Mary Poppins. That’s what he called me. Book my car, Mary Poppins. Get me the penthouse suite, Mary Pop-pins, and stay there with me pretending to make notes until I want to be alone with the latest actress wannabe and give you the nod to leave. Get my Viagra out of the fridge. Pour me a shot of tequila. Suck my cock, Mary Poppins.
He must have told me to suck his cock a thousand times. But it was reflexive; he spewed out that command to everyone, men as well as women. No, that’s not true, now I think about it. He never said it to women over thirty-five.
The first time he told me to do it, on my starting day as his latest PA, I raised my eyebrows and said, “I’m sure you’re joking, Mr Van Stratten, but I don’t find that very amusing,” and he roared with laughter and said, “Jesus, they hired me Mary Poppins! Where’s your umbrella?”
Thank God, by then I’d been in New York long enough to learn how much Americans love a posh British accent. My own is bog-standard middle class, now I’ve smoothed out the rolling Cambridgeshire accent that had people at university asking me rather snarkily where I came from. I wanted to be neutral, not to stand out; that’s always been my preference. I’m an observer, not a participant. It’s what makes me such a good PA. I always say that in interviews, and it always gets me the job, because people can see it’s true.
In New York, being English in itself is laden with meaning. They think you’re more intelligent, more sophisticated, more educated than they are. And if you can manage an upper-class, Downton Abbey above-stairs accent, that puts ten grand on your yearly salary right away.
I could never pass for posh back home, never. There are a million little things that give you away. We’re so attuned to accents in the UK, so aware of the tiniest inflexion or turn of phrase, the inability to spell hors d’oeuvres or per se correctly. I don’t even think I could pass for upper-middle: you need to know about opera and ballet and classical music for that. Posh people don’t do culture, necessarily, but upper-middle ones do.
I said I was an observer.
But here in New York, I watched other Brit expats and poshed up my accent, and it gave me power and money. Not only that: for Jared Van Stratten, I was Mary Poppins, and no one wants to have sex with Mary Poppins. As Jared once said, she could kill your boner just by looking at it.
Which suited me fine. It was protection. He had such a choice of starlets available to him that office workers were far, far down any list of women he’d want to have sex with. But Jared was an animal. I never believed in sex addiction until I started working for him; I thought it was an excuse that men use to cheat on their wives. I had never seen anything like his behaviour before, and I still can’t quite believe it. Trust me, if you’d been sitting just outside his office and regularly gone in there after one of his sessions to clear up, you wouldn’t have believed it either. And yes, if you’re wondering, he got a big kick out of strolling out of that office once the starlet had left, adjusting his trousers, watching Mary Poppins snapping on a pair of latex gloves, picking up a box of disinfectant wipes and heading into a room that smelt of semen and poppers and fear sweat and sometimes, slightly, of urine, to clean bodily fluids off his leather sofas.
America has introduced me to the near-miracle that is Scotchgard. With the job I do, its ridiculously long hours, its frequent travel, the possibility that Jared may call me any time. When I’m at home I mostly eat takeaway comfort food on my sofa in front of the Bravo Channel. I love reality TV. Scripted stuff is a busman’s holiday for me; reality, fake though it may be, soothes my nerves. The shows I like the most feature people screaming at each other, because they’re trapped inside the screen, under control.
They can’t, for instance, reach through the glass and yell at me to fill the script for their dick shots, an immortal line that Jared uttered to me on the first day I worked for him. I had no idea what he meant, and I stared at him, baffled, aware my mouth was hanging slightly open. It sounded as if he wanted an update on a porn movie they were shooting, but Parador, as far as I knew, specialised in popular, feel-good art films, the kind that won Oscars because they made the viewer feel intellectual and sophisticated.
‘Script’, it turned out, was American for ‘prescription’. And ‘dick shots’ was American for ‘penis injection’. I’m fairly sure that even if I’d understood what he was saying, I’d have goggled at him in exactly the same way.
It’s amazing what you can get used to, given time, and, more importantly, everyone around you taking outrageousness for granted and expecting you to do the same.
