Ambition

by Julie Burchill

  Like an optical illusion by Vogue, the slender blonde in the brown wool was replaced by a tarantula in tulle, its dark red hair cut in an ear-length power bob, its green eyes glinting with gossip and greed.

  ‘Hello, Ingrid,’ said Susan resignedly.

  ‘Hello darling. Having a Hers lunch?’

  ‘Looks like it, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It most certainly does. I also have sightings of you with Susie Douglas at the Kremlin, Lynne Franks at the Western World and that awful little bleached blonde clit-licker at the Groucho. What have they got, darling, that I don’t?’

  Apart from brains, looks and talent? Not a lot. She shrugged. ‘Oh, Ingrid . . . all business.’

  ‘Funny business, if I know that little clit-tickler.’ Ingrid leaned ravenously across the table. ‘Who’s the blonde? Not Caroline Malaise?’

  ‘Yes.’ She saw Caroline come up behind Ingrid to her table.

  ‘Really! How d’you know her?’

  ‘I’m Toby’s London girl,’ said Caroline, smiling down at Ingrid as if she was a long-lost, much-loved Nanna. Obviously her medicine had hit the spot. ‘Well, I was until he met Susie. He wants us to be friends, I think.’ She giggled. ‘I think it’s called the Pasha Syndrome. All the world’s a harem.’

  Susan looked down at her plate in mute horror.

  ‘Can you join us?’ Caroline was saying to Ingrid. ‘Sorry, I don’t know your name. But you have beautiful hair.’ She traced the line of Ingrid’s bob to her cheek and giggled. ‘Do you remember what colour it said on the packet?’ The narcotics were having a disastrous effect on her inhibitions which, to judge by the eagerness with which she had shed her clothes for the moving camera during her brief career, had been subterranean to start with.

  ‘I’d love to.’ Ingrid grabbed a chair in a split-second and sat there between them, grinning triumphantly from one to another. Yes, the bush telegraph of the media was going to have a pretty busy afternoon once Ingrid got back to the Commentator office. ‘But I can only stay two ticks. I’m with a fascinating man.’ She giggled. ‘I think you know him, Sue. Well, he knows you.’

  ‘Oh, who’s that?’

  ‘Over there at the corner table.’ Ingrid turned back to Caroline and started talking to her about polo. Who was she kidding? Caroline was such a very urban Sloane that the only polo she knew about was a mint with a hole in it.

  Susan looked across the room. The man was about forty, sipping red wine and smiling at her. He was handsome, if you liked small, greasy Latinos with skin that made the Rocky Mountains look like chiffon velvet and teeth like fluorescent strip lighting. As he held her eyes, he raised his right hand and, still smiling, drew his forefinger across his throat.

  It was Constantine Lejeune.

  ELEVEN

  ‘Let me get this straight.’ Zero bounced excitedly on a banquette at the Vendome. ‘Pope’s got Joe Moorsom, and Gary Pride, and Caroline Malaise and her sister and her band, and Washington Brown on his case, all wanting him looking like twelve tins of cat food. And you’ve got Constantine Lejeune on yours who’s now teamed up with that superannuated debutwat Irving. And now your old pal Moorsom’s sore at you, and so are Bryan and the boss because you couldn’t get round Moorsom for them. And to complicate matters, you’re in lurrrve with the kosher sausage, who won’t play ball because he’s got this girl in New York who makes Mother Theresa look like La Cicciolina.’ She shook her head sympathetically, but couldn’t control a smile like a bacon slicer. ‘What a fucking old mess you’ve got yourself into, bach.’

  ‘I need a Negroni.’ Susan looked around for a waitress.

  ‘I need a Negress.’ Zero giggled.

  Susan hadn’t seen her so happy in weeks. ‘Thanks for the sympathy, Zere.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Well, what can I do?’

  ‘For a start, quit hanging out with heteros. They’re nothing but trouble. For now – forget the fuck and the faggot, they’ll keep. Lejeune’s your big problem. Do you have any more stuff you can counter him with?’

  ‘No, we used everything Serena gave us. The sex and the stock market.’

  ‘What exactly are you frightened he’ll do?’

  ‘Something much bigger and nastier than alarms and computers going bleep in the night. Psychic things.’

  Zero made a noise.

  ‘I saw it, Zere, you didn’t. He can do those things.’

