Champagne Secrets Read online

  CHAMPAGNE SECRETS

  Amanda Brunker

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Also by Amanda Brunker

  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

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781407054889

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  TRANSWORLD IRELAND

  an imprint of The Random House Group Limited

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  www.rbooks.co.uk

  First published in 2010 by Transworld Ireland,

  a division of Transworld Publishers Ltd

  Copyright © Amanda Brunker 2010

  Amanda Brunker has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9781848270510

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  For Edward, my walking talking teddy bear

  Also by Amanda Brunker

  Champagne Kisses

  Champagne Babes

  1

  I can get through this. I just need to relax. I’ll be fine once I don’t make eye-contact – with anyone …

  Initially the press junket to Germany had sounded pretty fun. As I’d flicked casually through the itinerary at the airport, I had read about trips to casinos and perfumeries, but somehow missed the page that said, ‘You’ll have a chance to get naked and humiliate yourself in front of fellow freelance journalists, some of whom you’ve known previously on a formal basis for years, and some of whom you’ve just met.’

  Although I was chanting prayers inwardly for the world to open up and swallow me whole, my pleas were not being met, and I was growing weaker by the minute. I had never been to a Turkish bath before, but though I was only at stage three of what we had proudly been told were twelve stages in total, I was already feeling faint from the hot steam and the heat, not to mention the extreme effort it was taking to keep my stomach sucked in. And while I was trying my best not be prudish, the sight of old women’s breasts drooping on to their laps was proving too much at such an early hour of the morning.

  It didn’t help matters that the night before I had sampled far too many varieties of German beer; starting with the light ones, and building in bravery to the murky darker ales as the evening progressed. Our host had been an enthusiastic middle-aged man by the name of Hans Biermann, who, by the stroke of twelve, had turned out to be quite literally the beer-man who was all hands. He had looked like a character straight out of a children’s fairy tale, complete with handlebar moustache and touristy lederhosen kit. Yet there was no confusion over the games he wanted to play when he bluntly suggested we try Hide the Frankfurter.

  Although I’d been flattered by the attention (I’d been going through a man-famine of late), not even the gallon of sickly sweet free beer he had plied me with would have made me drop my standards that low. OK, well, also the killjoy PR woman who was in charge of the trip noticed the inappropriate behaviour and called time on the night snappish. It was hard to tell if it had been my Coyote Ugly impression – dancing on the bar – or my no-hands approach to drinking chasers of Jägermeister that had pushed her over the edge, but she’d refused to allow me to stay and follow her back later. I suppose I should probably thank her now for such a lucky escape – all I’d given her in the taxi last night had been the silent treatment. But any thank yous would have to wait, because I could hardly bear to look in her direction. She had a scrawny white body, and her giant collarbones protruded through her skin and threatened to poke me in the eye. Instead of too much flesh, this poor woman wasn’t sporting enough meat on her bones. Indeed, there’d be more meat on a butcher’s apron … or maybe even on a vegan supermodel’s pitta-bread sandwich. If ever there was a woman to buck the saying you can never be too rich or too thin, it was her. Not even if Mr Biermann tracked me down and came in and sat beside me could this flesh-fest get any worse.

  Averting my eyes, though, meant coming face to face with more matters fleshy. I began to amuse myself with counting nipples, well, boobs really – not in a pervy way, but in a more factual manner. Call it journalistic research. I knew my friends Parker and Lisa would ask for these details, so I collated in total seven pairs of droopy diddies, two big breastfeeders, five fried eggs, three fairly perfect funbags and me.

  I was just musing over my own perkiness, or should I say lack of, when a bell sounded and everyone stood up and headed in the direction of the next door. Before I had time to avert my gaze, a tide of breasts large and small swished and swayed past my face, causing mild nausea. Closing my eyes didn’t help – the horror was almost worse, as the slapping and squelching of women’s body-parts was so loud. I’d only had my eyes closed for a few seconds when beads of sweat began to roll down over my eyelids, forcing me to bend over to reach the small facecloth of a towel that was barely covering my sacred bits. Though if the truth be told, I didn’t possess sacred bits, just neglected and unloved-by-the-opposite-sex bits! When I opened my eyes again I saw I was being surrounded by another group of women, butcher and hairier than my own crowd, so I made a sprint for the safety of my companions, doing my best not to let my big Kim Kardashian bum slap off anyone on the way.

  ‘So have you sweated all the booze out of you yet?’ asked my skinny PR person, without a hint of a smile, as I rejoined the posse. I had lost the piece of paper with her name on it, and after the evening we had shared I thought it too late to ask her again.

