LEO
“Never explain. Deny!”
Change is overrated. Personally, I like knowing where I stand with people from one day to the next. But change is part of the human makeup. My mum always says it’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind, which is cool, but a lot of girls seem to think it’s also their prerogative to change their entire personality.
Take Holly. Five minutes after handing me a bowl of cereal all the shared conspiracy of our exchanged smiles and pleasant banter on the car journey to her house in the hills was gone. Swept away and replaced by a weird psychoneurosis that brought back memories of Auntie Lucy’s “change.” I’m not exaggerating. Pit bulls used to cross to the other side of the road when they saw my auntie Lucy heading their way.
She claims a woman’s mood swings are part of the complex mystery that makes the opposite sex attractive to men. Personally, I can’t see what part mystery plays in the way Auntie Lucy carries on sometimes—like when she threw her television and fridge out of her council flat window after her last bloke did a runner.
I had imagined Auntie Lucy and Holly to be as different as chalk and cheese, so I was surprised and disappointed when I found out that Holly could also be mysterious.
We’d arrived at her Hollywood Hills mansion and met the gardener—smiles, Ventolin inhalers and handshakes all round.
I told her I couldn’t speak Spanish, but that’s only partly true. I mean, you don’t spend as much time clubbing on Ibiza as I do and not pick up a bit. I wouldn’t say I’m fluent or anything, but I know enough to hear her warning the gardener to keep an eye on me.
So, having established Joseph’s role as her protector, we went into the house—all minimal and Zen-like, as you’d expect. And that’s good. I don’t like a girl who’s into “stuff.” You know—all that ornaments and clutter shit.
I like a place where you can stretch out without knocking over an antique smoking pipe from Egypt that turns out to be worth more than your entire education—which admittedly, in my case, was provided free of charge by the State.
I was well impressed by Holly’s decor. All clean lines and space. Tifanie’s apartment would fit in one of the cupboards. Holly made me an ice pack and borrowed some cereal for me from her gardener. She tried to palm me off with a wheat-grass shot, but after the gut rot I got from Kev’s beer I stood firm and demanded Cap’n Crunch. After twenty minutes with the ice pack we agreed that my nose wasn’t broken, just bruised. Very bruised. Along with the rest of my face.
She gave me some Tylenol and said she had to make a call. I was starting to think I could get used to this life as I munched my way through three bowls of cereal. When she didn’t come back after a while I thought I’d check out her music collection and ended up in the dining room. You can tell a lot about a girl by the music she listens to.
When Holly came in from her call, the expression on her face was pure poison. “Would you like a shower?” she asked crisply.
“Maybe later,” I agreed, sniffing my pits noisily—my idea of a joke.
I didn’t want to use her shower. It was too intimate. Intimate’s good, but the wrong sort of intimate is bad. In my experience, using girls’ bathrooms has never left girls with a warm feeling about me. I always do something wrong. Leave a sock on the shower rail, hair scum in the drain or the toothpaste lid off the tube.
“I think you should,” she persisted. The edge to her voice was so sharp you could shave on it.
I stayed casual. “Yeah, cheers. Maybe later, eh?”
“Only, I think I should tell you that you do, well…more or less…smell.”
“Me? Smell?” I gasped—as if shocked. Remembering Kev’s philosophy of, Never explain. Deny! I sniffed my pits again and shook my head. “I don’t smell, do I?” I asked, all innocence.
I know it was crap of me, but she was cute when she cringed. It made me like her again, the idea that a rich, gorgeous girl like her could feel self-conscious around me. “Erm, well, yeah. Just a bit,” she admitted.
I laughed. “Chill, will you? I’m just winding you up. I stink and I know it. I was out all last night checking out this new club, and after that Kev dragged me to this late-night dive in Hollywood. Drank a skinful. Guess I was too knackered to have a shower when I got home.”
“Home? You have a home?”
She thinks I’m homeless.
“It’s not a palace like this, or nothing. I share a lounge room with two others. Opposite where you were mugged, as it happens—the Hollymount Apartments?” By now I’d decided to relent on the shower thing. It was sweet of her to offer, really. I’d just have to remember to clean up after me and remember where things went.
“Well, we won’t go into that. I was thinking that you might prefer to take a shower outside by the pool, to take the worst off.”
The worst off? “Yeah…sure…whatever.”
I thought that was the end of it. The shower battle won, I hoped we could have a laugh and go back to where we were in the car. Me fancying her, and her giving me the impression that she didn’t think I was a complete waste of space.
Instead she went into a feverish lecture on chairs and how I was defiling hers.
