Based on a True Story (14 page)

twenty-five

She had always liked the way Kenneth walked. There had been times when it was the only thing she did like about him. Now Augusta scurried to keep up as he strode down Wilshire Boulevard with his long, loose gait, eyes locked on a point in the far distance. He walked as if no one was watching.

The pain in her head was alive. “Are we nearly there?” she panted.

He pointed to a white building in the distance, its roof ridged like a hedgehog’s back. “Just there,” he said. “We’ll have lunch at the art gallery.”

Would there be wine at the art gallery? Surely there had to be. Even the Americans weren’t as barbaric as that. Augusta hurried on, determined not to give him the satisfaction of asking for a slower pace. Her feet hurt, but her pride was even more bruised. What a debacle! Kenneth had hurried her out of the convention centre, ignoring Tyson Benn’s angry demand that Augusta stop and apologize to her fellow panellists.

“I’ll have her right back,” Ken called over his shoulder as he guided her to the car park.

As he drove, the messages from Benn flooded in on her phone: she had offended Christoph Frank and missed her autograph session. There was an equally frantic message from Frances saying that Fantasmagoria™ would no longer extend the hand of hospitality to those who had bitten it. They were being kicked out of their rooms. Augusta considered tossing the phone out the car window, but settled for shoving it to the bottom of her bag.

She felt a stitch in her side and slowed. An ornate green fence ran along one edge of the pavement, and she grasped it, breathing hard. The sun was warm on her face and for once she was grateful, and looked up to welcome it. A strange smell hung in the air: vegetal, dark, slightly bitter. She opened her eyes, blinked. Kenneth had realized she’d stopped and walked back toward her.

On the other side of the fence was a wide, grassy park. Schoolchildren played on the steps of a museum set on a little hill back from the street. Here and there, the beautiful lawn was marred by dark and greasy pools that seemed to shift and bubble in the sun.

“Ken,” she said, “where the hell are we?”

“La Brea tar pits,” he answered. He’d come to stand next to her, closer than a stranger should.

Augusta squinted through the fence. There was something odd going on. To the right, a giant elephant statue stood on the shore of a tar pit. It had the wrong proportions for an elephant, though, its shoulders too high and its tusks too long. The word for the prehistoric creature came into her head suddenly: mammoth. Next to the statue of the mammoth was a smaller one. A baby. Its trunk was raised in distress, and it appeared to be calling to a third mammoth, half-sunk and floundering in the sticky goo. Its mother.

Augusta stared at the dreadful tableau, the baby mammoth agonizing over its lost mother, the mother sinking in the tar, and felt the morning’s rage rush back. Her fingers tightened on the fence.

She hissed, “You are a miserable bastard.”

Ken turned sharply to look at her. “What?”

“This —” her hand flapped at the immobile mammoths. “This little domestic tableau. The abandoned baby. You brought me here to see this.”

He stared at her for a moment, and she realized, to her fury, that he was trying not to laugh.

“Augusta,” he said, when he’d managed to control his face. “You’re as mad as a box of frogs.”

He ordered a bottle of wine for them, and, as if sensing her need, filled her glass almost to the top. He gave himself a much smaller measure. She forced herself to wait before snatching up the glass. Instead she studied the other diners in the gallery’s courtyard, all of them looking as if they’d stepped, lineless and creaseless, from some celestial factory. Everyone in London looked unkempt most of the time. Only here did she realize the word had an opposite.

“Do they really need help with love, these pretty robots?” Now she could reach for her glass. The wine slipped down her throat, and immediately she felt her mood lift.

Kenneth shrugged. “Doesn’t everyone?”

“I suppose I find it odd that you’re here, of all places. Such a rough pebble amid all the glossy stones.”

If it stung, he wasn’t about to show it. “I like Americans,” he said. “You know where you stand with them. There’s no incessant digging for meaning.”

Augusta set her glass down with a clang, and the couple at the next table looked over. “Is that a jab?”

He leaned closer, and for a moment she saw him as a young man, the swagger that had taken her breath away.

“If I’d meant to jab,” he said softly, “you would have felt it.”

