‘Sorry.’
‘I need my neck brace.’
‘Um, Eamonn. I think I’ve killed Darren.’
‘OK, everyone relax,’ shouted Eamonn. Someone wheeled Darren off to find his neck brace. I looked sheepish and put my dressing gown on. Eamonn approached.
‘Eamonn, I’m so sorry,’ I whispered.
Eamonn didn’t respond. He was looking past me and not saying anything. I froze. Eamonn would never work with me again and Darren would probably sue me.
‘Eamonn.’
He ignored me again.
‘Eamonn! I’m really, really sorry.’
‘I’m trying not to laugh, Sarah.’
‘Oh, OK.’
Darren was wheeled back on. They’d somehow managed to put the neck brace on even with his head at that angle, which must have been tricky.
‘It’s actually going to look great,’ whispered Eamonn, studying Darren.
‘You are such a bastard.’
‘Right, we’ll go again. Without the breasts in Darren’s face. Sarah, if you could arrange not to injure any cast members this time that would be most appreciated. We’ll go for a take this time. One thing, Sarah: you’re going dangerously close to that cable there when you do that crawl around the floor at the end of the routine. I don’t want you to trip when you stand up. I’d like to limit the amount of neck braces being worn in the studio if we possibly can. Have a look now where it is.’
I looked at the cable.
‘Eamonn, I’ve got it.’ And then I tutted. ‘I’m a professional.’
‘And AAAACTION!’
I heard the opening beats. I started bobbing my head and prowling around the stage. I made eye contact with the uglier members of the audience. I’d picked them out earlier. I knew what I was like around good-looking people. I had discovered that the key to me doing the striptease is to:
1 pretend it’s a piss take
2 pretend Simon is there, making me smile
3 pretend I am a fully dressed eighties power rocker and disguise all mistakes with an eighties power rock move or an eighties power rock pout
Ooops, little stumble. Make it a shimmy. ‘Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now’. It was fun. Perhaps I did feel the empowerment that Sunflower had talked about. Although it was more like the time I drank four WKD and came home and danced in my lounge to Heart FM.
I summoned my Si when I had to start touching myself as though no one was looking. Not that I do touch myself like that when no one is looking. I’m hardly going to put on heels and wipe my hands over my boobs with a facial expression as though a dog has just bitten my foot.
‘Oh yes, she’s a maniac!’ Si piped up. I blew him a kiss. I teased my dress up but wobbled on my heels. Nothing a bit of heartfelt power ballad swaying couldn’t get me out of.
‘Pissed again.’
I gave him a sexy growl.
‘Time to get on the floor and pop those ping-pong balls out, babe.’
I turned round and attempted to do a downward dog sexily. Then I pumped up and down.
‘Shit, babe, that landed in Jay’s beer. Did I not tell you he was coming round?’
The boys cheered as told. I put my bum on the floor and swung round. I took a stocking off and crawled over to Darren. I eyeballed him. He looked in pain. I couldn’t take my stocking off and put it around a neck brace! Taylor would look like she was mocking the afflicted if she did that. Sorry, Darren. He tensed as I approached. So I was very gentle. More cheers when the stocking went around his neck without a need to call Casualty. Then I went back into the centre to whip it all off and start hotting it up. I was stomping and taking all my clothes off. I did my crawl around the floor. I managed to avoid the wire. I’d done it! I’d bloody done it! It was the homeward stretch. Now all I needed to do was patrol the men for cash.
There were only a few plasters, a pair of shoes and my knickers between me and my birthday suit. I stuck my beer glass in front of the men. If they didn’t give me money I pretended to get riled. I picked a ten-dollar note out of the glass and kissed it. Then I moved on to the next person with it in my mouth, hoping he’d match it. But the next punter was Leo Clement in a black wig. I needed to hold eye contact with him. Suddenly I was back on the beach kissing him. I thought about Simon. And at that point I could have screamed at Simon. I tried to get back into the scene. Leo clearly wasn’t giving me any money, so I did a dramatic pissed-off stomp away. Brilliantly Beyoncé. I was at the end. Thank you, God. I turned and gave Leo one last glare before the music stopped. I picked up my back foot. It didn’t move. However my front foot had already carried on. I tried to grab hold of something. Which was unfortunately Darren’s bad leg. He screamed. I shouted, ‘Fuuuuck!’ And before I knew it, I had landed spread-eagled across the stage, beer glass shattered and money everywhere.
