Escape for the Summer Read online

  She wasn’t wrong there. Mr Yuri looked like a pig squeezed into a suit and overcoat, and always reminded Angel horribly of Napoleon from Animal Farm. Nope, Mr Yuri, one of the wealthiest men alive and rumoured to have links to the Russian mafia, was not a person she would care to upset. She’d be at the bottom of the Thames before you could say “Siberia”.

  “So, mind on the job please, Angel. Any more errors and you’ll be looking at your P45. Do you understand how serious this warning is?”

  Angel widened her eyes and thought very hard of the saddest thing she could possibly think of. At this point in time that happened to be the beautiful pink patent-leather Chloé bag she’d set her heart on, which had been left dangling out of reach in the designer section of Selfridges just because her latest credit card was maxed out. Having had a rather good education – which she did her hardest to conceal because, after all, nobody on TOWIE ever mentioned the Classics – Angel felt like a modern version of Tantalus, albeit one with waist-length blonde extensions and false lashes. True to form, the tears began to pool in her eyes. God! She loved that bag so much! If Andi were any sort of a big sister she’d lend her the money. It was only a few hundred quid after all. Andi was such a tightwad with her cash; she was bound to have some spare. But if she didn’t, somebody else might buy the bag and then it would be lost – forever!

  At this thought a tear really fell in earnest, rolling down her peachy cheek like a perfect diamond and splashing onto the polished wooden floor.

  Brilliant. Tears were one of the few things that had never failed Angel in twenty-seven years. Parents yes. Boyfriends definitely. But tears? Never. Angel might not have Andi’s economics degree but she was well aware of the effect that her looks and tears had on people. And so far, so good.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, looking up through her double layer of Eylure’s best, in what she hoped was a winning Princess Diana manner. “I promise it’ll never happen again. I’ll come to work no matter what I look like. Even if my nails all break. Or my extensions fall out. Or I come out in boils or—”

  “Yes, yes, Angel, I get the gist,” said her supervisor hastily, before Angel could continue any further.

  Oops. Had she laid it on too thick? Used a shovel rather than a trowel? Making a mental note to ask her actress best friend Gemma for some emergency drama lessons, Angel crossed her slender fingers behind her back. Much as she craved fame and fortune, wanting nothing more than to sashay across a red carpet or have her own reality show, Angel needed her job. For now, at least. Her big break was just around the corner, she knew it, but since this morning’s post had brought with it two red credit-card bills, a thinly veiled threatening letter from her bank manager and a rejection from the latest series of Signed by Katie Price, painting toenails and waxing unmentionables would have to continue for a little bit longer.

  As Dawn, predictably softened by tears, proceeded to tell her exactly what was expected of an employee of Blush, Angel zoned out again. Although her eyes were widened and she was nodding attentively, in reality she was a world away – somewhere where she wore designer clothes rather than her cleverly purchased eBay fakes, and ate at the finest restaurants in town. She went shopping with Posh, dined out with Jamie and Jules and had been socialising with Peter Andre. Well, why not? He only lived in Brighton, for heaven’s sake, and if those pesky security guards on the private estate – the only men she’d ever met who’d been immune to her charms – had let her through, Angel knew she would have had a brilliant time at his last celeb-filled bash. An agent would have been bound to sign her on the spot, if only she hadn’t been caught trying to scale the fence. She’d been plucked off it with absolutely no ceremony whatsoever. As if that hadn’t been bad enough, insult had been added to injury today when a sternly worded letter from the estate’s management had been delivered by hand, politely but firmly telling her to stay away unless she wanted to face legal action.

  Lecture over, she returned to work and the demanding Mrs Yuri. As she prepared the treatment room for her latest client, Angel wondered whether dropping out of her degree had really been her smartest ever move. Sure, the lectures had been torturously dull and the other students about as exciting as watching the Sky Planner screen, but asking pampered women about their weekend plans was hardly thrilling either. And as for the razor-wire stabs of jealousy when they told her about their latest skiing holiday or Maldives jaunt, well those weren’t exactly pleasant either.

