Based on a True Story (5 page)

seven

“I have a question for you, Mr. Romance. Do you think it’s possible for a mattress to be cursed?”

The question was a needle to his drifting thoughts. Deflated, Kenneth Deller came back to the radio studio with a bump and noted that the coffee in his mug was cool. It was only two minutes since he’d last looked at the clock on the wall. During some shows, like this one, its hands actually seemed to click backward, like a toddler slipping down the stairs. His mind would wander as he responded with stock answers —
You have to learn to value yourself, or how will
he
ever learn your true value?

He cleared his throat. “Well, I guess that depends. Are we talking about a curse in the classical sense — that is, a hex placed by a supernatural force, in order to bring about painful retribution? Or are you just having bad luck in the bedroom?”

The woman on the other end hesitated, but only for a moment. They didn’t call in to radio talk shows because they needed to be drawn out. “Bad luck, I guess is what I’m saying. You see, Mr. Romance, I bought it a year or so ago, and I’ve only managed to, you know, get lucky on it once. And that was with my ex-husband. So it’s only, um, been christened once, and that was because we went out and got drunk after our divorce papers were signed. And no, um, party for two since then.”

Where did they come up with these euphemisms? Boinking, schtupping, doing the baby dance, getting laid, scoring. Their shame radiated down the phone line. Where he came from, people were just as prudish: shagging, getting a leg over, on the pull. One word for love, a thousand for sex.

“And you blame the mattress for this?”

“You should see how fellas look at it. Like they know nothing good has happened there in a long, long time.”

His producer, sitting outside the soundproof box of the studio, shook her head in disbelief.

“I think,” he said, “that you’re giving men a little too much credit for imagination. Usually when a bloke’s in the bedroom he’s not trying to channel supernatural messages from the furniture. He’s thanking whatever kind fate brought him there in the first place.”

“Actually, it’s been longer than a year . . . the drought.”

“It has?”

“More like five.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Have you thought about getting rid of the mattress?”

“Well, my sister’s moving house. I’d thought she might want it, but I can’t very well pass the curse on to her. She’s already got fibromyalgia.”

That was the highlight of his afternoon. The rest of the calls passed in an undifferentiated rush — boyfriends with porn addictions, boyfriends who wouldn’t commit, boyfriends who were losers, wasters, slackers. Men rarely called; they were terrified someone they knew might hear them on the radio, asking for advice about love.

It was more than that, though: men seldom realized when their relationships were in trouble, usually not until an exasperated wife rose like a viper to disturb their lethargy. “I had no idea anything was wrong,” they’d say, when they’d finally worked up the nerve to call. “Seventeen years, and we were happy. She never said.”

“Are you sure?” he’d ask. No clues? No taut silences that stretched over days, no floods of inexplicable tears, no suggestions that you find a couples counsellor? “It wasn’t that there were no clues,” he would say gently, “it’s that you chose not to notice.”

When the hour was up, he slipped off the black padded headphones and stretched. The bottom button of his shirt popped open under the strain, and he reached down to do it up. His stomach may have grown, but at least it was still hard. His dad and uncles were big men with hands like Christmas hams and bellies like cement. “Soft bastard” was the worst insult in his father’s vocabulary. Unfortunately, soft bastard seemed to be his job description these days. You couldn’t go around calling yourself Mr. Romance and expect to be a hard man at the same time. The next time he was in London he’d have some new shirts made. If he could stand the humiliation of the measuring tape.

He spun his chair around to face the window and the mole-coloured suburbs spread out below. Before he’d arrived he’d thought California would be green and lush, nectar cascading from hibiscus on every corner. How cruel it had been to find the same palette as his mother’s sitting room in Manchester, circa 1974: brown, orange, a thrilling splash of green.

He’d never grown used to the absence of clouds. That morning, as he was driving into the valley, he’d burst out laughing at the forecast on the radio. “Nice today,” the weatherman had said. “Nice again tomorrow.” A weatherman in Los Angeles. What a ridiculous job. Almost as ridiculous as a love adviser.

A city of wealth and warmth and privilege, yet it had to be the least romantic place in the world. People were afraid of food and abstained from drink, and as far as he was concerned those were the two major routes that led to sexual bliss. A city that contained the world’s most rigorously rounded buttocks, its most exquisitely hillocked biceps, and all anyone could concentrate on was the millimetre of sag. They only got their kit off to compare how much further they had to go.

He liked to think that the city would wither and die without him, its wedding chapels and nurseries empty and forlorn. Sometimes he imagined trying to explain to his father his place in the world. His jerry-rigged career. “You see, Dad, I’m a love adviser, an expert on romance, an explorer of the heart’s darkest corners.” And then his father’s fond, puzzled smile: “But lad, you were never much good with ladies, were you?”

