by Alison Bond
Seizing the moment she decided to call her. The answerphone picked up.
‘Hi, this is Serena Simon. Leave a message.’
Lynsey didn’t bother. She would arrange to meet up with Serena and talk to her face to face. She thought that they were friends and, as a friend not an agent, she wanted to give her some advice. Serena needed to be careful. She needed to surround herself with good people. Some of the previews were already calling her a major new star. Serena was about to enter the game for real.
Funny, Lynsey had thought that of the two women, Melanie would more naturally become a friend. After all, they had known each other longer. But ever since Melanie had moved in with Fabien and moved on to the second series of Justice, she seemed to have moved up some invisible ladder to an unreachable place. Up with the stars, she supposed. There was a thriving class system in Hollywood.
But Lynsey liked it here. She liked the fact that ambition was not a dirty word and self-confidence was rewarded with results. She liked the way that everybody seemed to come from somewhere else and that gave people the freedom to be whatever they wanted to be.
And if what she wanted to be was the kooky English chick who lived in a motel room by the beach then that was just fine.
It was rare for her to get back to Flamingo Park before nine. The traffic was invariably awful and she would sit in her car and listen to local talk radio, resisting the urge to call in when she had a good point to make. Instead she would shout at the radio as if it could hear her, arguing with an unseen host who she felt was wrong. Her car was not air-conditioned and she often seemed to be the only person on the road with her window open, shouting out to no one. Nobody else paid her the slightest bit of attention and the radio never answered back.
The empty weekends could be easily filled. She always had scripts to read and she had taken trips to Palm Springs and San Diego but lately she’d preferred the quiet comfort of her own neighbourhood, watching movies down on Third Street in Santa Monica, and having an evening beer with Jack and Lou on the rooftop. When she called home her mum continually asked if she had met any nice men and she mentioned Jack and Lou, omitting the fact that neither of them would ever see sixty again.
Lynsey’s phone rang. Front desk. ‘He’s on his way.’
Max was coming back from his meeting and as usual the receptionists had given them advance warning. Sheridan started lining up his first call but when Max came into view he was staring straight at Lynsey with a look in his eye that made her nervous.
‘You,’ he said. ‘In here now.’
He closed the door behind them and that’s when Lynsey knew it was serious.
‘So,’ he said. ‘Tell me about you and Serena Simon.’
She should have just told him everything there and then. Handed Serena’s brilliant career over to someone else and relaxed for a while. Instead she said, ‘Serena’s a friend of mine.’
‘Yeah? Cos I just heard a buzz at the Four Seasons saying that you’re her agent.’
‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘Yeah?’
It wasn’t too late. She could still come clean. Max would understand. On the other hand if she could just speak to Serena first to get their stories straight, she could introduce her to the agency and Max need never know the extent of her involvement. ‘How could I be her agent?’ she said. ‘I work for you, don’t you think someone might have noticed if I had another job?’
Max was trying to read her face. Lynsey kept her features relaxed, with a trace of bewilderment.
‘Okay,’ said Max. Lynsey stood to leave. ‘So who’s her agent?’ he said, casually.
‘What?’
‘Serena. Who’s her agent? Don’t you know? I thought she was a friend. Apparently Serena Simon is it. We could poach her.’
‘Um, some half-assed operation out in Venice, I think,’ said Lynsey. ‘You want to meet her? I can set it up.’
‘Sure,’ said Max.
Lynsey could feel his eyes on her as she walked back to her desk. God, why hadn’t she just told him? No matter. She was quietly confident that she’d got away with it. It was a sign, a sign that she should get out while she still could. But where the hell was Serena?
A hundred and fifty dollars was a lot of money to pay for a cab. Serena couldn’t wait until she was old enough to drive.
The groundskeeper checked the old paperwork and told Serena what she wanted to know. She followed the directions he had given her, walking through fields of graves, until she reached plot S732. She knelt in front of a simple headstone, the sheen of the black graphite made opaque with years of dust. The inscription read Emma Mindell, Beloved wife and mother, and she wiped it clean.
‘Hey, Mom,’ she said. ‘I’m on television tonight.’
*
‘This is Frank Mindell.’ The name meant nothing to Riley. ‘I’m Serena Simon’s father.’
Riley slammed the door of his office shut with his foot and jammed the phone in the crook of his neck while he grabbed his notebook and pen like the good journalist he was.
At first Frank was overcautious, demanding some sort of guaranteed payment before he would even confirm Serena’s hometown.
‘I hear what you’re saying. What I need from you is some sort of proof. Can you fax me some ID, something to prove that you are who you say you are?’
‘I don’t have a fax machine,’ said Frank, stubbornly.
‘Then I don’t see how we can do business. I’m sorry, Mr Mindell, but we get a lot of prank calls as you can imagine.’
‘This is no prank! They have one of those machines down at the store. Give me a number. I’ll send you your proof, but if you publish anything without my say-so you’ll be hearing from my lawyer.’ He pronounced lawyer with the emphasis on the second syllable so it rhymed with ‘voyeur’.
Riley kept half an eye on the fax machine for the rest of the morning. Eventually he was rewarded.
