Who's That Girl?

by Mhairi McFarlane

  Sod it. There was no avoiding Elliot Owen. She was probably one of the few women in the country that this opportunity was wasted on.

  12

  It was strange to get to know someone through their press before meeting them, but Edie guessed it had been a while since Elliot had met anyone who hadn’t met him in print first.

  What was that quote about Paul Newman, something about, ‘He was as nice as you could expect for a man who hadn’t heard the word “no” for twenty-five years’?

  The photogenically brooding Elliot Owen couldn’t have heard the word no for at least five now. From women, possibly ever.

  His bio details weren’t very colourful. He was thirty-one, not twenty-five, as Richard had said. Same age as Meg, though he’d been busier. Born to a comfortably middle-class family in the leafy Nottingham suburb of West Bridgford, went to a state school with a better OFSTED score than Edie’s, joined a local TV drama workshop, got spotted by a scout. He moved to London and ended up in a boring medical drama, did a bit of time in a soap, and a very quickly canned sitcom.

  He was the love interest in a video by a terrible American emo-rock band for a song called ‘Crumple Zone’, which was a huge hit in the States and got his face known. It landed his breakout role in Blood & Gold.

  As Prince Wulfroarer in the epic and boisterous fantasy series known for its stabbing, shouting, tits, scheming and tits, he was suddenly ‘sex in a wolf pelt’. A swaggering, high-born Northern warlord – rallying cry; ‘For the Blades of My Brothers!’ – he fell in love with a servant girl called Malleflead. Sadly that had proved his undoing, as Count Bragstard had also set his Machiavellian sights on her.

  Prince Wulfy had therefore died on the end of a pointy weapon at the end of last series, uttering the heartbreaking words to his distraught shag-piece, before he bit on the fake blood capsule: ‘I am my Kingdom’ (his catchphrase), ‘but I would sacrifice it all for you.’ His demise prompted much speculation about whether female viewers would desert in droves.

  Edie was resigned to Elliot being at best, boring, and at worst, an obnoxious brat. The fact the last ghost-writer had exited immediately was a very bad sign.

  She didn’t think this expectation was prejudice on her part, it was straightforward logic. Take one male ego, rain down this much attention, employ someone whose sole job it was to blast his armpits with a hairdryer, and so on. Pay him millions, spooge a luge of adoration all over him. To come through that and not be an arsehole would take someone of spectacular character. Which meant you were gambling on a man not only being given his physical gifts, but also bestowed with Gandhi-esque substance.

  You might as well pop down to the shop on the corner and expect your lotto ticket to pay off your mortgage.

  Edie leafed through the photos of him on set in whichever raggedy-beautiful Eastern European country doubled for ‘Easterport’ or ‘Goldendale’. (Edie hadn’t seen much of Blood & Gold and could never keep the fictional geography straight.)

  Elliot’s dark brown, slightly curly hair was dyed boot-polish black for Blood & Gold, and he wore dragon-green contact lenses. He had one of those squared-off jaws that a draughtsman could draw with three swipes of the pencil, and full lips that Edie envied, they were the sort she’d always wanted.

  It was obvious why he’d been such a hit. It wasn’t sensible or interesting good looks, in Edie’s humble opinion. It was silly-to-the-point-of-ridiculous, pin-up handsomeness, to appeal to teenagers who hadn’t developed a more complex palate yet. The sexiness equivalent of strawberry milkshake.

  She remembered Charlotte and others in her office all swooning and sighing over Elliot Owen, and Edie saying, ‘Meh, looks like the one in the TRAINEE BARISTA T-shirt who makes your cappuccino sour and gritty’, and Jack laughing in approval. Then Jack repeated the rumours he ‘played for Man City, not Man U’ and all the women chorused nooooooooo.

  Edie had best buckle down to this homework – she also had a stack of celeb auto biogs, and they made drear reading – so she didn’t give him an excuse to kick off when she fumbled a question to which there was a well-known answer.

  She’d start with a recent Sunday supplement profile. She flipped past moodily blue photos of Elliot resting his forehead on his forearm, with an expression as if he’d just been given terrible news. Headline: FANTASY CHAMPION.

