America had introduced me to the near-miracle that was Scotchgard. With the job I did, its ridiculously long hours, its frequent travel, the possibility that Jared might call me any time demanding something as ridiculous as the hours, when I was at home I mostly ate comfort food takeaway on my sofa in front of Bravo. I still 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 couldn’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 was really health: protein-rich kale salads, sushi rolls made with brown rice, superfoods and quinoa coming out of your ears. Jared was a health nut. So at home I tucked into messy, sloppy, delicious fatty food: enchiladas, pad thai, General Tso’s chicken, food that I could never get in London. 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 small 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. I used disinfectant wipes every single time on those sofas, and they were replaced very regularly.
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. University towns don’t have the best behaved clientele: I cleaned a lot of toilets. Once I had my degree, if my job required me to wipe up other people’s bodily fluids, it had better come with a great salary, yearly bonuses and the best health and dental care plan available to humanity. Which it did.
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 glanced at it. It was 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 forming a phalanx 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 waiting for him there already, which I had printed out earlier. 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 sidesaddle, 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 that sofa unless they had to. They were scrolling through their phones, I presumed surveying casting agencies’ offering 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 made, 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 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 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.