SIESTA

  Patrice Chaplin

  © Patrice Chaplin 1979

  Patrice Chaplin has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in Great Britain in 1979 by Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd.

  This edition published in 2018 by Lume Books.

  Table of Contents

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  ‘To all who weep shalt thou say, “Here am I! Weep not!” But they hear thee not and thou thinkest,

  “I am dead! What must I do?”’

  The Tibetan Book of the Dead

  1

  Sylvia came to in long yellow grass. The noise scything the sky was awesome. Something was wrong — this pain splicing her head, vibrating in her bones, filling her body till she thought it would burst. The field shook. She clung to the earth. Then she saw the pale vicious fin moving precisely along the top of the grass beside her. She sat up and saw the bulk of an ordinary aeroplane. It revved up harder, screaming, a metallic beast in pain. She tried to watch as it was delivered from the noise, up into the sky, its little wheeled legs folding neatly into its stomach. It was so close she could almost have touched it. The hissing grass slowed down; dry miserable grass. The choking oily smoke of used fuel hung over the field.

  She thought she must be in Spain. She knew the smell. Her life could be described as up, down; but so far no set of circumstances had had her lying at a disadvantage at the side of a runway. She had no explanation of why she was there. Her body was no longer a light, well-balanced unity. It hung sickly. It seemed to be in pieces, and none of the pieces were linked properly. The sky was dazzling. Palm trees in the distance wobbled and spun. She closed her eyes. The palm trees were tough and covered in dust like aged spiders. She thought she recognised the point of death symptoms. They were caused probably, not by the last stages of a fatal disease, but by the familiar enemy — alcohol.

  A plane circled, full of ice-cold reflections of the sky. Suddenly silent, it hovered above her. She protected her ears, but the noise entered her chest, as it came down, making her ribs shake. It drummed madly about her head, lifting her hair.

  She rolled sideways into thicker grass. Her dress was damp. Slopped wine? Sweat? She remembered nothing, knew nothing. She felt like death, but she’d felt like that before. Her hangovers had once or twice needed medical help. When she was badly hungover, being in her body was unbearable; all she wanted was to get out of her skin. But they insisted on getting her back to sober self-acceptance. It was a process as shocking as being born. She had to be squeezed out of the chrysalis of dead alcohol and remorse. They’d remind her of her debts, her duty. She needed vitamins, hot drinks, cold flannels, kindness. She never got the kindness. Her husband Del, the midwife on these occasions, was disgusted and said so. Even the hidden bottles would be emptied down the sink. She’d be told to pull herself together. What was wrong with her? Why did she drink? She had everything.

  Yet all that was over. She had the certain belief that the love affair with drink had been licked. Drinking was not compatible with tightrope walking. There had been one or two embarrassments in that area, but she’d never, as far as she knew, fallen off. They said her performing skills would be harmed, her balance be unreclaimable, if she didn’t stop.

  She lay sideways in the grass and held her puffed stomach. She saw the landed plane racing along a runway in the distance. Then she saw the blood. It was sticky, thick and still moist and it covered the front of her dress. Splodges had dried on her legs and feet. Terrified, she got up. Had she fallen out of a plane? Had she drunk so much? Activity on so grand a scale would be remembered in spite of alcohol.

  She was scared by the amount of blood, its richness. She patted her body, half expecting a gaping abdomen wound, her stomach all hanging out, all the inside things revealed. She didn’t want to look. She’d prefer to shout for help or crawl through the grass towards the airport buildings. There was no injury. She felt up into her knickers. The blood hadn’t come from inside her. Was she asleep? Could this nightmare have been produced by a bout of sudden drinking which had dissolved all the young tender resolutions and shocked her body into a sinister state of hallucination and fear? Lapsed teetotallers weren’t supposed to have a good time.

