by Mark Dawson
VINTAGE DAHLIAS
Home.
I take off my coat and switch on the radiators. I turn the knob: nothing happens. Perplexed - and fearing the worst - I check the boiler. Freezing cold. I scrabble through the post on the floor of the hallway until I find a letter I vaguely remember from the gas company. I rip it open. The letter is a final, final, final warning: unless I pay my outstanding account within two days my supply will be disconnected.
The letter is two weeks old.
Great. London’s in the middle of the coldest December for years and I haven’t got any heating.
Nelson is curled up on the sofa. I scratch his head and he wiggles his ears. I wander over to the shelf next to the stereo and run my finger along the spines of the records in my vinyl collection. I take out the Dahlias’ first record, and reverently remove the vinyl from its dust jacket. A mint pressing like this is probably worth £100 to the right collector - not that I’ve got any interest in selling. I lay the disc on the platter and lower the stylus. There’s a moment of scratchy static as the needle slides into the grooves, and then the sound of the Dahlias from their disposable electro-pop period - still darker than any of their New Romantic contemporaries - fills the room. I turn over the sleeve and look at the shot of the group on the back: four flamboyant dandies, Brian even sporting a feather boa around his neck, together with black nail varnish and lipstick. But there’s no getting away from it - even their early stuff is good.
NEWS OF AN ENGAGEMENT
I potter around, but in no time I’m restless. I try to find a comfortable spot next to Nelson with no luck. I squirm this way and that, then wander around the lounge, trying to keep warm. My mind is buzzing. Plus I can smell Hannah’s perfume. It must have sunk down into the fabric of the room.
It’s freezing cold. I’m wearing two jumpers and three pairs of socks. My breath steams the air in front of me.
Maybe I should harness this energy. Clean the flat.
Clear away this rubbish, treat it as a personal metaphor for a fresh start. The half-life for this idea occupies a nano-nano-second. I start pacing again, imagining a cool breeze flowing through chemically seared nostrils; the tang of alcohol on the back of my throat.
No, I won’t give in so easily. I switch on the TV and mute the sound. At least the electricity is back on again. The usual early-evening fare: a soap, regional news programmes, a cartoon. I flick over to a channel running a showbiz gossip programme.
This is more like it.
I watch a segment on the failed love life of some B-List Hollywood actress and then another with the royal family riding horses across a bleak moor. I’m already feeling more like myself, observing all this wonderful celebrity misery.
The show segues into the next segment: twenty-second snippets of hearsay and scandal packed together in an MTV-style montage. One snippet is shot outside a cinema on Leicester Square. The event seems to be a premiere.
I don’t recognize Hannah’s face immediately - not until she turns to smile into the camera.
Without taking an eye off the screen, I fumble for the remote, unmute the sound and set the video to instant record.
She’s wearing a full length cocktail dress made from a reflective silver material that glitters in the flashbulb explosions. It looks expensive. I don’t remember her owning anything like it and I’ve memorized every outfit she ever wore with me, even the sloppy jumper and comfort socks from lazy Sundays staying in. She gives the photographers a spin to demonstrate that the dress is backless. This exposes a long stretch of nut-coloured skin. She was never this tanned, this healthy, when she was with me. And it is obviously not of the bottled variety, either. I wonder where she could have been to get a colour like that.
‘Hannah,’ says the interviewer, off-screen. ‘What’s it feel like to finally be engaged?’
Engaged?
What?
‘Wonderful,’ Hannah says. ‘Just wonderful.’
My jaw is on the carpet.
‘Could we get a word with the lucky guy?’
Engaged? As in engaged to be married?
Hannah tugs at the arm of a figure standing just out of shot. As he allows himself to be pulled closer to her, I see the arm belongs to Vincent Haines. He’s wearing an expensive dinner jacket.
‘Vincent, tell them how you proposed to me,’ Hannah says.
He fakes bashfulness. She playfully chides him. He gives in.
‘I got down on the knee and took out the ring. I don’t usually make a mess of my lines, but I’ve never corpsed like that before…’
His wooden delivery reveals that this is entirely scripted.
The segment ends with a close-up of Hannah’s left hand: a new ring with an enormous diamond is on her finger.
I rewind the tape and play it back.
The ring with the enormous diamond is still there.
I rewind it again.
Still there.
I play it again.
I don’t want to think about what I’ve just heard.
I mute the sound and hit PLAY.
By using the video’s shuttle pause function I manage to halt the frame so Hannah is caught looking straight into the lens, out into the living room. Despite the dress, the neon background and the handsome actor onto whose arm she is clinging, the footage reminds me of the photo I keep on top of the television. An autumnal scene. Reds and golds and yellows. Hannah’s smile all for myself behind the camera.
There’s a moment during the segment, before she is accosted by the interviewer, when Hannah is wearing an aloof, cool expression. As soon as the paparazzi make their demands, flashes popping, her face lights up magically, a real pro. By jogging backwards and forwards between these two points I can make her smile on demand at the push of a button.
This doesn’t make me feel any better.
