by Cate Andrews
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 blonde 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 think 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, elsew
here?’
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. She 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.
‘I fucking hate him.’
Bang. Propelled by his lack of discretion the room started spinning more violently. He hoped to god she wasn’t lying about not being a journalist.
In the meantime, she had raised her glass in a mock toast to him.
‘Hurrah! I must say it’s taken you long enough to figure out.’
Joe lost his temper then. ‘Enough of the games, Samantha, who are you really?’
‘A wife of unfortunate circumstance,’ she said, spearing an olive with her cocktail umbrella. ‘Twelve years ago, I was married to a scriptwriter called Tommy Harper. That wannabe was a sure-fire gonnabe until Vincent Edwards came along and effectively took a blowtorch to our lives. My husband was the true creator of East End Heist 1 & 2,’ she added casually.
Joe stared at her in shock. ‘But those are Vincent’s first films. His whole reputation is based on them!’
‘Yes, so he’d like you, and the rest of the world, to believe.’
Joe knew it was true as soon as she said it. There was no way a producer surviving on a literary diet of trashy film reviews and porn magazines could have written two such fantastic scripts. The only real mystery was how he hadn’t been rumbled before.
‘But how?’
Samantha shrugged. ‘Tommy was on his way round to show the scripts to a friend of ours when he vanished. He was scraped off the front of a double-decker six hours later.’
‘Fuck, that’s awful!’
Samantha’s hand tightened around her dirty martini.
‘But what about copyright and stuff?’
‘Non-existent, like my bank balance,’ she said tightly. ‘I’m only here because I won a competition in Hot! Hot! Hot! It’s my first holiday in years.’
‘But Vincent’s made millions off the back of them,’ yelped Joe. ‘His whole career was cemented by their success. He’s even got two BAFTAs for Best Original Screenplay!’ The depth of the deception was mind-blowing. ‘Have you ever called him out about it?’
‘Of course I have! He played to type and called me a gold-digger. I didn’t have a leg to stand on and he knew it. That man had the nerve to stand there and humiliate ME when all those despicable stories about him were popping up in the papers. Thousands a night on strippers! That money was rightfully mine and he was frittering it away on skimpy thongs and nipple tassels.’
‘Christ, Samantha! People need to know!’
‘Not a chance. Vincent claimed those scripts the day Tommy died.’
Joe stared out of the window at a young couple canoodling in the moonlight. From a distance the girl looked like Polly.
‘Did Tommy write anything else? If his writing style exists elsewhere, then perhaps we could match…’
‘No,’ said Samantha firmly. ‘I packed up his study myself. All that was left were empty gin bottles, the drunkard!’
Like me, thought Joe grimly, sinking another rum as he mulled over her predicament. The list of people screwed over by his brother and his crony was growing by the day. He placed a hand over hers and squeezed gently. Right now, GBA Films was like an out of control steam-roller with no conscience, flattening lives but somehow eviscerating Stephen and Vincent’s culpability at the same time. He wanted to commandeer a fleet of bulldozers, trundle them up Wardour Street then tear the damn place apart until there was nothing left except that stupid brass plaque above the door.
The rest of the week passed in a drunken haze of sex and solace. United as victims, kindred spirits of survival, heartbreak had simply poured out of the both of them like a pair of uncapped wine barrels. Daylight hours were spent eliminating hurt with pitchers of rum-based cocktails and nights were passed wrapped in each other’s arms.
When Joe awoke six days later, he did so alone. Padding across the hut in need of a piss, he passed the window and saw that another day had been and gone. The sun was dissolving in the sky like orange aspirin and the tide had retreated well beyond the local dhows, now marooned on a bed of golden silt and scuttling hermit crabs.
Lifting the toilet seat, he hollered out to Samantha, thinking she was outside on the veranda soaking up the last of the rays.
‘Are we kicking off with beers or mojitos tonight?’
No answer. She must have headed up to the bar already.
Wondering back into the bedroom, he noticed a large manila envelope, the length and breadth of a stable yard breezeblock, balancing precariously on his bedside table. As he stared at it, the envelope lost its balance, toppled off the table and fired its contents across the room like a canon.
Cursing, he heaved the package back onto the bed. As he did, a single sheet of hotel stationary fluttered down to the floor. His heart sank at the sight of it. He hadn’t had much luck with mysterious handwritten correspondence lately. Steeling himself, he started reading;
My dearest Joe,
Forgive me, darling, for my dishonesty, but i’m no closer to winning a competition than those poor deluded fools who purchase lottery tickets week after week. The truth is I DID find a long lost remnant of my husband’s legacy underneath all those empty gin bottles but I came here with every intention of scattering the pages to the wind, like I did his ashes off Brighton Pier ten years ago. Then I met you, and in the last week I’ve come to realise that my final au revoir to Tommy might just be a lifeline for us both. Not only is this script all I have left of the complicated, moody, astonishingly funny man I once loved but it may hold the key to reversing all our fortunes.
It’s not much use in a copyright suit I’m afraid, Tommy’s style changed dramatically over the years, but it’s not dolphin fodder either, so I’d like you to have it. Four provisos though: No ham-fisted actors, no gob-shite producers and definitely no profit over substance GBA nonsense. I don’t want this turned into some generic rubbish that will clutter the top shelves in my local Blockbuster along with the dust mites. And I want you to direct it. You may be a rookie but you’re a rookie with heart and it’s high time you stepped out of your brother’s shadow.
In return, I seek no final approval over scripts, cast etc. I’m going to leave all that stuff to you, save one final request. When the film is done and dusted, please see to it that Tommy receives his credit. It would mean the world to me to finally see his name in lights, just how he dreamed of so many years ago.
All my love,
Samantha
PS a few of the profits wouldn’t go amiss either.
The setting sun had all but disappeared by the time Joe reached the final page. Rubbing his eyes, he reached for the phone. Samantha was right. It was good. Actually, it was better than good. In fact, Joe had just finished the best goddamn script he’d ever read, and, for the first time since that awful night in Morocco, he was feeling something close to optimism.
With no time to lose, he patch
ed a call straight through to LA.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Benny Sanchez pulled up to his first pool cleaning assignment of the day with a wry grin on his face. The one that softened his grey whiskers and bought a twinkle to his canny brown eyes. Benny was a contented old devil, despite having just spent the last three hours fishing used condoms out of Charlie Sheen’s pool, but hey, what were a few stray rubbers between has-beens.
There weren’t many who would cite pool cleaning as a die-hard aspiration, but to Benny it was a job rife with opportunity, particularly when the clientele list was a who’s who of Hollywood’s rich and infamous. The tips were lousy, a tight face meant tighter fist round these parts, but where else could you perv on youthful bottoms and bikini-busting silicon tits all day? What’s more, the hush-hush gossip he picked up, poolside, meant that he never had to pick up his drinks tab.
There was only one client he respected. The owner of the gorgeous white town house that he had just pulled up outside; Michael Wilson. A classy guy and no mistake, and one who always bucked the trend by slipping him a Lakers ticket along with a crisp fifty every month. Michael didn’t reek of shit like the rest of them rich assholes, no matter what the press was saying about him.