  The best thing would be to lie down and try to make contact with her bed. She spoke to herself firmly as though to a panicking child. She lay back in the grass, covered her ears. She lay in a foetal position. The grass pricked, insects stung. The field wouldn’t go away. She wasn’t asleep. She started to pray.

  Whose blood was it? Further away through the grass she could see billboards lining a road. One showed a huge bottle of Paternina Azul wine. She started to shake, but that petered out after a few seconds. She didn’t have energy even for unpleasant things. There was blood on her hands, dry and bitty, and it smelt of iron. Ants had discovered the blood on her legs. They scurried up under her dress, nipping and stinging. She’d heard of drunken women being driven into the country, raped, robbed, and then flung away to awaken in a ditch with no memory. That could have happened. But why the blood?

  She got to her knees and looked for a handbag, a coat. The sun blazed on to her back. Then she understood about the blood. If she hadn’t been hurt herself, she must have hurt someone, perhaps killed. That felt right.

  She reeled through the summer grass, away from the runway. Her hands — why else was there so much blood on her hands? She was alert, in danger. Even now they might be searching the airport.

  She could see the sunburnt top of a workman. She ducked quickly and her heart jumped in her chest like an animal in a cage. The workman was trampling through the grass, shovel on shoulder towards her. She turned and ran towards the billboards. Another plane rocketed upwards into the sky and she was swept down with the grass. Its baby wheels folding up obediently into the body made her want to cry. D.T.s? She stumbled away talking, trying to give herself at least a suggestion of company.

  2

  The billboards outside Club Heaven in Las Vegas showed Sylvia Chrystal, svelt and sexy and three stories high. Electricians clambered over the entrance, setting her name in lights. She wasn’t known in this entertainment town, except by reputation. Her shows in New York had been sell-outs and the ecstatic reviews were posted inside the foyer, where several businessmen waited dismally. The girl in the box office answered two phones at once.

  ‘Sold out. Sorry. All sold out.’

  ‘We’re sold out,’ said one of the businessmen. ‘She didn’t get the plane. All that bullshit her agent gives just makes more delay. Replace her.’

  ‘She’s stopped off somewhere to screw an Arab.’

  ‘She’s got a drink problem.’

  ‘Had! Had! Her insurance states categorically there’s been a drought in that department.’

  ‘There is the insurance of course.’ The thought of it soothed them.

  Len Leppard, Sylvia’s agent, bumped through the silent swing doors into the blue-tinted expensive atmosphere of the foyer where all sounds were hushed and smells didn’t exist. He was carrying a hat box. The men regarded him coldly. Because he was nervous he smelt slightly of sweat. The foyer ambience drew attention to it, dramatically. Len was trying to maintain the positive manner he’d started off with that morning.

  ‘The costumes are still at Heathrow. I think that’s the source of this mix up.’

  He didn’t think that at all. Nor did the Americans.

  ‘Well, that’s great, Mr Leppard. You’ve located her hatbox. What the fuck are we supposed to do with it? Put it on the stage?’

  *

  At the side of the road there was a ditch containing a long puddle of yellow water. She lapped at it like a dog, spat it out. She washed the blood off her hands and legs, and then crouched in the giant grass and took off her dress. She swished it in the puddle and the muddy water turned red. The activity exhausted her and her head filled with tight, blinding dizziness. Then she saw bruises on her breasts. They looked like love bites. She had no explanation for them. She sat in the sun by the puddle, shuddering and sickened. When the dress was almost dry, she put it on. The front was stiff.

  Her mind was stuck. That was the trouble. It was hopeless, like a broken down movie projector — no pictures would flow. It was jammed on a half image she didn’t want to see, but now and then she glimpsed a gaping stomach, orange globular flesh, dark erect handle of knife, blood escaping swiftly, silently. She croaked half-remembered prayers, writhed dramatically backward, forward. The uncaring stillness around her made the gesture seem futile. Death, she saw was not a torturous enemy to be dreaded but a merciful escape from unbearable circumstances. The one she was now in was a good example.

