Chapter Three
You know what real fame is? It’s being known by your first name only. It’s everyone knowing who you are as you walk into a restaurant, not just your hardcore fans. It’s being in the sidebar of the Daily Mail because you nearly walked in a puddle, but didn’t.
But if I had to pick a single example of what real fame means, it’d be not having to hold open your own bum cheeks when you get anally bleached.
In the old days, for waxing and bleaching, it was always me reaching back like I was doing some sort of mental yoga pose, grabbing my bum and trying not to wince while some Russian cow with an advanced degree in KGB interrogation techniques smeared hot wax on me and then ripped all the hairs off while I screamed and swore and said I’d tell her anything she wanted as long as she’d just effing stop. Nowadays, I know to take a handful of ibuprofen an hour or so before, never schedule this sort of thing when you’re premenstrual as it’s even more bloody painful then (excuse the pun!), and have a nice glass of champers before you get started, to take the edge off.
Plus, get someone else to do the bum-cheek holding so you can relax and breathe your way through it as best you can. Right now, I’m stark naked on the treatment table while my make-up artist and my fake tanner are stood on each side of me. Each one of them’s got a handful of what I must say are my very impressively firm round buttocks – all those lunges my bastard trainer makes me do three times a week – and they’re hauling their side towards them so that the technician can get a good old look at my bum hole.
It’s ironic, because Jay and Nathan are totally gay, and couldn’t give a shit about a woman’s arse (yeah, I like my puns!). God knows what the technician fancies, but all I can say is that if she’s gay she’s in heaven with her job. She must see more women’s bits in a day than a gynaecologist – they only get to do the front part, right?
Normally, of course, I’d be on my knees, shoving my bum back at her. But because I’m being filmed for my reality show, I’m having to lie down. Apparently it’s ‘too real’ to film me naked on all fours screeching ’cause I’m getting acid rubbed into me back there . . .
‘You want front done too?’ asked the bleaching technician, as she had been prompted to do by the producer of All About Lexy. And as they had rehearsed, Lexy squealed with laughter.
‘Nah, love!’ she said. Her head was raised, propped on her hands, so that the camera directly in front of her could capture her facial expression. Eyes dancing with amusement, full lips curved, she added:
‘Frank likes it pink! If he fancied copping off with an albino chick he should’ve done it before he got married, shouldn’t he?’
‘God, the hell you women have to put up with!’ Nathan said, shuddering theatrically. ‘Do some of you actually bleach your vadges?’
‘Mental, isn’t it,’ Lexy said casually. ‘What some needy desperado bitches do to snag a man. Hey, Ghost Mouse, don’t put “desperado” in! I know it’s wrong, I just like using it.’
Everyone looked over at Caroline, who was sitting tucked away in one corner of Lexy’s sprawling bathroom. She was ensconced on the loo seat, a suitably humble position for a lowly blogger who was lucky even to be interviewing for this job, scribbling away on a notepad, since tapping on her laptop keys had been banned by the TV crew on the grounds of background noise.
‘Cut,’ the director said, sighing. ‘Lexy—’
‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll pick it up, no worries.’
Caroline’s cheeks were tingling, that unpleasant feeling when all her little rosacea nodules became activated. She hated attention, and even though the anal bleaching technician, the make-up and hair artists and the crew had only glanced her way for a moment, as Lexy mentioned her, it had made her extremely self-conscious. Absurd, of course. There was Lexy, not only naked but positively splayed open to one of her cores, and it was the fully-dressed Caroline who was shrinking from being stared at.
‘Okay to go again?’ the director said to Lexy.
‘In three,’ she said, leaving a pause. Then, with the skill of long practice, in just the same tone as she had used before, she repeated:
‘Mental, isn’t it. What some needy desperado bitches do to snag a man.’ She paused. ‘Oi, Nathan! You got to keep opening up my area so she can get to it!’
Nathan tightened his grip on Lexy’s left buttock.
‘You’re in good nick, babes,’ he said. ‘Nice and plumptious.’
‘Got to have something for Frank to hold on to!’ Lexy said. ‘Oh, look, speak of the devil.’
‘You’re the devil,’ Jay commented, his pre-scripted dialogue for the scene. ‘Frank’s the angel, if you ask me.’
Once more ignored in the far corner of the room, quite removed from the angles of the cameras, which had been carefully positioned to avoid unwanted reflections in the many mirrors, Caroline looked over as Frank Callis, Lexy’s husband, walked into the room. This was scripted too, of course. Caroline had been privy to the whole planning and choreography of this scene, the producer and Lexy conferring on the shape of it, feeding Nathan and Jay their catchy lines, deciding that Frank should enter and feign shock at Lexy’s latest beauty treatment to give the scene some drama.
‘What you doing to yourself now, Lex?’ Frank asked, one of the cameras turning to capture his entrance, though naturally it would be reshot as well. His delivery was not lively, but it wasn’t wooden either; apart from several seasons of his wife’s reality show, having been a sports commentator for years he was very used to the demands of television by now.
‘Bleaching me arsehole for your pleasure!’ Lexy said, blowing him a kiss. ‘I hope you’re happy!’
