by Alison Bond
On the third morning she ran out of whisky. She asked Sean for the keys to his car but he insisted on driving her to the nearest supermarket to get whatever she wanted. She looked for her wig and sunglasses.
‘You won’t need them,’ said Sean.
‘I don’t want attention.’
‘This is way out west. Nobody will have a clue who you are, trust me. If you wear sunglasses on a day like today, however, I can’t make any promises, they might take a photograph just to laugh at it later.’
Thick grey clouds were lingering outside, making the day perpetually dark. He was right. There were only two other people doing their shopping that day and neither they nor the little granny who took Ruby’s money paid her anything beyond the mild interest afforded to a stranger in a small town.
Ruby bought a case of whisky and some Marlboro cigarettes. Dante’s brand. She stayed drunk for as long as possible, half-expecting Sean to take the bottle away from her and firmly suggest that she slowed down. But Sean kept on smiling at her if he passed her on the stairs and let her look for salvation at the bottom of every bottle. When the bottles ran dry, replacements miraculously appeared in their place.
She took the occasional walk in the lonely country surrounding the house. Twice she ran into neighbours and both times they called her Mrs Coltrane. She didn’t bother to correct them.
Her deadened mind eventually limped back to life and when it did she was angry more than anything. Her thoughts were as dark as the rainclouds overhead and she scared the sheep with her drunken wails. What did it matter if she drank herself to death? Who would miss her? The children had Ella, her fans had new idols; nobody would notice if she left the world. Sod everyone and everything.
She neglected her appearance, chewing her perfect fingernails down to the quick and not washing her hair or her clothes until she began to smell fusty below the top notes of her boozy breath. One night she smashed the mirror in her room by hurling an empty bottle at it. She heard frantic footsteps on the wooden stairs and Sean appeared. But he only glanced at the mess and then went back downstairs for a dustpan and brush and a cardboard box for the shards of glass. ‘Accidents happen,’ he said.
Eventually there didn’t seem to be any point in crying any more. Dante was dead and her tears had not resurrected him. Her career was over.
The following morning while she was pouring herself a cup of tea she didn’t lace it with her new favourite tipple. It was no great statement; she just didn’t feel like it. She was queasy and exhausted.
It was a relief to stop thinking about it all for a while. Thinking about what had happened to her life and what she was going to do next. Her head was clear for the first time in months but no easy solutions presented themselves, instead there was a blissful kind of nothingness through which idle thoughts would drift harmlessly. It reminded her of the first time she got stoned, before the paranoia had a chance to get its grips on her permanent high.
On her third day of sobriety Sean suggested a walk. ‘I don’t have a dog,’ he said, ‘so you’ll have to do.’ He bundled her up in two of his coats and pulled an unflattering woollen hat on to her head. Her feet, in four pairs of socks, were encased in Wellington boots several sizes too big.
She followed him dumbly as he set off into the country-side at a fast pace, not waiting to check on her progress. The going was all uphill and she was sweating underneath her clothes by the time they reached a wide plateau and he stopped.
‘Look at that,’ he said, and she gazed upon the most enchanting view. The low winter sun cast pale gold shadows over the frosted hills and in the distance a small pond sparkled. It was the quietest moment she had known, without so much as the flutter of a bird’s wing to break the silence. She inhaled a deep breath of the crisp air, feeling her lungs expand greedily for more. The chill of it numbed some of her sorrow.
‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ said Sean. ‘Come on.’
They walked on further, into the view itself, and Sean took her gloved hand to help her over the rough ground. Her calves were starting to burn but she got pleasure from feeling her muscles work, reminding her that she was human, and that she had a great pair of legs.
They reached the immaculate surface of the frozen pond. Next to it there was a sweet white cottage with a stone jetty out over the water. Ruby stumbled down the last few feet to the edge, took off her glove and touched her fingers to the sparkling ice. It burnt. She stepped on to it, wanting to get a closer look at the adorable house.
‘Careful,’ warned Sean. ‘It’s been getting warmer, the ice might not hold.’
She looked back at him and just then heard a terrible cracking noise beneath her. Her feet slipped and she was on her backside on the ice, then she dropped through into freezing black water and went under.
All her senses were driven berserk by the sudden sensation overload. It was as if a million white hot needles had pierced her skin. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t scream. The icy water was everywhere, in her ears, up her nose. It soaked through her layers of clothing, making them heavy and dragging her down.
Her body started to shut off the pain. It was quieter under that water than back in the real world. It was peaceful. Her frantic kicks subsided and the muted light from above grew dim until she wasn’t sure which direction she was facing any more.
She saw images of herself dancing as a little girl, of her parents’ faces, of her children, of Dante, and she thought, well, what do you know? It’s true what they say about life flashing before your eyes. Then she felt a primitive desire to survive, gave one final almighty kick and a powerful hand grabbed hold of her hair and hauled her gasping to the surface, dragging her away from the jagged edge.
‘I told you to be careful!’ said Sean, and collapsed on to the safety of the shore.
Ruby lay flat on her back, shivering and fighting for her first steady breath. The sunset traced pink scars across the mackerel sky above her and she felt happy to be alive.
