And there he was, grey with dust, staring up at her with those mad eyes.
‘Well look who it is!’ Froggy snapped. ‘What’s your problem this time?’
12
The arguments started almost immediately, in the taxi back to the airport. She dusted him off as best she could and sat him on her knee.
‘Why are you bothering me?’ she demanded.
‘Err… seems like you’re the one who’s bothering me.’
‘I heard your voice in Harry’s castle in France. And you were in my bathroom in Greenwich. What was that all about?’
‘That must have been your conscience, overcome with guilt at the way you’ve treated me.’
‘Froggy, you’re a soft toy.’
In a very loud voice, he squawked at the driver. ‘Hey mister! Turn this shit-heap around, so as Keira feckin’ Knightley here can put me back where I belong! What use is a shitty soft toy to a famous feckin’ actress, huh?’
The driver stared in his rear-view mirror.
‘Don’t listen to my frog!’ Annalise counter-commanded. ‘Keep going!’ The car lurched as the driver returned his eyes to the road, but his posture had tensed. ‘You shut up!’ she admonished. ‘I’ll do the talking, okay?’
‘Ha! Good one!’
‘Look,’ she moaned, ‘my life is turning to shit right now, but there must be a reason why you’re back inside my head.’
‘There is a reason – it’s because you’re mad, just like your mother before you.’
‘Right!’ she shrieked. ‘I don’t have to take that kind of crap from you! Hey!’ she ordered the driver. ‘The frog is right! Turn the car around! Take me back to Whin Abbey and you,’ she roared at Froggy, ‘can rot there for the rest of your fucking life!’
The driver turned all right, but only to swerve off the road, where he promptly killed the engine, ripped the keys from the ignition, jumped out and ran away along the hard shoulder.
‘How long does polyester take to rot?’ Froggy mused. ‘Because I don’t think I’m particularly biodegradable. Still, an eternity in stifling darkness is better than listening to you moaning about your problems.’
Annalise bumped the back of her head repeatedly off the headrest. ‘I… cannot… believe… I… am… having… this… conversation!’
‘I can! You only come to me when you have no one else to turn to! Now, are you gonna sit here gibbering until that driver calls the cops, or are you gonna get off your arse and sort things out?’
Fumbling and swearing, Annalise unbuttoned her raincoat and stuffed Froggy inside it. About twenty yards down the road, the driver paced around, talking vehemently to himself in what she thought might be Polish, or Romanian. Or maybe Lithuanian – she had no way of knowing.
‘I’m sorry!’ she called out. Headlights roared past in the swirling rain. ‘Please!’ she held her hands up to show they were empty. The driver stopped pacing and looked at her suspiciously. ‘I promise I’ll be quiet! Silent, yes?’ She put a finger to her lips.
‘Bollocks!’ Froggy yelled from beneath her coat.
‘Shut up, you!’ She punched her own stomach. ‘Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!’
The driver said something in Romanian or whatever and backed farther away, making a two-fingered gesture at her, as if to ward off the evil eye.
‘No! Wait! I won’t hurt you! Look!’ She dug in her pocket, extracted a clump of fifty-euro notes and waved them. ‘For you! Yes! For you! Please! Just take me to the airport!’
She got back in the car and sat upright and silent. The driver argued with himself for another minute or so but, eventually, strode over, flopped into his seat and slammed his door.
‘Money!’ he barked.
She gave him a hundred euros. ‘I’ll give you a hundred more at the airport.’
‘Aeroport two hun-red more!’
‘Yes, yes, okay!’
He drove back to Dublin at very high speed.
Once at the airport, she went straight to a shop and bought a small shoulder bag which she carried to a corner, far from anyone’s earshot. She took Froggy from her coat.
‘Hey, what’s the idea?’ he demanded as she unzipped the bag.
‘If you think you’re sitting with me on a plane then you’re out of your tiny, styrofoam mind!’
‘Who’s outta their mind, exactly?’
‘You nearly got me thrown out of that taxi! And aeroplanes have become very paranoid places in the past few years! If they see me talking to you, they’ll ground the flight and lock me up!’
