Unfamous Read online

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  https://callmechiara.blogspot.com/

  Shop Tactics

  Posted by Chiara on October 12, 2010

  Wherever the masks were, they were not in the cottage. All Stacey had brought with her, besides that tacky tracksuit she occasionally stood up in, were the paper... and that shoebox. Speaking of which, what was on those old cassettes?

  “We should head out tomorrow,” I suggested. “See a bit of the scenery. We will go stir crazy if we just stay here for the rest of the week. We should fill our lungs with country air and see if we can’t flush out a few more memories.”

  Kendal is hardly Kensington but I am sure Stacey could amuse herself for long enough to allow me to raid the local charity shops.

  “Fine,” she said, dismissively. “If you insist.”

  I wasn’t insisting and, to be honest, I would have been happy for her to stay home while I went off searching, but I didn’t entirely trust her home alone with the laptop, and it was too cumbersome to cart around town.

  We agreed to wake up whenever, eat and leave. I dragged the laptop into my room and re-read what I had dreamt up so far. I was already rather fond of Estella and Hilary, and felt rather sorry for them that their daughter had turned out to be a brat.

  I was tempted to write more of their story, to see what happened next, seeing as how it kind of came to me as I typed. After all, the only beats I had to hit were Estella dying and Hilary adopting Stacey-to-be; everything in between was mine for the writing.

  ‘Whenever’ turned out to be around eleven for Stacey, so breakfast became brunch and it was lunchtime by the time we made it into the town.

  I had misremembered the pencil museum as being here (it is actually in Keswick) but this aside failed to engage Stacey, as did the premise of mint cake.

  “So it is a block of mint-flavoured sugar?” she asked, incredulous. “Why?”

  “It is like an old-fashioned energy bar, for hikers,” I tried to explain. “One Guide camp I went to, it was the only thing keeping us going. The leaders fed us tinned burgers and kept all the cakes we had brought for themselves.” Two decades on, I was still bitter.

  “Fascinating.”

  Kendal, the Lakes, were, of course, as far removed from the West End as was imaginable to someone as self-centred and blinkered as Stacey, who, despite being born in North Africa, clearly had no global perspective. We were still in England, still in a middle-class enclave of the well-to-do, but we may as well have been visiting a herd of nomadic tribesmen with bones through their noses as peering at cakes with OAPs.

  She looked narcoleptically bored – I was expecting an extravagant swoon to the pavement any minute. But finally she saw signs for a mall and thawed.

  “I could do with new clothes, of my own,” she reasoned, like I was a weekend dad taking my ungrateful daughter out for the day.

  I saw my moment. “Why not go on ahead, pick out some stuff you like, and I’ll check my balance and see what I can stretch to? There’s a branch of my bank over there. I’ll come and find you in – half an hour? An hour?”

  This seemed to appease Stacey, so I stood and tinkered with my phone for as long as it took for her to wander off out of view, then assessed the high street. There were three charity shops within a stretch of maybe 15 storefronts: British Heart Foundation, Oxfam and Scope. All three had food steamers to spare, alongside old waxed jackets and shelves full of Dan Brown books, but only one had what I wanted.

  “Are you sure?” asked the aging volunteer at the till. “Sometimes we get in MP3 players. Not iPods, but other brands. They are very popular now...”

  “This is fine,” I assured her, popping the change from a tenner into the donation box. “It’s exactly what I was after.”

  “Well, maybe they’re due a comeback?” she suggested, with pity in her reply

  I doubted it, but needs must where tapes gather dust.

  I met Stacey earlier than expected but she had already amassed an armful of awful, garish jersey tops with gaping necklines and metallic flashes. That reputation for being a high-street boho princess was obviously hard work – away from the King’s Road she had the same magpie tendencies of any woman trying to shop at speed: pick up the most eye-catching items, regret at leisure when you try them on again at home.