Anyway, Scotchgard. All the catered food at Parador is extremely healthy and protein-rich: sushi rolls made with brown rice, superfoods and quinoa coming out of your ears. Jared’s a health nut. So at home I tuck into messy, sloppy, delicious fatty food: enchiladas, pad thai, General Tso’s chicken. After I got my first bonus, I went to West Elm and spent it all on a top-notch velvet corner sofa that practically fills my living room. And I ticked the Scotchgard option. Best money I ever spent; spilled takeaway wiped right off the velvet.
Pad thai, however, isn’t a biohazard. Jared’s sofas were replaced regularly and I used disinfectant wipes every single time I touched them.
Every year, my bonus went up by a considerable amount. Not only did I scare HR rigid with my euphemisms, Jared loved my work. (My actual work, not my sideline as a sofa cleaner and needle disposal technician.) I didn’t mind the sideline that much. I waitressed through university to help pay my tuition fees. And university towns don’t have the best-behaved clientele. I had to clean a lot of very gross restaurant toilets after students staggered out of them. Now that I’ve got my degree, if my job requires me to wipe up other people’s bodily fluids, it had better come with a great salary, huge yearly bonuses and the best health and dental care plan available to humanity. Which it does.
Besides, the office manager told me the real reason we had a personal copy of the New York Times delivered every morning, when Jared never even glances at it. It’s a thick stack of paper with several supplements every day, more than enough to wrap up the used syringes for safe disposal. I did suggest a sharps bin in the toilets, but the manager gave me to understand that this would make the situation too blatant. I had a whole system for making sure the needle was driven through layers and layers of paper, completely covered, so that the cleaners would never get hurt.
“Mary Poppins!” he yelled, striding into my office, the antechamber to his, with a couple of elegant, beautiful twenty-something women behind him, arrow formation. As always, with the particular type of assistants Jared called his wing women, their hair was long, their heels high and their smiles bright.
“Present and correct,” I said in my Mary voice. The more formally I talked, the better he liked it.
“Get me the latest version of the nun script!” he shouted.
This was his normal pitch, so I didn’t even blink.
“Absolutely, sir,” I said, extracting it from the stack of scripts on my desk and carrying it through to his office.
There was a pile of head shots, which I had printed out earlier, waiting for him there. Everything was done electronically nowadays, but Jared insisted on having them on paper. It wasn’t because he was old-fashioned; no, he had a ritual he always performed with the latest batch of young female possibilities. Standing in front of his big glass table, he reached out one hand, placed his palm on top of the pile and smeared it over the surface with a sweeping gesture until every face was visible. He didn’t care if he covered the text, their names, their accent and dialect skills, their performance skills, whether they could ride side-saddle, dance the Argentine tango, shoot a bow and arrow; all he cared about were the faces.
Then he stared down at them and touched the tip of his tongue to his bottom lip, entirely unselfconscious, a glutton contemplating an all-you-can-eat buffet.
The wing women were sitting side by side on the leather desk chairs. No one went near the sofa unless they had to. They were scrolling through their phones, busy surveying casting agencies’ offerings of the latest propositions for a demanding gourmet: fresh meat between eighteen and twenty-five, thin and white and coercible. They knew his tastes perfectly. Jared would have gone younger, of course, but he was self-protective enough to limit himself to legal flesh.
Having picked out several options, they would present Jared with the list. Calls would be placed, appointments booked, reservations made at the hotels in London and New York and LA that Jared favoured; young women who might be nervous of meeting a famous film producer in his hotel suite would be reassured by the presence of another attractive young woman taking notes, clearly there in a professional capacity.
Until she got an urgent phone call and had to excuse herself, a couple of drinks later…
“What do you think, Mary P?” Jared asked, and I looked down at the latest crop of sacrificial victims, still holding the script, careful not to look anywhere near his crotch area.
Colour photos, luminous skin, as natural looking as possible, any retouching minimal. No overt grooming, hair shown off if it was luxuriant, or pulled back if it wasn’t. Only the slightest of smiles, nothing provocative or enticing. These weren’t modelling shots. They were supposed to be neutral canvases onto which producers and directors could project their fantasies and desires.
I hadn’t looked at them before, apart from checking that they had all printed out clearly. There were so many. There were always so many. But as I stared at the latest offerings, young women to be considered for the lead in the nun film, one face stared right back at me, and I could not take my eyes from hers.
