A Night In With Audrey Hepburn Read online

And I know it might sound a bit weird – OK, I know it definitely sounds completely weird – but honestly, who wouldn’t want a best friend like Audrey Hepburn? Sweet, stylish, and utterly lovely in every imaginable way? Who better to ‘chat’ to, in your idle moments, about anything and everything that’s bothering you, from the unfortunate outbreak of zits along the entire length of your jawline the night before the end-of-term disco, to your mother’s refusal to accept that you might not be cut out for a career on the stage … to worrying, just occasionally, that your dad enjoys spending time in the company of long-dead movie stars more than he enjoys spending time with you …

  ‘Libby?’

  Olly Walker is looking straight at me, a concerned expression on his face.

  It’s a pretty good-looking face, now I come to notice it. He’s got these really interesting grey-coloured eyes, like pebbles on a Cornish beach, and his smile is sweet, and ever so slightly wonky, and – hang on, what’s going on here? – he’s reaching over the back of my seat, and taking my hand, and gently splaying out my fingers with his own, and …

  Wrapping them around a large, freshly made cheese sandwich.

  ‘You look like you need this,’ he says, kindly.

  Ridiculous of me. How could I ever have thought he was going to … what? Hold my hand? Kiss me?

  ‘Oh, no, no,’ I say, shoving the sandwich back in his direction. ‘You should have the first one!’

  ‘I’m all right. I’ll make another.’

  And then Mum’s Nokia starts ringing, right at the bottom of my rucksack.

  Annoyingly, I don’t get to the phone in time before it stops ringing.

  ‘You’ve got your own mobile phone?’ Olly Walker glances up from his sandwich-making, looking impressed.

  ‘God, no. This is my mum’s.’ I glance at the screen, which is displaying Dad’s number as the last caller. ‘I’d better call my dad back, if you don’t mind? He’s picking me up here after my audition.’

  ‘Of course. For your Audrey Hepburn retrospective.’

  ‘Yep. And,’ I add, because I’m getting the ever-so-slight impression that Olly Walker thinks the Audrey Hepburn retrospective is a little bit pompous, ‘to go for a meal in Chinatown.’

  ‘Hey, great, where?’ He’s looking a lot more interested in the Chinese meal than in the retrospective. ‘I know a couple of really amazing Chinese restaurants in Soho, if you’re interested? I did some work experience in a bistro in Soho last summer – I’m going to catering college when I leave school – and after we’d finished our shifts, all the kitchen staff would always head to this fantastic Chinese on Lisle Street …’

  ‘It’s OK. My dad’s booked his favourite place already. The Jade Dragon, on Gerrard Street. He’s a regular there.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ He looks a bit crushed, and it occurs to me, a moment too late, that – maybe? – he was trying to impress me with his work experience story. ‘Is it good?’ he asks me.

  I can’t say whether it is or it isn’t, because I’ve never actually been to The Jade Dragon before. Dad’s planned to take me several times, but it’s never actually worked out. He’s been really, really busy over the last few months – well, years, I suppose – and a lot of our plans to go and have a nice meal together after a movie end up getting cancelled at the last minute.

  Oh, the phone’s going again. I get to it quickly this time.

  ‘Marilyn, hi,’ comes Dad’s voice, as soon as I answer. ‘Look, you’re going to have to tell Libby I’m not going to make—’

  ‘Dad! Hi!’ (I remember, too late, that he prefers to be called by his first name, Eddie, rather than being boring old Dad.) ‘I mean, Eddie, sorry. It’s not Mum, it’s me.’

  ‘Libby!’ He sounds startled. ‘I didn’t expect you.’

  ‘No, Mum gave me her phone, I was meant to be calling you, actually, to remind you that you’re picking me up outside the theatre in Wimbledon. Not at the house.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s why I’m calling, sweetheart. I can’t make it.’

  ‘You can’t …’ I stop. I take a deep breath. ‘But I thought we were going to celebrate my birthday.’

  ‘Mm. That’s right. But we’ll do it another time, sweetheart, I promise.’

  You said that, I almost say, the last time. And the time before that.

  ‘I’m just pushing really, really hard for this new deadline, and the college isn’t giving me any time off teaching like they said they were going to—’

  ‘That’s OK.’ I use my calmest, most mature voice, because I want Dad to know I’m not going to be a baby about this. ‘Obviously you need time and space to write, Dad. I mean, Eddie. It’s perfectly OK. We’ll do it another time, like you said.’

