Kitabı oku: «The Rise and Fall of Becky Sharp: ‘A razor-sharp retelling of Vanity Fair’ Louise O’Neill»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Sarra Manning

About the Publisher

Chapter 1

BATTLE OF THE BIG BROTHER BEAUTIES!

Will It Be Amelia Or Becky Who Wins Tonight’s Final? Place Your Bets!

In one corner we have blonde banker’s daughter, Amelia Sedley, 22, the posh totty who’s been unlucky in love but has become princess of the nation’s hearts. And in the other corner we have red-headed stunner Becky Sharp, 20, a care assistant with a big heart and a wicked sense of humour.

Ahead of tonight’s final, bookies have slashed odds on either of them to win and are saying it’s too close to call. One thing’s for certain, this year’s Big Brother has had a massive ratings boost thanks to these two babes.

Who can forget Poolgate? Or Becky’s rousing ‘chicks before dicks’ speech? The double eviction of house villains, Leanne and Johnny? Or just how fabulous Amelia and Becky look in their bikinis?

So The Globe would like to wish both girls best of luck tonight and thanks for all the mammaries!

‘Big Brother house! You are live on Channel Five, please do not swear.’

Even though they’d been expecting the announcement, the two young women jumped as the excited tones of the TV announcer were broadcast into the house on a studio set in Elstree where they’d spent the last two months.

‘Are you all right?’ Becky Sharp mouthed to Amelia, her BFF, who was clutching her white acrylic wine glass for dear life.

The roar of the crowd gathered outside was audible even in the hermetically sealed house. It didn’t sound like a good roar but more like the last thing the Christian martyrs heard before they were ripped to shreds by lions in a Roman amphitheatre.

Although it was a warm August night, Becky couldn’t help the shiver that ran through her. Her eyes widened and she bit her bottom lip, making sure that her slightly furrowed brow was shown to its best advantage by the camera to her left, positioned high up in the corner. You couldn’t spend eight weeks in a house with eighty cameras in it without knowing exactly where those cameras were. Anyone who said that after a while you forgot their presence and showed your real self – like, say, the ten other contestants who’d already been kicked out of the house – were either liars or idiots. Or both. Yes, definitely both.

‘I’m so nervous,’ Amelia said, her wispy voice catching at the same time as her soft, pretty features began to wobble. Becky recognised the signs, Lord knows she’d seen them often enough to recognise when Amelia Sedley was about to burst into tears. On average, at least three times a day. On the day that Amelia had been cruelly cast aside by Gav, an ex-Marine, now personal trainer, from Wigan so he could fall into bed with Chloe, a glamour model from Braintree, she’d cried an unprecedented ten times. ‘Anyway, I won’t win. I don’t want to win. You deserve to win, Becky.’

‘Oh, Emmy, if anyone deserves to win, it’s you,’ Becky said, even as the possibility of winning sent a thrill through her.

‘So, the votes have been counted and verified and I can reveal that the winner of Big Brother is …’

Amelia grabbed hold of Becky’s arm so that Becky could feel the tremors running through the other girl. Amelia was entirely lacking in any inner reserves of strength. In fact, after Gavgate, she’d been planning to walk, but it was Becky who’d persuaded her to stay. ‘Chicks before dicks every single time. And if you leave, then I’ll leave too. We made a promise that we were in this together, Emmy, because together, nothing can stop us. So, come on! Stay! Stay in the name of sisterhood.’ Becky had spent hours locked in the toilet rehearsing that speech, so Amelia was right: if anyone deserved to win, it was Becky Sharp.

‘Amelia Sedley!’

You have got to be fucking kidding me!

It took everything she had not to screech it out loud, instead Becky bit her tongue so hard that it brought tears to her eyes, even as she hugged Amelia, who also had tears in her eyes, because she was gearing up for her biggest, ugliest cry of the summer.

‘I’m so happy for you, Emmy! Of course it had to be you!’ Becky said loudly enough that her words could be picked up over the chanting of the crowd.

