‘Well, why not come tonight then?’ I only said it because I knew she wouldn’t.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Katie. I wouldn’t dream of gate-crashing. And I don’t even know where it is.’ I was a little concerned about the relish with which she pronounced ‘gatecrashing’, which suggested that the idea had a wicked appeal.
‘Look, Penny,’ I said, ‘come or don’t come, it’s entirely up to you. But now I have to get home: I haven’t a clue yet what I’m going to wear.’
‘Oh. Okay. And Mile End – you will remember to kiss Cavafy for me, won’t you?’ she said.
‘Of course, Penny,’ I said, suppressing, with an effort that made my eyes water, a jostling crowd of curses and expletives.
The party to which Penny had alluded to was a launch at Momo’s. I can’t remember what was being launched – chocolate flavoured vodka or something – it never really matters. Milo, naturally, was doing the PR, and the place was packed with B- and C-list celebs. Not all fashion of course but, given that it was one of Milo’s, there was bound to be a fashiony feel. There were models, a smattering of out-of-favour designers, and a few vaguely familiar telly people from daytime soaps, or early evening quizzes. Milo had clearly been coasting: this really wasn’t his best work. The one real catch was Jude Law, who’d promised to make an appearance in return for the indefinite loan of a Gucci lizardskin jacket.
I was in my element. I have, you see, the sort of face that people think they know: people are always convinced that they’ve seen me on something. And best of all, I knew people in several of the discrete clusters that had formed. That meant I could island hop, moving from one to another as soon as the conversation dulled, which, in the PR-fashion cosmos took on average four and a half minutes.
First, there was Milo’s lot by the bar: that’s Milo himself, PR Queen of London, sleek and wondrously handsome in a black neoprene suit and a pair of piebald ponyskin shoes. Next to him, close as a gun in a holster, there pressed Xerxes, Milo’s Persian Boy. Xerxes was an exquisite miniature, eyes dark and lustrous. Milo said he was a Zoroastrian, a fire worshipper, and that he’d never let him blow out a match, but would make him wait until the flame had eaten all the wood, and licked at his fingers. No one had ever heard him speak. Some said he was dumb. Others disputed his origins. I’d heard, of course, the story about Xerxes being a Bangladeshi waiter, but who knew the truth in this world of rumour, fantasy and Fendi handbags?
Pippin, Milo’s ex, a designer whose name adorned a million pairs of tasselled loafers, hovered close by, although it was hard to work out if his interest was in his old lover, or the Persian Boy, or the barman, or the bar. Pippin was a hard one to like. Pretty, of course, in a high-cheekboned, floppy-haired, pastiche-Eton kind of way – he would never otherwise have kept Milo’s attention for eighteen months. But there was something foetid and creepy about him, as if he’d just pulled himself away from an act of gross indecency with a minor.
Two of Milo’s PR girls fluttered among them. I called them Kookai and Kleavage. Although I always thought of them as essentially the same person, and indeed often mixed them up, there were some differences. Physically they weren’t alike at all. Kookai was a pretty little thing, soooo Asian Babe I could never understand why she wasn’t reading the news on Channel Four. Sadly she was also too dumb to realise that all she had to do was ask, and she could drape herself from head to toe in the Prada and Paul Smith samples that lined the office walls back at Smack! PR. Hence Kookai.
Not a mistake that Kleavage was to make. Less naturally attractive than Kookai, with a jaw line perhaps a little too well defined, she was nearly always the best dressed girl in the room. Best dressed and least dressed, showing off her miraculous tits and supermodel midriff. Where Kookai was sheer gush, Kleavage was always more calculating: you could see her working out the angles, searching with those violet eyes for openings … weaknesses. So different from the broadband PR lovebeam that was Kookai.
I slipped in beside Milo, who was whispering something obscene into the ear of the Persian Boy. He looked at me, frowned for a nanosecond and then kissed me on the lips, sliding in his tongue just long enough to make his point.
‘You look amazing,’ he said with that luscious, creamy voice of his. The voice had been his making; telesales his first arena; cold calling his métier. ‘Yes,’ you’d have said to the double glazing, ‘Yes, yes’ to the encyclopaedias, ‘O God! Please, yes,’ to the financial services, and only ever, perhaps, ‘no’ to the dog shampoo. And so that fifty thousand stake was his, and Smack! PR born.
The tongue trick worked on most people, throwing them off their stride, giving him an instant advantage.
‘Put your tongue in my mouth again you fucking old queen and I’ll bite it off,’ I replied. It’s what I always said.
‘Less of the “old”,’ he said, looking around with theatrical paranoia, ‘there are clients about.’
We bantered for a little while, with Kookai and Kleavage giggling and trying to join in, Pippin smoking and self-consciously ignoring us, and the Persian Boy lost in his private world of fire, or chicken tikka masala.
‘Where’s your handsome rustic?’ said Milo after a while, miming a telescope. ‘Haven’t left him back at the flat with an individual pork pie and a work of improving literature, have we?’
Pippin giggled like a girl showing her knickers to the boys for the first time.
I didn’t like Milo sneering at Ludo – that was my job, and it’s different when you love someone, but I couldn’t object without slithering down a snake to the bottom of the board.
‘Really, Milo,’ I replied quickly, ‘surely you know that it’s after we get married that I start to leave him at home. He’s looking for the cloakroom. Could be hours.’
‘After you’re married?’ said Milo slyly. ‘Have you set a date then? Or are we still in the realms of whim and fancy?’
I wasn’t sure if Milo had deliberately passed from teasing into malice, but he had found his way unfailingly to the nerve.
‘Milo, I know you’re bitter about never having the chance to be the glorious centre of attention of everyone you know for a whole day, and never getting to wear white, and never having troops of pretty choir boys singing your praises, and never having literally hundreds of presents forced upon you, and never having a cake with a tiny statue of you on it, but you have to rise above all that.’
Had I gone too far? Milo was famous for his grudges which could lie dormant for years before bursting into poisonous fruit. But no, the operatic look of spite he threw my way was reassuring.
‘You can keep the juicer,’ he said through pursed lips, ‘and just how many Gucci ashtrays do you need? A wedding is a tiny rent in the straight universe that gives you a glimpse of the infinite glory of the camp beyond. I’m there already.’
‘Ain’t that the truth,’ said Pippin from the bar.
As soon as I felt Milo’s eyes begin to flicker over my shoulder I moved on – talk to any PR for more than five minutes and it’ll happen to you. The core of the next group was formed by three models, one posher than princesses, one of the middling sort, and the last born under the chemical cloud that covers Canvey Island, in deepest Essex. Despite spanning the entire range of the English class structure there were few differences between them discernible to the naked eye: they all smoked the same cigarettes, they all had the same hair, the same black-ringed eyes, the same magnificent bones and here, unshielded by the doting camera’s veil, the same tired skin.
I knew Canvey Island quite well: she’d