The catch, p.4
The Catch, page 4
Mirren flicked a button on the steering wheel, changing the channel to a pop station, and despite the tightness that was crushing her chest, she smiled as she recognized the tune.
‘Not Giving You Back’ by South City, a five-piece boy band that had sold more records in the US than any other act last year, a five-piece that was now rivalling the worldwide success of One Direction.
The lead singer’s voice was as smooth and soulful as it got, a testimony – Mirren knew – to a mother who had been a Motown backing singer for two decades. But it was the second voice on the harmonies that invoked a swell of something good in her heart.
She had no idea where her son, Logan Gore, got his voice from, since she couldn’t hold a note and neither could his father.
She slowed behind a vintage Ferrari as she approached the gates to Malibu Colony, then sped up again as the security guard waved her on, aware that several CCTV cameras had tracked her arrival. She hated the intrusion of the surveillance, but it did provide a certain level of comfort. Living in the Colony, one of the most expensive areas in the country, on a beachfront street that was populated by movie stars, producers, IT legends and a couple of big-spending rappers, it was inevitable that security would sit somewhere between ‘overcautious’ and ‘paranoid’.
Some had moved here for the ego trip. Some for the investment. But Mirren had arrived more than a decade before looking for solitude, peace, a safe haven for the children and direct access to golden sands so private that she often felt like she was the only person on earth.
In a time of intrusive social media, compulsory networking and pervasive press scrutiny, that was, for her, the best feeling in the world.
Of course, back then, they’d been a family. Jack and Mirren, and Chloe and Logan. True, Jack had spent most of their years together out on location, producing and directing some of the biggest movies of the last couple of decades, but when he was home, her whole world was under that roof. Chloe and Logan were great kids: fun, crazy company. They’d always thought that Chloe’s insatiable thirst for adventure and excitement would take her into the business or onto the stage, while Logan’s shy, self-effacing charm would sit well behind the scenes. How wrong they had been. Logan found a passion for singing, and what began with jamming sessions in the garage with some friends had led to South City and posters on the walls of teenage girls all over America. And Chloe? That thirst for adventure took her to toilet floors, crack dens, rehab and the mortuary. Dead at eighteen. Gone. A loss that had changed Mirren so irrevocably, in so many ways. The thought made another piece of Mirren’s heart shatter, but she couldn’t indulge her pain now. Later. But not now.
Pulling into the drive of her white California contemporary home, she took a deep breath. And another. OK, smile on, head up. Strong. Logan was sitting at the dining table in the kitchen, a semi- circular booth that looked like it belonged in a 1950s diner. Every detail of the room had been designed by Mirren with a family in mind. A perfect family. The one she’d dreamed of having since she was a little girl, bringing herself up on a tough Glasgow housing estate.
A movie reel on fast forward played through her mind. Arriving in LA in the eighties, with Davie and Zander, inseparable friends since the night they saw her, twelve years old, sitting in the street late at night. Back then, they were the only two people she loved in the world. They had nothing but each other, and for a while that seemed like it was enough.
The images skipped through time.
A few years later, picking up the Oscar for the movie that had brought them to LA, the moment that pain and betrayal had forced them to walk away from each other.
Fast-forward to a few years later still.
Logan and his big sister, Chloe, only a year between them, making potato prints at the table. The two of them doing home-work there. The pubescent years when the only communication was a sneer and an irritated sigh. Then the laughs came back and the three of them, four if Jack was home, would have home-made burgers on a Friday night and sit there for hours, just being the family that belonged there.
‘Hey, Mom. You OK?’ Her boy. Logan Gore. Eighteen now and six feet tall, and, according to the fan sites, 170 pounds of blond, ripped, six-pack muscular perfection. Mirren didn’t care if it showed bias for her to agree.
She tossed her jacket onto a chair and kicked off her heels, before leaning down to hug him. Arms around him, she lingered just a couple of seconds. Sometimes the human contact made it just a little bit more bearable.
