by Fay Weldon
Now, stuck in gridlock at Waterloo, he can foresee a future in which he has to travel by public transport and he does not look forward to it. At least Scarlet will be able to drive him around. The Prius is trendy enough, though more of a woman’s car than a man’s. He tries not to let himself be depressed, tells himself the fates are on his side, one door opens and the other closes. Upstairs, Downstairs today, Hamlet tomorrow. The life of an actor is all uncertainty. He does not want to actually see his ex-wife Briony, and hopes he will not have to. With any luck she will be at work, teaching.
These days Briony is polite to him but affects to despise him; women are so good at that. Briony makes like a sniffy wet blanket wherever she goes. He prefers the company of girls who know they are bad and like money and a good time, who despise themselves more than they despise him. Scarlet marvels, rather than despises, and is at ease in all company, which Jackson is not. He prefers circles where nobody has a university degree, though this is a problem in the film business, which has become poncified and over-educated, while still riddled with public-school wankers who never seem to go away.
Scarlet, he can take her anywhere; and she can open doors for him usefully in high circles. He might even marry her. If she splits with Louis there will be a property settlement of some kind, and her house should fetch a lot. And if not, she has a good job and a steady salary, and an accountant has explained to him that when it comes to paying off debts, ‘regularity of income’ is the key.
Jackson finds a parking place in the once dreary, now posh street where he and Briony had bought a house together when they married. He was twenty and she was thirty-six. He was making the first of the vampire films; she was the make-up girl; she seduced him and got pregnant. She said no, she wasn’t going to have a termination, this was her last chance to settle down: Jackson – he had only just become Jackson Wright: in the beginning he had answered to Colin Wince – had better marry her. If his fans thought their youthful angel had fathered a baby by an older woman and then dumped her it would be bad for his career. So he married her. He could scarcely remember the ceremony he was so high at the time. But it was only weed; those gentle days of soft drugs, not hard, natural not chemical. He’d then made a series of bad script and life choices, mostly because he followed Briony’s advice.
His agent Mike Bronstein had advised him to pull out after the first two vampires but Briony said why pay an agent 15 per cent when all you had to do was to bother to read the contracts yourself, and the scripts were brilliant. So he’d signed up for the series and ended up without the residuals that would have made him really rich. He’d been robbed. But Briony had what she wanted, namely, a house and a baby, and soon she was pregnant with the next. And once she had what she wanted she lost interest in Jackson; treated him like a tomcat who might eat the kittens if he came near, despised and reviled him as a useless thesp with his brain in his dick, wouldn’t share the bed, revealed she was a Catholic and wouldn’t use contraceptives, turned the children against him, divorced him, and having persuaded him he didn’t need a lawyer, took the house and vast sums in maintenance as well.
That was Briony. But oddly the South London house still felt like home. He guessed if you hoped for affection from someone and they didn’t give it you would go on battering yourself against that person for ever in the vain hope that they eventually would. He wanted some sign of recognition and acceptance from her. But she was like his mother, and cold.
After the divorce he wouldn’t come and take away his belongings so she’d piled them all into one room and put a notice up for the boys: DO NOT ENTER: TOMCAT’S LITTER BOX. All because she resented some poor girl called Flora he used to meet in a transsexual bar, and then visit in hospital where she was to die of Aids. ‘Oh good,’ Briony said when he told her. ‘One more piece of human crap out of the way.’
Though after Flora died Briony gradually became more friendly and when he called round to collect something or other from the cat-litter room as she still called it, she’d give him a cup of coffee and an update on the boys’ progress. They were good-looking boys and had both gone to university, one studying philosophy, the other theoretical physics.
‘At least they have your looks and my brains,’ their mother had once said by way of acknowledgement. ‘Supposing it had been the other way round!’
He’d tried to keep in touch when the boys were small, but now they were out of his intellectual reach and seldom contacted him. They didn’t even remember Father’s Day. ‘Our dad the film star’ didn’t have the cachet for them it did in circles which were more vampire oriented. His boys didn’t even go to the cinema. Perhaps Scarlet would change; she might want babies with him and he could get it right next time around. He’d met Louis, a pallid kind of bloke and a closet gay, and what Scarlet saw in him he couldn’t understand. He would have thought more of Scarlet if he had thought better of Louis.
What Jackson did next
Jackson opened the door with the key his ex-wife kept in a false rock just by the dustbins, where only a few brave plants and shrubs survived the onslaught of toxic traffic fumes from nearby Clapham High Street. He was glad to find the key there, though he had warned Briony time and time again about the absurdity of using a plastic box as a hiding place.
‘It doesn’t even look like a rock,’ he had complained. ‘Far more like the turd of a big dog.’
‘All the more reason for people not to look inside it,’ she’d said. She was sharp and shrewd and unpleasant but couldn’t help it.
As soon as the boys left home she had had the builders in, divided the house into four and let it out to what Jackson was convinced were illegal immigrants, and then trained as a teacher. She spent nothing and must have accumulated a fortune in unspent alimony and undeclared rents. She was as mean as a ferret. Even her coffee came from Lidl.