  If she’d come off the abstinence programme, all her organs would be rotted by drink. And if her liver collapsed it would only be a couple of months ahead of other parts of her body. She was thirty-three years old. She lay spread out, baked by the sun, thinking of death. The heat chilled her.

  In the end, anxiety made her move. If she stayed there someone would see her and suppose she was a victim. Police would be called. What time of day was it? What day? Her conscious thinking had been felled by drink. Her will to survive must look after her.

  Th e blood was still startling. She could have been in a car crash. She wondered why she couldn’t have thought of that first. As if the physical distress of a hangover wasn’t enough, she always had to fill herself with guilt and in such condition could attract any number of crimes and griefs and make them her own. As the symptoms wore off so would the murder notion. Logically, she didn’t have to have attacked anyone. A car crash was bad enough.

  It was when she came up to the back of the bill-boards that she was properly aware of Celestino’s absence. Had she been with him? Without question he was involved. He automatically came to mind if the situation was dramatic enough. Seeing him was bound to lead to trouble in the end. The bottle of Paternina Azul wine loomed over her as though jeering at her pathetic attempts at sobriety. It was a similar violent shade to the blood on her dress.

  She must get a hot drink, soothing milky coffee, dry biscuits to blot up the muck in her stomach. She must get rid of the blood, find somewhere to rest. She wanted to cry, but she wasn’t a woman who cried. She wanted her mother, almost laughed at the futility. She and her mother had long since passed the point of doing good to each other. She needed money, a friend, an escape. What she had was a hangover, no memory, no money. If she didn’t have a handbag she didn’t have a passport, ticket, credit card and so no way out of the country.

  The white tin sky pressed the heat down hard. Sweat leapt out of her skin, trickled under her arms, down her sides. She didn’t want to think about Celestino. His absence frightened her. If she’d drunkenly killed someone, the whole of Spain would be looking for her, for someone. And someone covered in blood would be a good first choice.

  When the grass ended there was a road full of cars and coaches. More billboards hid her. The airport building, far over to the left would be dangerous. She started walking towards the town. Her face felt tight. She knew it would be greenish white and opaque like cement. Her eyes were dry and puffed and saw everything in a shallow way. Nothing was allowed to get through to her mind. She couldn’t let herself become more agitated.

  She tried to be inconspicuous. She kept to the shade, walked humbly like a shy girl at a posh dance. People in passing cars looked at her; they even turned to look. She ran back into the long grass. Del had said, ‘If you go on drinking like this something terrible will happen.’ But being covered with someone’s life blood, and having no idea how it had got there, was probably not the revenge he’d anticipated.

  She’d wait for the night. She lay down, tried to sleep, her mind full of panic. She was too ill to sleep. That would come later when the dead alcohol drained away. Had she picked on someone in a bar? Had it been a senseless arbitrary killing? She wasn’t at her best when her money ran out and bartenders refused her any more drinks; she saw it as betrayal. The sun was raging, vicious. She felt cold. Time passed quickly as it always did when she was ill. She still couldn’t remember anything. She knew about Celestino. She knew about herself. She’d hold him clearly even as she lay dying. He would be the last thing to let go.

  She started to walk again. Other hangovers came back to her. She’d felt as ill as this in Paris at the Gare Austerlitz. After a night on a train from Spain, standing in a stuffy corridor, drinking two litres of cheap red, she’d half collapsed on the station in the morning. She’d got herself to a hospital. The French had no time for vertical victims. Her symptoms were mistaken for those of a heart attack and they gave her a shot of something lively that mixed badly with the alcohol. The evening before, she’d said goodbye to Celestino in Spain. Leaving him never did her any good. That journey on the train to Paris had been a wake.

  Suddenly she felt boiling hot, like a mad hot-water bottle. A workman was coming towards her. He looked into her face, and what he saw made him hurry away muttering. He looked back from a safe distance.

  Her only thought — get out! That stayed with her.

