Which is nuts, because it’s not like I’ve never smoked. I used to. Admittedly only when I was drunk, and not since I was about nineteen, when I went on a trip to Paris with Olly and smoked so many overpowering French cigarettes that it put me off for life.
But is this sort of hair-splitting worth missing out on another few minutes in Dillon’s company, when he’s never likely to exchange another word with me again?
‘What I mean to say is that I try not to smoke.’
‘Oh, well, if you’ve given up, then all credit to you—’
‘No, no, I haven’t given up! I’ve failed completely at it! Love smoking. Love it to death. Literally to death, probably, the amount I smoke!’
‘Then be my guest.’ He hands me the cigarette he’s holding, takes another for himself and then reaches into his back pocket again for a lighter.
‘So you’re one of the extras, right?’ he asks, flicking the lighter on and holding it out towards me.
‘Mnnh-hnngh.’ This is because I’ve got the cigarette in my mouth. ‘I’ve sort of been promoted, though,’ I add, once the end is lit. ‘I mean, I’ve got my first line to speak today. It’s not exactly a proper part, and obviously I get to wear the ugliest costume on set, but …’
‘Oh, I don’t know. I’ve seen worse.’ He takes an expert puff on his own cigarette, blowing the smoke in the opposite direction from me (which is courteous of him, seeing as I’m technically smoking too; I just haven’t risked actually inhaling yet in case I cough and sputter, unattractively, all over him). ‘I’ve an ex or two that looked a bit like that,’ – he nods at the alien head I’m clutching in my hand – ‘without their slap on.’
This is unlikely. But I appreciate his generosity.
‘Anyway, if you’re one of the extras, you probably know a thing or two about the way things work around here.’
‘Work?’
‘Yeah, every show I’ve ever worked on, the extras are always the ones who know how it all works. Who’s the biggest diva. Who’s got the biggest coke problem. Who’s getting it on in the props storeroom. I mean, there’s always somebody getting it on in the props storeroom, isn’t there?’
Given that I’m about to furnish my entire flat from the props storeroom, I can only hope that he’s joking about this.
‘So?’ he asks. ‘Dish the dirt! Tell me who to avoid, who to cultivate, who I’m going to get a stonking great crush on …’
‘Don’t you have a girlfriend?’ I suddenly blurt.
No, I’m not sure what’s wrong with me, either.
His black eyes narrow. ‘That’s a very personal question.’
‘Sorry, I only asked because … well, I read things in Grazia, obviously … not that I read a lot of celebrity gossip! Only when I’m in the waiting room at the dentist, or something. Hardly ever.’
‘You hardly ever go to the dentist?’
‘No! I mean, yes! I go loads!’ I say, continuing my apparent quest to make him think I have poor dental management and stinky cheese-breath. ‘Well, not loads … a normal amount, I’d say … Actually, it’s my sister Cass who reads all the gossip magazines—’
‘Then tell the silly cow not to believe everything she reads in them.’
‘Hey!’ I don’t care how gorgeous he is, standing here with his bare chest, and chivalrously blowing smoke away from me. ‘That’s my sister you’re talking about.’
‘Sorry.’ He looks, and sounds, instantly contrite. But then he is an actor, I suppose. Still, he repeats it. ‘Sorry. That was unforgivably rude of me.’
‘It was, a bit.’
‘It’s just that the girlfriend thing … it’s private, you know?’
‘Yes. Of course. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.’
‘Ah, you’re all right … Sorry, I’ve just realized I don’t know your name.’
‘Libby. Libby Lomax.’
‘Well, you’re all right, Libby, Libby Lomax. I’ll forgive you for calling me an arsehole. And for lying to me about being a smoker.’
Damn it; I’ve let the bloody thing practically burn itself out in my hand.
‘I am a smoker! I just forgot I had one,’ I say, popping the cigarette back into my mouth and hoping I can look one-tenth as sexy as him when I take a drag on it …
‘Dillon!’
Shit. It’s Vanessa, coming out of Wardrobe and walking towards us.
If she catches me smoking a cigarette, I’ll be off this location shoot in even less time than it would take Dillon to talk Cass into bed with him.
Instinctively, I do the first thing that springs to mind, which is to pull on the head I’ve got squashed under my arm.
