Based on a True Story (6 page)

“He’s calling from jail?” Frances said.

Both mother and son turned to look at her.

“I tried to tell you, love,” said Sheena as she reached for the phone. “He’s out now. Lives the next estate over.”

“Excuse me,” Frances said as she stumbled past the boy, breathing in a cold layer of cider and cigarettes.

“Toilet’s just there,” he said, and yanked on the chain as the dog, demented now, tried to follow her, snapping and snarling.

She scurried across the hall and slammed the door on the dog’s snout, not caring if she hurt the stupid thing. Fumbling with the knob, she found the little button in the centre stiff with disuse.

“I don’t believe it,” she muttered, trying to pinch the lock closed with her forefinger and thumb. The rattling sounded ridiculously loud in her ears, though not, by some degree, as loud as the combined howling of Sheena and the dog.

“You just scared the shit out of her!” Sheena screamed, presumably to the sinister Les. “You actually did! Poor girl just had to run to the toilet.”

“No!” Frances called desperately through the door, as she struggled to get her jeans down. “No, it wasn’t him.”

She noted just before bare bottom hit cold water that the toilet seat — clear plastic embedded with a strand of barbed wire — had been left up. With one hand she yanked it down, and collapsed with relief.

“I wasn’t frightened,” she said to the poster of Rihanna that covered the inside of the bathroom door. “I just needed to pee.”

She couldn’t find a towel, so after washing her hands with a cracked bit of soap she wiped them dry on her jeans. For a desperate minute she was gripped with the desire to call her parents, to swallow the dry crumbs of her pride and ask for a plane ticket home.

If she’d had £400 she would have given it to Sheena herself, just to spare her all the shame. She could hear the woman’s voice, now reduced to a rolling sob, in the spaces between the dog’s thudding attempts on the door.

“Uh, Michael?” Frances called. “Michael, can you control the dog? I’m coming out now.”

Deep breath. She reached down to the knob, but it refused to turn in her hands. Maybe they were still wet. Frances rubbed them on her jeans and tried again, but it was no use. The tiny lock was resistant in her hands. It refused to move a millimetre. She knelt, desperate now, grabbed the knob and began fiercely rattling it back and forth.

“What you doing in there? You didn’t lock the door?” It sounded suspiciously like the boy was trying not to laugh. “Fuck’s sake, that thing hasn’t worked in years.”

That’s what they’ll say about me one day,
she thought, and put her cheek against the cool of the door, in the shelter of Rihanna’s gleaming legs.
Maybe it isn’t too late to go to law school.

nine

The boy stopped at Augusta’s table and poked at the untouched stack of eight-by-ten photographs. They had been taken just after she’d been cast in
The Blood Bank
, and showed her in full vampire surgeon garb: mouth a red target, stethoscope draped over her tight vest top. As if she might visit the gym after a tracheotomy and a blood cocktail.

“What was you in?” the boy asked. He had narrow green eyes and dark hair that grew long to cover jug ears. She had a sudden desire to push his hair back and tell him to wear his impediment with pride.

“What was I in?” she said. “Trouble, mostly. Also some programs that your parents might remember.”

He nodded, picked up a photo from the top of the pile. “How much to sign this one?”

“My autographed bosom will set you back ten quid, darling. A bargain to rival the Louisiana Purchase.”

The boy nodded again and put the photo back on the pile. With a nervous half-smile he wandered off to join the queue at the next table, which snaked into the middle of the ballroom. At least fifty people waited patiently for the autograph of an American astronaut who’d orbited the earth three times and nearly drowned when he couldn’t get out of his landing capsule. His signature fetched ten times what hers did.

Augusta sighed and, scanning the room, reached into her purse. Her fingers closed around the tiny bottle she’d bought at the off-licence when Alma disappeared to use the loo. With a sweet crack, the metal lid gave beneath her fingers. Hiding the bottle in her palm, she brought it to the table and quickly dumped the vodka in her coffee. Such a ridiculously small bottle, the kind they gave out in airplanes. The kind you might slip into a Christmas stocking.

She was taking her first sip when Alma returned, hobbling on her stick, a look of determined cheerfulness on her powdered face. “Any business?”

Augusta shook her head. “It’s been quieter than a nun’s knickers. But Uncle Sam over there —” she indicated the retired astronaut, who sat under a giant photo of himself in space-helmeted glory, “has been drawing them like flies. Even though he barely set a toe in space.”

Alma set down her enormous vinyl bag with a thump. “World’s largest autograph show, my arse,” she said. “I was just over talking to Phyllida, do you remember her?”

“The raddled old tart who was in
Doctor Who
with you?”

“It was a classic episode,” Alma said with dignity.

“You played a monster covered in licorice allsorts.”

