Poisoned Cherries (27 page)

As we’d been warned, most of the time was taken up by changing the camera positions; we had a lot of standing around to do, but we did it patiently.
 
Ewan turned out to be a football fan, or at least a Falkirk supporter, the poor sad bastard.
 
He lamented his club’s weekend defeat, and its continuing failure to build itself a ground worthy of the name.

“Why don’t you build it for them?”
 
I suggested.

He raised an eyebrow, creasing his make-up.
 
“Not all followers of the Bairns are completely stupid,” he replied.

Eventually, around mid-morning, Miles called a refreshment break.
 
The weather was holding up, so there were no continuity worries on that score.
 
I stopped in at the canteen truck, picked up a mug of coffee and a couple of BLT rolls, loaded them on to a tray, and headed back to my dressing room ... if you’ve got it, flaunt it.

Awkwardly, I unlocked the door with my left hand, stepped up and inside and let it swung shut behind me, then went to set the tray down on the table, against the wall.

I only saw the thing because of the mirror, and even then, it only caught a corner of my eye.
 
I couldn’t see what it was, but it hadn’t been there earlier, of that I was sure.
 
At first I thought it was a leaflet, but when I slid the tray to one side, I saw that it was a photograph, an A4 computer print-out, lying face up on the table-top.

I picked it up and looked at it, and as I did I felt the blood racing to my head.
 
It was a picture of Susie, and me, pushing Janet in her pram, taken, I guessed from the steps of the Kelvingrove Museum, as we approached the Kelvin Hall.

It was my turn to go ballistic.
 
I jerked the door open again and yelled out into Cockburn Street.
 
“Ricky!”

It was Mandy who responded; she jumped out of the canteen wagon and ran up the hill.
 
“He’s gone back to his office, Oz,” she said, barely out of breath.
 
“What is it?”

“What sort of a fucking operation is this?”
 
I snarled at her.
 
Dawn’s dressing-room door opened as I spoke and she looked out, puzzled and curious.
 
I grabbed Mandy by the arm and hauled her inside.

I waved the photo in her face.
 
“Someone’s been in here,” I told her, making a conscious effort not to shout.
 
“He’s left me a calling card.
 
You people are supposed to be trying to trace this guy, you’re all over here, and yet he walked into this closed street, broke into my locked room and left this, and nobody stopped him.”

“Oz, I’m sorry,” she said, her face as pale as mine in my make-up.
 
“I don’t know anything about this.
 
What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to interrogate everyone on this crew, and I mean everyone, until you find someone who saw this guy getting in here.
 
Then I want you to circulate his description to every one of your people.
 
Then I want you to find the bastard and bring him to me, so that I can find out what his fucking problem is with me and my family.

“And while you’re at it, you tell that boss of yours that if this is how he protects me, then I’m starting to get seriously worried about Alison.”

I shoved the picture into her hand and stepped into the street to cool down.
 
Miles was waiting outside.
 
“What’s the problem, mate?”
 
he asked.

“I’ve got a stalker,” I replied, then told him the whole story.
 
His face grew more and more serious as I spoke.
 
Through my still-open door I could hear Mandy on the phone to her boss.

“Don’t worry,” he said, eventually in that quiet, dangerous tone he has.
 
“We’ll find this guy, even if I have to bring in Mark Kravitz to do it.”
 
He slapped me on the shoulder.
 
“Come on, let’s go down to the canteen truck and chill out.”

I followed him down the street and climbed up the steps that led into our travelling canteen.
 
When he got to the top, he stopped in his tracks, and I heard him gasp.
 
I stepped up beside him, and gasped just as he had.
 
Facing us was my soon-to-be-ex-wife Primavera, and her new lover, Nicky Johnson.

“Hi,” she said, without a trace of uncertainty.
 
“We’re passing through, on the way to Auchterarder for Nick to meet Mum and Dad.”

“Yeah,” said the former hot-dog vendor, with a greasy smile.
 
“I couldn’t be here and not call in to wish you luck with the new movie.”

I’d never actually met the man before; I’d heard of him, seen a couple of his movies, and we’d spoken that one time, but I’d never encountered him in Los Angeles.
 
I knew right there and then that if I had I wouldn’t have liked him, whatever the circumstances.
 
As it was, given what had just happened in my dressing room, he couldn’t have picked a worse moment to introduce himself.

I took a pace towards him, winding up the great big left hook that I’ve honed to perfection on the heavy punching bag, and with the serious intention of knocking his head clean off his shoulders.
 
Then I felt Miles grip my arm, hard.
 
“No!”
 
he shouted, stopping me in mid-stride.
 
Nicky and the catering staff all sighed with relief; especially Nicky, who had gone pale all of a sudden.

What happened next was just a blur.
 
Miles took half a pace forward and hit Prim’s new stud with the fastest right-hander I have ever seen in my life.
 
Johnson’s quite a beefy bloke, but still the force of the punch spun him half round and lifted him right up on his toes.
 
He held that position for a second, almost like a foot baller going up for a header, then pitched forward, face down, raising a small cloud of dust from the floor as he landed.

“Sorry, mate,” said Miles, over his shoulder.
 
“I know the son-of-a-bitch was trying to rub your nose in it, but I couldn’t let you hit him.
 
If you’d broken your hand, the delay while it healed would have cost us a fucking fortune.”

Thirty-Nine.

Nicky Johnson started crying when he came round.
 
He was dazed and confused, and somewhere at the back of his mind, he may have realised that he had done something very stupid, which would, given Miles’s wallop, figuratively as well as fistic ally have a bad effect on his career in the long run.

