To the Devil - a Diva! (24 page)

I stared at my gran.

‘It's no accident, all them creepy films she's been in,' Gran said vehemently, mistaking my surprise for scepticism. ‘Everything she's done has been about the black arts. Everything. She's spreading the word.' Gran's voice had gone rather thick. A terrible pall was spreading over the tea table. ‘She was even in films based on novels by Fox Soames. All he wanted to do was warn the world. He knew she was up to no good. He tried to get her out of all that.

And every film she was ever in, everyone she was around, all of it were cursed. Fox's wife, Magda Soames. She died. Killed in an accident when they were visiting the set. When they went to sort Karla out. Magda karked it. And I think it's all down to Karla. All the electricians, script writers, extras and co-stars who've died while she's been around, working on a film. It's too many. She's damned.'

Lance set down his tea cup. ‘I know,' he said. ‘I know exactly what you mean.' He looked at me hesitantly, and then back at Gran. ‘I've tried to warn people. For years. I've tried to tell them. I've seen at first-hand what Karla can do. No one believed a word of it.'

Gran nodded in satisfaction. ‘Well,' she said. ‘I'll back
you up, Lance. I know. Everything she touches turns to ash. I know because I was there when she first gave her soul to Satan. When she was just a kiddie. I know the damage she can do.'

I couldn't believe this. They'd switched into a different mode, all of a sudden. My gran and my new boyfriend. Suddenly they sounded like vampire hunters.

Lance had gone white. ‘She tried it on me. She tried it on my mother first. My mother died. And I was in Karla's care. She tried to take my soul, too.'

Lance didn't care if he sounded paranoid and mental. He felt a bit sorry for Colin in the midst of this conversation. Poor Colin, who was already so bewildered at Lance coming on so strong and being so keen for the past few days. Lance wouldn't have blamed Colin if he'd backed off right then and wanted nothing more to do with him.

But didn't Colin see? There was serendipity here. Or fate, or destiny. Some force was bringing them together. Look at the three of us, Lance thought, having tea together and there's no real reason for it. Just that me and Colin have happened to have started seeing each other. I had no idea Colin's gran knew Karla and had a piece of that woman's past in her safe-keeping. Why would I even suspect that?

Lance suddenly felt as if he was being told something. He was being warned and protected by an invisible force. A force opposed, perhaps, to the dark forces that Karla represented.

And that was why he was with Colin. That was why he had thrown in his lot with the boy so quickly and easily. He knew it hadn't really been like him, to behave like that. It just wasn't him at all. This force knew that Lance had to meet
Colin's gran. It had duped Lance into falling in love, just to get its own way. All for the greater good.

Lance had been prepared to forget about Karla. He'd got so embarrassingly worked up at the thought of her coming to Manchester. He couldn't see past that. He'd got scared. He'd thought she was coming here to do him in. To reclaim him, body and soul.

But Colin had been his distraction. When he woke up with Colin on Saturday morning, all that horror had gone. Dissolved out of his mind and bloodstream. It was like waking up with the sun streaming into the room. He realised that he didn't have to dwell on the past at all. That woman didn't have to be allowed to take over his life and fill all his thoughts. And when he saw her today he'd thought: Well, she's just a harmless old woman after all. Just a jobbing actress. She's nothing to me.

But this was too weird. This link to Colin's gran.

Lance didn't believe in coincidence. He just didn't. He thought all things happened for a reason. There was a pattern somewhere, here in this.

He was used to finding patterns. In his day-job he was a soap actor. He read his scripts every week and his fate was dictated by the panel of writers who sat in the conference room above the studios. By now he knew all their tricks. He could see their plot lines and their schemes and leitmotifs spiralling and stretching out ahead. He could sometimes anticipate what was coming. Every soap actor he knew kept on the ball like this. Agog for meaty storylines. Alert for getting the chop. Lance was particularly skilled at guessing what was in store.

And that was how he felt now. Karla had them all tangled
up. She was drawing them in closer. She was behind all of this, as she always was. She was plotting.

Colin and his gran had to work hard to calm Lance down. He was getting himself into a right flap. He really did sound paranoid to them as he stood up and paced around the living room, gabbling away and looking out at the cityscape. Colin had never seen him so perturbed and rambling. He was letting his words run on ahead of his mouth and not being very clear at all.

Gran fetched out more sherry. Lance looked to her like a drinker. Someone to whom something very stiff and very dry wouldn't come amiss. He thanked her and slumped back down.

‘Sorry,' he said. ‘It's just … She brings everything back up for me. I thought I'd dealt with it all.'

‘Katy's like that,' said Gran. ‘I've had all weekend, roving over the old days. She's just one of those people who can get to you.'