Sean broke into the white cottage. ‘It’s empty,’ he said. ‘It’s been on the market for months. This is an emergency.’
He found matches in the kitchen and smashed up a wardrobe from one of the bedrooms, then lit a fire. Within a few minutes the flames were enveloping them in much-needed heat and the flickering light sent their shadows skittering across the bare walls. Sean disappeared again and came back with an armful of curtains. He shook the dust from a thick brown set and wrapped them around her.
Ruby sat as close as she could to the fire without burning and gradually the warmth seeped through to her core. ‘I thought I was going to die,’ she said.
‘Disappointed?’
‘Why would you say that?’
‘I did think perhaps you were trying to do the job slowly with the whisky. That’d be a good choice, incidentally; what a way to go. But you stopped. I haven’t seen you touch a drop since the day before yesterday.’
‘I didn’t know you were watching me.’
‘Somebody has to.’ He shuffled over so that he was sitting next to her and rubbed her arms vigorously. ‘Do you want to know what I think?’ he said, and continued without waiting for an answer. ‘I think you’ve given up. Life must be lived, Ruby.’
‘Dante never loved me,’ she said. ‘He told me that he did but only because that was what I wanted to hear. I wasted my life trying to impress him. I hate him.’
‘You have to let him go. People die, Ruby, we all do. That’s what happens.’
‘You have no idea what I’ve been through.’
‘Pity the poor movie star, her diamond shoes are too tight’
‘How dare you!’
‘Listen to me, Ruby’ His voice had a sharpness that was unfamiliar. It changed him from a bumbling artist to somebody to take seriously. ‘You know me, you know you won’t get special treatment here. I’m happy to let you stay drunk for a month, for a year if that’s what you need to do. I’ve no argument with you, but the flip side is that when you need telling, I’ll
tell.’
‘What exactly is it that you think I need telling?’
He took a deep breath. ‘I’ve no doubt you’ve got a lot of pain inside you, but nobody can make that go away. It’s up to you. Drop the Zelda Fitzgerald bit and I’d bet there’s still a real person behind all the histrionics.’
‘It’s not an act, Sean.’
‘I know that. But from what you’ve told me, you and Dante were never happy. You could start again.’
‘We were happy,’ she whispered. If she had never been happy with Dante that would mean that she had driven herself to despair trying to maintain something that was never real to begin with.
She couldn’t start again. It was impossible. She was Ruby Valentine and everybody knew it. They knew that she had a dead husband, a floundering career, a borderline drink problem, a nefarious past. You couldn’t start over when you were well known. You carried your successes and your failures around for life. And what was the point if fame didn’t protect you?
‘Fame means sharing your mistakes with the whole world,’ she said. ‘I can’t take it any more.’
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But the question is: can you live without it?’
27
A quieter life was difficult for Ruby at first. She pottered around the isolated house thinking that perhaps she was losing her mind. What did people do with their down time if they weren’t making love? She read every novel that she could lay her hands on and when they ran out she started reading the complete works of Shakespeare a play at a time and, as an exercise, forced herself not to read the better female parts aloud.
She took long walks, often back to the stone cottage to remind herself of that night she’d come close to drowning. She spent several days cleaning the house from top to bottom, wondering what the world would say if they could see Ruby Valentine in her Marigolds, hair tied back with a nylon stocking. And when the shabby paintwork was back to its original white she decided on a whim to strip it all off and start again. Sean came back from the post office to find her knee-deep in paint scrapings.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘You need a project.’
She transformed the tired old house into a bright and airy home, wiping decades of grime from each leaded window pane and taking up the carpets to hang them on the low branches of the oak in the garden and beat them clean with a broken tennis racquet. She nourished it, she restored it, and as she did so, something of herself came back. When there was nothing more for her to do on the rented house, she taught herself to cook.
The whisky bottle on the kitchen counter winked at her when she was bored but she stayed off it. It wasn’t so hard. She knew that if she lost herself in the bottom of a bottle she would still have to crawl out eventually.
Gradually her anger was silenced. She no longer despised herself. Then one day she found herself humming as she thinned out the fresh basil she was growing in pots on the windowsill and decided to make pasta for dinner.
So this was how it felt to be organically relaxed. It was a wonderful discovery. These days when a neighbour called out, ‘Good morning, Mrs Coltrane,’ she smiled and said good morning back. She’d been married twice and nobody had called her Mrs anything before. It made her smile.
She contacted her bank and made an outrageously high offer to the owner of the house. She bought the house and the surrounding land as a thank-you to Sean. She had plenty of money. She was glad of the privacy and the security.
But there was no passion in her life. No drug-fuelled rows to be ended with ferocious sex. No challenge. ‘Could I be happy?’ she wondered. She supposed that she could try.
Ruby called Max and told him she was taking some time out.
‘How long?’ he asked.
‘A year, maybe.’
He whistled. A year was a long time in Hollywood. ‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing?’
‘No,’ she laughed, and Max wondered if that was the first genuine laugh he had ever heard from her. She sounded completely different.
