Chart Throb (61 page)

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Authors: Ben Elton

BOOK: Chart Throb
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‘Exactly! When I’m Priscilla Blenheim, world-famous reality TV star, I’m worth an album deal. But when I’m just
me
 . . . just a voice, a woman alone, singing a song, I suck like a fucking rent boy.’
Beryl could find no words to reply.
‘You could have stopped me, Mom. You could have said, don’t make an album, darling, you have no musical talent. But no. There might have been a buck in it so you let me do it. You
encouraged me
to do it. Not content with stealing my adolescence . . .’
‘Now hang on a minute, Priscilla.’
‘
With stealing my adolescence
, Mom!’ Priscilla insisted. ‘I was fourteen. That’s a time when most kids get a lock on their door so they can be self-obsessed brats in private. You invited the whole fucking world in! Just when me and Lisa Marie were beginning to grow up and trying to find out who we were, suddenly everyone else in the world had already made up their minds. We will
never
get away from what you did to us, Mom. We are fixed for ever. You were responsible for my welfare and you put me to work just as sure as if you’d stuck me down a mine or up a chimney. And now it turns out you didn’t even think I had any fucking talent anyway!’
‘No! That was Shaiana.’
‘I am Shaiana, Mom!’
‘You’re Priscilla.’
‘I’m Shaiana
and
Priscilla, Mom, and now the two of us have made you pay.’
‘Yes, all right then! You’ve made me fucking pay! You’ve given me the fright of my life, thank you very much, and by the way don’t come running to me next time you need help picking out a lawyer or a rehab unit . . .’
‘You have no idea yet how we’ve made you pay.’
‘Stop staying “we”, Priscilla, you’re beginning to sound as crazy as that bitch you made up.’
‘I am as crazy as her, Mom. And like I say, you have no idea how me and Shaiana have made you pay.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I’m talking about surgery, Mom. The thing you love most on this earth. Trying to look younger, trying to look better. It’s a fucking obsession with you, a disease. I swear you have spent more time with your cosmetic surgeon these last few years than you have spent with your supposedly beloved family.’
‘That’s not—’
‘It
is
true, Mom, and here’s the thing. You know that surgeon I booked for you?’
‘Yes. What about him?’
‘Well, I’m afraid he turned out to be not quite as good at his job as I thought.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Yeah. Oh and by the way, it’s not the morning after the show either, Mom. It’s actually two weeks later. We’ve had you unconscious for two weeks.’
‘Priscilla, what are you . . .’
‘We needed the time, you see. We had to keep working on you, I’m afraid, because my guy just
kept
making one mistake after another and the more he tried to put right what he’d got wrong, the more he fucked up. Sometimes it seemed like he was almost doing it deliberately. But why would anyone do that, Mom? Why would anyone try to fuck you up?’
‘Priscilla, this is the sickest joke I ever . . .’
‘Do you remember Damian, Mom?’
‘What?’
‘Damian, buck teeth and glasses. He was a Minger quickie.’
‘No, of course I don’t remember him. How the hell do you expect . . .’
The door opened and a young man entered. He was wearing a white coat which had a lot of blood on it. The man had buck teeth and wore glasses.
‘I’m a veterinary student, Mrs Blenheim, if you’d forgotten,’ said Damian. ‘So I suppose it was a bit of a stretch to imagine I’d be much cop as a cosmetic surgeon but Shaiana did insist and she’s such a persuasive girl. I’ve done quite a bit to you, I’m afraid. I expect it all feels numb at the moment but that’s the nerve suppressant. Later on you’re going to be in the most excruciating pain.’
Beryl swallowed hard as Priscilla produced a mirror and held it in front of her face.
Then she screamed. A huge scream, a scream which tore the air with shock and horror. The reflection she saw in the mirror was of a face mutilated, red, bloody, criss-crossed with scars and stitches, livid with bruises and scabs.
‘Like I say,’ Damian went on, ‘when the anaesthetic wears off I imagine it’s going to be agony.’
The scream was over but now Beryl was gasping, gagging and choking with the appalled realization of what had been done to her.
‘Ugly, Mom. Ugly!’ Priscilla shouted. ‘Think about it. Ugly! Because that’s what you are now. Now that my pal Damian has finished cutting you up. Ugly!’
Beryl seemed about to be sick.
‘Ugly and fat!’ Priscilla screeched.
This last word was a sufficiently powerful one to focus Beryl’s spinning mind for a moment.
‘Fat?’ she gulped, still half choking.
‘Yes, fat!’ Priscilla screamed. ‘The worst thing on earth, eh? The thing you’ve fought against for years! You’ve spent half your life sucking it out, cutting it off and stapling it down! Well, guess what? It’s back! Damian has put it all back!’
‘No!’
‘Yes!’ Priscilla shouted in triumph. ‘Lipo in reverse! How’s that,
Mom
! He invented the process himself.’
With that Priscilla tore away the sheet that covered Beryl and revealed a vast, sagging, obese and wounded body, red, purple and yellow all over with cuts, bruises and pus.
‘It’s a temporary effect, I imagine,’ said Damian modestly. ‘I doubt the new fat will actually bond with the existing tissue, I just injected it wherever I could. As I say, when the anaesthetic wears off the agony will begin but I doubt it will last long because I can’t imagine that a human system can survive what I’ve been doing to it. We’ve really only kept you alive so that you could see what we’ve done to you.’
‘Yes,’ said Priscilla, ‘so how’s that, Mom? You’re going to die, hideously ugly and very, very fat. The two things you have always feared most. That’s the price you’re paying for stealing my life, Mom. I’m stealing yours in return. No more TV now!’
Beryl stared down at the ruination of her body. She looked once more into the mirror at the grotesque mask of horror that had once been her face.
