“Of course I do.” He took a step closer, lowering the camera and wrapping his arm around her waist. Grayson Gilbert spun Diana Christmas giddily around, the gun hand rising up as she twirled. “Poor old Ray – before this terrible thing happened, he’d only shot two days. Obviously there will be a shutdown now, while the consequences are dealt with – including a soon to be very unhappy Italian investor who made it a condition to have his good chum, Raymond in the film. But, really, there’s too much footage in the can to abandon the whole thing now. We’ll have time to rewrite it and the insurance people will ultimately be fine. Actually, they’ll be delighted: all publicity is good publicity, and your unexpected return would be a coup!”
My head was pounding and I couldn’t help myself. “You’re insane!” I murmured.
“Oh my God!” Diana kissed him, leant in and kissed him full and hungrily on the lips. “That makes me so happy! You’ve made me so happy again, Gray!”
The great director spun the actress once more, the horror movie set relentless around them. Endless noise and flashing lights. That mechanical voice again.
“You’ve won. You’ve won. You’ve won.”
The dizzying twirling stopped and Gilbert lowered her down. “There’s just one thing, my dear, that we need to decide before we go forward.”
“What’s that?”
“Just what are we going to do about young Mr Mallory here?”
They glanced at me as one and then stepped away from each other as if it were a move choreographed on Come Dancing. Suddenly both gun and camera were pointed straight at me.
“You’re both insane!” I yelled, every part of me trembling.
Chapter Nineteen
As they turned to me, their faces were twisted in identical malevolent glares. They regarded me as if already relishing whatever dreadful fate might befall me.
“You’re not being reasonable, Michael.” Her voice trembled just a little, a mix of hurt and disappointment. The gun was fixed steadily on me again. “I thought you loved me. Certainly I think I love you. You’ve made me feel young again. I mean that, Michael. I’ve only known you such a short time, but you have filled me with confidence, brought me to where I needed to be. But don’t you see, I can’t then have you stand in my way. I can’t have you stop me being who I need to be. If you’re going to be like Timmy and all the others, then this can’t go on.”
“Please, Diana!” I was weeping. Everything reflected those lights, the flashing neon bursting back from every corner of that monstrous set, apart from the gun in her hand. The gun remained black, dull and deadly. “I love you, Diana, I really do, but this is crazy!” I couldn’t keep myself from yelling. “There’s a dead body! Raymond Wilder is dead!”
Her gaze shifted to the left, pondering. “Maybe our tale was always meant to be a tragic love story, Michael. I never got to play my Juliet, and perhaps now’s my chance.”
It felt horribly as if my bowels were about to open. My whole life whirred past my eyes. The last few days with Diana were the only ones when I seemed even remotely alive.
Truly and utterly alive – only now she was going to be the death of me.
Gilbert stepped towards me with the camera, seeking a low angle, like he was going to take great pleasure in capturing the moment when I doubled over with a bullet in my stomach.
His tone, though, was mollifying. “Come now, Diana, where’s your gratitude? Mr Mallory brought you here, brought your spark to the fore again – surely you can at least reward him with his life?”
“I’d love to. More than anything I’d love to, but he’s going to call the police!”
“The police will come anyway. I imagine that right this second there are a couple of old soaks wondering where their friend Raymond is with his wallet. Sooner or later his corpse is going to be discovered. Unless, of course, we want to pick it up, smuggle it out, bury it somewhere, come back and scrub these sticky stains from the carpet – and trust me, we don’t – then his body will be found and all kinds of questions are going to be asked.” He stared at me over the viewfinder, making eye contact for the first time. “Tell me, Mr Mallory, how many people have you told of your relationship with the fair and lovely Diana?”
“Nobody!” My voice was full of frightened tears, but I shook my head adamantly.
“Really?” His left eyebrow curled into its own question mark. “You haven’t boasted about your relationship to any cronies? The glamorous film star? The sexy older lady? The Mrs Robinson type?”
“No. I haven’t.”
