Star Struck

I drove home, which took less than five minutes even in early rush-hour traffic. I love living so close to the city centre, but the area’s become more dodgy in the last year. I’d have moved if I hadn’t had to commit every spare penny to the business. I’d been the junior partner in Mortensen & Brannigan, and when Bill Mortensen had decided to sell up and move to Australia, I’d thought my career prospects were in the toilet. I couldn’t afford to buy him out but I was damned if some stranger was going to end up with the lion’s share of a business I’d worked so hard to build. It had taken a lot of creative thinking and a shedload of debt to get Brannigan & Co off the ground. Now I had a sleeping partner in the Cayman Islands and a deal to buy out his share of the business piecemeal as and when I could afford it, so it would be a long time before I could consider heading for the southern suburbs where all my sensible friends had moved.

Besides, the domestic arrangements were perfect. My lover Richard, a freelance rock journalist, owned the bungalow next door to mine, linked by a long conservatory that ran along the back of both properties. We had all the advantages of living together and none of the disadvantages. I didn’t have to put up with his mess or his music-business cronies; he didn’t have to deal with my girls’ nights in or my addiction to very long baths.

Richard’s car, a hot-pink Volkswagen Beetle convertible, was in its slot, which, at this time of day, probably meant he was home. There might be other showbiz journos with him, so I played safe and asked Gloria to wait in the car. I was back inside ten minutes, wearing a bottle-green crushed-velvet cocktail dress under a dark-navy dupion-silk matador jacket. OTT for Blackburn, I know, but there hadn’t been a lot of choice. If I didn’t get to the dry cleaner soon, I’d be going to work in my dressing gown.

Gloria lived in Saddleworth, the expensively rural cluster of villages that hugs the edges of the Yorkshire moors on the eastern fringe of Greater Manchester. The hills are still green and rolling there, but on the skyline the dark humps of the moors lower unpleasantly, even on the sunniest of days. This is the wilderness that ate up the bodies of the child victims of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. I can never drive through this brooding landscape without remembering the Moors Murders. Living on the doorstep would give me nightmares. It didn’t seem to bother Gloria. But why would it? It didn’t impinge either on her or on Brenda Barrowclough, and the half-hour drive out to Saddleworth was long enough for me to realize these were the only criteria that mattered to her. I’d heard it said that actors are like children in their unconscious self-absorption. Now I was seeing the proof.

In the December dark, Saddleworth looked like a Christmas card, early fairy lights twinkling against a light dusting of snow. I wished I’d listened to the weather forecast; the roads out here can be closed by drifts when there hasn’t been so much as a flake on my roof. Yet another argument against country living. Gloria directed me down the valley in a gentle spiral to Greenfield. We turned off the main street into a narrow passage between two high walls. I hoped I wouldn’t meet something coming the other way in a hurry. About a hundred yards in, the passage ended in two tall wrought-iron gates. Gloria fumbled with something in her handbag and the gates swung open.

I edged forward slowly, completely gobsmacked. I appeared to have driven into the set of a BBC period drama. I was in a large cobbled courtyard, surrounded on three sides by handsome two-storey buildings in weatherworn gritstone. Even my untrained eye can spot early Industrial Revolution, and this was a prime example. ‘Wow,’ I said.

‘It were built as offices for the mill,’ Gloria said, pointing me towards a pair of double doors in the long left-hand side of the square. ‘Leave the car in front of my garage for now. Then the mill became a cat food factory. Sound familiar?’

‘The factory where you used to work?’

‘Got it in one.’ She opened the car door and I followed her across the courtyard. The door she stopped at was solid oak, the lock a sensible mortise. As we went in, a burglar alarm klaxoned its warning. While Gloria turned it off, I walked across the wide room that ran the whole depth of the building. Through the tall window, I could see light glinting off water. The house backed on to the canal. Suddenly life looked better. This house was about as impregnable as they come. Unless Gloria’s letter writer had the Venetian skill of climbing a ladder from a boat, I was going to be able to sleep in my own bed at night rather than across the threshold of Gloria’s bedroom.

‘It’s beautiful,’ I said.

‘Especially when your living room used to be the cashier’s office where you picked up your wages every week smelling of offal,’ Gloria said ironically.

I turned back to look round the room. Wall uplighters gave a soft glow to burnished beams and the exposed stone of the three outer walls. The furnishings looked like a job lot from John Lewis, all pastel-figured damask and mahogany. The pictures on the wall were big watercolour landscapes of the Yorkshire moorland and the expanse of stripped floorboards was broken up by thick pile Chinese rugs. There was nothing to quarrel with, but nothing that spoke of individual taste, unlike Gloria’s clothes. ‘You live here alone?’ I asked.

‘Thank God,’ she said with feeling, opening a walk-in cupboard and hanging up her coat.

‘Anyone else have keys?’

‘Only my daughter.’ Gloria emerged and pointed to a door in the far wall. ‘The kitchen’s through there. There’s a freezer full of ready meals. Do you want to grab a couple and stick them in the microwave while I’m getting changed?’ Without waiting for an answer, she started up the open-plan staircase that climbed to the upper floor.