Amelia was sobbing too hard to reply so Becky rubbed soothing circles on her back and murmured inanities into the other girl’s blonde hair.

‘Congratulations, Amelia, you’re our winner!’ the presenter bellowed and Amelia raised her head from where it had been nestled on Becky’s shoulder and showed her red, blotchy face to the world. ‘Now hold tight, Becky, I’m coming to get you!’

It was very hard to keep her face from contorting into a snarl of rage but somehow Becky managed it. It was going to be even harder to exit the Big Brother house with Amelia, still sobbing, clinging to her like a limpet on steroids.

‘Becky, this is Big Brother! Becky, you have been evicted. You have two minutes to say your goodbyes and leave the house.’

‘We should go out together,’ Amelia insisted phlegmily as Becky patted her back and prepared to disengage. ‘Really, we’re both winners.’

‘No, don’t be silly! This is your moment and I’m not going to spoil it for you.’ Becky would rather die than be accused of stealing Amelia’s thunder. As it was, because she was the runner-up, she’d get a rushed exit interview before they came back to get Amelia. Then there’d be fireworks and cheering and Amelia would cry again as she watched the winner’s prize of £70,000 hit her bank account. Like Amelia even needed the money. Becky eyed Amelia’s tight, black, designer bodycon dress and then looked down at her own ASOS knock-off. At least she could take some small comfort from the fact that Amelia had put on at least half a stone since she’d entered the Big Brother house and her expensive Herve Leger dress now resembled sausage casing.

‘Becky, this is Big Brother! You have been evicted. You have one minute to leave the house.’

‘Emmy, please, I have to go,’ Becky said firmly, disentangling Amelia’s arms from her neck. ‘Drink some water. Go and repair your make-up so you look beautiful for your big exit and I’ll see you on the flipside.’

Then she gently pushed Amelia to one side. Took a moment to straighten the skirt of her white dress, which was tight but not too tight, short but not too short, and slightly off the shoulder but not low cut because only the wrong sort of girl did legs and cleavage. Then she straightened her spine and, in time-honoured tradition, took a second with the mirror by the door. Fluffed her red hair, ran a finger under one eye to check that her mascara hadn’t run and mouthed very clearly for the benefit of the viewing public, ‘Come on, Becky, you got this.’

She pulled open the door, took a deep breath and began to climb the stairs.

‘Becky! You have been evicted! Please leave the Big Brother house!’

She was climbing towards freedom after being trapped for weeks in a state-of-the-art prison. OK, a prison with a huge gold sofa, a swimming pool full of unicorn and flamingo inflatables and copious amounts of alcohol as a reward each time the housemates completed an asinine task designed solely to humiliate them, but a prison nevertheless.

Outside was unknown. Becky had played a clever game but the general public were fickle. Who knew how she’d come across or how she’d been edited?

‘Becky! You have been evicted! Please leave the Big Brother house!’

There was only one way to find out.

The doors swung open and the almighty wall of noise that greeted Becky made her rock back on her spindly silver heels. All those people cheering her? Not one single, solitary boo. She put an unsteady hand to her heart.

You like me. You really like me.

Ha! Suckers!

Chapter 2

It was a blur of light and heat and noise as Becky’s hand was firmly taken by the excitable Emma Willis and she was pulled through the crowd, a camera in front of her, brazenly in her face this time.

There was a gratifying amount of poorly made banners with her name on them or proclaiming ‘Chicks before dicks’. Hands thrust at her. People screaming. Then up another flight of stairs on to a stage and past her former housemates sitting in two rows. Becky hadn’t even made contact with the chair before everyone’s attention was focused on the big screen above them which showed Amelia sitting on the big gold sofa in the Big Brother house with her head between her knees as she tried not to pass out.

Considering that Amelia was a posh girl, proper posh, who’d been torn from the bosom of her loving family and sent off to boarding school at the tender age of ten, Becky had been astounded that she wasn’t made of sterner stuff. In a year out from university, she’d even spent two weeks in Niger working in an orphanage, which had done absolutely nothing to toughen her up.

