The Stand-In Read online

  I was eleven years older than him and he liked to point out my period features. But every love-affair is a form of barter; as one acquaintance said: ‘You want him for his body and he wants you for your head.’ He said I had class. He was impressed by my collection of books and by the fact that he had once seen me on TV; it was a short-lived drama series on Channel 4 and I had played a probation officer. I suppose, in a minor way, he must have found this glamorous. I wasn’t well known, and most of the jobs I’d had were in small fringe theatres that put on undiscovered European classics and which were only reviewed in City Limits. With my looks I was frequently cast as a repressed, intelligent wife – Dorothea Casaubon, for instance, in an adaptation of Middlemarch that a now-defunct company staged above a kebab house in Tufnell Park. Leave it to Soak, a BBC daytime series on household management. That sort of thing. Like most working actresses I have never had a big break but I just about earned a living doing just about anything – voice-overs, school workshops, a video on Forgotten Women in History for the Open University. And though I didn’t have many close friends I knew a lot of people in the business. It’s a tight, enclosed world, and not as bitchy as people think. In fact it’s loyal, because nobody in the world is as insecure as an actor, and nobody knows quite how they feel except another one.

  And there is nobody as insecure as an actress in her late thirties, who sees the good roles slipping away to younger women and her own period features, inexorably, appearing.

  From the moment he met me, Trev wanted to be a writer. Not ‘to write’, but to be ‘a writer’, which meant doing deals about something more interesting than furniture. He pictured lunches in Soho brasseries with husky-voiced female journalists who asked him about his working methods. He pictured signing his books, like a pop star, for a queue of groupies. He pictured status. Money, of course. Above all, possibilities. Overnight, he thought, his life could change. Columbia Pictures could call – not for me, but for him.

  He had a bedsitter in Islington. He started to write, at night. I lived a few miles away in Belsize Park, a creamy, stuccoed, middle-class sort of neighbourhood. In the evenings, in thrall to him, I would truss myself up in a suspender belt and stockings because he loved to touch my skin there. I spent a fortune in Fenwicks; I made solitary, sensual pilgrimages there and, under the stern, dominatrix eye of the Austrian assistant, laced myself into basques so tight I could hardly breathe. I felt like a starlet. My body was ageing, but he aroused it in ways I had never felt before and I wanted to suffer for my pleasures. Under my misleading clothes I was his harlot. Pathetic, wasn’t it?

  My journey to Islington was punctuated by traffic lights. At one, I would tilt my driving mirror and apply lipstick; at the next, Caledonian Road, I would brush my hair. Heart thumping, I would prepare myself for him in my exposed little dressing room. I delayed these preparations until I was in my car. That passers-by could share my final touches made the whole thing highly erotic. I have always liked to be watched.

  Of course he sponged off me. It was me who brought along the food and wine, who lent him money and who ended the evening with an empty cigarette packet. But I didn’t even admit to myself that I noticed. I just cooked him dinner, and when he moved near me my mouth went dry. For months, like a student, I didn’t even know what was on the TV. In his disgusting, peeling kitchenette he touched me and I opened up to him like a flower. We would eat first because he was so hungry; then he would put on a Ry Cooder tape and pull me on to his bed. He liked screwing, slowly, to slide guitar music.

  In the small hours I would drive home, damp, flushed, my skin burning and my blouse buttoned up wrong. When I breathed heavily, I could smell his scent on my face. I would pass through the same traffic lights in reverse order. Those shabby intersections were stupidly dear to me. Intimate, momentarily, with the darkened houses either side, I would take out my brush and tackle my matted hair. I’d always wanted to be really messed-up by a man. By the time I reached Belsize Park I still hadn’t got out the tangles.

  I felt buffeted, bruised, heavier. Liberated. I felt wonderful. Trev was the sort of jerk who, seeing some angry feminist, could say that all she needed was a good fuck. I told you I despised myself.

  When I arrived home I would have a long bath and rejoin my other self. Back in his bedsitter he would work. Once he started he wrote fast, and soon he had written several rather derivative short stories and a stage play. This was called Use Me, and it was about a middle-class woman who was in masochistic thrall to her plumber. It was extremely explicit, and a lot of it took place on her kitchen table. Stripped pine, of course.

