As the mechanism purred gently into action, she pictured herself reclining on the freshly laundered sheets, being sensuously kneaded and pummelled at the end of every high-achieving day. She added Toby to the picture – a Toby stripping off his clothes and stretching out beside her, doubling all the delicious titillation. ‘For Christ’s sake!’ she muttered to herself. ‘You’ve finished with those sordid one-night stands.’ If she had a new relationship, it must be with someone worthy; different altogether from the pick-ups she’d made do with in the past.
As he showed her the en-suite bathroom, her inanely grinning face was reflected in the gleaming mirrored walls. Quickly she switched off the smile, tried to look nonchalant and blasé, as if the glamour of this flat was very much the norm for her, something she’d grown up with all her life.
‘I understand you’re an author, Miss Armit— er, Lauren.’
She gave a self-deprecating shrug. It still felt bogus to call herself an author, instead of a waitress or a barmaid, or, latterly, a nightclub hostess. Although, in fact, she was surprised that he didn’t know her name, which had been splashed all over the papers when her book came out four months ago. The publishers classed it as a ‘misery memoir’ – a term she disliked intensely. The word ‘misery’ seemed too downbeat for all the drama and sensationalism she had revealed about her family: her father’s racketeering, her mother’s drink and drugs, her brothers’ sexual advances to her when she was a kid of twelve or so. Such disclosures had caused a furore, and an uproar from the relatives, who had united in trying to rubbish her, claiming that the entire 300 pages was nothing but a pack of lies. Which had only increased the sales, of course, shot it to the bestseller list, and resulted in her present two-book contract, with an advance so high, she could afford to rent a flat like this and still have money over for new clothes and a car.
‘Yes, I’m working on a couple of things at the moment.’ That was true, at least. Her new prestigious publishers had not only commissioned a second instalment of the memoir, to bring her story up to date, but also an erotic saga, drawing on her life again, but fictionalized this time. The second memoir was going at a cracking pace, as if all the scandal and hysteria, the fury and acclaim, had acted like a spur, goading her into still more revelations. ‘One’s a sort of life story, which is already three-quarters done, and the other one’s a novel, but that’s only at the planning stage.’
‘Really? I’m an avid reader. You don’t write thrillers, do you?’
‘No,’ she laughed, distracted by the taps: slim silver dolphins, spouting jets of water as Toby turned them on. ‘The novel’s more a family drama, but told from the viewpoint of a girl of twenty-three.’ She had decided to make the protagonist exactly her own age, mainly because it was easier to write. She couldn’t imagine being forty, with a bunch of grotty kids and nothing much to show for them but saggy breasts and stretch-marks. Worse still being sixty: a withered crone, with no more men or sex, no more hope of conquests.
‘She’s never settled down, and had a really lousy childhood, living with these freakish parents and three brothers who abused her. But then she meets an American guy and—’ She shook her head, broke off. ‘Look, if I give away the plot, I won’t be able to write it. And, anyway, the other book’s more urgent, because they want to try to capitalize on the success of the first volume, so I’m working to a deadline. Which reminds me, Toby, I have to meet my agent in less than half-an-hour, so we ought to get a move on.’ She liked trotting out that phrase ‘my agent’; relishing the kick it gave her.
‘How do you get an agent?’ Toby asked, apparently more interested in the literary world than in completing the deal on the flat. ‘I was reading just the other day about some guy who’d made a million on a book deal, and I was rather tempted to have a bash myself. The problem is, I haven’t a clue as to how to start.’
Lauren hesitated, having only a vague idea of how the system worked. In her particular case, her future agent, Hugo, had wandered into her nightclub, semi-drunk, and she’d encouraged him to buy champagne (as she did with all the guys – the most expensive brand, of course). Only when he spelled out what he did, did she tell him about the pile of scribbled pages stuffed in her bottom drawer – pure dynamite, she’d said. From that one evening, her life had taken off. She no longer earned her living chatting up the punters who came to Funky Joe’s, but sitting at her new, state-of-the-art computer, when she wasn’t hobnobbing with famous authors in Hugo’s Chelsea pad.
