A Night In With Audrey Hepburn

by Lucy Holliday

  Resignedly, I slump back down onto the Chesterfield. ‘All right. Give it a go.’

  He slips one of the pairs of scissors out of the leather case. ‘Is not quite Mayfair salon. Try not to be thinking about smell.’

  ‘Oh, God, the cheese …’

  ‘Will be working fast, do not worry.’ He’s already started to snip. ‘Then you can be getting rid of cheese.’

  ‘Thank you, Bogdan, Son of … actually, I’ll just call you Bogdan, if that’s OK with you.’

  ‘Is fine. And is no need to be thanking. Is good practice. Besides this,’ he adds, scissors starting to fly, ‘am thinking you are having decent bone structure, if am able to find it.’

  *

  He found it.

  Look, I’m not going to claim Audrey cheekbones. But Bogdan (Son of, etc) was right: I do have decent bone structure, and his super-short pixie crop has brought it out.

  His genius scissors have done something feathery and choppy with all those dreadful wonky ends, and he’s shaped the disastro-fringe so that it makes my face look heart-shaped instead of hobbit-shaped.

  It’s no mean achievement.

  Honestly, if I were Bogdan Senior, I wouldn’t be banning a career in hairdressing and casting all kinds of aspersions (including some frankly unpleasant homophobic ones; Son Of told me quite a lot about his dad while he was snipping away), I’d be using my property empire to set Son Of up in a swanky salon all of his own as soon as possible, sit back and watch the satisfied customers roll out and the money roll in.

  But disapproving parents are hard to deal with. And mine may not be a minor Moldovan crime lord, but I’m heartily glad that I’m able to arrive at Mum’s flat, now looking a lot less like brush from toilet than I did an hour ago.

  Well, I say I’m arriving at her flat; actually I’m arriving at the sprawling new property development, taking up almost an entire block behind Baker Street, where Mum’s flat is located. It’s all very swanky and all very ‘Mum’: not just residential buildings but also several chichi shops, a couple of Hot New bars and restaurants, plus an über-hip day spa and gym – FitLondon – that’s already attracting an eager celebrity clientele to its acro-yoga classes and chakra-balancing massage treatments.

  It takes me several minutes to wend my way past all of this, and the most expensive townhouses and apartments, to reach the small studio flats right at the back of the development, but I find number 710 without too much difficulty, having helped Mum move in here a few nights ago, and ring the bell.

  Mum opens the door a moment later.

  At least, I think it’s Mum.

  Unless I’m seeing Hollywood legends again. Because the creature standing in front of me looks, thanks to the bizarre amount of hair covering it from head to waistline, an awful lot like Chewbacca.

  ‘What do you think?’

  It’s Mum’s voice coming out from under all the hair, not Chewbacca’s plaintive roar, thank goodness.

  ‘I got Stella to do some extensions for me too, while she’s here!’ she adds. ‘Freshen myself up before summer school starts!’

  (I should explain: Mum is using the proceeds from the sale of the house in Kensal Rise – the part she didn’t spend on a titchy studio apartment just off Baker Street – to buy a ‘Gonna Make U a Star’ franchise. They’re stage schools with after-school, Saturday morning and holiday-time acting, singing and dancing classes for children, exactly the sort of thing Cass (and I, somewhat less enthusiastically) used to attend. Mum’s new branch will be up and running, in a primary school back in Kensal Rise, a couple of weeks from now.

  ‘It looks … er …’

  ‘Cass says it makes me look ten years younger.’

  This means that Cass has simply nodded, without bothering to listen, and whilst simultaneously texting, flipping through OK! and watching back episodes of Keeping Up with the Kardashians on her iPad.

  But still, I’ll fib and agree, because life’s just easier that way.

  ‘They’re great, Mum. Really very—’

  ‘Oh, my God, Libby.’ She’s swept back a hank of extension and is now able to see out. ‘What have you done to your hair?

