How To Lose Weight And Alienate People

She grabs the reservations clipboard and holds it to her chest. ‘Ooooooooooh, has no one told you?’

‘About what?’

‘About who has arrived for supper?’ She claps her hands repeatedly like a delighted seal. Tabitha still hasn’t got her head round the whole pretend-to-be-utterly-unimpressed-by-all-celebrities that is a given amongst staff working in the high-end hospitality market. ‘My tummy totally did a flick-a-flack when he walked in.’

‘Who is it, then?’ I ask distractedly. I could do with a Nurofen. The raspberry-tinged scent of the freshly baked cakes hovers in the air between us. I bet Tabitha loves eating pink food. Personally, I stick to green, white or brown. Everyone has their nutritional colour rules, don’t they?

‘Hello? Vivian? Reaction, please!’ Tabitha claps again. ‘I said, it’s MAXIMILIAN FRY! He must have literally just got out of rehab … Oooooh, he is sooooo cute in the flesh. Even cuter than he was in The Simple Truth. Un-be-l-iev-able to think that what’s-her-name actually cheated on him. I tell you, if given the opp, I would never ever ever be unfaithful to him. Honestly, I wouldn’t.’

I smile at her. ‘Very decent of you, Tabs.’

Dane trots down the stairs holding a giant ice bucket with bottles of champagne poking out the top.

‘Did you see Maximilian Fry up there, Dane?’ Tabitha grins. ‘How gorge is he?’

‘Yeah, yeah … but it’s what’s inside that counts,’ says Dane. ‘You know he’s a Buddhist? Always cool to hear people embracing a sense of spirituality … whatever the origin. I’d love to play him some of the band’s tracks.’

‘I think he’s had more than enough to deal with this year,’ I laugh. But then something occurs to me. ‘Dane, how come you saw him? You only went up to the bar. Isn’t he dining in one of the private alcoves?’

‘Nope, he’s at the bar.’

Tabitha checks her yellow Swatch. ‘I seated him there ten minutes ago … he said he’d prefer to wait there until his guest arrived.’

‘Great. Clint Parks went upstairs about five minutes before that to use the loo.’

‘What’s the issue?’ she asks, furiously batting inch-long (natural) eyelashes as she senses impending drama.

I take a deep breath. ‘It was Clint who broke the story about Zoe Dano doing the dirty on Maximilian Fry. It was also Clint who printed those pictures of Fry heading off to treatment. He’s going to walk straight out of the toilet and slap bang into the one person who wants to kill him. Well, one of. Trust me, it will kick off.’

I run up the stairs to the first floor. There is a long line of people sitting at the bar on stools all with their backs to me, but I recognise Maximilian immediately because of his footwear: textbook A-List-actor scuffed hiking boots. (All generations wear them off set. Depp, Pitt, Farrell, DiCaprio, Butler, Cooper, Franco, LaBeouf, Lautner, Lutz, etc.) As I detect the shoes and approach Maximilian, the door of the unisex loo opens on the other side of the bar. Clint Parks bowls out looking refreshed. He immediately spots his nemesis.

‘Well, well, well! If it ain’t Max—’ is all he manages to say before Maximilian shoots off his stool and charges towards him.

‘You fucking noxious lump of shite,’ snarls Maximilian. ‘How dare you screw over my life to sell your contemptible whoring rag?’ Which is language he definitely did not use when last interviewed on the red carpet for E! by Giuliana Rancic.

Then everything seems to move in slow motion. Maximilian steams into Clint, knocking him back through the lavatory door; women at the bar start screaming, grab their drinks and jump off their stools. Tabitha and Dane come running up the stairs behind me, our head barman drops his silver cocktail shaker and tries to hurl himself over the bar in an attempt to split up Maximilian and Clint. But I get there first and find myself wedged between them. I don’t even get a fleeting glimpse of Maximilian’s face before his fist comes hurtling towards me.

It says a lot about how strange that day eventually turned out to be when the weirdest thing that happened to me was not getting punched in the eye by an Oscar nominee.

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_cc4ed44f-7595-5a91-8007-2e2183168d2c)

I open the door to the flat, automatically sling my keys in the glass fish bowl on the hall table and hang my leather jacket on the back of the door. I have been trained to do this by my flatmate, Adele, who has a zero-tolerance policy to household mess. For example, dirty clothes have to be washed, transferred to the dryer and put back in the wardrobe in quick succession – not left to ‘linger unnecessarily’ on the radiator. Smoking is strictly prohibited (even on the patio) and the fridge is constantly monitored for decaying comestibles. The chances of a bio-yogurt drifting past its best-before date are very slim indeed. Adele was only half joking when she once said to me, ‘Those bacteria may be friendly now, Vivian, but who knows when they might turn?’

A lot of people would find Adele’s idiosyncrasies a nightmare to live with but I am not really in a position to complain. I am lucky to be living in such a nice apartment in Bayswater, with a big clothes cupboard and the added bonus of a flatmate who travels abroad whenever she has time off. For some unfathomable reason Adele is never happier then when she is tramping through some Third World country under a spine-crunching backpack. I don’t see the point of travelling to far flung places myself, unless it’s to stock up on hardcore downers and speed-based diet pills, or to catch dysentery – the ultimate detox – then all the hassle would be worth it. Anyway, she bought this flat after she’d quit the drama college we were both at to become some sort of money broker. I was shocked when she told me she was giving up her dream of being on stage, and remember asking, ‘Do you think working in the City will be that rewarding?’ The answer turned out to be ‘yes’. Last year, her basic income (she wouldn’t tell me her bonus) was two hundred grand. She has an extensive shares portfolio, two sports cars, a buy-to-let in the Docklands and this place, which – after the installation of a hi-tech new kitchen – has been valued by a number of local agents at just over a million.

