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I say, embarrassed, ‘Or … whatever. Of course. So, anything else?’
She hesitates. ‘In fact … there’s two more things. I need to talk to you.’
‘What’s up?’
‘I’ll – no, I’ll ask you about it later.’
I put my elbows on the table. ‘I might be out later, I don’t know. Talk to me now.’
Tina puts her BlackBerry in her back pocket and twists her long, slim fingers together. ‘I need to have some time off. It’s not in my contract. You can – um, I’m gonna need two months.’
‘Two months? Why?’
She flushes and looks furiously at her hands. ‘I – medical reasons.’
I follow her gaze. She bites her nails; it’s the first time I’ve noticed. ‘Are you OK, Tina?’
‘Sure. I’m fine.’ She stares at me defiantly, her dark eyes flashing. I realise she’s quite beautiful; like the nails, I never noticed before. She always looks so downbeat, and those terrible lips … Suddenly it makes sense.
‘Are you having your lips done?’ I ask, and immediately wish I hadn’t. Tina is an unknown quantity. She worked for Byron Bay, the big action star, for several years before me and I think he was such a basket case she wanted a change. She’s been here for three years, but apart from the fact that she has a mom in Vegas and she once got an infected finger from a cactus prick, I know nothing about her. I’ve asked, believe me. I’m nosy, and a little bit lonely, plus there’s something about her I really like. She’s kind of loopy, but cool. But there’s some stuff you just shouldn’t ask. I’ve lost a level of appropriateness, living in my bubble.
‘I’d rather not say,’ Tina tells me firmly.
‘I’m sorry. Tina, I shouldn’t have asked.’ A wash of mortification floods over me. ‘It’s none of my business. Two months is fine – I guess we’ll have to find someone to cover you, and—’
‘I’ve already spoken to Kerry at WAM about it,’ she says. ‘In preparation. She’s talking to Artie and Tommy and I’ve contacted the agency who covered me last time. You liked that girl Janelle, didn’t you?’
‘Sure … sure …’ I’m looking at her now, wishing there was something else I could say, some way to cross the gulf between us. ‘She wasn’t as good as you, of course not, but – thanks, so …’ I sound so over-keen, it’s tragic. It’s like a scene from He’s Just Not That Into You.
‘I’ll leave you now.’ She takes a big breath and her pink tongue runs over her swollen lips. ‘Um, hey. Just one more thing. Deena’s arrived.’
My mind is still turning over the conversation, and it takes a moment before I catch up. ‘What?’
‘I warned you earlier, Sophie …’ Tina looks like she’s about to burst into tears. I wave my hand at her.
‘I know, I know. Don’t worry. Oh, jeez. Where is she?’
‘In the guest house. Unpacking. Her pickup is in the garage.’
‘She has a pickup truck?’
Tina gives the slightest suggestion of a smile. ‘It’s got three pairs of mannequin legs in the back.’
With anyone else this would be strange, not Deena. I give a small groan. ‘Listen, can you go across to the guest house and take out the laptop and the projector? Just in case.’
‘Sure,’ says Tina. ‘I’ll – leave you then.’
She closes the door and I stare at the pile of scripts but my eyes dart towards the window, in case Deena’s peering in, watching. My ghoulish godmother is here. When Mum was in London in the seventies, during her brief bid for fame as an actress, Deena was her best friend. They did everything together. Deena was always the star; my mother was dazzled by her, and still is. In the early eighties Deena moved to LA for a part in a TV soap and for a while she was doing well – Mum could boast to people she met in Woolworth’s that she knew someone in Laurel Canyon, and that she might have a guest role in next season’s Dynasty – but then she turned thirty-five and it all sort of petered out, like it does for hundreds of women here every year.
But I don’t trust her and I don’t think she’s a good influence, either. Mum behaves like a Bunny Girl when they’re together, wiggling and giggling and batting her eyelashes at everyone, and telling anyone who’ll listen that they used to ‘rule London in the seventies’. Those were her glory days, she’s always telling me. They can’t have been that glorious though. I mean, she ended up moving to the middle of nowhere and becoming the wife of a man who runs garages in the Gloucester area.
Still, Deena’s my godmother. I can’t let her sleep on the streets, can I, but I wish she wasn’t here. My shoulders slump childishly as Tina shuts the door, and I’m left alone gazing around my office at the markers of my career: the MTV movie award for Best Kiss, the magazine covers with my face on, the poster for A Cake-Shaped Mistake from Italy that looks a bloody piece of human tissue and not a wedding cake. I pull out the box of scripts, open page one of Love Me, Love My Pooch, and start to read.
