‘Libby.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘Why on earth have you got it into your head that you’ve got multiple personality disorder? Which it isn’t called any more, by the way. It’s called dissociative identity disorder, and it’s extremely serious, and I think we’d all know by now if you had it.’
‘How?’ I ask, leaning forward, urgently. ‘How would we know? Because I’d think I was talking to a person who can’t possibly be there? And talking back to myself as that person? And cutting my own hair with a breadknife while hallucinating that she was doing it? Because all those things have been happening, Nora. All of them.’
‘Hold on. You cut your own hair with a breadknife?’
‘Yes. Actually, no. That’s just what Bogdan said it looked like, before he trimmed it himself. Actually I think I must have used the kitchen scissors.’
‘OK … and this person you say you’re hallucinating … he’s a hairdresser called Bogdan?’
‘No, no!’ I feel marginally insulted, for a moment, that Nora thinks my alter ego could possibly be a hairdresser called Bogdan. ‘Christ, no, Bogdan is real. He’s the landlord’s son. At least …’ A horrifying thought has just struck me. ‘I think he’s real. Nora, tell me.’ I grab her arm. ‘Can you see that huge hole in the wall over there, or is it only me?’
‘Yes, I can see it.’
‘Oh, thank God. Because if I was imagining a huge Moldovan with a sledgehammer, that really would be scary.’
‘I think just knowing a huge Moldovan with a sledgehammer is fairly scary, Lib.’ Nora’s air of professional coolness is fading, however hard she tries to pretend it isn’t. ‘Now, look. I can’t say for absolute certain, of course, but I honestly think it’s pretty unlikely you’ve suddenly developed dissociative identity disorder. There are plenty of much more likely, much less serious explanations if you really believe you’re … what? … seeing things?’
‘Not things. People.’ I take a deep breath. ‘Audrey Hepburn.’
‘What about her?’
‘She’s the person I’ve been seeing. And talking to.’
‘Audrey Hepburn?’
‘Yes!’
‘Your all-time favourite movie star?’
‘Yes!’
Nora falls silent for a moment, then she says, in an exceptionally gentle tone of voice, ‘The movie star your dad’s been writing a book about for the last twenty years?’
‘Yes! I mean …’
OK. I’m getting the sense that Nora has just developed A Theory.
And, like quite a lot of Nora’s Theories About Libby (my catastrophic track record with men; my half-heartedness about my career) it sounds as if she’s decided it’s all down to my relationship with my father.
Or, to be more precise, the lack thereof.
‘He’s been writing a book about dozens of movie stars for the last twenty years,’ I go on, ‘and they’re not all popping up on my sofa. I’ve not been chin-wagging with Humphrey Bogart. I’ve not had my hair trimmed by Lauren Bacall. Judy Garland hasn’t taken a fancy to the milk frother on my Nespresso machine. Though, in fairness, if I were hallucinating Judy Garland, she’d probably be far more interested in the contents of my wine rack … anyway, the point is, Nora, that this has absolutely nothing to do with my father. I don’t even see him any more. I don’t even think about him.’
For a moment, I think she’s about to carry on expounding this new theory, but she just stays quiet while she picks up her eye-looking-in-thingy (she’s told me the technical name a million times, but it escapes me just now) and then holds it up and shines it into first one of my eyes and then, more carefully because of the bruising around it, the other.
‘All right, then,’ she says, after a moment. ‘There are still plenty of other explanations. You’ve been under a lot of stress recently, what with moving, and all of that, and you clearly haven’t been eating regularly, and your sister gave you a black eye last night, and – if I didn’t mishear your message, Lib, you’ve somehow ended up involved with a modelizer …’
‘So you know what a modelizer is, too?’
‘Of course.’ She looks surprised. ‘A man who only dates models. I think it was from Sex and the City. You could look it up on Wikipedia, to find out—’
‘No! I don’t want to look it up on Wikipedia. And you’re wrong, anyway, because I’m not involved with Dillon at all.’
‘Dillon … wait, not the Dillon who was coming to work on your show? Not …’ Nora’s mouth falls open. ‘Not Dillon O’Hara?’
