Plus One: A Novel

By Vanessa Raphaely

As deputy editor of the glamorous FILLE magazine in London, Lisa Lassiter had almost passed up the chance of a weekend on a billionaire’s yacht off the coast of Mykonos. But her best friend Claudia Hemmingway, on her way to becoming one of the hottest movie stars on the planet, could be very persuasive when she wanted something. Not only would they get there by private jet, she’d told Lisa, they would also get to rub shoulders with VIP guests – not least a famous Hollywood film producer. It would be a weekend of fun, sunshine, champagne and partying.

And it was all of those things. Until it wasn’t.

Lisa has spent ten years trying to get past that weekend. If she has learnt anything, it is that unfinished business and secrets always work their way to the surface. Moving on is one thing; forgetting is another, and forgiving … well, where to start?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan South Africa
• Release date: Sep 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781770106222

Book preview

Plus One

A Novel

Vanessa Raphaely

MACMILLAN

First published in 2018 by Pan Macmillan South Africa

Private Bag X19

Northlands

Johannesburg

2116

www.panmacmillan.co.za

ISBN: 978-1-77010-621-5

e-ISBN: 978-1-77010-622-2

© Vanessa Raphaely 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual places or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Editing by Alison Lowry

Proofreading by Sally Hines

Design and typesetting by Fire and Lion

Cover design by Ayanda Mbanjwa

Author photograph by Catherine Mac

Plus One is for my sister and mother, Julia and Jane Raphaely, and for the hundreds of wonderful women I met and worked with during my many happy years in women’s media. Principled, hard-working, kind and clever, neither they nor the businesses they run bear any resemblance to their nastier fictional counterparts or the truly awful VIVID.

Prologue

The Lear jet banks and begins its descent into Mykonos Island Airport. Leaning back and stretching out in its creamy white leather seats, I exhale and stare out of the cabin window … lost in the beauty of the aqua sea below. I’ve drunk a few glasses of the champagne the flight attendant offered us and have begun to believe that I might just have a chance of leaving my little corner of grim London and all its pressures and stress behind me, if only for a few days.

Claudia and I are the only passengers on this flight.

She was jittery as we boarded the plane, no doubt exhausted from the exertion of the past four or five days of shooting action sequences at Pinewood for her movie late into the night in order to wrap the most dramatic of her chases, fight and stunt scenes before we left. The effort seemed to have taken its toll. Under her immaculate make-up and behind her enormous Prada sunglasses, my friend looked pale. Uncharacteristically – because she usually remembers to be beautifully mannered in public – she also seemed short-tempered. She’d snapped at the driver in the car that deposited us at City Airport and then, as the plane took off, she couldn’t stop fidgeting in her seat. As soon as we were airborne, she’d asked the flight attendant for the bottle of champagne and instructed her not to bother us again. Between us we’d made embarrassingly fast work of it.

The buzz around Broken Hearts has been growing. This, Claudia’s breakout movie, is the first film, the producers hope, of what might become a new big-budget blockbuster action franchise, ‘a modern re-imagining of James Bond, where the dark, dangerous and sexy action hero is a young, beautiful girl’.

The stakes, for all concerned, are high.

In order to prepare for the role, for the past six months Claudia has been studying under Japanese martial arts legend Mai Ono, who has battered her into acceptable shape.

Thin as she looks now, she is a tiny package of muscle and sinew.

She’d elected not to use a stunt double for any of the film’s high-impact action sequences. Of course she’s been risking injury and exhaustion to impress or at least just capture the attention of Hollywood power brokers and I hope for her sake that her plan works.

Claudia wants fame with a fierce intensity so powerful that the desire sometimes seems to burn and bubble under her usually cool exterior.

I haven’t seen much of Claudia over the past few months – until the recent events, of course, which had put the two of us here – and for the first time in years I’d read more about her and her life in the newspapers and weekly magazine gossip columns than I’d seen of her in person. Immersed in the misery of my day job, I was preoccupied, and Claudia was so busy adjusting to the intensity and pressure of filming and her growing fame that time somehow just slipped by.

After she’d dismissed the flight attendant and we were alone in the cabin, Claudia unbuckled her seat-belt and stood up. She motioned at me to follow her to the lavatory at the rear of the plane.

‘Lise! Look.’

She opened her bag and fished out her purse. Inside was a plastic bank baggie and inside that … at least a couple of grams of coke.

I hissed, ‘We can’t go through customs with that!’

‘I forgot it was there!’

