Extract of Spa Wars

Prologue

‘Keep it reeeeaaal!’ yelled the tiny blonde girl standing at the top of the steps.
            ‘Carina!  Carina!  Carina!’ The crowd below was going crazy, whooping, shouting, chanting her name.
            The tiny blonde began an unsteady descent on very high heels to wild applause.
            ‘Carina!  Carina!’
            Carina Lees was the penultimate person to be evicted from the ‘Living Hell’ house at the end of that summer’s reality TV series.  First runner-up.  She left behind her in the house the winning housemate: a character called ‘Monkey’ whose brave struggle with catatonic schizophrenia had much endeared him to the Great British public, even though he spent most of his second month on the show having an episode that rendered him as silent and immobile as a hat-stand.  In fact, while Carina was making her grand exit, the surprise of winning TV’s most coveted reality prize was sending Monkey into another period of paralysis that would last for the next six months.
            ‘Carina! Carina!’
            Frenzied with excitement, the capacity crowd strained against the safety barriers. Some thrust flowers, fluffy heart-shaped cushions or teddy bears in Carina’s direction.  Others reached out for her like visitors to the grotto at Lourdes hoping for a miracle in her touch.  They waved homemade banners professing their love for her.
            ‘I love you too!  I love you all,’ she told them, arms wide like Evita. 
            The response was deafening.
All this for her? Thought Carina.  Just an ordinary girl from Essex?  For a moment she was rooted to the spot with something approaching shock.
            Jordi Flame, the eviction show’s obligatory uber-camp presenter, quickly whisked Carina past the fans and the tabloid photographers into the studio.  Once she was safely in the famous golden chair that had cradled so many reality bottoms, he congratulated her on her ‘great achievement’, then, together with the studio audience and half the nation, they watched her ‘best bits’ – a montage of different angles on her twenty-first birthday boob job interspersed with spectacular crying jags and more exhortations to ‘keep it real.’ 
‘You got more votes than the entire Conservative party had in the last election,’ Jordi told her. 
‘Wow,’ said Carina.  ‘Wow!’ At twenty-six years old, she’d never voted in anything other than the finals of The X Factor.  She whooped. The crowd whooped back at her.
‘As runner-up in this year’s Living Hell, you’ve won five hundred thousand pounds,’ Jordi continued.  ‘What are you going to do with it?’
‘I’m going to buy my Mum a new handbag from Prada and get my Step-Dad a watch from Gucci and get my Nan some shoes from Ferragamo and get myself something from Dolce and Gabbana…’
The studio audience applauded as though Carina had just revealed the secret of the universe.
‘That’s fabulous,’ said Jordi. ‘We all like D & G.  And I’m sure your Nan will love her new shoes.’
Close-up on Carina’s Nan in the front row of the audience.  Sobbing with pride.
‘I love you, Nan,’ said Carina.  ‘I love everybody!’  She stood up and blew more kisses to the crowd.  She waved her hands over her head as if to better reach the people in the cheap seats. ‘This is my dream come true!’
The camera turned back to Jordi Flame’s six-figure-deal smile. ‘Well, that’s all from Carina Lees for now. After the break we’ll be back with the official winner of this year’s Living Hell… Monkey Gordon.’
The crowd roared their approval once more.
The commercials started rolling.
Inside the Living Hell house, twenty-three year old Monkey Gordon adopted the
 cactus pose in which he would remain frozen until Christmas.