“You’re an absolute gentleman, Michael.” Even as she pointed the gun at my midriff, she gave me a wide smile which seemed full of genuine warmth and affection.
“I don’t really have any friends in London,” I added.
“I can see that.” Gilbert nodded with condescension. “What about elsewhere? Have you had a chance to send a missive of your news to some similarly bespectacled man who lives on your wavelength?”
“There hasn’t been the chance,” I told him.
He beamed with every line of his face. “So, I think we can agree, Diana, that there really is no pressing need to shoot Mr Mallory. It was unfortunate about our old friend, Ray Wilder, but he had done a great number of terrible things in his life. Mr Mallory, however, is merely a babe. I think we can spare him.”
Slowly Diana lowered the gun to her side and nodded.
“The police are going to know that Mr Mallory was the last person to see Ray Wilder alive. The last person apart from the killer, that is.” He chuckled, finally lowering the camera and standing up straight. “But if they ask him questions and he chooses to relay the truth, then his story is going to sound utterly preposterous. Preposterous to the point of fantasy! Him, having an affair with a beautiful movie star? They’ll think him delusional.
“Granted, Diana, you are most distinctive, so you may have been seen around the studio. But if Mr Mallory should tell his version of the truth and you are questioned, then we’ll just say that you were with me. A reunion of old friends. That Mr Mallory must have glimpsed you and, in his mentally unbalanced way, hallucinated your involvement. That is, of course, if you choose to tell your version of the truth, Mr Mallory.”
The gun stayed at her side, but malice rose to her cheeks. “You wouldn’t betray me, would you, Michael? After everything we’ve been through, you wouldn’t actually betray me?”
“I don’t know!” I told her, wishing I had it in me to tell her what she wanted to hear. “I don’t know what else I can say!”
“And that’s the problem with our scheme,” Gilbert mused. “Even if Mr Mallory commits to fabrication, we don’t know how inventive he will be. How well his story will stand up to any interrogation or cross-examination. Unless, of course, we muddy the waters a little.”
“What do you mean?” Diana and I asked the same question simultaneously, she with a tone of almost academic curiosity.
“One man dead, one man severely injured. Ray was obviously the target, but this young man evidently got in the way. If his injuries are bad enough, he’ll even be able to claim amnesia. He will be the full stop to their investigation. They’ll focus on him, but they won’t be able to get any further than him.”
I took a step back, smacking into an oversized machine which gave a hysterical clown’s laugh the moment I touched it. “You can’t be serious!”
Gilbert reached out and held Diana’s hand, clutching it tight. He stared at me and shook his head a little sadly. “I’m sorry, but it’s for the best.”
“It is,” Diana said quickly. “You said you’d do anything for me, and I really thought you meant it. I pinned my hopes on that, pinned my hopes on you. Please don’t let me down, Michael, please don’t!”
I nearly told her once again that I loved her, used that to plead, but the words were like acid in my throat.
“Romesh,” barked Gilbert. “As quick as you can, give Mr Mallory the old Bangkok Social Club Special, would you?”
&n
bsp; Gilbert’s man barely needed to move. All he had to do was reach out a hand and he had my skull.
Chapter Twenty
Diana and Gilbert walked off hand in hand, as if staging a Hollywood ending at Motspur.
I only got a glimpse of it, before Romesh smashed my face into the glass front of a giant fruit machine. My knees dropped away beneath me, but Romesh grabbed me and stood me up.
His expression was completely blank as he leant me right back against the machine and pummelled my insides. Punch after punch buried themselves ruthlessly in my stomach.
I’d never been in a fight. Never been close to a fight since I was six years old and ran home crying for my mummy. Ever since, I’d made it my business to avoid fights, secretly smug at how good I was at it.
That complacency fell apart as Romesh broke my already broken nose, flattening it over my face. Blood sprayed up and over my eyes.
I wanted to fall, to give in to oblivion. But Romesh kept me standing, slapping my face with fore- and backhand to make sure I was still with him. He didn’t want any of his blows wasted on the comatose.