‘You’ve got to get rid of it! Right now!’ I said and turned, with my hand on the door handle.

‘We’ll go through the VIP channel. We won’t get caught.’

‘Claudia! No! You can’t be serious.’

‘Don’t be a prude. Or …’ her eyes glint with mischief, also risk and adventure. ‘We could do most of it, quickly, here. No one would know.’

‘No! Get rid of it!’

Her face flushed with irritation. Our relationship works best when I don’t challenge her.

‘It’ll be a waste …’ she said, in her best wheedling voice.

Beautiful girls, I’ve noticed, are often quick to revert to the skills learned in early childhood to get their own way. Little girl behaviour (eyes wide, baby girl voice) works very, very well for them, in almost every situation.

The wheedling worked on me.

‘You don’t have to have any, if you insist,’ she said as she shook a fat slug of a line out on her copy of FILLE, which balanced precariously on the basin.

I plastered a smile on my face and leaned down. Snorted.

I watched her inhale way too much.

I know what I should have done. I should have ripped that baggie out of her hands and flushed its contents down the lavatory myself. But I didn’t.

You don’t go looking for trouble when you are just the Plus One.

Part One

2008

Chapter 1

London

Excess, the new London ’90s nostalgia club, is tucked under the Westway. For a venue that boasts of its exclusivity, tonight it’s heaving. Hundreds of people are butt-to-butt, hard up against each other on the dance floor, high on the ’90s nostalgia that has prompted this reverse migration of cool from East London back to West 11 and beyond. The crowd around the bar is five deep. The lines for the cloakrooms stretch past the dealers, the prematurely drunk, the writhing, copped-off couples and the Unfortunates – the messily, publicly heartbroken.

A tall, handsome manboy on the fringes of the dance floor catches my eye. He’s either the lead singer of a very fashionable boyband du jour, or a very handsome doppelganger. You can never be sure. Everyone tries to be beautiful. He smiles, raises his drink and gestures enthusiastically at me, mouths ‘Come on over!’

Shifting the two heavy winter coats I had collected from the coat check half an hour earlier from one aching arm to the other, I squint, shade my eyes against the lights. He’s unmistakably the Real Thing, an ex-model who, along with his two equally physically appealing pals (the stars of many underwear campaigns), have recently knocked out their first No 1 hit single.

The song wasn’t very good and they weren’t either, but it didn’t matter. The band members were photogenic and they fulfilled four quite separate, teenage naughty dream fantasy archetypes. Happily for all concerned, the target markets were, as instructed, gobbling them up.

I turn to check if anyone more useful to him, or more attractive, is standing behind me. After years in the company of the famous, the almost famous and the rich, I know enough to never assume that, when in the company of such an abundance of good-looking, famous or rich people, any one of them would actually be actively interested in … me.

That’s not to say I have no currency in the brutal and competitive social market in which I exist. But as a magazine editor, even one working for a respected celebrity and fashion bible like FILLE, my cachet is only low to middling. By the standards that matter in London, I’m just smart enough, pretty enough, well connected enough, and my job is just about interesting enough for me to hold my own at a glamorous dinner party. But on nights like tonight? I’m plankton in an ocean filled with sharks and killer whales.

But no. He’s still smiling, nodding his head. Pointing at me.

Oh, okay, I think. Maybe tonight just got interesting. I weave my way over.

‘Hello!’ he beams. ‘Just the girl I’ve been looking for!’

Of course there’s no time to think of a clever, flirtatious comeback. Snappy, sexy repartee only ever occurs to me hours after the opportunity presents itself, usually while I’m wallowing in a bath, with a large gin and tonic in my hand.

‘Oh. Haha.’ I manage.

‘Yes!’ He beams. ‘Woman of my dreams! A mobile coat check lady! What a fucking fantastic idea!’ He really couldn’t look happier. ‘Can you bring me mine? It’s a Paul Smith Original. Navy blue.’ He looks at me hopefully. ‘How does it work? Do I give you the receipt?’

Oh.

Chapter 2

In London in 2008 glamour is contagious. Everyone wants to position themselves as close to the famous as they can. The company you keep defines you.

There’s hot, thick, eye-stinging smoke from an over-abundance of atmosphere-enhancing smoke machines above, sticky, spilled drinks on the floor below. The music (provided by a DJ of recent Ibiza fame and infamy) is jarring competition for the cacophony of shrieks, as groups who have not seen each other since the last very similar party reunite at this one.

‘Darling!’