The kitchen was almost as big as the living room. One end was laid out as a dining area, with a long refectory table and a collection of unmatched antique farm kitchen chairs complete with patchwork cushions. The other end was an efficiently arranged working kitchen, dominated by an enormous freestanding fridge-freezer. The freezer was stacked from top to bottom with meals from Marks and Spencer. Maybe country living could be tolerable after all, I thought. All you needed to get through the winter was a big enough freezer and an endless supply of computer games. I chose a couple of pasta dishes and followed the instructions on the pack. By the time they were thawed and reheated, Gloria was back, dressed for action in a shocking-pink swirl of sequins. All it needed was the Brenda Barrowclough beehive to define camp kitsch better than any drag queen could have.

‘Amazing,’ I said faintly, scooping chicken and pasta into bowls.

‘Bloody awful, you mean,’ Gloria said, sitting down in a flounce of candyfloss. ‘But the punters are paying for Brenda, not me.’ She attacked her pasta like an extra from Oliver Twist. She finished while I was barely halfway through. ‘Right,’ she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘I’ll be five minutes putting on me slap and the wig. The dishwasher’s under the sink.’

With anyone else, I’d have started to resent being ordered around. But I was beginning to get the hang of Gloria. She wasn’t bossy as such. She was just supremely organized and blissfully convinced that her way was the best way. Life would inevitably be smoother for those around her who recognized this and went along with it unquestioningly. For now, I was prepared to settle for the quiet life. Later, it might be different, but I’d deal with that when later rolled round. Meanwhile, I loaded the dishwasher then went outside and started the car.

The drive to Blackburn was the last sane part of the evening. Gloria handed me a faxed set of directions then demanded that I didn’t mither her with problems so she could get her head straight. I loaded an appropriate CD into the car stereo and drove to the ambient chill of Dreamfish while she reclined her seat and closed her eyes. I pulled up outside the pub three-quarters of an hour later, ten minutes before she was due to sparkle. She opened her eyes, groaned softly and said, ‘It’s a bit repetitive, that music. Have you got no Frank Sinatra?’ I tried to disguise my sense of impending doom. I failed. Gloria roared with raucous laughter and said, ‘I were only winding you up. I can’t bloody stand Sinatra. Typical man, I did it my own bloody-minded way. This modern stuff’s much better.’

I left Gloria in the car while I did a brief reconnaissance of the venue. I had this vague notion of trying to spot any suspicious characters. I had more chance of hitting the Sahara on a wet Wednesday. Inside the pub, it was mayhem on a leash. Lads with bad haircuts and football shirts jostled giggling groups of girls dressed in what the high-street chain stores had persuaded them was fashion. Mostly they looked like they’d had a collision with their mothers’ cast-offs from the seventies. I couldn’t think of another reason for wearing Crimplene. The Lightning Seeds were revealing that football was coming home at a volume that made my fillings hurt. Provincial didn’t begin to describe it. It was so different from the city-centre scene I began to wonder if we could have slipped through a black hole and ended up in the Andromeda galaxy. What a waste of a good frock.

The special opening night offer of two drinks for the price of one had already scored a clutch of casualties and the rest of the partygoers looked like they were hellbent on the same fate. I ducked back out and collected Gloria. ‘I’ll try to stay as close to you as I can,’ I told her. ‘It’s a madhouse in there.’

She paused on the threshold, took a swift look round the room and said, ‘You’ve obviously led a very sheltered life.’ As she spoke, someone spotted her. The cry rippled across the room and within seconds the youth of Blackburn were cheering and bellowing a ragged chorus of the theme song from Northerners. And then we were plunged into the throbbing embrace of the crowd.

I gave up trying to keep Gloria from the assassin’s knife after about twenty seconds when I realized that if I came between her and her public, I was the more likely candidate for a stiletto in the ribs. I wriggled backwards through the crowd and found a vantage point on the raised dais where the DJ was looking as cool as any man can who works for the local building society during the day. I was scanning the crowd automatically, looking for behaviour that didn’t fit in. Easier said than done, given the level of drunken revelry around me. But from what I could see of the people crammed into the Frog and Scrannage, the natives were definitely friendly, at least as far as Gloria/Brenda was concerned.

I watched my client, impressed with her energy and her professionalism. She crossed the room slower than a stoned three-toed sloth, with a word and an autograph for everyone who managed to squeeze alongside. She didn’t even seem to be sweating, the only cool person in the biggest sauna in the North West. When she finally made it to the dais, there was no shortage of hands to help her up. She turned momentarily and swiftly handed the DJ a cassette tape. ‘Any time you like, chuck. Just let it run.’

The lad slotted it into his music deck and the opening bars of the Northerners theme crashed out over the PA, the audience swaying along. The music faded down and Gloria went straight into what was clearly a well-polished routine. Half a dozen jokes with a local spin, a clutch of anecdotes about her fellow cast members then, right on cue, the music swelled up under her and she belted out a segued medley of ‘I Will Survive’, ‘No More Tears’, ‘Roll With It’ and ‘No Regrets’.

You had to be there.

