Burning Bright Page 9

  Ten

  Paul Parrett turns off the video, rubs his eyes, swivels and looks out of the window. Dawn has come since he last looked round. He’s been awake all night. It doesn’t matter. It’s Saturday and he’ll catch up with a couple of hours’ sleep in the early afternoon. It’s going to be a quiet day. The House is empty. Times are jittery and no one can afford to sit back for a four-year ride, not the way things are now. Back to the constituency to attend Red Cross summer fairs, village donkey derbys, Polish ex-servicemen’s dinners, surgeries, tenants’ association meetings on draggled estates where you get lost and reverse furiously between Skylark Crescent and Goldfinch Gardens. But not too furiously. There are no votes in running over your constituents.

  He has a safe seat close to London and an excellent agent who judges to the second when and where a personal appearance is called for. The newspapers are always there when Paul Parrett comes. The crowds doughnut eagerly for TV newsbites. It’s not just to do with him being a minister either. His constituents actually seem to like him. How does the bugger do it, his fellow MPs grumble as they struggle into cabs to Paddington, Euston or King’s Cross on Friday nights.

  It is a fucking depressing video and he’s going to have to watch it again. But he’s hungry for something sweet first. He’ll make pancakes with real maple syrup. He’s been hooked ever since that first fact-finding tour to the US, when was it? Twelve years, it must be. He dumps eggs, flour, melted butter, milk into a blender and whizzes the mixture while he greases the pan. He flips down the button of his kitchen CD player and Cajun music floods out. The Alley Boys of Abbeville. Terrific. For a heavy man he’s light on his feet as he shimmies sideways, ladles pancake batter to fall hissing against the frying pan, puts a plate to warm and opens another bottle of syrup. Someone brings it over from Vermont for him. He remembers apples heaped against red barns, fat lolling squash, the smell of frost. But the music takes him south and he goes lightly across the kitchen, turns and chassés, playing an imaginary fiddle. The surface of the pancake pales as it cooks through. He slips the edges loose, hesitates, tosses. It goes up and lands in a crisp bubbly brown circle. Perfect. He waits a minute for the other side to cook, then dances down the kitchen again, frying pan in hand, and tosses the pancake in mid-turn. It turns twice in the air but flips down on the right side. His hands just can’t do wrong. He turns up the volume and trickles maple syrup in a thin stream, making lattice on the pancake. Then he rolls it up, swallows it in half a dozen bites and drops another half-ladle of batter on to the circle of hot heavy iron. Something to drink too. After all, it’s five a.m. Not brandy – Armagnac. There’s some somewhere, there’s some of everything somewhere. He finds the long wooden coffin they pack it in, pours the drink into a glass, pours more over the cooked pancake and sets light to it. It flares up and he eats it the second the flames go out, buttery, crisp and soaked in booze.

  Now for that bloody video. He runs it back, finds the place, leans forward feeling for the pad and pen by the side of his chair.

  ‘His wife has brought up the four boys on her own,’ says the commentator. An image flashes up, a still. She mustn’t have wanted them to be filmed. Four boys, twelve, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. All the bottom rungs of the ladder are missing: the kids she’d have had if her husband hadn’t been in prison for eleven and a half years. They had both loved kids. A voice-over tells the thin factual tale of the solid wall of justice coming down on this family like a tidal wave, smashing it flat. One of the boys had cancer. He’d had a bone-marrow transplant and he seemed to be doing well. She’d coped with that on her own, along with everything else. The woman was thirty-five and she looked fifty, though maybe that was the lighting and the dark plain jumper and her hair pulled back like that. She’d look different in the film of her husband’s release. She’d have her hair done and she’d be wearing something new and somebody’d have told her to put on some make-up, for the cameras if not for her husband.

  But that film hadn’t been made yet. Paul Parrett goes back again, replays. The usual story. Contradictions in the forensic evidence, allegations of police brutality, a time-gap which no one’s explained, an alibi which might stand or might not depending on who was looking at it. It had been the kid’s birthday, the eldest one.

