Model Guy (15 page)

 
Silence. With Peter and
Nora in the car with us now things are getting very cramped - and very uncomfortable.

 
"I see."

 
Silence.

 
"Look I've got to
keep her onside. She'll be very useful"

 
"Huh. What for?"

 
"For promoting the
site. Now let's leave it shall we?"

 
"What's her name
again?"

 
"Nora. Nora Bentall."

 
"Never heard of her,"
says Lauren. "She's obviously slept her way to the bottom."

 
Lauren and I get ready
for bed in silence. When I get in she has her back to me. I wriggle over to her
and put an arm round her. She mutters something about being tired.

Chapter Ten

It takes me ages to get to sleep. My mind is still buzzing from
the party. I've got lunches arranged from now until the end of my life and there
is a stack of business cards on the dressing table. I can still hear the voices:
"So exciting", "Excellent product", "So looking forward
to doing business with you", "You certainly have a wonderful proposition
here", "Tremendous opportunities for developing synergies". Or something
like that. Smart people, rich people, powerful people, famous people asking for
a piece of the action, a piece of me.

 
The light wakes me up.
I reach round instinctively for Lauren, looking for some lazy Saturday morning sex.
The kind where you don't mind if you come or not. But she's not there. The curtains
are open already. I squint my eyes up against the harsh, unforgiving light. I can
smell coffee. I fumble for my watch and check the time: just before eleven. I get
up and stumble into the kitchen. Lauren is chewing on a piece of toast and flicking
through the newspaper. I come up behind her and put my arms round her, nestling
into her hair and kissing her neck.

 
"Morning, hon,"
she says quietly, still reading the paper.

 
"You're up early,"
I say, wandering over to the fridge.

 
"Mmm? Yeah, I know,
we've got access to a studio today, so I'm going to do some autocue practice."

 
"What? Today? But
you were at it last Saturday."

 
"Yes. That's when
the studio's free. Do you know how much these things cost to rent? Thousands. Thank
goodness Peter knows someone who said we could borrow it for nothing."

 
"So you're going
to a studio this Saturday as well?" A pretty pointless summary of the situation,
I admit, but I want her to understand how ridiculous it is that she's working all
day given that we've seen so little of each other over the last week or so. Instead
she takes the opposite view.

 
"Yes, like I say,
it makes obvious sense."

 
"When will you be
finished?"

 
"I don't know. When
I've had enough. When Peter thinks I've done all I can."

 
"Will be you back
by five?" I ask, drinking orange juice out of the carton because I know it
will annoy her.

 
"I don't know, Charlie,
please don't pressurise me." I turn up the sulk meter a bit more. She comes
over to me and studies me for a moment then she laughs. "You look like a little
boy with your hair all messed up." I narrow my eyes at her with mock crossness.
She laughs again, takes the carton out of my hand, puts it back and then says: "What
am I going to do with you?"

 
I look into her eyes,
pull her towards me and say: "I can think of one thing."

 
She pinches my cheek and
giggles.

 
"That'll have to
wait." She pulls away. "I'm going to be late."

 
I catch her arm but, instead
of asking her what she wants to do tonight, I find myself saying: "Do you love
me?"

 
She pushes my hair out
of my eyes.

 
"Course I do."

I pick up the paper after Lauren has gone and begin to flick
through it, making my way towards the sport to see whether Chelsea are at home.
Halfway through there is an article by Nora along with a picture of her, looking
cheekily over her black framed glasses. It's called "Why I'll never marry a
man who waxes his behind." I have to read the title twice to make sure I've
got it right. The piece is about how women hate male vanity and how she and her
friends (who are her friends? Other clever, barmy women with strange names? Or does
she just invent them too?) would rather have a man with shaggy nose hair than one
who spent hours in the bathroom cutting it with their nail scissors. It seems that
her friend Amanda who works in marketing once went out with a bloke who waxed his
bum - hence the headline. My buttocks clench at the thought of it. They clench even
tighter as I read on:

 
"Male models shave
their chests" Nora informs the nation. "Can you imagine a greater turn
off? Most women I know like curling their fingers around a light dusting of chest
hair. The idea of a waxed, fake tanned chest is about as attractive as low calorie,
frozen risotto compared to the real thing, oozing wicked butter and parmesan and
eaten overlooking the Canale Grande."

I finish the paper and wander into the living room. Now where
did Nora get the inspiration for that? I'm not being vain, it's just an obvious
connection. Actually I did know a guy who shaved his chest. Gary had the kind of
body that looked like it had been carved out of granite at the dawn of time. Underpants
were his speciality. I still see him, well his six pack and lovingly sculpted (and
shaved) pecs on packets in department stores. He told me that he was once doing
a shoot and just as the client arrived he felt himself getting a hard on. Desperately
he tried to think about his tax return or Alan Titchmarsh but it had no effect.
As six women from the client company entered the room he found himself saluting
them through their soon-to-be-launched cotton and lycra microfiber mix knitted trunks.

 
I flick on children's
Saturday morning television and watch, feeling rather confused and out of it. After
a phone-in, in which Leanne from Burnley correctly identifies Ronan Keating's star
sign and wins a baseball cap and a CD, a girl band comes on:

 
"Oh babe, the cat's
out of the bag.

 
Your love's become a drag."

I rub my chin trying to decide whether to have a shave. Sod it.
It's Saturday.

At about seven I ring Lauren on her mobile. I've been avoiding
doing it all day, not wanting to pester her like the good boy that I am but now
I've had enough. I want to know what we're going to do this evening. I want to spend
it with her.

