Beads, Boys and Bangles Page 11

  It’s in a different league from the Italian awards thing. Pictures of the guests arriving at the Elysée Palace will be on the TV news and in every paper and newsy fashion magazine, and half the fashion blogs on the internet. Fashion designers will be falling over themselves to dress the stars. John Galliano is probably doing a dress for someone. And Alberta Ferretti. And Alber Elbaz for Lanvin, and the Valentino people (Valentino himself has retired to his yacht, as you do), and all my heroes. And Sigrid will be one of the prettiest, and one of the most photographed, people there.

  For once, Crow can let her imagination run away with her. There is no such thing as ‘undoable’, or even ‘unaffordable’. If Crow wants twenty metres of hand-dyed ultramarine silk so she can do some clever pleating, that’s fine. If she needs amethysts and turquoises to sparkle on the bodice, that’s great. If she has to hire a top professional French embroideress to complete the details on the waist and the train, fantastic.

  The Sigrid dress can finally use her ideas from Paris and bring them to life. With Andy Elat’s official approval it will have jewels. It will have sequins. It will have silver thread. The embroidery will be so complicated that it can only be done by one woman, who lives outside Toulouse and uses techniques handed down from the sixteenth century. It will cost so much to produce that Crow’s whole village in Uganda could live on the money for a year. But hopefully the publicity will be worth a fortune and Andy Elat will be a happy man again.

  One way of taking my mind off the shows is to go downstairs to the workroom and help. If I wear a padded bra and stand on a step, I’m about the same height and shape as Sigrid, and Crow can use me as a model to imagine her new creation.

  My version is less exotic. I’m wearing the toile, which is made out of thin cream cotton and will make the pattern. Zero jewels. Zip embroidery. At the moment, I actually look as if I’m off to a toga party. But I get the idea of how it will be when it’s finished and it will look as though Sigrid has risen from the sea like some sort of sparkling underwater goddess, picking up loads of precious stones on the way.

  It will be incredible and will make the Swan dress she wore last year seem like a kindergarten smock.

  I love to think of myself as a ‘house model’. Normally that means ‘design house’, not ‘your own house’, of course. It sounds so romantic. I pretend the step and padded bra aren’t required and Coco Chanel is fitting stuff onto me. Or at least I did until I discovered that Coco Chanel could be pretty mean on a bad day. Now we pretend it’s Dior himself. Crow isn’t the most perfect reincarnation of a middle-aged French bloke, but when she says, ‘And now, mam’selle, please ’old still for ze mastair,’ it makes me giggle so hard I end up with pin-pricks all over.

  After the fitting, I do a mental calculation of the cost of the silk, plus the jewels, plus the embroideress, plus Crow’s time to do it. It’s an extremely large number. Needless to say, Sigrid isn’t paying for this. We are. Or rather, Andy Elat is. Sigrid will borrow it and then, if we’re lucky, we may one day sell it to a rich client. A VERY rich client. Or a museum.

  * * *

  ‘You’re not worried, are you?’ I ask. ‘About working with such expensive stuff?’

  Crow looks at me as if I’m completely bonkers. I don’t know why I bothered to mention it.

  ‘Nothing else will give the effect,’ she says, wide-eyed.

  Nothing except the most expensive silk in the world and a bucketful of gemstones.

  ‘What if you spill something on it?’ I don’t mean to be negative, but I can’t help thinking of my polar bear jacket, which is pretty much ruined.

  Crow gives me another look. ‘I don’t spill stuff.’

  This is true. I am the stuff-spiller in this household.

  ‘Probably best if I don’t pop by too often while you’re working on the proper dress, then,’ I say, assuming she’ll laugh and tell me not to be silly.

  She doesn’t.

  Soon, Jenny gets pictured in two magazines slurping a smoothie on her way to rehearsals, alongside unfavourable comments about her jeans and unwashed hair and parka jacket.

  ‘Where is the glamour-puss we knew last year?’ they wonder sadly. As if she’s supposed to go to a studio in south London dressed in Louboutins and a Burberry mac.

