by Nick Louth
‘Yeah, so you can’t see anything,’ Carr muttered.
‘Well, you can see that she has breathtaking green eyes, a soft sensuous smile and the longest, smoothest legs on the planet. And you can still put “Mira nude pics exclusive” on the front page banner. Which should be good for a half million extra sales, right?’
‘I’d need to see them.’
‘They’d have to be run with the product clearly visible. There would have to be a contract about that, I’m afraid. And I can’t do it yet.’
‘What’s the product?’
‘Can’t say, obviously. But you’d be ahead of the launch, which will be huge, and I mean effing massive. And they would be big advertisers for your pages, very big. That is so long as you don’t spoil the show by saying horrible things about her now.’
‘The pictures are free?’
‘Maybe. So long as you run the video on your website.’
‘What video?’
‘The commercial. It’s an “unapproved” version, without the edits required by the broadcasters, so it’s quite sexy. We’d leak in onto YouTube eventually, director’s cut kind of thing, or we’d claim it had been stolen, but so long as you buy it from us and keep it prominent on the website you can have the stills for nothing.’
‘Hang on a minute, Jonesy, how much…?’
‘Fifty thou.’
‘Well, I’m not sure. So instead of you paying us for ads, we’d be bloody paying you.’
‘Just think though: Mira Roskova, voted world’s most beautiful woman, kit off. Sun exclusive…’
‘Fifty big ones though…,’ Carr complained.
‘Well, Nige, it’s much less than what we quoted The Sunday Mirror. Think about it. You’ve got until six o’clock. Sorry Nige, got a call on the other line. Probably the Mirror. Bye.’ He hung up, leaned back against the kitchen counter, and inhaled deeply. Victory from the jaws of defeat. Nice. At least now, with a tastier morsel dangled, The Sun might not go to the trouble of finding out that Mira never did go to Milan.
Now, Jonesy would just have to make sure that Mira did get that Suressence skincare contract, and then get some photos and a video made to match what he’d promised Nigel Carr. Still, with tabloid publicity like that lined up, something he’d tell them about tomorrow, it was all the more likely to happen.
Jonesy shuffled over and picked up the stack of newspapers from his doormat. As usual, he went straight for the Mirror, his alma mater. After a quick scan through for alluring female flesh, and clever headlines, he flipped over to the back page sports section. There was a half page photograph of Lawrence Wall bringing down Everton’s Karl Lutis in a cup tie last season. The picture, obviously taken with a telephoto lens, was a savagely foreshortened vision of predator and prey, like a National Geographic feature from the Serengeti. No wonder it had won a prize: the brutality of the tackle; the spray of mud frozen in space, like droplets of blood; the pain scribbled on the Everton forward’s features; and above all, the bestial snarl on Lawrence Wall’s face, level with the throat, as if he was about to bite his victim. Football? No. A matter of life and death.
Jonesy shuddered. He just hoped that this former soldier they’d hired to protect Mira was going to be up to the job. He’d imagine that some bloke who fought the Taliban would think it was a cushy number to guard some slip of a girl. He’d tell him. Beneath the glitz, beauty is as tough an industry as there is. It may be mascara and face cream, but they don’t take no effing prisoners.
Chapter Six
Virgil was welcomed into his first Team Mira meeting at noon on Wednesday. As he arrived, Stardust Brands’ offices were a hive of activity: corridor conversations, urgent phone calls and presentations in glass-walled meeting rooms. In Helmand, it just seemed like yesterday, he’d been used to hurried tactical meetings conducted at a bellow under a camouflaged tent, with the noise and dust of choppers in the background; gobbling down food on the hurry-up, squeezed out of foil packages into dented mess tins.
Here the walls were decorated with the luminously beautiful models, each the spearhead of a campaign to motivate women to part with serious cash for shampoo or face cream, handbags or clothing, in the hope of looking a little more like a goddess. On the large oval table there were danish pastries and fresh fruit, endless coffee, and a smoked salmon spread to allow them to work right through lunch and into the afternoon.