She was strong-featured, sculptural, her brows straight dark lines, her cheekbones slanting upwards towards them, a perfect triangle which echoed her wide forehead and pointed chin. Her wide-set eyes gazed directly at the camera, very distinctive. They were pale blue, but the irises were rimmed by a circle of darker blue, extraordinarily striking. If she photographed this well, she would pop on screen.
I knew straight away that he would want her. It was obvious in the set of her chin, the way her lips were pressed lightly together, that she had both character and personality. He liked ones he could break; he loved a challenge.
His hand was at his crotch now, and the three of us women were pretending that it wasn’t.
“Script,” he said to me, holding out the other hand.
I gave it to him and left the room, closing the door behind me. I knew I’d be needing the gloves and the wipes in about half an hour. At least he wasn’t requiring me to give him the injection, the way the nurse had shown me, into the side of the penis, avoiding the head and underside and any visible veins. One of the wing women would take care of that.
I sat down and stared at the screen in front of me, on which a complex spreadsheet ranked a long, long list of women’s names in order of current preference. The ones at the top were those who would snag the coveted parts they had been through hell to achieve. At the bottom was the blacklist: women who had turned him down, fought him off, got to the door of the suite before he could, possessed some God-given instinct which had kept them from ever being alone with him in the first place.
Many of the names would make people’s foreheads pucker, wondering what had happened to them. They had burned bright, been talented and charming and charismatic, made the cover of Vanity Fair, seemed on track for stellar careers. The answer, of course, was Jared. Jared had happened to them.
If a male director or producer was a predator, he just had to tell him that the women wouldn’t bend over the casting couch. If the guy had some scruples, he spread the word that the women who had rejected him were unreliable, emotional, difficult—that word which attaches so stickily to a female that it’s almost impossible to peel it from your skin. There were so many easy women to choose from. Why pick difficult when you didn’t need to?
No one ever made it off the blacklist.
But I wasn’t looking at the screen. I was seeing her, Siobhan Black, the name that had been at the top of the headshot. Irish, with a whole list of accents. She could ride a horse, drive a carriage, play the violin, cycle and rollerblade, had basic screen combat training.
Well, she wouldn’t need any of those for the nun script. The part mostly required the nun to lie on her back, crying and screaming while she was being gang raped. It was one of the hottest scripts of the year: young women were lining up to compete for it.
It was called Ave Maria, and it was written by an older English director, who was well known for his defiantly eccentric films, often involving a great deal of nudity, featuring malleable up-and-coming actresses who would be unlikely to push back against unscripted additions or “improvisations” he might make once shooting started. He had been struggling for a while, falling out of fashion, making films that seemed almost wilfully obscure.
Realising that, he had cleverly come up with this pitch. Jared loved it. All his male cohorts loved it. Ostensibly, it made a strong feminist statement: a young nun was raped to death by monks in the Middle Ages as punishment for defying their authority and trying to save a witch they were persecuting. The witch was forced to watch the rapes before being burned to death; she and the nun then proceeded to haunt the monastery, their ghosts increasingly vengeful, inflicting a series of nightmares and hallucinations on the monks, turning them against each other with grisly results.
It was a horror art film, by far the director’s most commercial idea to date. But, of course, it wasn’t merely the potential returns that so powerfully attracted Jared. He was licking his lips at the prospect of the auditions. One thin young vulnerable white woman after another, lying on the floor of a rehearsal room, feigning being raped, sobbing, pleading, struggling; stripping down in front of Jared, the director, the casting director, Jared’s buddies at Parador, a couple of money men, so they could “see if she looked physically right for the role”; and then, if Jared liked them, trooping into his office, his suite at The Plaza or The Ritz-Carlton, nervous but reassured by the presence of one of his wing women. Until she had to take that urgent phone call.
Or by my presence. I must be honest. I had been summoned to those suites several times when the wing women weren’t available. I knew what was expected of me, and I did it. It was part of my job.
But this time…
I don’t know why Siobhan Black affected me so much. She was part of a long, long line of young women just like her.
No, not just like her.