She sat back in her seat. So. A declaration of war. Strangely, it was a relief to have his feelings out in the open. That little stunt with the sad elephants had been deliberate.
If I’d meant to jab.
Well, he did mean to jab, didn’t he? He would have his revenge on her, in print, in his idiot book. She took a gulp of wine. Did he really think she’d let him ruin her future by lying about their past? He was a bigger fool than she remembered.

“So that’s what you want,” she said. “To hurt me.”

He looked at her, genuine confusion in his eyes. She noticed that he still had the tiny scar in the arch of his right brow where she’d winged him with an ashtray. She remembered the ashtray, shaped like a Sputnik satellite, but not the reason for the fight.

“I don’t want to hurt you, Augusta. I just wanted to take you to lunch.” He returned to studying his menu, so she barely heard his next words: “And perhaps stare at your legs.”

She searched for a suitably acid retort but the wine was an alkaline bath for her anger. “I’ll be back in a moment,” she said, gathering her bag. “Order me something delicious, would you? No arsenic.” She found the waitress and asked directions to the loo. She turned suddenly back to the table, hoping to catch him staring at her, but he was gazing away from her. She fumed all the way down the white marble staircase.

It was only when she climbed back up the stairs and saw him still gazing in the opposite direction that it struck her: he was watching her reflection in the gallery’s tall windows. He wanted to stare at her without being caught staring. She felt an odd spasm in her centre, unrooted to any emotion she could name.

“I’ve remembered what we were arguing about that time,” she said, as she slid back into her seat. He’d refilled her wineglass.

“Which time was that?”

Augusta waved a finger toward him. “The time your head got in the way of the ashtray.”

“Ah.”

“It is rather a large head, you have to admit.”

“Rather a large ashtray, too.” The waiter arrived and set down their plates. Ken had ordered lamb shanks for both of them, pale bones upright in a glossy, rich heap of meat. Augusta inhaled greedily; she hadn’t realized how hungry she was.

“I remember that row clearly,” he said, spearing a chunk of lamb on his fork. “You wanted to miss the school holiday in order to film some dreadful movie in Cardiff.” He chewed placidly, ignoring the clang as Augusta’s fork clattered to her plate.

In a deadly quiet voice, she said, “That is not why we rowed.”

“And you wanted me to tell Charles that you were in hospital having your appendix out. To explain why you couldn’t see him.” He picked up his wine glass, watching her over the rim.
He’s enjoying this
, Augusta thought. Sitting here, sparring with her, was the highlight of his week. His year.

Taking a deep breath, she said, “I think you might have the beginnings of Alzheimer’s, Ken, since the events of your life seem lost in some kind of fog. But I recall that day clearly: you told me you wanted us all to spend the school holidays in a caravan park . . .” she leaned toward him and hissed, “
in Skegness
.” She picked up her knife and fork. “This is why you cannot be trusted with the past. Your memory is a colander with extremely large holes.”

He stared at her, and to her irritation she realized, once again, that he was trying not to laugh. “You do know the story of the pot and the kettle, don’t you, Augusta?” Before she could say anything, he said, “There’s an easy way to solve this. We’ll just ask the lad what happened.”

She reached for her wineglass and turned to the windows, where the afternoon sun was a solid block of light. She could take her knife and cut it, she thought; slice it into pieces and take it home with her. Her eyes felt sore in the glare, and she closed them for a minute.

When he spoke his voice had changed. There was no mockery in it now, just gentleness. A voice she’d once welcomed in the dark. “You are going to see him, aren’t you?”

She turned back to her plate, but the lamb had cooled and sat jellied and unappetizing. The chatter rose around them, bouncing off the walls, and suddenly all she wanted was to be in bed, enrobed in silence. She didn’t trust herself to look at him.
It’s just been a crap day
, she thought.
A crap day that began with a hangover and went downhill from there.

A finger nudged the back of her hand and she looked up at him. Under the tiny scar, his blue eyes were coaxing. “I still have that ashtray, if you’d like to see it. One of the few things you left behind. I always imagined you might want to throw it at me again one day.”

twenty-six

The sign above the cracked carport indicated that they had arrived at the St. Tropez Motel.