In Afghanistan his kit was permanently filthy from the dust and grime, his bergen roughly stitched where a fragment from an RPG that would otherwise have severed his spine had shredded and scorched the material. At Stardust Brands, if anything was torn, it was meant to be torn. Dirt was only present by design. The tall Somali receptionist, Adula, was wearing a mauve dress whose strategically placed slits made it look like it had been raked by an AK47. Jarvis McTear, the quiffed and bearded art director, had the limpest handshake he’d ever felt, but his jeans sported shiny ingrained filth as if he’d spent a lifetime mending tractors, something Virgil seriously doubted. Virgil was no Army lifer, but he felt that this world was all dreams and desires, somehow lacking gravity and grit.
Virgil had been talking to Portia, who wanted to know all about Afghanistan. He tried to explain that there was no glamour in lying and bleeding in a wadi, wondering which of your mates was alive, while a couple of Afghan seven-year-olds sat nearby, waiting for you to die so they could steal and sell your kit. The conversation stopped when Thad swept into the room, already dispensing instructions, followed by Jonesy Tolling, and a couple of people he didn’t know. Virgil had spent his time on the Stardust Brands website last night in preparation and he had memorised the faces and titles. The gushing tribute to the talents of so-called brand managers and envisioning consultants had made him cringe.
Virgil was here to present a strategy, something that Colonel Forsyth and Chacewater had dreamed up, to protect Mira Roskova not only against Lawrence Wall, but against any of the many threats that can trouble celebrity life.
After welcoming Virgil, Thad detailed what he and Jonesy had done so far to keep the Lawrence Wall issue out of the press. ‘Now as for keeping her safe in future, it’s up to you Virgil.’
‘Well, I’d like to start by assessing the risk from Lawrence Wall. I understand that you’re working on how she delicately disengages her life from his.’
‘Yeah,’ said Jonesy. ‘She’s got a new phone, and Kelly is monitoring her personal e-mails. Lawrence Wall has e-mailed her numerous times, and for now she’s ignoring him. Long term, we’ve got some thinking to do, which is where you can help.’
‘Well, I take it you’ve all seen the Chacewater security strategy,’ Virgil said.
‘Perhaps you would summarise it for us,’ Thad said.
‘Okay. Like any high-profile celebrity, Mira needs her public exposure mapped in advance, to times and places where we can assess and manage the security risks. Press conferences, photo ops, public dinners, galas, charity events and so on, plus the planned transits to and from them. Even this week’s unplanned visit by Lawrence Wall to her apartment building. These are all set pieces because we know what the threats are likely to be, and how to protect her against them. UPIs, what we call unplanned public interactions, by contrast create hard-to-manage security situations.’
‘What type of thing are you thinking about?’ Portia asked.
‘Say Mira is driving alone and has a minor accident, and needs help. A guy stops to help, then asks for her phone number, or worse. Or if she is buttonholed in a hotel lift by an overly-persistent fan. Or nips out for a pizza, and is followed.’
‘Huh, so basically any moment of spontaneous human activity in the outside world is a UPI,’ said Portia.
‘In security terms, yes,’ Virgil said.
‘We’ve had to deal with all this in the past,’ Thad said. ‘But the ubiquity of camera phones now means there is a publishable record of every public moment: Mira looking ungainly emerging from a car, on holiday looking anything other than super-slim, eating
a burger with ketchup on her face. All potentially damaging.’
‘As Diane Glassman so memorably said,’ Portia muttered, ‘fame has a habit of devouring its most perfect children.’
‘And quickly turning them into shit,’ added Jonesy, smirking.
‘So how well has she adjusted to it, would you say?’ Virgil asked.
‘Not bad, so far,’ Thad said. ‘I know she likes to go for a run, and from now on that can’t happen without you, Virgil. She likes to meet friends in pubs or restaurants, but worries it might be increasingly difficult.’
‘It doesn’t have to be,’ Virgil said. ‘There are quiet times and quiet rooms, if we choose the venues carefully. But we also need genuinely safe places for her when it all becomes too much. Private places she can go to at short notice, with outdoor space, room for friends to come and stay. Not hotels, they cannot really be regarded as private, particularly after the Copenhagen experience. I imagine she’s not short of offers from wealthy men inviting her to use their private islands, country estates, grand villas, yachts, whatever.’