  “I can afford... £50.” I couldn’t but I was starting to care less about my current bank balance and more about an upcoming advance. I hoped my paperback sales would cover a cheapo sailor-suit top. And if the books ended up in Oxfam, well, everyone wins.

  Stacey looked at me in disbelief, as if £50 would barely buy a thong.

  “That’s not very much.”

  “I haven’t got much money right now. You can have £50-worth, max, or not get anything. But I think you should treat yourself.” Don’t stint to spend my money!

  “Fine, I’ll have this one” – the sailor top, bingo! – “and this one” – a floaty wingback number worthy of an amateur ice dancer.

  We joined the queue, like refugees carrying rags and, after one joyless exchange with a shop assistant, apparently offended by our faux pas of standing at her till and expecting her to serve us, headed back to the cottage via the supermarket.

  “I thought you had no more money,” snapped Stacey.

  “Can you eat clothes, then?” I retorted. “Which top shall we have for tea?”

  She sneered. “Ha ha.”

  We filled the basket with the least nutritious foodstuffs on offer in Cumbria and I snuck in a pack of AA batteries, hoping Stacey wouldn’t notice. And, as she would no more offer to help pack than pay, I succeeded.

  “It’s a shame I couldn’t afford to get you some new trousers,” I lied, on the walk back to the cottage. “There was a pair on a mannequin that would have gone really well with your sailor top.” You could have walked straight into the Navy recruitment office and all they would have to do would be give you a cap and a call sign!

  She sniffed at my attempts to be her stylist, but seemed to believe me.

  “Imagine the kind of clothes I will be able to buy...”

  She didn’t say when, but we both knew. My financial fantasies only extended to buying a bigger, better flat that didn’t require anything doing to it (including cleaning) but I knew Stacey imagined a world of locked boutique doors being flung open as she approached, personal shoppers jostling to dress her, and not needing to ask the price as handbags and other costly accessories were presented to her by bowed-head assistants on commission; Pretty Woman on Bond Street. Oh to wield wealth!

  Stacey never mentioned Cady Stone but I knew there was also an element of revenge in this entire endeavour. I had flicked through the tabloids in the supermarket but there was no mention of her. If the reunion with her ex was happening, there was no mention made of ousted second wives and elopements. Perhaps fights like theirs were commonplace and Stacey misinterpreted it all, got overwrought and threw herself into the river for no good reason?

  The cottage was freezing when we returned, so, after Stacey’s half-arsed fashion show, in which her disappointment in her purchases was as obvious as their garishness, we wore everything we had and huddled over nachos and dips in the sitting room.

  There were no aide memoire movies showing that night, just dour local news reports about floods and episodes of sitcoms we had both seen enough times to quote. Were they enough to occupy Stacey while I snuck into her room? Probably not.

  “Fancy a bath?” I asked. “You know, to warm up?”

  Stacey looked utterly horrified. What had I said? Was it water, was she aquaphobic now? Was that even the word, or was it ‘hydrophobia’, like with rabies?

  “W-w-with you?” she stammered.

  Seriously? Did she think I had been grooming her, that this entire adventure had been an elaborate way to get her naked and gaze in awe upon her scrawny limbs? I wouldn’t spend £50 for the privilege. I wasn’t after her body, I wanted her life story.

  “Don’t be ridiculous! I w
as just offering to run one for you. There is a knack to it, you have to just open the tap a tiny bit to get the water to come out hot. We would have to be pygmies to both fit in – and anyway, you’re not my type.”

  She agreed, apologetically, which suited me fine. There was probably mileage in pretending to be offended but I would save that for later. So, ten minutes later, I had the rest of the cottage to myself. Stacey locked herself in the bathroom, in case the mere suggestion had awakened a Sapphic urge within me, but had left her bedroom door ajar.

  Aside from the duvet, curled into a flowery turd atop the mattress, the room looked untouched, so I knew the shoebox must be under the bed. And it was. I lay flat on the floor to reach and remove it, then left the room as I found it, fighting the urge to make the bed as I left. I am as slovenly a housekeeper as is possible without living in my own waste, but even I could air out a duvet.