  ‘Exactly. I can always rely on you to understand, Libby. I’ll call with some dates, yeah?’

  ‘Well, I’m pretty free next weekend, and the weekend after that, or …’

  ‘Great. So I’ll call. And I’ll see you really soon, OK?’

  ‘OK, Eddie, just let me know wh—’

  ‘Bye, sweetheart.’

  He’s gone.

  I drop the phone, casually, back into my rucksack, and busy myself nibbling the outer edge of my sandwich. ‘It’s really good,’ I say. I don’t meet Olly Walker’s eye.

  ‘It’s your birthday?’ he asks, after a moment, in this weird voice – like, a super-gentle voice, all of a sudden, as if he thinks I might break or something.

  ‘No, no! My birthday was weeks ago. Well, months, actually, back in February.’

  ‘But you said, on the phone …’

  ‘Oh, that’s just because I didn’t get to see my dad on my actual birthday. He was … we were both really busy around then. So today was going to be a belated birthday thing. It’s no big deal. We’ll do it in a couple of weeks, or whenever.’

  ‘Right.’ He falls silent for a moment, then clears his throat and says, ‘Hey, you know, if you wanted to see a film and have dinner this evening anyway, I could always take you to The Matrix and a Chinese restaurant. If your mum would let you, I mean.’

  ‘Oh!’ I look at him properly now, startled. Is this … is a boy asking me on a date, for the first time ever?

  ‘I … I don’t—’

  ‘I’d get my sister Nora to come, too!’ he says, hastily, ‘so it wouldn’t just be, like, us two, or anything.’

  Oh. Right. So it wasn’t a date, then. Of course it wasn’t.

  Suddenly – I don’t know why, because it’s not like I’ve never been disappointed by something a boy has said or done before – I feel these awful, sharp tears pricking at the backs of my eyes. Without any further warning, three of them – I can feel each individual one – stop pricking the backs of my eyes and start sliding out of the fronts.

  ‘Oh, Jesus.’ Olly Walker, who can’t have failed to notice the tears, is looking agonized, as if he wishes he’d never mentioned films or Chinese food. As if he’d never heard of films or Chinese food. Or – most of all – as if he’d never met me. ‘I didn’t mean to … look, it doesn’t even have to be The Matrix! I’ll go and see your Audrey Hepburn retro-whatsit, if you want to. I’m sure Nora would much prefer that, anyway … oh, here she is now!’ he practically gasps with relief, waving like a drowning man towards the Upper Circle entrance several rows down, where a girl has just appeared.

  Nora is, of course, the pretty, blonde, prospective Louisa who told the littlest Showbiz-Walker off for doing showy-off splits downstairs.

  ‘Olly, hi.’ She starts to make her way up the aisle towards us, squinting through the gloom, while I scrub away the tears with the back of my hand. ‘I just came to say they’ve moved Kitty’s audition fifteen minutes later – something to do with another girl having a family emergency – so … oh,’ she stops next to row F, noticing me. ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi,’ I gulp. ‘I’m Libby.’

  ‘I’m Nora. I’m Olly’s …’ She stops. ‘Are you crying?’

  ‘No! Not at all!’ I lie, putting on a huge, bright smile
that, along with the tear-stained cheeks and the dribbly nose, probably makes me look a bit deranged, as well as a liar.

  ‘Olly!’ She turns to him. ‘What have you done?’

  ‘I didn’t do anything!’ Olly protests. ‘She was meant to be seeing her dad this evening, and he had to cancel.’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with my dad. Anyway, I’m fine. I’m not crying! In fact, I probably ought to be getting back downstairs, I’ve got an audition in … well, about three hours …’

  ‘Oh, God, not you, too.’ Nora Walker pulls a sympathetic face that makes her look just like her older brother, for a moment. ‘This is seriously the last one of these godawful things I’m agreeing to come to just to keep my mum happy. And you don’t look any keener on it than I am.’

  I’m torn between sounding like a wuss who can’t stand up to my mum, and sounding like the sort of person who actually wants to star in The Sound of Music at the New Wimbledon Theatre.

  ‘Do you want to go and get a drink, or something?’ Nora Showbiz-Walker asks, in a properly mature-sounding voice, rather than the one I was trying to use with Dad earlier. ‘There’s a café just over the Broadway that does these really amazing smoothies.’

