Hungry

by Grace Dent

  ‘So, this Patten girl?’ I say.

  ‘Yah, sweet thing. Tabitha is friends with her mother,’ says the woman.

  ‘Oh,’ I say.

  ‘How long are you here?’ she asks, but it isn’t a genuine question. No one in glossy magazines listens with both ears to the work experience girls.

  ‘Not sure at the moment,’ I say. ‘I’ve got things to sort out.’

  At Marie Claire, the unpaid fashion work experience girls were called, without even a wince, ‘the cupboard people’. These young hopefuls lived for months on end in a small room with no windows at the back of the editorial floor filled with rails and rails of sample-size items. From 9 a.m. until 7 p.m. they telephoned stockists, called in garments from fashion houses, spoke to foreign embassies, stuffed clothes into suitcases and lugged suitcases up and down stairs.

  ‘Where are my suitcases for Ghana? Where are the cupboard people?’ the fashion editors would roar, stomping into the cupboard.

  ‘I’m shooting with Testino on Saturday. Have they had all my customs waivers signed off by the embassy?’

  Glossy magazine editors in the Nineties were accustomed to being a terrifically important deal. Within a decade or so this world would implode, killed by the Internet, their influence nigh-on decimated. Magazines would be bought mainly by hair salons to give customers something to look at when their stylist was hungover. But at one point, these people were gods. Their behaviour was legendary.

  ‘You can’t slap Taffeta, even if she really deserves it,’ Clare told me on the first week of Workiedom – she was now working there too.

  ‘She stood at my desk and stamped her feet like a little pony when I wouldn’t drop all other jobs and ring a dispatch bike for her.’

  ‘I’m not saying she doesn’t deserve a slap,’ Clare said. ‘But her dad is much richer than yours, so she will have much better legal representation.’

  Clare’s words would ring in my ears many, many, many times over the next twenty years.

  Despite all this, I wanted to stay at Marie Claire. I rather enjoyed these London high-society girls’ whims and weirdnesses. Their lack of touchy-feeliness suited me; unabashed Nineties bitches were far easier to navigate than today’s duplicitous blowhards staging elaborate Women’s Day events and presenting as living saints with one eye on an OBE.

  Not a jot of writing would be involved as editorial assistant. It was a secretarial dogs-body job. My desk would be right by the front door and referred to by the fashion department as ‘reception’. However, if I got it, my name would go on the Who’s Who list in the opening pages of the magazine, known as the masthead.

  Grace Georgina Dent – Editorial Assistant.

  I would also get paid about £13k per annum, which would allow me to pay rent and move to Camden Town, where I would, I planned, meet Malcolm McLaren, become his muse and forge a path to my role as a national treasure. There was definitely a job going here as dozens of CVs were beginning to arrive from posh girls with double-barrelled names and covering letters name-checking their fathers. As I stood by the shredder feeding them in, watching them turn to piles of ribbons, I knew one thing for sure: none of them were having it. The year before New Labour had swept to power making the D:Ream song ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ their anthem, and its title had become something of a mantra among the well-off metropolitan media set. I used to laugh when I heard them say this, because I’d known Currock, then Scotland, then the media world, and I thought, Well, literally how could life be any better than this?

  October 1999

  Flying first class for the first time, at the age of twenty-six, ruined me.

  Absolutely ruined me.

  It was as though a structural change happened to my DNA in mid-air, undoing centuries of lowborn family ancestry and topping me up with regal genes.

  I had no idea life could be so fabulous. Until then, I didn’t realise travelling could even be pleasant.

  At Gatwick, as I boarded the flight, trip-trapping up the plane steps, I experienced something magical. I turned left at the top of the steps. Left. I entered a whole new cosmiverse called Club World. The air hostesses called me madam, ushered me to my seat and fetched a small, cold glass of champagne on a tray, with a paper-doily coaster. Then, an actual menu. Today’s lunch would be salad Niçoise, then baked ravioli, chocolate torte and Brie de Meaux with port. A stiff grey curtain was then pulled across to separate me from standard-class hoi polloi. This was so that first-class people didn’t have to look at everyday folks wearing loose-fitting travel garments with their bumbags, munching on big Toblerones. My first ten minutes behind the big curtain was already nicer than any actual holiday I’d been on. It was a long way from my first foreign excursion: the Dent family’s package holiday by coach to Spain in the late Eighties. This getaway began with a thirty-six-hour coach ride from Carlisle Civic Centre, heading south via London, then to Calais before making a long trek to Catalonia. As I sat in first class with British Airways hostesses spooning treats into my lap as if I were a petulant baby starling, I thought about the shabby coach to Santa Susanna with the overflowing loo and the onboard ‘snack bar’, which was mainly supermarket-brand cup noodles and cans of warm Top Deck. The onboard entertainment was a single sixteen-inch TV screen playing Smokey and the Bandit on a loop. We arrived in Spain fed up, with swollen ankles and constipation.

