Famous by Kate Langdon Page A

tearing my clothes off and jumping into one of the ice buckets. But that wasn’t the worst of it.
    ‘Jesus,’ said Mands, looking at me. ‘What’s happening to your face? It’s going all blotchy.’
    I reached my hands up towards my face and that’s when I saw them. Red welts all over the backs of my hands.
    ‘Fucking hell!’ I exclaimed, jumping up and running towards the bathroom.
    Mands and Lizzie followed in hot pursuit, watching me fling my clothes off in the hallway and run for the shower.
    ‘Need cold!’ I exclaimed, hurling myself into the shower.
    ‘Bloody hell!’ exclaimed Mands and Lizzie, staring at me.
    ‘You’re covered in blotches!’
    And I was. My entire body, from head to heel, was covered in large red and purple welts.
    ‘They’re even on your bum!’ cried Mands.
    ‘It must be something you’ve eaten,’ said Lizzie.
    The cold water gave me some temporary relief and after ten minutes of icy showering I was ready to bring my blotchy body out.
    ‘Jesus! What’s happening to your eyes?’ pointed Lizzie, as I gently dabbed my red welty body dry.
    ‘Whaddayamean?’ I hissed, staring at my blotchy arms and legs.
    ‘They’re closing over.’
    ‘And your lips,’ added Mands. ‘You look like Lisa Rina.’
    ‘Have a look in the mirror,’ they instructed.
    They were right. Both of my eyelids were so completely swollen that my eyes had become two thin green slits. And my lips were so big they were eating each other.
    ‘Oh Jesus!’ I moaned, starting to cry. ‘Somebody make it stop!’
    ‘We’re off to the A and E,’ declared Lizzie, swinging into action. ‘Mands, call us a cab!’
    ‘I wanna come too,’ complained Mands.
    ‘Look,’ said Lizzie. ‘One of us has got to stay here and it’s not me. If I have to look at that poxy spineless git and his nappy-hugging wife one minute longer, I’m gonna kill the both of them.’
    ‘Right,’ said Mands, assessing the potential damage and phoning us a taxi.
    ‘I’m coming too,’ said Jasper, meeting us in the hallway. ‘I’m bored. Bloody hell!’ he added, noticing the state of me.
    I wanted to hop into the taxi naked, but Mands persuaded me to put on her silk robe.
    When we got to the emergency room Lizzie made me peel the robe apart and flash the nurse on the reception desk.
    ‘Lord above!’ she exclaimed. ‘That’s an allergic reaction if ever I saw one!’
    After only five minutes of sitting in the waiting room, watching Jasper pace back and forth from the drink machine and visibly wear a hole in the carpet, I was ushered through to the doctor, Lizzie by my side. So, it was at exactly midnight that I found myself sitting opposite an Indian male doctor of approximately fifty years of age, wearing nothing but a pale pink silk robe, my eyes all but closed over and covered from head to toe in large itchy red welts.
    ‘Oh my!’ exclaimed the doctor. ‘How does the other person look?’
    He mistakenly assumed I’d been involved in some sort of uncouth bar brawl.
    ‘Actually…’ I replied, ‘I think I’ve had an allergic reaction to something.’
    ‘Peanuts?’ he asked. ‘The last time I saw a reaction like this, nuts were responsible.’
    ‘No,’ I replied.
    ‘What have you been eating?’ he asked, staring at the red welts all over my arms.
    ‘Zalmon and poompkin,’ I replied.
    ‘Beg your pardon?’ said the doctor.
    Lizzie relayed the dinner menu to him, in English, while I furtively scratched my arms and legs, like some sort of scabby town leper. There’s no doubt I would have been locked away in the cellar in years gone by, while the rest of the village rejoiced and threw the only key into the moat.
    ‘I see,’ he said, nodding his head. ‘And may I ask what spices and herbs you used when you were cooking this?’
    ‘Well…’ replied Lizzie. ‘You see, we didn’t actually make it.’
    ‘Who did?’ asked the doctor.
    ‘Um…Manuel did,’ replied Lizzie.
    ‘And who is Manuel?’ asked the