ruin things for me. I am asking you, as a fellow human being, not to do this.’
Adam leaned back in his chair.
‘As a man human being? I didn’t have you pegged as someone who’d pull a Penelope Pitstop.’ He stirred his coffee and tapped the spoon several times on the cup. ‘Even if I was the kind of slow wit to fall for the damsel in distress routine, I think I’d be doing you a huge favour if I lost you your job, Daisy. You’d be better off on benefits than doing Kurt Spicer’s grubby bidding. Ditto getting rid of the bilge pump that is his fiction factory.’
He paused. ‘Nice touch with the thing where you made your eyes look even bigger though,’ he mimicked cartoon cow eyes, pout and exaggerated blinking.
Well. Here was an intangible landmark in her time in London.
Delia had made her first enemy.
Kurt twirled his chair from side to side in the centre of the stuffy basement office.
‘Come at me.’
He’d announced a ‘thought-nado’ – a brainstorm, in old money, Delia thought – about a client.
She was actress Sophie Bramley, a cherubically pretty blonde C-lister. Attractive, but not threateningly so.
Sophie was currently a supporting player in a medical series, The Golden Hour. Set in an A&E department, it was distinguished for its unusual levels of ‘business end’ gore.
It was the kind of show where people in green scrubs shouted ‘I need fifty ccs of oxytoxycontalin NOW, dammit!’ There was lots of defibrillating, heartrending bedside confessions, arguments with arsehole consultants and out of hours inter-medic romances.
Sophie was thirty-one, a mother of one, and was regularly being passed over for more interesting – read, ‘grown-up, prime time, possible nudity’ – roles. In the fight to be better known, she was ready to take the surgical gloves off.
Kurt was trying to come up with a battle plan for Sophie and had just used the phrase ‘sex up her dossier’.
‘We need raunch, with maybe some overcoming adversity element thrown in,’ Kurt was saying, while stretching an elastic band between his hands. ‘I’m thinking along the lines of “Tiger Mom Lapdanced Her Way Out Of The Projects”.’
Delia looked at her notes.
‘She’s from Ashby-de-la-Zouch.’
‘Does it have mean streets?’
‘It’s a village near Leicester. Not really.’
‘Hmmm. Not sure about playing up the single mother angle, actually. I don’t want the complication of the dad getting involved.’ Kurt frowned, flinging the bands onto a nearby desk. Notionally his desk, as he rarely used it. ‘There were some custody issues. Last thing we want is to bait Fathers 4 Justice and the ass clefts who dress up as Spiderman, dicking about on rooftops.’
‘I think Fathers 4 Justice disbanded,’ Delia said.
‘Surprising, because when it comes to being seen as responsible people to be in charge of kids, their PR was watertight. What we need for Sophie is a good old-fashioned pants-off scandal.’
‘Like an affair with a co-star?’ Delia asked.
‘I’ve explored that with her, there’s no one convenient at the moment. Plus anyone in the same show is low-hanging fruit. We don’t just want people to think about her, we want them to think about her differently. Anything else?’
Freed from the constraints of the by-the-book stolidity of the council, Delia tried to get into the spirit, but it was proving difficult. Don’t hanker for a job that gives you creative, off the wall and fun, and then whinge, she thought, having a stern word with herself. Even though this felt right on the line between frivolity and vulgarity.
‘Accidentally uploading a nude photo on Instagram?’ she said, remembering an incident with one of Paul’s barmaids. (Although Paul had said: ‘She told every one of the staff and five of the regulars before she took it down. I think it was an accident in the same way they’re all accidents once the camcorder’s definitely running on You’ve Been Framed.’)
Kurt rubbed his chin, thoughtfully. ‘Not bad. Only it puts all the weight on the client to deliver. We want something we can justify getting paid for.’
The clock ticked.
‘A sex tape?’ Steph said, glancing nervously towards Delia.
Kurt put his head on one side.
‘Ooh. That’s calling to me.’
‘You mean, get her to make a sex tape?’ Delia said, doubtfully and fearfully. OK, this was full-on tacky. Come back Roger the jobsworth and Ann the joy thief, all is forgiven.
