High Life

by Matthew Stokoe

  In the early evening I sat in a café on Melrose drinking black coffee and reading the paper. The dead man found a couple of days ago in Westwood had been identified as an ex-cop. He’d died from a heart attack, possibly during sex. Police would like to interview the woman they assumed he was with.

  A few lines on page five. It didn’t seem much of a marker for someone as monstrous as Ryan. Tomorrow it’d be even less, screwed up in the bottom of a bin or stuck to the sole of somebody’s shoe. Death. Just like I’d always known it was. When you’re gone, you’re gone. Unless you get yourself on the screen first.

  And on the gossip pages, a snap that made me grind my teeth—Bella and Lorn, out the night before at the opening of a new boutique, chummy together, radiant smiles, cute little cocktail dresses. Prime exposure, their names under the photo.

  I ate some salad-type thing that made me gag, but I figured with the men’s grooming contract starting to look possible it’d be smart to be smart. Then I sat for half an hour smoking and thinking. Nothing of much use occurred to me, so after three Southerns I dragged my ass out of the café and into the Mustang.

  I cruised. Movement through the streets was a lullaby. Neon under burnt lemon sky slid by in time-lapse streaks, tweaking peripheral vision and interrupting thought, keeping a loose lid on my anxiety. Down to Santa Monica to look at the sea. No answers there. No beauty either—the water lay heavily against the coast like a planet-wide oil slick. The tramps looked worse than ever.

  I took PCH and spent half the night driving to Santa Barbara.

  I left the top down and my body got cold. The numbness was pleasant. When I got there I walked out into the ocean on a pier that was part of the marina and looked back inland at the mountains and the houses with their warm lights scattered through the foothills. Around me white boats rose on the swell.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  At Willow Glen there wasn’t anything to do but wander through the rooms and look at my possessions: my furniture, my technology, my clothes. It wasn’t a particularly comforting occupation as I was acutely aware that, like the house itself, everything was in Bella’s name.

  Out by the pool the palms rubbed their leaves together as though they couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen to me next. I watched them move in the breeze that came up the canyon in the afternoons and figured it might not be so bad to be like them, to just grow out of the ground and not have to deal with the endless disappointments that come with mobility and free will.

  Blue sky and sunshine. I sat in the middle of the lawn, my ears plugged with toilet paper, and stared up at the sky until bright dots of light danced in front of my eyes. It was pointless, I knew. I couldn’t escape the stigma of not being famous simply by pretending nothing existed, but without those brief moments of nonthinking I would certainly have been crushed by the reality of what was happening to me.

  Time passed slowly. I tried to tell myself that each minute was taking me closer to a point where Bella would forgive me and allow me back into the only world where real happiness was possible. But it wasn’t easy maintaining that kind of belief when there was nothing to support it.

  I stopped leaving the house. Someone on the street might have recognized me and tried to make conversation and it would have been painful maintaining the lie that I was still a presenter. Food came in by courier and a news stand delivered every magazine they carried on the lives of famous people. I had invites to parties and screenings that I got while I was on the show, but I didn’t use them. They were for another person, after all.

  I didn’t make plans for the future, I didn’t think about the past. Even when my Century City agent called to say it was down to me and one other guy for the men’s grooming gig I couldn’t get excited. With the way things had been going lately it seemed an utter waste of time to seriously think I might luck into something of that magnitude. All I did was consume media, burying myself under an avalanche of gossip in the hope that it would make me forget who I was and what had happened to me.

  One afternoon I spent an hour running the Tri Star identity tag over and over on video—that flying horse coming at you through the sky. I wanted to be in there, in with the clouds and the golden light—that distillation of Californian movie dreams. Johnny Depp and Kate Moss must have been in there somewhere, along with all the others, all loved up and wrapped safely in their fame. One of my magazines had an article on the house Depp had bought that used to belong to Bela Lugosi. I would have liked to rig the place with a camera so I could see what the two of them did when they weren’t being photographed or filmed. I didn’t want to see them fucking, although that would have been pretty cool. What I was interested in was what happened at breakfast and times like that, times when other people ploughed the boredom of their lives with meaningless activity. It would be comforting to think that even with their money and their celebrity they still shared in some of the same everyday banalities. But I bet they didn’t. I bet everything in their lives was extraordinary, right down to toasting a slice of bread or taking a dump.

  It occurred to me occasionally that it might be better to cut myself off from that kind of Hollywood speculation altogether. That way maybe I could drone along frying burgers and not want anything else. Narrow, but happy. Or, if not happy, at least not tortured every minute of every day by the desire to be someone I wasn’t. But then, if you don’t have a dream …

  Three weeks passed without a word from Bella. I’d hoped she’d call long before this. Lorn was the same. I rang her apartment constantly but no one ever answered. I knew, I just knew, she was spending her time with Bella at Malibu.