  First-class travel was not like that. I tottered down the plane’s staircase in Austria feeling like a more special class of human being entirely. Even the most tub-thumping class warrior would find it hard to turn down their return ticket home. No one has ever, ever, ever left the upper-class side of an airplane thinking, that was nice, but I like sitting right at the back by the loo, getting my funny bone smacked by the perfume trolley.

  After passport control, on a cold spring lunchtime in Austria, on my first official trip as editorial assistant at Marie Claire, I walked nervously towards the arrivals gate, pulling a small, cheap suitcase with a wonky wheel. I’d been sent to Vienna. I wasn’t really sure why. Or even really where Vienna was. Aside from hearing Midge Ure scream about the place on Top of the Pops in the Eighties, I knew no real facts about the place. It meant nothing to me. However, as I walked through the arrivals gate I saw something else I’ll never, ever get sick of: a smartly dressed man clutching a small white board with my name on it.

  Miss Grace Georgiana-Bente.

  OK, not my actual name. But he did mean me.

  As hundreds of fellow travellers struggled with bags, searching for their connecting bus or train, Lukas swept the suitcase from my hand and walked me to his Mercedes-Benz, where a copy of American Vogue and a small glass bottle of gently carbonated Badoit Eau de Minérale sat in the armrest.

  ‘You here for the conference, Miss Bente?’ he said as we began our route to central Vienna.

  ‘Ummmm, yes,’ I said, hoping he’d not ask about any specifics.

  ‘You are doctor – sorry, oncologist?’ he said.

  ‘Oh no, not an oncologist,’ I said. ‘I’m a writer.’

  ‘Ah, writer, excellent, good,’ he said, as if this was just as good.

  I was not really there to write anything. This was a freebie. In glossy magazines the freebies were abundant. At Eva magazine the only things I’d been sent for free were ‘women’s neck massagers’. At Marie Claire, the freebies were much classier. We were knee-deep in free luxury leave-in conditioner, designer boar-bristle tangle combs, nail-strengthening vitamins and eye caviar. Oh, and flowers, never-ending flowers.

  ‘Will someone take these vile Blushing Bride canna lilies that McQueen sent and give them to a hospice?’ my favourite fashion editor Liz would shriek as I whisked away the offending bouquet – about 300 quid’s worth – and left it out by the toilets. All this excess had probably begun to change me a bit. I was definitely not ringing Mam and Dad as much. With my job now permanent and my life f
aster and more glamorous, I was getting bad at keeping in touch with Clare too. She had left Marie Claire and gone to work on a special project in a different magazine house. We’d been missing each other’s calls. And now I was distracted by a trip to Vienna.

  ‘Next weekend?’ I said to Tilly, the managing editor.

  ‘Yah, it’s a pharmaceutical thing, they want some press bods out there,’ she said.

  This editor liked me a lot, as I could perform magic tricks like ‘retrieve a Chanel jacket from one of London’s fanciest, grumpiest dry cleaners without the actual ticket’ – a feat of charm and bloody-mindedness that would earn me a round of applause when I came back carrying the item.

  ‘They can’t teach that at Roedean,’ she once said to me.

  Stuff like this, and the lack of other good applications, is possibly why I got the job.

  So now here I was, one year into officially being Editorial Assistant, checking in at the exceedingly grand Hotel Imperial, Vienna, being escorted by the manager to one of their largest suites for a two-night stay. He turned the key in the lock and I squeaked with joy. This was an enormous apartment, with a large sitting-room area, two bedrooms, many sofas and decorative chaise longues and a glittering chandelier lighting up the main room. This suite was at least three times the size of the Dents’ self-catering accommodation all those years ago in Spain, where me and David had slept on pull-out beds.

