The Friday Night Book Club: Exclusive excerpts from Pan Macmillan every weekend!

Staying in this evening? Enjoy a glass of wine and this extended excerpt from Plus One, the debut novel from Vanessa Raphaely.

About the book

Plus One transports you to a world of fame, power and glamour in which the gritty reality is just below the surface. Entertaining to the last page! – Anele Mdoda

Lisa Lassiter is the deputy editor on one of the biggest, most successful women’s media brands in the United Kingdom – FILLE magazine and its host of online platforms. Her best friend is Claudia Hemmingway, an up-and-coming actress who is looking to launch her Hollywood career.

Lisa and Claudia move in rich and glamorous circles, and when they have the opportunity to spend a weekend in Mykonos on board a luxury yacht, they jump at the chance. But beneath the shiny veneer of this celebrity-filled world, is a competitive and sordid underbelly, filled with pitfalls and challenges for the unsuspecting.

From LA to Cape Town and the Greek islands to New York, Lisa’s and Claudia’s stories over the years are closely intertwined. Neither can escape the events of the past as they gather momentum and threaten to derail their seemingly perfect lives.

• Read previous Friday Night Book Club excerpts here!

 

Read the excerpt:

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Prologue

The Lear jet banks and begins its descent into Mykonos Island Airport. Leaning back and stretching out in its creamy white leather seats, I exhale and stare out of the cabin window … lost in the beauty of the aqua sea below. I’ve drunk a few glasses of the champagne the flight attendant offered us and have begun to believe that I might just have a chance of leaving my little corner of grim London and all its pressures and stress behind me, if only for a few days.

Claudia and I are the only passengers on this flight. She was jittery as we boarded the plane, no doubt exhausted from the exertion of the past four or five days of shooting action sequences at Pinewood for her movie late into the night in order to wrap the most dramatic of her chases, fight and stunt scenes before we left. The effort seemed to have taken its toll. Under her immaculate make-up and behind her enormous Prada sunglasses, my friend looked pale. Uncharacteristically – because she usually remembers to be beautifully mannered in public – she also seemed short-tempered. She’d snapped at the driver in the car that deposited us at City Airport and then, as the plane took off, she couldn’t stop fidgeting in her seat. As soon as we were airborne, she’d asked the flight attendant for the bottle of champagne and instructed her not to bother us again. Between us we’d made embarrassingly fast work of it.

The buzz around Broken Hearts has been growing. This, Claudia’s breakout movie, is the first film, the producers hope, of what might become a new big-budget blockbuster action franchise, ‘a modern reimagining of James Bond, where the dark, dangerous and sexy action “hero” is a young, beautiful girl’.

The stakes, for all concerned, are high. In order to prepare for the role, for the past six months Claudia has been studying under Japanese martial arts legend Mai Ono, who has battered her into acceptable shape.

Thin as she looks now, she is a tiny package of muscle and sinew. She’d elected not to use a stunt double for any of the film’s high-impact action sequences. Of course she’s been risking injury and exhaustion to impress or at least just capture the attention of Hollywood power brokers and I hope for her sake that her plan works. Claudia wants fame with a fierce intensity so powerful that the desire sometimes seems to burn and bubble under her usually cool exterior. I haven’t seen much of Claudia over the past few months – until the recent events, of course, which had put the two of us here – and for the first time in years I’d read more about her and her life in the newspapers and weekly magazine gossip columns than I’d seen of her in person. Immersed in the misery of my day job, I was preoccupied, and Claudia was so busy adjusting to the intensity and pressure of filming and her growing fame that time somehow just slipped by.

After she’d dismissed the flight attendant and we were alone in the cabin, Claudia unbuckled her seat-belt and stood up. She motioned at me to follow her to the lavatory at the rear of the plane. ‘Lise! Look.’

She opened her bag and fished out her purse. Inside was a plastic bank baggie and inside that … at least a couple of grams of coke.

I hissed, ‘We can’t go through customs with that!’

‘I forgot it was there!’

‘You’ve got to get rid of it! Right now!’ I said and turned, with my hand on the door handle.

