Lucy Holliday 2-Book Collection: A Night In with Audrey Hepburn and A Night In with Marilyn Monroe. Lucy Holliday
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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