Bad Sisters Read online

  In the summer hiatuses from Cooking up Murder, Nicky had taken second lead in an action movie and played the love interest in a Kate Hudson romcom that had had rave reviews. His movie career was well on the way.

  ‘So . . .’ Carmen pointed her cigarette at Deeley, who flinched back from the glowing point being waved in her face. ‘Time to upgrade his personal life. You two have been an item for five years. More than long enough.’

  Every muscle in Deeley’s body froze.

  ‘Do you mean you want us to get married?’ she managed to get out, though she could barely move her lips.

  Nicky and she had talked about this in the past. California had a community property divorce law that split everything down the middle, which would be so disadvantageous to Nicky he wouldn’t consider it. But they wouldn’t have to get married in California; they could elope to Hawaii, say, and make sure that Deeley had signed a cast-iron pre-nup. Deeley had fantasized about it; the dress, the photos, the glamour of it all. They could have IVF kids down the line. She’d thought she would be with Nicky forever; why would he want to swap her for another girl when he, she and Sean all got along so well? Nothing in Deeley’s messed-up childhood had given her any belief in true love or lasting relationships. Being settled with her lovely Nicky, cocooned in luxury, her only job to look beautiful at premieres and parties, was a far better life than she had ever thought she could achieve.

  And Deeley knew that Nicky wouldn’t come out, not as long as he had any kind of viable acting career. Other actors might be doing it, but not Nicky. Being a star was more important to him, and you wouldn’t make it to the A-list as an out gay man. Not yet, anyway.

  Carmen’s expression changed. To Deeley’s absolute horror, Carmen looked . . . pitying.

  ‘Oh, sweetie, no,’ Carmen said, rolling her eyes. ‘No, no, no. Look, you have a killer face and body – I suppose you don’t need brains as well, do you?’

  Deeley bridled furiously, but Carmen was already continuing.

  ‘Upgrade, sweetie. That means someone of a higher status. Get it?’ She gestured to the ceiling with her cigarette to emphasize her point. ‘Nicky definitely needs to be with a woman – officially. We’ve sold him as one of the good guys. Lovely girlfriend by his side. Needs to be in a relationship to be happy.’ She took a long drag. ‘Works very well – he plays a Casanova on TV, but off screen, he’s a devoted boyfriend. The women eat it up with a spoon.’

  He is a devoted boyfriend, Deeley thought ironically. Just not to me.

  ‘So this is what’s going to happen,’ Carmen said, sitting down on the love seat and crossing her superb legs. Her stiletto heels, reaching halfway up her calves with a complicated arrangement of buckles and straps, looked like a cross between fetishwear and deadly weapons. ‘Nicky, regretfully, decides that you’re not The One.’ She raised her manicured hands and put quotation marks around the last two words. ‘It’s been five years – make or break. Does he propose, or does he regretfully move on? Beep! He picks Door B. Very sad, but these things happen. He has to be honest about his feelings.’

  She looked around for an ashtray, didn’t find one, and tapped her ash into a half-full water glass instead.

  ‘So,’ she continued, ‘a natural period of grieving takes place. Various starlets try to console him. He goes on some dates, but it never pans out. Until!’ She smiled like a crocodile. ‘Until he and Jennifer Downs star in an action thriller at the end of the year! Jennifer will be heartbroken too. Her engagement to Joe Jeffreys hasn’t worked out, and they’ve called it quits. Again, the right thing to do, but not easy. Nicky and Jennifer console each other, bond over their break-ups. Next thing you know – bing! They’re an item. They’re engaged. And this time, it goes all the way – they get married. Jennifer’s The One. Happily ever after, with a big shiny red ribbon around the package.’

  It was common knowledge among the small inner circle of actors and movie-makers in Hollywood that Jennifer Downs, beautiful, Oscar-winning Jennifer Downs, was not only gay, but in a long-term relationship with Carmen herself. Deeley knew this perfectly well. She also knew, through the gossip mill, that Carmen had set Jennifer up with Joe Jeffreys, A-list movie star, to counter any speculation about Jennifer’s sexuality. You didn’t get more macho than Joe. He was like the male Deeley.

  ‘What about Joe?’ Deeley asked; she couldn’t help being curious.

