A Hollywood Beginning

By Alex Fisken

Chari is 27

Chari has never had a ‘proper’ job

Chari has no idea what’s waiting just around the corner . . .

Can a former child actor, lifelong film nerd and serial relationship saboteur find her ideal career and life partner?

Only if she agrees to take part in a live comedy show, playing opposite the charming but fickle Rob. Trouble is, she hates acting – but she’s also fast running out of options.

Is she doomed to experience yet another disappointment, or could this be the opportunity she’s been searching for?

Add a strong-willed talent agent with a face like a deep-fried Mars bar, and everything is sure to turn out fine.
Isn’t it?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alex Fisken
• Release date: Mar 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005394370

Alex Fisken

Alex is based in Ayrshire, Scotland, where she works as an editor. When she’s not at her desk editing or writing, you will find her looking for seaglass on the beautiful but often stormy Ayrshire coast. She has previously published newspaper articles and a literary novel under a different name. This is her first romantic comedy.

Book preview

Chapter 1

It’s not every day you turn a corner and are sent flying by an absconding bride.

Okay, so I was wearing my ludicrous office-girl heels and I’d had a drink or two. Well, four, actually. But it absolutely was not my fault. I defy anyone to remain upright under the circumstances.

All I did was walk around the corner and there she was: running out of a brightly lit churchyard. Going so fast that she barrelled into me without noticing and just kept moving. She headed right into the rush hour traffic, and only stopped when several cars hooted at her and a taxi driver began shouting obscenities.

I sat on the cold pavement, winded, my back lodged uncomfortably against a parked car. I tried to process events, but it felt as though my eyes were swivelling wildly in my head. The bride was standing half-in, half-out of the road, apparently on the verge of making another dash into the traffic. She looked classy in a slim ivory sheath, her dark hair unveiled but wound into a complicated chignon.

Three women in bridesmaids’ dresses came running out onto the street. The oldest among them – more matron of honour than bridesmaid – stopped dead at the kerb just a few feet away from me. ‘You can’t do this!’ she shouted at the bride. ‘Why are you doing this? Please come back.’

The second bridesmaid, a chubby blonde barely out of her teens, arrived slightly out of breath and stood at her side. ‘Come back inside!’ she repeated over and over, but the bride ignored her too.

A small audience gathered as some passers-by on their way to the Tube station abandoned their usual London ways and stopped to gawp, while others just slowed their pace a little and drifted past.

I realised that the third bridesmaid, a thirty-ish woman with golden brown skin, was crouching in front of me. She held her sea-green gown delicately off the ground. ‘Do you think you can stand?’ she said. She had the gentlest, softest northern Irish accent I had ever heard, and her warm eyes seemed full of concern.

‘N-n-not sure,’ I breathed, but she had already placed a graceful hand beneath my elbow and was quietly urging me to my feet.

The bride turned to face her wedding party, hands placed contemptuously on hips, just as the groom shot belatedly out of the churchyard gate. ‘Katie!’ he shouted.

The bride pointed a warning finger at him. ‘No,’ she said loudly but calmly. ‘It’s over, Andy – finished. I’m not coming back. Not this time.’

‘Katie, please.’

‘No!’ The wash of traffic abated a little as the lights changed, and the bride took a few steps into the road again, poised to take flight.

‘Katie, the dress!’ screamed the matron of honour. ‘At least leave us the dress!’

‘Fine,’ said Katie, and with a few defiant movements unzipped the sheath and let it fall to the ground. Still looking elegant in a tiny slip that could have passed for a sun dress at any other time of year, she stepped over the puddled wedding gown in her exquisite ivory satin heels. ‘Keep it,’ she shouted over her shoulder as she ran for the other side of the road. ‘See if I care.’

‘She’ll freeze to death,’ said the groom.

The bridesmaids stared at him, as if he had entirely missed the point.

Tall, fair-haired and very good-looking but obviously a bit thick, was what I thought. Maybe that was why Katie had left him.

‘What do we do now?’ wailed the youngest bridesmaid. She darted into the road and retrieved the discarded dress. ‘We’ll have to go in there and tell everyone to go home.’

‘We can’t,’ said the matron of honour. ‘Do you want to be the one to tell Senga we called it off? Because I don’t.’

I watched, fascinated, as they all looked at each other with something that could only be described as stunned horror.

My rescuer shattered the silence. ‘All we’re missing is a bride. One of you will have to stand in for her.’

None of this was making any sense, but I didn’t think it was my place to say so.

‘Well, I can’t do it,’ said the matron of honour. ‘I’m too old.’

‘And I’ll never get into that dress,’ the chubby bridesmaid added.

‘That leaves you, Giselle,’ said Andy, indicating my new friend.