‘Okay, stay there, whatever you want, you’re the client,’ he said. ‘But if anything spectacular lands on my desk will you read it?’
‘A script, you mean? If I said no, would that stop you from sending it to me?’
‘Probably not.’
‘Then don’t ask.’
There was a pause. The conversation was over but Max could sense there was something Ruby was not telling him.
‘What is it?’ he said.
‘The twins. Are they… do you ever…?’
‘Ruby,’ he said, ‘tell me you speak to your kids. Please tell me you call your kids. What is wrong with you?’
She was ashamed. She didn’t want Max to think that she was a bad person, even though deep down she suspected that she was. Bad to the core.
‘Ella came to see me,’ said Max. Weeks ago. She was in a mess with money’
A mess? What kind of mess?’
‘The kind of mess you find yourself in when your friend dumps her children on you and leaves town. She was half a minute away from calling social services.’
‘But she didn’t?’
‘No, I talked her round and set her up with a generous allowance; she’s okay. But seriously, Ruby, you can’t do that to people. What if she’d gone to the police?’
‘The police? Ella told me to go, she practically threw me out of the door.’
‘Abandonment, desertion. The newspapers would have been all over that and you’d have come home to a warrant.’
‘Thank you. Thank you for taking care of it.’
‘This is not a broken contract for me to take care of, Ruby, these are your children.’
‘I know.’
‘Yours and Dante’s.’
‘I know, okay? Please, just call Ella. Check that she’s okay. Tell her to call you if she needs anything, or the twins need anything.’
‘They need you.’
‘No,’ said Ruby, ‘I’ve failed them, I know that. But I’m scared.’
‘Scared of what?’
‘They’re so like him, like Dante. I’m scared that I’ll hate them for it for the rest of their lives. I know that sounds impossibly cruel but it’s the way I feel.’
‘I’ll call her,’ said Max. ‘I’ll explain that you need more time.’
His voice was ice-cold and Ruby knew that he was sickened by her apparent lack of human decency. She thought he was overreacting. Surely this was better than boarding school, the only other alternative? She could not be a mother now. She simply couldn’t. She could hardly take care of herself. If she’d realized that being a mother meant never having the chance to be selfish ever again, then perhaps she never would have tried.
*
The following month, inspired by giant blue skies, she finally wrote to the twins. She told them that she loved them, and that they should be good for Ella. She wasn’t sure if she would ever see them again. In this quiet life with her placid thoughts and a good man for company, she could hardly remember the woman she used to be.
It was a mistake. Nine days later Ella tracked her down. What is this shit?’ she said. ‘“Be good, I love you, you will always be in my heart”? It’s like a bloody suicide note.’
‘Just read it to them, please,’ said Ruby.
‘I already did,’ said Ella. ‘Vincent stuffed his hands in his ears after the first couple of lines, started to cry and then locked himself in his room for the rest of the night, and Octavia…’ Ella sighed.
‘What?’
‘She let me read the whole thing, she sat there and listened like a good girl, and then she asked me to give you a message. What was it again? Oh yeah, that’s right, fuck you.’
Ruby was shocked. ‘She’s only ten!’
‘No, Ruby, she’s eleven. Eleven going on nineteen.’
‘Are you trying to force me to come back?’
‘You stay there as long as you damn well like. This is a better life for us, for me and Tomas, better than I could have hoped. I’m say
ing that when you do come back, if you come back, your children are going to have some serious issues.’
Max sent her scripts from time to time. At first about one every month, then every six weeks or so, and eventually they slowed to a quarterly trickle. She never got past the first few pages of any of them. The parts were all the same – long-suffering wife/girlfriend/lover/partner (delete where applicable) of the hero. She always said no. After a while she started to wonder to herself, ‘Is that really what I once did for a living?’ She found it bizarre.
Sean made no demands on her and he never tried to give her advice. Not once did he ask what she thought the future held. It was a revelation to find a man who was emotionally self-sufficient. Living with Sean was like stumbling on an oasis after an arduous trek through the wasteland. She was able to unwind her nerves, which Dante had tangled into a tight ball of despair. At first she missed the crutch of her neuroses, without anything to obsess over she didn’t know what she was supposed to do with her vacant thoughts. But as her mind slowed down she realized that there was a whole world of things to think about besides herself. She understood the simple pleasure of a sunset or a fine meal with good conversation, reading a book or listening to music, things she had barely found time for over the years.
Then as Sean and Ruby approached their second winter together there was a subtle shift in their relationship. She blamed the long dark nights. He blamed the red dress she wore on Christmas Eve.
Making love to Sean didn’t change the way they felt about each other. The old Ruby would have destroyed the friendship by tormenting herself with what their new sexy pastime meant, what it would do to them, how he felt about her. But she refused to go down that road; she understood that it would lead her nowhere. Instead she chose to enjoy being exactly where she was, wrapped in the arms of a man she trusted, a man who had saved her. Neither of them was embarrassed, it didn’t ruin the friendship, and it didn’t happen every night. Sometimes she needed to be touched, she wanted to fuse with another human being. She wanted to feel alive, and sex was the best way she knew how. It was cosy to have company beneath the sheets, it was harmless.