Maybe the joke was on Becky and Amelia was playing the longest of cons herself. But then Emma tapped Becky on the knee and a producer counted them back from a commercial break and she needed to focus on her own long con.

‘So, hello, Becky Sharp,’ Emma said by way of introduction. ‘The housemate whose shoulder everyone cried on, who had more girl power than all the Spice Girls combined, and who might not have found love in the Big Brother house, but found her way into your hearts with 37.4 per cent of the final vote. It was very close, Becky. Amelia just pipped you to the post with 39.1 per cent of the vote.’

Becky shook her head and smiled. ‘The best girl won,’ she said to approving cheers, because what else could she say?

‘And you had quite the chequered love life while you were in the house,’ Emma continued cheerfully. ‘You seemed fated to never get your man.’

‘Well, I went into the house to find myself rather than find love, though love would have been nice too,’ Becky said, and she caught the eye of Carlo who she’d enjoyed a brief flirtation with, safe in the knowledge that he’d be evicted in week two because he had all the personality of damp cardboard. Carlo smiled and waved back. ‘Even better than love, I made friends that I know I’ll have for the rest of my life.’

The script just wrote itself, really.

‘You even let one of those friends come between you and what we all hoped was going to be a Big Brother romance,’ Emma said, as footage appeared on the big screen of Becky watching Johnny (who called himself an entrepreneur though he was hard pressed to explain what he actually entrepreneured) and Leanne, PR girl (which really meant that she handed out free, flavoured vodka shots in Cheshire nightclubs), frolicking in the hot tub. One single, solitary tear rolled down Becky’s alabaster cheek, because one tear was far more effective than sobbing all your make-up off at least twice a day.

‘Well, I realised that if Johnny and Leanne really cared for each other, then I shouldn’t stand in the way of their happiness,’ Becky explained with another glance over to the housemates. ‘I just never imagined that they’d be put up for eviction because of it or that there’d be a double eviction that week. You guys are still together, right?’

Of course they weren’t. They were seated as far away from each other as possible and, judging from the skin-stripping looks that Leanne was sending Johnny’s way as a muscle pounded in his cheek, they now hated each other with a passion. Even more passion than when Leanne had given him a blow job in the Big Brother toilet.

‘You might have been one of our most popular housemates but you still managed to land yourself in hot water, Becky,’ Emma said urgently, putting one hand on Becky’s knee again. ‘We need to talk about Poolgate.’

Becky made sure her green eyes were especially wide. ‘Poolgate?’ she echoed breathily.

Another scene was beamed up on the screen. Becky and Marie curled up on the big swan inflatable in the swimming pool. It was odd that they were curled up so amicably when Marie had earlier accused Becky of stealing a Chanel lipstick from her, though Becky, with trembling dignity, had insisted that the Chanel lipstick in question was hers and that maybe Marie had simply lost her own one.

‘Now you weren’t miked up here because you were in the pool but Marie swears that you whispered in her ear, “You chat shit about me again and I will wipe you off the face of the earth, bitch.”’

Becky put her hands to her cheeks as if they were burning. She couldn’t even look at Marie and the inevitably outraged expression on the other girl’s porcine and pugnacious face. If she did, she might laugh.

‘Really? She swears that I said that? Wow! Maybe I had a strange reaction to the chlorine in the swimming pool and it gave me a complete personality change and amnesia too.’ Becky shrugged and shook her head. ‘Because I have no memory of that happening.’

Emma went on to mention ‘Slag-gate’ (it had felt like the right thing to do to tell Leanne that Marie had called her a slag), ‘Pubegate’ (and who could blame Becky for nominating Carlo for eviction because of the shocking state he left the shower in each morning?) and ‘Gavgate’ (of course Becky was going to take Amelia’s side when Gav had done her wrong, even though it was Becky who’d told Gav that Chloe fancied him).