She couldn’t do it. Words failed her. Her lip quivered, her nostrils flared and a watery film spread across her eyes. The lids closed in an agonized grimace and squeezed out a glistening tear.
‘It’s . . . it’s . . .’ she said but could speak no more.
‘It’s a bodysuit actually,’ Priscilla replied.
Beryl looked at her, uncomprehending.
‘It’s a fat bodysuit, Mom. I got it from the BBC, from one of their sketch shows. Damian and I painted the wounds and bruises on it.’
‘What?’ Beryl still did not seem to understand.
‘And this is make-up,’ Priscilla continued, taking up a packet of Wet Wipes and rubbing roughly at Beryl’s face. The Wet Wipe was soon covered in red and purple and yellow, and much of the apparent bruising and stitching that had disfigured Beryl had disappeared.
‘We didn’t do anything to you, Mom. We just scared you. You haven’t been unconscious for two weeks either. It’s the morning after the
Chart Throb
final and you’re fine.’
‘You fucking bitch!’ Beryl screamed.
‘Damian was good, wasn’t he?’ Priscilla smiled.
‘Thanks, Priscilla,’ said Damian.
Beryl laid her head back on her pillow for a moment.
‘Untie me,’ she said.
Priscilla and Damian duly undid the straps that had held Beryl down.
‘This really is a fat suit?’ she said. ‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes, the zip’s at the back.’
‘And you haven’t done a single thing to me?’
‘Of course not.’
Beryl considered the matter once more.
‘You’re a fucking bitch,’ she said.
‘Takes one to know one, Mom.’
‘I can’t believe you did this!’
‘I can’t believe anything you do.’
‘Fuck.’
‘Yeah.’
Once again Beryl lay silent for a moment.
‘Oh well, I suppose that’s rock ’n’ roll, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah, I guess.’
‘And all’s well that ends well, eh? I forgive you, Priscilla.’
‘Thanks. Of course it isn’t over yet, Mom.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You haven’t been punished yet. You haven’t been made to pay.’
‘For God’s sake. What fucking now?’
‘You remember how you wanted to postpone the first episode of the new season? So you could get the eye surgery done? And some more work on your vagina?’
‘Yes. I suppose none of that’s happened, has it?’
‘No and I didn’t postpone the show either.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I postponed the postponement! Look!’
Priscilla moved a lamp so that the light was no longer shining so harshly into Beryl’s eyes. Instead a small television camera was suddenly revealed in the corner of the room, mounted on a tripod.
‘Hi, Mom,’ said Lisa Marie Blenheim, who was operating the camera.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Beryl demanded.
‘Helping Priscilla out,’ Lisa Marie replied. ‘We’re a family, remember.’
‘And we just made the first episode of the new series,’ Priscilla cried. ‘You, me and Lisa Marie. A step-mom and her daughters together.’
‘You haven’t!’
‘I have. For the first time in the history of TV we’re going to put the “real” into reality and you are going to be seen as you truly are.’
Lisa Marie keyed in a time code and turned a video monitor towards Beryl.
‘Shaiana, please, listen to me . . .’ Beryl could see herself saying. ‘
Chart Throb
is an
entertainment
show . . . It’s not about talent . . . it’s just a laugh . . . Calvin doesn’t care about your dreams . . . Do you know what he calls you? Mingers, Clingers and Blingers, that’s what. We all do . . . You put your faith in the wrong people, Shaiana. Don’t trust us, and don’t believe in us.’
Lisa Marie turned off the monitor.
‘I don’t think Calvin’s going to be very pleased when that little bit of reality is broadcast in full, do you?’ said Priscilla. ‘And I don’t think the nation is going to think much of their favourite mom being utterly humiliated by her stepdaughter in revenge for ruining her life.’
‘And mine,’ said Lisa Marie.
‘But that’s what they’re going to see in the first and final episode of this year’s season, Mom.’
‘Priscilla,’ Beryl said. ‘You can’t broadcast this. I have no make-up on. I absolutely forbid it!’
And Still to Come
As a result of his exposure on the final episode of
The Blenheims
, Damian was offered a reality project for Cable TV about cosmetic dental surgery entitled
The Buck Stops Here
.
Michelle from Peroxide is a stripper. She feels her work empowers her as a woman and is hoping to make a reality documentary on the subject.
Latiffa appeared in series twelve of
I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here!
and published an autobiography entitled
Being Me
.
Georgie managed finally to achieve the average weight for a young woman but only by moving to Beverly Hills. She continues to have severe eating disorders and is the envy of all her new friends.
Millicent and Graham could not rekindle their love in the bruising aftermath of
Chart Throb
and went their separate ways. They have been offered an undisclosed sum by a Birmingham radio station to get married live on air.
Tabitha appeared alongside Latiffa in
I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here!
where they snogged in a hammock. Latiffa later explained to
Heat
magazine that she was no lezza but that her career needed the boost of a lesbian kiss.
Tabitha’s girlfriend got her own reality show in which she lived on a desert island with a series of male hunks who were tasked with trying to turn her. The show was entitled
Breaching the Dyke
.
Vicky and her mum blamed each other for their disastrous
Chart Throb
experience and are regularly to be seen shouting at each other on Jerry Springer-style confrontation shows.
Suki got her longed-for second pair of new tits and hence feels newly empowered as a woman. The removal of the old implants was filmed for a reality TV show entitled
Suki: Tits Out for the Lads.
She has written her autobiography,
Still Growing.
Bloke made a reality TV show about their whirlwind post-
Chart Throb
existence entitled
Bloke Live the Dream.
They are available for party bookings and can be contacted via their website.

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