style="font-size:15px;"> I’ve always liked Stella, who’s an old friend of Cass’s from stage-school days (before sensibly deciding to opt out of show business and start up her own mobile-beautician business instead) but I like her now more than ever.
‘Thank you!’ I beam at her.
‘Are you nuts, Stell?’ Cass, still fiddling with her shower hat (and yes, she does indeed have her phone in the other hand, and her iPad, plus a copy of OK!, open on the bed in front of her). ‘She burnt half of it off yesterday.’
‘Burnt it?’ Stella – and Mum, coming up the stairs behind me – ask, in unison.
‘Muuu-uuuum!’ Cass rolls her eyes. ‘I told you that already!’
‘You did no such thing!’ Mum says.
‘Oh. Well, I meant to. Libby burnt half her hair off yesterday and got fired. Hi, Lib,’ she adds, ‘can you go straight out to Starbucks and get me a … oh!’ She’s glanced up at me for the first time. She frowns. Then she scowls. ‘Your hair! You look … you look like …’
‘She looks just like Audrey Hepburn!’ Stella declares.
There’s no time for me to be thrilled by the comparison, because Mum is staring at me with her arms folded and her mouth pinched.
‘Fired, Libby?’ she says.
‘Yes, but it wasn’t my fault. Well, not completely. I had this little accident with a lit cigarette …’
‘And when were you going to mention it to me? Your mother. Your agent.’
‘It only happened yesterday,’ I say, in my most practised not-a-big-drama voice, so as to bring about a modicum of calm (growing up in a house with Mum and Cass, it’s a tactic I’ve used a lot over the years). ‘Anyway, I didn’t think it was worth bothering you with, when you’ve got so much on. You know, with Gonna Make U a Star, and everything.’
(This is another tactic I’ve used a lot over the years – changing the subject, mostly back to something Mum or Cass really want to talk about: themselves.)
‘She looks nothing like Audrey Hepburn,’ Cass is pouting, staring at me in the mirror, then looking at herself, then back at me again. ‘Maybe I should go short. What do you think, Stella?’
‘After three hundred quid’s worth of hair extensions?’ Stella asks.
‘Well, if Libby looks that good, I’d look amazing.’
‘You are not cutting your hair!’ Mum barks at her. ‘It’s bad enough I have one daughter who looks like a lesbian!’
‘Honestly, Marilyn,’ Stella says, ‘you need to chill. Libby looks great!’
‘Stella, please.’ Mum is icy. ‘Can you just get on with Cass’s tan, please, and leave the serious family matters to us?’
‘Mum, for God’s sake, it isn’t a serious family matter. I mean, it might have been, if the accident with the cigarette had been any worse,’ I add, pointedly, because it occurs to me that Mum hasn’t expressed the slightest concern about this part of it. ‘But really, it’s not a huge deal. In fact, it might even be an opportunity for me to—’
‘Not a huge deal? It was your first speaking part in five years! Do you have any idea how hard it was for me to get you that job?’
‘Oh, come on, Mum, it was only a shitty little one line part.’ Cass is getting off the bed, taking her robe off to display her pertly naked body, and heading for the shower room. ‘Vanessa found another random extra to do it about two minutes after she kicked Libby off the set.’
‘Thank you, Cass,’ I say.
‘You’re welcome,’ she says, completely missing my sarcastic tone.
I’m not so distracted by Mum’s growing histrionics, by the way, that it doesn’t occur to me to think: if Cass knows that my role was filled two minutes after I was thrown off the set, maybe she wasn’t otherwise occupied with Dillon O’Hara after all.
‘After all the work I’ve put into your career!’ Mum is saying, sinking onto the bed in a soap-opera-worthy display of grief. ‘I just don’t know how you could do this to me, Libby.’
This is the point, normally, at which my patience would run thin and I’d fling myself out of Mum’s apartment in a red-faced whirl of silent fury, slamming doors and muttering expletives, making 1) absolutely no headway with my mother, and 2) a bit of a fool of myself into the bargain.
But today is different.
It’s not just because of my new haircut, and the confidence it’s given me.
Actually, do you know what: it’s nothing to do with my new haircut, or the confidence it’s given me.
It’s because of last night, and my all-too-vivid encounter with Imaginary Audrey.
Just because I hallucinated her (and just because I hallucinated her being weird about my Nespresso machine and wrecking my hair with a pair of kitchen scissors; though mind you, the wrecked hair turned out not to be a hallucination after all) it doesn’t mean that her legendary poise and grace and loveliness felt any less poised and graceful and lovely. And though I’ll never have her cheekbones, her waistline, or her ineffable style, I feel like I might just be able to achieve a bit of her poise and grace, if I really make the effort.
So instead of flinging and slamming and muttering, I take a very, very deep breath, and say, in a voice of poised, graceful loveliness (well, not a sweary mutter, anyway), ‘Mum, come on. I haven’t done anything to you. It was all just a silly accident.’
‘Oh, really? Because right now, Liberty, I have to ask myself: how much of an accident could this possibly have been?’
Poised. Graceful. Lovely.
‘Mum. Seriously. Do you really think I’d have set my head alight on purpose?’
‘Well, I’m sure you didn’t do it actually on purpose. But you may have done it unconsciously on purpose.’
Poised. Graceful. Lovely.
‘I mean, I just find it interesting,’ Mum goes on, as if she’s garnered some sort of psychological expertise from a first-class degree at Oxford University, rather than a monthly subscription to Top Santé magazine and a secret addiction to Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle website, ‘that this so-called accident happens the very first time you get a speaking part in years. A speaking part I arranged for you.’
‘Mum …’
‘Or,’ she goes on, ‘it could have been because you subconsciously wanted to sabotage the whole thing before you had a chance to fail.’
‘Oh, for crying out loud!’ I snap, my poise and grace wobbling in the face of Mum’s torrent of psychobabble nonsense.
Unless … well, was I
