Vanity (24 page)

‘How comfortable are you now, on a scale of one to ten?' Damian asked Poppy.

‘Erm … around one and a half, I'd say,' said Poppy, as the melting fake ice cream made its way down towards her crotch. For something sugar-free, it was quite spectacularly sticky.

‘If we were somewhere a bit more private, I'd lick it off you …'

‘I'd lick it off you! I'd lick it off you!' came an obnoxious, high-pitched chant from above. ‘Hahahahahaha!' Hammond started banging his empty bowl on the upper deck in time to his words, laughing like some kind of possessed demon child. ‘I'd lick it off you! I'd lick it off you! I'd lick it off you!'

‘Shut up!' hissed Damian, at which the little boy's face turned purple as he proceeded to scream the place down. ‘Waaaaaaaaaagh! Waaaaaaaaaagh! Waaaaaaaaaagh!'

Ellie, who had been on her way back to give Poppy a cloth, turned her back on her guests and ran upstairs, panic written all over her neat little features.

‘Baby! Don't you worry, Mommy's coming!'

‘Don't move an inch,' Damian said to Poppy. ‘I'll get you a cloth.'

‘Nice to have you to myself again,' Poppy said to Damian, who picked up her hand and kissed it.

‘Thank fuck for their anniversary,' he said.

They were at the Saltwater Grill, a mere ten-minute walk down the beach from Marty and Eleanor's house, the evening after Hammond had thrown his fake ice cream all over Poppy. The previous night, Ellie had said, winsomely, over dinner, ‘I hope you don't mind, you guys, but it's our fifth wedding anniversary tomorrow, and we want to be alone for dinner. I can recommend some awesome places for you two to eat …'

‘Oh, God, no, that's fine,' Poppy had said, kicking Damian under the table. ‘We'll be out of your hair as soon as you want us to be …'

Hammond had, despite his tender years, dominated dinner, which had been served at six p.m., and with one bottle of wine between the four of them. Neither Poppy nor Damian could remember having been so bored on holiday. Ever.

Now, though, they smiled at one another, already on their second bottle of Zinfandel. The Saltwater Grill enjoyed a superb location, right on the beach. The dunes were so high that they couldn't actually see the sea from where they were sitting, on the wooden deck, but there was a lovely relaxed air to the place. A reggae band was playing just to their left, they could hear the waves crashing against the shore and the smell of ozone filled their nostrils.

It was extraordinarily WASP-y though. Everywhere you looked were preppies dressed in expensive casualwear from Lacoste, J.Crew and L.L.Bean. They all had very straight teeth and exceptionally shiny hair. Just as Damian was reflecting that his was the only dark face for miles around, a couple of young guys – student jocks, by the look of them, both strapping and blond, approached their table, laughing and nudging one another.

‘Are you Poppy Wallace?'

Poppy looked at Damian nervously. Oh, for fuck's sake, this wasn't going to help matters tonight. But, as the pro she was, she smiled up at them.

‘Yup, that's me.'

‘I just wanted to say –' The boys were quite spectacularly drunk, Poppy now realized, but carried on smiling
regardless
– ‘that we all
jerk off
to your show, like EVERY THURSDAY!'

As both boys collapsed in hysterics, Damian jumped to his feet.

‘How
dare
you say that to my wife?'

‘It's a compliment, dude,' said one of them, setting his friend off into even greater paroxysms of mirth. Poppy bit her lip to stop giggling and making Damian even angrier.

‘Well, thank you very much,' she said. ‘I hope you all get a lot of sleep on Fridays, and rest your no doubt weary wrists.'

That took the jock-jerks by surprise and, after a beat, faces wreathed in smiles, they started high-fiving both her and Damian, slapping them both on the back for good measure.

‘High five! Respect, man! Your wife is one cool chick.'

As Damian high-fived them back, a reluctant smile crept across his face.

‘Sorry about that. I love you,' said Poppy, once the
jock-je
rks had ambled off down the beach, chortling to one another.

‘I'm sorry too. In fact, I should probably feel flattered that twats like that want to wank over my wife. Especially as I get to have the real thing.' The previous evening, with nothing else to do, they had shagged one another senseless, giggling as Marty and Eleanor's sex noises drowned theirs out over the salty night air.

