by Cate Andrews
‘They don’t have a Cinematographer yet,’ offered Vincent.
‘Well make sure it stays that way. You’re in cahoots with most of the Agents in town. POLLY!’ he bellowed suddenly at the open doorway. ‘Get your arse in here pronto!’
‘Yes Stephen?’ Polly was the picture of wide-eyed innocence as she sidled into view.
‘Get my lawyer on the phone,’ he snapped, adding in an undertone to Vincent, ‘the divorce isn’t finalised yet. If Christine owns the company, I may go after a stake. The stupid old hag will never see that one coming.’
‘I’m afraid he’s in Tobago,’ called out Polly, phone in hand, ‘shall I leave a message with his secretary?’
‘Then get me a mobile number, you brain-dead bitch!’ he screamed, appearing in the doorway. ‘And bring it to me on set. I don’t have time to hang around waiting for it. Polly, are you listening to me?’
‘Err yes, sorry, I’ll do that straight away,’ she said, distracted by the sight of Stephen’s pillar-box red boxer shorts peeking through his open flies. They were still gaping open as he stormed out of the office with Vincent trailing behind.
The lawyer’s secretary proved easy enough to sweet-talk. By the time Polly entered Studio Seven, she not only had the lawyer’s personal details, but also the numbers for both mistresses and his Housekeeper’s Blackberry PIN as well.
Peering out from behind an enormous blackout curtain, she squealed in fright as a drinks trolley appeared out of nowhere and slammed into a stack of camera peli-cases next to her, pelting them both with pyrostome cups, diet coke cans and crusty old bacon sandwiches. Peering out again, this time she saw Stephen striding around the set like a ringmaster, cracking his censure like a whip and verbally flogging each and every crewmember.
‘If I wanted a crap set, I would have looted some poxy Saturday night game show!’ she heard him scream. ‘And what kind of shitty set-up is this?’ he roared, directing his fury at the lighting arrangement for the next scene.
Polly watched in amazement as he proceeded to tear apart the whole set shouting, ‘you’re all a bunch of fucking amateurs!’ over and over again. The crew huddled together like terrified sheep as he continued to pick each department off one by one.
‘How dare you show your faces on a GBA set and produce this kind of fuckery! And what is this?’ screeched Stephen, spying a jacket that someone had foolishly left on the arm of his director’s chair. ‘How DARE you invade my personal space like that!’ Hurling the offending article straight at the crew, it struck a young costume assistant right in the kisser.
Polly watched his tantrum unfold in fascinated horror. She had seen Stephen go ballistic before but never to such an extent. With his flawless hair sticking up all over the place, crumpled shirt un-tucked and crimson face clashing with his still-exposed pants, he looked like a man on the brink of utter madness. Not to be outdone, Vincent quickly stepped out of the shadows and fired three crewmembers in quick succession.
‘Have you got that number?’ snarled Stephen, spotting her cringing against the curtain. Nodding frantically, she hurried over with the yellow post-it note, skidding on a stray bacon sandwich.
‘Now give me your phone,’ he snapped, holding out his hand again.
Polly stared at it stupidly.
‘Well I can’t very well use mine now, can I?’ he hissed, pointing to a smashed iPhone lying in amongst the debris of the ravaged lights.
Alas, by some terrible quirk of fate, just as he tore it from her fingers Indiana Jones burst into life. Polly went very still as she and Stephen both clocked the caller’s ID. He thrust it back to her immediately.
‘Answer it.’ His voice was like granite.
Polly stood rooted to the spot in fear.
‘I said ANSWER it.’ he repeated, trapping her chin in a pincer-like grip and wrenching it upwards. ‘And make sure you switch it to loud speaker.’
She did as she was told. She daren’t not. A split second later, Joe’s voice came booming out at full volume.
‘Hello Polly,’ he greeted her happily, ‘the cab’s booked. I’ll swing by and pick you up myself at three. Don’t worry i’ll loiter outside the gates so my wicked brother won’t get suspicious. Christine and Michael are overjoyed you’re on board, sweetheart.’
Flinching en masse, the crew seemed to shrink into the shadows leaving Polly all alone with Stephen like a solitary, quaking, sacrificial lamb.