“That,” said Augusta, pointing to the sign, “is the triumph of hope over evidence.”

The taxi dropped them at an inglorious delta between the rapids of the 101 freeway and the sluggish current of Hollywood Boulevard. Frances, thoroughly beaten, reached for her flat wallet. Augusta left the cab and stood on the sidewalk, watching the wind turn over a used condom in the gutter.

“My God,” she said when Frances joined her, “I love the glamour of Hollywood.”

They dragged their bags past an empty swimming pool where the paint sloughed off in great psoriatic flakes. Frances’s shoulder dipped from the weight of a plastic bag filled with tiny bottles of wine, vodka, and whisky. When they’d met in the lobby of the hotel and Frances had whispered that they had an hour to pack their bags, Augusta had shoved her back toward the elevator and said, “Right. Plunder the minibar. And don’t spare the liqueurs.”

They checked into the St. Tropez and found that their room overlooked the parking lot. They lay on matching twin beds, mini-bottles clustered on the table between them. Together they watched through the filthy window as a woman on a mobility scooter pulled up, answered her phone, and began to negotiate the price of a blow job.

They were too numb to do much but watch. Frances rolled over and stared at her phone, as if it were an oracle leading the way to salvation. She opened her Facebook page and reread the message from Stan. Augusta peered over her shoulder.

“Stanley wants to know when you’ll be home,” she read, and Frances, scowling, clapped a hand over the screen. Augusta rolled back onto her pillow, sending a cloud of dust motes into the air. “Stanley’s the fellow from the awards night? The drunk with the lovely grey quiff? He’s not too old for you, is he?”

“No,” Frances said. “He’s not. He went grey early, that’s all.” She sat up and hugged her knees, and Augusta thought she looked like a little girl. “It’s not like men are beating down my door, Augusta. It’s bad enough not to have a job or a home, but then not to have a boyfriend either . . . It’s like a trilogy of failure. At my age.”

“Well, yes,” said Augusta. “At the decrepit age of thirty-one. We should probably just shove you off on an ice floe.”

Frances turned to her and in the light from the window Augusta could see the warning glint of moisture in her eye. “I think I’m in love with him.”

Augusta now kept a wad of tissues constantly at hand. She pulled one out and handed it over. “If you’re certain,” she said.

“If I’m certain?” Frances wiped her nose. “God, you’re just like my mother.”

“Then your mother must be a very clever woman with a magnificent bosom.” The beep of an incoming message sounded on her phone, but Augusta ignored it. “I’m only worried that you might be confusing love for the man with love for the life he gave you. A job that you adored. When you pine for him, perhaps you’re just pining for that horrid newspaper. Though God knows why. You’d have a better life shovelling shit on the river bottom.”

Frances flopped back on the bed. “Thank you for your advice, Dr. Phil.”

“Truth be told, I never did finish my medical degree.”

Her phone beeped again, and with a curse Augusta picked it off the chenille bedspread where it lay between two stains, one ancient and one quite fresh. Another message from Kenneth. Before he’d let her go after lunch he’d made her promise that she would come to dinner at his house. The message contained his address and phone number. He’d signed off with a presumptuous x, as if there might be a kiss in their collective future.

Augusta reached for a tiny bottle of white wine, handed it wordlessly to Frances. She chose a red for herself. They lay in bed watching the woman outside haggle for her services, scything the air for emphasis.

Augusta’s phone rang, and she snatched it off the bed and barked, “Stop hounding me, you great knob!” Her mouth opened in a comical O and Frances heard her say, sheepishly: “It’s you, darling. Apologies.” After she’d hung up, she sat staring at the phone for a moment.

“That was my friend Alma calling from London. My elderly friend Alma. She wanted to know if I’m in some sort of trouble. Apparently she’d been following the convention on a tweetstream.” She looked up at Frances. “What the fuck is a tweetstream?”

twenty-seven

Frances had exhausted all the free reading material in the motel room: last week’s copy of
LA Weekly
, an issue of
Freedom
magazine with a young Scientologist pop star on the cover, and a pamphlet about Disneyland. She’d even considered the Bible in the drawer by the bed, but its pages were gummed together.

