Bad Heir Day (4 page)

“Forty-two, two twenty-eight, five fifty-seven.” Cassandra squinted at the list of clothes beside the computerised wardrobe door and entered the numbers of her chosen garments into the keypad, taking great care not to damage her nails. Tyra the manicurist had just left; the fact she cost just over double what most painters of nails and buffers of cuticles charged demanded that her handiwork be shown a certain respect. She was worth it though; did she not count Nicole Kidman, Elizabeth Hurley, and the editor of
Vogue
among her clients? Though the fact that they probably paid nothing explained Cassandra’s own exorbitant bills.

Still, full battle dress was essential today. Cassandra was not looking forward to the meeting with her publishers at which she would no doubt be expected to explain the whereabouts of
A Passionate Lover
,
her long-promised but as yet unforthcoming new novel. So far, she’d pleaded writer’s block, crashing laptop, even periodic bouts of mysterious illness, but now, floating faintly but definitely into her ear was the unmistakable sound of music that had to be faced. Cassandra was unsure how exactly she would break the news that no lover, passionate or otherwise, currently lurked in her laptop, still less in the left-hand side of her brain or wherever the creative part was supposed to be.

A PASSIONATE LOVER
,
screamed the poster pinned on the wall opposite her desk in bold letters of searing red. They were a searing reminder to Cassandra that her publishers had seen fit to start a poster campaign before seeing a single word of the novel it described. The apparent rationale was that if they proceeded as if the book existed, it might, through sheer force of corporate effort, actually materialise. “Love, lust, and betrayal—with a twist in the tail,” declared the poster. “The new Number One bestseller from the author of
The Sins of the Father
,
Impossible Lust
,
Guilty
,
and
Obsessions
,”
it went on in smaller letters running across the illustration of a tousle-haired Pierce Brosnan smoulderer in a frilled shirt who could pout and suck his cheeks in at the same time. Cassandra stared at him with loathing.

Love
,
lust
,
and betrayal—with a twist in the tail
.
Well, thought Cassandra bitterly, the publishers certainly had a head start on her. She hadn’t even begun to think about the plot, let alone start trying to write it. And as for Number One bestseller, well, despite the publishers’ best efforts—and often their worst and most underhand ones into the bargain—that was in the lap of the gods. It certainly wasn’t, at this precise moment, in her laptop.

Forcing this uncomfortable and inconvenient fact from her mind, she stared at the electronic display beside the wardrobe door as it processed the numbers she had punched in. The figures were rippling like the destination boards used to do at Waterloo in those thankfully long-ago days when public transport and Cassandra were not the strangers they were now. She tapped her foot as impatiently as she could, given that each tap sank into inches-thick cream carpet.

What had gone wrong? Why had the inspiring spark, so reliable for so long, recently failed to spring into anything approximating a flame? “Everything I’m writing is shit,” a panicked Cassandra had yelled at her editor recently. Harriet’s lack of surprise, indeed the unspoken implication that that was entirely expected, did little to improve Cassandra’s mood. But if shit it were, she thought indignantly, it was successful. Four bestsellers under her belt in as many years, spawning three mini-series and one talking book read by Joanna Lumley. But lately…Cassandra swallowed. The thought of the flint-faced executives she would shortly face around the boardroom table make her heart sink.

She could no longer think of plots. The personalities of her characters vacillated as wildly as their gender, hair colour, and motivation; her development and consistency skills had gone, although, she thought, reddening, many of her reviewers had questioned the existence of those skills in the first place.
Bastards
.
But far, far worse than the worst reviews (and there had been plenty of those and she never forgot the names and one day the score would be settled) was the fact that Cassandra couldn’t seem to write sex scenes anymore.

Sex scenes had been Cassandra’s stock in trade. Or stocking trade, as more than one razor-witted reviewer had pointed out in the past. Along with the smirking observation, following revelations that Cassandra was celebrated among the commuting classes for her ability to produce erections on the Circle Line at seven in the morning, that “here was a writer at the peak of her powers.” But for the moment, those powers had deserted her—Cassandra doubted now she’d be able to produce an erection among a gang of footballers being lapdanced in Stringfellow’s. Chronicling the most basic sexual encounter seemed beyond her; the springy breasts with their dark aureoles of nipple consistently failed to spring to mind. Likewise, the piston-like penises, so reliable of old, resolutely refused to come.

