Chapter Thirty-One
A few weeks later
‘Caroline! Who are you wearing?’
‘Caroline, can you give Sam a hug?’
‘Caroline, are you writing another book for Lexy?’
As she answered ‘Stella McCartney,’ slid her arm around Sam’s waist to pose with her, and smiled through the last question without responding to it, Caroline realized that she was actually getting used to this. Sam grinned at her as if they were old friends, mugging for the camera as they stood on the strip of red carpet in front of the ‘step and repeat wall’, a vinyl banner, tacked to a foam background, which bore the brand logos of the event and its sponsors. This afternoon, these were an obscure company promoting a new eyebrow product and a low-calorie sparkling wine launched by a terrifyingly thin American Real Housewife.
It wasn’t exactly Dior or Dom Perignon at the Savoy, but for Caroline it was a tremendous step forward into the glamorous life that Lexy led on a daily basis. As soon as Caroline had come back to London, this kind of low-level, C-list invitation had rolled in, courtesy of the PR agency to which she was paying a large proportion of the advance she had got for her new novel. Publishers, it turned out, didn’t do publicity for you until the book was about to come out, so, it had been gently made clear to her, if she wanted to raise her profile, she had to invest in it herself. And the more she did, they had intimated, the more her book would sell.
Naomi, her agent, had recommended a PR who worked with a lot of the rent-a-celebs who were here today. Reality stars, low-grade TV presenters, soap starlets, the troupe who could be relied on to don full make-up, new extensions, bandage dresses and five-inch Kandee heels to turn up to the opening of a crisp packet. But even with the PR working on her behalf, as a mere author Caroline would never have been invited to this kind of thing. Even if she had slipped in, there would have been zero interest in taking a single shot of her.
No, she owed her status entirely to the scandal trailing her, the fact that she was Lexy’s one-time ghostwriter and now her love rival. No one knew yet that Caroline was busy writing a novel that would be a Devil Wears Prada-style tell-all about Lexy, certainly not Frank; her editor was pushing her to make it as scurrilous as possible, while disguising Lexy’s identity just enough to make sure that she couldn’t sue for libel. From the reaction of Lexy’s so-called friends to Caroline, it was clear that they would lap up every last saucy detail with absolute relish.
‘You look great!’ Sam said to Caroline, kissing her cheek for the cameras, but careful not to actually touch her skin and risk smearing her brightly glossed fuchsia lipstick. ‘How’s Frank?’
‘Great!’ Caroline said with a big smile to show off her newly whitened teeth. ‘Really good!’
Next year, will they be asking me about Frank? she wondered. Will I be able to hang on to him if I’ve ripped his ex-wife to shreds in print?
Almost certainly not, she thought ruefully. But I got a six-figure advance for two books, and I’ll get a ton of publicity for the first one. That’ll be out in five months, as they’re going to turn it around super fast. Plus I’m selling my Regency porn novella really successfully on Amazon already! I realized when I signed the contract that I was choosing my career over Frank, so there’s no point second-guessing that choice now . . .
‘I loved your column in Sizzle this week!’ she said brightly to Sam as they turned to walk into the cocktail bar which was hosting the launch.
Caroline was getting used to the eccentric setup of these events. They were almost always held in the late afternoon so that the venue could reopen to paying punters by six or so, not losing too much custom. The attendees spent hours dressing up to the nines, looking as if they were going to a gala dinner, putting on shoes in the taxi in which they could barely stand, let alone walk; they tottered up the strip of tatty red carpet to the step and repeat, hoping that the photographers would know who they were and want to take their picture.
After that, the job was done. You didn’t even need to go into the venue. You had fulfilled the conditions of the invitation, got your face into the papers and promoted the brand that was looking for publicity by association. Many of the celebs who were most in demand did precisely this; on busy nights, they cabbed from one launch to another, collecting goodie bags as they went, then headed on to a club that would let them into the VIP area and comp them drinks in return for the draw of their presence.
Caroline was by no means at this level. She was grateful for anything offered, and had been delighted, as she got out of her taxi, to see Sam standing at the edge of the red carpet, checking her make-up in a compact mirror. Caroline had bumped into Sam at a few of these occasions before and found her surprisingly friendly, considering that she was supposed to be a friend of Lexy’s.
