Famous (16 page)

‘Okay,’ she said, realising she was pushing it. ‘But just remember that no matter what anyone says, you should be proud of yourself for bagging him.’

‘Thank you…’ I replied, although proud was not a word I was currently associating with myself. ‘…I think.’

Vicky was the final family member to ring me that day, in the early afternoon. I was surprised she’d seen the paper at all. Newspapers weren’t generally her first choice of reading material. She preferred
Women’s Life
and
Modern Woman
, good solid housewife manuals. Subsequently she was a brilliant and bottomless source of celebrity gossip. Of course she knew everything about Alistair, right down to the names of his two children (Joshua, aged six, and Harry, aged four), and his parents (Hugh and Sylvia), and how many months pregnant his wife Virginia was (four).

‘Vicky,’ I protested. ‘You know what?’

‘What?’

‘I’m really not that interested.’

But she was having none of it. She even knew he had a small scar on the left side of his neck.

‘I could have told you that,’ I said.

‘His poor wife,’ she sighed. ‘Not that you knew he was married, of course,’ she added quickly.

Trust Vicky to take the side of the wife, being that she was one herself.

‘Who’s to say she isn’t out there bagging anything that moves?’ I said.

‘Oh no, definitely not,’ replied Vicky. ‘I can tell. Plus,’ she added, ‘it’s impossible to bag anything when you’re pregnant, believe me.’

I spent the rest of the day holed up in my office, conducting meetings over the phone, with Izzy kindly running the gauntlet again so I didn’t starve to death.

Enormous sunglasses on I decided to head to the gym after work, in an attempt to avoid the pack of vultures who would inevitably be waiting outside my apartment. Four motorbikes in hot pursuit I pulled into the gym car park which was, thankfully, also a secure underground car park with swipe-card entry.

Now you can relax, I told myself, taking a couple of deep breaths. I felt secure in the knowledge the gym was not dissimilar to Fort Knox. You had to swipe your card at least ten times from the car park to the treadmill. If your membership fee was overdue by no more than five minutes you were literally pounced upon, handcuffed, and escorted from the premises. I was confident that with the sunglasses off, my hair tied back in a ponytail, a cap pulled firmly down over my eyes and sports gear on I would look unrecognizable to any nosy punters. And, apart from the odd stare (where the person thinks they recognise you then realise they don’t and avert their eyes so sharply they almost dislodge their head) I was left in insignificant peace.

After an hour-long work out (made slightly longer by the fact I had no desire to ever leave the building and was contemplating setting up home at the gym) I had a shower, got changed back into my suit and enormous glasses, and headed home.

Much to my relief the vultures were not waiting outside the gym car park, as I expected they would be. Presumably they had come to the conclusion that if they didn’t go and get something to eat they would in fact die.

But, as I sat in my office two cat-and-mouse (with me being the mouse) days later and looked at the morning paper, it was evident they had left me alone for another reason altogether. Unlike the day before, which showed the usual pictures of me driving out my gates in the morning, ginormous sunglasses barricading my face, and arriving at the office, this morning’s paper had a distinctly sport and recreation feel to it. There, on the front page, were two large full-colour pictures of me. At the gym. Inside the gym to be exact. The first one showed me on the treadmill, looking sweaty, beet in the face, and generally in severe pain. And the second picture showed me on the leg-extension machine. With a cluster of cellulite clearly visible on the inside of my upper left thigh.

Mother of God! Judging by the slightly grainy quality of the pictures it appeared someone at the gym had sold me out, via a video-surveillance camera by the looks of things.

I bet it was that bimbo with the fake tits and orange face, I thought to myself. The oompa loompa on reception. She was always calling me back to re-swipe my card for no good reason.

I slumped my head down onto my desk and realised there was nothing else for it.

I began to cry. Proper cry. I cried until a river of mascara washed down over the newsprint. I cried because I didn’t even know I had a cluster of cellulite at the top of my left thigh. And I cried because now I was going to turn into a human sized piece of Play-Doh, who couldn’t go to the gym because someone would just sell her pictures to the papers. I cried until Lizzie rang me.

‘I am never going to the fucking gym again!’ I wailed. ‘I am going to turn into a fat heifer!’