Cassandra was at a loss to explain, to Harriet or anybody else, why this should suddenly be the case. It was not, after all, as if her own sex life had suddenly slowed down to a splutter or that she had lost interest. She had never been interested in the first place. When push came to shove—and she rued every day that it did—Cassandra hated sex, at least, when she was sober. Her husband Jett, unfortunately, did not share her views and continued to press for his conjugal rights, although, admittedly, his requirements had gone down from a daily service to a Sunday one. Cassandra supposed she should be thankful for small mercies, even though there was nothing small or merciful about Jett at full throttle. The only point to sex, as far as she was concerned, was children. And after Zak’s birth, eight years ago, Cassandra had dropped even the pretence that she was interested.

From briefly dwelling on the favourite subject of her son, that most gifted, charming, and beautiful of children, Cassandra’s mind flitted to the rather less comfortable subject of Emma the nanny. Now
there
was a pressure, coping with the latest in that endless line of troublesome girls.
Five
in the last
twelve months
,
Cassandra seethed to herself. Did staying power and commitment mean nothing anymore? Given what she had to put up with in her domestic life, was it any wonder that her storylines were about as sexy as an orthopaedic shoe?

They were all the same, these ridiculous girls; at least, they all said the same things about Zak. Emma had proved particularly unresponsive to Cassandra’s standard line of nanny rebuttal, the argument that a child as brilliant as Zak was bound to be difficult from time to time, gifted children always were. And of
course
he was occasionally—
very
occasionally—disobedient. The respect of a child like Zak had to be
earned
.
Cassandra decided not to dwell on Emma’s mutinous expression the last time she had tried this tack, still less the pointed way she had turned her back and marched out of the room. She decided instead to concentrate on the matter in hand, which was the meeting and what to wear for it. It was eight o’clock, a blearily early hour for Cassandra to be up, and she was due in the boardroom at nine.

Forty-two, two twenty-eight, and five fifty-seven. It had been a difficult decision, but in the end, Cassandra was sure she had trodden the sartorial line between professionalism and plunging cleavage with consummate skill. Forty-two was the classic black YSL trouser suit with the big black buttons. Two twenty-eight was her new purple Prada shirt, and five fifty-seven her favourite pair of black elastic Manolo boots.

Boots? Was it, Cassandra thought, suddenly panicking, the
weather
for boots? She looked quickly at a second liquid crystal display beneath the keypad, which helpfully showed the temperature outside so you could pick your clothes to suit: 5°C. Christ, it was practically
freezing
.
Amazing weather for June, but then, this
was
England, she supposed. She’d need a coat too, obviously. It could be the furs first outing since Gstaad in February. Cassandra scanned the list. Seven hundred and four was the silver-mink ankle-length. If that didn’t wow them, nothing would.

There was a grinding sound, a faint rattle, then the door of the wardrobe slid back. Cassandra blinked as it revealed a pair of orange towelling sweatpants, a bright yellow jacket with shoulder pads of Thames Barrier proportions, and a bikini top in magenta satin. As Cassandra stared, aghast, a pair of olive-green Wellington boots hove into view along the conveyor belt at the bottom. “Jett!” she exploded. “Jett!”

“Whazzamatter?” A man in a red satin Chinese bathrobe far too small for him appeared in the doorway between the dressing room and the bedroom. His figure, with its round, protruding belly and long, skinny legs, was reminiscent of a lollipop. “Whazzup?” he asked, rubbing his eyes and yawning.

“This fucking computerised wardrobe you gave me,” Cassandra almost spat.

“I didn’t realise it fucked as well.” Jett lounged against the doorjamb, his heavily bagged eyes narrowed in amusement. “The miracles of modern science. I’d have kept it for myself if I’d known.”

