Namedropper (26 page)

Manny looked up from his paper. “That's wrong.”

“No it's not. I was in key.”

“Your singing's lovely, but you got the words wrong. It's ‘I
can
tell you.'”

“What?”

“It's ‘I
can
tell you my love for you will still be strong, after the boys of summer have gone.'”

“No it isn't.”

He laughed as if I were a small child with jam around her mouth. “Yes it is. It's about the rich kids who descend on the Hamptons for the summer and impress their town beauty with their flash cars, and about the local boy who will always love her, no matter what.”

I held the Coke to my temple. “Are you sure about this?”

“Yes, Viva. I should know, I spent my childhood summers in the Hamptons.”

I excused myself and crept into bed. It was so hot that I had taken the duvet off and was just using the sheets. I kicked my legs up and made myself a tent, with blue light coming
through where the sheets were thin. Then I let the tent collapse and curled into a ball. The whole point of “Boys of Summer” is that it's about how love, in its purest form, should last no more than a season. It's a hymn to living for the moment, to loving until you can love no more and then stopping. It's about knowing when to call it a day, when your series is about to be cancelled. The bikini dissolving in the water. Except it's not, because I had heard the words wrong.

There was nothing I could do. That song was gone, dead. What a stupid, stupid record. I had lived my life a certain way because of those lyrics. What else had I misheard? Lying there I decided, “If it's ‘I can tell you' and not ‘I can't tell you,' then I don't want to live in this world. And there is nothing, nothing left for me to do. Except find a new record to mishear.”

The more time passes, the more I hope I'm going to bump into Tommy in the street, and he'll let on that, actually, EVERYONE was in love with me. He'll take me for a coffee, and say, “You know, Drew was always in love with you. He was just too afraid to tell you,” or “All Dillon's girlfriends have been like faxes of you,” or “Treena has photos of you plastered all over the flat.” But we have no mutual friends. There are no extras in my movies. How stupid of me. The crowd of extras is a great place for the troubled star to hide. Elizabeth Taylor did it at the height of Liz 'n' Dick mania. In 1969, she appeared, unbilled, in
Anne of the Thousand Days
, just a violet-eyed, double-lashed face in the crowd. I hear it was the happiest she ever was.

And then I remembered one extra.

I didn't have time to dress as anyone, and besides, all my
best clothes were still dirty from Vegas. I pulled on my one pair of jeans, a grey vest, the Adidas sneakers Treena had handed down, and a hooded sweatshirt Ray had lent me. My hair had grown too shaggy for me to try to be Elizabeth, so I pulled it back in a ponytail and rooted through my bag for the underground fare. The train was sweltering and I tied the sweatshirt around my waist. I ran up the stairs at Piccadilly and was so happy to be overground that I could barely smell the urine and discarded McDonald's.

In Uptown Records, Marcus was just shutting up shop for the day. I pressed my face to the glass and watched him count the takings from the till. He was wearing indigo denim dungarees with one strap unbuckled. If it didn't say TOMMY HILFIGER in huge letters across the chest pocket, I would have taken it for a giant toddler's romper suit. His hair matched his clothes, with one side of it braided into antennae and the other in a three-inch Afro. I waved at him and he cocked his antennae to a right angle. When he saw it was me, he smiled. The gold on his teeth caught the last rays of the day's sun.

EMMA FORREST
is the author of the novels
Namedropper, Thin Skin
and
Cherries in the Snow
, the memoir
Your Voice in My Head
and editor of the non-fiction anthology
Damage Control
. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is a screen writer.

Cherries in the Snow
Thin Skin
Damage Control (editor)
Your Voice in My Head

Meet Ruby: a bedraggled, stinking romance heroine. At fifteen Ruby left home, got herself an agent and became a film star. Now twenty, she lives alone, in a world of hotels and fast food. Destructive and charming, cutting is Ruby's hobby. Her hair, her arms and occasional tattoos – her newest accessory is a bloodline necklace.

Ruby is a seductive blend of heroine and whore. She has left the man who loves her, been fired by her agent, and is starring in a film opposite the delectable Aslan. It is quite possibly her last chance.

‘Electric, irreverent prose. When people talk about “voice”, this is what they mean'
Ethan Hawke

‘Skeletal and luminous,
Thin Skin
takes the coming-of-age novel to places it has never been before'
Julie Burchill

‘A wonderfully distinctive mix of humour, the captured rawness of desires, and the enchantment of these lives'
JT LeRoy

In Sadie's head, she's a novelist. In real life, she spends her day searching for the ultimate way to say red at Grrl, an ultra hip make-up company. In her sex life, she's a modern-day Lolita who's never dated a man under forty. Then Sadie falls in love with Marley, a graffiti artist with a firm commitment to another woman: his eight-year-old daughter, Montana. Sadie isn't used to competing for a man's affections and certainly not with a little girl who is uncannily like herself. Real love could just be too grown up for her …

Cherries in the Snow
is a novel about womanhood, love, and lipstick. Flippant, sexy, acid and smart, this is Emma Forrest at her most dazzling.

‘This is so much more than a love story. Forrest is a beautiful writer: sharp, pithy, engaging and gut-wrenchingly honest ****'
Metro

‘Captures the neurotic vibe of single life in the city … Winningly honest about jealousy, sex and distinctly ungirlie bodily functions, Forrest puts her hyper-informed interest in slap and pearlescent artifice to good use'
Independent

‘[
Cherries in the Snow
] has pace, energy and eccentric, valid observation. And it has Emma Forrest's voice – flippant, irreverent and modern'
Observer

‘It's difficult to write a convincing tale of depression that's also an entertaining romp, but Forrest has done it'
Sunday Times

Emma Forrest was twenty-two when she realised that her quirks had gone beyond eccentricity. Lonely, in a cycle of self-harm and damaging relationships, she found herself in the chair of an effortlessly optimistic psychiatrist – a man whose wisdom and humanity would wrench her from the vibrant and dangerous tide of herself after she tried to end her life. A modern day fairy tale,
Your Voice in My Head
is a dazzling and devastating memoir, clear-eyed and shot through with wit. In her unique voice, Emma Forrest explores depression and mania, but also the beauty of love – and the heartbreak of loss.

‘Emma Forrest is an incredibly gifted writer, who crafted the living daylights out of every sentence in this unforgettable memoir. I can't remember the last time I ever read such a blistering, transfixing story of obsession, heartbreak and slow, stubborn healing'
Elizabeth Gilbert, author of
Eat Pray Love

www.bloomsbury.com/emmaforrest

First published in Great Britain by Arrow Books Ltd 1998

This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright © 1998 by Emma Forrest

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN: 978-1-4088-6020-5

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