Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination

  They stepped out on the deck where le tout fashionista and musico Miami monde was artfully arranged around a selection of wrong-sized furniture, and spilling down some steps into the garden below, where white-covered comfy chairs, giant indoor table lamps and cabanas surrounded the turquoise-lit pool.

  “Have you tried the Devorée martini? You got the press release about the chef who’s prepared the special dishes we’ll be sampling tonight?” Olivia let Melissa’s autowitter wash over her. Usually, she tried to let annoying people do their thing and hoped they’d buzz off as soon as possible. Night had fallen with tropical suddenness. The landscaping was lit with flaming torches, and beyond was the ocean, crashing in the darkness. Or maybe, she thought, it was an air-conditioning unit. There was something odd about this party. It felt controlling and tense, like Melissa. The wind was lifting press releases and serviettes, ruffling dresses and hair. There were people around who didn’t fit, moving and watching too anxiously for Party Funland. She focused on a group in the far corner, trying to figure them out. The women were actress slash model types: big hair, long legs, small dresses. The men were harder to place: dark-haired, olive-skinned, high mustache quotient. They were making a show of being rich, but they weren’t quite getting it right. They looked like an advert from Debenham’s in-house magazine.

  “If you’ll excuse me, there’s someone I need to bring over. Oh look, there’s Jennifer . . .” Melissa powered off, still talking, leaving Olivia standing on her own.

  For a throwback second, she felt residual feelings of insecurity. She stamped on them hard, as if they were a beetle or cockroach. Olivia used to hate going to parties. She was too sensitive to the signals given off by other people to glide through any social gathering unscathed. She liked to have proper conversations, not mindless insincere moments, and she could never quite master the art of moving smoothly from group to group. As a result, she used to spend entire evenings feeling either hurt or rude. Dramatic events, however, made her decide she would no longer give a shit about anything. Over time, she had painstakingly erased all womanly urges to question her shape, looks, role in life, or effect upon other people. She would watch, analyze and conform to codes as she observed them, without allowing them to affect or compromise her own identity.

  One of her favorites on her Rules for Living list was “No one is thinking about you. They’re thinking about themselves, just like you.” This was a particularly useful rule at parties. It meant, by implication, that no one was watching you either. Therefore, you could just stand on your own and observe, and no one would think you were a sad act. No one, for example, was thinking now that she was Olivia-no-mates-Joules just because she was on her own. Or worse, Rachel-no-mates-Pixley. No one would say, “Rachel Pixley, you’re a dropout from Worksop Comprehensive. Leave the Delano Hotel this instant and go to the Post House Hotel on the Nottingham bypass.”

  When Rachel Pixley was a normal schoolgirl, living with two parents in Worksop, coming home to tea in a warm house, she used to think that an orphan was a glamorous thing to be, like Alona the Wild One in Bunty or Mandy comics—an orphan who was wild and free and galloped her horse bareback along the shoreline. For a long time after it all happened, she thought she had been punished for this fantasy.

  When Rachel was fourteen, her mother, father and brother were run over by a lorry on a zebra crossing. Rachel, having lagged behind buying sweets and a magazine, saw the whole thing. She was put in the care of her unmarried Auntie Monica, who had cats and read newspapers all day in her nightdress. Her flat smelt of something indefinable and bad, but despite the fag ash that festooned her like snow, and her eccentric and inaccurate application of lipstick, Auntie Monica was beautiful and had been brilliant. She had studied at Cambridge and still played the piano wonderfully—when she wasn’t drunk. Playing the piano when drunk, as Rachel came to realize during the time she spent chez Auntie Monica, was like driving when drunk—inadvisable, if not criminal.

  Rachel had had a boyfriend at school who was a couple of years above her but seemed much older than everyone else. His father was a nightwatchman and a maniac. Roxby was not exactly good-looking, but he was his own man. He used to work nights as a bouncer in Romeo and Juliet’s. And when he came home—because by this time he and Rachel were living together in a room above the Hao Wah Chinese takeaway—he used to sit at the computer investing his bouncer earnings in stocks and shares.