‘OK, why does everybody seem to find it so mind-blowingly impossible that I could have slept with him? I mean, you … Olly …’
‘Olly knows you slept with him?’
‘Yes, and there’s a conversation I never want to have with your brother again, Nora, I’m telling you. I mean, when you started going out with Mark, did Olly threaten to beat his head in with a Le Creuset saucepan?’
‘No, but …’ Nora looks a bit flustered. ‘Look, I’m obviously not saying it’s mind-blowingly impossible that you slept with Dillon O’Hara, but you are saying you’ve been hallucinating entire conversations with Audrey Hepburn.’
‘And you think I might have hallucinated having sex with Dillon O’Hara, too?’ I gaze at her. Et tu, Nora. ‘Well, thanks for the show of faith, Nor. If you’d been the one in bed with him, you’d have known you weren’t hallucinating, I can tell you that.’
‘Really?’ Nora leans forward on the sofa, my best friend for a moment rather than a concerned medic. ‘He was that good?’
‘Oh, Nora. There are no words.’
‘Really? Well, I suppose from all the stuff you read about him in the gossip mags, he’s obviously had a fair amount of practice …’
‘So you do believe me?’
‘Well, of course I believe you, Lib. This is all just quite a lot to take in. And I was in such a flap when I got your message earlier, and rushing to the airport to get on the first available flight …’
‘I’m sorry.’ I take her hand. ‘I wasn’t thinking. You’re an amazing friend, Nora. Getting on a plane like that, especially after a long shift at the hospital. You must be knackered.’
‘I am a bit. Starving, mostly. And you must be, too. Look, why don’t we grab a takeaway, maybe have a nice relaxing glass of wine, and you can tell me a bit more about these hallucinations. Because honestly, Libby,’ she puts a hand on mine, ‘I don’t think there’s all that much to worry about. There are all kinds of perfectly simple explanations, without having to panic about serious mental disorders or – well – brain tumours.’
Great. So the fully qualified doctor amongst us hasn’t completely dismissed the notion of a brain tumour, either.
And we still haven’t actually discussed the fact that I’m evidently not simply hallucinating Audrey Hepburn, I’m talking to myself as her, too.
But there’s no reason that all of this can’t be dissected over some nice, freshly decapitated plaice from Bogdan’s Fish ’n’ Chipz, or a hefty order of fried chicken and ribs, and – even though I’m a tiny bit worried that some of Dillon’s excesses with alcohol might have rubbed off on me recently – a glass or two of that soothing wine Nora mentioned.
‘No, no, don’t worry, I’ll go,’ Nora says, gently pushing me back down as I start to get up off the sofa. ‘I’ve still got my coat and shoes on, and you’re … well, it looks like you might still be wearing the same clothes you had on yesterday?’ She peers more closely at my cocktail dress. ‘You weren’t trying to look like Audrey Hepburn, were you? I mean, the dress, and your hair, and that pearl necklace …?’
Oh, shit. On top of everything else, Nora has now seen her bridal gift, the necklace I was going to present to her as a Big Surprise on the morning of her wedding. So it’ll be back to the drawing board on that one, then. Mind you, the delicate beads could well have been permanently ruined by the layer of santol Martini that’s probably still coating them and, anyway, I’m not at all sure I could have given the necklace to N
ora to be worn with virginal, bridal white on her wedding day: not after I was wearing it (and, if I recall correctly, absolutely nothing else) when I was getting up to all kinds of naughtiness with Dillon last night.
‘No,’ I sigh, wearily, ‘I wasn’t trying to look like her, as such, she was just giving me styling advice … look, I’ll tell you more when you’re back with the food, OK? I’d just pop to one of the takeaways downstairs, if I were you,’ I add, grabbing my bag, pulling out my wallet and handing her the only note I have in there, which is – depressingly – just a fiver. ‘Tell them you’re a friend of Bogdan Senior’s. He’s their Moldovan crime-lord boss, so they should be terrified enough into giving you a fairly hefty discount.’
Nora just stares at me for a moment.
‘Honestly, Libby, you and I really do have a lot of catching up to do when I come back with this food.’
‘I know. Believe me.’
