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Authors: Jenny Colgan

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‘Anyway,’ said Philly, getting a bossy look on. ‘Sophie, we’ve - I’ve - got a proposition for you.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘You know, there’s a lot of interest in you.’

I looked around the table to see if there was anything else to eat.

‘Yeah, I do. They hang about my house trying to take pictures of me crying in my sweatpants.’

‘Did they get any?’ asked Carena.

‘That’s not the point.’

‘
Well
,’ said Philly, dragging the focus back to her. ‘Why don’t you capitalise on it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’re the Poor Little Rich Girl! Society Darling fallen on hard times! Why aren’t you cleaning up?’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’

Philly started talking to me as if I was really thick. ‘Well, you’ve been in the paper. Now there’s a whole career out there for you. Tearful interview with
OK!
Follow-up confessional in
Mail on Sunday
, triumphant appearance on
I’m a Celebrity
, a book deal, then
Dancing on Ice
. . .’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Stop being an idiot,’ said Philly, exasperated. ‘Something happened to you. You’re a commodity. There’s money to be made. From you. Uh, I mean,
for
you.’

I stared into the middle distance, chopsticks halfway to my mouth. ‘You mean . . . what, tell my tragic story, whore myself out to the media.’

‘If you lost some weight,’ said Philly pointedly, ‘you could do some modelling shoots too. They can do a lot with air-brushing these days. A
lot
.’

I ignored this. ‘So, I have to give lots of sobbing interviews about losing my dad and all my money and then everyone feels sorry for me and gives me money and stuff?’

‘That’s kind of how it works.’

‘Then I could get to be a Z-list celeb like those desperate horrors that clutter up charity balls that we always laugh at because they’re so desperate to get photographed they spend all night sidling up to an ex-game show host?’

‘Everyone wants to be a celebrity,’ said Philly huffily. ‘What makes you so special?’

‘So by trading in my own misery I could make a better living?’

‘Ironic, don’t you think?’ said Carena.

‘All jobs are like that,’ said Philly dismissively.

‘And you get, what?’

‘Twenty per cent,’ said Philly.

That was it. That was the last straw. I stood up.

‘You two,’ I said. ‘You are just disgusting. All of you. Pointless, desperate, leeches. You -’ I pointed at Carena - ‘steal a man off someone else and are too pathetic even to make up with her properly. And
you
-’ I pointed to Philly - ‘are just a pimp. And you just spent hundreds of pounds on a meal you didn’t eat, didn’t enjoy, and if you had eaten it would have spent half an hour in the toilets trying to vomit it up again. You are completely pathetic.’

I felt better.

‘Oh, and thanks for lunch. If you could let go of your terrible self-hatred for a minute, you’d see it was absolutely delicious.’

They sat there, not saying anything.

The waiter came over. Madly I thought he was about to congratulate me on telling those witches a thing or two.

‘Would you,’ he said discreetly, ‘like me to bag some of this up for you to take home?’

Feeling slightly sick, I boarded the bus home. Somehow I’d become completely oblivious to the noise of the children, and I quite liked the chatter of the pensioners. It was comforting, the way they worried about the price of potatoes and talked about their grandchildren. It was a relief to get to the flat.

‘They want you to do
what
?’ Cal said, when I told him about lunch.

‘I’m not sure exactly. Do interviews. Get my photo taken looking sad. It doesn’t matter anyway.’

‘What for?’

Cal had been, unusually for him, alone in the kitchen when I got back, and had enquired why I didn’t want dinner (pie and mash by the looks of things). I’d ended up telling him everything then, when Eck wandered in, telling it again.

‘Everyone wants to be famous, don’t they?’

‘Do they?’ said Cal.

‘Well, look at you,’ said Eck. ‘You think you’re a rock star.’

‘I’m an artist,’ said Cal. ‘That’s different.’

‘So if Damien Hirst invited you down the Groucho Club to get paparazzied you wouldn’t go?’

‘Well, that’s different.’

‘How?’

‘It’s different if you were famous for painting magnificent work or building superb sculptures or being the next person to do the Turbine Hall. But for . . . what, for a bit of bad luck that happened to you . . . surely that’s just embarrassing.’

‘It wasn’t “a bit of bad luck”,’ I grumbled. ‘My life is in total ruins. And with everything that’s happened to me I’m kind of beyond embarrassment. But I really, really need cash.’

‘Well, why don’t you put on a basque and parade up Shepherd’s Market?’

For fuck’s sake, Cal always had to cheapen everything.

‘That’s different.’

‘What, selling yourself?’

‘OK, maybe I don’t want any more advice from men who like to call me a whore.’

Cal rolled his eyes and went back to his dinner.

‘I think it’s quite a good idea,’ said Eck. ‘Get your picture in the paper, get back into that world where you belong. Plus, you’ll have everything on record if you manage to sue for your money back.’

‘Sue what?’ I said. ‘The world recession?’ Although there was still a tiny, tiny flicker at the back of my mind that suspected Gail had possibly stolen all the money. No. It wasn’t possible. Of course not. Just wishful thinking.

‘I mean, what would they make you do?’ said Eck, trying to pour oil on troubled waters as usual.