“A metaphor for the horror that lies beneath an appealing façade,” Alma sniffed. “Not that I’d expect you to understand. In any case, Phyllida’s got a bigger queue than the post office. She’s preening like she’s Judi bloody Dench when the truth is she can’t even get a Hovis advert.”

Against her better judgement, Augusta asked: “How much is she charging?”

Alma, rooting around in her bag, looked up with a scowl. “Thirty pounds.”

“Never!”

They sat, avoiding each other’s gaze, trying not ponder the algebra of their humiliation. After a moment, Alma pulled out her phone and aimed it at Augusta, who automatically smoothed her hair. “What in God’s name are you doing, darling?”

“I’m putting us on Twitter. Someone must bait the trap.”

Half an hour later, Alma had sold eight autographs, and Augusta two. She sat morosely over her empty coffee cup, plotting another trip to the off-licence. Alma had scrawled, “Meet the Dynamic Duo of Canals!” on a piece of paper and affixed it to the front of the table. In its heyday,
Canals
had been the best loved of night-time soaps, its popularity due in large part to the rapport between Alma’s shrewish pub landlady, Doris, and Augusta’s dim barmaid, Kit. A few nostalgic autograph hunters wandered over. For the most part, though, they lost business to a set of Hungarian twins who had once nearly murdered James Bond under a circus tent.

A familiar tide of self-pity washed over Augusta. Was this the sum of her life, this fetid ballroom in Leeds, which smelled of old carpet and Boots perfume? Her only stage the world’s largest autograph show? She’d told the American girl from the
Advance
that she had two meaty roles lined up, and the girl had printed it. Maybe she’d even wanted to believe it.

Grudgingly, Augusta admitted to herself once again that the article hadn’t been badly done, and was not nearly as vicious as it might have been in more waspish hands. The girl — Frances, that was her name — had some flair.

With Alma’s help, she had looked up Frances’s past writing. The articles in the
Advance
were lively, sometimes silly, but told with dash. A long story about a Russian spy who’d been poisoned at a London hotel had moved Augusta to unexpected tears. But there had been no stories for the past month, which seemed to indicate the girl and the newspaper had gone separate ways.

A dark thought had begun to take shape in Augusta’s mind. The girl would be a most useful tool; she seemed to know something about the idiots in California who were publishing Deller’s book.

The mere thought was an irritant. Augusta said, “Did you know Deller’s writing a book about me?” There was no answer from Alma, and she looked over to see that her friend had fallen asleep, her sparse eyelashes gummed together. To think that one spent one’s life in pursuit of pleasure and acclaim, only to have it end in a relentless trudge from nap to tea. It hardly seemed worth it. She jammed her elbow into Alma’s ribs and the old woman jumped. “I said, did you know Deller’s writing a book about me?”

Alma rubbed a paper-white hand across her mouth. “Kenneth Deller,” she said finally. “Is he still carrying a torch for you? You’d think he’d have burned his arm to a stump by now.” She sat up straight, yawned. “He was always so lovely to me.” At the look in Augusta’s eyes, she added hastily, “Though he’s a complete shit, of course. By all known measures.”

“He intends to spread lies about me, Alma. About a past that exists only in his twisted imagination.” Augusta picked up the coffee cup, drained the last few drops. “But I’m not going to let it happen. I have a plan.”

Alma shook her head, her lips drawn tight. “I don’t know, my dear. I once heard Reggie Kray say ‘I have a plan’ in exactly that tone. Sometimes it’s best to let — Oh, hello.”

A woman had approached their table, carrying a canvas shopping bag loaded with books and magazines. She was in the canyon of middle age, suspended somewhere between Augusta and Alma, and she wore a dark-purple beret pulled flirtatiously over one eye. Her broad smile took in both of them.

“My two favourites,” she said, setting her bag on the table. “You don’t know how happy I was to read you’d be here.
Canals
hasn’t been the same with Kit and Doris gone.”

“You are too kind,” murmured Alma.

“And you, Mrs. Partridge, oh how I’d looked forward —”

“Miss,” said Alma.

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s Miss, not Mrs. Like ‘Miss Havisham.’”

“Ah-ha, yes, that’s good,” said the woman, but she seemed momentarily thrown. She fished in her bag and brought out an ancient, plastic-wrapped copy of the
Yorkshire Evening Post
, its pages the colour of weak tea. She pulled the newspaper out of its wrapper, carefully opened it, and slid one of the inside sections across the table toward Alma.

A theatre review spread over a half-page, a huge photo anchoring it in the centre: Alma playing Eleanor of Aquitaine in a provincial production of
The Lion in Winter
. She ran a thin finger over the photograph that showed her face clenched in rage under a medieval wimple. “It was an abysmal production,” she said fondly. “The fellow playing Henry was blotto at every curtain, couldn’t remember a single line. We only realized later that it was the beginning of dementia. We played to empty houses.”