I sink back into the cushions of the Chesterfield as Nora heads out of the flat.
My mobile phone is telling me that it’s 8.36 p.m., so I slept for … God, can that be right? … almost ten hours. And it doesn’t even seem to have helped, because I still feel as though I could doze off to sleep again at a moment’s notice. In fact, while I’m waiting for Nora to get back with the takeaway, I might just close my eyes again. Just for a few minutes. I’d quite like to be able to enjoy an evening with my best friend, now that we’ve got all the neurological stuff out of the way, without yawning every five minutes and dropping off into my dinner. I mean, it’s not like there isn’t months of chitchat for us to catch up on: the plans she must surely be starting to make for her wedding, and how things are going with Mark now that they’re engaged, and …
‘I’m sorry.’
It’s – who else? – Audrey Hepburn, sitting beside me on the sofa. She’s fully dressed now, instead of just wearing the man’s shirt like she was earlier, and in her iconic Roman Holiday get-up: white puff-sleeve blouse, full skirt, and a little scarf knotted, stylishly, around her neck.
‘I’m ever so, ever so sorry, darling,’ she repeats, putting a cool hand on one of mine. ‘I’ve been thinking about what you said earlier, and I feel absolutely rotten about it.’
I have to ransack my addled brain to work out exactly what she’s talking about.
‘You said you wanted advice from me. You said you wanted to talk things through. And you’re quite right: I have spent too long playing around with your Nespresso machine, and I shouldn’t have ordered all those clothes.’
Oh, shit, the Net-a-Porter order. I need to do something about that asap, before the credit-card bill wends my way.
‘I was terribly touched,’ Audrey is going on, in the gentlest of gentle voices, ‘when you said you’d always seen me as a sort of fairy godmother. And I realize that maybe you wanted something else from me, something other than a wonky haircut and firm opinions about your shoes.’
I laugh. Well, it’s a sort of laugh, in a long, let-out breath. And Audrey smiles – that breathtaking, million-dollar smile that kicked off all my ridiculous Audrey fantasies in the first place, all those years ago.
‘I’m not sure what I can possibly have to offer,’ she says, ‘but I just wanted you to know that I’m here if you need me.’
I’m a bit too overcome to say anything in reply.
‘Oh, and by the way, I’m something of an expert on stupid, selfish shit-bags of fathers.’
‘Audrey!’ I’m truly shocked to hear the S-word come out of her mouth.
‘Well, I am.’ She slips off her ballet pumps and curls her feet up beneath her on the sofa. ‘So if you ever want to compare notes …’
‘I know. Your dad was having an affair with the nanny, left your mother when you were six, moved home to Ireland and became a Nazi sympathizer. My dad left my mother when I was three, for more time and space to work.’ Even as I say these words, I can hear Dad’s voice in my head; after all, he repeated the phrase often enough over the years. ‘Though at least he didn’t start sympathizing with any Nazis. But that might just be because it was the late Eighties and not the mid-Thirties, and there weren’t that many Nazis around. I’m sure if there had been, my dad would have found some sort of way of sympathizing with them, just to cause me maximum annoyance.’
‘Goodness!’ Audrey’s mouth is open. ‘How in heaven’s name do you know that about my father?’
‘Partly because my father’s been writing a book on you for the past twenty years. Well, you and a few other Hollywood legends.’
‘How extraordinary!’
‘Well, I suppose it is a bit of a coincidence,’ I say, wearily, ‘now I come to think of it.’
‘No, no, I mean that he should have been writing this book for twenty years … Is he a terribly meticulous researcher?’
‘No, he’s an irredeemably lazy bastard.’
My phone bleeps, suddenly, on the floor beside me.
‘Oh!’ Audrey gasps. ‘Could that be your modelizer?’
I should know better than to get excited, but I still feel the lurch in my stomach as I lean down to pick it up and look at the text.
But it isn’t Dillon. It’s Cass.
So are you still coming to the spa for Mum’s bday tomorrow, Lib, or not?