He was a man doing his job. A job he knew he was exceedingly good at.
I think I may have screamed as my lip tore open. Vomit rose to my throat as I felt it hang loose and fleshy over my chin.
The meagre contents of my stomach spewed from my broken mouth down my front, and were swiftly lost in the flowing blood.
My flesh and bones shuddered as one and I heard from somewhere miles away a long, desperate gasp of breath.
A death rattle.
My body preparing itself for the absolute worst, for the inevitable.
There was no strength left in me at all, and finally gravity was too much for even Romesh to battle. I slipped onto the floor, my body collapsing, him letting it collapse. My face cracked into the hard concrete, the blow barely softened by that carpet. My gaze spun around, taking in all the colours of that deadly amusement arcade as a hateful kaleidoscope.
Gilbert had said I wasn’t going to die, but I so clearly was.
This had to be my death.
And my last sight, glimpsed through battered and half-blind eyes, was Romesh stomping his size 10 boot down onto my face.
The last words I thought I’d ever hear were:
“You’ve won. You’ve won. You’ve won.”
Chapter Twenty-One
I don’t regret going to meet Diana Christmas. I don’t regret falling so eagerly into her bed. In the four months of my convalescence, there were times when I genuinely and truly despised her. When I thought of all she’d said and done, with wonder that I fell for it. It was the most intense week of my life; seven days that turned me inside out and nearly killed me. Still, I didn’t regret that I held Diana Christmas naked in my arms. I’d fallen for her and fallen for her hard, and the sheer strength of that emotion kept its grip tight around me. I might not have wanted it, but she still filled my dreams, both night and day. For good and bad, she was pretty much all I thought about.
Curiously I wasn’t found in the amusement arcade set. Neither was Raymond Wilder’s corpse. After the beating, Romesh must have picked us up and in turn dumped us onto the adjacent fake street. I don’t know why. All I can guess was that Gilbert loved that brightly lit hell so much that he couldn’t bear to have it cluttered by dead or injured men even for a few hours of night.
I suppose there was something fitting about it. Like many a Gilbert Grayson antihero, Ray Wilder ended up face-down and dead on some dingy English cobblestones.
And me? Well, I guess I was supposed to be the poor incidental sap who got to walk away with his life and be grateful for that much.
After six and a half weeks in hospital, where I celebrated (if that’s the correct word) the strangest and most subdued Christmas and New Year of my life, I was allowed to go home. Home, of course, did not mean Stoke Newington. It was my old home – my proper home – in Wickstanley. My mother, who didn’t like London and didn’t like driving, clutched the steering wheel of our cream Ford Anglia until her knuckles were white. She barely said anything the whole agonising trip, her jaw set tight, her gaze never deviating from the road.
It was Mum who set the tone for the next couple of months together. Once again I was her sickly little boy who she had to take care of. And I did my best not to grumble or rail against it. I even acted happy when she brought me a dish of strawberry jelly with a generous sprinkling of hundreds and thousands one evening, smiling like the grateful ten-year-old I’d once been.
Mum had always been an old Mum. She was forty when I was born. My dad had been fifteen years older again. They were both teachers, but whereas Dad was Wickstanley born and bred, Mum had travelled about the country a bit, searching for a place she could properly call home. This included, for a time, teaching in a school in Lewisham, London – a city she had come to despise for its crowds and its dirtiness and its constant air of menace. A city from which, even now, she had failed to save her darling little boy.
The two of them had married late, when each was entering confirmed bachelor and spinster stage. And Mum had me, no doubt, after she’d given up hope of ever having her own children. She doted on me. Behind her flinty, no-nonsense manner there beat such a giant heart. She had so much love within her. I could tell from a young age, just by seeing them together, how much she adored Dad. It never embarrassed me, not once. I always thought it incredibly sweet. Dad’s sudden illness and death decimated her, but at least she still had me. If she could look after me and keep me safe, then all would be well.
