My progress through to the floor laden with tomes about other people’s lives was impeded by a cardboard cut-out from my own autobiography: a larger than life–size poster of Elliot Edwards sitting inside a Monopoly boot as big as a car, holding a ladder in one hand and a snake in the other. Beneath was the information: “Elliot Edwards will be signing copies of Board Stupid: Beyond the Boards in the second-floor mezzanine.”
How his success mocked my own lack of it. Sometimes I liked the party piece of I Dated a Celeb, but most of the time I wished he were still a runner as he had been when we split up almost two and a half years ago. How his fortunes had changed in that time; how mine had remained the same.
I wanted to have something new to report to Maggie so I made my way to the book-signing. Did I have to buy the damn book, I wondered; I had no intention of splashing out the £10.99 required to read all about the wacky backstage secrets of the cult game show. I already knew quite enough about Elliot’s personal habits. Maybe he would not have so many female fans if they knew that he could only maintain an erection if you talked with awe of his manhood throughout sex. Having to intone, “Oh your big hard dick, oh your big hard dick, it’s so big and it’s so hard, it’s so hard and it’s so big” did nothing for a woman’s own pleasure. It was almost as unsexy as his tendency to fret about his weight and his ability to tell you the number of WeightWatchers points in a banana. Never trust a man who drinks Diet Coke and Slim-Fast.
He was looking good though, I gnashed as I observed him from a distance. He had that stringy, skinny look that can only come from a carbohydrate-free diet. Evidently Weight Watchers and Slim-Fast had been replaced by the Atkins regime. Just as a protein-laden diet removes anything round from your plate, like potatoes and bread rolls, so Elliot looked as though his doughy softness had been sucked away from his body to leave it vacuum-packed and as if assembled from pure lean turkey breasts and skinless chicken thighs. His sunken cheeks only served to make his trademark horn-rimmed glasses seem even more outsize, as if they, too, were a prop from Board Stupid.
I hung back, waiting for the session to come to an end.
“Izobel,” he cried when I presented myself. “How brilliant to see you. You look amazing.”
Even though he was my squitty ex, I still felt the relief and pleasure that you get from being recognized by someone more famous than you. He was nice, that Elliot, I thought to myself, blushing at a compliment from the mouth of a celebrity.
“Ditto. I saw the posters and thought I’d come and say hello.” As if that were a normal thing to do. I wouldn’t usually have come along to stand in a line with a bunch of game-show freaks merely to pay homage to Elliot, charming as he could be. I felt like I always do at weddings when you have to queue up to compliment an old friend, just because she’s wearing a long white dress.
“That’s so kind of you. Thank you. You’re probably too busy, but I’m just going to the hospitality room for a drink. Why don’t you come?”
“Thanks.” The teenagers looked at me enviously. It was as though I were sitting in a swanky convertible with the top down—I probably looked like a prat but I couldn’t help feeling that everyone was impressed.
Even someone with the low-grade level of fame of Elliot has “people.” In the green room lurked a publisher and a publicist. George only has a publican. I had a lager while Elliot sipped from a white wine spritzer made, I noticed, with only the merest dash of Chardonnay.
“So, how have you been?” he asked.
“Are you wearing makeup, Elliot?” I said, helping myself to the hospitality crisps that he had pushed away.
“No.” If not makeup, he definitely dyed his eyelashes. “Enough of me, Izobel, what are you up to? Something very glamorous, I’m sure.”
“The usual, PR still. And”—I looked to seize the moment— “breeding chinchillas.”
“Chinchillas?”
“Yes, chinchillas. Rabbity things, like great big hamsters, you could have them on the show they’re so out of scale. Worth a lot of money.” Chinchillas? Why, why, why? I was allowed to make up anything and I made up that. Why hadn’t I said that I was George Clooney’s secret lover or that NASA wanted me to join the space program? No, I breed squirrel creatures.
