Bad Heir Day

by Wendy Holden

  The phrases “ironic,” “cult,” and “the real-life Spinal Tap” were repeated again and again. “Jett St. Edmunds,” the Radio One researcher breathed reverently, “you are, quite literally, the new black.” Slowly, Cassandra worked out that not only was Jett’s nationwide tour of student halls proving a massive success, but “Sex and Sexibility,” the first single released from the Ass Me Anything comeback album, had gone straight to number one.

  “With a bullet,” some of the journalists added, whatever that meant. She wouldn’t mind pumping a few bullets into Jett now. Number one. Cassandra’s heart plummeted faster and colder than a block of frozen urine from a plane.

  Cassandra slammed the mobile back into the glove compartment. It was just so sodding typical of him to get successful now she was in the middle of divorcing him. Having sat on his arse doing fuck all for the past ten years at least, he would choose now, of all times, to get his act together and become famous. And, no doubt, rich. Bastard, thought Cassandra furiously. No wonder she was divorcing him.

  ***

  Geri, Anna considered, was proving something of a disappointment on the moral support front. So far, she had failed to detect any of the expected froideur between her faithful friend and her conniving fiancé. On the contrary, they were getting on like a castle on fire. Geri seemed to be drinking in every detail about Dampie as enthusiastically as she was downing the gin and flat tonics Anna had been relegated to preparing from the rudimentary contents of the drinks tray.

  “You know,” Geri said, “you should really think about promoting this place more. It’s so romantic and interesting. Have you ever thought of opening it to the public?”

  Anna was unable to suppress a snort. Jamie shot her an indignant look.

  “This place is a tourist gold mine.” Geri looked around decisively. “You’ve got turrets, towers, suits of armour, Dr. Johnson, and Mad Angus Thingy’s romantic burn, and that’s just for starters. You’ve even got a monster.”

  “Have we?” Jamie looked amazed.

  “Yes. That woman who showed me up to the sitting room was just about the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.” There was a silence. Anna looked keenly at Jamie.

  “You mean Nanny?” Jamie’s voice was noncommittal. Then, confounding all expectation, his mouth moved up at the corners. “I suppose she is a bit fearsome,” he admitted.

  Anna almost fell off her—admittedly rickety—chair. Jamie had never said anything before that implied Nanny was one whit less beautiful than Kate Moss.

  “Any dungeons?” Geri enquired briskly. “Tourists love a good dungeon.”

  “How come you know so much about it?” Anna asked.

  “Actually,” Jamie interrupted, looking hurriedly at his watch, “I think we’d better go down to dinner. Nanny will be very cross if we’re late.”

  “I was a hotel PR for years,” Geri confessed once they were seated at opposite ends and in the middle of the long dining table. “I quite enjoyed it, until…”

  “What?” asked Anna.

  “Until it all went horribly wrong when A. A. Gill was supposed to be going to one of the restaurants I represented. Everyone got in such a state because they didn’t know what he looked like that they made me do a drawing of him and fax it through.”

  “No!” said Jamie. “How ridiculous.”

  “Yes, and it all went more pear-shaped than the chef’s Belle Hélène. They ended up making the most tremendous fuss of someone who looked exactly like my drawing but turned out to be Jimmy Tarbuck. Poor Adrian Gill got completely ignored, was really pissed off, and slagged off the restaurant all over the Sunday Times.”

  Anna laughed. It was impossible not to find Geri funny, despite her abject failure to find Jamie as appalling as she was supposed to.

  “Then I decided to go into travel PR, but I left it when I found myself.”

  “Found yourself?” Jamie looked nonplussed. “But isn’t that a good thing?”

  “Found myself halfway up some mountain in Grenada with some old git from the travel pages looking up my skirt and asking for my room number, I mean,” said Geri. “After that, I decided to pack it in. Gosh, what’s this?”

  Nanny had arrived in the dining room, her large, reddened thumbs firmly pushed over the rim into whatever was piled on the pitilessly large plates. A teaspoonful of grey flakes that might have been some sort of fish cowered at the foothills of an Everest of pulverised vegetable.

