LITMIR.BIZ

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he was. He got sent off, you see, then he was never picked again. No one knows why. I mean—it was only a little kick, and that guy deserved it. Ridiculous.

      Anyway, I’m still proud of him. I display his cap in a large gold-rimmed frame. It’s back-lit, like all that naff old stuff in museums is, and it looks fantastic. I’ve got the match programme framed too, and my ticket for the game. Oh, and all the cuttings about the game from every newspaper that covered it around the world (except for the one where they described Dean as a ‘thug’—I threw that away). I’ve also got the precious squad list that the Football Association sent out with his name on it to confirm he was in the England squad. The annoying thing is that they’ve spelt his name wrong. Isn’t that ridiculous? To spell your star player’s name wrong! I rang them up at the time and screamed ‘It’s Dean Martin, not Martins’, but the woman on reception just kept asking me what department I wanted, then threatened to hang up when I called her a crazy old bat. Still, I had the last laugh because the squad list is now hanging on a red velvet background in a magnificent golden frame.

      The mementoes from Dean’s international career cover an entire wall in the entrance hall. They’re perfect, especially next to the large statue of Dean in his football kit. It’s life-size. Actually, to be fair, parts of it are bigger than life-size. I don’t know what Dean had down his shorts when the sculptor was assessing all the dimensions, but the statue is very impressive indeed. It looks wonderful, especially now we’ve put the spotlights directly above it. People said we didn’t need spotlights, what with the three chandeliers lighting up the entrance hall, but I think it looks great.

      I’d love Dean to have another chance to relive those four golden minutes and play for England once again. Above all, I’d like to be friends with Victoria, and go shopping and hang out with her and her Hollywood friends—and have a word with her about cutting her hair short.

      Dean’s gone back to watching television again, and fiddling with the crotch of his trousers. He can’t hear a word I’m saying with the TV blaring out. I don’t understand why he has to have it on so loud—he seems to nudge the volume up until everyone’s shouting out at us from the large plasma screen on the far wall.

      To be frank, I don’t need this right now. I’ve had one hell of a day. A dismal, horrific day in which I made a complete fool of myself at the beautician’s. Mallory normally tends to all my beauty needs—she’s practically full-time, hovering over me with tweezers and emery board day and night. But, for reasons that with hindsight I can’t begin to fathom, today I decided to pay a visit to the new salon in town for one of their oxygen facials. The beautician assigned to me was South African, which worried me from the start. I’ve only ever been to South Africa once and that was completely by accident. It was for our honeymoon and we ended up there after I told Dean that I really wanted to go to this fabulous club called En Safari in Ibiza. It never occurred to me that we’d go anywhere other than Ibiza for our honeymoon. I’m not sure I knew there were any other countries—just LA, where Mum had lived, England, where we lived, and Ibiza, where we went on holiday. Trouble was, Dean thought I’d said that I wanted to go ‘on safari’ so we ended up spending our entire honeymoon sleeping in a tent, covered in mosquitoes and watching a whole load of bloody animals. It was awful. I turned up on the first day wearing my specially chosen honeymoon outfit of little white hot-pants and fabulously high gold sandals with a gold halter-neck bikini top and a low-slung gold chain belt, and everyone was staring at me. They were all wearing plain, dull clothes. I had my gold-rimmed shades on and piles of bling that sparkled in the sunshine. I looked great and I knew it.

      ‘Hey, man. You’re gonna scare the animals,’ said this man with a rifle. He was all dressed in khaki. ‘And you need boots on your feet.’

      I said the only boots I had were made of pink plastic and came up to the middle of my thigh, so he made me wear flat shoes belonging to some plain woman in our group. FLAT SHOES!—and they didn’t match my outfit.

      It was the honeymoon from hell. No shops, no nice wine bars, no fancy cocktails, just a whole bunch of rhinoceroses and lions and stuff, and all these people going, ‘Aw, look—it’s a baby elephant…’ Don’t they have televisions? There are bloody nature programmes on all the time. I can’t get away from baby elephants when I’m flicking through to watch Britain’s Next Top Model, and I have to say that I’d be perfectly happy if I never saw a jungle animal again—baby or otherwise.

      We left the safari in the end. Or, more accurately, they asked us to leave. We went to some place called Cape Town for a couple of days. That was strange, too. I had this horrible moment when trying to find the shops. You see, they call their traffic lights ‘robots’ out there. I asked how to get to the shops and was told ‘Turn left at the robots.’

      ‘What?’ I said. ‘The robots? I want to go to the shops, not into the future.’

      Anyway, that’s why I was alarmed to have a South African beautician. Her name was Mandie.

      ‘Lie on the bed and take off your knickers,’ she said.

      ‘Pardon?’

      ‘I’ll need you to lie on there without your knickers on.’

      It seemed an odd request since I was only having my face massaged and plumped up with some oxygen-containing creams, but I did as I was told, lying on the bed entirely naked below the waist.

      The beautician turned round from where she’d been mixing lotions and potions and jumped back when she saw me lying there smiling at her, completely knickerless. She looked at me in the same way you might regard a lunatic running down the street, clutching a large knife—backing away from me, eyes wide and looking more than a little fearful.

      ‘What are you doing?’ she eventually asked.

      ‘I’ve taken off my knickers,’ I said.

      ‘No,’ said Mandie, pointing to my neck. ‘I said “Lie on the bed and take off your necklace.”’

      Fuck! I scrabbled back into my Luton Town thong and slipped off my choker. I’m sure she was laughing at me. The facial wasn’t even that good anyway.

      I rushed home afterwards to find Mum in the house—nothing odd about that,of course, she’s always there, snooping around to see what I’ve bought and to try on all my new clothes. Today, though, I just couldn’t handle talking to her and listening to all her criticisms of me.

      ‘These shoes are horrible,’ she said as soon as I walked in.

      ‘Not now, Mum,’ I said, walking right past her and going to look for Dean, hoping to have some sort of conversation with him. Now I’ve found him, though, he’s just locked in his own little TV world. He’s like a child when it comes to the goggle-box. He’s kicked the zebra rug out of the way and shifted the sofa forwards, so he’s practically nose-to-nose with the presenter. The only person I know who has the television on louder is Nell. She has it blaring out so much, you have to hold on to your ears in case your eardrums blow apart.

      I once took Nell to the cinema and she complained all the way through the film about how loud it was. Eh? How does that work? I’ll tell you what also confuses me about Nell is that she has the fire on, the central heating on and wears a coat, hat and gloves in August, then complains frequently of hot flushes. God help me if Dean ends up like her when he’s older—I don’t think I could cope.

      ‘Can you turn it down, love,’ I say for the third time, as if I’m asking him to make the ultimate sacrifice.

      ‘It’s celebrity darts,’ he says, turning to face me. A wounded look had crept across his features. ‘It’s Syd Little against Ulrika Jonsson’s sister’s ex-boyfriend’s uncle.’

      ‘This is important,’ I persist. ‘Really important.’

      Syd Little misses the dartboard completely and Dean spins round. ‘And you think this isn’t?’

      ‘Paskia Rose’s school report’s here,’ I say. ‘I found it screwed up in her underwear drawer. It turns out she’s really not doing very well at

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