“Don’t be so bloody facetious, Jett,” Cassandra snarled. “This wardrobe is
shit
.”
Losing her temper altogether, she slammed her clenched fists repeatedly against her sides with impotent rage, irrespective of Tyra’s recent careful and costly efforts. “How the
fuck
am I supposed to wear
this
lot to meet my
publishers
?”
She gestured furiously at the ensemble before her.

“Looks all right to me,” Jett yawned, loping over and tweaking the bikini top. “Looks quite rock ’n’ roll, actually.”

“Rock ’n’ roll my
arse
,”
hissed Cassandra.

“No, rock ’n’ roll your goddamn
tits
.”
Jett thrust out a hairy, ring-festooned hand to grab Cassandra’s breasts, half revealed by her flapping Janet Reger peignoir. Twisting deftly out of Jett’s way, Cassandra heard the unmistakable crunch of her neck muscles going. Damn. Another fifty quid to the osteopath.

“This stupid sodding wardrobe’s suggesting I wear nothing but this disgusting thing”—she tugged the yellow jacket—“outside when the temperature’s more or less zero.”

“Zero?” echoed Jett. “It’s goddamn
baking
out there. Just look out of the window.”

Cassandra turned and screwed up her face against the brilliant light streaming through the greige pashmina curtains, looped with studied artlessness over black iron rods.

It
did
look rather warm outside. “
Sod it
,”
she spat. “I’ve got to start all over again now. I’m going to be late. I need some help. Where’s that useless nanny? Where’s Emma?”

“I’m ’ere,” said a northern accent in the doorway. “And I’m handing in me notice. With immediate effect.”

Cassandra and Jett stared at the solid figure standing at the entrance to the room with two large bags in her hand. Then they stared at each other.

“You’ve been at it a-bloody-gain, haven’t you?” Cassandra shrieked at Jett. “Trying to screw the sodding nanny. I thought as much when I caught you with her in your library last week. Showing her a few of your favorite
passages
,
were you?”

“Well you can bloody well talk,” Jett snapped. “Getting her to take those goddamn dresses back to the shops and saying they’re not suitable, when you knew goddamn well you’d worn them. Poor cow. Sent packing by half of goddamn Bond Street.”

“Well, if she’d ironed the linings properly like I told her, no one would have known,” howled Cassandra, seemingly oblivious of the fact that Emma was still present and shifting from foot to sturdily shod foot. “And anyway, it’s not as if she’d ever go in those shops of her own accord. I gave her an
education
,
asking her to take them back. She should be bloody
grateful
.
You, on the other hand, gave her an education of a completely different sort.
Why cant you keep your zip up
?” Cassandra yelled. “You’re not a rock star being chased by every groupie in town anymore, you know. You’re not a rock star,
full stop
!”

Jett’s eyes flashed fire. Cassandra saw she had hit him where it hurt. “You haven’t released anything for years,” she taunted. “Apart from that
thing
in your trousers.”

“Well, neither has anybody goddamn else,” yelled Jett, furious. “You goddamn bitch. Solstice will be back with a bang, you’ll see. You wait till the new goddamn album’s mixed.”

“Mixed?
Mixed
?” bawled Cassandra. “The only thing you know how to mix these days is bloody whisky and soda.”

As Jett stormed out of the room, Emma stood aside, then stepped forward. “The real reason I’m leaving has nowt to do wi’ what you just said,” she said in dull Lancastrian tones, “although I’m not saying they didn’t ’elp.”

Cassandra stared at her in contempt.
Nowt
indeed.
Ghastly
northern vowels. She probably thought elocution was what happened if you dropped a hairdryer in the bath.

“Only summat happened this morning,” Emma added, unbowed by her employer’s freezing stare, “which made me realise I’d ’ad enough.”

Summat
.
Ugh
.
And just
look
at
that hair
.

“Zak were complaining about feeling awful and wanted to stay off school. He said there were summat wrong wi’ ’is insides.” Emma paused. “’E said his poop were white.”

“Poop?
Poop
?”
Cassandra was incandescent. “We don’t
poop
in this house. We
poo
.”

“Course,” Emma continued flatly, her stare concentrated at a corner of the room beyond her employer, “I tried to find out what were wrong before I got you involved. Zak took me into his bathroom and pointed at his toilet…”