Their food arrived – broiled lobster for Damian and clam chowder for Poppy – and they ordered another bottle of wine.

‘Sorry I've been a bit of a cunt recently,' said Damian.

‘Don't be silly. You could never be as much of a cunt as I was last year. I know it's tough at the moment, but the screenplay is brilliant. You know it and I know it – it's just a matter of time.'

‘Yes, you're right. Sorry again, Pops. Let's just enjoy this lovely evening. Oh, my God,
look
!'

Damian pointed over the deck and they both watched as a family of deer strolled by on the beach. Under the clear, starlit sky, the sight was magical.

‘You don't get that in Hoxton.'

Damian leant across the table to kiss Poppy and she kissed him back, happy and relieved. When he got up to go to the loo, she picked up a celeb gossip magazine that somebody had left on the bench next to her. Flicking through it, something stopped her in her tracks.

HOLLYWOOD BROMANCE
?
ran the headline.
Are über-cool Jack Meadows and hot hot HOT new Brit actor Ben Jones the new
Entourage
boys on the LA block? While filming their hotly Oscar-tipped new movie,
Beyond the Sea
, these guys seem to have struck a friendship the like of which has not been seen since Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. Watch this space, movie-lovers!

And there, in a double-page spread, were photo after photo of Ben and Jack – the lovely Jack who'd been so nice to her at her Prohibition party. God, they looked gorgeous, the photomontage comprising black-tie events, casual coffees on Melrose, hiking in the Hollywood hills, even frolicking in the surf together, both men's chests impressively worked-out. Jack was slightly taller than Ben, and his curly black hair contrasted beautifully with Ben's streaky light brown/dark blond locks. In every photo they were laughing, the rapport between them patently obvious.

Well, bugger me
, she thought.

Just as she was thinking, dispassionately, but with an understandable degree of vanity, that both these men had wanted to fuck her, Damian returned from his pee.

‘What are you reading?'

‘Oh, just some tabloid shit …'

Poppy tried to hide the magazine, but Damian was too quick for her and grabbed it, laughing. As it clocked, the sudden change in his expression was terrifying.

‘WHAT? Ben AND that shit Jack Meadows? Oh, for fuck's sake, Poppy, I bet you're loving this. You'd be so much better off with one of them than you are with me, wouldn't you? Fucking loser who hasn't even got a job. I bet you'd
love
a threesome with those vain fucking cunts. Wouldn't you? WOULDN'T YOU?'

And because she couldn't think of anything else to say – they were both quite pissed, and she was deeply tired of Damian's constant jealousy – she stood up, looked him straight in the eye, and said, ‘Yes. I would.'

Back in LA, Ben and Jack were sharing a spliff, lying in adjacent hammocks suspended from a large acacia tree whose branches stretched out over one end of Jack's mosaic-tiled pool. His Spanish-style villa was rammed with people he'd known since he was born – veterans of the rock and film worlds, to a man. His father, who went by the improbable name of Filthy Meadows (he'd had it changed by deed poll) was trying to placate his mother, the insanely large-breasted and flashing-eyed ex-groupie Heather Meadows (née Maria Gonzalez); against all odds, they had stayed together, though sometimes Jack wished that they hadn't.

Now she was screaming at him: ‘I know you're still screwing that Sandra bitch!'

‘And I know you're still screwing José.' José was the 21-year-old Mexican pool boy. ‘Just chill, woman.' And Filthy Meadows walked, with his signature languorous gait, over to the pool.

‘Hey, guys.'

Ben tried to sit up in his hammock – Filthy Meadows was a legend, after all – but it was too difficult, and he didn't want to fall into the pool and completely lose his cool.

‘Hey, Filthy,' he managed, through a fog of dope.

‘Filth to you.' The rock star winked and Ben laughed.

‘Filth it is, then.'

Since Natalia's abrupt departure, Ben had found himself heartbroken for the first time in his life. He had used all of the studio's immense powers to try to find her, in all the places he thought she might have hidden: St Barts, Mustique, Necker island, all the major cities in Europe; he'd even tried Kiev. But to no avail. Natalia seemed to have vanished off the surface of the planet.

