Based on a True Story (9 page)

People who have never taken drugs think of them as a contraction, as something that pulls you away from yourself and your friends, your responsibilities and dreams. They think that drugs diminish the drug-taker in some profound way. But the truth is completely the opposite. When used properly — assuming you haven’t stolen your son’s milk money to buy speed, or walked home covered in sick that may or may not be human — drugs are a gift of expansion. The accordion of your life unpleated. That night in Notting Hill I felt I was wandering the familiar house of my mind, discovering rooms I’d never known existed.

I sat in the flat and dreamed of the best incarnations of myself, and in the morning they were gone. I was first to wake, unpeeling eyelids that felt like they’d been stuck together with Blu Tack. We were jumbled in a bed — how many of us, I don’t know — our limbs and hands and feet tangled together like the tails in a nest of rats. Lenin was shirtless beside me, and I was naked next to a woman who hadn’t been there when I’d last visited this astral plane. Above the bed rose a vapour of rum and last night’s pot smoke. A vapour in my head, too, though there was a pain in the centre of it as sharp as a knife.

Despite the pain, and the scream that sounded as I stepped on someone’s hand on my way out of the bedroom, I felt . . . well, I felt new. As I left the flat, I saw that during the night someone had scrawled a message on the door:
It’s best if you don’t know.

I went to find Alma. A come-down crowd filled the café. I wasn’t sure she’d have braved the whole night, but there she sat at the table where I’d left her. She was drinking coffee with a pair of Corsican gangsters she’d befriended over the course of the evening. I joined them and together we watched the sun rise over the city.

fifteen

“Of course, it didn’t happen exactly like that,” Augusta said. “It was perhaps slightly less spiritual than I’ve let on.” She paused, an expression of horror crossing her face. Frances turned to see what monstrosity had caught her attention. “Has it come to this?” Her voice cut through the din at the champagne bar of St. Pancras rail station. Her gaze was locked on a corner table, where a young woman with glossy dark hair was transferring a baby from its pram to her lap. “Must people bring their infants everywhere?”

“I once wrote a story about a woman who’d forgotten her baby in the Brighton casino,” said Frances.

Augusta gave her a glance that wasn’t softened by two glasses of champagne. “Do you want children, Frances?”

“Me? No. God, no.”
With a ten percent chance of yes
, thought Frances. But it didn’t seem the right time to test their fragile entente.

“Hmm. Perhaps I should tell you about another small matter I may have neglected to mention in my book.” Augusta picked up her empty glass and waved it at the barman, holding up two fingers. “By the end of the
ayahuasca
evening, or at least some time over the following week, I’d fallen pregnant.” She frowned. “Within the next two weeks, certainly. I wasn’t exactly keeping a diary.” She pulled up the collar of her coat so that it framed her face like an Elizabethan ruff.

“Also I left poor Alma sitting in that dreadful café. I just never showed up. The bit about the Corsicans is true, though. They fell in love with her once they found out she’d played a copper’s wife on
The Sweeney
. They offered to come get me out of that flat, drag me away, kicking and screaming if necessary. They told Alma that what I lacked in my life was a man telling me what to do.” The bartender arrived and set down fresh glasses. Augusta tipped hers up. “What they didn’t know was that I already had too many.”

Maybe this is what hallucinogens feel like
, Frances thought. Sitting in a train station drinking champagne with a woman who had recently wanted her dead and was now proposing a business partnership. The world was turning too fast.

A flattened electronic voice announced, in French and English, that the 12:57 Eurostar for Brussels would shortly be leaving from Platform 1. Another voice, male and brusque, reminded passengers to keep their luggage with them at all times and report any suspicious activity. A few feet away from where they sat, the train let out a subdued hiss.

Augusta reached into her bag to retrieve a small white blister pack and poked out two capsules with a dark fingernail. Seeing Frances’s look, she cocked her head to one side.

“It’s just codeine. You get them in Boots, for God’s sake.”

“Should you be mixing them with, you know, drink?”

“It’s champagne,” Augusta said, tossing her head back in a practiced motion. “Hardly drink.”

