by Elton, Ben
Peroxide
Ten months after this conversation, Georgie’s parents were sitting in their small sitting room listening to the sound of the toilet flushing upstairs. They had not heard their daughter Georgia vomiting but that was only because she always played loud music when she went to the toilet to puke.
It had started again the moment she got the phone call.
‘Yeah, hi, Mr Costello, it’s Emma from Chart Throb, remember me? How’s gorgeous Georgie, we so love Georgie. We are such big fans. Is she there?’
Georgie was the younger of the two members of Peroxide, a pop duo which she and her friend ‘Chelle had formed while attending Saturday morning drama classes and which the previous year had triumphantly sailed through the first round of Chart Throb only to be sensationally dumped in the second. Georgie had been just seventeen at the time, too young, in her father’s opinion, to be appearing half-naked on television.
‘If it’s a singing competition why can’t you wear some clothes?’ he asked.
‘The show’s all about having what it takes, Dad,’ Georgia would reply, standing on the living-room carpet in little more than her underwear. ‘Calvin’s always saying it . . . do you have what it takes? Well, this is what it takes.’
The skimpy costumes had been ‘Chelle’s idea. At nineteen, she was very much the senior partner in the act.
Georgia’s parents were firmly of the opinion that their daughter’s eating disorders had begun with those costumes. ‘Chelle was a natural exhibitionist who would happily have worn her hotpants and bra top to the pub, but Georgia had what her school counsellor called ‘body issues’. She was a slim girl who, when she stood before the mirror, saw a fat girl staring back. Despite being generally acknowledged as very pretty, Georgia could never quite convince herself that her body was good enough to be displayed alongside the confident ‘Chelle’s and so she began to punish it for its inadequacy.
After Peroxide’s sudden and brutal ejection from Chart Throb Georgia had become convinced that they had failed because she hadn’t been thin enough. The more people expressed surprise that she and ’Chelle had failed to advance to the Pop School stage of the competition, the more she believed that it was her fault.
In the weeks following the ejection Georgia’s parents had watched in despair as their beautiful daughter had gone to war with her own body. At first they had hoped that as the notoriety faded she would regain some sense of balance in her life, but the extinguishing of the media spotlight served only to increase Georgia’s self-loathing. The comments in the street went from support to pity to contempt and finally to indifference, and it was this last that seemed to hurt Georgia most. For a moment she had imagined that she meant something and then she had discovered that she didn’t. It was all the fault of her traitorous body.
It had taken six months of family pain, together with the money for private help that her parents could ill afford, to bring Georgia back from the brink, and now it was all beginning again.
‘Hi, Georgie!’ Emma chirruped. ‘How’s it all going with Peroxide? We love Peroxide.’
Nothing had been promised. Emma had been extremely careful not to commit herself or her employers in any way but nonetheless she was gently encouraging. Subtle hints were dropped that everybody on the team thought an injustice had been done the previous year and that the girls owed it to themselves not to be beaten by it. They were two strong ladies and it was up to them to come back fighting.
’Chelle and Georgia had been thrilled. ’Chelle had gone straight to the local Ann Summers shop to start work on their new costumes and Georgia, whose breasts had only recently returned to their normal shape and whose periods had still not become regular again, had gone straight to the toilet to begin the process of getting back into shape.
And so her parents sat and watched as the same old signs crashed back into their lives. The gorging, the flushing, the ever-present smell of toothpaste on her breath. It was Georgia’s way of maintaining control: if she could influence nothing else in her life she could at least hold sway over her own body, forcing it to shrink, consume itself, punish it for having failed the last time and showing it what would happen if it failed again.
A Royal Request
Three hundred envelopes, four coffees and two cigarettes on from Peroxide and Emma’s head was seriously beginning to spin with too many hopes and dreams when suddenly she picked up an envelope that brought her up short. It was such a surprise, a shock even, and for Emma a deeply depressing one. The envelope was marked Balmoral and had been franked by the Buckingham Palace Post Office. It was embossed with a triple-feathered crest.