As I put my head in my hands I heard Eamonn saying, ‘Smashing, that was smashing.’ I looked up as Darren was wheeled away and Eamonn started to convulse above me.
sixty-three
There were positives and negatives. On the negative side: I had sprained my ankle.
However, on the positive side: I had been given prescription drugs by a personal physician. So I think the positive won. I felt like Marilyn.
There was a knock on my door.
‘How’s the ankle?’
‘Swollen, but I’m floating, so hey.’ I held the ice in place on the ankle and turned around to see which runner I was talking to now. Cor blimey. It wasn’t a runner. It was Dolph Bloody Wax, star, as you doubtless already know, of those subtle philosophical masterpieces of modern cinema, the Absolute Destruction series. He plays a character called Baptiste Fury who kills everyone before saving a baby to violin music, bonking its mother and then buggering off to do more butchering in the sequel. Thought I’d better explain in case you had it confused with something French.
‘Swollen.’
‘I haven’t laughed like that in years. And it’s good to laugh.’
I could have broke me leg!
‘Oh yes, there’s nothing like a good laugh.’
‘It’s a medicine. A tonic. In this industry, if you don’t laugh . . .’
‘You take prescription drugs?’
He gave me a sharp look; I feared I had touched a nerve. So I smiled, which made him smile.
‘Oh, a joke. You’re funny.’
‘I’m a hoot.’
‘Did you hear I’m having a party for us all?’
‘No.’
‘Next Friday. I just wanted us all to get to know each other away from the mechanics of film. Time to really interact, swap experiences. This is a journey. We’re struggling to achieve our aim but . . .’ He stopped here for effect. I waited and wondered what chicken nugget of wisdom Dolph would impart now.
‘We are human.’ He said this with a nod and a smile.
Brilliant, Dolph. I wasn’t sure, but you cleared that up for me.
‘We are human, Dolph,’ I repeated emphatically.
‘Yar, we are all human and we need to stop and refresh ourselves on the way.’ Dolph had started laughing. So I figured that was a little attempt at humour.
‘Ha, yes, very, very true. We are indeed all human.’
He suddenly stopped laughing.
‘You get it,’ he said seriously.
‘Yes, I do. Oh gosh, I get it.’
‘And I love your accent.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Great accent.’
‘Thanks. I’ll tell my mum.’
‘I like you.’ As he said this he did a disco-move finger-point in my direction. This was great. Floaty painkillers and a truly mad Hollywood Star. I thought of Simon. He would have found Dolph Wax hysterical. That was the first time I’d thought of Simon today. Except doing the striptease for him. But I hadn’t done my usual forty-five thoughts a second along the lines of, ‘Oh, I miss him, oh, I buggered it up, oh, I want him to call.’ I decided to think about him lots for the rest of the day. I didn’t want hi
m to think I was going off him.
‘Sar . . . Oh, hi, Dolph.’ It was Leo Clement. Dolph took Leo’s hand and shook it. Leo was minus the wig but still in the costume. Black tight jeans, cowboy boots, black leather jacket. It was quite Kurt Cobain. But clean. And sexy. Obviously. Just once, for the novelty, it would be nice to see Leo look crap.
Blimey, Dolph had still got hold of Leo’s hand. It was getting on for a fifteen-second hand clasp. When he eventually stopped that he put a hand on Leo’s back, but he wasn’t doing masculine back-clapping; he was just patting it. Actually, it was more of a stroke than a pat.
‘Sarah, how’s your leg?’ asked Leo, extricating himself from the man embrace and coming over to me.
‘Um,’ I wanted to say something witty. Actually, forget witty, anything would have done. But I couldn’t think of any words, because me and Leo on the beach was coming back to me. ‘Um, good, thanks.’
‘See you at the party, you two!’ shouted Dolph as he left.
Leo sighed.
‘I think you have an admirer.’
