The Book of the Film of the Story of My Life Read online

  Despite appearances, when I come up to her she’s complaining. “Christ, this is murder. I can’t feel my legs. I’ve never been up this early in my life.”

  “I thought you were a country girl. Weren’t you up at sparrowfart every morning to milk the cows or something?”

  “Levin is not the country. It’s a town. A built-up area. There are no cows.”

  “Whatever. Let’s check in, then we can find some coffee.”

  Checking-in is the usual business, except I notice immediately that people are looking at us. Us, a couple. Guys, sure, but not just guys, people in general. God, I exist. I remember that from when I’d walk down the street with Sophie. Glances, looks. You can feel them, casual glances sliding by, sticking for a moment, moving on. No big deal, but it’s a nice feeling, a caressing people-are-noticing-you feeling. Gives things a boost. This morning I am, incidentally, apart from the size twelve eye-bags, a dead ringer for the guy with everything. Steerhide coat, slightly square trousers, nice shirt, hot girlfriend. You’d never guess, never, the seething turmoil on the inside. Who knows? Maybe you’ve already seen me. Maybe you’re looking at me right now.

  We go upstairs, pick out a franchise and find a table. Melissa is full of ideas. “We need to discuss our story.”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  She holds up a finger. “First things first.”

  “I beg your pardon.” I pull out the money. The terms have already been agreed. It’s cash, in advance, one thousand pounds per week, plus per diems. No physical contact except in public, for the purposes of deception. All reasonable efforts to be made to establish pretense of genuine romantic involvement, as deemed necessary by the party of the first part (me). All expenses, including but not limited to travel, accommodation, incidentals and medical, to be my sole responsibility. In the event of travel delay, all additional costs to be my responsibility. She keeps her air miles.

  She counts the money, puts it away and sits back, sucking her teeth. The money from my folks, by the way, came through like clockwork. I went into the bank and there it was, a nice fat little bundle of zeros. My heart sank and beat faster, all at the same time.

  Meanwhile, Melissa pulls an exercise book out of her cabin bag, smooths it on the table. “Okay. Now. You want romance, right?”

  “That’s what I want.”

  “I’ve got some great ideas here. Fox hunting.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “We met at a fox hunt. We were both protesters. One of the fox hunters attacked me with a riding whip. You leapt forward and dragged him off his horse, but he turned out to be the cousin of the local . . .”

  I hold up a hand. Time for a hose-down. “People actually need to believe this, you know.”

  She waits.

  “A lot of these people have met me before. Some of them even know me. I’ve never been near a fox hunt in my life.”

  “Sometimes people do unexpected things.”

  “No fox hunting.”

  She puts the paper away in silence. I’ve hurt her feelings. She sighs. “Okay, what do you want? What’s the story?”

  “Something simple. Direct. Credible. Boring. I don’t know . . . Selfridges. The garden furniture section. We met there.”

  She looks puzzled.

  “I go there all the time.” Sophie knows that. She’ll believe that. I go there to read scripts.

  “What was I doing there?”

  “Buying garden furniture, I suppose.”

  She spreads her hands. “All right. What else? Who am I? What am I?”

  “What work experience do you have?”

  “Apart from what I’m doing now? When I left school I worked a year in Kentucky Fried. Oh, and I nannied for a few months when I first arrived in London.”

  “But that’s perfect.”

  “Kentucky Fried?”

  “Nannying. It’s perfect.”

  “I thought maybe I could have a wealthy background. You know, like my dad could be a shipping magnate or maybe an aircraft designer . . .”

  “What does your dad actually do?”

  “He runs the Toyota dealership in Levin.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “No, why?”

  “I know that place. On the corner just before you leave town?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “I used to drive past that place all the time. I lived in Wellington for a year.”

  She shakes her head. “Takes all types, I suppose.”

  “Anyway, that’s perfect. Keep your dad, keep your mum. Keep everything. Just wind the clock back a couple of years. You’re nannying in London. Use the same kids, the same family, everything. Make nothing up.”