‘Oh dolls,’ she comforted. ‘It’s not that bad…really.’

‘Lizzie!’ I ordered. ‘I am one half of your best friends. Do not lie to me!’

‘Okay,’ she replied. ‘You’re right. It’s a fucking disaster, dolls. The absolute bastards!’

More crying.

‘Why don’t you go home for the rest of the day?’ she suggested.

‘Because they’ll be waiting for me at home,’ I cried. ‘There’s no escaping them!’

‘Right. Well I’m going to finish up at lunchtime then and I’m going to come and get you and bring you round to my house. Where I’ll kick their arses if they go so far as to glance at my front gate.’

6

The next day at work, post national cellulite disclosure, I had a phone call from
Woman’s Life
, wanting to write an article about Alistair and I.

‘It’d be completely from your point of view,’ assured Linda, the assistant editor. ‘You could talk about what it’s really like to be the other woman.’

‘The other what?’ I asked.

‘The other woman.’

That’s what I thought she’d said. If there was one thing I would never be in my lifetime, that was The Other Woman.

‘Look Cindy…’

‘Linda,’ she corrected.

‘Yes, I know. Look Linda, I will never ever be the
other woman
. And another thing I will never ever do is sell my story to a crappy piece of crack-filler like your magazine. Goodbye.’

Fabulous, I thought to myself, hanging up the phone. As if it wasn’t bad enough the media had my home number, now they knew my work one too.

Woman’s Life
wasn’t the only trashy magazine to ring up and request an interview. Over the next few days I had calls from all of them;
Women Today
,
Star Weekly
,
Her
,
Modern Woman
, the lot. All promising an exclusive story, all wanting me to talk about Alistair, and all receiving the same reply from me.

In retrospect I possibly should have been a bit nicer to Linda/Cindy at
Woman’s Life
because when the following week’s issue hit the newsstands there was none other than guess who on the cover? Go on, take a guess. That’s right, Mrs Virginia bloody Ambrose herself. Looking immaculate and fabulous and pregnant and more than willing to talk about how I had ruined her life, her husband’s life and, naturally, her children’s lives too. It was a sob story, in the best hanky-wringing sense of the words. Initially I had felt sorry for this woman. I had even felt guilty for my role in her devastation. But now I just hated her. Throughout the whole air-brushed four-page spread there was not one mention of how this whole thing was completely her husband’s fault. Not one. But there were plenty of comments about why it was entirely my fault. There was no doubt in her mind that I had thrown myself at her husband (he was always getting women throwing themselves at him apparently). I also had ‘no respect for the sanctity of marriage’ and was just a ‘floozy’ who was really no different from a ‘prostitute’ in her books.

A
prostitute?
Here was her husband who had knowingly cheated on her (which he’d no doubt done gazillions of times previously) getting off scot-free and I was a prostitute? The woman was a logical abyss. She herself was ‘an emotional wreck’ and ‘trying to cope’ and of course, ‘devastated’.

She had no idea what devastated was. Devastated was going out to a bar with your two best friends, thinking you’ve met a foxy available man, taking him back to your apartment and innocently shagging him, only to have your life and privacy completely violated by the country’s media and the entire nation hating you. That constituted devastated.

‘The bloody fucking cow!’ I howled, as Mands and Lizzie sat in my living room that evening, looking at the article. ‘I want to beat her pretty blonde head in.’

‘We all do,’ they comforted. ‘With a hammer.’

‘One each,’ added Mands.

‘Let’s find a physical flaw and make up a horrible name for her,’ suggested Lizzie, in an attempt to cheer me up.

After umming and ahhing and scanning the several photographs for twenty minutes the best we could come up with was Tiny Tits. They weren’t even that tiny, it’s just that we were struggling for imperfections.

‘She’s like some sort of human Barbie doll,’ I declared. ‘She’s even got perfect ears.’

‘Air-brushing,’ comforted Mands. ‘I’m sure she’s a total mole in the flesh.’

The next morning the vultures at the front gate were able to expand their repertoire of repetitive and inane questions. Instead of the old ‘Give us a smile Samantha!’ and ‘Tell us what Alistair’s like in the sack!’ they were now able to yell ‘What do you think of Virginia Ambrose calling you a prostitute?’ and ‘What’s it like being labelled a floozy?’ The sort of questions anyone would just love to have yelled at them first thing in the morning.

