How To Lose Weight And Alienate People

I stand up too. ‘Actually, for your information, I don’t remove any plates. That is the waitress’s job. I’m a hostess, so technically my role is to look after the cust—’

But suddenly, I stop. My hands become clammy and my heart races. This can happen in the aftermath of a minor flashback. What Maximilian said pings back into my head. Until you know your truth … who you really are, you can’t pretend to be someone else. I look up, and consider attempting to continue what I was saying … but I don’t bother. I know when I’ve lost an audience. Even I don’t want to hear what I have to say.

CHAPTER EIGHT (#ulink_0a61066d-e3e3-54ce-a6c1-151047f2dc15)

Losing an audience is also a familiar feeling for every one of the thirty-something females hovering around at the East London studio, waiting to be seen by the casting director and producers for the Surf Shack audition. I recognise nearly all of them. For over a decade we have been competing against each other for the same parts. In chronological order these have ranged from sassy graduate to sexy love interest to wise-cracking singleton to office gossip and now (gulp!) trendy mum. Much further along the line, woman of the people (with some sort of all-consuming job in the federal civil service) will be up for grabs, then plucky divorcee rebuilding life. The thought of getting to the stage where we are vying for the role of crime-solving gardening enthusiast makes me shudder.

The atmosphere is exactly the same as it always is on these days, with everyone being pleasant and encouraging to each other. Good-luck hugs and supportive smiles are dished out without being meant in the slightest. I try to bypass the main throng without getting caught up in any chit-chat but am stopped in the hallway by Harriet Morgan. She was at drama school with me and Adele.

‘Vivian … hi!’

‘Oh, hi … how come you’re here?’ I ask. ‘I thought you were still shooting Nurses?’

Harriet plays ‘Angela’, the sensitive doctor with a crush on ‘Danny’ the married night porter. I’ve been in that show before. I was the first victim of a three-way suicide pact. It was a rubbish part – I got the least camera time out of the three corpses because at that point my demise didn’t appear to be part of a bigger plan, merely unfortunate.

Harriet sniffs acridly. ‘I’m being written out. Apparently, Angela can’t handle the pressures of hospital life. She’s going to deal with a horrific RTA at Christmas – drunk driver, natch – then lose confidence and leave to open a beautician’s. Bastards.’

‘That’s such shitty luck.’

I grimace, but I am not feeling too sorry for her. I auditioned for ‘Angela’ too. The casting director asked if I would put on a few pounds for the role. The character needed to appear more ‘comforting’, supposedly. I was extremely annoyed. Why can’t a thin person be seen as sympathetic on the screen? Surely, when you don’t revolve your day around mealtimes, you’re more flexible with the time you can give others? But that’s British TV for you. You wouldn’t get that in the States. Over there, if an actress has a strong stench of a disordered approach to eating and/or exercise about her she’s more likely to smell success.

‘Yeah, really shitty …’ agrees Harriet.

‘Maybe you should go on one of those soap chat-rooms to moan,’ I tell her. ‘Surely, there was far more to come from the Angela/Danny/Danny’s wife plot-line? I for one would adore to see the love triangle reignited after Danny nips into Angie’s Spa for a seaweed wrap.’

She shoots me a withered look. ‘Piss off, Vivian. I don’t think I’m quite ready to laugh about it yet. Nice shiner, by the way.’ She points at the bruise under my eye. ‘I read about your little incident on Perez. Did Fry apologise?’

‘Kind of.’

‘He did it through his agent, you mean. Bastard. Don’t give a fuck, do they?’ (They being our alias for anyone enjoying exceptional standing within the world of entertainment.) She eyes the packet of Marlboro Lights in my bag. ‘God, I’d kill for a fag.’

‘Help yourself.’

‘Nah, I’m crapping myself about wrinkles. Do you think I look older than when you last saw me?’

I pretend to examine her face. ‘Well, you’re hardly Yoda … but I think we both know you haven’t got a portrait up in the attic.’

‘Piss off,’ she says again, laughing. ‘Anyway, I never knew you smoked.’

‘I like to have some on me, just in case …’

‘Of what?’

I shrug. ‘You know, stress.’

‘Yeah, I do know. Agh, I WANT ONE! But it’s a sad fact that no one can get away with puffing cigs at our age. Even Sienna Miller will struggle.’

‘That’s true,’ agrees one of the girls further down the queue who has been ear-wigging our conversation. ‘She’s already got sallow looking.’

‘Mmmm, sort of pasty and “lived in”,’ says another.

‘Oh, stop!’ grins another.

But they carry on, because this is how they kill time before any audition: gunning down Sienna Miller. It’s been like this on the circuit for a long time, and there is no sign of a ceasefire. It may sound a negative thing to do, but actually it has a positive effect on morale for the regulars to have at least one actress they hate more than each other.

I sneak off to the loo, my place of comfort. I’ve always liked toilets. A locked cubicle is a good place to escape the potential uneasiness of any communal area. Once inside, I read through my script one more time. On the last page, I find a message from Luke. He must have written it while I was making his breakfast.

