Famous (29 page)

The police had arrested my mother and charged her with assault. She had been released on bail last night.

Dear God above, I despaired. It didn’t get any worse than this. It honestly didn’t.

I immediately clambered onto the roof and rang home, getting my father on the line. He recounted the sorry details. It was true she had been released on bail last night and was due to appear in court next week.

‘Put her on!’ I demanded.

‘What the hell were you thinking?’ I yelled, when she picked up the receiver. ‘Just when things were looking like they were settling down, you had to go and do this!’

‘What was I supposed to do?’ she asked. ‘Stand there and listen to those two walking doilies mouth you off?’

‘Yes,’ I replied, through gritted teeth. ‘That would have been the sensible thing to do.’

‘Well, I’m afraid that’s not in my nature.’

‘No bloody kidding!’

‘I was just trying to protect your character,’ she protested.

‘Mum, I mean Elizabeth, I am thirty-three years old. I have not lived at home for the past thirteen years. I am an adult. I do not need you to protect me, okay? What I need is for you to stay the hell out of it!’

And what I also needed was a chair. My thighs were killing me.

‘Fine,’ she replied, clearly sulking. ‘Goodbye then.’

My father came back on the line.

‘Take it easy on her love,’ he urged. ‘She was only trying to stand up for you. You know what she’s like.’

‘I know she likes getting arrested.’

‘Well yes, that’s true,’ agreed Dad. ‘But this was different. This was about you.’

‘That’s right, this is about me,’ I replied. ‘And I don’t want to see myself in the paper, let alone my own mother.’

‘Okay, okay,’ said Dad, noting my distress. ‘So, how’s everything else going then?’

‘Terrible,’ I replied. ‘There are peas bigger than this town.’

‘You’ll be back home in no time,’ he encouraged. ‘Hang in there kiddo.’

‘Thanks Dad,’ I sighed. ‘Oh, and can you please email me some dinner recipes?’ I asked.

‘Some recipes?’

‘Yes,’ I confirmed. ‘There are no restaurants in this place, so it looks as though I am going to have to either learn to cook or starve. Make them easy though,’ I added. ‘Very easy.’

‘Sure thing, I’ll send them through tonight. That’s great news!’

‘Don’t get too excited,’ I warned. ‘I’m sure I won’t be able to do anything with them.’

‘Don’t be silly love, you’ll be fine. And I’m only a phone call away if you need any help. At any time.’

I hung up the phone, aware I was possibly one of the only thirty-three-year-old women alive whose father was offering a twenty-four-hour cooking-info line.

That afternoon, much to my delight, the phone line was finally connected. I was even awarded a brief sojourn of social contact with the telcon man.

‘Plug it in and give it a whirl there,’ he instructed, once he had done his thing with the cables and bits.

I did as I was told and was greeted with the nostalgic sound of an active line. Gold to the ears. With a ‘Bob’s your uncle’, he hopped into his van and was off again. This meant I could finally, after six days of solitary confinement, log on and check my emails. I was as excited as a Jehovah’s Witness on their wedding night. But slow did not even begin to sum up the connection speed. It barely moved. There were tortoises out there with a greater sense of urgency. Ten minutes passed by and I still wasn’t connected. Whereas at home I would have phoned the provider and demanded they come round straightaway and ‘Make it fast!’ I realised there was simply no point in doing that here. There was no way in hell they were going to come and fix it.

When I was finally able to access my inbox, twenty minutes later, there were seventy-six new emails there to greet me, ticker tape and all. Seventy-six! For a fleeting second I felt overwhelmingly popular, but that was before I realized at least ninety per cent of them were work-related, of the
Where in God’s name have you disappeared to?
and
Are you still alive?’
variety.

At least twenty were from Gareth who was very keen to know if I was ready to do some work. The rest were from my clients who wanted to know if I still worked at the agency, or had I set up on my own somewhere? And if so, would I mind very much telling them where the hell that was? The feeling shifted from overwhelmingly popular to just plain overwhelmed in the space of a few seconds. I had only been four working days without communication and my career was on the verge of collapsing entirely.

I switched into damage-control mode and spent the rest of the day firing off emails and assuring everyone that yes, I was still very much alive and yes, I did still work for the agency and yes, we did still want their business and yes, I was only on leave and would be back in the very near future.

It was obvious Erica wasn’t doing such a great job of looking after my clients for me. The cow. I made sure to copy her in on every reply I sent, with the words and in my absence you can contact my assistant Erica Jordan clearly spelt out, with her direct dial, mobile and email in bold lettering below. I refrained from adding her home phone number.

What would these people do if I actually had died? I wondered. Would they be upset? Or would they just be pissed off that their thirty-second television commercial was now going to take six weeks to produce instead of four? Unfortunately I knew the answer, and it didn’t involve fresh flowers and words of condolence.

At nine o’clock I decided it was possibly in my best interests to make myself some dinner. I was supposed to be cooking risotto after all. I located the old saucepan and put the risotto on the element on a low heat (as instructed). Then I put the diced vegetables into an equally ancient frying pan on a medium heat. So far, so good. And then I sat back down at my laptop. Which was not so good.

