Bad Brides (8 page)

‘The wedding’s going to be such an amazing opportunity,’ Milly was saying. ‘Wait till I tell my publicist! Wow, just think of the photo-spreads that Tark and I can do. Is
it cool that we’ve got the same colouring, or is it a little weird? You know, making us look like brother and sister? Some people post comments like that online . . . I think we definitely
need to work on the styling so we’re not dressed
too
alike. Tark’s got his new-folk-crusty-whatever thing, which honestly I
hate
, but I can see it’s huge right
now, so I’m all right with it, and I have a more flower-child vibe, so there’s a difference there . . .’

Inside her pale suede Isabel Marant crossbody bag, Milly’s phone vibrated to signal an incoming text; she pulled it out and gasped.

‘It’s Katharine!’ she said excitedly. Katharine was her publicist. ‘She says it’s trending on Twitter already! Cool! Oh yeah, I should tweet a photo of the ring.
God knows why I didn’t do that already, what’s
wrong
with me? Everyone
loved
when I posted that pic you took of the daisy chain in my hair earlier today – oh,
Eves, that’s a good idea, what about doing some daisy-chain jewellery? That would be really on brand for Milly and Me.’

She scrolled down.

‘Oh
wow
!’ she exclaimed. ‘Katharine’s going to pitch the wedding to
Style
first thing Monday. They’re doing a Brides issue in the UK for the first
time ever next June, and she’s going to push for me and Tark to have the cover! Can you
imagine
? Oh my God, Eves, this is huge! I’m so,
so
glad that Tark proposed
now!’

Milly was so excited that she momentarily forgot about photographing, tweeting, Facebooking and Instagramming her ring: she clasped the phone to her narrow chest as ecstatically as if it were a
contract for a leading role in a Hollywood romcom, her eyes shining as brilliantly as the blue diamonds she infinitely preferred to turquoises.

‘Oh,’ she added, ‘and Katharine thinks the turquoise is fab –
right
on brand, she said. I can’t wait to tell her about Milly and Me Breast Cancer –
no, that doesn’t sound right at all. Katharine will think of how to put it, she’s a genius that way.
Anyway,
I’ll
totally
put up with having to wear a bloody
turquoise if it gets me on the cover of
Style
Brides!’

She gazed at Eva, her eyes so dazzling that Eva almost blinked.

‘And Eves, you’ll help me do it
all
,’ she went on, quite as if she were conferring the most generous of favours on her best friend. ‘You
know
how much I
rely on you! We’ll get a wedding planner, of course, but I want
everything
to reflect my and Tarquin’s ethos, you know? Wildflower meadows, home-made lemonade – ooh,
maybe we could get Pimm’s to sponsor the drinks? Everything has to be right on brand, and you just get that so instinctively. British, ethical, down-to-earth but just sheer luxury at the same
time.’

Milly heaved a huge sigh of bliss.

‘God, I didn’t see this coming at
all
!’ she said, deliciously aware that even the VIPs hanging out in the backstage area were taking surreptitious photos of her
– Milly Gamble from
Dr Who
looking all blissed-out and loved-up just after Tarquin Ormond had proposed to her. ‘This is really going to take me – and Milly and Me, of
course – to a
whole
new level of brand awareness!’

Two hundred miles away from the Sussex fields across which Ormond and Co were blasting out their song ‘Moon Face’, Tamra Maloney was settling into the
hand-upholstered, leather back seat of her Bentley Flying Spur as her chauffeur drove her back to London, blessedly unaware that Brianna Jade now had a rival for the
Style
Bride of the
Year tiara. If anything could have improved Tamra’s mood at that moment, which probably wasn’t even possible, it would have been her Bentley. She just loved this car. There was nothing
like it in the States, nothing at all. Yes, you could get hugely luxurious and expensive cars over there, of course, but nothing so elegant and refined. From the ‘B’ of the Bentley logo
hand-sewn into the capacious headrests, to the built-in case of drinking glasses and the tables that slid out so smoothly from the back seats, to the DVD screens and the multimedia remote control
that lay discreetly between the seats, everything had been hand-fitted by experts; it was like relaxing into a moving work of art.

