rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">Friday, 8 February
20 March—my birthday (sshhhhhhhhh...)
Inside the mind of Tracie Martin
1.15 p.m.
It’s quarter past one on a pleasant midsummer’s day and I’m about to have a fight with a spotty teenager in a bashed-up Ford Fiesta. Quite how I get myself into these positions so frequently is an entire mystery to me.
I’m sitting in my gleaming, mud-free, furiously expensive Land Rover (exactly the same model as Victoria Beckham’s…yeeeessss…took me ages to find it and it cost me more than a row of houses in most towns would, but it was worth every second and every penny). The Pussycat Dolls are blaring out, and the sun is shining down, bouncing off the windscreen and causing the sort of glare that makes every manoeuvre exciting for me and utterly hazardous for everyone else on the road. In short—I can’t see a bloody thing! My leopard-skin headrests already prevent any use of the rear window, and now there’s little point in looking through the front one either.
‘Doncha!’ I shout, clicking my fingers and tapping my feet. ‘Whoops!’ The pedals! The car lurches forward until it stalls terrifyingly close to an expensive-looking black and orange motorbike. The huge silver bumper on the side of my car is about an inch from its flame-painted engine.
It is at this point that I notice the ancient Fiesta directly in front of me, belching smoke and revving noisily. There’s a spotty teenager driving it and he clearly wants me to reverse out of his way. Reverse? Me? That’s so not going to happen!
‘It’s a one-way street,’ shouts the boy, like I don’t realise, and just for absolute clarity: ‘You’re going the wrong way down it.’
I smile alluringly, shrug innocently and pout seductively, but I don’t move. I can’t move. I can barely drive this thing forwards without crashing, let alone try to manoeuvre it backwards. Well, not without taking out all the bikes parked down the side of the road in the process, and if I did that I’d be even later for lunch than I’d planned to be.
We’re staring at each other over our respective steering wheels (mine has a fleecy candyfloss-pink cover on it). I remove my sunglasses and smile at him, batting my luxuriously curled eyelashes; hoping to appear tempting yet vulnerable, and thus prompt him into action of a chivalrous nature. He’s clearly not impressed. In fact, he’s sneering and snarling like an angry bull-mastiff as he growls and grimaces. He’s not dribbling—yet—but a chin full of spittle is all that’s separating him from the animal kingdom. I put my sunglasses back on. I’m sure they cost more than his car. I don’t mean that in a bitchy way—I mean I genuinely think my glasses cost more than his car. They’re VBD—from Posh’s new range—and quality does not come cheap.
‘Move your fucking car,’ he mouths, his eyes narrowing and fists clenching in an alarmingly aggressive and not entirely gentlemanly fashion. I’d make a fist back, but my nail extensions don’t allow for much movement at all in the finger department, so I just stare and smile, and leave the barbaric gestures to him. Neither of us is going to move. We might be here for the rest of our lives.
I would be more bothered by his aggression and male posturing if I weren’t completely distracted by the sign at the end of the road, saying ‘Capaliginni Piazza’, venue for today’s pre-season lunch—THE pre-season lunch, where you get to meet all the new girlfriends, see who’s been dumped, put on weight, or had a nip ‘n’ tuck.
It’s all women at today’s lunch. ALL WOMEN. If you don’t realise the implications of this then I should explain. An all-female lunch means but one thing to me and my fellow Wags—clothes! Not clothes to look pretty in, but clothes to compete in. There will be women at today’s lunch who will be more dressed up than they were on their wedding day. Those who aren’t will be outcasts—not spoken to and not invited anywhere for the rest of the season. If this sounds cruel then I’m sorry, but it’s how things work in my world. One of the fundamental rules of being a Wag is the realisation that you’re not dressing up for men—you’re dressing up for other women. If this were all about looking good for a man would we need to have the very latest handbag? Or the precise shade of nail varnish that has sold out everywhere? Be honest, the average footballer wouldn’t notice if you had fingernails at all, let alone whether they were coated in rouge noir or salmon pink. No, this is about becoming the Alpha Female—it’s a very knowing attempt at one-upwagship, and it kicks off today at the pre-season lunch.
I’m all dressed up for the occasion, naturally, wearing a pink furry jacket with a sweet little hood and featuring pink and white pom-poms, like large marshmallows, that dangle prettily over my recently inflated breasts. It’s cropped, so you can see my new tummy ring—it’s in the shape of a ‘D’ with two little diamonds on it. My husband Dean bought it for me. Ahhh…
I’m wearing about £6,000 worth of clothes today, which may sound like a lot, but it is really expensive trying to look this cheap. So, while the jacket may appear as if I found it in Primark for a tenner, it actually cost £700—that’s how good it looks! In case there’s any doubt—an item of clothing’s merits should always be judged on price above all else. If you try on a £50 top and it looks great, then you see a £500 top that looks terrible, go for the £500 one every time.