‘Poppet!’

‘Precious!’

Generous amounts of cocaine and ecstasy (‘so ’90s!’) help the British partygoers overcome their reserve. There’s nothing better for lubric­ating social contact than the first heady hour happily buzzing on recreational drugs. The magical combination of half the room’s bores on coke and the other half on E makes it possible, at least, for almost everyone to cosy up.

On E, everyone loves everyone, even the coked-up bores. They even love Boy George, who has been wheeled out in honour of the ironically ’90s theme.

But I have taken no drugs. As a result I have no insulation against any of the single-minded self-promotion and energetic networking. Or the sweaty, determined hustling.

Oh God. Someone is ‘Darling!’ and ‘Poppeting!’ me.

Madison Blake, ex-Page 3 Girl, side-chick of a notoriously priapic Chelsea defender, wannabe FILLE cover girl, and her two improbably enormous breasts bear down on me.

The problem with hovering in the corner of the bar at parties is that there’s nowhere to run when you see trouble approaching. I am well and truly trapped.

Tottering on hooker heels and wrapped in a dress that bears more than a passing resemblance to cerise cling-film, Madison is a vision of hopeful delusion.

She is also no respecter of boundaries – physical or otherwise.

Before I can fade into the crowd, I am grasped in her sweaty embrace, my nose wedged uncomfortably in the tiny space between those giant surgically enhanced breasts. Without waiting for me to draw breath and without loosening her grip on me, she launches into the high-octane pitch I feared was coming:

‘I called that fashion director of yours, just like you told me to. I’ve called him six times. But he never calls me back!’

‘Sorry, Madison,’ I say. ’I can’t hear a word you’re saying.’

‘I CALLED THAT FASHION DIRECTOR OF YOURS SIX TIMES BUT HE NEVER CALLS ME BACK.’

‘He’s terrified he’ll be suffocated by your breasts if he lets you anywhere near him,’ I say, confident that with my face buried between her Double Fs she will not hear a word.

‘I’VE OFFERED HIM AN EXCLUSIVE ON FILLE’S DECEMBER COVER,’ she continues yelling at me, at the top of her voice. ‘I’M ON I’M A CELEBRITY! IT’S A GREAT STORY! I’D BE INCREDIBLE.’

‘Look, look, Madison! Prince Harry has just walked in, over there. LOOK! In the VIP section.’ She hears that bit perfectly. She’s off.

This party is a heaving mass of ambition, insecurity and greed. Any other night I might have laughed at the energy and commitment of her hustle, but tonight I’m tired and irritable.

I stand sweating under the weight of the coats. My feet ache in my own hooker high heels (I had noticed, with some embarrassment, that Madison Blake’s were not dissimilar from mine).

For the last hour, having exhausted any even half friends of my own, I have had to pretend to be fascinated by people I will never see again – if I’m lucky. I’ve scraped the bottom of my social barrel. And my cheeks are aching from the effort of laughing my most convincing fake laugh.

I’ve used up every tip from every women’s magazine article ever written on the subject of ‘How to enjoy awful parties’.

There have been millions of those stories written.

I might even have written a few of them myself for FILLE.

Suddenly there is an explosion of applause and laughter. A Hugh Grant look-alike is doing what Hugh Grant allegedly used to do at parties like these in the ’90s: he’s sprung like a dizzy mountain goat onto a table, dropped his jeans and is waving his genitalia around cheerily, at nose level, almost in time with the music.

Only an amateur would think things would – or could – get better after that.

It’s Time To Go.

But Claudia Hemmingway, my golden ticket into this party, who, an hour earlier, had agreed that it was definitely time for both of us to leave, has since been swept away on a wave of admirers. As I scan the crowd for her shiny blonde head, I think of how there are both pros and cons to having an Official, Authentic ‘It Girl’ as a friend.

‘Red Hot and Cool’ (according to the Daily Mail), Claudia is currently being fêted as ‘The Nation’s New Darling’ by the UK’s tabloids, for good reason. Ambitious and driven, the daughter of ‘tragic ’70s supermodel’ Victoria Hemmingway, she is ‘heating up the red carpets’, according to the same tabloids. Her initial success came from her short career as a singer-songwriter, but before long she had starred in and shone as the star of a critically acclaimed indie British film. After wrapping her first major US action movie at Pinewood, she is soon to set off to Hollywood and what every pundit possible agrees is sure to be a stellar future. As her closest friend and most frequent Plus One, I am the beneficiary of many perks by association of our association. In Claudia’s company, a civilian such as myself can sweep past queues and be gifted with immediate access into every VIP section, anywhere.

