Dirty Movies (26 page)

Polly stared blankly at the airport departures board. She was f
inally on her way home but she had never felt less like celebrating. Even her red party dress looked miserable about it. The fabric was smeared with make-up and tears and, despite a hastily applied safety pin, the zip was busted beyond repair; a consequence of a passionate encounter that now seemed almost unreal.

In the last eight hours she must have gone through every kind of shock
, with three words repeating over and over in her head like some perverse Buddha mantra. The more she thought them the more miserable she felt.

Gone. Joe’s gone
.

All those months of hoping, wishing, dreaming.

Gone.

A
few metres away, Lucy was pretending to read a
Hot! Hot! Hot!
article about Christine LaVelle’s latest admittance to rehab but she couldn’t stop reliving last night’s events either. Polly had said very little since Lily tapped on her door late last night to finally reveal the contents of that terrible letter. Her face told a different story.

Through
the glass into the first class lounge, Lucy could see Maisie fussing over Stephen, demanding cold compresses from the star-struck airport staff. He’s not remorseful in the slightest, she thought angrily, watching as he used his one unbruised eye to wink at a stick thin model when Maisie’s back was turned. Joe had been far too restrained. If it were her brother who had screwed her husband and caused all that mayhem, she’d have snapped his bloody neck.

‘How is she?’ whispered Lily, plonking herself down next to
Lucy and pulling a grizzly Lucas onto her knee. ‘Hush darling, we’ll find you some breakfast in a minute. Sorry, he’s not usually like this but my nanny’s vanished. I wouldn’t normally mind but she’s run off with our Coco Pops as well.’

‘What a cow
!’ Lucy reached into her bag and pulled out a squishy, half-melted Double Decker. ‘Polly’s not good,’ she added, once Lucas was happily chomping his way through it. ‘I keep trying to get her to open up but it’s like talking to a brick wall.’

Lily wiped a glob of
chocolate off her knee. ‘This flight delay isn’t helping. I’ve just checked with the desk and we should be boarding in twenty minutes.’

‘Thank god. The sooner I get Polly home, the better. Did Joe give you any indication where he was
going?’

Lily shook her head. ‘I can’t believe he’s gone. Fir
st Michael, then Joe. I hate to think what the next shoot will be like.’

‘A fucking disaster, that’s what
,’ said a voice.

Lily
clapped her hands over Lucas’ ears and frowned at Rachel who immediately apologized as she parked herself in the hard blue plastic seat opposite.

‘Even so,’ conceded Lily
, ‘you might have a point.’

‘It’s more than a point
; it’s game set and match to our evil bosses. But I, for one, have no intention of heading up the salvage team this time around.’

‘Oh no, no, no
,’ gasped Lily, turning white. ‘You can’t quit too!’

‘I can
and I will. I almost feel sorry for Gillian. She might actually have to get off her backside and do some work for once.’

‘But
you can’t leave!’ hissed Lucy. ‘What about Polly? She can’t carry that crazy office on her own!’

‘I’m sorry, I really am, I like Polly but I’ve been putting thi
s decision off for far too long. I know its crap timing but, if I stay here, I run the risk of making even more of a mess out of my life than I already have. I’ve spent years looking after cast and crew. I think it’s high time, no pun intended, that I spend the next year looking after me.’

‘Perhaps the extra workload will take Polly’s mind off things
,’ said Lily doubtfully, searching for the good in the situation. ‘What will you do, Rachel? Find work with another production company?’

‘Oh I doubt it, not after word gets
out about my forthcoming stint as Christine LaVelle’s neighbor,’ she said dryly, pointing to Lucy’s magazine article. ‘Besides, Vincent and Stephen will see to it that I don’t work in this industry again. The only option is a complete career change.’