  ‘Get this!’ Carmen grinned. ‘He’s in love! For real! Whole big redemption story – she had quite a past. We’re making her into an actress now – it’ll play really well. They’re already engaged. Secretly, of course.’

  She tipped her cigarette into the water glass, where it hissed out.

  ‘It’s all planned out,’ she said. ‘You get your five-year bonus – it’s in the contract – and Nicky’ll kick in a nice little resettlement sum for you as well.’

  ‘Resettlement?’ Deeley whispered.

  ‘You’re going back to the UK, sweetie. That’s the story. You were in LA to be with your man, and it hasn’t worked out. So you need a fresh start. It wouldn’t look good to have you kicking round LA at a loose end. God knows what you’d get up to. We can’t have you falling in and out of clubs on the Strip. Nicky’s got a classy rep to maintain.’

  Deeley sat up straight, her eyes burning with indignation. ‘How dare—’ she started furiously, but Carmen cut her off.

  ‘Please,’ she said, standing up, flicking her hand at Deeley in dismissal. ‘I roll over three girls like you before my morning espresso, OK? You’ve done a great job, and you’ll get paid for it. But let’s face it, you’re – what, twenty-eight now?’

  ‘Twenty-seven,’ Deeley muttered angrily.

  ‘Way over the hill in starlet years. Time to take your earnings, go on home and snag yourself a rich husband who lets you decorate the place like Barbie’s love nest,’ Carmen said snarkily, glancing around her at the pink decor. ‘Oh, and fuck pool boys. I hear that’s your type.’

  ‘I didn’t exactly have much choice who I had sex with, did I?’ Deeley snapped, jumping to her feet in fury. ‘I had to be discreet for Nicky!’

  ‘Whatever,’ Carmen said over her shoulder, already on her way to the door. ‘Just remember, that contract you signed is ironclad. Breathe a word about what really happened with you and Nicky and you’ll have to pay back every cent of what you got over the last five years. Plus I’ll have you arrested. Keep your mouth shut and you’ll be well taken care of.’

  She turned in the doorway, spearing Deeley with a last terrifying black stare.

  ‘And don’t go crying to Nicky. It won’t change anything and it’ll just make him uncomfortable. Believe me, he’s 100 per cent on board with all this. You know how ambitious he is. Who do you think he’s going to listen to – you or me?’

  And with a toss of her black curls, Carmen strode away past the pool to the main house, her spike heels tapping out a metallic tattoo on the stone paving.

  Deeley sank back into her chair, her heart racing like an express train. In the space of a few minutes, her life had been turned completely upside down. Everything she had taken for granted had been picked up by Carmen and thrown into the dustbin.

  She looked around at her beautiful suite of rooms, decorated to her exact specifications; it was a bower fit for a fairy princess, all pink and gold and lavender. How dare Carmen call it a Barbie love nest? It was really sophisticated! Deeley glanced lovingly at the fuschia velvet love seat, piled high with sequinned and beaded throw pillows; at her canopied bed, taffeta curtains tumbling down from a central rose in the ceiling and held back with silk tasselled ties. Her Italian pink-and-gold mosaic-tiled bathroom with its claw-footed bath was like something out of a film. So was the dressing table she was sitting at – every little girl’s dream, mirrored glass with a silver chair in front of it, laden with expensive perfumes.

  But all this was no longer hers. She had just been a temporary tenant, and now she was being evicted.

  Tears sprang to her eyes, b
ut she had to blink them back to avoid ruining her make-up. No matter how upset she was, she knew that she was expected to leave with Nicky tonight, walk the red carpet, put on a perfect front, until Carmen instructed her otherwise. Carmen was holding that extra end-of-contract money over her head, and she’d be watching to make sure Deeley earned it.

  What am I going to do? Deeley thought frantically. Where am I going to go? She didn’t have any ties in London any more; she’d left everyone and everything behind to start a new glamorous life in LA with Nicky. The people she’d known in London had just been club friends, girls who shared the run-down flat in Acton with her, fellow hostesses at trade shows trying to climb the greasy pole of success, all of them elbowing each other out of the way for a shot at an opportunity. No one she cared about or had bonded with enough to keep in touch with them when she moved half a world away.

