Death & the City Book Two (46 page)

Her solemn face is hard to read, but she nods, and puts her arms out to give me a hug. She squeezes very tight and rubs my back.

"Then I did it for you," she says at last, patting my hair. "I was a publicity junkie. Without the celebrity agent, I was just a research scientist. I allowed my author image to be groomed into the squeaky-clean, mass Media, family-friendly stereotype, and before I knew it, I was selling a million books per territory. But it didn't allow me to be an individual, to have my own private fantasy life. I was public property twenty-four-seven. The most controversy I was allowed, was to wear a Westwood dress to a TV book awards, which I got slated in the Press for because they said it was too New York or Hollywood. How little they knew at the time."

"You should write as yourself," I suggest with a shrug. "Whatever you want to say now. About what makes you individual. Instead of whatever some agent thinks will sell a million books in every language."

"Yes. When I'm a really old lady and have all the answers to that myself," she laughs. "I don't think anyone really knows who they are while they're alive. We're all invisible to ourselves."

"Sounds like a good title," I joke. "You don't have to reference me for that, by the way."

She laughs.

"The bit people always miss when discussing mental health issues is how to have fun," she says. "Nowadays it's all about management and monitoring and reports and medication, and anyone with an addiction getting all the attention, and priority of care. When most people are just saying to themselves, where did my fun go out of life? Why does everyone I talk to have a serious face or a sad face, telling me about alcohol abuse or asking me if I feel suicidal, instead of just talking to me like a normal person, making a few jokes, and finding out what kind of things make me feel happy and laugh? Whenever I feel depressed now, I don't make an appointment with one of my old colleagues, or watch the
News
or read any advice books on depression. Instead I watch old Monty Python, Dick Emery or
Red Dwarf
, or read
The Bible According To Spike Milligan
. After I got out of the doom and gloom business, I wanted to just have fun. To make people smile and laugh, and to smile and laugh myself."

I nod thoughtfully. I wonder what I think of as fun, try to remember what fun feels like. For some reason I recall skateboarding through puddles one night in the City of Westminster at 3:00 a.m, and a policeman asking me nicely not to. Definitely something slightly skewed upstairs in my head. I should be thinking along the lines of, rollerblading through the park at 3:00 p.m. on a sunny day, throwing a stick for a dog, jogging along a sandy beach, but those aren't my memories - just a montage from a popular sanitary towel commercial. It doesn't even occur to me about anything fun being to do with the S-word, either.

"I have to change my costume for the next presentation," she says, taking a watch out of her pocket and consulting it. "Maybe I'll put my thong on back-to-front and see if it gets a laugh."

"See you later," I grin, as she heads backstage again with a little wave. She reminds me of Elaine and Martha. Kind of, this is the real me now, and I'm out enjoying myself. Screw what the rest of the world thinks.

It's only after she's gone that I realise the whole conversation was in Japanese. Glad I'm not a WW2 spy, like Alice thinks she is. I'd have been rubbish. My personality just adapts or switches on autopilot to match whoever's in front of me. I don't even get time to think about it first or make a choice. Everybody would have thought I was their cause sympathizer. I'd have been done for being a double or triple agent before I walked the length of a row of shops and chatted to three people along the way.

Not my problem in this job, though. It's meant to be the way things are run. See all points of view. Take all sides of the story. And then act in enforcement of the law, without bias or prejudice. That's the textbook case scenario. In reality, security staff do bring their own personalities to work, as much as anyone else does, but with all the latest cameras and surveillance technology watching us and listening in on us, it's repressed. Occasionally only glimpses appear, like in Doorman Harry's report-writing language, or the fact that Hurst Knightwood regularly sports a Batman or Superman t-shirt under his uniform.

Thinking of The Plaza guys, I get a surprise when my replacement on the next rotation turns out to be Niall Taylor. It turns out he started his shift at lunchtime, and was on an hour's break when mine started later.

"Hi ya," he greets me, with a playful thump on the shoulder. "Michelle would love this. Got a total thing for fantasy role-play. Not in the bedroom, just the internet communities. She's a vampire schoolteacher on Double Life. Spends hours reading those horror romance books as well, the ones meant for kids? Reads me bits out loud and then says, you should be more like that. What, a bloodthirsty monster who disappears on you without explanation, sulks, and stands you up all the time? No problem. I'm going to give her a shovel for her birthday and tell her to go dig up a new boyfriend, at this rate."

The rest of the evening is spectacular in the performance, but uneventful in the security job. Once the customers leave, the stars all having disappeared well before the end, the roadies appear out of the darkness to start packing up. The bar managers do a rapid stock-take, and Greg from security orders in pizza for everyone.

"There's enough booze left for everyone to take two drinks home with them," the head barman announces. "First come, first served."

"Bet all the cola has gone," Greg grumbles, as bar and door staff all converge on the bar. "If anyone sees a soft drink, grab it for me."

"Are you in A.A?" I ask. "Or are you pregnant?"

"Both," he grins, suddenly and unexpectedly. "No, I just hate the taste and hate being drunk. Haven't touched alcohol since I was eighteen."

There's an untouched crate of apple-watermelon JJ, so I get two bottles of that. Greg gets one of those also, and the last can of Red Akuma. Niall takes two beers with him and leaves mysteriously early - because I haven't heard from head office, probably only to check up on Michelle after his long double shift, who he never admits to being possessive and obsessive about.

The rest of us all sit on the edge of the stage when the pizzas arrive, while the roadies take down the taffeta, boasting that they've just had All-You-Can-Eat Indian curry buffet at the pub down the road.