  Oh God. She had to find a way out of this soon, surely? If Amy Childs could do it, then why not Angelique Evans? If only she and Gemma could have afforded to rent in Chelsea rather than Tooting Bec. She could have got herself a part on Made in Chelsea. Or maybe even met Prince Harry! Maybe the next time that Pippa Middleton came in…

  “Angel, Mrs Yuri is ready for you,” Dawn announced.

  Angel gritted her teeth, selected some relaxing panpipe music from the iPod docking station and checked that the products were all lined up and ready for action. Industrial strength cleanser to try to remove the caked-on foundation was a must, and a chisel would have been even more help. While Angel filled a bowl with water and laid out a heap of fluffy towels, Mrs Yuri shuffled into the room and heaved her bulk onto the treatment table.

  Don’t look at her mole. Don’t look at her mole. Don’t look at her mole.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs Yuri. I’m Angel and I’ll be doing your crystal scrub therapy facial today,” she said chirpily.

  Mrs Yuri grunted. Not a talker then. Fine. Angel actually preferred it when her clients didn’t want to chat. It gave her more thinking space to figure out a way to find fame and fortune. Concentrating very hard, she began to massage dollops of cleanser into the jowly face.

  Don’t look at her mole. Don’t look at her mole. Look at her mole. Look at her. Look at her mole.

  Oh bollocks.

  Angel couldn’t help it. She was looking at the mole. It was pretty impossible not to, really. She was just about to drag her gaze away when something caught her eye and made her heart bump painfully. Hang on. That looked awfully familiar. Was it the light in here, or was that mole looking a little sore around the edges? It seemed swollen too, and not just in a usual mole type way but as though it was changing size.

  “Vat are you looking at?” hissed Mrs Yuri. Eyes like boot buttons glinted beneath fleshy lids and she pinned Angel with a stare that the KGB would have envied. This was the point where Angel should fib and make something up about pores and indulge in some bland beautician jargon – but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Instead, horrible memories were flashing across her mind’s eye. Drips, clumps of hair falling to the floor, the smell of antiseptic… The last time Angel had seen a mole that looked as irritated as this had been on her poor mum. How could she possibly lie about something she knew had the potential to be life threatening?

  “Your mole,” Angel confessed. “It looks very sore. Does it itch? Has it been like this for long?”

  “You are looking at my mole? How dare you be so insulting, you bold girl?” Mrs Yuri hissed.

  “It’s not because it’s big or anything,” Angel said hastily, wanting to kick herself as the client went puce with rage. Great. Top marks there for tact. Why not just say it was the biggest, grossest mole ever? She took a deep breath. “I hardly noticed it! Honestly! It’s just that if a mole is sore or changes shape it could be an indication that there’s something changing or of melanoma.”

  “Melanoma?” screeched the client. “What is this you call me now? Some new insult?”

  Oh God. This wasn’t going so well. Why hadn’t she just kept quiet?

  The answer was, of course, because if somebody had spotted Natalie Evans’s mole earlier on, Angel’s mother might still be alive. Angel tried again.

  “Of course not. Melanoma is another word for skin cancer.”

  “You are saying I have cancer?” Mrs Yuri screeched.

  “No! No, of course not! I just think it would be worth getting a doctor to chec
k it over. These things can be easily removed.”

  Mrs Yuri leapt off the table as though scalded. “You tell me I should get my mole removed? Nobody in my whole life haff ever insulted me so much! Vait until my Anton hears about this!”

  Her shrieks continued to increase in volume. Possibly they could even drown out the sound of the planes taking off at Heathrow. In any case, they were certainly more than loud enough to alert Dawn and several other beauticians who came running.

  “What’s going on?” demanded Dawn.

  “I just mentioned that the mole looks a little sore,” explained Angel desperately. “No harm done.”

  “No harm done?” Despite being Botoxed to almost lethal levels, the client managed to show her shock. Rounding on Angel, she hissed, “You are rude bitch! You haff insulted me! Do you know who my husband is?”

  Angel gulped. She’d be feeding the fishes in the Thames by teatime.

  And that was if she was lucky.

  Dawn was clearly having very similar thoughts.

  “Mrs Yuri, I am so sorry! I can’t apologise enough!”