 
I get her voicemail and,
with super human effort, manage to sound casual and friendly. "Hi babe, just
wondered what time you thought you'd be finished." I wait nearly an hour and
then decide to go for a run because I can feel anger rising from deep within me
and I can't think how else to release it, other than yelling at her when she rings
or just throwing things around the flat but that would just make things worse and
I simply can't bear to do that, although part of me feels that I should. Perhaps
I would if I were a real man, not just an ex-male model now working in the virtual
glamour business.

I only run for twenty minutes or so, just round the block, but
laziness - and the sight of other couples walking along hand in hand - draws me
back home. It's just long enough, though, for Lauren to have called: "Hi babe
are you there....Charlie....Charlie? OK, well, just to say sorry I couldn't talk
to you just now, had to turn my phone off. But listen, babe, we've bumped into some
friends of Peter's and they've offered to take us to dinner so I'm just going to
have a quick bite to eat with them but I won't be late. Sorry about this, but I'll
make it up to you tomorrow night I promise. Love you."

 
She rings off. She might
as well have said: "I'm in bed with Peter, see you tomorrow perhaps" for
all the comfort it brings me.

I have a shower during which I find myself singing that stupid
girl band song from the children's television show. I knew it would get stuck in
my mind when I heard it.

 
I put my bathrobe on to
go into the kitchen. There is no wine in the fridge and the only stuff in the cupboard
is a Chateauneuf du Pape which we bought last year in France and promised to drink
on a special occasion. I shut the cupboard and begin to wonder whether I can be
arsed to get dressed and go up the road to the off license and buy another.

 
I can't so I open the
cupboard again and take the expensive, slightly dusty bottle out.

I don't bother to get a coaster and, glass in hand, I flop down
on the settee and switch on the telly. I flick between channels and watch Davina
McCall explaining to a group of lads with viciously gelled hair and River Island
shirts and girls with diamond nose studs exactly how they can earn points and what
they can do with them. "But," she explains from behind a huge perspex
lectern bathed in a ghostly blue light, "if someone from the opposing team
gets the answer before you then you have to give them half as many points as your
total so far, although, you can of course challenge them to gamble their bonus points
provided they haven't earned any bonus points this round. OK?"

 
I must be getting old
because I can't understand a word of it so I switch off and throw the remote down
next to me. The flat is suddenly silent. I get up and wander over to the music centre
and flick through the CDs. Opera highlights, Ministry of Sound Chill Out sessions,
Dido, the best of Frank Sinatra, jazz compilations. They're all Lauren's. Where
did mine go? I go back into the bedroom and reach up to the top shelf of the wardrobe
where there are some boxes of my stuff from before I moved in with Lauren. She didn't
seem to like any of my music and so it all got tidied up into these cardboard boxes
along with photographs from college and various other personal effects from Life
Before Lauren.

 
I flick through the cassettes
and find Suzanne Vega. I don't know why but I've always had a bit of a thing for
a chick with an acoustic guitar. I stick the tape in the machine, turn up the volume
and let her plaintiff, melancholy voice fill the room. Then I take a big gulp of
expensive wine and lie back, committing aural adultery.

Chapter Eleven

Perhaps to get away from home, I'm the first in the office on
Monday morning, just before nine. There are a pile of letters waiting on the mat.
I scoop them up and put them onto Scarlett's desk. Then I realise that I might as
well open them, partly because I am, after all, one of the team, so I have every
right to, and partly because, well, I've got nothing else to do. There is nothing
very exciting amongst them - just routine correspondence from the phone company,
the computer people and the landlord.

 
There are also letters
of welcome from the bank. Quite a few banks actually, including some in the Cayman
Islands and Monte Carlo, thanking 2cool for using their services and promising that
they are always on hand to help us. And there are some bills, lot of bills in fact,
most of which come from the do on Friday night but also from taxi companies, stationers,
a florist and even our masseur who I don't seem to have had the benefit of yet.
There is something from a Paris chocolatier which seems a bit bizarre as well as
invoices from The Communications Game and various Bond Street stores.

 
"Morning," says
Guy, striding in with a coffee in his hand. "How are you, Charlie? Good weekend?"

 
"Yeah, great thanks,"
I lie. "You?"

 
"Erm, yes, yes good,"
he says, eyeing the pile of post.

 
"Recovered from Friday?"
I say by way of conversation, suddenly feeling a bit shy of him now that there are
just the two of us in the office.

 
"Eh? Friday, oh yes,
of course. We had breakfast afterwards with some of those money men, most of them
were still working on West Coast time and so they weren't that bothered about going
to bed at all really - look why don't you just shove all that crap on Scarlett's
desk, let her deal with it?" he says, snatching the sheaf of letters from in
front of me and thrusting them into Scarlett's in tray.

 
"I don't mind going
through them," I say. "At least until Scarlett gets in."

 
"No, don't you worry
about that. Your time would be better spent chasing up some of the valuable contacts
we made on Friday night. Look, let's work up a list of people to see - get some
lunches planned, set up some meetings with some of the possible 2cool partner organisations,
shall we?"

 
"Sure" I say.

 
Later that morning a range
of specially imported Italian crockery and cutlery is delivered as is a huge cappuccino
machine. We all look at it appreciatively as it's being plumbed in but then realise
that we can't actually be arsed to use it and we'll just stick to Café Nero round
the corner.

"I got you a wheatgrass shot," says Scarlett putting
the tiny plastic container carefully down on my desk as she arrives just after half
past ten. "I've already had a double."

 
"You're such a health
freak." I tell her.

 
"Yeah, I know but
I dropped two Es on Saturday night and I just cannot get my shit together today,"
she explains.