‘Lance,' Colin told him. ‘It doesn't matter. She can't hurt you. She can't affect anything. We aren't being drawn into anything.'

He looked up at Colin, anguish in his eyes. ‘But that's my second surprise,' he said. ‘Remember I wouldn't tell you what the plans were for this evening?'

Colin nodded.

‘We're going for dinner,' he said heavily. ‘With Karla. We arranged it at the end of the shoot this morning. We got a bit carried away and decided it was the best thing to clear the air. She's booked a table for us. Me and you and …'

Gran tipped the sherry into his glass again. ‘And I'm coming as well.'

He smiled unsteadily. ‘Karla's bringing some other people. Friends she says she's made here already. A porter from the hotel she's staying in …'

‘She didn't waste any time,' Gran sighed.

‘And another friend,' said Lance. ‘Esther, or Ellie, or something.'

‘Effie!' Gran burst out. ‘Effie's supposed to be my friend, the cheeky mare!'

Lance shrugged. ‘Anyway. That's what's happening tonight. A nice Italian restaurant near the town hall. She seems to be drawing us together …'

Lance couldn't bring himself to tell them the full story of Karla and his mother. He gave them some of it, in the remainder of that afternoon, as they prepared for their evening out. The rest of the tale he kept, as ever, to himself.

My mother, he said, was everything Karla isn't. I know I idolise her and always have. I probably go too far. You've seen the picture in my hallway, Colin. You said it yourself, I've got a shrine to my mother.

She was classy. She was graceful. She used to stand by the scoreboards and the glittering prizes in evening dresses on TV quizzes and she became very popular. Then they sacked her because she had me out of wedlock. The sponsors wouldn't have her on anymore, even after the bump went down. That's how it was in those days.

So it was just me and Mum together and she had to work. Her agent was called Piggy and he said she needn't worry. She had the British Film Industry to fall back on. Studio
comedies and thrillers and, eventually, horror. Business was booming. She was able, she was gorgeous. She could sing and dance and she could scream. Sammi Randall could look like dynamite in anything she was given to wear. She appeared in the very last Ealing comedies, the earliest
Carry Ons
, and she was in the Hammer movies through their heyday. Never starring, always to one side, maybe one or two lines if she was lucky. But she was there to provide an alluring backdrop to the main action. It was enough to get by, to keep us both in babyfood and shoes and tea bags through the Sixties. While everyone in London was partying, she was home learning her scripts and bringing me up. Slowly I became aware of her public life.

My favourite moment of all the many moments she occupies in those movies comes in the dinosaur flick she made. She manages to look fabulous in a furry bikini, as a cavewoman with a Doris Day coiffure. She has one line and it's in perfect, clipped, King's Road tones: ‘Well, I don't mind roasting a pterodactyl, but how the devil do I stuff it?'

This was where she met Karla and how Karla came into our lives. They became friends amongst the polystyrene rocks of the set of ‘Prehysteria!' the cavewoman musical. Karla was the star of the show, of course.

They all caught fleas off the furry costumes. They were covered in itching bites and the script was, of course, an insult to their intelligence. But they were a team of women making a British film together. No Christopher Lee, Sid James or Peter Cushing in this one. Just lots of leggy extras in furry bras and pants fighting rubber tyrannosaurs and thinking they were making a feminist movie. Naturally they had the time of their lives.

Karla took Mum under her wing. I remember Karla coming back to our flat a few times, along with members of the crew. Mum's fee had gone up, and it was Karla who taught her to take charge of her money, and helped us look for a better place, closer to her. I was about twelve and I remember sitting up late in my pyjamas, watching these exciting film people drinking and smoking and dancing round our new house. It was like the party had decided to come to us.

Karla remembered Mum when it came to her next star vehicle. ‘Get Inside Me, Satan!' The one they filmed in a quarry. Another vampire queen extravaganza, written by Fox Soames. The best of its type, say all the movie books. Soames himself and his raddled boozy wife even came to see the filming. They lived with all of us in those grotty mobile homes in a valley in North Wales. I was there too, of course. Mum took me everywhere. I thought everyone lived like that.

Mum was one of the vampy slaves of the evil vampire queen, but she came back to our caravan every night to make me beans on toast or a poached egg, and to read me to sleep.

This was when Karla was at her height. The height of her fame and popularity, and also her powers.

That film marked the turning point. That was the film that was cursed.

It was the one during which Magda Soames died. I can remember seeing her shuffling about between the trailers and across the set in her mink coat, acting all grand and sniffy. She thought she could order everyone around because her husband was the great writer, Fox Soames.
None of us rabble would be there if it wasn't for him.