  “Okay, smart-arse. What’s a nanny doing buying garden furniture?”

  “You were on your way to the CD section. You have to use your imagination sometimes.”

  “Where is the CD section?”

  “Carry on straight past garden furniture and take a right at the donut outlet.”

  She makes some notes in her exercise book. I have to admit she’s professional, even if her lips do move when she writes. “Now. How serious are we? As a couple?”

  “We’ve only recently met.”

  “When?”

  “Six weeks.”

  “So we’re holding hands, we’re staring into each other’s eyes?”

  “Yep.”

  She nods, and writes down “insatiable,” if my lip-reading is up to scratch.

  “But without being gross or tasteless.”

  “No tongues.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So when do we start?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Holding hands and staring into each other’s eyes. You want to start now, or what?”

  “Oh, God, no. Let’s wait till LA at least. I couldn’t face it this early in the morning. I haven’t even finished my coffee. Anyway that’ll do for now.”

  “I have a suggestion.”

  “Yes?”

  “Lose the ponytail.”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “Because it is completely and utterly noncredible that a girl like me is going to be attracted to a guy with a ponytail.”

  “Let’s get one thing straight now, shall we? The tail stays.”

  She shrugs. “Your funeral.”

  “Anyway,” I say, gruffly, “I have to work.” Interview over. I pull out a romantic comedy. The hook of this one is a husband and wife who end up falling in love and making secret assignations with their respective chatroom e-pals. They don’t know it, but they’re actually chatting with each other. It will never work because it’s basically a story about two cheaters. Cheaters can never win. When was the last time you saw a film about a woman who met some nice guy and left her nice husband for him and lived happily ever after and didn’t get chased all over the place by some arsehole with a knife?

  Seeing what I’m doing, Melissa retaliates by reaching into her cabin bag and pulling out a big fat crime thriller. I get a glimpse inside the bag; it’s stuffed with paperbacks. “How many books have you got in there?”

  “Oh, heaps. I read them so fast I need to bring a stack whenever I travel.” She peers into my bag. “What have you got?”

  “Christ, between the two of us we’ll be lucky if we get off the tarmac.”

  Melissa groans in her sleep, tries to turn over and kicks me in the chest. I push her foot out of the way and try to read some more. We’ve been in the air for six hours. Future generations of intergalactic travelers are going to look back from the shopping malls of their vast intergalactic space liners in pity and horror at the conditions endured by late twentieth/early twenty-first-century travelers. The queues for the toilets, the lack of legroom, the appalling food. There’s really only one way to do it. Start drinking early and keep drinking. The added advantage of this technique is that it enforces regular leg stretching exercise in the form of lavatory trips, thus reducing the chances of dee
p vein thrombosis. The mistake people make is not that they drink, it’s that they stop halfway through the flight—and then they wonder why they feel terrible. Keep going, no matter what. That’s my advice . . . Although there is another way. You could do what I do. Fly business. The first thing I did when I got the tickets from Charles was upgrade.

  The first leg takes us London-LA direct. We spend a few hours in duty-free. Melissa buys makeup. By the time we find a hotel we’re completely whacked. It’s now four in the afternoon in LA and midnight in London.

  After a vast meal of Hawaiian chicken legs with hash browns and onion rings, followed by three flavors of ice cream and a gallon of weak brown coffee, we retire. I take the first shower, then sit in bed reading a script, while Melissa disappears into the bathroom and reappears in a puff of steam, rosy-cheeked, hair falling around her shoulders. She sorts through her things, looking for underwear. I observe surreptitiously.

