New York Valentine

by Carmen Reid

  ‘Yep, we are.’ Annie stood up and brushed herself down.

  ‘How do I look?’

  ‘Lovely,’ Bob told her, ‘but you’re wearing that dress again. Ain’t you got any time to go shopping, girl?’

  ‘Oh shut up!’ Annie told him.

  Under the glaring studio lights, Annie introduced Melissa for the benefit of the camera, then ushered her onto the set.

  ‘C’mon my lovely,’ Annie said in full-on, upbeat presenter mode, holding out a hand for Melissa to grab. ‘Melissa is here to show us how to do colours. We have red, we have pink, we have a splash of violet going on below. It’s a sizzle. A riot. I’m here to tell you: never worry about the rules your mum might have given you: if you love it, wear it!

  ‘Life is absolutely too short to worry about “does blue go with green?” If it looks good to you, go for it. I’ve had enough of people in black and navy and beige. Stand out from the crowd. Look lovely! And wear the colours you just can’t get enough of,’ Annie instructed.

  ‘Melissa hasn’t been well, she’s spent months in drab hospital wards so you can’t blame her for wanting to break open the paintbox and wear delicious reds and pinks all in one go.

  ‘And doesn’t she look gorgeous?’

  Even Melissa nodded her head at this.

  ‘I love my job,’ Annie said straight to camera with a big grin, ‘I really do love my job. If you are in a wardrobe rut, don’t know what to wear, can’t make sense of what’s out there in the shops, have a big milestone event ahead or are just generally freaking out about what you should be putting on, get in touch. Email me: we can feature your problem on the show, or even better, I’ll get on the phone and we’ll have you right here, just like Melissa.’

  The door to the studio opened, distracting Annie from her speech.

  ‘And cut … just for now,’ the director said, her attention caught as well. Everyone turned to see who had committed the crime of opening one of the large double doors and allowing a shaft of light into the darkened studio.

  Someone was walking through the darkness on sharp, metal-tipped heels.

  One of the lighting crew swung a spotlight in the direction of the footsteps. Tamsin Hinkley, the show’s producer, was striding towards them.

  Usually Annie was pleased to see Tamsin, and not just because she was always beautifully dressed. Tamsin was Annie’s biggest fan, who had believed in their programme right from the start and had ensured the last series was a major ratings success which was immediately re-commissioned.

  But today, Tamsin was not smiling. In fact, she looked thunderous.

  ‘Hello everyone,’ she said in a voice that sounded tense and angry.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hey Tamsin.’

  A range of voices answered back.

  ‘What’s up?’ Annie asked. ‘You don’t look happy.’

  ‘No. I’m not happy at all,’ Tamsin replied. Then she scraped her long hair away from her face and just held it there, hand clasped at the back of her head: ‘I don’t know how to tell you this,’ she began.

  Several people in the room started to fidget nervously.

  ‘Channel Four has de-commissioned this series,’ Tamsin announced, letting her hair fall and trying to stand up tall and look professionally around the room, ‘I’m afraid they’ve pulled the plug on us.’

  There was a slight wobble in her voice as she added: ‘And there’s absolutely nothing I can do. I know this because I’ve been on the phone to my lawyer for the last hour.’

  There were gasps of astonishment. Someone burst into tears. The director began to protest. Melissa looked crestfallen.

  Only cameraman Bob, who’d been with Annie right from her first TV job on an iffy digital channel, seemed unfazed. ‘Oh yeah,’ he said, as he calmly began to dismantle his equipment. ‘Happens all the time.’

  Annie stared at him in shock. ‘But it can’t be happening now.’ She heard her voice, all high and thin: ‘please just pinch me and tell me it can’t be happening.’

  ‘It is, Annie,’ Tamsin confirmed. ‘I’m so sorry,’

  Chapter Three

  Mimi-Jay looking deeeeeelightful:

  Black button-up short sleeved jacket (salon’s own)

  Silky black harem trousers (Topshop)

  High yellow patent heels (New Look)

  Bright pink push-up bra and thong (Dorothy Perkins)

  Oversized pearl and gold necklace (Topshop)

  Yellow and pink striped nails (Blaxx salon)

  Total est. cost: £145

  ‘No moanin’ and groanin’ now.’