‘No!’ Kurt said. ‘Walk the gangplank and get on the boat here, Red. Free your mind and the rest will follow.’
Delia translated this as: nothing needs to be true. Adam West’s words rolled round her mind.
‘Sex tape, good start.’ Kurt interlinked his fingers behind his head, rocking on the back legs of his chair. ‘OK, OK. So a scumbag ex-boyfriend is hawking this tape around the papers. We put out a release saying we condemn his actions. No one should have anything to do with him. Equally, Sophie’s not ashamed of her past.’
‘Which ex-boyfriend?’ Steph said. Delia was grateful to her for taking over the Bleeding Obvious Question Asking task.
‘We won’t dignify that question with an answer,’ Kurt said. ‘We won’t give this turd any more publicity. They’ll find out if he makes an approach. Which they should be strongly warned not to entertain.’
‘But he won’t make one …?’ Delia said, trying to catch up.
‘No. Because he doesn’t exist,’ Kurt said, looking at Delia as if she was a blade-of-grass-chewing simpleton.
Delia sensed she and Steph very much wanted to share a look of distress, but didn’t dare.
‘Y’see, a lot of people would stop here,’ Kurt said.
A lot of people would’ve stopped before here, Delia thought.
‘… I think bigger. How about if Sophie had a secret adult movie career? Did a few amateurs with the boyfriend, and then went semi pro? Sold a few, at the corner shop? White paper covers and all that.’
Delia didn’t understand how Kurt could ‘imagineer’ so recklessly.
‘How do we invent that history? Wouldn’t there be a record?’
Kurt shrugged. ‘Small distributor, went bust? Let’s see if the papers go for this first, then worry about that. Personally, I love it. The Linda Lovelace of Leicestershire. Cheap Throat. Delia, you write me the press release on this. I’ll get Sophie to sign off on her quotes. Do NOT give me grey. Give me purple prose. Purple, veiny and throbbing.’
Yeuch.
‘… Whizz it over as soon as it’s done and I’ll check it on the BlackBerry. I like to strike while the iron is hot.’
‘Does she want to be associated with having made porn?’ Delia said, worrying Sophie would be offended by something Delia had been told to write. She still hadn’t forgotten the false assurances that Kurt gave Gideon.
‘Do you know much about acting? It’s only one notch up from prostitution as it is.’ Kurt slammed back down on his chair legs and stood up.
‘Friend of mine from school, good-looking guy, talented. Thought he was going to be the next Jimmy Dean. Talking about which directors he’d work with, he’d be all about art instead of money. Five years later he’s in a shopping centre dressed as an onion ring and he’d give his left nut to be third possum in Awesome Possum: The Musical.’
Kurt shook his head.
‘What’s he doing now?’ Steph said.
‘No idea,’ Kurt said, looking surprised to be asked. ‘Not in Scorsese’s latest, that’s for sure.’
Kurt picked up his coat, doing a fingers-to-forehead salute. ‘Good work, ladies. Onwards and upwards.’
Delia and Steph waited several beats to be sure that Kurt wasn’t coming back.
As the sound of his footsteps faded, they turned to stare at each other with wide eyes, before bursting into laughte
r.
‘This is well mental,’ Steph said.
‘Shouldn’t we have something to stand it up before we test interest?’ Delia said. ‘Shouldn’t it have a bit of truth to it?’
‘The aroma of truth!’ Steph laughed.
‘With truth-style flavourings. Reality-free. Safe for truth allergy sufferers.’
Delia had flutters of concern, which she wasn’t mentioning in so many words to Steph. She felt sure that if this story went tits up, it wouldn’t be Kurt spluttering and stuttering on the phone to a journalist and tarnishing their name. Still, you had to buckle down in your first weeks.
Hopefully, Sophie Bramley was going to take one look at this ‘story’ and say ‘no way’.
With this in mind, Delia tried to dispense with self-consciousness and write the kind of press release that would be overheated enough to please her boss. Delia had always found inventing procedural quotes for councillors vaguely uncomfortable, but this was excruciating. BBC ACTRESS SLAMS EX PARTNER TRYING TO CASH IN ON ADULT MOVIE PAST. Delia angled it on the modern peril of ‘revenge porn’ and Sophie’s (synthetic) outrage at this unprincipled mercenary, going behind her back.
