The Out of Office Girl (20 page)

It just goes to show: you can be as rich and as famous as Luther, but none of it matters if you don’t have the important things: love, stability, a home, parents who love you or at least care where you are and what you’re doing. Perhaps that’s why he wanted to become famous – to try and get that love that he didn’t get at home.

I put in
my earphones and settle down for an evening’s work. The sound of Luther’s voice fills my ears, as I begin to type his words.

NINETEEN

I’m on a film set or a stage, and I’m meant to be playing Luther’s love interest but, instead, for some reason I’m sitting at a little desk, typing away furiously. All around me, people are rehearsing and putting up lights and arranging cameras. They’re all waiting for me and getting impatient, but I can’t help it – I have to finish writing the book before I can kiss Luther. The only
solution is to type faster, so I do, typing more and more furiously so that I can escape. The typing is getting louder and louder, until I realise it’s not typing, it’s knocking. I’m awake, and somebody is knocking loudly at my door. I close my eyes, hoping it will stop, but instead it goes on and on.

‘Who is it?’ I call, or croak.

The door opens. It’s Luther. I twitch the sheet over my exposed
leg and try to sit up and look respectable. I hope my face isn’t all puffy.

‘Hey. You mind if we get going soon? I’ve been up for a while, thinking . . .’

I squint at him. ‘Great. Just give me a minute?’

‘Don’t be long,’ he says, and disappears.

I collapse back on my pillow. I can barely open my eyes, I’m so tired. The typing last night took me so much longer than I’d thought. I was up until
2.30 a.m. transcribing the
interviews, editing out things we don’t need, and writing notes to Brian. I pick up my phone from the ground and check it.

It’s 6.40 a.m.

OK. It’s a little early, but that’s fine. The important thing is that Luther is motivated. This is great! I am a little groggy, but I’ll just get in the shower and I’ll feel fine.

Ten minutes later, my hair still wet and scraped
back in a ponytail, I’m on the back terrace with Luther, in the same positions we were in yesterday. I’m clutching a cup of coffee and a bread roll that I grabbed from the kitchen en route. Luther hasn’t shaved, but he looks very bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and very handsome in a blue hooded sweatshirt and jeans. He must have the stamina of an ox.

‘How was last night?’ I ask.

‘Fine. They all
wanted to go on somewhere after dinner but I wasn’t into it. I was preoccupied. I was just thinking about stuff, remembering all these things that I wanted to talk about.’

‘That’s fantastic. I’m delighted you’re – finally getting into this,’ I say. And I mean it. It is absolutely brilliant.

Luther and I spend the morning talking about his early film career and the two films he did after
Fever
. He gives me some great anecdotes about some of the actors and directors he’s worked with, all printable, I think. It’s so entertaining listening to him, I almost forget my exhaustion.

After we’ve been talking for over three hours, and gone through three tapes, I decide we both need a break. I wait for a suitable moment, when he’s just come to the end of a story, and then I say, ‘Hey, Luther.
It’s already ten. How about taking a break for half an hour or so?’

‘I’d rather not,’ he says. ‘I wanted to talk to you about Don.’

I’m completely lost. He’s assuming I know exactly what he means, and I don’t want to be rude, but I have no choice: I have to ask who Don is.

‘Dom! Dominique,’ he says.

‘Oh, of course. Sorry! I misheard you.’

He means his ex-wife, Dominique Rice. From everything
I’ve read, she sounds completely insane. Apparently she had his name tattooed on the sole of her foot after their divorce so that she could walk on him every day. I know this is true because I’ve seen pictures of her on a sunlounger, with ‘Luther’ in horrible faux-Gothic script on the bottom of her foot.

‘That will be great to talk about,’ I say. ‘What about a quick break first, though? That
way, you can be really fresh, and talk about it properly.’

Luther looks at me for a second, and then he looks out to sea. ‘I don’t know. I feel like I need to talk about it now, or not at all.’

OK, fair enough. He’s about to talk about his ex-wife, after all. I should probably be sensitive about this subject.

‘Of course.’

He starts by telling me how much Dominique has changed since she got
married, had her two kids and went all holistic, and how hard it is to break up with someone well-known.