Dispatching Maisie to find him another ice pack, Stephen was back eyeing up his model again. This time she was returning his advances with a suggestive lick of her lippy and a hasty ascension of her hemline. Somewhat of lingerie connoisseur, Stephen instantly recognised the brand of skimpy black underwear. He blew her a kiss and she flicked her hair at him provocatively. Even a black eye and a broken nose didn’t detract from Stephen De Vries’ celebrity status, or rather the opportunity for some red carpet exposure, at least until he got bored with her. The model wasn’t that stupid, she knew the rules.

Stephen was about to offer her some champagne
when the arrival of Vincent effectively put the kibosh on any potential pre-takeoff nookie.

‘Found another ice pack
for you,’ announced the producer, chucking a bag of mini frozen airline puddings on Stephen’s erection. ‘Probably too late to do any good but at least those shiners will match your tux this week. Who knew your loser brother had it in him, eh?’ Sniggering to himself, Vincent bent over to grab something from his laptop bag.

You fat fucker
, thought Stephen furiously. He was about to move seats to resume flirtations when Vincent tossed a script on top of the eighteen mini gateaux.

‘For god’s sake, watch where you throw that thing
!’ screeched Stephen. ‘What the hell is it anyway?

‘What does it look like?’

‘I dunno.
‘Noddy does Big Ears’
?’

Vincent smirked. ‘Let’s just call it a get well present from Walt Wilson
.’

‘A
nother First Look Picture Deal? You do realise our contract expires soon?’

‘No
, but I guarantee it’ll still make you smile, despite your broken nose.’

‘Oh get on it with Jack-a-Snory! I need a piss.’

‘Shut up and listen then. After Wilson was officially tossed forthwith from the family business, he was ordered to hand over every Global script in development and this,’ he said, waving a podgy finger at the script in Stephen’s lap, ‘happened to be his numero uno favourito, so much so that he’d already written pages and pages of extensive notes on it.’

‘What’s it got to do with us?’

‘Walt’s decided to pass it on to us as a gesture of goodwill. An apology for catching his son shafting your wife up the jacksie, if you like.’

Stephen grinned. Their
plan had worked to perfection.

‘Is it any good?’ he asked
, suddenly curious.

Vincent nodded, for once dispensing with the bullshit. ‘Michael’s a wretched little wanker but he couldn’t half spot a decent script. There is one drawback however, but hear me out before you go t
urning it into a raging bonfire. It’s a bit of a thinking man’s wank and the budget won’t be nearly as big as we’re…’ But that was as far as Vincent got before the pages went sailing over his shoulder and struck an elderly gentleman sitting behind, right between his Romanian Times headlines.

‘I told you to hear me out!’ roared
Vincent, waddling off to retrieve the script. ‘This might just be the film that earns us a spot on that Oscar podium, and your fourth nomination for Best Director. Everyone knows all the greats win fourth time around anyway. ‘Spielberg, David Lean…’

Stephen snatche
d the script back immediately.

‘What’s this crap called then?’

‘
Love letters from Timbuktu,
or something. Don’t ask me stupid questions. I couldn’t give a fuck as long as it makes me money.’

‘So
, what’s so Oscar-worthy about it then?’ Stephen prodded the tatty script suspiciously. It didn’t even have a front cover.

‘It’s got more drama than a sixth form common room. Better still
, there’s a filthy sex scene on page 45 that’ll require lots of imaginative camera shots. So,
now
are you interested?’ he asked Stephen, slyly.

The director shrugged. ‘Perhaps. I suppose I bette
r read it first and then decide.’

Vincent fought the urge to
punch him in the face. Stephen liked to keep up the pretense that he arrived at his own conclusions, but they both knew he was more turned on by this project than the skinny model opposite flashing her knickers.

Stephen yanked his producer to one side as they exited Heathrow’s arrivals’ hall later that day.

‘Do you speak Romanian
, Vincent?’ he enquired lightly.

‘No point.
I find ‘Fuck Off’ is universal in any language.’

‘Then may I suggest you think about expanding your repertoire?’

Vincent opened his mouth then shut it again. ‘Are you saying what I think you’re saying?’