  It has been said, by someone, that beauty is the promise of happiness. I wouldn’t know. I approach happiness the way some people approach cigarettes: strictly other people’s. If that is the case, however, I would say that Melissa promises happiness of a very specific kind. Big-breasted, wide-hipped, narrow-waisted, with flawless skin and masses of shiny, bouncy, curly chestnut hair, she’s a walking male fantasy of the mainstream, mass-consumption, centerfold kind. Charmingly, she has one defect. Slightly plump knees. Also, without makeup, her eyes have all but vanished, and her chin is surprisingly pointed. She climbs into bed looking defenseless, like a small laboratory animal. She looks across at me, as if waiting for instructions, eyebrows raised. I cough and concentrate on my script. It strikes me that this is the first time I’ve shared a bed since Sophie split. For a moment I’m close to panic. Then I relax. It’s okay. I don’t have to do anything. I’m in charge. I am the customer, and the customer is always right.

  “So,” says Melissa, “this is it? Right?”

  “This is it.”

  “No sex?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  She shrugs. “Okay. I just don’t want you to feel, like . . .”

  “Like what?”

  “Just feels a bit weird, that’s all. Taking your money like that.” She pulls out a paperback. “But we start tomorrow morning?”

  “Start what?”

  “Acting like a couple in public.”

  “We’ll start tomorrow.”

  “Can I ask you one question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Just out of curiosity. Why the no sex?”

  “I happen to be a married man.” I’m tired. I roll over.

  “You’re kidding?”

  “Not at all. Does that surprise you?”

  “Not that you’re married, no. Where is your wife?”

  “Probably on a plane.”

  “Does she know about this?”

  “Certainly not. But she’ll be on the island when we get there.”

  She scratches her head. “I’m sorry, I’m really not getting this. It’s no sex because you’re married. But you want me to pretend to be your . . .”

  “We’re estranged.”

  “Ah.”

  I put down my script. “Perhaps I should explain. I’m hiring you purely as a courtesy to others.”

  “Come again?”

  “I’m going to a party where I’ll be seeing my estranged wife and her boyfriend, plus a number of my friends and acquaintances. I don’t want to go, but it’s imperative that I see my wife, in person, as soon as possible. For reasons which I’d rather not discuss. If I turn up alone on the island, not only will my estranged wife be suspicious, and make it difficult for me to have access to her alone, but her boyfriend will most probably be territorial and aggressive, and all my other friends will feel obliged to be sorry for me, to give me special attention because I’m all by myself and Sophie’s there and Matt’s there, and so on. You know how people are. It would make them uncomfortable. It would make them feel they had to give me advice about my life and eye contact and hugs and pats on the shoulder and all sorts of other things I’d much prefer to avoid. But if I bring someone, like you, someone young and attractive, and I can give them the impression that I’m having a whale of a time, we can all just forget about it and get on with what we’re doing.”

  “But don’t you have anyone else you can bring? Like a normal regular girlfriend for example?”

  “Well, there is someone, as it happens, but she’d expect me to sleep with her.”

  “So why don’t you just sleep with her?”

  “Because I’m married. Do try to keep up.”

  “So you’ve hired a hooker because you don’t want to have sex?”

  “That’s right.”

  There’s a pause. “You want me to put the light out?”

  “No, that’s okay. I’ve got a blindfold from the plane.”

  “I won’t read for long.”

  “Well, good night, then.”

  “G’night.”

  I put on the blindfold. Melissa’s fingernails scrape on paper. A page turns. I can hear her breathing. I think she breathes a little harder when she’s concentrating. Another page turns. She seems to be turning pages every twenty seconds. “What are you reading?”

  “Just another thriller.”

  “Another? You only started one yesterday.”

  “I only ever read thrillers.”

  I take a peek from under the blindfold. Her eyes are scanning vertically, barely tracking sideways at all. “I’ve never seen anyone read that fast.”

  “I took a speed-reading course once.”

  I slip the blindfold back in place. Melissa’s fingernail scrapes on paper. I wait. I count. Twenty seconds later, her fingernail scrapes on paper.

