‘Last night I tried everything. Champagne, oysters, an essential oil massage, new underwear, aromatherapy candles . . .’
‘And?’
‘It was the most expensive non-event of my whole life.’ Angrily she shoved both halves of the Oreo into her mouth and chewed determinedly. Her diet of lust and raging hormones was definitely over. ‘We did all the usual foreplay stuff. I mean, I must have spent about twenty minutes with his dick in my mouth. But then, when it came to the crunch, nothing happened. Zilch. Fuck all.’
‘You mean you didn’t sleep together?’
‘Sleep’s about the only bloody thing we did do.’
‘But I thought . . .’
‘So did I,’ muttered Rita miserably. ‘How wrong can you be?’
‘Maybe he’d had a bit too much to drink?’ Frankie was trying to think of helpful suggestions.
‘Brewer’s droop?’ Rita huffed bitterly at the idea. ‘You must be joking. The bastard waved it around like Luke Skywalker with his light sabre.’ She finished picking at her fingernails and turned her attention to her toenails. ‘That’s why I couldn’t believe it when he said he didn’t want to. Talk about dangling the carrot.’
Frankie was feeling confused. She’d had about two hours’ sleep and now Rita was making Star Wars-slash-vegetable analogies.
‘Maybe he’s got a problem.’
‘I’m the one with the problem,’ sulked Rita miserably. ‘I’m the one with a boyfriend who refuses to have sex.’
‘Maybe he has a low sex drive.’ Frankie was getting desperate.
‘You mean frigid?’
‘Well, he could be.’
‘Are you telling me I’ve managed to find the only straight guy in LA without a sex drive?’ Rita shook her head in disbelief. ‘That would be just my luck, wouldn’t it? I finally manage to find a good-looking bloke in LA who isn’t either gay or married, in a twelve-step programme or a scientologist and bingo, he’s bloody frigid.’
Frankie looked sympathetic. ‘It’s like that episode of Sex and the City. You know the one, where Sarah Jessica Parker met that good-looking bloke and it was perfect on paper . . .’
‘. . . bad in bed,’ finished Rita gloomily. ‘I saw it.’ Lighting a cigarette, she stared at the glowing tip. ‘Maybe it’s not that at all. Maybe he just doesn’t fancy me.’ She took a deep drag. ‘It’s not exactly beyond the realms of possibility, is it?’ She looked down at herself in her terry-towelling bathrobe. She was still wearing her Trashy Lingerie knicker and bra set. A painful reminder of what might have been. ‘Maybe I just don’t turn him on.’ Picking up her compact mirror, which lay among the make-up strewn across the coffee table, she opened it and peered at her reflection. ‘And who would blame him? I look terrible. Look at me.’ She grabbed the skin on her face as if she was kneading dough.
‘Rubbish. You look fine,’ insisted Frankie.
Rita huffed. ‘It’s all right for you to say, you’ve got cheekbones.’
‘So have you.’
‘No, I haven’t. Cheekbones are like coat hangers for the face . . .’ She prodded her face with her finger. ‘And you know what happens when you don’t hang up your clothes – they get all creased and crumpled.’ She looked in the mirror. ‘Like me.’
Rita’s tragic soliloquy was interrupted by the sound of screeching tyres outside. Looking out of the window, Frankie saw one of Dorian’s cars reverse out of his drive and take off at sixty miles an hour towards Laurel Canyon.
‘Was that Dorian?’ She hadn’t been able to see the driver through the BMW’s tinted windows.
Rita nodded. ‘Yep. He got home a couple of hours ago, while you were still out. Apparently they didn’t charge him. No evidence.’ Deciding that cigarettes and Oreos didn’t go together, she stubbed out her American Spirit. ‘Which isn’t surprising. I mean, Dorian’s the last person to be involved with drugs.’
Frankie didn’t say anything. She felt an attack of guilt. After everything that had happened between her and Reilly, she’d completely forgotten about Dorian’s arrest. ‘How is he?’
‘Sore.’ Rita pulled a face. ‘Apparently they didn’t hold back during the strip search.’
Frankie winced.