‘Polly?’ She could hear a note of confusion creeping into Joe’s voice. ‘Hello, hello, are you there?’
‘Don’t worry Joe,’ growled Stephen suddenly, clamping Polly’s wrist to stop her bolting. ‘She’s. Right. Here. Next. To. Me.’
There was an awful pause.
‘Get away from her, you bastard,’ said Joe, sussing the situation straightaway. ‘If you so much as flick dirt at her walkie talkie, I’ll come down there and finish off what I started six months ago.’
‘What hostility, Joseph,’ jeered Stephen, ‘and a little uncalled for, since you’re the one who appears to be poaching my runner.’
‘I’m warning you, Stephen, you leave Polly out of this.’
‘Out of what exactly?’
‘Harper Films,’ muttered Joe defiantly.
‘I see, so that’s what you and your little band of desperados are calling yourselves. Surely you could have come up with a better name that that. May I suggest ‘Fatally Optimistic Productions’ or ‘No Hope Pictures’ perhaps’?
‘I’m warning you, Stephen…’
‘No I’m warning you,’ he snapped, ‘or rather urging you to seek help over the inordinate number of frighteningly bad decisions you’ve been making recently. Flitting away your career on a loser and a drunkard…Tut tut Joe, I thought you were smarter than that.’
‘Put Polly back on the line,’ demanded Joe but Stephen had already hung up.
Back in the studio, a deathly hush had descended. The fuse had been lit and any minute now the bomb would explode.
As quick as a flash, Stephen lifted his hand and belted Polly across the face. Bam! As her head ricocheted backwards there was a horrible crunch as he smashed her phone into her left temple. Raising his fist again, Danny sprung out of nowhere and grabbed his arm.
Dizzy with pain, Polly lurched away from him clutching her head. Blood was seeping through her fingers and muddling her vision but somehow she managed to reach the studio door without tripping over any camera cables. Then she was out, half-running, half-stumbling through the studio gates and towards the main road with one thought and one thought only; to put as much distance between her and Stephen De Vries as possible.
Dimitri the Doorman watched, fascinated, as the handsome Englishman marched up and down the hotel lobby like a soldier on some never-ending Parade. Up and down, up and down, up and down. His English was limited but he only need glance at Cristian the concierge’s pursed lips to know that Joe De Vries’s language was not of the civil variety.
Dimitri tried again. ‘But sir, are you zure I can’t ‘elp wiz anyzing?’
Joe shook his head tersely and resumed his marching. He had never felt so sick. Sick with guilt, sick with worry, sick from feeling like he had made the biggest mistake of his life finishing with Polly yesterday, sick from consuming the most god-awful ham, egg and chips from the room service menu at lunchtime. In his nervousness, he kept burping greasy, regurgitated pig as the worst kind of scenarios firebombed his brain. Polly’s fingers plunged into leftover boiling fat in the catering van, camera cases being dropped on her knee caps, her gorgeous body impaled on a boom pole. There was no end to Stephen’s capacity for cruelty.
Lifting his phone again, he was distracted by the sight of Danny jumping out of a taxicab outside. As he watched, Polly slowly emerged as well. Hurdling eight suitcases and a bellhop who was bending down to tie his shoelaces, he reached the doorway just as they entered the lobby. Polly was walking at right angles and had her face half-buried in Danny’s jacket.
‘Thank fuck you�
�re alright!’ he cried, but his words shriveled up as she lifted her face towards him. Her fringe was matted and stained maroon, and the left side of her face was puffy and misshapen.
Joe was horrified. ‘Jesus, what happened?’
‘Your brother ran out of lighting set-ups to annihilate,’ said Danny bleakly.
‘Why the hell didn’t you stop him?’
‘Joe don’t,’ sobbed Polly, ‘none of this is Danny’s fault.’
No it’s mine, he thought.
‘Take her straight to hospital,’ he urged Danny, shepherding them both back to the taxi rank. ‘I’ll follow in a bit.’
‘Why? Where are you going?’
‘To finish what I started.’
‘No don’t. Joe, please, I’m begging you,’ cried Polly grabbing his arm. ‘I don’t want you going back there.’ Her battered face dissolved into tears again. ‘Just take me home, I want to go home,’ she said feebly then fainted.
