Let's Pretend, page 11
‘If it were me,’ Nina continued, ‘Adam had better hold onto his knackers. Because I’d be coming for them with a rusty spoon.’
I’d told her that Adam was doing too much blow, I’d confronted him about it, and he’d dumped me as a result. This was definitely breaking our contract’s no-disparagement clause, but I wasn’t in the mood for crying over spilt small print.
‘I still can’t believe he got you kicked off Hollow Moon. That’s some seriously vengeful shit.’ Nina sounded almost admiring. But then, Nina loves a grudge match.
I stared at the table. As my mother had pointed out, it wasn’t the first time I’d been ditched by a project after I’d been cast. It seemed to me I could feel the heat of both humiliations, beating under my skin. Admitting to this would only make it worse. ‘I guess it’s possible the execs really didn’t think Cal and I made a good match. I’ll never know for sure.’
‘Huh. It sounded like a douche-y show anyway. Spacebilge with tits. But whatever you do next, you need to rub the tosser’s face in it. First off, you should sign up to Raya and upgrade to online-dating an A-lister.’
‘You overestimate my pulling-power.’
‘Fine, a B-lister then. But a bona fide one this time.’
‘Adam’s bona fide.’ Funny how defensive I felt about this.
‘Just wait till he crashes into rehab.’ Nina gestured to the barman for another round. ‘Seriously, though. What’s the plan?’
Good question. My agent remained upbeat. Whatever his listing, dating Adam meant that a lot more people knew my name, or had at least been reminded of who I was.
Trouble was, I’d begun to need reminding too.
The little rainbow ghost in the lens …
‘I might go travelling, actually. Take a sabbatical, whatever. I like the idea of finding a scenic wilderness with no Wi-Fi and disappearing for a while.’
‘Sounds terrible. Eat, Pray, Love meets Heart of Darkness. Or – even worse – that Reese Witherspoon film about hiking.’
‘At least Tinseltattles will be off my case.’ I tried to look Nina full in the face as I said this.
‘Mm. They were really gunning for you.’
‘It felt personal, yeah.’ I paused. I was still waiting for her to catch my eye. ‘As if I was the punchline to all these sick jokes. Some of it was obviously crazy – like how I was an escort, a junkie.’ Those, I could blame the likes of Zalandra for. ‘But sometimes it felt as if they must’ve had someone on the inside.’
‘What, like a mole?’
Nina had got her fringe cut extra blunt and short. It made her eyes look unexpectedly round and childish under the over-exposed brow. I didn’t know if I could trust the look of cartoon innocence she gave me. Maybe I was just projecting, anyhow. Nina didn’t do innocence. She did truth or dare or bare-faced lie.
‘Right. Like the “inside source” who told the website about the time Adam had a nosebleed, wiped the blood off on his co-star’s Hermès scarf and hid the evidence in my handbag. Nobody could have known about that unless I told them.’
I waited. Nina was still holding my gaze.
‘And,’ I said, ‘the only person I told was you.’
‘Piss off.’ She sounded entirely cheery.
‘I’m serious. Nobody else knew about that incident. That’s why I knew it had to be you who passed it on, along with the other personal stuff.’ I shook my head. ‘Why’d you do it? For laughs? A dare? Or just to take me down a peg or two?’
‘OK. Pay attention, cos I’m only gonna say this once,’ said Nina, one finger held dramatically aloft. ‘I. Have. Never. Spread. Or. Invented. Gossip. About. You.’
‘Bollocks! It’s one of your hobbies – posting made-up shit to gossip sites. Look, I’m not going to give you a hard time. But I still need you to be straight with me.’
Or maybe I was just minded to burn everything down.
Nina sprang to her feet. ‘The only thing you need is to get over yourself.’ The air between us crackled. ‘Aww, so you’ve been dumped? Aww, so you lost a job? Big deal. You’ll get over it, and you’ll be fine. People like you always are. Little Lucie bought you a flat. Your nose job bought you a load of crummy TV shows. Mummy and Daddy buy you everything else – except for some fucking self-respect, obviously. Otherwise you’d never’ve turned tricks for a creep like Harker in the first place.’