‘Actually, it’s difficult to find an agent who’ll agree to take you on. In fact, it’s as hard to get an agent as a publisher. You see, hordes of would-be writers are dying for a share of the action and sending in their stuff, but the great majority haven’t got a chance in hell. Only a fraction of the manuscripts ever get read at all – the rest are sent straight back, or land up in the waste-bin.’ Which made her own success all the more astounding. She had Lady Luck to thank for that and, of course, her monstrous family.
‘Well, you’ve obviously done well,’ Toby remarked, a touch of envy in his voice, ‘But, look, I mustn’t keep you if you’re pushed for time. I’ll just show you the kitchen, then I think we’re done.’
The kitchen had the spotless, streamlined efficiency of an operating theatre, and the same battery of complicated machines. Not that she could cook, but it would be a definite advance to own so many gleaming gadgets and a sleek, split-level oven, instead of the single basic gas ring she had made do with up till now.
‘What’s this?’ she asked, peering at a stainless-steel cabinet that resembled a large safe.
‘A rather snazzy drinks-cooler.’ Toby returned to his role of lettings agent, as he explained the mysteries of the built-in water-dispenser and integral, high-speed ice-maker, the temperature-control system and—
‘Toby,’ she interrupted, ‘I’m going to take the flat. I’ve made up my mind – this minute!’ In fact, the drinks-cooler had clinched it. Such gloriously superfluous extras seemed even more desirable than the sumptuous pad itself. ‘It’s far nicer than anything I’ve seen.’
‘Brilliant! I know you won’t regret it. It’s perfect for a writer – the whole ambience feels right.’
‘I’m afraid I haven’t time to go through all the paperwork right now, but if you can hold it ’til tomorrow, I’ll come in first thing and do the necessary.’
‘Great! I’ll expect you in the morning.’ He ushered her to the door, first presenting her with a large, laminated brochure, listing the selling-points and specifications of luxurious River Heights – the brochure itself as heavy as a hardback, and so glitzy in its general presentation, it did emphatic justice to its subject. ‘Just let me lock up, then I’ll escort you down in the lift.’
As they descended thirty floors, she experienced a curious sensation: instead of going down, she was soaring up, up, up – up into the clouds again; up into the dizzy heights of her spectacular new life.
‘Quiet, please!’ Hugo commanded, raising his voice above the buzz of conversation, so he could be heard by the whole gathering. ‘I want us all to raise our glasses to Lauren. She’s already had a huge success with Rock Bottom and I predict an equal triumph for her next two books.’
‘To Lauren!’ fifty voices echoed, followed by a cry of ‘Speech!’
For a moment, she stood dumb, unable to believe that this was really happening; that film producers, scriptwriters and the top brass at a top publishers could actually be her guests. When Hugo first suggested the flat-warming, she had wondered who on earth to ask – certainly not the girls from Funky Joe’s, who would only get rat-arsed, nor indeed her waitress friends, who would lower the tone (and might even nick the silver), nor Nathan, Greg or Brian, whom she’d buried in her unsavoury past and had no wish to resurrect – except in the pages of her second memoir. As for her family, forget it. Far from joining in the celebrations, or saying even a brief ‘Well done!’, they simply shunned her as traitor and a slut.
‘Leave it to me,’ Hu
go had said. ‘We’ll make the party a publicity exercise, invite the whole media pack, especially the gossip columnists and all the big guns in telly, and a few select but major players from the movie world. Though we won’t bother with the snooty literary editors – they’ll only damn the book with faint praise, or ignore it altogether.’
‘But what about the food and wine?’ she’d asked, alarmed at the prospect of catering for big shots, who’d only turn up their disdainful noses if she laid on plonk and crisps.
‘Don’t worry – we’ll use a caterer. In fact, I know this marvellous woman who’s an absolute whiz when it comes to upmarket nosh. Even her canapés are works of art. And she’s pally with a guy who owns a couple of vineyards in the Dordogne. Just relax, my sweet, and let the pros get on with it. All you have to do is wear something svelte and slinky, and be sure to schmooze the guests.’
‘Lauren!’ Hugo hissed, bringing her back to the present with an urgent nudge in the ribs. ‘We’re waiting for you to speak.’