  I stood, mouth ajar, not quite listening as the manager reminded me two, no, three, maybe four times that if I required anything, literally anything, it would be his pleasure. He left, moving backwards, sort of genuflecting as he closed the door. I immediately flopped onto the super-king-sized bed and lay in the middle, flailing my arms and legs out like an octopus. Then I did some shots from a tray of the finest small-batch schnapps, which was in a little glass jug on a tray on the antique dressing table. I considered calling my old Brown Owl from the phone beside the loo in the second bathroom to tell her to shove her Sixer Badge up her arse, but it felt petty, so instead I opened the handwritten letter from the hotel manager, which came in a thick cream envelope with a seal of soft red wax. This letter assured me – Miss Grace Georgina Bente – that I was an absolute priority. And should the merest hint of any whim that might accentuate my pleasure during this trip cross my mind over the next two days, I needed to contact him personally.

  Day or night.

  My needs would be top of their list, my pleasure was their one concern.

  The entire staff of the hotel were waiting breathlessly for my call.

  OK, this wasn’t exactly what it said, but it was something equally as overblown, because this is how, I was learning of late, people spoke to you almost all of the time if they thought you were rich or important or useful to them.

  You were a priority.

  If you have ever noticed wealthy people boarding an easyJet flight looking flummoxed and ashen, this could be because they paid for Priority Boarding and then the Priority Boarding call-out didn’t happen, and they complained and no one cared, and, well … it was a lot to take in. Maybe the greatest difference between being rich and poor is the number of instances per day that strangers inform you that you’ve been seen or your needs noted.

  At this moment, I noticed a large set of doors on the far side of the room fastened by a large antique bolt. They seemed to lead somewhere. After some pulling and heaving, the bolt gave way and the doors clattered open to reveal a balcony! And there was the courtyard of the Vienna State Opera House, lit ethereally as if prepared for a fairytale ball. I let out a shriek. It was quite simply the most beautiful view I had ever seen in real life. But quickly the joy felt bittersweet. To be all alone in this hotel room with this view felt a little bit sad. This room was priced at just short of £3,000 for a one-night stay. My family could never, ever experience it. This entire world was absolutely inaccessible to them. I tried to imagine them there: Dad on one of the sofas, with his slippers on, reading his newspaper. Mam giving the antique knick-knacks a onceover, saying, ‘See that vase? Your Aunt Mildred had a bedpan that looked like that’, and my brother Dave pouring us more schnapps.

  For a millisecond I felt a little bit lonely. My London life was certainly gathering pace: I had a paid job that turned heads when it was mentioned at parties; I’d pitched some pieces to the Guardian via email and had the breakthrough of some ‘try again, please’ feedback. Better than that: I’d been put on some ‘possible’ lists to appear on late-night TV debate shows after getting my face in a few magazine spreads. They were always the kind of humiliating jobs all wannabe writers take at the start of their career to get exposure and live to regret. I appeared in Marie Claire’s health-and-beauty spin-off magazine holding rollerblades beside a totally made-up caption that said, ‘I am devastated the body-doctor says my hourglass shape means I should give up blading or suffer thick thighs. It is my life and I can’t imagine stopping.’ My flatmates Eleanor and Craig had laughed until they were sick. Another time I was sent on a date with Sir Clive Sinclair to test what it was like to date a man with brains. He ditched me in the American Bar in the Savoy after one drink. This type of fame had led to semi-invites on the types of show where low-grade writers come on and shout a few things before the microphone moves on. TV fame. Now, I’d flown first class to Austria.

  Why did I feel a tiny bit sad?

  I imagined Clare spinning about on the balcony, saying, ‘Grace, this is some serious Hans Christian Andersen nonsense.’ Something had cooled between me and Clare, and it was totally my fault and I needed to address it. A few months before we’d had a silly run-in about a guestlist spot to a party – an ex-boyfriend of mine had taken a spot that was meant for me, and I was hurt, and she hadn’t got that I was hurt, and we’d ended up bickering in the road outside IPC Magazines, but halfway through I’d jumped into a cab with the Marie Claire girls as I was late for a perfume launch, which now I thought about it was a little starry on my part. Her last words to me were, ‘The thing with you, Grace, is that when you have been hurt it’s like you go into witness protection. A wall goes up and then no one can reach you.’ I’d thought as I got in the car that was very bloody astute. Maybe I should send Clare one of those SMS texts? Then a Public Relations girl called Jemima knocked on the door of my suite to tell me I had an hour to get ready before we all met in the lobby for champagne and I forgot all about London.

