Chapter Twenty-Eight #3
Not Dianne because nobody can get inside Dianne’s head and she has a massive amount of tension surrounding her.
But possibly Grazia too.
They might all meet up some Christmas, have a dinner party and discuss the retreat and how fabulous Rose was.
Dinner parties are what normal people have.
Keera’s never been to one.
She’s seen them on films and in cooking shows, obviously.
But sitting with friends around a table full of food is not something there’s been room for in her and her mother’s lives.
India waves to her from the beach and Keera waves back.
She holds her hand up: ‘Five minutes,’ she mouths.
Keera suddenly imagines what will happen when the retreat is over and she flies back home.
Home to the small, rented house in San Francisco where she has to pretend she’s living in a massive celeb-style house; where all interviews take place in beautiful hotels as reporters can’t come to the house and see where they really live.
Nobody can see that the person in charge of the money, Dr Bobbi, has mishandled it so badly that Keera’s capital has dwindled.
Two albums made years ago.
The money from her TV shows is long gone. The residuals are tiny.
She’ll have to go back on the tour bus again: touring and selling merchandise because that’s the only way to keep their heads above water.
That life stretches out in front of her unless she changes something.
This week is it.
She’s not ready to go back and … she’s not ready to confront her mother, either. It’s too hard.
Instead, she does the only thing she can think of.
‘Mom, I can’t deal with what you want right now. I have to make decisions about the rest of my life.’
Then she hangs up, turns her phone to silent and makes her way down to the beach where everyone else has settled themselves on beach towels. There are extra blankets in case it gets cooler later and, already, the group is preparing for the deep breathing in front of the Ionian Sea.
The phone continues vibrating for the next ten minutes. Her mother is not keen on being hung up on, although Keera herself has never done it before. But there’s a first time for everything.
On Thursday morning, Dianne’s sick.
‘She was fine on the beach last night,’ says Grazia, who appeared to be the person who says what everyone else is thinking and does not say. ‘I do not think she is sick, pah!’
Rose doesn’t think Dianne’s sick, either. She’s the only person who hasn’t revealed their personal story and she’s ruining Rose’s carefully worked out plans.
Dianne is getting a home visit in her villa bedroom this afternoon when everyone else is going to be getting some exercise and working on their notebooks.
Dianne’s notebook was found in the garden on Tuesday, so Rose got Beata to put it back in Dianne’s room that evening.
It has not been thrown out since, so far as Rose knows.
‘Keera,’ says Rose, once they’ve done their ten minutes of morning breathwork, ‘I wonder how you’ll feel if we come back to you, my dear?’
Keera is ready for this.
Since her mother’s outraged phone call last night, Keera’s mind has been full of moments when Dr Bobbi shouted at her or manipulated her.
She had told Rose about the call.
‘You’ve never hung up on your mother before,’ Rose had said. ‘It would have been an insane concept, but you just did it. That’s progress. You’re laying down boundaries.’
Throughout the meditation on the beach, all Keera thought of was the day the interview came out. It was the first time she’d felt that everything was falling apart.
Sunshine fills the hotel suite where Empress has come to interview singing superstar, Keera. Already one of the artists who are known by one name only, Keera joins icons like Beyoncé and Zendaya, whose career hers most closely resembles.
Plucked from obscurity to appear in a kids’ TV show, Keera’s talent was immediately obvious, and a meteoric rise to teen stardom followed.
Yet it’s hard to reconcile a girl who turned her kooky smile and exquisite voice into millions of dollars with the thoughtful young woman I’m interviewing today.
In the flesh, Keera is refreshingly normal. Polite.
‘Do you want coffee or water?’ she asks, gesturing at the juices and coffee pot laid out on a side table.
She’s drinking only iced water, which I mention must be proof of what it takes to take care of the luminous Celtic skin that’s rumoured to be responsible for a top-secret-for-now deal with Lanc?me.
She can’t talk about that, she says apologetically, neither denying nor confirming it.
But she can talk about the album she’s making with a multi-award-winning producer – ‘It’s such a privilege to work with Santi Montavano,’ she says earnestly.
She’s also eager to talk about the children’s charity she’s donating her early TV wardrobe to for a star-studded auction.
Some of the outfits from the early days of Keera & Cat are on show already: including the red gingham pinafore Keera wore for at least half of the first series.