There were all sorts of rumours that he was having an affair on the set. That was the real reason he was there, the dirty old sod. And he had the effrontery even to bring his wife. No wonder she was so foul-tempered. By then the production had already hit a few snags. Quarrels about decency with the studio, electrical faults. Several cans of rushes had mysteriously combusted en route to London. Costumes had shrank. There were dozens of retakes. Everyone was becoming fractious. The director was young. It was his first feature. Everyone knew he was supposedly gifted and brilliant, but they were starting to doubt his mettle, his pragmatism. His was another name apparently cursed by that film. He was killed the following year in a waterskiing accident. When you put them altogether, that's a lot of people dead who were connected with ‘Get Inside Me, Satan!'

And there I was, at my tender age, wandering about and watching all the grown-ups at work and play in that freezing valley. It was like running away and joining the circus. I remember walking about late at night between caravans, stepping over humming cables, keeping out of the arc lights. I wore slippers and a woolly checkered dressing gown Mum had bought me for my birthday. I thought I was the bee's knees, everyone knowing who I was. Everyone being so proud of Sammi Randall and her cherubic son. Thinking she was an angel and a great actress, destined for great things.

All the time we had the devil in our midst. Well, I always thought that was Fox Soames. I thought he was surely the epicentre of the evil storm they brewed up in that Welsh valley and then committed to celluloid forever. He certainly
looked the part: suave in his velvet suits and that gargoyle's face. Half-cut all the time on his brandy and champagne, furiously smoking black Sobranies and bullying the young director in his officer class tones.

My mum had read his novels of the Occult. In our caravan she had a shelf of well-thumbed paperbacks. She was thrilled to be in a film of his, and to actually meet him. She asked him to sign her yellow-spined, luridly-covered Pan paperbacks. He did so ill-naturedly, I remember, and he peered down at me with a wicked scowl, as if a mere child had no business on that film set.

It was being around that world, in all that industrious confusion of the filming, that made any other career but acting unthinkable for me. I sensed magic – not necessarily black – in the air on those cold Welsh nights.

If what I've been told by Sally today is correct, then Soames was only there to warn Karla. To rescue her from her wicked life. He wasn't the driving force at all. And, of course, he was dead himself, within a couple of years. Dead of the booze and a broken heart, they all said – though a few wags suggested he'd been dragged off to hell, having fleeced the devil for millions through the sales of his novels and movies. Now the devil was after his percentage. Others said that it was the cursed movie that got him: claiming yet another victim.

They can't even show that movie on the TV anymore. They banned it. I remember it being on once and I thought I'd tape it, because of Mum. But when I played the tape back the next day it was snooker. I've never been good at setting the video. The newspapers went mad about people being found dead, frozen solid in their armchairs. About power
failures and pets going mad. Heart attacks and so on. It's not actually that scary a film, from what I recall.

Can the essence of evil really be trapped between the frames of a film? Squashed into the cans and the reels and ready to seep out again into the world?

Some of the fanatics suggest that. Ghoulish creatures, fans, of course. I keep an eye out for their speculations. The internet seems to be seething with conspiracy theories and what they call Fan Fiction about ‘Get Inside Me, Satan!', Fox Soames and, of course, Karla Sorenson. Some people who weren't even born when that trashy film was made have let the damned thing take over their lives, their whole imaginations. Recently they've been saying that missing cans of unused film have turned up. Found in a church bring-andbuy sale. These were the ones that were meant to have been burnt. And there's rumours that one unscripted sequence has Karla turn on my mum and curse her out, vilely. I remember her coming back to the trailer that day, furious and upset they'd had a falling out. Of course, the fans make more of this supposed out-take. Pointing out it must have been a real curse from La Sorenson, because my mum was dead within a year, as well.

This is how legends grow up, of course. That's the legend I've grown up in the shadow of. No matter how ridiculous it sounds to people, I still can't escape it. And this afternoon the legend seems more palpable than ever. The legend that Karla Sorenson brought true evil into that film and all our lives and, as a result, Magda and Fox Soames, the director and my mum all died.

They found Magda on the rockface, broken up like a doll and her brains spattered all over the scree. She'd climbed up
the rocks in the middle of the night, pissed out of her mind in a nightie and her mink. We all heard the scream as she flung herself down on us, and missed. She'd been driven crackers, the inquest implied, by her husband's single-mindedness, his ruthless dedication to his career and his bizarre, unswerving conviction that the devil was at large in the world. Magda's capacity for rational thought and self-preservation had been utterly destroyed. The old man himself slunk away, ruined by guilt and grief. No more novels, no more stories.