Strictly Confidential

by Roxy Jacenko

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity

  to real persons, alive or dead, is coincidental and not intended by

  the author.

  First published in 2012

  Copyright © Roxy Jacenko 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or

  transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and

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  Allen & Unwin

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  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

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  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

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  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74237 757 5

  Typeset in 12.2/18.5 Joanna MT Std by Bookhouse, Sydney

  Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

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  Ebook Production by Midland Typesetters Australia

  It all began with knickers. And, like any good outfit should, this story ends in knickers too. But not just any knickers. We’re talking luxurious artisan lingerie from Vixenary’s Sabotage collection. Knickers that are one hundred percent silk with stylish soutache embellishment. Knickers to make you a pin-up when you’re stripped down. Knickers that are on trend, not off the rack. And in a g-string, naturally.

  This is Sydney, after all.

  We may be close, here in the Emerald City, to the great fashion capitals of the world (materially if not geographically), but we’re not averse to a little flashiness, to a little gratuitous baring of flesh. So it’s fitting, really, that my glittering career as Sydney’s premier fashion publicist was launched with the elastic of a size-zero g-string.

  If this were elsewhere in Australia, say the Apple Isle, my start would probably have come in the form of a kitsch pair of undies tastelessly plastered with an invitation to view my map of Tassie. Or, if my life as a PR doyenne began, as many do, in that other apple – the Big Apple – I’d probably be talking DKNY spandex briefs. Hip and urban and taking no shit, yeah? Unlike in London, where they’d be sensible charmeuse panties parading as your nanny’s knickers or whatever other campaign Agent Provocateur dreamed up to shift smalls to repressed Poms. Or Paris, where I’d be clad in some exquisite Chantal Thomass creation, only to bend over and have it ripped off by the marauding French press, as any PR girl would willingly do.

  Metaphorically speaking, of course.

  Perhaps, if my life as a publicist had begun in Milan, I’d be lounging in my La Perla finest, all frastaglio embroidery and mixing it with Italy’s beautiful people. Hell, I’d probably have found myself at one of Berlusconi’s bunga-bunga parties in the name of product placement where I’d thank God that, in my twenties, I was far too old to be his type.

  Instead, it all began with a red Vixenary g-string in the backstreets of Sydney’s Darlinghurst.

  ‘OMG! Emergency!’ her voice shrieked from my BlackBerry as I answered my phone in my sleep.

  My dream slid to the floor and lay dead among the detritus beside my bed. Mangled Manolos, last month’s Muse magazine, an overdue press release and now an interrupted dream: it was like a graveyard down there.

  Admittedly, I was only dreaming of being somewhere loud and dizzyingly disorienting with my boyfriend, Will. That could have been us at Paddington Inn any old Tuesday night. Hell, we were probably about set to launch into an argument over: a) ridiculous working hours (mine); b) ridiculous partying hours (his); or c) the fact we need Facebook face-recognition software to identify each other these days. Eyes closed or open. It’s not like it was a dream of being locked in Chanel’s flagship store on rue Cambon after-hours while a reincarnated Coco Chanel crafted a bespoke version of her iconic tweed suit for me and Karl Lagerfeld fed me Ladurée macaroons by hand. Hypothetically, say.

  Wait, was someone on the phone? Talking in rhymes? In the middle of the night? Was Dr Seuss on the line?

  ‘Sorry, who is this?’ I said, rubbing at my eyes.

  My bedside clock said 3.12 am. Glaringly.

  ‘It’s Diane! OMG!’ the phone said. Piercingly.

  Diane Wilderstein of Wilderstein PR was my boss and the only person over twenty-five to use OMG without irony.

  She went on: ‘Raven is completely off her face at Kit and Kaboodle and the paps are out front waiting for a money shot. I’m still in Melbourne so you’ll have to sort this. Now!’

  Frantically blinking sleep from my eyes, I tried to process what the hell was happening. Kit and Kaboodle, yes? Rue Cambon, non?

  I turned on the light. Ouch! Bad idea.

  ‘Where do you want me to go?’ I managed eventually.

  Diane sighed, as if even from interstate my ineptitude was draining. ‘Kit and Kaboodle nightclub in Kings Cross!’ she repeated. ‘Raven’s fallen off the fucking wagon and if the paps get a picture of her we’re fucked. Gone. Kaput!’

  I appreciated her spelling out the severity of the situation, I really did, but as it was, a 3 am wake-up call had done the trick. Butterflies started flittering around my stomach. The kind of butterflies usually reserved for monumental occasions. Like a bat mitzvah. Or a first date. Or the first precious minutes of a Sass & Bide stocktake clearance.

  ‘Get there now,’ Diane demanded. ‘Are you at home?’

  ‘Yes,’ I whispered and immediately regretted my honesty. I should have lied and said I was staying at a friend’s in Palm Beach or somewhere equally isolated. That way I could have bought myself a few more precious minutes under my doona.

  ‘Thank God. Paddington isn’t far from the Cross so you can be there in ten minutes. Call me as soon as you find Raven. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ I answered, dragging my arse out of bed and my trackies from the floor, before slipping them straight over my satin pyjama shorts.