‘I am, honey. How about you? Dad not here yet?’ she asked, already knowing the answer. There had been no sign of a midlife-crisis vehicle in the drive. God knows what it would be this month. So far, Jack had gone through a Ferrari, a Maserati, a Mclaren P1 and – ugh, make it stop – a pimped-up Escalade.
And to think, for nineteen years of marriage, she’d been under the illusion that uber-producer Jack Gore was the coolest man on the planet. It had only taken about five minutes to realise that he was far from it, right around the time she discovered he had been sharing his penis with a twenty-two-year-old starlet and then followed his raging hard-on out the door.
Clichéd as it sounded, it was for the best. The relationship with the actress, Mercedes Dance, had only lasted as long as it took for the paternity test to confirm that the baby she was carrying wasn’t Jack’s. Bizarrely, Mirren felt sorry for him. Back in cliché-land, there was no fool like a rich guy who was heading for fifty and who was stupid enough to believe for a second that a hot twenty-something babe was attracted to his personality. According to the tabloids, Mercedes and her baby were now shacked up with the true father of the child, a buff, fledgling actor who’d had one line in the movie Jack had directed Mercedes in.
Logan jumped up when the doorbell rang, high-fiving her as he passed on the way to open the door for his father. It had been one of the boundaries she’d set when her relationship with Jack had returned to civil ground. He could come over anytime, but no keys, and there had to be an arrangement or a call first. He lost the right to wander in and out of this house in the divorce settlement. She’d taken nothing else. Didn’t need his cash, his pensions or their other home in Aspen. The Colony house was all she wanted, and it was a fair price to pay for almost twenty years of devotion and two incredible kids. One incredible kid now. She’d never get used to thinking about her children in the singular. She was a mother of two. Even if only one was still with her.
The noise of Jack’s cowboy boots resonated with every step across the marble tiles. Dear Lord, cowboy boots. Black. Silver tips. With dark jeans and a grey retro Guns n’ Roses T-shirt. And… No. It couldn’t be. But yet… Yes, that was some kind of tattoo that appeared to be protruding from the bottom of one of his sleeves. Well, hello, rock phase, we’ve been expecting you.
The urge to laugh was almost irresistible, but Mirren fought to keep her face straight, knowing that the least sign of amusement, the tiniest morsel of disparagement, would incur a reaction of indignant petulance, and God knows, she didn’t need that today.
‘Hey, babe. You look good,’ he said as he dipped his head to kiss her on the cheek.
‘You too,’ she managed, not trusting herself to say any more. The truth was, he did actually look pretty good; he just didn’t look like Jack. Sure, he still had the whole Liam Neeson, ruggedly handsome thing going on. A couple of inches taller than Logan’s six feet, he had the athletic body of a guy who was vain enough to make fitness a priority in his work-life balance. But then, that was easy when your wife was taking care of every detail in your family, so that you could spend your life going from film-set location to film-set location, where you trained daily with a personal fitness expert and had the caterers prepare every meal to the exact specifications of your personal nutritionist.
Did she sound bitter? She knew she truly wasn’t. Losing Jack had been a drop in the ocean of incidentals compared to the tsunami of pain that still ebbed and flowed every day without Chloe, engulfing her and then retreating, then returning, until she felt unable to take her next breath.
Having Logan home from his endless touring for a few weeks helped. Especially today.
Pulling open the rich oak Meneghini Arredamenti fridge, Mirren stacked three loaded cake plates along one arm like the professional waitress she once was. Twenty-three years later, she still had the skills.
Turning, she handed one to Logan and one to Jack, before adding the forks she’d already left out on the sparkling white marble countertop. Everything had been prepared this morning at 3 a.m., when sleep had eluded her.
‘Come on, let’s go.’ The forced cheeriness in her voice would have been almost believable if it hadn’t been for the tears in her eyes. She blinked them away. Enough. She had to hold it together, for her, for Logan, for Chloe. Hell, even for Jack.
Mirren led the way out through the back door, down the path and past the white wooden fence at the end of the yard that led directly to the beach. Due to environmental damage, the coastline was eroding. Just like her family.