With reflexes as keen as his guilt, Joe caught her easily in his arms. ‘Right, hospital. Fast!’ he said, scooping her up as Dimitri sprung forward to hail them a taxi. Lying Polly gently down acrodd the back seat, Joe hopped in after her as Danny jumped in the front.
‘Urgenţă, Urgenţă!’ cried the Irishman, waving a fistful of Romanian Leu in the driver’s face. The guy didn’t need to be told twice. Hitting the accelerator, he cut across three lanes of traffic and sped off down the hill.
For Polly, the next few hours would be lost forever in a fug of pain and fuzziness, peppered with wafts of ‘eau de disinfectant’ and the occasional sharp, scratchy sting of a needle. Throughout the whole ordeal, Joe sat glued to her side mangling his fingernails one by one as Danny looked on in silence. The two men hadn’t spoken since their brief altercation and the atmosphere in the room was chillier than the autumnal wind outside.
When a bearded tea lady came by to offer them afternoon tea, Polly finally stirred and opened her eyes.
‘Joe?’
‘I’m right here,’ he said, flying to her side. The doctor had diagnosed mild concussion but to Joe it was terminal, a terminal failing on his part that she was lying in this hospital bed and not him. He should never have involved her without facing the fallout from his brother first
‘You didn’t go back to the studios, did you?’ she asked him anxiously.
He shook his head. ‘I’ve been here all along.’
Polly’s smile was as weak as the tea. ‘Good. I don’t want Stephen ending up next to me.’
‘He won’t be coming within a billion feet of you ever again. Not with me as your bodyguard.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ she said, smiling again. ‘Your forthcoming directorial debut will keep you busy enough.’
‘So the rumours are true?’ said Danny, snapping his head up. ‘When, exactly, were you planning on sharing this?’
Joe looked at him meditatively. ‘Can we do this another time?’
‘No we bloody can’t. Have you any idea how worried we’ve been about you? Sally even hired a private investigator.’
‘Well he can’t have been very good considering I’ve been at home for the last few weeks. Look, I only arrived here yesterday and I was going to explain everything in person but…’
‘But you thought it was more important to jump into Polly’s bed first!’
Joe lost his temper then and yanked him into the corridor.
‘Is this what it’s all about then, Danny? Is that the reason you’ve been such a shit to Polly? Don’t try and deny it. Janie told me last night.’
‘You’re out of your head! You’re welcome to her.’
‘Bollocks. You don’t spend six hours in a Romanian hospital for someone you don’t give the first fuck about. Stop acting like such a dick!’
‘Fucking unbelievable!’ hissed Danny, shrugging him off. ‘In my book, dicks don’t help out girls when they’ve just had the shit beaten out of them.’
‘They don’t stand by to watch who’s packing the punches either,’ countered Joe. ‘What’s the matter, Danny? Afraid you couldn’t afford the next pair of designer trainers if you lost the GBA gig?’
Danny looked stunned. ‘But I grabbed his arm, I stopped him!’
‘Not soon enough, Stephen’s hardly Muhammad Ali. You could have stepped in long before he had the chance to make mincemeat out of her left temple.’
Before Danny could reply, he stormed back into the ward
‘What was all that about?’ asked Polly, as he hovered, scowling, on the edge of her bed.
‘Nothing,’ he muttered. In truth, he was feeling utterly ashamed of himself. Goaded by guilt, he had just used Danny as a verbal punching bag and landed a few low blows that even his scummy brother would be proud of. None of this was Danny’s fault. Polly was no more his girlfriend than Christy Turlington, at the very least he should put him straight about that. However, on strolling back outside the only thing waiting for him, besides an empty corridor, was a friendship as broken and smashed up as Polly’s face.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chip Anderson polished off the last of the damp beer glasses and sneaked another peek at the regal-looking broad perched at the end of his bar. You didn’t get many lookers like her in Chip’s Place. It was the wrong end of town for the snitty college kids for starters, but with sophistication oozing out of the woman, like the sweat from his pits, he’d bet this classy dame would have outshone every last one of them.