I shrank back. ‘Is this how you really feel? About me?’
‘It doesn’t matter what I feel or what I say. You won’t believe me.’ Nina looked at me hard and straight – the way I’d looked at her when I said I knew she was Tinseltattle’s source. ‘There’s times I think you only keep me around so’s to feel better about yourself.’
I had never felt so shrunken, so ashamed. So alone.
(Actually, that’s not true. But the other occasion was a lifetime ago.)
At least I still had Talia.
Her care package was certainly an improvement on Dido’s. Ladurée macarons, a vintage Alexander McQueen scarf and a glitter-spangled greetings card with a quote about difficult roads leading to beautiful destinations.
Even so, she struggled to come to terms with my back-packing plans. (‘You know I adore Eat, Pray, Love, but these days it’s practically a historical novel’.) Instead, she tried her best to persuade me to check into a luxury Mexican wellness retreat she’d done some promotional Instagramming for. As a last resort, she offered to go travelling with me – ‘We could go find ourselves together!’
I told her this was something I had to do for myself. I needed, I said, to find my own beautiful destination.
This was at the airport, where Talia had come to wave me off. She was sniffling a bit at Departures. ‘God. Look at me! Ugh! I knew I should’ve worn waterproof mascara … I’ll miss you so much, Lily. Everyone will. But I know you’ll get over this and come back stronger, more radiant, than ever.’ She clutched at my hands. ‘And Adam will always, always regret losing you.’
If he had regrets, he didn’t dwell on them. When I got back from my travels, three months later, it was to find that Talia was his new beard.
PART TWO
CHAPTER ONE
‘Shameless, trashy, back-stabbing wench …’
‘Good luck to her,’ I said tartly. ‘She’ll need it.’
The Momager continued to look tragic. ‘Well, it’s true such grotesque attention-seeking can only be a cry for help. I just don’t understand why poor Adam would want to be associated with some brainless socialite. Not after you.’ She sighed. ‘Though, to be fair, the unwashed hippy look is unlikely to win him back. Boho can be tricky to pull off past your twenties.’
I’d only been back a day after three months off-grid in Southeast Asia. I’d taken photographs on disposable cameras rather than posting to Instagram, read serious books and stayed in low-budget rentals. I was thin and brown without recourse to spray tans and purging, and my hair was its natural mouse. I’d even dreamed up plans to reinvent myself as a screenwriter. I felt lighter and therefore liberated.
Wanting to be magnanimous, the first act of my return had been to follow up on my postcards and voicemails and make peace with my mother. Now it was starting to feel as if I’d never left.
‘Ask Nina what’s going on, sweetie. She’ll know the inside story – she always does.’
Invoking Nina was a sign of how seriously the Momager was taking the matter. She wasn’t to know that Nina had cut me out of her life.
I blamed Adam for this as well as for everything else. Sure, Talia’s move was a shocker. But Adam shacking up with her was a calculated provocation. He’d called her a loser, sneered at her, sneered at me for being her friend, and now he was using Talia to stick in the knife. Grace Tang and Victor Green were no doubt all smiles: Talia, spawn of a supermodel-turned-activist and a retail tycoon, was much better connected than a third-rate Thane.
Victor had phoned me post break-up to remind me of my contractual obligations, serving up his poison pill of threat with a sugar-coating of commiseration. At that point I hated him even more than Adam. But at least I wasn’t scared of Adam.
My travels had been meant to draw a line under that part of my life. But this was impossible now. As soon as the Momager had left, I did what I was supposed to have sworn off forever, and looked Adam up online.
‘Hot New Couple Alert!’ yelped the gossip sites, which variously described Talia as a socialite or heiress or influencer. (With a pang, I remembered Nina: ‘That girl couldn’t influence her way out of a colostomy bag.’) So here were she and Adam strolling hand in hand in Central Park, heading out of London’s celebrity restaurant du jour, frolicking on her dad’s yacht. There was even a snap of them hanging out with Nina at an ice-cream stand, the two girls laughing over their lollies like poster-girls in a tampon advert. That hurt.