Eyes closed, she kept her face turned up to the weak winter light that filtered through the glass vault above them. Frances couldn’t take her eyes away: the pale face, skin falling ever so slightly away from the bones, the sweep of lash and brow, the fine mesh of lines at the corners of the eyes. What was it about some faces, some gestures, that was so hypnotizing?

Augusta spoke without opening her eyes. “Are you bored, Frances?”

Frances was startled from her reverie. “Am I what?”

“Are you bored, darling? Does your life lack zing?”

The thin light that fell on them from above offered no warmth. Frances was freezing.

She said, “Augusta, I live in a flat the size of a shoebox that I can no longer afford. I’ve lost the only job I ever loved. My sole entertainment is watching drunks fight across the street.” She took a sip of her champagne, savouring it. “At this point zing seems like the light from a distant planet.”

Augusta laughed. “Then you’ll think about my proposal?”

Frances watched the passengers boarding the Eurostar. They were headed for Brussels, yet they still seemed happy.

“You want me to write an outline for your new book on overcoming adversity.”

“Yes, although I forbid you from using that phrase.”

“And then I’d ghost write the book?”

Augusta fixed her with a deadly stare. “You would assist me in summoning the muse.”

“Fine, I’m good with muses.” The champagne was making her bold. “Will I be, you know, remunerated?”

“My dear,” said Augusta, leaning in so that Frances felt herself mesmerized by the pulsing brown pupils. “
Richly
remunerated.” She turned back to her drink. “There’s one last thing.”

“Mmm?”

“We shall begin in California.”

Frances felt the ground move under her, and realized with a start that the train was rolling away. “We’ll do what?”

“I’ve accepted a short, expense-free sojourn in the Golden State. Land of your birth, I believe, and outlet malls. I’m quite excited by the malls.” Augusta spread her hand to study her nails, a languid gesture that Frances was sure she recognized from television. “I imagine we could have all the fun the law allows. And, of course, you might guide me in the art of storytelling. I found it quite draining the last time.”

Augusta slid her gaze sideways, the way a cat watches a mousehole. “Did I mention there will be a free hotel? And a stipend?” It occurred to Frances that she always felt like a pathetic animal in Augusta’s company: magician’s rabbit, seeing-eye dog, pack mule. Dead duck.

California. She hadn’t been home in two years. She thought of her mother, alone with her father in the giant, echoing house overlooking the ocean, overseeing the installation of the wheelchair ramp and the chairlift. Guilt gripped her.

And yet . . . California. The place of fresh starts. She imagined her name on the spine of a book, or at least at the end of the acknowledgements. To be in Augusta’s company for a few days would be maddening, yes, but possibly enlightening. She needed to remember how to live. She was barely into her thirties — too young to lie down and wait for death.

“I’ll do it,” she said.

They had just finished clinking their glasses when a group of tightly suited young men took a table nearby, bringing with them the unmistakable hilarity of the expense-account lunch. One of them, tall and ginger, held up a hand and shouted for the waitress in boarding-school French. His friends brayed with laughter. The waitress stiffened, rolled her eyes, and slowly came over.

Augusta watched their table through half-closed eyes: “How old do you think they are?”

Frances turned bleary eyes on them: “I don’t know. Old enough to know not to be rude to people who earn one-tenth what they do.”

“Exactly,” said Augusta. “I fear they’ve been brought up under a terrible influence.” She appeared to be on the verge of saying something, but stopped, and slid off her stool. “I’m off to the loo, darling. Order us another round, and whatever you do, don’t leave the bar. Beyond here be cocksuckers.”

Frances and the barman both watched her go, swaying gently as if she were taking a turn on a ship’s deck.
If I leave London now
, Frances thought,
I leave behind what I’ve built, and the chance to find another job I love
.
And the man I love
. She shook her head, hoping her thoughts would fall into some orderly pattern. Could you love someone you’d never kissed?

There had been a night at the pub when Stanley, astonished that she’d never been to Paris, had drawn a map of the city in the crisp crumbs on the table. “That’s St. Sulpice there, you must see it,” he’d said, and pressed her forefinger into the centre of the pile. “I’ll show it to you.” He blew the crumbs off the tip of her finger, turned red, and stumbled off to the bar.

I’ll never see Paris now
, she thought as Augusta returned.
But maybe I don’t need Paris, or London. Maybe what I need is home
.