  So much for my freshly discovered cheekbones. So much, in fact, for the fact that after Bogdan trimmed my hair, I felt so good that I even braved a slight change from my usual jeans and grey hoodie, rooted around in my wardrobe boxes and dug out the black Burberry trench-coat I bought in a designer discount sale when I was feeling unusually flush with money having done a radio voiceover ad a few years ago. And which has remained unworn ever since, because I never felt chic enough to pull it off until now. I mean, I’ve still got my jeans and a grey hoodie on underneath, to be fair. Which is probably stupid of me because, I’ve only just realized, the hood will be bulging at the back and making me look less like Audrey Hepburn and more like the Hunchback of Notre-Dame.

  ‘Don’t you like it?’ I ask Mum.

  ‘That’s not the point.’ She stands back as I go through the door into the flat, folds her arms and gives me a long, disapproving once-over. ‘Long hair is so much more versatile! What if you want to audition for a period drama? RTE have just started casting one on the lives and loves of the Brontë sisters, as it happens.’

  ‘Oh, Mum, I’m not sure if I’m really cut out to play a Brontë, no matter what my hair—’

  ‘No, darling, I was going to suggest you try out for a part as one of the servants. I was talking to the casting director yesterday – I mean, don’t you think Cass would just be perfect as Emily Brontë? – and my radar went on for you when she mentioned that they’re going to need loads of non-speaking actors to play the housemaids and the village yokels. Stuff like that.’

  I’m not sure what I’m more depressed by: Mum’s certainty that the very highest I can possibly rise in my career is playing a non-speaking housemaid-slash-village yokel, or the (frankly horrifying) image of Cass murdering the role of Emily Brontë.

  ‘But they won’t look twice at you if you turn up looking like that!’ Mum complains. ‘Wigs are way too expensive to bother wasting them on the extras!’

  ‘Well, it’s done now. And, in all honesty, Mum, I’m not sure I really want to go up for another non-speaking role in anything. In fact, I’ve been thinking that it might be time to look for another job. A non-acting job, I mean. I’m not sure exactly what, right now, but …’

  ‘I suppose they might be able to put you in a mob cap, or something,’ she muses. ‘Perhaps if you wore one when you went to the audition … or a straw bonnet, maybe, like a yokel might wear …’

  ‘Muuuuuum! Is that Libby? Is she finally here?’

  I’m actually grateful for Cass bellowing for me, for once, before Mum can suggest any more Ye Olde Country Bumpkin regalia for me to wear to an audition I don’t want to go to.

  ‘Yep, Cass, I’m right here.’

  I slip past Mum and up the stairs to the bedroom, where Cass is currently sitting on the bed like Lady Muck, while her usual hairdresser, make-up artist, and maid of all work, Stella, is hanging plastic sheeting all over the en-suite shower room.

  I’d be a bit concerned that something right out of an episode of Dexter is going to happen if it weren’t for the fact that Stella is surrounded by spray-tan equipment, and that Cass is lazily scooping her freshly extended hair up into the huge polka-dot shower cap she only ever uses when she’s about to be St-Tropez’d to within an inch of her life.

  ‘Oooooooh, Libby!’ Stella stops what she’s doing and stares at me out of the en-suite door. ‘I love your hair!’

  I’ve always liked Stella, who’s an old friend of Cass’s from stage-school days (before sensibly deciding to opt out of show business and start up her own mobile-beautician business instead) but I like her now more than ever.

  ‘Thank you!’ I beam at her.

  ‘Are you nuts, Stell?’ Cass, still fiddling with her shower hat (and yes, she does indeed have her phone in the other hand, and her iPad, plus a copy of OK!, open on the bed
in front of her). ‘She burnt half of it off yesterday.’

  ‘Burnt it?’ Stella – and Mum, coming up the stairs behind me – ask, in unison.

  ‘Muuu-uuuum!’ Cass rolls her eyes. ‘I told you that already!’

  ‘You did no such thing!’ Mum says.

  ‘Oh. Well, I meant to. Libby burnt half her hair off yesterday and got fired. Hi, Lib,’ she adds, ‘can you go straight out to Starbucks and get me a … oh!’ She’s glanced up at me for the first time. She frowns. Then she scowls. ‘Your hair! You look … you look like …’

  ‘She looks just like Audrey Hepburn!’ Stella declares.

  There’s no time for me to be thrilled by the comparison, because Mum is staring at me with her arms folded and her mouth pinched.

  ‘Fired, Libby?’ she says.

