I sigh. Harriet has only received another dozen or so creepy emails from her non-stalkers since the march (‘Saw you didn’t even have the grace to honour your mother’s memory on Saturday. Shame. I was looking forward to seeing you there. I had a present for you’), but the blinkers are still firmly on. I’ve tried screaming, and shouting, and pointing to the lump on my head, and talking reasonably, and even threatening her, but all she does is set her mouth and say, ‘Well, obviously I’m going to be careful.’ So, silly me, I’m scared to go anywhere without her, insist on following her everywhere, as if someone my size would be any use against a nutter with a hotline to London’s skinhead community. Then again, it seems to have worked: nothing seems to have happened in the past five days, and now I can take a night off because we’re going to be surrounded by Everyone Who’s Anyone, Darling in the London restaurant community and no one, but no one, who shouldn’t be there will get past Lydia’s bouncers.
They have to have bouncers. Of course they’ve got bouncers. All new bars these days are built with aquarium windows so that the handbag thieves have plenty of room to scope the yuppies before they pop in and set themselves up for the night. So when there’s a launch, everyone within a mile’s radius knows about it within seconds of the paper coming down from the windows. Bars have been known to go bankrupt on the backs of their launch parties. Obviously, underfinanced bars run by nitwits, but it’s still a fact.
Of course, the owners of the Ski Bar probably think they’ve got bouncers because it lends them a certain exclusive cachet, like chrome swipe cards and a no-suits policy, but fortunately for them, they’ve hired Lydia to do their launch, and what Lydia doesn’t know about bouncers, their uses and abuses, probably isn’t worth knowing.
Lydia is Dom’s new boss. Lydia specialises in top of the market launches and plucked Dom from the obscurity of front-of-house at Barley Cane to start at the bottom in her PR company. He’s been there four weeks now, still in the middle of the honeymoon period, and we’ve already discovered the perks of having a mate in restaurant PR: that we will never, ever have to pay for a drink on Thursday night again. Because Thursday night is launch night, and all the PRs go to each other’s launches when they’re not doing launches of their own, and nobodies like us get to tag along.
Despite the fact that she eats out three or four times a week, Lydia is pencil-thin to fit into the designer gear she blags from her fashion PR friends in return for setting them up with the wherewithal to dine their clients without paying. Lydia has bags of energy and is always bestest, bestest friends with her staff in between the eighteen-month tantrums when she sacks them all, which usually precedes a five-week holiday somewhere in the Arizona desert. But she’s the best in the business, everybody knows that, and Dom says he reckons he’ll have learned everything he needs to know by the time she sacks him, and then he’ll be able to set up on his own. ‘It’s a licence to print money, love,’ he says. ‘And I don’t want to be living on catering wages when I’m forty.’
As we stand in the queue, Harriet says, ‘So you’re still thinking about that horrible old bat, then?’
I nod. Grace is rarely off my mind, though God knows I’d like to expunge every memory if I could. She hasn’t, of course, been in touch. I didn’t expect her to be. And I’m damned if I’m getting in touch with her.
‘Poor old you.’ Harriet makes an effort to sound sympathetic. ‘All that and a headache too. How are you feeling?’
‘Okay,’ I reply. I’ve pretty much recovered. For four days, I nursed a headache and a sense of approaching doom, and though, obviously, I didn’t have to work on Sunday and Monday because we were closed, things were pretty tough on the following two shifts. Even Harriet decided to lay off for a while, and behaved immaculately, taking up the slack when I had to pop off and sit down on a chair in the alleyway for a few minutes and close my eyes, though a strange virus seems to have struck Roy’s new botanical collection, and their leaves are beginning to mottle and curl. But she’s added a new twist to her act, trussing up her victims with liquorice bootlaces, an idea she introduced just as Roy was starting to ask questions, and he was so thrilled that he forgot all about his line of thought.
Dom’s working the table in the foyer, scanning lists of names and ticking them off. He looks harrassed. ‘Look,’ he is saying to a man in a ski jacket that looks like it’s been inflated with a bicycle pump, ‘you’re the third Adam Collyer who’s come in tonight. You can’t all be Adam Collyer.’ Dom isn’t just being firm because it’s his job. He has certain standards and this man, who seems to have had his hair cut in the highlighted beach-bum curtains of 1991 despite being thirty-five if he’s a day and is blessed with a set of teeth that some roebuck somewhere must be sorely missing, doesn’t live up to them. ‘Well, it’s hardly my fault that someone else is pretending to be me, is it?’ he is saying. ‘Which ones were they? I’ll go and find them.’ Yer, right. Like no one on a door has ever heard that one before. ‘There have been over three hundred people through the door already tonight,’ Dom replies. ‘I wasn’t keeping an eye on what the Adam Collyers looked like.’