  “Yummy,” said Geri. “I love mashed potato.”

  “Champit tatties, you mean.” Jamie glanced nervously into the shadows where Nanny lurked.

  “Do I?”

  “Yes, and that orange stuff next to it is bashed neeps.”

  “Oh well, never mind. I’m sure they taste just as good as ordinary neeps, whatever they are.”

  “Actually,” Jamie said hurriedly, “Nanny’s cooking is renowned the length and breadth of the island.”

  “I bet it is,” giggled Geri, flinging him a flirtatious glance as devastating as a mortar. “Well, nobody’s perfect. I expect there are lots of other things she can do.”

  Anna was not in the least surprised when Nanny turned massively in her shadow and stomped furiously out of the room. What was amazing was that Jamie did not immediately scuttle after her. Instead, he shrugged his shoulders and grinned apologetically at Geri.

  Past one in the morning, they were still all in the sitting room. Egged on by Geri, Jamie had returned to the subject of Dampie and had even dug out some mouldering and ancient pamphlets about the island. Anna, meanwhile, had felt compelled to stay through a mixture of masochism and curiosity. Geri was up to something, it was obvious. But what?

  “And this is Old Man Rock.” Clouds of dust wafted from the pamphlet Jamie waved at Geri. “It’s supposed to look like an old man.”

  Anna recalled the penis-shaped rock she had glimpsed fleetingly in the mist. No doubt the keen-to-impress-Jamie Geri would think of a more suitable way to describe it.

  “Looks exactly like a penis to me,” said Geri, staring at the grey, grainy picture.

  Anna muffled a giggle.

  “Well…” began Jamie, doubtfully.

  “But don’t you see?” said Geri. “That’s a great asset. If you think about how many people go and look at a lump of stone shaped like four presidents, just think how many will come to see a rock that’s shaped like a penis.”

  Jamie did not look entirely convinced. “I suppose I see what you’re getting at,” he muttered.

  “And what’s this?” Geri reached for another pamphlet and sneezed as she prised apart its long unopened pages. “The Mount O’Many Stanes?”

  “A construction in the islands west comprising concentric circles of stone slabs on a hilltop,” supplied Jamie instantly. Both women looked at each other, and then at Jamie, in astonishment.

  “Various guesses—graveyard, remains of extraterrestrial settlement, early form of calculator—have been hazarded through the centuries,” Jamie added, “but no one really knows what they’re there for. The latest research thinks it has something to do with working out the best time for planting crops.”

  “Fine,” said Geri, breezily. “You’re looking at the world’s first Filofax in that case, aren’t you? The cake-and-a-crap crowd will love it.”

  “Sorry?” said Jamie.

  “Cake-and-a-crap crowd,” Geri enunciated emphatically. “Tourists, in other words. They like to have a look at something before going to what they really came for—the café and the loo.”

  As Geri and Jamie proceeded to discuss Dampie’s potential as the Alton Towers of the North, Anna found following the conversation increasingly impossible. Her thoughts kept drifting to a smiling poet with big teeth. She resolved to add every detail of her encounter with Robbie to tonight’s diary entry, especially her impression that she had met someone with a heart almost as big
as his muscles. “Come to my class tomorrow if you feel like it,” he had said. Such a shame he had a beard. But even given that rather considerable drawback, Anna was surprised by how much she felt like it.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  When Geri failed to appear at breakfast, Anna seized the opportunity to take it up to her. Doubtless after a night on one of Dampie’s rock-stuffed mattresses, she would have an altogether different view of both the castle and its laird. At last they’d be able to have the heart to heart she’d been longing for.

  “Ugh, that smells disgusting,” groaned Geri, turning her face away from the plate of tepid egg on toast. Anna tried not to mind the ingratitude—following Geri’s comments the night before it had taken the diplomatic skills of Kofi Annan to get any breakfast at all out of Nanny this morning. Only by pretending the eggs were for him had Jamie acquired them. Anna had stepped in before he could take them upstairs himself, but not before hearing about little other than Geri all breakfast-time. “So positive,” Jamie kept repeating. “So full of good ideas.”

