I continued regardless. “. . . and that’s why I’m here.”
She turned to her phone, then yelled over the partition. “Rachel! What’s the number for security again?”
Rachel popped up over the partition. “No! Wait until you hear what she did!”
And so, Rachel relayed what I did. Fair play to her, she made it sound a million times better than it was. I had practically grown five feet during my metamorphosis from victim to hero, whilst Dave had shrunk to Tom Thumb proportions over the course of her recounting. I decided I liked Rachel.
Lindy turned her slits on me again. I felt a strange urge to check her desk for blue tack to hold her eyelids up. She was very annoying to look at. But suddenly, like a flower opening up in the first burst of spring sunshine, she popped her eyes open.
“Good for you. Dave can be a real crock of shit.”
“Em . . . yeah, he can be, can’t he?”
“You know what I like about you, Andie?”
I shrugged nonchalantly, and paused to accept whatever praise was coming my way.
“You have absolutely no qualms about making a complete and utter fool of yourself.”
“Thanks.” I smiled, but this time I was the one with slits where my lips used to be. Cheeky bitch.
“That’s rare these days, you know. The whole world has taken extreme reticence to an unprecedented level.”
She sounded like a younger, sophisticated, urbane version of Isolde when she was on her anti-PC rant. She was also coming across as a pain in the hole, just like Isolde, so I was starting to feel right at home in her company.
“When you say ‘That’s why I’m here’, what exactly do you want from me?”
“Publicity.” Okay, so she wasn’t as bright as Isolde. “You’re an interviewer, and I’m looking for an interview. Just a two-minute segment where you’d ask me about my search for Leon. Surely he’d see it and get in touch with me. I’ve heard everyone in this state and the neighbouring states watches your show.”
“What’s the name of my show?”
“Em . . .” Busted.
“I’d be surprised if they did, considering I don’t have one. I’m an entertainment correspondent for the nightly news. That’s the show I was supposed to be interviewing the real Misty for.”
Ah, yes . . . now that I thought about it, the clip I’d found on the LVTV website of the interview with Josh Feather had been in an entertainment section of a news bulletin. Time for a swift recovery of the situation . . .
“Oh hey, I did something very similar!” I told her about my Éire TV days. This was good bonding material, surely.
Then Lindy’s phone rang. She muttered “Shit,” as she listened to the person on the other end, then her face brightened. “Rachel, be a doll and go down to Reception to explain everything to the real Misty. I’m kinda busy here.”
“But –”
“No buts. Just go.” She turned her back on Rachel and looked at me instead. I gave Rachel a sympathetic look as she left the office. I had a feeling the real Misty would be baying for my blood at having her slot stolen, to say nothing of being impersonated badly, but that was a worry for another time.
“You know, I’m actually starting to see the potential in this,” Lindy said. “I could do a two-minute segment in the entertainment section about the mad girl from Ireland who’s still on a desperate hunt for a man.”
“What a delightful description.” Cheeky and nasty too. Nice combination. She’d get her own show yet.
“I say ‘still’, because you did cause something of a stir with your ridiculous antics during my interview with the singer – you totally messed up our relationship with him, by the way. He’s refusing to have anything more to do with us. When he hits the big-time, we’re going to hold you responsible.”
“Somehow I don’t think I need to put a lawyer on speed-dial. But when you say it caused a stir, what do you mean? I saw the interview with the singer on your website, and there was no sign of me – I thought it hadn’t been televised –”
“We broadcast it in a separate part of the bulletin. A kind of ‘And finally, here are some of the weird things that are happening in the world today’ type of segment at the end of the show.”
“Oh wow. I didn’t know.” I instantly wondered if Leon had seen it.
“Are you free to be filmed now?”
“Yes.”
She picked up the phone. “Let me call the cameraman.”
I shuddered at the dirty word that reminded me of Colm, the auld bastard. Christ, but he was one streak of misery.
She put down the phone. “Right, he can’t make it for another hour, so do you want to go to hair and make-up to kill the time?”
Why was everyone always telling me to go to hair and make-up before getting filmed? Was I that yukky-looking? Now, I have to tell you, I don’t ever come out with the old “I was a model, you know” line, because a) I’d be slightly afraid they’d laugh in my face and go “Ahahahaaa! Good one!” and b) it’s just plain arsey. But for the first time ever, I actually felt like spouting it. Yer one was pencilled, plucked and pansticked to within an inch of her life even though she would have looked amazing without any of it, and she actually made me want to go au naturel as much as possible.
“I’m fine, thanks.” I raised my chin in defiance.
“You’re not, you know. You look flushed and bedraggled. But hey, I suppose you’ve just been beamed to the nation looking like that, so hair and make-up is a bit pointless, really. You’re right – don’t waste your time.”
Of course, now I wanted the bloody hair and make-up, but I couldn’t give in and ask for it. “Is there a bathroom around here?”
Lindy gave me directions to the restroom, where I checked myself out in the mirror. God, she was right, and what’s more, she was being kind. Flushed? I had the purple glow of a consummate alcoholic. Bedraggled? The knots in my hair from heat and sweat were tighter than those in a hammock – I’d have to cut the blessed things out.