When I first saw her at my hospital bedside, her face was so worn with worry as to be a mask of death.
She looked at me in those months afterwards with relief: sheer gratitude that I was all right, prayers of thankfulness offered to a distant God she only half believed in.
And she looked at me with dread. I was quite transparent to Mum, and she knew eventually that I’d go back to London.
That I couldn’t just walk away from it.
I was treated as an outpatient at the local hospital, the one I was born in, and the doctors were happy with my recovery. Slowly I learned to walk again with my pinned-together pelvis, both of my legs now having a slight limp. The combined effect was to give me a new casual, shuffling walk – like I was Peter Falk in Columbo. Good progress was made though. I even started to put some weight back on, which made me look less like a little boy. Although my nose, which was forever going to bend like a hairpin turn, instantly gave away that I’d had some experiences beyond the playground.
After two months, I had enough stamina to get a job as a barman at a local pub. My old schoolmate, Jason, was doing shifts there and put in a good word with the grumpy Scouse landlord. Mum approved. Not that she’d ever have gone into the Marquis of Granby herself (if she was to meet one of her pals for a G&T and a prawn cocktail, it was guaranteed to be the much nicer Wheatsheaf), but she was happy I had a job nearby. It meant I was likely to stay at home for the foreseeable.
I never told her I was only doing the job to earn and save enough money to get back to London.
Occasionally, pamphlets for teacher training courses would appear in the house. Never at locations too far away: places like Bristol, Cardiff or Cheltenham. Mum was clearly thinking I could take my English degree and follow her and Dad’s path. Maybe I could even get a position, as they did, at the local school – turn it into a family concern.
We didn’t talk about it though, at least not immediately, anyway. We didn’t have the conversation because I was a coward and didn’t want to hurt her. As she always did, Mum was thinking about my future, taking care of me.
Meanwhile, I was spending virtually every waking hour fixated on the prodigal movie star, Diana Christmas.
In a fit of pique not long after I got home, I ripped her picture down from the collage of classic movie stars I’d made for my bedroom wall when I was about thirteen. Right then, I couldn’t bear to even look at her. But, as I realised Grayson Gilber
t was making good on his promise to cast her in his new film, I steeled myself to see her face and became a devourer of the tabloid press. Either I brazenly walked into newsagents and read them while standing by the shelves, or I picked up second hand copies at the pub. When she made an appearance, I sullied Mum’s lovely home by bringing in copies of The Sun, The Mirror, The News of the World and The People.
There were fresh photos of her at movie premières, theatre first nights, at gallery openings, at one of Gilbert’s famous parties. Those black and white snaps were accompanied by admiring commentary on how little she had changed since her 1950s heyday, on how she was an ageless beauty of the kind only Britain can produce. There was even talk that some long-dormant romance had been reignited between her and Grayson Gilbert.
Her photo might have gone from my wall, but I stared constantly at the ones which showed up in the newspapers. The two of them arm in arm, his hand clutching her around her waist. One even showed their solemn faces together at Raymond Wilder’s memorial.
“It was such a tragedy,” Diana was quoted as saying. “I hadn’t seen him in years and years, but it still cuts me to the quick to think that he’s gone.”
I stared at those photos, my head stooped and my gaze fixed until my eyes ached with strain. How beautiful she appeared, how happy, how much of a success she now was. While I’d been exiled back to the country, my body rattling like a bag of marbles.
Every day I swore it to myself: Diana Christmas might think she was done with me, but I wasn’t finished with her. She couldn’t just throw me off as if I were nothing.
It was only a matter of time. Time for me to get some money together, to make sure I had my strength fully up.
One night, without us having discussed my plans at all, I came into the kitchen to find Mum gazing into space at the kitchen table. It was late and she was wrapped in her frumpy dressing gown, curlers in her hair, drinking from a mug of hot milk. I stared at her, a little startled, the trails on her cheeks suggesting silent tears had been shed.
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