Based on a True Story (8 page)

thirteen

The vicar walked slowly back to the church through a scattering of mourners, his surplice a flash of white in a shoal of black wool. Above a mound of freshly dug earth, Alma stood with her head bowed — whether in prayer or as a result of osteoporosis was unclear.

Drawing a shaky hand to her eyes, Alma dabbed delicately. “Goodbye, Barry,” she whispered. “You dreadful old cunt.”

“Miss P,” came a hiss from the bulky figure holding her elbow. “You can’t say ‘cunt’ in a churchyard.”

“Why, my dear? Because this is a holy place?” Alma pointed to an empty bottle nestled at the bottom of a headstone. “The abundance of Babycham bottles would suggest otherwise.”

Deb, Alma’s carer, had worked at the Ellen Terry Home for Theatrical Professionals long enough to know not to step on a punchline. She shook her head.

“It’s just not right, is it?” Deb said. “Maybe his spirit is still here.”

“Well, if Barry is still floating around, he’s trying to find some way to bugger the vicar. The man was randy as a goat in May.”

Alma shivered and drew her coat around her. Augusta reached out to fasten the buttons across Alma’s chest, but the older woman batted her away. She pivoted on her stick, began taking small steps away from the grave. “It’s not that I didn’t like Barry,” she said. “One very cold night in February I took the train to Bristol to see his Malvolio at the Old Vic. He was magnificent — of course, he never let you forget it. Especially,” she stopped and peered up at Deb, “he never let you forget what a hot piece he’d been in his youth. Do you know he told me he’d once been the filling in a Danny Kaye–Laurence Olivier sandwich?” She set off again. “I cannot abide a braggart.”

For a moment Augusta stood and watched the peaceful scene below. The Church of England knew how to build a gateway to the afterlife: moss glowed green on the headstones, the branches of chestnut trees were laced like penitent hands above. The church, pale Bath limestone rubbed smooth by the years, looked more like a bed and breakfast than the dark temples of recrimination she’d visited every Sunday of her childhood.

Her mother hadn’t even been Catholic, and yet the three of them had trudged off to Mass every weekend. If it had been a particularly naughty week — and most of them were — Augusta would drag her feet as they approached the gothic doorway, her mind racing with counterfeit sins to which she might admit. If she fidgeted too much during the service, her father would point to a low, arched door near the altar and whisper: “The Other Place.” He told her that the Other Place was where you went after you were dead, and all the relatives who hated you in life gathered to torment you through eternity.

A dozen of Barry’s ancient friends stood in a small knot, the men willing themselves straight, the women with bright powder caught in the creases of their cheeks.

“Alma Partridge!” cried a stooped man in a club tie. “How long has it been, my girl?” A clutch of teetering elderlies drew her into its fold.

Augusta handed Deb a cigarette, then lit one for herself. “She’s happier than I’ve seen her in ages.”

Deb nodded. “Funerals are just Facebook for old people.”

In the taxi back, Deb provided a commentary on the current events in
Canals
, assuming that the show’s two former stars pined for news of the viruses, miscarriages, and divorces that plagued their lost landscape.

“Chad, you remember, what killed Kit . . .”

“I’ve had no luck forgetting,” murmured Augusta.

“So now he’s taken up with Iqbal down the chippy. Iqbal’s mum’s not too happy, you can imagine, what with him being gay and Islam —”

“Muslim.”

“Right, so his brother’s beat him within an inch of his life . . .”

Augusta felt the inconsequential weight of Alma on her shoulder, heard the small, rattling breath as she slept. She put a finger to her lips and Deb, with a frown, fell silent.

At the Ellen Terry Home for Retired Theatre Professionals, Deb helped Alma out of the heavy fur coat. It was like seeing a child emerge from a suit of armour. The room was growing dark, though it was only mid-afternoon. From the window of Alma’s room on the second floor, Augusta could see joggers puffing on the common below.
What if I started running?
she thought.
More absurd things have happened. Maybe I could run all the way to California, and rip out his bloody throat and stuff the hole with pages of his book.

She should have gone to Hollywood when she had the chance, when she was ripe for the plucking. That bird had long since flown. California meant nothing to her now apart from death and oranges. The place that had stolen her son. Suddenly she remembered a day long forgotten, when she sat with Deller in a café by the motorway, and he read to her from
The Loved One
. The idea of Los Angeles had seemed utterly foreign to them, descent into failure even more so. “I wept as I remembered how often you and I / Had laughed about Los Angeles and now ’tis here you’ll lie . . .”