Deciding to spend over two hundred and fifty thousand pounds for the Flying Spur had been the easy part. Picking her colour choices for the interior by contrast had been agonizing. Bentley
offered a dark-red leather called Fireglow for the seats and upholstery, with a dark stained burr walnut for the wooden veneers that was almost black. Tamra had been seriously tempted by the rich
crimson and charcoal combination of one of the showroom models. But the salesman, with exquisite tact, had murmured: ‘Very
nightclub
, madam. This colour choice is extremely popular
with our Russian and Arab clients . . .’ and Tamra, who was very quick on the uptake, had read his meaning instantly.

‘I got it,’ she had said, flashing him a gorgeous smile. ‘Like we’d say in the States, keep walking. What do you suggest?’

The salesman had allowed himself a much smaller smile and advised Tamra that the combination of a damson exterior, plus beige leather seats and matching damson leather interior trim, with the
dark walnut veneer, would be the choice
he
would make for madam. Madam was modern and elegant, and the deep purple reflected her style and was contemporary without being – well,
nightclub
.

And she loved it. The purple made her feel positively regal, and the sales guy had been right – the beige seats looked a lot classier than the red would have done. Tamra had no problems
flashing her money around, no wish to pretend she wasn’t anything but the newest of new multi-millionaires; it was a shame, she often thought, that there wasn’t a word that fitted in
between ‘multi-million’ and ‘billion’. The former didn’t really convey the scale of her wealth, and she wasn’t quite in the latter’s league.
Yet. Never
say never.

She was perfectly happy to buy everything new and shiny and custom-made: that was her deal. But there was luxurious and there was flashy, and she knew she needed to stay on the right side of
that line. It was proving surprisingly easy: the Bentley guy had been typical of the high-end salespeople here, who were very happy to guide you along the right path as long as you learnt their
keywords. You went into their shops dressed all elegant and rich-looking –
not
flashy, Armani rather than Versace – and you listened out for key phrases like
‘refined’ and ‘restrained’, or their antonyms, ‘perhaps a little flamboyant’, or the killer ‘Arab/Russian/nightclub’ trifecta used by the Bentley
salesman, which was the biggest warning of all. Having tons of money was fine in the UK, but being vulgar with it was not. Tamra had learnt to focus her love of shiny things squarely into
jewellery.

And this kind of shine,
she thought, reaching out to run one finger over the surface of the open table next to her, the walnut lacquered in layer upon layer of hand-painted applications
till it shone like a mirror.
Look at that glossy finish. There can’t be a car in the world more beautiful than this.

She drank some of the Cristal from the glass she was holding and selected a small canapé from the plate that was resting on the table: smoked salmon, tossed in the lightest dressing of
lemon juice, low-fat crème fraiche and chopped dill, served in a Little Gem lettuce leaf cup. No carbs, of course. Barely ever any carbs in solid form, only in liquid: the Cristal, for
instance. Tamra was fine never eating solid carbs again in her life, but by God, you’d have to pry the liquor bottle from her cold dead hands, even if it was getting harder to keep the weight
off now that she’d gone past the forty mark.

Forty! My God! I still can’t believe it!

She resisted the impulse to pull out her pocket mirror and scan her face; she’d told herself to stop doing that any more. It led to paranoia, which led to unnecessary surgery, which led to
looking like one of the women off the
Real Housewives
shows, who literally didn’t know where to stop. Some of them were like wax models of their former selves, Madame Tussaud’s
come to life, smooth, motionless, their eyes stretched artificially wide by upper eyelid repositioning surgery: or blepharoplasty, where any excess fatty tissue was removed from around the eyes,
making them seem bigger, but also oddly stretched. Like Manga teenage eyes in a middleaged face.

And once you start, you don’t stop
. For confirmation, she only had to look back at all the other women in the social circle in Florida into which marriage to Ken Maloney, the
Fracking King, had precipitated her. Ken had proposed to her within a week of their first meeting and whisked her and Brianna Jade off to his marble beachfront palace. The levels of nipping,
tucking, lifting and liposuctioning in West Palm Beach had to be seen to be believed. If an alien from another galaxy had landed there, it would immediately have assumed that all the women at the
country club were engaged in a terrible, suicidal competition to stretch their skin as tight over their skeletons as humanly possible. Tamra, with only a nose job and boob implants, was quite a
contrast, and only the deep well of common sense from which she had drawn ever since she’d found herself a pregnant single mother at sixteen had saved her from the temptation to start
tinkering with her face.

