Chapter 33 Margot
Chapter 33
Margot
Once again, my life is available for public consumption. One of the guests at last week’s party – I’ll probably never know who – leaked what happened to The Sun and even sent them photographs they snapped on their phone. Earlier today, Good Morning Britain ran a poll on whether I did the right or the wrong thing. Then Loose Women played a leaked recording of my speech.
I’ve spent all day with my phone glued to my hand, reading social media’s takes. Some people believe I did it for my own sake and they’d prefer to see my head on a plate rather than across the pages of Yeah! magazine. That edition comes out in a few days, so I expect the argument to continue long into the week.
Others reckon I’m trying to show support to my non-binary stepchild and are claiming me as their poster girl for modern mums and blended families. Then there’s the anti-woke mob who think I’m a victim, being forced into supporting something I don’t truly understand. So I’m either manipulative, a modernist or a moron.
My family are barely talking to me. While I’ve apologised to Frankie – even though it went against my better judgement – she and I remain as far apart as me and her dad. I hadn’t told Nicu in advance about the gender reveal angle, so it was as much of a surprise to him as it was to anyone. But I really thought he’d be on board. Nothing I’ve said since has changed his belief that my intentions were entirely self-serving. All I’ve done is push us further apart.
This afternoon I’m distracting myself with a little online maintenance. Every month, some anonymous idiot who’s had it in for me for years alters the facts on my Wikipedia page. Then I have to rewrite all the inaccuracies and blatant lies. This time, they’ve removed the photo I uploaded of me with Britney Spears, taken when the Party Hard Posse supported her on a British tour. And they’ve replaced it with one that’s been edited to give me a gaunt, dead-eyed appearance, and the hint of a moustache.
They’ve also put a T-shirt on me with the word ‘Killer’ written across the chest.
I draw in a deep breath as I stare at it, my stomach churning. Who the hell has it in for me? What have I ever done to them? I delete the photo and replace it with a more flattering image, but I know it won’t remain there for long.
I reach the section that refers to the Strictly Come Dancing fiasco, claiming I was voted out on the first night. Everyone knows that’s a lie, because Nicu and I made it to the finals. We were even the bookmakers’ favourites to win. Instead of it being a career highlight, it destroyed me.
My life as a pop star had been in the doldrums for years when my agent put my name forward to the show’s producers. Geri received an immediate ‘no thank you’, as they’d already signed up a former pop puppet for that series. But when she was forced to pull out after developing shingles, they invited me to replace her. I’ve yet to be more grateful to an infection.
Strictly paired me with a handsome Romanian ballroom dancer called Nicu Rosetti. He was smart and sexy and viewers fell in love with him. And soon after our first meeting, so did I.
I knew he had a girlfriend, Ioana, and two young children. I met her several times, and she recoiled around me like a slug in the presence of a salt cellar. It was also clear that any chemistry they might once have shared had fizzled out like day-old Prosecco. Nicu eventually admitted he was only staying with her for the sake of the kids.
Meanwhile, I’d been dating Jerome Maguire, a male model whose career was on the rise thanks to a lucrative contract with British and French fashion houses. He was sweet, intimidatingly handsome and utterly besotted with me. But he was also fluent in stupidity.
Neither Nicu nor I admitted to our mutual attraction at first. However, it was there, an itch waiting to see who’d scratch it first. Then, a month after the series began, we scratched it together after becoming the first couple to have scored a perfect forty that season. The celebrations began in earnest away from the cameras and in my dressing room.
We hated lying to our respective partners, but until we figured out whether it was a fling or something more serious, we did just that. And we were aware of the repercussions if anyone should find out. In a previous series, soap star Ellis Anders had cheated on his girlfriend Mia with a dancer. They were tabloid headlines for weeks. However, I had more sympathy for his ex years later, when she married into the notorious Hunter family. Next time she’s looking for love, if I were her, I’d seriously consider lesbianism.
So, Nicu and I were careful. We never visited each other’s flats, only meeting at an apartment owned by a dancer friend of his who was away on an eight-month Japanese tour. One of us would enter by the front door and the other through an alleyway, up a fire exit and into the rear of the property.
We kept our relationship under wraps until a week before the Strictly final, when our arsehole of a taxi driver turned his dashboard camera around to record us chewing each other’s faces off, then sold the footage to a press agency along with the address of where he’d dropped us off. They used their own photographer to catch us sneaking in and out of the flat.
The tabloids and celebrity magazines that I’d once been so desperate to court turned against me quicker than you can say Amber Heard. And even though Nicu had a fiancée and children, I was the one they branded a ‘ballroom bitch’, the ‘foxtrot floozy’, and my personal favourite, the ‘mambo mistress’.
We followed the BBC press department’s advice and issued a grovelling apology, begging our loved ones and viewers to forgive us for our ‘error in judgement’. But no one listened. Jerome dumped me and I don’t think there was a single publication Ioana didn’t sell her story to. She gained a manager and a career, claiming that prior to the affair I’d befriended her (a lie), I’d betrayed her (there was no friendship to betray, except perhaps the illusory ‘girl code’), and that she’d even asked me to be chief bridesmaid at her forthcoming wedding to Nicu (there had been no wedding plans or even an engagement).
She also claimed that Nicu had threatened to force her and their children out of their London apartment so I could move in, and how I’d left her hateful, threatening voicemails. Only that last accusation had some truth in it. I did send a couple of angry voice notes that Daily Star readers could attest to when the paper set up a premium phoneline for readers to call and listen to just how hateful I was.
Nicu and I were desperate to pull out of that coming weekend’s Strictly finale, but contractually, we had to remain. Unsurprisingly we came last in the public vote. Incidentally, that episode remains the most viewed in Strictly ’s history.
‘You should think about marriage,’ the damage limitations expert we hired advised. ‘Prove this isn’t a casual affair.’
So that’s what we did. And then, just hours after we said ‘I do’ at a West London register office in front of the remains of our friends and family – plus staff from Yeah! magazine who were covering it – our plan for public rehabilitation came crashing to the ground.
It was during our evening party that Nicu’s then-manager informed him Ioana’s body had been found by a neighbour fifteen storeys below the balcony of her apartment. Later, some salacious online news providers used a photograph of her impaled on railings, the metal spikes protruding through her chest.
Police had broken down Ioana’s front door and found two frightened, screaming children locked in the bedroom. And instead of us leaving our reception to fly to our Sicilian honeymoon, Nicu spent the evening in a hospital mortuary identifying Ioana’s body while I sat with his bewildered kids and a social worker in a hospital room, wondering what the hell I’d just taken on. Later that night, we drove back to our flat to start our married life as a four, and not a two.
All these years later, I still remember word for word the suicide note Ioana left on her laptop: ‘You did this to me, Nicu. You and that bitch took everything. Now I’m going to take it all from you.’
It was one of the only truths she told. I took her love, her life and her children. But in return, she took my career. And, somewhere deep down in hell where she now resides, I get the feeling she’s not in any hurry to let go of it.