The Vanity Game

by H. J. Hampson

  I'm shaking. He puts his hand on my arm. So I am in Glasgow... Why have they brought me here? How do I get home? Where is home?

  I wish Mum was here. They've never mentioned her before. Oh God I wish she was here, she would still love me, even if I'm not him any more, and so would Krystal… Krystal…

  "Come on mate," the guy says soothingly. I'm crying, I realise.

  "Krystal…"

  "Krystal, is she your girlfriend? Nice name, you want us to call her?"

  "She's dead."

  "Oh… I'm sorry mate." He puts his hand on my arm. I tense up, expecting, but there's no punishment following saying her name.

  "So come on, what's your name then?"

  Maybe … maybe… Is this a test? I don't know. But I have to tell him what has happened. I have to risk it and see.

  "B-B-Beaumont," I say, slowly, to gauge his reaction. He narrows his eyes as if he's thinking hard.

  "Bowman? Is that what you said?" he asks,

  "Beaumont, I think. You know, like the footballer," a voice says, I jerk with fright, it's the woman again, she must have sneaked back through the curtain.

  "It's okay, you know," the guy's saying again, "Beaumont. So Beaumont, how about a surname so we can try to let someone know what's happened to you?"

  Nothing … no attack, no blood. Is this for real? Am I really free? Or are the scientists testing me?

  "Alex-ander," I manage to say.

  The guy and the woman look at each other, and then back to me.

  "That's not what the passport said," the woman whispers.

  A sinking feeling comes over me. Don't they know who I am? Didn't the woman say 'the footballer'? Am I failing their tests?

  "Right, mate. Well we're just going to leave you here while we get the results of your test, okay?" the guy says, smiling at me.

  Tests? What tests? Are they returning with a punishment?

  They leave me alone in the cubicle for a while and nothing happens, I just sit there, stunned. Then the guy returns with two policemen. Are these real police? Have they come to arrest me?

  "A few questions," the guy says, and they ask questions – what had happened? What could I remember? All I can say back is "Dante, I need to speak to Dante."

  But they tell me they don't know anyone called Dante.

  Eventually they go away and a man comes into the cubicle who asks all kinds of weird questions. I try to give honest answers and he nods approvingly, just like The Beard, and writes things down on his clipboard. I tell him I think they are testing me, I tell him my body is no good for their purposes any more, that I can't contribute to the perfection any longer, and he nods, like he's agreeing with everything I say, like these are the right answers.

  FORTY-NINE

  The flashlights blind them as they hold onto each other tightly.

  'Like rabbits in the headlights,' he thinks.

  This is such a drag, having to put up with all these idiots, but fuck it, think of the money, he tells himself.

  'This is all you've ever wanted, the fame, the adoration, the big house, the beautiful girlfriend.'

  They walk into the cinema and pick the champagne glasses lightly off the tray. Brad Pitt comes over to say 'hi'. Brad fucking Pitt. He tries to act cool, maybe the other guy used to hang out with him.

  'The other guy', he chastises himself. There is no other guy, never has been, he's always been Beaumont Alexander and always will be. He is just an heir. 'The king is dead, long live the king!'

  The film is a total bore and he drifts off, lost in his own thoughts. That Vegas wedding was crazy. The photo-shoot in the bathtub, the celebrity guests, everything so expensive but all of it covered by the Chic! magazine deal. Mental.

  And all the fuss that was made of the announcement that he'd retired from football to take up acting. It was all very touching.

  Now here he is in Hollywood. Live the dream, baby, he tells himself, just live the dream.

  FIFTY

  There is something about the clean, egg-shell coloured walls, soft green carpets and the discreetly placed notices that make you feel the need to whisper. It's a bit like a hotel but much blander because heavy curtains, dazzling chandeliers and bright colours may unsettle the patients.

  Each morning I make the journey from my room in the extension wing, through this lobby and up the small staircase to the dining room on the first floor where I am served either cornflakes in a plastic bowl or toast on a plastic plate, both with plastic cutlery. We are less likely to use it to harm ourselves or others when it's plastic.

  The day sprawls out ahead of me like a huge field of untouched snow – cold white nothingness. Whatever they are giving me makes me feel like I'm moving through glue. Everything slows down, and edges slightly blur. The silence hangs heavy with insanity; it sticks to you. The germs cover everything. My skin is red-raw from scrubbing.

  I'm not sure how long I have been here and I cannot think of the future. It's a blank. There is only the present moment.

  In the glue there is sometimes muffled screaming, resistance, many hands pulling me back. Are these memories though or just dreams? It's impossible to tell. It's all one and the same in the glue.

  Every so often there is a test, and afterwards the glue gets thicker, so thick that all I can do is sit in my room for hours and watch the specks of dust dance in the sunlight; my own discarded skin cells, I've been told. I fret about wasting away. Beaumont Alexander decomposing into dust and leaving this thing, a shell. What can I do though? I can't save him, not just me on my own, not from here.

  There are others living in the glue with greying skin and dark shadows under their eyes, as if their skulls are black and it's just showing through. We sit in a room together, all in a circle and sometimes someone speaks, always very quietly. Sometimes they give me looks, the others, that say 'We believe you, we know who you are.'

