Face Value (2 page)

MAIDSTONE WEEKLY NEWS

See the image of Trisha Hillmory in the puff panel in the right-hand corner (in a red swimsuit). Delight in the right cross-ref she knew by heart: TRISHA’S BEAUTY SECRETS, MAIDSTONE BAZAAR EXCLUSIVE, SEE MAGAZINE. She retrieved the newspaper, put it on the desk in front of her, smoothing out the creases with her hands, and stared at those three magic words again: BY KATE MILLER. Her first front-page byline. Her first celebrity story.

It was hardly surprising the editor, Brian Palmers, had been so thrilled. Trisha Hillmory, BBC national newscaster, was indeed a rare and beautiful thing. A Maidstone A-lister. Celebrities had spread from international cities (London, New York, Los Angeles) to large regional towns (Newcastle, Liverpool, Manchester) thanks to football and its trappings, namely the footballer’s wife. Even some northern, hitherto unnoteworthy towns (Nottingham, Shrewsbury, Blackpool) had a smattering thanks to the return visit of migrating soap stars deigning to open a cinema, appear in a play, or scratch a donkey’s nose on the beach for a photo op. But strangely, Maidstone, county town of Kent, adult population 138,959 (census 2001 statistics), had not attracted them just yet, even though it had once boasted Europe’s first drive-in cinema (opened by Diana Dors, no less, now sadly closed due to lack of interest) and was the home to Kimberly-Clark, one of Britain’s biggest toilet paper manufacturers. And as everyone, even celebrities, needed toilet paper, that should have been enough to put the town on the map, shouldn’t it?

Kate had known she was on to a winner the moment Trisha Hillmory’s front door had opened that rainy afternoon ten days ago. The orange-colored manager man came out—the same one she’d seen that morning at the swimming pool opening where she’d first met Trisha. Only this time, instead of welcoming her, or facilitating the interview as she presumed was the reason for his presence, Donald Truckell—she had Googled him—flounced out of the door and brushed past her without so much as a backward glance. His face was flushed florid. He gave a petulant stamp to his feet before fandangoing his way like Rumpelstiltskin with a fake tan down Trisha’s redbrick path.

"Off. Get her off,” he muttered into his lapels, shaking his jacket with panicky, jerky movements, as if a tick had just landed on it. She thought she saw his hair move, slide toward his shoulder as if to give it a cheer-up pat. He clamped his flabby hand to his hair, slid it back up, and strode on, crown intact.

It left Kate in the unsatisfactory position of not really knowing what to do. With the front door still open, she had considered calling Trisha from her mobile, offering to postpone the interview. Something had happened. The interviewee needed time to reflect. To compose herself. She considered it for about two seconds, that is.

A brown court shoe with a bow at the front came hurling through the air at full force, grazing her cheek.

“Ow!” said Kate. "That was me you hit!”

“Who’s that?” The voice that came from somewhere upstairs was different from the one belonging to the Trisha Kate had met before. At the Larkfield Leisure Centre pool reopening she’d been magnaminous Trisha, generous toward this scruffy local reporter who still dressed like a student. She had laughed gaily at childhood reminiscences of Larkfield Leisure Centre before the lottery money makeover. She had promised Kate an interview later that same day, all to benefit her favorite local charity, just as soon as she’d thought of one.

And now here she was. Happy, confident Trisha the newscaster was crumpled in a ball at the top of the stairs, her hair a tangled mess, her mascara making smoky trickles down her face.

There was no way Kate was going to postpone this. No way! First rule of journalism: The early bird catches the worm. And if it wriggles away, run after it. She’d made that last bit up, but it seemed apt given the circumstances.

“Oh. It’s you. The local journalist.” Trisha dabbed at her eyes with the back of her sleeve, then sniffed noisily. “Did I . . . ?”

“It’s okay. Really, it didn’t hurt.”

BBC TRISHA ATTACKS LOCAL REPORTER.

Trisha stared at her with misty eyes. “I . . . we . . . just had, you know, a row. Lovers’ tiff. Silly really, isn’t it?” She stood up. Her pink suit was creased. The once-jaunty split of her skirt hung limp and puckered like a pair of curtains whose lining had shrunk in the wash.

