For a moment, I thought he’d said Lyra’s had a stroke and the opportunity to call off this circus filled me with short-lived hope. Hope which vanished as he continued speaking.
“The rebirth of Lyra Day, in the same type of venues she played as an ingénue. A reminder of her honest beginnings.”
Lyra didn’t like this; I felt her stiffen beside me, though the beatific smile stayed fixed in place.
“It’s an incredible opportunity for those who truly appreciate her amazing talent…”
This she liked and the stiff body relaxed slightly.
“To see her up close and intimate. True genius. And only true genius; only real talent – would be unafraid of such a small venue.”
“Bijou,” Lyra murmured smoothly, placing the hand on his back once again and moving him along the unofficial receiving line. “And this is Mr. Bird’s friend,” she dismissed Caz.
“Lyra,” Foster interjected, “shouldn’t you be preparing yourself.”
Lyra produced something between a giggle and a titter, and actually fluttered her eyelashes at Baker. “Oh Morgan,” she twittered and we were only a wedding cake and a few cobwebs off Miss Havisham, “it’s hours yet to the performance. Now this,” she pushed Baker in front of Dominic Mouret, “is the young man who’s working with me on my autobiography.”
“Lyra. Your voice,” Foster persisted, somewhat desperately. “You need to save it.”
The switch flicked again. Lyra turned her face so that Baker, who stood frozen to stone, couldn’t see it and fixed Foster with a furious glare. “I’m doing introductions, dear,” she said in that spun-sugar tone she’d been using since the fan had first entered the room, “not reciting the Gettysburg fucking address.”
Baker – for the first time unprompted by Lyra – addressed the tall attractively dark man before him. “You are?” he asked.
“Dominic Mouret.” Dominic put a hand out, but Baker didn’t offer his own in return.
“No,” he said, “I mean you are doing – what – exactly?”
Dominic, flustered, dropped his hand, looked uncertainly at Lyra, and shrugged. “Well, Lyra – Ms Day – has had an incredible life,”
“So far, dear,” she simpered. “It’s not quite over yet,” and she giggled.
“Yes, um, yes,” Mouret stumbled, “and we felt that now – as she embarks on her comeback – might be a good time to reflect on the journey.”
“Comeback?” both Lyra and Baker chorused in horror.
“Lyra Day is not making a comeback,” Baker stated definitively, “because she’s never been away.”
I could have begged to differ; being locked in a mental ward and forced through rehab, screaming at fantasy spiders and picking imaginary woodlice off of one’s skin whilst residing in an isolation ward; these things are usually indicative of someone who’s been away. Instead, I stayed silent. It seemed like the best policy.
Baker seemed to be personally offended. Lyra, mollified by his chivalrous defence of her career status, obviously decided not to immediately immolate and/or eat the hapless biographer, and Mouret opened his mouth to continue his job description.
It was not to be. “And what – if I may ask – qualifies you to write a biography of Ms Day?” Baker asked.
“Co-write,” Lyra interjected.
“Well,” Mouret drew himself up to his full height, flipped his head back and looked down on Leon Baker as though he were something nasty the cat had dragged in, “my own memoir – Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On – was: a Times Bestseller; the biggest selling memoir in Barnes & Nobel in the States last year; an Aftonbladet ‘Book of the Year’; a Die Welt must-read pick. It has been translated into fifteen different languages; has been optioned for movies; and was described by the Guardian as ‘one of the most poignant rags to riches stories in the genre.’”
So there! I could almost hear him adding.
I’d read Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On. It was the story of a boy whose young mother had been forced by her strict father to give up the baby she’d had out of wedlock. The child had been placed into an orphanage with nothing more than his stuffed monkey, Moppet and, almost as soon as the orphanage doors had closed, the abuse had started.
In the book, the boy had been beaten, starved, raped, tortured and had been told repeatedly that he was a hideous creature that nobody could love.
His mother – once she’d got her life straight – had tried to find him and reclaim him, only to be told by the head of child services – who had subsequently turned out to be the leader of a paedophile ring – that the child had been adopted and was therefore not reclaimable. The poor woman had developed bone cancer and died without ever seeing her son again.