The queer airlessness of the studio pressed on his ears; the sooner he was out of here the better. He fished his phone out of his pocket and turned the power back on. Seventeen new emails. He held it at arm’s length and squinted at its tiny screen. Surely the print on his last phone had been much larger.

He sighed when he spotted the latest email from his publisher, Middle Way Books, asking if he could please deliver the manuscript by the end of the month. Closing the message hastily, he opened the next one. It was a brief note from Charles that made him smile, as always, with its formality: “Is tomorrow still fine for supper? Shall I make reservations?” There was a message from an engaged couple he was counselling confirming their next meeting.

His chair creaked as he sat forward suddenly, squinting at the next message. It had arrived from an address he didn’t recognize, with no subject line. It seemed to have been typed by a child, or someone with hooks for hands. His breath caught as he read,
Write t hat book and you will rUE the day.

eight

Across the turd-strewn courtyard of the George Cadbury Estate, a dog hung by its jaws from the seat of a children’s swing. Even at this distance Frances could hear its rolling growls. Apart from the quivering and foam-flecked muzzle, it was completely still, suspended like a ham in a butcher’s shop.

Its teenaged owner, hands deep in parka pockets, raised one foot and gave the dog a prod in the flank, which set its head whipping back and forth, meaty haunches dancing.
Looks like it’s being electrocuted,
Frances thought. She recognized the ritual. In the park near her flat in London, half-chewed swings dangled above muscled, joyless dogs in spiked collars. They were being trained for fighting.

Once, when she still had a job she’d been sent on a quest to find out why these weapons dogs — as the
Advance
insisted on calling them — were so popular with shiftless youth.

“Find the hoodie with the ugliest dog,” Stan had instructed, and so she had, approaching a spliff-smoking group with several panting beasts lying at their feet. It had ended, not quite according to plan, with Frances fleeing down a street in Bermondsey, the sound of her own screams and the boys’ laughter in her ears, while a monster called Tiny galloped behind her trailing a spiked lead and a rope of saliva.

“’E just wants a kiss, darling!” was the last thing she heard before she dived into a Tesco for safety.

Frances had done everything Stanley asked, hunted down every story he assigned, and this was where her loyalty had led: to a shit-pocked, cigarette-stubbled patch of lawn on the outskirts of Birmingham. Once they had been friends, teetering perhaps on the edge of something more, but that was BS. Before Sacking.

Best not to think of that now
, Frances thought. It wasn’t a sacking, anyway, it was a “strategic distillation of resources,” or that’s how Stan had put it when he’d ushered her into his office. At least he’d had the grace to look ashamed.

“I feel like a prat,” he’d said, refusing to meet her eyes. “But I’m not allowed to say ‘sacked,’ Frances, it’s some legal thing. Bloody stupid, I always thought we were in the business of speaking plainly. Although I’m not sure we’re going to be in any business in fairly short order.”

He’d finally looked up at her, and immediately glanced away again. Frances couldn’t swallow.

“Anyway, it’s not so much . . . letting you go, as not renewing your contract. It’s not just you. There are thirteen other people I have to tell by the end of the day.” He was looking out the window at the fascinating view of the betting shop below. “I wanted to tell you first because I knew it would be hardest.” His smile seemed controlled by electrodes at either side of his mouth, jerking at random intervals: “You’ll be fine. You’re better than this place. And we’ll see each other. I’ll buy you a drink and make sure you’re okay.”

Bastarding bastardy bastard
, Frances thought. That one little phrase —
we’ll see each other
— had given her a sick amount of hope. She checked her texts so often that her thumb hurt. Not one message from him. Not one.

Her fingers closed around the tiny voice recorder in her pocket. Taking the train two hours out of London to investigate some poor woman’s misery for
Under the Skin
magazine was not the path she’d envisioned when she moved to this country. She sat on the freezing bench at the edge of the council estate, marvelling at how easy it was to slip down the ladder’s rungs once your grip started to loosen.

Sue had arranged for her job interview at
Under the Skin,
calling in a favour from an old friend. At first, Frances had balked:
Under the Skin
was a magazine she scorned whenever she saw it at the newsagent’s, with its headlines dredged from life’s direst melodramas: “Who Would Steal Our Baby’s Legs?” “Tumour Terror at 10,000 Feet.” Once, just before Easter, she’d succumbed and bought a copy of the magazine, lured by the promise of its main story: “Cannibal Ate My Nan with Broccoli and Cheese Sauce.”