  Rachel, who had only ever understood money as something you earned in very small quantities by working, was initially resistant to the notion of making money out of money. “Money doesn’t buy happiness,” her hardworking father had told her. “If you work hard and you’re honest and kind, then nothing can harm you.” But it had. A lorry had run over him. So Rachel threw in her lot with Roxby and worked every weekend at Morrisons’ supermarket, and did evening shifts after school in a corner shop run by a Pakistani family, and let him invest the money for her. When she turned sixteen, her father’s life-insurance policy was turned over to her. She had twenty thousand pounds to invest. It was the beginning of the eighties. She was on the way to becoming, if not a rich woman, at least a woman of independent means.

  When she was seventeen, Roxby announced that he was gay and moved to the canal district of Manchester. And Rachel, fed up with knock after knock, took a long hard look at life. She had seen her friends’ older sisters, radiant and triumphant, flashing minuscule H. Samuel’s solitaires on their engagement fingers, spending months obsessed with dresses, flowers and event-planning, only to be found a couple of years later in the shopping center, fat, broke and hassled, pushing prams through the rain, moaning about being hit, or belittled, or left. And she thought: Sod that. She started with her name. “Olivia” sounded glam. And the attractiveness of the word “Joules” was the only thing she remembered from physics lessons. I’m all I’ve got, she thought. I’m going to be complete in myself. I’m going to work out my own good and bad. I’m going to be a top journalist or an explorer and do something that matters. I’m going to search this shitty world for some beauty and excitement and I’m going to have a bloody good time.

  And this, Olivia Joules thought, leaning back against the Delano pillar, is a lot more beautiful and exciting than Worksop. No one is watching you, just go with the flow and enjoy it. Unfortunately for the Rule for Living, however, somebody was watching her. As she continued to scan the party, a pair of eyes met hers in a second of highly charged interest, then looked away. She also looked away, then glanced back. The man was standing alone. He was dark and rather aristocratic-looking. He was wearing a suit that was a bit too black and a shirt that was a bit too white—too flash for the Delano. And yet he didn’t look like a flash person. There was a stillness about him. He turned, and suddenly his eyes met hers again with that thrilling unspoken message which sometimes transmits itself across a room and says, “I want to fuck you too.” That was all that was needed: a look. No need to flirt, to maneuver, to chat. Just that moment of recognition. Then all you had to do was follow, like in a dance.

  “Everything going okay?” It was the hyperactive PR woman. Olivia, realizing she was staring lustfully into space, remembered that she had a piece to file by tomorrow and had better get on with it. “There’s lots of people I want you to meet,” said Melissa, starting to bustle Olivia along. “Have you had something to eat? Let me see if we’ve got some people for you to talk to. Have you met Devorée?”

  Putting thoughts of shagging strangers firmly to one side, she turned her attention to the business of quote-gathering. Everyone wanted to be in British Elan and the launch was easy pickings for sound bites. After an hour or so she had vaguely face-cream-based quotes from Devorée, Chris Blackwell, the manager of the Delano, a couple of handsome men whom she suspected were for hire, the guy who did the list at Tantra, the PR for Michael Kors and P. Diddy. It was more than enough for the solitary paragraph which would inevitably prove the sum total of Elan’s coverage. Moving on to the Sunday Times “Cool Mi
ami” piece, she quickly filled her notebook with the grandmother of one of the models, who had lived on the South Shore Strip twenty years before it became fashionable again; a cop who claimed to have been on the scene after the Versace shooting and was plainly lying and—la pièce de résistance—Gianni Versace’s former cleaning lady.

  “Olivia?” Damn, it was Melissa again. “Can I introduce you to the creator of Devorée’s Crème de Phylgie? Though, of course, Devorée has selected the ingredients personally herself.”

  Olivia let out an odd noise. It was the man who had been watching her. He was a compelling mixture of soulful and powerful: finely drawn features, a straight nose, fine, arched brows, hooded brown eyes.

  “This is Pierre Ferramo.” She was disappointed. The name sounded like something you’d find in gilt-plastic faux handwriting, pinned on an overpriced tie in a duty-free shop.