  I wake about eight the next morning after a long and complicated dream in which Sophie was trying to teach me to fly. I lie disoriented for a time, thinking I’m at home. Melissa is already in the shower. She’s clearly a very clean person. She emerges in jeans and T-shirt. She looks bright and radiant. I take my turn and we go down to breakfast. Just before the lift doors open, Melissa turns to me. “Okay, big boy, ready?” She twines her fingers between mine and leads me casually out of the lift and across the restaurant floor. I’m a bundle of nerves. It’s all I can do to keep from bumping into the tables. We pick a place near the bar. Melissa kisses me on the cheek and slips into her chair. She picks up a menu. “What are you having, sweetheart? Hungry?” She looks at me over the menu and bats her eyelids. Incredible.

  After a rousing breakfast of hash browns, eggs over easy, sausages, bacon, toast, fried tomatoes, three gallons of very weak coffee and a glass of orange juice, we’re ready for a day’s sightseeing. We decide to hire a car and just drive around. The courtesy shuttle drops us at the car hire place, where Melissa picks out a huge Dodge saloon. It’s far more than we need, and it’s going to cost a fortune. I put it on the card.

  We pull out of the hire garage, take a right, a left, change lanes, accelerate wildly, take another left, slam on the brakes, accelerate wildly, take a right, a left, two more rights, accelerate still more, and we’re on the way to Disneyland. Melissa says that every New Zealand kid longs more than anything else to go to Disneyland and this is her chance to fulfill that dream. You grow up with Disneyland. Disneyland on the back of your cornflakes packets, Disneyland in the comics you read. A free trip to Disneyland for the lucky kid who sends in the right coupon. And then at school some rich kid shows up back from the Christmas holidays in a pair of Mickey Mouse sunglasses talking about Space Mountain, and you just die with envy.

  I was that rich kid. I don’t want to go to Disneyland—I’ve already been, three times. I’m hanging out for the La Brea Tar Pits. Throughout my childhood I was haunted by an image, from The Children’s Illustrated Encyclopedia of Fates Worse than Death, of a life-size model mother mammoth up to her knees in tar, her helpless baby bellowing from the bank as Mum disappears into the morass. I wanted to go, but we never got to the pits
because every time we went through LA we naturally went to Disneyland. This is a perfect opportunity to reconnect with some childhood fears and I’m in exactly the right frame of mind for some gratuitous pathos but Melissa’s mind is made up, it’s the Magic Kingdom or bust. In all conscience, I feel I cannot deny her. Besides, she’s driving.

  Melissa holds out a small square of blotting paper. It has a Mickey Mouse face printed on it. “Want one?”

  “Oh my God. You took those through customs?”

  She shrugs.

  “Where did you hide them?”

  “A safe place.”

  “Jesus. Promise me you won’t do that again.”

  “Do you want one or not?”

  “We’re going to Disneyland as it is. Isn’t that enough for you?” The last time I dropped a trip I remember spending several hours watching neon Mickey Mouses crawl across the walls. I don’t even like Mickey Mouse.

  Melissa shrugs. “Whatever. I’ve already taken mine.”

  We drive in bruised silence. I wonder if I’m getting on Melissa’s nerves. Young people can be very difficult. They have no idea, really. They sound like grown-ups, they have the vocabulary, they look like grown-ups, but in actual fact they aren’t. I actually think that having a real girlfriend this age would be unbearable. My absolute most unfavorite story cliché of all time is the one the French love to death. You know the one: the clapped-out fucked-over-by-life middle-aged mojo-less guy like me who ends up, by some colossal unlikely concatenation of contrived events, stuck in close proximity with an incredibly hot spunky young gamin with spiky hair and nose rings and way too much attitude. She, utterly inexplicably, finds him sexy, reaches out and touches him in some deep and amazing and mildly pornographic way and then either fades away into the ether or dies of a drug overdose while he rises up, throws away his hairpiece and walks, wiser and happier. Of course “wiser and happier” is an oxymoron, anyway. This is generally just after the scene where he takes her to the opera and she gets through two boxes of Kleenex before the interval that is supposed to prove that she isn’t just some hard-hearted slag.