The hot sand collected between her bare toes, but she didn’t register the discomfort, only stopping when they were twenty or so feet from the water’s edge. Mirren hitched up her black trousers as she sat down, automatically crossing her legs, one man on either side, gazing out at the glistening waves.
Her girl was out there. Her beautiful girl. Wild, irrepressible, defiant, wonderful Chloe was in every wave that rushed towards her, every spot where the sun bounced off the water.
Throat tightening, she barely managed to swallow a tiny piece of Chloe’s favourite chocolate cake. Mirren had baked it for her every year, on every birthday, and had baked it again for today, Chloe’s first birthday since her ashes had been scattered on the seabed, safe, near her mother, so Mirren could protect her in the way she hadn’t been able to when she was alive.
Reaching across, her hand found Logan’s, and only then did she find the strength to look back out to the ocean and speak. ‘Happy birthday, my darling girl. We’ll never stop missing you.’
Logan’s arm came around her and she rested her head on his shoulder, her other hand automatically seeking out Jack’s when she heard him choke back a sob.
There were no words, no stories, no reflections on what might have been. Just three people, staring at the water, holding on to each other to survive the pain that didn’t ever diminish, immersed in their memories.
Only when she shivered did Mirren realise the sun was coming down.
‘Let’s go in,’ she said softly, standing first, then holding Logan’s hand while he pulled himself up. ‘Jack, you’re welcome to stay.’ The flush of embarrassment that crossed his face told her that he had other plans. Hadn’t he always had somewhere else to be? For all those years, she’d bought the myth about the pressure of spending months of every year away on location. Only when it was over did she realise that she had no idea who he was or what his life had been.
‘Or not.’ She attempted to make it light-hearted, determined to ensure Logan felt comfortable when his parents were both with him.
Jack’s eyes were red-rimmed as he answered. ‘Thanks, but I’ve got a meeting. Another time.’
It was tempting to rage. Who scheduled any kind of event for their daughter’s birthday? Especially since that daughter was no longer here?
There was no point waging war. Jack was Jack. He’d go out, screw a twenty-one-year-old supermodel and make himself feel better. Instant gratification. That’s what she’d discovered drove him. Ego. Power. Vanity. Good luck to him. She’d spend the night with her boy, and Zander said he’d drop by later too. Her son and the man who was now, once again, like a brother to her. That was all she needed.
They were almost at the white picket gate that led back onto her property when she caught sight of the figure standing fifty yards down the sand in her peripheral vision.
At first, she thought it was a paparazzo. They occasionally came down here in the hope of catching Jennifer Aniston walking her dog. Or Pam Anderson hanging out with her boys in the water.
Perhaps one of them had been smart enough to realise that today was Chloe’s birthday.
Slowing down and shielding her eyes from the glare of the setting sun, Mirren peered across. Nope, no camera. It was a woman. And there was a curve to her back, a profile to her face that jarred Mirren’s soul. She squinted again, trying to get a clearer view, but the woman was on her feet now, walking in the other direction.
‘You OK, Mom?’ Logan asked, concerned.
Mirren shook off the insidious chill that was working its way through the marrow of her bones.
‘Yeah, I’m… Sorry, it’s just for a second there I thought… That woman reminded me of someone.’
‘Who?’ Logan was peering after the retreating form now. ‘Erm… My mum.’ The second it was out, she cursed herself for not thinking quickly enough to come up with a fabrication that would disguise the truth. Logan was going to be completely freaked out if she carried on like this, especially as he’d think she was clearly losing her mind. They said grief sometimes did that to people, and right now she wouldn’t argue.
It was Jack who was first to point out the obvious. ‘But, Mirren, honey, you know that can’t be.’
It was enough to pull her out of her paralysed stare.
‘I know that, Jack. Of course it isn’t.’ Mirren snapped back to the present and immediately went into recovery mode, preparing to trot out the same lie she’d spun since she arrived in LA. Her parents were dead. No surviving family. No DNA connection to her homeland, so no need to go back there. It was a better story than saying that she’d last spoken to her mother two decades ago, when she’d buggered off to live with some drug dealing gangster in Liverpool. Acting had never been Mirren’s talent, but this performance came from years of practise.