  It’s considered good manners to dip your headlights, at night, so as not to dazzle the oncoming traffic. When Elliot Owen strides casually into the dramatically under lit environs of the hip East Village restaurant he chose for our meeting, you can’t help wonder if he wishes he could flip his full beam off, at will. As he asks the waitresses for his table, they virtually crash and burn in the blazing glare.

  Jesus wept, seriously?!

  Raymond Chandler once described a ‘blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window’. In the 21st century, Owen’s a brunette who could leave a nunnery in smoking ruins.

  Yes, that’s how religion works, Edie thought, nuns simply haven’t met sufficiently fit men and so married the Son of God as a fallback. These people.

  With effortless good manners, Elliot inquires what I’m drinking. ‘Diet Coke, right?’ He summons the waitress, who is caught still staring at us. If Elliot’s noticed, he doesn’t let on: an old-fashioned gentleman, under the modern-casual shirt and jeans. ‘Can we have a Diet Coke, and which beers do you have?’ The waitress almost trembles as she offers Budweiser. ‘Ah, not a big fan of Budweiser. Clearly not spent enough time here yet,’ he says, with that sleepily devastating smile, as the waitress almost ovulates. ‘But that will be fine.’ And where is ‘here’? America, or the spotlight he’s now occupying? He’s seemingly come from nowhere … ‘Or Nottingham, as we like to call it,’ he corrects me, sharp as a tack. There’s that impossibly disarming smile again.

  Christ, this is some hardcore drivel, Edie thought. Man In Ordering Beverage Shocker. He’s just a person who has to poo like the rest of us. Also, is that a dig at Nottingham? She flared with indignation, which was a bit hypocritical, she realised.

  New York has its fair share of celebrities and its most fashionable inhabitants are well trained in ignoring the famous. But Elliot Owen is so white hot right now, even those who aren’t looking over at us are still looking.

  How exactly do you look and NOT look at the same time? Edie wanted the female journalist to show her working. She was also curious how you show someone to their table in the style of a crashing car. Or ‘almost’ ovulate.

  The reason, of course, is Blood & Gold, the fantasy series that sparked many a female fantasy about its heroic, flawed, tragic lead, Prince Wulfroarer. With Byronic looks that could unlace a bodice at thirty paces, Owen bestrode the pitiless landscape of the ‘Eight Islands’ like a warrior Heathcliff, spliced with Mr Darcy. And like Mr Darcy, had his cold, proud heart melted by a woman of inferior class. In the hands of a lesser actor, the Prince might’ve been a …

  Oh God, enough, Edie thought and started skimming. Right, here was a bit about the Nottingham series.

  The world is Owen’s oyster right now, yet he makes it clear that he’s not interested in the low-hanging fruit of decorative roles. His first job, since hanging up Wulfroarer’s armour, is a relatively low-budget gritty thriller set in his native Nottingham, called Gun City.

  Written and directed by Archie Puce, the enfant terrible of British drama who made a splash with his BAFTA-winning science fiction film INTERREGNUM, Puce is notorious for pushing actors to their limit, and giving studios, and the media, hell.

  Both Owen and his US co-star, Greta Alan, are taking a huge pay cut to be part of Gun City, as the two detectives unravelling the mystery behind a young woman’s corpse, found spread-eagled and naked in a fountain in the middle of the town centre on Christmas Day.

  ‘When Archie got in touch, I was thrilled,’ Elliot says. ‘Everyone wants to impress people who are hard to impress and Archie is very much in that category. When he explained the thinking behind G
un City, examining the real law-and-order problems facing the region, I knew I wouldn’t be able to live with someone else taking this role. Not least because it’s my stamping ground. It’s great to spend some time at home.’

  Edie shouldn’t be rankled, but the whole thing irritated her. As if the city was going to be grateful for rich ex-pat Elliot Owen giving it lots of publicity as a crime-ridden grot hole.

  The rest of the cuttings didn’t live up to the swooning hagiography of the Sunday magazine piece. The papers and women’s glossies were mainly interested in the fact Elliot was dating a hot British actress called Heather Lily. (Two flowers? Impossibly fragrant.) They featured together in recent paparazzi pictures in New York; Elliot in that very self-conscious ‘off-duty’ outfit of no-doubt hideously expensive binman’s style donkey jacket and artfully battered brown boots, carrying Starbucks cups. His blonde girlfriend only a perfect Dairylea triangle nose peeking through a bundle of thick blonde hair, with a tiny sphere-of-fluff dog on a lead bouncing behind her. Why did starlets always have dogs? Maybe it was the pissy cat lady stigma.