‘More gates than a garden centre,’ Becky noted to the approval of the audience, and anyway, she hadn’t been directly involved in any of the incidents. The fact that Primark were now apparently selling ‘Chicks Before Dicks’ T-shirts and the Guardian had labelled Becky as ‘this summer’s most unlikely feminist icon’ was completely beyond her control.

There was just time for Emma to remind the viewers that when Becky had won a task and been rewarded with a phone call home, she’d given her prize to Amelia.

Again, there was Becky’s face on the screen – she really did look so much better from her left side – telling a sobbing Amelia that ‘I don’t have a home or a mum and dad, but you do, so I want you to have the call.’

There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. ‘Is that true?’ Emma gently probed even as Becky could hear the producer telling her to wrap things up. ‘That you don’t have a family?’

If she concentrated really hard, Becky could always get that single, solitary tear to start its slow descent down her cheek. She’d just recall the sting of her father’s hand across that same cheek as he coached her on how to cry on cue. Rich tourist or DWP case worker, no one could resist a whey-faced little moppet crying so prettily.

She felt the tear begin its journey now, let it get level with her mouth before she brushed it away with an impatient hand. ‘My mum and dad died so long ago that it hardly even hurts any more. Anyway, friends are the new family, isn’t that what they say?’

Emma reached forward and gathered Becky into a motherly hug until they both heard the producer snap in their ears, ‘We’re due an ad break, cue her best bits.’

‘Becky, you’ve been one of our favourite housemates of all time and here are your best bits!’

What if the two minutes that comprised Becky’s highlight reel were the sum total of her life’s work? How she’d always be remembered? A slender girl in a white bikini with green eyes, riotous red curls, fair skin and what The Sun called ‘the best boobs in Big Brother’ schooling another girl in a bikini about the ‘most basic rule of feminism. Chicks Before Dicks.’

Was this it? In years to come when Becky was standing in a queue in the Post Office or the supermarket, would someone tap her on the shoulder and say, ‘Excuse me? You are, aren’t you? Big Brother? Chicks Before Dicks? Sorry, I can’t remember your name.’

She’d had a taste of it now: the applause of the crowd, the flash of a hundred cameras. She knew how easy it was to win the slavish adoration of the public and her fellow housemates (apart from Marie, and Marie could just go and fuck herself). But just one taste was never going to be enough.

No, Becky intended to gorge on it all: fame, power, success, as if she was standing in Nando’s with a tapeworm and a black card.

By the time she was done, everyone was going to remember her name.

Chapter 3

But first she had to stand down stage, take her place with the other former housemates and watch Amelia be crowned the winner, then fluff and weep her way through her exit interview.

The only gratifying part was when she said, ‘The best bit of my Big Brother experience was meeting Becky, because I know I have a friend for life. More than a friend. She’s my sister from another mister.’

After the cameras stopped rolling Becky and the other losers were herded like cattle into a people carrier to be ferried to an Elstree hotel, while Amelia was whisked off in a limo, as befitted her winner’s status. She was the best of them all and Becky was left to mill about the after party nursing a lukewarm white wine that was all the production budget would stretch to.

Her fellow housemates were surrounded by their families. Not that Becky felt even one pang on that score, having lost her mother when she was eight and her father seven years later.

Poor Becky. Not only had she come from the most broken of homes, but at fifteen she was an actual bona fide orphan, like some poor creature from a Victorian novel waiting to be sent either to the workhouse or to live with a kindly guardian and benefactor.

In the end, her father’s old Soho drinking buddy, Barbara Pinkerton, agent to the stars of stage and screen, had fallen somewhere between the two, and even now was bearing down on her in the same hotel bar they’d waited in before Becky had entered the Big Brother house.

‘Becky!’ Babs boomed once she was within booming distance. ‘My little Becky Sharp.’

She descended in a cloud of Opium to place lips slick with shocking-pink lipstick in the vicinity of Becky’s cheek.

‘I’m surprised a devious little cow like you didn’t go all the way,’ she murmured as she sat down on the leather-look banquette next to Becky. ‘You played a blinder, even had my stony-cold heart stirring when you gave that insipid little debutante your phone call home. But turns out insipid little debutantes trump sparky orphans. Who knew?’