Prim knelt beside him as he stirred on the floor; he was only out cold for a few seconds, and soon she had him in a sitting position with his back against the trailer wall.
 
He looked like a big dummy sitting there, dazed, not quite knowing where he was, with two big tears tracking down his cheeks.

It put a damper on Prim’s show of outrage, as she glared up at Miles and me.
 
“You’re a couple of thugs,” she snapped.
 
“I should call the police.”

“What did you expect?”
 
I told her.
 
“Whose idea was it to come here, yours or the boy’s?”

“We thought of it together,” she said.
 
“We were in Edinburgh and it seemed the right thing to do.
 
Dawn’s my sister, remember, and Miles is my brother-in-law.
 
Why shouldn’t I come to visit them?
 
It’s got nothing to do with you.
 
You’re nothing to me now.”

I looked down at her, and I could see in her eyes that she was economising with the truth.
 
If Susie Gantry’s taught me one thing, it’s that I’ve usually been more in love with myself than with anyone else.
 
There have been a few exceptions to that, but Prim wasn’t one of them.
 
I think what bound us together was luck, more than anything else.
 
There’s no doubt about it; my life changed irrevocably from the moment we met.
 
She was like a lucky charm to me; when she was around, at first at least, everything we touched turned to money.

We believed that we cared for each other, and we probably did, but

looking back it was superficial.
 
As a basis for a shared life, lust

alone doesn’t last.
 
We fucked a lot, Premier-League class sometimes,

but we never talked about anything worth talking about.
 
Before too

long,

each of us was cheating on the other and justifying it in our own minds, until eventually, for one of the few times in my life, I got honest with myself, and went back to Jan.
 
Even without Prim, my good-luck streak seemed to carry on, until the night when it turned very bad.

Afterwards, I turned to Prim again, maybe in the subconscious hope of restoring it... that possibility hadn’t occurred to me until that moment in the trailer, but yes, maybe I did.
 
If that was the case, it didn’t work out.
 
Sure, the money kept rolling in, but it was offset by black moments too.
 
Even our wedding day had its crisis.
 
Come to think of it, our short-lived marriage was one big crisis.
 
As for our honeymoon .. . but that’s another story.

All that said, though, flawed, selfish, cynical, and ultimately doomed as a couple as we may have been, we never were ordinary.
 
The bond that tied us might not have been true love, but whatever it was, its fabric was strong, and conductive.
 
Sparks did fly between us, and sometimes, bolts of lightning.

That’s how it was as we looked at each other in the canteen trailer.
 
“I’m nothing to you, am I?”
 
I challenged her.
 
“So why are you looking at me that way?
 
You don’t know whether you want to stab me or shag me, do you?”

She jumped to her feet.
 
“Given the choice I bloody well do!”
 
she shouted.
 
“Do you think I’ve forgiven you for Susie Gantry?
 
Or forgiven her, for that matter?”

“You think I’ve forgiven you for yours?”
 
I heard myself snap back.

Actually, I thought I had, but old Oz had been lying to himself again.
 
“Do you want me to run through the list?
 
Or the age range of the guys you had?
 
Half a century wouldn’t cover it.”
 
We glared at each other.

She had forgotten Nicky; I had forgotten everyone else.
 
“So don’t go

telling me I mean nothing.
 
I mean plenty, otherwise you wouldn’t have

set up that poor sap there to see what I would do to him.”
 
A twitch of

her right eye told me I’d hit the mark.
 
“I bet you got your jollies

off him being flattened, didn’t you?
 
I’ll bet you’re all moist now’

She slapped me, hard, across the cheek.
 
I laughed at her.
 
Then I heard a shout from the door.
 
“You two stop it!
 
Stop it at once!”
 
It was the first time I’d ever heard Dawn speak sharply to anyone, other than on the screen.
 
“If you’re going to scream at each other, do it in private.”

“Yeah,” said Miles, quietly, his calmness contrasting with his wife’s anger.
 
“That’s a good idea.
 
There are things you two need to get out of your system; without knocking ten bells out of each other, of course.

Oz, you aren’t in the next couple of shots.
 
Take time out and we’ll see you back after the lunch break.”

“I’ve got nothing to say to this bastard,” Prim hissed.

I had cooled off.
 
“Well, I’ve got things to say to you.
 
Let’s go up the hill to my dressing room.”

Nicky Johnson was still sitting on the floor, against the wall.
 
He made a small sound, of protest, perhaps, but everyone ignored him.
 
My wife glared at me again, but nodded.
 
“Okay.”

She followed me up the hill to my trailer and stepped inside; I locked the door behind us to make sure we weren’t interrupted.
 
“No more yelling now,” I warned her.
 
“You don’t want to disturb Ewan Capperauld, if you haven’t already.”

“Don’t you bet on it,” she snorted.
 
“After what you just said.”

I felt my cheek; it was still stinging.
 
“I was right, then; Nicky getting belted over you did give you a wee thrill.”

“No it did not!”

“Then why did you bring him here?
 
You must have known it was on the cards.”

“You promised me you wouldn’t touch him.”

“Since when did you and I start keeping promises to each other?
 
You just wanted to see what would happen, didn’t you?”

“What sort of a bloody nerve have you got?”
 
she gasped.

Time for a change of tack, Osbert.
 
“Sorry,” I murmured.

She blinked.
 
“I said.
 
“What..
 
.”
 
‘

“I heard you the first time, and I said “Sorry”.
 
I want to apologise properly for what happened with Susie.
 
I’ve never really done that, and I should.”

“Apology noted,” she murmured, ‘even if I can’t accept it, in the circumstances.
 
And I’m not apologising, for any of what I did; I was more than entitled.”