Augusta mouthed the words, smiling. She caught herself and snuffed the spark of memory before it had a chance to kindle. Behind her, Alma gave a sigh as she settled into a worn armchair, lighting a cigarette in defiance of the house rules. Every time one of the nurses chastised her, she pleaded dementia.

The wall above her head was covered in framed photographs: Alma taller, Alma with dark hair instead of grey, wigged and pancaked as Medea, as Nora, as Rosalind. A virgin sacrifice in a Christopher Lee film, she ran toward the camera sobbing, blood trailing from her throat to the ripped collar of a gossamer negligee. Not a single personal picture graced the walls — not a dog, a child, a lover.

Deb excused herself to check on some of her other wards, or “clients,” as she preferred to call them. Augusta drew a deep breath, began to speak, but found herself drawn to the activity on the common below: in the near-darkness a woman knelt by her child’s side, placing his feet in plastic carrier bags, tying them tightly above his ankles. What enigma of modern parenting was this? When the woman stood up, her son ran joyfully down the path, jumped with both feet into a wide puddle and stomped like a demented elf. Augusta imagined the spray from the child’s frenzied feet, saw the mother’s shoulders shaking.

She wondered if it took a special skill to care for things, a gene that she’d been born without, the same way she’d always been terrible at maths. Perhaps this disconnect wasn’t such a bad thing. It allowed her to see what was good for people when they couldn’t see it themselves. Frances, for example. She had taken one look at the poor girl at the awards ceremony and knew what she needed. A bit of adventure. A sense of purpose in her life. Frances had seemed wild-eyed, expectant, a rabbit who could be lured easily into a trap.
Not a trap
, Augusta corrected herself.
A safe harbour.

“— and did I tell you about the old girls down the hall who have taken up together? Laura and Corinne, they were in rep in Edinburgh, known each other for years, but only in their ninth decades have they decided to walk the path of Sappho. I suppose it’s no wonder, considering they’ll get no cock from the old boys around here. My dear, are you even listening?”

Augusta drew herself away from the scene outside. “I was going to ask your advice.”

Alma leaned forward, blue eyes wide. “You’re not back on the opium?”

“No, darling, there’s no opium involved.”

“Is it work, then? I fear it’s a desert out there, for women like us. Though of course you’re still lovely as ever, my dear.”

Augusta raised an eyebrow. “I do own a mirror, you know. Anyway, it’s been worse. There are enough odds and ends to keep me in fags.” There was nothing more dreary than tales from the coal face of middle-aged anxiety. She lied smoothly: “I’m doing some worthy thing for Channel 4. I’m the wife of a Q.C. who’s secretly running an Albanian sex-trafficking ring from the garden shed.”

Alma sniffed. “Not exactly
Middlemarch
, is it? Still, you need to keep your oar in.”

Augusta shifted in her chair. Why were old people’s homes so hot? She fanned herself with an ancient copy of
The Stage
.

After a minute she said, “I suppose I’m asking about the past. Family, you know. Those things.”

“Oh, my dear,” Alma said, putting out her cigarette in a saucer at her elbow. “I’m not sure I’m the one to ask about family. You might have better advice from a cat.”

“That’s exactly the reason I wanted to talk to you.” Augusta stood, and put her palms against the cool window. She could barely make out the figures on the common now; the mother and child were gone. “I’d get a sermon from anyone else. Some treacly nonsense about the importance of keeping people close. You, darling,” she put a hand on Alma’s shoulder, “you’re my vinegar.”

“I shall take that as a compliment. All right; I’m prepared to cleanse.”

Augusta turned to the window again. “I’m thinking about taking a trip to California.”

“Ah.”

“You do know why I need to go?”

“Of course I know.”

“Well, for God’s sake then, help me. A good idea or no?”

Alma regarded her for a moment. “At the risk of sounding gnomic, my dear, I should think you won’t know till you get there. Possibly not even then.”

Or possibly not ever
, Augusta thought. “All right,” she said, and bent toward her old friend to cup her face. “I’ll think about it. If I go, I’ll drop you a line.”

