Rich Again

by Anna Maxted

  She hated her father, with a deep, dark, burning anger. She hated him for this, his latest crime, and she hated him for every other: that Claudia was the chosen one; that Claudia, though no blood relative, would inherit his billions, and not a penny to spare for Emily. She blamed her mother; she, Emily, was being punished for Innocence’s sins. Maria had been the beloved geisha wife, and so Claudia, her daughter, was rewarded. And he was a shit grandfather. He was awkward, irritated, ratty around the children. The noise they made annoyed him; he thought they were rude and ill-disciplined. He expected them to act with the decorum of Prince Charles when, really, they were just children. They broke his Ming vase – well, of course they did, it was balanced on a pillar! They’d drawn an alien in purple felt tip on his Van Gogh. The implication also was that she, Emily, was a bad parent. Hello, pot!

  It had all worked out, sort of, but no thanks to him. Jack had really upset her. He had screwed with her life. With no income, she couldn’t afford the rent on the apartment; she couldn’t afford to keep Nanny.

  That was the worst of it – losing Nanny. She hadn’t been half so upset when her mother had gone to prison. The difference was, Nanny had been useful. Nanny had kept Emily from losing control. Nanny had served as a buffer between Emily and the children. Emily was still a child herself – like, she felt about ten – and the serious shit of being a mother scared her to death. She was frightened of George and baby Molly, those intense, powerful little people. As Nanny insisted, she, Emily, was their sun and moon and, truth was, she didn’t feel worthy.

  Nanny had been competent; she understood children. She was the facilitator who stopped war breaking out.

  Now that she was their sole carer, Emily felt terrified for their welfare. Innocence had buggered off somewhere – perhaps Spyglass Island? She hadn’t returned Emily’s calls, which meant that she didn’t want to. In other words, the bank was closed. Emily didn’t even have the option of crashing at her mother’s LA pad, as it was occupied by a Spice Girl. One of them (Emily didn’t care to know which) was ‘working’ out here and Innocence, a big fan of Zigazig Ha, had offered her home as a base until the Spice Girl found somewhere more permanent. Or until, as Emily hoped and prayed, the US authorities declined to renew her visa.

  There was always Claudia. But until Jack snuffed it, Claudia was broke. In fact, she was such a martyr Emily tensed her fingers into claws every time she thought of her sister. Claudia was living a pious life of self-denial now that that total fox Alfie had married that total hound. Basically, she was in a sulk. Only Claudia could write for Vanity Fair and make it seem unglamorous. When she was in the US, she stayed in other hotels, and the rest of the time, she was holed up in the Highgate flat. Apparently there were five flats in this one house, and they had parties. Kill me now. Claudia would have lent Emily cash, but Emily would have rather hitched to Vegas and sold her body on the Strip. But Ethan’s people were helping out.

  Oh my God, Ethan!

  He had pretended to forget her name. That kiss was so hot she’d almost forgotten her own name. Everyone had been agog. All those famous people were totally upstaged. It was one of the most satisfying moments of her life. The host, standing there like a botoxed lemon, had remarked that Emily had certainly got her money’s worth, and Emily had murmured, ‘Not quite.’

  Then she’d taken the call from her father, via Ms Green: a total buzzkill. Dad would have been happy to let her starve on the streets of LA, feeding the baby in Taco Bell. It was just so amazing that Ethan had overheard the call and invited her to stay at his place. With the children. He was so sweet. She totally got why he was such a star. He had this wild charisma, this animal heat that people wanted to be around: it was like an energy source. She was desperate to fuck him. She could hardly walk straight for thinking about it.

  The only trouble was, that creep Mark was always hovering. Lurch. She could tell that Lurch didn’t approve. Well, tough shit, Lurch, I’ve got the fanny. In a way, it was good to have Lurch there as a live chastity belt. With Ethan she had no capacity to play it cool although she knew she should. She should be the one girl who didn’t roll over and beg, but she wanted him so bad. Emily had always been the queen of mean, forgetting to return calls, postponing dates, showing men just how low they ranked in her fabulous life.

  You didn’t do that with Ethan Summers. She got the sense he didn’t play games. This way was better.