Later that day, after seething and stewing over being publicly slandered by Tiny Tits, I decided there was only one thing for it. I was going to have to sell my story to the media. But there was no way I was taking my face on national television, or lowering myself to the filthy depths of a trashy magazine. It would have to be the newspaper. I phoned Mary Simperington from
The Daily Telegraph
.

‘I’m ready to talk,’ I said.

‘Fantastic,’ she replied, as though she had been expecting my call at any moment. ‘We can offer you a full-page section cover and of course there will be a figure to discuss. As long as we have the exclusive of course. You haven’t talked to anyone else?’ she pressed.

‘No.’

‘Right then, let’s meet as soon as possible to go over the agreement and set a time for the interview. How are you placed today?’

Before I could blink she was on my doorstep, contract in her hack hands. Clearly I was a hot potato she had no intention of letting slip off her dinner plate. I read through the agreement, which seemed fairly straightforward, and then stopped dead at the figure. It was fifteen thousand dollars. I had absolutely no idea whether this was a good figure or not but it seemed ridiculous. I was going to be paid fifteen thousand dollars to talk to a journalist for one hour. One hour. And to have my picture taken.

I had absolutely no idea why celebrities hated doing interviews. How could you possibly hate this?

We scheduled the interview for two days time.

I decided to phone Jenna Griffin in the hope that with nearly twenty years’ experience of interviewing people to a pulp, she might be able to give me some much needed advice. She agreed to come round to my apartment the following evening after work. She also thankfully refrained from requesting an interview herself. She was on my side after all.

‘You have to think about your strategy,’ she said on the phone. ‘You have to know exactly what she’s going to ask you and exactly what your answers will be. Ask her for a copy of her questions so you can prepare yourself.’

‘Really?’ This surprised me.

‘Yes,’ replied Jenna. ‘And if you’re not happy with any of them you can choose not to answer. She’ll try and push you to answer all of them though, so you need to be ready for this.’

I asked Mary Simperington to email me her question list and eventually she obliged.

‘Bloody hell!’ cried Jenna, stumbling through my front door. ‘They’re the worst I’ve seen. Barely human.’

‘No kidding,’ I replied, pulling her inside and getting temporarily blinded in the process.

‘What’s the bet I’ll be on the front page tomorrow too,’ said Jenna, taking off her coat. She was spot on.

‘Right then,’ she declared, sitting me down on my sofa and taking the chair opposite, question list in hand. ‘We need to have a practice run.’

‘Okay,’ she began. ‘Tell me what happened between you and Alistair Ambrose that infamous night two weeks ago?’

‘We met at a bar in town. We had a few drinks together. And then we went back to my apartment and had sex,’ I replied.

‘No you didn’t,’ said Jenna.

‘Yes we did,’ I replied. ‘It was good too.’

We definitely did.

‘I know you did but that is something which the public does not need to know.’

‘You mean I lie?’

‘No,’ replied Jenna. ‘I mean there’s no need for you to give her every single detail. Your answer should be
I met Alistair Ambrose at a bar in town, we sat down and had a few drinks together after my friends had left, and then we went back to my apartment.
End of story.’

‘But everyone knows I shagged him,’ I protested.

‘No,’ said Jenna. ‘Everyone
thinks
you shagged him. There’s a big difference. How do people know what really went on inside this apartment? There was no camera in here. Sure there are pictures of Alistair leaving the next morning, but who’s to say he didn’t just sleep on the couch?’

‘I see,’ I said, starting to get the hang of it. ‘But what happens when she asks me if I shagged him?’

‘That’s when you say
I am neither going to confirm nor deny those rumours, out of respect for both Alistair and myself. All I will say is that he did stay at my apartment on the night in question
.’

I repeated this back to Jenna.

‘And you did have sex with him?’ she asked.

‘What?’ I replied, confused. ‘I thought you said I hadn’t shagged him?’

‘I’m just trying to show you what this woman will be like,’ explained Jenna. ‘So, what’s your answer?’