She wasn’t an angel and she wasn’t actually from Harlow. But Angel of Bishop’s Stortford didn’t scan as well in the press. Noor was signed by a record company when she was fourteen – this was pre-streaming, when CDs still ruled and there was money in the industry’s coffers – released her first album at sixteen and her second just before her seventeenth birthday. The quality was astonishing given the speed with which they were recorded. Most of that was down to Noor’s voice. The young girl could transmute at will, aurally at least, into Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin or Nina Simone. Add to that an ear for pop hooks and Noor was quite the package, appealing across a wide demographic.
She also looked great: tall, sharp-boned and funky. Her dad was an engineer from Grenada, her mother a teacher from Switzerland. She had been one of the first teen pop stars to resurrect the Afro and flaunt her many piercings, which she preferred to tattoos on the grounds that they were more easily reversed.
I was pulled in during the time when the tabloids went sour on her. You know, after about ten minutes. She had turned eighteen and was hanging out in clubs and bars. There were a few stumbling-from-the-Groucho-at-two-in-the-morning shots and a couple of her bleary-eyed and hungover having breakfast with her disapproving manager.
And then the Angel of Harlow got a boyfriend and wouldn’t play ball. Who was he? How did they meet? Have they had sex yet? All of which was met with a resounding: fuck off. One of the rags was offering fifty grand for an ID and an interview with Noor’s Nookie, as they’d called him.
So I had been roped in as a media blocker; someone to stand between the paps and Noor. I might not have had the bulk, but I was young enough – still in my twenties, with a young child and a prospective husband called Paul – to get into the same clubs as Noor and her pals without attracting too much attention. Sometimes a ‘lump’, as we call the big, beefy refrigerators some stars prefer as minders, is like a curiosity magnet. I was also new to the game and, I am ashamed to say now, I displayed a vestigial misogyny from my army days. As I said, I was young.
So there I was, sitting in the back of a stretch limo, three teenage girls opposite me, and no Mr Nookie, mysterious or not, in sight. In the centre of the trio was Noor, playing on her new iPhone 3G and cooing every time she found a fresh function. Like she would ever really have to use a spirit level.
To Noor’s right was Kassie, her bestie from school. Kassie was – and this is an example of me being very unsisterly, but here we go – the archetypal fat friend, so beloved of Hollywood. She was squeezed into some strapless, stretchy-yet-clingy material that she was always tugging out of one crevice or another, or pulling up over her considerable cleavage. Her cheeks were already red from the champagne she had necked out of the bottle she was holding, and her eyes had what I’d suspected was a Colombian-sourced sheen to them.
On Noor’s left was Romana, aka Romy. She was like a darker-skinned proto-Kardashian – again, this was before that particular plague escaped from the lab – with cheekbones so prominent they cast shadows down her face, a permanent pout and a striking aquiline nose, perfect for when she wanted to look down it at you. I’d quite liked her. She’d always acted as if something about the whole set-up smelled fishy. She was also wearing a similar little black dress to me, except hers never seemed to bunch or wrinkle whereas mine felt like it was only a single evolutionary step above a pound-store bin liner. Which was unfair as it was from Whistles, which must be several evolutionary steps up.
We were heading for a club in Mayfair, driving there from the Sanderson, Noor’s second-favourite hotel after the Portobello. It was fifteen minutes if traffic was light, down Regent Street, along Conduit, right at Berkeley Square. But we weren’t going directly to the club, which was on Albemarle Street. It had been set up with the deliberate intention to mimic/rival Mahiki and, although the newbie hadn’t bagged any royal princes yet, they had enough visiting celebs to make it worthwhile for some of the paparazzi to divide their time between the two clubs.
We wanted to avoid them.
To that end, there was another way into the new club from Stafford Street, through the premises of a personal trainer who catered to the time-poor, monied rich, including the odd pop star. Of course, the limo sort of gave the game away and I’d argued against using it. But Kassie had decided she never ever wanted to ride in anything but a pap-magnet again. And Noor had indulged her, over my objections.
Soon after we’d set off, I had issued some instructions.