  “Ms. Joules.” He was wearing a ridiculously over-the-top gold watch, but his hand was rougher than she expected and the handshake strong.

  “Pleased to meet you,” she said. “Congratulations on Crème de Phylgie. Does it really contain sea slugs?”

  He didn’t laugh, he glinted. “Not the sea slugs themselves, only an essence: an oil secreted by their skin.”

  “It sounds like something you’d want to wipe off rather than put on.”

  “Does it, indeed?” He raised his eyebrows.

  “I hope you won’t be writing that in your piece,” trilled Melissa with a brittle laugh.

  “I’m sure Ms. Joules will write with infinite subtlety and grace.”

  “Infinite,” she said.

  There was an extremely charged pause. Melissa looked from one to the other then started twittering. “Oh look, she’s leaving. Will you excuse us? Pierre, I just want you to say hello to one of our very special guests before she leaves.”

  “Very well,” he said wearily, murmuring to Olivia as he left, “sea slugs indeed.”

  * * *

  Melissa introduced Olivia to more of her client base: two members of a boy band called Break whose gimmick was surfing and who had a “Beach Boys meets Radiohead fusion vibe.” Olivia had never heard of the band, but the two boys were rather sweet. Beneath the surf-white hair, their complexions displayed a fascinating mixture of sunburnt crispiness and acne. She listened as they chattered on about their careers, Beavis-and-Butthead-type nervous sniggers punctuating a fragile veneer of bored arrogance. “We’re auditioning for parts in this, like, movie? With surfers?” Their strange interrogatory intonation seemed to suggest that someone as old as Olivia might not understand words like “movie” or “surfers.” “It’s going to launch the single off the album?”

  Two hits and they’d be off, but they didn’t know it. She felt like giving them a motherly chat, but instead she just listened and nodded, watching Pierre Ferramo out of the corner of her eye.

  “That’s the guy who’s, like, the producer? Of the movie?” whispered one of the boys.

  “Really?”

  They all watched as Ferramo made his stately way towards a mysterious-looking group of dark men and models. He moved gracefully, languid almost to the point of being fey, but exuding a sense of tremendous latent power. He reminded her of someone. The group parted like the Red Sea to receive him, as if he were a guru or god rather than a face-cream creator slash producer slash whatever. He settled himself down gracefully, crossing one leg over the other, revealing an expanse of bare leg, black shiny slip-ons and thin silky gray socks. A couple close to the group rose to leave their sofa.

  “Shall we sit a bit nearer?” said Olivia, nodding towards the empty seats.

  It was a silly, too-big sofa, so Olivia and the surf boys had almost to climb onto it, and then either virtually lie down or sit with their legs dangling like children. Ferramo looked up as she sat and graciously inclined his head. She felt her senses quicken and looked away. She breathed slowly, remembering her scuba-diving training: just keep breathing, deep breaths, be cool at all times.

  She turned back to the boys, crossing her legs and smoothing her hand across her thigh. She moistened her lips, laughed and played for a second with the delicate diamond and sapphire cross at her throat. She could feel his eyes on her. She raised her lashes, preparing to look straight into those penetrating dark eyes. Oh. Pierre Ferramo was staring down the cleavage of the tall, unbelievably beautiful Indian model on his other side. He said something to her and the two of them rose, his arm around her, his hand on her hip, guiding her away from the table. Olivia looked at one of the spotty boys. He leaned forward and whispered, “It was doing it for me,” and traced a tiny circle with his finger on her thigh. She laughed her deep throaty laugh and closed her eyes. It had been a while.

  Halfway across the terrace, Pierre Ferramo heard Olivia’s laugh and raised his head, like an animal catching a scent. He turned to Melissa, who was hovering at his elbow and murmured a few words to her, then he continued his dignified progress towards the lobby, the tall, silken-haired Indian model at his side.

  As she sipped her apple martini, Olivia was struggling to think who it was that Ferramo reminded her of: the hooded eyes, the sense of intelligence and power, the languid movements.

  She felt a hand on her arm and jumped.

