Free Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination by Helen Fielding Page A

had inexplicably changed to show a gray-haired woman giving a ballroom-dancing demonstration to a roomful of people. Olivia clicked off the TV in exasperation. Why couldn’t they give you some clue as to where the news bulletin ended and the incontinence-remedy adverts began?
    She clicked on Avizon.com in her favorites list. It was a low-rent actress slash model agency Web site which she’d found amongst a horrifying 764,000 entries for “Actresses Los Angeles.” There was Kimberley Alford, one in a whole page of startlingly similar Kirstens, Kelleys and Kims pouting provocatively at the camera for producers to mull over and the rest of the world to wank over. She clicked on Kimberley’s nose and her photo appeared full page, with her credentials:
    Modeling level: professional.
    Acting level: professional.
    Ethnic look: Cherokee/Romanian.
    Then her bust size, waist size, shoe size, teeth quality (“excellent”).
    Professional skills: rollerblading, tap, speaks five languages. Has own cheerleader uniform.
    Underneath was Kimberley’s four-line personal message:
    “ I am a true four-cornered all-rounder. I can sing, dance, act, model and play guitar! I’m on the right path, and waiting for the door to open that will lead to stardom. Acting is in my blood. My father has done the follow spot at the Academy Awards for twenty-five years. If you turn your spotlight on me, I will blow you away !”
    Olivia turned to Travis Brancato, the wolf-eyed wannabe. His p. 64 business card led her to a Web site called Enclave, listing the hapless Travis as a “lifestyle budget manager”:
     
    What is Enclave?
    Enclave is a groundbreaking soft-science-based interface grounded in a qualitative value-increase-based proposition. Through this unique lifestyle enhancement program Enclave enables clients to increase qualitative lifestyle returns on investments to achieve maximum enjoyment.
    Clients allow Enclave to manage a minimum annual lifestyle budget of $500,000, to advise and direct where the money is spent and to negotiate the purchase of qualitative-led concepts, experiences, goods and services.
    From tickets to a major sporting event, premiere or award ceremony, a copy of a rarely heard early Floyd recording, to a table at the hottest new restaurant in Paris, many of LA’s most senior CEOs, movie actors, producers and recording executives are already enjoying the science-based maximization of pleasure interfaces which Enclave affords.
     
    Olivia leaned back from the screen and grinned. The idea, it seemed, was that clients would “give” Travis half a million dollars a year to spend, and in return occasionally receive a pair of tickets to a ball game or a free CD. She couldn’t get anything but an answering machine on Enclave’s twenty-four-hour hotline number. Presumably all the lifestyle managers were too busy managing hundreds of thousands of dollars into soft-science-based enjoyment maximization to pick up the phone.
    She Googled Ferramo again. Nothing new.

Chapter 12
     
    p. 65 T he indoor bar area of the Standard had a loosely desert theme: the walls were papered with a floor-to-ceiling frieze of Joshua trees, the floor was cork, the lamps like giant desert flowers. There were two—for some reason—fish suspended from the ceiling. Olivia sat enjoying her morning coffee and the sunlight blasting in from the pool area. Auditions were plainly about to start. A youth, sweating in the heat in thick camouflage trousers and a woolly hat, was wandering among the girls, sporting a clipboard and a rather confused expression.
    Olivia saw Kimberley before Kimberley saw Olivia. Her unfeasibly large and perky breasts were bouncing in a thin white halter-neck above her nonexistent hips, which were swathed in a miniature version of an ecru cheerleader’s skirt. Horribly aware of how attractive she looked, she was sliding her finger in and out of her mouth like a cross between a five-year-old and a porn queen. Suddenly she started