Bad Heir Day

by Wendy Holden

  “Great. You look well scary now.” Although his pelvis was as eloquent as ever, Seven’s face was now invisible behind his lens. “No, this is for the shoot.”

  “Whoa. Hold on just one minute.” Jett tried to hold up a hand, but the deer carcass swaying on his shoulders prevented him. “Remind me again,” he said in a dangerously level voice, “where the prawns come in?”

  Seven lowered the lens. His hips stopped jerking. “You’re joking, aren’t you? They’re the title, aren’t they? Prawn of Satan.”

  Behind his mirror shades, Jett’s eyes bulged with fury. “Prawn of Satan?” he gasped eventually. “Prawn?” he spluttered. “If anyone’s a fucking goddamn prawn it’s you. Of course it’s not called fucking goddamn Prawn of fucking goddamn Satan.” The deer carcass lurched and began to list dangerously to the left. Seven hastily put his camera down, rushed forward, and pushed it back on again.

  “Well, it was very hard to hear what you were saying on the mobile,” he said testily. “It sounded exactly like prawn to me. Thought you must be doing a tie-in with Iceland. You know, free kilo of crevettes with every CD. Lots of people do that sort of thing now, you know. Anyway, anyway…” he added hastily, catching Jett’s murderous glare, “being a professional, I have a contingency plan. There is an alternative.”

  “So I should fucking goddamn hope,” exploded Jett as Seven scuttled back inside the deer larder to emerge, a few seconds later, with a long, thin orange plastic device. A length of twine dangled out of the front of it. Jett glanced contemptuously in its direction before swivelling his incandescent, reflector-lensed glare back to the hapless photographer. “And what the goddamn fucking fuck is this?”

  “A strimmer,” said Seven.

  “May I,” asked Jett in even more dangerously level tones than before, “ask why?”

  “Well,” gibbered Seven, “I thought what you’d actually said might have been Lawn of Satan. As I believe I mentioned,” he blathered helplessly on, “it wasn’t easy to understand you on the mobile. I thought I could have you standing on some grass smeared in blood with your horns on, strimming with an evil expression…” His voice trailed away at the sight of Jett’s face. Never had Seven seen an expression more evil. The trouble was, he knew if he snapped it, he’d never live to tell the tale. Let alone develop the film.

  Jett’s anger dropped several hundred degrees below freezing hatred. He took a few steps closer to Seven so the dead stag’s nose pressed almost into the photographer’s face. “Lawn of Satan?” he hissed. “Lawn? Lawn?” When did you last see someone looking like the goddamn Antichrist mowing their goddamn lawn for Chrissakes?”

  “Well, take Haselmere any Sunday afternoon—”

  “The name of the alburm, you fucking moron,” Jett cut in viciously, “is Spawn of Satan. Spawn. Not lawn. Not prawn. Spawn.” For a few seconds, Seven looked downcast. Then he brightened.

  “There’s a loch over there,” he said eagerly. “We could borrow a jam jar from the kitchen and get some frogspawn. You could hold the jar up to the camera…” His voice trailed away again as he realised Jett was no longer listening to him. His furious expression had been replaced by one of terror. Seven whipped round to see the largest, widest, biggest, ugliest, and angriest woman he had ever set eyes on stomping towards them from the direction of the kitchen. In her wake floated the vilest of cooking smells.

  “And what exactly,” boomed Nanny, striding up to Jett and prodding the carcass with a forefinger as thick as a tree branch, “do you think you are doing with tonight’s dinner?”

  ***

  Jett stormed back into his bedroom feeling rawer than a sushi makers’ convention. The cover shoot degenerating into farce had been bad enough without that terrifying old bag bearing down on them into the bargain. Seven’s offering her the prawns as a starter had only made things worse. Jett was not looking forward to the evening’s planned big dinner party, despite being flattered that Geri and Jamie had decided to throw one in his honour.

  The door, slamming shut behind him, echoed his feelings.

  “Is that you, Wobblebottom? In here, darling.” Jett’s heart sank as he heard Champagne’s voice issuing shrilly from the bathroom. In the three hours he had been absent, Champagne had managed to progress from the bed to the bath, a distance of a full ten feet. He stuck his head round the bathroom door to see her immersed in bubbles.