  Hmm, Edie conceded the angle of Elliot’s jaw was caught nicely in photo number five, as he stepped out to hail a yellow cab. She caught herself getting sucked into the whirlpool of trivia and thought, you really had to wonder at a society that was fascinated by couple buy coffee.

  She put the cuttings back inside the envelope and laid back on her bed. Her dad had yet to find the funds or the will to fix the damp problem at the back of the house, so the off-white walls in this back room sagged and bloated like a wedding cake that had been left out in the rain. The ghostly remnants of her teenage self filled it, from the greasy blots left by Blu- Tack on the walls, to shreds of ripped-off stickers (the New Kids on the Block phase.)

  Edie was once obsessed with glow-in-the-dark stickers, peppering her navy-blue bedroom ceiling with a constellation of white-green paper stars, crescent moons and comets.

  She lay in her bed and stared at the universe on her ceiling in the late afternoon murk. Edie used to lie there thinking what a big world it was and how, one day, she was going to strike out into it.

  That had gone well.

  13

  ‘Whereabouts, love?’ said the taxi driver, as they both peered at deserted acres of not much at all, some ugly squat container buildings and trailers dotted about.

  It seemed making dramas – the fictional sort – was less thrilling than Edie expected. When she got details of her first on-set meeting with Elliot Owen via his flunkies, she expected to be told to meet at somewhere like the Council House, which they were re-dressing as a haunted library, or something.

  Instead she got the coordinates to an industrial estate at the south of the city, near a race track. A pile of churned mud. Oh.

  Edie could see some vans in the distance, and possibly the odd human.

  ‘Just here, thanks,’ she said, doubtfully, wondering at the wisdom of having worn a small heel and her beloved tartan coat with brown fur hood. (Jack always asked if it was ‘real gerbil’. She HAD to stop thinking about Jack.)

  She picked her way towards the vague signs of life in the distance, men in North Face jackets, holding walkie-talkies. If she squinted, beyond them she could see some arc lights and maybe cameras.

  As Edie drew nearer, she realised what she thought was ‘someone telling a funny story, in a heightened excitable voice’ was in fact, a person having a massive rant. A wiry, bespectacled man in a long narrow beanie hat was having a meltdown, hopping around, gesticulating at a deeply dismayed looking member of the North Face team.

  They were gathered round in a circle, staring at something. As the people shifted, Edie glimpsed the focus – a figure of a garden gnome, in a hat with a bell, holding a watering can at a jaunty angle.

  Edie suspected, due to the sense of cowed deference, that the shouter was enfant terrible Archie Puce – being terrible if not enfant. The words faded in.

  ‘—back and get me what I FUCKING WELL ASKED FOR, THE FUCK IS THIS? Do you grasp the significance of Buddha, Clive? Do you realise why this scene where Garratt smashes up a statue of BUDDHA in ANGER is IRONIC? I mean should I even BOTHER MAKING ART, WITH THIS SORT OF CLOWN WORKSHOP OVERT COCK-ENDERY?’

  Lots of shaking of heads and chewing of lips and shuffling of feet. Blimey, Edie didn’t think even divas did shit fits on day one at 10 a.m.

  Archie waved a sheaf of paper in his hands and read from the page.

  ‘Garratt sees the terracotta figurine, and gripped by an unreasoning fury at its ironic juxtaposition in these war-torn surroundings, destroys the smiling round-bellied icon of peace as he hurls it at the fence, again and again. As it shatters, so does Garratt’s hope.’

  Archie looked up at Clive.

  ‘Perhaps I should have been more explicit for the hard of thinking. He is committing an act of ICONOCLASM. What is iconoclasm, please?’

  Clive looked pretty miserable and very pale. He scratched his cheek. ‘Smashing up … religious stuff?’

  ‘OH, A BREAKTHROUGH. Religious “stuff”. So, on the one hand, Buddha, an enlightened sage of the sixth century and figurehead of a faith. What do we have here as substitute?’

  Archie picked it up.