CHAPTER FIVE
HALF AN HOUR later I put Love Me, Love My Pooch down and gaze around the room. I wish I had a cigarette. Or a gun. I pick some gum out of a drawer and chew three sticks in one go. Love Me, Love My Pooch is shit. Perhaps I’ve been blind all these years, just happily saying what people told me to say, but this is a new low. Sample extract:
Int. House.
SEAN IS TALKING ON THE PHONE.
SEAN (chuckling into phone):
Yeah, she’s a bitch. And those puppies of hers … man, they are cute!
MEGAN IS COMING IN FROM OUTSIDE. SHE HEARS SEAN TALKING. SHE IS DISGUSTED.
MEGAN (in hallway, standing holding mittens in hand, mouth wide open):
What kind of man am I dating! A man who calls women bitches and talks about their puppies?
SHE WALKS INTO THE KITCHEN AND TAKES HER COAT OFF. SHE BENDS OVER SEAN.
MEGAN:
I hate you, Sean Flynn! Get out of my life! You’ll never see these puppies again!
SHE SQUEEZES HER BREASTS IN HIS FACE AND LEAVES.
I keep thinking, Oh, no, this is so bad, there’ll be some pay-off, it’s setting itself up for a secondary joke, it’s not totally this one-note and crass and shit. But I’m wrong. This is the movie Artie thinks is going to take me ‘Sandy–Jen big’. Well, if Cameron and Carey Mulligan really are dying to do it, which I doubt, they’re welcome to it. No way. No freaking WAY.
Carmen brings me my lunch in the end and I spend the afternoon going methodically through the rest of the pile. Boy Meets Girl is about a boy who meets a girl. Yep, you guessed it. She seems really sweet at first but then turns out to have a wedding album full of pictures of dresses she wants, and flower arrangements, so by accident he sleeps with a stripper. From Russia with Lust is an American Pie style frat-comedy: a cute local prosecutor marries a girl he has a whirlwind romance with and she turns out to be a Russian prostitute! Pat Me Down is about a waitress who falls in love with a bodyguard after he strip-searches her at a nightclub and she takes secret stripping classes as a fun thing to do with all her girlfriends! Because being a stripper is every little girl’s dream, isn’t it? Then there’s Bride Wars 2 – seriously, who thought that was a good idea? Did they not see Bride Wars?
Not one of these girls has anything to say about anything other than boys, weddings, clothes and shoes. I mean, I like all those things, but is that all there is?
I scuff at the carpet and my toes kick something by accident. It’s the Eve Noel biography which has slid out of my bag. I frown as I remember Artie’s reaction. I know when Artie’s playing me, and most of the time I just go along with it, because I trust him and I want an easy life. But I want to make that film about her. Or rather, I want to find out what happened to her.
I Google her again – “Eve Noel where is she now”, “Eve Noel disappearance”, “Eve Noel living in England” – but I get the same results I always do whenever I cunningly use my wiles to track her down, i.e. Google her. The same old stuff. A review of the biography, which in itself doesn’t have any answers, it’s really just a retelling of what we know anyway, but even so it’s a good story. The only actual hard facts it has are that all her residuals and any monies from films are paid into a bank account by her agents in London, and they have no contact details for her, or none that they’ll say. An article in the Sunday Telegraph last year about her films, which tails off at the end and asserts, kind of limply, ‘She now lives anonymously out of the spotlight’ – yeah, thanks, crappy journalist, good one. An advertisement for a British Film Institute retrospective which says, ‘It is a mystery that Eve Noel’s whereabouts are not a greater mystery. One of the UK’s most successful and talented post-war stars, she must surely know some of the esteem in which she is now held. Yet she chooses, for whatever reasons, to remain out of the public eye. A salutary lesson for many of today’s young actresses.’ The rest of the results are stupid blog references or DVDs on eBay or people talking in discussion threads about her. The Internet is useless when you actually need to find something important. Perhaps she’s dead? Her husband’s dead, but she must have had some family? Well, maybe I should actually do some proper research. Like, call her agency and get them to give me her address. I bet they have it. I email Tina.
Can you track down Eve Noel’s British agents and say I’m interested in talking to her?
Won’t work but can do no harm, I reason, and I go back to my pile, flicking through to find something I might vaguely like. I’m relieved when I get to the bottom and see My Second-Best Bed, the Shakespeare script which I’d sort of been subconsciously hoping would be something special. As I start to read it I’m practically crossing my fingers.