  I’ll try to be objective about this. It wasn’t exactly a good play – its plot was hopeless, and I told myself the woman was unconvincing. I didn’t like to think about her too much. But he had two talents that many better writers don’t possess. He wrote exactly as he spoke – direct, slangy and rude. And, more important – though it shouldn’t be – he knew how to sell.

  He used me, of course, just as he used my car and my washing machine and my slavish, older body. He used my contacts in the theatre, and after nearly a year of re-writes, phone calls, boozy lunches and relentless charm, he got an acquaintance of mine, a radical producer, a likely lad himself, to put together a production above a pub in Tottenham.

  It opened that August. I thought I would be offered the lead, but the part went to the director’s ex-wife because she was being bolshie about access to their kids and he wanted to soften her up. Of course I acted as if I didn’t mind. Trev never guessed. But then he never guessed what a terrific actress I was. Nobody did.

  Trev’s bedsit was revolting, but he never suggested leaving it and moving in with me. It was on the ground floor of a house in a busy one-way street. The only sign of neighbours was when the car-clampers appeared and the cry went from flat to flat ‘Clampers, clampers!’ as if the recruiting officers had arrived. It faced a furniture superstore. All day, happy couples double-parked outside, and reappeared carrying household items. He groaned at the baby-seats in the back of their cars and said, ‘Catch me changing nappies.’ Stroking the inside of his thigh, I murmured, ‘Catch me.’

  His mattress was on the floor. When I climbed to my feet, my back ached. I’m too old for this, I thought. Naked, I filled the kettle at his sink. I kept my back to him so he couldn’t see my slack belly. It was Saturday afternoon. Outside, two children rattled something metal along the railings.

  One of them said, ‘I can swallow my burps.’

  ‘So fucking what?’ said the other.

  The street was veiled by the previous tenant’s net curtains; Trev was no home-maker. I switched on the kettle. I should be at my dance class. When I saw them I would have to lie, yet again.

  But then I was good at lying. The night before I had told Trev that I couldn’t see him because I was going out. In fact I had eaten toasted cheese and watched Bergerac. However, I wanted him to think that I had another life; more than that, I wanted to convince myself that I still had some sort of life within myself, and that I could last an evening alone. And I had lasted, hadn’t I?

  Trev came up behind me. Sometimes he licked my spine. Sometimes he made up an alphabet of all the parts of my body. Sometimes he wrote in Pentel on my buttocks, words I couldn’t see until I found a mirror. Once it was affectionate; once it was a recipe for hot cross buns. He had invented it, of course; he was hopeless at cooking. Today he was blind, and tried to find out who I was.

  ‘Mmm . . . female,’ he said, burying his face in my hair. He ran his hands over my shoulders, and cupped my breasts. ‘Thought so. Right first time. Intelligent nipples. You’re a barrister.’ He groaned. ‘Black high heels, severe skirt . . .’ I shook my head. He ran his hands down my waist. ‘Hmmm . . . prose-bearing hips. You’re one of those novelist birds. You write about adultery amongst the quiche-eaters and you want to be shagged by Melvyn Bragg.’

  ‘No fear. And quiche is passé.’

  ‘No? Wrong?’ He ran his hand lower. I
tensed. He paused, his fingers damp. ‘Ah,’ he murmured. ‘Now I know.’ He whispered to me, his breath warm in my ear. As he whispered, my body opened like a mouth. I turned to him, my legs buckling. He pulled the bathroom door shut behind me, and pressed me against the panels. I was still wet, from the last time. Whimpering, I gripped him as he slid into me.

  ‘Hayley!’ A woman’s voice, close. ‘Throw it away!’

  A child cried. A car revved up and I smelt exhaust smoke. Saturday was humming along a few feet away. The door rattled as I bumped against it.

  He put his hand behind my head, to cushion it, and smiled into my face. As a lover he could be surprisingly, and temporarily, considerate.

  And all the time I was watching myself move and listening to my own high cries. Inhuman, those noises, aren’t they? I played them to him, and to all the audiences I had never reached. The people leaned forward in their seats.

  Glued together, we slid to the floor and finally ended up on the bed. The kettle spouted steam on to the wallpaper. Afterwards he laughed, stroking my cheek with his finger. I got up and began making the tea all over again.