The Prince of Wales was applying to be a Chart Throb.
She could hardly believe her eyes when she saw the name on the application form and read the personal description beneath it. Organic farmer. Charity worker. Heir to throne.
Emma felt like she wanted to cry. This was simply too much. It wasn’t that she was a fervent monarchist but she had a real affection for an institution that had lasted so many hundreds of years and was in any number of ways unique in the world. When Emma had been a little girl, the Queen had visited her school and everyone had had the most splendid day. All the little girls had carried flowers and felt themselves to be princesses in the presence of a real queen. Of course that had been nearly twenty years before and nowadays the monarchy was no longer the stuff of fairy tales. Nonetheless in a world of enormous breast implants, radical facelifts and reality television, Emma had continued to respect what the royal family stood for. And now . . . now the Prince of Wales was applying to be a Chart Throb.
‘Fuck!’ she could not help exclaiming. ‘My God!’
‘What’s up?’ Trent enquired as everybody around the big paper-strewn table turned to look.
‘Nothing,’ Emma replied.
In an instant she had made her decision. She would not put him through. She would save him from himself. Hiding the monogrammed envelope, she casually tossed the royal application on to the recycling pile.
‘It’s nothing at all,’ she repeated.
But it was too late.
‘What was that?’ Trent enquired.
‘Nothing, I said.’
‘So why shout “fuck” and “my God”? Come on, Emma, what’s on that form? Your mum?’
‘Oh, it’s just a stupid hoax, somebody pretending to be the Prince of Wales of all people. I’m binning it.’
‘Show me the envelope.’
Attempting a shrug of indifference, Emma handed over the envelope with its embossed fleur-de-lis and royal franking. Trent studied it carefully.
‘I think this is fucking genuine,’ he said at last.
‘Oh come on . . .’ Emma began.
‘Because if it is a hoax it could only come from somebody with access to the Buckingham Palace post room and what would they have to gain? Either way we need to find out. Get me the number of the Prince of Wales’s office.’
Fifteen minutes later the story was confirmed. His Royal Highness had indeed decided to volunteer for the experience of Chart Throb and hoped to be selected for audition. It was stressed that he wished to be treated in exactly the same manner as all the other applicants and that if he wasn’t he would withdraw.
‘The clever bastard,’ Trent exclaimed.
‘What do you mean?’ Emma replied. ‘It’s simply ridiculous. How could he possibly be a pop star?’
‘It’s a last throw of the dice, isn’t it? The guy’s finished anyway, every single poll says everybody wants him to stand aside for the next generation. So what does he do? He applies to join the next generation. It’s so audacious it isn’t funny! The clever, clever bastard.’
The more Emma thought about it the less she wanted any part of it. She was a girl who went to museums and visited castles. She was a member of the National Trust and the History Society. Tradition and the past meant something, surely? Except if the heir to the throne was to appear on Chart Throb, clearly they didn’t.
‘Let’s reject him,’ she said, trying to sound cool and casual.
‘What?’ Trent demanded, astonished.
‘He’ll just turn himself into even more of a laughing stock.’
‘And?’
‘Well . . . I mean, it might make us look stupid too.’
‘Uhm, I don’t think so, Emma. You have clearly lost the plot. This will be brilliant. Fucking hell. He actually thinks he can use us. They all do, don’t they? All those desperates who go on Celebrity Big Brother and I’m a Celebrity and Shag Me, I’m Famous, they all think they can use the process to get what they want. Haven’t they learned yet? Don’t they remember George Galloway? We will eat them. We will chew them up, swallow them down and shit them out! This guy actually thinks we’ll make him popular. He probably thinks it will make him seem down with the kids! Is he going to get a shock when Calvin’s finished editing his stupid royal arse!’
