a.m.
Mum and Dean must have such sore necks. They haven’t stopped shaking their heads for almost twenty-four hours now. Mum’s the worst, though. ‘Bacon?’ she says. ‘Why did you even have a packet of bacon on you?’ So I go through the whole sorry tale again.
‘Faux Fur?’ she replies. ‘I don’t understand why you would have been in a shop called Faux Fur.’
So I tell her that bit again too. It’s like being interviewed by Jeremy Paxman. I feel like I’ve run through the whole sorry saga more times than is of any use to anyone. Now we’re awaiting the arrival of Magick PR—specialist celebrity PR agency to the stars—and I know I’ll have to go through the whole thing again…and again…Bringing in a PR firm was Nell’s idea (I ended up calling her last night when I tired of watching the nodding dogs failing to come up with any ideas of remote value or help to anyone).
It was such a relief to talk to Nell because, unlike anyone else I’d spoken to that day, she found the whole thing funny. Funny! Imagine how refreshing that was, after all the ‘Why does everything have to end up in such a total fiasco with you?’ comments. Take this as an example: Mum said, ‘You are shameful. You have embarrassed your man. There are times when I dislike you intensely.’
I know she doesn’t really mean it quite as nastily as it sounds. She’s always saying things like that—like she used to when I was little. All this ‘children should be seen and not heard’ has now become ‘a footballer’s wife should be seen and not heard’.
Nell, though, just collapsed into laughter when I’d finished telling her. ‘I love you, you great banana. That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. Tell me about the bit with the dog and the bacon again.’
I told Nell everything about ten times, and it never once felt like she was judging me.
‘Look, sweetheart,’ she said. ‘Just don’t worry about it. Things like that happen all the time.’
Perhaps they do in Sunnyside Sheltered Accommodation, but they certainly don’t in most people’s worlds.
‘You should have seen us in the war…’ continues Nell. ‘We used to have such a laugh. Did I tell you about the time we bricked up the air-raid shelter and five families nearly died?’
If you have a grandmother like Dean’s, you’ll know that any mention of the war, air-raid shelters or having a laugh is the beginning of a very heavily romanticised trip down Memory Lane that goes on for about three days. It’s a trip that involves Nell laughing in a high-pitched and quite hysterical fashion at some frankly very unamusing things like near-death experiences and the day that old Mr Simpson was bombed as he sat on the loo in the shed at the bottom of the garden on Christmas morning.
‘You know what you should do, don’t you?’ asks Nell, pulling herself back into the same century as the rest of us with unaccustomed speed.’Ring one of those glossy magazines and tell your side of the story to them. Get some good publicity for you and Dean and everything will be fine, don’t you worry.’
So that’s exactly what we did.
There’s the distinctive sound of the bell (it plays the theme tune from Match of the Day) and the equally distinctive sound of footsteps padding down the hall to answer the door. ‘Cccchello,’ says Alba. ‘Ccccchhow can I ’elp you?’
When Alba first came to work with us, with her beautiful Spanish accent, we spent all the time trying to get her to say words beginning with ‘h’ because her pronunciation of them was out of this world. That deep guttural ccccc sound that preceded every ‘h’ was great.
‘Can you do that?’ I’d say, pointing at the hoover.
‘Cccccchoover?’ Alba would reply, and Pask and I would roar with laughter. Mum thought it was all very juvenile, and that I was setting a bad example, but we did it in a nice way, we weren’t being nasty.
While Alba leads the guys from Magick PR into the house, Mum doesn’t move at all—in fact she’s still too busy shaking her head and muttering some sort of Buddhist chant. If she’s not careful there’s every chance that her head will come off altogether.
‘I really don’t think you should be doing this,’ she says, once she’s returned from her brief meditation to rejoin the world the rest of us are living in. ‘You should remain silent and dignified and just keep yourself out of the papers. You certainly should not be doing something that is going to get more publicity than ever—it’s absurd, utterly absurd.’
When the PR people walk into the room, though, Mum is straight to her feet and introducing herself to everyone. She’s air-kissing and explaining that she used to be a public relations executive in Los Angeles. Even Dean manages to look baffled by this sudden announcement. Up until this point he’s been like a little puppy dog next to her, nodding along with her and grinning inanely at her every suggestion. He’s always been like that around Mum. She does seem to have this peculiar hold over him. Indeed, she has a peculiar hold over all men. Dean says he just makes an effort with her because he knows how important she is to me, but it’s more than that, I’m sure of it. Not in a bad way—just that she has this kind of allure, this lustre, that men find irresistible. Perhaps it’s the macrobiotic diet that she’s always bleating on about, or the eighty-six supplements that she seems to take every day, but men are drawn to her like moths to a flame in some subconscious, deeply primitive fashion. They seem to want to be liked by her.
‘Were you really in PR?’ he asks, and Mum smiles in an unnecessarily flirty way and says yes she was, adding that there is much about Mum that Dean does not yet know. To his credit, at this point he does look rather scared.
11.04 a.m.
In they come, and all my worst fears are confirmed in an instant. ‘Dahhhling, how are you?’ they ask in their absurdly plummy voices. I smile and say ‘Hey, these things happen’, as if swinging Geri Halliwell’s dog around attached to a packet of bacon in a fake fur shop is something that happens daily—to everyone.
‘Now,’ says the man in the group, though ‘man’ is a very generous description of him. He weighs about the same as I do and has thinner thighs. Not good. ‘Let me introduce everyone.’ With a dramatic flourish, he says: ‘This is Arabella, this is Philonella and this is Marinella.’ Presumably, Salmonella was off sick. ‘We’re Magick!’ he announces, and the girls all giggle like helpless schoolgirls.
The level of my dislike for them has risen to quite staggering heights, considering that a) I’ve never met them before, and b) they’ve done absolutely nothing wrong. The thing is, they’re young, they’re pretty and they’re sensibly dressed. They all have flat shoes on—in my house! One of them is wearing a string of pearls. Can you imagine? The only pearls I own are attached to a rather sexy little g-string, and there was this one time when Dean licked every pearl before…no, sorry, I shouldn’t really go into that here. Anyway, the girl with the pearl—Arabella or Rubella or something—well, she does not look like the sort of woman who runs about town dressed in a sexy thong, and perhaps that’s why I dislike her. Or it could be the combination of the gratingly upper-class voice and the fact that she’s young. Bitch.
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