I met Prince William when he had hair. I spent a weekend in Sussex watching Harry trying to teach Claudia how to play polo.

My mother, once famously Miss Bergvliet 1972 back home in Cape Town, had levitated with joy at that news. I had long suspected that her finest hour had been the moment when, as a long-time passionate and loyal subscriber to weekly gossip magazines, she opened her precious copy one week and noticed me, her only daughter (just a face in the crowd, but no matter), at a polo match. ‘In the presence of their highnesses!’ she had sighed with rapturous pleasure over the phone. No journalism awards, university degrees or career success would ever equal the pride she felt in my achievements at that moment. She was the person who had said, when I had told her of my career plans: ‘That’s such a smart choice for a girl! After all, you can interview lots of rich and famous men and perhaps end up marrying one of them.’

The ladies at her tennis club heard all about the ‘Princes William and Harry Weekend’ for years.

Courtesy of Claudia, I’ve hopped on and off helicopters and private jets, and dropped into the most beautiful and expensive destinations; I’ve skied, played polo myself and scuba-dived. I’ve partied and played with the kind of people most of us only read about in gossip columns – rich beyond fantasy people, successful and famous people, the nicer of whom give their staff real (though entry-level) Rolexes or their gently worn designer handbags for Christmas.

I wasn’t born to this.

In contrast my parents’ suburban middle-class South African life was a mostly dull and disappointing affair, playing out in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. During the week my father worked at a job he considered below his abilities. (‘The only decent jobs are reserved for the blacks, what a fucking disgrace,’ he would grumble, with no acknowledgement of how, for most of his working life pre-1994 the very same jobs were solely available to white people.)

My mother played tennis and read gossip magazines.

She also loved her soaps. ‘The American ones, not those terrible South African ones. I mean, who cares about what goes on in the lives of …’ She’d let her voice tail off before actually saying the words ‘black people’, but that’s what she meant.

My parents filled their weekends with sport and joined their friends and neighbours in devout and pious prayer to their white-bearded God, and his son, in their Anglican church every Sunday. It seemed to me that they filled the rest of their leisure time with bitter complaints about ‘the blacks’ who were ‘ruining everything’.

As a teenager I would sit silently at the dining room table and listen to their and their friends’ alcohol-fuelled conversations about crime, about how the schools, the hospitals and the buses ‘had worked better under apartheid’. (‘Say what you like, but you didn’t wait all day to renew your passport.’) Other favoured subjects, guaranteed to get all of them raising their voices and thumping the table, included: ‘How often do you see a white man accused of hijacking, or rape, or robbery? Now come on, be honest!’ And ‘I’m not a racist but … you’ve got to agree that the beaches were cleaner back in the old days’, and ‘It’s a scandal that they get all the places at UCT Medical School/the South African cricket team/become CEOs when their marks are nowhere near as good as our kids’.

After each course my mother would ring a bell and Xoliswa, their domestic worker (who Mom and her friends called ‘the maid’, or ‘Beauty’, because they struggled to remember and pronounce her name, and who called my mother ‘Madam’ and my father ‘Master’, because she was told to), would arrive to clear the dishes.

Their voices would drop in her presence, but as soon as she left the room my father would complain about how clumsy she was and my mother would mention her laziness and remark that you couldn’t trust ‘them’ around your jewellery.

Completing an economics and politics degree at the University of Cape Town had further complicated my relationship with my parents, and with my home.

My ‘white liberal bullshit’ was greeted with as much enthusiasm by my parents as it was by the black students in whose company I found myself for the first time at university.

It had not taken much encouragement for me to board a plane for London a week after graduation.

Forging a successful career and being befriended by the glittering and glamorous Claudia Hemmingway along the way had seemed like a first-class ticket away from my past.

Tonight I was a long way away from Bergvliet in Cape Town.

Chapter 3

Being Claudia’s friend also had its downside. Like Prince Philip, as a Plus One to a star on the rise, your officially designated position is always just a few steps behind the Queen. Your role is Best Supporting Pal. There is probably an award for it somewhere. The Queen is the Main Event. You, her handmaiden, are not. The Plus One gets elbowed in a crowd.

It’s the Plus One’s job to collect and carry coats, guard the drinks, find the taxi.

No matter how successful I was in my own career, my achievements didn’t count for very much when in the shadow of Claudia’s.