Beryl Is (Briefly) There for Priscilla
Beryl perched gingerly on the very edge of the back seat of her black stretch Humvee truck, wearing no seat belt in order to be able to sit as far forward as she could. She was of course breaking a state law and putting herself at risk of being stopped and fined by the LAPD, but Beryl was rock ’n’ roll and played by her own rules. Besides which, the Humvee was equipped with reflective windows and so she was totally safe from detection.
Beryl was perching on the front of her seat because she had finally been able to fit her arse into her celebrity surgeon’s busy schedule, where it had been subjected to a particularly brutal treatment of lifting, underpinning and cellulite-sucking. The surgeon had thrown in a complimentary rectal bleaching, which had stung like hell. She had also had more work done on her false vagina, which had been an ongoing project ever since her sex-change operation. Further work had been done on the imitation clitoris the surgeons had built for her out of the nerve endings which had been left hanging about after her dick was removed. Beryl’s ambition (as she had confessed to Oprah) was one day to be in a position to pleasure herself with a big black dildo.
‘Honestly, Oprah, I haven’t had one off the wrist since I gave old John Thomas a last slap in pre-op before they cut it off.’
Such indulgences were, however, in the future for Beryl and currently she was reluctant even to trust her full weight upon her bruised and battered undercarriage. Not that that weight amounted to much, since in another part of her obsessive body-management programme Beryl consumed a weekly fat pill which absorbed almost everything she ate before emerging from her like a seal stuck in a sewage pipe.
Having recently had the fat sucked out of your buttocks and what had once been your dick nerves knotted into a small bun to make a clitoris is not likely to put a person in the best of moods, but Beryl would have been tetchy even without having to sit on a sucked-out arse. For a start she was stuck in traffic and, like most people of her phenomenal wealth and power, Beryl could never quite work out why it was that traffic jams applied as much to her as to the rest of the human race. Why did she have to sit in traffic? Every other aspect of her existence was improved by her wealth but the trip out to LAX remained a frustratingly egalitarian experience. That couldn’t be right. Surely something could be done? But drum her fingers, swear at the windows and wriggle her sore arse about on the rich leather upholstery though she might, Beryl could think of nothing. Even she could not afford to build a private road from her house out to the airport and so the freeway remained her only option.
And that was another point. Why was she on the freeway anyway? Because she was on her way back to the UK, which she absolutely hated. The UK was where she had come from and (as she never tired of telling people) she had come from a dark, dark place. Backward, parochial and frustratingly devoid of good and attentive staff.
‘So why are you going?’ her wife Serenity had mumbled through her obscenely inflated inner-tube-like lips as she bade Beryl farewell from the marble steps of their mansion that morning.
It was a good question. Why go and work in shitty old Britain when you have a huge career and a huge house in sun-drenched California?
Deep in her heart, just above the groaning fat pill and behind the breast implants, Beryl knew the reason. Vanity, vengeful vanity. It was payback time. She wanted all the sad, dowdy, permanent residents of the dark little island from which she had come to see just how big a deal she was these days. All the people who, in her own mind, had shat on her and on whom she had most certainly shat would have to eat it. That was why she was going back to Britain: hate it though she most certainly did, there was nowhere on earth where her success mattered more to her.
Unfortunately for Beryl she was going to miss her flight and if she had been in a bad mood on her way out to the airport, that mood was sunshine itself compared to how she felt on her way back into town, having been urgently summoned to return to Beverly Hills. The call had come just as Beryl was finally beginning to relax and to think about a gin and tonic in the VIP area.
The call was from Claude, her personal assistant.
‘It’s bad news, I’m afraid, Mrs Blenheim. Priscilla’s been caught on camera buying coke.’
‘Fuck,’ Beryl gasped. ‘How’s it spinning?’
‘Not great. Fox is trying to be nice . . .’
‘Of course they are. We’re all under contract to them. I suppose everybody else is going for the jugular.’
‘Kind of. Maybe just a tad,’ Claude replied, trying to project a grimace of sympathy over a cell phone. ‘She says she needed it for the pain of her new breasts.’
‘Priscilla had new breasts?’