‘The thing is, when regular people break up, they don’t have to see their exes ten feet high on a billboard, you know? I mean, it’s hard enough breaking up with someone, without having to see them on screen, and in magazines, and read interviews about how your break-up was mutual when you
know it was anything but. Don’t quote me on that, by the way.’

‘I won’t quote you about reading her interviews and
disagreeing about the break-up being mutual,’ I say. ‘But I like the bit about the billboards.’

‘I read an interview after she had her baby,’ Luther continues. ‘I couldn’t believe it was her. All that stuff about the divine mother and life force and seeing rainbows everywhere. I
remember her saying that she definitely didn’t want kids because they sucked the life force
out
of you, and that was why she hated her parents and vice versa. Kids were not on our agenda. But I guess he talked her into it. And now she’s happy. And that’s great.’

‘He’ is Dominique’s current husband, and I’ve already gathered that Luther can’t stand him. ‘Douchebag’ is one of the more polite words
he’s used.

‘I mean, you know what – he acts all arthouse and sensitive and he does his painting and carpentry and all that stuff. And that’s cool. But what nobody seems to remember is that he started out on a soap opera and he’s basically had about as much formal training as I have, i.e., none. And even though he’s meant to be so bankable, half of his movies don’t open. The fact is, he has this
undeserved reputation which doesn’t translate, either to his bottom line or to the quality of the movies he picks.’

‘Um . . .’ I’m beginning to realise that, like most authors, Luther sometimes has a tendency to go off on tangents. He clearly has a bee in his bonnet about Dominique’s husband: I’ll have to remember this and steer clear of the subject. ‘You were telling me about Dominique,’ I say,
gently.

‘Right. Dominique and the mother life force?’ He laughs. Then his smile fades. ‘I guess the thing about those conversations we had,’ he continues, ‘was that they always happened when we were out of it. But then, we were almost always out of it. That’s kind of how it worked with us.’

‘Right,’ I say, trying to look knowledgeable.

‘I don’t know if you do drugs, Alice.’

‘Well, I’ve—’

‘The thing about them is . . . when you do a lot of drugs, and you get together with someone else who does a lot of drugs, it’s a kind of like having a third person in your relationship. Do you know what I mean? I mean . . . after a while it’s hard to tell if you’re doing drugs because you’re together, or you’re together because you do drugs, or both.’

I make a note of this, thinking again how
perceptive he can be.

‘The first time I met her was during a read-through. I’d seen pictures of her, but I just thought she was even more beautiful in the flesh, and she had this edge about her. The tattoos – I had never seen an actress with inks before. Now they all have them, but even six years ago it was pretty unusual. But most of all, it was the way she just looked right through me, like
she didn’t give a damn who I was.’

‘And you liked that,’ I say. Clever Dominique, I think. The oldest trick in the book.

‘Yeah! I’d had two years of women throwing themselves at me. I could have anyone I wanted, and I did. I can remember – I’m not kidding – being at a party where girls were literally lined up in front of me. The line to talk to me was like a line to get into a nightclub. So
Dom’s attitude was pretty attractive.

‘The movie wasn’t huge, as you know. But we had fun shooting it. Lots of action scenes. We used to get off on those.’ He looks at me lazily, and I sit up straighter, hoping I don’t look embarrassed. ‘And Dom got me into her hobbies. I already did coke and E and sometimes meth, but she was in a whole other league.’

‘Meaning?’ I take an involuntary glance
at the Dictaphone to make sure it’s still working. I don’t want to miss a second of this. I suddenly have one of those flashes of surreality that have hit me since Luther started telling his story:
I’m
sitting here with Luther Carson, hearing things that he’s potentially never told anybody else, ever
.

‘Heroin. She did heroin. The first time I saw her, I could not believe it. I wanted to call
the cops, or something. She was “chasing the dragon” – you know, where you cook it up and sort of smoke it. Like a fucking Chinese gangster. But she said it was cool, and I trusted her, so we did it. It was – if you’ve never done it, I can’t describe it to you. But trust me, it was unbelievable.