“Drop me a line?” said Alma, pushing her away. “My dear, I’m on Skype.”

fourteen

Across the street, two drunks throttled each other in the doorway of the Twelve Pins. Once the scene would have filled Frances with horror, but now she watched from her kitchen table, numb. She could call the police, but she only had a few pounds’ credit left on her mobile. BT had cut off her landline the week before.

It was freezing in her flat. Every time she approached the thermostat she pictured a heap of pound notes, merrily burning. Her computer sat open on the table, displaying a list of bills the bank wanted her to pay at her earliest convenience. Frances had added the column again and again, but each time she’d arrived at a figure that defied the laws of arithmetic.

The nights were drawing in; the light was gone by four p.m.; misery arrived with the dusk. She couldn’t remember what it felt like to be warm. Forty years earlier, her father had fled Coventry for the California sun and never looked back. At times like this she cursed her decision to make the opposite journey.

Best not to think of her father, trapped in the big house overlooking the Pacific. She glanced out the window. One of the drunks collapsed to the ground, succumbing to a particularly vicious head-butt. Frances turned back to her numbers.

Ping.
The sound was so rare that for a moment it startled her: Doorbell? Smoke detector? Then she remembered. It was the sound of an email arriving on her phone, a noise that used to drive her mad with its frequency.

Frances reached for her mobile and stopped; her breath caught. She read the message again. Then she burst out laughing, which seemed the only proper response to a job offer received by email from a crazy alcoholic.
Former alcoholic
, she reminded herself. It was not in her nature to be uncharitable.

The message from Augusta Price said simply,
I have an adventure in mind, and I believe you are exactly the woman for the job. Would you care to join me to discuss Plan Z?

From across the street she heard police officers arrive to subdue the combatants at the Twelve Pins. Frances sat in the shadows, thinking. It was true that she had nothing left to lose. Dignity gone, job gone, romantic prospect gone, if he had ever existed at all. Stanley had fallen silent in the wake of the awards-show debacle. Sue had sent a text saying he’d gone
AWOL
from the newsroom. The Georgian owner had ordered Stanley’s office repainted.

In her ample spare time, Frances found herself reading about Augusta. In her story for the
Advance
, she’d noted how the historical record and Augusta’s had diverged, but she hadn’t realized how wide the gap actually was. She found interviews that Augusta had given over the years, and the facts of her life shifted, merged, disappeared. Charles was mentioned rarely as a child, almost never as a young man. It was like seeing a chalk drawing slowly disappear on a wet pavement. Deller appeared even less frequently. Why was Augusta so keen to erase her past and to ensure that no one added new details? Frances’s curiosity, dormant this past month, began to stir.

The room had grown dark, but she knew the contours of the little flat well enough that she didn’t need light. It had seemed depressing when she’d first moved in, hardly bigger than her childhood bedroom, with a bathroom light that sparked and fizzed every time she pulled the cord. But now that she was about to lose it the flat achieved a shabby, romantic grandeur. She got up to switch on a desk light — a vintage French jeweller’s lamp, a gift from her parents. She stood for a moment and then moved over to the bookshelf, where her fingers ran across the titles until she came to a spine printed in a particularly lurid green. She took the book down, its pages still stiff with the Post-it notes she’d scribbled when she’d gone to interview Augusta. Her thoughts scattered, pinballs bouncing and deflecting off all the possibilities. She sat down at her desk, adjusted the lamp, and opened the book:

The Shaman of Notting Hill

The moment we heard a new drug was making the rounds, we all wanted to give it a try. You have to understand, it was a more liberal age. You’d come home on the bus at four in the morning and find yourself next to a builder from Essex, in a pirate blouse, eyeliner running down his face, snogging another bloke. Things were more fluid then.

I’d had a little success on television, a few promising small parts in film, and my agent wanted me to try Los Angeles. The great pink castle in the sky. But, being a rebellious sort — or “idiot,” if you prefer — I decided instead to spend that spring in thrall to a radical group of actors in London. Radically averse to bathing or picking up the tab, as it turned out.

They preferred to style themselves performance activists, taking over derelict buildings to torment audiences with blood- and snot-drenched productions of Edward Bond and Samuel Beckett. They ate and drank Brecht and Boal: “liberation through theatre.” In fact, they were liberating their todgers: the four actresses in the company were meant to inspire creativity in a variety of ways, none of which required clothes. We were meant to be grateful for such offerings: so many other girls waited in the wings.

