by Adele Parks
‘What if he had? Would you still have left him for Scott Taylor then?’ demands Jess.
‘He didn’t,’ I reply firmly.
Suddenly my mouth tastes metallic; a taste I normally associate with waiting to see if my card will be rejected at the till point or going to the dentist – fear generally. That Buck’s Fizz I had earlier must have been off. What have I got to be afraid of? A third long silence stretches between me and my best hate – sorry, I mean best mate. But honestly! Couldn’t she have pretended to be happier for me? What would that have cost her? I can feel every one of the 5,456 miles that separates us. I want Scott to come back. I want him to put his arms around me; maybe then I’d have the guts to hang up on my old life, although there probably isn’t any need. If Jess’s reaction is anything to go by then I think my old life will hang up on me pretty damn soon. Why does it have to be like this?
‘You need to call Adam. You see it as a done deal.’
‘I told him it was a done deal.’
‘You were both drunk, he didn’t take you seriously. He thought it was a fight you’d get over by the next evening.’
‘Well, I’m sure he sees things differently now,’ I say with a frustrated sigh. ‘He does read the papers.’
‘You owe him a proper explanation, at least that much after four years. He’s a good guy. You know that.’
‘OK, OK, if I agree to call him will you agree to talk about something different? Like bridesmaids’ dresses for instance,’ I bargain.
‘I am not wearing pink.’
‘Fine, how about mauve?’
For a moment I think she might show an interest but my hopes are dashed when she says, ‘He’ll be back in a
He’s eating then. Not so heartbroken. I’ve had enough of this nonsense from Jess. She’s supposed to be my friend. Snippily I say, ‘He won’t want to have a big emotional talk and risk his pork chow mein going cold. Anyway, I’ve got to go now; I’m supposed to be somewhere else.’
I hang up. I don’t bother to explain to my naggy mate that my pressing engagement is dragging my sun-bed out of the shade (or watching someone else drag it, to be precise). Rolling on to my stomach, so that my back gets tanned, would probably seem like a flimsy excuse for not talking to my ex.
43. Scott
Straight after lunch Fern and I jump in my yellow Lamborghini Murciélago and speed off to Santa Monica pier. Fern’s really chuffed because we are alone; which – apart from Bob, who follows us in the Audi – we are. We don’t talk about her phone call with her mate. It’s a downer and I don’t want to do ‘down’ this afternoon; I want to do ‘tourist’.
The sun guarantees smiles as well as flip-flops and we wander hand in hand and on air. We cross a bridge above a busy, multi-lane road. The air smells of gasoline and hot tarmac but when I breathe deeply there is a hint of sea breeze, accentuated and made more convincing by the sound of seagulls. Fern reads a little plaque and tells me that the wooden pier dates back to 1909; the wood is worn to a shine with the feet of thousands, if not millions, of souls who have also sought a bit of easy fun in the amusement park.
It’s a beautiful day. We ride the rollercoaster and the carousel, we eat candyfloss and drink Diet Coke, then we wander down to the beach and walk along the waves. We kick off our footwear and I keep dashing us both in and out of the sea, trying to race the surf. We get soaked but we’ll look pretty cool if we happen to get caught on camera. I don’t think any photographers are trailing us but I’m just saying – if they are – they’ll get some great
‘I feel as carefree as a child and yet I’m an engaged woman with a home and a future. It’s marvellous. How come when I was with Adam I owned nothing and had no plans and yet I felt weighed down?’ asks Fern. She’s panting and she has sand stuck to the side of her face. She’s lovely.
I don’t answer her because I don’t have the answer. I have very few answers, actually, but I am listening to her. I’m finding that nearly everything she says is interesting. Unlike most men I love to talk about moods, and beliefs, and life’s incidents that we call experience. I find it helps my work. For instance, there’s a lyric somewhere in what she’s just said. Something about the weight of freedom or the lightness of commitment. Not sure; I jot it down anyway.
