Читать книгу Tinseltown - Victoria Fox, Victoria Fox - Страница 5

Only two words, but they bothered him. Or maybe it was the question mark.

DOMINIC JUDD – HOT SHOT?

He ran a hand through his thick dark hair and stood for a moment, baffled, before angrily tossing the magazine to the floor and taking care to step squarely on it with a foot still wet from the shower. The page stuck and he lost his balance, forced to hop, undignified, while he peeled the offending publication from a water-wrinkled sole.

‘Hot shot?’ What the bloody hell did that mean? It wasn’t like he’d done a gun movie or a coffee commercial or something worthy of the pun, and Dom Judd was Eton-educated, for heaven’s sake – he ought to be able to work it out. Then again, maybe there wasn’t anything to work out. Maybe it was just a full-of-herself writer struggling for a headline, who thought if she whacked a question mark on the end it might encourage readers to think it wasn’t her missing the point, it was them. And it had to be a girl: if a lady wasn’t interested in fucking him, Dom had to assume she was against him.

At twenty-six, Dom Judd was experiencing the first flush of long-sought-after celebrity. This time last year, he’d been languishing on the set of a UK soap opera, the posh villain come to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting community of russet-cheeked farmers and barmaids in leopard-print. He’d been there too long and was approaching the hollow realisation that a life in soap was all he was cut out for: that forty-mile-an-hour, middle-lane limbo, OK but not great, famous but not celebrated … no, Dom had other ambitions. He wanted it hard and he wanted it fast, and if he kept to the childish notion that he’d be dead by the age of twenty-seven – because all idols worth their accolade died that young – then he only had a year left to do it in. But he was starting to change his mind about that.

Just as well, then, that he’d been auditioned – ‘on the off chance’, according to his agent – for what was going to become, over the next eight months, the biggest American sitcom since Friends. Dom was playing the English eccentric, the quirky one, who – in spite of his warm, dark eyes, mop of black hair and square jaw shaded with three-day stubble – was never considered a love interest because he was too, well, kooky (he hated that word). It was the posh accent, didn’t you know, it made everything sound ten times funnier. Things weren’t quite so platonic with his adoring public: since moving to LA, women flocked to Dom like bees to honey. He was young, rich and ubiquitous – it was all you needed.

Dom dressed swiftly, slumping on to the bed and sighing loudly in a gutless attempt to rouse the girl still sleeping there. He couldn’t remember her name. Julie? Julia? Didn’t matter. But she was pretty even in daylight, so he congratulated himself on a choice well made. Miraculous, given the amount he’d put away the night before.

‘Do you want a shower or anything?’ he asked when she opened her eyes. ‘I’ve got to get moving. My brother’ll be here in a sec.’

She reached for his bare chest, the colour of a strong cup of tea. ‘You got a brother?’

Hmm. He and Freddy were close, but they weren’t that close.

‘I’m serious.’ He chucked her the previous night’s lacy panties, formerly strewn across a stupid claw-footed armchair he’d purchased during a brief spell of imagining himself to be Jeremy Irons and which he now realised was ridiculous. ‘Move.’

The girl sat up with a pout, allowing her generous tits to come into frame. Dom gave one of them a quick, perfunctory squeeze, like someone testing the ripeness of a piece of fruit, and which managed, offensively, to signal both hello and goodbye. She muttered something under her breath and made a grand show of leaving, saying she felt sick and needed water or a lie-down or an aspirin – or, no doubt, a sense-restoring fuck – and it wasn’t till half an hour later that he managed to bundle her out the door of his apartment.

Was he living the dream? Course he was. Dom Judd was the name on everyone’s lips: he was at every party, every opening, every fundraiser, every premiere … The press recorded his every move, fascinated by his brooding good looks and impeccable accent. Admittedly, some were kinder than others. He picked up the discarded magazine, the ‘Hot Shot?’ grey and wrinkly now from having got damp, and stuffed it in the bin. He thought he might speak to his representative about taking legal action. He had no clue what that actually entailed, but it made him feel like he was firing from both balls and that was what mattered.

With California sun streaming in through the blinds, it was hard to believe December was only a week away. Dom grimaced, supposing he ought to return to London for Christmas, but the thought of his melancholic mother, who prefaced everything with a wheedling, ‘You’ll join me in a small one, won’t you?’ and which invariably led to her having to be scraped off the sofa hours later after several dozen ‘small ones’, and his ex-army father, who said little but whose sideways glances gave the impression that Dom’s career was a bad smell passing under his nose, was depressing. Christmas was always depressing.

Despite the warmth, Dom shuddered. Whatever Christmas at home might have in store, it surely couldn’t be worse than the joke awaiting him here.

That blasted Celebrity Parade! Why had he agreed to do it?

On cue, there was a knock at the door – a rat-a-tat, followed by a brief pause, then a final a-tat. It was the same code they’d used since Dom was ten and building a spacecraft in his room made of loo rolls and clothes pegs. It was a vessel only those with authorisation – namely his younger brother Freddy – were permitted to view.

Dom opened the door, scratched his belly and yawned. ‘Go on, then,’ he managed through what was shaping up to be a fucking awful headache. ‘Hit me with it.’

