Mr Toppit (29 page)

The first pictures were of me and Toby standing beside each other, not full length because Toby was standing on a box so we would be the same height. Though we were so close that we were almost touching, I felt completely disconnected from him and completely rigid. I could feel my smile freezing into a sickly grin. The photographer must have sensed something because, after the first couple of shots, he said, “Put your arms round each other, go on, you’re friends, you’re old friends, go on, that’s it—great! Great!” He kept snapping and the flash kept flashing. I couldn’t wait for it to be over: it was like being at the dentist’s. Then he said, in his horrible, jolly, hectoring voice, “You’re too stiff, Luke, loosen up. You’re mates, remember, you’re the same person!” My arm lay inert on Toby’s shoulder like a dead snake.

I pulled away. “Haven’t we finished yet?” I said desperately.

Rachel whispered something in the photographer’s ear and he said, “Yeah, great!” and pulled the tripod with the camera on it towards us. “We need to do some closer stuff,” he said. “This is going to be great—don’t worry, it’s going to be great.” His babble seemed to be on a loop.

Leaving his tripod, he came over and manhandled us as if we were giant chess pieces. He twisted us round so we were facing each other. “That’s it—that’s it! Hold it like that.” Toby and I were so close that our noses were almost touching, and as the photographer moved back to the camera I pulled away instinctively. But he was back in a second pushing us together again. “Closer, Luke, closer. You could drive a truck through that gap.”

Now our noses were touching and I could smell Toby’s yeasty breath. His eyes were looking straight into mine and I forced myself to hold his gaze while the flashes came in quick succession. His pupils were tiny pinpricks and he could stare without blinking. When it was finished, he winked at me and said, “You should come to the set more often. We could have a laugh.” Before I had time to answer—not that I could think of anything to say—the makeup girl and the others had surrounded him, put a quilted anorak round his shoulders and were fussing over him. They needed him on set and people were talking into walkie-talkies about estimated times of arrival as if it was a military operation: “Be there in five, yeah. Makeup on set, okay?”

As Toby and his entourage headed away, Rachel in their midst, he turned back to me. “You must hate me being you,” he said.

I thought about it. “Not at all,” I said breezily. “It’s fine by me, actually.”

Martha had gone missing. As far as I was concerned this was no particular cause for alarm but Jake seemed flustered. He asked Rachel if she knew where Martha could be, but he was dismissed: Rachel was not to be disturbed. She was wearing a pair of headphones and was standing beside the director, staring into a little monitor on which you could see what the camera was filming as Toby was running out of the woods holding a huge pitchfork. She was probably giving him a few pointers on how to direct, gleaned from her and Claude’s extensive knowledge of the oeuvre of Douglas Sirk.

“Where do you think she can be?” Jake asked me. “She was with the director—actually, she was rather rude to him, told
him the house looked suburban. Then she disappeared.” I wondered if he was more worried about Martha wandering round leaving a trail of destruction than about her well-being.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said. “She’ll be fine, honestly.”

He clicked his fingers. “Steve! Steve!” he called, to a burly man heading for the set. “I need your walkie-talkie.”

The man turned. “It’s Colin,” he said.

“Sorry,” Jake said, and grabbed the thing out of his hands. “Roxy, come in! Roxy? Where are you?” A terrible squawk came out of it. “I’m by the set. I need you now.” Another squawk. “No, now!” He thrust the walkie-talkie back at Colin.

Roxy arrived, flustered. “Jake, I’m trying to—”

“Can you find Mrs. Hayman? She’s gone AWOL.”

“What’s happened to her?”

“If I knew that, Roxy, I wouldn’t be asking you, would I?”

“I’ll come with you,” I said.

Roxy was cross. “I’m not Jake’s assistant, you know,” she said, setting the record straight. “I’m the floor runner.”

I couldn’t imagine what a floor runner was. “We don’t have to look for Martha if you don’t want to. She’ll be fine.”

“My life won’t be worth living if I don’t find her.”

We walked back to the unit base where the lorries and caravans were. In the back of one of the camera trucks a group of men were playing cards. A little football game was going on behind the dining bus while one of the drivers was waxing his silver limo. In the costume truck the washing machine was spinning and two girls were darning. There seemed to be a whole other life going on away from the set, like all the things people did at home when the men were off fighting a war.