  “Olivia?” It was the wretched Melissa. “Mr. Ferramo would like you to join him for a small private party he is having in his apartment tomorrow night.”

  Olivia could hardly breathe. The small hairs were rising on the back of her neck and her forearms.

  “All right,” she said, brave and resolute, eyes darting this way and that in terror. “I shall be there.”

  Melissa looked at her oddly. “It’s only a party.”

  But Olivia had suddenly realized exactly who Ferramo reminded her of. It was Osama bin Laden.

  4

  If Olivia had not yet brought her overactive imagination to bear, she was at least beginning to recognize the symptoms of a flare-up. As she let herself into her all-white hotel room, she was alive with excitement, mind racing through myriad wild scenarios. She kicked off her sandals, rubbed a blister on her left foot with one hand and reached for the phone to call Barry. Stop, breathe, think, she told herself, replacing the receiver in the nick of time. Don’t be crazy. She sat on her hands and tried to distance herself from her whirling mind.

  But it’s brilliant, the whirling mind continued to tell her. Where better for al-Qaeda to hide than in the center of a hip urban scene? Everyone thought operatives were geeky types: engineers in grungy clothes who lived in grim apartments in Hamburg, or faded thirties terraced houses in faded London suburbs, eating takeaways together, praying in makeshift mosques and faxing their instructions from post offices in Neasden. Al-Qaeda operatives didn’t drink apple martinis in cool hotels wearing Armani. Al-Qaeda operatives didn’t produce movies and have hyperactive PRs to up their profiles. It was the perfect way to forge contacts. It was the perfect cover.

  She jumped up to her laptop and Googled Pierre Ferramo. Hardly anything appeared on the screen. There was an Austrian jeweler in Salzburg who made cheap knockoffs of Fabergé eggs. There was a chain of ladies’ boutiques in the north of England. And Google asked, “Did you mean Ferrari?” But nothing about a film producer or a perfumier, or anything that related to the man she’d met. It didn’t add up. Even “Olivia Joules” would throw up a couple of hundred entries. As her hand crept towards the phone again, she told herself to get a grip, thinking back to the conversation with Barry.

  You’re having an overimaginative attack, she told herself. And it’s certifiably non-PC. Just because someone has dark hair, an accent and reminds you of Osama bin Laden, that’s no reason to decide he’s a terrorist.

  She took a hot bath and fell into a fitful sleep, then awoke suddenly half an hour later hearing Ferramo’s voice again in her head, analyzing the accent. It was hopeless trying to sleep with jet lag. She changed position, moved her head this way and that, her thoughts becoming crazier and crazier. Then she
sat up, glanced at her watch, picked up the phone and dialed.

  “It’s me,” she whispered urgently into the receiver.

  “Olivia, it’s the middle of the bloody night.” An English girl’s voice—posh, confident.

  “It’s not the middle of the night.”

  “Olivia, eight o’clock on a Saturday morning is, to all intents and purposes, the middle of the night.”

  “Sorry, sorry. But it’s important.”

  “Okay, what? Don’t tell me. You’ve discovered Miami is a giant hologram designed by aliens? You’re getting married to Elton John?”

  “No,” said Olivia, smiling in spite of herself. Kate O’Neill was her friend but also the Middle East correspondent for the Sunday Times. Olivia wanted her approval more than she could quite admit to herself.

  “What? Come on.”

  “I can’t sleep. I think I’ve . . . I’ve just got a hunch there might have been some al-Qaeda at that party last night. I met this guy. He kind of reminds me of Osama bin Laden.”

  Kate started laughing. She laughed for quite a long time. Olivia’s shoulders slumped and she blinked rapidly, hurt.

  “Okay,” Kate said eventually. “How drunk are you, exactly?”

  “I am not,” Olivia said indignantly, “drunk.”

  “You’re sure it’s not a resurrected Abraham Lincoln?”

  “Shut up,” said Olivia. “But seriously. Just think about it. Where better could they hide than in plain sight where no one’s expecting to see them?”

  “I could think of, ooh, three, maybe four hundred places, just off the top of my head. Who is the guy? Is he six foot four, late forties?”