Rebecca Campbell - The Favours and Fortunes of Katie Castle

Pippin, Milo’s ex, a designer whose name adorned a million pairs of tasselled loafers, hovered close by, although it was hard to work out if his interest was in his old lover, or the Persian Boy, or the barman, or the bar. Pippin was a hard one to like. Pretty, of course, in a high-cheekboned, floppy-haired, pastiche-Eton kind of way – he would never otherwise have kept Milo’s attention for eighteen months. But there was something foetid and creepy about him, as if he’d just pulled himself away from an act of gross indecency with a minor.

Two of Milo’s PR girls fluttered among them. I called them Kookai and Kleavage. Although I always thought of them as essentially the same person, and indeed often mixed them up, there were some differences. Physically they weren’t alike at all. Kookai was a pretty little thing, soooo Asian Babe I could never understand why she wasn’t reading the news on Channel Four. Sadly she was also too dumb to realise that all she had to do was ask, and she could drape herself from head to toe in the Prada and Paul Smith samples that lined the office walls back at Smack! PR. Hence Kookai.

Not a mistake that Kleavage was to make. Less naturally attractive than Kookai, with a jaw line perhaps a little too well defined, she was nearly always the best dressed girl in the room. Best dressed and least dressed, showing off her miraculous tits and supermodel midriff. Where Kookai was sheer gush, Kleavage was always more calculating: you could see her working out the angles, searching with those violet eyes for openings … weaknesses. So different from the broadband PR lovebeam that was Kookai.

I slipped in beside Milo, who was whispering something obscene into the ear of the Persian Boy. He looked at me, frowned for a nanosecond and then kissed me on the lips, sliding in his tongue just long enough to make his point.

‘You look amazing,’ he said with that luscious, creamy voice of his. The voice had been his making; telesales his first arena; cold calling his métier. ‘Yes,’ you’d have said to the double glazing, ‘Yes, yes’ to the encyclopaedias, ‘O God! Please, yes,’ to the financial services, and only ever, perhaps, ‘no’ to the dog shampoo. And so that fifty thousand stake was his, and Smack! PR born.

The tongue trick worked on most people, throwing them off their stride, giving him an instant advantage.

‘Put your tongue in my mouth again you fucking old queen and I’ll bite it off,’ I replied. It’s what I always said.

‘Less of the “old”,’ he said, looking around with theatrical paranoia, ‘there are clients about.’

We bantered for a little while, with Kookai and Kleavage giggling and trying to join in, Pippin smoking and self-consciously ignoring us, and the Persian Boy lost in his private world of fire, or chicken tikka masala.

‘Where’s your handsome rustic?’ said Milo after a while, miming a telescope. ‘Haven’t left him back at the flat with an individual pork pie and a work of improving literature, have we?’

Pippin giggled like a girl showing her knickers to the boys for the first time.

I didn’t like Milo sneering at Ludo – that was my job, and it’s different when you love someone, but I couldn’t object without slithering down a snake to the bottom of the board.

‘Really, Milo,’ I replied quickly, ‘surely you know that it’s after we get married that I start to leave him at home. He’s looking for the cloakroom. Could be hours.’

‘ After you’re married?’ said Milo slyly. ‘Have you set a date then? Or are we still in the realms of whim and fancy?’

I wasn’t sure if Milo had deliberately passed from teasing into malice, but he had found his way unfailingly to the nerve.

‘Milo, I know you’re bitter about never having the chance to be the glorious centre of attention of everyone you know for a whole day, and never getting to wear white, and never having troops of pretty choir boys singing your praises, and never having literally hundreds of presents forced upon you, and never having a cake with a tiny statue of you on it, but you have to rise above all that.’

Had I gone too far? Milo was famous for his grudges which could lie dormant for years before bursting into poisonous fruit. But no, the operatic look of spite he threw my way was reassuring.

‘You can keep the juicer,’ he said through pursed lips, ‘and just how many Gucci ashtrays do you need? A wedding is a tiny rent in the straight universe that gives you a glimpse of the infinite glory of the camp beyond. I’m there already.’

‘Ain’t that the truth,’ said Pippin from the bar.

As soon as I felt Milo’s eyes begin to flicker over my shoulder I moved on – talk to any PR for more than five minutes and it’ll happen to you. The core of the next group was formed by three models, one posher than princesses, one of the middling sort, and the last born under the chemical cloud that covers Canvey Island, in deepest Essex. Despite spanning the entire range of the English class structure there were few differences between them discernible to the naked eye: they all smoked the same cigarettes, they all had the same hair, the same black-ringed eyes, the same magnificent bones and here, unshielded by the doting camera’s veil, the same tired skin.

I knew Canvey Island quite well: she’d modelled for us more than once. She had a little more conversation than the other two, but even so it was limited to accounts of her appalling sexual experiences. I always liked her story about losing her virginity at thirteen to a guy with a tight curly perm and pencil moustache, who’d picked her up at a nightclub in Billericay. He started dancing next to her, expertly separating her from her friends, his white slip-on shoes moving like two maggots on a hook. He bought her three sweet martini and lemonades and then led her outside to a Ford Escort van in the car park. He exclaimed ‘ta da’, and threw open the back doors to reveal a flowery mattress, with a stain the size and colour of a dead dog in its precise centre. He bundled her into the back, fumbling at his stone-washed jeans. Her skirt was up and her knickers off before she knew what was happening. His cock was smaller than a mini-tampon, and so she felt little pain. After four weaselly thrusts he came, yelping out an excited ‘fuckfuckfuck.’ With a smirk of satisfaction he tied a knot in his condom and chucked it down the side of the mattress, where it joined dozens more. He locked up the van and went back to the club. She went for some chips, and ate them as she walked home.

She was telling the story again to four men strutting and preening around the models. Two were tall and good-looking, two squat and ugly: a footballer, and the footballer’s agent, an actor and the actor’s agent. The actor had made his name playing East End villains in low budget British gangster films, but a public school drawl kept breaking through the studied cockney. The footballer was famous for biting the testicles of a more talented opponent, and this singular act of brutality had mysteriously given him access to the world of celebrity. I sensed that my presence was desired, and realised at once why – I’d round out the numbers nicely. But I knew I’d be stuck with one of the uglies. Life, like the agents, was too short. And Ludo, of course, was out there, somewhere. I smiled and moved on. Still, the footballer had been rather good-looking, decked out by some tame stylist in an Oswald Boateng suit, conventionally, almost boringly, tailored, but showing, when he moved, flashes of brilliant electric-blue lining, like a fish turning on a coral reef.

There were, naturally, endless journos on the lig. I knew most of the fashion writers, ‘the clittorati’, as Milo called them, as bitchy in the flesh as they are fawning on paper. They were never quite sure what to make of me. They knew that I was oily rag, a production pleb. But they also knew that I was heir presumptive to the Penny Moss throne. And, okay, it’s Ruritania, and not the Holy fucking Roman Empire, but royalty’s royalty, after all.