Based on a True Story

Based on a True Story

A Novel

Elizabeth Renzetti

Copyright © 2014 Elizabeth Renzetti

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This edition published in 2014 by
House of Anansi Press Inc.
110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801
Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4
Tel. 416-363-4343
Fax 416-363-1017
www.houseofanansi.com

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Renzetti, Elizabeth, author
Based on a true story / Elizabeth Renzetti.

Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77089-313-9 (pbk.). — ISBN 978-1-77089-314-6 (epub).

I. Title.

PS8635.E59B37 2014                C813'.6                C2013-906990-9
C2013-906991-7

Jacket design: Kathryn Macnaughton
Author photo: Jessica Blaine Smith

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

For Doug, who gave me the title and much more.

“Her heart was broken perhaps but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture.”
— Evelyn Waugh,
The Loved One

one

It was not the first time she’d been asked to leave a clinic. Augusta huddled into her coat as the wind cut across the porch. The nurse who’d come to say goodbye remained inside, as if afraid to leave the safety of the foyer. One hand held out in farewell, the other on the handle of the door. The paint was peeling down the side, Augusta noticed. The other clinics had been much smarter than this.

She took the outstretched hand, their cold fingers meeting. This nurse, Jennifer, had been her sole friend and ally over one long week, which should have been two.

“We’ll not see you here again,” Jennifer said.

“No,” said Augusta. “You’ll not see me here again.”

“Well,” said the nurse, “you know you can always ring me, any time, if you do feel yourself slipping. My mobile’s on there.” She fished a card from the pocket of her blue tunic. Augusta looked at it, and realized with some surprise that the nurse she’d been calling Jennifer was in fact named Claudia.

The door inched shut, and Claudia turned back inside to tend the drunks and wastrels who knew how to obey rules. Augusta watched her go. She really should have made more of an effort to hide the pills, but who knew that her roommate would be such a quisling? She walked to the curb, where a minicab sat idling. Someone had drawn a penis in the dirt on its side, elephantine testicles dangling below.

“My chariot,” she said. A copy of the local newspaper tumbled along the pavement and wrapped itself around her ankle. “Walthamstow Shopping Centre to Celebrate 25 Years,” read the headline on the front page. Walthamstow, boil on the neck of London. Where she’d begun and, against all best efforts, where she had washed up.

She kicked the newspaper aside and reached for the door of the minicab. Alma Partridge sat in the back, wrapped in an ancient fur as stiff as a sarcophagus. Augusta slid in beside her, inhaling the mingled smells of her old friend’s musty coat and the driver’s luncheon kebab.

Alma gave him an address in Camden, and he pulled out into traffic. After a moment, Alma placed a dry and papery hand over Augusta’s. “You look well, my dear. How was the sanatorium?”

Augusta closed her eyes against the pain of the last afternoon light. “It was fine. Fewer meetings than usual, thank Christ. But, if you really want to know, a bit on the cheap side. Thin gruel.”

She felt Alma’s hand withdraw. “Perhaps if you had stayed the course it would have proved more useful.”

Despite herself, Augusta laughed. “You have a positively maternal gift for the barb, Alma. How I missed that when I was inside. All they spoke about was vulnerability and forgiveness and reaching out and recovering one’s footing.”

“Not such bad things.”

“And journey, as a verb.”

Alma shuddered. “That is disgraceful.”

With an effort, Augusta wrenched one eye open. “I am grateful that you came to collect me, darling. Really. You are my dearest friend.”

“I am your only —”

Augusta brought her hand up. The broken tip of one fingernail dangled like an unlatched gate. “I am well aware. It does not bear repeating.”

Each retreated to her own corner in rankled silence. “No photographers outside when I left,” Augusta muttered. “I thought the rags loved this kind of filth. Fallen celebrities.”

Alma raised one pencilled brow at the word “celebrities.” She said, “I believe what they’re searching for is the
unexpected
fall.” She ran a hand through her nimbus of white hair, coaxing the sparse strands higher.

As the car sped south, the lights of shops and restaurants glowed in the gathering dusk. It seemed that every second window advertised a pub quiz, pitchers of draft on sale, discounted trays of shooters.

“So,” Augusta said brightly. “Drink?” She felt Alma stiffen next to her, and reached to clasp her friend’s hand. “A joke, darling. Merely a joke.”

two

The answering machine shuddered to life when Augusta pressed one gummy button. Amazing that it still worked. She had a ridiculously sentimental attachment to the thing. Once, after she’d spilled a drink on it, it had expired with a sigh. She’d found a man in Kentish Town to fix it, and when she placed it on the shop’s counter he’d looked at it as if she’d presented him with an ear trumpet.

“Has this been out in the rain?” the fix-it man asked, as he poked its innards. “It’s completely sodden.”

