Chapter 3

The most difficult person to get in contact with had been Chloe. Everyone else’s life provided a fully traceable internet track. Chloe was still attempting to shake off the shackles and traces of technology. This was intensely difficult, and created an isolation of sorts that many people would have found difficult. It was lucky that her face to face contact with people was so effecting – she appeared as a character in many blogs and online diaries. Those around her used the internet, and Ego had at first accidentally contacted her daughter, who at first accidentally believed she was being targeted by a pervert with an unconvincing back story. Once this misunderstanding had been cleared up (this took a lot of courage on the part of Ego, after the abusive and disturbingly graphic castration suggestion he received in his inbox at first), Chloe’s dislike for the internet forced a face–to-face meeting. Chloe and Ego met for tea in a café off Russell Square, three months before the planned reunion. The instant recognition felt both unnerving and natural, and the afternoon quickly spiralled into a drink fuelled discussion of the group. Once their own lives were accounted for, they began to speculate on the others’. The conversation naturally fell to Jen. They noted the gossip magazines had not yet become aware of her predilection for crisp sandwiches, and were sceptical of reports that she spent evenings cooking for her husband. They marvelled at the irony of seeing Jen in the publications she had been addicted to as a student. Ego tried to explain the far reaching effects of Mark’s computer company and its inventions but after an hour they gave up, and Chloe accepted she would never understand the implications, other than the wealth and fame of the couple, and the bizarre circumstances of having a previous housemate on the cover of Vogue, still sporting her lizard tattoo.
In the first months of Mark’s riches, Jen was thrown into a world of wealth and perfection. She was alone and unprepared. At first she felt the way to contentment was conformity – to accept her new life and the people in it. This involved believing in the importance of nostril waxing, and that arranging a party every year for charity was selfless, fulfilling and extremely hard work. If she had continued in this attitude, she would have been an unremarkable and unpleasant wife to a rich man. But Jen revolted. After months of obsessive preening and exclusivity, Jen rejected, rather forcefully, the doctrine. This occurred at the beauty spa, and left other rich men’s wives with broken nails, a nasty case of mud-inhalation, and a bald patch where Jen had waxed the off a section of hair – roots, extensions, highlights and all. In the aftermath and publicity, the spa announced a new and stringent no drinking policy.
Jen’s rebellion was seen by some to be feminist, post-feminist, or post post-feminist. Jen didn’t care either way. She went and got another couple of piercings, a tattoo to mark the occasion, and set up her own, now internationally renowned, business, in representing and promoting actors. More specifically, she searched for unusual looking actors- those who looked real, and those who looked interesting. Most specifically, she rejected any who pouted. She liked to call it Anti-Keira. Being represented by Jen soon became an indicator of acting talent and personality. Many independent and web film producers began to solely use her as a talent scout, and her new discoveries, as well as Jen herself, were looked to as indicators of off-beat and alternative fashions. Jen found this perplexing, as did the members of the Varey group, who saw her wearing her old Camden platform boots in Heat and watched it spark a resurgent craze. Meeting Jen again would certainly be an interesting experience. Chloe and Ego were particularly interested to discover whether the stories of diva behaviour were well founded, as well as the relative truth behind rumours of more intriguing incestuous celebrity couplings. Ego wondered if it would be morally wrong to ring into Heat’s Spotted page after the reunion.