I’ve been working on the new album for some months now. All my albums to date have had songs about being, well… me – angry, cheeky, humble beginnings, rich and famous now, misunderstood, too well understood. I use my song writing to replace the confessional box which I gave up when I was about thirteen (roughly the same time as I really started to sin, actually). I offer my fans brief glimpses into my infamous life. I lay out my sordid and soiled self. I flaunt my fame-induced neuroses and I dazzle them with my humongous success. It’s complex. But people are. And me, I am especially because I’m like other people but more so. The Europeans love all that stuff, always have done. They love hearing about my sex
But not the Americans. The albums haven’t worked in America. How come even when I’m having the best times that thought punches me? Floors me.
Thinking about it (and I do think about it, endlessly), it’s not a surprise my albums aren’t doing it for the guys of the stars and stripes. For one thing they don’t like messy famous people. They like their famous people to be happy and uncomplicated (because otherwise what are they all working for?). And for another thing, they don’t really accept I’m famous at all because I’m not famous here. It’s a fucker.
So I have two jobs to do out here in the States. One, I have to show them just how big a dick I swing and two, I have to produce an album they will like – which probably means I have to stop talking about swinging my dick. I need to do less of the fame stuff, they’re not buying it – literally. And I need to talk about love. The happy sort. The celebratory, blissful, ecstatic sort. Enter Fern.
Fern is so clear-cut and straightforward. Her dilemmas are few and far between and so ordinary. The Americans are really going to relate.
‘The stuff you talk about, Fern, is so fresh and frank and authentic. I love it. You’re helping me think new thoughts. I’ve written so much in the last week. I’m working on this new album, called Wedding Album, it’s a bunch of love ballads. Something very different for me. It’s all about you.’
‘Really?’ Fern flashes one of her astonishing smiles.
No, not really if she means really in the absolutely, one now. I’ve dropped her name into two or three of the songs, which only required the smallest of changes in the lyrics. It’s pedantic to insist on believing that just because I wrote the vast majority of the album before I met her, it’s any less about her than it would have been if I’d written it after I’d met her. I’m like dedicating it to her. The press will think it’s about her. My fans will think it’s about her. And in my experience if enough people think a thing, it makes it true. True enough. The thing is, more people will buy it if they think it’s about her.
I start to tell Fern more stories about myself. This isn’t just because I like talking about me, I’m wondering how she will react to it all. She’s appropriately (and understandably) enthralled, but more than that, her responses to my experiences are really fascinating. Fern understands my ordinary roots and extraordinary flowering. That’s special. I offer up fragile, immersed memories and she appreciates what I’m on about; I can elaborate on them, giving them warmth and texture and a meaning they sure as hell didn’t have when I was living them. Story after story pours forth. Some are blazingly bizarre; she’s surprised to hear I’ve had coffee with Nelson Mandela. Others are painfully predictable; everyone expects me to have snorted cocaine off the arses of women whose names I never knew.
‘I think it’s brilliant that I can tell you all this stuff,’ I mutter as I kiss her. I slip my tongue in her mouth and my hand up her skirt. I feel her warm wetness in both places. We’re lying side by side on the sand. It’s fun to push a fraction further, go a bit deeper, play a little harder.
‘Not if you insist on giving me filthy
looks and probing kisses in the sunshine,’ she laughs. We both know she wants it.
I love it that she’s so horny for me but I love controlling myself (and her) more, so I keep talking. There’s loads more stuff to tell her about me yet and she, like everyone else, can’t get enough. The difference between her and everyone else is that I don’t edit. If she’s shocked she doesn’t show it. The thing is, for a long time I believed that as a rock star I sort of had a duty to enjoy myself to the absolute limit. That’s what’s supposed to happen; it’s part of the natural order of things and rock stars don’t enjoy themselves line-dancing or whipping up a really tasty meal for two with only four ingredients. Decadence and depravity are the birthright of the rock star. It’s my job to be reckless and extreme. People expect it, because if I’m not shagging and snorting to excess then who the hell is? It would be an ungrateful waste of opportunity to be a rock star and to just turn up at a gig or the studio, play some songs and leave quietly by the back door. No one wants that. I’m in a unique position, not even models or princes get the same opportunities. I answer to no one. The stuff I’ve done isn’t evil; it’s just dirty. Really, very much so.