  Somehow Sigrid manages to dress down for the same rehearsals and get universal sighs of appreciation. Her hair is always shiny. She’s in jeans, but they’re skinny, frayed and totally on-trend. She’s in a biker jacket, but it’s soft leather (not mink this time) and every fashionista wants one. She’s in a tee-shirt, but it’s a vintage one as worn by two of her friends in Hollywood and everyone loves it. She’s not wearing makeup, but the fashion press find this ‘authentic’ and ‘a sign of her dedication to taking acting back to basics’.

  There are no pictures of her swanning around inside the studio, insisting on fresh, warm water with a hint of lemon every thirty seconds and wondering if it wouldn’t be possible to have ‘just a little bit more to say’ in every speech.

  Jim, the actor playing Jenny’s father, hates her to bits. He is mostly left to nod and look amazed and adoring as Sigrid drones on with her new, expanded part. He and Jenny have completely bonded, which is strange since he plays a man we all find impossibly irritating in real life.

  Everyone else, though, finds Sigrid adorable. The director dotes on her. The other actors want her autograph and love the anecdotes about Hollywood life and going out with Joe Yule, the Not-So-New Teenage Sex God. They even love it when she gets a text in mid-scene and STOPS REHEARSING TO READ IT, in case it’s from Joe. And the stagehands and other backstage people keep going on about how thoughtful she is, arriving every day with a box of fresh doughnuts and asking after their pets. Only Bill, Jenny’s friend, looks slightly grumpy each time he’s asked to rewrite a scene to make the stepmother part younger, prettier and more centre-stage.

  ‘The thing is,’ Jenny says, ‘they all know the play will be a success because of her. They all think I must be so incredibly grateful she wore one of my friend’s dresses at the Oscars last year. They’ve all gone to see it at the V&A, you know. She took them there. It was like a little tour party. It was sickening. And because I know Joe, she thinks I’ll want to hear all the lovey-dovey things he’s doing, like sending flowers to her hotel every day and making playlists for her and tweeting about her on Twitter.’

  ‘Ew,’ I say. There is no other word. ‘Ew’ captures it exactly.

  Despite ourselves, we look up the tweets.

  Still missing darling @sigsantorini. Just sent her a little something to say ‘Happy Monday’.

  ‘What was it?’ I ask.

  ‘The letter S made out of twenty-seven diamonds on a platinum chain,’ Jenny sighs. ‘And a matching charm bracelet.’

  We read on.

  Thinking about @sigsantorini in London. Her play’s in two weeks. She’ll be dynamite. Check it out.

  At this point, Joe gives the website of the Boat House.

  ‘Their site crashed, obviously,’ Jenny points out. ‘Took a day to fix it. They were thrilled.’

  We make ourselves miserable for a while longer, then Jenny remembers to ask me about Alexander.

  ‘So? Is it true love?’

  I was in fact just about to tell her about the fake swollen ankle, but her tone is so mocking that I’m instantly furious.

  ‘It might be,’ I say. ‘We’re going out again next week.’

  Which means that unfortunately I have to text him and suggest a date. He accepts instantly and sends round a big bunch of flowers to say ‘Happy better ankle’. It must be a star performer thing. Now I understand how florists and jewellers stay in business.

  With Jenny’s opening night just over a week away, Edie calls us to a lunch-break meeting in the cafeteria.

  ‘I’ve made a list of all the main health hazards of visiting the Indian subcontinent,’ she says, as if that’s a perfectly normal thing to do, ‘and it’s not too bad. But the important thing i
s not to drink the water or eat salad.’

  ‘Cool,’ I point out. ‘So we can live on burgers and Coke.’

  Edie looks as though she’d love to disagree with me from a nutritional point of view, but is forced to admit that from a healthcare perspective, yes, that would be a good idea.

  ‘Or what?’ asks Jenny. It’s always details with Jenny.

  ‘Or bugs,’ Edie says. Her eyes go so wide she looks like a bug herself. ‘Bad ones. You spend your whole time on the loo.’

  ‘Lucky I’m not going then,’ Jenny smiles.

  Edie looks shocked. ‘Not going? Why?’

  Jenny and I look shocked back.

  ‘Because of her play, silly,’ I say. ‘It’ll be transferring to the West End when we get back. Of course she can’t go.’