‘Anyway you don’t live here any more, so what’s it got to do with you, what kind of coffee I choose?’
The dustbins had increased in number since last he visited: two weeks back there were only four, now there were six, differently coloured and labelled, with days of the week painted on them. Wandsworth Council had been busy with its drive to save the planet. All were overdue for collection, judging by the sweet sickly smell of fermentation that rose from them. The number of doorbells had increased too. That meant even more tenants.
Even as he put the key to the lock the door opened and Briony pushed past him towards the bins, strong workaday hands carrying two full plastic sacks, one flung over each shoulder. He had it in his head that she’d be off teaching and was taken aback to see her. The Briony he had married had been lithe and lissome, a red-headed, freckled Doris Day with a smiley face, an artist at home amongst the pots and paints and creams and all the wizardry of the studio makeup room. It had been a disguise. The real Briony had always been lurking underneath, a stocky, blunt-looking woman in her mid-fifties, with a grey pudding-basin haircut, decent but hardly erotic in a pair of striped flannel pyjamas. Jackson thought of Scarlet and her little white hands, elegant heels and languorous waist.
‘What are you doing here?’ Briony asked. Her South London accent seemed stronger than ever. ‘What do you want? Did you think I’d be out?’
‘I just needed a couple of things from the house,’ he said.
‘Oh, what?’
‘Just my driving licence,’ he said.
‘Just, just,’ she said. ‘Always just. Never ever head-on or definite. I don’t know how she stands it. I don’t suppose she will for long.’
‘Who?’ Jackson asked, startled.
‘This girl you’re seeing, the journalist. I read her column sometimes. I thought she was meant to be happily married.’
How did she know about Scarlet? He’d said nothing. There had been a fairly constant flow of girls to the penthouse, in and out, all found wanting; they had the looks or sparkle to make you interested, but in the morning all you wanted was for them to go away. Scarlet was different; he wanted her for the
night, for breakfast, and now for lunch, dinner and bed in between. But how was Briony to know that? He realised she was jealous. She hadn’t been like this about any of the others. Women seemed to have an unholy instinct for when anything fundamentally changed.
‘You’d better come in now you’re here,’ she said. ‘I can’t stand around in my pyjamas. So what’s she really like?’
He followed her inside. She put on the kettle and measured out a meagre tablespoon of coffee for the cafetière, and even that she levelled off with a knife. Inside, the house seemed the same as when he’d left it, the same style of practical untidiness, just the right side of squalor. She didn’t like change.
‘She’s going to move in with me,’ he said.
‘And you had to come and tell Mummy,’ she said. ‘Do what you like. It’s nothing to do with me.’
‘We could get together again,’ he said. ‘You and me. I’m thinking of giving up the film business.’
That quietened the tongue for a second or so. But then she was back.
‘You mean the film business is giving you up? No longer the boy wonder? The drink and the drugs and the girls have rather taken their toll. I always told you they would.’
‘We were together in the beginning,’ was all he could say.
‘In your dreams,’ she said. He felt angry now.
‘You must be doing all right here,’ he said. ‘I’m going to stop the maintenance. It was meant to stop when Howell was eighteen. I’m entitled.’
‘You never even send him a birthday card,’ Briony said. ‘You never cared about either of them. I wish you’d take your things away and not keep turning up where you’re not wanted. I could let the room.’
He found the driving licence where he hoped he would, in the drawer of his desk, and left. She watched him go, unsmiling. He hoped he wouldn’t be late for Scarlet. There was always a gap between saying you were leaving, and actually leaving. He needed to be there when he said he would be. It would be difficult explaining to Scarlet about Briony.
Look, he would say to her, try and understand. She’s more like my mother than an ex-wife. If I go near Briony she spits and bites like a female cat to keep me off. It was all too like incest. We thought we could get away with it. But then the boys came along and they felt more like brothers than sons. We didn’t know what to do. No, actually, he wouldn’t say that. He hardly understood it himself. Why would Scarlet?
Coming back across Waterloo Bridge he saw that Oedipus Rex was on at the National. Now there was a part! He would try and make things up with Bronstein. His original ambition had been stage, not film. Vampires had waylaid him, turned him into the living dead.
Things are not working out in the basement
I have tried, I really have. I’ve kept myself out of the story. I’ve tried not to comment. I have even taken to putting a string of garlic above my desk to keep out vampires, kehua, breathing laundresses, chopping cooks, fidgety kitchenmaids, revenant collies, whatever. I have tried to keep characters and ghosts separate, and under control, while acknowledging that none has any reality, but are all projections of my own fancy transmitted through Microsoft. They have no true existence until translated on to the screen via a keyboard.
The trouble is, I get less real, these characters get more real. I hardly go out of the house now: I feel I have to get on. Another thousand words, another; before whatever magic it is dries up and I have to rely on rational thought and an acquired and practised past to get it on to the page. I have written thirty-four novels in my life, and God knows how many short stories: it is more than most writers manage and with good reason. The brain can barely contain them. They fizzle and snap and laugh and cry and complain in there, and ease what is left of me out. They reject me.