  Diane, however, didn’t wait to hear my answer. She’d already hung up the phone and, with it, any chance I had of returning to sleep. My work fate was sealed.

  If I’m honest though, my work fate had been sealed long before Diane dialled my digits that night. In just the same way that some kids are destined to follow their parents’ vocational footsteps into law or dentistry or chartered accounting, I trod like a lemming the well-worn track laid down by my parents. The path, that is, of plain old hard work.

  Perhaps it was because both my parents came from housing commission neighbourhoods more rat-infested than a Ksubi catwalk and then clawed their way up from there that I found myself inheriting one hell of a serious work ethic. If mine is a rags to riches story, those riches haven’t come without hard slog. First my parents’ and then mine.

  Or perhaps it was because Mum and Dad threw every cent they slavishly earned into a very expen
sive Jewish private-school education for me that I embraced my lot as a minion in the marketplace so wholeheartedly. After all, nothing teaches you to suck it up and work hard, princess, like six years of orthodox education. Then again, maybe it was the copy of Donald Trump’s autobiography, The Art of the Deal, which my grandmother Bubbe gave me for my tenth birthday that really set me on the course of career conscientiousness. (Not to mention a lifetime of megalomania.) Or it could have been the fact that my parents and Bubbe talked of nothing but business strategy at the dinner table each night. I could talk shop with them or I could not talk at all. And that’s not much of a choice for a teenage girl.

  I got my first job during high school, first at Bondi Junction McDonald’s scooping fries, and then scrubbing walls at the local florist, and finally printing pics of Eastern Suburbs identities at Kodak. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I’m sure this last job was responsible for more than just lining my Dollarmite account with pocket money, because it was here that I first developed photos of visiting Hollywood stars and, with them, most likely, my passion for PR.

  So even though I came from the wrong side of the PR tracks, what I lacked in connections and social standing I more than made up for with diligence and dogged hard work. The kind of diligence that enabled a person to survive four years working for Diane Wilderstein. Because if the devil wears Prada then Diane keeps Miuccia in business. I swear that woman is Lucifer in luxury labels.

  Yes, I had the kind of tenacity that saw a person progress from receptionist to office-coordinator-slash-personal-assistant-to-Diane and then, finally, to the role of senior publicist at Wilderstein PR. Although the title was purely semantics: what my day-to-day working life at Wilderstein really entailed was being at the mercy of Diane’s every whim. Run a media campaign for a famous fashion label or run to the drycleaners to collect Diane’s laundry. Whip up a press release or whip up a batch of cupcakes for Diane’s client meeting. Look after a celeb’s media tour in Sydney or look after Diane’s caffeine habit. Devise a publicity schedule for a major international organisation or devise a way to get the latest Birkin design into Diane’s possession before COB. I did it all.

  In short, I was cursed with the kind of diligence that would make a person think nothing of dragging herself out of bed at three-thirty on a Thursday morning to track down a totalled client before they did serious harm to their reputation.

  A thousand thoughts raced through my mind as I battled to get out the door. Most of them incoherent and certainly none of them printable.

  I focused on trying to approximate clothed. Trackies? Check. EMU ugg boots? Check. T-shirt? Fuck. The first top I laid my hands on bore a slogan that read Desperate Housewives Season Five, March 2005: Juicy! It was hardly a to-the-minute sartorial selection but who cared? Who was I likely to see at Kit and Kaboodle before dawn on a Thursday morning? Aside from Raven, of course. I’d better bloody see her there.

  Now, handbag? Kitchen table. Makeup bag? In bag. Phone? Bed. Got it. Go!

  A text came through from Diane just as I picked up my phone: Are you there yet? it screamed and I tripped down the front stairs reading it. Bolting outside I scanned for taxis and replied to Diane: Sure. Almost.

  I willed a taxi to appear.

  Nothing. Only the monotonous drone of cicadas.

  Shit.

  At this point I decided the best course of action was to leg it. This was a rash decision. Still, avoiding death-by-Diane was a powerful motivator and soon my legs were pounding down Oxford Street. When suddenly it came to me: no bra.

  It seemed the homeless man perched nearby on his pile of plastic bags worked this out before I did. ‘Juicy,’ he muttered croakily as I scuffed past in my EMU uggs, my trench dangling off one shoulder, my left breast completely visible through the white promo tee.

  Enjoy, mate, I thought grimly.

  And then, was that a taxi? A taxi! With its light on? Yes!

  The cab sped up on approach and hastily pulled in. Hurrah! I dived onto the backseat and slammed the door behind me.

  ‘Darlinghurst-Road-Kings-Cross-quick-as-you-can-please,’ I said, beyond breathless.

  The driver turned around and was staring at me open-mouthed, his cab stationary at the kerb. What? Had no one seen a bra-less woman in Paddington until tonight?

  ‘Go!’ I shouted, flicking up the collar of my coat in a vain attempt at some dignity and he put his foot to the floor.

