A WAG Abroad

That’s when I have to bite my tongue. Why does she want to go to school? She’s twelve! What girl her age wants to practise maths? It’s not natural. I worry for her. The girl hasn’t had so much as a pregnancy scare. She has no intimate piercings or tattoos, and despite my many searches I’ve never found any illegal drugs in her room. Now she’s desperate to go to school. What horrors have I got lurking round the corner? University? PhDs?

But I don’t say a negative word. Not now I know that I am super mum. I smile sweetly and try to interest her in my world.

‘Would you like to get your makeup done before the party tonight?’ I ask. ‘The beauticians are setting things out upstairs.’

‘Er … like … how do I say this? Er … no! I don’t even want to go to the party. I want to watch TV. There’s a match on.’

‘You have to come. Oh, Paskia, go on, sweetheart. Mummy would love to get you all dressed up and show you off. Please let me turn you into a little princess.’

‘No,’ she says definitively.

‘Please,’ I try. ‘It could be fun!’

‘No! I’ll come, but I’m not dressing up like a fairy. Leave me alone.’

‘OK then, love,’ I say, ‘I’ll be upstairs if you need me.’ Then I sashay out of the kitchen, glancing once again at my reflection before heading upstairs to where a team of LA’s hottest facialists, waxers, hairdressers and nail technicians await.

‘What look are you after?’ they ask.

‘Mainly, I would like not to look like a transvestite,’ I say. ‘That’s my overriding aim.’

‘Lady, you look nothing like a transvestite,’ says a woman stirring a pot of warm wax and chuckling to herself. ‘I don’t think I ain’t ever met someone who looks less like a transvestite.’

She has no idea how big a tip she just earned herself.

Sian and Chuck’s house, 8.30 p.m.

PARTY TIME!!! But we’re hovering in the cloakroom.

‘Don’t bend down, love,’ says Dean, again. I know he means well, but – honestly – I can’t go through the entire party standing bolt upright.

‘You’ll have to,’ he insists. ‘Honestly, love. Every time you bend down to reach for the Bacardi you moon the whole party through the cloakroom door.’

‘And?’ I say, rather petulantly. ‘What’s the problem with that?’

Dean shrugs and says nothing’s wrong with it, but we don’t know these people and they might not want to see a lady’s bottom before the watershed. It seems unlikely, but I’m not in the mood for an argument, so I move the Bacardi up so I can reach it without any indecent exposure and promise I won’t bend down.

‘No, not there,’ he says, quickly putting the alcohol back on the floor.

‘What are you doing?’ I ask.

‘No one here drinks,’ he says. ‘Keep it hidden.’

‘Oh God. This is mad,’ says Paskia-Rose. ‘Can’t we just go into the party like normal people? Why do we have to hide away in the cloakroom, drinking alcohol like naughty schoolchildren?’

‘Pask’s right. Come on, love. Why don’t you try and have a night when you don’t get drunk? I haven’t touched a drop.’

God, he’s become dull. What is it with these LA people? It’s like there’s some sort of bizarre abstinence cult they’ve all joined. It’s no way to live. I grab a large beaker and fill it to the top with Bacardi to keep me going.

‘Come on then,’ I say. ‘Let’s go in. After all, they’re throwing the party for us.’

Throwing a party for us … imagine that! I’ve been thrown out of parties in the past, and I’ve thrown up at parties, but never had a party thrown for me.

We walk into the main room and, I have to be honest, it’s weird. Big time weird. You know how you walk into a party and the first thing you do is look around the room to check what everyone’s wearing, and that no one’s wearing the same as you?

Ha! Well, no one is! Not by a fucking long, long way, because no one has bothered to dress up for this party at all. I mean – not-at-all! They’re in flip-flops, for God’s sake. They have great bodies and everything, but their taste in clothes leaves so much to be desired that I can barely speak as I look around the huge open-plan house. There are people everywhere, and as far as the eye can see they have all stopped what they are doing, and they’re staring at me. Have they never seen a Bacardi-drinking Wag in a skin-tight gold lamé mini-dress with matching thigh-length gold boots before?

Let me describe what the scene is like. In many ways it’s like a Barbie convention – a veritable feast of brown, plastic-looking skin, yellow hair and great big enormous knockers. To that extent they all look like me, and walking into the room is like walking into the hall of mirrors at the funfair, and seeing your image reflected back at you from all sides. Except for the clothes.

And the thing I don’t get is, why would you bother starving yourself, eating cotton wool and taking pills to suppress your appetite if you’re then going to just stick a T-shirt and flat (I hate that word) shoes on? What’s the point? Why would you suffer the pain and indignity of having great big jelly mould tits stuck on your chest if you’re just going to cover them up? It’s a mystery. You can say what you like about me, but I do get my bangers out at every possible opportunity. In fact, with the falsies I’ve used you can see my nipples approaching you roughly ten minutes before the rest of me wiggles into view.

