The Queen of New Beginnings (3 page)

Somewhere in the faraway distance, he could hear Katya moving about upstairs. He’d got his own back on her. Using the sachet of sugar he had pinched on the train yesterday—he never could resist helping himself to those perfectly shaped little packets, even though he never took sugar in his own drinks—he had added it to her coffee. Served her right. Small victories. They were not to be knocked.

He had made up his mind. Just as soon as she had gone shopping and stocked the cupboards and fridge with food, he’d call Glen and insist he speak to the agency and demand someone else to shop and clean for him. He could just imagine Glen’s response. He’d probably say having a foreigner as his only point of contact with the outside world was ideal. It meant she wouldn’t have a clue who he was.

A scratching noise behind him had him spinning round in his chair.

Mice?

He cocked his head and listened hard. There it was again. Not mice, he concluded. And not a scratching noise as he’d thought, but a ticking.

Seconds passed.

Tick…tick…gurgle…tick.

It was the gurgle that did it. He knew then what the sound was. It was the sound of trapped air.

Was it possible?

Had Katya succeeded where he had failed?

He went over to one of the two radiators in the room.
Yes!
Heat. Glorious heat. The girl was a miracle worker. He wasn’t going to die of hypothermia after all.

Of all the bedrooms he could have picked, Mr. Shannon had chosen Alice’s old bedroom. But like the kitchen downstairs, which was sleek and showroom-smart with shiny granite work surfaces and state-of-the-art appliances, it bore very little resemblance to the bedroom of Alice’s childhood.

When it had been Alice’s room, it had contained an eclectic mix of rugs and cumbersome furniture, including her great aunt Eliza’s rocking chair. Alice had spent hours rocking in it, either lost in a book or simply daydreaming while gazing out of the windows. Thanks to her father, who had never been short on whimsical ideas when it came to presents, she had had a small wooden stool and a spinning wheel and she used to sit at it in the turret and pretend that she was Rapunzel waiting for her prince to appear.

As an only child she had learned from a young age to lose herself in her imagination and would often write, direct and star in her own one-woman shows. Just occasionally she would perform for her parents or the au pair, but her regular audience consisted of her collection of spellbound dolls and teddy bears.

At the end of her bed there had been a large wooden trunk that had travelled the world with Great Aunt Eliza. It had ended its life as Alice’s dressing-up box and most of its contents—tailored dress suits, floaty evening dresses, scarves, beads, broaches, hats, shoes and handbags—had belonged to a woman that Alice only remembered from photographs. She couldn’t have been very big because when Alice was only ten years old, Great Aunt Eliza’s shoes fitted her perfectly.

As well as a dressing-up box, Alice also had an intriguing store of props to use in her one-woman shows. This was mostly down to her father, who had an obsessive eye for anything of a fanciful or theatrical nature. “I came across this the other day and thought you might like it, Alice,” he would say. One day he presented her with an ornate birdcage with a stuffed mynah bird inside. It was a week before Alice discovered there was a key under the base of the cage and that when she turned it, the mynah bird moved its head, opened its beak and sang. Other “finds” had included the spinning wheel and stool, a top hat, a Russian copy of Leo Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina
, a false beard, an old-fashioned telephone, a Sherlock Holmes-style pipe, a battered dinner gong, and a scruffy pair of red tap shoes, which her father soon regretted giving her.

To Alice’s disappointment the tap shoes only fitted her for a few months. But during those months she drove her parents to distraction by endlessly tap-tap-tapping her way round the house. She loved the noise the metal taps made, especially on the wooden floorboards in her bedroom. She would roll back the threadbare rugs and dance and dance. If her parents were away she would seize her opportunity and dance until her legs ached and she was doubled over with a stitch. But if her father was home, he would crash into her room after only a few minutes, throw her over his shoulder and threaten to chuck her down the stairs if she made any more noise. She never actually thought he would, but on one occasion, the au pair—a quiet, studious girl from Stockholm who had only been with them a few days—thought he was serious. At the sight of Alice being dangled over the banisters, she burst into tears with fright. She packed her bags and left that very evening in a taxi, saying she couldn’t stay in such a mad house a moment longer.