  ‘He was there. He lit the candles. He’d never’ve missed Paul’s birthday.’

  Paul Parrett feels the small flicker at the sound of his own name. Evidence has been built on less than such a small flicker, he knows. He can’t help a moment of empathy for a father who would never miss the birthday of his little son called Paul. Evidence, evidence. He knows about evidence.

  ‘Why are you lying there looking as if butter wouldn’t melt? I know you’ve been up to something. I know what you’ve been up to.’

  ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean. I can see right through you.’

  ‘If it wasn’t you done it, then why are you looking at me so innocent?’

  The past’s a great place, he thinks, as long as you don’t have to live in it. The way that family’s had to. The forensic expert’s dead and dodgy, the two detectives from a well-known squad have admitted fabricating evidence on another case. Yes, he decides, that film’s going to be made, the one where the wife buys a new red dress which doesn’t suit her and has her hair coloured as well as permed, and wears lipstick which all comes off because she can’t stop biting her lips just in case, at the very last moment, it’s all going to be snatched from her. And the boys’ll be wearing their jeans and huge trainers, hair gelled into place, eyes wary. They know about cameras and what newspapers can do. And there’ll be a crowd of well-wishers, campaigners, family members, hangers-on, surging around the court gates. They’ll look angrier than the family and maybe more joyful. The well-wishers haven’t gone through these gates a hundred times.

  Yes, the film’s got to be made. It needs research, production, costing. The budget is going to be enormous. Appeals are getting slammed back these days. There’s a reaction after the wave of appeals which ended in men and women walking out of the dock into the world. In these cases there are all kinds of costs to be taken into consideration. Public confidence in British justice, for instance.

  But the film will be made. He already knows some of the actors. The programme researchers and the presenter he’s just watched will be in it. Miscarriages of justice are their field. They know the score. Judge and lawyers are variables. The family have already got their parts. They live in role. And the man in prison too, and the three men convicted with him. The Manchester Four, they call them now. Safe casting: they aren’t going to run away.

  ‘Fuck it,’ says Paul Parrett aloud, writing notes on his pad. The things that happen in daylight, under the camera’s eye – they’re not the point. The point is kids lying awake in bed at night, wondering what the fuck is going to happen to them now.

  Eleven

  As the credits start to roll, Nadine pulls back the door and fastens its hook, letting in the light from the corridor outside. Then the auditorium lights go up, small orange bulbs in the comfortable gloom, and people pick their way over one another, commenting on the film. They’ve all seen it before. The point of the film season isn’t to go to films new and naïve and ready for enjoyment. This is the Warehouse’s Icons of Sexuality season: Monroe this week, Garbo next, Mae West the week after. Talks at seven o’clock, before the screenings, drinks afterwards. Tonight there was a discussion on glamour and feminism, but Nadine wasn’t ushering for that. It’s the third time Nadine has seen Some Like It Hot. She listens to the comments of the departing patrons, as they move along to the complex’s café which overlooks the water. Now they’ll sprawl at fragile metal tables, drinking expensive bottled beers and tiny cups of overboiled coffee. Stumbling and blinking, they brush past her. Chris, the usher from Cinema 2, pushes his way in against the tide. His show ends about ten minutes before hers.

  ‘Coming for a drink, Nadine?’

  She shakes her head. ‘No, I got to get
back. I promised Enid I’d see her. Kai and Tony are away again.’

  Chris has never met Enid, Kai or Tony, but he knows who they are. There are lots of dead hours with nothing happening, when Chris and Nadine talk.

  ‘Just a quick one? I’ve got something to tell you.’

  ‘Well…;’ Nadine hesitates. But Kai’s away – he won’t look up and frown as she comes in and say that he thought the show finished at ten this week. And Enid is awake until all hours, night after night. She won’t mind what time Nadine comes, as long as she comes.

  ‘OΚ, then. I’ll check the auditorium and lock up. Be down in about five minutes.’

