The Weight of Numbers (42 page)

Deborah has other ideas.

Everyone who's leaving wants to say goodbye to Stacey and, by the time she returns to her tree, both man and car have gone.

Where Harry Conroy led, many have followed. Right now on TV a man in a black cape and mask is driving Hulk Hogan's head repeatedly into a table.

Transfixed before the screen, fingers up to the knuckle in her careful hairdo, Deborah absent-mindedly strokes the bald dent in her skull.

Following Harry's death, Deborah has returned to England with her daughter. She wants Stacey to know the old country. She also had it in the back of her mind that the schools are better here, but as things have panned out, Stacey's first love has won out over her studies; a full-time TV actress at sixteen, she does the very minimum the schoolwork regulations will allow.

Mother and daughter live together in Vauxhall, on a forgotten street, in an old Edwardian terrace house with high moulded ceilings. They have money. Deborah's stock options have seen to that, as well as the numerous financial provisions Harry made for his granddaughter. They have no attachments.

It has been a strange few years for Deborah. Out from under her father's heavy care, thirty-two years old, she had thought she might begin again, acquire a lover, travel; she even entertained a certain nostalgia for her last bid for freedom – the disastrous summer of 1968 when, smothered by her father's difficult affection, she ran away to London, just a kid, and fell in with a succession of unsuitable lovers: men who were never kind.

Four years on, 1986, she realizes that this kind of freedom is no longer possible. She is not a teenager any more. The life she has hankered for does not pertain to who she is now. Besides, the times are different. She is happy on her own, happy not to be travelling, happy to
sit and steer, as best she can, her daughter's career.

Now the Hulk has hold of the man in the black cape. He is twirling him around and around, over his head, as though he were spinning dough for a pizza. Even the very worst the world has to offer can be controlled now, with only a small loss of realism. Deborah glances at her watch and lights her joint. Although this ersatz world can never be hers, Deborah is glad Stacey lives surrounded by scenarios and mere appearances.

The Hulk is slamming the man down, head-first into the floor. The man's head connects with the sprung floor of the ring. He sprawls. He does not get up.

For her daughter's sake, Deborah will do everything she can to preserve the illusion that the world is harmless: a place of rules, prepared stories, angles and sleights of hand. Stacey knows that she used a walking frame until she was twelve years old. It is evident too that her life has been dominated by the threat of grand mal seizures. But the cause of it all, the details of the event…

To this day Stacey thinks her mum was in a road traffic accident.

Hulk Hogan stamps on his opponent's chest. Deborah expects the man in black to grab the Hulk's foot – to twist it, to rise, even as the Hulk falls. But the man does not move. A pause. Hulk Hogan steps away. Paramedics clamber into the ring and carry the man in black out on a stretcher. Impossible to tell whether this is part of the scenario or not.

Perhaps there was a time, as Stacey reached her early teens, when Deborah could have told her daughter the truth. How she had woken from a dream of God's white house to a blast of pain, trapped in the hollow metal dark of a car boot. To tell her this now – what would Stacey be able do with this information? She would only use it to psychologize her mother. To her mother's every check and word of reason: ‘You only say this because of what some maniac did to you.'

How can Deborah admit her sufferings have no meaning? Her
broken skull; her stroke; her epilepsy. Her tongue bitten half away in excruciating increments, the struggle she had to prove herself a fit mother, baby Stacey so often nearly taken away from her; her husband's incarceration and subsequent disappearance; her father's slide into alcoholism, the way he punished himself to death. The fits themselves, their cruel variety. The way they cluster sometimes round her frontal lobe, twisting her moods. All the times she has sat frozen in her chair, staring into the middle distance, counting down, quite rationally and white with fear, to the end of the world.

Her daughter's early success – the speed with which the school soap
Grange Hill
has propelled her into the teen magazines and even the gossip columns – has robbed Deborah of those few moments when an adult intimacy between mother and daughter might have been possible. There is also the conviction – couched in the back of Deborah's mind, a small but certain voice like tinnitus – that she is not wrong; that the higher her daughter climbs, the more terrible the fiend will be who, with one blow of his hammer, will cast her down into the metal dark.