Augusta slid onto her stool. “There was a reason I wanted to talk to you about the bit of the book involving the shaman.” She scowled at her empty glass. Lifting her hand to the barman, she said, without looking at Frances, “Darling, if we are to travel together, you’re going to have to be less of an amateur.”

“You mean I’ll have to get better at ordering drinks?”

Augusta laughed, and said, “There is an art to it. There needs to be one glass in your hand, and another waiting on the bar. Kenneth had the knack. I suppose everyone must have one talent.”

“Kenneth?” Frances mumbled. She’d had three glasses of champagne and no food. She tried not to think about who would pay.

“Try to keep up, darling. Kenneth was there that night. The night of the
ayahuasca
. Possibly also for the nights that followed; I’m not sure. Those few days were . . . well, a defining time in my life. Unfortunately, they also appear to have been ripped from my memory.”

“Kenneth?” said Frances stupidly, and feared from the look in Augusta’s eyes that there might be sharp words in her immediate future.

“Kenneth Deller,” Augusta said slowly. “I told you about him the first time we met. A reporter, or at least he was when I met him. More pertinent to this story, he was a barnacle. A barnacle on the ship of my life.”

“Oh,” said Frances, as if a hole had cleared in the fog. “He’s the one you didn’t want to include in your book.”

“Well,” said Augusta. “Yes.” From her purse she’d pulled a pack of cigarettes and a silver lighter, cunningly designed to look like a miniature pistol. She began spinning it on the bar.

“Are you trying to tell me,” Frances said, dropping her voice, “that he was there the night your son was conceived? That he’s the father?”

“I never said any such thing.” Fiercely, she turned on Frances. “Why, what have you heard?”

“What have I . . .” Frances shook her head. Would this make more sense if she were sober? “Augusta, I don’t understand. What are you talking about?”

Two young women, chatting, slid up to the bar and sat next to them, tucking shopping bags at their feet. Augusta beckoned Frances closer.

“It’s true I didn’t include him in my book, but apparently he’s writing one of his own. I would very much like to know what he is writing about me. What lies.”

Up close, Augusta’s dark irises contained a dozen shades, brown and amber and purple.
No wonder men become lost
, Frances thought. Cobra in a snake charmer’s basket. Fly in the spider’s web.

Augusta took a cigarette from the pack and, with an unsteady hand, pulled the trigger on the lighter so a spurt of flame shot out the end. “You see, he thinks he knows about me. About certain things that transpired.” She blew a stream of smoke. “But he does not.”
That’s the earth shifting under my feet again
, Frances thought. But it was only another Eurostar train, rumbling to a stop beside them. The barman hurried toward them, flapping hands in panic.

“Augusta,” said Frances, as calmly as she could. “Are we going to California so I can help you write a proposal for this new book —”

“Of course we are, darling.”

“— or are we going because you want us to spy on this Kenneth fellow?”

“Now you’re being ridiculous.”

“Or are we going because there’s some weird unfinished business with your kid?”

Augusta slid off the stool, and Frances edged backwards, thinking:
This could go either way. This could go any way.

“You’ll have to put that out,” the barman called. “There’s no smoking, miss.”

Taking a long final haul, Augusta dropped her cigarette into her glass, watched it expire with a hiss. She turned back to Frances, her face impassive. “I haven’t spoken to my son in seven years.”

Lamb to the slaughter.

sixteen

When people asked why he stayed in Los Angeles, he would say this: where else can you see a movie in a cemetery filled with dead movie stars? On the wall of the Abbey of the Psalms mausoleum it was 1944, and two men were in love with a ghost.

The movie was
Laura
, the ghost was played by Gene Tierney, and she wasn’t dead after all. When she appeared like a sculpture made of light the audience on the lawn of the Hollywood Forever Cemetery shifted and gasped: had anyone ever been so beautiful? Even Kenneth, who had seen
Laura
half a dozen times, sighed and sank a little further into the arms folded behind his head.

Charles was unmoved by the film. He sat hunched over, hands cupping his chin, watching Laura ensnare her prey. He shook his head as the final soliloquy carried over the silent crowd: “Love is stronger than life. It reaches beyond the dark shadow of death . . .”