I tell her about parties where people left their clothes and sense at the door, where joints and women were rolled on glass-top tables and champagne and bullshit flowed and was lapped up with ravenous greed.
However sensationally beautiful and cool the party
‘I guess we won’t be going to many parties,’ comments Fern.
‘No, not at the moment. I don’t feel like it. Does that bother you?’
‘No.’ She hesitates and then adds, ‘But maybe parties would be more fun together than they ever were when you were alone.’
‘Yeah, maybe. That’s what I’m hoping.’
We kiss again and I don’t tell her that my hope has a way of vanishing; I spend it like liquid gold. That sort of thought won’t help Wedding Album; it’s not the right chi. Instead I say, ‘It’s great that I can tell you the most sensational and sinister things about myself and you seem equally interested in both.’ I shake my head with a mix of disbelief and delight.
‘That’s what love is, accepting the person faults and mistakes and all,’ says Fern in a matter-of-fact way.
‘So it appears.’
We stare peacefully out to sea for a few moments, then Fern asks, ‘Do you think I’ll get a signal here? I’d really like to call another one of my mates, Lisa.’
And we were having such a nice time; she must be a glutton for punishment. I smile and try to appear supportive. As it happens it pans out better than I hoped as this Lisa practically wets herself when I grab Fern’s phone and talk to her.
‘Hello, Scottie Taylor here,’ I say. ‘How’s tricks?’ This is the routine I use at my gigs. I grab the phone off someone in the crowd who is taking a photo and then I call their mum. It’s hilarious. The effect is just as awesome with Fern’s friend as it is with the people in the crowds. Of course, Lisa squeals with laughter.
I like this Lisa better than the other mate. At least she doesn’t give Fern a hard time about leaving her old boyfriend in the lurch. In fact, she doesn’t say much at all beyond, ‘Fern is a lucky, lucky cow.’ Which she says about ninety times, but sort of nicely.
Fern takes the phone off me and asks Lisa to be bridesmaid so I hope she’s fit. Lisa says yes and gushes that she’ll do anything to help out, that she’ll come to LA at the drop of a hat. But when Fern offers to fly her out and to hire a nanny for her sprogs Lisa says she is meant to be running the NCT nearly new sale in the town hall next Saturday, so it’s tricky. I’m not sure what that is but it must be pretty important, sort of on a par with a global summit about climate change, I guess. Fern
Poor Fern, I think she’s beginning to realize that the tiresome thing about getting what you want is that you always have to lose what you had.
44. Fern
America is built with giants in mind. Everything is on a galactic scale. Skyscrapers actually do scrape the sky, there are ten- and twelve-lane road systems and flyovers that look big enough for spaceships to land. The plates of food are vast, the cartons of yogurt are enormous and you can swim in the beakers of coffee. And as far as I’m concerned, the best thing of all, the stores stretch on and on and on and never seem to meet the horizon. The size of the US is probably one of the reasons Scott fits in here – as he’s gargantuan too.
Scott is being such a sweetheart. He must be really busy with his album and yet he’s making a huge effort to help settle me in. He carves out time to show me all the sights. I don’t just mean the tourist stuff I’ve circled in the guidebook; he’s keen to show me his LA too.
We visit Disneyland, we go and watch the whales swimming, we visit the zoo and we go to the predictable (unmissable), if not slightly crude and tasteless, Hollywood Boulevard. There’s a shockingly bad waxwork museum there. The models are all slightly out of focus, off-scale versions of American actors. It’s not a patch on Madame Tussaud’s. I once had my photo taken with Scott’s model in Madame Tussaud’s in London but I don’t confess to it. He knows I was a fan before I met him, not a crazy fan but enough of a fan. Yet confessing to the fact that
We also visit the Guinness Book of Records Museum, where being a freak is celebrated; God Bless America. I insist that we go to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and take pictures. I’m desperate to put my hands and feet in the prints of Sophia Loren and Susan Sarandon. Scott is reluctant.
‘I’m not mad about actors,’ he says.
‘Why’s that then?’
‘The people who make it their business to be vicious about me say that’s because I’ve never been offered a role on the silver screen and I’m consumed with vulgar jealousy. It’s nothing as crass. I just don’t think they should be paid such obscene amounts for doing what the rest of us do all the time for free.’