Finally, a wealthy and childless couple had adopted him and Dominic had finally – after much struggle and resistance on the parts of all those involved in the abuse scandal – been rescued from the system.
It wasn’t exactly a light read, but I figured his life – if it was anything like the one he’d portrayed in his memoir – had perfectly prepared the writer for the disaster that was the Lyra Day menagerie.
“I’ve lived through being unwanted,” Mouret spoke, “through being told that I had no talent, no hope, that nobody would ever love me. I’ve seen madness and horror face to face, and I’ve seen wealth and luxury, and I’ve survived both. I think that puts me in a good position to help Lyra tell her story. To help explain to the world how a working class girl who was abandoned by her father and abused by her mother and sister could turn herself into an icon of hope and beauty; how the spark of self-belief, the ball of talent, could win out over a world that sought to grind the child into the dirt.”
Can I get an Amen, I half expected a minister somewhere to shout out.
“And what,” Baker demanded, without blinking, “was the name of Lyra’s first single? How did she feel when Cilla Black stole Anyone Who Had a Heart from her? Why did she reject Engelbert Humperdinck’s advances in a Las Vegas casino?”
Mouret frowned. “This isn’t about trivia,” he said.
“Humperdinck?” Lyra raised an eyebrow, which, considering the amount of Botox in her forehead was an achievement. “I’ve never even met the man. It was Tom Jones. Dirty old bugger. Wait – trivia? It’s not really trivia, Dominic dear; it’s the details of my career.”
“Glittering career,” Baker clarified.
Mouret shrugged. “That’ll all be covered,” he said, “but the piece is more about the person under the glitter. The little girl inside the crust that is Lyra Day.”
“The who in the what?” Lyra seemed startled. The eyebrow rose again. Her tame writer, she seemed to be realising, appeared to have ideas of his own. Ideas that might not fit with the self-image that Ms Lyra Day had cultivated. “Well, we’d need to talk about that, Dominic dear; I mean,” she confided to Baker, “it’s early days yet.”
“The contracts are signed,” Foster cut in, a worried frown creasing his brow. “The advance is already in the bank and we’ve got a publisher expecting a draft in the spring.”
“From a man who can’t even name his subject’s first Japanese number one?” Baker curled his lip. “Really?”
Mouret bristled then, his eyes passing over Leon to Lyra, he seemed to deflate momentarily, before taking a deep breath, redrawing himself up and fixing Baker with an even more dismissive sneer. “Yes,” he said, “really. There’ll be a discography and a list of awards at the end of the book but I happen to think that the story of this woman – this remarkable individual – is more than a bloody set list. Excuse me,” and, firmly moving Baker out of his way, he exited the room.
Chapter Twelve
“Sweetheart that is the most deluded woman I have ever met; and remember I’ve spent thirteen years in media.”
“Sssh, Caz; she’ll hear you!”
“Danny, we’re whispering and she’s upstairs behind a locked door, with her favourite thing in the whole wide world: an audience.”
; After Mouret had made his escape, there’d been a millisecond where it seemed that Lyra might actually have been aware of a bad atmosphere in the room but during that millisecond Baker had said something complimentary about Lyra’s eye makeup and had been wheeled over to meet with the downtrodden Liz Britton.
Caz and I had taken our chances and made our escape. As we got to the bottom of the stairs – with me wondering whether it was too late to hunt down a drag ‘tribute’ to Lyra and pass it off as the real thing – we discovered Ali stacking boxes of crisps and using a box cutter to slash them open, exposing the contents like a bizarre cheese and onion autopsy.
“No offence,” Ali replied, “but have either of you ever actually done bar work? In a pub? Only, from what I can see you’ve got a sold-out crowd; a total of six, no–” she recounted, “seven boxes of out-of-date cheese and onion crisps to provide this sell-out crowd with sustenance; a parlour full of hooky Polish Budweiser; a van load of liquor that appears to have come from a warehouse in Syria; a dozen cases of Shampagne – spelled with an S – which the bloody ASBO twins are currently decanting into Veuve bottles you nicked from a bin somewhere; and that fucking Witch upstairs to entertain the place.”