I feel like a bit of a fraud for living here. I always avoid saying hello to the upstairs neighbours – a German couple with their own architectural practice – and if I ever see them I pretend to be deep in conversation on my mobile. Stupid really, what are they going to do? Drag me into the upper maisonette and interrogate me using a Philippe Starck brushed-steel anglepoise lamp until I admit Adele lets me live here for a minimal rent? One thing is for sure, without her generosity I would be living in a much lesser flat somewhere a lot further west … like Wales. So, what does she get in return? Well, someone to stand by her, I suppose. Or more specifically, someone who is on standby 24/7 with a box of man-size Kleenex to mop up her tears. They fall quite often. Adele may have her working life neatly squared off, but her love life is a pentagram of doom.

I pick up an ASOS package off the hall table. It should contain five vests, four grey marl and one nude, plus two pairs of skinny-leg trousers, one black, one grey. It is the second ASOS parcel to arrive this week.

I can hear Luke in the kitchen, opening then banging cupboards shut, still trying to work out where things are. I have been letting him stay here whilst Adele is trekking across the Himalayas with her latest boyfriend, James. They met in Asia doing voluntary work at a wildlife sanctuary for endangered species. She has already hit a new record with him: they’ve been together since the end of last year and she hasn’t cried once.

‘You’re back early,’ shouts Luke.

‘Yes, I am,’ I shout back. ‘Five hours and thirty-three minutes earlier than I should be, if you need the exact timings for your log book.’

‘Thanks, I’ll jot those figures down.’

I hear him laugh as I walk into the lounge. The usual organised debris that appears whenever Luke is within a ten-metre radius is all present and correct. A half-drunk two-litre bottle of Dr Pepper, headphones, laptop logged onto beatport.com and back copies of dance music magazines are lined up on Adele’s African chest, which doubles up as a coffee table. In a pile on the floor next to it are his hooded grey sweatshirt, gaffer-taped work boots, thick mountain socks and a plastic bag from an electrical wholesaler. It’s full of electrical leads.

‘Luke!’ I yell. ‘Why have you bought more cables?’

‘Because I need them.’

‘Christ, how could you? Your bedroom floor already looks like the snake pit in Indiana Jones. By the way, Adele gets back tomorrow so we need to clean up this mess. It’s a tip in here.’

I sit down on the sofa and notice a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket on the floor the other side of the arm rest. Luke must have bought a snack from there at teatime on his way home from the building site. I peer inside the container at the gnawed, withered drumsticks and find myself thinking about Angelina Jolie’s leg poking out of her dress at that Oscar ceremony …

‘This isn’t a tip,’ says Luke, walking into the lounge holding a plate of more food. ‘Mine and Wozza’s place is a tip. What you’re looking at is just surface rubbish, which admittedly has shock value, I’ll give you that. But it’s easy to get rid of. Although, I still can’t find the bin in there.’ He nods towards the kitchen.

I smile. To be fair, Adele’s recently installed kitchen is a complex set-up. You feel pressurised cooking in there … it’s like competing in an episode of The Cube. Fortunately, that – preparing and assembling dishes or game shows – is not something I like to get involved in very often.

Luke sits down next to me and puts his dinner on the leather chest. He has made himself a grilled lamb chop with salad and potatoes.

I find Luke’s approach to diet interesting but baffling. On the one hand, he is quite content chomping his way through the types of dishes laid out in front of the obese person on the first episode of The Biggest Loser to serve as a reality check. On the other, he could name most superfoods (probably not the goji berry, though), and more often that not always has his five-a-day. He eats what he wants, when he wants it. His approach to exercise is the same. He doesn’t bother with a gym schedule, but if he fancies some fresh air he goes for a run. Not that he needs to burn anything off; there is no ‘excess’ on him. The combination of doing manual labour and a ridiculously high metabolic rate keeps his body hard and angular. It’s like sleeping next to a bicycle.

‘So why did you sack off the rest of your shift?’ he asks, leaning over to give me a kiss. Then he clocks my blackening eye and leaps back. ‘Jeeeeeeeeeesus, who the fuck did that? I’ll kill them!’

I burst out laughing. Luke is the least confrontational person I have ever met. If he found a spider in the bathroom he would negotiate with it to leave as quietly as possible and put in a polite request that any flamboyant scuttling is kept to a minimum.

‘It was an accident,’ I explain. ‘A couple of the customers had a run-in; I tried to split it up and got whacked by mistake. It looks a lot more painful than it is.’

‘Ouch.’ He peers at the bruise. ‘That’s a shiner. Why didn’t you call me when it happened?’

‘Because I was flat out on the floor.’

‘Afterwards, I mean. I could have come to get you.’ He picks up his fork and motions at me to try some of his meal, but I pull a face and shake my head. This is our standard procedure. ‘You might have got delayed concussion on the way home and passed out on the pavement.’

‘Well, I didn’t, did I? I’m here.’

‘You never phone me in a crisis.’

‘That’s because in the year I have known you there hasn’t been a crisis to report. It’s not as if one has occurred and I have made a point of not informing you. Besides, this wasn’t a crisis it was a drama.’

His face crumples slightly. It always does when I have a verbal jab at him. First his forehead creases, then his cheekbones sink and his mouth turns at the corners.

‘At least, let me get you some ice,’ he says.

‘No way, I want it to look really bad for tomorrow. I may be able to elicit some sympathy at my audition and get a call-back because they feel sorry for me. Desperate times call for desperate measures.’