Giselle shook her head. ‘Not me – I’ll be too busy. We’re down two flower girls, remember, so I’m already having to take care of stuff during the service they were supposed to do.’

‘Forgot about that,’ sighed the matron of honour. ‘Damn it.’ Her eyes slid towards me and she did that slight double-take I’d seen all too many times. I forced a blank look onto my face, and she frowned a little and turned away.

‘Well,’ said Andy, nodding in my direction. ‘How about her?’

All I could do was stare back at his beautiful blue eyes.

‘Me?’ I said eventually. ‘But I can’t.’

‘Why?’ asked Andy. ‘Do you have to be somewhere?’

‘No,’ I said. The events of the last few hours had definitively ensured that there was absolutely nowhere I had to be that night, or possibly ever again.

‘Andy, I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but you’re a genius,’ declared the matron of honour. She turned to me. ‘What size are you? 12? 10?’ She looked me up and down, calculating.

‘I’m a 10,’ I said automatically. ‘But –’

‘Perfect.’ She grabbed my hand and began pulling me towards the church. ‘Come with me. Emily – bring the dress; Giselle – you do her hair; Andy – stall the guests. Tell them the bride’s got cold feet, but we’re taking care of it. Or something.’ She eyed my black stilettos with distaste. ‘And I’ll see if we can rustle up some decent shoes for you.’

‘But I can’t –’ I tried again. I might have been slightly inebriated, and almost certainly concussed, but I was convinced the wedding guests would notice I wasn’t Katie.

No one was listening. The matron of honour grabbed me tightly by the hand and again gave me a look that suggested she knew me from somewhere but hadn’t yet quite figured it out. ‘Of course you can,’ she said, and towed me towards the church behind the groom in full morning dress, flanked by a froth of light-green bridesmaid’s dresses.

The church was a substantial building that looked imposing as every one of its stained-glass windows illuminated the autumn dusk. The muffled sound of an organ playing wedding tunes drifted out from behind a pair of heavy wooden doors. As we reached the entrance I stopped dead. Sensing resistance, my captor instantly jerked me round to face her. Despite her lacy dress and tastefully dyed auburn ringlets she looked grim and determined, like a headmistress who wasn’t going to stand for any nonsense. ‘Listen, whatever your name is,’ she said. ‘It’s only for a few hours, and all you have to do is stand there, look pretty and say: I do. That’s it – literally one line. You can do that, can’t you?’ She paused, then added in a faintly menacing tone: ‘You know you can.’

I shot her an agonised look: she’d obviously realised who I was, and I prayed she wouldn’t say anything. I just couldn’t deal with it tonight.

Recognising my silent plea, or perhaps still not completely sure how she knew my face, she visibly softened. ‘Come on, then,’ she said more reasonably. We’ll give you nice food and lots of champagne – hell, we’ll even pay you – and by 10 o’clock you can go back to being whoever you normally are.’ She nodded towards the groom and grinned ferociously. ‘Best of all, Andy will love you forever – won’t you, Andy?’

Andy twisted his hat in his hand and smiled for the first time since his bride had jilted him. ‘Absolutely,’ he agreed. ‘It’s almost inevitable.’

Chapter 2

Well, you’ve probably worked things out by now. I was considerably slower on the uptake.

Blame the fact that my world had fallen apart twice that day, or the alcohol I’d drunk in an attempt to wipe it all out. I was distraught, numb and beyond caring about very much at all, but I still maintain the collision with Katie had scrambled my brain. How else could I have missed all the signs? I didn’t completely catch on until halfway through the ceremony, and even then it was only because Giselle finally told me.

Stay with me.

The next thing I knew I was in a tiny upstairs room in the church, being pushed and pulled into Katie’s discarded dress. Giselle began torturing my hair, pulling it into a French braid and scattering silk daisies into it with a painful array of hairpins. By the time she was finished hunger had joined forces with my other troubles to propel my thoughts in a series of wild directions. Who on earth got married on a Friday evening in late September? It didn’t make any sense. Obviously it wasn’t a real wedding: something else had to be going on.

I ran through all the things it couldn’t possibly be. Not a proxy wedding, where someone stands in for a bride who can’t be there in person. Katie had run away just ten minutes earlier: it wasn’t as if she was trapped behind enemy lines on the other side of the world, with no way of making it to her own nuptials. Anyway, in these digital times, surely a bride who couldn’t actually be present would just get married over the internet? Assuming that was legal, of course.

The matron of honour whipped a selection of bridal shoes on and off my feet, maintaining a running commentary as she went.

‘Right, the first thing you need to know is that I’m your Aunt Margaret – much younger sister of your mother, who’s divorced from your father, who’s here to give you away, but your stepmother’s playing mother-of-the-bride instead of your actual mother for reasons that may or may not become clear as we go along.’

‘But – ’ I tried.