  Edie still looks amazed. ‘But this is India. The chance of a lifetime.’

  ‘So’s the West End,’ I point out. Jenny’s still too shocked to speak. ‘It’s the biggest deal you can get. Huge. She needs all the practice she can get. Everyone in theatre will be watching. It’ll be a major event.’

  I’ve been thinking about Edie’s dimness all this time, not about Jenny’s nervousness. Then I notice Jenny’s gone green.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she says, and rushes out.

  It looks as though it’s not only bugs that make you need the loo. Sometimes your friends can too.

  After my quick text about going out, Alexander texts me back with lots of suggestions. One of them is going to see a comedy horror movie that’s had great reviews. He says he’s going with a bunch of friends. This sounds fun and bench-free, so I’m happy to say yes.

  We meet up at a cool cinema in Notting Hill. I’m back in my pixie boots and remembering to limp slightly. All his friends turn out to be incredibly thin, pale and beautiful. They stand with straight backs and their feet turned out, or drape themselves elegantly on available surfaces. They are clearly ballet dancers and don’t even need to wear linen scarves to prove it.

  They are all very nice to me, even though I’m by far the youngest, and they like my new fake fur mini-dress (I miss the pink polar bear). One of the boys is from Belgium and insists on chatting to me in French while we queue for our tickets. So I chat in French back.

  I am metropolitan and multilingual and totally amazing, basically. Once again I have made a good dating decision and I wish Jenny could be here to see me. All I need now is for the movie to be as good as everyone says it is and this will be a near-perfect evening.

  But I never find out how good the movie is because I don’t get to see it.

  Just after the bit where they tell you to switch off your mobile phones, Alexander turns round in his seat and lowers his sweaty face onto mine. FOR FIVE MINUTES. Well, it might be a bit less but it feels like fifty years so it’s probably about that. Then he breaks for air and I manage to watch a couple of funny set-up scenes until he turns round and DOES IT AGAIN.

  Does the man have no shame? Do his friends not care? Am I supposed to come back and actually watch the movie some other time?

  The third time, I open my teeth a bit just to see if the tongue-in-mouth thing is as bad as I feared. And it is. His tongue is hard and pointy and although I guess it can’t be sweaty, it feels as though it is. This is so awful I’m suddenly living a horror movie of my own, except this one isn’t a comedy and if you close your eyes you can’t block it out.

  At which point I finally realise that I DON’T FANCY ALEXANDER. I should have known ages ago.

  I like the floppy hair. I like the Robert Pattinson overtones – anyone would. I like the long fingers and the muscly legs, but I don’t like being called Boots and I don’t like not knowing if I can eat chips or not and I don’t like HIS FACE COMING ANYWHERE NEAR ME.

  Which is not ideal in a boyfriend.

  Suddenly I think of Crow and it’s easy to know what to do. I wait for him to finish, trying not to picture the last horror movie I went to, where a giant spider landed on someone’s face. Then I pull away, give him a gentle peck on the cheek and say, ‘Sorry, got to go.’ I get up and walk out of the cinema and don’t look back.

  It was a lot easier than I expected. And I feel so relieved, I know I’ve done the right thing. I’m also very glad that Jenny isn’t here to see me on my date after all.

  She’d be laughing so hard she’d probably rupture something and not be able to do her play.

  I make sure I’m not around when Jenny finds out. I tell Edie and Edie tells her, but Edie then tells me how hysterically funny Jenny found the whole thing, so I might just as well have told her myself.

  Somehow the story gets out at home. Harry finds it so amusing he stops playing sad Russian folk songs for several hours. Mum tries to be sympathetic but you can tell she saw it coming.

  I hate it when mothers can see things coming. It’s a deeply irritating trait of theirs and they should pretend very hard that everything’s a big surprise.

  Only Crow is suitably shocked and sympathetic, so I talk to her about it for ages while she works on the new dress for Sigrid. She nods and doesn’t say much, which is ideal (apart from reminding me not to come too close). Also, watching her work, it’s occasionally possible to forget about Alexander and sweat and cinemas. Sometimes, it’s just about fashion.