  ‘Guess who I saw yesterday,’ I said, opening the fridge. I took out the milk and sniffed it. ‘Lila Dune.’

  He groaned. ‘Lila Dune!’

  ‘She’s in London, making a picture.’ I paused. ‘Probably earns as much as the council’s entire arts budget for the year.’ I turned. He was lying on the mattress, his eyes closed. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Lila Dune,’ he murmured. ‘I’m getting another erection.’

  ‘Why?’ I looked down at him. ‘Anyway, you’re not.’

  ‘Remember her in Touch and Go?’

  I nodded. ‘Lousy film. You must’ve still been in nappies.’

  ‘I was a throbbing teenager. Remember when she came out of the swimming pool, all wet, and –’

  ‘All right, all right!’ I searched for the packet of tea bags I had bought him. ‘Anyway, she’s ancient now.’

  ‘Only your age.’

  ‘She’s older!’ I paused. Probably not, actually. When caught on the off-beat, my own age could surprise me. Thirty-eight was what other women were, women I saw shopping.

  ‘You should be grateful I like mature women. With my incredible sex drive and their experience . . .’ He closed his eyes again. ‘I had this photo of her up on my wall, from Time Out, she was poured into this dress, and I’d go to bed and –’

  ‘Spare us your jejeune masturbatory fantasies –’

  ‘Her, and Angie Dickinson in that cop thing –’

  ‘Angie Dickinson! You really are a gerontophile.’

  ‘A what?’

  I was scrubbing out his mugs. I looked inside them. ‘These are grotesque.’

  I wanted him home with me, drinking out of my own clean tea cups. I wanted him to want to live with me. I wanted his socks and his underpants in my cupboard, under my own tight roof. I wanted him to have never known any woman but me. I was humiliatingly jealous, and it was getting out of hand. Usually I disguised it. When, for instance, he mentioned some long-ago holiday in Spain, I tried with various veiled assumptions to prove that his companion was female. She was, of course – I found that out when the subject of topless beaches came up. I felt a sort of curdled satisfaction, a bitter sediment in my stomach. I almost relished my own distress. Pornographically, I aroused myself with visions of them in a hundred hotel beds. It was insane, of course; I knew that. However young they are, everybody has a past – I had a past, for Christ’s sake, and eleven more years of it than he did, but he never seemed that interested. My efforts to inflame him only made him amused, and left me feeling flustered and juvenile.

  Trev didn’t reflect on the past or anticipate the future. I suppose that was part of his attraction for someone like me, who schemed and brooded. He lived simply, in the present, like an animal.

  Once I went to a wine bar where an ex-girlfriend of his worked. Her name was Dawn. Like a lovesick schoolgirl, I found myself writing her name down the margin of a script I was learning. Dawn. DAWN. The wine bar was in Battersea, the other side of London. For my own equilibrium I convinced myself I needed to go to that area anyway, to look at some bathroom fixtures. I almost convinced myself with my own performance, spending all the morning looking at bidets. Then I lingered outside the wine bar, casually, like somebody on a first date. She was dark, and very pretty. I went in and sat down; as she passed, I gazed at her mouth and her breasts with such attention that I alarmed myself. Obsession, I guess, is a form of desire; when I paid, my hand was trembling. I went back at night, and watched. When I looked at my watch, I had been there forty minutes. I felt like an assassin, waiting for a celebrity. I sat there, night after night.

  I’m telling you this in case you understand it. By now I can’t tell how normal I was – in some way, you would know better than I would. I have had to remodel my own past, you see, in the light of what happened. It’s the only way I can make sense of it, but by doing this I have lost the exact reality. It’s as if there has been an explosion in my kitchen; I’ve returned to find my saucepans buckled. The blast has altered my possessions for ever; I can never knock them back into their former shape – not quite.

  A girl in my class at school was later killed in an air crash. When I think of her she isn’t Anna-the-schoolgirl, but Anna-who-was-soon-to-die. When a tragedy occurs you don’t only lose the person concerned, you also lose your accurate, unclouded memory of them. It is doubly sad, for you lose out not once but twice.

  Three

  THE FOLLOWING MONDAY I had a phone call from my agent. At first I couldn’t grasp what it was about. A man I hadn’t heard of had phoned from a film company.

