The Afterparty
Page 5
‘Have you now?’ Hugo raised a famous eyebrow. ‘And I don’t suppose one of you would be Miss Briony Warshak?’
‘That’s me!’ she said, stepping forward, almost curtseying, to put her hand in his. ‘I lo-oved you in Little Steve.’
‘Thank you very much. It was a great part. I was very lucky.’
Calvin decided to wear suits more often.
‘You were just great.’
‘Oh, now you’re embarrassing me.’
The girls laughed together, in a shrill release of tension.
Hugo leaned across to speak to a waiter as they did so.
‘Could you take a selection of your best malts over to that group of people at the bottom of the stairs please?’ he said.
The waiter nodded and disappeared.
There was a moment of silence.
‘Hi,’ said Michael. ‘I’m such a big fan.’
‘Oh, now you’re embarrassing me.’
She liked this, Warshak’s daughter did, and led her friends in a cascade of glittery laughter, to which Calvin Vance breathlessly chipped in. He looked truly wasted, staring wildly out of a patina of sweat.
From a passing waiter, Hugo ordered his intended round of scotches. Another guy queued silently for his turn. He was unattractive, and older than the others, though not old. Strangely dressed as well, like an ambitious chemistry teacher.
‘Hi,’ the man said, stepping forward. ‘I’m such a big fan.’
No one had briefed Hugo about him.
* * *
From: valerie.morrell@nortonmorrell.co.uk
To: williammendez75@gmail.com
Subject: Publicity
Date: Wednesday, 26 August 2009 09:05:11
Dear William,
Thanks for this. From what I have seen of it so far, I think the book is very promising. I enjoy your style, and the introduction of Calvin adds a valuable extra dimension. You say you are still polishing the rest, so I was wondering if there might be any more I could have a look at, perhaps with a synopsis? Let me rephrase that: I’m desperate to know what happens next!
And another thing: what more can you tell me about yourself? Is this your first novel? And what kind of journalism do you do? Perhaps we could meet up at some point? This week’s bad for me, but any day next (except Friday) would be fine.
Regards,
Val
* * *
From:williammendez75@gmail.com
To:valerie.morrell@nortonmorrell.co.uk
Subject: Re: Publicity
Date: Wednesday, 26 August 2009 17:12:42
Thanks Val – I’m delighted you’re enjoying it. I’ve been working on the novel for years and you are the first agent I’ve shown it to, so this really does mean a lot to me. I can’t tell you how many times I imagined something like this happening!
As for a synopsis, well, the book is virtually finished now, so if you can bear to wait, I think I’d rather let it unfold at its own pace. I did sit down to write a basic summary after reading your email, but it just felt wrong. Sorry if that’s frustrating for you. It won’t be long before you can see the whole thing. If it helps, I will say that the finished version is shaping up to be about 85,000 words, and it turns on one central event roughly halfway through. When you get there, you’ll know.
What do you think of the names of Warshak’s daughter and her friends, by the way? I’m suddenly having my doubts about Briony as an American name – and Alissa and Kelly-Marie sound a bit council-house for such exalted company. In my first draft they were friends of the DJ, but then I wrote him out, and now I’m not sure they belong. Hmmm …
As for me, yes this is my first novel. And I, like Michael, am mostly a freelance subeditor, usually at The Times. It pays the bills (just about) and leaves enough space for writing. On Sunday I’m off to Sicily for a fortnight, but I could come in to see you on the Friday after I get back? That’s Sept 18. Any good?
All the best,
William
* * *
From: valerie.morrell@nortonmorrell.co.uk
To: williammendez75@gmail.com
Subject: Re. Publicity
Date: Thursday, 27 August 2009 08:50:10
Perfect. Fri Sept 18 is in my diary. Shall we say 4pm at the Norton Morrell offices? And by all means bin the synopsis if you feel it spoils things. Just don’t lose interest and leave me hanging!
Vx
PS Girls’ names don’t bother me, by the way. But then you’re the author …
* * *
From:williammendez75@gmail.com
To:valerie.morrell@nortonmorrell.co.uk
Subject:Chapter 3!