Since I’m not allowed to say anything encouraging about your acting I thought you should know that there are many other areas you excel in. I won’t list these areas in case you stop excelling in them on purpose to wind me up but rest assured, on a scale of one to ten … one being someone with a single niche party talent (e.g., swallowing whole fist or very low limbo-ing) and ten being bonzer across the board, I’d say you’re a nine*. Good luck.

*You lose a point for not being able to swim.

Luke has started to leave me more and more messages like this. He uses them to say the stuff he has realised I am uncomfortable with him saying to my face, i.e. Aussie-isms and slushy stuff. The messages are never texted or emailed; they’re always handwritten on random bits of paper. Given that all other males born at the nineties end of the eighties have fully rejected the concept of communicating through either the medium of handwriting or speaking in favour of tapping a screen … well, it’s quite nice, really.

Prior to Luke, the only ‘secret notes’ I’d ever been written were at school. They would be slipped into my pencil tin, often with an added gift of spit globules, bogeys or pubes. I knew who the perpetrators were and who they were led by. Their leader never ran out of names to call me but never had the guts to sign hers.

I don’t audition for Surf Shack. Twenty minutes after arriving I am on my way back to the Underground; hands clamming up again, heart racing faster. As I walk, I realise Maximilian Fry was wrong about me lacking commitment. I don’t. I am wholly committed to playing one role: ‘me’. The thing is that sometimes leaves me too exhausted to play anyone else.

CHAPTER NINE (#ulink_b219b4c3-0030-5b70-9cd3-19f365cd0f7a)

Adele is home. I would know this even if her backpack wasn’t sitting in the corridor because I can smell something spicy wafting from the kitchen. She brings back some kind of pungent brew from each trip abroad and can’t wait to tell me the ludicrous myth behind its production, like it was originally ground from the bark of a hallowed oak tree and rubbed on the bleeding feet of Taoist monks during long pilgrimages. But no matter what the mystical back story to the leaves, the finished drink always tastes like piss with a hint of cinnamon.

I drop my keys in the goldfish bowl and creep into my bedroom to get undressed and hide the things I nabbed from Adele’s wardrobe this morning.

‘Vivian, is that you?’ she calls from the bathroom, in her resolutely middle-class Home Counties accent.

‘No, I’m a masked robber with a spare set of keys to the flat,’ I shout, clicking back into ‘me’ mode with ease. (Years of practice.) ‘I’m going to fleece the spare room first, then the lounge. Is that okay?’

‘Fine. Do your worst … as long as you don’t call it the lounge!’

I strip out of the Stella McCartney vest, chuck it under my duvet, kick off the sandals under the bed and manage to pull on Luke’s sweatshirt seconds before she appears in the doorway.

‘… or the living room,’ she says. ‘Repeat after me … sitting room.’

‘It’s been seventeen years, Dels. I think it’s about time you accepted I’m a bit common.’ I smile. ‘Wow, you look fantastic.’

I am not being sycophantic. She has got a post-vacation zing about her; the type that comes from two weeks spent at one with nature and yourself. She is refreshed. Personally, I have never quite grasped the concept of a health-boosting break. If your internal organs aren’t really feeling it, what’s the point? Once, as I was sunbathing on the final day of a heavy trip to Ibiza, Roger told me I looked like that Roswell alien laid out on the autopsy table …

Mind you, except when she’s sunk too much white wine, Adele always looks fresh and expensively demure. Today, her bouncy bracken-coloured curls are neatly held back with a beige silk scarf and she is wearing a white smock top with an ankle-length white tiered skirt. I think it’s all Anna Sui. It’s gypsy chic but done in an off-duty high-powered career-girl kind of way; a look that says more, ‘This cost me a fortune!’ as opposed to, ‘Can I read your fortune?’.

‘Ah, thanks,’ she says, pushing her scarf further back off her forehead. ‘I feel great. Nepal was amazing. Such an intriguing country and the people were so kind and generous.’

‘Good, good … but most importantly did you remember to get me some super-strength sleeping pills that have definitely not been authorised by any medical governing body, during your stopover in Bangkok?’ Adele always manages to get me the strongest downers without prescription in Thailand – presumably the Thai people need easy access to medication like that to help them zone out from the constant flow of gap-year students in Billabong T-shirts called Josh invading their homeland. I rub my hands together. ‘Please, tell me they’re as powerful as that batch you got me at Christmas? They could have felled an ox.’

She grimaces guiltily. ‘I didn’t get any. I’d planned to get them on the way back, but then … well, something happened. I got distracted and totally forg—’

‘Dels! Nooo! I took the last one after going clubbing while you were away assuming you’d replenish my stock.’

‘You shouldn’t take downers after doing uppers, anyway, or vice versa,’ admonishes Adele. ‘You’re asking for a cardiac arrest. If it’s any consolation, I did get you some Napalese black tea. I’m brewing a batch on the stove. It’s good stuff – packed full of antioxidants. In the old days, the villagers in the foothills filled pouches of—’ But then she stops, distracted by something on the floor.