‘You’re right there, Virgil. She’s got to be about the most eligible woman on the planet right now,’ Portia said.
‘But all such offers obviously need careful vetting,’ Virgil continued. ‘We don’t want her to jump out of the public frying pan and into a private fire.’
‘True,’ said Portia. ‘There are emotionally manipulative people out there who may be much cleverer than Lawrence Wall, even if less violent. At least with Wall, he’s got a public brand of his own to protect, which should give us some leverage.’
‘Nah, nah, not all brands are like the ones we push,’ Jonesy said. ‘Lawrence Wall is a bad boy image already. No one thinks he sends his birds effing flowers, Portia. He shags ’em from behind over the breakfast table.’ Jonesy leaned back, hands behind his head, exposing the dark sweat stains in the armpits of his blue shirt. ‘This was the guy, remember, who headbutted a referee at the age of seventeen, who’s been sent off countless times, and had endless nightclub punch-ups. Yet no one can so reliably stop an opposing forward. He’s always in the right place. That’s why despite the injuries and his red cards, he’s still an England regular.’
‘But he has sponsors, Jonesy, and they get nervous about bad behaviour,’ Portia said.
‘Some do,’ Jonesy said. ‘But don’t forget Wall’s brand is built around being the meanest player on the pitch. After all, it was word-for-word Nike’s slogan when it launched its Destroyer range of Lawrence Wall footwear, a deal worth ten million, which may I remind you is more than anything we’ve yet got for Mira. That’s why all these eight-year-olds begged their dads to buy them a pair of eighty-five quid Lawrence Wall red and black football boots with those words on the side. That’s why their older brothers shaved the same stripe into their hair as his, with the scorpion tattoo underneath. I mean every bus stop and dole queue is heaving with ‘Wallheads’. They love him nasty. That’s why the camera is always on him. He’s media magic. Lawrence Wall is like the pile-ups that stop Formula One being boring.’
‘But this is 2015,’ Portia persisted. ‘Public opinion won’t stand for it.’
‘In The Guardian, no doubt,’ Jonesy chuckled. ‘But look broader. Lawrence Wall’s demographic is all those blokes in white vans with copies of the tabloids stuffed down the dashboards. The people who got left behind in the metrosexual, multicultural, pancetta-nibbling Britain. They’re on minimum wage, zero hours contracts, and a bit of cash in hand if they’re lucky. They love football, and they idolise Lawrence Wall because he is their dreams made flesh. Look at their faces in the crowd when Wall brings someone down. You must have seen it on telly. Snarling faces, clenched fists and a chorus of “Another one bites the dust”. Don’t you understand, Portia? He’s getting even for them all.’
‘Okay people,’ Thad said. ‘Focus, focus. Suressence is absolute priority one until we close the deal. No budget for anything else. Okay?’
‘Shame,’ said Virgil. ‘We could do with an additional bodyguard, even part-time.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ Thad said. ‘But you have to understand that we can’t sign any new branding deals for Mira until Suressence finalises all the product rights it wants. In the meantime all other long-term brand associations are on hold. We lost Pond’s skincream last month because they won’t wait, and the Silky hair products deal has expired. Look, I’m sure you’ll do fine.’
‘Lawrence Wall has already made one public attempt to get into her flat,’ Virgil said. ‘The lock to the apartment has only just been changed today, and he still has a key to the lift which they aren’t going to change. If he’d gone in through the car park level he’d have got in. We could do with someone there.’
‘But Mira’s away, right?’ Jonesy said. ‘She’s sunning herself on a private island in the Caribbean until the bruises heal. All you have to do, Virgil, is protect her until Lawrence Wall loses interest. He’s bound to have a queue of women, so his interest in her should soon start to wind down.’
‘Unless he’s fallen in love,’ Portia laughed. ‘Then you’ll have a job for life.’
* * *
Virgil left the meeting before its conclusion in order to meet intern Kelly Hopkins, who monitored all the media comment on Stardust clients, and collected and filed plaudits and threats. He was pointed towards an office marked admin. The door was open and he saw where a slim-but-stacked redhead in a tight white shirt and jeans was hard at work at a screen, surrounded by stacks of files. The office was small and windowless.