What was silly? The tiff? Or the fact that Orange Man was her lover? Kate had cautiously stepped into the house, her war wounds entitling her to an all-access pass. On the wall alongside the stairs, light green wallpaper with a fleur-de-lis pattern embossed on it was broken up by four wood-framed prints of nineteenth-century women taking walks in long white skirts on deserted beaches. The frames had fake antique woodworm marks in them. She reached for her notebook to start writing notes, details, the kind of woodworm trivia her readers would lap up, then pulled back. Writing notes perhaps wasn’t the most sensitive of things to do in times of crisis. There it was again, the sensitive side of her.

BBC TRISHA THROWS OUT LOVE-RAT!

“How about a cup of tea?” said Trisha, stifling a sobbing noise in an effort to regain control of the situation. “I know I’m ready for one!” Fake laughter. “I’m sorry about the, er . . . shoe thing.” She limped down the stairs, thickly carpeted in cream, and sat on the bottom step, sticking her left foot out expectantly.

“Oh! I’m sorry. Your shoe!” said Kate, proffering it to her.

Over several cups of tea, perching uncomfortably on a spinning breakfast-bar chair with a shallow back and such an oversensitive axis that Kate had to balance herself every time she took a sip from her mug or risk splashing Trisha with the hot liquid, Trisha explained the cause of the shoe-throwing incident. It was the stuff a young reporter’s dreams were made of. Or even a thirty-two-year-old senior reporter’s dreams were made of.

Trisha had been in a deeply unhappy relationship with her manager, a svengali figure whom she’d met while still at university (she’d studied classics at Oxford, which surprised Kate as she’d always thought of Trisha as one of those new generation newscasters who looked pretty but was only just clever enough to throw in the odd impromptu question to an interview subject, the Minister of Agriculture in Mali, say). Orange Man had propelled her rapidly forward in her career, thanks mainly to his impeccable contacts and Trisha’s own talent, but theirs quickly became a platonic relationship as her work took off. Things had finally come to a fore when he found out she’d been having an affair with her personal trainer, a former dancer from the Ballet Rambert she’d met while doing an obituary piece on a Royal Ballet legend. Now Trisha had finally plucked up the courage to ditch Orange Man once and for all, and he hadn’t taken it well.

SEX-MAD TRISH IN LOVE TRIANGLE.

It was a winner.

It seemed hideously unfair that a woman in this day and age would have to short-circuit her way to the top by having sexual relations with a man with a toupee. But then, did she really have to? Why couldn’t she have done what every other self-respecting young reporter did and sit it out in the suburbs until she was ready to make her transition to a national? Kate knew the answer to that one already. They might be the same age, but you wouldn’t catch Trisha putting up with stories like “Maidstone Mum Moonlights as Pole Dancer.” Lame, lame, lame. But now it was Kate’s turn. This story was her break—her sex with her own Orange Man. Her short-circuit to a national paper, or even a long, convoluted, meandering, scenic route to a national. Sure, she’d have to get a few more Trisha Hillmorys first, but write this story and doors would open. Promotion. The making of her career. Today Maidstone. Tomorrow London. After that, who knew?

Just as she was working out what percentage pay rise she could negotiate, Trisha dropped the bomb.

“Of course,” she said, clicking two Splenda into her bone-china mug, “you can’t write about any of this, you do know that, don’t you?” The tears had dried up, but her face was still streaked with mascara. It did nothing to dispel the steely narrowing of her eyes as she stirred her tea, the spoon hitting the sides of the cup in a steady, even rhythm. “I always sue ... always.”

Kate slipped off the spinning chair, slopping her tea onto her lap.

“You do? . . . You sue?” She couldn’t let this story go, just couldn’t. “But of course you know you can trust me, I mean, I’d never—”

“Never write about me in anything but a sympathetic style? Oh, sure. I know. Give me copy approval. Give me two weeks in the bleeding Bahamas. Give me a new Balenciaga. Anything. Just so long as you can break the story. . . .” She reached for her handbag, a bulging, dark brown leather thing with buckles and clasps all over, and pulled out a compact. It clicked open, extra loudly now that Kate’s cozy companionship was vanquished, leaving in its place a void of bittersweet professional distance. Trisha examined her face in the mirror, dusting powder over the smudges where the tears had been, pressing it determinedly with an expert hand.