  ‘Oh, I know the one,’ Olly chips in. ‘They do a pretty good lemon drizzle cake, too.’

  I’m starting to wonder if it shouldn’t be the Showbiz Walkers so much as the Food-Obsessed Walkers.

  ‘I can leave my little sister annoying everybody downstairs for a bit,’ Nora adds. ‘Or you could go and chaperone her, Olly.’

  ‘Oh. I thought I might come and have a smoothie and a bit of cake,’ Olly says, looking like a Labrador that’s just been deprived of a doggy treat. ‘It’s hours until we can get out of here.’

  ‘Fine,’ Nora sighs. ‘I’ll ask one of the mums to keep an eye on her. If you’d like to go and get a drink, Libby, that is?’

  ‘Yes. I’d love to.’

  ‘Ace. Why don’t you walk Libby over there, Ol, and I’ll go and find a random stage mum to watch Kitty.’

  I don’t suggest that she ask my mum, unless she wants her little sister to end up suffering a nasty and suspicious accident that takes her out of the running for the part of Brigitta and, potentially, any other role for the rest of her child-acting life.

  Olly looks hesitant for a moment – presumably concerned that, if left alone with me, I’ll start bawling like a baby again – but then Nora adds, cheerily, ‘And order me something with lots of pineapple and stuff in it. But not kiwi. I hate kiwi,’ and starts to head back down the aisle towards the doors. So he doesn’t really have much choice about the being-left-alone-with-me part.

  Still, he’s a trooper, because he just starts to gather up his stuff ready to leave, while I do the same, and then we both start to make our way towards the Upper Circle exit doors too.

  ‘You’re wrong about The Matrix, by the way,’ he says, as we reach the doors and he holds one of them open for me. ‘I mean, it may not be Brunch at Bloomingdales, or whatever your Audrey Hepburn thing is called—’

  ‘It’s not called Brunch at Bloomingdale’s!’ I gasp, until I see his grin and realize that he’s joking.

  ‘Dinner at Debenhams, then?’ he hazards.

  ‘Supper at Selfridges?’ I suggest.

  ‘Lunch at Liberty’s?’

  ‘Tea at Tesco’s?’

  ‘Now, there’s a movie I’d definitely go and see,’ he says, with a bark of delighted laughter.

  As we start down the half-billion stairs, I zip up my grey hooded top as far as it will go. This is partly to hide my own delighted smile – because I’m not sure I’ve ever made a boy laugh like that before – and partly because I don’t want anyone in the café to choke on their smoothie when a thirteen-year-old girl wanders in wearing an egg-yolk-yellow dirndl.

  Everyone on set is looking suspiciously gorgeous this morning.

  The catering bus is filling up quickly on our location shoot near King’s Cross this morning, with crew members already on their second (or third) bacon roll of the morning, and actors and actresses sipping, piously, at large mugs of tea and honey. All over the bus, people are looking as if they’re off for a Big Night Out. There are freshly blow-dried hairdos, newly fake-tanned legs, and more layers of mascara than you can shake a stick at. Everybody looks stunning.

  And then there’s me.

  Today is my first day in my brand-new speaking role, after months of being a random, silent extra.

  Unfortunately, the role I’m playing is Warty Alien. So this morning I’m wearing the most grotesque costume you’ve ever seen in all your life.

  I give it one last go with Frankie the Wardrobe assistant as she passes by my table now, just to see if there might have been some sort of mistake.

  ‘You’re absolutely sure,’ I say, ‘that I’m down on your list as Warty Alien? I mean, there couldn’t have been a spelling mistake? And it isn’t meant to be … I don’t know … Party Alien?’

  See, that couldn’t be too bad. Especially if I could wear one of the alien costumes like my sister Cass wears, in her starring role as one of the Cat People. They’re actually quite sexy – skintight silvery bodysuit, mysterious eye mask, high-heeled knee boots – and even if I had to accessorize it, as Party Alien, with, say, a silly paper hat and a hula skirt, I’d still look halfway decent. Especially if I had to wear a hula skirt, in fact, because it would hide whatever horrors the silvery bodysuit would reveal in the bum region. Two birds, one stone!