Sometimes, good ideas are like buses. If I rang Colm and asked him to film this interview too, we’d have the beginnings of the footage we needed for our first episode of Looking for Leon, and what’s more, he could bring my (small and limited) make-up bag with him. I’d have myself fixed up in ten minutes, whereas the hair and make-up department here would be primping and preening me for the full hour, not to mention the fact that I’d have to back down in front of Lindy. I’d given him a spare key for the penthouse when he’d come down to Reception to collect his luggage, purely because I was prone to losing things, drunk or sober – I suppose you’d already guessed that about me.
I pulled out my mobile, barked a few orders down the phone at Colm on the lines of “Taxi – LVTV – now – bring camera and make-up bag!” and made my way back into Lindy to make sure she was okay with having Colm film the interview too.
I smiled as I pictured the look of envy on Colm’s face when he saw all the 70s goodies in the penthouse. What goes around comes around . . .
Chapter Ten
Colm was reading the paper at a table in the corner when I came down for breakfast the next morning. As soon as he saw me, he smirked.
I ignored him, and poured myself a bowl of clotting cornflakes. They looked like they’d been around for centuries. The young guy in Reception had probably robbed them from one of those window displays in shops where the logo on the cereal box has faded from being in the sun for years. Actually, that was something that always bothered me at home – and while it wasn’t quite up there with Personal-Space Invaders, it was almost a pet hate. We never had any sunshine, yet every town or village you drove through had an old shop with a window full of faded cardboard. Does constant rain produce a glare, or have I missed something? Of course, that problem was being eliminated by the emergence of another one – the identikit grocery chain stores that were wiping out the little businesses. Those shops changed their displays about three times a day, even if it was only the same handf
ul of old biddies that would ever notice. Mind you, I saw a group of them buying the latest Twirly Twist Limited Edition ice cream last week after a display went up in the window, so maybe it worked, who knows?
Tempted as I was to sit at a table at the opposite end of the room, I decided to be mature and join Colm. Besides, nosiness had got the better of me. He seemed very interested in that newspaper, and what was worse, he seemed to be laughing at me every time he looked up from it.
I sat down. “Anything good in the paper?” I took a spoon of cornflakes with what I hoped was an appropriate level of nonchalance. Christ on a bike, they tasted foul.
Colm looked into his bowl of fruit and speared a piece of shrivelled pear. I didn’t know why he was bothering – there was no doubt in my mind but that the fruit had come from a tin, despite the handwritten ‘Fresh Fruit’ sign perching lazily beside the fruit bowl in the breakfast area. But it seemed that, despite his biscuit fixation, he tried to eat healthily most of the time – although he also had a fry on the table for after his fruit.
“Depends on your definition of good,” he said.
“Throw it over here and I’ll have a look.”
“No, I’m not finished with it yet.” He placed his cup of coffee on it.
“But you’re not reading it at the moment!”
“I thought you came down here to eat breakfast?”
“I can eat and read at the same time – it’s not that difficult!” I could feel the usual Colm-induced irritation rising in me. “Jesus, just hand it over, will you?”
“Are you sure you want to see it?”
“No. I want to smell it. Of course I bloody want to see it – why would I be asking for it otherwise?”
He lifted up his cup of coffee. “Okay, be my guest. But on your own head be it.”
“I’m going to read a paper, Colm. It’s not as if I’m going to play chase with lions or something. Stop being so damn dramatic.” I grabbed the paper and browsed the cover, then flicked the page. “Oh my God!” I looked up at Colm in disbelief.
He raised an eyebrow. “Did you just say something about cutting down on the drama?”
“Oh, shut up! I’m all over the paper! What did you expect?”
“You’re all over half of Page 3, you mean. There are other articles in the paper too, you know.”
“Why did they put me on shagging Page 3 of a national newspaper, of all shagging pages?”
“It’s a broadsheet. They don’t have Page 3 girls in broadsheets. What difference does it make anyway?”
“It’s the principle! It’s the shagging association! Christ!”
At the top left of the page was a picture of me singing ‘Boogie Queen’ – and looking like I was quite into it, actually. To the right of the picture was an article about an Irishwoman’s “infiltration” into the hallowed grounds of LVTV, accompanied by an interview from Dangly Dave.
“This woman had an agenda,” said Dave Dagenham, director of LVTV’s programming schedules. “She violated our security procedures and purposely pretended to be someone she wasn’t. My first thought was that she was a very disturbed woman.”
“A very disturbed woman!”
Colm covered his ears as I shrieked.
“I did try to stop you reading the paper . . .”
“You made sure I read it by sniggering at me non-stop the minute I walked in here!”
I read on.
“However, it transpired that her motive was in some way honorable. This lady is looking for the love of her life, a man called Leon from Arizona, and she’s gone to some extraordinary lengths to find him. In fact, she’s already featured on one of our previous bulletins in a former infiltration attempt, which you can now watch again on our website. Everyone’s talking about her since she appeared on our show, but we’re the only TV station she’s chosen to talk to. Don’t miss our exclusive interview with her on our entertainment show tonight at 18:30 PDT.”