"The thing is, you might be like that, Kate, and you seem like a nice person so I suppose I could trust you. But those others . . . They’ll be dreaming up the headlines the moment you tell them about all this. . . . I can see it now . . . ‘Sex-Mad Trish in Love Triangle!’ ”

“Oh, no, you don’t think . . . of course we wouldn’t . . . they wouldn’t . . . I mean, you really don’t think that . . .” She felt her face and neck burning up, hot and red with guilt and embarrassment.

Trisha stood up squarely in front of Kate, who began swinging her chair from side to side. She stared. Kate shivered.

“Of course, there is the small matter of the graze,” she said, patting a little powder onto Kate’s cheek. The flesh-colored dust stung as it settled in the contours of the reddened scratch.

“Ouch!”

“So, I’ll give you a different story,” continued Trisha, ignoring her complaint. “It’ll be positive. An ‘at home with Trisha’ type of thing. Plug the charity. Talk about my favorite moisturizer. And all right, you can have the end of my affair,” she continued, “but we’ll do it my way, okay? No shoe throwing. And I’m not seeing anyone else, you understand? Not yet, anyway. Now do we have a deal?”

AT HOME WITH TRISHA. BBC STAR REVEALS HER BEAUTY SECRETS.

It might just work.

“One more thing. Trisha Hillmory has never had Botox. Do you understand? Never ever.”

She snapped the compact shut.

two

By the time Kate deigned to arrive at the office the day following her front-page debut, it was teatime. Now that the nation had apparently switched its allegiance to coffee, teatime was a somewhat redundant way of timekeeping, conjuring up obsolete images of cucumber sandwiches, Earl Grey, and dancing at the Waldorf. Four o’clock, then. It had so far been a thoroughly disappointing day, failing to live up to the previous day’s promise. She had allowed herself a congratulatory late start, then attended the local planning meeting regarding the proposed new shopping mall out in Meadowparks, before skiving off for a late lunch with Lise, to which Lise hadn’t shown up because she’d been sidetracked by her new boyfriend, a married bank manager. With five children.

The office reeked of the conflicting smells of oranges and burgers.
Maidstone Bazaar
shared a 1960s block with an accountancy firm, above a newsagent’s and a cut-price supermarket, that was neither chic enough to be turned into some sucker’s dream loft space nor ugly enough to be condemned. The main newspaper had moved two years before to a swanky new office development on the outskirts of town, but incredibly there hadn’t been enough room for the magazine’s staff of five despite Brian Palmers’s protestations that the magazine was an integral part of the paper. He’d fired off several letters to the paper’s forward-thinking development and management consultants, citing the magazine’s vital role within the paper as reasons for them to find space,
damn it
, using whatever means necessary. For a while he was the paper’s unwritten hero, fighting for his small yet crucial team to be recognized with all the attendant privileges and accolades of the mothership. Until that is, the powers that be took him seriously and offered
Maidstone Bazaar
an exclusive office “block” adjacent to the newspaper’s executive suites, the prime site within site. Sadly, the prime site turned out to be little more than a glorified trailer, the yucca plant in the corner doing nothing to hide the condensation that misted up the windows, or the rust around the edges of the door, which rocked unsteadily on its hinges until Brian Palmers slammed it firmly behind him on his way out. On second thought, he argued, the central location of
Maidstone Bazaar
’s current home gave it unique access to its readers. Just off the high street, it would be able to keep in touch with what the people of the borough really wanted from a magazine supplement and with the main paper being so far removed, geographically speaking (he still hoped its correspondents would be able to make those crucial trips into town), perhaps it was important that he do the only proper and decent thing: stay put.

He prided himself on his democratic style of leadership. Democratic as long as everyone knew who was boss, ha-ha! But the close working conditions meant that there wasn’t room for big egos or autocrats, familiarity breeding not so much contempt as a healthy tinge of sarcasm intoned into every other sentence and an overriding feeling that in career terms at least, this was it. The office was so cramped that the staff shared one table, canteen style, the heat of their computers generating enough warmth to keep winter radiators switched off permanently (so much better for asthma and allergies), and looked out onto the car park round the back of the supermarket. Brian had a separate box, with a glass screen affording some privacy, but it wasn’t grand by any means. Meetings were kept blissfully short, for the simple reason that they either took place with him crouching on a spare chair by their desks, or even worse—them all perching on his desk. There had been so many spilled cups of coffee that the only beverage allowed in meetings was water. As a result most of the real decision making took place in the pub, a smoky, video game-dominated affair at the end of the block.