Deciding to try his luck, Chip slicked back his tired, grey ponytail and tossed away his dirty dishcloth, but the randy old cowboy only got as far as offering her a dish of shriveled-up peanuts when the front door opened and a stinging autumnal wind came raging in like a cantankerous old bitch, rattling the dusty Moose heads above his whiskeys and the giant neon Budweiser sign looming over the jukebox. The door slammed shut again and a man-giant in an enormous grey duffel coat stood plugging the entrance, steam rising off him like roast beef fresh from the oven.
Chip recognised him instantly. Everyone in these parts knew about the weird, moose-obsessed loner who lived out in the woods. The guy only ventured out to buy groceries and drink a solitary beer here at Chip’s Place or at his rival Al’s Bar & Grill down on Main Street. One of Chip’s wisecracking regulars, Billy-Joe Johnson, liked to tell tall tales of all the creepy techno gear he’d gotten a peek of in the back of the guy’s pick-up truck once. Even now, he could hear the old man gleefully likening it to torture props from some late night horror movie.
‘Hey buddy, what can I get ya?’ called out Chip, uneasily. At the same time the classy dame rose gracefully from her stool.
‘I believe he’s looking for me,’ she said, with an accent so posh it could’ve cut every beer glass in his joint.
‘You’re a hard man to track down, Benito,’ smiled Christine, striding over to Italian-kiss his prickly hedgehog stubble. ‘I must have had half of Maine out looking for you.’
‘Was up in ze woods,’ he grunted, plonking his enormous bulk down on the spare stool next to her. Benito reeked of the subject of his nature documentaries but Christine felt safe and secure in his mighty shadow.
‘Still trying to capture that elusive shot for the BBC, old friend? I hope they’re paying you on delivery only.’
The corners of Benito’s mouth twitched. ‘And I’m surprised to see you this far into the wilderneez, Christine. No Gucci or Prada round ‘ere. Shouldn’t you be tucked up in one of your eight mansions with your famous ‘usband?’ His voice was light but his eyes were as black as coal. Benito hated film industry bigwigs with a passion, equaled only by his love of moose.
‘Yes, well, the less said about him the better,’ replied Christine briskly. ‘May we have a couple of beers over here please?’ she asked the riveted Chip.
‘How’s Flavio?’
‘No idea. He stopped returning my calls decades ago.’
‘Imbecille!’ spat Benito, outraged. ‘’Zat man wouldn’t know talent if it came up and smacked him on the culo.’
Christine was touched. ‘That’s very sweet of you to say so, darling, but I gather he’s coping rather well without me. He now runs a very successful film distribution company out of Paris.’
Benito wrinkled his big Roman nose as if she had just farted.
‘And what about you, mio dolce,’ his said, his face softening, ‘I bet you are still entrancing audiences around ze world.’
‘Not for a good while now,’ she admitted. ‘To be perfectly honest, Benito, I’ve spent the last decade more in the wilderness than you.’
‘But zat is abominable!’ he cried, banging his giant’s fist down on the counter, ‘you light up zat lens even more than my moose. If only I could find a way to capture their passionate spirit as I did yours!’
Christine tried not to giggle. ‘Look, darling, I appreciate you meeting me tonight, but I must confess, I came here with something of an ulterior motive…’ She stopped suddenly when she saw the roguish gleam in his eye. ‘It’s a work related motive,’ she added firmly, quick to quash any romantic notions he might be concocting in that enormous head of his. ‘How do you fancy a change of scenery?’
Benito wrinkled his nose again. ‘I love my Moose, so it would ‘ave to be something spectacular. Having zaid that, I wouldn’t mind filming ze leopards in Kenya,’ he added longingly, ‘or ze lions in…’
‘Ah, I think you might have misunderstood me,’ said Christine, cutting him off mid-sentence. ‘I’m afraid I’m not in the market for documentaries, anymore than I am for bridal wear. You see, Benito, myself and a few others have started up a film company and, as one as the principal producers, I can’t tell you what a thrill it would be to work with you again…’ Her words faltered when she heard a low growling sound. She glanced at the floor, half-expecting to find an angry dog encircling her fur-lined boots. Then she caught sight of Benito’s mouth shaped in a rabid snarl.