Not Without You (19 page)

It’s early on Saturday morning. We’re outside, on the lawn doing sit-ups. At least I am – she’s yelling at me. When I stop, Laney shoots water into my mouth like I’m a professional athlete, and as I lie panting on the ground she says, ‘That was good, Sophie, but you can do better.’

‘I don’t want to do better,’ I rasp. ‘I want to die.’

‘You’re so funny.’ Laney smiles, her teeth glinting in the morning sun. She’s gone a shade too far with the whitening, I think, but the world of HDTV will teach her that, I’m sure. ‘So I’m gonna take off, OK? I’m filming later.’ Like all good personal trainers, Laney is on TV and has her own DVD empire. ‘Stay focused on yourself. Remember the sunshine you bring to people.’

‘OK,’ I say, totally straight-faced. ‘Thanks, Laney. Good session. See you soon.’ I want to reach out and touch her hair, like Vicky Watkins’s hair at school.

‘I’ll see you next week.’ She nudges me lightly with the pristine white toe of her sneaker. ‘Is this all for the Patrick Drew movie? Did you meet with him yet?’

‘Sure,’ I tell her. ‘Last week. We had coffee.’

‘What’s he like? My girlfriends and I are obsessed with him. Is he really dumb as a plank? Or does he have a special aura?’

I think for a minute. ‘He’s not dumb.’ I think about his smile, his stories about his parents, the Celine Dion Las Vegas conversation, and I grin. ‘Actually, he’s lovely.’

‘Oh, my goodness, did you guys—’ Laney’s mouth opens and she claps her hands.

‘No!’ I say loudly, too loudly. ‘Laney, no way!’

‘You have a crush on him.’

‘I do not. I met him, once. He’s a big dufus.’

Laney ignores this. ‘Did you call him?’

‘We’ve … we’ve texted a couple times.’ I pull my arm across my body with one hand, stretching my shoulder, pretending I’m focused on this and not on Patrick Drew.

Laney straddles the mat, pulling her hair into a ponytail. ‘That is so lame. Texting is like nothing. You might as well be Facebook friends. Ask him out!’

‘It doesn’t work like that. Anyway, we have nothing in common.’

‘That’s for the birds, Sophie. You should ask him out.’ I cross my arms and she changes tack, smiling. ‘Makes shooting the movie more interesting, right?’

‘It does make a difference, that’s for sure.’

She claps her hands together. ‘OK, well I’ll see you next week! Even more reason to enjoy those extra sessions, am I right?’

‘What?’

‘Tommy called me. I’m coming by four times next week. Just to make sure you’re in the best shape of your life before shooting starts.’

‘Four?’ I shake my head. ‘I don’t think so. Tommy asked for four sessions?’

She looks awkward, pulling her foot up behind her, each leg in turn. ‘I don’t think it came from Tommy, Sophie. Some request from the studio. He told Tina. The director asked that we move you up to four times a week prior to shooting.’

I get up slowly, turning away from her so she can’t see my face.

Fucking George. It’s him. I know it’s him, trying to screw with my head now he’s not screwing me. No contact since he stayed over that time – what, well over a week ago now? First the costume designer calls Tina and tells her I’m too big for the costumes and they’re being remade; now this. This is his way of letting me know he’s still in control. Tell her she’s fat, tell her she’s unfit, get to her so she’s a crazy mess and I can do what I want with her on set and she’ll end up taking her clothes off out of desperation to keep me happy. For what? For him, for the film? I don’t know which yet.

Before we even started sleeping together I’d heard stories about him and what he does to actresses. He made one girl once do fifty-two takes of the same six-word line.
Fifty-two
. She’s a big star, too – you’d know exactly who I mean. And she’s good, a total professional, not a flake like some of them. She was crying by the end, and he’d just stop every time and make them do her make-up, touch it up, wait till they could go again, then shout ‘Cut!’ and swear at her that she wasn’t getting it right. Then,
then
, he went with the first take. He’s a bastard.

Laney looks at me, a little concerned. ‘Hey, Sophie, that’s OK, right?’

I bend down, touch my toes, feeling the stretch in my back, my shoulder blades, my arms. ‘That’s absolutely fine. It’ll be great to see you!’

‘Well, totally,’ she says, looking relieved. ‘OK! I wasn’t sure. It’s such a blessing that we—’ when the French doors open and Ashley, my publicist, appears.

‘Hi! Hi, Sophie! Hi, Laney, how’re you?’