"How many First Aid cases tonight?" one of the guys asks, as Greg hands out incident sheets needing signatures, and I scribble briefly on mine.

"Er, three," he says. "Good result. One asthma attack, one too much to drink, one Ingestion Of Other."

"How was the asthma case?" someone else chips in.

"Fine." Greg bites into his pizza. "Grabbed him and did the acupressure point on his ear, he was breathing normally before his girlfriend finally found his inhaler in her handbag." He glances at me as I give him a critical look. "I'm Traditional Chinese Medicine qualified. Acupuncture and herbalism. Not the kind you smoke, you dorks."

A couple of leering door staff snigger.

"You see many customers at these gigs on drugs, like the guy outside earlier?" I query.

"Yeah, some of the Medieval hippies turn up on mushrooms at the right time of year, or munchied out of their heads on hash brownies. They're assholes. Always saying it's authentic. Well, I just tell them, so is gonorrhea. Come back when you've got that, and smallpox."

"What do you think he was on?"

"Looked like Phencyclidine, or LSD, or something similar. Or mushroom tea, that can be horrible. He's gone for a stomach pump because they can't establish from him what he took, so they'll test if it was anything in that bottle he had with him, flush him out anyway, and give him some anti-psychotic downers."

Gladly I have had very little contact with drug users, out of my own avoidance of the stuff. It just means I avoid the people as well. Due to my inflexibility over the matter, they also avoid me. Fortunately for them. The last thing my artificial psychopathic nature needs is to relax its inhibitions.

The delightful Darth Malaga was a recreational drug user. Couldn't spend an hour alone, or in intimate company, without a smoke. He said he used to be an alcoholic, then found he preferred alcohol when it was inside young women in large quantities nearby, where he could take better advantage of it. I still don't know whether being an evil bastard came naturally to him, or if he had to work on it to build up a character like that.

It was the boasting about paying for his ex-girlfriends' abortions as his regular birth control method that made me think he must have had a few role models of his own. It's not even as if he was anyone important - behaving like an early 20
^th
century Hollywood casting director, or sleazy New York art dealer or music producer.
Hey baby, wannabe famous?

No thanks. Just sane.

Maybe I'll take Connor's suggestion and sort out a child support claim. Would serve the guy right. Considering I never filed against him for holiday rape.

I'm still thinking about it as I rejoin the motorway on the start of my trek back home. Junior drops hints, like why does she never get birthday cards, but not like the daily
I-want-a-Dad
wail that I got when she was four. Because, like me, she saw the family demographic portrayed every day on TV. Brian, from
My Parents Are Aliens
,
has a lot to answer for - giving single mums a hard time explaining that sometimes, there is no Brian. Not every family has a Brian. And not every family has a Sophie.

Connor seems to have the same bone to pick about the Media representation of families. By the sound of it, both his parents successfully alienated him. Like his only purpose in life to them was a means to hide their ongoing infidelities, by having him supposedly corroborate each of their stories, filling his childhood ears with their guile and lies. If I was him, I'd be more than just a surgically enhanced psychopath, I think. No wonder he avoids relationships, and goes well out of his way to avoid certain types of women.

I wonder if it's a really healthy form of empathy that I share with Connor, which means we seem to be getting along. Empathy in what's so unstable about both of us. Because in a strange way, we're not competing over it - about who's got the worst deal, which of us is the more complicated. At least it doesn't feel like that. We both allow each other airtime, see each other's point of view, and then get on with something else. It's as if we can both see inside each other a bit of us which was never affected by any of it, the bit which wasn't impressed by all the drama. The unemotional, objective, altruistic part of each other, which at the end of the day meant we stayed objective, sane, and pro-active, in our regular day-to-day responsibilities. Whenever I seem to start straying into something emotionally confusing, Connor says something logical about it, and I automatically stabilize again.

However, I feel as though HIS feelings are more under control by physical outlet, rather than logic, or at least threats of a physical outlet - going by the last few nights. I get the feeling he enjoys the challenge it gives his self-control. Like if he can control that particular urge, he feels more in control the rest of the time. Or something like that. It sounds a bit Zen. Almost a monastic thing.

Funny how abstinence cults haven't caught on as much as you'd think they would, with the whole world trying to sell everyone stuff all the time nowadays. I remember Junior asking me if she could give up being shown any commercials for Lent. I told her that would be cool, and to turn the sound off whenever they came on, if there was no avoiding them. Although the year before, she did ask if it was possible to give up hiccups, and the anticipation of any breakthrough hiccup seemed to cure her of them altogether. Maybe I could make that work for me, and stay vigilant for the next pair of shoes that tries to catch me unawares. Supposing Crank's hotel in Vegas has an on-site shopping mall? I might actually get to see my iBay bargains with the designer price tags on.

I'm alone on the motorway, except for the tail-lights of a lorry in the distance ahead, and equally distant headlights behind. Deep in thought about parenting matters, my phone on the dashboard is quite a rude interruption.

"Yeah," I sigh, pressing Connect, once the volume on my stereo is down to background level.

"Lara, you need to set up voice recognition now," says Warren. "You've got a target on the road."

"Is it human or FTO?" I ask, really not bothered one way or the other. I could just go straight home, to be honest. Where's Connor when I need him? That's what I need a wingman for. To take out the target while I get a long overdue lie-in.

"In the compartment under your arm-rest you'll find a USB toggle and a hands-free Bluetooth earpiece," he says. "Put one in the stereo and the other in your ear, and don't play cute asking me what goes where, those kind of games are for the bedroom."