‘Knowing Philly, probably the most embarrassing things possible,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter anyway, I told them all to piss off.’

‘Well, how bad could it be?’ said Eck. ‘I think you should give it a shot.’

‘Not in a million years,’ I said.

‘OK,’ said Eck. ‘Oh, by the way, I hate to do this to you. But the electricity bill’s come in.’

I picked it up. I couldn’t believe how much it was for.

‘Christ,’ I said. I turned to Cal. ‘Are you running a full-on aquarium up there for all your exotic animals?’

‘Yes, but it’s solar powered,’ he said lazily.

‘I can’t afford this.’ I looked at Eck in a pleading way.

‘We’re all on loans, Sophie,’ said Eck. ‘None of us can. We all have to chip in, that’s how it has to work.’

‘I know,’ I said, feeling my stomach turn over sadly. I trudged to the kitchen cabinet. ‘I’ll get the mop out.’

Eck looked awkward. ‘And the windows could do with a wash.’

And it was perching outside, precipitously high in a howling gale, desperately scrubbing at a smeary window with a piece of newspaper with my face on it that I found myself thinking, Could Philly’s proposition really be worse than this?

Yes, as it turned out. Much.

Chapter Fourteen

There are moments in life when you wonder whether you aren’t the punchline of some enormous galactic joke. That, in fact, the whole universe is having an enormous laugh at your expense. That your very existence is part of a bet two aliens are having to see how much unbelievable humiliation one human body can put up with before it actually spontaneously combusts in an orgy of embarrassment. That must be it, I was thinking to myself. That must be why I kept getting myself into these situations. Surely it couldn’t all be my fault . . .

‘Yeah, move a bit, to the right, that’s right. Lift that left tit up . . . gorgeous.’

Julius was squinting at me from behind the lens. Yes. At me. It had been a month since my sashimi lunch with Carena and Philly. A very, very long month.

‘You scrub up all right you do. Course I prefer more than a handful, but that’s me, innit.’

I grunted in response. I didn’t want Julius talking to me really. Didn’t want any reminder of where I actually was right now - half naked in a draughty lock-up garage in south London. Selling myself. The thing I really, really hadn’t meant to do. I felt the colour rise to my cheeks again.

‘That’s lovely, bit of a flush, pretty, nice, nice . . .’

I did my best not to cry.

‘You can still see a bit of chunky fat around the side,’ yelled Philly from the far side of the studio, where she was also hollering down the phone at someone from a newspaper. ‘Well, that’s a ridiculous sum, Jeremy, no point to us, we’ve got the broad-sheets breathing down our necks . . . can’t you hoik that left tit up a bit more? She looks like some old rock star’s wife.’

‘Yeah, I’ll just get my invisible tit-hoikers, you daft cow,’ said Julius, quietly.

I’d been so desperate. So desperate. I couldn’t eat another bean. I’d had horrible, seriously threatening letters from the council tax people, and I’d been turned down for housing benefit, on the grounds of actually trying to work for a living. I’d eaten humble pie. I hadn’t even had any phone credit, I’d had to phone Philly from a phone box. She was
delighted.

Of course, it hadn’t been anything like what she had said it would be. There had been no sympathetic newspaper spreads; no kind interviews, or the media picking up an investigative torch on my behalf. It hadn’t been like that at all.

Although after the
Daily Post
feature I had received a letter in a slightly creased envelope. Inside was a card with a picture of a kitten wearing a hat and, in badly written English, a note.
Dear Sophie,
it said.
Sorry I has no been in touch with you. Things were hard. Your stepmother was very sad. I hope you are no too sad also. You’re Friend, Esperanza
. There was also a cheque for twenty pounds. I’d sat down at the kitchen table, holding it in my hands. I bought her granddaughter a dress and sent it back. It soothed the pain a little.

But after that, nothing, except a couple of weekly magazines that said, actually, if I didn’t have a disabled baby whom I’d given up for adoption, whom I’d met when grown up and then accidentally fallen in love with, they weren’t that interested. Finally, Philly took a call from a magazine who said if I could lose some weight their readers might be interested in seeing me with just a bikini top on, which wasn’t topless, after all.

She was delighted. ‘It’s the big time!’ she yelled down the telephone. I winced. Grace and Kelly thought it was the big time too. It wasn’t really what I’d dreamed of when I thought of the big time. In my wildest fantasies I’d imagined
Vogue
doing a photoshoot with me where they dressed me up in lovely clothes again. Taking my clothes off for a men’s mag? Absolutely no way. Definitely, absolutely not. I would rather drink non-brand-name bleach than put on a bikini and . . .

Then she told me how much they were paying. It was the difference . . . I mean, it was everything. Rent arrears, bills, some credit for my phone. It was money I didn’t really see any other way of getting. It was . . . well. I didn’t have much choice. It was wretched.

Two days earlier I had been walking home with Eck. He’d got in the habit of turning up on his way home from college and walking me home from the studio. I sighed.

‘How are you feeling?’ asked Eck.

‘I know,’ I said, ‘that Grace and Kelly do it every day. I don’t know why it bothers me so much. I’ve had such a cruddy day.’

BOOK: Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend

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