Free Vanity by Lucy Lord Page A

more gorgeous in the flesh. She’s really clever too.’ He was starting to feel a tad sentimental. This bartender mixed his drinks strong.
    â€˜I’m sure she ish, man, sure she ish.’ Lars was slurring a little and Damian realized he was in the company of a fellow boozer. Excellent. Damian himself wasn’t generally a lunchtime drinker, but with so much time on his hands he was finding it very easy to slip into, and curiously enjoyable. He looked properly at his new companion for the first time.
    Everything about Lars was huge, from his head to his hands to his feet, but he wasn’t fat. Just … HUGE. Piercing blue eyes looked out from a good-natured, square face, with a beaming smile that revealed big, square teeth.
    â€˜Let me get you a drink,’ said Damian. ‘What are you having?’
    â€˜Thank you, man.’ Lars slapped Damian on the back, nearly propelling him over the bar. ‘I am drinking schnapps.’
    â€˜Sounds great. I think I’ll join you. Two very large schnapps, please, and have one for yourself, mate,’ Damian added to the barman. ‘It’s on my wife’s tab.’ All three men roared with laughter at this. The barman gave Damian the Manhattan he’d just mixed (which Damian proceeded to down in one, belching slightly), then swiftly poured three absurdly large tumblers of neat schnapps.
    Lars raised his glass and bellowed, ‘SKOL!’
    â€˜SKOL!’ shouted Damian and the barman. They poured the drinks down their throats and the barman happily started to prepare another round.
    â€˜So if you want your eggs sunny-side up in east Manhattan, I couldn’t recommend a better place.’ Poppy winked at the camera. ‘And I have to say this
sunny-side
East Side is an awful lot more sunny – and, dare I say it –
up
than the grey old East End I left behind me in London. They have
jellied eels
in the East End of London, you know, and they are just as revolting as they sound!’
    She felt a bit guilty about her disloyalty to her beloved ’hood, but hey. Business was business. And jellied eels
were
revolting. She’d tried them once, for a bet, pissed as a fart as she staggered home from Dalston to Hoxton, clad only in a shocking-pink leotard and laddered purple tights; she’d managed somehow to lose her boots, hat and skirt en route. Poppy had, with an effort, kept the eels down; her fellow reveller, a minor rock star used to three grams of coke and a bottle of JD a night, had puked his guts up.
    â€˜It’s a wrap!’ said Marty, the director.
    â€˜Really?’ Poppy beamed at him. This was only her second take.
    â€˜You’re a natural, honey. Go have some fun now. And don’t forget – eight p.m. at L’Ambassadeur tonight.’
    â€˜How could I forget?’
    As it was Thursday and they’d finished for the week, Marty had suggested that Poppy and Damian join him and his wife for drinks and dinner that evening at the hottest new restaurant in town. The assistant director and his boyfriend were going to be there too. ‘Thanks for this morning, Marty, you’re a star.’ Poppy kissed him on the cheek and Marty blushed, unable to know how to take this gorgeous yet apparently unaffected English girl, their new star in the making. She was a breath of fresh air, of that he was certain.
    Once Poppy had wiped her face clean of the make-up (it might have looked natural on screen, but it felt beyond disgusting in this heat), she decided to go to Greenwich Village and hit all the vintage shops she’d been filming in last week. It was about time she bought some presents for her loved ones, and unless she was very much mistaken, the shops would be falling over themselves to give her a discount.
    â€˜Poppy Wallace!’ Sandra, a 65-year-old ex-rock chick with madly teased peroxide hair, a ton of black eyeliner and a treasure trove of a clothes shop, greeted her warmly.