At the door, I turn. ‘I’m working on recipes for helping you when you’re down, for when your family is down, for life. Because it’s not all happy. Social media likes to pretend life’s fabulous, but it’s not. I hate fakery. We should try to be real, because when life’s really good, it’s marvellous.’
I give her the beaming smile I’d given to the photographer scores of times earlier that day, but this time it’s real, and leave.
I go downstairs to the bar where Nina is at one end, not eating a sandwich but tapping away on her laptop and Lorraine is sitting down the other end nursing a Coke and looking as if she really wishes it was a very big glass of wine. I sneak over to Lorraine.
‘Come with me,’ I say.
We walk to Nina together.
‘You told her,’ I say.
‘Wha—?’ Lorraine roars.
‘It’s publicity gold,’ begins Nina.
‘You’re fired and I’m suing you,’ I say and I drag Lorraine out before she can punch Nina.
‘Let me go! I’m gonna get that bitch!’ she shrieks.
‘You can’t put the genie back in the bottle,’ I say calmly. ‘From now on, we do it our way.’
Viking Chef Freya’s Secret Misery
A terrifying city centre car park mugging plunged TV chef Freya Abalone into depression – and her attacker has not yet been caught.
‘I can’t get it out of my head,’ says distraught Freya,forty-two,one-time winner of the Sexiest Chef of the Year award. Leggy, blonde Freya, whose cool good looks mean she’s known as ‘Viking’, was knocked to the ground and had several bones broken and insists that if it wasn’t for a victim support group, she’d be living in terror.
For the first few days after ‘My Secret Horror: Viking Freya Mugged’, Lorraine is on the phone all the time. Crisis management, she calls it.
‘I’m fed up of crisis management, Lorraine,’ I say. ‘I wantnon-crisis management, what’s that?’
‘I think that’s what happens when you go out on a Friday night and get scuttered,’ says Lorraine, straightforward as ever.
Uber-agent Paddy Ashmore in the UK has put us on to a fabulous publicity team who work with Lorraine because I am not discussing anything again until I want to. Saying no to people is afull-time job.
Dan hugs me a lot and says: ‘I don’t know why we trusted Nina in the first place.’
I always thought there was something wrong with her,says Mildred.
No, you didn’t, I tell Mildred. You thought she was fabulous. You were entirely taken in by her and wished you were her when you grew up, even though she’s at least, I don’t know, fifteen years younger than we are, or a hundred years older if she’s made a Faustian pact, which is a possibility.
OK, Mildred agrees.She dazzled me a little bit with all the ‘you can have the universe if you just learn how to do social media’ stuff.I was taken in by her.
We both were, I say. Actually, you and me are really the same thing. You do realise that? You are my inner voice.
Mildred says nothing. She knows she’s my inner voice. She just does this to amuse us both.
I think the crisis management is just about managed.
But what’s amazing to me are the emails and messages and tweets of support from real people who say they understand how I feel.
I was attacked and I didn’t leave the house for a year. You made me feel normal, Freya, thank you.
My daughter was mugged and she has never been the same again. She’s terrified. I showed her your story and she wants to write to you. If you can get through it, she can.
Tell us the real story because that’s what we need, Freya, not the pretend stuff on social media.
I’ve had body issues my whole life and it got much worse two years ago when I became obsessed with having lovely Instagram pictures. I pretend I eat loads but I don’t. I weigh six stone. My doctor says I’m anorexic and I need to go into hospital.