Adam appeared the same as ever in this montage. Talia looked genuinely thrilled. Awestruck, in fact, as if she couldn’t believe her luck. Was it possible she didn’t even know? Or was she a better actress than I imagined?
I tried to take comfort from the trolls, but so far their antipathy was tepid. Lol so our boy’s got himself a suga mama. Or Adam’s type = real basic bitches amirite?
I wondered what Zalandra thought of it all.
(For a mad moment, I thought I’d spotted her in a street market in Senegal. There were times I felt like the crazy one.)
And here I was, late at night, down the rabbit hole again.
I looked up from my laptop to the mirror above my desk. My bare face, with its childish new freckles. The straggling eyebrows and limp bob. Who was I kidding? My mother was right. This wasn’t what liberation looked like. This was defeat.
I plugged on with my new life goals all the same and started filling in applications for various screenwriting courses. I was browsing the creative-writing section of Foyles, when who should I bump into but Nick, with a stack of literary magazines under his arm.
He peered at me dubiously. ‘Lily?’
‘Nick! Hi!’ It’s possible I overdid the sprightliness.
‘You’ve been away.’
‘Travelling! Yeah –’
‘Trying to get over your toxic ex.’
I glanced around in case of witnesses. ‘Oh, it was fine. The break-up, that is. All for the best! I’m feeling good about it – we’re all good. Everything’s great.’
‘You don’t have to put a brave face on it,’ he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. The smile that followed was more condescending than consoling but, being Nick, was probably the best he could manage. ‘Adam Harker’s your classic narcissist. And that bimbo he’s dating – the new one – she’s just a cover.’
I was taken aback. ‘What?’
‘He was screwing Dido most of the time he was with you. Still is.’
‘Ah. No. No, definitely not.’
He laughed hollowly. ‘Christ, Lily. I wouldn’t have thought you were so naïve. Mind you, Dido’s almost as bad. She actually believes that Adam’s going to fix her up with Kash Malik and turn her into a film star.’
Since when did Dido want to be in the movies?
‘I’d got a bad vibe from your blue-eyed bimboy from the off. Still, Dido was convinced he wanted to help her. He took advantage of that. Strung her along, then made his move.’
‘I really don’t think –’
‘All the signs are there. Late-night phone calls. Unexplained absences, odd receipts. Some guy’s sweatshirt left in the car. And Dido’s not herself. She’s distracted, dreamy. Even Hotspur’s picked up on it.’
I suppressed an unkind urge to laugh. Nick’s eyes were puffy and he’d lost weight, along with his trademark sneer. Dido was definitely cheating on him, poor sod. It just wasn’t with Adam Harker. But I couldn’t be bothered to protest Adam’s innocence any further. Why should I?
‘I’m very sorry to hear that, if it’s true. I hope the two of you can work it out.’
‘What I can’t get over,’ he said, ignoring me, ‘is how someone of Dido’s intelligence could be taken in by a pseud like Harker.’ The sneer was back. ‘Even you, Lily, must’ve known he’s a vacuous little prick. But since the camera apparently lurves him, everyone else is falling over themselves to gush what a great talent he is. What an inspiration, what an artist.’
This, I realised, was the real sore point.
‘Someone needs to expose him for what he is.’
Two weeks passed. I sent in my writing-course applications, got my hair done and went to a couple of castings, one of which seemed to go well. In the meantime, Pa fixed me up with his former agent, who’s in his eighties and retired but needed someone to type up his memoirs. Nina was probably right to jeer at my cosseted lifestyle, but the residual cheques were getting smaller and my Southeast Asian adventures had made a hefty dent in my savings.
I swore off news sites and social media after finding myself on the Daily Mail online. There was a deeply unflattering picture of me trudging along in my gym kit with a bag of groceries. (‘From Morrisons, of all places!’ wailed the Momager.) ‘Lily Looks Downcast as Adam Says He’s “Never Been Happier”’, opined the Sidebar of Shame.
The next day, I came home from work to find Talia waiting for me on the doorstep.
As soon as she saw me she burst into tears.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she eventually choked out. ‘Do you hate me? Please don’t hate me. I totally would if I were you.’