  * * *

  I avoid Jenny for a couple of days, but in the end, she begs to meet up and as the play’s about to start, I can’t really say no. Jenny doesn’t have too many friends at school because lots of girls don’t really know how to behave around someone who’s been in a blockbuster movie and on a TV chat show and who’s ‘best friends’ with the girlfriend of a Teenage Sex God. (The answer is ‘normally’, by the way, but that doesn’t occur to them, whereas ‘meanly’ often does.) And Edie’s usually busy doing clubs or telling people not to buy clothes, so if I don’t talk to Jenny, there’s a danger nobody will.

  We make our usual date at the V&A café on Saturday, after Jenny’s rehearsal. She arrives in her Vuitton scarf again, and she’s taken to winding it round her face so she looks a bit like a copper-haired Michael Jackson. She sits down and I spot two separate tables of people taking photos of her on their mobile phones. For the first five minutes she has to keep stopping to sign autographs. Then she takes the scarf off so she can do proper justice to her smoothie, and people seem not to notice her so much any more. We get the chance to chat.

  ‘I don’t want to say I told you so,’ she says, so that the words ‘I told you so’ linger over the table.

  I sigh. Might as well get it over with.

  ‘You mean about Alexander?’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘OK. But he wasn’t exactly horrible. He didn’t two-time me or anything. He just wasn’t . . .’

  ‘What? Sexy? Interesting? Nice?’

  ‘My type,’ I say lamely.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ she grins. ‘Well, you see what they’re like now. Sorry you had to learn the hard way.’

  She doesn’t look remotely sorry. And I’m not convinced she’s right. I don’t think all men are like that. Harry’s lovely, for a start, when he’s not teasing me. And my dad. It’s not my fault if Jenny’s unlucky. But I’ve promised myself to be nice. The only answer is to change the subject.

  ‘How are you feeling? Are you ready for the first night?’

  The colour drains from her face. ‘As ready as I’ll ever be. Anthony says he thinks we’re not total disasters.’

  Anthony Lyle is the director of Her Father’s Daughter. Jenny’s movie director used to make her miserable by complaining about everything she did, including the way she looked at people. From what she’s said about Anthony, he’s the opposite: he hardly says anything to her at all.

  ‘Has he been any more helpful recently?’

  ‘No, not really,’ she mutters glumly. ‘He’s too busy taking Sigrid through her lines and making sure she’s happy with her water and asking whether Joe Yule has texted recently. He let us go early today so he could stay behind with her and so
rt out something that was bugging her. He usually does. I have to rely on Jim to make sure I’m doing everything OK.’

  Jim is the one playing the dad character. He and Jenny have formed the SIRTQOE society, which stands for Sigrid Is Really The Queen Of Evil. So far they’re the only members. They don’t dare ask anyone else, in case they mysteriously have to ‘spend more time with their families’, like Caroline – the woman who originally had Sigrid’s part.

  ‘I’m sure you’re brilliant,’ I say loyally.

  Jenny smiles a sad, wistful, actressy smile. ‘I hope so. I want to be. I mean, it’s lovely on that stage. I really enjoy it. It’s just the audience bit that worries me. You know . . . after . . . everything.’

  She means after being compared to dining room furniture the last time she performed beside a Hollywood star.

  ‘Anyway,’ she sighs, ‘here are the tickets. You can see for yourself on Wednesday.’

  She hands over an envelope and I can feel the tickets inside it. For a moment, I feel vaguely sick myself. The last time someone gave me tickets it was my soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend and we all know what happened next.

  ‘Looking forward to it,’ I lie, while my insides scrunch themselves up on Jenny’s behalf.

  ‘Yeah,’ she says, sighing. Then she puts her Michael Jackson outfit back on and we slink through the museum, past the Queen of Evil Oscar dress in its shiny display case, and out into the early spring rain that captures our feelings exactly.

  Wednesday comes. I’m expecting paparazzi everywhere, but amazingly there are only a few. This is partly because the play is on in one of the smallest theatres in London. Also because a big new musical is opening tonight on the other side of town. And because none of the major critics are going yet. They’re waiting until Her Father’s Daughter transfers to the West End, where most of the audience will see it.