Untidiness was a sign of a creative mind, so Alice’s mother maintained. Which seemed to be the family excuse for the chaotic state of the house, a chaos that guaranteed nothing could ever be found when it was needed. Her parents would frequently drive themselves wild looking for their car keys or a pen. Shrieking at the top of their voices, they would accuse each other of moving whatever it was they couldn’t find. Invariably it was Alice who would find what they were looking for. Instead of thanking her, they would suspect that she had been playing a game with them, of hiding the kitchen scissors or the TV licence that urgently needed paying, merely to gain their attention.

So much for Cuckoo House when she was growing up, when it had been a casual, messy and informal environment.

Under its current ownership, it looked and felt a very different house. Alice couldn’t imagine anyone threatening to throw a nuisance tap-dancing child down the stairs in these immaculate surroundings.

The walls of her old bedroom were decorated with a subtly patterned cream and blue wallpaper and the pale-blue carpet was fitted and invitingly soft underfoot. The furniture was antique, elegant and highly polished; it reeked of good taste and sophistication, and of order. Most striking of all was the enormous bed with its intricately carved headboard. Not so striking was that Mr. Shannon hadn’t bothered to cover the duvet or pillows.

After a brief search, she found what she was looking for in a large chest of drawers: fresh bed linen. She began making up the bed, allowing herself once again to explore her secret store of memories.

One of her earliest memories was when her father had returned home from one of his many trips abroad. He had tiptoed into her room and woken her with a scratchy kiss. At first she hadn’t recognized him because of his beard, and she’d let out a startled cry and buried herself deep beneath the bedclothes. He’d laughed and tugged her out and when she’d looked at him closely she could see that he wasn’t a stranger come to steal her after all. He’d given her a toy koala and a wooden snake that moved like the real thing.

As a naturalist photographer of some repute, Bruce Barrett was frequently away for months at a time. His work was always being featured in the
National Geographic
magazine as well as the Sunday supplements. When he was home he was more often than not at the top of the house in his darkroom. There was no guessing what kind of mood he’d be in when he opened the door and emerged blinking mole-like into the light. He could be sulky and withdrawn, or waging war on anything or anyone who was unfortunate enough to get in his way. Other times he had a ridiculous sense of the dramatic and would dress up as a pirate, complete with wooden peg leg and eye patch. Waving a fake cutlass he would chase Alice round the house until her giddy excitement tipped over into high-pitched squealing terror and she’d be shaking and screaming for him to stop. He never knew when enough was enough, that a small child could only take so much. There were other times, though, when he would sit for hours at a time quietly reading to her. She often fell asleep in his arms.

A typical way for him to emerge from his darkroom was to slide down the banisters and bellow at the top of his voice, “What’s a man to do round here to get anything to eat?”

“Oh, do stop crashing around like a five-year-old,” Alice’s mother would say when he burst into her study. “I’m trying to write my column. Now go away.”

“But I’m hungry,” he would complain. “I haven’t eaten for twenty-four hours.”

“You have no one to blame but yourself. I’m sure if you asked Thalia nicely she would rustle something up for you. Now go away and leave me in peace.”

Thalia, a Greek girl from Athens, had been one of many young au pairs who came to Cuckoo House. They rarely stayed long. Some said they couldn’t cope with the isolation, or the unconventional way the household was run. Others, the prettier ones, had a different reason for leaving.

Alice’s mother, Dr. Barbara Barrett, was a psychiatrist and in her husband’s opinion—an opinion he loved to taunt her with—she had turned her back on a respectable profession to pursue the dark arts of popular psychology in the name of slapstick fame.

Her change of career happened quite by accident. After one of her patients, a man who worked for the BBC, put in a good word for her, she became a media family and relationship expert. By the time Alice was ten, Dr. Barbara Barrett was writing a weekly column for a national newspaper and appeared regularly on the television and radio. She was also an agony aunt for a monthly women’s magazine. Yet for all her so-called professional expertise, Barbara Barrett had no handle on her own domestic situation. She regularly forgot Alice’s birthday and left most of her care to whichever au pair was currently employed. Her husband was beyond her comprehension, or control, and too often when she was preoccupied with work she left him dangerously to his own devices.