  Having hidden my charity buy and batteries behind the Gideon’s Bible in the unit by my bed, I retrieved them then dug my headphones out from my coat pocket. But as I slipped the battery-compartment cover off to slot in the AAs, a thought struck me – it might not work. It might have been given to charity because it was broken. That sweet old dear who was trying to get me to upgrade probably knew that, that was why she was trying to sell me something else, the wily old...

  It worked. Or at least the things that turned the spools turned the spools. It didn’t mean the head still worked, of course, and it might not amplify sound any more... but I could sit and worry myself sick or I could give it a go.

  The tapes were numbered, so I picked the first one out of the shoebox. The inlay card had nothing written on it but was clearly vintage, going by the design. I flipped the case open and slid out the tape, blowing dust off before putting into the charity Walkman.

  And then I pressed Play.

  I don’t know what I had expected to hear – music, mainly. Demos, maybe. It crossed my mind for a moment that these were early recordings of tracks by Cady Stone’s ex/future husband, such as she had presented at his trial. But it was just voices.

  Whose they were, I wasn’t sure.

  One was a sprightly old woman; the other was barely audible, a mumble in the background – male or female I couldn’t tell, age unknown.

  This first tape began with the clattering familiar to anyone transcribing an interview, of a recorder being activated and positioned close enough to the subject to capture every utterance, however quiet and seemingly insignificant at the time. So was it an interview? I couldn’t hear questions, just murmurs in the gaps between answers.

  It began with pleasantries. “Oh thank you!” trilled the old lady, “I’m so glad you like it. I picked out the colours myself but I got a man in to do the actual work. But yes, I think he did a good job. I said to him, ‘I want the feel of a meadow in springtime, inside’ and this is what he came up with. It’s so rejuvenating, don’t you think? Darling.”

  So I knew what the room they were in looked like, but not who they were.

  “No, not long,” she responded to an incomprehensible question. “About... five years? Which I suppose sounds long to you but to me it’s nothing, nothing at all. I was in Los Angeles for, what... six decades? And that felt like no time at all. Not enough time.”

  That gave me an age range, at least. Whoever was speaking was at least 65, but sounded much older.

  “Well, I had no reason to stay. Really, I left it too late. I wanted to see Charles, you see, but I never dared. He’d been gone so long but I always thought he’d come back for me one day, and then he died. I mean, I’d seen him in ’72, we all had, and just knowing he was in town was wonderful, just wonderful, but it was a flying visit and we didn’t get to see each other face to face. I considered turning up, of course, but Oona was with him and we’d never got on. I didn’t dislike her, I didn’t dislike anyone, but I knew she thought she’d won and she hadn’t. I’d had the best of him. She was just the younger model. And my god, Switzerland, can you imagine spending all that time in Switzerland? I’m with Orson on that one. Cuckoo clocks? Cuckoo is right – crazy. Switzerland!”

  ‘Oona’ is a pretty unusual name. And if by Los Angeles she had meant Hollywood, then I might be on to something. Oona and Charles, formerly of Los Angeles/Hollywood, then Switzerland.

  I dragged the laptop from the lounge. What reporters had done before Google, I do not know. All that information, instantly. Amazing. “Er, reporting?” some say, but, honestly, I just think a lot more mistakes got into print. I cringe when I think of some of the stuff we had run in the past, in the dark ages before email and web access for all.

  In this instance, I got what I was after in one quick search.

  Oona, Charles, Hollywood, Switzerland.

  Third from the top of the results was a Wikipedia page on Oona O’Neill, daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill, fourth and final wife of... Charlie Chaplin. Who exiled himself in Switzerland after his visa was revoked on suspicion of his being a Communist.

  Mystery solved – right?

  Wrong.

  That left me with three other wives, all younger than Oona by a decade or more. There were nine other serious relationships listed online, aside from his wives (who gave birth to eleven children – poor Oona had eight alone), and who knows how many young starlets who caught his eye and stirred his Lolita-loving loins in between (or during).

