Unfamous Read online

  *****

  https://callmechiara.blogspot.com/

  Loosely Translated As...

  Posted by Chiara on October 06, 2010

  I accepted the reverse-charges call – so quaint! – and waited. Coaxing is an important part of my job, waiting for the right time to ask the killer question, laughing and smiling and beguiling gossip out of media-trained celebrity sphinxes. So I checked email on my other phone as I waited for the caller to insert words between the sobs.

  “H-h-h-hello?”

  “Yes, hello? Who’s that?” I asked in my softest, sweetest voice.

  “It’sss m-m-me,” Stacey gasped. Or shuddered. Or shivered. I can’t tell, and I’ve played it back 20 times. (I record every call, just in case.)

  “Oh... hi, how are you?” We parted under awkward circumstances, so I thought I’d be the last person she wanted to speak to now. Or maybe the second-to-last...

  She forced out a “Not good” I could barely hear. She wasn’t happy when she left the office but she didn’t seem ill or pained, just fearful for the Cady Stone showdown.

  “Where are you?”

  I had taken enough calls from A&E – ‘concerned pals’ bursting to tell me about B-list suicide bids, for the right price – to know a hospital soundtrack when I heard one, but I wanted her to confide in me.

  “I’m... in... Chelsea Hospital,” she huffed, as if fighting for every breath. “I fell.”

  Caffeine and Class-As have nothing on an exclusive to revive a weary writer; I knew there was more but didn’t want her to exhaust herself before she could tell me.

  “Do you want me to come and get you? I can be there in... 40 minutes? Half an hour!” I didn’t want to put her off, and at 2am I was sure I could shave some time off.

  “I have nowhere to go... ” I could hear the wobble and knew a sob would follow.

  “You can stay with me, I have a spare room. It’s not a problem. Get your things and be waiting downstairs in about half an hour – can you do that, are you allowed to discharge yourself? You’ve not been... sectioned?”

  Had she lost it in the space of 17 hours? It could happen. What had Cady said?

  “No, no... that’s fine. But hurry.”

  We hung up and I scrabbled for my car keys, pulling on trainers and a coat long enough to hide my pyjamas – I didn’t want anyone thinking I was insane – and left.

  I know people think, ‘How do you sleep, how do you live with yourself?’ given my job is writing about people’s private affairs, but consider this – how well do you sleep, how do you live with yourself when you’ve bought and read the papers and magazines we fill? It’s like thinking horror writers must be psychos; if you read their books and watch the movies, what does that make you?

  Somehow, I got myself along the north circular and down Western Avenue, arriving at the hospital before 3am. At first, I thought the shivering figure was an orderly on a cigarette break, but as I got closer I recognised the arched eyebrows and highlights.

  I pulled in and opened the passenger door, hissing “Come on, it’s too cold to stand around” as if I was breaking her out of prison and we had to scarper before wardens set the searchlights on us. She took a second to recognise me, then slipped into the seat, slamming the door.

  “Go,” she croaked, pulling her knees to her seatbelted chest and resting her head.

  Once back at the flat, I settled Stacey on the sofa and went to make drinks.

  “No tea,” she rasped, “no more sweet tea.”

  Would brandy be better?

  “Yes please.”

  She looked bedraggled and exhausted, as though she had walked out of my office and into thunderstorms and Biblical plagues. Her skin was blotchy and chapped, her lips cracked and her hair so harshly scraped off her face she almost looked bald by lamp light. Cocooned in a throw, with a heater on full, she was still trembling but slowly sipping at the brandy seemed to calm her.

  “How about a bath, a really hot bath, would that help?”

  I am with Sylvia Plath on this one: ‘There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.’

  Wait; Stacey wasn’t suicidal, was she?

  “No, no bath, I just need some rest and I’ll be alright...” she mumbled, sadly.