Date: Sunday, 30 August 2009 04:51:09
Chapter 3 – Hugo/Mellody
Hi Val – I’ve worked extra hard to get this to you before I go away. I also hope to do some more work out there, so you won’t be waiting long for the next one. All feedback gratefully received – especially on Mellody sections, which are meant to sound/look consistently like US English, but probably don’t. And I did decide to change the girls’ names in the end. Hope you approve…
William
Friday, April 1 2005
21:01
FLICK FLICK. FLI-ICK.
A freelance strand of sinew typed a little overtime in Hugo’s eye.
Flick fli-ick fli-ick flick.
It was usually higher up, the feeling. In his brow. He sensed its movements like the rustle of a caterpillar busying itself among the hairs. Painless, and unpleasant only in his inability to govern it. Today this rebel twitch, however, had migrated down into the apron of his eye. It was visible, he knew from bathroom surveillance, as a minute activation in the filmy skin. Though whether others noticed was impossible to tell.
‘Anyway, we appreciate that your time is less than limited, so I’ll cut to the chase,’ said Edie, ‘Princess Pam: Green Card meets The Princess Diaries.’
The chase. Hugo thought there would be a chase.
‘A girl.’ With hands, Edie set the scene. ‘A law student working pro bono in New York, marries a mysterious European guy to get him citizenship. But at their wedding she discovers his secret: back home he is a prince – and now she is a princess. So together, they must return to the old country to face what he was trying to run away from. You would play that man.’
‘Which man?’
He had stopped listening.
‘Who are we kidding here? You’re Hugo Marks, you play Prince Dmitri. When I heard this idea, I called Brian and I said, “Hugo Marks. No one else.”’
She was one of those very Californian women, Edie was. Moderately old. And large, one suspected, beneath her patterned smock. Not Chicken Cottage large, not outlandish, not a largeness that restricts one’s choice of chairs. Hers was more the dwindled bulk that might result from being rapidly inflated once (by disease? by grief?) and then let down again, leaving her body grooved with tawny corrugations, like a sundried Mama Cass. Edie was a powerful producer, though. And her husband Brian’s hedge fund had a taste for financing her films.
‘Well, you know,’ Hugo said, ‘as ever it’s script-dependent.’
‘Well, we’ve got a sensational writer.’ Brian joined in. ‘Chloe Green.’
‘I’m embarrassed. I haven’t heard of her.’
‘She’s from TV.’ Old blond Brian looked happy in his money suit. White shirt, red tie. No lapel flag tonight, though doubtless he kept several spares.
‘So there’s a script?’
‘We wanted to surmise your interest.’ Edie reassumed control. ‘And then tailor the part to your specificities. No one plays an a-wrist-o-crat like you do.’
‘You’ve got it down. Trust me.’ Brian grinned like he had swindled a few.
‘I take that as quite a compliment,’ Hugo said, though there was none he liked less to receive. Ever since the success of his first film, Little Steve (attributed to his effortlessly debonair performance as Lord Mayle), it was as if some edict had been passed through Hollywood that no
body should offer him a role outside the aristocracy. Through doggedness, he had found more outré options, playing a drug dealer, a strung-out executive, a hit man and a writer – all with immaculate American accents. And yet even now, as Sinbad, the biggest film of his career, was finally on the point of release, three quarters of the scripts he received still contained some suave young nobleman, his dry wit highlighted in yellow streaks.
‘So look: directors,’ Edie said. ‘Chris Columbus is interested. I met with him on Tuesday …’
Hugo swigged his drink and stared out across the casserole of names and faces on the floor below. Such energy, such frightening life. Mellody would be in there, of course, folded gracefully into a booth, laughing with her friends, that Pete Sheen character among them. It made Hugo glad to be elsewhere. Though now the mezzanine was growing crowded too.
‘… could not agree with me more passionately. He was effusive, Hugo, to tell you the truth. And with the two of you on board, I think we have a good chance of getting on set by the fall of next year. If your schedule permits …’
He looked around for an escape route.