“That’s great, that’s fabulous, how exciting. Wow, you’re doing really well. You must be so proud of yourself.” He wasn’t being sarcastic.
“As must you be,” I said. “Your life’s pretty good.”
“A bit. Not really. It’s a lot of hard work most of the time. You’re looking fantastic too, Izobel, really well.”
“So are you. You’ve swapped bodies with someone.”
“What, me? No, I’m still a bit of chubster. Too much of a couch potato, sat at home watching The Simpsons.” He puffed out his chest and pulled in his stomach, glancing at the mirror as he did so.
“Hardly sat at home. I’ve seen the photos of you—you go to all those celebrity parties.”
“Me? A celebrity? Don’t be ridiculous. If people ever ask for my autograph it’s because they think I’m somebody else. Woody Allen, probably. I’m just thankful that an idiot like me can get paid for doing something I love.”
I’d read that very spiel in an interview with him. “Come on Elliot, don’t put it on. You know life’s turned out pretty well for you.”
“No, really. How are things for you?” he said. “Are you still with George?”
“Yes, I am.” I sounded apologetic. There had been no actual overlap between Elliot and George, though there may have been an emotional one. “What about you?”
“Gosh, me? I couldn’t possibly say,” he muttered.
Perhaps he wasn’t yet over me after all. I changed the subject. “What do you do when you’re not working? Do you use the Internet much? There are lots of sites about you.” I had Googled Elliot long before I had Googled myself.
“Really? I wouldn’t know about that. Probably mad people. Can’t imagine why anyone else would make a site about me.”
“Come on, I bet you do look at them.”
He refused to concur.
“Do you know much about the Web generally?” I probed. “You were one of the first people I know to get an Internet connection and e-mail. You used to go to American chat rooms in the middle of the night.”
I perceived a blush in those recently sculpted cheeks.
“I know a bit,” he said. “Gosh, so little really. I can create sites. Dave and I have been doing a few satirical ones anonymously. Hoaxes and stuff, causing mischief.” He looked around. “Don’t tell anyone, though.”
If in Maggie-world all my other suspects’ Internet ignorance made them more likely to be the perpetrator, did the fact that Elliot was so freely admitting to having the necessary nous to create a site mean that he was innocent?
“And we’re interested in raising the profile of a manned mission to Mars,” he added. “We’ve got a site about that. They’ve already been there, you know, the Americans, they’re just not telling us. Dave and I have seen the pictures and we want to force them to go public with them.”
At that moment a familiar-looking girl approached us. She was small and narrow-backed but with disproportionately large breasts that nonetheless had the mobility of real ones. If her body was inflatable doll, her face was china doll—little Cupid’s-bow mouth, round eyes framed with mascara that looked like it had been applied with a spray gun and tiger-striped straightened hair. She wore a tight T-shirt with “Board Stupid Crew” written across it, but the size of her chest ensured that it landed far short of her tight hipster jeans, revealing a flat stomach and high, tiny outie belly button. She could have been a pretty checkout girl from Top Shop or a cover star from a lads’ mag. She was, I realized, the latter. One of those male fantasies, the playgirl-next-door, a woman without a surname, one hand pulling her pants almost down, the other fingering her mouth, spatchcocked on the pages of middle-shelf men’s magazines.
“Hello, darling,” Elliot said to her.
She must have a lot of fan sites on the Internet, I thought. “Talitha, this is Izobel, an old friend of mine. Izobel, meet Talitha.” He paused. “My girlfriend.”
Talitha, yes, of course that was her clearly faked-up name. I had seen her on TV and on those magazine covers. Her face was blank but her body was not, telling men as it did how “up for it” she was. Isn’t it depressing how women fancy quirky, nerdy-looking men and these men praise us for our ability to see beyond plastic handsomeness? Yet they repay our lack of superficiality by being more obsessed with landing themselves a conventional babe than their good-looking rivals. The more they portray themselves as dorky, the less dorky their taste in women becomes.
