Carlyle would watch just about anything. Unlike Helen, he needed the subtitles. But he enjoyed the films all the same. Indeed, once he cottoned on to the fact that ‘arthouse’ did not preclude sex or violence, and often demanded lashings of both, he was quite happy to sit back and enjoy.
Standing in front of the Renoir, Carlyle thought about that time. Early-afternoon matinées in an empty cinema. Perfect. Perfect and long gone. Now, the Lumière had been turned into a gym. At least the Renoir was still there. He looked up at the films listed above the entrance. None of the titles meant anything to him, but that didn’t matter. ‘What are we going to see?’ he asked, pulling her close.
‘Alice in the Cities,’ Helen smiled.
He looked at her blankly.
‘It’s a Wim Wenders road movie.’
‘Sounds good,’ Carlyle nodded. ‘Let’s go.’
‘This stuff’s not bad.’ Olivia Blackman sucked down on the small joint and offered it to Alice Carlyle.
‘Nah.’ Alice shook her head. ‘I’ve had enough.’ She felt sluggish. The latest Lady Gaga CD was playing in the background but she tried to ignore it. Having spent the last five years listening to her dad’s CD collection, she was more into The Clash than whatever was currently flavour of the month. Right on cue, ‘Guns of Brixton’ started playing in her head and she smiled to herself.
‘Suit yourself.’ Flopping down on her bed, Olivia took another drag and began coughing.
‘Don’t your parents mind?’ Alice asked, climbing into her sleeping bag on the floor.
‘What,’ Olivia asked once she’d finally got the coughing under control, ‘about me smoking dope?’
‘Yeah,’ Alice said. ‘Mine are really pissed off about it.’
‘Big surprise,’ Olivia observed. ‘Your father is a cop, for God’s sake.’ She rested the spliff on an ashtray on the bedside table. ‘What do you expect?’
Alice shrugged. ‘It’s not like they didn’t do stuff themselves, like, when they were young.’
Olivia pushed herself up onto her elbows. ‘Being a parent means being a hypocrite, that’s what my mum says, anyway.’
‘But your parents, they let you do what you want.’
‘I wish!’ Olivia took another toke and rolled her eyes to the ceiling. ‘They won’t let Ryan stay over, for one thing.’
‘Mm.’ Alice felt herself blush slightly. Her experience of boyfriends wasn’t great and it wasn’t something she wanted to discuss.
‘I think they just ignore it,’ Olivia continued, ‘at least my dad does. He’s travelling a lot of the time, so I guess it’s not his problem.’
‘And your mum?’
‘Ha!’ Olivia collapsed back on to the bed, throwing out her arms, as if she was being crucified. ‘She absolutely needs me to do drugs.’
Confused, Alice sat up. ‘Eh?’
‘My dear mama,’ Olivia simpered, ‘is none other than Lucy Pulse.’ She raised her eyebrows as if this explained everything.
Alice frowned. ‘But I thought her name was Andrea Blackman?’
‘It is. Lucy Pulse is her pen name. She writes a monthly column in The Times called “My Teenager Hell”. It’s a thinly fictionalized account of life with me and my brothers.’ She lifted her wrist to her forehead in a dramatic pose. ‘You know, saintly parents locked in an endless struggle with their wretched offspring with nothing but a bottle of Gordon’s, a DVD box set and a packet of Benson amp; Hedges for comfort.’
‘Oh.’ Alice thought about it all for a minute. A nasty thought entered her head. ‘Am I in it?’
‘Hardly,’ Olivia laughed. ‘Although I’m sure if you manage to vomit down the stairs or something, you’ll get an honourable mention in the next one. She’s on deadline and I heard her moaning on the phone the other day that she had nothing to write about.’
‘But why does she do it?’
‘Who knows?’ Olivia said. ‘It’s not for the money, which she says is a pittance. I guess she needs the attention and doesn’t have anything else to write about.’ She started to giggle. ‘Sometimes I feel like I’m under sooo much pressure to perform. All that my lovely brothers do is play World of Warcaft and masturbate, sometimes at the same time.’
‘Gross! That’s too much information.’
‘It’s not enough to keep a column going. If it wasn’t for yours truly smoking dope, getting into trouble at school and chasing boys, she would be totally fucked.’
Alice was beginning to see Olivia’s mum in a whole new light. ‘Why doesn’t she just make it up?’
‘She does, a lot of the time. But she needs to be able to claim it’s broadly based on real life; otherwise, no more column.’ Olivia picked up a diary from next to the ashtray. Inside was a collection of newspaper cuttings. Flicking through the pages, she found the one she was looking for. ‘The aim of the column is to offer a scrupulously honest picture of family life. At the same time, inevitably, some incidents are partly fictionalized, some details have to be carefully rearranged and some characters become composites, to conceal the identity of our children . . .’
‘Your mother said that?’
‘Yeah,’ Alice nodded. ‘About a month ago, not long after she was outed by another newspaper.’
‘Don’t you mind?’
‘Nah.’ Olivia closed the diary and tossed it onto the carpet by the side of the bed. ‘Who cares about some shitty newspaper column? Certainly no one at our school. The good thing is that the paper’s website is behind a pay wall, so no one will go and look at it online. Only a total idiot would pay to read the rubbish my mum writes.’
‘That’s something, I suppose.’
‘I wish she hadn’t done one about my first period, though,’ Olivia groaned. ‘And I’ve told her that Ryan is, like, totally off-limits, but I know that cow will write something about him anyway, just to embarrass me. I think she probably fancies him herself.’
‘Urgh!’ Alice stuck her head back inside the sleeping bag. Fictionalized . . . rearranged . . . composites. She made a vow that she would be very careful around Olivia’s mum from now on.
SIX
Tomorrow’s special was to be Shepherd’s Pie with chips and peas. All for the heavily subsidised price of just £2.99. For another £1.50 you could also have Bakewell tart with custard. Standing in front of a large whiteboard in the basement canteen of Charing Cross police station, a tiny, grey-haired dinner lady wrote up the details in large capital letters in bright red marker pen. When she had finished, the woman admired her penmanship, carefully replaced the cap on the marker then disappeared back behind the serving counter, which had been cleared for the night. Feeling more than a little peckish, Commander Carole Simpson scanned the vending machine in the corner. A Bounty Bar stared enticingly back at her. Disappointed with the amount of effort it took to abstain, she turned to John Carlyle, watching with a certain amount of envy as the inspector happily munched on an apple.
‘Where did all these people come from?’ she whispered.
‘Well,’ he whispered back, ‘if you ask for volunteers to raid a strip club, what did you expect?’ He gestured at the expectant crowd of officers. ‘I could have sold tickets for this gig.’
‘We didn’t ask for volunteers,’ Simpson said tetchily. She looked relaxed after a week’s holiday on safari in South Africa but, back on the job, he could already see the stress building up, starting to seep out of the corners of her eyes and her mouth. A mere couple of days back in wet and cheerless London had already taken their toll.
Standing next to his boss, Carlyle looked almost spectral by comparison. As befitted a man who was unwilling to take any unnecessary risks with his health, he had not exposed himself to any serious sun for years, if not decades. ‘You might as well have done,’ he mumbled.