Beer I Make My Own Fun

'A dark, crazed reversal of Notting Hill'
Main
ISBN: 978-1-80546-025-1
Verlag: Atlantic Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

'Darkly humorous and outrageous, this is your next obsession' LUCY ROSE 'A riotous dissection of celebrity culture' INDEPENDENT 'An absolute banger of the highest order' ALICE SLATER 'I adored this book' KATY BRENT 'The most entertaining debut of the year' KIA ABDULLAH ______________________________ She's the woman who has everything. But she wants more. She wants you... Everyone knows Marina, the A-list movie star. But very few know Marina, the absolute monster. Years at the top have proved that whatever Marina wants, she gets. But when she meets bartender Anna, Marina discovers something that can't be bought: Anna's affection. As Anna remains unmoved, Marina's advances become more desperate - and her obsession more dangerous. The price of fame is heavy - and someone will have to pay for it... _________________________ Readers are loving I Make My Own Fun... 'Absolutely brilliant' 'A stellar and entertaining read' 'Enthralling reading experience' 'Sharp and spiky' 'I will definitely be recommending'

Hannah Beer is a writer from North West England. She lives in London and works in communications. A reformed fangirl, she has an encyclopaedic knowledge of celebrity culture that she writes about in her newsletter Emotional Speculation. When not working or writing, she enjoys reading, going to gigs and cooking elaborate meals for her friends.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Beer, Hannah

Leseproben

LONDON

The hotel suite in London is fussy and looks almost full to bursting with the sorts of odds and ends that are always associated with a particular British luxury by those who have no direct experience of it: antique vases, endless lamps, tasselled throw pillows as far as the eye can see. It’s easy to imagine the type of people this room caters to: rich Europeans looking for somewhere ‘proper’ as a base whilst they visit distant relatives, obnoxious Americans seeking out some authentic , Australians obsessed with the Royal Family.

The thought of the and those people might exclaim when they walk into the space makes me feel nauseous. I prefer hotels to feel like a blank canvas for my own taste, even if I’m only in them for a few nights. Usually, Jules would have ensured that my things were in place by the time I entered the suite, removing any trace of the hotel’s decor choices and fixing some paintings from my own collection to the wall, but the one I chose for this trip is propped unceremoniously against a dresser on the back wall. Too exhausted from eight hours of Henry’s yapping and Jules’s incompetence to investigate the hold-up, I just gesture in its general direction to Jules on the way to my evening session with my trainer.

‘Tell Henry I’m with Magnus, Jules,’ I say as I leave, ‘and can you make sure he doesn’t bother me now until tomorrow?’ It’s a rhetorical question. I don’t need to wait for her response before I let the suite door swing shut behind me.

Tomorrow is the final premiere for the schmaltzy, spacey, Academy-catnip film Henry and I have produced together. Well, is a loose term; Henry is, it goes without saying, a moron, and I allow him minimal input into any of our shared projects, including our relationship. He doesn’t mind: it’s a small price to pay for what I’ve given him. Years ago, I hand-selected him from a long list of inoffensively handsome actors of middling talent to be my public-facing boyfriend. If it weren’t for me, he’d never even have dreamed of fulfilling his greedy, unimaginative ambition for fame. I dragged him by his perfectly silky, Ken-doll locks right up to the A list. Without me he’d be a recurring part on a cable show by now, and he’s never once lost sight of that. Still, without him, I’d be a lot less likeable to the general public, and a lot more exposed. As much as it pains me to admit it, I need a Henry. It’s so much harder for people to speculate on my life when it’s securely tied to someone else’s. I’m more powerful this way.

I take the service lift down to the gym in the basement. When it reaches the ground floor, a boy in sauce-splattered chef whites a few inches shorter than me moves to enter the lift without looking up from his phone.

‘Going down?’ he says, and then looks at me, stopping just over the threshold. As I’ve come to expect, I watch a supercut of emotions flash across a stranger’s face as they register who I am. Shock. Embarrassment. Reverence. Lust.

‘Oh, hi!’ he says then, as if I’m an acquaintance. I get that a lot.

‘Hi, yourself,’ I reply, shooting him a warm, mechanical smile. He’s so starstruck that he doesn’t notice my hand repeatedly pressing the ‘close’ button. After a moment, the door starts bashing against his right arm, the lift dinging as it does, and it takes him a second too long to leap back into the corridor behind him. He looks slightly sheepish, as if he’s only just remembered his hotel-mandated do-not-bother-thecelebrities training.