And it’s no good which somehow makes me angrier than ever, because out of all of these scripts this one could be great. The girl working at Anne Hathaway’s house is OK, actually quite cool. She’s a nice character, a bit chippy, funny. Even the bits in the past aren’t too wacky, to start with – she hits her head on a low beam and passes out, and when she wakes up she’s the younger Anne Hathaway meeting Shakespeare and it almost works because you don’t know if it’s a dream or not. But then she and Shakespeare and Elizabeth I – yes, she suddenly turns up – go on a treasure hunt to find this key to take her back to the modern day, and it turns into a weirdly crappy sort of trawl through history. All these historical figures keep appearing, like Jane Austen and Lord Nelson and the ones they didn’t use in Bill & Ted, and it’s ridiculous. In the end you sort of wonder if it’s a piss-take.
It annoys me, because like I say it could be really good. Some of the scenes have a special sharp, cool charm, and I want to keep reading, no matter how ridiculous it gets. It’d be easy to whip into shape – if I had my own production company or some people on my side I’d get them to work with the girl who wrote it. But I don’t and I can’t take it back to Artie; it needs to be straight out of the ballpark good, this one.
Idly I look at the title page, wondering if there’s an email address for the writer or her agent.
My Second-Best Bed
Tammy Gutenberg
I sit up straight. I know Tammy. Maybe it’s because seeing Sara and thinking about those Venice Beach days is fresh in my head but it comes to me right away this time. She used to hang out at Jimmy Samba’s; she got a job at Castle Rock, I think, and moved on from that scene before I did. She was half English: her mother was from Bristol and she knew some of the places I knew. It’s a sign, I’m sure it is. Well. I type her an email, which I send to Tina to pass on, asking if we can have coffee some time to talk about it. I don’t know what good it’ll do but it’s a start. I’ve done something, at least.
My neck hurts, my shoulders are stiff. I look up to see it’s nearly seven. There’s a framed photo of Bette Davis in All About Eve I’ve had hung on the wall next to the clock. No one ever sent Bette Davis a script called From Russia with Lust. I think for a moment. Fatigue, adrenalin and excitement mingle in my stomach, making my blood pump faster round my body. I pick up the phone and dial a number I’m ashamed to say I’ve learned by heart.
A deep, gruff voice answers, smoky with promise. ‘Hello?’
‘Hi, George – it’s me.’
‘You? Hey, you. How are you?’
‘I’m good.’ I wriggle in my chair, pleased. Last week when I rang him he thought I was his sister. She’s fifty-five and lives in Wisconsin; I remember everything about him.
‘What you up to, honey?’
‘Oh.’ I don’t know what to say. ‘Just hanging out. Had the meeting with Artie.’
‘Good, good,’ George says. ‘He tell you how good you’re gonna be in The Bachelorette Party? How hot you are? How tight your smooth little buns are, honey? Did he tell you that?’
I laugh. ‘No, he didn’t.’
‘Well, he’s a fucking idiot,’ George says. ‘Tell him I’m taking that deal away from him and going to Paramount. What else?’
‘Artie gave me a load of scripts for my next project, and they’re kind of crap. I don’t know, I want to—’
‘Show ’em to me,’ George interrupts smoothly. ‘He should know what to put in front of you. He shouldn’t be wasting your time with stupid art-house shit and sci-fi. He doing that to you?’
‘No, the other way round,’ I say. ‘It’s … Oh, never mind.’
‘We’ll get it sorted out.’ There’s a noise in the background, voices, an echoing sound, maybe splashing from a pool. George’s voice gets closer to the phone. ‘Listen, now’s not a great time, sweetie. Listen to me. I have to fuck you today, honey, otherwise I’ll lose my mind. Come over, later.’
I’m knackered, I realise. ‘Well …’
He lowers his voice even further. ‘I want to show you something, Sophie babe.’
‘Really?’
‘What we shot last night. I want you to see it. I want you to see how hot you are. There’s one shot I got of you – mm.’ His soft, low voice rasps gently into the phone. I press myself against the leather chair, mad for him. ‘Can you bring some different clothes? You got any babydoll nighties, that kinda thing?’
‘Honey, what I’ve got’ll blow your mind,’ I say softly into the phone. I can hear him breathing. ‘I’ll come by this evening?’
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Around eleven, eleven-thirty? I have to have dinner before with some friends.’
‘Oh – OK,’ I say.
He says slowly, deliberately, ‘Will you be ready for me?’
‘Yes,’ I whisper. ‘Yes … I will.’
He puts the phone down. I uncurl myself from the chair and stand up. I realise I’m flushed, and my heart is pounding. I’ve never been with anyone like George before. He is like a drug. It’s a cliché but it’s true. He’s so powerful; it oozes out of him, and he knows it. He’s not a megalomaniac, he’s just … intense. When you’re with him you know he’s in control and he’s so used to being in control you’ll let anything happen.
