Chart Throb (28 page)

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Authors: Ben Elton

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‘For the final time, Fleur, it’s one thing being made a fool of, it’s another telling everyone about it.’
Fleur simply sighed. The girls had spoken many times of how they might avenge themselves on Rodney Root for the way he had promised so much and delivered so little. But Iona refused to buy into it.
‘I’m not making myself the tragic victim. I was a grown-up girl and I thought I loved him and I thought he loved me. That’s all. What would talking to the papers make me look like? All the
Chart Throb
fans hate us anyway after the last series, when everyone booed us. I’d just look like a sad tart.’
‘Oh well. No sense crying about it, eh?’ Fleur said, finally managing to get some movement into her congealed make-up. ‘We’ll earn three hundred tonight and we’ve two gigs at the weekend so things could be a sight worse.’
Of course three hundred pounds did not go very far between five band members and a roadie, particularly once travel and dry cleaning and other expenses had been deducted. It was certainly a long way from the dreams of wealth and stardom that they had all indulged in the previous year when embarking on their
Chart Throb
journey. They all had real jobs now but they still loved the music.
‘We don’t do so badly, do we, girls?’ said Mary cheerfully. ‘And the pub’s providing supper, so get your pants on, Iona, and go and grab some menus. Be sure to bat your eyelids and lean well forward over the bar. If you don’t come back with a round of free rum and Cokes you’re a disgrace to Scottish rock chicks!’
Just then Iona’s mobile phone rang. At that point she was standing on the bar stool with one leg out of her jeans.
‘Oh shit. Who’s that?’ she said, crouching down and trying to pull the phone from her scrunched-up pocket.
By the time she retrieved it she had missed the call and she didn’t recognize the number.
Moments later her message service rang.
‘Hi, Iona. You don’t know me, my name’s Chelsie. I’m on
Chart Throb.
Calvin asked me to call . . .’
The Meeting Fails to Start
It was the day before full-scale recording on the new series of
Chart Throb
was to begin. On the morrow the three celebrity judges would ‘start’ the lengthy process of scouring the country in their obsessive and highly motivated personal quests to discover new talent. The days would be long and draining, and meticulous forward planning was essential. Therefore the entire team had foregathered in the spacious morning room of the summer house at Copton Thorpe Manor, a country house hotel that nestled cosily in a long loop of the M4 motorway some miles north of Newbury. Calvin would brief them fully on how he saw the various storylines developing in the early stages of the ‘audition’ process. There was an enormous amount to get through and everybody was anxious to be off. Unfortunately the meeting had stalled before it could begin, due to the continuing absence of one of the famous judges.
What was even more frustrating was that it wasn’t one of the important ones. It was the one whom nobody gave a shit about.
‘Where the fuck is Rodney?’ Beryl rasped angrily from a corner of the room. She was still suffering somewhat from further massive treatments of liposuction which she had endured as final preparation for her forthcoming TV appearances, and so, despite the old-fashioned soft furnishings in which Copton Thorpe Manor took such pride, she declined to sit.
‘I
said
where the FUCK is Rodney?’ she repeated, brutally flexing the muscles of her celebrity by swearing loudly in such ostentatiously genteel surroundings. The prim duty manageress and her smartly dressed staff might redden and purse their lips at such an uncouth display, but Beryl had not got to where she was today by playing by other people’s rules. On the contrary, as she was wont to tell people, she was one strong woman (who used to be a man) and she made her own fucking rules and if people didn’t like it they could go fuck themselves.
‘I spoke to him earlier,’ Calvin replied soothingly. ‘He said he’d be here.’ He turned towards a comely production assistant. ‘You did tell him we’re in the morning room, didn’t you, babes?’
The girl’s name was Gretel but she was ‘babes’ to Calvin. Everyone was a ‘babe’ or a ‘darling’ or a ‘mate’ to him. He employed so many people in so many countries that he could not possibly remember anybody’s name and had long since given up trying. In fact he had already fallen completely in love with Emma before he knew her name.
‘I texted, e’d and slid hard copy under his door, Calvin,’ Gretel replied, almost snapping to attention and saluting. She knew that Calvin valued nothing more highly than efficiency. He liked his girls to look and talk like hip, self-assertive, independent young troubleshooters but he liked them to do what they were told.
‘What the fuck
is
a morning room anyway?’ Beryl enquired, massaging her ass. ‘What happens to it in the afternoon? Does it disappear into another fucking dimension?’
‘It’s a room built and windowed in order to favour the morning sun, dear,’ Calvin informed her.
‘There! You see why I hate England!’ Beryl almost spat. ‘They have to build special rooms to make the most of the five minutes of watery piss-poor sunlight that shines on this shithole. In LA we can’t get away from the stuff. We build rooms to
avoid
the fucking sun.’
There being no reply to this, nobody attempted one and a silence fell. An uncomfortable silence as it was a very crowded room.
‘Where the
fuck
is Rodney?’ Beryl asked once more. ‘
We
came from LA, Calvin.
He
only has to buzz in from London. Stupid twat.’
Rodney Is Not Happy
Rodney was at that moment standing at the hotel reception desk and he was most unhappy.
‘So you’re saying you have two suites?’
‘Yes, sir. The Brunel and the Glenfiddich.’
‘Two suites?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And I’m in neither of them?’
‘No, sir. You have an executive room.’
‘An executive room?’
‘Yes, sir, with a view of the artificial lake.’
‘Oh well,
that’s all right then
,’ Rodney spluttered, the icy calm which he had been struggling to maintain utterly deserting him in the face of this damning affront to his status. ‘As long as I’ve got a view of the
artificial lake.’