  ‘For me?’ My stomach churned.

  ‘He met you on Friday,’ said Maggie. ‘Don’t you remember?’

  ‘Friday?’

  Maggie, my agent, didn’t sound too excited about any of this. In fact she almost sounded diffident – not a word that sprang to mind when her clients described her.

  It was the movie Sexbusters. No, it wasn’t exactly a part. On the other hand, it was work. Lila Dune’s stand-in had been beaten up by her ex-husband.

  ‘Whose ex-husband?’

  ‘Not Lila’s, darling. Her own. Anyway, she’s gone into hospital and they need another stand-in right away. Like, tomorrow. They’ve got three more weeks of filming and, well, darling.’

  Well, darling, meant well darling we’ve not got much else on the cards, have we? Well darling beggars can’t be choosers, £400 a week’s not to be sniffed at, darling, and my other phone’s ringing.

  I said I’d think about it, darling, and phone her back.

  I finally tracked Trev down at Look Back in Ongar. This was a second-hand furniture shop, down the Essex Road, that belonged to one of his mates. Trev was using the phone; he was always using people’s phones. He loved the telephone like an American.

  Look Back in Ongar specialised in the sort of chintzy suburban furniture that used to belong to people’s aunts but was now high style. I sat down. Going out with Trev didn’t always make me feel old. In many ways it was rejuvenating. Besides, when we were alone we could simply be a couple – lips, bodies, fights. Alone with somebody, you adjust to them and they to you; there is no third person to mirror back to you your discrepancies.

  It was his friends who reminded me of my age. With them, I realised that Trev was practically another generation. They seemed cocky and yet unweathered; they seemed young. In their company he took on their colour, chameleon-like, and it seemed as if he had always been this way. This disturbed me so much I pretended I didn’t notice.

  They polished up the sort of furniture my parents would have thrown out. They dressed like dudes and put gel on their hair. They played the juke box in reconstituted Soho bars and discovered, for themselves, the Buddy Holly songs that I knew from my childhood. One of them had even asked me, respectfully, what it was like in the sixties, as if I were a museum specimen. I had replied, t
artly, that in the Flower Power year of 1967 I was still only seventeen. Trev had sucked his thumb and said, ‘And I was only six.’ This gave me a jolt, as if I were sitting in a train and it suddenly shunted backwards. Or, indeed, forwards. This happened quite often, with me and Trev. Depending on my mood I found this piquant, irritating or disturbing. Sometimes I just found it gratifying.

  I waited until Max, the owner, had gone out of the shop. A TV company was hiring a three-piece suite and he was loading it into a van. I moved next to Trev and told him about the stand-in offer. I wanted us to be like a real couple, and for him to join in the decision-making. Besides, I was curious to see his reaction. With a thump, I realised I didn’t know him well enough to guess how he would answer.

  He was seeing his agent later that day and he’d had his hair cut. He wore his wide, peacock-blue shirt and his red leather tie. He looked like an advertisement for Coca-Cola. I gazed at his legs, spreadeagled. It hurt to look at him; instead I gazed at the shelves of hideous plaster odalisques. I didn’t really mind about the stand-in job, you see, one way or another. At that moment I simply ached with pain, from wanting to have his baby.

  ‘Think of the contacts!’ he was saying. ‘Once you’re in with those guys.’ He fished for one of my cigarettes.

  ‘Know what you do?’ I said. ‘You just stand there while they set up the shot. While they light you. You’re just a dummy.’

  ‘Listen, dummy. It’s the first step. Where’s your matches?’

  ‘You’re not even an understudy. Christ, you’re not even an extra!’

  ‘Look, you’ll be on a film set. Big geezers with cigars. Anyway, I want to know what she’s like. Hey, I’ll get to meet her!’

  ‘Trev, I’m an actress! I’ve played Hedda Gabler.’ Well, above a pub I had. In Cardiff.

  ‘Listen, prune-face.’ He ran his finger down my cheek. ‘Play your cards right and next stop Hollywood. Maybe she’ll be run over by a bus and you’ll take the lead.’ He lay back, exhaling smoke. ‘I’d be quite happy with Laurel Canyon.’