Everybody seemed pleased to see Roxy. When she was away from Jake she had a very smiley face. We weren’t getting far
with the Martha mystery: nobody had seen her. Then, as we were heading back to the set, someone shouted Roxy’s name.

“Were you looking for Mrs. Hayman?” It was one of the unit drivers.

“Have you seen her, Lee?”

“She went off with Kenny. She asked him to drive her home.”

Roxy looked at me, as if I could explain it. I shrugged my shoulders.

“Actually, she seemed a bit upset,” Lee added.

“Upset?”

“Well, she might have been crying. Kenny had some tissues in his car.”

“I better go and tell Jake.” Roxy touched my arm. “Are you okay, Luke?”

I nodded. “Sure,” I said, although I was a bit hurt. It meant I wouldn’t see Martha before I flew to America the next day. Still, good-byes had never been her thing. “I’ll wait here,” I said. “You go.” I didn’t want everyone on the set cross-examining me about Martha. She wasn’t my responsibility.

I felt a bit exposed on my own, after Roxy had left. Lee was leaning against his car having a cigarette so I went over to him.

“Sorry about all this, mate,” he said. “Want a ciggie?” He waved the pack at me. “Go on.”

It was such a relief to be treated like an adult that I took one, even though I didn’t really like smoking. I’d had enough of them with Adam, though, not to do anything embarrassing like cough.

“Enjoying yourself?”

“It’s really interesting,” I said lamely.

“You don’t look anything like I thought.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, I thought you’d be like Toby. He’s a little bugger, no end of trouble. He needs Mr. Toppit to keep him in order. Nice lady, your mother.”

“Really?”

“She asked where I come from. Tried to guess my accent.”

“Where do you come from?”

“Wales.”

“Was she right?”

He guffawed. “Thought I was Turkish!”

“Why do you think she was upset?”

“I don’t know. She was over there”—he waved at one of the trucks—“having a ciggie, talking to someone, then next thing I knew she was driving off with Kenny.” He gestured with his hands to indicate that she might have vanished in a puff of smoke.

After we had stubbed out our cigarettes, I wandered over to the truck he had pointed out. It was like a furniture-removal van, filled with garden benches and tables and a lot of plants in pots and grow bags. At the back I could see a figure moving in the dark.

I called, “Hello!” and, out of the gloom, a woman came towards me. She was wearing dungarees and dirty gloves. Her hair was blond and cropped short, and she would have been attractive if she hadn’t been so enormous. Out of her short-sleeved T-shirt great white arms protruded, mottled pink. The tailgate of the truck groaned when she stepped onto it.

She blinked when she saw me. “Am I having another royal visit?” she said. Then she took off her gloves, wiped her palms on her dungarees, and put out her hand to shake. “I thought you’d be spending time with the grand people on the set. We’re just the oily rags down here. I’m Dawn.”

“Why have you got all that stuff in your van?”

“We’ve got to dress the garden for tomorrow. The people who live here, they’ve got a lot of poncy furniture and weird sculpture. We’re making it look like the garden in the books: old benches, nice weathered wood.” She pointed to the back of the truck. “Lot of lavender. We’re putting it in the flowerbeds for the scenes with you and the bees.”

I didn’t bother to correct her. “Are you a gardener?”

She laughed. “No, I do props. I help my dad. He’s the prop master.”

“My mother’s gone missing.”

She looked surprised. “Has she?”

“The driver—Lee—said she was over here at one point.”

“She looked a bit lost. I showed her the stuff we were going to put in the garden. She liked the urns. They’re Victorian. She wanted to know where we got them from. I said she’d better talk to Ray when he gets back.”

“Who’s Ray?”

“Ray Parsons, my dad. He sourced all the props.”

“Then what happened?”

“It was odd. She just fled.”

Rachel’s eyes were shining and she was buzzing with excitement as we were leaving. She seemed totally unconcerned about Martha’s departure. She kept promising Jake she would come back as soon as she could. I think he was glad to see the back of us. He was still fretting over Martha.

