Chapter Twenty-Two
Of course, it wasn’t just one more trip. They didn’t leave until the club closed at three a.m., and even then Lexy was reluctant to move from the cosy banquette, the salacious gossip, the champagne and the charlie. The manager had to usher them out tactfully, instructing the bouncer downstairs to make sure that all three of the very coked-up and drunk women were safely seen into black cabs. Lexy was so out of it that she had no memory of the last hour she had spent in the Camden Club, of her journey home, or the tumble she had taken getting out of the lift, fumbling for her door key in her bag. One of her heels had caught on the edge of the carpet, and, her hands occupied, she couldn’t save herself: she had crashed heavily down on her knees, her bag flying across the corridor.
Luckily she hadn’t woken up the neighbours as she kicked off her shoes, scrabbled to retrieve the bag, hoisted herself to her feet and drunkenly tried three keys in the lock before finding the right one. Once inside the flat, she had been unable to wriggle out of her dress, due to its extreme tightness and her extreme inebriation. She had managed to remove most of her hairgrips, but that was the extent of her efforts.
Having fallen into bed, snoring heavily, with all her clothes and make-up on, she had slowly, painfully awoken to a pillowcase smeared with mascara, lipstick and, gruesomely, a drop or two of blood from her nostril: the coke she had taken had irritated the lining of her nose. Her eyes closed, she was still half-dreaming, and the image she was seeing was a nun standing in a tower, pulling on a bell rope, tolling it over and over again. On the roof below was a woman’s body, spread-eagled, a blonde woman in a grey skirt suit who had fallen from the tower . . . the bell kept ringing, the nun kept tugging that bell rope like an automaton, on and on and on . . .
Lexy managed to pry her eyes open, a sticky procedure because of the mascara and fake eyelashes she was still wearing. She hadn’t closed the curtains the night before, and the daylight was so piercingly bright that she had a sudden, vivid flash of sympathy for vampires. She turned her head sideways into the pillow, squinting, getting accustomed to the light. Gradually, she realized that she had been seeing the last few frames of the Hitchcock film Vertigo. And the reason her brain had summoned up the image of the nun in the belltower above Kim Novak’s corpse was that a bell was indeed ringing insistently.
It was the landline. That was why Lexy had taken so long to recognize it: she was much more used to the ringtone of her mobile. She sat up, groaning as the movement caused pain to stab through her head, and promptly fought an urge to retch, sitting still till the nausea passed. After a while, she noticed a pattern. The phone rang seven times, stopped, then started up again almost immediately, as the caller got the answering machine, hung up, and then redialled the number straight away.
As her eyes focused, she caught sight of herself in the floor-to-ceiling mirrored fitted wardrobes opposite. Lexy had, ironically, loved this feature when they bought the flat. So much time, money and hard work had gone into her appearance that she relished the sight of the fruits of her labour. Today, however, the woman in the mirror was not a lithe, big-boobed sex symbol but an extra from the Rocky Horror Show. She moaned aloud. Her bra was digging into her, and her Spanx were so tight she had probably got a yeast infection from wearing them for so long.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed and yelped at the sight of her right knee. On it was a weal the size of a two-pound coin, red and puffy. A flash of memory snapped across her brain, like a near-subliminal cut in a film: the carpeted floor of the corridor hallway, seen in a very tight close-up, so close that she must have been on hands and knees looking down at it . . . It hurt to put weight on that leg. She might have twisted the knee a little when she landed on it. Nothing major, but she would definitely need to stay off high heels for a while.
Everywhere in this flat were reflective surfaces. It was a new-build, its interior design all glass and chrome or mirrored walls. As Lexy limped into the ensuite bathroom, she had to direct her gaze to the floor in order to avoid catching a glimpse of her smeared, grotesque face. She turned away from the mirror over the sink, peeling off the Hervé Léger dress; the wriggling, writhing movements required to drag it down to her ankles made her feel off-balance and nauseated. It was just as painful wrenching off the Spanx. She pulled off her fake lashes, started the shower running, smeared her face in make-up remover and stepped under the rainforest shower head, turning the temperature down as cold as she could bear to help with her screaming headache.
Black trails poured down her face as her make-up washed off, the chilly jet on her scalp at first agony but then slowly doing its work, waking her up and cooling her down, helping to diminish the effects of the hangover. She managed to stay under it for a good five minutes before she finally stepped out and wrapped a towel around her, brave enough now to look at herself in the mirror. It wasn’t a pretty sight. The whites of her eyes were bloodshot, the eyes themselves seeming to have receded in her face, small and piggy, her skin blotched.
If she had been able to, she would have rung up Skin3 right away, begged for an emergency appointment and gone in for a full restorative face mask. The staff were very used to her staggering in, hungover and in need of TLC: first, Eva would mix her a restorative potion of cucumber water in which she had dissolved glutamine powder, an amino acid that she swore acted as a conditioner for the stomach, soothing a tummy sore from a heavy drinking session. Then she whisked Lexy into a mercifully dark treatment room where the vitamins and collagen she so sorely needed would be worked deep into her epidermis as soothing music played. Lexy always emerged a different woman after one of these emergency sessions, ready to face whatever the day threw at her.