He says this so casually that I almost miss the importance of what he’s saying. Poor Scott, he certainly has come across more than his fair share of fakers and I suppose he does have to perform for strangers a lot of the time. ‘Everyone isn’t acting all the time,’ I point out encouragingly. ‘I’m not acting. You’re not acting.’
Scott grins, ‘OK, let’s go to Grauman’s then. You know I can’t deny you anything.’
We spend a lot of time on Sunset Boulevard. The road is massive. In fact all roads are unfeasibly long in the US; when I was first given someone’s business card I thought the house number was a telephone number. Other than length, it is a surprisingly mundane road to look at. Despite
We visit Johnny Depp’s old nightclub, the Viper Room, but we don’t stay long; nightclubs and addicts are an explosive brew. We move on to the Standard to eat chips at the twenty-four-hour restaurant; Leonardo Di Caprio and Cameron Diaz reportedly have shares in that establishment. We sit in a cosy booth and chat over the sound of ice being crushed as pomegranate margaritas are being prepared for other people. When I’m in the mood for champagne we pop to Chateau Marmont, a plush, fantastical hideaway, or we float in the clouds at the Sky Bar. All these celebrated hotels, with legendary bars, boast famous patrons. We (and a lot of other recognizable people) do our shopping at Ralph’s supermarket, also on Sunset. The bread’s good but the thrill for me is that I stood behind Drew Barrymore in the checkout queue. I’m secretly keeping a list detailing the famous people I’ve met or spotted. Besides Drew, I spotted Jennifer Aniston while dining at the Mondrian and I stood in the loo queue with Emily Blunt at Mel’s (it’s a diner that’s celebrated for its customers – strike that, I meant to say its waffles, strike that, I did mean the customers). I sat at a sushi bar next to Anne Marie Duff. It all leaves me gasping with excitement.
Scott keeps the best until last. Just when I start to insist that I simply can’t be any more impressed with the razzmatazz, glitz and notoriety, he takes me to Rodeo Drive.
I stand, mouth wide open, gaping in absolute awe. Rodeo Drive is truly dazzling. Everything shines; the expansive windows displayin
g breathtaking clothes and jewels, the dark, sleek cars, the blonde glossy women and even the older plump men who accompany them, shine. These men wear a uniform of the confident wealthy: pale blue shirts, red ties and navy blazers with buffed buttons and cufflinks and enormous watches that… yes, you’ve guessed it… shine. The street is clean enough to eat your dinner off and every street lamp is decorated with hanging baskets full of pretty bougainvillea that gently sway in the breeze. I turn around and around in circles.
‘Where should we start?’ I gasp, craning my neck to take in the enormous, shiny buildings. ‘I know, I know.’ I scrabble in my bag and find my all-singing all-dancing iPhone. ‘I have to call Ben,’ I say excitedly. He is the perfect person to appreciate this perfection.
‘Ben?’ asks Scott.
‘My old boss, remember?’
‘Oh yeah.’
‘Darling, how utterly fabulous to hear from you,’ shrieks Ben. ‘My most famous, famous, famous friend.’ I’m pretty sure Scott will have overheard him.
‘Well, I’m not really famous,’ I point out, blushing a little.
‘Clearly you haven’t been keeping up with the press, darling. You are a face,’ he yelps excitedly. ‘Every glossy
‘Which paper wrote that?’ I ask, distraught (Saadi had been too; Scott thought it was hilarious). ‘I sound like a trying-too-hard idiot.’
‘Most of them ran with that, since it’s the only comment you’ve made so far. And I noticed that you are taking all the credit for B&B. Most papers say you own it.’
‘I’m sorry about that,’ I mutter. ‘The papers aren’t always that accurate.’
‘No kidding. Don’t sweat it. Your engagement has been marvellous for business. I’ve had to take on three new fulltime staff.’
‘Three!’
‘One permanent and two on contract. When the fuss dies down I won’t need the contractors but I might as well milk it while I can,’ says business savvy Ben.
‘So the permanent girl, she’s –’