‘Rich and Stinky are going to be siriusly pissed off about this,’ says Adam the Third. Dom treats him to a welcoming smile. Rich and Stinky are the owners of this new glamour spot, a pair of former City traders who jumped over the wall to set up a company promoting off-piste snowboarding holidays for other Sloane Rangers. The business has done well, branching out into a healthy trade in branded skiwear, lipsalve and so forth, and now they’re launching the Ski Bar to make some cash in the four months a year when the snow’s gone from the Alps and the rest of us are treated to the sound of braying in the streets of London. They’ve even managed to get cigarette sponsorship from St Moritz, boom-boom.
‘Ah!’ says Dom, ‘you’re a friend of Rich and Stinky’s! Why didn’t you say?’
‘Didn’t think I had to,’ says Adam the Third.
‘Well, we can get this sorted out in no time,’ says Dom, turns slightly to his left and says, ‘Rich! Stinky! I’ve got Adam Collyer here!’
Rich looks up from where he and Stinky have a small blonde woman pinned at bay against a coat rack made from old chair-lift parts. Her suntan would make a Spanish shoemaker wince with pride. ‘Air Yair?’ he says. ‘Wear?’ and I realise that he and Stinky must be distantly – or of course, not so distantly – related to Harriet. I stand back in amazement as they speak. Not a word emerges unscathed. You don’t learn to speak like that; you’re born to it. Liz Hurley could practise in front of the dressing-room mirror for the rest of her life and still never learn.
‘Here.’ Dom points at Adam the Third.
‘Well, he’snur A’am Coyer,’ says Stinky. ‘Who the blaryal ar year?’
Adam the Third, unabashed, sticks out a hand. ‘Ha-o Stinky. Rory Cottrell. Wazza school waya bra’er. Met at that fraferl Jane creacher’s chalet at Zermatt.’
‘Air furguards sake,’ says Stinky, catching him a violent slap on the upper arm. ‘Why didn’t yer sayser? Wappened to the Jane creacher, anyway?’
‘Married some Franch skiern strata. Nafterer furra moneya course. Slarve.’
‘Well, dafta be larve. Couldn’t be furra sex appeal, could it?’
‘Too righ. Sirius paper bag job, that one.’
‘Yah, sirius.’
They roar and treat each other’s upper arms to another bout of violence. Dom sighs, turns back and puts a third tick beside the fated Adam Collyer’s name. ‘Hello, darlings,’ he says, kisses us both. ‘Avoid the gluhwein like the plague. Ranjiit’s behind the bar.’
Then he turns to the pair of scarecrows jiggling in line behind us and says, ‘Hi, there. Can I have your names, please?’
Lydia is in the middle of the main room, talking to Terry Marshall. Terry is the bar correspondent for the Evening Argus, and wrote a book last year called How to Get Drunk for Free. Terry hasn’t paid for a drink since 1987, and the whites of his eyes have been yellow since 1992. It doesn�
�t take much to get Terry going these days, and he has already started singing. ‘Have you heard this one, then?’ he yells into Lydia’s ear as she gamely smiles her welcoming smile. ‘Liddia oh Liddia say have you seen Liddia, Liddia the tattoed laydy …’
‘I have, Terry,’ says Lydia, who has heard it from these very lips every time she’s done a launch since she entered the business in 1993. ‘Very good.’
‘Music hall,’ barks Terry, ‘you can’t beat a bit of music hall. Ah. Now. Who have we here?’
Lydia’s eyes light up. ‘Anna! Harriet! Welcome! Have you got a drink? Have you met Terry Marshall?’ and before we’re even able to say, ‘Yes, Lydia, we were only spanking him a month ago,’ she has slipped off into the crowd. This is what’s technically known in the trade as the Teflon Shuffle, that ability to pass on anyone, however sticky, without ever seeming to have been there. Lydia’s ability with the Teflon Shuffle is renowned throughout the industry. PR companies actually send their trainees to her launches to observe how it’s done.