Stephen nodded and grinned roguishly beneath the cruel, fluorescent airport lights. ‘You were
right, it really is quite the page-turner. In fact, as soon as
Desert
is edited and this turgid crap’s green lit, then you and I, my friend, are first-class bound for Eastern Europe.’

Dmitri Popescu gave a shudder and clasped his miserably inadequate head doorman uniform tighter to his chest. A bitter autumnal wind was howling across the main square in Bucharest and mauling everything in its path, from half-frozen doormen to the immaculate window boxes and streak-free windows of the Five Star Irina Hotel behind him.

Clamping a cigarette between his teeth, he was just sparking up when a group of noisy foreigners exited the establishment, blasting out more hot air from their mouths than the gaps in the swivel door. Like a sagging sunflower, Dmitri radiated towards the warmth. To hell with his stuffy supervisor’s insistence that all doormen should position themselves precisely equidistant from the taxi stand and the hotel, he wasn’t the poor bastard stood outside with hypothermia nibbling at his toes.

From her bedroom window fifteen floors above, Polly
watched the Camera Department slink off into the night like a pack of hungry wolves. As they rounded the corner by the Tabac that served her a piping hot coffee at 5am every morning, her eyes fell upon the frozen doorman again. Unaware of her scrutiny, he continued to stamp the arctic out of his feet and snarl abuse at a couple of child beggars loitering close-by.

Continuing her casual surveillance, more out of boredom than a hankering to be
some Hitchcock movie character, Polly watched as a yellow taxicab pulled up to the hotel. The doorman shot forward and a tall girl with long, platinum blonde hair emerged wearing five-inch stilettos and a very short, silver-grey trench coat buckled tightly at the waist. It was the sort of garment that made you question the decency of the clothes underneath, or rather lack of them. The girl was a walking advertisement for hired sex, from her steel-tipped stiletto heels glinting in the streetlight, right the way up to the dull sheen of her heavyweight make-up. She must be Stephen’s entertainment arriving for the evening.  Ever since Maisie had jetted back to the states for an Oprah Exclusive last week, he had been testing out his hotel mattress springs with a string of similar dyed-haired, red light companions.

As
Polly watched, the prostitute rudely pushed past the doorman without so much as a ‘multumesc’. Polly immediately found herself hoping that she and Stephen gave each other crabs. Her contempt was then re-directed at the room service menu. She was sick to death of burgers and fries, or ham and egg and fries or the yucky, desiccated club sandwich with the ever-present side order of fries. For some reason a simple green salad, or any kind of salad, didn’t appear to exist this side of Europe. Polly daren’t look in the mirror. Long shooting hours, coupled with a bad diet, had given her a paunch like Santa Claus and more spots than a Dalmatian’s pelt.

Placing an order with the kitchen staff (sausage, bacon and fries) she lay down on the bed and closed her
eyes. There was no point sugarcoating, or rather
potato-coating
it. The last few months had been hell. There was the agonising loss of Joe, then Rachel, then the fallout of the disastrous pre-release reviews of
A Desert Affair
that had turned Stephen and Vincent into complete despots. For the first time in GBA’s history, they were facing a very real downward turn in their box office fortunes, and industry journalists smelling a bloody,
Gigli
-style mega flop were already beginning to circle. Only this morning, Stephen had stormed off set after a naughty crewmember had left a very uncomplimentary article about him on his director’s chair. It had included a number of damning quotes from several disgruntled ex-employees, only too happy to add their two-penny’s worth now that his stranglehold over the industry was showing every sign of loosening.

Polly couldn’t help yearning for the dusty, exotic expanse of North Africa. The cracks in her broken heart had fractured
that little bit more when she had first laid eyes on the blustery, bleak, concrete sky-rises of Bucharest. It was a post-apocalyptic wasteland; peppered with broken telephone cables, dirty street urchins and battered old signs for Coca Cola.