“I hear you, Ali,” I said, “but believe me, I know the crowd we’re pitching to. They’re not the usual punters who’ll fill the place up every week. This is the opening night; these are the trendsetters, the beautiful people.”
“And as beautiful people,” Caz interrupted, “they attend ten cocktail parties a week; twenty at this time of year. And they never – never – eat. They drink like fishes and, so long as the alcohol is above eighty percent proof and ice cold, their taste buds won’t spot Syrian scotch from Johnnie Black.”
Ali sighed, a noise that spoke volumes about her belief in our abilities. “You’re the boss,” she muttered to me and strolled off to make sure that Dash and Ray were properly hammering the corks into the Shampagne. “Oh, careful in there,” she inclined her head towards the bar, “it’s another bloody minefield.”
Caz raised an eyebrow. Minefield, she mouthed, at which point Jenny Foster’s voice drifted through to us.
“I mean, who does she think she is?” she was demanding. “I could – oh, Dommy – I could fucking kill her. Are you even listening to me, Dominic?”
Mouret’s voice was heard murmuring something we couldn’t make out and then Jenny piped up once again, “Well that’s bloody easy for you to say; you haven’t had to put up with her all these years. It’s been hell. Her and her tantrums.”
Again, Mouret’s voice spoke up and again we couldn’t make out what he was actually saying. But this time there was a definite tone to the sound.
“No, Dom, it’s not nothing. My whole teens, ruined by that cow. And now she wants to ruin my bloody wedding.”
“Alright, our bloody wedding. God, Dom, what is your problem? Don’t you care about this? Don’t you see what she’s doing? Don’t you mind that she absolutely ruined my life and took over every single birthday party since I was, like, twelve?”
Which, considering the childhood that Dominic Mouret had discussed in his book, seemed a little rich. I looked to Caz to make a comment and she wasn’t there. Then I heard her voice – clear and distinct – issue from the bar.
“Ah, there you are. Thought I’d nip out to the offy and get some decent fizz to toast tonight. Give me a hand? You don’t mind if I borrow your fiancé, do you?” she asked, I supposed, Dominic, who murmured, I supposed, his willing assent and then I heard the pub door open and swing shut.
I stepped into the bar and found Dominic Mouret; his short dark hair tousled carelessly; his full lips pursed moodily in a frame of chiselled cheekbones, firm jawline and a chin with a cleft deep enough to drown a kitten in; his eyes squinting against the low winter sun coming weakly through the frosted windows as he hunched over a scotch – the last of the genuine Johnny Walker I presumed. A smoking cigarette was filling the bar with a greyish tint; in an empty tumbler before him two nicotine corpses already lay decomposing.
“Bit early for that, isn’t it?” I commented, glancing, in succession at the clock displaying eleven am and the tumbler of scotch, and wondering whether I was the only pub landlord on the planet trying to discourage his punters from drinking before lunchtime.
Then, remembering what had just transpired upstairs, what Mouret had just been subjected to by Jenny Foster and what the night might well hold in store for me if Lyra didn’t get her act – in every sense of the word – together, I too reached for and filled a tumbler full of vodka.
I swigged it and winced. I’d been unlucky – clearly the Absolut had already been replaced with the Absolutely-undrinkable. I added tonic water and ice, and tried again.
Dominic dragged on his cigarette – a long, slow drag that seemed to pull the smoke down into his very soul – and I thought Jesus, you’re one beautiful man, then caught myself and apropos of nothing said “You know, they’ve banned smoking in pubs now. Mad, isn’t it?”
“What?” For the first time, he seemed to actually see me and glanced at the cigarette in his hand. “Oh, sorry,” he muttered and went to stub it out.
“No,” I put a hand out to stop him. “That’s not what I meant. I just...”
What? I asked myself. You just what? You just did what you always do when faced with someone too gorgeous for words: you just made a tit of yourself.
“You heard that?” Mouret jerked his head at the door where Jenny had just left with Caz.
“A bit of it,” I admitted.