‘It’s just me being… Overwhelmed. How could someone be sitting over there when they’ve been dead for over twenty years?’
4
ZANDER LEITH
‘Rehab’ – Amy Winehouse
He was peeing in a plastic cup.
He earned in excess of $30 million per movie, topping Hanks, Cruise and Downey Jr, and in a recent survey of sixteen to twenty-one-year-olds, he was more recognizable than Jesus.
Yet Zander Leith was peeing in a cup. Yup, this was living the dream.
Job done, he exited the cubicle and handed the sample over to a rotund nurse, who eyed him with deep suspicion. Cynical hostility was probably a requirement of the job. The lengths that people in the industry would go to in order to deliver clean samples was legendary. Hadn’t Tom Sizemore rigged up a fake penis? There was rock bottom, and then there was attempting to pervert the truth with a manufactured knob.
The nurse gave him the minimum smile required by her last round of client relations training, accompanied by a curt ‘goodbye’ as he headed for the door.
It wasn’t the reaction he was used to, but in all honesty, he preferred it. If someone was thoroughly unimpressed with him right from the off, then in his extensive experience, there was less chance of him letting them down when he royally fucked up.
And when it came to fuck-ups, there had been many. The magazines charted his career by the number of years in the business – twenty and counting. He charted his life by the number of times in rehab and jail. The combined total was disturbingly similar. Six or seven clinics, and at least a dozen nights in the cells after alcohol or drug-fuelled brawls. The last one came after he’d punched the face off a particularly annoying reality-TV star, but sadly that didn’t buy him any leniency from the judge. The result was three months in a stunning Malibu haven of gruesome withdrawals.
That was when everything changed. It was where he’d met a spaced-out, angry and bitter teenager and they’d struck up an unlikely friendship. He was the messed-up, macho movie star; she was Chloe, the teenage daughter of Mirren McLean, the childhood friend he’d grown up with, but hadn’t seen since they picked up their first Oscar in 1986.
Two broken souls, kindred spirits who were drowning in an ocean of booze and drugs.
He’d tried to help her, but this wasn’t the movies. He didn’t come charging in at the end and save the day. Chloe was dead. And since the day the drugs claimed her, he’d been clean.
Promises weren’t enough for the insurance company, though. They were filming the seventh Seb Dunhill movie, the franchise that whipped Bond, Bourne and Indiana Jones, and the studio could only get him covered if he subjected to weekly testing. Another week, another piss in a plastic cup.
‘I hope you washed your hands,’ Hollie remarked as he climbed into the passenger seat of her Dodge Durango. He’d bought it for her as a Christmas present, sending her right to the top of the list of ‘PAs with Fuck-off Brilliant Presents’. She deserved it. Ten years of bailing his ass out and she still stuck with him. Zander hoped it was devotion – she claimed it was masochistic tendencies that required the aid of a therapist. They both knew it was love. Not rip-your-clothes-off lust. Just the true, forgiving, platonic love of two people bound together by friendship, care and their equal ability to fuck up every romantic relationship they ever had. In Zander’s case, addiction, dysfunction, demons and the serial avoidance of commitment could be blamed for his solitary status. Hollie’s barrier to coupledom was a different one. During his lost years of excess, she’d regularly reminded him that she had no time to date because looking after a screwed-up movie star was an all-consuming vocation. ‘I’m like a nun who devotes herself to God, except Mother Teresa never had to drag her main man out of a crack den.’
Hollie flicked her highlighted brunette waves back from her face and pulled her seatbelt over a white tailored shirt that was very slightly straining at the buttons. In any other world, her naturally large breasts and hourglass curves would put her in the ‘normal size and gorgeous’ category. In LA, she would undoubtedly be classed as obese. Not that she cared. She may have forty-inch hips, but she also had a completely secure body image and more confidence than a therapist’s office full of size zero starlets.