  ‘Bollocks.’

  Susan hesitated. ‘But it’s something else. I’m afraid he’ll cook something up with Ingrid.’

  ‘Come on. “Girl Wonder In Sex Slave Seven In A Bed Romp With Pope”. It’s a great headline, but it’s hardly the Commentator’s cup of Earl Grey.’ Zero sniggered. ‘They’re not the Best, you know.’

  ‘Everyone’s going downmarket, Zero – downmarket forces. The fact that I stitched him up, and that Ingrid wants to wipe me off the board, and that even the alleged qualities are starting to carry scandal now, even if it is about Claus von Bulow and Robert Chambers – they just might. He’s Tobias Pope, not some scream idol. If it got out that he’d had me tattooed, and taken me to SOUTH AFRICA, and watched me in bed with prostitutes of every conceivable colour and gender . . .’ Susan shook her head desperately. ‘Don’t you understand what that would mean to my career? I’d be a bimbo, a laughing stock. I wouldn’t stand a chance of getting the editorship. I’d be lucky to get a job as a researcher, after that.’

  ‘Pope would still give you the job. He wouldn’t care what some toffee-nosed Sunday paper thought.’

  ‘It wouldn’t end there; everyone would be on it like a duck on dough-boys. And you know what a fuss the government are making about the morality factor when it comes to handing out the cable franchises. The electorate are already terrified that their children are going to be force-fed hard-core porn at the touch of a switch. The government is hardly going to think it’s a vote-catcher to hand one out to a man whose leisure hours are largely concerned with setting up those very same hardcore scenes in the flesh. And if he can’t get his cable, he’ll be off. He’ll sell the Best, and I’ll be out on the street.’ She drained her Negroni.

  Zero was silent for a moment. ‘What’s Lejeune been doing since we ran Serena’s story?’

  ‘He’s been lying low. Cancelled his public appearances, radio show, TV spots. He’s planning something, Zere.’

  ‘Planning be buggered. He’s keeping out of his adoring public’s way. You know that crowd he attracts – all those skinheads and international Zionist conspiracy freaks. They’d have his guts for garters.’ She darted a worried glance at Susan. ‘You don’t think he’d get together with Moorsom?’

  ‘But Joe’s a Labour MP, and Lejeune’s a racist.’

  ‘Bach, don’t you remember the anti-Common Market campaign? Power and Benn on the same platform?’

  ‘Face it, there’s nothing I can do to Lejeune. He’s got me.’

  ‘Then you’ll just have to concentrate on sorting Moorsom out. You’ve got something on him. Seventeen years old, camp as a row of tents and answers to the name of Rupert.’

  ‘It’s sordid, Zere . . . even if I could find him, which I doubt, I don’t know if I want to . . .’

  ‘Pull yourself together, girl. Do you really want Pope to think you can’t pick off a backbencher? After all you’ve been through? Do you think he’s going to give the editor’s chair to someone with such a weak stomach? You’ve been through a mutilation and two orgies for this job – are you going to buckle at the knees because some malicious fag says “Boo!” to you?’

  Susan looked at her empty glass. ‘But how would I find Rupert Grey?’

  ‘I’ve found him for you already.’ Zero smirked. ‘I danced with a girl who’s danced with a boy who’s danced with Rupert Grey. He hangs out in a pub in Meard Street called Ye Old Troute. For the price of a glass of pink champagne, he can be yours. Or anyone’s.’

  ‘Shan’t,’ said Rupert Grey, blowing sullenly at his fringe. He liked that word, almost as much
as ‘Don’t’, ‘Won’t’ and ‘Can’t’. Between them, they had more or less made up his side of the seven-minute conversation Susan had been having with him in the early evening smog of Ye Olde Troute.

  After three years of waking up in strange beds with even stranger men, Rupert Grey looked remarkably fresh. The hair was still silky, the figure – Rupert would always have a figure rather than a body or a physique – still lithe, the pout still holding up admirably. Well, he was still only seventeen.

  ‘Please,’ said Susan again.

  ‘No. I won’t help you. You were mean to me when I was all alone in the world. Why should I trust you now?’

  ‘I’ll pay you,’ she offered eagerly.

  ‘Money means nothing. You can cancel the cheque.’

  ‘Cash.’