Hulk Hogan leaves and Captain America enters the ring with a bandaged knee. Even before he has finished acknowledging his fans, a man in a sort of beetle costume has wrestled him to the ground. When, Deborah wonders, did the world cease to be real?

She studies the girls surrounding the ring – the show's lean, muscular eye-candy in their swimsuits and cheerleader gear. It is becoming more and more difficult for her to feel easy with Stacey's looks. Even by these girls' streamlined standards, her daughter is becoming painfully thin. The columnists are whispering. Stacey and the rest of the
Grange Hill
cast are in America this week, singing ‘Just Say No' for Nancy Reagan. She hopes someone's on hand to make sure Stacey eats properly.

Now the beetle is jumping up and down on the Captain's wounded knee.

Deborah will not always be here to take care of her daughter, so it is good that this new world has come to trivialize her pain. The world is
nanny now. Watching these choreographed atrocities, Deborah has convinced herself that this is how her daughter lives these days: the world scripting every line for her; weakening every table; padding every hammer.

Hands held behind her back to thrust her small bust against the cotton of her white school blouse, Stacey kneels on the tiled floor of the players' toilet cubicle and lets her co-star Darren slide his already rock-hard cock between her teeth.

An over-achiever in all things, she takes him all the way to the back of her throat, then, pulling back, she lifts his penis, pressing it against her face as she tongues his balls with a rapacity that is frankly frightening: he wilts.

It is Darren's dick in her face, but neither of them is in any doubt that Stacey Chavez is out to pleasure herself. She is known for this kind of thing, this athletic approach, as if she has something to prove. It does not take much to make Darren hard again. She dry-kisses the vein running along his shaft, pulls his foreskin back and tongues around the groove, then takes him in again. Darren thrusts a little against the roof of her mouth, unsure how much of this she will let him get away with. Stacey, determined to Win, to ruin him for all the others, grabs his hands, presses them to the back of her head and keeps them there, her hands on his, urging him to fuck her face.

The tiles are cold against her knees; her sensible school shoes pinch her feet. There is indignity in this, and perversity too, dressed as the schoolchild she never was; and Darren, in grey jumper and school tie, baby-faced Darren, at twenty playing fourteen-year-old heroin addict Biff McBain.

This American tour rides on the back of Biff's plot-line, for its poignancy has captured the imagination of a drug-paranoid world. Yesterday, at the White House, they sang for Nancy Reagan – Nancy's big on anti-drugs. Today they're in New York, half an hour away from
the game at Yankee Stadium, where they will perform their single ‘Just Say No' in front of fifty thousand baseball fans.

When Darren comes finally, he ejaculates so far in the back of her throat, Stacey doesn't even taste his semen, only the musty afterbreath, mixing unappetizingly with the toilet's just-scrubbed smell. Still she sucks and sucks, taking him in, further and further, as he softens, Christ, what is she planning to do?
Bite?
Darren pulls her to her feet – a brave move, given she is a good four inches taller than him. Now he is kissing her, lifting her shirt, trying to wedge his head between her breasts, probably for balance, his whole body a-tremble with the aftershock of what is easily and for all time his best-ever blowjob.

She lifts her shirt for him. She doesn't wear a bra. She doesn't need one. Her breasts are so precise and tiny you can fit them in your mouth.

There you go.

Good boy.

She is eighteen years old – the age her mother was when she gave birth.

Deborah has always expected her daughter to do well. She has demanded it. At the same time, she is afraid that Stacey will make her mother's mistakes. So Deborah has set bounds on what her daughter can reasonably be expected to achieve. She has tried to manage her expectations. It is a strange sort of encouragement that begins ‘Are you sure…?' ‘Do you really think…?' ‘Maybe, but…' ‘Do not forget…' and its effects are equally strange.

For Stacey, these minatory utterances are not the soft upholstery Deborah meant them to be. They are chains and prison walls, tying her to her mother, this woman who has no life of her own but lives through her. They are goads, reminding Stacey of her own uselessness, driving her forward from one over-achievement to the next.

