Taking Hollywood

by Shari King

  Two hours later, she knew. Knew the whole story. It had been right there all along.

  Her mind buzzed as facts whirled around, falling into place, making her heart ache for Mirren’s tragic neglect and the brutality she faced in the end, for Zander’s harrowing upbringing of violence and fear, and for Davie, the sweet young thing who tried to keep it all together, put patches on the pain.

  It was all there. She had her story.

  63.

  Screams

  Glasgow, 1989

  Jono Leith was so fucking heavy. How could he weigh this much?

  Davie’s breathing was fast and gasping as he staggered a few feet, then placed the weight down.

  ‘Hang on, hang on. Can’t get a good grip. Give me a minute.’

  Zander showed no expression, just gave Davie the break that he needed.

  He was freaking out inside. Freaking out. A dead body. He’d never seen a dead body before, let alone touched one. The blood. And Jono, so white, no colour left in his face or body. Like he was made of chalk.

  They’d had the sense to roll the body in a polythene sheet before moving it. Jono had acted all flash when he’d called in the decorators to have Marilyn’s kitchen painted. Aubergine. Apparently it was the in colour. Now the cover sheet they’d left behind was being put to a very different use. And they’d needed it. The stuff coming out of him . . . Urgh, Davie didn’t even want to think about it. He was so light-headed. Couldn’t breathe.

  Davie stared at the hut in his garden, trying to work out the distance. Mirren lived in the middle house in the block, Zander at one end, Davie at the other. They just had to get it across two gardens, then past his window to the hut.

  And they had to do it all without being seen. That meant staying close to the walls, dragging the body under the eyeline of the windows: commando crawl, pull, commando crawl, pull. There were access gaps between each garden so the bin men could get in to collect the black plastic bags that nestled inside steel cages outside every back door.

  Well, now they were definitely throwing out a piece of rubbish.

  The Macalisters on the other side weren’t a problem. They both worked the night shift down at the frozen chicken plant. But his mum was always saying that old Mrs McWilliam, between Davie and Mirren, had the surveillance skills of a bloody telescope. He checked his watch. Almost eight. They’d just have to hope that she was so engrossed in Coronation Street that she didn’t notice a polythene-wrapped corpse being dragged past her window. Commando crawl, pull. Commando crawl, pull.

  This was mental. Pure mental. They were bound to get caught, jailed, and they hadn’t even done anything wrong. Mirren’s mum was a fucking fruit loop and they were going to get the blame. But what else could they do? Heart racing, hands shaking, there was no other choice. He tried not to look at Jono, not to think of the lump he was carrying as a real person, because if he did, he’d lose it. Freak out. A glance at Zander told him nothing about how his mate was doing. He couldn’t even begin to imagine how that would feel – carrying your own dad. Dead. Blood oozing under the polythene so that now it looked like a packet of steak you’d pick up from the supermarket.

  Davie turned to the side and vomited, retching until there was nothing left to come up. Stomach empty, he closed his eyes, took a deep breath and forced some air back into his lungs.

  ‘You OK?’ Zander asked. ‘I’ll take the blame for this, Davie. Go home. I swear I’ll never say you helped. I’ll tell them it was me.’

  Davie shook his head. How many times had Zander said he wished his dad was dead? Too many. But saying it was one thing, seeing it was another. He wasn’t going to bail out and leave them to deal with this now. They stuck together. It’s what they did.

  ‘OK, let’s go,’ he told Zander, once again heaving his half of the body up, waiting until his pal had done the same. They got a fair distance this time. Fast and small steps now that they were no longer crossing someone else’s garden.

  One last semi-sprint and they burst through the hut door, hurtling the body between them, jumping at the bang as it hit the floor.

  Looking at each other, they slid down the walls, sweating, breathing hard.

  ‘How did this happen?’ Davie sighed, not really a question, not expecting an answer. He could feel the tears sitting at the back of his eyes, waiting to fall, and he pushed them away.

  Zander reached into the hole in the floor, the one made all those years ago by a stray fag, and felt around, then pulled out a bottle of vodka he always kept there, took a slug and rested his head back against the wall. Both of them were filthy, their clothes matted with blood and dirt, their faces streaked where sweat had smeared the dust.