  One night the two of them actually turned up on TV together. Some fan show was running a clip of stars coming out of an opening and I caught them in the background. Holding hands, for fucksake. It looked like the camera was about to get interested in 28 FPS presenter Lorn, but then someone more famous came out and the angle changed. I was taking the show in broadcast so I couldn’t run it again, but even in the few seconds they were on screen it was impossible to mistake the absorption with which Bella regarded her partner.

  I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it one bit. In fact, next evening, the image of them standing so cozily together, combined with my accumulated isolation, pushed me out into the Mustang and down to Santa Monica.

  I was lucky. The morgue was quiet and the Japanese guy was on duty. He looked anxious when he saw me, like maybe he thought I was going to make a habit of this and end up getting him busted. But I had a lot of money and his fat face smoothed out when I showed him the notes. He had some kind of food dried to a crust in the corner of his mouth. It fell off when he started speaking.

  “Not good to take one out back now. You do it here. I lock the door, but you don’t take too long, okay? What you want, something hairy like before? We have a selection.”

  He bolted the door to the outside world and pulled open drawers. I pointed to three young women. He didn’t look happy when I said I wanted them all, but I threw money at him until he agreed.

  On the floor. Three dead naked bodies pushed close together in a row. I stripped down and climbed onto the one in the middle and worked my way inside her. She was much colder than the one I’d done with Ryan because she was straight from the fridge. But that didn’t spoil anything. All three of them were that way, a bed of cold gray flesh. Fatso was itching to do sentry duty, but he had to earn his money first. I made him haul the other two bodies and lay them facedown across my back. I felt the rough cunt hair of one against the crack of my ass, the tits and ribs of the other close to my shoulders. He left me to go stand by the door and I just lay there for a while, quiet and still under the pressure.

  The woman I had my dick inside had fucked-up teeth and her mouth smelled bad. I turn her head sideways and pressed my face into the base of her neck. I had my arms under hers, holding onto her shoulders. I felt protected and secure, but it was difficult to move and I had to grind rather than thrust so the others wouldn’t roll
off. Toward the end, though, I couldn’t help jerking about a bit more and the girl across my ass flipped over and rolled to the back of my knees. Her head hit the stone floor and it made this thunking sound that was just so empty, just so … dead, that the reality of what I was doing drove home like a stake and I spurted my guts into the lifeless gash beneath me.

  I wanted to stay there with my dick going soft inside the meat, breathing in the scent of the bodies—clammy like the stale water that collects in the defrost section of a fridge. If someone had asked me right then how I was feeling I’d have had to say comforted. These women used to be people. They’d lived, they’d had chances, but now they couldn’t do anything at all.

  No threats.

  Human form without danger.

  But when the Japanese guy saw I wasn’t pumping anymore he started pulling them off and loading them back in their trays.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Lorn took a seat in a zone café on Olympic. I’d followed her from Burbank through late afternoon traffic and, what with freeway-generated road rage and the bombers I dropped earlier, I was feeling slightly fritzed. This unscheduled meeting was uncool. Totally. I knew it, but I couldn’t help myself. I had to know what was going on. I had to know if there was ever going to be another chance for me.

  I walked into the slick self-righteousness of the place and stood just inside the door. She looked up and saw me and her face went blank. It wasn’t encouraging, it wasn’t at all like the best-case scenario of happy surprise I’d daydreamed my way through before sleep the night before. But my need was great enough to armor me against this initial knee-jerk unpleasantness. I walked down an aisle of molded plastic and sat opposite her. She’d already ordered and a waitress swayed up as I was settling and put a plate of correctly balanced protein and carbohydrate in front of her. Lorn waited until she was gone before she said anything.

  “What do you want?”

  “You didn’t answer my calls.”

  “And you expected … what?”

  “You can’t still be pissed off about the review slot.”

  “You didn’t tell me about Bella. We were sleeping together and you didn’t say shit.”

  “She told me not to.”

  “Mmm, such a good boy.”

  “Give me a break. I lost everything because of you.”

  “Because of me … You lost it because you couldn’t resist fucking someone famous. It could have been anyone, I just happened to be accessible. How could you think she wouldn’t find out? She owns half the fucking studio.”

  “I don’t know, it didn’t seem to matter at the time.”

  “Don’t you fucking dare pull that emotional manipulation shit with me. What do you want? She’d be pissed off if she knew I was talking to you.”

  “She told you not to?”

  “You don’t have to be Einstein.”

  “Sounds intimate.”

  “She’s going to make them syndicate me next year.”

  When I heard this, I knew there was no point asking Lorn how long she was going to stay with Bella, and even less trying to persuade her to end the relationship so I could take my place again at Malibu. Syndication is the golden prize that every presenter covets and Lorn would hang out until doomsday for it.

  She ate some of her food. When she spoke again her voice was a little softer than it had been.

  “I know it must hurt, what happened to you, but it’s between you and Bella. I can’t do anything about it. It isn’t fair to ask me.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “But that’s why you’re here.”

  “I guess … Look, Lorn, you should be careful with Bella. I know her a lot better than you and she’s not what she seems. You think you’re using her, but it’s the other way around.”