‘You must be Virgil,’ said Kelly, picking up a hefty stack of files. ‘Welcome to my hutch. Let’s get a coffee and have a chat somewhere with some space.’
She took him to one of the glass meeting rooms, closed the door and leaned back against it to look at him. ‘I’m really glad to have you aboard. Never mind about saving Mira’s life, you’re going to save mine,’ she said. ‘I am absolutely snowed under. If you are able to take over most of the Mira work, I’ll at least be able to do the other fifteen clients.’
‘I’m just writing the reports, I think,’ Virgil said.
‘Mainly yes, but I’m sure you’ve got a keener eye for the threats than I have. You’d notice things that would pass me by, I’m sure.’
‘I’ve noticed something already. There’s a sleeping bag under your desk,’ he jerked his thumb back towards her office.
‘Well, yes. Last night was a particularly long one. I had to get up to date for today’s big meeting. I’m refusing to do any more overnighters until they start paying me.’
‘You’re not paid?’
‘I’m an intern. Doing it for love.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘And training of course. But I already know more about the monitoring and record systems than any of them, because I set them up. I could train them. But, between you and me, I don’t. The idea is that by making myself indispensible they’ll have to give me a proper job.’
‘In the army you never volunteer for anything,’ Virgil said. ‘Still, I’m sure it’s different here.’
‘Not completely. We don’t have the Taliban but we do have Portia bloody Casals. She’s my boss, earns a big whack, and has outsourced most of her drudge work to me, basically.’ She looked at him again. ‘So I take it you are being paid?’
‘Yes, I’m glad to say I am.’ Virgil stared into those questioning blue eyes which demanded: and how much? He already felt that he needed Kelly on his side, and she wouldn’t be that way for long if he told her. ‘It’s not that good,’ he lied. ‘But they’ve promised me more down the line…’
‘Ha. Jam tomorrow. That sounds like the Stardust Brands I know.’
‘What about Thad Cobalt?’
‘Nice enough, but he lives in cloud-cuckoo land. An academic, basically. Has to get consultants in to zip up his flies for him.’ Without looking up she said, ‘Being male, there is one piece of advice you won’t need.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Never be caugh
t alone in an office with Jonesy Tolling.’ She snaked her arms in front of her. ‘The drunken octopus. If he wasn’t so bloody brilliant at his job they would have sacked him years ago.’
‘What’s so clever about him?’
‘Well, Thad was negotiating this deal for Mira to endorse a Norwegian mineral water called Purity. Jonesy then started schmoozing his well-connected friends to gain her an entrée into becoming a UN ambassador for water conservation. It’s not a done deal yet, but it would quadruple what they can charge Purity for her. Clever or what?’
‘What about Mira herself?’
‘Ah yes, Snow White, the virginal princess.’ She grinned at him. ‘You’re probably expecting me to come out with the standard jealous bitch response aren’t you? Stuck-up, uptight, high-maintenance cow etcetera.’
Virgil laughed. ‘No, really I’m not.’
‘She is demanding, no doubt about that. And she has a heck of a temper. But she’s very professional, especially for someone who has just been catapulted from nowhere into this shitstorm of publicity.’ She indicated the heaps of papers around her. ‘And she can be very kind. She knows I’m not paid, and when she found out we were the same size, she has given me, literally, dozens of pairs of gorgeous shoes. Manolo Blahniks, Jimmy Choos. She gets given so much, and they would just be in her wardrobe gathering dust. I wish I could get down another dress size, and then I could get some of her clothes too. I wish I’d never had the boob job now.’
‘Should I ask why?’
‘A couple of years ago I did some glamour modelling…mainly lingerie mind, not porn, but they all say the same thing: “You need to add a cup size, love.” These blokes, of course, are usually paunchy alcoholic perverts who no woman would give a second glance to, but to them whatever a woman looks like isn’t enough. So I got a loan and had an op, for which I’m still in debt incidentally, but then they wanted me to do collagen injections for my lips and I thought, no way. It’s bad enough to know that thousands of spotty fourteen-year- old boys are wanking off over your picture without having to change the shape of your face as well.’ She made a cross-eyed pout.