  ‘It’s weird. I hate him. Have always hated him. But now I just feel nothing,’ Zander said quietly. ‘Not even glad he’s dead. Just nothing.’

  He knocked back another inch of vodka.

  Davie’s guts twisted again, but he knew there was nothing left to throw up.

  ‘So what’s the plan?’ Zander said.

  Davie nodded towards the hole from which Zander had pulled his vodka. ‘There. We lift more of the floor, bury him underneath. No one can see us if we stay inside.’

  ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding,’ Zander said, one hand running through his hair. ‘We’re putting my dead da under your hut?’

  ‘Got a better idea?’ Davie challenged him.

  Zander paused, thought for a moment. ‘No.’

  ‘So we take up that half of the floor,’ Davie said, pointing in the direction of the hole, ‘and dig deeper, put the soil on this half. Then when we’re done, just fill it with the soil again. Then tomorrow morning, I’ll go to B&Q. Not the one in Darnley. Another one. Further away. Just to be sure. And I’ll get some concrete, the ready-made stuff. I’ll put a layer of concrete over the ground and then put the wooden floor back down. Look,’ he finished wearily, ‘it’s all I’ve got.’

  More vodka before Zander wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and then pushed himself up. ‘Then we’d better start. I’ll get a shovel from my garden and take the first shift. I meant what I said, pal. I’ll do this.’

  Davie shook his head. ‘Naw. I’m in.’

  Hours later, they were back on the half of the wooden floor that they hadn’t ripped up, Jono no longer there, buried under the freshly replaced soil next to them. For once, Davie reached over, took the vodka bottle and took a slug. The reaction was instant. It didn’t even get as far as his stomach before his mouth rejected it, spraying it across the wall.

  ‘Christ, how can you drink that stuff?’ he asked.

  Exhausted, head resting on his knees, Zander didn’t reply for a long time. Davie was beginning to wonder if he’d fallen asleep when he eventually croaked, ‘Thanks, Davie. I mean it.’

  Davie smiled sadly. ‘Just hope we get away with it. Don’t fancy Barlinnie.’

  He wasn’t joking. HMP Barlinnie stood like a grey fortress overlooking the city, a warning that it was up there, waiting for the mad, the bad and the evil.

  ‘If anyone had seen us, we’d have known by now,’ Zander murmured, a layer of hope sitting over a tone that blended confidence with desperation.

  He was almost right.

  The Macalisters were both at work, as hoped, so their house lay empty. Old Mrs McWilliam had missed Coronation Street, but only because she’d had a fish supper for tea and the massive intake of food had made her doze off in front of her four-bar electric fire.

  There were no dog-walkers in the woods behind them, no kids loitering around where they shouldn’t be, no police keeping an eye on Jono Leith’s territory using covert surveillance. None of that.

  Just Davie’s mum, standing well back from the window, wearing a thick fleece dressing gown, cigarette in hand. The noise of Mirren running around the house looking for Davie had momentarily distracted her from the book she was reading in the bath. Sidney Sheldon. He was her favourite.

  She’d climbed out, opened the bathroom window, saw
the state of Mirren as she’d flown out of the hut a few moments later, her boy and Zander in tow.

  Then later, she’d seen the boys carry something into the hut.

  It wasn’t difficult to work out what had happened – some of her guesswork slightly off base, some of it spot on.

  But the thing they’d dragged into the hut? She knew. Of course she knew.

  For four hours she’d stood there, watching the light shine from the tiny opaque window, listening to the sound of gravel, soil, digging.

  But at no point did she go there. That wasn’t her job. Her job was to watch, oversee, look for danger coming, protect those she loved, keep their secrets.

  Hadn’t she been doing that for years?

  This was just one more secret to add to the list. And Ena Johnston would die before she gave it up.

  64.