  ‘A gnome. A small old cunt with a pointy beard found in suburban gardens. Do we see the difference? What does smashing a gnome up signify? GOOD TASTE?’

  Edie was suddenly gripped by an urgent need to laugh and had to choke back a honk as it surfaced.

  Archie read the lettering on the base. ‘Ninbert. So we have two options, Clive. Either we found a new religion based on THE CULT OF FUCKING NINBERT OR WE BUY THE RIGHT ITEM WHAT STRIKES YOU AS MORE FEASIBLE WITHIN OUR SHOOTING SCHEDULE?’

  Clive was in that deeply unpleasant situation during a bollocking where you were required to explain the unacceptable and dig yourself in deeper.

  ‘Sorry it’s just B&Q didn’t have any garden statue Buddhas and then I … looking at comparative size …’

  ‘Size?’

  Clive nodded.

  ‘My head is comparative in size to a large gourd. Should I replace my head with a large gourd, Clive?’

  He shook his head.

  Archie hurled Ninbert in the air, and booted him with the toe of his shoe, causing onlookers to duck.

  ‘What’s in there?’ Archie said, spotting another B&Q bag, beyond Clive’s legs.

  ‘Uh. Another one.’

  ‘Get it out!’ screeched Archie.

  Clive miserably produced the second gnome, which was lying on its side, insouciantly smoking a bubble pipe, which seemed in the circumstances likely to inflame Archie. ‘Who’s this, Dildo Baggins?’ He inspected its name. ‘Boddywinkle.’

  Archie kicked that gnome clear of the group too, with a menacing zeal.

  ‘This production,’ he pulled his hat from his head and threw it on the ground, ‘is a PROPER SHITTERS’ PICNIC.’

  An obliging runner nervously ducked in and snatched the hat up.

  ‘LEAVE MY HAT WHERE I PUT IT, YOU ARSEFUCK!’ screamed Archie.

  The runner darted in and threw it back down again.

  A silence where no one said anything, for fear of being an arsefuck. Edie couldn’t back away without it being noticed. She stood very still, as if she was a small shivery mammal in an old wildlife programme and a tiger was prowling around nearby. Unfortunately, Archie’s boggling eyes swept over the company for fresh meat, and Edie had rather made herself stand out by being dressed as a cute librarian in an indie movie, instead of the regulation fleece.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’

  Edie cleared her throat as everyone turned and stared.

  ‘Edie Thompson. I’m a copywriter … I’m here to interview Elliot Owen.’

  Archie ignored this.

  ‘Since you’ve decided to join us without invitation, let’s hear your thoughts on Buddha being substituted by Ninbert and or Boddywinkle.’

  ‘I haven’t read the scene.’

  ‘Well nei
ther has Clive, clearly.’

  ‘Erm,’ Edie was sweating inside her coat. ‘… Why would there be a statue of Buddha lying around on an industrial estate in Colwick?’

  There was a pause while Archie Puce went, well, even more puce. Then his features twisted in an unpleasant fashion, as if he’d thought of something cunning and done a sly fart at the same time.

  ‘Why is there a fucking gnome out here?’

  ‘… Because you sent Clive to B&Q?’

  Edie couldn’t be sure but it seemed as if there was a beat of shock followed by some suppressed laughter-snorts. A harassed-looking woman at Archie’s elbow who’d previously stayed neutral stepped forward and said briskly:

  ‘Can I see some sort of ID?’

  Edie dropped her bag to fumble for her wallet and the crowd dispersed, amid mumbling. When Edie looked up, Archie was stalking back towards the set and the air pressure had reduced considerably.

  ‘When did he say he’d see you?’ the woman said, handing Edie’s driving licence back to her in disgust.

  ‘Just to be here at ten.’

  ‘Alright, wait here.’

  The woman turned on her heel and left Edie feeling like turning up at the appointed place and time had been the most presumptuous thing she could’ve done.

  After ten minutes, the irascible woman with a walkie-talkie trudged back to Edie.

  ‘Elliot can’t see you today, sorry.’

  ‘Oh. Can I—’

  ‘That’s it. Sorry.’

  ‘OK …’ Edie tried to say more but the woman had already turned. She hit the taxi number on her mobile and tried not to feel stupid, as people milling nearby glanced at her.