Who knows why one face in particular calls out to you? After the myriad faces I’d seen spread out on Jared’s desk, a smorgasbord of availability, who knows why hers and hers alone affected me so much? I never had a type. Never felt especially drawn to strong straight eyebrows or white skin or light blue eyes limned in darker blue. It wasn’t her looks, though of course I was drawn to beauty. Who isn’t? It was something in her gaze.
Maybe she reminded me of my first-ever crush, but who was that? How can I possibly remember? Some little girl at kindergarten sitting opposite me on the bus, playing with me at the sandpit at the local park? Features that imprinted on me, formed some image of my ideal woman before I was even able to remember, some alchemical combination of elegance and strength, straight eyebrows, pointed chin? A babysitter, a friend of my parents, a next-door neighbour?
Perhaps there was never a template. Perhaps it was just her, Siobhan herself. Something in the way she looked at the camera, something that made me fall in love with her without knowing anything about her. If so, she would be a wondrous success as an actress. I couldn’t be the only one in whom she stirred these feelings, this need, this desperate compulsion to protect her from a predator who had stared at her photograph and licked his lips and stroked himself through his trousers, picturing her naked on his leather sofa.
There was a commotion just outside my office and I braced myself, recognising the particular quality of bustle and noise. A few seconds later in swept Mrs Van Stratten, over six foot tall and looking, as always, like a finalist for Miss World in the Trophy Wife dress category, hair over fur over silk over skinny jeans over heels barely thicker than a darning needle, on which she moved as easily as if she were barefoot.
Gold and diamonds dripped from her ears, her throat and her wrists, and flashed from the designer sunglasses holding back her thick blonde-streaked tresses. Behind her trailed the Van Stratten twins, a matched pair of five-year-old boys who were biologically hers but had been carried by another woman, as Natalia Van Stratten’s irritable bowel syndrome had prevented her from being able to do so.
I know. Me neither.
They were adorable children, if you liked that kind of thing, which I didn’t. Each was shadowed by his own nanny, silent Filipinas whose eyes never left their respective charges.
“His door’s closed, Mrs Van Stratten,” I said, but she had already come to a halt in the middle of the room.
Natalia Van Stratten knew the situation perfectly well, had served her time, I had been told, as an aspirant actress on a previous incarnation of that sofa. Now she was happily ensconced in Jared’s twenty-two million dollar penthouse in one of the Richard Meier-designed towers on the edge of the West Village, the twins and nannies sequestered on the lower floor of the duplex. She gave him respectability, accompanied him to red carpet events and premieres, trotted out the children when he needed family-friendly publicity, wore the latest designers and smiled a lot in public.
In private, she compensated for the smiling.
“Ugh!” she complained, frowning as much as her Botox permitted. “I need to talk to him right away! The doctor rang me and he’s skipped his appointment again!”
I knew that, of course. I had texted his driver to confirm and reminded Jared first thing that morning, an hour before the car was due, and on the driver’s confirming he had arrived. At which point Jared had told me to fuck off, because he wasn’t fucking going.
“You should have made him go!” she ranted, and I nodded in agreement with her, because what alternative did I have?
“I’m so sorry,” I said humbly, and as I did I noticed one of the nannies shoot the other a glance that said: Look, they yell at the white women just like they do at us for completely unreasonable things we can’t do anything about. It’s not personal.
“It’s important!” Natalia said, stamping her foot. “This crazy new diet’s putting such a strain on his kidneys the doctor says he needs to stop it immediately! It could be dangerous!”
Honestly, I thought, what do you care if he drops dead tomorrow?
And I was pretty sure, from their blank stares at the floor, that the nannies were thinking exactly the same thing.
Jared was always trying new diets, as if there were some miracle fix to be accessed, though he knew perfectly well, from working with actors, that there was no substitute for lean protein and a hardcore personal trainer. His weight fluctuated wildly; he could come back from a weeklong business trip a stone heavier, fly to Canyon Ranch for a few days and starve himself back down again, then pile two stone back on when he got back to New York.
To me, it didn’t seem that big a deal. But I had very swiftly learned that rich Americans could be obsessive about their health. Sometimes I thought that they secretly believed they could live forever if they ate the right food, took the right supplements and exercised compulsively. Besides, if Jared’s doctor fussed about the yo-yo dieting, kept calling him in for check-ups and tests, it spiked the bill, so it was in the doctor’s interest to take it more seriously than it warranted.