“You’re going out with each other?” Elliot beamed at my surprise. “Wow, that’s great. How long have you been a couple?”
“A few months.” He leaned forward. “Please don’t tell the press, they’d have a field day. We don’t want the whole world to know.” On the contrary, he looked as though he’d like nothing better, and I could start by informing those rugby-playing types he’d been at school with.
Talitha wriggled her freakishly small bottom onto his lap.
“Where did you two meet?” She kissed the tips of his fingers, the ones that created Web sites about Martian conspiracy theories.
“On set. Talitha had a friend working on the show.”
“We share a makeup artist,” she said, in a baby voice. I shuddered to think of that little-girl voice praising the size of Elliot’s cock in congress. “Oh Elliot, your big hard cock, it’s so big and it’s so hard, oh Elliot,” she’d be forced to squeak. Or maybe with a girl as sexy as Talitha, Elliot would not need such continual verbal encouragement to remain constant. Maybe it wasn’t his problem, but mine.
“And now we share much more,” he said.
“Much, much more,” Talitha replied.
I raised my eyebrows and made my excuses, leaving them to swap spritzer and spittle.
“Good luck with the cute little animals,” he called as I left. And good luck with yours, I hissed under my breath.
*
I stared at my face in the mirror of the pub toilets. I had scooted into them unseen before feeling able to face Mick, Maggie, Frank and the others in the back bar. It was an OK face, but not so pretty as Talitha’s. I had ended up downsizing boyfriend, while Elliot had traded up, if not intellectually then erotically. There would be few men in the world and absolutely no boys who’d choose me over Talitha. I shook my head to try to scatter the image burned onto it of Talitha’s tiny little body coiled around Elliot’s newly toned one.
“It’s our very own star of the Internet,” said Frank as I approached their table.
“Piss off.” I looked around to see who was here. Camilla sat beside him. Frank couldn’t come anywhere without Camilla these days. Beside them was a girl I’d not met before.
“Frank told me that you think he’s been writing stuff about you on the Net,” interjected Camilla incredulously.
“No, not exactly. It’s more complicated than that.” Where was Maggie? I needed her help. “And very boring.”
“Where’s George tonight?” asked Frank.
Piss off, I said, but silently this time. At least I hope it was silent, I’m never quite sure. Out loud I explained, “It’s his night with Grace.” This was a lie, of course, but it was always a convenient one to explain George’s absences from my friends’ gatherings. Nobody, not George, not my friends and not me, wanted him to attend them.
“That’s his daughter, isn’t it? How sweet. How old is she?” asked Camilla.
“Six. Going on twenty-six. The other day I admired her shoes and she said, ‘Yes, they’re from Harvey Nicks.’”
“Surely not,” said Camilla.
“Really, she’s so knowing. She met Maggie and asked why she spoke like a man and had a hairy chin.”
“I bet you adore her really.”
“She’s all right, I suppose. Who wants a drink?”
“Becksy and the other one are at the bar,” said Frank. “And this is Molly, by the way.”
“Another St. Tree’s alumnus,” said Camilla. “The gang’s all here. Well, except Miche.”
“And Kitty,” said Molly, in exactly the same gushing tones as Becksy and Alice used. I hadn’t realized that some sort of evil Stepford cloning experiment had gone on at St. Teresa’s in the late eighties, churning out enthusing blondes with overgrown flower grips in their hair.
“Izobel doesn’t have any friends,” said Camilla.
“I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“I mean, friends from school anyway.” Camilla and Molly put their heads to one side, the same side of course, and looked at me pityingly.
I escaped to the bar to help and to place my own order. It was already crowded with pints, although I had noticed that all the men around the table were already nursing beers.
“Hello,” Alice said with surprise, as if these were her friends, not mine, as if she was more than an almost silent faded carbon copy of Becksy and in turn Camilla.
“Hi. Let me help. It’s always the same with these blokes, they always like to line up their pints. The way men time their arrival around round-buying and its elaborate rituals makes me realize why they all eventually end up becoming obsessed with military history. They’ve been practising annexation and stockpiling all their lives.”