‘What?’
‘Dolph. I think he likes you.’ Because I hadn’t progressed much from the playground I sang ‘I think he likes you’ as though I was seven.
‘Huh?’
‘I think Dolph likes you. Likes you, likes you.’ It probably goes without saying but I did the seven-year-old sing for ‘likes you, likes you’.
‘I wouldn’t say that around here,’ whispered Leo.
‘Why?’ I whisper back.
‘Because according to his publicist, who is somewhere round here, he is a straight Hollywood actor.’
‘Ah, a straight Hollywood actor,’ I nod. ‘One of those straight Hollywood actors who likes boys.’
‘Hmmm. Will you protect me at the party?’
Oh dear. The party was on the night after Leo and I filmed our sexy scene and I was really hoping to avoid Leo from then on. It was just too obvious that I thought he was beautiful and that kissing him was one of the most sensual things I had ever done. And I wanted to be beyond that. I wanted to be his dumpy English friend. I didn’t want to be like all the other girls he met. I didn’t want to stare at him with my gob open like an accident-prone loon. I wanted to be shaken-martini cool around him so that we could be friends and have a laugh. But that was completely out of the question because when I was around Leo I was about as cool as PVC-clad bollock.
‘Don’t worry, Leo. I’ll protect you,’ I said.
And he smiled. And I smiled. And we held the look and then our breathing started to get in synch again.
I looked away quickly and started thinking about Simon.
sixty-four
That afternoon I had hours to kill. I was at a clinic waiting for Rachel to finish having more anaemia tests done. As it’s impossible to have happy thoughts in hospitals, I let my mind get on the crap-thought roundabout. And of course I thought about Simon.
I tried to imagine what he was doing. I guessed he was racing around trying to shift his Viagra product. I bet he’d already bought a baby Tottenham Hotspur outfit. I could see him touching her tummy and whispering stories and jokes to the bump. I thought about them in bed at night, her and her bump taking up just a tiny corner as she slept silently like an impregnated angel.
I wondered if he was happy with his choice. And whether he thought of me and, if he did, in what context. I suspected that if he ever spoke of me my name would be preceded by the word ‘nightmare’ and closely followed by the word ‘nutter’. I wondered whether he’d been back to the flat and taken his stuff. And if he had, would there be a note waiting for me? And what would it say?
And I wondered whether I’d be happy again soon. I’d never had the highest self-esteem but now it felt as though it was underneath the sole of my bandaged foot.
They really do things properly in the States. I thought they’d just give Rachel a prescription and she’d be off. But we must have been in that surgery for hours and hours.
I dozed off and woke to see Rachel and a doctor walking towards me. They didn’t say anything. I must have sensed they were coming. Rachel looked wired. Her eyes were open really wide and there was a far-away look there that I couldn’t place.
I was disappointed that the male doctor didn’t look like George Clooney. He more resembled the villain from The Simpsons. He was wiry and slightly hunched like he was about to walk into an olde worlde low-ceilinged tearoom.
‘Are you Rachel’s friend?’
‘Yes,’ I said, getting up. ‘Yes, I am.’
‘Would you mind joining us in here for a moment?’
‘No, no, of course not.’ As we walked I took Rachel’s hand like the nuns used to make us do at school. I’m not sure exactly why I did this but it suddenly felt very wrong to sing ‘Anaemia’ to the tune of ‘Insomnia’ as I had been doing all morning.
‘Now then,’ said Mr Burns. ‘It is anaemia as we thought.’
Rachel sighed and I started doing some bad singing.
‘However, as is often the case, the anaemia is brought on by an underlying health problem. And in your case, we have to be relieved that it has brought it to our attention. Because we have to act quickly.’
What’s this, the bloody trailer? Get to the point, doctor.
‘We are looking at breast cancer, as feared.’
Oh no. Not that point. Don’t get to that point ever, doctor. Why didn’t he say something else?
‘My personal method of attacking this would be a mastectomy as soon as possible. It will immediately be followed by chemotherapy. The key here is to stop it spreading to the lymph nodes, if it hasn’t already, and therefore round the body. I understand this is a huge shock but, on a positive, you are in a very good place.’