‘But you don’t need to worry about that,’ Giselle reassured me. ‘We’ll take care of that, if it comes up.’

Margaret nodded. ‘Absolutely,’ she said, then resumed her narrative. ‘You know Giselle from university – which is where you also met Andy – and Emily’s your best friend from school.’ She paused, and shot a look at me. ‘Even though she’s actually about, what, eight or ten years younger than you, but don’t worry about that: of course it makes no sense, but nobody cares. Anyway, she’s sometimes a bit jealous of you because you’re slimmer and better looking than she is and you’ve always had more luck with men.’

‘Hey!’ Emily protested.

Margaret gave her a look. ‘You know it’s true.’

‘Okay, okay. Just not sure I like playing the role of fat, tragically single best friend all that much.’

‘You’re not fat,’ said the other two in chorus, and Margaret added: ‘Just beautifully rounded.’ Her tone was firm, as though it was something she’d repeated many times. ‘And don’t get on to me about your personal history – talk to the boss.’

Could it be a marriage of convenience for visa reasons? I doubted it. For a start, none of these people looked like they belonged to a gang of bogus wedding fixers. And it didn’t make any sense: with his tall, blonde, blue-eyed looks, Andy might look like a modern-day Viking, but he didn’t sound remotely foreign. And surely people-traffickers wouldn’t spend ridiculous amounts of money on a full-blown all-frills church wedding, just to make sure an illegal immigrant could stay in the country. Would they?

Andy stuck his head around the door. ‘Nearly ready? Jed’s told the guests that the bride’s got the jitters. He’s entertaining them with embarrassing stories about her childhood, but if you don’t all get a move on he’ll run out of material for the reception.’

Giselle turned me around to face her, ran a hand over my newly styled hair, and smiled radiantly. ‘You beautiful thing, you,’ she said, then addressed Andy. ‘We’re done. Tell Jed his amazing daughter is on her way down.’

‘But – ’ I tried again.

‘Got it,’ said Andy. He disappeared momentarily, then his head popped back. ‘You look gorgeous, by the way,’ he said, flashing a grin in my direction. ‘Like an Egyptian goddess who just descended from heaven into Hammersmith.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t start all that again,’ said Emily in mock disgust. She threw a rejected bridal shoe at the closing door. ‘Does that boy never learn?’

Margaret raised an eyebrow. ‘Apparently not. Okay, everyone – deep breath, moment of calm. There’s been enough drama already, and we need to focus.’

I breathed deeply, as commanded, closing my eyes and inhaling the scent of wood panels, dusty velvet curtains and old Bibles. I thought I might as well give up trying to think or speak, and instead surrender to the moment. Go with the flow. And somewhere at the back of my emotionally distressed brain, I thought I heard the distant sound of a penny beginning to drop. If my surmise was correct, then the prospect of what was about to happen was terrifying.

‘Right,’ I heard Margaret say from somewhere at the bottom of a deep, dark well. ‘Let’s get moving.’

I resurfaced. Butterflies gathered in my stomach, threatening to leap into my throat and suffocate me with their tiny, fluttering wings. But the cogs and wheels in my brain were beginning to turn. Since nobody was listening to a word I said, I might as well attempt to poke another spanner into the works and see if I couldn’t goad someone into telling me what was going on.

‘Isn’t it supposed to be bad luck for the groom to see the bride in her wedding dress before the ceremony?’ I asked no one in particular.

Three pairs of eyes stared at me, as if I had gone completely insane.

‘Andy,’ I clarified. ‘He was just in here, and he saw me.’

‘Oh, we don’t actually take things that far,’ Emily said. ‘That would be injecting a bit too much realism into the proceedings.’ She giggled. ‘I mean, it’s not as if we’re Method actors, or anything.’

‘Not any kind of actors at all, if A Certain Person is to be believed,’ Giselle said.

‘Shush,’ ordered Margaret. ‘Let’s go. Giselle and Emily in front, Aunt Margaret behind them. Katie – follow me. Your father is waiting for you downstairs.’

And so he was: a tall, handsome silver fox of a man, dressed in traditional grey tails and a carnation in his buttonhole. So perfect a father-of-the bride that he was almost a cliché.

‘Katie, my dear,’ he said. His voice was low and silky, like a Hollywood actor from another age. As he placed my arm in his, he fixed me with a deep, meaningful gaze. His eyes were the same piercing clear-blue as Andy’s and I wondered, stupidly, whether they were related.

‘You look simply charming,’ he continued. ‘Ready to meet your groom?’

I stared at him and shook my head. From the corner of my eye I saw Giselle and Emily fussing over a flower girl and a page boy. I heard soft organ music and a murmur of voices coming from the other side of a heavy oak door, and briefly contemplated hitting this beautiful stranger over the head before running away.