  ‘There’s no rush. I’ll wait here.’

  They go along the corridor into the smoky café. A soft dull roar of conversation folds around them.

  ‘And her arse when she walks down the platform…;’

  ‘Yes – those amazing buttocks.’

  ‘But she’s so lovable!’ cuts in a girl’s voice, ‘Don’t you see – it’s not just a sexual thing. I mean, it makes me want to take her home and look after her, and I’m not gay or anything. It’s sort of innocent.’

  ‘That cotton-candy hair.’

  ‘Did you see that film they found, from Something’s Got to Give?

  ‘Amazing.’

  ‘Of course she’d lost a lot of weight.’

  ‘Fifteen pounds.’

  ‘Yeah – she was a bit overweight in Some Like It Hot.’

  ‘That just shows how your ideas about female beauty have been conditioned by fashion models.’

  ‘Did you see the autopsy photos?’

  Chris winks at Nadine. Everyone’s seen the autopsy photos, they’re the thing to talk about. Marilyn Monroe with her face pocked in death. Bruises, splats of decay. Her jaw fallen, her cheeks pouched, her hair flat and stringy. Less beautiful, at last, than any of us.

  Soon they’re tucked into a corner by the bar, drinking. The wine is very dry, just like drinking stone, Nadine thinks.

  ‘How’s Mark?’

  ‘Oh, he’s fine. Except I never see him – he’s working late on a commission every night, then he’s away to the studio again before I wake up.’

  ‘It must be big business, jewellery,’ says Nadine, who has none.

  ‘Well, it is, once you start making serious pieces,’ agrees Chris with eager vicarious pride. ‘This is for a Nigerian client. He came into Mark’s exhibition and took three pieces straight away. The neckpiece and gold bangles. And now there’s this commission as well. You’ve got to ride the wave.’

  Nadine swills her wine round in her glass and stares into it. She and Chris sound like children boasting about their parents. The big people: the people who do things. Kai’s done this. Mark’s done that. Only she’s more subtle than Chris, knowing that he’ll gladly swallow every hint from her secret world.

  ‘So what was it – what you wanted to talk about?’

  Chris gulps his wine and answers, ‘There’s a job coming up here. A proper job.’

  Yes, there it is again, his childhood in his voice. Echoes of mothers, of ‘standards’. Λ proper job. All the things he’s supposed to have grown out of.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Programming assistant. You must have heard about it?’

  He is looking at her sharply. He’s been here much longer than she has, and no permanent vacancies have come up in that time. She’s temporary, casual labour, and so’s Chris, even though he knows everything about how things work here.

  ‘I didn’t know anything about it. Are you going to apply?’

  ‘I might. What about you?’

  ‘Me? How could I? I don’t know anything about it.’

  ‘Of course you do. You know quite a lot about films. You could read. There’s loads of good books. You’d soon learn how to build up a programme. How do you think Richard started? He hasn’t got a masters in film studies, that’s for sure.’

  Nadine drinks before she answers. Chris isn’t really talking to her: he’s persuading himself. It’s obvious that he wants the job. Anyway she can’t apply. She’d never be able to hide the way words dazzle and won’t do what her mind wants. There’d be an application form, national insurance details. They all think she is nineteen.

  ‘No, I don’t want anything permanent just now. I don’t want to tie myself down. I might go to a few festivals with Cathy. I’d like to do that.’

  ‘How are you getting on?’ He knows about her juggling, and approves. Everybody’s doing it now, even in serious theatre. Circus skills. Tumbling and juggling and swallowing fire and hustling for pound coins. If Nadine gets really good, all sorts of things might open up. Film companies are always looking for people. Look at those Angela Carter films.

  ‘Cathy’s going to take me down the Ring.’

  ‘You must be getting good. I’ve seen her there.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, stretching in her chair, feeling the new suppleness Cathy’s building into her muscles. ‘Yes, I like it. It feels good.’

  ‘I’m thinking of going for it myself,’ says Chris and swallows wine. ‘The job, I mean.’