Whilst it was true that two such larger than life characters had a volatile love-hate relationship and couldn’t cope with each other on a full-time basis, it was also true that they couldn’t live without each other. Any agony aunt worth her salt would have told them to take greater care of each other. Had they done so, who knew how differently life would have been at Cuckoo House in the years that followed?

Another day, another dollar.

As the saying goes. Who first said it and when, Clayton didn’t have a clue. Or the slightest care. All that was of interest to him was that he’d eaten well last night, he’d slept the sleep of the dead, he was warm, it had stopped raining, the sun was shining and the coffee was made. The only dilemma to the day was whether to have two fried eggs with his sausages and bacon, or one. He tossed an egg in the air as if flipping a coin for his answer and caught it deftly with one hand. Oh, what the hell, he’d have two.

He cracked the eggs into the crowded sizzling pan then spooned hot oil over them. Ooh, yeah, life was good. “What’s that you say?” he asked himself aloud. “Clayton my man, I said life was kickassing
GOOD!
”

Clayton often held conversations with himself. He used to quip that it was the only way he could participate in an intelligent discussion. If that was a sign of madness, well, he’d crossed that line a long time ago. Truth was, he couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t talked to himself.

When Stacey used to walk into his office and found him chuntering away to himself, she would say he was madder than a box of monkeys. That was in the days when she said it as an endearment and with a smile on her face. When she accused him of lunacy towards the end of their relationship, the smile had been replaced with an expression of disgust and loathing. “You need help, Clayton,” she had said on more than one occasion. “Professional help.”

He switched off the gas, tipped the frying pan with well-practised precision and slid his breakfast onto a warmed plate. “There, the perfect breakfast.” He took the plate over to the table and sat down. He was a man transformed. A man who was happy to know that for the next thirty minutes of his life, all was right in the world.

He tucked into his breakfast with relish. A piece of sausage poised on the prongs of his fork, he held it an inch or two from his mouth. He smiled. “Come to Daddy.” In it went. He chewed on it slowly, savouring the texture—crumbly yet reassuringly meaty. “Yeah baby! That’s what I’m talking about!
Dee
-licious.” Next he tried a piece of bacon. It was as good as the sausage. “My compliments to the chef. And to the lippy Katya for doing my shopping.”

“Local food,” she had explained when she had returned from the shops. “Organic meat. From Mr. Butcher in village. I no buy you rubbish.”

For all their getting off on the wrong foot yesterday, he was grateful for what Katya had done for him. She had shown him how the heating system worked and had bought him everything he’d put on his shopping list, plus other things he hadn’t given a thought so, such as toilet paper and tissues. She had suggested that for the time being he should use the Armstrongs’ washing powder, dishwasher tablets and washing up liquid and replace them when required. He had given her a wad of cash and convinced that she would try to con him, he’d checked all the items off against the till receipts when she’d left. But everything was just as it should be.

He had decided not to make that call to Glen. For now, the girl could stay. Her next scheduled visit was for the day after tomorrow. She had offered to cook for him, but not wanting the bother of having to make conversation with her for more than was necessary, he’d said he was quite capable of cooking for himself.

Stacey would have sneered at that. “You, cook?” she would have said. “Don’t make me laugh.”

How he had ever got sucked into Stacey’s gravitational forcefield, he didn’t know. He used to say that they were such opposites that they’d met at their polar parts coming in the opposite direction. Thinking this now, it somehow didn’t make the same sense it had then. If any.

Actually, he knew exactly how they had been drawn together and who was responsible: Lucky Bazza. Bazza had got himself a new date lined up and had suggested Clayton and the date’s best friend join them at the pub to make a foursome. This was back in 1994, in the days when they were sharing a flat together in Clapham and were struggling to make ends meet. To supplement their meagre earnings from their writing, Bazza was working in a bar and Clayton had a job in a seedy hotel as a night porter. He spent most of those nights—when he wasn’t turning a blind eye to questionable women coming and going—working on a script. They were both twenty-nine and beginning to think they had hit a dead end, when suddenly things were finally looking up for them: their script had been accepted by the BBC.

