“Fuck’s sake. What happened?”
“His agent called. He’s had second thoughts.”
She spoke the last two words with utter contempt.
“The money?”
“Not the money.”
The other memorable tip in the Metro piece was to get your boss to think of you as someone who solves problems (and not someone who creates them). Accordingly, I set my expression to “cool, troubleshooting” mode.
“Leave it with me,” I told her. “I’ll sort it.”
Leave it with me, by the way, is a marvelously useful phrase, according to the free newspaper, seeming to promise much, but committing to exactly nothing. All sorts of crazy ideas can be interred, said the article, in the burial plot marked “Leave It With Me.”
But Harriet Vick may have read the exact same feature. There was a look in her eye that I didn’t especially care for.
“Leave it with you,” she said sourly. “I thought we had left it with you. It was with you when it all came undone.”
“I’ll go round with some flowers and make everything all right again.”
The boss sighed (an especially dangerous sign, I seem to recall).
“His agent said, And don’t bother sending anyone round with flowers, he’s not about to change his mind.”
Some of the other tips in the Metro story were frankly unhelpful—be hard working and dependable, for instance—and I was struggling to recall a zinger that could take me out of the door.
Stay one step ahead!
Was that one?
“I’ve got a feeling I can talk him back on board,” I told her.
Her face suggested this line had gone down like a cup of cold sick.
“What makes you say that, Daisy?”
Her eyes skated dangerously to something on her computer screen; quite possibly the terms of my contract.
“What makes me say that,” I began, having no clue about how the sentence would end, “is that. Is that your phone is ringing!”
Her mobile was ringing; and vibrating, and turning in an angry circle on the shiny surface of her desk. She gave me the signal for I have to take this call, but don’t for a moment imagine you have heard the end of this. And I fled her office performing the signal for Don’t worry, I’ll sort it out, everything will be just fine… maybe.
In under an hour, I was sitting on Chad Butterick’s white sofa, drinking coffee and staring into the ruined schoolboy face.
As a masterstroke, I had skipped the flowers and instead presented him with a big fat art book that I scored in Foyle’s on the way over. Chad, however, was oddly unmoved by The Male Nude in Sculpture (only £15.99!). He flicked through its pages, pausing briefly at I think a Bernini, his eyebrows suggesting interest, but then he put the volume to one side and shook his head sadly.
“It’s not the money, my love,” he explained (again). “They could offer me a million, and I still wouldn’t do it.”
This of course was an out and out whopper, but it would not help to call him on it.
The queasy backnote of drains and Febreze seemed especially prominent this morning beneath the ever-present pong of Marlboro. I tried asking what “we” needed to do to resolve the situation. Apparently, there was no “situation”; nothing to resolve; his mind was made up. I tried saying, Please help me understand; what’s it all about? His reply—that he preferred to maintain the performer’s mystique; that it was necessary to retain a degree of mystery for one’s audience—made me dive into the coffee mug to bury a huge cackle of hilarity.
Mystique! Mystery! From the man who was never out of OK, Chat magazine and Hello!
Like he’d give a shit, I even tried suggesting my job was on the line (which it probably was).
“My darling, you’ll get another,” he said unhelpfully.
“I’ve only just got this one.”
“Listen, sweetie. I’ve been in this business long enough to know that none of it matters. Have another biscuit.”
We’d agree all the questions in advance? He smiled weakly.
We’d double the fee—yes, I knew it wasn’t about the money—and if there was a book of the series—and there could very well be—he’d be on the cover. He playfully “slapped” my wrist and said didn’t my mother teach me not to tell porkies.
He could pick his favorite cameraman, lighting director, best boy; whatever it took, we’d make it work. “You’re very good at your job, my darling,” he lied, but it wasn’t gonna happen.
So I was sitting with Chad, eating biscuits in his monstrous white room—my whole flat could fit inside it—when my eyes cut to the window and the house across the road. What would Dr. Eggstain do in my position? I found myself wondering. He would, I seemed to recall from our last meeting, say the first thing that came into his head.
“So who’s that on your mantelpiece?” I asked in reference to the massive black and white photo of a fit young male with his kit off. “Is he some famous sixties film star I should know?”
“He was a star, yes,” said Chad. But his voice had thickened.
“I was thinking Alain Delon?”
“Not French. Irish. And not a film star. His name was Donal; he was my star. He was the sun that I orbited.”
And he wept.
Proper salty tears slid down his cheeks—he was oddly unembarrassed, while I was effing mortified—hideous to see the face familiar from a thousand cheesy grins now contorted in a rictus of anguish.
“He died. We were so young.”
I gazed at the broad back of the youth over the fireplace, the crows wing of black hair falling toward the firm jaw. It suddenly struck me.
“Did you take that photo?”
“I did. On Ballintoy strand. August 15, 1980.”
“Jesus. I’m so sorry. Would you like a tissue?”
“Thanks, my darling.”
Chad spent a few moments dabbing at his face. A sorry smile broke through the misery.
“You never really get over it. They tell you that you will, but you actually don’t.”
I had the good sense to say nothing. Especially not that I had felt exactly the same when my hamster Billy drowned in the fish
