Lucy Holliday 2-Book Collection: A Night In with Audrey Hepburn and A Night In with Marilyn Monroe. Lucy Holliday
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please.’ Mum is icy. ‘Can you just get on with Cass’s tan, please, and leave the serious family matters to us?’
‘Mum, for God’s sake, it isn’t a serious family matter. I mean, it might have been, if the accident with the cigarette had been any worse,’ I add, pointedly, because it occurs to me that Mum hasn’t expressed the slightest concern about this part of it. ‘But really, it’s not a huge deal. In fact, it might even be an opportunity for me to—’
‘Not a huge deal? It was your first speaking part in five years! Do you have any idea how hard it was for me to get you that job?’
‘Oh, come on, Mum, it was only a shitty little one line part.’ Cass is getting off the bed, taking her robe off to display her pertly naked body, and heading for the shower room. ‘Vanessa found another random extra to do it about two minutes after she kicked Libby off the set.’
‘Thank you, Cass,’ I say.
‘You’re welcome,’ she says, completely missing my sarcastic tone.
I’m not so distracted by Mum’s growing histrionics, by the way, that it doesn’t occur to me to think: if Cass knows that my role was filled two minutes after I was thrown off the set, maybe she wasn’t otherwise occupied with Dillon O’Hara after all.
‘After all the work I’ve put into your career!’ Mum is saying, sinking onto the bed in a soap-opera-worthy display of grief. ‘I just don’t know how you could do this to me, Libby.’
This is the point, normally, at which my patience would run thin and I’d fling myself out of Mum’s apartment in a red-faced whirl of silent fury, slamming doors and muttering expletives, making 1) absolutely no headway with my mother, and 2) a bit of a fool of myself into the bargain.
But today is different.
It’s not just because of my new haircut, and the confidence it’s given me.
Actually, do you know what: it’s nothing to do with my new haircut, or the confidence it’s given me.
It’s because of last night, and my all-too-vivid encounter with Imaginary Audrey.
Just because I hallucinated her (and just because I hallucinated her being weird about my Nespresso machine and wrecking my hair with a pair of kitchen scissors; though mind you, the wrecked hair turned out not to be a hallucination after all) it doesn’t mean that her legendary poise and grace and loveliness felt any less poised and graceful and lovely. And though I’ll never have her cheekbones, her waistline, or her ineffable style, I feel like I might just be able to achieve a bit of her poise and grace, if I really make the effort.
So instead of flinging and slamming and muttering, I take a very, very deep breath, and say, in a voice of poised, graceful loveliness (well, not a sweary mutter, anyway), ‘Mum, come on. I haven’t done anything to you. It was all just a silly accident.’
‘Oh, really? Because right now, Liberty, I have to ask myself: how much of an accident could this possibly have been?’
Poised. Graceful. Lovely.
‘Mum. Seriously. Do you really think I’d have set my head alight on purpose?’
‘Well, I’m sure you didn’t do it actually on purpose. But you may have done it unconsciously on purpose.’
Poised. Graceful. Lovely.
‘I mean, I just find it interesting,’ Mum goes on, as if she’s garnered some sort of psychological expertise from a first-class degree at Oxford University, rather than a monthly subscription to Top Santé magazine and a secret addiction to Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle website, ‘that this so-called accident happens the very first time you get a speaking part in years. A speaking part I arranged for you.’
‘Mum …’
‘Or,’ she goes on, ‘it could have been because you subconsciously wanted to sabotage the whole thing before you had a chance to fail.’
‘Oh, for crying out loud!’ I snap, my poise and grace wobbling in the face of Mum’s torrent of psychobabble nonsense.
Unless … well, was I subconsciously sabotaging myself?
It has just the tiniest ring of truth about it, I have to admit.
‘You used to do it all the time when you were a little girl.’ Mum is on a roll now. ‘That time you accidentally-on-purpose stubbed your toe the day before the Cinderella audition, do you remember? I put it down to jealousy of your sister, because she was up for the part of Cinders and you were only trying out for the chorus, but now I’m wondering if it was nothing to do with Cass, and simply because you couldn’t handle the pressure …’
‘It was an am-dram panto! In Hounslow! There wasn’t any pressure!’
‘Well, of course there wasn’t, because you couldn’t audition and you never got the part! And what about your Year Five carol concert, when you had a solo line in Twelve Days of Christmas? You came down with a so-called sore throat half an hour before curtain-up.’
The way I recall this event, I still managed to croak my way, half a dozen times, through the ‘Six Geese A-Laying’ verse before collapsing straight after the concert with a fever of 103 degrees and then being in bed with tonsillitis for a week.
‘And what about that day when the Royal Ballet scouts were coming to Miss Pauline’s, and you slipped getting out of the shower and knocked yourself out on the towel rail …’
‘Mum, for the last time, it was an accident!’ All attempts at Audrey-esque poise have vanished. ‘And I didn’t come all the way over here this morning for a psychiatric evaluation!’
‘Yeah, Mum, there’s loads of stuff we need Libby to do!’ Cass calls from the bathroom, where Stella has started to blast her with fake-tan spray. ‘I need my dress picking up from the dry-cleaner’s and I need some Spanx picking up from the Selfridges lingerie department and I need my ruby pendant altering – so it highlights my boobs better, Lib, remember?’
‘I remember.’
‘… and I need my I’m Not Really a Waitress for my pedicure – that’s an OPI nail polish, Libby, by the way – and I need …’
‘I know it’s an OPI nail polish, Cass, thank you.’
‘Well, they’ll have it in the spa at FitLondon. And can you go there first, please, or my toenails will never be dry in time?’
I’ll be dispatched on any menial errand, to be honest, if it gets me away from Mum’s amateur-psychology codswallop.
‘Fine. I’ll go there first.’
‘This discussion is not over, Libby!’ Mum calls after me as I start to head down the stairs. ‘As soon as Cass’s big night is over …’
But I’m closing the front door behind me.
The worst is over, at least.
Because that’s the thing: as soon as Cass’s Big Night is over … what? Mum will just move onto the next project she’s earmarked for Cass – Emily Brontë, a Made Man magazine cover, Strictly Come Dancing; neither she nor Cass will care that much as long as it keeps her in the public eye – and my embarrassing sacking will be forgotten.
And when Mum does find three minutes to think about it again, and book me in for another extras job on whatever TV drama is particularly desperate right now, I’m just going to decline. Summon back a soupçon more of that Audrey poise and tell Mum politely, but categorically, No.
Of course, I do need to crack on with finding another job in the meantime. The rent on my new flat – even if I can persuade Bogdan Senior to halve it, which I doubt – isn’t going to grow on trees.
Rent money that,