The crowd was baying for more. They got it. ‘The Power of Love’ blasted our eardrums into the middle of next week. Then we were out of there. The car park was so cold and quiet I’d have been tempted to linger if I hadn’t had the client to consider. Instead I ran to the car and brought it round to the doorway, where she was signing the last few autographs. ‘Keep watching the show,’ she urged them as she climbed into the car.

As soon as we were out of the car park, she pulled off the wig with a noisy sigh. ‘What did you think?’

‘Anybody who seriously wanted to damage you could easily get close enough. Getting away might be harder,’ I said, half my attention on negotiating a brutal one-way system that could commit us to Chorley or Preston or some other fate worse than death if I didn’t keep my wits about me.

‘No, not that,’ Gloria said impatiently. ‘Never mind that. How was I? Did they love it?’

It was gone midnight by the time I’d deposited Gloria behind bolted doors and locked gates and driven back through the empty impoverished streets of the city’s eastern fringes. Nothing much was moving except the litter in the wind. I felt a faint nagging throb in my sinuses, thanks to the assault of cigarette smoke, loud music and flashing lights I’d endured in the pub. I’d recently turned thirty; maybe some fundamental alteration had happened in my brain which meant my body could no longer tolerate all the things that spelled ‘a good night out’ to the denizens of Blackburn’s latest fun pub. Perhaps there were hidden benefits in aging after all.

I yawned as I turned out of the council estate into the enclave of private housing where I occasionally manage a full night’s sleep. Tonight wouldn’t be one; Gloria had to be at the studios by nine thirty, so she wanted me at her place by eight thirty. I’d gritted my teeth, thought about the hourly rate and smiled.

I staggered up the path, slithering slightly on the frosted cobbles, already imagining the sensuous bliss of slipping under a winter-weight feather-and-down duvet. As soon as I opened the door, the dream shattered. Even from the hallway I could see the glow of light from the conservatory. I could hear moody saxophone music and the mutter of voices. That they were in the conservatory rather than Richard’s living room meant that whoever he was talking to was there for me.

My bag slid to the floor as my shoulders drooped. I walked through to the living room and took in the scene through the patio doors. Beer bottles, a plume of smoke from a joint, two male bodies sprawled across the wicker.

Just what I’d always wanted at the end of a working day. A pair of criminals in the conservatory.

3 (#u4e10d156-d23f-5259-8f0f-2c7aec8ac5d0)

VENUS SQUARES NEPTUNE

This is a tense aspect that produces strain in affairs of the heart because she has a higher expectation of love and comradeship than her world provides. She has a strong determination to beat the odds stacked against her.

From Written in the Stars, by Dorothea Dawson

It’s not every night you feel like you need a Visiting Order to enter your own conservatory. That night I definitely wanted reinforcements before I could face the music or the men. A quick trip to the kitchen and I was equipped with a sweating tumbler of ice-cold pepper-flavoured Absolut topped up with pink grapefruit juice. I took a deep draught and headed for whatever Dennis and Richard had to throw at me.

When I say the conservatory was full of criminals, I was only slightly exaggerating. Although Richard’s insistence on the need for marijuana before creativity can be achieved means he cheerfully breaks the law every day, he’s got no criminal convictions. Being a journalist, he doesn’t have any other kind either.

Dennis is a different animal. He’s a career criminal but, paradoxically, I trust him more than almost anyone. I always know where I am with Dennis; his morality might not be constructed along traditional lines, but it’s more rigid than the law of gravity, and a hell of a lot more forgiving. He used to be a professional burglar; not the sort who breaks into people’s houses to steal the video and rummage through the lingerie, but the sort who relieves the very rich of some of their ill-gotten and well-insured gains. Some of his victims had so many expensive status symbols lying around that they didn’t even realize they’d been burgled. These days, he’s more or less given up robbing anyone except other villains who’ve got too much pride to complain to the law. That’s because, after his last enforced spell of taking care of business from behind high walls with no office equipment except a phone card, his wife told him she’d divorce him if he ever did anything else that carried a custodial sentence.

I’ve known Dennis even longer than I’ve known Richard. He’s my Thai-boxing coach, and he taught me the basic principle of self-defence for someone as little as I am–one crippling kick to the kneecap or the balls, then run like hell. It’s saved my life more than once, which is another good reason why Dennis will always be welcome in my house. Well, almost always.

I leaned against the doorjamb and scowled. ‘I thought you didn’t do drugs,’ I said mildly to Dennis.

‘You know I don’t,’ he said. ‘Who’s been telling porkies about me?’

‘Nobody. I was referring to the atmosphere in here,’ I said, wafting my hand in front of my face as I crossed the room to give Dennis a kiss on a cheek so smooth he must have shaved before he came out for the evening. ‘Breathe and you’re stoned. Not to mention cutting your life expectancy by half.’

‘Nice to see you too, Brannigan,’ my beloved said as I pushed the evening paper to one side and dropped on to the sofa next to him.

‘So what are you two boys plotting?’

Dennis grinned like Wile E. Coyote. My heart sank. I was well past a convincing impersonation of the Road Runner. ‘Wanted to pick your brains,’ he said.