It had been a slow process of realization that friendship, in these circles, meant mutual association for mutual benefits, rather than anything involving loyalty or trust. Right now, Lexy’s frenemies were very much enjoying being seen out with Caroline, as it emphasized Lexy’s fall from the pinnacle she had occupied for so long.
Caroline had waved at Sam and was promptly beckoned to her side for photos, just as she had hoped. She intended to network as much as she could at the launch, and then, ideally, attach herself to Sam’s group and continue the party elsewhere. Since Sam was one of the leading lights of this social circle, allying with her and Michelle gave Caroline entrée to an extensive posse comprising a surprisingly large number of reality stars, soap actresses and footballers’ wives who were ecstatic to finally sink their claws into Lexy and draw some blood.
‘Hah!’ Sam said, giggling as they accepted glasses of the low-calorie sparkling wine from the waiter stationed just inside the door. ‘I bet you liked my column, eh? You owe me, girl – I made you look fantastic!’
‘Lovely hanging out with Caroline Macintosh at Mahiki last week!’ Sam had ‘written’. ‘Frank’s new girl is a total stunner and a brainiac to boot – never thought I’d be mates with a real author! Guess what – Caroline’s clever enough to write her own books, ahem ahem! Can’t wait to read her novel, she says it’s going to be well saucy and I believe it!’
‘I did!’ Caroline said. ‘I’d buy you a drink to say thanks, but oopsie, they’re all free!’
She took a sip of her drink.
‘Wow,’ she observed, her mouth puckering up. ‘It’s way too sweet at first and then it goes sour afterwards. Like one of those new double-flavour Tic-Tacs.’
Sam giggled again.
‘You’re so funny,’ she said. ‘Oh look, there’s Michelle, she said she’d be coming along . . .’
Michelle, new hair extensions hanging down to her waist, her heels so high they forced her bottom into a back-arching tilt upwards to enable her to maintain her balance, made her way carefully across the polished floor towards them.
‘Hey!’ she said, eyes artificially bright, her speech pouring out very quickly. ‘Anyone know what the fuck this one’s for? It’s my third tonight and I’ve got no fucking idea what the product is!’
‘This wine, and the eyebrow stuff,’ Caroline said. ‘It’s supposed to fill in the gaps and stay on for ages. That’s what it said on the invite, anyway.’
‘Ooh, that sounds good,’ Michelle said. ‘Bagsie a goodie bag! Thanks, Writer Girl. Trust you to actually read the crap they send us. How’re you doing?’
‘Brilliant!’ Caroline said, faux-kissing her cheek.
‘How’s Frank?’ Michelle gushed. ‘God, he’s a hottie, lucky you! Lexy must be going mad stuck down in the sticks with the kids while you get to shag Frank’s brains out and go out on the town!’
Caroline flashed a huge and entirely genuine smile; this statement summed up exactly how she felt about the situation.
‘He’s great,’ she said. ‘Just not much of a partygoer.’
‘No, he never was,’ Sam said wistfully. ‘Not like my Ryan, the fucker. Out on the lash all the time and up to all sorts of crap. I’m just like, make sure they’re over eighteen, for fuck’s sake, you know? And not so pissed they start snoring while you’re doing them, either, and then say they didn’t know what they were doing when they went back to your hotel room, the slags. Because they’re really strict about that nowadays, aren’t they? And I don’t fancy having to dress up like a fucking schoolteacher with a Daily Mail sadface for your trial, know what I mean?’
Sam had very recently started seeing Ryan Banks, the goalie for Kensington, who was famously promiscuous and undiscriminating. She was right to be worried on both counts. The relationship was something of a convenient arrangement, as Ryan wanted a girlfriend to improve his playboy reputation, but had barely slowed down the pace with which he tore through girls he met clubbing.
‘I mean, it’s not like we’re married and I can divorce him for a ton of dosh if he gets done for letting some fifteen-year-old tart suck him off, is it?’ Sam continued in the characteristically loud and unselfconscious tone of a woman who has already snorted half a gram of coke that evening.
