She didn’t greet me. She came over and sat down opposite me, on an orange, slatted chair.
‘So how’s it feel, huh?’ she asked, taking off her dark glasses. Her face was heavily made-up; she looked nervous, too.
‘So-so,’ I said.
‘Which unit you in?’ she asked.
I told her.
She raised her eyebrows. ‘You met Beverly yet?’
I nodded.
She smiled.
‘She’s in my corridor,’ I said.
Lila’s smiled broadened. ‘She tried to get into your pants yet?’
I nodded.
She chuckled. ‘You managed to protect your virtue?’ she asked, bitchily.
‘Yes.’
She took off her gloves, took out her Salems and lit one. ‘Where’re you working?’ she asked, squinting through the smoke.
‘In the Volunteers Services office,’ I said. ‘I just started.’
‘Oh, real la-di-dah.’
‘Filing and stuff,’ I said. ‘We’re putting together packages for Puerto Rico Discovery Day.’
She nodded abstractedly and waved at Allie, a stylish ex-hooker. Allie waved back. It was as if Lila were visiting her old Sixth Form, at school.
‘I’m thinking of starting some drama workshops,’ I said. ‘Maybe putting on a play. I’ve always wanted to direct.’
There was a pause.
‘Worst thing’s the squat’n’cough, right?’ said Lila. That’s when they strip-search you; you have to cough, so if you have hidden anything it falls out. ‘Pretty bad, eh?’ she asked.
I nodded.
‘Even worse than having to kiss Sylvester Stallone,’ she said. ‘Till then, I thought that was the pits.’
She put the cigarette between her lips, rummaged in her bag and brought out a book. It was an early, proof copy of Heavy Petting in Hornchurch by Trevor Parsons. ‘Where the fuck is Hornchurch, anyway?’ she asked, passing the book to me. ‘The publishers sent it. Wanna read it?’
‘Thanks.’ I took the book.
‘I’m not in it,’ she said. ‘I flipped through it, then I read it slowly. There’s nobody like me in it.’ She took a drag of her cigarette. ‘Nobody like you, either. It’s all about a girl called Dawn. Know her?’
I shook my head. ‘I saw her once. She worked in a wine bar.’
Lila indicated the book. ‘It’s full of dirty words,’ she said, wrinkling her nose in distaste. ‘I wouldn’t let him do half those things with me.’ She pulled some fluff off her coat and looked around. ‘You notice, there’s hardly any guys visit?’
I nodded. It was true. Mostly women came, bringing children to see their mothers.
‘First sign of trouble, they all fuck off,’ she said. ‘Hightail it out of town.’
‘Unless they’re teamsters,’ I said.
‘Sure. Unless they’re teamsters.’
‘What did Jesus Christ say to the teamster?’
‘I dunno,’ she said. ‘What?’
‘Don’t do anything till I get back.’
There was a silence.
She looked at me. ‘Kinda sad, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘I thought we were pals.’
‘So did I.’
Under the make-up, I saw the lines around her mouth. Her lips seemed thinner. I realised that she was starting to look her age. Forty-three. Maybe forty-four by now.
‘How could you do it to me, Jules?’ she asked.
‘I’m a severe schizoid,’ I said.
‘That’s no excuse.’
I paused. ‘I know.’
‘Irma told me not to come. She said I’d get too upset. She hates your guts.’
‘I thought you’d get off!’ I blurted.
She stared at me. ‘Why the hell should I?’
‘Because . . .’ I stopped. ‘Just because.’ I paused. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’
We relapsed into silence. I looked across the room. The COs sat in their bubble. When I first had a visitor – Roly – I got up to see him out. I had normal, hostess instincts then. But of course I couldn’t see him out, could I? They clanged the gate shut in my face.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry.’
‘Sure, you’re sorry.’ She dropped her cigarette and ground it out, viciously, with her boot.
There was a silence. We both gazed at the flattened butt. It was splayed out sootily on the lino.
‘The son-of-a-bitch never told me about you,’ she said. ‘It might have been different, then.’
‘Might it?’
‘Sure. What you take me for?’ She shrugged. ‘Maybe not. Who knows?’
I leant forward. ‘How did you do it? When I came to visit you here. How did you know what to say?’
‘My lawyer tried to tell me what to say. Like, to trap you. But I stopped him. I said I can do it fine. I’m not as dumb as people think. I’m a woman, for Chrissake! I know just what to say.’
‘It was a terrific performance.’
She nodded smugly. ‘They’ve nominated me for an Academy Award.’
There was another pause. The room hummed with voices. Next to us, a little girl stood with her head in her mother’s lap.
Lila took out her pack of cigarettes. This time she passed one to me. ‘You weren’t so bad either,’ she said. ‘Prime-time news! Fame at last, huh?’
‘Which bit did you see?’
‘You standing in the witness box, socking it to them. Telling them every goddam detail of what you did. “So then I put on the wig, I put on the dark glasses and I quietly left the apartment.” You had them there in the palm of your hand. You played the room.’ She looked at me admiringly. ‘Know what? You could’ve been one hell of an actress.’
‘Could I?’
She nodded. We smoked for a while, in silence.
‘Didn’t see it all,’ she said. ‘I was sitting in the rec room and Beverly wanted to watch some garbage game show with Jaclyn Smith in it. Eek! Jaclyn Smith!’
She inhaled deeply and looked around. We were still edgy with each other. But the atmosphere had warmed, slightly.
The CO called out, ‘Five minutes, ladies! The visitors’ room will be dosing in five minutes!’