“Defiling?” No one had ever used the word “defiling” about me before. If you’d asked me I would have said the term was like blasphemy—reserved for those religious fanatics who stand on street corners. Anyway, so Holly started banging on about her precious table and chairs. About them being “art.” See, what I hadn’t realized is that they weren’t chairs in the true sense of the word. They looked like chairs, and felt like chairs when you sat on them, but they were designed by Gunter Gurt, which makes a big difference, apparently.
If, like me, you’ve never heard of this Gunter bloke, he’s a German guy who’s about to be the next big thing in furniture design. Actually, he is really a sculptor more than a furniture-maker, and the “chairs” (use the word loosely) are actually works of creative genius. Are you impressed? Nor was I.
Faced with a barrage of lectures about German design, I figured the best defense was no defense at all. It was a tactic I used to great effect on Mum and Auntie Lucy as a kid, and later on with any girl who confused me with emotions and feelings. I kept eating my cereal, thinking she’d eventually chill and we could go back to how we were in the car.
But then she did this pursed thing with her mouth that my mum used to do when people tried to get her to knock a few quid off something at her stall—right before she said, “Now you’re trying to fleece me!” When my mum gave that look, it was best for them to just put down whatever it was they were handling and move away from the market table as quickly as they could. I spooned the last of the cereal into my mouth, put the bowl down and stood up as if to leave.
Her tone was edgy. “I thought you’d eat it in the kitchen.” I was still chewing a wodge of cereal that was far more than my mouth could manage, so I nodded to show that I was taking her expectations on board. “Only it’s a lot easier,” she persisted.
“Easier than what?” Like a lot of the shit that pours out of my mouth, I regretted the remark instantly. Not least of all because I was still chewing, and as I spoke small bits of potassium-enriched cardboard and dried fruit flew out of my mouth and landed all over Gunter’s great work of genius.
That was when her eyes started popping out of their sockets, and she started taking in huge gulps of air and holding her hands against her chest like corpses do when they’re in their coffins at wakes. I almost wet myself I was so scared. What if she died?
Images of me trying to explain to the cops how a bum like me was in the home of an up-till-then healthy celebrity when she keeled over and died flashed through my brain. This was bad news. No passport, no money and a dead celebrity on my hands—and my smashed-up face wouldn’t look too great in the police mug shots either. These thoughts all took less than a nanosecond, of course, and I immediately took action.
The deep breaths might just mean she was hyperventilating, with the stress of everything, so I grabbed the nearest thing to a paper bag I could find, which as it happens was the inside of the cereal box. Technically it wasn’t a paper bag, more a wax-paper sleeve, but now wasn’t the time for technicalities. Her eyes were still bulging and her breathing was still sounding bad and the similarity to corpses in coffins was increasing every moment.
Apart from one time at a club in London, when this fat guy passed out in the toilets on E, I’ve never had to resuscitate anyone before. As it was, my attempt was unsuccessful—and that was with help from the club’s in-house medics. So, with one thing and another, I had a lot to prove here.
Grabbing the carton of cereal and emptying the contents onto the floor, I wrenched the wax sleeve from the carton, shoved it over Holly’s mouth, held her head firmly and told her to breathe into the bag very deeply.
What I wasn’t expecting was a struggle.
The next thing I knew I was in a headlock and she had my balls twisted up inside her fist.
“What the fuck are you doing,” I squeaked.
“What am I doing? What the hell were you doing?”
“I was trying to get you to breathe into the bag,” I gasped. “I thought you were hyperventilating!”
“I was taking deep cleansing breaths.” She released her hold on my balls, but kept me in the lock.
“Are you going to let me go?” I asked, in as nonconfrontational a way as I could after a few minutes had elapsed.
“Are you going to try anything like that again?”
“Only if you start hyperventilating again.”
She let me go. “Conchita will be furious when she sees this mess!”
I looked around at the cereal strewn all over the dining room. “I wanted to help,” I tried to explain, cradling my testicles in my hand. “Shit, that hurt. Did you have to give me such a literal bollocking?”
“I thought you were trying to kill me! I thought you’d gone psycho.” She looked mortified by her behavior. “Oh, God, have I really hurt you?” she asked.
When I nodded she laughed. Because my balls hurt I confined myself to smiling broadly, but I still asked her what the fuck she was taking a deep cleansing breath for anyway?
“I do it whenever I get stressed. My producer has just warned me that you might try to kill me.”
“And you thought I’d choose this as my weapon?” I asked, holding up the crushed waxed sleeve still crunched up in my hand. I noticed that it was ripped; it must have torn when I’d pulled it out of the box, so basically it would have been useless anyway.
I was useless.
Holly was still laughing—and even though my balls ached something rotten, and I felt useless, and she probably thought I was insane, all I could think was—She touched my balls! Holly Klein, the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met in my life, actually touched my balls.