In search of inspiration, she gazed out through the panoramic windows at the lights of London reflected in the water. Churches, bridges, cupolas were laid out below, as if some kindly architect had provided little toys for her diversion; sent catamarans and cabin cruisers chugging up and down the river purely to amuse her.
‘W … welcome,’ she stammered, suddenly overcome with nerves. She had never made a speech before, let alone to such a swanky gathering. But Hugo’s strong, supportive arm was still pressing into hers, acting as a prompt. ‘It’s great to have you here,’ she said, smiling round at the assembled company. ‘This block is called River Heights, which isn’t very original, I know. But actually I like the name, because I feel I’ve moved from living at “rock bottom”’ – she emphasized the title of her book – ‘to a place not far from Heaven!’
Surprised by the ripple of laughter, she continued with more confidence. ‘When Hugo told me we were going to go to auction, I didn’t understand. You see, I thought only paintings or furniture were auctioned.’
More laughter. How extraordinary. As a child, she’d been instantly shot down if she dared to open her mouth, but these people were laughing when she hadn’t been remotely funny, and seemed to be hanging on her every word. ‘But it was me that was going to be auctioned, Hugo said, or at least my two new books, so you can imagine just how scared I was! It turned out all right, thank God. In fact, it was the only time I remember in my life when men – and even women – were fighting tooth and nail to possess me.’
Guffaws now. She relished them; gloried in the fact that nobody was telling her to shut up, pipe down and stop making an exhibition of herself. Her parents had always sought to muzzle her, but with an audience like this, she felt she could talk for ever and the whole of teeming London would stop its frenetic life to listen.
‘Say thank you,’ Hugo whispered.
God, she’d totally forgotten! She was meant to be expressing gratitude to Piers Pemberton, the publisher, who had outbid all his rivals and ‘bought’ her for his stable.
She began voicing her appreciation and, all at once, the legendary P.P., alarmingly high-born and seriously rich, pushed forward to embrace her – an overpowering figure, built like a boxer with broad shoulders and a burly chest. He kissed her on both cheeks and she seemed to drown a moment in the heady scent of cigars and Dior Homme, as the entire rapt room exploded in applause.
She paced up and down the lounge, dragging on a cigarette – the first since she’d quit, officially, at the beginning of the month. But this was an emergency: a severe case of writer’s block. At first, she had put it down to a hangover resulting from the flat-warming, but no hangover would last for four whole weeks. Since the morning after the party, she had deleted every sentence she had typed, as being, stupid, ungrammatical or just boring, boring, boring. She had even ditched the computer and tried writing in a notebook, as she’d done with her first book, but that had proved worse still. The messy scrawl looked so childish and unprofessional, she’d finally tossed the notebook in the bin.
‘Look, get a grip,’ she told herself. ‘You need a cup of coffee, that’s all – something to wake you up.’
She stole into the kitchen, daunted, as always, by its steely, cold perfection. Ignoring the complicated coffee machine (which still baffled her, with its strength-selector, milk-frother and rows of different buttons for Espresso, cappuccino, lattes and the like), she unscrewed the jar of Nescafé and tipped a good three spoonfuls into a white bone-china cup. Then, taking her coffee back to the lounge, she sat staring at the computer screen, still frustratingly blank. She had reached the point in the memoir when she had first moved in with Nathan, and there was enough drama in that period to fill a dozen books: the violence, the affairs, the risks he took to fuel his crack-cocaine habit. Yet still the words refused to come.
She glared at the prissy cup, feeling a pang of nostalgia for the chipped, stained Snoopy mug that had been her constant companion throughout her writing career to date – indeed had become a magic talisman. So long as she used it for her endless cups of coffee, it kept the words cascading out and imbued them with real power. Whereas this namby cup and saucer was useless in the extreme, and seemed even to disapprove of her raw and brutish memoir. ‘You’re mental!’ she muttered irritably, ‘blaming a cup and saucer for your own lack of inspiration.’