Freddy Judd, a fraction taller than Dom and with all the same good looks, just arranged slightly differently, entered the room, clocked the dishevelled bed, the empty bottles of beer, and tried to find a way of phrasing it that didn’t sound disastrous.

‘There’s no way out of it, mate, I’m sorry,’ he said at last, biting back a laugh because it wasn’t funny; it really wasn’t. ‘But it looks like Santa Claus is coming to town.’

The Celebrity Christmas Parade was an annual extravaganza that took place a week after Thanksgiving on the streets of downtown Hollywood. Hundreds of thousands came in the hope of catching a glimpse of the stars, gracing the procession atop floats and stages, in open-top vintage cars and sleighs dazzling with lights. It was a great promotional opportunity – if you were a daytime-TV D-lister or an actor on his way out the game. Not for the top dogs, the main players, the – Dom cringed – hot-shot-question-marks. Not for him.

‘I can’t believe I ever said yes to this stupid gig,’ he muttered darkly as Freddy found them a table outside Maracas. ‘It’s humiliating, fucking humiliating.’

Freddy attempted to stop a grin pulling free. It was an asset he had over Dom, because he had this pair of really cute dimples.

‘You said yes at a time when nothing else was coming up. You needed the—’

‘It wasn’t a question,’ snapped Dom bitterly, flipping open the menu.

Freddy nodded obediently. His appointment as Dom’s PA – a position he’d embraced in the purgatory of post-university job seeking – had dropped him right in at the deep end. Since Dom had made it big, priorities were shifting in seismic proportions.

‘All I’m saying is you’ll look bad if you back out. Seriously bad. I’ve tried to pull strings, but, bro, you’re Santa.’ He ordered a beer. ‘Do it for the kids.’

‘Piss off.’

‘Look, you’ve just got to put on a beard—’

‘And a fat suit.’

‘I was forgetting the fat suit.’

‘Lucky you,’ Dom grumbled. ‘The whole thing’s so … Disney.’ He summoned a charm offensive for a passing troupe of girls in minuscule hot pants. ‘All right, ladies?’

Freddy watched as Dom signed autographs with a flourish, his good mood temporarily restored. Dom had always been the one who craved attention, while Freddy could think of little worse than having his every move monitored and scrutinised by the vulture-like media. But, despite their differences, he loved his brother and acknowledged that he’d taken the PA role because it was exciting and good money, but also because, if he hadn’t, he could see the future opening up with his brother drifting further and further off into a life he couldn’t understand, until eventually Freddy wouldn’t be able to see him at all.

‘So I’ve got to have the tykes clambering all over my lap as well, have I?’ Dom made a face once the girls had gone.

‘Not sure. I can find out.’

‘Promise them Lego and Barbies and all that bollocks.’

‘Maybe. It’s Bratz nowadays.’

‘Brats?’

‘Never mind.’

‘I bet they can’t believe their luck. Probably thought they’d be stuck with Mr Octogenarian Action-Movie-Reject for the fifth year running.’

It was true. The Parade’s organisers had hit the jackpot big-time. Dom had agreed to take on the role of Santa Claus, the main attraction of the star-spangled celebrations, Saint Nick plumply waving from a glitzy moving float, posing for photographs, chortling like one of the wind-up toys he bribed children with. He had said yes months before, when his star was fledgling, uncertain, a faint glimmer in a vast galaxy. The flipside of Dom’s desire to be famous was that he would agree to everything that guaranteed publicity, like a kind of Tourette’s, and then regret it afterwards. Today, riding high on the crest of newfound fame, wanting above all else to be taken seriously in his craft, the prospect of donning a fat suit and ho-ho-hoing his way through Hollywood was a fate worse than death.

Who could cancel Christmas? He couldn’t, not with the whole world watching.

Dom’s phone rang just as the food arrived. Grimacing, he picked up. Freddy stifled another comment when he saw his brother had ordered a chopped salad. A ‘chopped’ salad? As opposed to what, an entire lettuce and cucumber, maybe a tomato vine on the side? But Dom’s stormy glare told him to keep it shut.

‘Yes, yes, fine, OK.’ Dom rolled his eyes at the voice down the line, held the handset away from his face a moment and then did that immature but still quite effective thing of tucking his tongue inside his bottom lip and making a face like a fifteen-year-old.

By the time the call was over, Freddy was halfway through his burger. ‘Lex?’ he guessed. Lex Savage, silver-haired, silver-tongued PR guru, was Dom’s publicist.

‘Unfortunately.’ Dom popped a slice of avocado into his mouth while looking enviously at his brother’s plate. ‘I’ve got to start “behaving” now I’m Father-bullshitting-Christmas. At this rate the only bird I’ll be getting my teeth into’ll be the turkey.’

Freddy laughed. ‘Guess you’d better be a good boy this time of year. Or Santa might not come down your chimney.’

‘Santa can stick it up his own chimney.’

‘Nice.’

Dom began stabbing bad-temperedly at his salad. ‘The sooner this is done, Fred, the better. Let’s just get it over with, all right?’