by Nigel May
Two
‘So you’re telling me Surf N Turf won’t take me back and now I’m out of work thanks to Mitzi vanishing into thin air? For fuck’s sake, I need money to live on, especially now I’ve rented up here. A cup of coffee and a sarnie in this city costs me more than a three course dinner back home.’
The here in question was Chelsea, London, not a million miles away from the central London office of Aaron Rose’s go-getting new agent. The one who had relentlessly chased him to sign with her when he was working on Surf N Turf back in Cornwall. The one who had promised him a bollock-grabber of a deal that she would reveal to him once he’d left the show and moved himself to the big smoke so that he could be near to the media action. The one who was now finding him highly nauseating.
‘Get a grip, Aaron, will you? This is all a touch drama queen,’ snapped Rachel Jerome, adjusting her two-piece Forever Unique ensemble. It was a bit dressy for daywear but she had back to back meetings today and then was straight out to the Reality Awards later, for which it would be the perfect red carpet look. Rachel, one of London’s most notorious agents, was supposedly going with new client Aaron Rose on her arm, but if he was going to be decidedly stroppy and arsey about things just a few weeks after signing with her then, quite frankly, he could take a running jump. She’d take one of the lads from the new man band she’d managed to blag onto Britain’s Got Talent. As thick as shit and as intellectually stimulating as a night out with a colouring book, nevertheless his Ninja Turtle abs and cock with a girth like an observatory telescope would be company enough for Rachel between the sheets come the end of the night.
‘Rachel, you made me leave Surf N Turf, telling me you have this amazing offer for me to do the dance show, tear me away from Cornwall to rent a flat in a place I don’t even like very much and now you’re telling me the dance producers have canned me because of Mitzi Bidgood being abducted by aliens or whatever the fuck has happened? This is not what you promised?’
‘I know, darling. Shit happens. Look, you were getting too cosy in Surf N Turf anyway and the show is on its way out. Maybe one more season and a kit-off calendar deal was all they could offer so disembarking that sinking ship now was a good move. It’s a shame about the dancing but how was I to know that they would not partner you with someone else? I think they wanted you to follow in Foster’s footsteps by partnering Mitzi to see what happened. Now she’s … er … no more,’ Rachel wasn’t really sure how to phrase it, ‘… I suppose the offer had to be revoked. I’ll try for some compo, darling, but I don’t hold out much hope.’
In fact Rachel knew there was no hope. The show’s producers had only taken Aaron on in the hope that a spark of romance would ignite between him and Mitzi, even if they had to orchestrate it themselves, in order to gain ‘love triangle’ press for the show. Rachel had sworn to them that Aaron was already besotted with Mitzi having once met her at a film premiere and that hopefully their union would see them both kicking their legs high and Mitzi spreading hers wide. Total lies, but welcome to the world of agenting.
‘I don’t want to always be in Foster’s shadow!’ sniped Aaron. ‘I was his replacement on Surf in the first place. I never worked with him but always had the press comparing us, and we couldn’t be more different.’
Totally true. With his tree trunk build, rugged bearded face and layering of thick dark body hair from the dip of his neck down to the delights of his boxer shorts, Aaron was the antipode of Foster’s living doll look. Aaron was Desperate Dan post modelling school.
‘Well, word reaches me that Foster was up for some gardening show transforming some godforsaken scrub land on an estate in the back end of East Bumfuck or wherever so if it does turn out that he’s met his maker I could try and squeeze you in there. I’m not sure where it is, but a job’s a job, darling, no matter where you have to go.’ For Rachel, apart from much-needed jaunts to the South of France or a sun-drenched week in the Maldives, all necessary life actually halted, dead-end, at the borders of the WC1 postcode.
‘I’ve just told you, I don’t simply want to follow in his footsteps or take his cast-offs. I need some kind of money coming in, and I need it now.’
Rachel had heard enough. She had promised the world so maybe she should see what she could do but she’d had her fill of moaning from Aaron for one day. There had to be some work for him somewhere. It was just a case of finding out where. But right now, she had other fish to fry, and not some little tiddler. She needed to phone her escort for the night. She’d not been able to think about anything else for the last five minutes. Whatever her dumb, young wannabe had planned for tonight he needed to drop it quicker than she’d be forcing him to drop to his knees and service her. Time for action.
