Not Without You

I say, embarrassed, ‘Or … whatever. Of course. So, anything else?’

She hesitates. ‘In fact … there’s two more things. I need to talk to you.’

‘What’s up?’

‘I’ll – no, I’ll ask you about it later.’

I put my elbows on the table. ‘I might be out later, I don’t know. Talk to me now.’

Tina puts her BlackBerry in her back pocket and twists her long, slim fingers together. ‘I need to have some time off. It’s not in my contract. You can – um, I’m gonna need two months.’

‘Two months? Why?’

She flushes and looks furiously at her hands. ‘I – medical reasons.’

I follow her gaze. She bites her nails; it’s the first time I’ve noticed. ‘Are you OK, Tina?’

‘Sure. I’m fine.’ She stares at me defiantly, her dark eyes flashing. I realise she’s quite beautiful; like the nails, I never noticed before. She always looks so downbeat, and those terrible lips … Suddenly it makes sense.

‘Are you having your lips done?’ I ask, and immediately wish I hadn’t. Tina is an unknown quantity. She worked for Byron Bay, the big action star, for several years before me and I think he was such a basket case she wanted a change. She’s been here for three years, but apart from the fact that she has a mom in Vegas and she once got an infected finger from a cactus prick, I know nothing about her. I’ve asked, believe me. I’m nosy, and a little bit lonely, plus there’s something about her I really like. She’s kind of loopy, but cool. But there’s some stuff you just shouldn’t ask. I’ve lost a level of appropriateness, living in my bubble.

‘I’d rather not say,’ Tina tells me firmly.

‘I’m sorry. Tina, I shouldn’t have asked.’ A wash of mortification floods over me. ‘It’s none of my business. Two months is fine – I guess we’ll have to find someone to cover you, and—’

‘I’ve already spoken to Kerry at WAM about it,’ she says. ‘In preparation. She’s talking to Artie and Tommy and I’ve contacted the agency who covered me last time. You liked that girl Janelle, didn’t you?’

‘Sure … sure …’ I’m looking at her now, wishing there was something else I could say, some way to cross the gulf between us. ‘She wasn’t as good as you, of course not, but – thanks, so …’ I sound so over-keen, it’s tragic. It’s like a scene from He’s Just Not That Into You.

‘I’ll leave you now.’ She takes a big breath and her pink tongue runs over her swollen lips. ‘Um, hey. Just one more thing. Deena’s arrived.’

My mind is still turning over the conversation, and it takes a moment before I catch up. ‘What?’

‘I warned you earlier, Sophie …’ Tina looks like she’s about to burst into tears. I wave my hand at her.

‘I know, I know. Don’t worry. Oh, jeez. Where is she?’

‘In the guest house. Unpacking. Her pickup is in the garage.’

‘She has a pickup truck?’

Tina gives the slightest suggestion of a smile. ‘It’s got three pairs of mannequin legs in the back.’

With anyone else this would be strange, not Deena. I give a small groan. ‘Listen, can you go across to the guest house and take out the laptop and the projector? Just in case.’

‘Sure,’ says Tina. ‘I’ll – leave you then.’

She closes the door and I stare at the pile of scripts but my eyes dart towards the window, in case Deena’s peering in, watching. My ghoulish godmother is here. When Mum was in London in the seventies, during her brief bid for fame as an actress, Deena was her best friend. They did everything together. Deena was always the star; my mother was dazzled by her, and still is. In the early eighties Deena moved to LA for a part in a TV soap and for a while she was doing well – Mum could boast to people she met in Woolworth’s that she knew someone in Laurel Canyon, and that she might have a guest role in next season’s Dynasty – but then she turned thirty-five and it all sort of petered out, like it does for hundreds of women here every year.

But I don’t trust her and I don’t think she’s a good influence, either. Mum behaves like a Bunny Girl when they’re together, wiggling and giggling and batting her eyelashes at everyone, and telling anyone who’ll listen that they used to ‘rule London in the seventies’. Those were her glory days, she’s always telling me. They can’t have been that glorious though. I mean, she ended up moving to the middle of nowhere and becoming the wife of a man who runs garages in the Gloucester area.

Still, Deena’s my godmother. I can’t let her sleep on the streets, can I, but I wish she wasn’t here. My shoulders slump childishly as Tina shuts the door, and I’m left alone gazing around my office at the markers of my career: the MTV movie award for Best Kiss, the magazine covers with my face on, the poster for A Cake-Shaped Mistake from Italy that looks a bloody piece of human tissue and not a wedding cake. I pull out the box of scripts, open page one of Love Me, Love My Pooch, and start to read.

CHAPTER FIVE

HALF AN HOUR later I put Love Me, Love My Pooch down and gaze around the room. I wish I had a cigarette. Or a gun. I pick some gum out of a drawer and chew three sticks in one go. Love Me, Love My Pooch is shit. Perhaps I’ve been blind all these years, just happily saying what people told me to say, but this is a new low. Sample extract:

Int. House.

SEAN IS TALKING ON THE PHONE.

SEAN (chuckling into phone):

Yeah, she’s a bitch. And those puppies of hers … man, they are cute!

