Lovers and Liars Trilogy (167 page)

The two weeks were active ones. During them, she discovered something unpleasant: she began to realize just how much she missed her son, and how much she missed the daily tussle of wills provided in the past by the presence of her difficult mother. She missed Gini and her husband Pascal; other friends, and one in particular, were also away from London during this period, and Lindsay, returning to her familiar apartment after work, realized with a sense of panic that these much-loved rooms could feel lonely, not only on Sundays, but on weekday evenings as well.

So, when it finally came to Hallowe’en, and the last day of her spiritual antibiotic course, Lindsay weakened. Invitations to Lulu’s parties, she had heard, were much in demand. Lulu was
famous
for her parties. Lindsay, a social cynic, placed little faith in such claims, or in parties. On the evening in question, however, she discovered she had decided to go after all; a mysterious process. In the shower, she was still undecided; wrapped in a towel five minutes later, her mind was made up.

She threw on a red partyish dress, hated it, pulled it off, kicked it across the room and donned a black one. She screwed into place the prettiest ear-rings she possessed, which had been given to her by Gini as a parting gift: two teardrops of pale jade which seemed to have been imbued with an animation of their own, so that they shimmered or trembled before she made the least gesture or the slightest turn of her head.

She ran up and down stairs in stockinged feet as darkness fell and her front doorbell kept ringing. She gave a bar of chocolate to a diminutive witch and her brother the hangman. She gave a tube of sweets to a werewolf, and some Turkish delight to a covey of skeletons from next door, escorted by a lugubrious father with an axe through his head. She was forestalled by a gorilla and a ghoul when finally leaving, and lacking sweets or small change, thrust a five pound note into the startled gorilla’s fur-paw. The gorilla and the ghoul she noted, fought a brief battle for possession of this prize in the middle of the street.

Then, over an hour and a half late, and thoroughly rattled, she set off in her small car eastwards. Lindsay was a bad driver, and her sense of direction was dysfunctional. This fact had often been remarked upon, amiably and laconically, by Rowland McGuire. Even in his absence, Lindsay was determined to prove him wrong. She failed; as she had predicted, she lost herself in the dark streets of Docklands almost at once.

‘…T
HE THAMES,’ LINDSAY SAID
, raising her voice and peering upwards at the white, bloodless face of a complete stranger, an exceedingly tall, vampiric and emaciated man, whose features she could only just see through candle smoke, cigarette smoke, and some peculiar foggy density to the air, apparent throughout this vast and crowded room, but especially dense in this area, to which she had been bobbed, tossed and cast like so much flotsam and jetsam.

‘What? What did you say?’

The pale man had backed against a pillar, towards which he too had been tossed some moments before. Jammed against his right elbow, was a shorter, fatter man with a ponytail, who was waving a glass in one hand, and a large prawn in the other. This man was haranguing a satellite group on the subject of Scorsese’s movies.

‘Mayhem,’ he yelled. ‘Steadicam.
Mean Streets
, my friends. Note the tracking shots, yes?’

Another piece of human driftwood hit Lindsay hard from behind. She stumbled, then righted herself. She had arrived late; most of the other party guests appeared to have arrived early and were already wrecked. She gazed helplessly around her. If this room was like an aircraft carrier—and it was; several planes could have been parked in this space—its decks were awash. Waves of random conversations kept breaking over her; people surged on all sides; she could not even see properly, since it seemed Lulu Sabatier eschewed electric light. This entire, huge, confusing loft space, with a bewilderment of metal stairways; jutting, galleried upper decks; dark archways which might lead somewhere or nowhere, was lit by candles. In the centre of the deck, or floor, was a lipstick-coloured couch, to which party-goers clung like a life-raft, and thrumming up through her feet, she could sense some mysterious energy, like the power of a whirring turbine, buried deep in the bowels of a ship. The throb and pulse of this power source had a propulsive effect. Lindsay felt it was propelling her through the dark and the smoke to some vital but as yet undisclosed destination. She felt she would surely arrive somewhere eventually, but meanwhile she felt unstable, not too sure of her balance, and faintly sea-sick.

She peered up at the landmark of the tall Dracula man. He had just avoided being speared by his fat neighbour’s cocktail stick and was looking down at Lindsay with a mad desperation.