You need robust self-esteem and an excellent sense of humour in this unofficial job. Mine has taken enough punishment tonight.

Predictably, Claudia has been swept up in the flood of attention and admiration that always seems to find her at events like this. Finally, I spot her. She is settled in for the long run, enthroned on a white leather couch in the VIP section. Of course. Claudia is never alone in public. She might not quite be on the A-List yet, but her star is on the rise. And nothing attracts new best friends like freshly minted fame. I’ve learned to find Claudia in crowds by seeking her out amongst the pilot fishes in the world of celebrity: hangers-on, sponges, wannabes, her ‘people’, the paparazzi, bloggers, bottom feeders and the rest. There are two people in Claudia’s world currently who pre-date this recent flood of fame. I suppose I should count myself lucky to be one of them.

I’ve interviewed hundreds of celebrities during my tenure at FILLE. Celebrities are the rocket fuel of our industry. Without a recognisable face or body on the cover of our magazine, without an interview that promises (but rarely delivers) some sort of disclosure, a new snippet of something salacious or an exclusive, our sales would be even worse than they currently were. ‘A likeable, though devastatingly hot starlet in jeopardy, not of her own making’, was the algorithm we applied to our choice of cover stars.

The pressure to be likeable, ‘hot’ and in jeopardy (though simul­taneously successful and well-groomed and, of course, NEVER ‘fat’) at the same time made many of those starlets almost mentally ill, in my opinion. Proximity had bred in me a certain kind of hypocritical contempt.

But Claudia … Claudia was different.

We had met when I had interviewed her for FILLE. Of course. How else does an ‘It Girl’/‘B Lister with a bullet’ meet someone who’s not even on the guest list?

She’d seemed quiet and fragile when I first met her in the Groucho Club. I’d first noticed the artfully messy thick and yet glossy ash-blonde hair. She had huge dark blue eyes, rimmed with her trademark ’60s black eye-liner and mascara. She had skin that looked as if a make-up artist had spent hours applying the world’s most expensive cosmetic cover-up to achieve a perfect ‘natural’ result. She had laughed when I had asked what foundation she was using – her answer ‘Skin courtesy of genetics’ – as you are obliged to when you are interviewing a woman for a women’s magazine.

I’d probably stared. And lost track of my thoughts and questions. Charisma and beauty can do that to you.

Claudia had warmed up after that. I looked at my notes afterwards and saw I’d scrawled ‘Decent SOH’. And ‘Self-deprecating’, and ‘Not THICK’.

You can’t take any of those characteristics for granted when inter­viewing celebrities.

We’d met on a typically cold, dank and miserable February London afternoon. But the drinks were flowing inside Groucho’s and the tea-time interview slipped into early evening. Soon the two of us were laughing. And chatting. As if we had known each other for ever.

It was then that she told me just a little about her background. But even ‘just a little’ was quite an admission for a woman who was about to become very, very famous. Stars don’t share anything even faintly intimate. But after her second (or third?) Prosecco she’d accidentally found herself confiding in me that her mother had only really seemed to ‘swim into focus when I did something that important people noticed.’ Almost without warning, after telling me something totally innocuous about how marvellous her long-time manager and agent had been, through ‘some very grim years’, and what a rock and how supportive he was, she had added, wistfully, ‘Thanks to my marvellous parents, my entire childhood was all a bit awful, to be honest.’

After sharing that, she’d closed up quickly. She’d smiled, picked up her £1 000 handbag, wrapped herself in her shawl made of gossamer and Siberian unicorn and hugged me and said, ‘We must stay in touch’ (… which is what some celebrities say when exiting an interview that has overstepped its protective boundaries; or when dismissing civilians from their presence, knowing that your lives will never intersect again).

But the next day Claudia had called me to ask me politely – ‘Please, darling, please, please’ – not to publish ‘that awful nonsense about my parents.’ And ‘You know … Oh my God, give me a Prosecco and I lose what few brain cells I have …’

So I hadn’t.

And when the neutral, flattering and deathly boring profile and the Sexy, Strong and Successful (as per our tagline) cover pic of her in a breath-taking evening dress worth more than a small house in my home town had been published, she’d called me again to ask me to come out to dinner with her as her way to say thank you. And that was that. We became friends and four years later we were still friends.

Or … she was a star and I was still here, carrying her coat, still wishing I could go home and go to bed.

‘Claudia. CLAUDIA,’ I yell, weaving through the mass of people who surround her. The usual suspects: future glamorous one-night