However, if the doctor’s concern turned out to be warranted, enough to worry Natalia Van Stratten like this, it had to be the case that her pre-nup wouldn’t fully pay out if she couldn’t keep her husband alive for another few years. New York had been quite the learning curve for me. Trophy wives regularly signed agreements that gave them bonuses per every five years of marriage, for instance; maybe Natalia came into a major lump sum at the end of her first decade with Jared.
The office door swung open, and the wing women emerged, sleek as always, quite as if nothing had been going on in there that shouldn’t have been. They acknowledged Natalia with deferential nods, gliding past her, their heads bowed like subservient swans. She ignored them completely in magnificent style.
“Jared!” she yelled, and one of the twins ran over to his nanny and drove his head against her waist in a primitive need for comfort. “You need to go to the doctor, now!”
“Fuck you!” her husband yelled back, appearing into view. “If I wanted some bitch who nagged me about going to the doctor, I wouldn’t have married a Russian, would I? I’d have picked a Jew or a Chinese or an Italian!”
Natalia set her hands on her waist and threw her head back, ready for combat. The other twin took refuge with his nanny, who started stroking his curls. And as my employer and his wife continued screeching at each other, I did a Google search for branches of the New York Public Library in Harlem.
I live in Brooklyn.
* * *
It took a fortnight. Michael, the British film director, flew to NYC so that he and Jared could start initial auditions with an enthusiasm that was marked even by their standards. Video clips of young women sobbing and pleading not to be raped by invisible monks accumulated in my inbox, self-taped by prospects who were unable to present themselves in person because they were working on another job. Appointments racked up for the young women available to sob and plead in person. One of them was Siobhan, who had been flown over by Parador from the UK, together with several other prospects, every one of whose agents knew exactly what her client was in for.
As did the female casting director. The only extenuating circumstance for them all acquiescing to this was that, as I had learned from office canteen chat, women blocked by the boys’ club from the opportunity to be editors, producers and directors became agents or took casting jobs instead. Roles that were traditionally perceived as female and which, not uncoincidentally, paid considerably less.
This afternoon, Siobhan was booked into the casting suite. We had our own, a large meeting room with cameras and lighting permanently set up; other production companies used rented space, but Jared loved auditions—technically called “meetings”, I had learned when I came to Parador—and he wanted to be on the spot for as many as possible. It was my job to meet the actors in reception, to calm their nerves, bring them up to the suite, reassure them with my lovely manners and my Mary Poppins voice. After all, what could be more calming than being escorted by Mary Poppins?
Jared was highly predictable. If an actress piqued his interest in the casting suite, he would bring them back to his office straight afterwards. And as soon as I saw her in person, I knew that was what would happen. She was even more beautiful in real life, which isn’t always the case. Her Irish colouring was very strong, the black hair, the light blue eyes, the milk-white skin so pale it almost had a bluish tinge, a delicate Milky Way of freckles across the bridge of her long straight nose.
She was dressed in the usual way for actors coming to meetings, like models for go-sees. Casual, functional, showing she was there to work. Faded jeans, a black roll-neck sweater, form-fitting enough to reassure everyone that she was as slim as leading actresses needed to be. A black leather jacket was slung over her shoulders, and her hair was pulled back from her face in an artfully messy twist.
“Oh, you’re English!” she said, smiling at me, holding out her hand. “Nice to hear a familiar accent over here.”
Mine shook as I took hers, but hopefully not enough for her to realise. It was cool and dry, a little too much so; she needed to moisturise more.
“Nice to have an Irish person be happy to meet an English one,” I said in response, and she grinned like an urchin.
“Hey,” she said, “I’ll take what I can get in a foreign country.”
“Is your hotel okay?” I asked, the standard question I asked everyone, as I turned to lead her through security. The big glass gate swung open for us.
“Oh yeah, thanks,” she said, a little too casually.