LONDON, ‘06
We met because of work. White Hunter was acting for the writer of a television soap opera. I’d been at the office for a few months but I was still wet behind the ears when it came to media law, and I was given clients of little or no consequence. The firm considered this purveyor of low-brow entertainment a suitable stone upon which I could whet my legal blade. He’d been offered a modest deal with a production company intending to film the script he’d been working on for years; an offbeat comedy, he said, although I couldn’t find the laughs in it. I remember him vividly, a little red-faced man who looked like Stephen Fry if Stephen Fry was five foot three, fat and bald. He clutched the contract close to his breast as he left the office, as if worried that a gust of wind might snatch it away and rob him of his colourful future. With the benefit of hindsight, he really needn’t have been so concerned. His labour of love was savaged by the critics and he went back to the soaps, tail between his legs, lit-cred in tatters. His descent was obviously complete when I noticed his name in the credits for Skin Trade. He’d sunk as low as you can go.
Hannah had just graduated from the Old Vic in Bristol and was temping in the reprographics department of a firm of London accountants. She was earning barely enough to support herself between auditions, appearing in an amateur production of The Iliad during the evenings but holding out for proper television work. TV was the way to the prizes - intellectual satisfaction and material reward - that acting had to offer.
I noticed her at an audition for a part in my client’s film. I’d headed down to the theatre at the NFT which he’d rented for the auditions, to have him sign his copy of the contract. It was a sunny day and I was happy as a sandboy, not only would I take the bus back to the office and claim the expenses for a taxi, but I’d take my time doing it and enjoy the weather. A stroll along the river, a pint at one of the riverside pubs, watching the cruisers and barges working the water.
Hannah was up for a minor part in the film but quickly decided the material was below her. She gave a perfunctory reading and left. Even to this day I’m not sure where I got the bottle to approach her. She seemed so far out of my league, the only
possible response to my advance was rejection. She was artistic, quietly intelligent and with a brooding beauty, a dark gloss. Twenty years old and beautiful. In short: a heartbreaker.
I caught her up outside the theatre, scrunching her red hair up beneath a kelly green New York Jets cap. She’d dumped the balled-up script into an overflowing rubbish bin.
‘I didn’t like it either,’ was the first thing I ever said to her.
I was surprised when we started talking, not cramped by the usual awkwardness of strangers, then shocked when she gave me her number after we had shared a coffee and a Danish at the NFT’s cafe under Waterloo Bridge, and stupefied when she agreed to meet me for a date.
That first date: I cowered in the darkness of a theatre, gaping at her on the stage as I waited for her to finish a performance. She looked so beautiful and aloof that I felt hopelessly out of my depth and almost walked out. I screwed up my courage and took her to a branch of a ubiquitous pizza and pasta chain. That first date led to another, and then another. Within a month, we were together, and before I knew it she had moved in.
The relationship was low-maintenance; it suited us both. We’d spend the evenings at home doing little except enjoying each other’s company. I was saving up for a bigger place and so we lived frugally, enjoying a simple bucolic existence. She read voraciously, devouring print, and stirred in me an appetite for art that had long lain dormant. She provided the books that had changed her life, and I read them all: Nostromo, Brighton Rock, Howards End, Ulysses. We went to exhibitions together and joined the Tate, things I’d never have done without her, but now things I can’t imagine being without.
We huddled together in the smoky darkness of the NFT and watched black and white movies by Chabrol and Zeffirelli. My shelves were soon stocked with her long rows of books: slim tan volumes for her favourite plays by Shakespeare, Wilde and Stoppard, doorstop anthologies for Wordsworth and Tennyson. And all the pulpy ephemera: remaindered paperbacks she picked up from the bookshops on the Charing Cross Road but never read. She just liked to have books, she said. She liked to fill the house with the smell of slowly yellowing pages.
BIRMINGHAM, ‘90
She was two years my junior, although you’d never have guessed it. Her maturity was forced onto her by a difficult childhood. Her father flew the nest when she was five. He moved to another city and set up another family. To him, families were like franchises, a new one in every town. She never saw him again, which seemed to suit her well. He sent scribbled cards for birthdays and Christmas for a few years after his departure, but he eventually tired of even that small chore.
Her mother was an alcoholic who spent her days marooned in an armchair in front of the television, hypnotized and docile, drinking Bacardi and Pernod straight from the bottle. Their relationship was inverted; more often than not it was the infant Hannah who put her slaughtered mother to bed. There were no siblings to share the burden. Other men came and went, surrogates who were amorous or abusive to both mother and child. She had to grow up fast, and did. One such boyfriend threw her down the stairs when she confronted him for beating her mother. Another thought it amusing to hold her by her ankles from the communal balcony, her dress around her ears, looking down at the cracked flagstones of the car park seven storeys below. My modest middle-class upbringing seemed cosseted by comparison. I was impressed with her gritty determination to escape her roots, but I could never properly empathize with it.
There was a period when her mother called her every day, drunk and sobbing. Whenever I thought of Hannah’s clipped responses to unheard maternal supplications as cruel and icy, I pictured her aged seven or eight or nine - dutifully flicking off the lights in their scabby council flat and sliding the bolt on the thin front door - and reprimanded myself for passing a judgment I was not qualified to make.