Rodney did not need to enquire who was occupying the Brunel and the Glenfiddich suites, he knew the answer as certainly as if he’d made the bookings himself. Beryl Blenheim and Calvin Simms. Of course they would be in the two available suites while he was in an executive room with a view of the lake.
A thought struck him.
‘Do the Brunel and Glenfiddich have views of the artificial lake?’ he asked, clutching at what in his heart of hearts he knew to be the thinnest of straws.
‘Yes, sir, of course.’
‘In which case
my
view of it can scarcely be considered a bonus, can it?’
‘I don’t understand, sir.’
‘No, I don’t suppose you do. Anyway it doesn’t matter,’ he said with the same weary sadness which Hamlet might have shown when considering the possibility that his uncle had murdered his father and was shagging his mother. ‘Where is the morning room?’
The receptionist explained that the morning room was in the summer house, which was situated in the middle of the golf course.
‘It’s a buggy ride, sir,’ she continued. ‘You can drive yourself, which is great fun, or some of our guests prefer to be driven by a qualified member of our hospitality team.’
‘A buggy?’
‘Yes, a golf buggy. Great fun. Although helmets must be worn.’
‘Do you know who I am?’
‘Yes, sir. You’re Rodney Root.’
‘Do you imagine that Rodney Root attends meetings in golf buggies?’
‘Well, uhm . . . you could walk, sir. It’s about a fifteen-minute stroll. Some of our guests prefer that . . .’
‘You think that I
walk
to my meetings, is that it?’
‘Well, I . . .’
Rodney banged his hand down on the reception desk in a manner which he imagined appeared commanding and decisive. There had clearly been a
major
cock-up and it was time he took control.
‘Is there access by road?’
‘By road, sir?’
‘Yes, miss, by road. We are all speaking English, aren’t we? I presume this summer house is regularly maintained and supplied. I don’t imagine all that is done by golf buggy.’
‘No, sir. There is road access but it means rejoining the A34 heading north, coming off at the next exit and doubling back. It takes rather longer than . . .’
But Rodney was already heading for the front door, beyond which he knew that the leather-lined comfort and appropriate status of his chauffeur-driven Mercedes was waiting.
Getting On with It
In the morning room Calvin had decided he would have to start.
Beryl was making his skin crawl and it was only the first day. The woman was an obnoxious bully at the best of times and her enormous success in the previous series (which Calvin himself had so carefully engineered) had gone horribly to her head. He had created a monster, a nightmare ego, and the brutalized buttocks and half-finished clitoris were doing nothing to improve her people skills.
Besides which, the atmosphere was becoming oppressive. The great crowd of production staff who had been bussed in from the unit base at the Newbury Ramada had already been sitting about for nearly three quarters of an hour. The coffee had been consumed, the pastries nibbled and the jolly greetings with which the room had earlier buzzed had long since fallen silent. Calvin was captain of a ship becalmed, and although his was a pretty docile crew every minute that ticked by put another tiny dent in his authority. If there was one thing that Calvin liked to be it was decisive, and there was nothing less decisive than hanging around. Everyone was waiting for him and he was waiting for
Rodney.
That was simply outrageous.
And he had been in such a sunny mood at breakfast. He had talked on the phone to Emma for nearly twenty minutes and loved every moment of it.
There could be no doubt now that Emma was his girlfriend.
Certainly she had continued to decline his invitations to return to work but they had seen each other or at least spoken every day since the morning coffee summit. He still needed to win her trust so that she would have sex with him but in the meantime, just as she had previously blurred his vision so frustratingly, she was now having the opposite effect. He was
focused on his goal.
Calvin was going through what was for him the almost entirely novel experience of ‘the early stages of a relationship’. Not since his dim and distant youth had he known such a process of personal discovery and deferred gratification. He had always enjoyed both sex and the company of women, but all his adult life he had experienced them only on
his
terms. He had associated with women who were interested in what he had to offer them and who were therefore happy to play entirely by his rules. Emma’s refusal to do the same was a new and curiously exhilarating sensation for him, reminding him of the innocence of youth.
It actually made him feel younger.
So far he had only kissed her.
How weird was that?
Usually he had scarcely even kissed them before they were having sex and now he had only kissed her. He had not even pawed her body, he had hardly
seen
any of it. He was planning seaside trips just to get her into a bathing costume.
Weird.
And for the most powerful man in TV, who was accustomed to getting whatever he wanted whenever he wanted it. Very weird. But also fun; strange, exhilarating, utterly unfamiliar fun.
Standing at the head of that crowded meeting room he wanted to talk to her some more. He would have liked to phone her right there and then. But he knew that she was busy in her new job, writing an article about the fledgling café society in East Finchley. And he had an incredibly busy day ahead of him, a day which he could not even begin because he was
waiting for Rodney.
‘All right, let’s get started,’ he said decisively. ‘Rodney can catch up later.’
‘I doubt he’s caught up on the last fucking series yet,’ said Beryl.
Calvin turned to Trent. ‘Get on with it.’
Once more Trent took up his favourite position in front of the audiovisual displays.
‘Right. So, as you know, team, tomorrow we kick off in Birmingham. We’ll be seeing six of our proposed finalists, although two of them, Latiffa, our black girl with attitude, and Bloke, the boring old party band, will be cut into the Manchester show, so, for God’s sake, Continuity, can you
please
be careful with Beryl’s jackets.’
‘We have Beryl in the beige Versace for Manchester day one,’ said the head of costume, referring to one of the enormous files which lay before her. ‘And the silver sheen Lacroix for Birmingham. Is that right, Penny?’

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