‘And maybe strip-search you,’ Froggy added, ‘then send you to Guantanamo Bay.’
She stuffed him in the bag.
She thought the guards gave her funny looks as they scanned the bag through security, but they didn’t search it or her. Her head felt feather-light, as if she’d smoked some really powerful dope, although she hadn’t smoked dope since she was sixteen. She ordered three brandies with Coke on the plane. Again, the stewardess gave her a bit of a vibe, but she didn’t care.
It was just before midnight when they landed at Heathrow. She wandered around the terminal until she found a quiet row of seats. She lay with her head on the bag, facing inwards, so that no one would recognise her. Just another passenger, waiting on a flight to God knows where.
‘When you are acting,’ Sylvia instructed her, ‘you are performing a trick; that is all – like a juggler or an acrobat. But unlike a juggler, your trick is not obvious. Indeed, your trick will only work if it is invisible. For you must convince your audience, without a shadow of doubt, that you really are the person you are pretending to be. You are distorting reality, you are telling a lie. Some actors can just switch it on; others might labour over a part for months. But it’s still just a trick.’
Sylvia rented a rehearsal room in nearby Tavistock Street – it came as news to Annalise that entire buildings existed for this sole purpose. But Sylvia did not want to work in her flat because she said they needed to separate the activities of living and working. So they spent eight hours a day at the rehearsal room, every day except Sunday. Outside that room, Sylvia’s attitude relaxed; inside it, she was a tyrant. There was no question of Annalise going back to school and Sylvia too gave up her night classes at Broken Cross. As weeks became months, they walked across Covent Garden to Tavistock Street at eight-thirty in the morning, where they stayed until four-thirty on the dot. Sylvia allowed only one short break, when Annalise could grab some fresh air and perhaps buy a sandwich – Sylvia lived off coffee and never ate until she settled her elegant little frame into the same booth at Joe Allen every evening at six.
Her tutor went back to the start, repeating every lesson she’d given at Broken Cross. For the first month, nothing but movement, movement, movement, which Annalise really resented… until she felt her body begin to lighten and strengthen; until she felt her sense of balance attune; until she could walk with a new, feline grace and do a cartwheel without drawing breath… until she wore holes in her pair of leather pumps.
Then came the voice exercises – Sylvia introduced a digital recorder, so that Annalise could hear herself speak, an experience that she hated at first but which, by the time they moved on to accents, she accepted as just another slightly humiliating method of doing something better than she had the day before. Once, when she could not replicate Ava Gardner’s Southern drawl from the film Show Boat to Sylvia’s satisfaction, Annalise burst into tears and shouted that she didn’t want to be an actress anyway. Sylvia shocked her by laughing out loud.
‘What?’ Annalise raged. ‘What’s so bloody funny?’
‘My dear, that’s like a pigeon saying it does not want to be a bird! You are an actress – I am merely ensuring that you become a good one.’
‘But why? Why? What’s it to you?’
Sylvia’s finger stabbed the Stop button on the recorder.
‘Because once upon a time, a very wonderful lady took me under her wing and taught me a great many things. She opened door
s to a better life, a life that I have enjoyed immensely. I also owe my life to a great many doctors, so maybe,’ she raised an eyebrow, ‘you are just my way of putting something back.’
‘Oh.’
‘And also,’ she looked away momentarily, ‘I knew your father.’
‘What?’
‘I cast him in his first Fanshawe and Grovel film, back in the late seventies. The producer wanted Ustinov but he wasn’t available, so I showed him some of your father’s early work. He took a bit of persuading, but it turned out to be a good call.’
‘You never said you knew my father!’
‘You never asked.’
‘Were you and he… you know…?’
‘Lovers?’ she asked crisply. ‘No. Although he did try it on a few times because, if you don’t mind me saying, he was the sort of man who chased anything in a skirt. The lady who came to the school that awful night; she was a familiar face from those days, one I hadn’t seen in quite some time.’