  “Not still in the goddamn tub?”

  Champagne pushed her hands into her hair and pouted at him. As her breasts travelled gloriously upwards at the movement of her arms, Jett was conscious of a tightening around his groin area hardly due to his skin-tight black jeans alone. Champagne’s body was the most generously luscious he had ever seen, even if being first in line in the Looks queue meant she’d gone straight to the back of Brains. He’d heard that her beauty could drive men mad; but hadn’t, until recently, appreciated in quite what way.

  “Darling, I’m relaxing, yah?” Champagne beamed at him and raised a tanned, pink-toenailed foot from the foam. “Had an unbelievably exhausting afternoon. Waited ages for the maid to come and unpack my bag and in the end had to go down and drag someone up here to do it. Annie, I think she was called. Bloody useless, anyway. Hung my Gucci up all wrong.”

  Jett’s heart sank. “That,” he said evenly, “is the castle owner’s fiancée. Your hostess.”

  “0h. Well, I must say she was very unhelpful over doing my washing for me. Can you believe there’s no laundry service here? She said she always washes her knickers in the sink.”

  “Well, that won’t be a problem for you. You don’t wear knickers. Anyway, you better get ready,” said Jett impatiently. “Dinner’s in half an hour.”

  “Oh, Wobblebottom.” The special voice Champagne put on for wheedling purposes set Jett’s teeth on edge even more than the maddening pet name. His bottom emphatically did not wobble. “You know I never eat in public,” she purred. “Can’t you get them to send me up a tiny vegetable consomme followed by a minuscule white truffle risotto and—oh, perhaps a tiny half-bottle of Krug as well? I hate to put anyone out, of course…”

  For a moment, Jett flirted with the delicious idea of ordering room service from that terrifying bruiser of a cook. Better still, of getting Champagne to. “Well, come down for a drink at least. Be rude not to.”

  “Oh, if I must.” As Champagne rose, pouting, from the bath, water running down her breasts, hips, and pubic hair, Jett struggled to keep his erection under control. If Champagne saw it, all would be lost and he really wasn’t in the mood. Her voracious sexual appetite could have left Casanova on his knees weeping and begging for mercy.

  Galling though it was to admit it, Champagne was getting too much of a handful for him. His hands, at any rate, were getting too full of her rather too much; Jett wondered, quite literally, how much longer he was going to be able to keep it up. The years between his first flush of fame and recent revival had not seen an increase in stamina to match the decrease in hair. And besides, girls seemed to be getting more difficult to satisfy; Jett had no memories of seventies chicks being as goddamn demanding as their contemporary counterparts. Girls today seemed to expect more, and Jett had never met anyone who expected as goddamn much as Champagne.

  In his defence, Jett knew his decline had been less spectacular than that of the rest of the band. Talk about the Mild Ones. By Solstice’s former hell-raising standards, the pre-gig dressing-room conversations during the Wold Tour had been embarrassing. Less sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll than gardening, mortgages, and children. He was the only one even getting divorced, for Christ’s goddamn sake…

  Jett gazed out moodily into the impenetrable black beyond the windows. Say what you like about Cassandra—and he had, many times—at least she didn’t want five orgasms a night. Didn’t want any at all, in fact. Recalling the deep, deep, unmolested peace of the marital minimalist double bed, Jett sighed almost wistfu
lly in the direction of the emerging stars.

  “Dah-dah, yah?”

  Jett was jerked out of his daydream to see Champagne standing in the bathroom doorway, arms raised in triumph and wearing a pair of snakeskin pants that must have been looser on the original snake.

  Champagne wriggled her shoulders. “Like my bustier? Very rock chick, yah?” She tugged out a breast to expose the tip of a nipple and pouted at him again.

  Jett stared at the complex structure of underwiring and cantilevering necessary to support and contain the flowing flesh of Champagne’s cleavage. “Looks like something by Isambard Kingdom Brunel.”

  “Never heard of him, darling. This is Westwood.”