  I lifted her legs onto the sofa and she obediently lay down, nestling her head on my sample-sale cushions as I rearranged the throw over her. When I heard her breathing get heavy and slow, I went to sleep myself. Or rather I lay in bed until my alarm went off, wondering what I had done.

  At the office, I found out.

  It was a slow day, so even local-paper titbits were being bandied about for big splashes. Some PC-gone-mad ruling about care homes not being allowed to put up Christmas decorations for Health & Safety purposes was one option, as was the latest pre-teen father to surface. But “biddies don’t sell”, according to one senior editor, and no-one wanted to go big on the boy without DNA confirmation – “not after the last time.”

  “What about this: the Lifeboat team dragged a girl out of the Thames last night, didn’t get her name, and she had disappeared by the morning when the Police came back to question her...”

  I was too tired to make the connection straight away.

  “Is that all we’ve got, isn’t there a picture?”

  “No, but apparently she was pretty and only wearing her underwear and heels...”

  “So there’s no picture, we don’t know anything about her and she didn’t die, is that what you are telling me?”

  “Well, yeah, but we can...”

  “Put it on page seven with a hotline call-to-action, that’s it. What else?”

  Who cares? ‘Drunk Slapper Takes A Dip’. She would have to be famous first for anyone to want to read that...

  “What hospital was she at?” I asked, horribly conscious of having the attention of the entire newsroom on me. “I... have some contacts in some A&E departments, I might be able to get... CCTV footage?” I lied.

  Don’t say Chelsea, don’t say Chelsea...

  The reporter scanned his notes; “Chelsea & Westminster, I think.”

  “Ohhh,” I said, with theatrical emphasis, “sorry – no-one I know there.”

  Not since about 3am this morning.

  Being on the Entertainment desk, there was no chance I would get to write the story up, but I could read it off the server before it went to press:

  MYSTERY OF RIVER RESCUE WOMAN

  Police are appealing for help from the public to identify a woman who fell 50 feet from Chelsea Bridge yesterday.

  Emergency services were summoned to SW1 when onlookers saw the woman – described as young, distressed and inappropriately dressed for winter – climb over the steel railings on the west-side footpath and fall into the Thames.

  A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: “We were called at 11.15pm with reports of a woman having fallen from Chelsea Bridge. Working in conjunction with the RNLI and London Fire Brigade’s marine unit, we were able to carry out a successful rescue.”

  The woman, who was treated at nearby Chelsea & Westminster Hospital, was breathalysed but not found to be intoxicated. She was carrying no identification.

  The blonde-haired woman is aged between 25 and 35, is of slim build and is around five feet nine inches in height, police said. Anyone with any information about her identity is asked to contact the Metropolitan Police in confidence on 0300 123 1212.

  The age, height and colouring fit; as for being “inappropriately dressed” in “a slip and heels”, the black dress Stacey had on yesterday might have looked like a slip when she was pulled out of the water, and she was certainly wearing stilettos.

  I went back to the hospital at lunchtime, to appeal to the mercy of nurses.

  “Hi,” I smiled, shyly, “my friend was brought in last night and I think she left her keys behind with some clothes – has anything been handed in?”

  I was shuttled around a few floors until I
found a lost-property box, under the control of a suspicious sister.

  “Was it the suicide, in the river?” she asked, interrogation-style.

  Wide-eyed: “Suicide? Gosh, no, I think she passed out and was brought in for observation, she has got a bit of a drink problem.”

  I shook my head and tutted at the invented alcoholism.

  The ward was busy, so I was directed to the box with a terse “Good luck”.

  If the shoes had ever been in the box they weren’t now (any brand identifiable to Sex And The City fans is hot property, saturated with stinking river water or not) but the black rag of a dress was still there, swimming in a plastic sack.

  I grabbed it then locked myself into the nearest disabled loo. Dumped into a sink of running water, the dress floated like an inky jellyfish. I swirled it around until I could see the label; a friend of Cady’s had made it, a year or so ago. Another designer hand-me-down confirmed the story, but I wouldn’t be printing in the paper just yet.