‘Hey, you’d get a nice juicy wodge for standing by him,’ Michelle pointed out. She lowered her voice. ‘Chantelle got half a mil last year for that, did you know? She played it really well – banged on about being really upset and embarrassed and everything when her Darrell got arrested for grooming, said she was going to leave him. His lawyers went ballistic and said it’d look terrible in the media if she did that. So she cried a lot and then said oh no, I couldn’t possibly, and finally he went okay, what’s it worth to you? She turned up every day, all classy looking, hair done like she was going to church, and he still got four years for sexual activity with a minor. Paid that half a mil for nothing.’
Caroline was greedily absorbing all these juicy details for a future novel. Michelle, who, for all her laboriously cultivated ditzy blonde appearance, was sharp as a whip, tittered: ‘Ooh, look at Writer Girl, Sam! Careful, that’ll all end up in one of her books!’
‘Just as long as you change the details,’ Sam said, winking.
‘Actually, Darrell was up on more charges, wasn’t he?’ Caroline said, remembering the much-publicized case. ‘I think he got let off some of them. So maybe it was worth the money after all . . .’
‘Ladies, hi!’ said a very glossy young man, approaching their gossip huddle with a big smile. ‘Have any of you tried Browfinity yet? Or Browtastic? We have a beauty station all set up in the back and we’d love one of our fantastic technicians to give you all totally complimentary eyebrow makeovers – or, as we like to call it, Browkover!’
‘Yeah, let me stop you there, mate,’ said the uninhibited Sam. ‘That is never going to catch on. Sounds like you just threw up over yourself, dunnit?’
‘The thing is,’ Michelle confided in Caroline several hours later, sitting at the very same rooftop table in the Camden Club that she, Lexy and Sam had occupied several weeks ago, ‘no one likes Lexy. She acts like she’s better than everyone else.’
Um, she sort of is, Caroline thought, even as Sam nodded in agreement with Michelle, the carefully sculpted curls of her weave bouncing on her shoulders. Lexy’s got the top reality show in the country, she makes way more money than any of you from her products and endorsements, and now I’m dating her husband she’s all set with a great storyline for the next season of the show.
It was ironic that she, Lexy’s greatest enemy, was able to acknowledge Lexy’s superiority, while Michelle and Sam could not.
‘I bet she was a nightmare when you were writing her book,’ Sam said.
‘Ahem, I could confirm that, but then I’d have to kill you!’ Caroline said, grinning. ‘Officially, I was helping her do her research, get her dates right, that sort of thing.’
She executed a large comedy wink.
‘But yeah, safe to say that during that process it could not have been more about her all the time,’ she went on. ‘And it wasn’t just me who feels like that. Lexy’s the big bright shining sun and Frank, the kids, the staff – we’re all just little planets circling in her orbit.’
‘Get you, Writer Girl!’ Michelle said admiringly. ‘I’m not actually going to read Lexy’s book that you didn’t write –’
She did a wink back at Caroline.
‘–’cause I don’t have the time to read books, what with being really busy doing, um, stuff. But I bet it’s well classy from the way you talk.’
The description of Lexy as a sun with strong gravitational pull was a line Caroline had come up with just that morning, as she knocked out her daily five thousand words of her novel. It was to be called Bad Girl: her editor had said that anything with ‘Girl’ in the title was bound to sell well.
‘You must be really disciplined,’ Sam said admiringly. ‘I don’t know how writers do it. Where do you get your ideas from?’
‘I don’t get paid if I don’t deliver my book,’ Caroline said, unaware that she was answering questions that writers have been asked since the dawn of time. ‘And the ideas thing – I don’t know, really. Things just pop into my head. I read a ton of magazines and gossip sites, and the way people act in real life is crazier than anything you could put in a novel.’
This was quite true. Outlining her first novel, Caroline had realized that she could not put in many stories which, as they said in the reruns of Law and Order she watched on breaks from writing, were ‘ripped from the headlines’: her book would have careened from one exaggerated setup to the next. Her editor had made the point that the Lexy character, for instance, could not be an out-and-out villain with no redeeming qualities at all – that would look too crude and cartoonish. She had at least to be as talented, quick-witted and charming as her real-life inspiration, capable of attracting the legions of fans that Lexy had, or it simply wouldn’t be plausible.
