Chapter 39 Margot
Chapter 39
Margot
‘Fuck!’
I’m cursing aloud to an empty house when the doorbell rings.
‘Come in,’ I shout, ‘the door’s unlocked.’
I’m on my hands and knees searching the cupboard under the stairs when Anna appears. She said in a text that she’d call for me before we meet Liv for coffee.
‘Morning,’ she says as I turn to face her.
Even for Anna, she’s looking exceptionally beige today. Her T-shirt has a brown stain on her right breast, her leggings are too small, and that bob went out of style at the same time as UGGs paired with denim miniskirts. Many times I’ve offered to take her out clothes shopping, even to – God help me – Primark. She can chuck as much as she wants in a basket there and it will never break the ￡30 barrier. Each time, it has fallen on deaf ears.
‘Lost something?’ she asks.
‘My white Florent lace-ups.’
‘Your white what?’
‘Trainers, Anna, Florents are trainers. Surely even you have heard of Jimmy Choo?’
She looks at me blankly. I might as well be talking fashion with a bag of rocks.
‘I’m sure I left them in a box in here, but I can’t find them anywhere.’
I wonder if Frankie has hidden them in retaliation for me tossing her Crocs in the recycling bin all those months ago? Much to my annoyance, she found them before it was emptied.
‘Where have you been hiding yourself the last few days?’ Anna asks.
‘Oh, just a little life admin,’ I say.
There’s a lot I can’t tell her, as I’m not in the mood for a lecture. I also can’t mention how many hours I’ve spent trawling through the website OnlyFans, searching for an account that apparently belongs to Liv.
Tonya, the Knightsbridge Knights star I met on the set of Help! , revealed an ex-flatmate of Liv’s told her Liv has funded her lifestyle and business through money made in the online sex industry. Well, telling me that was like throwing a seal at a shark and expecting the shark to refrain from taking a bite. Of course I was going to search for it. However, with two-million-plus content providers, it’s been impossible to find. She might even have taken her page down, now that she thinks she’s Gwyneth Paltrow in full lifestyle provocateur mode.
Anna glances at two stacks of brown padded envelopes behind me that I’ve taken out of the cupboard. She spots one with a box poking out from the top, containing two tiny plastic feet.
‘Oh wow,’ she says, pulling it out. ‘Is this one of the Party Hard Posse dolls?’
‘Yes, but that one’s been a little modified,’ I reply as she removes the rest of it.
‘Oh,’ she says suddenly. ‘Where’s the head gone?’
‘My stalker has kept it as a souvenir.’
‘Your what?’
‘My stalker. You know you’ve really made it when you have an obsessive.’ I direct her attention to the rest of the envelopes. I try and play it cool and make out that it doesn’t bother me, but of course it does. ‘Have a look at the other little treats he’s sent me. There’s another decapitated one, but most times, I’m allowed to keep my head.’
I give up searching for my elusive footwear and watch her reaction as she reopens random envelopes. Her face creases: they’re disturbing her as much as they do me. In one, she finds the remains of a Margot mug, in another there’s a T-shirt with red paint covering my face and my eyes have been cut out. A third has a watch with a broken face, and yet another includes a smashed-up signed CD.
‘How long have you been getting them?’ she asks.
‘Eighteen months or so, I think.’
‘And what do the police say?’
‘I don’t bother reporting them anymore. I did when they first started arriving and they took them away and fingerprinted them. But everything had been wiped clean. And the products were so mass-manufactured that there’s nothing the police can do. They suggested I keep hold of them, so I store them in here. Like a macabre retrospective of my life.’
‘You should post something about this online.’
‘And give the creep the attention he’s looking for? No. It’d probably encourage a bunch of brand-new fuckwits to come out of the woodwork and join him.’
Anna appears genuinely concerned for me. And if I’m not mistaken, there are tears forming.
‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I just think after all you’ve been through, it’s unfair.’
I’m uncertain how to respond as she dabs her eyes while watching me. Normally when people stare at me this long, they’re making notes. But not her. I’m unused to this depth of connection. Yet I’m more surprised by how much I appreciate it.
A short time later, we’re at Liv’s house and Brandon ushers us towards the patio chairs. It’s a gorgeous day, and I struggle to tear my line of vision away from his sports shorts and black vest. Those thighs could crack billiard balls. Both Liv and I are fortunate to have husbands who look after themselves because their bodies are their careers. No one pays to see a fat dancer in tight clothing prancing around a ballroom and firing sequins through the air like bullets, or a personal trainer stuffed into Lycra like too much pork in a sausage skin.
I’m suddenly aware of Anna’s glare. She’s caught me staring at Brandon.
‘What?’ I mouth.
She gives me a withering glance. If only she knew.
Two Cat Faces brush past us. One turns – version 1.0 I think – and I swear it’s laughing at me. Surely they’ve renamed 2.0, but I don’t care enough to inquire.
‘Sorry to keep you waiting, girls,’ Liv begins when she appears.
I hate how she refers to us as ‘girls’. We’re not in Sex and the City . And if we were, she’d be one of the new characters in the reboot that no one gives a toss about.
Now she’s staring at her phone and clenching her jaw.
‘Everything okay?’ asks Anna.
‘Problems with the orangery,’ she sighs.
She’s referring to the extension she and Brandon are building on the back of their house. The way she talks about it, you’d think she was recreating the Palace of Versailles.
‘Brandon was in construction before he became a personal trainer, so he’s been working on it himself, but now the council’s planning officers are telling us we’ve gone over the agreed boundary by ten centimetres.’
‘Is that all?’ says Anna.
‘I know. But it’s enough for someone to have reported us. How in hell could they have known? Anyway, now we either keep on building, return to the planning department and put in a retrospective application with no guarantee of it being approved, and risk having to demolish it. Or Brandon has to dig out what we’ve already done and start again.’
‘Who complained?’ Anna asks.
‘It was anonymous.’
Liv looks at me for a beat too long. I think she’s studying my reaction.
‘Some people aren’t happy unless they’re making other people miserable,’ I suggest.
The ‘people’ I’m referring to is just one person. Me, of course. While Liv and the family were out one afternoon, I snuck into their back garden to measure their conservatory before comparing it with the planning application listed on the council’s website. It was larger than they’d been granted permission for. If people like Liv are given an inch, they’ll take a mile. And then probably build on that as well. Not this time.
‘What are you going to do?’ asks Anna.
‘I think we’ll have to take it down,’ Liv acquiesces. ‘I’m starting to wonder if someone has a vendetta against us, because the studio had six one-star reviews appear on Trustpilot last night. That’s brought my average down to two and a half out of five. I checked the names of the reviewers against past bookings, and unless they’ve changed their identities, I don’t think they’ve been to any of my classes. And they were all posted within half an hour of each other.’
Once more, Liv’s gaze lingers on me. Guilty as charged , I think. There’s one thing she has yet to learn about me, and that is if you poke your nose into my business, then I will retaliate in kind. By offering Frankie advice about her non-binary phase, Liv overstepped the mark. And don’t get me started on how she tried to humiliate me in front of Anna with that eBay auction. Or led me to believe that she was treating me and not just Anna to the spa weekend. Since she moved here, she has been gaslighting me so often I’m thinking of carrying a caged canary to detect each whiff of deceit.
‘Perhaps Anna and I can leave you five-star reviews?’ I suggest. ‘And if we get Nicu and Drew to do the same, that should push your average back up, shouldn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ she says, a little thrown by my offer. ‘That’d be really kind of you.’
‘Anything for a friend,’ I reply.