They had been writing together since their days at university, mostly gags and sketches for up and coming comedians. They had never felt the lure of the stage or screen themselves, preferring to write for others. Their goal was to write situation comedy, but not just any old sitcom; they wanted to claim the crown of Best Ever Sitcom. Which they did. They racked up record ratings and made stars of the actors who, until the pilot show had gone out, had been unknowns. Now they were household names with two of the central characters currently making films in Hollywood. Clayton didn’t believe those writers, actors or programme makers who claimed retrospectively that they had no idea they’d had a potential hit on their hands. He and Bazza had
known
. They had known right from the outset that what they’d written was bloody good.

The fourth and final series of
Joking Aside
had been broadcast five years ago and yet only last year it had come out top again in a poll conducted by the
Radio Times
to establish the best ever sitcom. Holding the hefty piece of glassware aloft at the award ceremony at the Grosvenor Hotel in London, Clayton had mumbled drunkenly into the microphone, “How do you like them bananas, Ricky Gervais?”

Bazza hadn’t been able to attend; he’d been over in Los Angeles sucking up to some big studio boss, but doubtless he would have made a far more eloquent and self-effacing acceptance speech. But then, had Bazza been around to accept the award, Clayton wouldn’t have gone within a mile of the place. He and Bazza hadn’t spoken for more than two years. Their relationship, as Bazza repeatedly referred to their writing partnership in the countless interviews he gave, had lost its creative spark. That wasn’t all it had lost.

Normally only too quick to attend a lavish do of celebrity backpatting, Stacey hadn’t accompanied Clayton to the Grosvenor; she had stayed at home, saying she didn’t want to be seen in public with him when, once again, he would make an idiot of himself. But Glen had been there. Through thick and thin, his agent had always been there for Clayton.

It had meant a lot to him that when Bazza made the unilateral decision to end their writing partnership—claiming he felt stifled and needed to spread his creative wings, no hard feelings, blah, blah—Glen, who had represented them both, stuck with Clayton. It was a decision he must have regretted at least a million times a day ever since. Had he chosen Bazza, he would have earned much more than he did with Clayton. Not that Clayton was hard up. Far from it. He had more than enough money. The royalties from
Joking Aside
showed no sign of drying up. He had lost count how many countries the series was shown in around the world and with DVD sales continually on the up, even if he never wrote another successful script again, he would be comfortable for the rest of his life.

But he wanted to write. He missed the buzz that writing used to give him. His life felt meaningless without a script in front of him. It was his identity. And it was thanks to Bazza that he couldn’t write. He had taken it badly when Bazza had ended the partnership. At first he had thought it was a joke, that his old mate was playing a number on him. He had even checked their office for hidden cameras, certain that Bazza was setting him up for some kind of funny-ha-ha candid TV moment. When the truth finally hit Clayton, that Bazza wasn’t mucking about, he was gutted. To his eternal shame, he had resorted to begging Bazza to reconsider. “But we’re the golden ticket,” he’d said. “We’ve got a licence to print money right now. Why would you give that up?”

“It’s not about the money,” Bazza had said. “I want to write new things.”

“Then let’s do it together. Just as we’ve always done.”

“No, I want to write on my own. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for some time. I’m sorry, Clayton, it’s over. We’ve gone as far as we can together. We had a good run, but let’s look to the future now.”

In the days, weeks and months that followed, Clayton swung from high optimism that he was free to write the best stuff he’d ever written—now that he wasn’t carrying such a useless co-writer—to feeling adrift and incapable of writing a single line of dialogue. It wasn’t long before he ran dry of optimism and all he had left was a debilitating fear that he would never be able to write again.

Then his parents died, one after the other in obscenely quick succession. One minute they were both alive and nagging him to visit more often; the next his father died of a heart attack and two months later his mother suffered a massive stroke and died a week later. It was then that he discovered that while they had both been supremely proud of what he had achieved, they hadn’t trusted it. To them, it hadn’t seemed like a proper job. After his mother’s funeral, while he’d been staying at the house where he’d grown up, he had found a building society book. It was a joint account and it had over four hundred and fifty thousand pounds in it. Every month, regular as clockwork, a cheque had been paid into the account. It was the exact same amount Clayton had sent his parents every month to provide them with a bit of luxury, holidays, a new car, new clothes, that kind of thing. But here was the evidence that they hadn’t spent a penny of his success. Many times he had offered to buy them a new house, somewhere in the country or by the sea, but they’d refused, saying there was nothing wrong with the house they had. There had been a handwritten note contained within the pages of the account book—written by his mother—and it said that when they died, the money they had saved was for Clayton, just in case things hadn’t worked out for him.