‘I’m not supposed to tell anyone, so don’t pass it on,’ Caroline continued, a phrase that had Sam and Michelle leaning in to listen with avid attention, ‘but the book’s about Lexy. Like a tell-all, but a novel, so—’
‘So she can’t sue you!’ Michelle said quickly. ‘Ooh, what fun!’
‘I heard that The Devil Wears Prada was supposed to be a memoir originally,’ Caroline said, ‘but then they told her to write it as fiction.’
‘OMG, I can’t wait for the book to come out! I might even read that one!’ Michelle said eagerly. ‘I mean, you know, like, shitloads of dirt on her!’
She shot a knowing glance at Sam.
‘I was wondering if Caroline might like to meet Dorinda,’ she said faux-casually. ‘What do you think?’
Caroline had apparently gained full access to the most exclusive of inner circles. ‘Meeting Dorinda’, it turned out, was Sam and Michelle’s private code for doing cocaine, based on an obscure character from a childhood cartoon who’d had a habit of rubbing her nose a lot and sniffing. Caroline had barely done coke before; apart from anything else, at seventy-five pounds a gram, she simply couldn’t have afforded it. Ecstacy, weed and ketamine were much more within the price range of struggling young professionals crammed into a dilapidated house share in Edmonton.
As it turned out, a liking for coke was something else that Caroline had in common with Lexy, as well as vaulting ambition, a love of the limelight and a strong attraction to Frank. Sam and Michelle were highly amused by how eagerly she took to it, so much so that she even proposed getting another gram in at her own expense. They were dubious at first, because Sam’s guy would not deliver to an address in W1 that wasn’t a private home, because of the CCTV that was everywhere in the heart of London: but then Michelle spotted a contact across the bar, the tattooed Eastern European boyfriend of a girl she knew, and they were able to do a deal on the smoking terrace of the club, which was notoriously dark and therefore ideal for this kind of thing.
In fact, the presumption among Camden Club members was that the terrace was kept as crepuscular as possible precisely to facilitate exchanges of folded bills in return for small packets. Although there were posted rules in the toilets warning that the club had a zero-tolerance policy for drug-taking, no one even flickered an eyebrow at the sight of two people going into a single cubicle, and the smooth marble covers of the cisterns might have been designed expressly to provide its clientele with an ideal surface for cutting lines.
Just as Lexy had done before her, Caroline found time suddenly compressing, as if it had folded over, jumping three hours ahead in what felt like the span of barely thirty minutes. When the bar manager presented their table with the bill, an apologetic smile on her face as she explained that the club was closing, she was horrified to realize how late it was, and, looking at her phone, she saw, to her panic, several increasingly worried texts from Frank.
‘You’ve got sleeping pills, yeah?’ Sam asked Caroline.
On hearing the answer no, Sam looked taken aback and slipped Caroline a Valium.
‘Take it now,’ Sam said kindly. ‘And I’d put a towel on your pillow tonight, yeah? You might bleed just a little bit from your nose.’
Caroline was able to make it back into the apartment, but only because she had changed out of her high heels and into her fold-up ballet flats in the members’ club. If she hadn’t had the sense to do that, her legs would have buckled underneath her – as Michelle’s did spectacularly, tumbling her into the cab over her Kandee spikes. Caroline was wobbly, but still buzzing, when she sneaked back into the Chelsea Harbour flat, and even when the Valium kicked in, it had barely any calming counter-effect after all the coke and the copious espresso martinis she had put away.
Frank stirred in the master bedroom, hearing the front door close.
‘Lex?’ he called out from the depths of sleep. ‘That you?’ Caroline’s jaw set in fury.
‘Yes!’ she whispered back, not wanting him to wake up and realize that his girlfriend was coming back at three a.m. in just the same state, after just the same kind of evening, as his wife had so often done. Hopefully this way he would think it was a dream. ‘Be in bed soon!’
She heard a mumble, a grunt, as he turned over and sunk into unconsciousness again. How was she possibly going to join him in bed, though? Her brain was still racing, her teeth chattering, and not with cold. She felt a thousand miles from being able to fall asleep. If only Sam had had a sleeping pill as well!
Wait, thinking about sleeping pills – Lexy was bound to have them, wasn’t she? According to Frank she had done this kind of thing very often, come home buzzing and high. Surely Lexy must have a stash?