Jumping up from her desk, she lit another cigarette and continued her restless pacing – back and forth, back and forth, from the pompous, pallid sofas to the glass-topped dining-table and its uncomfortably pretentious chairs. This expensive, showy furniture was beginning to seem unnatural, if not downright alien, and, in fact, only now did it dawn on her that there was not a single item she had actually bought herself. She had deliberately trashed her former stuff as being cheap and shoddy and thus forbidden entry into prestigious River Heights. But, without her things, she felt her whole identity slowly crumbling into nothing. The flat didn’t appear to want her here, as if its own insipid pallor recoiled in sheer distaste from her jolt-blue nail-varnish and wildly hennaed hair. Never, in her former pad, had she felt stagnant or slow-witted. Vivid scenes and characters poured pell-mell from her pen, in their haste to be immortalized, but here the high-flown atmosphere acted like a censor.
Stubbing out her cigarette, she marched into the bedroom and grabbed her coat and bag. She was going out – to buy another Snoopy mug. And a fake leopard-skin rug to lend a bit of tarty life to those immaculate twin sofas. And a nice, fat, bouncy beanbag, so she could sit cross-legged on the floor, as she had always done at home.
‘This is home,’ she reminded herself. ‘You’ve left Tottenham for good.’
Could you really miss a squalid basement flat, with damp walls and peeling paint and the whiff of cats and cabbage seeping through the ceiling from the weird old trout upstairs? Yes, you damned well could.
Having banged her fortress-like front door, she stood waiting for the lift. Even that was pointlessly grand: carpeted and spacious, marble-clad and mirrored. Once she’d stepped inside, she averted her gaze from the glass, avoiding the sight of her pale, drawn face and the dark circles under her eyes. It was proving impossible to sleep in that vestal-virgin bedroom, beneath a stiff white shroud.
The foyer was deserted, save for the smugly plashing fountain and the veritable Kew Gardens of exotic, jungly plants. Most of these flats were corporate lets, rented by faceless City types who spent most of their time at work. And the upmarket boutiques and restaurants, planned as part of the complex, hadn’t yet been built. Though even when they were built, she would still hanker for the corner shop right opposite her former flat, run by Pakistanis who treated her as family and even gave her credit; still miss the friendly newsagent a few paces down the street, the grungy caff and shabby launderette.
‘You don’t need a launderette,’ she said out loud. ‘You have your own washer-drier, as well as a dishwasher, a microwave and an elaborate juicer-cum-blender you haven’t even used yet.’
Yes, but the launderette was company, a place to meet the locals, have a chat, share a joke, cadge a cigarette. As were the café and the newsagent’s. At River Heights, there was not a soul to talk to.
‘Which is why you’re talking to yourself.’
Christ, she’d better watch it! If she carried on like this, she’d be locked up as a lunatic. Already the concierge was glancing at her oddly. Which was hardly any wonder when she was wearing purple leggings and bright green plastic flip-flops underneath her coat. He, of course, was all dolled up in his smart blue livery and ridiculous top hat, and looked like an extra from some TV series on Dickens and his World.
Before venturing to the shops, she decided to take a walk along the river. The languid way it was rippling and meandering might help to calm her down, but, of course, it had nothing else to do all day but slowly sink and rise in obedience to the tide, and open its obliging arms to fish and flotsam, birds and boats. She buttoned up her coat, wishing she’d brought gloves. The November day was cold and overcast; the pigeons on the promenade fluffing out their feathers; the water itself pigeon-coloured: a sombre, brooding grey. As a child, she had always used her blue crayon to colour in a river, but the Thames was never blue – rather shades of shale and slate.
The tide was out and she stopped a moment to watch the scrum of hungry gulls pecking for food in the mud bank. Birds were lucky in that they didn’t live alone, but in flocks and throngs and colonies. Still, it was probably her own fault that no one phoned or visited. She’d cold-shouldered all her former friends, assuming she’d gain entry into her agent’s own charmed circle, mixing automatically with the cultured types she had met at his smart soirées. But although they’d fêted her short-term as Hugo’s latest protégée, they’d subsequently ignored her; never following up with an email or a phone-call, and probably regarding her as scum, because she hadn’t been to Oxbridge and didn’t read the Literary Review. But just give her time and she’d show the rotten snobs. Once her two new books were published to critical acclaim, they’d be queuing up to kiss her arse.
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