“What utter horseshit,” Charles said, loudly enough that the young women on the blanket next to them turned in anger, suddenly ashamed of their tears.

They were still glaring twenty minutes later when the film ended. Charles placed the remnants of their dinner in the picnic basket, wiping each fork before placing it in its proper slot. Kenneth poured the last of the white rioja into his plastic cup. A little warm now, but still drinkable.

“The next one’s at Valentino’s crypt, if you want to go,” Charles said.

Around them, people picked up their blankets, older couples arguing good-naturedly about where they’d left the car, young men rubbing their girlfriends’ arms.

Kenneth scraped the last bit of Reblochon off its waxed paper and balanced it on a cracker. Not as good as Carr’s water biscuits. The things they’d left behind. He opened his mouth to say something and shut it abruptly.

“Ken,” said the boy, “you’re catching flies. And you’ve been strange all night.”

The older man shook out one leg, then the other, knees popping like twigs in a fire.

“We may have a visitor,” he said finally. “I noticed that Augusta’s coming to town. Some fan convention. There was a Google Alert yesterday.”

Charles didn’t look up from the picnic basket. “You’re still stalking her online, then.”

He frowned at the boy. “Not stalking. Following at a respectful distance.”

“Has she been in touch with you?”

Kenneth’s laugh threatened the button on his trousers. “Hardly,” he said. “As I recall, ‘traitorous cunt’ was the last thing she said to me. And there was also that moment when she tried to cut off one of my fingers.”

“Well,” said Charles, “she always was a bit of a romantic.”

When Charles smiled, he showed wolfish fangs.
Whose teeth are those?
Ken wondered, for the thousandth time.
Nobody else in my family has teeth like that. But those definitely could be Deller ears, poor lad.

“I wondered if she might be coming through your book shop,” he said. “You know, for her memoir.” He made air quotes around the word memoir, but his hands froze in mid-air when he realized how ridiculous this looked.

“That book was full of shit,” the boy said, suddenly fierce. A security guard standing nearby turned to look at them. “She’s full of shit. I can’t believe you don’t know that. Or are you still making excuses?”

It may be my only skill
, thought Kenneth. He bent his head back. Above, there were no stars, just a milky cataract that gave the sky its glow. Nothing like the black nights you got in London, in winter, when the dark started to close in as soon as you’d finished lunch.

He remembered being in a car, boxed in between snow-topped hedgerows, Augusta irritatingly mute in the seat beside him as he drove, faster than he should, because they were late, as usual. The headmaster’s smile grew cooler by several degrees each time they missed the beginning of Charlie’s concerts. After the first visit, when he’d written “guardian” on the school’s entrance form, there were no more questions about his relationship to Augusta, or Charlie. The other boys were sure to taunt him about it, though: How’s Charlie like a stray dog? Bitch for a mother and no idea who his dad is.

As they’d entered the auditorium, winded after a fast walk past the rugby pitch and the library and the cabbage-scented dining hall, the school orchestra was already in place, the boys shuffling and giggling and scraping their chairs. All except Charlie, whose eyes scanned the crowd. He relaxed visibly when he saw them, and put his trumpet to his lips.

Augusta ignored the stares of the other parents, but Kenneth knew she was taut as a violin string, finely tuned to each breath and whisper. They were always the subject of curiosity, because no one could quite fathom the workings of their relationship — Kenneth least of all.

Her silence on the drive did not bode well for the evening. Kenneth watched as her eyes skimmed the crowd and came to rest on a boy from Charlie’s class, sitting a few rows ahead, legs splayed into the aisle. He had the mutinous air of a trainee delinquent. The boy turned and caught Augusta’s eye, smirked. Then he saw Kenneth and shrank back into himself

Augusta’s thrumming nerves made him twitch. He put a calming hand on her arm and whispered, “I think Charlie’s trying to say hello.”

Augusta looked away from the baby thug to smile and wave at her son. Charlie’s face broke into such a huge grin that Kenneth had to close his eyes against it. As the lights dimmed, he whispered to Augusta to switch seats with him. That way, she’d be seated behind the giant banker in the row ahead and hidden from Charlie’s anxious gaze if she happened to doze off. And she’d be out of the sightline of the gleaming-eyed little punk.