‘I – I think I love you,' Darren stammers, pleasure-drugged.

Good. Meaningless as the words are to her, this is what Stacey wants to hear. This moment is what she has learned to manufacture. It is her
solace; otherwise she drowns, every waking minute, in the ghastly conviction of her own weakness.

A bell rings.

Quickly, they dress.

Stacey is first out of the gents', leaving Darren with his fly still undone, his school tie still askew. There are fifty thousand people out there, at the bright end of that tunnel, waiting to hear her sing. Thousands of men and boys who have yet to fall in love with her.

Nine years later. First-time Hollywood director Jon Amiel orders the crayfish. He has done what he can to persuade Stacey Chavez to order from the menu; Stacey is adamant, and has brought along her own muffin.

She has lost the part. There is no way Amiel is going to present the producers of
Entrapment
with such an obvious insurance risk, especially now he's had Zeta-Jones's agent on the line. But it would be tactless to let Stacey Chavez in on his snap decision during their very first face-to-face meeting. Besides, he likes her showreel, and life is long; he may be able to do something for her if she can get her head sorted out. All Brits go a bit crazy the first time they hit LA.

Tuesday, 9 May 1997. It is eight years since Stacey left
Grange Hill.
She has had her share of bit parts, a starring role in a more-than-dodgy Ken Russell B movie, a walk-on in
The Singing Detective
. The work that's really put her on the map is ITV's explicit reworking of
The Moth –
Catherine Cookson must have choked on her teeth, but enough critics looked beyond the carnal distractions and tissue-thin script to discover Stacey Chavez, her hunger, her fire. If she can only learn to harness it, her energy might make her great one day.

‘I need a part that really
stretches
me,' says Stacey, lining up her knife. (Has she looked him in the eye once?)

Stacey has her meal planned. She doesn't need to look at her watch; she can count in her head. Every forty-five seconds she is going to eat a piece of muffin approximately the size of the first joint of her forefinger.
She will not tear this off the body of the muffin with her fingers: this method might suffice at home, but here it is too approximate. She will use her knife. A few seconds before she reaches for her knife, she measures the muffin against her forefinger, planning her attack. The conceit of cutting perfect rectangles from a round muffin is appealingly nonsensical, almost Zen. She maps this muffin's every crumb and bubble. Escape is impossible: this muffin is
going down
. Taking her hand away, she reaches for her knife, brings it over her plate and cuts exactly the shape she measured out. What I need, she thinks – because she is not beyond self-parody; like most anoretics, she knows what she is – is one of those vegetable slicers you find sometimes in Japanese kitchen stores. One stamp and hey presto! Every piece the same! Perfect bite-size muffiny chunks. She can even hear the exact note she'd hit, were she selling such a device, for such a purpose, on local TV, her first love.

Like this:

Per…fect
(not too fast, build up slowly. Not too much of a smile; a note of suspense)
bite-size
(crisp and even here: nothing much else you can do. Just play up the consonants, the neatness of those two ‘eye' sounds; careful not to drawl the ‘z': this is no time to slacken the pace!)
muffiny
(a gift; would that every tag-line boasted such a word. You can really camp up kids' words. Big, big grin: hell, you just can't say ‘muffiny' without breaking into a great big mischievous grin! Finally…)
CHUNKS.
(What a kicker! A real stamp-on-the-toes number. Heck, frighten them a little, even. Make them think about that sharp metal template hitting that dough. Not tearing it, not squashing it, not squeezing the life out of it
‘which, as we ALL KNOW, happens TIME AND TIME AGAIN with INFERIOR CUTTERS
'. No, my friends, my ensofa-ed brethren, we are here today to talk about taking this muffin and CUTTING IT! Into CHUNKS!)

‘Of course, the final decision lies mainly with the producers,' says Amiel, unable to keep up the pretence. He hasn't wanted to hurt her feelings, and because of this he is messing up badly. He knows this is
cowardly of him, placing responsibility for her eventual rejection at someone else's door. He knows that she will surely hear, at the back of these words, the most mealy-mouthed of excuses.