  ‘Sorry, Libby. There’s no spelling mistake. Anyway, the part’s not actually called Warty Alien, you know. You’re down on my list as—’ Frankie glances down at the notepad she never lets more than two inches from her sight – ‘Extra-Terrestrial Spaceship Technician.’

  (This basically means that I’m playing an alien version of a Kwik Fit mechanic, and explains why my one and only line – my Big Break! On National Television! – is: ‘But fixing the docking module could take days, Captain, maybe even weeks.’ Look, I never said it was a good line.)

  ‘OK, then,’ I say, desperately, ‘are you sure this is definitely the costume the Extra-Terrestrial Spaceship Technician is supposed to wear?’

  ‘Well, you’re more than welcome to query that with the Obergruppenführer. Because if there had been any kind of an error, it would be her mistake.’

  The Obergruppenführer, otherwise (just not very often) known as Vanessa, is the production manager. It’s probably obvious, from her nickname, that she’s not the sort of person you want to accuse of making mistakes. Particularly not when you’re a lowly extra on a surprise hit TV show, with literally thousands of out-of-work actors ready to kill their own grandmothers to take your job instead.

  ‘Anyway, I don’t know why you’re complaining,’ Frankie adds, over her shoulder, as she sashays in impractical four-inch heels to the bus’s exit. ‘In technical terms, that costume is a work of art, you know.’

  I stare down at the vomit-green latex suit I’ve been sweating into since seven o’clock this morning and pick up the separate alien head that’s sitting on the chair beside me. The head features one particularly giant pustule, right in between the eyes. It doesn’t look like a work of art.

  ‘God, Libby, is that your costume?’

  It’s Cass, squeezing into the seat opposite me.

  And I mean literally squeezing, because she’s some-how managed to inflate her already fulsome cleavage by another couple of cup sizes, and given herself the biggest blow-dry this side of Texas. She’s not changed into her Cat Person costume yet, so the eye-popping cleavage is (barely) contained by a teeny pink hoodie with the zip pulled scandalously low, and I’m quite sure she’s teamed this, as she always does when she’s all out to impress, with either an equally teeny pair of denim cut-offs, or a sassy towelling micro-skirt.

  (We’re half-sisters, by the way. Different dads. Even though the irony is that actually, my dad is the better looking out of the two: her dad, Michael, is a nice-but-nerdy geologist while
my dad is as handsome as he is an utter waste of good oxygen. Anyway, Cass is quite definitively the better-looking out of us two: blonde, blue-eyed and curvy while my hair and eyes are from an uninspired palette of browns, my bosom is very nearly non-existent, and the only reason you’d ever call me ‘curvy’ is because I have a sturdy bottom half that’s seemingly impervious to all forms of exercise.)

  ‘Yes, it’s my costume,’ I tell Cass, with as much dignity as I can scrape together under the circumstances. ‘It’s a technical work of art, as a matter of fact.’

  But Cass has already lost interest. ‘So, do I look OK? Do I look better than Melody? Do you think he’s going to notice me?’

  Melody is the lead actress on our (sci-fi, if you hadn’t already guessed) TV show, The Time Guardians.

  The he that Cass is referring to is Dillon O’Hara, our brand-new star. Whose first day on set it is today and who – in case you were starting to wonder – is the reason that everybody has turned up to work this morning in their Saturday Night Best.

  ‘I’m sure he’ll notice you, Cass. You look very eye-catching.’

  ‘You’re sure? Because you do know, don’t you, the kind of girls Dillon normally goes out with?’ To back up her point, Cass rifles in her bag for this week’s copy of Grazia magazine, puts it down on the table next to the script I was given this morning, and jabs a manicured finger at the front cover. ‘That’s the competition.’

  It’s a paparazzi shot of a blonde Victoria’s Secret model – I can’t remember her name, but she’s platinum blonde and buxom, with legs roughly a mile high – exiting a nightclub with Mr O’Hara.

  I hate myself for thinking it, given that the wretched man is keeping an entire cast and crew waiting for him on location this morning while he decides if he can be bothered to show up or not. But he’s annoyingly gorgeous. If you happen to be a fan, that is, of ripped torsos, muscular shoulders and angelic cheekbones. His hair is sooty black, his eyes almost match, and he’s stocky and well muscled in a way that implies not so much a life spent pumping iron while gazing into a gym mirror, but long teenage summers spent working on building sites. Shirtless, probably. Getting an all-over tan on that ripped torso …