It’s a nanosecond later that I realize I still have the cigarette between my lips.
But it’s OK! It’s OK, because all I have to do is walk past Vanessa and go, as fast as I can, round the other side of the catering bus, where I can pull my head off and take the cigarette out.
Or at least, I could, if she weren’t blocking my way with her arms folded and a scowl on her face.
‘Libby,’ she hisses, none too quietly, ‘what the fuck are you bothering Dillon for?’
‘She wasn’t bothering me, Vanessa, don’t stress about it.’ Dillon taps me on the shoulder from behind, and when I wheel round unsteadily he’s holding out one of my latex gloves. ‘You dropped this.’
‘Thank you,’ I mumble, snatching the glove and making to turn away again. But he stops me.
‘You’re smoking,’ he says.
Traitor! He’s sold me out, and right in front of Vanessa, too.
‘I mean, you’re really smoking, Libby.’
He’s staring into my eyes, through the pin-holes in my Warty Alien head, with such intensity that I can’t help but think … Is he saying he fancies me? I mean, nobody’s ever called me ‘smoking’ before, and certainly not someone as smoking-hot himself as Dillon is, but I suppose weirder things have happened—
‘For fuck’s sake!’ Vanessa ruins the moment by screaming, at Obergruppenführer volume, from behind me. ‘Her fucking head’s on fire!’
At the very same time as she screams this, I inhale an extremely unpleasant smell that can only be burning latex.
OK, so I know the Thing To Do in a fire is to stay cool, calm and collected. I know the worst thing you can do is to panic, because you just start to drag other people under with you …
Oh, hang on a minute, that’s drowning.
In a head-on-fire scenario, panic, I suspect, is perfectly acceptable.
‘Shit!’ I almost out-scream Vanessa, pulling at my head in a wild frenzy. But it isn’t coming off! It isn’t coming off! ‘Get it off, get it off, get it off me!’
‘For fuck’s sake!’ Vanessa is yelling, again, as she stampedes away from us toward the catering bus door. ‘We need the fucking fire extinguisher!’
‘There’s no time for that.’ I hear Dillon’s voice, and then feel his hand grab my wrists to stop me ineffectually yanking at my head. ‘Stop,’ he orders, ‘and keep still.’
Then he grips the alien head, pulls it clear of my actual head, and throws the smouldering latex down onto the ground.
And then everything goes black.
I haven’t fainted, by the way. I think Dillon’s just thrown his T-shirt over me to put out any lingering sparks.
There’s a brief, stunned silence.
‘You all right under there?’ Dillon asks, a moment later.
I open my mouth to say ‘Just about’ when I’m hit, smack in the middle of the face, with a powerful jet of very cold liquid.
I gasp, which draws a large portion of sodden T-shirt into my mouth. I gag, splutter, and double over.
‘Fucking hell!’ I hear Dillon say, from my position near his groin. ‘It was under control. You didn’t need to blast the poor girl with the fire extinguisher!’
Ah, so it was very cold foam, then. Just in case I didn’t look like enough of an idiot with a wet T-shirt over my head … no, it has to be a foam-covered T-s
hirt instead.
But Vanessa clearly isn’t in any kind of mood for sympathy.
‘Libby! What the fuck are you playing at?’
‘Hey, leave her alone.’ I feel a hand on my shoulder, pulling me upright. ‘Let me get that off you,’ Dillon says, pulling at the T-shirt.
‘I’m fine! Might be better to leave it on for a bit longer, actually!’ Like, until the end of time. Or at least until I’ve regained my composure, and until everyone on the catering bus – whom I can now hear leaning out of the windows, asking each other what’s been going on, and having a good old chortle when they hear the answer – has gone home and, ideally, sixty or seventy years down the line, died, without me having to face them again. I grip onto the T-shirt at neck level. ‘Better not to … you know … expose burnt skin to the air.’
‘Shit, did your skin burn?’ Dillon rips the T-shirt off my head in one smooth movement; he’s obviously a man accustomed to removing items of clothing from women. ‘Oh, don’t worry, you’re all right. It’s only your hair.’
‘Only my hair what?’
‘That’s been burnt off.’
‘My hair’s been burnt off?’
‘God, no, no, no.’