‘Ah, my dear.’ He patted my hand. ‘Wedding nerves, of course: very natural.’ He leaned closer and whispered: ‘Don’t worry – just keep it together and follow our lead. It’ll all be fine. We’ll look after you.’

The music and the voices stopped, and in the sudden hush he stood up very straight and looked dead ahead. The door was pulled open from the inside and bright lights spilled out. Margaret turned and quickly thrust a bouquet into my hand.

They say that every girl wants to be married, and it’s probably true. Even with my disastrous relationship history I dare say that I, too, had sometimes dreamed of wafting down the aisle looking delicious in a white creation. So my fantasy, and that of many other women in the world, was only a few short seconds away from becoming reality.

But I think, on reflection, that getting married to a complete stranger while not completely sober, having eaten nothing since lunch and being surrounded by several hundred people you’ve never seen before and never wish to see again, is not ideal, no matter how beautiful you look or feel or how imposing the venue. Having experienced it at first hand, I’m in a position to say it’s not all that much fun.

The organ started up again, and the Wedding March began.

Chapter 3

Phone cameras clicked and flashed as I clutched my bouquet for dear life. I had never seen a church more crammed with people: there had to be more than 200 guests, filling the pews both upstairs and down. Everyone was staring at me and smiling, and only a few looked surprised. Definitely a fake wedding, then, if hardly anyone noticed or cared that I wasn’t actually the woman who had run away.

The air was heavily perfumed and very hot, and the female guests seemed to have dressed more for garden party at Buckingham Palace than a wedding in Hammersmith. I passed a fascinator that was all netting and improbable turquoise quills, and longed to rage-snatch it from its grinning owner’s head. All I had was an improvised tiara made from silk daisies. Not even a flimsy veil to hide behind. What kind of bride didn’t have a veil?

At last the long march was over. Andy flashed a smile and leaned towards me as I was delivered to his side. ‘You’re doing great!’ he whispered.

I opened my mouth, then shut it again. The last time anything had made sense that day was at 4 o’clock, when I was fired from my job. Since then, my life had gone steadily down the plughole without much sign of improvement. Taking part in a pretend marriage, for reasons that still weren’t clear, certainly wasn’t helping.

The organ music trailed away. ‘Dearly beloved,’ intoned the vicar, who was dressed to the nines in a white frock with gold trim. At least, that’s what it looked like to me. And for the next fifteen minutes, he kept a completely straight face while trying to conduct a wedding ceremony that was interrupted by the following:

o The best man, who ostentatiously produced a hip flask and spilled the contents over Emily’s dress.

o The page boy, who spirited a lighter out of his pocket and tried to set Margaret’s bouquet on fire.

o A woman who purported to be my mother getting into a fight with another woman who was apparently my stepmother, both eventually separated by the man pretending to be my father.

o One of the male guests, who fainted and was carried outside by four men who were built like Welsh rugby prop forwards and wore identical pink-and-white striped carnations in their buttonholes.

The guests loved it, laughing and applauding at every turn. There were even a few cheers.

As everyone seemed to be in on whatever this was, I concluded it was safe to rule out proxy marriages and immigration scams. My worst fears had come true, then: I was in a play. Which at least meant that it would come to an end sooner than most weddings, which usually seemed interminable.

‘Just stand there and look pretty,’ Margaret had said, and I started repeating her words to myself like a mantra, along with ‘it’ll all be over soon’.

But it wasn’t to be. When the vicar began ‘does anyone know any just impediment why these two . . .’ I perked up, reasoning that my one line – ‘I do’ – wouldn’t be far behind, swiftly followed by the end of the proceedings. But a man at the back stood up and shouted: ‘I do! I object! It’s a bigamous wedding – the bride is already married to me!’

In the stunned but gleeful silence that followed, something made me turn and stare at the objector. Then I slowly raised an arm and pointed in his direction. ‘I’ve never seen that man before in my life!’ I declared, then fell on my knees to the floor.

Amid the ensuing uproar, Andy crouched down and beamed me a delighted smile. ‘Nice improv! You’re a natural,’ he said.

I sat there, head bowed, shaking. ‘I’m not improvising,’ I said, and it was true – I wasn’t. I can’t act for toffee. It’s a bit ironic, I always think, considering my family background and a particular slice of my own personal history, but I’m no actor. So my outburst wasn’t improv, just an impulsive protest at the day’s events combined with another interruption that suggested I wouldn’t be freed from this nightmare of a wedding any time soon.

Andy’s looked turned to one of concern. ‘You’re not crying, are you?’

I shook my head and gasped out a ‘no’, then nodded a ‘yes’ as a tear trickled down my cheek. ‘I just wish I knew what was going on.’

The father of the bride turned to the guests and raised a hand.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, my daughter is understandably distraught. The wedding party will now withdraw