Twenty miles away, in the little town of Blountford, another Essex girl’s grandmother was sobbing her heart out with pride. 
            ‘Give over, Gran,’ said Emily Brown. ‘This is meant to be a happy occasion.
            ‘I know, my darling,’ said Grandma Brown.  ‘It must be the alco-pops.  Always make me maudlin.’
            She accepted another Bacardi Breezer all the same. 
            ‘Speech!  Speech!’ called Eric Brown, Emily’s father.
            ‘Dad…’ Emily began.
            ‘You’ve got to have a speech,’ he said.
            As Eric tapped a fork against his beer bottle in a bid to establish silence, Emily reluctantly climbed up onto a chair.  She smiled down at her guests; family, friends and neighbours, all of them beaming right back at her.
            ‘I’m so pleased you could all make it here tonight,’ she began.  ‘To the opening of The Beauty Spot.’  She flung wide her arms to take in the tiny pink-painted beauty salon that would be opening its doors to the public for the first time the following morning.  ‘You’ve all been so supportive.  I don’t know how I would have done it without you.  I hope you’re going to come to me next time you need a manicure.’
            ‘I’ll come in for a manicure!’ shouted Emily’s grandfather.
            ‘Going to take more than a manicure to fix him,’ catcalled Grandma Brown.
            ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, let’s raise a glass to The Beauty Spot,’ said Emily’s father.
            The guests obliged.
            ‘The Beauty Spot!’ they cheered as they tipped their glasses and bottles towards a blushing Emily.
            ‘And to our lovely daughter Emily,’ said Barbara, Emily’s mum.  ‘I always knew you had it in you.  She’ll be a millionairess within a year,’ she added.  ‘Mark my words.’
            ‘May your salon be a huge success, dear,’ said Grandma Brown, enfolding her granddaughter into a hug.  ‘You deserve it, sweetheart.’
            Now Emily was crying with happiness too.  ‘I love you, Gran.  I love everybody. This is my dream come true.’

CHAPTER ONE

While Monkey Jordan was wheeled to hospital – still standing upright and stiff as a board – Carina Lees plunged headlong into her new life as a reality star.  She had wisely retained a PR agent called Mickey Shore before entering the Living Hell house and she exited to find that he had set up a punishing publicity round.  Every tabloid and entertainment magazine published in the United Kingdom had bid for the first exclusive.  By the time she left the television studio after her triumphant exit interview with Jordi Flame, Carina Lees was already a millionaire. 
            She gave her first exclusive to The News Of The World.  In six pages punctuated with lots of colour photographs of Carina and her brand new hair extensions, she revealed the ‘truth’ about her relationship with the other Living Hell-mates, though she remained tight-lipped about an alleged sexual liaison with Monkey during a period of unconsciousness (his, not hers).  That was worth another hundred grand, Mickey explained to his fast-learning client.
Advertising campaigns followed. Carina’s obsession with keeping the kitchen clean while in the Living Hell house, translated into a high six figure contract to be the face of ‘Whoosh’ multi-surface cleaner.  There were more interviews for the tabloids.  More photo-shoots. More carefully-timed appearances outside old restaurants and new nightclubs.  Within the space of a week Carina was linked with all four former members of a recently defunct boy-band.  There were rumours that she was planning to record a single of her own, despite the ample evidence (provided by the 24/7 live feed from Living Hell) that she could not sing a note.  She got more new hair extensions. Longer.  Blonder. Better. She considered a bigger boob job.