Sneaking on stockinged feet through the master bedroom into the ensuite, Caroline shut the door before turning on the lights around the sink, in an attempt not to wake Frank again. She checked out the contents of the medicine shelf. What would send her to sleep? She couldn’t risk getting it wrong, and she hadn’t brought her phone into the bathroom to Google which was which . . .
Eventually she found codeine, and swallowed two with water gulped from the tap. Raising her head again, she saw with horror that a bead of blood was issuing from her nostril, just as Sam had warned her. Her reflection looked mad: wild-eyed, her eye make-up smudged, her pupils visibly dilated. If Frank woke up and came into the bathroom, he would know at once what she had been doing. Frantically, she grabbed a tissue from the Blomus stainless-steel tissue box (which had cost, Lexy had boasted, seventy pounds) and shoved it up her nostril, wadding it up there to hopefully soak up all the blood.
She had wanted this, Caroline thought ruefully. She had wanted exactly this: to be like Lexy, to lead her wild life, to hang out with her glamorous friends, to see people looking over at their table, gossiping about her as she passed on her way to the toilet to do coke with Michelle or Sam, to be namechecked in the gossip magazines and the Daily Mail sidebar, people knowing who she was with just a few words to clue them in. ‘The one who ghosted the book for Lexy’; ‘the one who stole Lexy’s husband’, ‘Frank Callis’s new girlfriend’ – ‘Oh, that Caroline!’
Well, ‘that Caroline’ had a spinning head, a bleeding nose, and was dizzy and weak. She was desperate for sleep that still felt very far away, and she did not feel remotely glamorous. She had spent the evening talking a load of nonsense to two women she didn’t even like, who would stab her in the back the instant she turned around if it suited them to do so.
For all she knew, she might have given them plenty of ammunition – or daggers – during those last coke-fuelled hours. Even before that, she had spilled about her novel being a thinly veiled satire of all Lexy’s scandalous behaviour! Thank God she hadn’t got off her face enough to tell them about the deal Lexy had made with Silantra. She was putting that in the book, of course, but disguising it so thoroughly that Silantra would not be identifiable, as no one wanted to risk her wrath or that of her equally powerful husband.
A wave of exhaustion flooded Caroline, tiredness and nerves. Maybe the codeine and the Valium were interacting, finally balancing out the jitters. She took off her make-up, washed her face, and padded back through the bedroom into the spare room next door, in her hand the darkest towel in the flat, a medium grey one. Placing the towel on the pillow – she didn’t trust herself in bed next to Frank right now, not if her nose continued to bleed – she lay down on the bed, staring at the ceiling.
So this was the downside to being Lexy. Caroline’s heart was racing crazily, her body twitching, her brain teeming with doubts about what she had confided in Sam and Michelle, what might appear in their columns or be spread on the grapevine. It was the classic three or four a.m. wakeup, when your eyes snap open and you run through, in pitiless detail, all the stupid things you did that evening. But this time, she hadn’t even gone to sleep; she’d had no rest at all.
She lay there for an hour or so, the insecurity plus the coke withdrawal becoming ever more difficult to bear. Finally she got up, slipped down the darkened corridor in the kitchen and poured herself a glass of brandy, forcing it down as she stood there in the faint glimmer of moonlight. It was disgusting, but it worked, the alcohol enough to tip her over the edge; she could feel sleep finally reaching out for her with soft, gentle tendrils. Rinsing out the tumbler, she padded back towards the bedroom, and slipped between the sheets with Frank. There had been no blood on the towel; she had checked it carefully. Hopefully she would be fine.
So, would she have to get used to this if she wanted to hang out with Sam, Michelle and their crew again? Yes, was the answer. She’d plan it better, though. Get herself a prescription for Valium, and one for sleeping pills: she could tell the doctor she had travel anxiety, problems with jetlag. Stop doing coke at midnight, rather than right up to the time they had to go, so she started to wind down; leave earlier, so Frank didn’t get pissed off at her rolling in at three in the morning.
And with those resolutions running through her mind, quite unaware that Lexy had made both of them before her and completely failed to keep either one, Caroline finally fell asleep.