  She turned slowly in her chair, staring at herself in the dressing table mirror. In the full view, and the two smaller wings on either side, she looked as stunning as ever. Her genetic inheritance was excellent. Her mother had been a complete disaster as far as her maternal responsibilities went, but she had passed on her stunning features to all three of her daughters. Deeley had the big dark McKenna eyes, the smooth creamy McKenna skin, now gently gilded by the LA sun, and the thick dark McKenna hair, which she had lightened to shades of toffee and caramel. Deeley leaned into the mirror, looking for crow’s feet, lifting her hair to see if there were any lines on her forehead. She couldn’t see any. And even though she was

  wearing smoothly blended base and foundation, courtesy of Hervé, when she squinted up her eyes, she still couldn’t spot any lines. But Carmen’s words had sunk into her like heavy lead bullets. Twenty-seven, twenty-eight . . . way over the hill in starlet years.

  Not being able to stay in LA was the killer. She loved it here. Everything was so easy. She wafted along on an invisible cushion of money and fame, every door opening to her without her even having to lift a hand.

  But it won’t be so easy when you’re not dating Nicky, a little voice inside her head told her. You can kiss goodbye to the automatic tables at Nobu and Katsuya and the Ivy. And you won’t get the gold-star treatment in Fred Siegel if you don’t have a no-limits platinum Amex to flash around. If you stayed on here, you’d be last week’s news as soon as you broke up with Nicky. You’d be lucky to get offered a place on one of those shitty VH1 ‘Celebreality’ shows.

  The thought of doing something like that made her shiver; how she and Sean and Nicky had loved to watch those shows, all curled up on Nicky’s huge wraparound beige suede sofa, laughing at the fame-hungry contestants. What a slide down the ladder it would be to humble herself by stooping to them now.

  Forget it, Deeley, the voice snapped. Carmen would never let you do a show like that; it’d make Nicky look like shit. That contract you signed must have been thirty pages thick. I bet it’s got more sub-clauses than the Bible.

  She kept staring at herself, trying to assess her worth, because that was how she’d always calculated her value. Looks were all she’d ever had; her older sisters had got all the brains in the family. Snag a rich husband, Carmen had said, but Deeley couldn’t help seeing that as prostitution. Having sex with someone you didn’t fancy because he had tons of money – what else was that? She shivered again at the thought. It felt as if the world was closing in around her, squeezing her down to nothing. No options at all. Whatever money Nicky gave her wouldn’t last long, she knew; she was terrible with money, always had been.

  And then she thought of her older sisters. Maxie. Devon. They’re both back in London, and doing so well. They’ve really made something of themselves.

  Deeley hadn’t seen either of them for years. Longer than the time she’d been in LA. What had happened that day in the front room of Bill’s council house in Riseholme – that day she tried never to think about – should have brought them closer together than anything, bonded them for life. But for her, at least, that hadn’t happened. Never the brainy one, Deeley had dropped out of school at sixteen and headed to London, where Maxie and Devon were already living by then; but they’d been too busy establishing their careers, building their glamorous lives, to have much room for a younger sister with no greater ambition than to go out dancing every night. When Nicky had whisked her off to LA, Deeley knew that both her sisters had thought it was just the right place for her. And since then they’d barely been in touch.

  It was Deeley’s fault as much as theirs. She’d been swept away by Nicky’s amazing lifestyle and had never looked back. She hadn’t even gone back to London for Devon’s wedding to Matt Bates, the England rugby star.

  Well, it’s time to build some bridges. I need Maxie and Devon now. Maxie always looked after me . . . she’ll help me till I get on my feet in London, I’m sure she will.

  After all, we promised to stick together – whatever happened . . . didn’t we?

  Devon

  Devon felt really, really fat. Hugely, grotesquely, enormously fat.

  She reached down and put both hands round her stomach. She was lying in bed, so it was at its flattest, but she could still make her tummy bulge into a solid roll, thumbs digging in on one side, fingers into the other, like a big doughnut round her waist that easily filled her palms. She couldn’t think why she was feeling this bloated when she’d had such a virtuous dinner last night: she’d made pasta carbonara for Matt, but only had a few forkfuls herself, filling up on carrot sticks and beetroot slices. No cream in the carbonara, the fat trimmed off the bacon, and barely any cheese on hers; besides, it had been rice pasta. Matt wasn’t as keen on the rice pasta, but sod him, it was much more digestible than the wheat version and it didn’t make her retain water . . .