If there had been any uncertainty before that he was experiencing a phase of writer’s block, losing his parents and squaring up to his own mortality ensured there was not a shred of doubt from then on.

Meanwhile, Lucky Bazza’s writing career went from strength to strength. If they had once been the crowned kings of comedy writing, Lucky Bazza was now the golden boy who couldn’t put a foot wrong. While Clayton was deeply mired in a state of inertia, Bazza had written a film script for a major box-office hit and had thrown himself into trying to save Africa, along with just about every other comedian, actor, writer and musician in the country.

Never mind saving Africa, Clayton had his work cut out saving himself!

There was no getting away from it; one person’s success is another person’s failure. Clayton had tried hard to pretend that Lucky Bazza’s success didn’t bother him, but the truth was it hurt like hell. He had believed it to be the bitterest pill of all to swallow. But then Stacey left him for Bazza.

Throughout this dark, depressing period of his life, and presumably in an effort to raise his flagging spirits, Stacey had kept up a steady onslaught of derogatory comments. “You’re not funny at all,” she complained to him one day. “I can’t remember the last time you made me laugh.”

He couldn’t remember ever telling her that he was funny. Why would he? Why would he go around saying he was funny?
Who, me? Oh, I’m the funniest man on the planet. Wind me up and watch me go. I’ll have you in stitches for hours
. Comedy doesn’t work that way. Everyone knows that. Everyone except for Stacey, maybe.

The way he saw it, being funny was a disability. It dragged a person down with the sheer weight of expectation that it fostered. “Go on, then, make me laugh,” was the expectation of anyone who met him for the first time. It was a hell of a weight to lug around.

When it became obvious that Clayton was not going to earn his agent any money from fresh writing, Glen began getting him appearances on panel shows for TV and radio. He rapidly made a name for himself as the grumpy, dry-witted, mordant guest. Then one week when he was appearing on a topical news show, he let rip with a vociferous attack on the guest host, a sickening man with a squeaky-clean image and an ego the size of Texas. Clayton couldn’t abide him. Off camera, the squeaky-clean image was anything but squeaky-clean. “Let me stop you right there, Baby Doll,” Clayton had said when the host, grinning from squeaky-clean ear to squeaky-clean ear, had started to describe Clayton as a one-hit wonder who couldn’t write without his co-writer, the much more talented Barry Osborne.

Clayton’s diatribe made the headlines the next day and, ever since, when an example of a truly excruciating on-screen moment was called for, the clip of him outing the host as a coke head with a penchant for dressing up in baby-doll nightdresses whilst indulging in sex with men twenty years his junior was shown. The man’s proclivities were well known in certain showbiz circles, and Clayton didn’t regret his outburst, or the man’s subsequent downfall from prime-time television.

For weeks afterwards Clayton was hot property. Every newspaper and chat show host wanted to interview him, probably in the hope that he would let rip with some other salacious exposé. He was glad when the circus left town and the telephone stopped ringing.

Stacey wasn’t so happy. He had never been interested in being Mr. Showbiz, but Stacey had loved the razzamatazz of an opening night or the chance of being snapped by the paparazzi coming out of a restaurant or a club late at night. He’d played along initially, knowing that it pleased her, but when they’d reached the sniping Heather versus Macca stage of their relationship, he told her he would sooner stay at home playing Scrabble while having his toenails systematically ripped out at the roots. Stacey’s response was to accuse him of being small-minded.

Later, when she announced that she was leaving him for Bazza, she said his small-mindedness wasn’t his only area of deficiency. Small in the trouser department? That was news to him. But apparently, Lucky Bazza was gloriously endowed. Funny, because as far as Clayton could recall from the many side-by-side urinal situations they’d shared, Lucky Bazza hadn’t shown any outstanding tendencies.