There was Gareth Morse, a senior British screenwriter and amiably sozzled cove. But Morse had already floridly unloaded his ‘Many happy returns of the day’, and might be just as difficult to shake off. Or there was Carlotta Bossi, a model friend of Mellody’s, whom Hugo also had already spoken to – and then abandoned with the excuse that he was going to get a drink, only to see, on looking down, that his glass was full. Near Carlotta, however, was Don Scarlett. Don Scarlett: fashion designer, diminutive and neatly grizzled, hair black the colour of suspicion, in progressive specs and a clean-lined suit. He was battering another man with cockney repartee. Don would do.
‘Excuse me Edie, sorry.’ Hugo called out: ‘Don! Don!’
The little man grinned through his cigar, and blithely forced his way over.
‘Hugo, you old cunt!’ he roared, startling the Americans a little.
‘Don, this is Edie and Brian,’ Hugo said, and everyone shook hands. ‘Guys, this is Don Scarlett, an old friend. Mellody’s been modelling for him for, ooh, absolutely ages.’
‘Don’t say that, son,’ Don said. ‘You’ll make her sound old.’
‘You’re right.’ Hugo nodded. ‘She wouldn’t like that.’ And she wouldn’t. ‘Don’s always had a bit of a soft spot for Mell,’ he explained helpfully, to keep things running. ‘Haven’t you Don?’
‘Are you joking?’ Don was incredulous. ‘I could fuck her in half!’ Three hacks of laughter followed, before the intervention of a rich tobacco cough, fibrous and long-lasting.
Brian and Edie joined in for politeness.
‘Well that’s nice to know,’ Hugo said.
For years, to please Mellody, he had simulated an affection for Don. And, a good actor, he sometimes convinced himself. Recently, though, as his wife began to weary him, the final wisps of this illusion had evaporated. Don, in Hugo’s now concrete opinion, was a misogynist, an ego thug, and a consummate charlatan. He had become notorious in the early punk period for including customers’ own blood in his designs, among other fluids; but now he was a public monument, the useful idiot of the avant-garde, though no less pugnacious for it. Badgered by the media after a derided show in Milan the previous year, Don had wrenched a microphone from the hand of an importunate Rai Uno reporter and told him in faithfully recorded Italian to go and fuck his sister with it.
‘Don is an institution over here,’ Hugo explained to Edie. ‘He single-handedly invented drainpipe trousers, and is “the living embodiment of all that is wrong with British fashion”. The Independent called you that, didn’t they?’
‘Guardian …’ Don growled, through a smile of smoke, like some predatory beast caught in a digesting lull.
‘In fact,’ Hugo soothed, ‘you just had a show in America, didn’t you?’
‘Paris. It was fashion week.’
‘Of course! Sorry. Mellody said. How did you go down?’
‘Fucking stormed it, didn’t I.’
This was not what Hugo had heard.
‘Cool,’ Brian said, with every appearance of meaning it.
‘You not see the pictures, Hugo?’ Don and his cigar looked serious. Prepared.
Hugo had to be careful. Not noticing Don’s work was a far from trivial insult. But being caught in the act of pretending that he had … He must be vague, and fulsome, much as he would usually be. A designer’s new collection, in his experience, was at least as precious as a baby, and equally unavailable for review.
‘Sorry, yes, Mellody did show me. It was great, totally you,’ he said, committing to the lie. ‘Mell absolutely loved it too.’
‘Course she did.’ The cigar glowed happily. ‘Listen.’ A note of earnestness entered Don’s voice. Whatever came next was what he really wanted to talk about. ‘You’ve got to get her back on the runway, mate. The stuff I’m doing right now, I’m telling you, she is going to love it. Seriously, she’s …’
‘I’m sure you’re right, Don,’ Hugo interrupted. ‘But you’ll never get her on a catwalk again. Believe me. Too much temptation, and too much waiting around. It’s commercial work only these days, plus endorsements. And she’s got this fragrance coming out.’
‘Bollocks, Hugo. Perfume’s for wankers.’
‘Yeah, well …’
Hugo’s phone was ringing. It would be Renée.
‘… The thing is …’
He fumbled in his pocket.
‘… Sorry Don. I’d better take this … Hello?’