  Oh. Shit. A memory of the last part of the evening flooded back to her. Matt had gone to sleep early, as he always did when he was training. One beer with dinner, then his favourite TV programme, Escape to the Country, a kiss on Devon’s lips, and then off to bed by nine thirty with the latest issue of XBox magazine. The glamour of married life, Devon thought sourly. If the people who read OK and Hello! and gawk at the spreads of me and Matt ‘enjoying a cocktail while relaxing in our gorgeous living room’ could see the reality, they’d be a lot less jealous of our lifestyle. Honestly, most of the time I’m bored out of my mind.

  Matt never wanted to go out any more. Devon grimaced. To be fair, Matt had never wanted to go out. The longer they were together, the clearer it was how different their lifestyles were. In the first exciting flush of dating, Matt had accompanied her everywhere, but she had made the fatal mistake of assuming that this was because he loved parties as much as she did. Actually, the reason was simpler: he just wanted to be with her. Now that they were settled down, Matt still wanted to be with Devon as much as ever, but for him that meant cosy evenings in at home, dinner and a TV programme, and then bed. He’d given up asking her to come to bed with him, to curl up and read a novel while he paged through his gaming magazine; he’d resigned himself to the knowledge that he and his wife had very different body clocks. And very different ideas of what constituted a fun evening.

  And Devon, still wide awake, had roamed the house, a big glass of red wine in her hand. She’d Twittered, logged on to her Facebook page and checked out what her friends were up to, envious of the ones who were out at gallery openings and cocktail parties and launches, dying to be out with them, all dressed up, laughing and gossiping and sinking martinis.

  But I was supposed to be having a quiet night in, she’d thought gloomily, shutting her MacBook and watching as the apple glowed brightly and then faded to grey. I’ve been going out too much. And when I go out, I drink too much, and eat canapés, which are really fattening, and then I get home drunk, and Matt’s fast asleep, so I raid the kitchen and stuff down cheese and biscuits and bread and butter and ice cream . . .

  She’d curled up in one of the corners of the huge leather U-shaped sofa, swaddling herself in her favourite cable-knit plum Mongo
lian cashmere throw, and watched some crappy TV, refilling her glass a couple of times till the bottle was empty. If she turned her head, she could see herself in the huge antique mirror hanging above the wrought-iron fireplace to her left, tilted down at a slight angle so it reflected the room. Thick dark hair piled up on top of her head, secured with a big tortoiseshell clip, creamy skin against the purple of her silk lounging pyjamas, her body flatteringly concealed by the soft knitted throw; she looked stunning, like one of those shots from a magazine: ‘Devon McKenna, culinary goddess, relaxing at home with a glass of Pinot Noir after a long day whipping up delicious recipes!’

  Only, when she unwound the throw and stood up, glancing at herself in the mirror, the image wasn’t quite so picture-perfect. She could see the curve of her bum distorting the smooth line of the silk pyjama jacket, which ought to hang down straight, but instead stuck out like a pelmet over her bottom. And her boobs, lifted and supported by a bra (she never, ever went bra-less unless she was in bed or in the bath, it was too uncomfortable) were doing exactly the same on the front of her body, straining the buttons of the jacket. The silk was pulled tight at the buttons, gaping open on either side of them; anyone looking at her would have said the pyjamas were too small.

  And they were a size Large.

  Devon shuddered, turning away from the mirror. She knew she should go to bed; it was nearly midnight. Yes, she’d had a couple of glasses of wine too many – more than a couple, if she were being honest, because their Riedel crystal Burgundy wine glasses were enormous, and she’d been pouring very generously. And the calories in wine were . . . well, she wasn’t going to think about that now. It was too depressing.

  A little voice was telling her to put the wine glass on the mantelpiece, turn off the lights and head upstairs to the master bedroom, where her husband was already, doubtless, fast asleep, making those little snuffling noises that she’d used to think cute, years ago, and now just made her want to hold a pillow over his face. But instead – because she really ought to put the wine glass in the dishwasher, not just leave it like litter around the house – she found herself walking into the hallway, its stained-glass skylight overhead dark now, and into the huge, stunning, perfect kitchen where her TV cooking show was filmed.