‘Hi, Terry,’ says Harriet. ‘How are you?’
‘Well, well,’ bellows Terry, wiping the corners of his eyes with a wad of crumpled bog paper he’s brought out from his pocket. ‘Bloody awful launch, though. Never seen so many ugly people in one room in my life.’
Mr Marshall has a point, though. The press may offer little to write home about, but their leather-patched tweed jackets look positively tempting beside Rich and Stinky’s field of acquaintance, who have turned out en masse to lig every last drop they can. Because what is just about acceptable in the low-lit wooden schnapps bars of Kandersteg is just so not attractive in the less kindly illumination of the urban wilds. Because, you see, though skiboarders like to think of themselves as the surfers of the mountains, it’s not like that at all. They’re more like the trolls of suburbia.
Where surfers are long and lean from a diet of shellfish and amphetamine, these people are square and squat from a diet of dope munchies. Where surfers have smooth, blemishless skin from constant exposure to sunlight and salt water, these people have rashes on their necks from constant exposure to man-made fabrics. Where surfers chug the occasional beer from the neck of the bottle, these people chug anything they can get, and their chapped lips are perpetually blackened by the berry stain of gluhwein. Surfers come from the coast, where the air is clean and long legs are a great aid in breasting sand dunes. Skiboarders come from the central counties, where short, thick little legs are a great aid in dipping sheep. You can’t take a boy from a farm in Gloucestershire and turn him into an Adonis: it just won’t happen.
Harriet executes a perfect Teflon Shuffle on Terry Marshall. She appeals to his sympathy. ‘We’ve been here twenty minutes, Terry,’ she lies, ‘and we still haven’t managed to get a drink. I’m going to die if I don’t go to the bar. Can we get you something while we’re there?’
‘Poor old you,’ says Terry. ‘No, you’re all right.’
We slip away and Terry disappears among the cackle of trolls. I brush against a pop-eyed brunette who has obviously stolen her teeth from a chain-smoking buck of the same family that Adam the Third got his from. She goggles, says, ‘Mind out.’ Then, she tries to take a puff of her Silk Cut extra-long with lips that have difficulty stretching closed, trails smoke up through her seagrass hair. ‘You okay, Biccie?’ says a bloke with a bobble hat. Oh, please. ‘Yeah,’ says Biccie. ‘Though obviously some people can’t see where they’re going.’ Puts a glass of red wine to her face, pushing lips forward in a trough to meet it, and a trail of spare goes down her chin to join the rest on her collar.
‘Biccie,’ I say, ‘it’s meant to go in your mouth,’ and I move on while she’s still goggling and trying to think of a response.
Ranjiit, tidy little goatee and hard-trimmed hair, hasn’t worked a launch for a while, and is looking harassed. Presses up on the bar to give us kisses and drops back down again. ‘They’re animals,’ he says. ‘It’s a feeding frenzy.’ Waitresses attempt to come out of the kitchen doors with trays of canapés, get four, maybe five steps into the crowd and have to turn back because their trays have been sucked as clean as bleached dinosaur bones on a Montana hillside. He stops for a minute, picks up a cloth and a glass to look like he’s doing something. ‘How are you both? Haven’t seen you since you left the Bean Bag Bar. You’ve been in the papers a lot.’
‘Please don’t start,’ says Harriet.
‘No, it’s cool,’ says Ranjiit. ‘I was really proud. Did you really swear at Leeza Hayman?’
‘Sort of,’ says Harriet. ‘I called her a bibulous old fishwife, if that counts as swearing.’
‘Respect,’ says Ranjiit, and gives her a high five. ‘D’you two want a drink?’
We nod. We need a drink.
‘What do you want? White wine?’
‘Great.’
Ranjiit selects a nice bottle of Aussie Semillion, pops the cork and hands it over with two glasses.
Biccie shoves an elbow under mine, heaves me off the bar. ‘I’ll have one of those as well,’ she says.
Ranjiit shakes his head, smiling nicely like a well-trained little boy. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m not allowed to hand out bottles.’
Biccie goggles. ‘But you gave her a bottle.’
‘Ah,’ says Ranjiit. ‘She’s special.’
‘Well, I’ll have five glasses of wine, then,’ says Biccie decidedly.
‘Sorry.’ Ranjiit shakes his head again, but nicely. ‘I’m not allowed to do more than three glasses at a time.’