They had put her up in the latest hip place on The Bowery, I knew. I had checked the travel department’s reservation for her. It had the usual complement of try-hard décor and gimmicks: single shots of gin, made in the hotel’s on-site distillery, served from a machine in the check-in area; an entirely gluten-free menu; a dedicated ballet barre studio in the gym. All charges to Parador’s card. Siobhan couldn’t fail to be impressed, but she was doing her best to act cool, for which I couldn’t blame her.
“I haven’t been there yet,” I said at random, trying not to babble. “Is it nice? How’s your room?”
Was that creepy? No, I decided. It sounded like small talk, not as if I were asking her for a photo of her bed so I could imagine her on it.
I didn’t need it. I already saw it on her Instagram a couple of hours ago.
“Small but perfectly formed,” she said with a lilt of amusement. “And some things I’ve never even heard of in the minibar.”
“They’ll be very healthy and taste a bit like seaweed,” I said, pressing the button for the lift. “Just don’t look at the ingredients.”
This was small talk at its finest, words intended merely to spackle and plaster over any awkward silences, pure filler. And yet it felt to me as if every word that dropped from her lips was a diamond, or a pearl, like a fairy tale I remember, where the heroine is given that blessing in return for her sweet nature.
I led her into the casting suite, and I saw Jared and Michael’s expressions as they took her in, that particular toxic flicker in their eyes, the burning darkness inside them crawling out for a moment, a flash of feral red. And she thanked me for bringing her to them as sweetly as the girl in the fairy tale would have done.
I couldn’t access the video recording system from my computer to watch it live, not until the recording was finished and it streamed automatically to my database. I sat in my office in a pool of sweat for half an hour. It was the longest thirty minutes of my life. I took handfuls of antiseptic wipes and dabbed myself down under my blouse. They stung; I welcomed the sensation. I had seen some of the other auditions for Ave Maria. I knew what kinds of things she was having to do, the questions she was being asked.
Finally the door opened and Jared walked in, Siobhan following directly behind him. On her face was the identical expression I had seen on so many starlets accompanying him into his office: dazed, disbelieving, afraid to hope her dream was coming true, struggling to keep her spiking optimism under control. And just a little apprehensive.
Jared didn’t look at me as he passed. He didn’t need to tell me not to disturb him or to hold his calls. I was very well-trained, and I knew exactly what to do.
The door closed behind them. His office was practically sound-proof. I had barely ever heard anything through the thick wenge wood walls, the door with rubber flanges that enabled it to close with only the faintest sigh and click.
I went through two more handfuls of disinfectant wipes.
Then the door flew open with such force that my heart slammed just as powerfully into my ribcage. Siobhan stood there, wearing only a small lace bralette on the upper half of her body. The top button of her jeans was unfastened. Her eyes were wild, the pupils hugely enlarged.
“He-he-” she stammered.
I was on my feet, running towards her in stockinged feet. Jared made his female employees wear high heels, but I had kicked them off as soon as I sat down. I caught her and pushed her back into his office, guiding her to one of the chairs in front of his huge desk. She was shaking like a birch tree in high winds.
Jared was collapsed across one arm of the sofa, face down, trousers and boxers down. The kidney-straining diet had been effective, I noticed; his bare buttocks were slim and toned. From the floor, I grabbed her sweater, the thin T-shirt she had been wearing underneath it, and shoved them at her, telling her to put them on and button her jeans. As she obeyed, clumsily fumbling to pull the clothes over her head, I dived for the used syringe on his desk. All I had to do was substitute it; I had kept the one he’d used a couple of days ago, hidden at the back of a drawer, his fingerprints on it, and now I pulled that out, switching them over.
I was very fast. Siobhan wouldn’t have seen me; her head was buried in her black sweater, her arms struggling to find the sleeves. I dashed into my office and buried the syringe Jared had just used in the usual crumple of newspapers in my desk bin, which the cleaners were briefed to empty carefully.
I was back in his office as her head emerged from the neck of the sweater. She was in shock, I thought, her pupils still dilated, so pale that her freckles were even more visible than they had been an hour ago.
“Sit still,” I said to her, going round the desk, taking up his cell phone, dialling the direct line to our head of security, Caspar Petersen, the man who knew the precise location of every single Parador corpse. “It’ll be okay. I promise you, it’ll be okay. Everything’s going to work out fine.”