These were desperate times, as the cash machine liked to remind her, and she had accepted an assignment from the magazine. Strictly on spec, said the features editor, whose name was Emma, or possibly Gemma. Frances would have to come up with the goods first.

“I’ve got a feeling about this story,” Emma said over the phone. “This woman’s a fighter. And this man, this Les, this
monster
, is trying to bring her down. Crush her spirit. I can see the headline, Frances: ‘Caged Sex Beast Kept Me on a Chain.’”

“Literally?” Frances had asked.

There was a long silence. “Not literally, Frances, no. But this woman —” Emma clicked through her emails — “this Sheena, she’s trying to live a good life, works all night and goes to school. She’s trying to be a good mum. She’s lonely. Vulnerable. She becomes a pen pal with Les, the convict. And before you know it, he’s preying on her from prison. Calling her every chance he gets. Telling her what to wear and who to see. Terrifying her. There’s something here — yes, listen to this part: ‘I want to tell my story so the young girls reading
Under the Skin
won’t make the same mistake I did.’”

A day later, Frances was on her way to Birmingham to meet Sheena Henry, victim of a notorious sex beast, and wring every ounce of pathos from her story.

There are jobs and then there are jobs
, thought Frances, shivering on the bench. Some people have to pluck a hundred chickens an hour. Some people repossess family homes. Some people shove giant hoses down public conveniences and watch a river of excrement get sucked into a waiting truck. And some people write for
Under the Skin
. Beggars, choosers. In the past few weeks, she had inched nearer to one pole than the other.

“It’s not so nice as London, is it?” The woman had approached quietly and drew back in apology as Frances jumped. “I’m sorry, love. Didn’t mean to startle you. You must be Frances.”

The woman held out a chapped, red hand and smiled, her face crumpling inwards a little. Could she possibly be missing teeth? According to the file in Frances’s bag, Sheena Henry worked as a cleaner at Argos at night, took a computer course in the morning, and spent the rest of her day in electronic thrall to a tattooed and steel-toothed inmate called Les. But this couldn’t be Sheena, because Sheena was forty-one, only ten years older than Frances. This woman, despite the optimism of freshly dyed hair, had the wizened look of an apple left outside all winter.

“Sheena?” Frances said weakly.

The woman took her arm and began leading her toward a block of flats. “Let’s get inside before we’ve froze.” She nodded toward the boy, who was throwing bits of cinder block at his pet. “Miserable little bastard,” she sniffed. “Should be in school, ’stead of faffing about with that bloody dog.”

Once inside her flat and fortified with hot tea, Sheena scattered stories like an upended purse — a cascade of blighted hopes, useless children, men who had stuck around long enough only to fatten themselves on her cooking and then take up with a neighbour. She was remarkably cheery as she went over the details of her sciatica, her daughter’s gastric-band surgery, her son’s truancy. It was this zesty air of defiance that had distinguished her voicemail from the hundreds recorded every week at the offices of
Under the Skin
.

If the story were published, Sheena would pocket £400 and Frances would have wedged a toe in the magazine’s door. So she sat across the tiny kitchen table and watched Sheena’s face relax as she unburdened herself. There was a picture of a pretty blonde girl in a school uniform on the fridge and a stack of
Under the Skin
s on the kitchen counter. Frances was on her fourth Hobnob and her third cup of tea. She felt no nearer to plucking out the heart of Sheena’s mystery, but much closer to needing the toilet, a circumstance she tried to avoid during an interview. It seemed so unprofessional.

“What exactly attracted you to Les in the first place?”

“My mate Sandra’s dating his friend Terry. Can you call it dating if they’ve never actually met without a piece of glass between ’em? Anyway. She tells me about this bloke, Les, and texts me his picture, and —” Sheena fanned herself. “He’s well fit. I thought, might be nice to have a fella who’s with you, but not with you, you know? Not underfoot all the time causing trouble.”

“But he was in prison. Did you really need a man so badly?” Frances cursed the words as they left her mouth, and felt a hot flush spread to her face.

For a moment Sheena concentrated on pulling a Rizla from its package and filling it with tobacco. “I don’t imagine you’d understand. You’re a pretty thing. And young enough. Maybe things are different here to what you know. Where are you from, anyway?”

“California,” Frances said.

“Well,” said Sheena, “there’s no Brad Pitt ’round here. We make do with what we’ve got.” Picking up the teapot, she reached over to fill Frances’s cup, which had a bite-sized chip in the rim. Frances crossed her legs, but didn’t protest.