A tense forty-minute, white-knuckled drive to the Film Studios on the edge of town twice a day didn’t improve matters. The sparse streets of Bucharest’s suburbia were strewn with litter, defeated-looking Romany characters and dozens of stray animals cowering at every passing car. What’s more, despite the general jollity of the Romanian set crew
, Polly had found her production office colleagues short-tempered and the language barrier much like a stormy English Channel.

Only that morning
, she had wasted three hours organising to have Stephen’s fax machine disconnected and thrown in the studio skip. The director had developed an aversion bordering on butchery to its constant beeping as more bad reviews arrived from the Global Studios press office, and Polly was fed up of dodging stationary missiles whenever Walt Wilson’s honchos were feeling particularly spiteful. Discovering that the blasted machine was still in place after lunch, it had taken all of Polly’s willpower not to throw her phrase book straight at the sniggering Romanian girls’ heads. Rachel would have stapled fingers to desks for pulling such stunts but she hadn’t quite reached that level of managerial sadism yet.

She
missed her friend like mad, but whilst Rachel’s departure had tested the limits of her sanity, it had also inadvertently saved her career. With Joe gone, Stephen, still smarting from the trailer incident, was itching to karate-chop her contract. He would have succeeded as well if Gillian, unable to face the thought of training up a small army of new office staff, had quickly ear-marked Polly for salvation and threatened some first class stropping to Vincent if she didn’t get her way.

Nevertheless
, this still left them one key UK production member short, and after Gillian kept blowing him out to tend to some budget or other, instead of, well, blowing him, Vincent had insisted they find someone right away. With Janie preoccupied with the tireless search for Joe’s replacement, and Stephen and Vincent tied up suing every film magazine on the market for slander, Gillian had gone and hired the first girl who walked through the door the day before the team left for Bucharest.

Barely out of college, auburn airhead
, Gabriella Roose, had never worked on a film production, let alone a regular 9-5 in one of the Soho ‘quickie marts’ that Polly was forced to shop in every week for Stephen’s triple quilted loo-paper. But, like Gillian, Gabriella quickly realised Polly’s worth and took full advantage, developing a deft talent for hiding gossip magazines and nail files under call sheets whenever Stephen or Vincent were around. Much to Polly’s consternation, she did this with enviable precision, and the lion’s share of the vital shoot logistics ended up back on her plate. 

Stretched to breaking point
, and in danger of an entire head of grey hair by the age of twenty-three, Polly couldn’t have cared less about any of it if Joe had kept in contact.  But he hadn’t, and now her heart felt like broken glass. Every time his name was mentioned, another shard would splinter off and wound her. She couldn’t blame him for disappearing. He needed a fifty-year sabbatical to get over all the terrible things that Stephen had done.

She wasn’t the only crewmember to lament Joe’s absence. Stephen had already exhausted two exemplary replacement 1st ADs in as many months
, and tales were already beginning to circulate that number three had been caught sobbing into his call sheet on the steps of Stephen’s trailer yesterday evening.

Polly
closed her eyes and tried to imagine Joe on a far flung paradise beach, a place where the stars twinkled above perfect palm trees, not dullsville, grey, eastern European tower blocks, and where the wind was no more forceful than a temperate zephyr gently ruffling his gorgeous dark curls.

She longed to tell Stephen to shove his special coffee beans, catch a late flight out of Bucharest and begin the long
, long quest to find him, but a hateful little voice inside kept pulling her up short. If Joe truly loved her then surely he would have been in contact by now? Polly was one of life’s eternal go-getters, but even she wasn’t brave enough to chuck her career away on a wing and a prayer and a capricious 1st AD.

Unbeknownst to Polly, Joe had indeed sought umbrage in a little slice of heaven, one known to all good tour operators as the staggeringly beautiful archipelago of islands bordering the coast of Mozambique. Alas, he was far more taken with the tumblers of rum than the soft waves lapping at the beach, and the mild evening breezes were having a testing time ruffling his greasy, unwashed locks.