Dean’s shuffling from foot to foot next to me when Sian approaches, wearing a white cheesecloth kaftan and loose-fitting jersey trousers. ‘Well, look at you two,’ she squeals, and I’m not sure whether she’s talking to my chest or to me and Dean. ‘Our lovely British friends.’ I’m once again enveloped in a rather painful hug and subjected to kissing and hair stroking. ‘My God, but you’re wonderful,’ she says. ‘Look at you!’

Behind her strides Chuck. His hair has a parting so neat it looks like it’s been done with a ruler, and his hair is all gelled to one side like he’s in the Great Gatsby or something. He’s wearing white trousers that are ever-so-slightly too tight and way too short. He’s got them pulled up high and I can see every lump and bump on his groin. For the sake of absolute clarity: this is a bad thing. Chuck is not a man with lumps and bumps that any sane girl would want to admire. His light blue, short-sleeved shirt is ironed to within an inch of its life, and even from this distance I can see that he has huge, round sweat marks under his arms. His belt is elasticated and stripy light and dark blue, and his light blue socks, visible because the trousers are so bloody short, match the shirt exactly. He looks, as Dean so accurately observes, like ‘a complete fucking ponce’.

He’s on the phone as he walks over, and Sian apologizes before he even arrives.

‘Sorry, guys, it’s a business thing. He had to take the call.’

‘Ya,’ Chuck is saying into his state-of-the-art mobile. ‘I like where you’re coming from on that. We should diarize and book in a hook-up to discuss ballpark figures.’ He puts his hand over the receiver and apologizes. ‘It’s all gone crazy in the world of canned meats. Be with you in five,’ then he’s back to his conversation. ‘It’s time for everyone to step up to the plate and stretch the envelope,’ he says, raising his voice a little. ‘But let’s not forget – keep everything swimming in lanes, then we can take a helicopter view of the situation.’

He clips his phone shut and puts it into the front pocket of his shirt.

‘Our lovely guests are here. What an honour,’ he says, kissing my hand without breaking eye contact. ‘Truly. We are thrilled that you could join us.’

He goes to hug Dean but Dean’s too British to cope. He knows that when a man gets that close to you in England it means he’s either gay or about to beat you up. I can see Dean hoping and praying that he’s going to get punched.

‘Let’s introduce these children to one another,’ says Sian, heading off to collect her offspring. Paskia-Rose has run off to the far side of the sitting room and is admiring all the football pictures and signed photos on the wall. Sian’s twin girls are the same age as Pask but could not be more different from my daughter. They are, I have to say, among the most perfect girls that I have ever seen. They’re dressed in pink and they’re all small and delicate, like little dolls. If they piled the makeup on and stuffed a pair of socks down their bras, they’d be almost as lovely as the three girls we met today. Pask runs back over and stands next to Dean. She towers over the twins and looks ungainly next to them in her daft football shirt, baggy jeans and trainers.

‘I love soccer,’ I hear her say, as the twins look at each other in astonishment. ‘I’m going to this fantastic school with the best football pitches I’ve ever seen!’

‘Come on,’ says Sian. ‘Let me show you three girls what I’ve got in the kitchen. Frozen fat-free yoghurt!’

‘Yummy!’ shout the twins.

‘Whooppee!’ says Paskia, her voice weighed down by sarcasm. ‘I thought you were going to say pizza and chips.’

I’m not sure whether the ‘p’ word or the ‘c’ word has ever been used in this house before. I can see Sian fighting to regain her composure before leaving the children to their ‘treat’ and marching back towards me.

‘Tracie, can I introduce you to Poppy and Macey?’ she says, indicating two women standing to my left. One has plain dark hair and the other has plain blonde hair, and neither is wearing makeup. They stare at me as if I’ve been beamed down from outer space.

‘Great to meet you,’ says Macey, flicking her natural locks away from her face like the girl in the Timotei advert. She’s wearing a long white cotton skirt and a white crop top which, I’ll grant her, does display her large breasts to their best advantage, and gives you a peek at a flat, tanned stomach, but it’s not right. She needs a belly-button piercing at the very least.

Poppy’s incredibly sweet-looking, with her long dark hair and the way she tilts her head to one side, like Snow White. I expect bunnies to come hopping through the sitting room at any minute. She’s wearing a sun dress in an emerald green colour with simple kitten-heeled shoes. It’s shameful the way these women dress. I must work with them and try and inject a little of Luton into their wardrobes.

‘We’ll all get the chance to chat later,’ says Sian, dragging me away from them and over to one of the many huge cream sofas in her sitting room. Happily, our journey takes us right past the drinks – all laid out neatly in the kitchen.

‘Ooooh,’ I say as we pass, my glass now a desperate, Bacardi-free zone.