‘I can’t
hear
,’ he shouted. ‘You cannot hear a goddamn thing in here…’

‘The
Thames
,’ Lindsay yelled, with equal desperation. ‘I said, this place is very hard to find, isn’t it? I nearly drove into the Thames twice…’

The pale man, she perceived, was not interested in this. He was not interested in Lindsay either, but—hedging his bets—he was not yet prepared to be uninterested. She could already see that he had an acute case of party squint, partly caused by alcohol, she suspected, but also caused by visual dilemmas.

It was not easy to keep one eye perpetually on the entrance doors, in case
someone
came in, while keeping the other eye on two hundred guests, all of whom kept milling back and forth, and any one of whom might be (several certainly were)
someone
as well. Nor was he prepared to cast off Lindsay yet; she too, after all, might turn out to be
someone
, though he seemed to find that possibility unlikely. He performed another periscopic manoeuvre—a process assisted by the length of his neck—then, with an irritable frantic air, bent one eye upon her from a great height.

‘
Fog
,’ he shouted. ‘This room is full of fucking
fog
. Why has Lulu opened the fucking windows? I mean, it’s
October
. It’s
Hallowe
’
en
, for fuck’s sake. What kind of maniac opens the windows in October? The fog comes in off the river. It mists the whole place up…’

‘If Lulu didn’t open the windows,’ Lindsay yelled, ‘it would be impossible to breathe…’

‘Ahhh…’ Momentary hope dawned in his eyes. ‘You know Lulu then?’

‘Intimately,’ replied Lindsay, who had still to identify her hostess, let alone be introduced to her. ‘Lulu and I go way back.’

This statement, designed to annoy, had an arresting effect. The pale man’s fly-eyes stopped swivelling. He clasped Lindsay’s arm in a demented grip, and said something frantic and inaudible, something washed away by the incoming tide of adjacent conversations.

‘…Is he here?’ Lindsay heard, as the conversations ebbed. ‘Because fucking Lulu
swore
he was coming…Only reason I’m here…Have to speak to…Urgent…Project…Script. This man is my
god
. I mean no exaggeration, my
god
.’

‘Is who here?’ Lindsay shouted back, decoding this.

‘Court. Tomas Court.’

‘Where? Where?’ cried the ponytailed neighbour, as this magic name was uttered. He spun round like a dervish, grabbed the pale man with one hand and Lindsay with the other, spilling champagne down her dress.

‘He’s here? Did you say Tomas was here?’

‘No, I said
maybe
he was here.’ The pale man swayed. ‘I said Lulu
said
he’d be here. Look, d’you mind fucking letting go of me?’

‘Apologies, my friend.’ The ponytail stepped back half an inch, and with difficulty focused upon Lindsay.

‘And this is?’

‘I don’t
know
who this is,’ the pale man replied in an aggrieved tone. ‘She knows Lulu. She
says
she knows Lulu…’ He paused. ‘Whereas I’ve never fucking
met
Lulu. I’ve been here eight times and I’ve never met her yet’

This surprising information seemed to forge an instant bond. The two men embraced.

‘Shake, pal.’ They shook. ‘I’m beginning to wonder, my friend,’ the ponytail remarked, in Jacobean tones, ‘whether Lulu exists.’

‘She says she does.’ The pale man turned accusingly to Lindsay. ‘Knows her intimately. Friends from way back…’

Fixing her with his eyes, in so far as he was able, the ponytail demanded to know where, in that case, Lulu was. ‘Because,’ he said, swaying like a yachtsman, ‘I’ve been promised an introduction to Tomas. I spoke to a very very close aide of Lulu’s called Pat.’

The two men eyed each other.

‘Pat? Pat?’ The pale man sighed. ‘That rings a bell. But there’s a lot of aides. Lulu has a
confusing
number of aides…’

‘True. An ear to the ground, however. On the inside of the inside. On the
ball
. That’s Lulu’s strength. Elusive, though, my friend. Cancels lunch dates…’

‘Doesn’t return calls. Can’t be fucking reached…’

‘Here tonight though. Definitely here—somewhere. I have assurances. Lulu’s here—and so is Tomas Court.’

Lindsay, growing anxious to escape, attempted to edge away, but the group behind her pushed her back. Oblivious to her presence, an expression of demented reverence came upon the pale man’s face.

‘Tomas Court!’ he cried. ‘I worship that man. I bow down before him. I say—and I don’t fucking care who hears me say it—I say: that man is my god.’

‘A director of genius, my friend. No argument.
Dead Heat
?’

‘Incandescent. I’ve seen it fifteen times. A masterpiece. I fucking wept.’

‘Pure film, my friend. In a class of its own. Except…’

‘The spider sequence?’