  There was the girl with the black hair who grabbed me in the corridor, pulled me into a room, her face up close to mine, breathing on me with her breath that smelt of sick.

  She said: "I know what happened to you, it happened to me too. I used to be on prime time TV."

  Or was that just a dream? She always tries to catch my eye, tries to reach out, through the glue.

  And sometimes a man comes. He says he's my father. Sometimes he shows me pictures of a childhood I don't remember.

  I dream of being underwater with her, the perfect Krystal, and the Koi Carp fish.

  And I see myself on the TV in the day room posing on a red carpet at some movie première. Apparently I have moved into acting.

  She's on my arm, still there, still going strong. Is this the past or the present though, or even the future? Is it me myself or a fake? How many Beaumonts are there? Maybe we are all one and the same. No-one can answer my questions. In brief moments of lucidity between doses, something floats there just above my head, a thought or a realisation perhaps; I can never quite grasp it.

  Then one day something reaches out through the glue and touches me, so strongly I actually feel it. A powerful emotion, the first one in a while, maybe sadness, or regret, or even anger. The ten o'clock news:

  'Star couple killed in a tragic car crash'

  …the rolling headline announces, and there we are, Beaumont and Krystal smiling from a photograph, my arms around her, relaxing in the Love Palace, and then the mangled wreckage of a Brabus Mercedes. My car.

  "Beaumont died instantly after the car, thought to be doing over 100mph, hit a tree. Krystal McQueen was taken to hospital, but pronounced dead on arrival. Both bodies have been taken for post-mortem examinations. Tributes to the celebrity couple have been flooding in…"

  Well.

  I sit back in his chair, and I can feel the glue receding as my life passes before my eyes, neatly edited and put to suitably moving music. Seamless. I can't even tell where I stop and he begins. But he has ended. I breathe in, feeling my lungs rise and fall. A weight has been lifted. He is dead and I can begin again. />
  They won't have forgotten me.

  Fake celebrity crime ring smashed

  The entertainment industry is in turmoil after it emerged that a shadowy organisation known as The Substitutors has been creating 'fake celebrities' for years.

  Police raided offices in South West London in the early hours of this morning and arrested several people thought to be ring-leaders in this bizarre fraud operation.

  Up to a hundred well-known celebrities are thought to be impostors who have been installed by the organised crime ring. The real personalities have either died, or even more disturbingly, have been forced out of the public eye and forced into anonymity.

  Geoffrey Dante, the detective who led the investigation, said at a press conference this morning: "This is probably the most audacious crime of our time. I cannot stress how happy I am to see these people finally brought to justice."

  It's believed that the crime ring played on people's hunger for fame and recruited replacements from reality TV shows. Thousands have been left devastated after it was announced that the forthcoming X Factor auditions have been cancelled as a precaution.

  Police say the breakthrough came when post-mortems were carried out on the alleged bodies of footballer-turned-actor Beaumont Alexander and singer Krystal McQueen. They both died in a car crash last week. Tests showed that the DNA of these bodies did not match the DNA collected from Beaumont Alexander when he was arrested on suspicion of murdering Krystal in July 2009, and DNA collected from a knife which was believed to contain Krystal's blood. Krystal McQueen went missing and then apparently re-appeared. Police now believe that Krystal was murdered and the subsequent re-appearance was that of an impostor.

  The grotesque suicide of rock star Taylor James is also being linked to this crime ring.

  Psychologists have recorded a spate of cases in recent years of mentally ill patients claiming to be famous people. They are now re-examining such cases, especially where the patient did bear a resemblance to the person they claimed to be.

  Of particular interest is a man interned in a London mental hospital who claimed to be Beaumont Alexander. He was admitted around the time of Beaumont's retirement from football. Hospital staff say that shortly after the apparent deaths of Beaumont and Krystal, the man escaped from the institution and has not been seen since.

  A source at the hospital said: "Looking back, I suppose he did look a bit like Beaumont Alexander."

  ***

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to thank my parents for encouraging me to pursue all my creative nonsense and making me head-strong enough to see it through. Thank you to Elizabeth Wilson for buying all the trashy mags, and to Kevin MacNeil, my agent Judy Moir, and Al and Kyle at Blasted Heath for believing in this thing. And thanks to all the Haters, you only made me more determined.

  About the author

  H.J. Hampson is a novelist and screenwriter from Runcorn, a bleak industrial town in northern England. She went to Sheffield University where she was the music editor on the student paper. Whilst dossing around in Sheffield after university she formed a rock band called The Lousy Virgins – who were indeed quite lousy – and began writing short stories and novels. She currently lives in London, where she hangs out at literary haunts and drinks lots of gin.

  For news, reviews, interviews and lots more about H.J. Hampson and our other great authors, visit Blasted Heath.

  Also by Blasted Heath

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  Wee Rockets by Gerard Brennan

  Phase Four by Gary Carson

  The Unburied Dead by Douglas Lindsay

  The Man in the Seventh Row by Brian Pendreigh

  The Killing of Emma Gross by Damien Seaman

  All The Young Warriors by Anthony Neil Smith

  The Crime Interviews: Volume Two by Len Wanner

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