After two carols, he wished she
would
fall asleep. Instead, she shuffled, coughed, and sighed loudly every time the headmaster spoke between songs to expound on the ecumenical nature of the season: the joy of the moment, he said, was in the brotherhood of all students, whether they were Hindu or Jew or Muslim, or indeed, “alternatively faithed.” Augusta failed to hide a laugh behind her hand.

As the last note sounded before the interval — a ragged start had built to a perfectly respectable “O Holy Night” — Augusta was on her feet before he could stop her. Kenneth reached to grab her sleeve between his fingers, but he was left holding her coat, a dry and empty chrysalis.
Sometimes I could kill you
, he thought as he watched her saunter over to the surly boy, tap his shoulder, and beckon him toward the exit.

Charlie had left the stage, trumpet still in hand. He walked up to Ken, his eyes darting around the room in a fruitless search.

“Hello, lad,” Kenneth said, bluff and hearty. Around them, boys were enfolded in their mothers’ perfumed embraces, their fathers’ humorous congratulations. “I think your mum’s just gone to the loo.” But the boy’s expression said: You’re full of shit.

In fifteen minutes Augusta had returned, and they watched her bounce down the centre aisle, dropping a hand on the shoulders of the few parents she knew, waving to others. She rubbed the tip of her nose, which was red and running, Kenneth noted, and not from the cold. The jubilation on her face was as familiar as the deep silence that had come before, and equally unnerving. Eyes bright, lips freshly glossed, she came to Charlie and gathered him up. By that age he already towered over her by half a head. At first he remained stiff in her arms and then, as if his strings had been cut, sagged against her, his head on her shoulder.

“What a little genius up there,” Augusta said, the words running into each other. “I couldn’t believe it was you. My little light under a bushel! My baby Miles Davis.”

“Don’t want to be Miles Davis,” the boy mumbled.

“Of course you don’t, darling. Look at how that man ended up. Now, you want to pick up another instrument, while you still can, while your brain is flexible, you could be Stevie Wonder . . .” She was still babbling as the lights went down.

Gently, or at least without actual violence, Kenneth pulled her to her chair. “Augusta, be quiet. And let the lad go. They’re starting up again.”

She drew herself away, and picked up her coat. “Actually, I’m dying for a fag. I’ll just nip out for a bit.” She cupped her son’s cheek. On stage the violinists were tuning their instruments. “Don’t worry, love. I’ll be back to hear you bastardize ‘Silent Night.’”

With that she walked away, and the man and the boy watched her go, not knowing what to say.

A Sussex public school’s not so far from a Hollywood graveyard
, Kenneth thought, as he watched the security guard crouch and shine his flashlight at the perfectly groomed underside of a boxwood hedge. Lawns trimmed with manicure scissors. Families dragooned into visiting once a year. The professionally sombre recruited to run the place.

Charles had somehow survived it all, slim and graceful and contained, nothing like him. Nothing like either of them.

“When was the last time you had a date, lad?” he asked. “You’re a rare commodity. You’re straight, reasonably attractive, and you don’t smoke crack. You’re like a bloody ten-kilo white truffle!”

The boy shook his head. “That is completely random, Ken.”

Random
. He was so American. “Seriously, now.”

“Seriously, Ken. When was the last time you went on a date?”

“You know I don’t date,” said Kenneth, yanking the picnic basket from the boy. He found three grapes in the bottom and put them in his mouth. Waste was the sin they forgot to put in the Bible, his mother liked to say. He handed the basket back to the boy and said, “It’s an occupational hazard. Do you know many chefs who like to cook at home? Doctors who perform surgery on the coffee table?”

The boy made no attempt to keep the scorn from his voice. “Really, Ken? That’s why you don’t date?”

Kenneth wanted to reach for the lad’s shoulder, the way he would have years ago after another broken promise, another school holiday spent by themselves in the flat.
I love you enough for ten people
, he thought.
I wish I had twenty arms to hold you
.
But it’s not enough
.

He put his hand on Charles’s shoulder, and tried to keep his voice light. “She broke us, I’m afraid.”

At last the boy turned to look up at him, and it must have been the lights hidden in the bushes that made his eyes shine like that.

“We’re not broken,” he said. “We’re together.”