Cocooning him in his misery
that evening was the usual hotchpotch of American and South African tourists, all falling over themselves to join in with each other’s conversations in the loudest, brashest ways imaginable. Joe kept himself to himself, as he had done ever since his arrival four months ago, his regular slot at the counter contributing much to a growing drinking problem and a doctorate in self-indulgence, interspersed with a few gruff nods of recognition from the bar staff.

He was just mulling over his shattered career, Cassie’s damning revelations and the complete lack of direction in his life when he locked eyes with a blond
e in the mirror above the bar’s stellar selection of cocktail mixers.  Joe looked away, disinterested. He was sick to death of fending off the advances of drunken females who saw their holiday status as a free permit to letch over every unattached male in a five-mile radius.

The blonde clearly wasn’t in the market for subtle hints. She immediately crossed the bar and slid into the spare stool next to him. Joe
signaled for another drink and braced himself for the clumsy chat-up line.

When it
didn’t come, he started getting twitchy. Trust his luck to be pestered by some prehistoric female with no social skills whatsoever.
Oh bog off,
he thought irritably, as the silence crept on and on. He was considering stomping off to bed when she lent over and whispered in his ear;

‘They must have done something truly awful to make
you
walk, Joe De Vries. Tell me, i’m intrigued. What did those soulless bastards do this time?’

Joe froze, his worst nightmare realised. Some tabloid
hack had gotten wind of the big De Vries brothers’ fallout and chased him halfway across the world for the scoop. He glanced sideways and his suspicions were confirmed. She definitely had a brassy, beaky, hard-nosed journalistic look about her.

‘I’m not a reporter,
’ she said quietly, reading his panicked expression. Winking at the bar tender she indicated to her empty glass, ‘i’ll take another round here too please, Manu.’

Joe sat there sweating.  Not a journo? Then who was she? Some unhappy GBA ex-employee
, callously discarded by Stephen after a sordid one-nighter, or sacked by Vincent after a run-in over the last doughnut on the craft services table?  He was still struggling to place her as Manu plonked a fresh drink down in front of her. She lent forward to take a sip, her sweaty bare thighs sounding like a pair of kitchen plungers as they unpeeled noisily from the leather barstool.

Joe cleared his throat. ‘I t
hink you might have me confused with someone else.’

She
grinned and pulled out a pack of smokes. ‘Don’t worry, darling, if Stephen was my brother I’d be denying all knowledge too.’ She laughed then, a dry raspy sound, befitting of someone who smoked forty a day.

Joe scowled at her
. All of a sudden, he didn’t care what she knew, or how she knew it. A permanent state of drunkenness came with an inability to give a shit about anything for very long and, right now, this woman was nothing more than a tenuous link to a world he had travelled a long, long way to forget.

Downing his drink
, he demanded another from the hovering Manu. He had discovered that total obliteration came somewhere around drink number fifteen. With a little luck, he would be passed out in twenty.

‘I don’t know why you’re so intent on pestering me but may I suggest you take your drink
, and presumptions, elsewhere?’

One dyed-
blonde eyebrow lifted in surprise. ‘Aren’t you even a little intrigued who I am?’

Joe shook his head and the room started spinning.

‘Well I’m going to tell you anyway. My name’s Samantha, Samantha Harper. For the last eight years, I’ve been following the breadcrumb trail of destruction left by GBA Films. You could say it’s become something of a hobby of mine…’

Christ, thought Joe. S
he was some loony-tunes film nut. He was going to be chopped up into little pieces and posted back to BAFTA in a jiffy bag.

‘I find most people take up reading in
their spare time, not stalking,’ he said, quietly.

‘What about drinking oneself into oblivion?’ she retorted, looking pointedly at his glass. ‘Anyway I have my reasons
, and they’re far more personal.’

‘Definitely jilted ex flame
,’ he murmured in relief.

Samantha’s face darkened. ‘Not ‘flaming’ likely
,’ she snapped. ‘When it comes to those two, I wouldn’t drop my knickers for all the neon in Vegas. Tell me, Joe, do you even like your brother?’

Her question took him by surprise. Before he could stop himself
, he’d blown his cover completely.