  ‘Over the Rainbow’

  – Eva Cassidy

  Mirren knew that the Hollywood glitterati would turn out in force for Chloe’s funeral. That’s what happened here. Just another place to be seen, another opportunity to network. In a town that hated death unless it was at the hands of an action hero and earned over $100 million at the box office, they turned up, wearing black, even though it drained the complexion.

  She couldn’t bear it. Not today. So she’d insisted on family and close friends, invitation only, no more than twenty people, only those whom she trusted.

  The ceremony was to be on the beach outside her home, to scatter the ashes of her girl in the place she’d loved more than anywhere else growing up. Mirren would sit on the deck night after night, watching her fearless twelve-year-old hit the waves in the sunset. Now she would always be there, in the ocean, her breath in every wave that crashed to the shore. And no black or formality. Mirren was in a white flowing shirt, over jeans, her feet bare, her red hair flowing down her back. Everyone else was similarly casual. The rebel in Chloe would have loved that.

  ‘You ready, honey?’ Lou’s arm was tight around her shoulders, passing support and love by osmosis.

  Mirren nodded. What else was there to do? Keep going.

  ‘Mom, are you OK?’

  Keep going for her boy. Her gorgeous, six-foot, beautiful boy.

  If there had been one blessing of the last fortnight, it was that he’d been here with her, arriving the day after Chloe died, the two of them clinging together in their grief. Some nights Mirren coped; other nights he was the parent, holding her, comforting her, promising her that they’d get through this.

  Mirren took Logan’s hand and let him lead her down through the house. Ahead of them, Lou was on her cell, the breeze from the sea carrying her words back to Mirren.

  ‘And let me tell you something. Stop. Turn around. Go home. I don’t care if you’re at the fricking gate. I don’t care if you’re attached to him by fricking handcuffs, string or an invisible fricking force field. Turn around and go home. If that prick is too insensitive to see that you shouldn’t be here, then you’ll have to be the grown-up.’

  Pause.

  ‘Don’t tempt me, doll. Because if you’re here, I’ll make sure that the photos I have in my desk drawer of you and an ageing reality star – a female ageing reality star – go viral. You know who I mean. Hell, I might send them viral anyway, just for fun.’

  Lou snapped her phone shut and turned, jumping when she saw Mirren right behind her. ‘Oh, babe, I’m so sorry. Did you hear all that?’

  Mirren nodded. ‘It’s fine. Mercedes?’

  ‘Ah, so smart, my friend,’ Lou replied with a warm smile. ‘Unfortunately, Jack’s slut, not so much. On the way up, she had a thing with Lana Delasso. It’ll be interesting to see if she repeats it on the way down.’

  Mirren shook her head. ‘Don’t, Lou. Let Jack have this one.’

  Right on cue, Jack walked in the door, his face ashen, looking ten years older than he ever had before. He wasn’t doing well.

  Logan greeted his dad coolly. For her son’s sake, she’d find a civil way to make this work, but there was no going back for them.

  The truth was that Jack couldn’t cope with reality. All these years he’d been away, she’d taken care of everything. She’d shielded him from the worst of their problems and hadn’t minded when he’d headed off to a new location and left her to deal with things. When he’d finally had to face Chloe’s illness, he’d reacted by seeking solace and escape with Mercedes. Anything to protect himself from a pain he couldn’t handle.

  Mirren would never regret marrying him. In hindsight she could see that there was blame with her too. Was he a rebound after Davie? Maybe. But it was security she craved. A normal home. She’d needed an anchor and, back then, she thought Jack was it. If she hadn’t been so determined to make it last, she would have realized long before now that the anchor had no grip on shifting sands.

  To her left, she heard Lou pick up the phone and speak again. ‘OK, you can come in. But you’ve got Mirren to thank for it. Remember that.’

  ‘Sometimes I wonder why we’re friends,’ Lou said, taking Mirren’s hand now, while Logan took the other, and together the three of them headed out to the sands.

  A couple of Chloe’s friends were there. A few of Jack’s buddies. To the left of the arch of white flowers that Mirren had constructed as a permanent memorial to her daughter, Zander stood, his cream shirt softly billowing in the sea breeze. Beside him, Lex Callaghan and his wife, Cara, looking beautiful in a floor-length blush maxi with ruby flowers in her hair.