‘I couldn’t be happier for Emmy,’ Becky said, as she’d been saying at regular intervals to whoever drifted into her orbit. ‘It really couldn’t have happened to a lovelier person.’

‘Bet she has a trust fund the size of the Guatemalan national debt. What does she need the prize money for?’ Barbara wondered. ‘It shouldn’t be allowed.’

‘Too fucking right.’

Their eyes met. Pupil and master, though for the first time Babs Pinkerton couldn’t tell which was which.

‘I promised your poor, dear old Pa that I’d look after you like you were my own,’ she’d said when she’d shown up at the council-run children’s home in Tower Hamlets where Becky had been assigned a bed and a case worker, after six different foster placements had returned her to sender.

Compared to the horrors of the home, Babs Pinkerton was definitely the lesser of two evils, but she was still fairly evil. Becky had known Babs all her life. The Sharp family had lived in a series of rooms in Soho, usually reached through a street door with a tatty handmade sign – ‘Model 2nd floor’ – invariably pinned to it. Her father didn’t have far to stagger to The Coach and Horses, and when that shut, on to The Colony Rooms, where he’d often take a snifter with Babs.

Sometimes he’d think it amusing to bring Becky along so she could mimic the regulars. More often she’d be sent by her mother to bring her father home or ask for five quid to feed the meter and buy a can of beans. Babs Pinkerton was like an honorary aunt, or so she claimed as she sat with Frank Sharp, a large gin and tonic always within reach, and always dressed in pink because that was her thing, as if she was a frilly, feminine, frivolous little thing when actually she was a shark in lipstick. In a show of affection, she’d pinch Becky’s cheek, her fingers hard and unforgiving, and it was a point of pride to Becky never to make a sound.

So when Babs turned up in Tower Hamlets, Becky didn’t hope for the best. Just expected the worst.

For the first two weeks or so, the worst wasn’t that bad. Despite spending so long in The Colony Rooms each night that the next day she seeped noxious gin fumes through her pores, Babs did have a roster of clients in work, albeit strictly D-list. Comedians still hankering after their glory days in the seventies when they could get a primetime slot on Saturday-night TV telling mother-in-law jokes and making racist jibes. Superannuated dollybirds hoping to resurrect their careers with a slot on Celebrity Masterchef or in a gritty TV drama on Channel 4. More recently, Babs had started to mine a lucrative seam of reality-TV contestants determined to cling on to their fifteen minutes of fame like it was the last lifebelt on the Titanic.

Babs had done well enough for herself that she had a house in a little mews in Paddington where she installed Becky in a spare room along with boxes of glossy ten-by-fours of former clients and left her alone every day with ten quid to buy herself snacks and a big TV with all the satellite channels.

Becky knew it couldn’t last because nothing ever did.

The worst, when it came, was far worse than Becky had ever imagined: Babs shipped her off to Bournemouth to act as a companion to her ageing aunt, Jemima Pinkerton, once the queen of British soaps, and now a septuagenarian with atrial defibrillation, two artificial hips and a recent dementia diagnosis.

‘I’ve been so worried about poor Auntie Jemima,’ Babs told Becky as they travelled down to poor Auntie Jemima’s well-appointed bungalow in the exclusive enclave of Southbourne, under the guise of a little daytrip to the seaside. ‘She hasn’t got a soul in the world – fame is a fickle, heartless bitch. And then I thought, well, poor, dear Becky doesn’t have a soul in the world either. You’ll be the granddaughter she never had.’

‘You want me to spend my days wiping the shitty arse of some senile old has-been?’ Becky had spluttered.

‘She’s not senile. Not yet. Just a bit forgetful, and the years might not have been kind – neither was her third husband, an absolute brute – but Jemima’s a sweetheart …’

‘I don’t care if she’s the queen of fucking everything,’ Becky had interrupted. ‘I’m not doing it.’