I mustn’t let him bite my tit again though. That fucking hurt. I don’t care if it was hot on film or not. And that stupid girl bashing into my boob – humph. Sara. I open the bottom drawer to put the script of My Second-Best Bed away until I hear back from Tammy, and see a bag of Goldfish crackers I’d stowed for a day like today. I’m sick of doing what someone else says all the time. I tear open the bag and munch, and when the other scripts cascade to the floor I pay no attention. I close my eyes, imagining the night ahead. It’s good to be bad sometimes.
CHAPTER SIX
UP IN MY white bedroom, I take off my clothes and stand naked in front of the mirror. I turn around slowly, appraising myself. I hate this part so much but it’s my job, this delicate balancing act. You can’t have any fat on you, yet you don’t want to end up like Nicole Richie. It’s not a good look for a bona fide A-Lister being scary-thin – unless you’re Angelina, but Angelina’s a basket case. I turn slowly. My butt is still high, and firm. When I turned thirty a couple of months ago, Tommy suggested I get it lifted before it needs to be, but I told him to fuck off in such definite terms I don’t think he’ll mention it again. My tits are good – I wish they were bigger, but bigger means you’re fatter and so far I’ve had no complaints. Tommy’s suggested having a tiny lift in a year or so. He says it just makes the job easier later on. I cup them in my hands, thinking about tonight, wondering what George will make me do, what I’ll do to him. I shiver with anticipation and smile at myself in the long mirror, shaking my head at my stupidity; but it’s so good to have someone to go and be this person with, someone who understands, and he does.
And then a shadow on the bed reflected in the mirror catches my eye.
At first I think it’s just a crease in the sheet, but when I turn around and walk towards the bed, I realise it’s not. It’s a rose. A perfect, white, single rose. There’s the faintest hint of cream in the soft buttery petals, and when I pick it up I cry out, sharply, because it has thorns. It smells delicious.
I suck my thumb and look towards the window, almost expecting to see a face there, but this side of the house looks directly over the hills and the road and they’d have to be suspended 30 feet above the road to get a good look in. I pull on some sweatpants and a top, hurriedly peering into the bathroom, then into my closet, but there’s no one. A hair on my neck itches, as if there’s something else there.
So I tell myself I’m overreacting. It was probably delivered to me and left here by Tina. Or maybe Deena stole it from somewhere and left it as a present. There’ve been guys in and out of the house all day, fixing the TV, steaming the carpets. Probably some loser trying to make a joke.
Why do white roses ring a bell though? There’s something about them that makes a knot tighten in my stomach. I can’t put my finger on why. I stand there for a moment trying to remember, then suddenly I pick up the rose and throw it out of the window. It loops awkwardly in the air and disappears. It will land on the road below me and be crushed by a car and it’s nothing – I’m being stupid. I go downstairs, to try and find something to eat.
Carmen is clearing up, polishing the wood. ‘Carmen,’ I say. ‘Did someone leave a rose for me on my bed?’
She frowns. ‘What?’
‘A rose. Single stem.’ I sound insane; I wish I hadn’t thrown it away.
Carmen gives me a curious look. She shrugs. ‘No, Sophie, I have not seen a rose. No roses here.’
‘Where’s Tina?’
A slight spasm crosses Carmen’s face. ‘She on the phone outside.’
Tina is standing by the pool whispering urgently into her cellphone. I clear my throat and she jumps, automatically putting her spare hand on her head, like she’s been busted in a police raid.
‘Oh! Sophie. Hi there!’ She kind of bellows this at me. ‘Are you OK? Do you need something?’
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.’ I feel stupid, even asking. ‘Er – did you put a rose in my room?’ I say.
She looks understandably confused at this question, though her rigid forehead remains immobile. ‘Uh – no, I didn’t, Sophie—’
She must think I’m going mad today. ‘Not you personally,’ I say impatiently. ‘I mean did someone ask you to or did they drop it off there? I was just in there. There was a white rose on my bed.’
‘I don’t know,’ says Tina. She narrows her eyes and then clears her throat. ‘Do you think someone was in the house?’
When she says it like that, it sounds kind of sinister, and I don’t want to hear it. ‘I’m sure not,’ I say. ‘I bet there’s a perfectly simple explanation.’
‘Sure,’ Tina says. ‘Let me just call Denis.’ She dials the gatehouse. ‘Denis, can you read me the list of who’s been checked in today? Uh-uh … sure. Sure.’
She ends her call. ‘You, well, you and T.J., the carpet guys, Juan was here in the garden, me, Carmen. The Mulberry guy but he didn’t come inside. A FedEx guy, ditto. We can go back to the carpet company too, see who came in, ask them if they left it. OK?’ She sounds calm. ‘I’m sure it’s nothing.’