I feel weak with relief, until he goes on.
‘I mean, not all of it. Only most of the right side. Unless …’ He studies me for a moment. ‘I’m sorry, maybe I just didn’t notice. Did you have a lopsided haircut when I was talking to you five minutes ago?’
‘No!’ I yelp, clutching the side of my head. I’m horrified to feel short, crispy, burnt bits where there used to be, if not exactly locks worthy of a Victoria’s Secret Angel, at least a perfectly decent amount of hair.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Libby, it’s only fucking hair.’ Vanessa is snapping her fingers at one of the crew members leaning out of the bus window to come and take the fire extinguisher from her. ‘It’ll grow back. Unlike the chunk you’ve burnt out of that costume!’
‘I’m really sorry, Vanessa. It was an accident.’
‘Yeah, it was an accident.’ Dillon backs me up. ‘I mean, nobody would intentionally set light to themselves like that. Unless they were a Buddhist monk, or something. Which you’re not, are you?’
Before I can answer, there’s a collective wheeze of mirth from the watching crew members, and one of them starts up – oh, so hilariously – a chant of Om.
‘Ah, give her a break, guys.’ Dillon grins up at them and pats me on the shoulder. His hand stays there. I don’t breathe in case this alerts him and he decides to move it. ‘Poor girl’s had a nasty shock. You know, one of you baboons could make yourselves useful and get her a nice cup of sweet tea, instead of standing there taking the …’
His eyes suddenly flicker sideways.
Which is hardly surprising, given that my sister has just teetered into view.
Lord only knows what Mum texted her after seeing the selfie, but Cass has ramped up the sexiness by roughly one hundred degrees centigrade. She’s changed into her Cat Person costume, for the show, but with a few little tweaks that only a certifiable man-eater like Cass is truly capable of. She’s unzipped the front of the skintight jumpsuit down to a near-pornographic level, replaced the regulation black Dr Martens with – and I can only assume she either brought these with her this morning, or borrowed them from a streetwalker a little closer to King’s Cross – a thigh-high pair of stiletto-heeled boots, and coated her mouth in what is surely the entire contents of a tube of Nars Striptease lip gloss.
Part of me wants to applaud her for such brazen, no-holds-barred chutzpah.
A much larger part of me wants to rip off her thigh boots and beat her over the head with them.
Because Dillon’s hand has just dropped off my shoulder. And I’ve just dropped off his radar.
‘Oh, my God!’ Cass squeals, clasping her hands to her mouth and doing a pretty decent performance of Distraught Woman. ‘Libby! My darling sister! What happened?’
‘Your darling sister set fire to her fucking head,’ Vanessa snaps. ‘Costing me six hundred quid for a replacement costume in the process.’
‘Oh, my God!’ Cass says, again. (Her performance might be decent, but the script has its limits.) ‘And your hair, Libby! What have you done to your beautiful, beautiful hair!’
Which would be a nice thing for her to have said, if it weren’t for the fact that I suspect it’s just a vehicle for her next trick, which is to break down in melodramatic sobs and clutch a hand to her (ballooning) chest, as if she’s about to swoon.
‘Woah, there!’ Dillon slips an arm around her waist. ‘Let’s go and get you a hot, sweet cup of tea.’
The same hot, sweet cup of tea that he promised me a moment ago. And which, I can’t help but notice, the entire leering gang of crew members is practically leap-frogging each other off the bus to fetch for her.
‘I’m sorry!’ Cass gulps. ‘It’s just such a terrible shock …’
‘Oh, for crying out loud,’ Vanessa mutters, which actually makes me feel quite fond of her all of a sudden.
‘Of course it is, sweetheart,’ Dillon is saying, in a melted-dark-chocolate tone quite unlike the one he was using while he was chatting to me. ‘You just need that tea, and a nice sit-down …’
‘I do,’ Cass replies, dabbing prettily at dry cheeks. ‘I do need a lie-down.’
You have to give it to her (and Dillon, no doubt, will do exactly that), she’s good at this stuff. The Damsel in Distress act (when I’m the only one round here who’s got any reason to be in distress); the subtle hint that she’d rather be lying down than sitting …
‘I’m Dillon, by the way,’ Dillon is murmuring, putting a hand in the small of her back and steering her in the direction of the leap-frogging crew members on their way to Olly’s catering truck.