‘We’ll go through the VIP channel. We won’t get caught.’

‘Claudia! No! You can’t be serious.’

‘Don’t be a prude. Or …’ her eyes glint with mischief, also risk and adventure. ‘We could do most of it, quickly, here. No one would know.’

‘No! Get rid of it!’

Her face flushed with irritation. Our relationship works best when I don’t challenge her.

‘It’ll be a waste …’ she said, in her best wheedling voice.

Beautiful girls, I’ve noticed, are often quick to revert to the skills learned in early childhood to get their own way. Little girl behaviour (eyes wide, baby girl voice) works very, very well for them, in almost every situation. The wheedling worked on me.

‘You don’t have to have any, if you insist,’ she said as she shook a fat slug of a line out on her copy of FILLE, which balanced precariously on the basin.

I plastered a smile on my face and leaned down. Snorted.

I watched her inhale way too much. I know what I should have done. I should have ripped that baggie out of her hands and flushed its contents down the lavatory myself.

But I didn’t. You don’t go looking for trouble when you are just the Plus One.

 

Part One
2008

CHAPTER 1

London

Excess, the new London ’90s nostalgia club, is tucked under the Westway. For a venue that boasts of its exclusivity, tonight it’s heaving. Hundreds of people are butt-to-butt, hard up against each other on the dance floor, high on the ’90s nostalgia that has prompted this reverse migration of cool from East London back to West 11 and beyond. The crowd around the bar is five deep. The lines for the cloakrooms stretch past the dealers, the prematurely drunk, the writhing, copped-off couples and the Unfortunates – the messily, publicly heartbroken. A tall, handsome manboy on the fringes of the dance floor catches my eye. He’s either the lead singer of a very fashionable boyband du jour, or a very handsome doppelganger. You can never be sure.

Everyone tries to be beautiful. He smiles, raises his drink and gestures enthusiastically at me, mouths ‘Come on over!’

Shifting the two heavy winter coats I had collected from the coat check half an hour earlier from one aching arm to the other, I squint, shade my eyes against the lights. He’s unmistakably the Real Thing, an ex-model who, along with his two equally physically appealing pals (the stars of many underwear campaigns), have recently knocked out their first No 1 hit single.

The song wasn’t very good and they weren’t either, but it didn’t matter. The band members were photogenic and they fulfilled four quite separate, teenage naughty dream fantasy archetypes. Happily for all concerned, the target markets were, as instructed, gobbling them up.

I turn to check if anyone more useful to him, or more attractive, is standing behind me. After years in the company of the famous, the almost famous and the rich, I know enough to never assume that, when in the company of such an abundance of good-looking, famous or rich people, any one of them would actually be actively interested in … me. That’s not to say I have no currency in the brutal and competitive social market in which I exist. But as a magazine editor, even one working for a respected celebrity and fashion bible like FILLE, my cachet is only low to middling.

By the standards that matter in London, I’m just smart enough, pretty enough, well connected enough, and my job is just about interesting enough for me to hold my own at a glamorous dinner party. But on nights like tonight? I’m plankton in an ocean filled with sharks and killer whales. But no. He’s still smiling, nodding his head. Pointing at me. Oh, okay, I think. Maybe tonight just got interesting. I weave my way over.

‘Hello!’ he beams. ‘Just the girl I’ve been looking for!’

Of course there’s no time to think of a clever, flirtatious comeback.

Snappy, sexy repartee only ever occurs to me hours after the opportunity presents itself, usually while I’m wallowing in a bath, with a large gin and tonic in my hand.

‘Oh. Haha.’ I manage.

‘Yes!’ He beams. ‘Woman of my dreams! A mobile coat check lady!

What a fucking fantastic idea!’ He really couldn’t look happier. ‘Can you bring me mine? It’s a Paul Smith Original. Navy blue.’ He looks at me hopefully. ‘How does it work? Do I give you the receipt?’

Oh.

Categories Fiction South Africa

Tags Book excerpts Book extracts Friday Night Book Club Pan Macmillan SA Plus One Vanessa Raphaely