  The furious client spun around. “Your apologies are meaningless! Vat do you sink my Anton will say when he sees how this girl has upset me? Personally insulted me?”

  Angel dreaded to think – and so did her boss, judging by Dawn’s white face.

  “He will sue you,” continued Mrs Yuri, warming to her theme. “Then he will want to personally speak to the owner of this pitiful excuse for a salon. Unless—” she paused for dramatic emphasis and pointed a gore-red talon in Angel’s direction. “Unless you have rid of this useless imbecile of a girl. At once!”

  “I was trying to help!” cried Angel desperately. “The mole looks sore. You really should see a specialist just in case!”

  “How dare you!” Mrs Yuri squawked in outrage. “There’s nothing wrong with my mole! How dare you say I need to see doctor?”

  Rounding on Dawn she added, “Are you going to let her speak to me like that? I haff never been so insulted! My Anton, he will be furious! Are you going to do nothing to compensate me for being so insulted in your salon?”

  “Of course not, madam! We’ll do anything to make up for Angel’s appalling lack of manners. Whatever you wish!”

  Angel felt faint. This was it. River time.

  Mrs Yuri shot Angel a look of triumph.

  “Either she goes, or I do! And my friends, of course! We do not come here to be insulted. My Anton vill make sure this salon closes for good.”

  Now Dawn had a face that was an exact match for her starched white uniform. Angel’s heart plummeted into her sparkly Skechers. Mrs Yuri was exactly the kind of loaded and bored customer on whom the salon depended. Along with her friends, yet more pampered and glamorous wives of small ugly Russian oligarchs, she probably spent more in one visit to Blush than Angel earned in an entire year.

  P45 here she came.

  Maybe I should get a job as a psychic instead of being a beautician, thought Angel miserably, as less than five minutes later she stood on the pavement with the contents of her locker in a carrier bag. She’d been ejected so fast that her head was reeling. While just about every beautician in the place raced to pamper Mrs Yuri, she’d been frogmarched out of the building and told never to return. Honestly, she’d only been trying to help. That mole had looked very suspicious and Angel was sure that it needed medical attention. There was no need for such a ridiculous overreaction. Some people just loved to make a drama.

  Mind you, it would have made a fantastic scene for a dramality show. If only she’d had a film crew in tow...

  But unfortunately for Angel she didn’t have a film crew following her every move. Flipping her long blonde hair back from her face and hiking up her skirt an inch or two just in case a millionaire came cruising by and fancied offering her a lift, Angel plucked her iPhone from her bag and set off along the street.

  In a moment she’d call her sister, just to make certain that Andi had got that money out for her. Angel was definitely going to buy that bag now.

  After the day she’d had, it was the least she deserved.

  Chapter 3

  “You told me she was a size fourteen! I specifically requested a girl who was a size fourteen for this job! Not one who’s a sixteen on a good day, breathing in and wearing granny pants!”

  Gemma Pengelley, she of size-sixteen curves that today were possibly billowing to an eighteen after a weekend spent comfort eating and mainlining vodka, felt her face turn into a giant Edam of humiliation. Standing in a freezing studio and wearing nothing more than a deeply unflattering minimiser bra while two Twiglet-like women poked her fat bits and squabbled over the size of her thighs was not top of her list of favourite things to do. It didn’t even make it to the bottom of that list.

  “Does it really matter?” Gemma’s agent, Chloe, was saying hopefully. “She’s modelling control pants anyway. Surely the whole point is that they should hold her in? Won’t it look better to have them modelled by the type of girl who might actually need to wear them?”

  “She’s supposed to look slim so the consumer thinks that these briefs really work. They’re meant to hold a tummy in. Not work miracles!” The creative director of the shoot for Trim Tums looked at Gemma with disgust. “How on earth are we supposed to hide that overhang? Call in Kevin McCloud?”

  “What about Photoshop?” Chloe said helpfully.

  The creative director shook her head. “If we wanted to use Photoshop we could have just hired another slim girl and made her look bigger. We wanted somebody slightly on the larger side, not somebody fat! Didn’t you read the job spec we emailed you?”