I glanced at Rachel; she was staring at Mr Burns. He did a slow, doctorly sympathetic head-nod thing. It was deathly quiet in there, until I started breathing through my nose and twitching. I felt like punching something. She was thirty-two. Not that I wanted it to happen to anyone older. But she was only thirty-two. And she did yoga every day. It was just wrong.
‘Fuck,’ I said. ‘Sorry, sorry, I didn’t mean to say that out loud.’
Rachel started to laugh.
‘My friend Sarah, she knows exactly what to say in any situation. Yes. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck . . .’
I think Mr Burns was a bit worried that Rachel wouldn’t stop saying ‘fuck’, but he managed to stop the ‘fuck’s by saying, ‘I quite agree.’
‘Fuck,’ said Rachel again, but it was just the one.
‘Like I said, you’re in a good place,’ nodded Mr Burns.
Rachel sat blinking at him.
‘Well, team tumour, let’s fight this fucker,’ I said.
I still cringe to think I said it.
sixty-five
Rachel didn’t call Eamonn or her mum and she didn’t cry. But she did howl, out of rage. Rachel was furious. I have never seen anything like it. It was anger that could have powered the national grid.
She didn’t want to go home. She wanted to go shopping. So we went to a posh clothing shop. I can’t remember the name of the place or where it was. It reminded me of Fenwick, except that in Fenwick I might have been able to afford one or two things. Those prices detonated any budget I’d ever had in my life. Rachel strode through the store roughly handling designer clothes, muttering, ‘My stupid body, my stupid body, I so looked after it, and what does it go and do?’ over and over again.
‘Rach, do you want to go somewhere and talk?’ I asked quietly, as I unwrapped a leather belt that she’d coiled round her fist.
‘No, no. I want to buy you a present!’
‘Rach, you don’t need to buy me a present.’
‘Let me!’
‘No.’
‘I’m going to buy you a dress to wear for Dolph’s party.’
‘But Rach . . .’
‘I’ve got cancer, don’t argue with me.’
‘Oh, I see how it’ll be.’
&nb
sp; ‘Yep, and you’d better get used to it.’
‘I’ll do anything you want except that stripping routine again.’
‘Great, because I don’t want sympathy, OK?’ She stopped and swallowed before she continued. ‘Please. No sympathy. We can have the occasional hug. But that’s it. No poor Rach. OK? Got it? No bloody sympathy.’
‘Like I was going to give you sympathy. You’re going to beat the bitch.’ I have no idea where the hip-hop talk came from. ‘You have the cancer. It is a wanker. We gonna beat it. Like an egg in an omelette,’ I rapped dreadfully. It was so hard to know what to say. ‘We gonna beat it. Like an egg in an omelette. Bloody genius that.’
‘Try that on. And that.’
‘Rach!’
‘Do it now!’
She threw two beautiful dresses at me. One was navy silk and long with a halter neck and a low back, and the other was a deep red, shorter, with little straps and a cinched-in waist.
A young shop assistant approached.
‘How are you doing?’ she said in a particularly high register. ‘Can I help you guys?’
‘Yes,’ barked Rachel. ‘I’ve got cancer and my friend here . . .’
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ the woman gushed.
‘I’m not sorry. I’m angry!’ she barked at her.
‘Oh.’
‘We’re fine, thank you,’ I said to the terrified girl.
‘Call if you need me,’ she whispered and then she scampered away to find some jumpers to fold.
I looked down at the dresses and caught sight of one of the price tags. It had four figures on it!
‘Rach!’
‘I’ve got cancer,’ she shrugged.
‘Stop that, Lance!’ That was my new name for her, after Lance Armstrong.
I did as I was told and walked into the changing rooms. I stripped down to my Primark underwear and I put the navy dress on. When I walked out of the changing room, Rachel was sitting before me in a big armchair with her head in her hands. I watched her for a few seconds.
‘In a really unsympathetic way, I was just wondering if you’re OK,’ I said softly.
‘In a really not-wallowing-in-it sort of way, I don’t bloody know,’ she answered, still with her face in her hands.
The (Im)Perfect Girlfriend Page 22