‘Still sober?’ Renée’s voice seemed to be asking, above the din.
Hugo pressed a hand over his left ear and offered an apologising face to Don, Brian and Edie.
‘Just about,’ he said, squeezing through a pore in the crowd and shuffling towards a barside corner.
‘Good. And you’re upstairs, yeah?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK. Two things.’
Renée liked to be organised. Appointed chief publicist on Little Steve, she had impressed him on sight. Her pragmatic wits, sealed in a box of Chicago toughness, seemed absolutely to embody the professionalism of the upper industry. So casually, informally, he had begun to ask for her advice on other matters. Would it be good for him to do a coffee commercial? (‘Sure, yes.’) How about a cerebral palsy benefit? (‘Definitely not.’) Next he was consulting her about Mellody, too, asking how to handle the unrelenting scrutiny that their relationship had brought upon his life. Finally, when he called her to discuss whom he should approach to be his manager, Renée just said, ‘Well you might as well start paying me,’ and quit her job that day. Since then, she and her assistant Theresa had worked for him unstintingly and indispensably, thriving in the fastidious panic that they whisked into his affairs. No one but Renée could have convinced him to throw this party.
‘First thing,’ Renée said. ‘Rick Warshak’s here. Have you seen him yet?’
Shit. He had forgotten about Warshak. Besides re-burnishing his image, tonight was also meant to thaw relations with the chief executive of Pantheon Studios, who had perceived a slight, quite accurately, in Hugo’s refusal of a three-picture deal. Indeed the party’s date, and designation, had been purposefully set to capture Warshak’s visit to his teenage daughter, who was a student in London and, Renée’s intelligence suggested, a loyal Hugo Marks fan.
‘Hugo? Have you seen Warshak?’
‘Sorry. No, not yet.’ Hugo swallowed. ‘But I’ve …’
‘OK, well he arrived around a half-hour ago and he’s here to see you, so don’t keep him waiting.’
‘Sure. Obviously. I just got stuck with …’
‘Thing two. And for now this is more important. You need to go find Mellody.’
‘No I don’t. She’s downstairs.’
‘No she’s not.’
On tiptoes, Hugo peered above the heads. He could not see Mellody anywhere. Or Pete Sheen.
‘She was there a minute ago,’ he sa
id, gulping.
‘Well she’s not there now.’
‘Yes, I can see th—’
‘OK, look. It doesn’t matter. She’s with her friends from that stupid band, OK? They just arrived, and it’s best they don’t monopolise her. So just go and spend a little time together. Be seen. Can you do that?’
Hugo said nothing.
‘Then go talk to Warshak.’
‘He-ey!’
Pete’s denim-coated shins danced towards her through the crush, his arms Italian-wide.
Malcolm, drummer, tall and frizzy-headed, shuffled in behind.
‘Mwah, darling, mwah,’ said Pete, pecking her cheeks theatrically. His closeness brought a hobo cloud of masculinity, the sour-savoury accumulation of lived-in skin. ‘Have you put on a couple of quid?’ he added, looking her over, making fun of her profession as he liked to do.
Mellody laughed.
‘All right Mell,’ said Malcolm. Glum, as was his custom.
‘Pete, you smell horrible.’ She pitched the cheerful insult at him.
‘I think you’ll find,’ said Pete, head rotated to the fact position, ‘that brother Malcolm is the smelly one in this band. Drummers never wash, I tells you. The man is a walking dreadlock.’
And Mellody laughed again. Thank God the boys had arrived. She had been so bored.
‘Malcolm?’ she began, as he stepped into the light. ‘Malcolm, is there something wrong with your eyes?’
‘My eyes?’
‘They look kind of weird.’
Pete was laughing now. His eyes were the same: a green iris in one side, an inhuman shade of indigo in the other.
‘Fook,’ Malcolm said, in his funny accent from the north. ‘Have I still got them in? We went home with these two girls last night oo both had colored contact lenses. So this morning we borrowed one each.’
Mellody prevented herself from stiffening.
‘It’s an homage to Bowie,’ Pete airily remarked, opening his mouth and plopping in a canapé.