  ‘You should. Mark’s doing so well now –’ She doesn’t go on. She shouldn’t have said anything. Chris has tensed up, and no wonder. Mark is beginning to get clients, to travel. There’s talk of a one-man show, a big one this time. And there’s money coming in, money which Chris can’t match. People at parties talk to Mark first, then turn politely to Chris. ‘And what do you do, Chris?’ ‘Oh – I work at the Warehouse.’ If he’s lucky there are no more questions, and they leave it that he might be a photographer, a video-maker or an exhibition organizer. If they cut to the bone Mark’s suddenly there, casually close, casually sexy, making it all right. But that can’t last for ever.

  ‘Anyway, I shan’t be applying,’ says Nadine. ‘So the field’s clear for you.’

  ‘Veronica’s bound to – and she’s tough, she’ll talk her way into anything,’ he says gloomily, staring across the café at Veronica, her glossy wedge of hair slipping forward as she points out something on her clipboard. She’s talking to Richard again. Veronica likes working in public. She’s never self-conscious, only perhaps a trace more focused and professional when she senses eyes on her. Nadine watches Chris watching Veronica. Yes, he’s right to be worried. She’s a winner, and he isn’t. Chris turns back to Nadine.

  ‘I like your hair. Where did you get it done?’

  ‘It was somebody Tony knew. She doesn’t work in a salon, she comes to the house.’

  Nadine’s dark hair has been cut short so that it waves around her head and curls in at her nape. It is even shorter than she wore it at school and much better cut. A disturbing look: boy/girl, yes/no. It was Tony who shaped out the cut in the air for Francesca, Tony who flipped over style books and scooped Nadine’s hair off her face to judge the effect. Kai was away at the time. It was going to be a surprise for him, Tony said.

  ‘It looks good,’ says Chris. ‘Androgynous. Very sexy. Does Kai like androgynous girls?’

  Nadine blushes faintly, remembering how Kai had reacted to the haircut that night when he got home. She thought Tony’d wanted this too. It had been part of the pattern he’d sketched in the air for Francesca. Tony made you feel naked to him. He was there in the bedroom shadows, noiseless, waiting and watching for what he already knew was going to happen.

  ‘You can’t go on ushering here for ever. What about going to college? You could easily get some Α-levels,’ says Chris.

  ‘I like it here. Where else could I see all these films without paying? And it’s Garbo next week. My heroine.’

  ‘Is she? Lots of women go for Garbo, did you know?’

  ‘Mmm. I can see why.’

  Nadine thinks of Garbo’s eyelids, faintly vaselined, gleaming, and the star’s face turning into camera, breaking into movement. She stops listening to Chris. Besides, she ought to get home. She’s said too much. Why does she always tell Chris things?

  ‘I owe you a drink,’ she
says. ‘I’ll get it, but then I’ve got to go. Enid likes to chat – you know how it is.’

  That was safe ground. Never, never had she heard Chris admit that he did not ‘know how it is’ about anything. She bought him another glass of Muscadet and watched him cross the room towards Richard and Veronica as she made her way out of the café. They did not look up or seem to notice him. Chris would be running over his opening line in his head as he approached.

  The rear lights of the bus wink triumphantly as it moves off just as Nadine crosses the green. It rumbles away uphill, tauntingly slow at first, then gathering speed.

  ‘Have you got the price of a cup of tea?’ asks a voice from the ground. He is sitting in a pool of shadow under a lime tree. He does not ask for change; he has no dog or musical treatment, no baby in a pram. He has been asking for the price of a cup of tea for twenty years, and he will not change his begging now to fit in with these young ones. Long-haired, deeply weathered as he aged in public, often reading, he was unique in the district and known by name, Samuel. Little children pointed at his nest of beard and coiled greying hair, and sometimes their mothers put ten pence into their hands to give him. An object lesson. But you can’t encourage children to do that sort of thing now, when there are hundreds of beggars all over the city.