  ‘Yes, but it wasn’t my fault. Well, not completely. I had this little accident with a lit cigarette …’

  ‘And when were you going to mention it to me? Your mother. Your agent.’

  ‘It only happened yesterday,’ I say, in my most practised not-a-big-drama voice, so as to bring about a modicum of calm (growing up in a house with Mum and Cass, it’s a tactic I’ve used a lot over the years). ‘Anyway, I didn’t think it was worth bothering you with, when you’ve got so much on. You know, with Gonna Make U a Star, and everything.’

  (This is another tactic I’ve used a lot over the years – changing the subject, mostly back to something Mum or Cass really want to talk about: themselves.)

  ‘She looks nothing like Audrey Hepburn,’ Cass is pouting, staring at me in the mirror, then looking at herself, then back at me again. ‘Maybe I should go short. What do you think, Stella?’

  ‘After three hundred quid’s worth of hair extensions?’ Stella asks.

  ‘Well, if Libby looks that good, I’d look amazing.’

  ‘You are not cutting your hair!’ Mum barks at her. ‘It’s bad enough I have one daughter who looks like a lesbian!’

  ‘Honestly, Marilyn,’ Stella says, ‘you need to chill. Libby looks great!’

  ‘Stella, please.’ Mum is icy. ‘Can you just get on with Cass’s tan, please, and leave the serious family matters to us?’

  ‘Mum, for God’s sake, it isn’t a serious family matter. I mean, it might have been, if the accident with the cigarette had been any worse,’ I add, pointedly, because it occurs to me that Mum hasn’t expressed the slightest concern about this part of it. ‘But really, it’s not a huge deal. In fact, it might even be an opportunity for me to—’

  ‘Not a huge deal? It was your first speaking part in five years! Do you have any idea how hard it was for me to get you that job?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Mum, it was only a shitty little one line part.’ Cass is getting off the bed, taking her robe off to display her pertly naked body, and heading for the shower room. ‘Vanessa found another random extra to do it about two minutes after she kicked Libby off the set.’

  ‘Thank you, Cass,’ I say.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ she says, completely missing my sarcastic tone.

  I’m not so distracted by Mum’s growing histrionics, by the way, that it doesn’t occur to me to think: if Cass knows that my role was filled two minutes after I was thrown off the set, maybe she wasn’t otherwise occupied with Dillon O’Hara after all.

  ‘After all the work I’ve put into your career!’ Mum is saying, sinking onto the bed in a soap-opera-worthy display of grief. ‘I just don’t know how you could do this to me, Libby.’

  This is the point, normally, at which my patience would run thin and I’d fling myself out of Mum’s apartment in a red-faced whirl of silent fury, slamming doors and muttering expletives, making 1) absolutely no headway with my mother, and 2) a bit of a fool of myself into the bargain.

  But today is different.

  It’s not just because of my new haircut, and the confidence it’s given me.

  Actually, do you know what: it’s nothing to do with my new haircut, or the confidence it’s given me.

  It’s because of last night, and my all-too-vivid encounter with Imaginary Audrey.

  Just because I hallucinated her (and just because I hallucinated her being weird about my Nespresso machine and wrecking my hair with a pair of kitchen scissors; though mind you, the wrecked hair turned out not to be a hallucination after all) it doesn’t mean that her legendary poise and grace and loveliness felt any less poised and graceful and lovely. And though I’ll never have her cheekbones, her waistline, or her ineffable style, I feel like I might just be able to achieve a bit of her poise and grace, if I really make the effort.

  So instead of flinging and slamming and muttering, I take a very, very deep breath, and say, in a voice of poised, graceful loveliness (well, not a sweary mutter, anyway), ‘Mum, come on. I haven’t done anything to you. It was all just a silly accident.’

  ‘Oh, really? Because right now, Liberty, I have to ask myself: how much of an accident could this possibly have been?’

  Poised. Graceful. Lovely.

  ‘Mum. Seriously. Do you really think I’d have set my head alight on purpose?’

  ‘Well, I’m sure you didn’t do it actually on purpose. But you may have done it unconsciously on purpose.’

  Poised. Graceful. Lovely.

  ‘I mean, I just find it interesting,’ Mum goes on, as if she’s garnered some sort of psychological expertise from a first-class degree at Oxford University, rather than a monthly subscription to Top Santé magazine and a secret addiction to Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle website, ‘that this so-called accident happens the very first time you get a speaking part in years. A speaking part I arranged for you.’