“Yes,” said Augusta, “but at least you had a full set of teeth.”

Alma slapped her lightly with one hand and picked up a pen to sign the newspaper. The woman took it back and slid it into its wrapper. She put a twenty-pound note across the table.

“Ah, so you would like the full deal,” Augusta said.

The woman leaned down, her beret dipping across one shining eye. “I have something special for you. I’ve been saving it for years.”

Augusta felt a curious lurch in the pit of her stomach. From within her bag, the woman took out a magazine, the kind that featured photos of celebrities’ improbably perfect weddings and Christmases. The cover of the magazine stirred no memory. She noticed the date in the top right corner: December 1993.

The woman was beaming with excitement. “I kept it because I know how rare it is, to find family pictures of you . . .” Augusta wanted to get up and walk away, but she felt pinned to her seat. She tried to reach out and push the magazine away, but the woman had already opened it to a dog-eared page.

Don’t look,
she thought,
don’t look
. But of course she looked, and there she was, in front of a Christmas tree, with Charlie on her lap. She remembered the
Blue Peter
pyjamas that Ken had bought him. She pulled the magazine closer, as if the little-boy scent of him would lift off the page. How old would he have been? She did the math in her head: four. He would have been four years old. She scanned the image for clues, but she had absolutely no memory of the picture being taken. It was like looking at a stranger’s photo album.

Next to her, she heard Alma draw in a quick breath and then the woman’s bright voice: “What an adorable little boy. Where is he now?”

ten

The little gang of punks clustered on the towpath, Camden refugees in twenty-hole Doc Martens and with grommets the size of bath plugs stretching their earlobes. Augusta, leaning out her window, did not need to see her reflection to know that her forehead was a creased map of contempt.

Every day brought a different configuration of punks, but the one constant was a knobby-domed goon who spent his days fishing small plastic bags from the recesses of his bondage trousers. Their Artful Dodger. They’d strayed from their natural habitat, the market stalls and noodle shops of Camden, just out of sight around a bend in the canal. Downstream was King’s Cross, where the prostitutes and drug dealers had been driven from their once-rich hunting grounds by encroaching ciabatta peddlers and pilates studios.

Augusta had bought the flat in a moment of chemically assisted mysticism.
It’s on the canal
, she had thought when the estate agent first walked her through the empty, sun-drenched rooms,
and I’m in
Canals. The handful of Percocets she’d taken earlier had taken the edge off the morning and become her partner in crime:
Buy the flat, Kit. You deserve it.

And Kit did deserve it, poor thing. After that string of husbands — the one who’d set fire to his scooter under her front window, the other who hadn’t mentioned he was wanted for war crimes — even the pluckiest barmaid in England was starting to feel the drag. Unfortunately, Kit was soon to meet her bloody end in front of a rack of cookery magazines at WH Smith, the victim of a desperate act of violence and, more importantly, the producers’ equally desperate desire never to work with Augusta again. Two years after she’d bought the flat, Kit was dead, and Augusta was left with a mortgage, the mere spectre of future work, and no painkillers to ease her passage into the day.

The punks huddled closer, and Augusta strained to see what they were busy with. A spliff? A bag of pills? She felt a spasm of envy as she imagined what they would soon share: a magic carpet of fellow-feeling, insulation from the chatter of the crowd and the voices in their own heads.

A wintry breeze blew through the open window, carrying the scent of the canal, diesel, and weed entwined. The old England and the new. The afternoon stretched before her, Siberian in its emptiness.

With a last glance out the window, Augusta picked up her coffee and moved to her desk. As she set down her mug, she ran her finger over the surface, scarred with rings from more glamorous drinks. She picked up the picture of Charlie that sat beside her computer. It was taken when he was — nine? Ten? She didn’t remember much about that school holiday, except that Kenneth had brought the boy to meet her down by Tower Bridge. He had left them, backing away down the Thames path as if he were afraid to let the boy out of his sight.

Augusta and her son had sat on a bench watching the tourist boats on the river, and she’d whispered that maybe, if they were very lucky, a sailing ship would come by and the bridge would be raised, its two vast blue arms creaking slowly to the sky.

The boy looked at her politely but didn’t say anything, and she tried to think, for the thousandth time, who he reminded her of. Caramel hair, eyes almost the same colour, freckles matching those, and a ridiculously small nose. But didn’t all children have noses that size? It was adulthood that brought the giant honker, the misshapen hooter, the syphilitic proboscis.

Charlie had accepted her offer of an ice cream, and sat eating it with neat deliberation, his eyes on the river. She kept one hand in her purse, her fingers touching a flask of whisky.

“We’re studying the river at school,” he said. “Do you know how many bodies they pull out a week?”

“What, now?” she asked, startled.

“Yes. There are special river police — do you know how many bodies they pull out?”