Six months out of the house, several of the original fifty ‘Living Hell’ housemates had disappeared back into obscurity, the only column inches they garnered now in the magistrates’ court sections of their local newspapers.  A handful of the others were doing reasonably well.  Monkey Gordon was in the newspapers almost daily, though it wasn’t clear whether he knew about it.  He was still in the celebrities’ favourite residential mental health facility – The Bakery -  standing for hours on end in a cactus pose.  It was front-page news when he adopted the ‘eagle pose’ for twenty minutes one afternoon.  Carina nodded approvingly when she read that.  She’d been doing some yoga with her personal trainer.  It was hard to hold the eagle pose for thirty seconds, let alone twenty minutes. 
            Apart from Monkey, those Living Hell alumni that hadn’t returned to a life of shop-lifting had largely moved on to yet more reality TV.  Three of them were taking part in a series called ‘Celebrity Service Station’, in which they did the night shift at a branch of Road Chef on the M25.  Tanya, Carina’s rival Essex girl in ‘Living Hell’ was appearing alongside a former conservative MP and a duchess on the third series of ‘Trust me, I’m a celebrity check-out girl’.  Tanya had taken to the business of being a celebrity checkout girl very well.  Perhaps that was because she had been a real checkout girl for several years before she went into the ‘Living Hell’ house.  Clare – ‘Living Hell’s’ token ‘posh bird’ – was a guest star in the Danish version of the same show.  She was voted out after a week, which was a good job since no one in the house could understand a word she said and she was starting to display symptoms of isolation-induced depression.
            It wasn’t that the reality show offers hadn’t poured in for Carina as well.  On the contrary, Carina was the first person every TV producer thought of when trying to cast ‘Celebrity Allotments’ or ‘Roller-blading with the stars’.  But Carina didn’t even get to consider the increasingly valuable reality packages the TV companies sent in her direction. Mickey Shore had bigger ideas. 
            Mickey’s plans for Carina included a proper television presenting job.  On the television food chain, presenting was definitely a tier above endless reality. After keeping Carina out of the reality show ghetto for six months, Mickey’s foresight was rewarded when he got her a fortnightly gig on Wakey Wakey – Britain’s favourite breakfast show (according to a survey commissioned by their own production company). 
Carina’s brief on the Wakey Wakey show was extremely flexible.  One week she might be reporting on the plight of abandoned pets at Battersea Dogs Home.  The next she would be trying out new face creams with a bunch of middle-aged women who bore a remarkable resemblance to the Shar-pei puppies she’d been interviewing the week before.   She was even regressed to a past life by a psychic called Liyo Aslan (formerly a John Lewis carpet salesman called Terry Bostock), who told her she had been an Ancient Egyptian slave-girl.  That prompted Carina to read a Dorling Kindersley book on the pyramids that inspired her to consider having her hair dyed black and cut into a bob.
‘Black sucks with your present life skin tone,’ Mickey warned.
So Carina kept her hair blonde. And before long, she was appearing on Wakey Wakey once a week instead of once a fortnight.  The viewers loved her glamorous blonde looks.  Guardian readers (who only watched Wakey Wakey ironically) liked to sneer at her faux pas.
            Next Mickey ensured Carina had a column.  Every serious reality star turned proper celeb had to have a column in which to slag off other reality stars who hadn’t quite made the transition.  All the gossip mags were keen to have Carina on board.  Mickey settled on a new magazine called ‘Get This!’, which was already rivaling ‘Heat’ in circulation figures, and closed a deal for a thousand words a week at ten thousand pounds a time.  Even Mickey shook his head with amusement as he worked out that Carina would be paid ten pounds a word! Not that she would be writing any of them. That job fell to a hapless Get This! staff-writer. But the column was important, allowing Carina a regular platform for unadulterated self-promotion as it did.
            Meanwhile, Mickey continued to ensure that Carina was seen at all the right parties with all the right people.  Those ‘right people’ included another of his clients: Danny Rhodes.  Danny was a former singer with a boy band, currently trying to kick-start a solo career with a stint as the lead in a sell-out West End revival of The Music Man.  Carina looked just perfect on his arm.
            When Mickey’s office received a gold-embossed invitation asking Carina to attend the country house wedding of a premiership footballer to a member of the nation’s hottest girl band, neither of whom she had ever met, Mickey knew that Carina had made it. She was a bona fide celebrity. The Great British public had taken Carina Lees to their hearts.