‘Nice to meet you!’ I hear him half-shout, panicked, as the door closes, revealing in that split second how he’ll relay this briefest of encounters to anyone who’ll listen. This acne-riddled boy will be dining out for years on how he , stretching the two words I spoke to him to breaking point. He will, inevitably, forget that I didn’t let him share the lift with me. He may even pretend we had a little flirt. Social media is full of these kinds of tales. That’s another line I like to trot out in interviews – that I don’t read my own press. It’s par for the course in my position. I’ve had a Google alert set for myself since I was fifteen, and I regularly scroll through the articles, sometimes venturing over to Twitter, and, even the cesspool that is my Instagram comments. It’s taught me that people believe what they want to believe, and the image of me they revere – that I’m , and sweet, and kind – is no bad thing.

When I get to the gym – a dark, dingy space with a long, low-mirrored wall – my trainer is already waiting for me. He’s the only other person in the room, and his hammerhead shark body takes up almost as much space as the slightly shabby gym equipment dotted around the room.

‘Magnus,’ I say, walking over to him. ‘I have to say, I’m pleased to see you after the day I’ve had.’ There are very few people I would say this to, but Magnus is essentially an animate brick wall who does nothing but tell me I’m fantastic. Time with him always soothes me because I know he’s making me tighter, stronger, hotter. I don’t prescribe to this new fad that all bodies are beautiful, despite what my public personal brand might suggest. body is beautiful because I work hard to make it so. People don’t need platitudes, they need discipline.

‘Love to hear that, Marina!’ Magnus replies in his booming, blandly American voice. Magnus has about three stock phrases in his vocabulary, and ‘Love to hear that’ is one of them. He gestures to the exercise mat in front of him, beckoning me towards it.

‘Let’s work those superstar abs of yours, shall we?’ That’s another. Every muscle in my body is a superstar, according to Magnus.

After forty minutes of Magnus’s militaristic regimen I feel much more centred than I did when we landed. We do five minutes on the treadmill to round it off, at the end of which Magnus shoots his right hand into the air and exclaims, ‘That’s the stuff, Marina! Give me five!’ Stock phrase number three.

As I’m taking a sip of water and Magnus is wiping my sweat off the mat, he starts his usual end-of-session small talk.

‘Are you happy to be back in London? Home-town show, right?’ he asks.

He’s only making conversation, but my internal response to it takes me by surprise. I have, I suppose, been eagerly anticipating this final stop; yearning for this grey, suffocating city and the space it will free up in my head once this carousel is over. I always feel at ease in London, with its rigid and deeply entrenched understanding of status. Not that I would confess any of this to Magnus.

‘Yes,’ I reply neutrally, handing him back the empty water bottle. ‘It’s good to be here.’

‘Sure is,’ Magnus says, chipper as ever. We start walking towards the door; he falls in step behind me. ‘I want to see some of the sights when I’m here, get myself down to Buckingham Palace’ – pronounced – ‘Abbey Road, just go full tourist mode, you know? That’s if you’ll let me stop doing these damn squats for an hour or two...’ He grins foolishly, flashing his too-white veneers.

I raise my eyebrows at him in return. We’re at the lift. I’m full of endorphins, but I still have no interest in continuing the conversation any further.

‘I’m sure I could get us into Buckingham Palace to do some squats if you wanted, Magnus,’ I say. And then, stepping into the lift, ‘See you tomorrow.’ He salutes at me as the doors close.

Back in the suite, I head to the bathroom. The decor in this room is less offensive than the rest of the suite, all white marble and low lighting, and the bath faces the window so I can look out towards the city as I’m lying in it. I turn the tap on, and when the bath is ready, I take my phone in with me and open up the dating app I downloaded a year or so ago to entertain myself in precisely these sorts of in-between moments.

I open ‘Jules’s’ profile, which I made during a particularly boring film screening. It was to make, getting her answers just so, equal parts sexy and wholesome. I chose the best possible pictures of her I could get hold of. My Jules avatar is nothing like the real one. The real Jules is still much the same as she was when she interviewed for my assistant job all those years ago, fresh out of film school: uninspiring and hungry for my world. There’s a weakness to her want, like a kitten abandoned on a highway, listlessly hoping some food might simply come its way. Feeble. But the Jules I’m pretending to be is different. She’s very adventurous. She’s coquettish. She uses a lot of suggestive emojis. She wants to show you a good time, if you’ll let her, and naturally everybody does, because people are predictable. They’ll all take the easy route if it’s presented to them.

She has no idea, of course, which makes it so much more enjoyable: my own little secret. I am, as they say, so at acting. As I scroll through the matched profiles, all the s, several viable options present themselves to me. I tend to ignore the good-looking...