  ‘You can mark the notes and do me for blackmail.’ His pout trembled bravely. ‘Those judges are hard on blackmailers, because so many of them are in compromising positions. They’ll make an example of me, to put people off.’ He looked at her accusingly. ‘There’s no conditioner in prison. You told me.’

  She cursed herself for laying on the Draconian conditions for personal grooming in reform school so thick. There was no way Rupert Grey was going to risk being separated from his Vidal Sassoon Deep Heat Protein Treatment sachets, not for any six-figure sum no matter how you arranged the digits. ‘OK,’ she said resignedly, gathering up her things.

  ‘Wait.’ Rupert stopped her. ‘There might be something you can do for me.’

  ‘Name it.’

  ‘You’re powerful, aren’t you? People come to you, wanting your paper to write about their artistes. Record company people and PR people, they want to be in with you. They take notice of you. If you say jump, they jump.’ He looked her in the eyes, and his were as a straightforward as child’s.

  ‘So what do you want from these people?’

  ‘I want to be a staaaar.’ He said it as though it was the most beautiful word in the world, better than love, money or buggery. She thought it was probably the first sincere, painfully simple thing he had said in his life.

  ‘I’m not sure I can make you a star, Rupert. I haven’t had much experience at being a Svengali.’

  He shook his pageboy impatiently. ‘I’m not asking you to make me a star. No one makes anyone a star. A star is a star. All you have to do is introduce me to someone who can see my potential – I’ll do the rest. And then no one will be able to touch me. You can’t touch a star without burning your fingers, even if they’re on the end of the long arm of the law. And then, if you want me to reveal how I was used by that man Moorsom, la publicité can only be good. It’s a great angle, isn’t it? – youth, beauty and innocence used and abused and thrown to one side by some famous old creep old enough to be my grandfather – why, I’ll be the male Mandy Smith!’

  Only marginally more feminine, Susan thought. ‘But what sort of star do you want to be, Rupert? What can you do?’

  ‘I can sing.’ He pouted. ‘I can sing at least as well as Boy Georgina, or that old tart Marilyn, or Jimmy Somerville. It’s all done in the studio anyway, isn’t it? Everyone knows that.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right,’ said Susan wearily. ‘OK. I’ll see what I can do. What’s your number?’

  ‘I’m not telling you. I don’t trust you yet. You can find me here most Mondays. I think of it as my office.’

  ‘OK.’ She gathered up her things and slid off her barstool. Who could she have a word with, who specialized in Svengalidom? Lynne Franks? Simon Napier–Bell? Vivienne Westwood? No, they all had bigger fish in small ponds to fry. This wasn’t going to be as easy as Rupert made it sound.

  In the street, she looked up at the ornately painted sign that marked Ye Old Troute. And as if by free association, a name from the past sprang into her mind and on to her lips in tandem

  ‘Gary Pride!’

  Since losing Fuck U to Tobias Pope outside South Africa House, Gary Pride had made a partial recovery and a modest name for himself as manager of two acts; a band called U.S.S.A. who claimed to be the first Russo-American band in the world, playing something they called Glasnost Rock which featured electric guitars and balalaikas and lots of songs about fighting the Muslim hordes. Then there was a French lesbian torch singer, sleek in the way that only French lesbians could be, who called herself Donna and did a beautiful version of ‘My Girl’. They were all very attractive and got a good many covers of the style magazines between them, not to mention a lot of modelling work and free entry to nightclubs. In fact, they had everything but The Hit. Try as he might, Gary Pride could not get his charges into the charts. If he couldn’t get into the Top Fifty, he was very unlikely to be able to get into the Groucho Club and, sure enough, Susan came through the revolving door to find him sulking in reception and arguing with the receptionist about his phone.

  ‘Sorry, you’ll have to leave it here.’

  ‘Tell ’er, will you?’

  ‘Sorry, Gary, it’s against house rules. They’ll look after it for you.’

  ‘You’d let a lame man take in his crutch, or a man with a bad ticker take in his pacemaker, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Well, that’s what this is!’ He brandished the ugly phone dramatically. ‘My life-support machine!’

  Susan cast an apologetic and despairing look at the receptionist. ‘Gary, the club’s really filling up now. If we don’t bag a sofa soon, we’ll have to sit in Siberia. Sara will mind your phone for you. Come on.’