  She was full of hope. It was like a fairy tale. She was in distress, he was the conquering hero; he had swept her off her feet. He had rescued her, just as he had rescued Tim in the Paris bomb. She hadn’t mentioned Tim – she doubted that Ethan even knew who Tim was – he’d just acted on impulse to help another human being. Tim was irrelevant. Now, it was all about her and Ethan and nothing would detract from that.

  Her and Ethan.

  Like, there were twenty websites devoted to this guy. The clothes he was wearing, today, and where you could get them. On Reel Clothes, the khaki T-shirt he’d worn in Parajumper was on sale for $850. Today’s headline in People, the most clicked-on image, was ‘hot, shirtless: Ethan on the beach’. The quote of the day, on ET, was Ethan, on the paparazzi: ‘What they’re doing is illegal. Ten of them chase me down the street at sixty m.p.h. They’re not trying to catch me doing a crazy thing. They’re trying to make me do a crazy thing.’

  A short quote given to Variety, about his forthcoming movie, Hero, had been picked meatless and regurgitated in every tabloid nationwide. ‘Yes, I have a hero. My agent’s daughter, Angie, is mentally challenged. She is my role model. She has cheerfully overcome more obstacles – learning to tie a shoelace, spell her name – than I ever will.’

  His home was sick, way beyond anything in Cribs. She was used to this kind of space, where it took three minutes to cross a room. But his house seemed bigger than even her parents’ homes, probably because Innocence was like a magpie – she couldn’t stop filling her properties with tat – and Jack … well, she couldn’t recall; she hadn’t visited any of her father’s homes for a while. Her father wasn’t fun to be around.

  He was depressed after Maria’s death, and he was depressed that his injuries and the coma had aged him. He was still a good-looking guy, for a totally old person; he still had his hair. She hated bald men. They reminded her of clowns.

  Ethan’s main house was cool and white and chic. Each piece of furniture was a work of art; it was like a show home, designed to leave you open-mouthed with envy and awe. She was jealous of what he had – the land, the house, the stuff inside it; but most of all what these things together spelt: security.

  She was jealous because she loved every bit of it: the polished hardwood floors; the whitewashed walls; the art (Blood Head by Marc Quinn – crazy! George loved gore and was transfixed – a translucent cast of the artist’s head filled with his actual frozen blood); the gorgeous contemporary chandeliers (she loved the one that was made from hundreds of black and clear clusters of hand-blown glass baubles, like evil and good bubbling up). She loved, too, his luxury double armchairs of khaki-green nubuck where she could snuggle with Molly and George.

  She loved the framed black-and-white poster of Sick Day with Ethan sexy and rugged, a shotgun slung over his shoulder; she loved the huge sleek kitchen of glass and steel – he never cooked but his chef was amazing; she loved the painting of the angel on his bedroom wall; she loved the wicker mannequin in her room and the little stone gargoyles on the roof; she loved the mirrored chest of drawers – the square bath in black ceramic – the model Dalek in the corridor – his bull’s eye clock – the silver-grey fur throw on her enormous four-poster – and let’s not even talk about the garden and the pool and the pagoda and the gym and the sauna and the steam room and the underground garage. Millions and millions of dollars had been lavished on this house to make it the perfect sanctuary and she wanted to cry with relief.

  Secretly, she wanted to marry him and be rescued for ever, not just for a couple of weeks. Of course she’d told him that sh
e would only stay until she found work. If it had to be PR, she’d probably send a resume to her own mother. Meanwhile, there was now the possibility of earning a quick hundred thousand dollars. Heat – Heat was, like, a thousand times cooler than Hello! – would love to talk about her celebrity friend. But Ethan was private and she didn’t want to betray him – or lose him.

  He’d given her the run of the place and instructed his staff to be at her disposal, but he was working sixteen-hour days on Transmission. She’d barely seen him.

  But he’d said that this weekend, they weren’t shooting, and he would be all hers. ‘All yours,’ he’d said, and she’d felt jittery with excitement. Maybe he’d whisk her off to the Malibu beach house where they would spend a romantic evening. Oh God, but there was a small hitch – two small hitches. Putting the baby to bed could take half the night. Emily could never resist the lure of the Two-Hour Late-Afternoon Nap. However, once the Two-Hour Late-Afternoon Nap was complete, baby Molly considered half the night’s sleep done, and presumed she would be vigorously entertained until midnight. The truth was, minding a baby and a six-year-old was drudgery. Emily was pasty with exhaustion, shocked that Nanny had chosen this for a job. Working on a North Sea oil rig was less strenuous.

