At present it’s just a nightmare, but I can imagine myself, in a few years time fleeing from debt collectors (that bit’s extremely plausible) and pulling into the drive of a dilapidated house. A neglected house gets an unhappy look. This one had it in spades.
The garden was full of abandoned and neglected toys, a rusty quad bike and a Jacuzzi sprouting weeds. It looked like the adults had moved out years ago, and the kids had run riot for a while before moving on too.
“Madam is expecting you. The departed is at the foot of the stripper’s pole.” The guy had the bloated face of someone who breakfasts on neat vodka, three days of stubble on chin and head, and was squeezed into a threadbare monkey suit two sizes too small. “We mustn’t keep Madam waiting.”
“Show the gentleman in, Jordan Mybrothernotthevileone.”
The room he showed me into looked like a museum of tat and smelled like Battersea Dogs’ Home in a heat wave. One look at the lady of the house was enough to prove she was madder than a sack of ferrets and about as friendly. Her hair was a mess of nylon as tangled as Tony Blair’s psyche, she was wearing a dress which belonged to a streetwalker half her size, her skin seemed to have been dyed Day Glo orange, and her lipstick was crawling up her nostrils, under a nose which looked like a ski jump in profile… I remembered!
“Aren’t you Jodie Marsh? Used to be big in tit mags?”
“My tits still are big. It’s the mags which got small.” She gestured, “And now, aren’t you going to attend to Kenzie?”
After a frantic scan of the room I noticed a wooden box just about big enough for a pair of shoes, lined with pink satin. In it lay a very dead chihuahua. “I loved him so much. I’ve had his name tattooed on my thigh, here…” She lifted her skirt to reveal a thigh which looked like a puffy version of the Orange Pages, a cornucopia of animal ‘in memoriam’ notes, plus ‘Heartbreaker,’ because, she said, “that’s what I am.”
She may not have used a needle and ink, but “Mad Bitch” was written all over her face just as clearly as if she had.
When I explained I wasn’t a pet mortician but a writer she wanted to show me something she’d written. As long as it wasn’t on her flesh anything was an improvement.
“It’s a fiction novel. It’ll make me the English Jackie Collins…”
Sometimes it's interesting to see just how bad bad writing can be. This promised to go the limit. It was, unsurprisingly, the story of a beautiful, brilliant, charming, generous young girl with a slightly bent nose, whose life was made a misery by vile, hideous bullies until she has a nose job and starts dressing and acting like a slapper. That sets her on the path to international celebrity, wealth, fame, being irresistible to men, a ceaseless worker for charity, but nasty, vile, hideous people who are jealous of her say nasty things about her for no reason until, eventually she withdraws from celebrity, along with her brother, who forsakes his glittering musical career when he is on the brink of becoming an international superstar to be with his sister.
“It needs a little trimming?”
This writer stops at the bedroom door, so you don’t get to hear about the evenings when Jordan Mybrothernotthevileone entertained with his organ, or the visits from the waxworks, Kyle her Sozzled Mate, Rusted, Soiled Pants, and Bag Lady Lauren (“Can you believe it, they said she couldn’t work as a teacher unless she went to Rehab! And she hardly drinks!”) You don’t have to smell the bed: dogs, urine, doggy and human, make up, vodka-soaked sweat. Who could stand the stench of that bed?
You don’t have to listen in to the drunken tantrums, tears and suicide threats. “Don’t leave me like all the others!”
Cut to her at the dressing table, sticking a postage stamp to each nipple and painting yet another layer of slap over the caked on layers.
“I’m ready for my close up now.”