  The Viennese trip – a weekend of non-stop eating, drinking and partying with surgeons and doctors in a luxury five-star hotel – was all paid for by a big pharmaceutical company. All I had to do in return for this splendid time drinking sturm and scoffing wiener schnitzel was hear the odd lecture about some research, pills and potions, and remember what nice people worked at this firm whenever I wrote about HRT, breast cancer or fertility problems. On the Sunday morning, when I woke up in a damp vintage Armand Basi frock after flinging myself into a hotel pool at 2 a.m. still clutching a bottle of Moët, I stared at the press releases for HRT pills strewn all over the carpet and thought, well, where is the harm in all this?

  CHAPTER 6

  BMW

  February 2000

  Although the Noughties sit hazily in my mind – with vast patches left unaccountable – I do recall clearly that as I left Bounds Green to move to a new rented flat in Putney, I packed up in such a hungover state that, absentmindedly, I shoved a number of the free ‘women’s neck massagers’ from Eva magazine into the bag heading to the local charity shop. A day later, as the Man with a Van pulled away down the street, I noticed that one of the lovely old volunteer ladies who ran the shop had placed the most ‘rabbity’ one in the window, mistaking it for a ring tree. Events like this stand out. Also, around this time, I remember Piers Morgan, now editor of the Daily Mirror, standing outside his office on the twenty-second floor of the Canary Wharf tower yelling loudly to the entire newsroom, ‘If any of you fucking lemmings leave this building to panic-buy petrol, you are fire
d!’

  I bobbed my head out of sight and cackled. The chief sub-editor put his car keys down sheepishly. My time at the Mirror started after an exodus of my favourite Marie Claire staffmembers shifted there to launch a free women’s magazine called M, sweeping me along with them as a writer. My dad was properly proud when he found out. He’d been unimpressed by my other breakthrough around this time: writing some pop-culture pieces for the Guardian, which he believed was a communist rag only bought by social workers and do-gooders. The Mirror, on the other hand, was something he was proud to carry back from the newsagent.

  After four years of relatively sedate magazine editorial floors, I found the constant racket of the Mirror newsroom comforting. It reminded me of the Dents’ living room back in Carlisle where everybody shouted all the time, even when discussing simple things like who’d turn on the kettle. Piers Morgan as an editor was noisy, rambunctious, often hilarious and never, ever boring. He spent a lot of the time in an ongoing one-man argument, berating the world, often pulling other staff into the whirlwind. For the 1999 Christmas party, Morgan took the M girls to Marco Pierre White’s Mirabelle, where Salman Rushdie came to the table to give his regards, Liz Hurley swept by, Joan Collins was in the house with Percy and I sat with my gob ajar. At least by now, despite being starstruck, I was much more prepared for a multitude of knives, forks and wine glasses.

  ‘BMW’, I’d taught myself. Bread, meal, wine: bread on the left, plate in the middle, wine on the right. But as Aunt Frieda says, after a few drinks no one cares. Furthermore, the posher the person, the less they cared about living by silly rules.

  At the Mirror my desk was among the 3 a.m. Girls – a trio of infamous all-female gossip columnists – Jessica, Eva and Polly – who were currently causing havoc across celebrity land. As I sat at my keyboard typing up my latest world-changing article on dating trends, the 3 a.m. Girls’ phonelines buzzed continuously with showbiz tittle-tattle, mainly about Kate Moss and the Primrose Hill set, who were having a fantastic time in north-west London. Although tabloid gossip in the Nineties and early Noughties was gleaned by some pretty nefarious means, little is often said about the large percentage of the dirt that came from celebrities’ supposed friends. Or, at least, people the celebs believed were friends. Friendship in media London was nothing like everyday friendship. People ran hot and heavy with each other for a few months of parties, VIP rooms and summer yachting excursions, then moved on without a word to bigger, better things. Characters burned out and left London without warning or disappeared off the radar with no one caring enough to ask why. All this was a positive boon for gossip writers: there’s nothing more lethal than a cohort or hanger-on who’s been edged out of a glamorous gang. They tend to want money or revenge.