Petersen was there in five minutes. By that time I was sitting in the other desk chair, having drawn it next to Siobhan. I was holding her hands, murmuring quiet words of reassurance.
I had felt for Jared’s pulse. There wasn’t one.
Then a whole crowd of Parador employees whirled in like a tornado that picked us up and whisked us into the outer office, the head of HR cooing over us, asking us how we were. Siobhan was clinging to me, and I put my arm around her narrow waist. If I shook when I touched her now, like this, no one would realise why.
Petersen was making phone calls to the Mayor, the state governor and Jared’s guy in the NYPD, a deputy chief. I heard the fridge open and close and one of Petersen’s henchmen emerged from the office, carrying a stack of boxes of loaded syringes, other medications, popper vials, and something on top wrapped in hand tissue. The used needle.
He was moving very gingerly, and I couldn’t blame him. A wave of relief hit me; I would never have to touch those things again. It was extraordinary that I hadn’t developed a phobia of injections myself. Through the open door, I saw two more of Petersen’s men wrestling Jared’s corpse off the sofa, dragging up his trousers, returning him to respectability, a film magnate tragically struck by an unexpected heart attack.
They brought us water. We drank it. A doctor summoned by Petersen examined Siobhan briefly and offered her some pills that she refused. Petersen and the head of PR told us we would be taken care of and not to worry. One of the henchmen guided us out of the building, and, with considerable irony, into Jared’s waiting limo and thence to his suite at The Plaza. There we were ensconced in unbelievable luxury high above the city as the storm broke a few blocks below us. We watched it on New York 1, the local channel, Jared’s body carried out of the Parador building, journalists shouting questions, the ambulance lights flashing bright, Jared’s partner delivering a brief, grim-faced statement about what a terrible loss Jared would be to the industry.
They said it was a heart attack, and they were quite right, though no autopsy was conducted, as nobody wanted there to be a record of what precisely had been in Jared’s body. I had seen them cover up plenty of scandals. I knew I was safe there. More precisely, he died of hyperkalemia, which, according to the New York Public Library computer in a particularly obscure Harlem branch, occurs when you already have weak kidneys and you inject yourself with a huge dose of potassium chloride, thinking that it’s your erection drug.
To be fair, the New York Public Library didn’t quite put it that way. But it did also tell me that potassium chloride is a generic drug and you can buy it in liquid form at any health shop, after I Googled ‘weak kidney die’ and it gave me the answer to my unspoken question.
I didn’t need to be told to wear a baseball cap and a faceful of make-up in the library and then at the Vitamin Shoppe, plus layers of clothes that made me look a lot bigger than I am. I had no intention of being recognised on CCTV. Nor did I need to be advised to pay in cash without using my loyalty card, and to remove all traces of potassium chloride and the packaging from my apartment after I filled that syringe and took it back to the office. I read a lot of mystery novels.
With Jared’s death, Parador was in a positive scramble to sanitise his memory, literally and metaphorically. Natalia sobbed on cue for the benefit of the paparazzi, her arms wrapped around the adorable twins. Everyone on the long list of employees and actresses who had signed non-disclosure agreements with Parador for lucrative settlements was contacted by lawyers and gently reminded that those agreements were just as valid whether Jared was alive or dead.
Siobhan and I, visited in our suite by the NYPD deputy chief, recounted how Jared had suddenly collapsed while talking to Siobhan about the part. Through the open doorway, I said, noticing his approving nod at this, I had heard her cry out, seen him clasp his chest and fall to the sofa.
She was superb at improvising. That was her RADA training, I suppose. I followed along, careful to add nothing to her story, simply agree. We had been heavily coached, of course, by the head of publicity and a media handler who were both present during the entirety of the pro-forma interview. The deputy chief left, expressing his sympathy to both of us and assuring us we would not be bothered again. The head of publicity told us to charge anything we wanted to the room, and not to leave it until they told us we could, and the media handler told us not to answer any call that wasn’t from Parador.
Jared’s partner rang Siobhan and told her that she could have her pick of roles on Parador’s upcoming roster of films.
The head of HR rang me and said I was being given a hundred grand hardship bonus for my loyalty and the exemplary way I had handled matters. Would I like to transfer to the LA office, all expenses paid? The precise nature of my role was still to be confirmed, but was I at all interested in producing?