LONDON, ‘07
These glacial moments were rare, fortunately. I was deliriously happy during those first months, while I waited for the gleam of passion to fade, as it always does, to be replaced by comfortable familiarity, security by routine, relationship by rote. It never did. During the flush of that early enthusiasm, I had found myself working long hours, and often stayed at Hannah’s Holborn bedsit, closer to the office than my place in the suburbs. There would always be a plate of food in the fridge waiting to be heated, and sometimes a warm bath unwinding coils of steam onto the moist ceiling. I’d stare at the shape her supine body made under the duvet, and stroke the fan of hair that spread around her head like a russet crown.
I observed her career unfold with a mixture of pride and dread.
Pride: as her resume filled out with increasingly impressive parts, chiefly on stage, with occasional forays into television drama. She quickly moved from amateur dramatics to fringe theatre, and then found a role as Rosalind in As You Like It, in a well-reviewed production.
Dread: as her career took off, it took her further from me. She landed roles with repertory companies across the capital. Then minor parts in the West End. She played a whimsical Gertrude in Wilde’s An Ideal Husband - one of her favourites - then Abigail Williams in The Crucible. Her star was in the ascendant. She soon played a shoplifter in an episode of The Bill, and then had a semi-frequent part as a barmaid in a long-running soap opera.
She started to return from the theatre later than I got home and rose just as I was leaving for the morning tube. The margins of our free time overlapped less and less. She’d bring me a sandwich for lunch and we’d eat together in Soho Square, outside the office, tossing crumbs to the pigeons. She was happier than I could remember; she could see a destination emerging from the mist of her uncertainty, and she was determined to strive harder and harder to bring it nearer. I accepted that sacrifices would be necessary. I knew that trying to constrain her ambition would be folly: do that and I’d lose her. So I basked in the reflected glow of her excitement and encouraged her as best I could.
LONDON, HERE AND NOW
A while ago, at home, as I was filtering a stack of papers sent by Davey for Brian’s defence, she started crying. I asked if everything was all right and she said that it was. Just nervous about her upcoming performance as Cordelia in King Lear. Skin Trade was doing well and there was talk of a role in EastEnders. Of course she was nervous.
When I got home the next day the flat was empty.
And not empty as in simply empty of her. It was as if a magician had chosen to erase all proof that I’d ever shared the place with her. Apart from the miscellany I tearfully packed into boxes, everything was gone: her clothes, her plants, her books - all gone. She’d even cleaned the place before leaving; penance, maybe, and the last time either duster or hoover were exercised properly within the place.
Just Nelson and a note: The cat always liked you more than me.
I called her mother and endured a drunken rambling for ten minutes before I could extricate myself. She didn’t know where her daughter was. I looked for Hannah’s address book, but of course it was gone. I thought about wandering the restaurants and pubs she liked. Crazy of me. I had insane thoughts: a murderer with an obsessive-compulsive disorder had broken in, done away with her, then neatly tidied up after himself. Or that this was all an elaborate joke and she would appear, mischievously grinning, after a suitable pause.
I couldn’t sleep. Feverish thoughts sprouted into my mind like weeds pushing through the gaps in paving stones.
Two days later she called me. She sounded distant, flat-voiced.
‘Where are you?’ I demanded.
‘That doesn’t matter.’
‘I’ve been worried sick.’
‘I’m so sorry, Daniel, I’m leaving you. I’m sorry.’
‘What?’
‘I’m so sorry.’
I paused for a moment to let this information seep in. ‘Who is he?’
‘That’s not important.’
‘What do you mean it’s not important?’
‘This is about us. I just wanted to tell you I’m not coming back. An
d that I’m sorry if I’ve upset you. I just want this to be as painless as possible.’
‘Painless? That’s easy for you to say. Off fucking your new boyfriend with me left alone in our flat. The one we bought together.’
‘Don’t be melodramatic.’
‘That’s rich coming from you.’
‘The flat’ll have to be sold. I think you should put it on the market as soon as you can. I don’t see any reason to wait.’
‘Hannah…’
‘I’ll be around to pick up my things in a couple of days.’
‘They’ll be in the yard. Can’t promise they’ll be in one piece, though.’
‘Don’t be like that.’
She left a sad pause and I could hear her breathing, across the crackling line. The same breathing that I used to listen to hushing in and out as I fell asleep.
‘Why? What did I do?’
She sounded tired. ‘Nothing. You didn’t do anything.’
‘So why aren’t you here?’
‘It’s a long story, Daniel. I’ll explain later. I’ll call you. Goodbye.’
Then she hung up. And that was that. And she never did call again.
TIME FOR A DISTRACTION
My mind is made up. I know exactly what I want to do. I switch off the television, take my coat and head for the tube.
ON THE TOWN
Attica is busy when I arrive. Bored paparazzi quaff cups of black coffee outside the door, juicing themselves up in case the celebs inside stagger out drunk and foolish. Bono and The Edge leave as I’m being frisked by security; they pause on the stoop for an impromptu, impassive photocall. Bono is wearing shades, as usual. As I watch the flashes catch in the lenses, I realize, with a flash of insight, that a celebrity is someone who works hard his whole life to get noticed, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.