Once they started dating, Elizabeth made a point of taking him only to restaurants where there were sure to be paparazzi waiting outside and, although she did her best to cover her face and appear furious at the press intrusion whenever they walked in or out, the photographers had no idea who she was so didn’t bother to take any pictures. Over time, she made her outfits more risqué, hoping this might encourage them to let off a few flashes in her direction, but still no luck.
In the meantime, her followers had plateaued and her social media creativity director, Trevé, had suggested that she do something dramatic if she wanted to increase her profile. No one knew who she was, Trevé pointed out, and no one cared. But everyone knew who her parents were. Embarrass them, and the country would follow her anywhere. Which was when she came up with the idea.
At first, Tuscany was wary about the camera she set up in her bedroom, wondering why they would want to watch themselves having sex after the event. It was like those people who went to concerts, he said, who paid no attention to the show but kept their arms extended, filming the whole thing on their phones. What are they going to do, he asked, go home and watch it again later and wish that they’d been there to enjoy it live?
‘It’ll be sexy,’ insisted Elizabeth, ripping off his shirt and unzipping his trousers. ‘When we’re old and grey we’ll be able to look back and remember when we were young and had fantastic bodies.’
‘You think we’ll still be together then?’ he asked hopefully, thinking that his girlfriend had acquired a sudden romantic streak that had previously been missing.
‘Well, no,’ she admitted. ‘Probably not.’
He remained unconvinced but gave in to her pleading and, he had to admit, when they watched it a little later, he did find it quite arousing. The following day, Elizabeth emailed the file to Trevé, who forwarded it to a specialist editing suite, who in turn chopped it down into a neat five-minute showreel of her and Tuscany’s finest moments.
When the file was returned to her, she watched it over and over, wanting to ensure that it showed her at her most primal. Her instructions had been clear. She was happy to give viewers a glimpse of her breasts, but nothing was to be revealed between the waist and the knee, a courtesy that she did not extend to Tuscany, whose shortcomings were on display for the whole world to see.
A date was set for the leaking of the video, and several celebrity and pornographic websites were contacted in advance as official brand partners. Elizabeth would have been perfectly happy to give them the footage for free, but Trevé was clear that this was not the way these things worked. And so she accepted £2,000 from each of three sites, and on the agreed morning it was released online in sixty-minute time gaps, leading to her first tweet on the subject, which, despite its simplicity, she later discovered had taken more time to compose (23 days) than Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (21).
@ElizCleverley Devastated that private moments of intimacy between @TuscanyFields and me have been leaked online by sick perverts. #tits #free #celebsexvideo #pleasedontlook #checkitout
This small taster allowed her followers to get a sample of what was to come and to conduct some private searches of their own now that the footage was freely available. Within an hour, she received hundreds of likes and retweets, along with supportive messages from people desperate for her to validate their existence. She waited a little longer before following up with:
@ElizCleverley Can’t get out of bed, can’t eat, can’t even pick up my phone, I feel violated. If this is the price of being a public figure, then I’d prefer to be anonymous. #freeporn #doggystyle #searchandyouwillfind
To her disappointment, this second tweet did not receive the attention of the first and, when she checked the celebrity blogs and the websites of the trashier newspapers, there was no mention of her public shaming. It was time to be a little more explicit:
@ElizCleverley The sick people at daughtersofcelebs.com, privatesexvidz.com and bbcslutz.com should be ashamed of themselves. They’ve destroyed my life by posting a private, intimate video of @TuscanyFields and me on their websites. Shameful. #watchforyourself #completelyfree
Again, there was a brief uptake in clicks, likes and retweets, but nothing substantial. She went to bed feeling miserable, and the next morning, only the Daily Express had bothered to run a piece on their online site, describing the ‘shame of telly host’s girl caught with her knickers down’, an article that received even less attention than a piece about the funding of an art installation by a lesbian poet that featured her bodyweight in Snickers bars.
‘My followers have increased by only ten per cent,’ she complained to Trevé when she dropped in to see him a few days later. ‘You said that they would double. Even triple.’
‘I may have overestimated the public recognition factor,’ he said, admitting defeat in the face of general indifference. ‘If it had been your father caught on a sex tape—’
‘Don’t be disgusting,’ she snapped.
‘But it’s true.’
She’d stared at him contemptuously. ‘Are you seriously telling me that a sex video of my past-his-prime father rolling around in bed with some twenty-five-year-old model would prove more popular with the public than one of @TuscanyFields and me?’ She’d recently started to refer to her boyfriend by his full Twitter and Instagram handles, forgetting that, in real life, he preferred to be known simply as Tuscany.
‘Of course,’ he replied. ‘The public know your father. Any opportunity to shame him is manna from heaven to them. You couldn’t get your hands on one, I don’t suppose? Perhaps if we were to release that and then you were to confront him outside Broadcasting House—’
He didn’t get to make any more suggestions as Elizabeth had already left his office, firing him by email the following morning. The entire experience had proved utterly dispiriting.
Lying in the bath now, she could hear her phone ringing in the distance and groaned. She felt cut off from the world. What was she doing wallowing in a pool of her own filth anyway? She stood up, wiping the bubbles from her body, and jumped into the shower, scrubbing any remains of the homeless from her skin, before wrapping a towel around her and emerging from the bathroom on to the landing, where Ustym Karmaliuk stood waiting to greet her at the top of the staircase.
‘How did you get up here?’ she asked, lifting him up and turning him around. Another few hours and he’d surely make his way back down to the living room. Her phone rang again and she ran towards her bedroom, but it stopped before she could answer. She glanced at the screen. Two missed calls from Achilles. She threw it back on the bedspread. Whatever it was, it could wait.
CODE PURPLE
In the staff room, none of the teachers was aware of Nelson’s extraordinary goal, and a moment that might have passed into legend quickly took on the shape of a dream. The boys, drifting back to classes in a fog of sweat and boredom, had already forgotten, while Martin, impressed and a little jealous, would certainly never refer to it again. But Nelson knew. He sat down in one of the ancient armchairs, the brown webbing beneath the seat slapping against the floor, and lifted a copy of that day’s Guardian to scan the headlines but found himself unable to take anything in since all he really wanted to do was laugh.