Then Babs had taken Becky’s cheek between thumb and forefinger as she’d used to do, and this time when she finally let go, she’d left a bruise. ‘Listen to me, you ungrateful little wretch, you’ll do this or we’ll turn round and I’ll take you to the nearest police station so I can turn you in for stealing three pieces out of my jewellery box and four blank cheques.’

‘They’re not worth anything. Just glass and paste,’ Becky muttered, but she subsided.

‘Also, once you’re sixteen you can claim a carer’s allowance, which is something because it’s not like I could even get you a walk-on in a crisps commercial,’ Babs had pointed out because in those days, Becky had been small, wan and her perfectly pert breasts had yet to put in an appearance. It also explained why Babs had left her to rot in care when Frank Sharp had first been sent down four years ago. At nearly sixteen, Becky was useful in a way that she hadn’t been when she was nearly twelve. ‘Besides, you owe me for two weeks bed and board, plus your expenses. Take you months to work off that debt.’

It had taken months, but by then Becky and Jemima Pinkerton were firm friends. Jemima trusted Becky implicitly (‘You might as well have my pin number, because God knows, I won’t be able to remember it before too long’) and Becky made herself indispensable to the old lady. After all, you didn’t bite the hand that fed you and in her way, Becky supposed that she was quite fond of Jemima.

Certainly, Becky had learned more from Jemima than she’d ever learned on the infrequent occasions when she’d somehow found herself in a classroom. Becky had listened transfixed to all of Jemima’s stories. From her ingénue days as a contracted player at Gainsborough Studios, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scene that had earned her the title Bond Girl, through stints as a series regular on cop shows and medical dramas, a short season with the Royal Shakespeare Company and a dry spell (‘drier than the bloody Sahara in a heatwave’) that had lasted five years and had seen Jemima working the Christian Dior counter at Harvey Nicks. Then fame had beckoned again as the matriarch of an East End gangland family in a new soap opera, which had put a sizeable sum in Jemima’s pension pot and had led to all kinds of lucrative voiceover work.

Yet it wasn’t life treading the boards or working on a big sound stage at Shepperton that had enthralled Becky. On the contrary, that seemed to involve a lot of hanging about and knitting, and she wasn’t ever going to be the type to knit one purl one. No lessons to be learned there.

But Becky was fascinated by Jemima’s tales of the casting couch, amorous directors and handsy casting agents; of ambitious starlets nobbling the competition with a tube of greasepaint carelessly left on the dressing-room stairs; of young juvenile male leads seeing to the needs of rich, older ladies; and of that other, shadow world of gangsters and dealers, kingmakers and hookers … Well, all of human life was there.

Again, it couldn’t last for ever. But it lasted long enough. Besides, her father had always said that the longer the con, the bigger the reward. Nearly four and a half years, by which time Becky had blossomed like a dewy young rose, petals slowly unfurling. And Jemima, bless her, had withered. Her limbs clawed with arthritis and her mind slowly eaten away by the ravages of time.

In the end, Jemima had gone in her sleep. The ink was barely dry on the death certificate (natural causes) before Babs Pinkerton descended in a cerise power suit (‘Auntie Jemima wouldn’t have wanted me to wear black’) clutching a will that predated the newer will that Jemima had drawn up from a will-making kit that Becky had purchased in WHSmith.

‘It will never stand up in a court of law,’ Babs had said, when Becky had presented her with the evidence that she, Becky Sharp, loyal companion to Jemima Pinkerton during her twilight years, was the late and much-loved actress’s sole heir and beneficiary. ‘Everyone knew that Jemima’s mind was so addled that she didn’t know her arse from her elbow, God rest her soul.’

It had got nasty enough, even without Becky daring to seek legal counsel. It seemed that there were items of jewellery missing, large sums gone from Jemima’s bank account, her fur coat currently in the window of the local pawn shop. But as Becky sweetly pointed out, ‘Like you just said, poor Jemima was very confused towards the end. We may never know where she hid her jewellery or what she spent all that money on.’