My first thought was that she’d come over because things had already come unstuck with Adam. But no, everything there was still peachy – except for the guilt. Talia couldn’t sleep, she said, for worrying about me and what I was thinking. God, she was the worst –
To shut her up, more than anything, I invited her in.
Once in the flat, she perched on the sofa and covered her face with her hands. ‘I don’t expect you to forgive me,’ she sniffled. ‘All I want is for you to understand.’
I folded my arms across my chest. ‘Fine. Explain it to me, then.’
She took a wavering breath and launched into a stream-of-consciousness account of running into Adam at Annabel’s, shortly after our break-up. How she’d confronted him for being a loser and a dirt-bag for letting me go, and how he’d laughed at her, and that made her really mad, so she hit him, actually hit him, and everyone saw, and she thought he’d be crazy angry but instead they went into a corner and talked, about everything, for hours, and then met up and talked again. At first, she thought this was because Adam wanted to come to terms with breaking up with me, and maybe even think about winning me back, but it ended up being a completely different kind of conversation, well, more of an unburdening, for both of them, a heart-to-heart the likes of which Talia hadn’t had with anyone before. And Adam explained the truth about his relationship with me and how he’d always be so thankful for it, even though he’d come to feel the two of us weren’t the right fit, which made him really sad. Heartbroken, in fact. Talia didn’t know what to think at first but mostly she was just so moved, so honoured, he’d shared his secret with her. (Many of her closest BFFs were out-and-proud LGBTQIA, of course, but she totally understood that, as an aspiring Leading Man, Adam was up against the heteronormative industrial complex.) And then they met up a couple more times, as friends, but now there was this new and beautiful feeling of trust between them – so when Adam suggested that maybe she might like to go on a few dates with him, it seemed natural to say yes.
‘Obviously, if the two of you had been genuinely, you know, in love I would never have gone anywhere near him. But I figured … well, you were away travelling … nobody even knew when you’d be back … maybe you’d be pleased Adam was with me rather than some, you know, random model or actress type? But then you came home, and the tabloids were saying all these mean things about you. And Nina said the two of you weren’t talking any more, though she wouldn’t tell me why. And I realised I’d been kidding myself the whole time because, actually, I’d gone behind your back, and that was a totally disloyal thing to do, and it made me a shitty friend. Because however much I like Adam and want to help him – and I really do – he’s still not worth sacrificing our friendship for. So I’m here to say I’ll end it, right this minute, if you want me to. Just don’t hate me. Say you don’t hate me. Please?’
It was all very exhausting. Talia looked so ridiculous, with her nose red and her cheeks wet and her eyelash extensions half falling off because she kept scrubbing her eyes … Adam wasn’t my ex-boyfriend; he was my ex-business-associate. And at least I’d signed our contract with my eyes open. Talia was clueless, otherwise she’d know Adam was only with her for her trust fund. His tastes, not to mention predilections, had got hella more expensive during the time we’d dated, and until the movie megabucks came in, he was no doubt in the market for a sugar mama. Like the trolls said.
Plus, I was consumed with curiosity. How was Adam treating his new boo? How was he treating himself?
So I fetched a bottle of wine and a couple of glasses and sat down next to Talia and told her that, actually, it was fine; I’d just needed to get over the shock. ‘It’s kind of a relief to know that you know. There’s nobody else I can really talk to about Adam because of the NDA.’
‘You didn’t even tell Nina?’ Talia blew her nose, trumpeting, and reached gratefully for the wine.
‘No. It can be lonely, keeping someone else’s secret. Living a lie with all your family and friends.’
Talia looked sad again. ‘My parents love Adam. They keep saying how much better he is than my other boyfriends. They’d be so disappointed if they knew the truth.’
No wonder. Talia’s exes include a fifty-year-old nightclub owner and an ex-con covered in gang tattoos.
‘I suppose nobody knows the truth of anybody else’s relationship behind closed doors.’
‘Right? Why shouldn’t my relationship with Adam be “real”, just because we’re not sleeping together? I mean, loads of married people don’t have sex. Are they all fakes, too?’
I topped up both our glasses. ‘How is Adam … behind closed doors?’