Around us there was a stirring. The mother cupped her child’s head in her hands, drawing her between her knees. People picked up their coats and put them on. We didn’t, of course. We, the inmates. But they did.
Lila looked at me. ‘Know something? Something really weird?’
‘What?’
‘Guess who was the stand-in this time?’ She jabbed at her fur with a red fingernail. ‘Me. I was your fucking stand-in. One helluva job, isn’t it? Now I know what it’s like.’ She shivered, and ground out her cigarette. ‘Kind of a creepy job, if you ask me.’ She looked up. ‘I did the set-up, honey, but you’ve got to act it now. And this show’s going to run and run. For life.’ She stood up.
‘You play, you pay,’ I said.
‘You play me, you pay.’
Then she leaned forward and kissed me. I smelt her perfume, and the scent of tobacco on her breath.
‘Bye,’ she said. She turned around. ‘Bye, ladies!’
Then she walked away, fast.
The tap-tap of high-heeled boots; the clang of a gate. Then the fainter clang of another gate, further down the corridor.
And she was gone.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Mercedes Burleigh, queen of stand-ins, and to Tom Hanks’s stand-in on Big (a delightful man whose name I have, appropriately enough, forgotten). Thanks to John Guare for the Mary Pickford story, and to Stephen Frears for inviting me onto his set. For their help, thanks also to Debbie Stead and Mike Shuster, Dick Hess, Ivan and Susi Sharrock, and Steven Spielberg’s mother Leah Adler, of the ‘Milky Way’; Rick Finkelstein, Fredi Friedman, Nadia Lawrence, Mike Shaw and Peter Ginsberg. Grateful thanks to Joan M Devereaux of the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, for her kindness. Thanks to Mel, as always. And, above all, tha
nks to Susannah York, who sparked off the idea in the first place; and to Maurice Hatton, who introduced us.
Deborah Moggach
1991
Read on for the first chapter of Deborah Moggach’s brilliant new novel Something to Hide
Pimlico, London
I’ll tell you how the last one ended. I was watching the news and eating supper off a tray. There was an item about a methane explosion, somewhere in Lincolnshire. A barn full of cows had blown up, killing several animals and injuring a stockman. It’s the farting, apparently.
I missed someone with me to laugh at this. To laugh, and shake our heads about factory farming. To share the bottle of wine I was steadily emptying. I wondered if Alan would ever move in. This was hard to imagine. What did he feel about factory farming? I hadn’t a clue.
And then, there he was. On the TV screen. A reporter was standing outside the Eurostar terminal, something about an incident in the tunnel. Passengers were milling around behind him. Amongst them was Alan.
He was with a woman. Just a glimpse and he was gone.
I’m off to see me bruv down in Somerset. Look after yourself, love, see you Tuesday.
Just a glimpse but I checked later, on iPlayer. I reran the news and stopped it at that moment. Alan turning towards the woman and mouthing something at her. She was young, needless to say, much younger than me, and wearing a red padded jacket. Chavvy, his sort. Her stilled face, eyebrows raised. Then they were gone, swallowed up in the crowd.
See you Tuesday and I’ll get that plastering done by the end of the week.
Don’t fuck the help. For when it ends, and it will, you’ll find yourself staring at a half-plastered wall with wires dangling like entrails and a heap of rubble in the corner. And he nicked my power drill.
Before him, and the others, I was married. I have two grown-up children but they live in Melbourne and Seattle, as far away as they could go. Of course there’s scar tissue but I miss them with a physical pain of which they are hopefully unaware. Neediness is even more unattractive in the old than in the young. Their father has long since remarried. He has a corporate Japanese wife who thinks I’m a flake. Neurotic, needy, borderline alcoholic. I can see it in the swing of her shiny black hair. For obvious reasons, I keep my disastrous love-life to myself.
I’m thinking of buying a dog. It would gaze at me moistly, its eyes filled with unconditional love. This is what lonely women long for, as they turn sixty. I would die with my arms around a cocker spaniel, there are worse ways to go.
Three months have passed and Alan is a distant humiliation. I need to find another builder to finish off the work in the basement, then I can re-let it, but I’m seized with paralysis and can’t bring myself to go down the stairs. I lived in it when I was young, you see, and just arrived in London. Years later I bought the house, and tenants downstairs have come and gone, but now the flat has been stripped bare those early years are suddenly vivid. I can remember it like yesterday, the tights drying in front of the gas fire, the sex and smoking, the laughter. To descend now into that chilly tomb, with its dust and debris – I don’t have the energy.
Now I sound like a depressive but I’m not. I’m just a woman longing for love. I’m tired of being put in the back seat of the car when I go out with a couple. I’m tired of internet dates with balding men who talk about golf – golf. I’m tired of coming home to silent rooms, everything as I left it, the Marie Celeste of the solitary female. Was Alan the last man I shall ever lie with, naked in my arms?
This is how I am, at this moment. Darkness has fallen. In the windows of the flats opposite, faces are illuminated by their laptops. I have the feeling that we are all fixed here, at this point in time, as motionless as the Bonnard lady in the print on my wall. Something must jolt me out of this stupor, it’s too pathetic for words. In front of me is a bowl of Bombay mix; I’ve worked my way through it. Nothing’s left but the peanuts, my least favourite.
I want to stand in the street and howl at the moon.
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Copyright © Deborah Moggach 1991
Deborah Moggach has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published in Great Britain in 1971 by William Heinemann
Published by Vintage in 2005
www.vintage-books.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The Stand-In Page 41