“Thing is,” he said, sipping from the scotch, “much as it pains me to admit, Lyra might actually have a point. I can’t help wondering what on earth I’m doing with these people. Morgan has ruined his daughter by giving in to every demand she’s ever made, and Lyra...” he dragged from the cigarette again and shook his head sadly.
“So what are you doing here?” I asked and his eyes narrowed even further.
“My agent might ask the same question,” he replied. “She wanted me to write a follow-on to the first book. More about how vile the abuse had been and how redemptive the Mouret’s had been. But I didn’t want to; I’d told that story and wanted to tell another one. Then a few things happened: I met Jenny; I fell in love and, within a year, both of my adoptive parents died.”
“Jesus.” I gasped, swigged from the vodka, gagged, had a coughing fit and felt wretched for pulling up this poor man’s tragedy once again. “What happened to them?” I asked, unable – despite feeling so bad – to suppress my natural desire to have details.
“Car accident,” he said, sipping the scotch and draining the glass. I reached for the bottle and topped his glass back up.
“Go on.”
“Not much to tell. We have – had – a holiday place in Corsica. They went out one night, dad had had too much to drink, driving back to the villa, he missed a turning and they went off the edge of a cliff. Mum died instantly. Dad was airlifted to Nice and survived, but his heart was broken. He’d had a dodgy ticker for a few years and I guess all of this just broke it. He had a heart attack about nine months later.”
I carefully sipped my vodka as he opened the fag packet, offered me one – which I declined – selected and lit one for himself and then, his eyes squinting against the smoke, continued his story: “So, I’d met Jenny, I’d fallen in love and I’d lost the only two people who’d ever been a family to me. I guess I was looking for another family and when Morgan suggested the Lyra book, it just sort of felt right.”
“What did Lyra think about the idea?” I wondered aloud.
“Ah,” he held the glass to me in a silent toast, “That we may never know. What counts is that, whatever her initial thoughts, Foster managed to convince her that it would be a good idea. I’ve been working with her every single day – shadowing virtually every aspect of her life for the best part of the past six months – ever since she came out of the hospital and, up until today, she seemed to have bought into the idea. Then Leo
n Bloody Baker shows up and suddenly I’m not quite Marcel Proust anymore.”
“So what do you think is gonna happen?”
He shrugged, “Not sure. Morgan’s right, of course; she’s already had an advance and I’ve already had my cut of that. And if there’s one thing I know about Lyra, it’s this: she hates returning money. Her biggest regret about that debacle last year wasn’t that she had a breakdown in front of a theatre full of people; it was that the tickets had to be refunded because she didn’t get far enough into the show for it to be declared a full performance.”
“She’s something,” I said.
“Yes,” he admitted, “she’s definitely that.”
The clock ticked. Outside, a van went by, it’s gear change feeling like the bridge of a dance track and from somewhere inside the pub, the floorboards creaked.
An intense sadness seemed to have overtaken him and I was debating whether to come around to his side of the bar, put my arms around him and hug him close in an effort to make him feel better when he spoke again.
“Did you ever spend your whole life looking for something; get it, then realise that it’s the one thing you should – all this time – have been running a million miles from?”
“Yeah,” I said, “something like that.”
“So what did you do?” He was looking directly at me now and the low sunlight, coming from the side, made his eyes glow golden brown like a cat.
“Nothing. I told myself that I’d ask him outright what he wanted, what we were doing, where we were going. Whether we had a future. But I never did, cos I was afraid of the answer I’d get. So we drifted.”
“And what happened?”
“I came home one day and – well, I couldn’t pretend anymore. So I left.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, his eyes flicking down, then up again and fixing me with a stare that seemed to linger just a beat too long.
Stop that!
“Oh don’t be,” I said. “I’m not. Well, I was; then I realised: it would have ended eventually. One day – later on – it would have ended. I would always have walked in on what I walked in on, so better it should happen now when,” I remembered Caz’s words of comfort to me, “I’m still young enough to put it behind me and find someone who really does care. I’ve only got one regret,” I admitted, wondering why I was saying this to a virtual stranger.
Death Of A Diva Page 5