  ‘Ah, nearly there, thanks,’ I mumbled. ‘I feel about as fresh as an out-of-date bag of fish.’ My PR chaperone just looked at me bemusedly. ‘But I’m thrilled to be away. So thanks for having me on the trip. Felt like I was going batty at home. I’ve had serious cabin fever the last few months. Everyone I know seems to have caught swine flu or bird flu, and the reces
sion has killed the fun out of most of my rich friends – and even a few of my poor ones, too.’

  I didn’t get a response, but I didn’t care. Maybe I was still drunk from last night, but I needed to talk, and now seemed as good a time as any. I slipped into a warm pool of crystal-clear water and, feeling even chattier now that I was less exposed, I turned to the middle-aged woman beside me.

  Joyce was a wild-haired travel journalist who, I had so far worked out, had very little time for personal grooming, yet a big love for cigarettes and the lonely existence of the road. ‘Fancy a game of I spy?’ I asked. After all, I couldn’t be the only one uncomfortable with the view.

  ‘P.’ Her lips barely moved, and for a moment I wasn’t sure if I had imagined a response.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘You heard me,’ answered Joyce abruptly. ‘I spy something beginning with P.’

  I let out a little snigger, flashes of naughty words firing off in my head. Penis? None of them in here. Pubic hair? Possibly, considering Joyce’s ran practically halfway down to her knee. ‘Ummm, pimple?’ I asked, spying a large boil on a nearby German woman’s back.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Pedicure?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ponytail?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ah, psychic … psycho … psychiatrist … ah, I don’t know, paedophile … eh, party-pooper … I give up. What is it?’

  ‘Piercings.’ Once again Joyce’s face barely moved. Instead she just signalled to my ears, which indeed had empty holes in them, where beautiful diamonds had once lived.

  ‘Ah, well now, Joyce, there’s a story and a half behind those.’ I winked and began my sorry tale. ‘In a former life, my soon-to-be ex-husband Michael bought me a gorgeous single solitaire diamond engagement ring. Marriage swiftly over, it lived at the bottom of my sock drawer until my second – or should I say fake – husband bought me a thank you gift of another diamond, and made them into stunning earrings for me—’

  ‘Fake?’ Joyce interrupted, her face moving for the first time as her eyebrows lifted in disbelief.

  ‘Yep. The diamonds were real, the husband was fake – about a year ago I pretended to marry my gay friend Alistair George in a staged wedding because his ninety-year-old mother Agatha was about to evict him from the family home and give the proceeds away to her various animal charities. It had been his father’s dying wish that Alistair marry, and although his mother knew that Alistair was most definitely gay, and not even in the slightest bit bicurious, she’d demanded he make a full and public display of straightness, so as not to embarrass the family further.

  ‘In the end the homophobic George family got their dream arranged marriage. Alistair got to keep his fancy mansion in Dalkey. Many out-of-work actors pocketed a handy few euros as pretend guests at the pantomime, and yours truly got a pair of sparklers just like Victoria Beckham’s. Well, until the recession kicked in, my real hubby Michael kicked me out of the house I couldn’t afford to contribute to, and some robbing thief in Essex paid three thousand, three hundred quid on eBay for them. They were easily worth closer to six thousand, but I needed a deposit on a ground-floor flat, and, well, now that I’m a single parent, I need all the spare cash I can get my hands on.’

  Joyce’s expression had frozen again. Her eyebrows remained in the raised, ‘surprised’ position – clearly my romantic life story so far was as good as a free shot of Botox for the unprepared. She muttered her excuses and floated off to check something with the PR lady, who was looking really uncomfortable in her own skin. She was surveying an older, more rotund type, who seemed to be completely at ease with herself as she laughed her way through a funny story. I wondered why the PR lady was so skinny. Did she have an eating disorder? Was she actually genuinely sick? Or maybe stressed out? It was as I began to feel sorry for her that I realized how much better I felt about myself. Was that wrong of me? Of course all of us have our own problems, but suddenly my newly acquired poverty – and singleton lifestyle – didn’t seem so bad after all. My circumstances would improve with something as simple as a great first date. But could hers be turned around by a feed of drink and a calorie-filled meal? Methinks possibly not.

  The next eight stages of the baths, especially stage ten, the scrub-down, were much more enjoyable once I had unshackled my fears. As I lay like a starfish on a hard bed while a woman who looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger took the top ten layers of skin off me with a yard brush, I decided this was going to be my year. It was only the second week in January, and although many of my New Year’s resolutions had already fallen by the wayside I felt that literally shedding my old skin could really help, if only symbolically, in starting over afresh. While my new home’s address – 12 Park Avenue – looked good on paper, the reality was somewhat different. Yet it was becoming a home for me and my two-year-old daughter Daisy, and that was the most important thing.