Since the eighth series of Living Hell finished and The Beauty Spot began Emily Brown had also had a very busy six months.  
Beauty had always been Emily’s passion.  She’d been obsessed by make-up since childhood and her friends were well used to her instinct to tweak and polish anyone she could get her hands on. She couldn’t sit opposite someone with chipped nail polish or streaky foundation without feeling the urge to act.  Many times Emily had marched mere acquaintances into the corner of a restaurant or nightclub and set about their shiny faces with pressed powder. She once set up an impromptu eyebrow-tidying clinic in the ladies’ room of The Hippodrome in Leicester Square.
It was inevitable that Emily would go to beauty school when she finished her GCSEs.  She graduated at the top of her class and found her first job on a cruise ship. Within three years she had been promoted from lowliest therapist to the ship’s beauty salon manager.  It was the perfect start to her career.  With no real expenses to speak of while she was living onboard, she was able to salt away plenty of savings before she came back to dry land.  On her twenty-third birthday, Emily’s father matched what she had saved, thinking she might like to buy herself a car.  But Emily had far bigger ambitions than ownership of a nearly new Volkswagen Golf.  A year later, her savings were boosted once more by a bequest from an elderly aunt.  Emily took all her money to a bank and they matched it with a business loan.  She signed a long lease on an empty barber’s shop a few streets from where she had grown up and The Beauty Spot was born.
Emily had very worked hard to achieve her ambition.  First to save the money, then to transform the barber’s shop into something a great deal more girly.  Lack of spare funds meant that she had to decorate The Beauty Spot herself, ruining her own carefully manicured nails when she sanded down the woodwork. But that wasn’t to be the end of it.  Six months after the opening, she was working even harder.  Apart from Chloe Jones, the junior therapist who had been with her from the start, Emily Brown was the entire staff of her little salon. She was full-time therapist, office manager, accountant and cleaner.  It didn’t leave much time for a personal life.  As for romance?  Forget about it.

When they had a moment to talk about it, Emily and Chloe often bemoaned the fact that they’d chosen a career where it was very unlikely they would meet a future husband on the job.  Emily’s year group at beauty school had been exclusively female.  On board ship, she was discouraged from fraternizing with other staff members and most of the male holidaymakers under fifty were on honeymoon.  The only men who visited a day spa like The Beauty Spot were married (from time to time, Emily had to deal with the hairy backs of men whose wives couldn’t stand the idea of sitting next to a gorilla on the beach).  Or gay.
You could tell the straight married men right away.  They always looked terrified.  And the bigger they were, the louder they cried when Emily got out the wax strips and went to work.
            The gay guys were better clients.  They spent a great deal more money.  They knew that just because they were men, looking good wasn’t a simple matter of a short back and sides at the barber’s by the train station. These guys were as high maintenance as any of Emily’s female clients. They wanted the lot.  Waxing (Emily had all the right certificates, though she had yet to item ‘back, crack and sack’ on her service list), facials, pedicures, manicures, eyebrow shaping, fake tan.  And the gossip they shared over the manicure table made a change from the usual gripes about unreliable nannies and workaholic husbands she got from the local yummy mummies.  Still, there was something strangely depressing about massaging a beautiful male body, knowing that your gorgeous client was probably thinking about another beautiful male body while you did it.       
Emily could hardly remember the last time she’d touched a man during a moment of passion.  Her most recent boyfriend had given up on her because she was spending too much time setting up the salon.  She’d realized quickly that Mr. Right was unlikely to walk in off the street and ask for an impromptu eyebrow tweeze.  And so it was Emily felt more than a little tweak of envy as she read Carina Lees’ first column in Get This! magazine.
‘Wow!  What am amazing week I’ve had!’ Carina wrote.  ‘I was so excited to get an invitation to Get This! magazine’s annual Valentine’s singles party.  All the best single men in England were there, including Danny Rhodes…’
Emily glanced at the picture of the handsome former boy band star, ‘currently appearing in the West End revival of The Music Man’. He was ridiculously good-looking.  Like a Ken doll come to life.  Chloe peered over Emily’s shoulder.
‘Isn’t he…?’ Chloe began.
‘Gay is the only word for the whole evening,’ Carina’s column continued.  ‘In keeping with the Valentine’s Theme, the entire top floor of the exclusive Café De France had been turned into a tart’s boudoir.  Everything was pink.  Pink drinks, pink cakes.  Even the dress-code was ‘in the pink’.  Lucky it’s my favourite colour!
‘We danced the night away to a live set (by a tribute band playing cover of Pink songs of course).  And when the clock struck midnight, Danny Rhodes asked if I would be his Valentine!  What did I say?  You’ll have to watch this space!’
            Emily closed the magazine with a sigh.  She hadn’t received a single Valentine’s card.  The postcard from the video shop suggesting romantic rentals for a Valentine’s night spent at home definitely didn’t count. But Emily had no time to dwell on her lack of love action right then.  She had a customer to see.

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