Anything to keep her from the thoughts that chased each other endlessly, fanged mouth to chewed tail.
Useless, useless, useless
, said the fanged mouth, and she heard herself repeat it out loud: “I’m useless.”

She clapped a hand over her mouth, but Augusta was in the shower and hadn’t heard. Had Augusta ever stood on a threadbare carpet chastising herself out loud? Frances doubted it. Augusta would have drowned the spiteful little voice instead. She longed to see her parents, who remembered what she had once been, and wouldn’t despise her failure. She longed to see Stanley, who had recognized her potential. Stanley, who courted catastrophe.

Frances swung her feet off the bed. Empty bottles formed a cliff face on the bedside table. She could hear Augusta in the shower, occasionally exclaiming in disgust over the quality of the motel shampoo.

She brought the wastepaper basket over and began dropping the bottles in. The sound of them hitting bottom reminded her of something, and after the last bottle fell she wandered over to her suitcase and pulled Augusta’s memoir from it. She came back to the bed, stretching out, and turned to a page she’d dog-eared when she’d first read the book.

The Wrecks of Wreckford Hall

Cars are the enemies of drinking. Not only for the reasons you’d imagine — a ton of metal being a serious weapon in the hands of someone who can’t even get the keys into the ignition.

No, cars are the great betrayers of drunks. They are not our friends. Think of the number of celebrities you’ve read about whose shameful addictions finally became public, and it usually involves a vehicle of some kind. Crashing late at night into a café window, driving endless circles in some suburban roundabout, unable to find the proper exit. Paparazzi mysteriously always on hand to snap the poor bastard being led away from his Lotus by the cops.

Or you’re betrayed by what’s inside your car, because really, it’s a little travelling house, isn’t it? The wife thinks you’ve given up drinking until one day she can’t use the brakes because a tin of Scrumpy Jack has lodged under the pedal. You must never underestimate the determination of a person who needs to get high. I endured countless AA meetings just to reassure myself that there was someone more abject than me.

A car was my undoing, the first time. Not that I was behind the wheel. If I have a motto, it’s this: Why drive when you can be driven? In those first few years on
Canals
, when the producers were filled with joy at Kit Gallagher’s hold over the audience, a car was placed at my disposal every morning and every evening to take me to and from the studio.

Joe was my driver — sainted Joe of memory. Each morning at six he’d come collect me. I’d find him leaning against the black sedan, holding a sugary coffee for himself and one for me. For the better part of an hour he’d regale me with the stories of his three ungrateful children, who didn’t know how good they ’ad it, and who insisted on speaking an unintelligible mishmash of Cockney and West Indian patois they called “Jafaikan.” It was a very long ride.

For this reason I kept a plastic bottle of contact lens fluid in my bag. Although, having reached this point in my story, you will probably have guessed that the bottle was filled not with EZ No-Rub Kleen but with vodka, bought in gallon bottles and painstakingly decanted into the smaller containers nightly. Each morning I pretended on the long drive to Surrey first to place my contact lenses in, and then to fiddle with them, and occasionally even to retrieve them from the floor, while Joe mourned his lot from the front seat. I was quite proud of my little ruse, in the way drunks always are when they think no one has noticed.

One morning I asked Joe to stop the car at the newsagent’s so I could buy a pack of Marlboro Lights. It must have been close to Christmas, because the man behind the counter was wearing a red elf’s cap, ringed with a circlet of bells. When we first heard the screams, the shopkeeper’s head jerked toward the door and set the bells dancing. I grabbed the cigarettes and ran outside, sure that Joe was trapped in a death struggle with some south London hoodie.

But there was only Joe, clawing his way out of the car, one hand frantically pawing at his eyes. His foot caught on the curb, and next thing I knew he was lying on the pavement of Croydon, faced screwed in pain, screaming: “Some fucker’s burnt my eyes!”

Two weeks later I arrived with one suitcase — carefully examined for EZ No-Rub Kleen bottles and other suspicious vessels — at Wreckford Hall in Hertfordshire. Kit’s absence was hastily written into the show; I believe a lucky scratch card had finally provided her with the means for a much-deserved holiday in Benidorm. Go, the producers said, and we’ll pay. Get well. They were tired of me. Joe’s vodka blindness was quick to heal, but the potential for a lawsuit hung in the air.