Willy-nilly, volens, nolens, I find myself turning into what the New Agers call a channeller, which Janice claims to be: someone who picks up and communicates with the spirits, only for me it is with fictional characters. The ghosts of the past are reluctant to come forward, but these personages from alternative universes have no shame. ‘Me, me, me, what about me!’ they cry. I have been fighting back – determined to keep myself in here with them, but I think perhaps I have been misguided, worn too easy a passage for them. I must change tactics.
A couple of things happened recently to bring me to this conclusion. I was shaken, I must say, when Jackson turned out to be more worthy of sympathy than I thought. He was not going to be just the rat that ran across the purity of new snow and soiled it and was a threat to our Scarlet; he was going to have to be taken seriously as a person, he was not going to be just a shagpile penthouse villain. Though I have met them and they exist. And then his past turns out to involve vampires. I hadn’t expected that at all. I could just as well have had him star in the first place in a series of college comedies, I nearly did; really I didn’t give the matter two thoughts, and that was before I had even realised about the kehua as metaphor for generational family dysfunction.
It’s why I tell my MA students – I teach creative writing in a university, one day a week – not to delete passages apparently irrelevant to what you are trying to do – but to keep an off-cut file and save them there in case you realise later why it was you wrote that: it wasn’t irrelevant at all, but key to the whole thing. The sensation is that you don’t exactly write novels – you simply unfold them, or fish them up from a well, or hook them down from the sky. But you’re still the one in charge – the appointee, without particular merit, just there to do the job – and you have your responsibilities. If I’m not careful Lola is going to end up striking Jackson dead with a silver paperknife, equivalent to a silver bullet or a stake through the heart.
Because really if Gerry the heartless is to sit amid gravestones (which he is) and mourn the loss of the wife he seemed to take so lightly, Cynara the powerhouse of moral authority is to be in thrall to Dyke Dora, the pretty little mountain climber, and Louis is to want to write a novel – where indeed will it end? Things are getting out of control, and I suspect it’s because these creatures of my invention are tapping into the energies that already reside in these stone walls. Two sets of ghosts might yet combine to make one wandering dybbuk, to waylay me on the way to the supermarket. I am trying to be light and facetious but it is difficult. I am spooked, spooked, spooked.
I am going to move upstairs to my regular office. That’s not really giving in. It is common sense. Things happened, and not just Jackson and the vampires, which led me to conclude that garlic alone was not enough. I even tried burning sage and circling my desk with the ash, but Vi came and vacuumed it up.
What I suffered was a hallucination that was, finally, visual as well as auditory. The face which appeared in the wallpaper was, I am sure, only damp. True, I had been working hard and I was tired, and too much coffee to keep one awake may make one over-prone to imagine things. It was a Sunday and over the road in All Saints’ Church (I am talking the reality of here and now), Evensong was in full swing. The only trouble, on reflection, is that the church here and now across the road is deconsecrated and no services are held there, yet I had heard the church bells clearly enough and paid them no attention, and strains of organ music likewise. So the staff were all over the road attending to their souls, and only Mavis was left behind. The fire had been playing up and needed relighting and Mavis had been delegated to be the one to do it. And I could actually see Mavis for once, with her beskirted little bum in the air as she bent over to feed paper spills and kindling into its reluctant heart.
Then I watched as Mr Bennett came down into the basement, and as he brushed by me the breath of his violent passing actually ruffled the papers on my desk. That was too much overlapping for comfort. He was breathing heavily – and I realised I had heard that sound quite often. He was a big man, dark and flushed, very handsome in a portly kind of way, with a moustache, and a beard that ran from his ears to under his chin, which was clean shaven. Quite fancy for a small-town country solicitor. I knew it was Mr Benn
ett and I knew he was angry with Mrs Bennett, who wouldn’t let him into her bed since she had three children already and had no intention of having any more; he was a man in his mid-fifties who was accustomed to getting what he wanted whenever he wanted it. The rest of the Bennett family had gone out to tea in the gig, so Mr Bennett was down here, naturally enough, to see if Mavis would oblige. I don’t know how I knew this any more than I knew how Jackson came to be in Vampire Rising all those years back, or forwards, depending on your perspective.
Mavis didn’t hear him coming, and when his long strong fingers pinched her rump she uttered a little gasping squeal of surprise which would really have turned him on, so when she wheeled to see who it was and he pulled her to him and pressed her small body to him she’d have felt the hard determined lump beneath the skin-tight trousers. I’d heard that little gasp many a time but not known until now what it was about. Mavis being pinched. I’m not saying it really happened, just that I remembered it happening, in much the same way as I remembered Briony using the blade of a knife to even off the measured tablespoon of coffee, or indeed Rex this Sunday suppertime, checking over mussels for the moules marinière, making sure all the shells were safely closed, so we weren’t poisoned.
‘Mr Bennett, sir, you should be ashamed of yourself,’ I heard her say. ‘Poor Mrs Bennett being out and all.’
‘Don’t be hard on me, Mavis,’ he said, ‘I’ll pay you double.’