  ‘So it sounds as if Ed has been cool about it,’ Connor said, although his voice was muffled because he was lying face down on Mimi-Jay’s beautician’s couch, head inside a fluffy white towel, enjoying some full-on Blaxx salon attention.

  ‘Yeah, Ed is as cool as I am stressed,’ Annie replied from her own couch, where she lay smothered in a face mask, ‘he was unbelievably calm. As if TV shows just come and go, as if I breeze in and announce my entire series has been cancelled every day of the week.’

  ‘Well, it has happened to you once before,’ Connor pointed out, ‘and for a while there it did look as if you wouldn’t be in the second series … so you can’t say he’d had no warning – owww!’ Connor exclaimed as Mimi-Jay yanked the wax-covered cloth from his shoulder blade, pulling a strip of back hair with it.

  ‘C’mon man,’ Mimi-Jay protested, ‘you’re a big strong, muscular guy, no moanin’ and groanin’ now. It’s bad for business. You know I’m gonna be quick.’

  ‘Eeeek!’ Connor squeaked into his towel when the next strip was ripped off. He didn’t dare disobey Mimi-Jay. Nobody would. She was a six-foot-tall black girl with biceps as broad as a boxer’s. If she said ‘no moanin’ and groanin’,’ then there would be no moaning and groaning.

  ‘Annie, I don’t know if you should be eating crisps lying down,’ Dinah pointed out from her couch on the other side of Connor’s. ‘You could choke and, adorable though the twins are, I don’t know if I want to be their step-mum as well as their nanny.’

  Through a half-crunched mouthful, Annie replied: ‘They’re not crisps, they’re nachos, and anyway, I thought you could do the Heimlich manoeuvre.’

  ‘Theoretically,’ Annie’s sister replied, but waving her drying fingertips in the air, she added, ‘It would seriously spoil my manicure, though.’

  This made Annie laugh, despite the nachos, because it was so un-Dinah. Her younger sister was a grown-up art student who wore Birkenstocks, Oxfam treasures and homemade things and whose idea of ‘grooming’ was washing her below-the-shoulder hair and twice a year taking tweezers to her shaggy eyebrows.

  ‘Why am I getting a manicure anyway?’ Dinah wondered. ‘I’ll just be wiping bottoms tomorrow.’

  ‘But with baby-pink nails,’ Annie pointed out, ‘so much nicer.’

  ‘Didn’t you eat a bag of nachos on the way over here?’ demanded Dinah.

  ‘I’m addicted,’ Annie had to admit. ‘Ever since the show got canned, I can’t stop eating them. I think it’s because they crunch. I think it’s angry eating.

  ‘It’s not just me – now Lana has no gap-year job she’s going to be mooching round the house in a total sulk wishing she could join her best friend Greta, tracking yetis in the jungle or whatever it is she’s up to.’

  ‘Yetis? Don’t they live on mountains?’ Connor asked.

  ‘Dunno,’ Annie said, chomping another mouthful.

  ‘This nacho habit is not good, my darling. Maybe you should try popcorn?’ Dinah suggested: ‘air-popped, no oil.’

  ‘Oh yes, oh saintly wholemealy one. Maybe I could just try chewing on a bit of string?’

  Annie sank her hand into the bag once again.

  Along with the bling-est nails ever seen outside the Bronx, the ‘beauty treats with friends’ room was a Blaxx speciality. It consisted of three couches in one treatment room and often three therapists workin
g at the same time, gossiping up a storm.

  ‘So what is your plan of action now?’ Connor asked Annie. ‘Tamsin must be trying to get another channel to buy the show. Right?’

  Connor was a well-known actor who was years ahead of Annie in the TV career game. He had spent the past fifteen years trying to get on TV, being on TV, finding fame on TV, then, inevitably, being thrown off TV. He was currently trying to get his foot back in the door in a meaningful and long-term way. So he knew much more about the industry than Annie.

  RADA-trained acTOR Connor was so tall, olive-skinned, dark-haired, snowplough-jawed and generally knicker-droppingly handsome that it was hard to believe why any TV executive would keep him from the small screen. In fact, Annie had to sit up and take a little look at his face and rippling torso just to cheer herself up. In the way that she might look at a painting or fashion photograph, just for the sheer aesthetic pleasure.