  It was a disastrously slow exit from the hotel the next day, due to four members of the entourage going missing in action. Two slept through their repeated wake-up calls, one never even made it back to sleep in their bed at all, and then Joyce went walkabout, claiming to have totally forgotten about the call time. ‘I began meditating at the riverside and just zenned out. Sorry.’

  Forty minutes later, the panicked search-and-rescue teams had returned to the minibus with all the tardy journos, none of whom looked the least bit remorseful, and the driver had taken off at great speed – urged on by our now desperate PR friend. Our journey should only have taken twenty-five minutes. In theory, that is. It wasn’t to be, though. A large pile-up on the autobahn just outside the airport made the route almost impassable, so after a lengthy, frustrating and claustrophobic journey, we were told in no uncertain terms that we had missed our flight back to Dublin. Although we were given options, neither included a later Dublin flight home. Instead we had the choice of staying another night at the nearby Hilton or flying home via Heathrow, and much to my relief the group unanimously agreed that they were all sick of the sight of one another, and that the second option was the only alternative.

  It was only when we arrived at our departure gate an hour later that things started to look up. As if I had walked into a special-edition copy of Heat magazine, there stood in front of me about half-a-dozen English WAGs that I recognized, engaged in what could politely be termed a heated debate. There were Page 3 glamour girls screaming at reality TV stars, and a soap actress pointing her over-accessorized finger at a very chavvy looking young woman who, I vaguely recalled, usually had a microphone in her hand. I just wasn’t sure if I’d seen her in my local Lidl store calling special offers or on a pop video.

  Needless to say their dramatics made quite a floor show, and numerous passengers from neighbouring flights had crowded down to watch – including a giddy group of flight attendants who seemed highly amused, and not the least bit interested in breaking up the catfights.

  ‘This nose was done by the best surgeon in the world,’ screamed one WAG. ‘He also did Angelina Jolie’s, so what do you know? You’ve the worst boob job ever. They’re so mad lookin’ you look like you’re smuggling a bag o’ cats down your top. They’re all spilling out in different directions!’

  Utterly riled by this outburst, another WAG let out a high-pitched scream that sent out frequency waves strong enough to burst her silicone implants. Then she pounced on her rival and pulled at her hair. ‘You stupid bitch, how very dare you—’

  ‘Get off me!’ the other howled as she struggled to hang on to her locks.

  ‘I’ll rip those ugly extensions out at the roots,’ growled the first.

  The other women dropped their own arguments to form two teams goading the squabbling divas on. The situation was beginning to get out of control.

  ‘Yeah, you show her, Tanya,’ screamed one.

  ‘Rip her eyes out, Issey,’ screamed another.

  ‘Tanya, she’s only a wannabe.’

  ‘Don’t mind ’em. You’ve more class in your litt
le finger, Issey. You’re better than her. Her fella’s gonna be relegated next season. She’s dead to us.’

  The insults were coming thick and fast, but it was only when the two women fell to the floor and started to knock over their matching Louis Vuitton carry-on cases that security arrived to break up the duelling duo. Instead of applause, there was a symphony of boos, which was followed by a fair bit of pushing from nosy passengers trying to get a better glimpse of the spectacle. While I think we all secretly wished one of the ladies – if not both – would be carted off in handcuffs, both feuding foes were allowed on to the plane after a short cooling-off period, a stern talking-to and, from what I could see, an impromptu autograph-signing. It wasn’t quite a rumble in the jungle – more an at-loggerheads in Lagerfeld – but it was certainly entertainment enough to get us disgruntled journos back on talking terms.

  ‘Which one is married to the gorgeous striker, you know, the one who’s meant to be gay?’ asked my skinny PR friend excitedly as we queued up to board the plane. ‘Is it the blonde with the really large breasts?’

  ‘They’re all blonde and they’ve all got inflatable boobs,’ I mused, pretending I wasn’t the least bit interested in celebrity culture.

  ‘Yeah, but the cartoonish-looking blonde with the breasts that look like they’re going to topple her over … Her. The one who left several hair-extensions on the floor, and who’s wearing the boob-tube as a dress. She’s with the gay footballer. I’m nearly sure of it.’

  Before I got a chance to reply, one of the older gentlemen on the trip, Clark – renamed Clark Kent after pulling a little disappearing act earlier – chipped in. ‘No she’s not. She’s married to one of the Liverpool players. Or is it United?’ He continued, frowning, ‘No, it’s Liverpool … oh gosh, no, I’m getting confused. I actually think she’s married to one of the lads from Spurs. Oh, forget I said anything, I don’t know who she is.’