It had been shockingly unprecedented in West Palm Beach when she’d gone under the knife to actually
reverse
a cosmetic procedure. Ken had whined when she’d had her implants
removed, but Tamra had his ring on her finger by then, so there was nothing he could do about it. And since she was a B/C cup anyway he’d had to admit, post-surgery, that there wasn’t
that much of a difference.

Dr Dubrow did a great job,
she thought now, complacently looking down at her breasts.
The girls look great.
Tamra still regretted never having done pageants herself; with her,
it would’ve been Miss USA or die trying. She had the attitude as well as the looks. Brianna Jade was drop-dead beautiful – Tamra had been a knockout at sixteen, but she genuinely
thought that her daughter was even better-looking than she had been at that age. However, Brianna Jade had never truly relished getting up on that stage and selling her personality with everything
she’d got.

Tamra’s perfectly shaped lips curved in a smile of nostalgic amusement as she remembered the struggle it had been to find her daughter a suitable talent for that specific part of the
competition. When Brianna Jade had won Pork Queen at the Kewanee State Fair (prize: five hundred dollars, a pigskin jacket and the lead place on a tractor trailer in the parade), all the
contestants had been required to prepare a pork dish as part of the contest, and Brianna Jade’s Tater Tots casserole had been widely appreciated.

Thank God for Mrs Lutz, our landlady, helping BJ with that pork casserole. Someone had to – I could never cook to save my life – and at least BJ did the gruntwork herself. I know
damn well that Barb Norkus, who came second and went on to win Watseka Corn Queen, didn’t do anything with her pork ’n’ beans but carry the casserole – her mom cooked it
all.

But you couldn’t hand out your pork casserole to judges from the stage, nor could you even cook it as you travelled around the Midwest staying in the cheapest of cheap motels and living
off bulk-bought ramen noodles, yoghurt and take-out salads from Arby’s. And Brianna Jade couldn’t sing or dance, not well enough to compete with the other girls, that was for sure: most
of them had come off the kiddie pageant circuit and had been taking lessons since they were four. So Tamra had come up with a comic skit for her daughter, ‘Twenty Things You Didn’t Know
About the Pig’, complete with a slide show, and, after intensive coaching, BJ had managed to pull it off okay.

Never enough to win, though. BJ was beautiful enough to place as a runner-up for the prize money to keep them going, but it wasn’t enough for the big time. And Tamra had never blamed her
for it. She had pushed her daughter into pageants to get them out of Kewanee, and it had worked.

But Tamra had been getting more and more worried, waiting in vain for that big break that would happen for BJ, the competition she’d win, the nice rich guy who’d fall for her. People
would tell Tamra to take BJ to LA and try the acting circuit, but no way was BJ an actress: she only managed that comic monologue with Tamra coaching the hell out of her. And Tamra could easily
imagine what pretty girls who weren’t great actresses went through in Hollywood to get cast. She’d have taken a rusty old pickaxe to the balls of the first guy who asked her daughter to
get down on her knees at an audition.

Tamra wasn’t a typical pageant mom, living through her daughter’s success, letting her own looks fade in order to channel everything into the younger version of herself, willing to
sacrifice her daughter’s own wishes ruthlessly on an altar bedecked with crowns and prize money. Tamra had firmly told the many people in Kewanee who’d pushed her to get her adorable
little five-year-old into kiddie pageants where they could stick it. Brianna Jade would have as normal a childhood as her mother could manage, though Tamra had to work long days at the feed store
and pull night shifts at the local bar, Hogs and Cobs, while she scrabbled to maintain a network of fellow moms who would watch Brianna Jade for her.

No point asking her folks for help: she’d been thrown out of the house when she got knocked up by her boyfriend, Brian Schladdenhouffer, even though he’d swallowed hard, manned up
and proposed when he heard the news. And no point looking to the Schladdenhouffers either; they’d blamed her for everything, from ‘trapping’ their son (whose clumsy condom skills
had actually been to blame for the pregnancy) to pretty much causing his death in the combine-harvester accident because, according to them, he’d been so distracted by being trapped that he
had slipped and fallen from the machine during refuelling. Not a pleasant way to go.