  “Oh my head. Someone’s tightening a rope around my brain.” Geri’s usually tanned face was almost as sludge green as the blankets. “It was that fish we had last night. I’m sure it was off. I’ve had,” she added, “what you might call a long dark night of the sole.”

  Anna suspected there might be another reason for Geri’s condition and wondered guiltily whether she really should have compensated for the flatness of the tonic by adding twice as much gin. Geri’s Malteser eyes were now rather more reminiscent of a red-rimmed multi-hued gobstopper.

  “And I’m sure this horrible seventies wallpaper’s not helping,” grinned Anna, nodding her head towards the vast orange and brown flowers crawling all over the walls. To her surprise, Geri refused to rise to the bait.

  “Well, I wasn’t expecting Claridges. And if you think this is bad, you should have seen the room I got last time.”

  “I think its probably the room I’ve got now,” sighed Anna. As the familiar drone of MacLoggie started up outside the windows, she looked at her watch. Three hours later than usual—Jamie must have asked him specially to serenade Geri. And, Anna saw gleefully, it wasn’t having quite the effect he was intending.

  “What the hell is that?” Geri shot up in bed like a scalded cat. “Christ, my head. My brain’s slamming around in there like a squash ball.”

  “Since the dawn of time,” Anna declaimed dramatically, “MacLoggies have lived and died as pipers to the Anguses.”

  “Died, by the sound of that,” Geri groaned. “One’s heart rather goes out to the Anguses.”

  As MacLoggie’s attempts to launch into “Scotland the Brave” collapsed into a cacophony of choking coughs, Geri covered her ears. “I’m not sure about the bagpipes,” she groaned, “but he does a great catarrh solo.”

  Anna stuck her fingers in her ears. “See what I have to put up with?”

  “Oh, the poor old boy’s in a bad way,” Geri chided. “When he showed me to my room last night, his knees were cracking like a firing squad.”

  “I wish I’d never seen this place.” Anna, overcome by a fit of despair, dramatically buried her head in the musty-smelling quilt on Geri’s bed. “Come for a walk with me?”

  “I couldn’t. The only walk I’m capable of making is to the bathroom to throw up.”

  “But I need to talk to you. My life’s fallen apart at the seams.”

  “Bit like these sheets then.”

  Something in Anna suddenly snapped. She rounded on Geri with fury. “All very well for you to come up here and find the whole thing side-splitting,” she snapped. “I thought you were supposed to be my friend.”

  “I am. But I feel slightly as if I’ve been dragged up on false pretences.”

  “False pretences?”

  “Well, you made it sound as if you were more or less rotting alive in a dungeon, helpless in the grip of an evil and ruthless brute of a fiancé and his stone-hearted female accomplice…” Geri held up a hand as Anna tried to interrupt. “…And I arrive to find you in the company of nothing more disturbing than a slightly preoccupied and really rather sweet Scottish aristo and his nanny who, though admittedly not at the front of the queue when looks were given out, isn’t exactly Frankenstein. In other words, I think you might have things slightly out of proportion.”

  “Well.” Anna’s mouth opened and shut like a guppy catching flies. “There’s nothing much in proportion about Nanny, for a start.”

  “Nanny’s easily dealt with. She just needs showing who’s boss. Take the piss out of her a bit, like I did last night. Better still, just sack her.”

  “And what,” demanded Anna furiously, “is so wonderfully in proportion about Jamie only wanting to marry me so he’ll inherit the estate? What about the fact that he lured me up here on false pretences?”

  “Darling,” Geri sighed ostentatiously, “every husband, to some extent, lures his wife on false pretences. If every woman knew exactly who and what she was marrying, there wouldn’t be any weddings at all.”

  The blood pounded in Anna’s head. Her brain whirled. How dare, how could Geri be so flippant about her situation—a situation she was only in, after all, largely thanks to Geri. Right, well, she’d let her have it with both barrels.

  “What about Jamie not wanting to have sex with me?” There. Get out of that.

  There was a pause. Got her, Anna thought, darkly triumphant.

  “Well, sweetheart,” Geri eventually remarked, “I suppose you have to look on the bright side.”