In amongst the usual press releases and unsolicited material was a picture of an eleven-year-old girl. The quality was poor but there was no mistaking that the angelic little girl gazing precociously at the camera was Serena Simon. She had changed very little, the wide expressive features and the captivating eyes were already there and the famous curves were beginning to blossom. At the bottom of the sheet of fax paper was a scrawled message. ‘Many more pix where this came from. Call this number.’
‘Money first,’ demanded Frank a few minutes later when Riley called him back.
‘I’ll have someone give you a call to discuss those details. Can you just give me some idea of how many photographs you have, good ones?’
‘It’s not just photos,’ said Frank. ‘There’s a lot more to my daughter than meets the eye.
Riley doubted that slightly. Serena had put just about everything on show since the day she arrived. ‘We do have certain time pressures on us here,’ he said. ‘Maybe we could start with the photographs and go from there.’ It was the photographs that interested him. He had rarely had success with parental retrospectives. They fell into two camps: ‘I hate my child, they’ve shut me out’ which reads as ‘I’m jealous’, or ‘I love my child and always knew they’d make it’ which reads as ‘You owe me’. Neither angle was particularly flattering for the talent and so far Serena hadn’t done anything offensive and Junket would do well to stay on her side. Cute childhood photographs were much more publishable than some highly subjective interview.
‘You get your money person on the phone and then we’ll talk,’ Frank continued.
Riley looked down at the photograph next to him. Rationalizing that he’d want to buy this one in any event he decided to play along. ‘I’ll get my assistant Kerry to give you a call and talk figures.’
‘You do that,’ said Frank. ‘You make sure she’s got a big space in her cheque book to write the zeros. What I’ve got doesn’t come cheap.’
Serena had been three years old when her mother died. Bobby was just a baby. Horrified at the prospect of raising
the children all by himself, Frank had thrown them in the car and driven all the way to Maine to be near his sister. California had been Emma’s dream, not his. He had no reason to stay. He left every photograph of her behind, his perfect wife, his perfect life. Everything changed.
Serena had only one memory of her mother. She remembered playing underneath a bed in a shiny white hospital as her mother lay dying above her. As far as she was concerned it was her last memory of childhood. She grew up quickly in Maine.
Now here she was kneeling before her mother and asking for approval, feeling more like a child than she had for years.
‘I did good,’ she said. ‘They really liked me.’
The dry earth was silent in reply.
Serena put her head in her hands and sobbed.
Kerry had spent a frustrating half-hour talking to Frank Mindell. ‘He won’t do anything for under twenty thousand.’ The man acted as if he was being interrogated by the police. At one point Frank seemed to forget that he had called Junket and not the other way around.
‘Is he worth it?’ asked Riley.
‘I can’t tell. He says the pictures are all high quality, but he keeps talking about an exclusive interview. I’ve offered him one per picture up to a max of ten thousand and two for the interview but he says that what he’s got is worth more.’
‘Go to fifteen for the lot but that’s our limit.’
‘And if he pushes it?’ Kerry asked.
‘Tell him we’ll call him back.’
‘Meaning bye-bye?’
‘Of course,’ said Riley. Frank Mindell was boring him already.
‘Okay,’ said Kerry, ‘but I’ve got a feeling it’s good stuff.’
‘Why?’
‘Different surnames. Nothing in any of the clippings about her family. I mean, nothing at all. Not even your stuff. Did you ever ask her?’
‘I must have,’ said Riley, ‘it should be in my notes. It was probably too average to print.’
‘That’s what I’m saying, maybe it’s not average, maybe it’s hush-hush.’
‘Use your instincts.’
There was so much that Serena wanted to say, but it all came down to one thing.
‘I miss you,’ she said. ‘I miss you so much.’
It simply isn’t true that you cannot miss what you never had. Serena had only that single memory of her mother and did not know the comfort of her arms or the warm reassurance of her unconditional love, but she missed them all the same.
‘I spoke to Bobby last night,’ she said. ‘He has a girlfriend, can you believe that? He said he’d send a picture. I could bring it, maybe, if you like.’
She choked on another sob. Her heart ached, it quite literally ached, like the soft long burn of a broken bone. And all she could think of was that one memory, over and over again. Playing on the sterile hospital floor, licking her finger to paint a picture on the tile. A picture that dried up and magically disappeared before her very eyes. If she had known, if she had only known, she would have thrown herself up onto the bed and held her mother to keep the life in. To have another memory.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
Kerry slammed the door of Riley’s office to get his attention. He was crouched over a litter of magazine clippings laid out on the floor in front of him. ‘We’re on ten for the photos and six for the story,’ she said.
‘I thought we agreed fifteen was as high as you went.’
‘I know, I know, but he’s disappointed. He thought he was going to make a million. You should hear some of this stuff. The father sounds freaky, he’s been getting drunker through the morning. She has a baby brother she deserted to become a star, she ran away from home.’
‘A lot of kids run away from home,’ said Riley.
‘There’s more. He’s standing at the fax machine in some small-town store waiting for me to send him confirmation of the bank transfer then he says he’s going to send something by return that’ll blow my mind.’