Tucked away on the toilet seat, Caroline had a clear view of Frank. His wife’s tanned, hairless, naked body was stretched out on a treatment table covered with white towelling. The contrast made Lexy’s skin glow luminously against the white background. Her dark hair was pinned up on the crown of her head, elongating her neck; it looked positively swanlike as Lexy swivelled to address him directly: she was breathtakingly attractive
But it was Frank who was holding all Caroline’s attention. He’d never been a classically handsome heartthrob, pursued by adverts keen to use him for underwear or aftershave campaigns: he was no David Beckham or Freddie Ljungberg. However, Caroline was realizing, this must be due to the fact that he did not photograph well. It was her first experience of the capricious gift that nature bestows on some people but not others, the magic of being born photogenic. Lexy had it in spades. Frank did not.
His features were blunt, his forehead too low. But the dark curls clustering over it gave him a very youthful appearance, and his almond-shaped black eyes were luminous and compelling. He was taller than Caroline had expected, his shoulders wider, his stomach flatter. It was amazing to her, staring at him, that Frank had never had a fan club of admirers, never been considered anything but a safe pair of hands, a very reliable winger, a thoughtful and considered TV pundit. The television cameras did not capture the softness of those wonderful dark eyes, the quiet confidence of his demeanour, and most of all, the luminosity of his skin.
Lexy glowed because of her excellent and expensive fake tan, but Frank’s colour was all his own. Caroline had copy-edited a press release for a luxury wood company the year before, and still remembered some of the more exotic varieties. Cherrywood, fruitwood, Ipswich pine, red mahogany, colonial maple: poetic names. Well, Frank’s skin made her feel poetic: it looked like the burnished golden pecan about which the press release had waxed lyrical, the heart of a fire against which you could warm your hands. Frank might have been planed down and then oiled deeply, just like the wood; Caroline imagined that if she ran her hand down his chest, which was partly visible at the neckline of his open shirt, it would feel just as smooth . . .
She caught herself, swallowing so hard it was almost painful. But she simply hadn’t expected Frank to be so handsome. On TV, on Lexy’s show, he came across as – not bland, exactly. But . . . nice. Dependable. The voice of reason on every panel discussion, the foil to Lexy’s high-spirited, attention-seeking loudmouth. Good husband material, a man who had unquestioningly taken on Laylah, Lexy’s daughter, raising her as his own. Laylah’s biological father, a basketball player with whom Lexy had had a famously tempestuous affair, had walked out when she told him she was pregnant. Frank was, in every way but genetic, Laylah’s father.
Good husband material: that phrase was never used to describe a man who was sexually attractive. But as Caroline, her face on fire now, ducked her head to hide it, she was so dazzled by Frank that all she could manage was to make squiggles in her notebook so that anyone who looked over would think she was writing. She had never seen a man who she had found more compelling.
Frank said the line fed him by the producer: ‘Babes, you know I like you a bit more natural.’
Even his voice sounded different than it did on television. Charming, gentle, amused. Sexy.
He really cares about her, Caroline thought. You can tell he loves her in their series, but in real life . . . he doesn’t just love her, he likes her. That’s just as important.
‘Oh, come on, Frank, you love it when I’m all nice and smooth!’ Lexy was saying flirtatiously.
Frank raised one big hand and wiped it over his face as if he were trying to block out the image of his wife lying naked in front of him with two gay men pulling her buttocks apart, a young woman with a white plastic spatula smearing gel between them, and a camera crew surrounding her, with bright lights illuminating the entire scene.
‘Sometimes, Lex,’ he said, lowering his hand again, ‘I wonder where this is all going to end, y’know?’
Lexy paused. This wasn’t what he had been supposed to say, and she wasn’t sure whether to make an unscripted joke about him and one of her ends; their show was re-run in the daytime, and she couldn’t say anything too explicit.
Although she was being filmed in the nude, the viewers would see nothing but the blurred curve of her bottom. It was commonplace now on reality shows for female cast members to get their private parts waxed. The network, however, was increasingly strict with Lexy about her swearing and sexual innuendo, and she knew that if she made a joke that was too risqué it would be cut.
And yet Frank’s reaction, though unscripted, had been so good, so honest, that it would work fantastically on TV – if she could find something light and funny to respond with . . .
‘Mummy!’
Laylah tore into the bathroom, her plaits bouncing on her shoulders, her blue eyes wide as she took in the sight of her mother splayed on the beauty therapist’s table. She skidded to a halt beside her father as, following in her footsteps, her little brother London, a stocky four-year-old, tumbled in behind her. With his tight dark curls and burnished skin, his slanting eyes and square jaw, he was the image of his father, apart from the light eyes that were clearly from his mother’s gene pool. Suddenly shy at the number of people present, he slipped behind Laylah, aware that all the attention would be on her as soon as she entered a room.
And he was perfectly right. Laylah stole the scene.
‘Oh no, Mummy!’ she said, nailing that world-weary tone that small children can sometimes assume. Playing for the cameras, as she had been taught, she folded her arms over her chest and stuck out her small pointed chin. ‘Why have you taken all your clothes off for the men again?’
‘And cut,’ the director said gratefully.