How To Lose Weight And Alienate People. Ollie Quain
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as she pulls out a document and a gold fountain pen from her red Hermès Birkin bag. As I’m signing, her BlackBerry buzzes and she checks the caller ID. I glance at it too. It says ‘Achilles’.
‘Woah, someone’s keen.’ She cackles satisfactorily but then zaps the call with a scarlet fingernail. ‘I’ll make him sweat, though. Some model I met last night,’ she explains. ‘I’ve got a good feeling about this one.’
‘Boyfriend material?’
‘Sheesh, no! I’ve got handbags older than him. The prognosis for relationship age gaps is never good in the entertainment industry … no matter how much the more mature party spends on cosmetic surgery. I mean look at Demi Moore. She looked younger than Ashton Kutcher by the time they hit their fifth wedding anniversary, but he still celebrated it in a Vegas hot tub with someone other than his wife.’ She cackles harder. ‘I meant I’ve got a positive hunch about the kid’s career.’
‘Is he an actor too, then?’
“Course he is, all models are actors. At least, they all think they could be. Trust me, if I had a dollar for every clothes horse I’ve screwed that wants to play a misunderstood junkie in some leftfield art-house movie opposite Chloe Sevigny I’d be a lot richer than I already am.’ She removes her shades and raises her eyebrows at me. Well, judging by the expression in her eyes I assume that’s what her brows would be doing if the surrounding area wasn’t paralysed with Botox. ‘Take us round the back, sugar …’ She taps the driver on his left shoulder. ‘There are paps outside the front gate.’
‘But you think this one does have talent, Barb?’ I ask.
‘From what I’ve seen so far? I reckon he’d be hard pushed to show grief at a funeral. But you know what, sometimes they don’t need any real ability for a crack at a screen career. Okay, so in shelf-life terms we’re not talking canned goods, but they can make a few dollars. Way more, if they really luck out. Enter stage left, Channing Tatum!’
‘Did Maximilian ever model?’
‘No goddamn way … Besides, he’s more than an actor.’ Her voice becomes serious. ‘He’s an artist. What he does is who he is.’
She inserts a piece of gum into her mouth and as she breaks it in we drive down a road lined with stucco-fronted five-storey white houses, then turn down a back street behind them and stop outside a wide iron gate. The driver jumps out of the car, enters a code into a security box and the gate swings open to reveal a decked garden full of exotic-looking flowers and a big lily-covered pond with its own fountain. Next to the pond is a giant bronze Buddha.
‘Just what this house needs,’ I deadpan. ‘A tranquil point of worship to help combat against the surrounding chaos and disorder of Primrose Hill.’
Barb smiles. ‘I bought Maxy that statue. Personally, religion gives me the willies. I used to sneak out of Sunday School and go to the flicks. But hey, if it provides him with a little tranquillity then I’m not going to argue.’ She turns to the driver. ‘I’m going back to The Dorchester in a couple of hours, so you might as well wait here.’ He nods and doffs his cap at her. ‘Payton, sugar, how many times do I have to tell you not to do that? I’m not the Duchess of goddamn Cornwall. Chill!’ She beckons to me. ‘Come with me, kiddo …’
I follow Barb as she stalks up a decked pathway, round the pond, across a flagstone patio and into the house through a set of French windows at the side. She glances at me over her shoulder.
‘So, this is my Maxy’s place …’
I immediately notice two things about ‘Maxy’s place’. Firstly, it looks like something out of the hardback book on hip hotels that Adele bought for the upstairs neighbours last Christmas; full of expensive design details like marble flooring, leather padded walls, giant neon crystal chandeliers and the odd piece of slightly risqué art – including a semi-nude photograph in the hallway of Zoe Dano, only her ridiculously long, lustrous, unassisted hair retaining her modesty. Secondly, it is spotless. Not in a quick-whip-round-with-some-antibacterial-spray-on-a-wet-cloth kind of way but clinically clean, like a hospital operating theatre. Every surface is bare and all the walls are painted white. As Barb guides me down the hallway into an immaculate kitchen with pristine stainless-steel worktops I get the impression that Maximilian Fry clearly feels that the home shouldn’t necessarily be where the heart is but more somewhere you could potentially transplant one.
‘Right,’ says Barb. ‘You stay here, kiddo. I’ll go and find him.’
She leaves the room, her heels clip-clopping across the marble. I walk over to the kitchen window and look out onto the garden. From this angle I can see an ivy gazebo sheltering a raised multicoloured platform where there is another Buddha on a podium. It is scattered with flower petals. That’s probably a meditation area. This thought makes me squirm a bit. There’s something rather embarrassing about celebrities who are seeking a higher meaning – especially those who wear a wristband to prove it. Luke was right. What a pretentious wanker.
‘Yeah, yeah, I know … I’m a pretentious wanker.’
I spin round. Standing in the doorway of the kitchen wearing a pair of worn grey tracksuit bottoms with a T-shirt tucked in the pocket and a white towel draped round his neck is … Maximilian Fry. Now, I had always thought he had shown potential – even as a ‘wolf-boy’ in The Orc’s Progress and badly wounded in Victim X – way before everyone fancied him as Jack Chase in The Simple Truth. But nothing could have prepared me for this … the live version. Like all actors he is smaller than he looks on film, probably no more than five foot ten-ish, but he is a lot broader and his features are much more intense. His eyes are a velvety brown. His cheekbones are sharper, his jaw line is squarer and the jagged scar that runs down his right cheek is much deeper, giving his face a kind of brooding darkness. He has obviously just finished some sort of exercise session because his body is covered in a thin sheen of perspiration, making him look sort of … not simply sweaty, more basted. My eyes fall to his torso. Parts of it are so defined that I never even knew were an official muscle group. I force myself to jump past the pelvic area and scan down to his feet. Like the rest of him they are immaculately groomed – the nails on each toe are buffed and shaped to perfection, a world away from the pterodactyl-like claws that most men tended to reveal at the beginning of every summer. A lemony, woody scent fills the space between us. I have a feeling it’s Issey Miyake. The visual and nasal stimulus is so intense that I totally forget to do my (heavily rehearsed) casual greeting, cowering as if I am expecting him to hit me again. Instead, I find myself giving him a wave as if I’m setting off on a cruise. He gives me a confused but half-hearted wave back as though he is unsure as to why I am departing these shores, but isn’t that fussed if I do go.
‘A pretentious wanker?’ I repeat.
‘Well, that’s what the press makes me out to be, isn’t it?’ His voice is posher than I was expecting, but it isn’t luvvie-ish. It’s got a kind of lazy lilt to it.
‘But that doesn’t mean everyone accepts what they say.’
‘Most people do.’
‘Why do you think that is?’
‘It’s easier to take the piss out of someone than to try to understand them. Any form of spirituality is only wanting to be at peace with yourself and the world around you, but it’s hard to explain that without sounding even more of a …’ He drifts off, as if he can’t be bothered.
‘Why talk about it, then?’
‘I wish I hadn’t, but I had to give them something. They need those sorts of details to manufacture the image of … “the” Maximilian Fry.’
I pull a face at him. ‘Did you just place an italic ‘the’