  And Ethan’s staff were morons. They were programmed to cater for the needs of a young, single male god. Had Molly been a puppy she would have been fussed over, fought over, her every requirement met, but human babies were unheard of in these parts, viewed as disgusting, unpredictable, unfathomable pests.

  When Emily asked Cook, as Ethan had suggested, to prepare lunch for Baby, Cook had presented a lobster bisque followed by rare steak. Lurch’s assistant had, again on Ethan’s suggestion, purchased a few toys for Baby, one of which was a computer game, the other a tricycle. Emily looked around to see her child of sixteen months balancing unsupported on the tricycle on the granite patio while Lurch’s assistant checked her hair for split ends.

  Doors and windows were left open; the pools and the hot tub were all ungated so as not to spoil the look. Emily was used to issuing orders and being obeyed. It was a nasty feeling not to feel entitled, not to trust. Once, she wouldn’t have noticed or cared – Quintin apart, she had always considered staff to be robots. Now, she was humbled, paranoid, her confidence shaky; the sullen glance, the slight flair of nostrils: no slight was missed. So Emily rose at six thirty to make the children’s breakfast in case Cook saw fit to stir brandy into their porridge, then the chauffeur drove George to school in the black four-by-four, with Emily and Molly in the back, Molly in her regulation child seat. The chauffeur had reacted to the introduction of the child seat (let alone the child) as if it were a goat. Ethan’s staff did her laundry, made their beds, cleaned their rooms, took her to where she needed to go, fed her, shopped for her, provided her with towels for the pool. They obeyed Ethan’s orders with precision. But there was an air of snootiness, an aura of ‘Who are you?’ She didn’t like to let Baby Molly out of her sight. It was a selfless act as she wasn’t even sure that Baby Molly liked her. She suspected that Baby Molly was irritated, being in the hands of an amateur.

  Even if Ethan was ‘all hers’ at the weekend, there might be zero opportunity to be his. George could be distracted with a small bowl of M&M’s and El Cid. But Molly was a tougher call. The Two-Hour Nap was not guaranteed. At the sleeper’s discretion, it could emerge without warning as a Ten-Minute Power Nap.

  Also, Emily needed about a day to become a goddess. Ethan had a fearsome back catalogue of girlfriends: every one had topped the FHM ‘100 Sexiest Women in the World’ list. Right now Emily looked a total hag by Isle of Dogs standards, let alone Sexiest Women in the World standards. What Emily actually required was that both children be removed from the premises for twenty-four hours. She didn’t want this to be a quick bang. She wanted to start a relationship. She wanted to provide George and Molly with stability and a father.

  Suddenly, after six years of remote parenting, Emily was at the coal face and she was flabbergasted. Who could know that having kids would change a person’s fabulous, comfortable privileged life to an out of control mess?

  Well.

  She mustn’t panic. It was going to work out. She just had to figure how.

  MALIBU, THAT WEEKEND

  George

  You could wear shorts in LA. They called trousers pants! He could swim underwater now and fetch hoops from the bottom of the pool, and his teacher would shout, ‘Good job!’ and give him a high-five.

  He liked Ethan’s pool but he didn’t like his house. He got lost a lot and there were too many people. He preferred when it was just him and Molly and Mummy and Nanny in the flat. When they were in Ethan’s house, Mummy was always shouting, ‘Don’t touch that!’

  He liked Ethan though. Ethan was cool. He was a superhero. He was on TV. He was famous. He was on his mobile a lot and everyone had to shush. They’d gone to the zoo that morning, and Ethan had to go in disguise. Ethan had his soldier with him, who used to be in the SAS, but when George asked him ‘Have you killed anyone?’ he ruffled his hair and didn’t answer.

  And people still stared. And some of them came up and said, ‘I loved you in Hit Point,’ and he’d say ‘Thank you’ and his friend Mark would say ‘Thank you,’ and nod, and the SAS guy would nod too, and then the people would go away.

  There was a lot of walking at the zoo, but he liked the tigers. And the most disgusting thing was, the monkey was eating pooh!