  Chloe was mortified. “Of course I did. I just haven’t seen Gemma for a few months. Work’s been quiet for her. Let me assure you that the last time I saw my client she really was a size fourteen. Weren’t you, Gemma?”

  Gemma nodded miserably. As if it wasn’t humiliating enough to be stripped down to her knickers in a room so cold that her goosebumps had goosebumps, now she had to have all her squishy bits poked and prodded in full view of all the other stick-insect models. Even though she’d fixed her gaze firmly on the studio floor, Gemma could tell that the other, slimmer girls were sniggering and enjoying every minute of her humiliation. Oh God, she knew she should have turned this job down but her agent had insisted that it would be, in her words, “a nice little earner”. So, being perpetually broke, usually because her flatmate Angel had failed to make the rent, Gemma had taken the job, albeit against her better judgement. Acting work had been thin on the ground lately and so she’d taken her eye off the ball a bit with her weight, choosing to treat herself to a Snickers when she didn’t get a call back or grabbing a quick Maccy D’s on the way home from yet another fruitless casting. Somewhere in her wardrobe, stuffed full of clothes that ranged from twelves up to voluminous size eighteens, there were garments she could squeeze into which bore the legend 14, so technically when Chloe had asked her what she size she was she hadn’t really been lying.

  I’m an actress anyway, not a bloody model, thought Gemma resentfully while her agent and the creative director continued to bicker and prod her flabby bits. In the cold studio lighting her cellulitey legs were the same colour and texture as the porridge she’d shovelled down before she’d left the house that morning. Well, porridge was good for you, wasn’t it? Everybody knew that. But maybe without the huge dollop of condensed milk and the three big spoonfuls of sugar? whispered the Diet Angel, who often liked to perch on Gemma’s shoulder. Fat lot of use she was; Gemma hadn’t heard from the Diet Angel for weeks. She thought it must have been squashed flat by the Diet Devil, who seemed to be in permanent residence, urging her that one more slice of pizza wouldn’t hurt and murmuring Go on, you’ve eaten one biscuit; you might as well just finish the packet. However, the Diet Devil didn’t have to parade around in her knickers in front of a group of girls who made Bambi look chunky.

  Gemma sighed. Maybe on the way home she’d pop into her local
Greggs? They always saved her a cheese swirl or two. That would cheer her up.

  “I don’t know why you’re sighing,” hissed Chloe as, with her bony fingers biting into Gemma’s fleshy shoulder, she propelled her client across the studio. “You’re not the one who’s just been made to look like a total and utter dick. In fact, worse than that! An unprofessional total and utter dick! You told me that you were a size fourteen!”

  “I am a size fourteen. I think these pants are probably cut on a bit on the small side,” protested Gemma, trying to conceal her billowing body with a wrap.

  Chloe, in her early forties and funky and slim, shot Gemma a withering look. Dragging her client to a full-length mirror and whipping away the wrap, she said sharply, “Look in that mirror and tell me what you see! Is that a size fourteen? Seriously?”

  Gemma gulped. There was a lump in her throat the size and consistency of one of the rock cakes she’d baked the day before. They’d been lovely too, just the right mixture of crusty on the outside but soft and fluffy and curranty on the inside. Gemma loved to bake, especially when she was feeling low – which seemed to be most of the time just lately. The problem was that she also liked to eat what she’d baked. She was already looking forward to going home and polishing off the rest of the batch. Preferably all alone in her bedroom, where nobody could have a go at her.

  “Don’t, Chloe!” she begged, when her nose was practically rammed into the glass. God, but Gemma hated mirrors. Really hated them. In fact Dracula was probably happier to tuck into a clove of garlic than Gemma was to look at her reflection. She managed to avoid mirrors most of the time, or full-length ones in any case, which was some feat for somebody who shared a house with Angel, the girl who’d have trampled Narcissus on her way to a spot of pool-gazing.

  “Don’t you dare look away!” warned Chloe when Gemma tried to avert her eyes. “This is called tough love, Gemma! No matter what Christina Hendricks might say, nobody wants to hire a fat actress. Now look in the mirror!”