  With the Thames rinsed away, I scrunched the dress up in paper towels and shoved it into my bag. Checking the sister wasn’t in the vicinity I fled, making one more stop before returning to my desk. You don’t have a social calendar like mine without getting to know a dry cleaner who can return a battered borrowed dress to its former glory in time to be returned to the PR.

  Until I knew more about the skeletons in Stacey’s closet, I would make do with an incriminating LBD. It worked for Monica Lewinsky.

  My attendance wasn’t required at any parties that night so, after making up for my extended lunch hour, I went straight back to the flat. At first it seemed like Stacey hadn’t moved from the sofa, but there were empty plates and mugs surrounding it, and the TV was on. One bony hand poked out from under the throw, clutching the remote so hard the knuckles were white. No wonder; local news was leading on the disappearing jumper.

  When she heard me, Stacey changed the channel, so I pretended I didn’t know what she had been watching and went into brassily oblivious carer mode.

  “How are you feeling now, have you warmed up?”

  I hoped so; it was stiflingly hot in there and I feared for my gas bill.

  She nodded, feebly.

  “Have you managed to eat anything?” I said, trying not to look at the rockery of crockery decorating the rug.

  “A little,” she volunteered. “Thanks.”

  I took the empties to the kitchen and wondered how long I would have to pussyfoot about until she a) told me what happened and – hope, hope – let me off the hook b) dished some revenge dirt on Cady? A few hours, days, weeks? I couldn’t write off a lodger on expenses, or keep her going on vol-au-vents smuggled back from junkets.

  When I rejoined her, prepared to disconnect my brain and watch TV until I fell asleep – my ideal wind-down routine on a night off – Stacey seemed eager to speak but somehow too shy to start. It wasn’t until I stood up to go to bed that she came to life.

  “There is s-s-something I need to ask you,” she stammered.

  Ask me? I was hoping she would tell me something.

  “A favour. Could you collect some stuff for me? I would go myself but... It’s stuff I really need...”

  There was no way I was knocking on Cady Stone’s door in the middle of the night to ask for a bag of knickers. She knew who I was and what I wanted and if she realised I was behind Stacey’s surreptitious storytelling I would be hobbling to my next premiere and liquidizing appetizers.

  “I don’t know, it’s really late and I am tired and she will probably be asleep by the time I get there and...”

  Stacey looked puzzled – the most expressive I had seen her all day.

  “It’s open 24 hours a day, you just need the code for the front gate.”

  Really? Was that Cady’s door policy?

  “Where do you want me to go?”

  “A storage locker in Chalk Farm, it isn’t far from...”

  Cady’s. But she didn’t say it and I didn’t finish the sentence for her.

  I didn’t have to go and I certainly didn’t want to, but although Stacey didn’t seem to be holding me responsible for whatever made her jump in the river, I still felt terrible about it all. So I donned the PJs and overcoat once more. (Secretly, I enjoyed pretending to be Indiana Jones when ducking under the massive roller door, having looked around furtively before tapping in the four-digit code.)

  The locker was a disappointment; just an A4 envelope and a shoebox of old C60s. My car stereo had been liberated over the last bank-holiday weekend but even that hadn’t played tapes. I was fairly sure I didn’t even have a tape deck in the flat – I switched to solid-state Dictaphones you can plug directly into computers years ago, meaning you can easily dump and duplicate recordings: audio insurance policies.

  Predictably, Stacey was asleep when I got back, so I dumped her stuff by the side of the sofa, and went to bed myself. I didn’t disturb her in the morning or call her during the day, so we didn’t speak until I got home, having forsaken the usual Friday-night drinks for once. So, like a dog wanting a walk, she was more than ready for my return.

  The contents of the envelope were now neatly laid out on the coffee table, like I had walked into a surprise presentation.

  “Should I take notes?” I asked, as I dumped my bag and undid my shoes.