  Of course, as Annie knew, every truly maddeningly handsome man came with a catch: too vain, too stupid, too flirtatious – there was always a fatal flaw. With Connor, there had been two. Number one: she was introduced to Connor by the man she was desperately in love with, and number two: Connor was only interested in equally gorgeous men.

  Ah well. Never mind. Over the years, he’d become one of her truly best friends.

  ‘Yeah,’ Annie said, lowering another nacho into her mouth, despite the danger of a monosodium-glutamate overdose. ‘Of course Tamsin’s out there selling hard. And there’s a campaign on Facebook: save our How Not To Shop. Owen’s getting my website sorted and apparently I need to Twitter.’

  ‘Oh yes, you must have a tweeting twategy,’ Connor said from the depths of his towel.

  Riiiiiippppp went another wax strip.

  ‘But Tamsin’s the lynchpin,’ Annie added: ‘she’s the one who needs to sell it to someone else. That’s my best hope.’

  ‘So you’re not offering yourself around as a presenter yet?’

  ‘No … do you think I should?’

  ‘Definitely. Meet agent. Discuss.’ Connor instructed.

  ‘Please tell me that everything’s going great with you again,’ Annie said. ‘You were the star of a much bigger TV show than I was, you got dumped but now you’re back in the saddle again. Aren’t you?’

  ‘It’s never been quite as comfortable or quite as secure a saddle, let me tell you,’ Connor admitted.

  Mimi-Jay’s wax strips were travelling lower, Annie noticed when she glanced over. Surely Connor wasn’t getting his buttocks waxed? Not right here in front of her and her sister?

  ‘The Elephant Man series has nearly finished shooting,’ Connor went on. ‘All hopes of it translating into a West End play are fading fast, because the guy who was going to write the script is ill. So in just a few weeks I’ll be as footloose, fancy free and frightened about the future as you. Unfortunately.’

  ‘You’re kidding. What are you going to do?’ Dinah asked.

  ‘First of all, I’m going to track down Gawain, the best personal trainer I have ever experienced, so I can chisel my abs and beef up my arms. Then I’m going to look for parts which demand physical perfection. I want to be an action hero, or at the very least, a dangerously threatening English bad guy – all the major movies have one. I think I’d be fabulous.’

  With that, he turned his beautiful square jaw, sculpted cheekbones and dark eyes towards Annie and gave her ‘sultry and smouldering’.

  ‘Ooooh, yes, you would be good,’ she agreed, ‘we know this. It’s just getting everyone else in the world to see it.’

  ‘I know,’ Connor gave a sigh and not just because Mimi-Jay was now smearing molten paraffin onto his left buttock.

  Annie closed her eyes. She didn’t need to see more. Really, she didn’t.

  ‘What am I going to do?’ she asked Connor, sounding a little more worried. ‘I loved my show. It can’t just end like this.’

  ‘You’ve got to stay visible, be visible. Call Tamsin and your agent every second day if you can bear it. Keep totally plugged into all the TV industry news. If there’s a whisper of anyone making anything that might be good for you, you get your agent to chase it. Or do the chasing yourself. Have meetings! Get out there. But there’s something I have to tell you and you’re not going to like it …’

  ‘Oh?’ Annie sat up, propped on her elbow.

  Just at that moment, Mimi-Jay whisked away the towel preserving the very last of Connor’s modesty and instructed: ‘On your knees and I hope you had a very thorough wash before you came here.’

  Annie and Dinah watched wide-eyed as a totally naked Connor raised his knees so that his bum stuck right up into the air.

  Totally professionally, Mimi-Jay began to apply molten wax to his … inner (eek!) buttocks.

  ‘What’s up wichoo two?’ Mimi-Jay asked. ‘Did he not tell you he was getting a back, crack and sack?’

  ‘Whoa,’ Annie said, putting her hands over her eyes. Yes, she liked to appreciate Connor and his physical beauty, but this was an overdose.

  ‘Hey, apparently straight guys are getting this done now,’ Connor said between gritted teeth. ‘Girls too want their men smooth all over. But what would I know?’

  Mimi-Jay pulled off the cloth, and Connor gave an ‘Owwwwww!’ of pain.

  ‘I think this is progress,’ Dinah pointed out. ‘It goes some way to making up for the female torture known as the Brazilian. I did that once and never again.’