Aren’t we all,
Augusta’d thought, but had merely smiled.

“Augusta? Are you back from holiday?” The answering machine made everyone sound like Orson Welles. Even the high-pitched voice of her agent, David, came out as a bass rumble. “Looking forward to breakfast next week. Bright and early, don’t forget. There’s a journalist from the
London Advance
who wants to do an interview about the book, now that it’s coming out in paperback. Lovely timing, it was starting to fade a bit. Another little push, my love.” His voice took on a wheedling quality and she clicked the message to a halt.

Across the room, her book stood out on the shelf, its title,
Based on a True Story: A Memoir of Sorts
, set in neon-green type. The publisher had favoured this vulgar display over her protests, arguing that a more tasteful colour would have been, in essence, false advertising. Neither she nor her agent had expected the book to do as well as it had, but they had stumbled by accident into a fad for the unearned memoir. A newspaper excerpt featuring Augusta’s ecstatic encounter with a shaman had given the book a certain momentum leading into the holiday season. Augusta did not delude herself that its minor success equalled literary merit: the first week it landed on the bestseller list,
Based on a True Story
was sandwiched between the confessions of a disgraced DJ and the autobiography of a badgers’ rights activist.

She wished her father could have lived to see the book published. Giovanni was certain of very few things: one, that the only books worth reading had been written by men who’d worked by candlelight, and two, that his daughter’s trajectory, from a young age, was toward hell in a handbasket. But Giovanni had been in his grave for more than twenty years. She imagined her father marvelling from above, or more likely below, at the improbable mid-life success of his only child.

Although the book was soon to appear in a new edition, her sojourn in rehabilitation had prevented her from doing any publicity. God bless David for drumming up an interview now. The
Advance
was a rag, but it was read by half the commuters on the Tube every evening.

Rehab. What a loathsome word. It suggested new fabric on a knackered sofa. She went and stood by the window. Below, the Regent’s Canal shimmered dark and oily in the towpath’s lights. A couple sat on the bench at the water’s edge, kissing, and she watched them for a moment. Two weeks ago, she’d hurled a tin of tomatoes at a couple rutting in the shadows, but that was a different time. It was the drink that had powered her throwing arm. There was no drink in the flat now; Alma had seen to that. She’d even found the shampoo bottle filled with Amaretto.

Odd that David had mentioned her book, but not the role that would return her to her rightful place in the public eye. Augusta cast a quick eye around the room: Surely she’d left the
Circle of Lies
script here when she’d left for the clinic? That morning had been ever so slightly shrouded in fog.

No matter. She’d find it and make the lines her own before they met for the first table reading. It was a good role, a small one but with meat on it. There was Channel 4 money behind it, which meant there might even be a car and driver. David had sworn to her reliability, practically in his own blood. Back in front of the camera. Useful. It would make all the difference.

One message in seven days. It was not a pleasing number. Should she even bother checking her email? Augusta sat at her desk, where Alma had piled a week’s worth of post. There was a hysterical taxation notice from Revenue and Customs, which she dropped in the bin, and a flyer for a new Thai takeaway, which she placed in the top drawer.

A fine film of dust covered the two photographs that sat on her desk. The first showed Augusta and Alma in the week they’d met, thirty-two years before. Augusta had been little more than a child, and Alma already well into middle age, with a lifetime of roles and men behind her, equally chewed to gristle. They’d starred in a dreadful pantomime in Cromer, the December sea wind lifting Alma’s enormous wig every time someone opened the stage door. The actor playing Widow Twankey was a crème de menthe drunk, gassing the matinee crowds with great minty bellows.

The other photo . . . with the corner of her sleeve Augusta wiped away the thin layer of grit. Such a handsome boy, her son, with serious dark eyes that reminded her of an unplaceable someone. Could she still call him “son” when they hadn’t spoken in seven years? Perhaps there was a statute of limitations on these things.

She placed the photo back on her desk and walked back to the tiny nook that served as a kitchen. The silence in the flat was unnerving, and she reached for the answering machine. Perhaps there was a reward at the end of David’s message. Augusta hit the play button again.

His voice broke the stillness, a welcome presence. He gave the time and place of their meeting, and offered a few tantalizing details about mutual acquaintances. In the time she’d been away, one surgery had gone badly awry, and two marriages had crumbled.

Augusta stood half-listening, wondering if a glass of water would do anything for her thirst, when a name pierced her reverie. Her stomach lurched. She spun toward the answering machine, breath caught. She couldn’t possibly have heard what she thought she’d heard. Sobriety was playing evil tricks.

With a shaking finger she jabbed the rewind button and David’s voice rose again. She sank into a chair, unseeing, as he spoke the awful words again: “Speaking of publishing, I heard some news from California. Did you know your old mucker Ken Deller’s writing a book? I think it might be about you.”