  He got to ride on Ethan’s shoulders, and Molly went in the buggy. Mummy looked very beautiful today, like a princess. He liked Molly now. She was a lovely chubby baby and he was her big brother. He was a very kind big brother. He was good with babies. He always noticed if she put something in her mouth. She put everything in her mouth, like a coin, but it was dangerous because she could choke. He wasn’t allowed to pick her up. Mummy said, ‘Children don’t pick up children.’

  Now they were at Ethan’s other house on the beach and that had a pool with a slide. Ethan said that in the mornings you could see the dolphins playing. He liked dolphins but he preferred sharks.

  On the way home from the zoo, Mark had got him a Krabby Patty from Fatburger. Mark was Ethan’s servant, not like a mummy, a real servant. Molly was too little for a Krabby Patty, so Mummy had made her macaroni cheese (gross) and Ethan had helped. Mummy was a rubbish cook and Ethan didn’t know how to cook and it took them a thousand years to make the macaroni cheese and Molly was screaming. It really hurt his ears.

  But now she was eating it. He couldn’t watch Molly eating because it made him feel sick, and once he had actually been sick. Mummy had been very cross.

  Mummy was being as good as gold. And silver. She was laughing a lot and Ethan was making her laugh. They were pleased that Molly liked the macaroni cheese. He liked it when Mummy was happy. That was his best day. Mummy had promised that after lunch they would all go on the beach, and George could go surfing with Ethan, and she would help Molly to paddle, and they could all build sandcastles. It was cool that Ethan had his own beach. George wondered if he’d bought the sea, too, or just the beach.

  ‘Mummy,’ he said. ‘Can you put on your swimming costume now? I think Molly’s finished her lunch. She’s throwing it all on the floor.’

  Mummy laughed, when normally she’d be cross. She was kissing Ethan, and they were hugging. She was all pink in the face. He didn’t mind. She didn’t kiss Daddy any more – she wasn’t his friend. Daddy was a stupid fuck, although we don’t say fuck, we say bother. Daddy was a stupid bother. He did miss Daddy but Mummy was more fun.

  ‘OK,’ said Mummy. ‘If Ethan thinks it’s OK. If he’s not too busy.’

  Ethan smiled. ‘Let’s do it, buddy.’

  He loved Mummy. She was the best mummy ever. ‘Mummy, thank you so much. I love you to the sky!’

  ‘I love you too, darling. Later, when we come back from the beach, you can watch a film, while Molly has her nap. How does that sound?’

  ‘Oh, great! Ca
n it be Spiderman? Are you in Spiderman, Ethan?’

  ‘I passed on it, buddy.’

  ‘Darling, let’s get some sun block on you, and we’ll have to smother Molly. Um, Ethan, sorry. It might take a few moments to get ready.’

  ‘No worries. Is there anything Mark can do to help?’

  ‘Oh, er …’

  ‘Mark!’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Mark, can you hold the baby while Emily gets ready. We’re going to the beach.’

  ‘Oh! Are you sure you know how to … She’s very strong. She wriggles, you’ll need to get a good grip. Jig her a bit. Not too much. OK. Are you sure you’ve got her? OK. I won’t be a second. Thank you!’

  Mark looked cross. He was a rubbish servant. Now Mummy was out of the room finding their stuff for the beach, Ethan was laughing at Mark holding Molly. Mark wasn’t good with babies.

  ‘Don’t you like babies, Mark?’

  ‘Of course I like babies, George! I just happen to be wearing a very expensive T-shirt. I don’t want her to – shit.’

  ‘That’s sick. Nanny says you can get it off with a baby wipe. Shall I find you a wipe?’

  ‘Yes.’

  George found Mark a wipe. ‘There you go. What do you say?’

  Mark said thank you, but in a cross way so it didn’t count.

  George smiled at Ethan. ‘How good have I been?’

  ‘Very good, George.’

  ‘May I have a treat?’

  ‘You’re going surfing with me, buddy. That’s the biggest treat in the world!’

  ‘I mean a chocolate treat.’

  ‘Later, buddy, OK? Here’s your mom.’

  The sand was boiling hot, too hot to walk on in bare feet. Malibu was nicer than Santa Monica beach. It was closer. You didn’t get stuck on the 10 when you really needed to do a wee. Mark came with them to carry all the stuff, but then he went back in the house. George was pleased. Mark didn’t like him. He knew when grown-ups didn’t like him and Mark didn’t. That was OK. Mark wasn’t cool. He lived with Ethan in the guesthouse.