‘Right, Aaron darling, you’ll have to go. I have the Reality Awards tonight and there’s a lot of deals to be done. I’ll be sure to throw your name into the mix for as many shows as possible. And not one that’s associated with Foster, okay? Now, if you’ll excuse me ….’
‘But I thought I was coming to the Awards with you?’ quizzed Aaron.
‘Did you, darling? You must have misunderstood. Now, I’ll phone you tomorrow for a catch-up and I’m sure I’ll have some news for you. Why don’t you go to the gym and keep that body of yours in good shape? There’s a lot more TV out there where you can show off those muscles of yours without any need for Lycra or body glitter. Oh, and if you’re worried about money, I have some free passes for the gym around the corner. Give it a whirl. You’ll probably find half the cast of EastEnders and Downton Abbey in there anyway. There are more initial contacts made in those showers than any amount of begging emails. Go and work your rustic charm and don’t be afraid to drop your towel in the right direction if need be.’ She grabbed the passes from her desk, thrust them into Aaron’s hand and opened the door for his departure.
For a man whose major decisions in life up until recently were which colour wetsuit to wear for surfing and which hardy perennial to choose for a customer’s border, Aaron Rose felt mightily bamboozled by his new agent’s hard-hitting London ways. He wasn’t sure he’d made the right move in signing with her. If an agent like Rachel thought she could treat him like a stupid glove puppet and shove her hand up his ass to work him whenever she pleased then she had another think coming. As he descended the stairs from Rachel’s office and headed off down the far-too-busy-for-his-liking streets of inner London, he stared at the gym card. Maybe a work out was a good idea.
At her desk, Rachel had another kind of work out on her mind. She made the first of two phone calls. One to her toy boy for the night. Who said a well-preserved forty-five-year-old couldn’t shag a twenty-one-year-old hunk once in a while? Especially one with no choice.
The second one was to a gay magazine. She could book Aaron a fitness feature for a few quid. Those magazines would take any old half-baked celebrity with a decent pair of pecs who looked good in a pair of tight shorts. She’d tell Aaron tomorrow, forgetting to mention that Foster had done countless similar features in the past, of course. There were certain things some clients just never needed to know.
Three
The top of the moussaka was black. And hard. And totally inedible. How had Victoria Palmer-Roberts let this happen again? Hard and unappetising. Hadn’t that become the story of her life? The story of her marriage, lately? She feared it had.
She’d spent hours studying the recipe, making sure that her combination of aubergine, potato, minced meat, herbs and spices were all spot on. Making sure that it would be a treat that her financial advisor husband, Scott, would relish with glee after another busy day sorting out the finances of the rich and famous. And then there were the twins, six-year-old Lexi and Leo. They loved Mummy’s moussaka. Well, they did when it was the normal colour and actually recognisable as food. The only thing it looked good for now would be to drop on one of the many molehills that seemed to be springing up with alarming regularity in the garden of their two-million-pound West London family home. If a kn
ife and fork couldn’t crack the surface of the supposed culinary joy, then what chance would a nearly blind, small furry critter have?
Victoria pulled open one of the kitchen drawers and drew out a delivery pizza menu. Scott would not be pleased – Lexi and Leo were supposed to be on a balanced diet, watching their weight, making sure they didn’t put on a few extra pounds like their mum seemed to have done lately. A fact that Scott seemed completely at ease with mentioning in not so glorious detail to her both over the dinner table and in the marital bed. He’d freak when a pizza delivery guy turned up with a stack of twelve inch Hawaiians and a calorie-laden Quattro Stagioni, but judging by the charcoal offering in front of her, it was that or starve. Tonight was going to be another night of arguments, she could see it now. Weren’t they all?
