LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER ELEVEN

      ‘Oi oiiiii! Wozza’s in the hoooooooooouse. Time to get the mother-fuckin’ clown car out the rave garage! Vroom vroooooooooom! Ooooooooooh, this gear is mental. MENTAL! It’s mental continental Avis four-door hatchback seven-day rental chicken orientaaaaaaaaaal!’

      At seven o’clock the next morning, Luke’s flatmate Warren – the only living organism to make Scott Disick look complicated – returns home from a night out with his mates. Banging dance music starts pounding through the wall. Simultaneously, the washing machine in the flat above kicks into the planet’s clunkiest spin cycle, so I give up trying to sleep and make a cup of tea. Luke has stuck a note on the kettle.

       Happy birthday! As they say in The Outback, ‘Rinse it like a drongo!’ So here’s the plan. From now until 8 p.m. I want you to remember you’re awesome, because you are. Then, at 8 p.m. meet me outside that Spanish place round the back of Bethnal Green Road. We’re going for tapas …

      I freeze and immediately stop reading. Christ, really? Tapas is a ridiculous way of eating. Multiple dishes come to the table at random times and nothing on the menu is straightforward, i.e., plain brown, white or green. Bar the olives, I suppose, but even they could be stuffed with an insurgent pimento. I take my tea back to bed and pull the duvet around me. Luke’s room hasn’t got the same kind of feel about it in the cold light of day, with no twinkling tea lights or post-coital glow to bathe in. (Spotting the almost full tape in my video camera makes me cringe slightly.) I listen to the bass pounding away through the wall, and as much as I wouldn’t want to be hanging out with Warren and his gang, I am jealous that they have all been out having fun. The thought of not going to Ibiza this summer – the Promised Land of Fun – makes me disgruntled.

      I look over to the mantelpiece. Propped up behind a photo of Luke’s family is the acting card my agent, Terry, uses to send out to casting directors. For someone who resolutely avoided a single picture to be taken of them between the age of ten and twenty, it’s weird how relaxed I appear. The shot is in black and white and I am looking directly into the camera whilst pulling my best smiley yet pouty, serious but light-hearted, angelically devilish face … to show I have a fantastically varied range. I lean forward and try to figure out how old I look in the picture but it’s difficult to tell. I certainly don’t look my age, but then I’m not, not really. According to my birth certificate I am thirty-five today, but in a sense I’m only twenty-five. That dark side period … it obliterated a whole decade of my life. Losing me to it, looking for me, giving up on me to create the new me, getting used to this me … took close to ten years.

      My eyes wander back to the picture of Luke with his family; he is laughing as his father pretends to plonk a large prawn on his mother’s head with some barbecue tongs. He must be seventeen, nearly eighteen, at the time that picture was taken – round about the same age I was when I left home. The scene looks like something out of a summer TV commercial for outside grilling equipment, with Luke’s parents cast as the perfect mum and dad. But then Luke thinks his parents are perfect. One of the first things he ever said to me was that the greatest lesson he learnt from them was to be honest with yourself … because then you will be honest with other people. I murmured something resembling an agreement – as I do every time he imparts any other words of wisdom his ‘folks’ have bestowed upon him – because it’s the easiest thing to do. But frankly, their inspirational fridge-magnet approach to life doesn’t sound that far up the well-meaning-but-delusional scale from my mother’s biblical one. Proverbs Chapter 10 Verse 9: Honest people are safe and secure, but the dishonest will be caught … She couldn’t have been more wrong.

      I flop back against the head rest. The bed snaps in two like a Venus fly trap, ensnaring me in the middle and sending my tea flying. Wriggling out, I catch my hair on one of the broken springs, which causes unhelpful tangling. So I switch on the do-gooding styling irons Luke gave me last night. But even after a minute they don’t heat up to a level anywhere near as powerful as my own ones that I bought off that stylist. It just goes to show you can’t save lives and achieve a catwalk-ready look. I crawl over some electric leads to get my own straighteners out of my bag. But whilst rummaging, I stop, grab my Nokia instead and quickly scroll down the list of received calls. I find the number I need and before I give myself a moment to change my mind, I phone it. The call is answered on the third ring – I knew she would be up.

      ‘Ha!’ cackles Barb Silver. ‘You do have a bit of freakin’ ambition after all, kiddo. Maxy will be freakin’ pleased you’re coming. Listen, I’m mid Gyrotonic … I’ll shoot you over the details in five minutes.’

      They ping through in three. I am back at home in forty. I am ready in two hundred and twenty-six … and waiting by the window in the lounge for my cab. Whilst I am there, I text Adele, tell her I’m going to a party and ask if I can go into her closet and borrow some accessories – namely, the ones I have already stolen. Monday watches me from the sofa, blinking. He blinks a few more times then wraps his big orange tail tight round him, and settles down amongst the cushions with his back to me.