  ‘Still Brazilian-ing, Annie?’ Connor asked, the nervy fear of what was to come next obvious in his voice.

  ‘Every now and then I like to hack the undergrowth from the runway so in the event of an unscheduled landing, I’m prepared.’

  ‘Sex life that good, huh?’ Connor asked. ‘And you two used to be so h-ot!’

  Obviously, things were getting hotter for Connor too. The wax was being layered on fast.

  ‘Connor, shut up,’ Annie replied grumpily. ‘You’ve never been a parent. We have babies. No one with babies has a sex life. I’m bloody grateful that we’re still talking.’

  Annie lay back down on her couch. ‘What were you about to tell me that I wasn’t going to like?’ she asked, hoping to distract Connor from whatever excruciating pain was coming right up with the sack wax.

  ‘This business is all about looks,’ Connor began, ‘and it’s very tough. Dog eat dog. There are thousands of young, beautiful, talented females queuing around the block to fill your shoes, Annie Valentine. It’s staring you right in the face, baby. For TV, you look big. Way too big, honeybun. When I find Gawain, you are going to come and train with him too. And for God’s sake girl, put those nachos down. Step away from the nachos. Uh oh …’

  ‘Bite down hard,’ Mimi-Jay warned.

  Rrrrrriiiiiippppp.

  ‘Aaaaaaargh!’

  Chapter Four

  At home Annie:

  Very forgiving black dress with extra stretch

  (Betty Jackson)

  Purple leggings (Lana’s wardrobe)

  Red lipstick (Chanel)

  Black sheepskin slippers (ugggggh) (Ugg)

  Total est. cost: £170

  ‘Are you on drugs?!’

  Annie stared at the computer screen in front of her. She had phoned Tamsin (again). She had phoned her agent (again). She had updated her Facebook page, Twittered her Tweets, replied to all the latest comments made by her very sweet and loving fans and now she had nothing else to do.

  Absolutely nothing.

  She looked at the corner of the screen. It was only 10.17a.m. She’d been at her desk for forty-seven minutes exactly. Listening hard, she could just make out Dinah’s cheerful voice as she chatted to the babies downstairs.

  Employing her sister as her full-time nanny had been one of the best business decisions Annie had ever made. And even though she was at home now, she wasn’t going to cut Dinah’s hours, because there was going to be more work. She was determined there was going to be more work. For everybody’s sake.

  Her ph
one bleeped with a text and she snatched it up, anxious for a development of any kind at all.

  ‘Surviving?’ the text from Ed began, ‘you are wondrfl. Sthg will happn. Dnt PANIC. Pls. Xxx’

  It wasn’t the agent/producer news she’d been hoping for but at least it made her smile.

  When the babies were tiny, Ed had taken months of unpaid leave to look after them. But finally, in the summer term, he’d gone back to his job as head of music at the mightily posh and private St Vincent’s – the school Annie had slaved to send her children to. It still made Annie smile to think that she’d first met Ed on a parent-teacher night.

  When Ed and Owen had rushed out of the house at 8.15 this morning, Annie had felt so jealous of their need to be somewhere by a certain time. As she’d stood in the hall, ready to see them off, she hadn’t quite been able to believe that once again she was adrift, at home, without a job.

  Ed had kissed her goodbye and told her as cheerfully as possible: ‘Keep busy, keep smiling. This is only day four. And this is you we’re talking about. You always get through things. You are always OK. I know you!’

  But staring at the computer screen now, it was hard to believe in herself. As usual, she had no backup. Tamsin was the one and only executive she knew in the TV business. She hadn’t a clue who else to speak to about finding a job. Well no, that wasn’t quite true. She’d worked on another programme before. Although almost everyone who’d been involved with that had been a complete idiot.

  Apart from Bob, the cameraman. He’d been so incredibly good, she’d immediately put him forward for the HNTS job.

  She called Bob’s number up on her phone.

  ‘Hello Annie,’ he answered almost immediately.

  ‘Hey, how’s it going? Have you recovered from the shock yet?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah … you’ve got to be prepared in this business. I’ve been in it long enough to know that. I’m working on a nice little documentary up in Wales. Old friend of mine put me on to it.’

  ‘You’ve got another job? Already?’ She tried not to sound too resentful.