  Jett gritted his teeth. Champagne’s obsession with fashion had been the one flashpoint of the Back From the Dead tour. Deriding their blow-dried, tight satin, and studded leather look, Champagne had attempted to shoehorn the whole of Solstice into Prada. The Mild Ones had finally seen red. As Champagne ordered him into a leather sarong, Nigel “Animal” Gurkin, drummer, father of five, resident of Tunbridge Wells, builder of dolls’ houses out of matchsticks, and the Mildest One of all, had snapped. “We’re a heavy metal band, you know,” he had remonstrated, placing his glass of orange juice down on the table with slightly more emphasis than was strictly necessary.

  If only we were, thought Jett longingly. For the money if nothing else. It was true that “Sex and Sexibility,” the first single released from the Ass Me Anything album, had gone straight to number one on a riptide of ironic revivalism, but the unhappy consequences for him personally were the unwelcome attentions of that slumbering lion, the Inland Revenue. Then of course there was the yawning pit called the divorce courts down which he was pouring thousands despite a settlement seeming light years away. Talk about nisi goddamn work if you can get it, Jett thought sourly.

  Last, but by no means least, was Champagne’s conviction that, as a much-publicised, relaunched rock star in regular receipt of lavish amounts of publicity, Jett was rolling in money and it was her duty to get through as much of it as possible. His pleadings that a Solstice wold tour brought in significantly less than a Madonna-style world one completely failed to make an impact. Champagne had, Jett eventually realised, absolutely no idea of the multimillion-dollar difference between ironic and iconic.

  At first he had thought she was joking when she’d asked him what she should wear to the Number Ten celebrity party this year. The thought of Champagne in Downing Street was an arresting one, especially after she had confided her belief that the Gulf War was caused by people queue-jumping at the Gulfstream factory. Even Cassandra had more of a grasp of foreign affairs than that, although she had once mortified him by insisting they stayed in the Hotel de Ville on a trip to Paris on the grounds that it was larger and more impressive than the Hôtel Crillon.

  Jett sighed. He had passed from being an enthusiastic admirer of Champagne’s frontage to looking forward to seeing the back of her. What had been initially good for his cred was proving disastrous for his bank balance. A Champagne lifestyle was not all it was cracked up to be. Yes, he was definitely missing Cassandra.

  ***

  Zak stuck his fork in his glass and clanked it loudly backwards and forwards. Tendrils of venison stew sauce unravelled from the prongs and floated slowly in the water.

  “Zak darling?” Cassandra smiled vaguely and beatifically at her son. “That’s such a wonderful noise, but—”

  “Shut up,” snarled Jett as Zak, tiring of glass-banging, started instead to smash the silver cutlery hard against the polished surface of the table. In the shadows, Anna felt Nanny stiffen, yet Cassandra, most uncharacteristically, failed to fly like a wildcat to her son’s defence. She seemed very calm. Probably still drunk, thought Anna. Yet, for someone recovering from an industrial-strength hangover, Cassandra seemed in an unusually good mood. Even more amazingly, a whispered conversation with Robbie had revealed that it was something to do with Mrs. McLeod.

  Anna shot an amused glance across the table to Robbie, intercepting an amused one from Geri to Jamie. Those two, thought Anna with a twist of the lips. Obvious enough what was happening there. They’d bonded over the tearooms and toilets—talk about lav at first sight. Just as well she wasn’t the jealous type. Besides, discussing books with Robbie made such a welcome change from Jamie banging on about drains.

  Robbie looked so handsome in his dinner jacket, the miraculously white and crisp collar of his shirt—could she detect the skilled hand of Mrs. McLeod here?—contrasting with the high, outdoor colour of his rugged, sensual face. Looking at his eyes, shining large, amused, and amber in the candlelight, Anna felt for the first time in her life that here was a man she could trust. Except for keeping the dreaded beard at bay—his five o’clock shadow was now edging rather more towards midnight.

  “Darling, what are you doing now?” Cassandra’s urgent whisper suddenly cut across her thoughts.

  “Willy tricks.” Zak, smirking ostentatiously, was busy pressing down hard on his leeks with a fork so the white centre shot out at a distinctly penile angle.

  “Behave your goddamn self,” snapped Jett, raising an eyebrow and grinning apologetically to Cassandra.