  ‘Mum …’

  ‘Or,’ she goes on, ‘it could have been because you subconsciously wanted to sabotage the whole thing before you had a chance to fail.’

  ‘Oh, for crying out loud!’ I snap, my poise and grace wobbling in the face of Mum’s torrent of psychobabble nonsense.

  Unless … well, was I subconsciously sabotaging myself?

  It has just the tiniest ring of truth about it, I have to admit.

  ‘You used to do it all the time when you were a little girl.’ Mum is on a roll now. ‘That time you accidentally-on-purpose stubbed your toe the day before the Cinderella audition, do you remember? I put it down to jealousy of your sister, because she was up for the part of Cinders and you were only trying out for the chorus, but now I’m wondering if it was nothing to do with Cass, and simply because you couldn’t handle the pressure …’

  ‘It was an am-dram panto! In Hounslow! There wasn’t any pressure!’

  ‘Well, of course there wasn’t, because you couldn’t audition and you never got the part! And what about your Year Five carol concert, when you had a solo line in Twelve Days of Christmas? You came down with a so-called sore throat half an hour before curtain-up.’

  The way I recall this event, I still managed to croak my way, half a dozen times, through the ‘Six Geese A-Laying’ verse before collapsing straight after the concert with a fever of 103 degrees and then being in bed with tonsillitis for a week.

  ‘And what about that day when the Royal Ballet scouts were coming to Miss Pauline’s, and you slipped getting out of the shower and knocked yourself out on the towel rail …’

  ‘Mum, for the last time, it was an accident!’ All attempts at Audrey-esque poise have vanished. ‘And I didn’t come all the way over here this morning for a psychiatric evaluation!’

  ‘Yeah, Mum, there’s loads of stuff we need Libby to do!’ Cass calls from the bathroom, where Stella has started to blast her with fake-tan spray. ‘I need my dress picking up from the dry-cleaner’s and I need some Spanx picking up from the Selfridges lingerie department and I need my ruby pendant altering – so it highlights my boobs better, Lib, remember?’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘… and I need my I’m Not Really a Waitress for my pedicure – that’s an OPI nail polish, Libby, by the way – and I need …’

  ‘I
know it’s an OPI nail polish, Cass, thank you.’

  ‘Well, they’ll have it in the spa at FitLondon. And can you go there first, please, or my toenails will never be dry in time?’

  I’ll be dispatched on any menial errand, to be honest, if it gets me away from Mum’s amateur-psychology codswallop.

  ‘Fine. I’ll go there first.’

  ‘This discussion is not over, Libby!’ Mum calls after me as I start to head down the stairs. ‘As soon as Cass’s big night is over …’

  But I’m closing the front door behind me.

  The worst is over, at least.

  Because that’s the thing: as soon as Cass’s Big Night is over … what? Mum will just move onto the next project she’s earmarked for Cass – Emily Brontë, a Made Man magazine cover, Strictly Come Dancing; neither she nor Cass will care that much as long as it keeps her in the public eye – and my embarrassing sacking will be forgotten.

  And when Mum does find three minutes to think about it again, and book me in for another extras job on whatever TV drama is particularly desperate right now, I’m just going to decline. Summon back a soupçon more of that Audrey poise and tell Mum politely, but categorically, No.

  Of course, I do need to crack on with finding another job in the meantime. The rent on my new flat – even if I can persuade Bogdan Senior to halve it, which I doubt – isn’t going to grow on trees.

  Rent money that, it only occurs to me as I approach the entrance to FitLondon, I’m just about to blow on OPI nail polishes and Spanx pants for Cass, because she didn’t give me any money to pay for it all and she’s notoriously bad at paying me back.

  Obviously this isn’t going to fly, not now that I’m dealing with a minor Moldovan crime lord. I need to go back to Mum’s and get some cash from her, or I’ll be easily forty quid out of pocket before I know it.

  As I turn away from FitLondon’s entrance doors, back towards the flat, my phone suddenly bleeps with a text.

  It’s Olly:

  Any decision on pie yet? The pie world is your oyster. Suggest, however, not oyster.