I was insecure about my own talents, tainted with the stain of television success. So I was perversely happy to be told that everything I had done, to that point, was shit. It was a relief to shut my mouth and follow someone else’s bad decisions for a change.

Did I mention they had great drugs? That might have been part of the lure. I was still an amateur at this point — a bit of speed, a bit of hash, a few lines of coke at the beginning of the night and a Valium at the end. But these guys were serious. The Edmund Hillarys of mind expansion. They were on the frontiers, at the summit, always looking ahead for new and better ways to claw through the barriers around their imaginations.

This is how I came, one warm night in May, to be sitting in a decrepit flat in Notting Hill with a wizened creature who called himself a shaman, drinking a brew that tasted of cat litter, which was supposed to blow my mind open forever. Only after I’d taken the first rancid sip did it occur to me: I was probably better off with my mind sealed against draughts.

To start at the beginning, though. Danny was our troupe’s leader — as an anarchist collective, we shunned hierarchies, but Danny always got his choice of roles and women. He’d been to Peru, shooting a small role in a Werner Herzog movie, and there he’d got wind of a powerful hallucinogen used by Quechua Indians in their rituals:
ayahuasca
. It translated to “vine of spirits” or “vine of life” or “vine of death”; Danny wasn’t sure which.

Somehow, Danny blagged his way into an
ayahuasca
ceremony — using his beautiful voice or his luscious bottom or perhaps both — and came back to London a new man. While he was tripping, all knowledge in the world became available to him. For weeks he droned on about how we needed to take this drug together, to fly as one through the cosmos. The world’s first
ayahuasca
bore. To shut him up, we agreed. This is the thing about druggies: they’re always looking for the new best high. Why not a potion brewed from an Amazonian weed?

That was our first problem. It grew in the Amazon, and the only fellow capable of administering it was also in the Amazon, having his jaguar visions at the end of an impassable dirt track. Danny was adamant that we needed to take the trip properly, and that meant having a shaman as our navigator. He put all his energies into bringing the vine and the man to London, a highly illegal and fraught proposition. The troupe’s meagre resources were marshalled toward this purpose. It meant the end of our plans for a black-light version of
No Exit
, to be staged in an abandoned post office in Pimlico. The world somehow survived its absence.

Finally Danny had pulled sufficient strings, bribing a baggage handler at Heathrow and a cousin who worked at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The date was set. The setting was crucial — a hut in the jungle would have been ideal, but we didn’t know anyone who lived outside the M25. So we settled for a flat in Notting Hill, the next best thing.

You must remember that in those days Notting Hill was a jungle, a different country, a no man’s land. Today it’s where you buy eggs with pedigrees stretching back to Noah, but back then it was a criminal’s playground. A place to score drugs and run.

Despite Danny’s enthusiasm for
ayahuasca
— or perhaps because of it — I had misgivings. Hallucinogens had never been my favourite form of escape; I don’t like riding in a car that has no brakes.

I turned for wisdom to my dear friend Alma Partridge, whom you have already encountered in these pages, and whom you will recognize as the Sage of Swindon.

“My dear,” she said, “if you wish to leave your body behind, why don’t we just take a ferry to Calais and buy a bottle of absinthe? I am sure it will be more hygienic.”

But I was young and rash (one of those conditions I outgrew) and brushed aside her concerns. Alma convinced me that she should at least wait for me outside the flat lest anything go wrong. And she did, sitting for hours in a diabolical café in Ladbroke Grove while all manner of fleshly and chemical transactions went down around her. Never was there a truer friend.

On the appointed evening, we arrived at the flat, lent to us by Danny’s friend, who was either in prison or in Aberdeen. Eight of us made the trip; there was only one other woman, Bea, a pretty, slightly vacant actress who specialized in distressed damsels and was even more likely than I to offer unclothed succour.

We entered the flat — high ceilings, cobwebs, and a floor entirely covered in an elegant mosaic of black-and-white tiles. A tripper’s nightmare, those tiles.

Unaccountably, there were bowls lined up along the edges of the floor. In the centre was a pile of what appeared to be, and yet could not possibly be, cloth nappies. We gathered around this heap and stared.