I booked an Ayurvedic aromatherapy in-room massage for two. We ordered tuna poke and sweet potato fries. We got into the master bed, drank Tattinger and watched a Bravo series with attractive young people working on a luxury yacht, bickering, getting drunk and serving exotic cocktails to entitled guests. Eventually, we made love.
Siobhan had a boyfriend back in London. Some young actresses were coming out now, as lesbian or bisexual, but only women who had already had major Hollywood blockbuster success and now wanted to work in art films. One of them took the part of the nun in Ave Maria. She said in interviews that, like Jodie Foster in The Betrayed, it was much easier for her, as a gay woman, to play the victim of a male gang rape, than it would have been for a straight one.
Siobhan asked for and got the coveted part of a sexy assassin in a well-received thriller, which led to a role in a Marvel franchise. I moved to LA and got into production. It had been a nominal job title, given to me under the assumption that everyone wanted to produce, but to my surprise, I turned out to be very skilled at it. I have a sense of how to sell a story, what people will believe, what they won’t. And there’s quite the lesbian network in Los Angeles. They’re all big fans of Julie Andrews and Mary Poppins.
I was Siobhan’s maid of honour at her wedding to her understanding long-term boyfriend. We’re still very close, though I’m married now myself, to a writer/director who was nominated for an Oscar last year. The boys’ club has realised it needs to let in more than a token couple of women, and we’re shoving hard at the floodgates. Siobhan and I don’t talk about that afternoon in Jared’s office. We spent four days holed up at The Plaza, talking, crying, sleeping, working through it, and then we were done.
She didn’t realise then that I was the one who filled his prescriptions, stocked his fridge with them, cleaned up the used needles, provided the starlets’ contact details for the lawyers to move in smoothly with their NDAs and settlement offers. It may have occurred to her since, but she’s never brought it up to me. Why would an actress unnecessarily antagonise a producer?
Sometimes I think I see a little flicker of speculation in her eye as we hang out on the terrace of my house high in the Hollywood Hills, the lights of downtown glittering below, Katrine grilling a Paleo-suitable slab of meat over our fire pit, Siobhan and I sipping dry, low-sugar red wine, the fountain playing beside the vertically planted living wall of our garden. But that could so easily be a glimmer reflected from the leaping flames, the glint of light on moving water.
It’s very unlikely that she’s wondering if I emptied out that syringe of erectile dysfunction disorder medication and replaced its contents with heavily condensed potassium chloride, boiled down on my kitchen stove. That she’s remembering my passion for her in that huge bed at The Plaza, and asking herself whether, after all the starlets I’d seen come and go, I finally killed him to protect her, putting that syringe in his fridge, the last one in the box, after I took her to the casting suite.
Because then it would dawn on her that, if my only motive had been to protect her, I hadn’t done the best of jobs. I had subjected her to his aggression, his insistence that she show him her tits, unbutton her jeans, as he sat at his desk chair, pulled the last syringe out from the packet, unzipped his trousers, discarded the plastic needle cover and stuck the needle into the side of his penis—avoiding, of course, the head and underside and any visible veins.
I had forced her to watch him stand up, lurch towards her, tears forming in her beautiful eyes as he told her that good girls get leading roles, and to strip down, get on her knees and show him what a good girl she could be. To stand there, paralysed, terrified, conflicted, before he gasped and grabbed his left arm, his own knees buckling, his torso bending forward, hitting the wide leather arm of the sofa, his head crashing down like a heavy weight, pulling his body with it. To watch him die.
If I had truly done it out of pure love for her, I wouldn’t have put her through that. I would have loaded that syringe for another actress’s ‘meeting’ with him in his office and spared her the entire experience.
But then, she wouldn’t have owed me. I wouldn’t have been the one who rushed to her side, comforting her, telling her everything would be all right, and was as good as her word. I wouldn’t have been holed up with her in The Plaza for four beautiful, miraculous, heaven-sent days. Wouldn’t have been perfectly positioned to take advantage of her when she was in a state of extreme shock and vulnerability.
In my defence, however, she had sex with me entirely willingly. On that score, at least, I’m morally superior to Jared.