‘Cheap. I would have to say that. Edging towards the cheap.’

‘Vulgar?’

‘My friend, I’d have to agree. Seriously vulgar. Even jejune. You could say—a mistake.’

‘He makes mistakes!’ Here, the pale man became very animated. ‘OK, it’s heresy, but I’ll say it: Tomas Court makes mistakes, misjudgements. And
Dead Heat
is riddled with them…’

‘The end is lousy.
Dead Heat
has a lousy ending. Personally, I have my doubts about the beginning, as well…’

‘What’s your view on the editing?’

‘A fucking shambles.’

‘Dialogue?’

‘
Please
. I could write better dialogue in my sleep.’

‘No heart, my friend.’ Ponytail sighed. ‘It’s all window dressing. Smart-ass movie graduate stuff. Post-modern posturing.
Hommage
. Quotes. Does Tomas Court even
understand
genre, my friend? That’s the question I ask myself…’

‘
Understand
it? He couldn’t spell it.’

‘He’s sold out, in my view. He’s peaked, let’s face it. He peaked a while ago. He was a flash in the pan. He…’

‘Actually, he’s over there,’ said Lindsay, who had now decided that she disliked these two cabaret artists very much. ‘He’s over there by the door,’ she continued, giving them both the sweetest smile she possessed.

‘Don’t you see him? By the door, with Lulu.’

She pointed across the room. There, in a thick cluster by the entrance, stood a tall and dramatically dressed woman of a certain age, who jutted up from the heaving crowd like a gaunt, weatherbeaten lighthouse. None of her companions was Tomas Court, now so famous that Lindsay would have recognized him, and the tall woman was not Lulu Sabatier, but paleface and ponytail deserved punishment, and this woman was, without a doubt, the most terminally boring woman Lindsay had ever met in her life. Grasping Lindsay as she entered, she had pinned her to the wall and gone through her last screenplay scene by scene and comma by comma. Emma was mad about it, she said; Michelle had read it—it was female, female, female—and Michelle had flipped.

‘That woman there.’ Lindsay pointed again. ‘The one in the burnous. That’s Lulu. She’s been waiting there for Tomas Court all evening. He just came in, a second ago. Sharon Stone was with him, I think…’

‘Christ…’ Paleface and ponytail convulsed. Parting the waters, they hit the waves at speed; as some wind in the room took up the cry ‘Tomas Court, Tomas Court’ a host of back-up vessels surged in their wake. A social tide turned; two, four, ten, fifteen, thirty others caught the prevailing current and made for the beachhead of the burnous. Lindsay, well satisfied, watched this armada with delight. The burnous woman, used to being avoided, greeted her new-found popularity with stupefaction. Lindsay slipped her moorings, shifted behind the now-vacant pillar, and resolved to lie low, over the horizon, out of sight.

She had been at the party less than an hour by then; it felt like a week. Somewhere during the course of the evening, she had lost her grip, and time and age had run amok. A rattled forty by the time she left her apartment, she suddenly turned thirty in the elevator here as, soothed by recondite muzak, she glided up.

The elevator was multi-mirrored, and its lighting had been unusually flattering. Looking at what appeared to be several well-dressed, passably pretty women who, since she was the only female present, were presumably herself, Lindsay experienced pre-party optimism; it was as pungent as snuff. The true source of this optimism, she realized a second later, was not really her own reflection, but the apparently admiring glance of the elevator’s only other occupant, a tall, dark-haired American, who had held the doors for her, who had wished her ‘Good Evening’, and who bore a passing resemblance to Rowland McGuire. It was as she noticed this resemblance that she hit thirty, a promising age. However, on reaching Lulu Sabatier’s loft-palace, he remarked, ‘Nice
dress
, babe,’ and Lindsay, realizing he looked nothing like Rowland at all, hit thirty-eight.

Thanks to paleface and ponytail, she was now sixty-five, going on eighty-two. She did not smoke, she had never smoked, but she now needed a cigarette badly. Also alcohol; yes, it was certainly a mistake in these circumstances to be drinking prudent Perrier and ice. What she needed was a triple brandy, or intravenous vodka perhaps. Since she was driving, the best she could risk was a glass of champagne. If she drank it extremely fast, however, having eaten nothing since lunch, perhaps all these frogs would turn into princes; perhaps all these basilisk women would turn and welcome her; perhaps the air would begin to ring with good fellowship and wit. And if that transformation failed to occur, as seemed likely, she would find Markov and Jippy and insist on escape.