‘You really think he’s worth it? It could just be a picture of Serena with her top off.’
‘Instinct, you said. I say, don’t let the guy go. The Enquirer will give him twenty for the pictures alone.’
‘Don’t tell him that,’ said Riley.
‘Do you think I’m completely dumb? What is your problem with this? Serena is one of our favourites,’ said Kerry.
‘She might not return the compliment if we drag her father out from under the woodwork,’ said Riley. Until Serena peaked, Junket was set to be her biggest fan. She liked them. Much as the tabloid side of him hated to admit it, that was the main reason for his hesitancy, something Kerry seemed to detect.
‘If we don’t run with him, someone else will and they might not consider Serena’s side of things at all. This way we can control it,’ said Kerry.
‘Okay, you’re right, do it.’
Serena cried all the way home. The cab driver asked for his fare in advance when he saw the sight of her and then ignored her until they got to her street and he had to ask where to stop.
She climbed the stairs to her tiny apartment and drank two glasses of water straight down, her stomach clenching up against the chill of them. She was glad of the new pain.
Serena washed her face and took off every trace of make-up, her fingers worked methodically, soothing her fraught emotions. She pulled her hair back from her face and twisted it into a long plait, back and forth, back and forth. When she was finished she turned and looked long and hard into the mirror at her beautiful face.
She didn’t know it but she had her mother’s eyes.
They lifted at the corners as she smiled.
*
‘Got it!’ Kerry said triumphantly an hour later. ‘I wired him a thousand dollars as a down-payment and it must have gone to his head. Check it out.’
It was just a fax page, a photocopy of a birth certificate. But the date could have been written in fire.
‘She’s fifteen?’ said Riley.
‘Almost,’ said Kerry.
Riley picked up the fax and studied it closely. ‘I take it this is legit?’
‘I double checked with county records. It’s good.’
‘Fourteen. Jesus.’
‘You didn’t even suspect?’ asked Kerry. It was a big secret to keep in such a nosy town. How could he have missed it?
‘Didn’t have a clue. Makes me feel like a dirty old man.’
‘You and the rest of the west coast. I thought you might have been sitting on that piece of information, what with you and Lynsey Dixon being so pally and all. She might have asked you not to mention it.’
‘Why?’
‘Doesn’t look good. Dressing her up like prime meat when she’s out of bounds,’ said Kerry. ‘Shit, think of all those guys jerking off at home over a fourteen-year-old kid.’
‘I’ve gotta take a shower,’ said Riley.
Frank Mindell felt rich. Seventeen thousand dollars. He could kiss Arnold Liebwitz. His wife had seen Serena on TV in some true-life weepfest and Arnie’d called Frank and told him to change the channel. Lucky he did, even if it had meant missing the last quarter of his game. When Frank got the cash he would be sure to buy Arnold a drink. Hell, he’d even buy his wife one.
Riley was outside Serena’s apartment building by a quarter to ten. He needed time to prepare what he was going to say. Kerry had insisted that he take a tape recorder, she had even wanted him to take Luke, their photographer.
‘Forget it,’ said Riley. ‘I’m not ready to do that to her. She’s just a kid.’
‘Yesterday you didn’t know that.’
‘So what? Today I do,’ he said. ‘Just let me do it my way.’
Kerry backed off, he was the boss.
Except now the moment was here Riley wasn’t sure what ‘his way’ entailed. He had planned to ask her for her comment directly. Ring her doorbell and catch her off-guard. Now he felt guilty.
She came down when he buzzed.
Riley thought she looked e
specially beautiful tonight. Her hair was tied back in a plait and her face was naturally bare. With his new knowledge he could suddenly see that the wise eyes in an innocent face were the secret of her allure. He felt a surge of protectiveness that he tried to check by reminding himself that she had lived and worked alone in this town for the best part of a year.
‘I had a call today,’ he started and he could feel unfamiliar sweat beading on his brow. Nerves had never been a problem for him, he could deal with any situation. But staring into her sweet face he felt ashamed of himself. ‘Frank Mindell called my office.’
Serena shuddered. He would know what kind of father she had, he would know how they had lived. Serena felt ashamed, as if Riley had just stripped off her ballgown to reveal the rags beneath.
‘So now you know,’ she said. ‘Not exactly the stuff of fairy tales.’
‘No,’ said Riley cautiously, ‘not exactly.’
‘So what are you going to do?’ asked Serena.
‘We have to go with the story, I’m afraid. You’re popular. The readers want to know as much about you as possible.’
‘Why?’ said Serena. ‘What happened to being famous for what you do? Now we’re just famous for who we are? I’m Serena Simon. Frank Mindell is a drunk, you must realize that, yet you’ll take his word over mine.’
‘You don’t even know what he said yet and already you’re denying it,’ said Riley.
‘What did he say?’ said Serena.
‘You’re fourteen.’
‘So what?’ said Serena. She ripped out the plait in her hair and let the silver strands fall around her shoulders. Her eyes were bright with defiance and once again Riley wondered how God, or whoever, dared to give a little girl looks like that.
‘So that’s news.’
‘I can do my job, I’m good at it. It doesn’t matter how old I am.’