‘I’m appalled someone I was once close to would betray my trust like this,’ Sophie said. Delia wondered who Sophie should be appalled at. ‘It was a long time ago and while I am not ashamed of my past, the particular films he is offering were strictly for private consumption and something we did as a couple.’
She sent it to Kurt, waiting to be told it wasn’t nearly outrageous enough, or that Sophie hated it.
Red. LOVE IT. Sophie’s good with it too. Get it out there. KS
Delia didn’t know whether to be pleased, or to believe him. She hit send with a sense of squeam. She now had dirty hands.
Delia had dodged a few nights out since she arrived, but her defences were never going to hold for long against the march of Emma.
To quote her hostess: ‘You’re not Julian Assange and this isn’t the Ecuadorian Embassy.’
Emma got Delia to ‘keep Thursday free’ – as if all Delia’s evenings weren’t free.
‘You’ve got to see this speakeasy bar, Mayor of Scaredy Cat Town in Spitalfields. You’ll love it. The entrance is through a Smeg fridge door. The cocktails are lush.’
She was so enthusiastic, Delia didn’t have the heart to tell Emma that the last thing that appealed was sitting somewhere self-consciously fashionable, necking drinks with ironic paper umbrellas at ten pounds a pop.
She wanted a standard-issue pub with textured wallpaper, jars of glacé cherries and morose older couples with halves of mild and lager blackcurrants who’d run out of conversation twenty years ago. She needed plain comfort, not spicy novelty.
To make it even less possible to say no, it was the night before Emma disappeared for the hen marathon in Rome. She had to be up at Oh Fuck o’clock to go to Stansted, and yet she was out on the lash. Emma’s energy reserves were truly Herculean.
As expected, the bar was a posers’ paradise. It had all the hallmarks: Stygian gloom, barmen in braces who looked like D.H. Lawrence, a disco ball and signs saying No Heavy Petting.
They had the first half an hour to themselves. Delia told Emma about the Adam West encounter.
‘This double-agenting is very good news,’ Emma said, handing her ‘Basil No Faulty’ cocktail to Delia to try, wiggling Delia’s appropriate ‘Red Lady’ towards her.
‘Is it?’ Delia said, trying to connect mouth with straw. ‘It feels like a total disaster.’
‘Oh yes. There’s all kinds of room for manoeuvre here. What if you give him bad intel?’
‘Then he eventually realises, and drops me in it?’
‘Depends on the information. He’s not going to be able to hold the folder thing over you forever. This has a lifespan. A few big wins at work and it’ll be old news.’
‘That relies on me having big wins.’
‘Ah, they’re here!’ Emma waved at a crowd of shiny-haired strangers who’d poured through the door.
Delia put her game face on and tried to make a polite effort with a group who were, with the best will in the world, only feigning polite interest in her.
Jessie, Tallulah, Sarah-Louise and her boyfriend Roan – and someone who might actually be called Bounty, as in bar or hunter – didn’t want to make an effort with the odd one out, given a choice of that or a catch up with the people they’d come out to see. She couldn’t blame them.
Every so often, Emma would shriek a remark in her direction, having found a helpful detail to draw Delia in to the chatter. She smiled and made efforts but no topic sparked, caught light and developed into natural conversational momentum. Delia was reminded of her parents’ old oven in Hexham that needed the dial holding in for minutes on end to get the hobs going: clack clack clack.
She fell between stools, and was able to sit in her own little bubble of aloneness, feeling sorry for herself.
Frustratingly, alcohol wasn’t helping. Eventually, Delia decided to hell with the cost and knocked back postmodern cocktail after postmodern cocktail. The booze only deepened and lengthened the shadows inside, instead of brightening her up.
When she went to the loo, she saw a missed call from Paul. An accompanying text said: ‘Hey, just calling for a catch up/chat if it’s a good time. Px’ She’d lost count of the number of times over the past four weeks that she’d seen his name flash up on her phone – she wasn’t strong enough to resist returning it, this time. She wanted to speak to someone who wanted to speak to her.