MEGAN IS COMING IN FROM OUTSIDE. SHE HEARS SEAN TALKING. SHE IS DISGUSTED.

MEGAN (in hallway, standing holding mittens in hand, mouth wide open):

What kind of man am I dating! A man who calls women bitches and talks about their puppies?

SHE WALKS INTO THE KITCHEN AND TAKES HER COAT OFF. SHE BENDS OVER SEAN.

MEGAN:

I hate you, Sean Flynn! Get out of my life! You’ll never see these puppies again!

SHE SQUEEZES HER BREASTS IN HIS FACE AND LEAVES.

I keep thinking, Oh, no, this is so bad, there’ll be some pay-off, it’s setting itself up for a secondary joke, it’s not totally this one-note and crass and shit. But I’m wrong. This is the movie Artie thinks is going to take me ‘Sandy–Jen big’. Well, if Cameron and Carey Mulligan really are dying to do it, which I doubt, they’re welcome to it. No way. No freaking WAY.

Carmen brings me my lunch in the end and I spend the afternoon going methodically through the rest of the pile. Boy Meets Girl is about a boy who meets a girl. Yep, you guessed it. She seems really sweet at first but then turns out to have a wedding album full of pictures of dresses she wants, and flower arrangements, so by accident he sleeps with a stripper. From Russia with Lust is an American Pie style frat-comedy: a cute local prosecutor marries a girl he has a whirlwind romance with and she turns out to be a Russian prostitute! Pat Me Down is about a waitress who falls in love with a bodyguard after he strip-searches her at a nightclub and she takes secret stripping classes as a fun thing to do with all her girlfriends! Because being a stripper is every little girl’s dream, isn’t it? Then there’s Bride Wars 2 – seriously, who thought that was a good idea? Did they not see Bride Wars?

Not one of these girls has anything to say about anything other than boys, weddings, clothes and shoes. I mean, I like all those things, but is that all there is?

I scuff at the carpet and my toes kick something by accident. It’s the Eve Noel biography which has slid out of my bag. I frown as I remember Artie’s reaction. I know when Artie’s playing me, and most of the time I just go along with it, because I trust him and I want an easy life. But I want to make that film about her. Or rather, I want to find out what happened to her.

I Google her again – “Eve Noel where is she now”, “Eve Noel disappearance”, “Eve Noel living in England” – but I get the same results I always do whenever I cunningly use my wiles to track her down, i.e. Google her. The same old stuff. A review of the biography, which in itself doesn’t have any answers, it’s really just a retelling of what we know anyway, but even so it’s a good story. The only actual hard facts it has are that all her residuals and any monies from films are paid into a bank account by her agents in London, and they have no contact details for her, or none that they’ll say. An article in the Sunday Telegraph last year about her films, which tails off at the end and asserts, kind of limply, ‘She now lives anonymously out of the spotlight’ – yeah, thanks, crappy journalist, good one. An advertisement for a British Film Institute retrospective which says, ‘It is a mystery that Eve Noel’s whereabouts are not a greater mystery. One of the UK’s most successful and talented post-war stars, she must surely know some of the esteem in which she is now held. Yet she chooses, for whatever reasons, to remain out of the public eye. A salutary lesson for many of today’s young actresses.’ The rest of the results are stupid blog references or DVDs on eBay or people talking in discussion threads about her. The Internet is useless when you actually need to find something important. Perhaps she’s dead? Her husband’s dead, but she must have had some family? Well, maybe I should actually do some proper research. Like, call her agency and get them to give me her address. I bet they have it. I email Tina.

Can you track down Eve Noel’s British agents and say I’m interested in talking to her?

Won’t work but can do no harm, I reason, and I go back to my pile, flicking through to find something I might vaguely like. I’m relieved when I get to the bottom and see My Second-Best Bed, the Shakespeare script which I’d sort of been subconsciously hoping would be something special. As I start to read it I’m practically crossing my fingers.

And it’s no good which somehow makes me angrier than ever, because out of all of these scripts this one could be great. The girl working at Anne Hathaway’s house is OK, actually quite cool. She’s a nice character, a bit chippy, funny. Even the bits in the past aren’t too wacky, to start with – she hits her head on a low beam and passes out, and when she wakes up she’s the younger Anne Hathaway meeting Shakespeare and it almost works because you don’t know if it’s a dream or not. But then she and Shakespeare and Elizabeth I – yes, she suddenly turns up – go on a treasure hunt to find this key to take her back to the modern day, and it turns into a weirdly crappy sort of trawl through history. All these historical figures keep appearing, like Jane Austen and Lord Nelson and the ones they didn’t use in Bill & Ted, and it’s ridiculous. In the end you sort of wonder if it’s a piss-take.

It annoys me, because like I say it could be really good. Some of the scenes have a special sharp, cool charm, and I want to keep reading, no matter how ridiculous it gets. It’d be easy to whip into shape – if I had my own production company or some people on my side I’d get them to work with the girl who wrote it. But I don’t and I can’t take it back to Artie; it needs to be straight out of the ballpark good, this one.

Idly I look at the title page, wondering if there’s an email address for the writer or her agent.