“You’re so right,” said Becksy, as I scooped them up. “I’ve never thought of that before. That’s really clever.”
“Hardly.” I scooted back to the table, not wanting to get stuck at the B-list end of it with Camilla’s friends all evening. “You’ll never guess who Elliot’s going out with now,” I said on my return to a captive audience. “Talitha.” A few blank stares. “You know, the one who was in that celebrity reality thing and poses in men’s magazines and red-tops.” Flashes of recognition.
“Urgh,” said Maggie. “She’s so plain.”
“Yeah right,” said Mick. “She’s hideous. Bollocks, Maggie, she is absolutely gorgeous. Out of two, I’d give her one.” All the other men mumbled agreement.
“She is so not,” said Camilla. “She’s completely nondescript.”
“Yeah right,” said Frank. “This is why when a woman is described to me, I always ask, is she female-pretty or male-pretty? They are such different concepts.”
“Well, I’ve just met Talitha,” I interjected. “And she’s both weirdly plain and weirdly sexy. And Elliot is looking like the adolescent geek who’s pulled the head cheerleader on prom night.”
“From you to Talitha in the space of a few years,” said Frank. “Elliot must be gutted with the progress of his life. He probably spends all his time writing stuff about you on the Internet.”
“Oh piss off, Frank.” This time very audibly. I looked at Maggie and she raised an eyebrow at me and shook her head. “Are we going to eat at some point tonight or are you beer-arians going to do your usual trick of surviving on Guinness alone?”
“Not me,” said Maggie. “Eating for two and all that. There’s a new-wave Chinese across the road. We call it Fung MSG.”
“Iz can order for us, can’t you, Iz?” Frank turned to everyone. “Izobel has so many talents, and one of them is that she speaks Chinese.”
Maggie raised both her eyebrows this time.
“Mandarin. I’m learning Mandarin,” I corrected. “That place is Sichuan, I think. Don’t speak that, sorry.”
*
I was eating a sandwich alone at my desk, dribbling chicken globules into my keyboard to mingle with the croissant crumble and splashes of coffee that already made a meal of it down there.
“Hello, Izobel.” I jolted. I hated people coming up behind me at my desk.
Ivan sat down on Mimi’s midget swivel chair at the desk next to mine. “I’ve been thinking about your site. It’s strange.” I hated people interrupting my lunch breaks too.
“You’re telling me.”
“I can’t imagine who
’d do such a thing.”
“Me neither. That’s why I’m asking you for your help.”
“What else are you doing to find out who is behind it?” he asked. “Besides enlisting me?”
“A colleague and I have put into place a series of investigations.” I paused. “We’re starting from the premise that the perpetrator is most likely to be someone who has been, er, emotionally involved with the eponymous protagonist of the site. Aka Izobel Brannigan. Aka me. Since adopting this strategy we have instigated such investigations as to the likely responsibility of the respective candidates.”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“We’re talking to those people who at some point have been intimate with Izobel Brannigan.”
“Your exes?”
“Indeed. As yet these investigations are proving inconclusive but informative.”
“Meaning?”
“I don’t know, Ivan, I don’t. That’s why I’ve got you on board.”
“And who are they, your exes? No, don’t tell me, I bet they’re all men who work in professions advertised in the Guardian on a Monday. Creative, Media and Marketing.”
“Rubbish. Frank’s an academic.” With a sideline in radio punditry. “And one of them’s unemployed.” Though William’s dole-queue status was mitigated by the fact of his father being Britain’s richest theatrical impresario.
“And the rest?”
“So. What’s wrong with working in the media?”
“Nothing, I suppose. It’s just that people who work in the media are so self-obsessed and superior. They think that it gives them license to bore the rest of us with stories about their jobs, when really all work tales are as interesting and relevant as the details of somebody’s dreams. Boring and meaningless.”
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