It was not the first time I had shamed myself on the set of
Canals
— there were days, I’ve been told, when I could barely make myself understood, though in my ears I sounded like Sybil Thorndike speaking into a crystal pitcher. Delusions, my dearest companions. Alma protected me as best she could, writing Kit’s lines on a notepad I could carry with me as if I were consulting that day’s specials. Even her faith wasn’t enough of a safety net, in the end.

It was the first time my failings had harmed a colleague. I was mortified. My employers could no longer afford to look away, and so instead they sent me to the end of the Metropolitan Line. To Wreckford Hall.

It was not my first time in . . . what shall we call it? In treatment? In trouble? Let’s defer to our American cousins: in a rehabilitation facility. Not the first time, and not the last. If there’s a thimbleful of wisdom I’ve scraped together over the years, it’s this: No one can order your recovery. You must pay for it yourself, in all ways.

I hadn’t lived with anyone, not properly, since I’d left home at seventeen; if you’ve read this far, you’ll know my fear of enclosed spaces, and of proximity of most kinds. Those anxieties, a counsellor would soon tell me, were the walls that shut me off from the world. “The ego’s leash,” I think he called it.

Like all the patients at Wreckford, I was assigned a roommate. I was quite lucky to draw Margaret, a binge-eating, bulimic mother of three from Kent, who was kind enough to extend her housewifely skills to my half of our nunnish cell. Whether she considered herself equally fortunate is a matter for Margaret’s memoir.

Margaret was fat, and had once been jolly, until her family grew tired of the sour tang of vomit in the house and the mood swings that accompanied the fluctuations in her weight. We walked the grounds of Wreckford Hall on our four stumpy legs, Margaret so she could work off some of the Hobnobs she’d snuck into our room (secreted in a box of sanitary pads) and me so I could smoke. Unfortunately, the minor lord who had sold the hall to pay his gambling debts had some years earlier also sold the gardens to a golf club. The grounds were pimpled, at all times, with men swinging clubs and chortling together in tiny clumps. More than once as we walked the lovely, even grass we’d hear screams of “Fore!” Once Margaret took a ball in the stomach, which I thought would make her cry but instead caused her to run screaming at the man who had made the shot, rip the club out of his hand, and begin beating his golf cart with it. Unresolved anger, we were told at that afternoon’s group meeting, was the root cause of Margaret’s illness.

Well. You think I’m mocking the whole process, that I never took it seriously. It is true: because I hadn’t arrived under my own steam, I was as truculent as a twelve-year-old sent to the head teacher’s office. The whole experience seemed like primary school in microcosm, only much worse because we couldn’t get away and steal our parents’ alcohol. The hierarchy was just as impermeable. Those at the top, the coolest kids, were the serious addicts — heroin, cocaine — and anyone who had tried to kill either themselves or a loved one. My own minor celebrity and entirely predictable pill-and-alcohol use placed me in a category just below this. At the bottom rung, just as in primary school, were the food phobics, the undereaters and the overeaters, the bingers and vomiters.

Wreckford, unlike some other more authoritarian (and expensive) facilities, allowed visitors, but in the weeks I was there no one came to visit me. That’s not true; Alma visited regularly. I could always tell that she’d eaten a package of mints just before her arrival to mask the scent of her lunchtime gin. A true friend.

“I’m not sure I entirely understand why you’re here,” she whispered, the first time she visited. We sat on a bench underneath a copper beech, the golfers hacking and swinging in the dip below. “There was that incident with the driver — poor man — but he was compensated, and his eyesight has almost entirely returned. Apart from that, though, who have you harmed? In my day, one was nearly always potted before the curtain went up; it helped with one’s nerves. I was in
Private Lives
once in Wolverhampton when the fellow playing Elyot pretended to look for an umbrella in the coat rack upstage. But really he was sicking up the pie he’d had at lunch. I covered with the loudest laugh I could manage, and eventually he turned around, said, ‘Amanda, darling,’ and we were off.”

“Times have changed,” I said. “Liability. Insurance premiums.” Alma just shook her head. “Atonement,” I said.