‘And I’m Cassidy …’
Vanessa and I watch them go, united – for once – in irritation.
‘Your fucking sister,’ says Vanessa.
To agree would be disloyal; to disagree would be rank hypocrisy. So I don’t say anything.
‘You’re all right?’ she asks, gesturing at my burnt hair. ‘Not actually injured or anything?’
‘No, I’m OK.’ I’m touched that she’s concerned. ‘But thanks, Vanessa, and I’m really sorry again about—’
‘Good,’ she says, briskly. ‘Then I don’t need to get the first-aid guys over before you leave.’
‘Leave?’
‘The shoot. The show, in fact.’
I stare at her. ‘You’re … firing me?’
‘Well, of course I fucking well am. You’re lucky I’m not also charging you for the costume you’ve just wrecked.’
‘But I … this was meant to be my big … I mean, I need the money for my rent … And my mother is going to …’
‘None of that is my problem.’ She turns on her heel. ‘Sorry, Libby,’ she adds, in a flat tone of no regret whatsoever. ‘But can you please just return the costume to Wardrobe and get off my set?’
There’s absolutely no point in arguing. All I can do now is do as she says and get out of here while I still have my dignity.
OK, while I still have a shred of dignity.
OK, before I annoy her any more and she decides to charge me six hundred quid into the bargain. Because, in all honesty, I think my dignity has pretty much gone the way of my hair. Along with the ability to pay the rent on my flat, and the long-awaited approval of my mother.
Still, at least the Om-chanting crew are no longer around to witness my walk of shame. I suppose I have to be grateful for small mercies.
I’m due to pick the keys up from my new landlord, Bogdan, at six o’clock this evening, but there are several things I need to get done before then.
The first, and let’s face it, most important, being to buy a hat.
This I accomplish by nipping in to the huge TK Maxx near Marble Arch tube, grabbing the largest straw sunhat I can find (thank God it’s a sunny day, so I have an obvious excuse to be we
aring it) and taking off the label to wear it immediately after handing over the fiver it cost me.
And it’s a good thing it was reasonably cheap, because my next stop is at the cheese shop on New Quebec Street, where I’m due to collect forty quid’s worth of eye-wateringly expensive (and probably just eye-watering, ha-ha) cheese that I ordered a couple of days ago. It’s for Olly, as a thank-you gift for all his help with the move and the furniture. I racked my brains for quite a while to come up with something I knew he’d love – a sci-fi movie box-set, a kitchen-y gadget for messing about with when he’s cooking (for fun, staggeringly) at home – but in the end I thought some serious cheese was a great gift for someone who’s … well, as serious about cheese as Olly is.
As we both are, in fact. Cheese was one of the very first things we bonded over, and cheese has continued to play a front-and-centre role in our friendship ever since. We sometimes go to cheese-tasting evenings – right here, at Le Grand Fromage on New Quebec Street, or at Neal’s Yard Dairy in Covent Garden; we once went to an entire cheese festival, at some Nineties rock star’s country farm down in Somerset; when I was nineteen and he was turning twenty-one, we celebrated his significant birthday by taking the Eurostar over to Paris for the day, wandering around the first arrondissement, from fromagerie to fromagerie (with l’occasional stop-off at le bar on the way), buying more cheese than we could possibly afford, and eating most of it on the Eurostar on the way back home. Le Marathon de Cheese, we called it, and we’ve long talked about repeating the performance.
The owner of Le Grand Fromage recognizes me by now, and waves to me from behind the counter as I make my way through the door and into her shop.
‘Hi, there! Libby, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right!’ I don’t know her name; she did mention it to me once, but I’ve forgotten it and now it’s too embarrassing to ask again. In my head I just call her The Big Cheese Woman. Which makes her sound like she’s made entirely from wheels of cheddar, with mini Babybels for her eyes and nose, when in fact she’s a pleasant-looking forty-something with a petite figure and an enviable choppy haircut. (Enviable even before I burnt half my hair off this morning. Right now, I might actually kill to have hair like hers.) ‘You called to say my cheese order was ready?’
A Night In With Audrey Hepburn Page 4