  “No, not notes.” She sounded self-assured, like her old self. “I just want you to record what I am going to tell you.”

  Under the pretence of finding AAA batteries, I faffed about in the kitchen as long as I could – this was supposed to be the weekend, not overtime – returning to the lounge with a bottle and, begrudgingly, two glasses.

  Stacey took a whistle-wetting sip, then held out a hand for the recorder, a silver voice-activated one not much bigger than a cigarette lighter that could record for up to eight hours – dear lord, no!

  When the red recording light was lit, she began.

  “I know everyone thinks I am a nobody...”

  My wine went down the wrong way.

  “...And maybe I was, for a while. I just knew somebodies. But I have proof that I am actually very important indeed.”

  I worried I had taken her from hospital too soon – was this a head-injury talking?

  “My adoptive parents had a child that died.”

  Adoptive? Stacey started to make sense. Like many of the celebrities I have met, pursued or been pestered by, she had a vast emotional vacuum inside that nothing could fill, not even fame. And I could see how she and Cady could have bonded over being adopted – an unofficial part of Ms Stone’s biography.

  “I don’t think they ever got over it, really – certainly not my mum. I think that is why she was never very loving; she didn’t want to get all attached and hurt if anything happened to me, so she sent me to boarding school instead. Why adopt me, then, right?”

  Why indeed?

  “Dad was a diplomat, or something like that, and so they were abroad when she gave birth. I don’t know if it was stillborn or premature or what, but it died.”

  ‘It’. Such empathy!

  “And rather than go home to London and have to tell everyone what had happened, they stayed in Marrakech, in Morocco...”

  Did she think I was an idiot?

  “...because no-one knew them there. Only my mum made friends with this American girl. She lived near the Medina – the ancient part of the city...”

  ‘I’VE BEEN!’ I wanted to scream.

  “My mum didn’t have any other local friends and it cost a lot to call the UK and letters took forever, so they started to hang out together. And that is how she met me.”

  “You were... the American girl’s daughter?”

  She nodded, regally, as if I could now see her lineage, stretching back into the past like a bejewelled Bayeux tapestry, then rattled on, as if she was pitching her biopic.

  “So when my American mum died, it gave my dad an idea: The Omen.”

  “He wrote The Omen? He is, what is his na
me? David something?”

  Stacey looked at me with what would be pity, if her paralysed brows allowed it.

  “No, of course not. He had seen the film and it got him thinking...”

  That you were the Devil’s child?

  “...That they could pass me off as their daughter.”

  As one does. Sorry, I meant to say: What?

  “If anyone asked, they said everything was fine. They hadn’t got around to telling anyone what had happened, and they weren’t due back in London for ages, so no worries if I looked too young or small.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing – I hoped the recorder was working.

  “So I am brought up thinking they’re my parents, not knowing or remembering any different, then one day I find this.”

  She passes me an official-looking form in Arabic, with an English translation paperclipped to it, headed ‘CORONER’S REPORT’.

  It said a white female in her early 20s had been found dead in August 1976. Her body showed signs of long-term drug use but it was impossible to tell whether drugs had directly contributed to her demise. Cause of death was an inconclusive ‘heart attack’.

  “This is your birth mother?”

  Stacey nodded. “Read the bit at the bottom.”

  In the ‘Additional Notes’ section, it said the pelvis had “parturition pits, indicating the deceased woman had given birth.”

  “So the authorities knew she had a baby but didn’t investigate where it, where you were? How strange.”

  “Very strange – and that’s not all.”

  The handwriting on the original document was odd, presumably an Arabic hand not used to writing in English, but, somehow, someone had deciphered the name scrawl.

  I have developed a pretty impenetrable poker face through my line of work. If you betray your interest when someone lets slip a confidence during a casual chat, you will never get the whole story, so I remain impassive even when infidelities, abortions and procedures crop up. But remaining stoic after Stacey’s revelation was like trying to pretend you’ve not won the Lottery.