But, she told herself wistfully, she had to get back to Sandbanks as soon as possible. The phone was still ringing; whoever was calling her would not give up until she answered. She patted in her serum and eye cream and vitamin oil, dusted herself with a layer of mineral powder, then spritzed her face with hydrating spray, more powder, even more hydrating spray, till at last she could bear the sight of her reflection. Padding back into the bedroom, Lexy took a deep breath, sat down on the bed and, finally, raised the receiver.
‘Hello? Hello? Lexy, is that you? Hello?’
It was Brandon, sounding fairly deranged at the surprise of hearing something else but the expected seven rings and then the answering machine clicking in. Lexy opened her mouth to say ‘Hello’ back, but it came out like the croak of a dying raven. She cleared her throat, hawked up a large gob of phlegm, and tried again.
‘Hello? Brandon?’ she managed hoarsely.
‘Lexy!’ he squealed. ‘Oh my God, what a relief to hear your voice! Emily was saying we should call the management of your building and try to get in so we could see if you were there and doing okay – you are okay, aren’t you?’
Lexy winced at the stream of words, holding the handset further from her ear.
‘Yeah, I’m okay. But I have a monster hangover,’ she said.
‘Have you gone online? The photos are all over everywhere, everywhere! It’s bad, Lexy. You look like you were having sex with him. Were you having sex with him?’
No one could have seen that Deacon had fingered her, Lexy was sure. All that would have been visible was his hand up her skirt, and though that wasn’t great, it certainly didn’t translate to looking as if she was having sex with Deacon . . .
‘No, I wasn’t,’ she said firmly.
‘Lexy?’ the head of the agency interrupted. ‘It’s Emily. Brandon’s been ringing you over and over for hours. What the fuck were you thinking? Frank’s furious and I don’t blame him! You’ve gone way too far!’
‘I really didn’t . . .’ Lexy said feebly. ‘I didn’t have sex with him, I really didn’t . . .’
‘I’m booking a car for you right now,’ Emily said crisply. ‘It’ll be twenty minutes, tops. Clean yourself up, get dressed in your most covered-up, repentant outfit. Flat shoes. No ripped jeans. Nothing tight. No leather, apart from your shoes. Make-up minimal – it has to look like you’re not wearing any at all. Hair back, so everyone can see you looking sad. Dark colours only, no jewellery, but make sure they can see your wedding ring. Do the walk of shame through the paps. No sunglasses. Rub your eyes in the car as you get there so it looks like you’ve been crying. Got all that? Do I need to come round and check you over?’
‘No, I’ve got it,’ Lexy said feebly, overwhelmed by the barrage of instructions.
‘Remember, it’s a total walk of shame,’ Emily said. ‘You’re humbling yourself, showing everyone how terrible you feel. Get home and do whatever you need to do to calm Frank down. Charge your phone in the car – it’s out of juice. If you spend the time looking at the press, trust me, you won’t even need to rub your eyes. This is not the kind of thing we were after! You know better than this, Lexy! Thank God we’ve got months before the series and the book come out to fix this fucking disaster!’
Ensconced in the car, her phone charging, Lexy Google-searched herself. She was dressed exactly as per Emily’s instructions, in navy jeans, a long, bottom-skimming, high-necked grey sweater, and a demure knee-length navy coat, ballet flats on her feet. Her hair was brushed back into a ponytail, her only make-up a single layer of mascara. It would have taken an observer quite a while to recognize the woman in the back of the car as the one in the photographs, with the latter’s piled-up hair, fake eyelashes and smeared lipstick, her disproportionately large boobs spilling over the tight bodice of the dress, her skirt high enough to look as if she wasn’t wearing any underwear at all . . .
Photographs of her with her bottom in the sink and her legs splayed in the air on either side of Deacon. Photos of her staggering back down again, heel tipping underneath her, her skirt caught up almost to her crotch, but not high enough to show the Spanx that would to some degree acquit her of having just had penetrative sex. Photos of Deacon turning away towards the woman, looking dazed and shocked, the stain on his trousers visible.
Okay, at least those last ones proved that he hadn’t got his cock out – but still, they looked awful, because the clear inference was that he and Lexy had been so hot and heavy that they would have done it if they hadn’t been interrupted. And since that was probably no more than the truth, Lexy’s emotions as she stared at those pictures were cripplingly painful.
She could have sworn that the cameraphones had been put away after Deacon had pleaded with the women to stop; she hadn’t been drunk then, and she had fairly clear memories of the whole time in the bathroom. One or both of them must have kept taking surreptitious photos.
It was clear from the angle that they were being shot upwards – thanks for that chin bulge, by the way! she thought ruefully. I always say never let anyone photograph you from below! There was a whole series of the come stain on Deacon’s jeans spreading, from a tiny patch to the sodden crotch a couple of minutes later. Some of the more satirical gossip sites had done a slide show of the process, with amusing captions.
And then there was the video. Oh God, the video, the most incriminating thing of all. Deacon humping away, moaning, coming, telling Lexy that he was sorry he’d shot his load but he’d get hard again in ten minutes . . .
She dropped the phone onto the seat beside her, staring ahead blankly. The only way she could describe her situation was, given the circumstances, deeply ironic. She was totally fucked.