‘Why on earth not?’
‘Well,’ he says slowly, ‘because people often take advantage at things like this and get half a dozen glasses for themselves at a time. Which means that the drink runs out in the first half hour, and then there’s nothing left for the people who come later.’
‘You’re patronising me!’ she says accusingly.
Ranjiit smiles a lovely smile, blinks a couple of times. ‘How clever of you to notice,’ he replies. ‘Three glasses of white, was it?’
We finally track Linds and Mel down to a corner by the window, where they perch on a stack of piled-up tables and share an ashtray made from an empty St Moritz packet. They are deep in conversation with Max Kershaw and Bob Pruitt.
‘… Sort of person you’d have to gob in their food,’ I hear Linds say to Max as we approach.
‘An Amis or a Winslet?’ asks Max.
‘Oh, a DiCaprio at the very least,’ she says. ‘It would definitely have to come from the back of the throat.’
‘Good girl,’ says Max. ‘He can’t cook to save his life, anyway. Did you see the other night? Bloody bacon and tomatoes in the same pan, as though that was some sort of revelation.’
Max and Bob are both food writers. Max works for a glossy freesheet distributed in expensive hotels in the central zone, has a signet ring on his little pinkie and believes vehemently in capital punishment. Bob wears bow ties, and is obscenely, magnificently fat. I’m not talking unfashionably fat, here: Bob is a walking bell jar, a titan of fatness. Bob has to squeeze to get through doors, and that’s when he’s already turned sideways. I once sat in a booth in Livebait backing on to the one Bob was sitting in, and when he laughed, he catapulted me face-first into the person opposite me’s bouillabaisse. Bob writes recipes for a Sunday paper that begin with declarations like ‘There is no chip that compares with one fried in home-made beef dripping.’ I love Bob.
He is also amazingly strong for someone for whom the very effort of standing up produces the sort of panting you usually only see in a Grand National winner. He picks me up in huge arms and squashes me into the folds of his tummy. ‘My dear,’ he declares, ‘it’s always so nice to see the rude girls. Have you insulted anyone yet this evening?’
‘It would be hard not to,’ Harriet splutters after receiving the same affectionate treatment. Bob is a lovely guy, but it’s hard to breathe when your face has been buried in three tons of lard. ‘Anna found someone called Biccie.’
/> ‘Biccie?’ says Max. ‘Biccie? What sort of a name is that?’
‘Biccies?’ Bob looks around him wildly, hopefully. ‘Are there? I’m fainting from hunger.’
‘No, no,’ says Max. ‘It’s a name. What do you think it’s short for?’
‘Biscuit, obviously,’ says Harriet.
Mel gives me a big cuddle round my well-squashed shoulders. ‘How’s the head?’
‘Better.’ I push my hair back to show her the bruise.
‘I say,’ says Max, ‘been tangling with that chef of yours again?’
‘Oh no, far more dramatic,’ says Harriet, ‘she got kidnapped. Had to be saved by a very cute policeman.’
‘How cute?’ asks Linds.
‘Very cute,’ we chorus together, and I look at her in mild surprise.
‘Kidnapped?’ asks Bob, to whom the idea of someone picking you up and carrying you away seems an entirely alien concept.
‘Don’t worry,’ says Harriet. ‘She got a police escort home.’
‘Hang on,’ says Mel, ‘last I heard you had that nice Australian boy in tow.’
‘Well, yes, but he’s in Barcelona until Sunday. And then he’s off back down under.’
‘Still keeping them lined up like chocolates, then,’ teases Mel.
‘Chocolates?’ Says Bob. ‘Where?’
‘It’s a crime against humanity,’ Max fulminates.
‘What?’ asks Linds.
‘You can’t call a woman Biccie. It’s like calling your dog Cressida.’
This goes over everyone’s head. Especially Bob’s. ‘I wish you wouldn’t keep mentioning biccies,’ he says. ‘I might have to slip through the crowd and see if I can’t get a bit closer to the kitchen.’
We all turn to watch Bob slip through the crowd. It’s one of those unmissable phenomena, like the parting of the Red Sea. He lumbers away from us, going, amiably, ‘Excuse me, excuse me,’ and ploughing forward without waiting for a response. People topple like ninepins before a bowling ball. A swathe of clear floor opens up behind him.
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