The Pearl Necklace by Geraldine O'Hara

Chapter One

 
    Stop primping my hair. Please, just stop
primping my bloody hair!
    I sighed,
fiddling with the strings of pearls around my neck. I had to get out of here,
away from the madness my life had become. Charlene, the hairdresser for the
evening chat show called You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet , was yakking away in my ear
about facial scrubs while trying to force my thick, wavy black mass to stay in
a French pleat. A French pleat that didn’t suit me and made me look like
someone I wasn’t. A posh person.
    Posh, I
was not.
    “Would you
mind if I just…” I looked up at her reflection in the mirror.
    She
paused, tilted her glossy blonde head, and gave me one of her insane,
red-lipped smiles. She had those ultra-white teeth I’d been advised to get. You
know the kind, where when you show them you blind whoever is looking at you.
    “Need a
tinkle?” she asked, her voice all girly and sweet.
    Yes, I
needed a tinkle if it meant I could get away for five minutes. I nodded.
“Sorry, you know how it is.”
    “Nerves
getting to you?” she asked, lowering her hands from my hair then resting one on
the top of my back.
    Bless her,
she meant well, but I had the urge to run, to have some space without someone
always being there. Not only was I due to appear on TV for a ten-minute slot
from hell, I had the daily task of being guarded every minute, worried about
stalkers following me, and having my photo taken every chance the press got. Which was often. And how had this happened? How the bugger
had my life changed so quickly? I’d let off steam in the comments section of a
newspaper, that’s how, and someone in the know had spotted it and decided I was
to be their guinea pig. A normal woman dragged from her normal life into the
insanity of stardom, all because the creator of a wonder drug to help people
lose weight had chosen me to be their proof of the pudding.
    I’d
blabbed, in my diatribe, that I didn’t think any drug would make me lose weight
no matter how many pretty pink pills I scoffed. I’d tried every diet
imaginable, sweated my tits off at the gym, and watched my calorie intake like
an overzealous hawk. And still I hadn’t kept the weight off. Yes, I’d lost
some, but the dreaded numbers on the scale had crept up again pretty sodding quick .
    So they’d
chosen me to make a point. And, damn it, their pills had worked. I’d been able
to eat whatever I’d wanted while slimming down, and not having to get on the
treadmill or the hellish elliptical—designed by the devil in disguise, I’d
bet—had been a huge bonus. But then the book deal had come—someone had written
it for me, making up eighty-thousand words of crap about my wonder-pill
journey—and the endless rounds of TV appearances and radio shows had begun.
Then came the billboard photo shoot request, which had also appeared on the
sides of double-decker buses, and it seemed that everywhere I went I saw myself
plastered.
    I could
only wish I was plastered. Being off
my face from downing a few G & T’s would suit me down to the ground right
now. But any goings-on like that were not on the menu. I’d stupidly signed the
contract without reading the small print, which stated that I had to be a
well-behaved ambassador, a smiley girl-next-door glamour puss who was the
picture of health.
    In short,
a new life had begun.
    At first,
it had been fun. Of course it had. Who wouldn’t like a bit of attention when
previously they’d hardly registered on anyone’s radar? Who wouldn’t enjoy free
manicures, pedicures, facials and whatever else they desired? Clothes, shoes,
perfume, hair dyes, face creams? I can honestly say that after about a month it
got boring. I’d started to realise I was losing myself at that point, that I
was being moulded into someone I wasn’t, and I longed to be how I was before, a
woman with a generous muffin top hanging over my waistband and tits the size of
party balloons. All right, they hadn’t been perky like they’d