‘Right, the idea is that we get dropped opposite the entrance to Joe Roberts’ place. It’s down the steps. There will be someone waiting to take you through to the entrance to the club. It opens directly into the VIP room.’ I had already scoped the place out while Noor was having a nap after a morning of radio and press interviews. Kassie and Romy also needed a kip, having run themselves ragged executing a harrowing Bond Street shopping sprint. ‘So, when we stop, don’t stick around to admire the view. There isn’t one. Straight in. I’ll be right behind you, just in case.’
‘Yes, Miss Wylde,’ said Kassie, giggling.
‘Are you coming in with us?’ asked Romy, making a valiant effort to keep the horror from her voice. ‘To the VIP area?’
‘I’ll be around,’ I said. I didn’t add that what happened to Kassie and Romy was not my concern, unless it impinged on my client. They could have sex in the toilets with a donkey for all I cared.
Always protect the Principal.
‘If I say leave, Noor, don’t ask questions. Just come with me. You two follow if you want to. The club has its own security and they’re pretty good. We’ve got a safe area set out, and we’ll have Vic parked up for a fast exit.’ Vic was the limo driver, an old-school chauffeur-cum-heavy who had done the job since the days of Led Zeppelin.
The stories he could tell.
In fact, he did, some of them at least, in a memoir called Rock’n’Roll Getaway Driver, a few years back. Sadly, the lawyers had gutted it, so the most salacious stories ended up on the cutting-room floor. Or in a safe somewhere.
‘Wasn’t like this when we used to go to Marlon’s in Harrow,’ said Kassie, playing with the various controls on her armrest. For a second, Inner City’s ‘Good Life’ boomed out at a volume that threatened to blow the speakers. She apologised and turned it down.
‘Well, Noor wasn’t worth millions to a record company when you were going to Marlon’s,’ I said. It was the record company paying my bill. Actually, that wasn’t quite true. The record company had hired me, but eventually Noor would find herself footing the bill for me, the limo, Vic, the champagne, the club bar bill, maybe even the snowstorm up Kassie’s nostrils. One day, Noor would wonder where her generous advance had gone.
You can usually see enough out of a heavily tinted limo window to make out people gawping, trying to figure out who’s inside. This was before camera phones became ubiquitous, but still there were a few futile shots towards the glass as we slowed at the lights at the top of Regent Street.
Just as we were lining up for the right turn, a blast of cold night air hit me. The roof panel had been slid back and, before I could stop her, Kassie was through it, arms waving in the air.
She began to whoop at the top of her voice and wave the champagne bottle. Then she began to sing. Or, more accurately, wail. ‘Goodlifegoodlifegoodlife. GOOD LIFE!’
There was a thud on the window next to me. A snail-trail of froth was smeared down the glass. Someone had thrown a can. I wasn’t certain I blamed them.
‘Kassie, get in,’ I said.
‘Goodlifegoodlifegoodlife. GOOD LIFE!’
‘Kassie, now.’
I heard some lads jeering or cheering at her, I couldn’t be sure which. But we were crawling up to the right turn and exposed to the world. A thought reinforced when the next half-drunk can of beer plopped like a slam-dunk into the car and spewed all over the leather seat next to me.
I lost a little of my PPO cool at that point, duck-walked across to her side of the cabin and pulled Kassie down. ‘Close the roof!’ I yelled at Noor.
As I grabbed hold of Kassie’s waist and pulled, that pesky elasticated material decided to ping down, unleashing her breasts in a blancmange of white flesh. As I yanked her away from the sunroof, she staggered as one of her heels bent under her and she lurched on top of me. I managed to shuffle a few steps back to reach my seat before collapsing with her full weight on me. It was like being attacked by an albino boxing kangaroo.
‘Get off me, you lezza!’ she’d cried as we had slithered on the wet leather. ‘I’ll do you like a fucking kipper.’
Exactly what that entailed I didn’t know, so I gave her a little slap. ‘Behave.’
‘You hit me!’
‘Not yet.’
I managed to push her away and across to her own seat, where she set about corralling her escaped prisoners back into captivity. Noor and Romy couldn’t speak for laughing at whatever the former was holding up for them to view. Noor, I realised, had found the camera function on her phone. I’d made a mental note to get that off her and delete the evidence before the night was out.
We’d ridden the rest of the way to the club in silence, the odd outburst of giggles apart.