‘When I saw him this morning he looked awful. The poor bloke’s had all the stuffing knocked out of him. He could hardly speak. I made him a cup of liquorice tea with brandy in it and he could barely hold the cup his hand was trembling so much.’ Snapping the mirror shut, she looked at Frankie, and for the first time suddenly noticed she was still wearing clothes from the night before. Plunged into her pit of depression, she hadn’t been able to see anything else but her own disastrous situation. ‘Where’ve you been?’ Her forehead creased as her eyes narrowed.
Frankie smiled sheepishly, delightedly, barely able to contain her excitement. Her voice was practically a whisper. ‘Reilly’s.’
Rita gasped. Even in her state of angst, she couldn’t miss the glint in Frankie’s eye. ‘Bloody hell, you didn’t?’ She couldn’t believe it. Surely not. Not devoted-to-Hugh Frankie, there’ll-never-be-anyone-but-Hugh Frankie, I-can’t-even-look-at-another-man-if-it’s-not-Hugh Frankie.
Frankie nodded.
Dumbfounded, Rita fell back against the sofa, her mouth hanging open. ‘Fuck.’
‘Yep,’ grinned Frankie. ‘Three times.’
33
For the next few days, the grin never left Frankie’s face. Any initial doubts she may have had about sleeping with Reilly evaporated with his first phone call. Not a cool couple of days later, but just a few hours after he’d left her asleep in his bed. A scratchy, echoing line all the way from baggage reclaim at Cancun Airport in Mexico, and his low, lazy voice telling her what a great time he’d had last night and how he couldn’t wait to get back to LA to ‘take up where we left off’.
Pressing the receiver tightly against the side of her face, her lips touching the mouthpiece, she’d drank in his words. She knew when she repeated them back to Rita they’d probably sound silly, even a bit sleazy, but they hadn’t been spoken in a blokish nudge-nudge, wink-wink kind of way. If anything, he’d sounded nervous, unsure, hesitant. As if he couldn’t quite believe what had happened between them.
He wasn’t the only one.
‘Well, I think it’s great,’ declared Rita as they trudged around Firs for the Stars, a Christmas tree plot in Beverly Hills, trying to find the perfect Norwegian spruce for their apartment. ‘A fling is just what you need. Especially at this time of year. Just think about all that smooching under the mistletoe.’ Grabbing a clump from a display basket, she stood on tiptoes, teetering on her cork platforms as she tried to waggle it above Frankie’s head.
Laughing, Frankie pushed her away, but she couldn’t help thinking twice about Rita’s choice of words. A fling. Is that all it was going to be? A few whirlwind weeks of being drunk and flirty in Italian restaurants, with melted candles in wine bottles on the table and his hand groping her thigh underneath, snogging on dance floors and having more sex than she knew what to do with?
After a week of long-distance phone calls from the far-flung beaches of? Tulum and the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itzá – brief snatches of conversation across crackly lines from Mexican coin-boxes – Frankie couldn’t help feeling that underneath their casual chitchat there lay unspoken feelings. That it was going to be more than an affair that just fizzled out as quickly as it ignited, with a thanks-see-you-around-sometime farewell. A bit of fun that would leave her with nothing but hazy drunken memories of nights out, a massive credit card bill, and if she was unlucky or lucky, depending which way she looked at it, a bout of cystitis from all that energetic shagging.
This felt different.
Absent-mindedly running her fingers over the spiky needles of a tree, she turned to Rita. ‘I think this one’s perfect.’
‘Do you?’ Pouncing on the branches, Rita shook the fir tree vigorously, holding it away from her to get a better look. ‘Yep, you’re right. I think it’s perfect too.’
Grinning jubilantly at her discovery, she tottered off in search of the good-looking dude in charge, fluffing up her hair and undoing her top button in preparation.
Frankie watched her weaving her way between dark glasses and baseball-capped celebrities and inflatable Santas and smiled to herself. She hadn’t been talking about the Christmas tree.
Over the past week Frankie had accepted that she was no longer just Hugh’s ex but Reilly’s lover. Reilly’s lover. It sounded illicit and exciting, a damn sight more exciting than Hugh’s ex. But it was also going to take more than a little getting used to. Even now, a whole seven days later, she still couldn’t quite believe it. For the first few days after Reilly had left for Mexico, she’d been nagged by pangs of guilt. As if somehow she was cheating on Hugh. She knew hers was a crazy, warped sense of loyalty, but it wasn’t easy to break the habit of what she’d once hoped would be for a lifetime. Only two months ago she’d been hearing wedding bells, day-dreaming about Tiffany’s diamond solitaires, practising her signature as Mrs Hugh Hamilton, and now, out of the blue, this had happened. Without any warning she’d fallen for a beer-swilling, meat-eating, untidy, arrogant . . . bloody gorgeous American she couldn’t stop thinking about.