She turned to me, sharply: “There’s nothing to forgive. You have made a series of small mistakes, as we all do.”

But this was not the belief system operating at Wreckford Hall. There was always somebody who had been harmed, whose forgiveness was just out of reach.

The problem was, I agreed with Alma: I didn’t think I owed anyone an explanation. At this early stage of my recovery, I didn’t think I belonged there, among the falling-down drunks, the blackout artists, the zombies who put needles in the veins of their feet because all their other veins had collapsed. I’d never put a needle in my body in my life; my fingernails were clean; how could I be a junkie?

You couldn’t say that at the meetings, of course. So I developed a convincing line in contrition as my bottom slowly moulded itself into the shape of the folding chair and I ate so many biscuits my trousers wouldn’t do up. At our daily group meetings I learned to recite a list of mea culpas — I’d disappointed my friends, my colleagues, myself. It was as easy, as rote, as saying the rosary had once been.

Once a week there was Face to Face Day, which everyone dreaded. With good reason. On this day, we gathered in the central meeting hall, our circle of folding chairs expanded to include family members we’d wronged. Any relative could attend — father, wife, child — to lay out the trail of betrayal and lies and misery the addict had left behind. It was excruciating to watch, a cross between a Quaker meeting and a Maoist show trial, long stretches of silence erupting into desperate, teary incriminations.

Margaret’s daughter came every week to accuse her. Neither of the other children or the husband could be bothered, but this girl — a pale, lovely woman of thirty who looked ten years younger — took a two-hour coach ride to Wreckford every week to inform her mother that she had ruined her life, that her own disrupted eating habits meant no man would ever love her.

“I was fishing Black Forest gâteau out of the bin when I should have been out meeting someone nice,” she accused her mother, while Margaret sat weeping into a shredded tissue.

I’d try to cheer Margaret up before the weekly session, but whenever I reminded her over breakfast “It’s Fuck You Up Day!” she would only smile grimly and return to her grapefruit. She was not a Larkin fan.

But by now you’ve seen the hole in my narrative, the emptiness of my bravado. Where were the people I’d fucked up? Who came to accuse me? The answer is: no one. I sat and watched my fellow patients being flagellated and chastised until they were broken and numb, and thought:
Shouldn’t that be me? Where are the people I’ve tormented?
But no one came, and I sat, day after day, alone with my thoughts, and tortured myself.

“It might not have happened precisely that way,” Augusta said, reading over her shoulder.

With a yelp of shock, Frances dropped the book. “For God’s sake, Augusta. Don’t sneak up on people like that. You nearly scared me to death.”

“I would hardly call it sneaking, darling. You could hear the crushing of mouse turds in this broadloom from a mile off.” Augusta sat on the edge of her bed, drying her hair with a towel, a cigarette perched at the corner of her mouth. She’d draped the other ravelled-edge towel over the room’s smoke detector. “I’m merely saying that things may have unfolded slightly differently at Wreckford Hall. Charlie and Kenneth may have shown up once. Or possibly twice. But I believe I had an infection, and couldn’t see them. Anyway,” she tossed the towel aside and walked, naked, to the open window, “those Face to Face sessions were unspeakably dreary.”

Averting her eyes, Frances reached for the book she’d dropped. “You’ll probably say I’m horribly provincial, but don’t you think your readers might have liked to know the actual events? Otherwise it’s just . . . I don’t know. A performance.”

Augusta turned away from the window, and Frances noticed, for the first time, the silvery stretch marks that banded her waist; Frances’s mother had a matching set.

“Darling,” she said. “No one wants the facts of a life. They want the story.”

Frances sat up on the bed. Around her were the notes she’d been making for the book outline.
Giving Life the Finger
, she’d written on the top of one page.
A Survivor’s Guide to Overcoming Adversity
.

“Fine,” she said. “Then tell me a story. Something we can use.”

Augusta turned to face her, hands on hips. A shelf of ash broke from her cigarette and drifted to the floor. Frances was reminded of a visit she’d taken once to the British Museum, where a statue of Artemis, liberated from a Greek villa, stood glowering in a forgotten corner.