Oh, Christ, this is all I need. The annual Lomax Ladies’ spa outing for Mum’s upcoming birthday. This year, it’s being held – where else? – at FitLondon, where the prices are so astronomical that I could only find a single, solitary treatment costing less than a hundred quid to book for myself, and even that’s just some crappy-sounding fifteen-minute steam-room algae jobby that still costs seventy pounds and will probably just be me left to my own devices in an empty room with a kettle, a washing-up bowl and a large tea towel to drape over my head, the way I used to when I was 13 and trying to steam-clean the mucky pores on my nose and forehead.
Yes, I reply to Cass, am coming to spa despite HUGE BLACK EYE that am currently sporting.
‘Not your modelizer?’ Audrey asks.
‘Not my modelizer.’
Oh good, comes the reply from Cass. Can I go halves with u on whatever present u bought?
‘You know, I ended up getting on well enough with mine.’
I glance up at Audrey, confused. ‘Sorry – you ended up getting on quite well with … your modelizer?’
‘No, no, darling, I never had a modelizer! Though my second husband in particular did have an eye for the ladies … but I was actually talking about my father.’
‘Oh, sorry, I thought we’d moved off the topic of fathers.’
She shrugs. ‘Only if you want to.’
‘God, yes, I want to.’ I start composing a reply to Cass – ffs can’t you just pick up some … And then I stop. It’s incredibly rude to sit here texting while I’m having a conversation, for one thing, and for another thing, I want to ask Audrey something, after what she’s just said. ‘You ended up getting on OK with him?’
‘My father?’ Audrey nods. ‘Decently enough. We wrote. I visited him, occasionally. It was very healing.’
I raise a sceptical eyebrow.
‘It was, Libby, honestly. I mean, of course I wish he’d not been—’
‘A Nazi sympathizer? Sleeping with the nanny? Your father?’
‘The way he was,’ Audrey finishes, giving me a gently reproachful look that makes me feel about an inch high, and ashamed of myself for being so flippant. ‘But the good part about being in touch with him again, as an adult, was that I started to see that the way he was had nothing to do with me. That all the things he did weren’t done to cause me – what was it you said just now? – maximum annoyance. They were done because he simply wasn’t capable of anything else.’
I don’t say anything.
‘Anyhow, you don’t have to listen to me. I’m no expert. But I do know how it feels to have everything in the world except a proper father.’
She sounds so desperately sad, all of a sudden, that I instinctively reach across the sofa
to put an arm around her.
But she’s gone.
The hallucination is … what? Broken?
And this time it didn’t even take Bogdan coming through the wall with a sledgehammer to do it.
This time, though, I’d have rather liked it if she’d stuck around a little bit longer. Just until Nora came back. Seeing as I was sort of enjoying our chat about our fathers.
Well, as much as you can ever enjoy a chat about two complete wasters who go about either a) waving swastikas or b) telling their daughters they meant to phone on their birthday/show up to parent’s evening/stick to yet another arrangement to go out for dinner, but that their book about the golden age of Hollywood is a little bit more important right now.
I do recognize, by the way, that the swastika thing is quite a bit worse than the Hollywood book thing.
But then, as Audrey just said, before the hallucination shattered, she had everything in the world except a proper father. And I … don’t. I’m not a world-class beauty, a style legend or an Oscar-winning movie star. I certainly don’t have what it takes to travel to poverty-stricken shantytowns in Central America, or famine-ridden villages in Africa, light up some desperate children’s lives and raise a tonne of money for UNICEF into the bargain.
I’m not Audrey Hepburn, dealt the card of the crappy father. I’m Libby Lomax, dealt the card of the crappy father.
Though, right now, I urgently need to stop thinking all about crappy fathers, because Nora is going to be back any minute with the takeaway, and I don’t want to dwell on the subject any longer. Partly because I really, really do want to hear about Nora’s plans for the wedding, and partly because I don’t want to accidentally prove right her theory about the hallucinations.
I haul myself up off the Chesterfield and squeeze my way round to the kitchen, to start getting the crockery out for our supper.
Nora is taking the Paddington Express out to Heathrow for her flight back to Glasgow this morning, and seeing as she travelled six hundred miles at the drop of a hat to come and see me yesterday evening, I think it’s only right and fair that I accompany her to Paddington to see her off.
A Night In With Audrey Hepburn Page 19