  “So you’re a...”

  That regal nod returned. “I’m the last living heir.”

  “Only...”

  “No-one knows I am alive.”

  The ill-fated heiress in question had dropped off the map in the mid-’70s and everyone assumed she had ‘gone Getty’ and ended up drug-deranged in an expensive, discrete asylum somewhere.

  “This is huge,” I said, tapping the coroner’s report. “They still do anniversary shows about her disappearance, so to find proof that she died...”

  “She disappeared? In Morocco?”

  “No, LA. You know all this?” How could she not? It’s like being aware JFK existed but remaining oblivious to his assassination.

  Stacey shook her head.

  I pointed out the vast laptop lying under the sofa and stopped the recording while Stacey Googled her long-lost/dead mother – how had she not done all this before? I idly imagined walking into the newsroom meeting on Monday morning, passing round copies of the coroner’s report and asking how many pages they would give it, or did they think I should go straight to Vanity Fair? They would sneer at first, as was tradition, then look closely and realise what it meant. ‘There is more where that came from – living proof, you might say...’ I would add as they clamoured for more information. ‘All in good time,’ I would tease, ‘there might be a book in this for me...’

  Of course – the best way to do this was a book. I could get an article into the paper straight away, but then everyone would be onto it. Sure, I might get an award out of it, but awards don’t buy two-bedroom flats, they are just bookends in bedsits. A book meant we could do the whole story, Stacey and her parents and the fortune and all, and sell excerpts. No-one else could jump on the story then because the work would all be done, they couldn’t find out anything I wouldn’t already have, the book would be a bestseller – and I would be out of the grimy ‘Diary’ ghetto for good.

  “A book,” I announced to Stacey. “We have to do this as a book. It’s the best way, it means we, you remain the author of your own story. It will do amazingly well in America and we can find out everything we need to without anyone else getting a sniff.”

  Without looking up from the laptop, she said, “I can’t write. You are a writer. If I could write, I would do it myself.”

  “You don’t have to write. No-one famous writes anything themselves. All those ‘autobiographies’ and columns, they are dictated. All you have to do is sit here and talk and I’ll... transcribe it.” Ugh, I shuddered at the thought – worst part of the job.

  I mean, what could be easier? ‘You know how you like talking about yourself? Well keep doing it and people will pay to see it all written down and spelt right.’

  “How long will that take?”

  “How quickly can you talk? It just needs to be juicy. You need to tell me everything. About you, your mother...” – I lowered my voice – “...Cady...”

  She scrunched up her backlight-blue face for a few seconds’ thinking time.

  “Fine.”

  “Good. But look – you have had a bad week. If we are going to do this, and make a good job of it, we need to be fighting fit. So how about I take some holiday – I’ve got loads owing – and we go away somewhere quiet for a week and really go for it, get it all recorded, then I’ll bash it into shape and we will start shopping it around?”

  “I am okay, I can carry on now.”

  “You’re not okay. You look dreadful...”

  Some people will only slow down if they think it’s affecting their looks.

  “...And if you’re not at your best when we start, you might burn out before we have got it all down and we will never finish it. I don’t want you having a breakdown.”

  Stacey either knew I was right or really was too tired to protest. So we had a well-earned lazy weekend of R&R (mainly Ribena and Revels) and while I didn’t waltz into the Monday-morning meeting with an exclusive, I did walk out with a week’s holiday signed off. I booked a cheap cottage in the Lakes and train tickets, and the next day we were off, sitting in First Class, and sneering at bikini pictures in the weeklies.

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  *****

  Daily Mirror, THURSDAY 07.10.2010

  SHH! Uh oh – have our downmarket rival’s ‘exclusive extracts’ been scooped? So far, the must-read online exposé hasn’t named names, but we hear it’s just a matter of time until a certain outspoken starlet finds she has nothing more to say, no more ace to play...