She slunk out and stood in the street with the smokers. Taking a deep breath, she pressed his name.
‘Hi. Paul?’
‘Dee! Thanks for calling back. Where are you?’ Paul said.
‘Outside a bar, why?’
‘Sounds noisy, that’s all.’
It wasn’t noisy, but Paul could tell she wasn’t in the flat and wanted to keep tabs. He had some nerve if he was going to get suspicious about Delia enjoying herself, she thought, however misapplied a suspicion it was in this situation.
‘How are things going?’
‘Good,’ Delia said. ‘You?’
‘Same old, same old.’
‘What did you want to talk about?’
‘Nothing in particular. I wanted to hear your voice and know how you’re doing.’
This was why she was dodging Paul. She couldn’t be bothered with small talk and she wasn’t ready for big talk yet.
‘How’s Parsnip?’ she said, poking a burger wrapper with the toe of her patent shoe.
‘Y’know. Widdly and rickety. Missing you. You alright for money?’
‘I have a job.’ Delia couldn’t avoid admitting that, if Paul was going to turn paternalistic provider on her. ‘Not sure how long it’ll last.’
‘What sort of work?’
‘PR. A small PR firm.’
‘Wow. Delia.’
‘What?’
‘You’ve really gone, haven’t you?’
‘I told you, it’s more like … a sabbatical. I haven’t made any long-term decisions.’
Paul was quiet and Delia began to feel sorry for him; old habits died hard. But then she recalled Celine calling him her boyfriend and the sorriness was obliterated by a flood of liquid fury and insecurity. In sobriety, she’d stem the tide. In ebriation, she carried on.
‘Did Celine call you her boyfriend?’
‘Sorry, what?’
‘I saw her referring to you as her boyfriend on Facebook …’
‘Eh? How can you even see that?’
‘She has no privacy settings. Maybe in life as well as social media.’
Paul fell silent before saying, ‘Maybe she was seeing other people too. She must’ve meant someone else.’
‘I suppose we should both get tested then.’
It was an ugly thing to have to say, and Paul mumbled, then said: ‘Look. Maybe she did call me her boyfriend. The truth is, I don’t know. I wasn’t her friend on there.’
‘So she did or she didn’t?’
‘Not to my face. It is how she talked, though. It’s the kind of thing she’d say.’
‘What does that even mean? You just keep lying and lying, don’t you? Listen, Paul. I’ve got to go.’
‘Delia, don’t—’
Delia cut him off and, taking in an inadvertent lungful of Camel Lights, felt the force of her folly. These skirmishes got them nowhere. She wanted him to take back what he’d done, and he couldn’t. She called him because she felt lonely in the bar downstairs, but talking to Paul made her feel lonely in a different way.
Delia was trapped between worlds, worlds with a Smeg fridge door as portal. Hipster Narnia.
‘Hi. This is Freya Campbell-Brown from the Mirror. This story about Sophie Bramley …’
Delia, alone in the airless office, had a whisper of fear. The press releases had been released into the wild.
‘Yes?’
‘Can we have a name for the ex-boyfriend?’
‘I’m afraid we can’t give it out. We don’t want to give him any more publicity. Sophie’s adamant.’
‘Riiiight,’ Freya said, in a languorous and contemptuous drawl, with a rising inflection. ‘It’s just that without that, this isn’t a story?’
Delia paused.
‘You have Sophie’s quotes.’
‘Yeah. But nothing about the films. You’re saying she made them for sale? Where were they sold?’
‘Local outlets, I think …’ Delia mumbled, feeling her face heat.
‘You think?’
‘Obviously it’s a painful memory for Sophie.’ Oh God, this was excruciating. Delia wasn’t Kurt. She couldn’t build magical citadels out of untruth, in unconstructed dream space. She squirmed.
‘How do we know the films exist?’
‘Why would Sophie comment on them, if they didn’t?’
‘Don’t get me wrong, we’re interested. But not without something more to stand it up. There’s nothing on her IMDb page …’
‘She’s hardly going to put it on her IMDb page,’ Delia said.
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