‘Yeah.’
‘How do they look?’
‘OK . . . Kind of big.’
‘Tacky big?’
‘Sort of.’
Beryl pulled down the favourites menu on the car’s computer and clicked on Priscilla’s website. Sure enough, there was her stepdaughter, now augmented by two enormous new breasts.
‘Fuck. She got herself a couple of Pammies.’
‘And some.’
‘Takes after her mum. Serenity gets new tits like most girls get new bras . . . Actually, you know, they look OK. Tacky but kind of punk. Like Courtney Love or something. I always say if you’re going to get new tits, get “Fuck You” tits. I know I did. She’ll have them removed when she gets bored.’
‘What do you want me to do about the drugs thing?’
Beryl had momentarily forgotten about this added complication to her life.
‘That idiot. If she needed drugs why didn’t she ask her fucking mother! Juan!’ Beryl shouted, rapping on the glass partition that separated her from her driver. ‘Turn around!’
If there was one thing Beryl prided herself on as a mother, it was her ability to handle a domestic crisis. Perhaps not mundane domestic crises, such as leaky taps, bee stings and tummy upsets. For that she would get her office to call a plumber or hand the kids over to a member of staff. But in terms of a real family crisis, like if one of her stepchildren was caught buying drugs after having inappropriate cosmetic surgery, for instance, and was subsequently engulfed in a media feeding frenzy which threatened to swamp the entire family franchise, Beryl was a mum in a million.
‘Where is she?’
‘At the precinct.’
‘She’s been busted?’
‘Maybe just a tad.’
‘Which precinct?’
‘Beverly Hills.’
Beryl breathed a small sigh of relief. Buying drugs in Beverly Hills was a very different thing to buying them in South Central.
‘Frank thinks it’ll be a caution pending social reports,’ Claude went on. Frank was the Blenheim family lawyer. ‘I called him first. He’s down there with her.’
‘You’re a star, Claude. Call him again, tell him Priscilla is not to leave until I get there to pick her up. Her mother needs to be there.’
‘Of course, Mrs Blenheim.’
Once more Beryl shouted at her driver. There was actually no need to shout as th
e Humvee had an intercom, but Beryl was naturally disposed towards ostentatious displays of authority.
‘Juan, you dozy tortoise! How long to Beverly Hills if you risk your licence?’
‘It’s clear heading back in, Mrs Blenheim, so forty-five minutes top.’
Beryl checked her watch. It was 11.03.
‘OK, then take it a little easy because I want to be pulling up outside the police precinct in exactly one hour.’
‘12.03. You got it.’
Beryl returned to her conversation with her PA.
‘Claude, call the networks. Tell them I have cancelled my UK trip and will be picking up Priscilla personally. I will arrive at the precinct at 12.03.’
‘I see where you’re coming from, Mrs Blenheim.’
Claude understood that Beryl was anxious to ensure that the promptness with which she was spreading her mother hen’s wings and ‘being there’ for her ‘troubled’ daughter would play live as breaking news midway through the top stories on the noon bulletin. ‘Next, call the Betty Ford Clinic, book Priscilla in as of this afternoon then release a statement in my name saying that Priscilla is actively seeking help to deal with her problem, which has been brought on as a result of media pressure and poor self-image. After that, call the Larry King office and get me and Serenity on to tonight’s show. They’re bound to bump someone for us, particularly now that Priscilla’s been busted.’
‘Will do. You got it.’
It all went like clockwork and exactly an hour later Beryl Blenheim was meeting her errant daughter on the steps of the Beverly Hills police station among a level of media frenzy that, twenty years before, would have been reserved for a visit from the president.
‘We got into this as a family and we will get through it as a family,’ Beryl said grimly from behind her dark glasses. ‘Priscilla fully realizes she needs help at this time to deal with her issues and to learn and to grow. She is reaching out and she will not reach out in vain. In closing I should like to thank the wonderful LAPD and everyone else for the support that we have received during this difficult time.’