  “Bright side?” Anna was staggered. “What bright side?”

  “Well, a lot of wives would give anything for a husband who doesn’t want to have sex with them. Kate for one. Julian gives her a UTI practically every time. She has to sit on the loo for hours pouring water on her clit from a milk bottle.”

  “But this is practically an arranged marriage,” blustered an aghast Anna. “Except for the fact that no one ever got around to arranging it,” she added.

  “Well, in that case perhaps you should get on with it,” said Geri calmly. “Jamie’s very good-looking. Just get real, will you? You could have ended up with a lot worse.”

  Anna felt she was about to hyperventilate with shock and disappointment.

  “OK, so your sex life isn’t exactly electric,” said Geri, “but you can be friends. Lots of couples are and have affairs on the side. It would be rather fun. Very French.”

  “But I don’t want to have affairs on the side,” wailed Anna. “I wanted to marry for love. I thought I was going to.”

  Geri looked at her with a mixture of exasperation and pity. “Your trouble is that you’re a fully paid up, hearts and flowers hopeless romantic, aren’t you?”

  “And what’s wrong with that? Better that than viewing every relationship as a business opportunity,” she snapped, immediately regretting it.

  There was a silence.

  “Knights on white chargers don’t exist in real life,” said Geri. She sounded more sad than triumphant. “At least, not without the charger being weighed down with more baggage than the Heathrow arrivals hall.”

  Anna’s top lip quivered, her throat ached, and her eyes brimmed with tears. She would not cry.

  “I just don’t understand,” Geri continued, “why you seem incapable of seeing what a brilliant position you’re in.”

  Anna closed her eyes. “You’ve lost me,” she said faintly. The only position she was aware of was sitting in a rickety armchair from which entire handfuls of smelly stuffing were making a bid for freedom.

  “The castle, of course.” Geri’s voice was now hard with impatience. “Absolutely bursting with opportunities. Wake up and smell the coffee—not to mention the tearoom, the conference dinners, the five-star restaurant specialising in local produce—you name it. Just stop being so bloody sensitive. You could really make a
go of this place.”

  “Well, why don’t you?” sobbed Anna, reaching both the end of her tether and her ability to hold the tears back. “As you’ve got so many brilliant ideas for it. Personally speaking, I’m finding it less than wonderful to be stuck in a rotting pile in the middle of nowhere with a fiancé who literally doesn’t give a fuck.” Tearing out of the room, Anna headed for her bedroom. Her first instinct was to go straight to her diary and confide to its unconditionally sympathetic bosom every shocking detail of Geri’s shameless betrayal.

  Sitting on the musty quilt, she flicked back randomly through the pages, reliving the humiliation of the overheard conversation between Nanny and MacLoggie and the heart-sinking misery of Jamie confessing he was marrying her for a reason. Get real indeed. Was there something wrong with her that she didn’t immediately feel able to pick herself up, dust herself down and channel her frustrations into a tourist boutique? Reading on, however, she suddenly felt self-conscious. She imagined Geri’s mocking tones. “To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, it would take a heart of stone to read the diaries of Little Anna and not laugh.”

  Looking at the battered pad, its pages covered with her embarrassingly large and juvenile-looking scrawl, Anna was suddenly overpowered by a sense of futility. What was the point of writing things down in a filthy old book when no one but herself would ever see them? What had happened to the wonderful writing career—writing real books—that she had promised herself? Hopeless romantic, quite literally. She stared at the creased and battered old notebook with sudden loathing. It seemed less a repository for observations, dreams, and ambitions than a chronicle of abject defeat.

  Grasping the now-hated notebook by its cover, Anna walked slowly out of the room, down the stairs, out of the front door, and down the pitted and scabby drive, pausing only to stuff the entire volume firmly into the dustbin that stood by the peeling and half-unhinged gate for collection. Rubbish to rubbish, she thought.

  ***

  “Her nipple pinged erect under the urgent rasp of his flickering tongue. She groaned as, tracing her long, red-painted fingernails down the matted hair on his chest, her hand touched the thick, insistent swell of his tumescent and throbbing cock…”