Her phone beeped, and Frances glanced at the screen. It would be deeply unprofessional to check her messages during an interview — something she’d never consider — but she snatched the phone up when she saw the email address:
Stanley.
Sheena’s voice faded as Frances stared at the brief message, which radiated a forced jauntiness:
Frances, have you heard? We’ve somehow been nominated for a Well Done London Award. Do you fancy putting on a frock and joining your old friends? Moaning and crap food guaranteed.
There was a postscript after his name:
If anyone deserves to be there, it’s you.

The sheer presumption of it. Was she supposed to sit and watch while the people who’d rejected her celebrated their success? Frances’s pride battled with her desire to be among them again, to be part of their miserable, wonderful circle. Her phone clattered to the table and Sheena stopped, mid-sentence, to stare at her.

Frances dragged herself back to Les, the monster. “You would visit him? And you kept up contact through phone calls? He became threatening over the phone?”

Sheena’s fingers strayed to the little gold cross at her throat. “He became horrible, really. Told me his mate Terry was keeping an eye on me, saw me down the pub acting like a slag. Which I was not.” She drew a long breath. “Then it got worse. Les said he knew I was shagging some bloke I work with at Argos. Which I was not. But he called me one day, said horrible things. That he’d do to me and my kids when he got out.” A tiny rivulet of blue eyeliner began migrating down her cheek. “I had no idea he was such a bastard, or I would never have taken up with him in the first place.”

“You’re worried about what will happen when he gets out?”
God, it’s boiling in here
, Frances thought, and shrugged off her cardigan.
Does heat increase the urge to urinate?
She needed the bathroom quite badly now.

“When he gets out? Oh, no —”

A sound at the front door made Sheena turn, and a tall dark shape moved through the hallway followed by a small squat one.

“Oi, you,” Sheena bellowed. “Come in here and say hello to our guest.”

From the explosive sigh and the sound of dragging feet, Frances knew it would be a teenager even before she saw him framed in the kitchen door. The boy from the playground. His fleshy dog squatted, pink-eyed and panting, at his feet.

“Hello, guest,” he said.

“This here’s Michael, my oldest.” Sheena grabbed the sleeve of the boy’s parka. “Who is still not too old to turn over my knee if he doesn’t start going to school.” The boy grunted and began to leave, but Sheena held him firm. “And this is Frances, from that magazine I told you about. In London. She’s going to write a story about Les and what a monster he is.”

“Well, maybe,” Frances muttered. “It’s not really up to me —”

“And how he threatened us with violence. How we’re terrified.”

Michael burst out laughing, the dog echoing with a series of sharp barks. “You are fucking joking me. I’m not scared of that twat.” He turned his pale, narrow face to Frances. “Did she tell you what he was in for?”

“She doesn’t need to know that,” his mother said quickly.

“This fucking monster that’s giving her nightmares?” Michael moved into the tiny kitchen, and the dog followed.
Damn
, thought Frances,
now I’m going to have to squeeze past him to get to the toilet.

“It’s not important, Michael —”

“You think maybe he’s banged up for rape? For doing someone with a knife?”

Sheena smiled apologetically at Frances and tugged harder at her son’s sleeve. The dog growled low in its throat. Dragging her son closer, Sheena whispered, “Four hundred quid.”

“Awright then,” the boy said, shrugging her off. “He’s Charles fucking Manson. He’s the Yorkshire Ripper. He’s not some little pisshead in the nick ’cause he didn’t pay for his fucking TV.”

Frances stared at Sheena, her urgent need momentarily forgotten. She imagined her new career, not yet built, crumbling before her eyes.

“Is that true, Sheena? Is he in jail for not paying the licence fee?” She’d always thought it was an urban myth that people would be thrown in jail for not paying their television licences.

“Wasn’t just the licence fee,” said Sheena with indignation. “He hadn’t paid his council tax neither. And you should have seen what he done to the bailiff that come for him.”

Suddenly Frances felt sick — for herself, for this skiving boy, for this kindly, deluded woman.

“I need to use the bathroom, if you don’t mind,” she said, pushing back her chair.

At that moment, the mobile at Sheena’s elbow went off, the opening notes of Katy Perry’s “Hot N Cold” echoing around the kitchen. The dog began a series of frenzied leaps for the phone while Michael cursed and yanked on its lead.

“Jesus and Mary,” Sheena whispered, staring at the number. Her mouth sagged into a pink oval. “It’s like he can hear us.”

Frances, edging sideways out of the kitchen, said, “Why? Who is it?”

“It’s him,” whimpered Sheena. The phone sang, in a tinny voice, that someone was kissing and making up. The dog made another lunge and let out a strangled howl as Sheena planted her foot in its chest.