‘Monica? Monica Goddard? Are saying that–’
‘I’m not saying anything. You asked me why I’ve chosen to coach you and I’ve given you my reasons. Now,’ she consulted her watch, ‘we have another two hours and twenty-three minutes left of this particular exercise and then, after dinner, I want you to have a good night’s sleep because tomorrow we start stage fighting and you must be fresh and ready.’
‘Huh?’
‘Two of the best stuntmen in England run a stage-fighting school at a gym in Holland Park and I’ve booked you in for the next three weeks. You know, you can’t assume that every role you’ll be offered will be Scarlett O’Hara.’
‘Who?’
Sylvia sighed and restarted the player. ‘A character from a very great film which I will show you as part of your education. Now, repeat after me,’ and she copied Gardner exactly, ‘“Gimme a neat rye, just to get my courage up.”’
‘So the old girl is buried here?’
‘Quiet. A bit of respect, please.’
Holding Froggy, she stood before a simple stone plinth in Kensal Green Cemetery. She’d slept a few hours in Heathrow, then taken a tube into Hammersmith and walked north through the busy morning traffic, which had quelled now to a distant rumble beyond the statues, crooked crosses and ivy-choked mausoleums of the Victorian necropolis.
‘She took you away from me,’ Froggy sniffed. ‘I’m not sure I like her for doing that.’
‘She saved my life. She gave me so much.’
‘Yeah, yeah, whatever… so why are we here?’
‘I haven’t visited her grave for so long, but I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately and it seemed like a good place to start.’
‘To start what?’
‘I miss Sylvia. She’d have known what to do about all the… crap that’s been happening.’
‘My first time in London and you take me to a graveyard? Could we not do something fun instead, like get really drunk or go on the London Eye? Or maybe both?’
‘Her heart gave out. She went into hospital for yet another operation and just didn’t come out again. She always said it was a miracle she’d made it so far. By then, she’d helped me get my first television part. She left me three thousand pounds in her will and gave everything else she owned to St Bartholomew’s. It was like, one day she was here and the next she wasn’t.’ Her eyes moistened. ‘It’s not fair; everyone flipping well dies on me!’
‘I’m gonna die of fecking boredom if we stay here much longer. Okay: we’ve seen the grave, we’ve bought the T-shirt – what’s the plan?’
‘I… don’t have a plan. I thought that fetching you would help, but I want to run away more than ever. Bloody Harry, bloody Jimmy, bloody Peter Tress – everywhere I turn, there’s a man, messing with my head.’
‘I don’t like it when people mess with our head, so here’s a plan: bring the fight to the enemy.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean no more Mr Nice Girl. How far is Paddington from here?’
‘Paddington?’
‘As in the asswipe bear.’
‘What’s in Paddington?’
‘You know what’s in Paddington.’
‘Do I?’
‘Yes. You read it on the internet.’
‘But… I can’t do that!’
‘Oh yes you can.’
‘I think I need a drink.’
‘Now you’re talking – pub first, then let’s go to work.’
She set off along the gravel path. She dumped her shoulder-bag in the nearest bin and, still carrying Froggy over one arm, made for the cemetery gates.
She walked into the city centre along the Grand Union Canal towpath, past trees, warehouses, tall blocks of flats and busy flyovers. That way, she did not meet many passers-by. At Maida Vale, she left the canal and stopped in a pub. The young barman gave her an amused look but made no comment as he served her a large brandy and Coke with lots of ice. She took her drink to the payphone, rang directory enquiries and asked for Shepperton studios, then the Perfect Heresy production office.
‘Let me speak to them,’ Froggy told her.
‘Not yet.’ She sat him on top of the telephone. The number rang twice then answered. She used her politest voice. ‘Hello, Annalise Palatine here, who’s that? Amanda? Oh, hi, fine, fine. No, I’m perfectly fine, I just felt a bit sick yesterday… What? Harry’s been looking for me, has he? He called at my house? Gosh. I took a few tablets and went straight to bed, I didn’t hear a thing. In a bit of a panic, is he? Look, I know I’m running late but tell him I’ll meet him on set after lunch. No, don’t send a car, I’m not at home. Where? Oh, some payphone somewhere, hold on… oh bum, there goes my credit…’ She hung up, gulped her drink then walked down the Edgware Road, through St John’s Wood.