It wasn’t until the smell of black and shrivelled vegetables reached my nose I realised (a) I had forgotten to add the olive oil and (b) I had also forgotten about the vegetables.

If there was a bloody smoke detector they might have been saved, I thought to myself, as I scraped the charcoaled remains into the rubbish bin.

I sat down to a large bowl of bare, dry risotto.

I will never be able to cook, I despaired. It was only the continuous swigs of red wine which stopped the risotto from taking up permanent residence in my esophagus.

Thankfully my father emailed me several recipes the following day. All with headings like
Easy Meals
and
Simple and Delicious
, which gave me some small glimmer of hope. And a couple of days later, although I was still burning things left, right and centre, I was finally able to construct something reasonably edible. It was only the complete lack of any other eating options which made me persevere. I wasn’t willing to starve to death just yet.

The next morning I began to feel guilty for yelling at my mother, but there was no point in ringing her to apologise. Whenever she was told off she generally went all silent and uncommunicative. So I decided to send her an email instead.

Dear Elizabeth,

Firstly, I would like to apologise for yelling at you.

However, can you please try to understand how seeing you belting women with your bread, simply because they were talking about me, might make me slightly upset?

I really don’t need any help in the publicity stakes, I seem to be doing quite nicely by myself at the moment. Plus, I think you should understand everyone is talking about me and not all of it is pleasant. All I want is to keep a low profile and for the media to leave me alone, hence hiding out in this hellhole. So, can you please do me a favour and keep your handbag on your shoulder from now on?

Love,

Sa
m

I got a swift reply.

Dear Samantha,

I have processed your thoughts and will endeavour to keep a lid on my emotions in future. However, there is no denying those two gossiping sock-darners got what they deserved.

Elizabeth.

PS. Your father has made you some boysenberry jam and wants to know where to send it?

Great. I had jam coming out my ears. When was he going to start making wine?

I also emailed Mands and Lizzie with my new phone number and within a millisecond they had both tried to phone me. Lizzie got through first.

‘We have contact, sweets!’ she cried. ‘Hurrah!’

‘Yes, finally,’ I replied. ‘I was beginning to think I had died and been deported to the Land of Eerie Silence.’

‘How are you?’ she asked.

‘Okay,’ I replied. ‘Just bored. And lonely. I’ve even started talking to the spider in the shower. Oh, and I now drink tea.’

‘You what? But you hate tea.’

‘Yes, you’re right, I do. I also hate dusty old sheds but that isn’t stopping me from living in one.’

‘Poor dolls.’

‘But enough about me,’ I urged. ‘Why don’t you tell me what the rest of the country thinks about me?’

‘Well…’ began Lizzie. ‘There’s some good news…and there’s some bad news.’

Why was there always some good news and some bad news? Why couldn’t it just be all good news? It’s like the good news got lonely and packed a sad if there was no bad news to keep it company.

‘Good or bad?’ asked Lizzie.

‘Both,’ I replied.

I had given up believing there was a tunnel, let alone a light at the end of it. There was simply an eternity of blackness.

‘Your mother’s been beating up women in the supermarket with her…’

‘Bread stick,’ I finished. ‘Seen it.’

Good news.

‘Right. Well okay, that’s good. Apparently there was a picture in
The Morning Sun
as well, but that was only on page two, and it was much smaller.’

Correction. Bad news.

‘It looks as though Tiny Tits has overtaken you in the publicity stakes.’

Good news.

‘Over the past couple of days there’s been more news in the papers about her than you.’

Very good news.

‘Her pictures are huge and yours are much smaller and sitting either underneath or to the side of hers, just as a sort of reference point.’

Fabulous news.

‘The cow looks immaculate in every picture too!’

Terrible news.

‘I think it’s because they haven’t got any new pictures of you. They just keep printing the same old ones.’

‘Not the one with my finger up my nose?’

‘Well…yes…but only a couple of times.’

Hideous news.

‘Has she done any more telly interviews?’

‘No.’

Good news.

‘The media seem to know that you’ve skipped town.’

Bad news.

‘But they have no idea where to.’

Good news.

‘The
Telegraph
seems to think you’re lying on a beach somewhere in Fiji.’

‘I bloody wish.’

‘Oh, and the World Cup’s about to begin. The team’s leaving tomorrow.’

Bad news. That meant even more news about football in the paper, which meant even more pictures of me. But at least it would be over soon. And perhaps then they might decide to leave us both in peace.

‘Well that’s about it,’ said Lizzie, wrapping up her report.

‘They’ll soon get sick of you dolls, now they haven’t got anything new to say.’

10

I had my breakfast and flicked through the rest of yesterday’s newspaper. What the hell was I going to do today? I wondered.

It was Saturday morning. If I was at home I would have been going shopping with Mands and Lizzie. Shopping, I thought in faint recognition. I had almost forgotten what it was. Fat chance of doing that here. I suddenly remembered Elsie saying it was market day in the village that day. Whatever that was. Probably some sort of prehistoric food-bartering system, villagers swapping potatoes for fertiliser type thing. However, God knew, I really did have to get out of the hovel at some stage, the antler-clad walls were beginning to close in on me. Plus, I thought, in a faint glimmer of deluded hope, perhaps there would be something for me to buy? Some local clothing designer yet to make it big?