She shrugged, thinking that if she’d known children were this morbid, she might have been more interested in having one.

“One a week. Fifty-two a year. On average.”

They’d sat for at least an hour, hardly speaking, but content. At least she was. Being with her son gave her a strange, electric thrill. She’d imagined that passersby were staring at him, handsome in his school blazer. The bridge never went up and no police boats went by. As the sun set Kenneth came to find them, astonished they hadn’t moved.

Perhaps that silence presaged this one. Seven years. What kind of son doesn’t speak to his mother for seven years? She opened the lid of her computer and laboriously punched in an address she knew by heart. The book shop’s web site was designed to look like it had been produced on a typewriter, the letters black and wavy-edged. Hell Yes Books, West Third Street, Los Angeles.

She placed her cursor above the tab that said Who We Are, held her breath, and clicked. Charles Price, events manager. As always, she was grateful for the tiny concession he’d made by keeping her name. Well, her adopted name. She squinted at his photo. He was beautiful, her boy, but he looked sinewy, almost gaunt. Augusta thought:
If he’s on a raw food diet I’ll kill him.

She felt the familiar indignation rise. He couldn’t pick up the phone? Admittedly, she might have made more of an effort. But she had been busy. A woman on her own, trying to make her way in the world. Irritation drew Augusta up a little higher. The boy sold books in a Los Angeles shop. Part-time. Which of them had more time for maintaining bridges?

Some people preferred burning bridges. She imagined Kenneth Deller, tight polyester trousers aflame, plummeting from a great height. Augusta closed the bookstore’s page and typed in a new address. A lurid web page sprang up, flame-orange and hope-pink, and she squinted against the glow. “Are You in a Love Rut? Stuck with a Love Rat? Mr. Romance Can Help You Through!” Happy couples, glued together like conjoined twins, offered testimonials to Mr. Romance’s prowess in matchmaking, but nowhere on the web site was there a picture of the man himself. Because then people would see that he was a fat bastard with lying crocodile eyes.

Under the section labelled Upcoming, there was a note about the date of Mr. Romance’s next radio show. Below that was a promise — or a threat — that Mr. Romance’s self-help manual for overcoming heartbreak would be in stores soon. A pain pierced her chest as she saw the title of the book:
The Heart Is an Egg (It Can Be Broken, But Never Beaten).
Underneath, it read: “Drawing on painful personal experience as well as years as relationship counsellor, the author will explore the ways that lies and self-deception can curdle even the strongest bonds.” There was no more information forthcoming. Whatever that fucker was writing about her, it was, for the moment, sealed in his brain’s soft yolk.

Drawing on painful personal experience. He was sitting in Los Angeles at that moment, redrawing their past. His lies would become her truth. She moved the cursor over the little tab that said “Contact.” Perhaps she should send him another email. He was too pig-headed to have absorbed the threat in the first one.

She sat back, letting the rage buoy her. It would not stand. From down the hall, she heard one of her neighbours’ doors opening. The first human sound she’d heard all day. She could die in here, and no one would know. Only Alma, who might be dead herself any day.

With a sudden start, Augusta reached for the bin by the desk and started to rifle through it. There was a mountain of detritus inside, most of it paper: a flyer from the local Italian advertising its latest abomination, curry pizza. A handout from the council explaining recycling protocols. And bills, God, so many bills, all of them still sealed in their envelopes. Frantic now, she dug deeper. Apple core (when had she bought apples?). A dead mouse, or something like it. No bottles; those she carefully placed in the communal bin downstairs.

Finally, near the bottom, her fingers found a bit of thick paper. She had been impressed by the rich, pebbled stock when the letter arrived. It had landed with the rest of the post, and when she saw that the return address was Los Angeles, her heart had thumped madly. But once she’d glanced at the contents and realized it wasn’t from Charlie, she’d chucked it out with the other rubbish.

Now she carefully wiped a bit of ash off one corner and sat back with the letter in her hands.

Dear Ms. Price,

Please let me introduce myself. I’m Tyson Benn, the Talent Liaison Manager for Fantasmagoria™, which you might know is the Largest Fan-Based Multi-Media Entertainment Gathering™ in the Los Angeles area (Orange County excluded).

I am currently organizing the schedule for this year’s event, and I would like to extend an invitation to you to appear in our panel discussion, “Type-A Personalities: The Evolution of the Vampire Medical Drama.”

Your iconic role as Dr. Helen Mount in
The Blood Bank
would make you an ideal participant on this panel, and we are hoping you might consider our offer to visit Los Angeles and meet some of your most devoted fans at the 12th annual Fantasmagoria™. Of course we would like to extend our hospitality, and would provide all flights, transfers, accommodation, and a per diem to be used at your discretion.

Please do let me know at your earliest convenience if this might be of interest, and I can provide you with further details.

With warmest (Type O) regards,

Tyson Benn