  Jack took charge, always the producer, thanking everyone for coming, then wistfully, choking back his emotions, recalling Chloe’s life, from the time that she was his little princess until she hit her teens and onwards. They didn’t mention her troubles. They’d agreed there was no point. That’s not who their Chloe was. She was their angel, their love – the person she became when she did drugs was a stranger to them.

  So they’d celebrate the good, let go of the bad. Wasn’t that what she’d been doing her whole life?

  Her tears fell as they cast the ashes, silent tears. This wasn’t a time to indulge her pain. Her son needed her to be stronger than that.

  Later, as the sun set, she stood alone.

  Jack and Mercedes were back under whatever rock they’d crawled from. Lou and Logan were inside having hot chocolate in the kitchen. Their friends all travelling home, all heart-broken, but already healing, moving on. It was all anyone could do.

  A figure in a cream shirt was walking along the beach towards her. Zander. She wondered where he’d gone after the ceremony but now it was obvious. Walking. Separating himself. Dealing with it alone.

  ‘Hey,’ he said as he neared her. He’d always been one of few words.

  ‘Hey.’

  In the distance, a lone surfer was a silhouette against the dipping sun and Mirren watched as he moved with such grace it was as if he belonged to the sea. Just like Chloe now.

  ‘I’ve missed you,’ she said softly when he reached her.

  Zander nodded. ‘I missed you. And I don’t just mean the last couple of days.’

  Mirren got it instantly because she felt the same. She smiled.

  ‘Talk to me, Zander. About anything. Just talk,’ she asked him, the emotion catching in her throat, raw and aching from days of grief.

  He picked up a pebble and with a flick of the wrist cast it into the ocean. They both watched as it bounced several times before disappearing. They’d practised that at the local reservoir for hours when they were kids.

  ‘I just couldn’t handle the reminders,’ he confessed. ‘Couldn’t handle the fact that something so shameful, so horrific, had changed our lives, brought us so much. Didn’t seem right. I was already drinking, already messed up. Couldn’t handle the anger - at you and Davie for creating a permanent reminder, at Jono, at my mum . . .’

  ‘I understand it all, Zander. I struggled with it too, but then I decided that Jono owed me. Owed me a new life. And I took it.’

  He nodded, cast another skimming
stone.

  ‘I get that. We just handled it in different ways, I guess. No right, no wrong. Although maybe I was too young and stupid to see that at the time. And then it just seemed too late.’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your mum.’

  ‘Gone. Cancer. Two weeks after we won the Oscar. She’d moved to a convent in Ireland. They took care of her to the end.’

  ‘Oh, Zander, I’m so sorry.’

  He shrugged, not because he didn’t care, but because it was done.

  ‘She’d never have lasted without Jono anyway. She loved him. God knows why, but she did.’

  Neither of them spoke for a while, sat on the sands, both with their own thoughts. Finally Mirren broke the silence.

  ‘She’s still around, you know. Marilyn. Went down to Liverpool, met the guy Jono was buying the drugs from. Moved in with him. As far as I know, they’re still together. She sent a photograph a few weeks ago to my office. Still looks the same, hanging on to the arm of this tall, imposing-looking guy, scar on one cheek. It was always the danger that attracted her. Turned her on. I sent the photo back. Not interested. She gave up her rights to my life a long time ago.’

  ‘So why do you think she got back in touch?’

  Mirren shrugged. In the light of dusk, her skin was almost alabaster white, a stark contrast to the dark circles underneath her eyes.

  ‘Money. Fame. A free holiday in LA. She said she’d been up at Manny Murphy’s funeral in Glasgow, so maybe being back there threw up memories. Could be anything. But Marilyn’s only interested in what’s in it for her, so it’s a fair bet it wasn’t because she was pining for her daughter or desperate to see her grandchildren. Grandchild, now. Only one.’

  The sadness was almost unbearable.

  Zander put his arm around her, held her close.

  ‘Just one day at a time,’ he murmured softly. ‘And if you want me to, I’ll stick around to help you.’