Thank fuck, he had his work to throw himself into, and, in Jack, a surprisingly good new mate. Although there had been the inevitable locking of horns between two alpha males to start with, Ben and Jack were both classically trained actors, of similar intelligence and with similar senses of humour; they found, grudgingly, that they liked one another enormously. And of course the publicity people encouraged it – the movie-loving saps always loved a good ‘bromance'.

‘Why do you and Mom keep doing this, Dad?' asked Jack.

‘Because we love each other.' Filthy's face, all plumped-up lips and weird facial topiary, went soft. ‘When you find the one you love, none of the screwing around means anything. She knows that, and I know that. Sometimes we just like a fight. It means the sex—'

‘No, no, no …!' Jack put his hands over his ears. ‘I've heard it all before and – Dad,
way
too much information, even the first time.'

‘I've found the woman I love,' said Ben. The dope and the hammock were giving him a curious sensation of
weightlessness
, floating on a cloud as the A-list party
glittered
and twinkled across the way.

‘That's awesome, man,' said Filth, with a tear in his eye. ‘That's the most important thing you can do in your life. Where is she, then? The one you love should always be by your side. EVEN IF SHE IS SCREWING THE POOL BOY,' he shouted over his shoulder. Then, as if surprised at his momentary lack of nonchalance, he resumed his habitual slouch.

Jack sighed theatrically as he heard his mother screaming a string of Spanish expletives from the kitchen.

‘I don't know, Filth,' said Ben sadly. ‘I just don't know.'

‘Full house!' Natalia slapped her cards down and smiled round at her new friends on Bottle Beach, which was on the Thai island of Koh Phangan. Having thought about it carefully, she had decided that the best way for her to disappear was to mingle with backpackers on beaches. Nobody would think of looking for her in such unsophisticated surroundings, and she could wander freely with the constant stream of travellers: gap-year kids, elderly hippies, drifters, party people, earnest, well-meaning couples – and the rest of the hundreds of thousands of people who wanted to take advantage of cheap food and beer on beautiful beaches, while managing to kid themselves that they were having some kind of spiritual awakening.

She was still paying Georgiou through the nose, enough to keep him happy, she hoped. There was no way he'd go to the press when she was such a lucrative source of income, and noncontactable. Every week, she transferred the money from a new Android, on which she had disabled the GPS and downloaded a banking app. The most important thing was that they didn't implicate Ben in her sordid past.

She couldn't believe how much she missed him, and still cried herself to sleep every night. But Natalia was used to pain. And, bizarrely, in this little backpacker haven, she had found a certain degree of comfort. Her beach hut was basic, but it had an electric fan, mosquito net and its own shower and lavatory. It opened directly onto the white sandy beach, and there was a little wooden deck where she could dry her wet towels and lie in a hammock, reading or just gazing out to sea; hardly
purgatory
when she remembered the dark chill of her Ukrainian upbringing.

She had instructed her crew to take her yacht and designer wardrobe back to Ibiza, and had bought a selection of cheap string bikinis, tie-dye sarongs, faded cotton vest tops and denim cut-offs. She hadn't got over her aversion to denim, but had to look the part. Not wanting to cut her hair, most days she wore it in plaits, and now that the platinum dye was starting to grow out and her mousy roots were becoming streaky in the hot Thai sun, she could easily pass for just another (strikingly good looking) 30–40-something trying to find herself on foreign shores. Deeply tanned and freckled now, her only jewellery was a silver-and-turquoise anklet; she never wore shoes.

Bottle Beach was an extraordinarily picturesque cove, all powdery sand, turquoise sea and gently swaying palm trees, only accessible by boat from Haad Rin, the main village on the island. Natalia remembered Poppy and Damian telling her about it – they had met seven years previously at one of Koh Phangan's notorious Full Moon parties, and spent several days exploring the island together afterwards. They had raved about its beauty and
remoteness
, and Natalia had thought it sounded absolutely perfect for her requirements. It was the sort of place where, amongst the constant stream of people passing through, some chose to spend an entire season, just chilling out for months on end.