‘Hi, Ashley, how’re you!’

‘I’m good, I’m good. Sophie, we have to talk. Something happened.’ Ashley’s jaw is tight, her dead straight ginger hair is sticking out slightly, and her hazel eyes are bulging. She still has her phone headset on. ‘You didn’t see the papers yet?’

I laugh and gesture at Laney. ‘Well – no, not so much.’

‘Come with me,’ says Ashley, grabbing my hand. ‘We got a problem.’

Ashley’s iPad is propped up in my study. She’s got a British tabloid website on-screen, and I glance at it more out of curiosity than anything else. Then I start to read:

SOPHIE AND ME: MY TIME WITH BRITAIN’S NO.1 STAR

* Wild nights in LA sleeping with ‘every man in town’

* ‘Village of chavs’ – her snobbery about home town

* ‘I’m so fat’ – paranoid star’s insecurity about looks

* Armpitgate – DOES Brit lovely have hygiene problems?

D
AVE
O
LDMAN
, ex-boyfriend of Hollywood megastar Sophie Leigh, last night broke his silence on their four-year relationship, and insists – ‘I DUMPED HER because I couldn’t take her demands for sex and booze any more.’

The 29-year-old former child actor turned IT technician, and father of one, was with the West Country lovely after her career Stateside went global. In this EXCLUSIVE interview he tells us all about her insatiable appetite, her …

I scroll down frantically, and see yet another snap of me with the soggy armpit. There’s a photo of Dave too and I zoom in and stare at him, at his thin face with the weak chin, patchy with sparse hairs. He wears a wounded expression and he’s sitting on a sofa, holding a baby, with a short girl, so fake-tanned she looks like an Oompa-Loompa.
Doting Dad Dave now prefers the quiet life at home with his fiancée Sherree and baby Armani,
says the caption. I shake my head.

‘Jesus, Ashley,’ I say. ‘Why the hell didn’t you try and stop it?’

‘They kept it totally hidden. The bastards didn’t want it to go viral. They needed a splash for the Saturday edition – they’re locked in a circ war with the British Sunday tabloids,’ says Ashley robotically. Her jaw’s so tight I’m surprised she can speak.

The air con is on full blast. The fresh sweat from my workout is like an icy chill on my body. I stare at the screen and a photo of me and Dave, arms round each other: I’ve got red streaks in my hair like I’m a Spice Girl, and we’re laughing, sticking our tongues out. I remember that night. He was over staying for one of his periodic bouts of interest in me, when everything would be cool to start with and four days in I’d have realised it was all a big mistake. But I couldn’t ever seem to get rid of him, tell him to fuck off back home. I don’t know why, now. So naive. ‘I thought he was so great when we got together,’ I say. ‘Couldn’t believe he was interested in me. He was so sharp and cool …’ I push the iPad away and stand up. ‘What did I ever see in him? What a cliché! What a knob.’

‘If I had a nickel …’ Ashley says grimly. ‘Honey, Tommy and Artie are on their way up. They wanna talk it over. What you do next.’ I rub my eyes, my vision cloudy in the sudden dark of the room. ‘Listen, we got caught sleeping on the armpit thing. We need to handle this, otherwise people aren’t gonna get you any more, Sophie. They’d just forgotten about the action movie and the indie movie – now this stuff. We need to make you America’s British sweetheart again, not someone dragged into the tabloids for all the wrong reasons.’ I stare at her, nodding mutely. ‘Don’t panic, honey,’ she says. ‘We’ll regroup.’

‘Angelina Jolie’s in the tabloids every fucking week.’ I try to keep my voice level, and turn on my computer.

‘She’s crazy – she doesn’t count. You’re supposed to be a normal girl.’ Ashley starts drumming on the table, her slim fingers beating a rhythm. ‘Normal girls need to be in there trying on new nail polish, yukking it up with their friends over salads, playing with their babies in the park, going on dates. Normal girls aren’t walking round with wet pits, rubbing their boobs in front of Patrick Drew—’

‘I was showing him how Sara whacked into me!’ I exclaim.

Ashley shrugs. ‘Honey, they don’t care. That’s what they see. And now this – some scuzzball linking himself with you, and his white-trash girlfriend and their baby.’ Her face is screwed into a picture of distaste as she looks at Dave. ‘Look at them. You don’t want the association. The US tabloids’ll pick it up and run with it. It’s already on TMZ and People.com. It’s a disaster, honey. You’re supposed to be sweet, cute, classy.’ Her cell rings. ‘Sure,’ she says, after a few seconds. ‘Sure, I got you.’ She strides out of the room, holding her index finger up to me, mouthing,
One minute. One minute.