Her face angled towards the LA sun, the now-twenty-eight-year-old Keera’s beauty is ethereal. She has 1950s screen goddess curves, what she laughingly calls ‘Proof that I actually eat.’
Dressed in a norm-core pair of Levis and a vintage tee with her luxuriant dark hair shining in waves, she’s an intriguing combination of honesty and normality.
The latter quality has earned her many fans but, in a luxe suite in The Contessa Hotel in Bel Air, she’s as glamorous …
‘Fuck.’
It’s taken Keera one minute to scan the start of the article and realise that despite being as charming as humanly possible to the bone-thin forty-something woman who interviewed her two months ago, she’s been fat-shamed.
‘Screen goddess curves …’ She can imagine her mom’s reaction to that.
Knowing it was coming out today, Keera was anxious as she opened the pre-publication online Empress interview messaged to her by Lara LaGrand, the current publicist. Dr Bobbi believes publicists need to be kept on their toes so, no matter how tough it is, she fires them regularly.
Lara has made the cut for longer than usual because of mentions of her family’s vast home on Philadelphia’s old-money Main Line.
Keera knows her mom is a sucker for inherited wealth.
Lara fixed the interview and has just messaged that it’s ‘fabulous!’, which it is. Except for one thing that’s going to ruin Dr Bobbi’s day. And it’s not the mention of the possible Lanc?me deal, which is a totally manufactured piece of news created by Dr Bobbi herself.
‘Makes you sound sought-after,’ she said, ignoring her daughter’s look of horror.
It’s after half nine in the morning and it’s been a slightly foggy start to the day on Martina Street in San Francisco. February can be like that. The day starts with a mist around the house, and then suddenly it lifts, allowing the sun to glitter the bay.
Keera likes this house on the hill. She likes the utter anonymity of San Francisco and how the beach is only a walk from the house.
Los Angeles is all entertainment industry, where nobody’s ever an ordinary person – they’re an influencer waiting for a big break or they’re peering over your shoulder to see if anyone more important is coming along.
Dr Bobbi’s great at that.
She’s got the three-minute attention span of the relentless social climber.
This means endless lies about everything.
She’s told Keera to be vague about where they live.
‘Say Pacific Avenue,’ she insists. ‘We’re renting a huge house there. With …’ Dr Bobbi has to think of what she can add on to this mythical house – ‘a housekeeper, a zen garden with a cloud tree, a sauna, gym with a barre and Pilates reformer, and an infinity pool.’
‘Sure,’ Keera always says.
Sure is a word that says nothing.
Now she makes her third cup of coffee of the day and walks out into the back yard where she was sitting earlier with an old furry blanket around her. She’s been smoking and the aluminium ashtray has three butts in it already.
Stressed, Keera lights another, knowing this will boil her mother’s blood.
Her mother smokes.
In fact, it’s a mystery to Keera as to why Big Tobacco hasn’t flown Dr Bobbi out to Kentucky and planted a tree in her honour.
But Keera is not allowed to smoke.
It’s about appealing to the widest age group – both young girls and people in their twenties.
No smoking, no drinking, smile politely all the fucking time.
Her mother’s rules.
Oh yeah, and be thin.
Pretend to not care about being thin but work really hard at being thin so that she can fit into size zero pants and have the hips of a twelve-year-old.
Dr Bobbi makes the rules and insists on a weigh-in every week.
Keera has tried slimming pills but amphetamines make her wildly nervous and weight-loss injections affect her particularly badly with nausea.
Now she’s smoking and, while that works in terms of flattening her appetite, she’s not supposed to be smoking. She’s supposed to be doing intensive training with a guy who allegedly once got Lady Gaga in shape for a tour.
She’s exhausted trying to be thin. Why is this the only metric by which she’s measured? Thin first. Pretty next. Only then is her actual work considered.
Keera hates the misogyny of it.
She’s come to realise that women artists are never celebrated purely for their art: instead, it’s all folded up with physical attractiveness and ranked depending on how the powers that be – men – define women’s art.
Today, she and her mother have lunch – which means lines of coke and possibly margaritas – with Santi Montavano’s ex-wife, who is an old pal of Dr Bobbi’s and the one who got them the introduction to Santi himself.
They’ve only done one day in the studio so far. Keera feels too burned out to have sung well. It had not been a good day.
Santi’s heavily booked for the next two months, so with its implications of much time to come with the fabulous producer, the article contained another half-truth, which she hates.