Except as the days had passed, the more she’d thought about it, the more she’d had to admit that what had happened between her and Reilly wasn’t a surprise at all. The signs had been there for weeks, she’d just failed to see them. It was as if she’d been staring at one of those pictures made up of a thousand tiny meaningless dots, and suddenly she was able to make sense of it and see the real picture underneath. She’d been so immersed in Hugh, so wrapped up in Hugh and what she didn’t have, that she’d been unable to see what she did have. What she could have if she reached out and grabbed it with both hands. And now she had, she was going to enjoy it. Whatever happened.
‘Crikey, it’s massive. Do you think you’re going to be able to squeeze it in?’
Rita stared not so innocently at the assistant, a gum-chewing, six-footer called Michael, who was wearing Ray-Bans and a baseball cap on back to front. He was trying to fit the Christmas tree on the back seat of the Thunderbird, which was already crammed with multicoloured tinsel, several boxes of baubles and six cans of fake snow. Rita didn’t like the designer festive look – a minimalist display of silver twigs and a few tastefully arranged tealights – she preferred flashing rainbow fairy lights, canned snow sprayed around the windows (complete with stencils of holly and snowmen) and Christmas cards strung like banners across the ceiling.
Wiping a trickle of sweat from his forehead with one of his suede gardening gloves, Michael smiled knowingly at both Rita and Frankie. ‘I’ve never had a problem before.’ His delivery was as slick as his gelled ponytail, which hung like a black shiny slug out of the back of his baseball cap.
Frankie kept a stony face. What a creep. Surely he didn’t think he was being sexy?
Rita obviously did. Giggling provocatively, she leaned over the bonnet of the car, squeezing her boobs together to make sure that if Michael hadn’t noticed her cleavage before, he sure as hell would now. She knew she was being an outrageous flirt, but she didn’t care. Playing imaginary footsie with the twenty-year-old assistant at the Christmas tree plot was the only kind of sexual kicks she was going to be getting.
Despite the disappointing night of Carter Mansfield’s party, she and Matt were still seeing each other, but she was beginning to have serious doubts about how long she could last with a surfer who liked riding the waves and not redheads from Lancashire. It had been a month and they still hadn’t had sex, and it was becoming more and more frustrating. She’d heard of taking things slowly, but this was crazy. If she didn’t get a shag soon her hymen would have grown back and she’d turn into a born-again virgin.
Not that it wasn’t for want of trying. After the embarrassing failure of the Trashy Lingerie and massage oil, she’d taken Frankie’s advice, which had been to sit down and talk calmly about what was causing his celibacy. Unfortunately, Rita’s interpretation of ‘sitting down and talking calmly’ had been to stand in the middle of the bedroom clutching the cellulite on her buttocks and yelling, ‘It’s because of this, isn’t it?’ Not surprisingly, this softly-softly approach didn’t provide any answers. She still didn’t know why Matt didn’t want to have sex. In fact, the only thing she did know was that she wasn’t getting it. And it was getting to her. Big time.
‘Be careful you don’t prick yourself on all those needles. They can be pretty sharp.’ Michael finished tying the tree across the back seat. It was the only way it would fit, despite his earlier testosterone-charged boasts.
‘Don’t worry, I could do with a decent prick.’ Rita winked at Frankie, who was trying not to cringe.
She felt relieved when their verbal shagging was interrupted by the strains of ‘Mission: Impossible’ coming from Rita’s leopard-skin handbag. It was Rita’s new mobile phone. She’d bought it only last week on the advice of her agent, who said she needed to be able to contact her at any time. Unfortunately, for some reason her number kept getting mixed up with that of a twenty-four-hour Thai takeaway on Ventura Boulevard, and instead of being flooded with offers of auditions and film roles, she was being inundated night and day with orders for sweet and sour pork, Pad Thai noodles and boiled rice.
‘If it’s another bloody order for green chicken curry I’m going to tell them to sod off,’ she hissed, scrabbling around in the bottom of her bag. She pulled the phone out just as it was about to ring off.