  Lorn put her fork down and her face went flinty.

  “How stupid do you think I am?”

  “Believe me, she’s going to ask for more than you’ll ever want to give. She’s dangerous.”

  “Jesus, try and maintain some dignity.”

  “I’m just telling you. She’s involved in a lot of bad stuff. You could get hurt, and I don’t mean emotionally. Take my word for it.”

  Lorn stared at me in disbelief, then stood and slid out from behind the table.

  “That’s an all-time high in pathetic. Stay away from me, Jack.”

  She left the restaurant without looking back. After she’d gone I sat for a long time kicking myself and trying not to think about what would happen if she felt the need to share the afternoon’s conversation with Bella.

  Eventually the waitress drifted over and asked if I wished to nourish myself. I didn’t have the energy to reply.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Next day what was bound to happen happened. An expression of Lorn’s loyalties. A lawyer and a couple of large guys walked into Willow Glen while Baywatch was on and I was doing the best I could to imagine what it was like being Pamela. The lawyer showed me Bella’s signature on some papers and told me I had half an hour to quit the premises. I made a token attempt at refusal but it didn’t get me anywhere. She owned the place and everything in it and my property rights numbered exactly zero.

  All three of them followed me around while I packed, making sure I didn’t take anything that couldn’t legitimately be classed as a personal gift. This amounted to some clothes, my photos, the video from Ryan, my watch, and a wallet. And they went through that, too. The only plastic they let me keep was my ATM card—access to the cash in my account, but no credit beyond.

  I moved in a stupor. I felt like the people you see being walked to the edge of a pit in Nazi archive footage. But even through the frozen-gut brainfuck I felt the stab of what they saved for last.

  Out front. I was about to dump my bags in the trunk of the Mustang but the lawyer shook his head and put his hand out for the key. Insult to injury. But how else would something like that have gone down? They let me call a cab, then they took my mobile off me.

  Waiting with them for the taxi was uncomfortable. The lawyer took a fresh set of papers from his briefcase and flipped through them, no doubt readying himself to dispossess someone else. The big guys just stared at me. When the cab came, one of them opened the door and the other one pushed me carefully through it.

  The drive from Laurel Canyon to Hollywood was long enough for my head to start working again. But thinking didn’t give me much comfort. With Rex dead and Lorn busy sucking Bella’s cunt, the opportunities L.A. offered for some kind of emotional succor were limited to motel rooms and hookers. I needed a hole to crawl into, somewhere to autopsy what had happened and figure out if I could recover from it.

  I had the cab trawl Sunset, along by the motels. Several blocks of twoand three-story courts, all of them so scarred with neon the place looked like some kind of accommodation Vegas. There was no way to tell one from another so I got out at the Palm Grove. Apart from the flashing outline of an oasis, the wall that fronted the street was blank—no windows, no balconies, just slab concrete up and down.

  My room wasn’t bad. It had twin beds, a TV, and a big mirror on the wall. The bathroom was at the back and at the front by the door there was a window covered with a blind so people going by on the walkway couldn’t see in. Two stories down, in the center of the court, the pool looked faded and unused. I was sure if I stayed there long enough I’d see trash accumulate under the water.

  I had about ten grand left out of what I’d managed to hold onto from my snack-food ad and Bella’s last monthly payment. I could survive for a while, but it wouldn’t last forever.

  I turned the TV on. I took a piss and unpacked my bags, then I walked up and down trying to think. Ever since the night I’d walked in on Bella and Lorn having dinner together at Malibu I’d held onto the hope that things would work out, that my relationship with Bella would eventually regenerate itself. Now it was significantly more than obvious that that wasn’t going to happen. Getting fired from the show might have been reversible,
but eviction from my house and repossession of my car, without even a phone call from her, smacked of finality.

  I considered my position. Incurring more of her enmity was a daunting prospect, but what did I have to lose? She’d taken everything from me already. Public exposure and money are drugs that once tasted can never be washed from the body, and I had no intention of living without them if there was any way at all of reconnecting to a supply. It was time to get a little leverage on the situation. Time to see if what Powell had said while he was dying meant anything.

  By the time I came to that decision, though, it was too late to go pick up the Prelude—getting tough would have to wait until tomorrow. Instead, I wandered around the strip long enough to score a selection of pills and some fried chicken. A little while after that, things didn’t seem so immediate.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Four months in storage and the Prelude ran as smooth as ever. It didn’t have the grunt of the Mustang and nobody turned to look, but it beat walking. The sledgehammer I’d bought that evening from a hardware store in Santa Monica thunked about in the trunk as I took corners.

  The streets were quiet once I got through the flats of Beverly Hills and they got quieter still when I hit Peavine Canyon.

  Apricot Avenue was as dead as the other times I’d been there, no people moving about, no cars on the road. I coasted slowly to the end and parked. No light in the house, but that didn’t mean anything. The basement didn’t have windows and if anyone was home tonight that was where they’d be.