  It might have been easier if she had said she had never loved Chaplin.

  But hang on – if she was older than Oona, who was born in 1925, then she was at least 85. She had been in her new home for five years when the tapes were made... but if I didn’t know the date the tapes were made, then that’s useless information. Square One.

  Of course, the tapes themselves could have been utterly worthless. They could have been some school-project thing Stacey’s been carting around for years for sentimental reasons, some old dear she befriended and can’t bear to bin, even though she can’t (couldn’t) play the tapes any more. But I didn’t think they were. I thought they were important.

  So I pressed Play again.

  “It’s not very modern to admit it, but I followed him out there. I was lovesick! And we’d never met at the time. So silly, but you have to follow your heart, don’t you agree? So I did... I saw him on the screen, you see. At the picturehouse. Films were very short in those days, not like today – so long, don’t you think? Too long – so you would get a whole load of them all bunched together. And my favourites were always Charles’.”

  Was she a stalker?

  “I’d begun performing by then and my mother mentioned one day she’d known Charles’ poor mother, Hannah – Lily, as she used to be known – and how Charles took care of her even from all that way away, in America, making sure she was always in the very best asylums and so forth. My mother wasn’t mentally unwell herself but I think she liked the idea of being kept by me, as young as I was. So, first opportunity, she shipped me off to America. ‘Tell everyone you’re 18,’ she said as she pushed me up the gang plank, ‘except Charles. Younger the better with him.’ That was the last time I saw her.”

  So she’s not a stalker now, she was a honey trap – as endorsed by her own avaricious mother? Is there a statute of limitations on child endangerment?

  “Well, the boat took forever, as you can imagine. Days and days. When they launched Concorde, I couldn’t believe it – all that distance in three hours, when it took us a week at high sea! Not everyone made it. I was always more sturdy than I seemed, for such a slight young thing, a stripling, so all day long I would see grown men vomiting and I’d be fine, like a mountain goat, tripping merrily around the deck without once being green around the gills. Some families were in a terrible state, but not me. I loved it all.”

  I still couldn’t catch a single word spoken by the interviewer, but I got the gist.

  “I went straight to Broadway – where else? I had letters of recommendation from all the music halls, most of which were written by my mot
her and other friends of hers who were literate enough. And of course it would be such an enormous effort to call and confirm the contents of each letter, and so expensive to the penny-pinching producers, that they all just offered me auditions there and then. And of course, they all loved me. Ever since Charles had wowed ’em with Fred Karno’s troupe they’d all wanted a little British starlet of their own – and here I was.”

  More mumbling.

  “A bidding war? Possibly. I just know that they all wanted me and I could only pick one, if I was to be the star of the show. So I accepted the offer that came with the nicest dressing room and costumes. I didn’t really care about the money, I just wanted the lifestyle. Which of course my mother would be furious about, if she realised I’d passed up on money that should rightfully have been hers, but who’d tell her? Not me.”

  I started making up questions of my own in the gaps, silently awarding myself points when they tallied with the answer given.

  “The showgirls and the pony-ballet kids were all terribly jealous, of course, but I couldn’t care less. I was up on stage every night, twice on matinee days, and all I could hear was adoration, not envy. I didn’t care for any pettiness. I was en route to the arms of Charles, that was all I cared about. I’d make my name and he’d want to meet me and we’d marry and... well if he made me a film star too then so be it but it wasn’t my one aim in life. I really just wanted to be his wife. Is that awful?”

  Before I could get all enraged about her non-existent feminist principles, the bathroom door clicked open and I heard Stacey scuttle to her room – my home-time bell.

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  Daily Mirror, WEDNESDAY 13.10.2010

  SHH! Staff at an exotic luxury hotel are in damage-limitation mode after more unreliable memoirs from a starry-eyed source. They claim there are no recorded drug deaths on the premises, or evidence the storyteller ever stayed there. Spin – or a statement of fact?