  To Anna’s amazement, Cassandra not only grinned back but, in addition, shot Jett a coy look from under her eyelashes. In Jett’s mirrored lenses, the candlelight glowed softly in reply. What was going on there? The expected hysterical scenes following Jett and Cassandra’s discovery of each other in the castle had not taken place. And that was before Champagne D’Vyne had appeared.

  Champagne had arrived at the dining table forty-five minutes late. “Sorry, yah?” she trilled, tossing her long blonde hair back over her shoulders. “Had to write my column, yah?” She rolled her brilliant green eyes theatrically. “Deadlines are such a bore.”

  “You’re telling me,” muttered Jett. Champagne’s weekly newspaper column, in which she chronicled her dizzyingly glamorous social life and in which Jett had recently made his debut portrayed as the author’s adoring lapdog, had done his street cred almost as much damage as Champagne herself had done his bank balance.

  The rest of the company exchanged looks. Along with everyone else in the Sunday newspaper-reading universe, all those present, apart, perhaps, from Jamie, were aware that Champagne did not write the society column that appeared weekly under her name. It was well known that the only person for whom Champagne’s deadlines were a bore was the unfortunate hack on the paper whose job it was to extract the column from her.

  Having arrived for dinner fashionably late, Champagne soon found herself in the considerably less chic situation of facing Jett’s ex-wife across the table. “Is this some kind of joke?” she had, after a freezing silence, demanded of the hapless Jamie who was doing the introductions. Stamping her metal heel so hard it drew sparks from the flagstones, Champagne treated the assembly to a display of explosions worthy of the millennium celebrations and a stream of eye-watering expletives that would have left a battleship crew gasping but left Zak in raptures.

  By way of a finale, Champagne stormed off as best she could given that at Dampie storming off anywhere involved waiting in the hall for the one local taxi for up to three hours. And there was another curious thing, thought Anna. Jett had seemed almost relieved to see the back of her, even if the two engineers he had brought with him had looked rather regretful. In the end, it had been they who took Champagne off in their gaffer’s van, thus freeing up three portions in total of Nanny’s venison stew to be divided among those left behind. This had not been a blessing. The rule that each mouthful must be chewed thirty-two times could have been invented for Nanny’s cuisine. Then doubled.

  “I can’t eat any more of this crap.” Zak suddenly spat out a mouthful of venison casserole on to the table. Jett immediately cuffed him across the basin cut.

  “Gosh, the wind’s getting up, isn’t it?” Geri said loudly and distract
ingly, as Nanny smashed plates together on the pretext of collecting them. Outside, the gale was slapping itself against the windows almost as hard as Jett had just smacked his son. And, no doubt, almost as hard as Nanny would like to smack Geri.

  “Nanny’ll soon fix that,” said Jamie, grabbing the chance to make amends with both hands. “She’s amazing. Full of ancient lore. Whenever there’s a storm, it always calms down after Nanny goes to the shore and throws a pudding into the sea.”

  “Pardon?” Cassandra, evidently glad of the excuse, put her fork down in surprise. Anna blinked. Even she had never heard this one.

  “Ancient tradition,” Jamie added. “Feeding the waves, she calls it.”

  “Eat up,” Jett ordered Zak, who immediately stuck his tongue out even further.

  “Tummyache,” he muttered.

  “Oh, Nanny’s got a cure for that as well,” Jamie burst in eagerly. “She’ll have you hanging upside down like a shot.”

  “What?” Cassandra and Jett peered into the shadows where Nanny lurked with awe and interest, as if observing a strange and wonderful beast.

  “That’s her cure for stomachache,” Jamie gabbled, thrilled that Nanny was receiving the respect she deserved from some quarters at least. “Hanging people upside down by the heels.”

  “Really?” Cassandra looked impressed. A speculative light shone from Jett’s eye. There was an astonished silence, in which it was hard not to notice that Zak was the stillest and quietest of all.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  “Will you…?” Jamie looked apologetically at Anna. The question, raised after dinner in the sitting room while Geri had gone down to the kitchen to, in her words, “put a bomb under Nanny with the coffee,” was not entirely unanticipated.

  Anna had been expecting it for days, ever since she had caught Jamie kissing Geri in the ruins of the wine store. After which Geri had studiously avoided her—that had been Anna’s interpretation, at least, of the fact Geri had suddenly been rushing back and forth to London on “urgent business.”