She should send the live-in nanny, Chloe, on a cookery course. One of those ones run by a TV celebrity chef. That would make Scott sit up and take notice. Then Victoria would have more time to look after herself instead of catering for the family all the time. While Chloe played with the kids and sorted out school duties and organised visits to London Zoo or the Natural History Museum, Victoria seemed to be the one keeping the house clean, making up beds, tidying toys and shopping for food. Chloe was good cop, she was bad cop. Chloe was thin cop, young cop, smiley cop, fresh-faced cop, bloody drop dead gorgeous cop … Victoria was worn-out, knackered, frumpy old miserable cop. Ironic since, at twenty-two years of age, Chloe, their third nanny to date, was actually only six years younger than Victoria. She’d had a body like Chloe’s at twenty-two, she’d made time to go to Zumba, to sweat it out with the girls in the sauna, to swim as much as she could and then treat herself to a little something sexy from Miu Miu or Dior. And then she became pregnant, lost her figure and lost her confidence. Even though she adored her twins, Lexi and Leo’s arrival had seemed to signal the end of any youthful exuberance she’d once had, whether she liked it or not. Maybe Victoria was the one who needed to get away, to recharge her batteries.
How had this happened? It never used to be this way.
Victoria Wentworth was born in New Orleans, but away from the colour and the jazz-filled madness of America’s ‘Big Easy’ and the voodoo-spiced streets of the French Quarter. She was born in the Garden District, an area so rich and decadent that not even Hurricane Katrina dared to flood it when it struck in 2005. Whereas virtually all of the rest of the city was blitzed by the ferocity of the Hurricane, the Garden District, with its beautifully spaced out houses, surrounded by pillars, limitless blankets of green and corn-stalk fences was a charmed area inhabited by charmed people. People who could smile at the tourists walking past their palatial houses, but who, unless they chose to, would never have to talk to them. The area had always been one of beauty, elegance and tradition. Proper home values with good decent, honest, home-loving people. A wonderfully tasteful slice of American pie.
Originally created in the early nineteenth century, it was a place where new American residents of NOLA could live so as not to mingle with ‘those of European descent’ primarily living in the French Quarter at the riotous core of the city. Americans who had gained their hard-earned dollars from respected trades like cotton, shipping, insurance and sugar, who could afford to commission architects to create tiered houses in magnificent styles; Victorian, Greek Revival and Italianate.
Victoria’s great grandparents had moved there at the start of the twentieth century. Her parents set up home there in the late 1960s and it was expected that one day Victoria and her husband to be would do exactly the same and settle safely within the confines of an area where traffic was minimal, wildlife ran free and houses possessed a charm to rival Gone with the Wind.
Victoria loved it there, excelling in school, perfecting her languages like French and Spanish and thriving at sports like softball, track volleyball, golf and swimming. With rose-kissed skin and long blonde hair she was the essence of all-American girl. She had braces at an early age to straighten any rogue gnashers, learnt ballet and horse-riding as necessary skills, and was the perfect pupil, earning the ultimate accolade of becoming Prom Queen at the age of sixteen. One of her finest memories would always be sitting upon her Prom Queen throne, looking at a sea of genuinely happy friends and peers staring up at her, all thrilled for her popularity.
But despite a sign just around the corner from her Garden District house stating, ‘On This Site In 1897 Nothing Happened’ – the ridiculousness of which used to make Victoria and her friends laugh – suddenly something did. Her parents, persuaded by one of their neighbours that it was the in-thing for smart US families to do, decided to send Victoria away to England to finish her education. She was to spend a few terms at the much-famed Farmington Grange, a place of education for young ladies, especially from families around the world with enough zeroes on the end of their bank account balances to make sure that the extortionate term fees were met. Just before her seventeenth birthday Victoria Wentworth was driven to Louis Armstrong airport in New Orleans with three trunks full of her belongings and waved off by her parents to start a new life in the UK.