  The thought of Siberia scared the image-conscious Gary Pride (she couldn’t get used to thinking of him as Gary Prince) like nothing else, and he quickly abandoned his phone and skipped smartly into the club. ‘Well?’ he glowered at her once they were seated. She could tell he still didn’t remember he’d had her technical virginity all those years ago in that frenzied night of boredom; his memory of her went back no further than a few months ago and her role as Tobias Pope’s London bird.

  ‘Well, it’s like this. I need your help.’

  ‘Help? Help you?’ He laughed in a manner he probably thought of as hollow. ‘That’s a good one.’

  ‘If you can help me, I may be able to get your band back for you. I know for a fact that Mr Pope isn’t terribly interested in them any more.’

  ‘Is that a fact?’ He looked suspicious, but interested.

  ‘They’re on ice, I believe it’s called. He won’t put out any of their product, and he won’t let them go. When the contract runs out, they’ll be only too pleased to return to you with their amps between their legs.’

  ‘Iced, are they?’ He laughed uproariously. ‘That’s a good one!’

  His vocabulary was certainly a lot more down to earth these days, she thought – no more talk about parfait knights and buffalo dignity. ECT, it can cure your purple prose. ‘Well, do you want them back?’

  ‘Wouldn’t mind. On their knees, though; I’m the boss this time.’

  ‘But of course.’

  He sighed. ‘OK. What do you want out of this?’

  She opened her leather folder. ‘Nothing much. Nothing out of your line of work. There’s this young singer I know, called Rupert.’ She handed him two eight-by-ten black and white glossies. He took them wordlessly. He studied with impressive professional detachment the studies of Rupert’s pale young face cupped coolly in one hand, and Rupert’s slender body clad in tennis whites with what looked like a year’s supply of the Queen’s Club spare ball stuffed into his crotch. ‘He sings as well,’ she said sarcastically.

  ‘Mmmm.’ He didn’t notice. ‘How old?’

  ‘Seventeen.’

  ‘Yeah? Queer as a nine-bob note, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘No sweat. In fact it could be a plus.’ He thought about it. ‘A queer, eh? I could use a cute young queer. Fresh meat – that first batch of gender benders are starting to look well dodgy. They’ll never see twenty-two again, that’s for sure. Seventeen, right . . . ? Below the a
ge of queer consent, if I’m not mistaken.’ He closed his eyes. ‘Do you know a song called “Too Young”?’

  She dredged into her distant youth. ‘Donny Osmond?’

  ‘Thassit . . . but that was the cover version. Some letter-sweater jock did it in the Fifties first. “They try to tell us weee’re too young! Too young to reeely beee in looove!”’ sang Gary Pride. His voice hadn’t improved, and Susan knew sorrow as the club turned to look at them with interest and concern. ‘Geddit?’ he asked her excitedly.

  ‘Very nice.’

  ‘Nice! It’s fucking brilliant! I get my cred and eat it! See, everyone will twig that he’s singing about being too young to be buggered, so I get my cred and the fag market. And they’ve got a fuck of a lot of readies going begging. But on the other hand, the song doesn’t mention bending, blowing or buggery so they can’t ban it, so I get my airplay and my teenies. I’m telling you, with this kid I’ve got every angle covered.’ He looked proudly at the close-up of Rupert. ‘All the guys want to fuck him, all the girls want to convert him, all the mothers want to give him a good square meal and all the fathers want to lynch him. My little cash-cow!’ He lifted the closeup to his lips and in full view of the interested patrons gave it a loud, smacking kiss. ‘Nothing can stop us!’

  ‘What’s your mother like?’ asked Susan as David Weiss got up from his big bed at Claridge’s and started opening windows prior to committing postcoital pollution.

  ‘Maxine – she’s beautiful, cultured, crazy as a loon, just your average German–Jewish New York Princess who happened to marry a complete and total bastard.’ He drew deeply on his Camel. ‘You know she’s in the Sunny von Bulow Clinic?’

  ‘Yes, what is it? Drugs or drink?’

  He cast her an offended look. ‘Neither. Nervous exhaustion. There’s nothing wrong with Maxine that a divorce wouldn’t put right.’

  ‘Then why doesn’t she?’

  ‘It’s not that simple. He won’t. There are shares . . . things of hers tied up in Pope Communications. He’s got her stitched up, I’m afraid.’ He looked at her. ‘I joined the company because I thought it was time I knew a little bit about it all.’