  Resting my head against the taxi window, I turned my attention to the PR disaster at hand. Surely I was not the only person who had seen this coming? I mean, even as a senior publicist I was still only a nonentity in the galaxy of Public Relations. A mere red dwarf. Far-flung and unimportant and straining to feel the warmth of the sun’s rays from the outer rim of the media Milky Way. And given PR itself was considered only one small spiral galaxy in the vast fashion universe, I cannot understate my insignificance. The (working) dog star of the universe, that was me. But pleb or not, even I could see getting Raven out to Australia had been a big mistake from the start.

  Only eight months earlier the entire globe had been glued to Raven’s spectacular downfall as she’d plummeted from US pop starlet to prescription pill-popping junkie overnight, thanks to a rogue YouTube clip. In the clip, Raven crawled around someone’s backyard on all fours looking for her lost bag of cocaine, wearing nothing but a cheap g-string. While the coke was unarguably lost, all signs as to where it might have gone pointed to the streams of blood pouring from Raven’s nostrils. Naturally, the video was an instant viral sensation when it appeared online in twelve easy-to-use chapters, each named artfully for the on-camera quotes in each clip. My personal favourite was ‘Where the fark is ma shit?’ but ‘Who’s cravin’ some Raven?’ was also soaring up YouTube’s ‘Most viewed’ list. In fact, if only her latest music single ‘Trespass’ had got that many hits, Raven could have retired right now.

  The upside of two hundred million people viewing Raven in her knickers was that her infamous derrière now fit perfectly the, ahem, brief for the new Vixenary underwear campaign. The downside was Vixenary was one of our key clients so I had to deal with all Raven’s shit. You see, Vixenary had just released their Sabotage collection of very risqué, very expensive g-strings which carried the advertising line: It’s all you ever need. A claim Raven had adroitly proved by her choice of attire in her YouTube clips, making her Vixenary’s model muse. Why the ill-advised Raven saw spruiking smalls as the obvious next step on her path to a redeemed public profile, I couldn’t tell you. But as to our side of the bargain? Easy. Raven was broke after literally blowing her bucks, so she came tantalisingly cheap. Which was how I found myself hurtling towards Kings Cross at 3.30 am, sporting pyjama shorts under a pair of tracksuit pants, in order to retrieve Raven.

  Still, I was confused. Raven had been in town for two days now and besides all the predictable diva demands, the kid had turned out to be all right. Straight even (well, most of the time). From OBs (outdoor broadcasts) on Show FM, to in-store signings for Vixenary intimates, from morning TV performances to evening prime time, Raven hadn’t caused me, as her minder, a single headache – until now. In fact, the only blip on her charge sheet since Monday had been her suspiciously dilated pupils and unaccountable twitchiness when on stage at Westfield centre court, Bondi Junction. A twitchiness that couldn’t quite be explained away by having to front a crowd of hip-thrusting, booty-gyrating tweens. Although, granted, that was enough to make anyone jumpy.

  Could it be that Diane had been given the wrong information? Had Raven really flown the coop? Is it possible Diane was sending me out on a wild-goose chase in the middle of the night? And if so, was it really a mistake or some perverted fun on her part? After all, the woman fired publicists like normal people got spray tans. Who knew what she did for kicks after hours.

  Pulling up outside the club, I saw with a sinking heart that Diane wasn’t wro
ng. Four photographers lined the footpath, shooting the breeze with who I assumed was the owner of the club (and most likely the one who had alerted them). Due to the hour, and the fact it was midweek, there was no one on the door when I schlepped inside, leaving me free to run upstairs to the second level in the sixties-inspired club, all vintage furniture and black and white patterned carpet, where I began searching for our pill-popping protégée.

  It didn’t take long to find her.

  There, in a corner near the dance floor, was Raven. She was flicking her head as though trapped in a beehive, and her bottom jaw looked like it was about to detach and go and get a cocktail.

  I stalked over. ‘Raven, hi. Remember me? Jasmine? I’m the publicist who’s been looking after you for the past few days,’ I said to the hot mess.

  ‘Someone has been, like, cutting off my fucking hair,’ she said by way of reply, still flicking her hair and ferociously licking her lips.

  Aside from the sweat beads forming on her forehead, both Raven and her allegedly hacked-off hair looked fine to me.

  ‘What the fuck have they done?’ she shouted, looking around for the rogue hairdresser while pulling long blonde locks out herself.

  People were starting to stare. This kid was attracting way too much attention here. Bloody Hollywood exhibitionist; she couldn’t go anywhere without demanding an audience.

  Nervous about potentially catching something from touching her, I reached out and removed her hands from her head, where she was fast giving herself alopecia. Next, I brought my face up close to hers and spoke loudly and clearly, trying to avoid any polysyllabic words: ‘Look, you are fine and you are hot. In fact, why don’t we go to the bathroom so you can see for yourself?’

  Raven smiled and nodded enthusiastically.

  Grabbing her hand, I wheeled her around and was pointing out the direction of the bathrooms when I spotted her handbag lying nearby. It was a caramel Balenciaga behemoth that I’d drooled over just the day before. I snatched up the tote and dragged Raven towards the toilets when an ‘I Kissed a Girl’ megamix boomed from the dance floor.