Farmington Grange was a place that Victoria enjoyed. If anything, it made her even more confident than she already was. It was full of cliques, there were bitchy girls, there were spoilt brats, there were girls who weren’t just born with a silver spoon in their mouths, they were rich enough to have the whole canteen of cutlery, but Victoria managed to fit in. Not attaching herself to any one group in particular she made friends with a selection of different girls. Back home in New Orleans, she had been used to a group of friends whose main ambition in life was to marry a son of a family friend, one with a good dependable job with major career prospects, probably already guaranteed through a family business, and become the model wife and mother. ‘Stand by Your Man’ as the song says. The expectation was for them to pop out a few children, see them on their path to Prom Queen or soccer team captain and then ad lib to fade as they waited for the onslaught of grey hairs and face lifts.
But Farmington was different – girls aspired to be someone, to make a difference, with or without a man by their side. Girls dream of theatrical acting, of being lawyers, of working in the armed forces, professions that the wives of her Garden District existence might not have considered. There was an excitement about the future that Victoria relished.
When she left a year later she was determined to make a difference and use her skills, especially as a linguist, to forge her way in life. Charity work in Africa? Relief work in the Far East? Volunteer projects in South America? Had she not met Scott Palmer-Roberts, the dashingly handsome son of the owner of one of the UK’s most successful financial corporations, she might well have done just that.
But the moment she laid eyes on Scott – his dark curly locks and pistachio green eyes an irresistible combination – all thoughts of any new career aspirations fluttered off on the wings of love. In their place returned the inbuilt, once latent now potent desire to be the perfect wife with the perfect life. And that suited Scott and his family down to the ground. While Scott’s career rocketed, courtesy of his blood ties, Victoria became the dutiful trophy fiancée, engaged at nineteen, perfect arm candy wife at twenty and the mother of twins by the age of twenty-two. She may have been living in London, but apart from the geography of her residential time zone, she could have been back in the picturesque serenity of the Garden District leading the perfect life. Nights out with the girls seemed to cease and be replaced with black tie financial boreathons that were both swanky and, more often than not, totally wanky.
For a while the role of the apple pie mother and wife suited her needs. Trips back to New Orleans with her beautiful double babies in a double buggy with matching scallop-edged trims to see her doting parents and her insanely jealous friends were wonderful. Victoria had found her prince, produced two bundles of joy and lived happily ever after. So what if it happened to be away from everybody she’d grown up with and in a foreign land? The end of the rainbow could be anyw
here, couldn’t it?
But then the trips back home seemed to become less and less frequent. Scott was always saying that something had to be done at work, or that it wasn’t good for the children to be constantly travelling at such a young age. Victoria became homesick. Her husband was at work sixteen hours a day, her children were suddenly being looked after by a live-in nanny, and she found herself bored, unable to pop around the corner to see her parents and friends. Sure, she had managed to keep a few friends from her Farmington days, more down to their efforts than hers, if she were honest. There was best friend and her maid of honour Evie Merchant, whose career as an actress was really beginning to soar, plus others who were studying hard in the hope of becoming lawyers, doctors, politicians or fashion designers. Occasionally, schedules permitting, they would visit Victoria. For a few hours they would laugh and joke, reminiscing about their schooldays together over a slice of cake and coffee. But then they’d be gone, back to their exciting lives leaving Victoria to load the dishwasher and eat the rest of the cake. Why couldn’t everything in life be as joyful as a slice of rich, crumbly, cream-filled cake? Scott didn’t approve of anything too sweet and sugary. He didn’t approve of her weight gain. Why was he with her? Thank God he didn’t know about her taking anti-depressants to try and mask her unhappiness. If she could apply the same dedication to getting her life back into shape that she did to hiding her tablets away from those around her then everything would be peachy. She was a master at that.
But she needed them. They helped her deal with the fact she was becoming resentful of her friends and their seemingly perfect lives. She tried not to be, but something rotting away inside eroded at her. It was then that her confidence started to crumble.
Walking from the kitchen to the bottom of the stairs, Victoria shouted up at the children who were playing upstairs. ‘Leo, Lexi … it’ll be delivery pizza for tea, okay?’ A few seconds later Leo stuck his head over the banister on the landing a floor up and shouted down, ‘Cool, Mum. Does that mean we’re not eating whatever’s burnt the house down? We can smell it up here.’ How many times had she heard that lately? Far too many.