‘The only trouble is, it can kill you. A girl she knew died from an overdose, and Dom stopped, and
I stopped too. But we were always doing something. We couldn’t even watch a movie together at home without doing a line of coke first. And we always had it before sex as well.’ He pauses. ‘I guess we overdid it. One time, my mom rented a vacation house in Florida and invited us to visit her. I told Dominique we couldn’t bring anything with us, because I knew my mom would have hated it, so Dom said
she wouldn’t go.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘I cancelled. I said she was sick. I just couldn’t stand to be away from her. But then I realised things were just getting more and more out of hand. One night, I stayed awake all night, sweating and having DTs. My heart was beating so fast I honestly thought I was going to die. I got up and started looking around for a pen and paper to make my will, I
was so out of it. You’d think I would have had the sense to call 911 instead, but no, I had to dispose of all my assets first. And then, as you know, one night, someone else did call 911 for me, and I got rushed to hospital. I’d been drinking pretty heavily and then I took some, I don’t know, rat poison or something. I don’t know what the hell I took. But that’s not what got me into rehab.’

‘What did?’

‘I did something pretty shitty. I had earned a lot of money from my first two films, but somehow I never seemed to have any. By the time I paid my agent, paid my tax, bought a new car, well, a couple cars, took care of my buddies, rented a place, went out every night . . . it just disappeared. Dominique was even worse. One night, I just happened to be between pay cheques and I had
lost one of my ATM cards as well. But we needed cash right away. So I stole a hundred dollars from Bruce Willis.’

‘You
what
?’

‘Yeah. We were at a benefit dinner for AIDS. I was sitting at his table, and I saw him put some money in a donation envelope on the table. When he got up, I just took it and left. Nobody noticed a thing. It was pretty lame, I know, but at the time I thought it was hilarious.
And so did she. To be honest, it’s not like we were short of cash. I just needed to pay my dealer that night and thought it was easier to take it from the table than go driving around looking for an ATM machine. But later I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I thought, you’ve almost killed yourself twice, and now you’ve stolen money from AIDS victims. And I just called up a rehab centre and
in I went. Dominique was not happy.’

‘Why not?’ I ask.

‘She felt like I was abandoning her, I guess. Like I said, she needed me to be using so that she felt OK about her own drug use. And I think she thought that she was more likely to OD or get in trouble without me around to keep an eye on her. But in the end, she got out of it fine. She’s done very well for herself.’ He sounds slightly resentful.

‘So, is that why you two broke up?’ I say. ‘Because you stopped doing drugs to the same extent?’

‘I guess it was, you know? We were both addicts and we made each other keep using. You know, they talk about
co-dependency and all the rest of it. But the truth was that the drugs were what kept us together. Without them, I don’t think we would have had a whole lot to talk about. Funny. I knew that
I knew that, but it’s only really occurring to me now you’ve asked me that. Don’t put all that in.’

I find it hard to believe that talking was really ever what Luther wanted from her, but who am I to judge? But it’s interesting to know that he can see deficiencies in their relationship. He’s obviously realised that he needs someone with a more stable lifestyle.

‘What about that tattoo on her
foot?’ I ask. ‘Is it true that she, um, got it . . .’

‘So she could walk on me every day? That’s bullshit. She got it long before we separated. She said it was because I was the ground beneath her feet. It’s probably faded by now. I told her at the time that’s a terrible place for a tattoo because it wears away so fast, but she insisted.’

I make a note, ‘Dominique foot – check’, and sigh inwardly.
This sounds like the sort of thing that will become an unending bone of contention during the libel read, with lawyers asking for proof, Luther swearing blind that that’s what happened, Dominique’s attorney, if we send him the manuscript, objecting . . . It suddenly strikes me how surreal this situation is. I’m probably going to spend a lot of time in the next week or so, along with several
other people, trying to establish the facts around Dominique’s foot tattoo. How has this become a normal part of anyone’s working day? If I ever thought, for a second, that some stranger was writing memos about my feet, I would think that there was something seriously wrong with the world.

I decide to take Luther back over a few important parts of their relationship: I want to know what his first
words to Dominique were, for example. He can’t remember, which is unfortunate though not unusual.