Left alone, I sniff my armpits cautiously, and then catch my reflection in the glass doors. I want to laugh, a mixture of hysteria, fatigue and bewilderment. Because this is ridiculous, isn’t it? Normal girls, Ashley says. None of this is normal, none of it. I stretch and then sit down at the computer and log into Twitter to see what people are saying. I know I shouldn’t, but if you were on the front page of every tabloid in the UK with exclusive revelations from your ex in the
Sun
about how you’re a nympho who drinks too much and has severe hygiene problems you’d kind of care, wouldn’t you? Don’t tell me you wouldn’t.

It’s the usual depressing kind of stuff. My eyes run up and down the columns, drearily reading it all: the worst, most inhumane corners of people’s brains, the smegma they think it’s OK to put out there, like there’s no repercussions, no one is affected by it.

I feel my heart stop, then it starts to pound again, and then someone bangs on the glass door and I scream.

‘Hey, kiddo.’ Deena steps inside. ‘Can I ask you—’

‘Get out!’ I shout. ‘For fuck’s sake, Deena, leave me alone, I’m—’ I cover my face and turn back to the screen and she stares at me in astonishment. I hear her boots on the terrace as she walks away.

I peer again at the screen, my head throbbing and my heart thumping so loud I can hear it. I stare at the message.

The username is White_Roses and I click on their profile.

‘IT’S SOME NUT-JOB,’ Artie says. ‘It’s a crazy fucking nut-job and we should just ignore it.’

A crackling voice yells, ‘It’s a nut-job who might break in and stab her to death! Artie, you lost your mind? We need to get security doubled, OK? I’ve spoken to the guys already. I’m on this, Tina’s on this, T.J. is on this. Sophie ain’t going nowhere without a driver and a detail on her twenty-four seven. And …’

The voice goes dead. Ashley sighs, Artie looks at his fingers. I sit between them on the cream sofa that looks out over the pool, showered and changed and feeling like a pupil who’s done something bad and been called to see the headmaster. I hadn’t told them about the white roses and now they’re furious. I told Denis. I thought that was enough. Well, I know it wasn’t, deep down – he’s an old guy and he’s not quite up to it any more. I knew he wasn’t. I just didn’t want to deal with it, I don’t know why. Maybe to avoid all of this. Tommy is on speakerphone; he’s out on a yacht this weekend and can’t get back but he’s been patched through, like this is the Situation Room.

‘Listen,’ Ashley says. ‘Now we know about it –’ she glances at me – ‘it’s gonna be fine. We just have to make sure security is in place. I’ll stay here. What are your plans for later?’

‘I have Steve and Suzy’s party tonight. But I don’t know if I’ll go, now.’

‘You should go,’ Artie grunts. ‘Listen, Tommy – are you there?’

‘I’m fucking there! Of course I’m there! Whose party?’ The phone on the side is practically jumping with static and barely controlled rage. ‘Whose party you going to?’

‘Steve Levine,’ I yell. ‘It’s Suzy’s benefit for something. Suzy’s his wife.’

‘I know who fucking Suzy Levine’s married to, OK? I know Steve Levine. Cock-sucker wouldn’t return my calls when I started out – he can screw himself.’ Tommy has an outsider’s chip on his shoulder; he didn’t come up through the agent system but worked in the music industry first and he’s extremely sensitive about what he sees as ‘old’ Hollywood.

‘Tommy, I got this.’ Artie is eyeing up the cakes, sliding his finger inside his watch strap so the thick silver links rub over his knuckles. ‘Let me take care of it.’

‘No way, Artie. You said you had it before and we got ourselves into the armpit thing, OK? We shoulda caught the tabloid before they printed the story. Now we look like we were fucking sleeping our way through this thing, plus this – if she gets whacked by some psycho …’ Tommy leaves the sentence hanging in mid-air.

‘What the hell does that mean?’ I say. ‘Tommy, you’re freaking me out.’

‘I know, sweetie, but you don’t need to worry. It’s all gonna be OK. I got fucking Mossad and the fuckin’ SAS coming out to look after you. And after that, you know what I think? We have you hospitalised for exhaustion. I know this place in Arizona …’ He cuts out. ‘Shit. I’m breaking up.’