“My God, that was a bit of a surprise!”
“Oh, stop pretending you don’t love all of this. Being in the paper is exactly what you want. The more publicity you can get, the more likely it is that you’ll find Leon.”
He had a point. I didn’t have to admit that, though. “Hmmm. Do you want that toast?”
“No. I’m finished.” He pushed his plate away, even though more than half of his eggs and bacon still sat on it. “See you later.”
“That’s fine, Colm, you just go and leave me sitting here on my own like an arsehole. Don’t worry, I’ll take it personally.”
“I’d expect nothing less.” He did that smirk again, but it was less malevolent this time.
“You might want to take your biscuits with you.” I pointed to a cling-filmed stack of three biscuits that were peeking out from behind a teapot. They looked like raspberry creams.
“Oh, yeah.” He grabbed them and stuffed them in his pocket.
“You do know they have biscuits over here too, don’t you?”
“The biscuits here are shite. I always bring my own to have with a cup of tea.”
It was my turn to smirk. It sounded like something my granny would say, if you took away the expletive. Well, no, actually. Granny was good for an auld curse too, when I thought about it.
“Did you bring a big stockpile of biscuits over in your suitcase then?”
“Yes, of course I did.” He said it as if doing anything other than that would be completely mad. “Right. See you at three for our editing session.” He took off, biscuits in tow.
I stuffed a corner of a piece of toast in my mouth, then walked away from the table too with the rest of the toast dangling from my lips and the paper in my hand. I had a column to write.
As I walked upstairs, I wondered if somewhere in the country Leon was choking on his cornflakes at the sight of me pretending to be Misty Moore. I really hoped so.
“And finally tonight, in Entertainment News, a video of an Irishwoman who stole the identity of singer Misty Moore on a TV show has become a huge Internet hit. Andie Appleton duped staff here at LVTV into believing she was Misty, and appeared on a daytime show attempting to sing Misty’s chart hit, ‘Boogie Queen’. Staff on the show realised their error as soon as Ms Appleton opened her mouth, and an emergency ad break was taken to spare viewers from further aural distress, but the revelation of Andie’s motives behind her deception has enthralled viewers. Former model Andie is on a one-woman crusade to find the love of her life, a man called Leon from Arizona who she met on a night out in the MGM Grand on the Vegas Strip three weeks ago, and was subsequently separated from. Leon, if you’re watching, get in touch – we like a happy ending here at LVTV!”
I turned off the TV.
Sometimes, you just had to laugh. I wanted publicity to help me find Leon, and boy, had I got it.
It had been four days since my interview with Lindy was televised, and something about my story seemed to have captured the mood of the nation. In a world of Internet-dating, speed-dating, blind-dating, Frisky Fifties dating (such a thing exists, according to Mum’s neighbour Eileen – she’s abandoned the bingo entirely since she joined an online website) and so on, everyone was doing something to help them find love. My story was a little more extreme than what most people did, but the public just seemed to get it and relate to it. That, and the fact that Dave had been canny about exploiting the story for maximum publicity. It seemed there were no hard feelings between Dave and me – as soon as he sniffed the opportunity to make a story out of my appearance, he was all over me like that horrendous smell of chip-pan oil that permeates an entire house long after the chips have been devoured and forgotten. Even the real Misty was happy about the whole thing. She had enough sense to realise that there was no such thing as bad publicity, and her song had been flying up the charts ever since my TV appearance.
Since the footage had been broadcast, I had barely slept. Our half-an-hour interview, filmed by both LVTV and Colm, had been edited down into the promised two minutes for the enter
tainment show, but after it was broadcast LVTV were flooded with requests from viewers wanting more on the story. The next day, they broadcast fifteen minutes out of our half-hour interview on a daily entertainment show. Meanwhile, I got permission from LVTV to broadcast my singing escapades on Irish TV. Colm filmed some footage of me explaining how I had got myself in that situation, edited my interview with Lindy down to twenty minutes, and then filmed me sifting through the newspapers with articles about my search in them (minus the Page 3 article) – and hey presto, we had the first of the four episodes we were contractually obliged to produce. Colm emailed it to Éire TV and it had been broadcast at home the previous night, so now we just had to wait for the feedback on how it had been received. All in all, I certainly wasn’t short of entries for my diary, if I only had time to keep it updated properly.
Dave had appointed Lindy as my unofficial agent, and she’d dragged me off to do interview after interview with radio stations, local newspapers, magazines, you name it, since the two-minute interview had been broadcast.
“Dave’s been in a lot of hot water recently over flagging ratings for some of the shows he’s involved in,” Lindy told me and Colm over cocktails after my interview.
I was initially shocked that she’d invited us to go for a drink with her, but her motive soon became apparent as she threw long glances at Colm across the table in the trendy bar she’d brought us to.
“So anything that’ll bring the spotlight back on him will be a feather in his cap,” she went on.
“And he views me as a whole pillow’s worth, I presume?”
She didn’t bother confirming or denying that – she was far too busy making eyes at an unmoved, or possibly unaware, Colm.
[2014] Looking for Leon Page 9