“I hope she’s not unhappy with the filming,” he said. “It’s been a bit of a nightmare, actually.” He grimaced. “We’re over budget, but that’s not unusual, not on a show this ambitious. They’re not happy bunnies at Television Centre, I can tell you. Of course they love the stuff, the footage. The rushes are great.
Everybody thinks so. We’ve got to reshoot some things, but that’s quite normal. You don’t think she’s going to complain, do you? You don’t think she’ll call the BBC and say she doesn’t like it?”

As the car drove away, whatever energy Rachel had had on the set dissipated and within a few minutes she was fast asleep, lying across me on the back seat, her head on my legs. In the cold afternoon light she looked pale and ill as I stroked her hair.

The plan was this: because it was my last night before I went to America, Rachel and Claude were going to have a leaving dinner for me at Claude’s place. Damian was no longer living there. I didn’t know whether they had broken up or not, but he had gone to New York and Claude became uncharacteristically vague whenever his name was mentioned.

Claude was desperate to hear about the filming. Rachel said, “I’ve got a surprise for you. You’ll find out later. You’ll really like it,” then clammed up and wouldn’t say any more. Once she had changed, she seemed much livelier and helped Claude to get everything ready. She was wearing a kind of kaftan with a shawl round her shoulders and had put her hair up, like Martha did. Claude was wearing a green velvet jacket with a bowtie and smoking his Turkish cigarettes from a cigarette holder. I was just in jeans and a T-shirt, and Claude asked if I wanted to borrow some clothes. He said he liked his dinners to be formal.

To my surprise there was another guest, a Romanian student called Rani, who had the room next door to Claude’s. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt. But his concession to formality was a souvenir Beefeater’s hat from the Tower of London. Claude
hardly lowered his voice when he said, “Don’t bother with him. He’s very dull. He’s just here to make up numbers.”

Although it was summer and still light outside, the curtains were drawn and the room was lit by candles. There was a peculiar smell that Claude said was church incense, but it smelled like dope to me. He had made a special cocktail that he had invented specially for the dinner made from vodka and blue Curaçao. I think Rani had had quite a lot of it already because he stumbled and knocked the jug over as he got up.

While we mopped up the mess, Claude began to prepare a Thai meal, swapping pans like a juggler on the single burner of his little stove. He couldn’t eat any of it himself because he was having work done on his teeth, which had been crooked and brown ever since I had known him. Dental work was the only way he could get money out of his grandfather. Luckily, Claude had managed to persuade him not to pay the dentist direct so he was just having the front ones done and keeping the remainder of the cash.

Claude kept asking Rachel what her surprise was, and finally she whispered in his ear. He gave a little whoop of excitement and hugged her. “This is fantastic!” he kept saying. “Fantastic!” Then she and Claude went off somewhere and didn’t return for fifteen minutes. I don’t know why people who are taking drugs always think nobody knows what they’re doing. Anyway, I was feeling sick. The room was smoky and Rani had turned the television on loudly.

It was only towards the end of the evening—after another jug of the cocktail had been drunk and not much of the food had been eaten—that Rachel and Claude began arguing.

“Well, you were the one who said he was coming!” he shouted.

“He told me he would if he could.”

“If he could? You didn’t say that. You said he
was
coming!”

To be honest, I was having some difficulty following what was going on, but I did realize that Rachel must have invited Toby Luttrell. Something terrible had gone wrong with the evening. Although I had been there all along, I felt as if I had missed the bit where it had changed from how it had begun to what it was like now, as if I was reading a book with some of the pages torn out. I headed for the loo because I knew I was going to throw up. I could still hear Rachel and Claude shouting at each other from down the hall.

When I got back into the room, Claude and Rani were sitting on the sofa giggling over something on the television. Claude had his arm round Rani’s shoulder. Rachel wasn’t there. When I asked Claude what had happened to her, he said sulkily, “Well, I hope she’s sorting herself out. I don’t know what’s the matter with her. She’s let us all down.”

That didn’t seem strictly accurate, but I wasn’t in any state to argue. It was after midnight, and the house was dark. I didn’t want to call Rachel and wake the other occupants of the house, so I kept whispering her name.

I found her on the ground floor. She was sitting in the space under the stairs where the pay phone was, her arms round her scrunched-up knees as if she was trying to make herself as small as possible. She looked awful. Her hair had come down, and there was a stain at the top of her dress.