‘Yes?’ she snapped, ready to launch into a tirade of verbal abuse. Except she didn’t. Wrinkling her forehead, she pressed the phone to her ear. It was difficult to hear, what with Michael Bolton’s unplugged version of ‘Jingle Bells’ being piped out of the overhead speakers.
‘Yeah, speaking . . .’ There was a pause.
Frankie watched Rita’s face drain of colour.
‘Oh . . . OK . . . yeah . . . I mean, of course . . . Yeah . . . OK . . . bye.’ She stared blankly at the phone in her hand as if she’d never seen a Nokia before.
‘Well?’ Frankie was worried something was up. She’d never seen Rita so pale. ‘What’s happened?’
For the first time ever, Rita had been rendered speechless. She seemed to be in a daze, a state of shock.
‘Rita, for Christ’s sake will you tell me what’s going on?’
With a shaking hand, Rita pulled out her packet of cigarettes and lit one. She took a deep drag as the colour came flooding back into her face and her shock gave way to excitement. And a smile plastered itself across her face, so she looked like one of those lottery winners you see in the papers clutching a cardboard cheque. Blowing out a cloud of smoke, she bit her lip and spoke slowly, deliberately, as if she was having trouble getting her mind around the words she was speaking. ‘I got it . . .’ She paused, blowing two chimneys of smoke down her nostrils. ‘I got the part in Malibu Motel. Of Tracy Potter, the receptionist . . .’ Her voice broke off as the reality of what she was saying sank in. Gripping Frankie, she stared at her. ‘Can you fucking believe it? I got the fucking part . . .’
The incognito celebrity customers at Firs for the Stars stopped loading up their sports utility vehicles with Trafalgar Square-size Norwegian spruces and turned to see where all the shrieking was coming from. Trying to crease their botoxed foreheads, they stared through their designer sunglasses at a pint-size redhead in a leopard-skin top and a miniskirt, whooping with joy and jigging up and down in crazed exhilaration. Grabbing her friend, she’d wrapped strands of tinsel around herself and the sales assistant like silver feather boas and was squirting fake snow into the air, so that it fluttered down over them as if they were plastic figures in one of those snow shakers.
Rita knew everybody was staring, and she didn’t care. She was going to be on the receiving end of a lot more attention in the future, so she might as well start getting used to it. She was going to be famous. It was hard to believe, but she’d finally done it.
> Rita Duffin was set to become a star. A Hollywood fucking soap star.
34
‘Happy Christmas, darlings.’ Waving a branch of mistletoe and wearing a butcher’s pinny over the top of a snake-skin-print suit, Dorian greeted Rita and Frankie at the door and kissed them both hungrily. ‘Looking totally fabulous as ever.’ He grinned, licking his lips and wrapping his arms snugly around their waists. Ushering them over the threshold and on to his balcony, which he’d decorated with fairy lights and a deluxe, top-of-the-range gold tinsel tree from Barneys, he picked up a cut-glass decanter that was glinting in the sun. ‘Fancy a sherry?’
It was Christmas Day and they’d gone next door to spend it with Dorian, who, after his drugs scare, had turned his Versace back on his sex-drugs-and-party lifestyle. Not that he wasn’t still dealing, but instead of illegal substances, he was now making his fortune trading stocks and shares on the Internet. As well as his new career, he’d also begun some kind of health kick. Instead of lying in bed all day with a hangover and a fully paid-up member of the LA ChildWoman species, he was now up at six a.m., jogging around the Hollywood reservoir with Elvis on a retractable lead, and after working at his laptop all day he spent his evenings cooking low-fat smoked salmon risotto for one, watching films on his state-of-the-art DVD player and going to bed early.
‘I thought you might be missing home and so I made a special trip to the English store in Santa Monica. The old dear that runs the place told me to buy a Harrods Christmas pudding, some of that Bird’s custard, Paxo stuffing and a couple of bottles of Bristol Cream.’ Looking delighted with himself, Dorian took a swig from a glass and pulled a face. ‘Jesus Christ, how can you drink this stuff?’ Coughing, he tipped it into one of his many now-empty plant pots and reached for a bottle of Sky vodka. ‘What about a Bloody Mary instead?’ His new health regime obviously hadn’t vetoed alcohol.