  *

  Len Leppard went back to the Hilton, too tired actually to hate his client. She’d never shown even a suggestion of unreliability in the five and a half years he’d represented her. Sometimes she had about her an enigmatic quality as though she wasn’t quite there. Her attention was drawn off — perhaps to some remembered place, more convincing than the present one. But that could be the very quality that made her so tantalising.

  He washed his face and ordered coffee and aspirin. He’d told the Americans Sylvia stories to keep them going. They loved the one about the Arab approaching Sylvia in the foyer of a London hotel and offering 50,000 for half an hour.

  ‘I couldn’t do it. Not without asking my husband. I never do anything without him.’

  ‘Well, ask him.’ And the Arab showed her a briefcase of money.

  Del was in the hotel bar. His immediate reaction was outrage. ‘I’ll kill the wog.’ But by the time he’d got to the foyer he’d remembered his mortgage. ‘Of course, I don’t want you to do it. It’s just ironic that a sum like that would pay it off. And everything else.’

  The Arab, perhaps alarmed by Del’s size and dangerous calm, offered 70,000.

  ‘It’s entirely up to you, Sylvia,’ said Del.

  Sylvia was supposed to have given the Arab a satisfying half hour, because Del’s standard of living rose appreciably.

  Len Leppard had heard that story many times, but he wasn’t sure it starred Sylvia Chrystal. He changed his suit and decided to go out on the town and eat and so dodge the eleventh-hour meeting with the Americans at the club. He knew he’d have to pay them back the advance fee and pre-production costs before he left. Las Vegas wasn’t a town in which to owe money. But the door opened unexpectedly and they were in the room. They’d come over to him instead. They were no fools.

  ‘Well, you’ve caught me as I was about to call her husband in London.’

  ‘We’ve just done it, Len. As you probably already know, he doesn’t have any idea where she is. He hasn’t heard from her. As far as he’s concerned she got the plane two days ago. Quit stalling, Len. Stop trying to buy your client time. She has four hours to get her arse on Heaven’s stage for a lighting rehearsal or we replace her.’

  Len kicked his chair childishly. They decided to interpret the gesture as one of submission.

  ‘I’d make her do her pieces, Len. After all, she’s not a big star. She’s done one film people noticed. But she’s not there by any means. Not yet. She can’t behave like this. It’ll get around, of course. You won’t be able to do anything with her.’

  Now that they’d actually issued an ultimatum and upset the English agent, the Americans weren’t as satisfied as they might have been. A day ago, Sylvia was just a good music hall performer. Now she was suddenly irreplaceable. Her qualities, rather than what she did, made her unique. They couldn’t stop listing them, it seemed.

  ‘She isn’t young, but she can do anything on a tightrope. No, it’s something about the way she peels off that dress. She’s out of bounds, yet she makes me feel hot in places I’ve forgotten about for years.’

  ‘She enjoys it. It’s not an act. Some man taught her how to take it off. She’s taken her clothes off for someone she wanted.’

  ‘She’s funny in a dry way. Sometimes her performance is faultless. And subtle. She’s nostalgic, isn’t she? She takes me back to Paris in the twenties and thirties.’

  They ordered seafood special and fruit surprise and bottles of spa water. They were all on diets of one sort or another. They all had early appointments either with an analyst or a clairvoyant, so the four-hours deadline was reduced to three. Len called his lawyer and a film producer in Hollywood. He couldn’t think who else to call. He didn’t know much about her, he realised. Although they were sitting down and eating, Len’s jet lag made the businessmen almost menacing. He supposed they were all organisation men. He came from Surbiton and couldn’t handle this. He signed an emergency fee return and various financially crucifying memos as soon as they produced them.

  ‘We may have to sue for breach of contract. We have to recoup our loss of anticipated profits. We know you understand that.’

  Len expected them to leave, but they hung around the room. Like him, they were waiting for the phone to ring.

 

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