I will not lie to you, reader: the afternoon had been spent at the pub and by the time we reached Notting Hill we were quite drunk. Yet there’s something about a pile of children’s shit rags that cuts through even the densest fog.

While we stood gawping, Danny said, “I might have forgotten to mention this one thing about
ayahuasca
. It’s a bit of an emetic. Also perhaps a laxative.”

And then, like a general leading the charge from the front, he proceeded to drop his trousers — no underwear, of course — and pick up a nappy, which he fastened around his pelvis, as if he were Jesus and these his swaddling clothes.

At that, I turned to leave. I was quite happy for my self-knowledge and my knickers to remain in their untroubled natural state. But just as I was preparing my exit, the door opened: Enter the shaman.

I’m not sure what I’d been expecting, but it was not this tiny, weathered creature, with rheumy eyes that moved calmly from me, fully clothed, to Danny, trousers around his ankles and nappy drooping sadly between his hairy thighs. The shaman (I never knew his name) wore blindingly white trainers and a leather jacket advertising Billy Joel’s 1982 world tour. I was much more impressed with the handsome dark boy at his side, who whispered something to the old man in Spanish. This was the son, we soon discovered, on hand to facilitate the ritual and the financial transaction that preceded it.

While the shaman wandered over to look out the window, the son took Danny aside for negotiations, speaking English this time.

“My father needs a bottle of rum to aid the arrival of the spirit guide. Also
£
500, a gift for our rainforest foundation. And he would like tickets to a West Ham match.”

Danny nodded; he had half a nappy sticking out of the top of his trousers and was hardly in a position to negotiate.

Before the ritual began, I tucked myself in next to this lovely boy. A graduate of the University of Leeds, as it turned out, he went by the extraordinary name of Lenin. When I expressed my concerns about the
ayahuasca
ritual, he reassured me with a hand on my knee.

“You will be fine,” he whispered. “You will be free, and empty yourself.”

“That’s what I’m worried about,” I said, but I’m not sure he shared my little joke. He wanted to share something, though; the hand slid north from my knee.

In the kitchen, the shaman prepared the brew in a battered kettle. I could hear him humming to himself, a hypnotic sound. I saw the others wince as they drank, and when it came to my turn I held my nose and fought to keep the mucky stuff down.

The details thereafter become fuzzy, though not the visions themselves. I remember Danny putting some dire Andean music on the stereo — “El Cóndor Pasa,” perhaps — and Lenin rolling his eyes. I remember the shaman, shirtless, kneeling before me and his voice keening in the dark.

I don’t know how much time passed; I was concentrating on the reassuring presence of Lenin. Then I heard someone — or many someones; it sounded like a legion — breaking away from the circle, crawling off, retching and moaning. Danny had dragged himself into the hall, where I could see him peering at one of the black tiles by the dim glow of his cigarette.

He bellowed into the silence: “How can I find five pence in this hexagon?”

But by this time I was above it all; I had left my body. I had left the room. I was outside, in winter, on a beautiful snow-covered hill; the trees were draped in ice, each shard bright in the moonlight. On either side of me, great ice horses formed from the snow and leapt off the crown of the hill, their manes flowing, hooves leaving trails of sparks in the air. They came in waves, forming and leaping and evaporating, like a vast surf of silver light. A small part of me was aware of the room, the sounds of distress, but it seemed a galaxy away.

Reaching out, I grasped the silver tail of one of the horses. It was silken and warm under my hand. I was pulled, soaring off the mountaintop, and we flew through a tunnel of pulsing colour, the faces of everyone I’d ever known smiling at me — really beaming with love — from within glowing bands of blue and purple and green.

Tumbling slowly, I fell into a warm, dark room, a room from an earlier century, lit by a fire in the hearth. I was watching another me in that room; a more beautiful version of myself, my hair less tangled and my eyes more kindly, standing in front of an easel. And I was drawing like Raphael: rapidly, confidently, perfectly proportioned figures and animated faces. Keep in mind I’d never been able to draw a stick figure, and yet here I was, a prodigy, producing these sketches that looked like they belonged in the Uffizi. And I knew, somehow, that the Augusta in that room could dance or sing or play piano with equal facility, speak Greek or Latin, understand quantum physics, catch a shark with her bare hands.