She had last walked through St John’s Wood at the age of sixteen, on a midsummer’s night at four o’clock in the morning. She and Lucy had blagged their way into the Groucho Club with some publicist that Lucy had picked up at a gig. They were barely through the door when they’d spotted the bass player from a well-known pop group, so in classic Lucy fashion, she had dumped the publicist and within five minutes had wormed her way over beside the musician until she was whispering in his ear. That left Annalise with his drinking buddy, a much older, balding man who told Annalise he was ‘a really famous fucking TV presenter’, but when he named the show he presented, Annalise had never heard of it. She explained that she had only recently arrived from Ireland. The man had laughed at that, but not in a nice way. Still, every time she sipped her champagne he’d topped her glass up and next thing she knew they were in a cab together and off to a party in St John’s Wood. Lucy and the bass player had snogged all the way there.
But the party turned out to be just the four of them at the presenter’s flat – a very private party, he had leered. He had chopped out some cocaine, but Annalise had refused to take any. As he had fetched drinks from his fridge, Lucy had dragged the bass player off to a bedroom. Soon, from the noise they were making it was obvious they were having S-E-X.
‘Your friend’s having a good time,’ the presenter had smiled. He flopped down beside her on the sofa and she’d thought he’d overbalanced because suddenly his weight was against her, but then he sucked her face with his old person’s mouth.
‘Stop that!’ she’d cried. ‘Get off me!’
He’d laughed his nasty laugh and had stuck his hand up her skirt. That had made her shriek.
‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ He’d grabbed her jacket. ‘Your little friend’s enoyin’ it, ain’t she?’
She’d tried to pull away and for an awful moment he had been too strong, but she’d given a superhuman tug and her jacket had ripped and his grip had slipped.
‘Lucy!’ she’d screamed. ‘Lucy!’ But Lucy had just kept on making noises.
‘What is this?’ the man had spluttered. ‘You’re just a bit of fluff from a nightclub and it’s like you’re doing me the favour?’ She’d fled
into the hallway and had pushed open a bedroom door and had been greeted by the bass player’s naked backside and Lucy’s wide-open legs, still clad in spangly socks. The rest of her had been buried beneath the bass player’s hunched form.
‘Lucy!’ she’d yelled. ‘We’ve got to get out of here!’
‘What?’ Her voice had been muffled.
‘We have to leave!’
Lucy’s face had appeared from underneath the bass player. ‘Annalise – do I look like I’m leaving anytime soon?’
Her attacker had staggered out of the lounge, so she had run. She’d lost a shoe but hadn’t stopped. She’d crashed through the apartment door and had fled down the stairwell, his evil laughter echoing behind her.
Now, eight years later, as she walked down the Edgware Road in broad daylight, she could almost see her younger self, limping along on one shoe in the dark, wondering how on earth she would ever find her way back to the Goddards’. That had been her first walk across London, and it had not been a pleasant one. But she had made it eventually, trembling and exhausted, only to find Lucy sitting on the steps of the house with the yellow door, smoking a cigarette.
‘Where the hell did you get to?’ she’d demanded. ‘I’ve been waiting here ages!’
‘But how did you…?’
‘I took a taxi, you moron. What the fuck happened back there?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t want to… you know… that guy, he tried to–’
Lucy had snapped. ‘Why did you think he invited us home from the club, you little hick? To do the dishes? What’s wrong with you? I thought you Irish fucked like rabbits!’
‘But I’ve never… I mean, I don’t–’
‘Oh shut your blithering spazz! He wouldn’t give me his number and it’s all your fault for not keeping his friend happy!’ She’d flicked her cigarette at the gutter. ‘If you say a word to my parents, I’ll kill you in your fat, stupid sleep.’
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