Death Of A Diva (8 page)

Chapter Eighteen

              I went through the doorway into the hallway.

              From behind me, I could hear Jimmy Christie trying to impress the girls whilst downplaying the agony of consuming a fistful of wasabi. “I love a vindaloo, me. Spicier the better, eh girls. I bet you like it spicy, don’t you?”

Christie’s boss was a man known, for reasons I had always been too frightened to enquire into, as Chopper Falzone.

              My deal with Falzone was that he would receive a certain percentage each week from the pub’s tills, with a guaranteed minimum and in return I would have free rein to do whatever I wanted, so long as I covered Chopper’s take, ensured that the law never had reason to pay too much attention to the place and didn’t endanger his reputation.

              Mind you, being indicted as a war criminal was about the only thing that I thought likely to damage his already filthy rep and, even then, only in certain quarters.

              Now I had his left-hand man trying to chat up my mate, whilst the woman who was supposed to ensure that I could pay Falzone was drinking herself into oblivion.

              This could
not
be happening.

              I tip-toed up the stairs, listening out for – what? The clink of bottle on glass? The thump of shitfaced diva hitting the floor? But no sound came to me.

              At the top, the landing stretched away. The dressing room door was firmly closed. There was only one thing for it: I was going to have to go along there, knock on the door and politely but firmly inform Lyra that I had reason to believe she had alcohol in the room and would she please return it to me.

              She would, of course, return the bottle, no doubt with some explanation to cover both our embarrassment at the situation and all would be returned to normality.

             
Yeah, that’ll work
...

              I stepped forward, the scene unfolding in my mind’s eye. There’d be begging, I knew; doubtless there’d be tears and acrimony and foul oaths and epithets. I wondered how Lyra would react.

              Then a funny thing happened: from behind Lyra’s door I heard low but urgent voices. One was Lyra’s and though I couldn’t hear what she was saying the tone suggested she was not particularly happy.

              The other voice murmured back, the tone seeming to be insistent rather than argumentative and Lyra was silent for a moment before responding. Something was clearly wrong and the presence of the other person in the room, for some reason, bothered me.

              Morgan had left the pub via the front door and hadn’t come back in that way, but I wondered whether he’d remembered to lock the back door after he’d had his ciggie. Had he re-entered that way and made his way back to his wife’s room? Was he, even now, pleading with her to put the bottle down?

              Suddenly, I was overcome with embarrassment. By now, I was standing outside the dressing room and was moments away from pressing my ear to the keyhole. At which point, of course, either the door would be opened, or one of Lyra’s entourage would come up the stairs and discover me eavesdropping.

              So, in order to ensure that I wasn’t discovered in such a hideously unpleasant situation, I did the only thing I could do: I ducked into the next room, closed the door and pressed my back against it.

              I was standing in a room that once doubled as the pub’s ‘office’. The curtains – a pair of filthy floral bits of fabric – were pulled, plunging the room into a murky half-light and the huge bulk of the pub’s old safe, pressed solidly against the outer wall of the building, was the only piece of furniture.

              To my left was a door which I knew connected up to what was now Lyra’s dressing room and I knew that I could press my ear to this one to listen with far less fear of discovery; nobody was likely to come into this room and the connecting door itself was jammed shut so neither of the inhabitants of the other room were likely to suddenly walk in on my Peeping Tom act.

              I stepped over, dropped to my knees and peered through the keyhole.

              I could see a little of the room and there was no sign of the bottle of vodka. What I could see, however, was Lyra, standing up with her back against the dressing table, her cleavage a little overexposed and a slightly wild look in her eyes.

              “I wish I could,” she was saying, “but it’s not as easy as you think.” She sighed. “Everything just seems to be so much more difficult these days.”

              “It’s as hard as you make it,” said a man’s voice as his back stepped in front of me and Lyra’s arm snaked around his waist and pulled him closer.

              “Oh darling,” she murmured, “I like to make things as hard as I possibly can.” Her other arm came around, cupped his arse and then both arms came up to his shoulders, pulling him closer to her.

              The man moaned wordlessly.

              “Come on,” she murmured once more, “you know what you came for and you know you can have it.”

              “Wait,” he whispered, pulling back from her till her hand came up behind his head and pulled him forward, “wait...”

              Suddenly there was a shove, a squawk, a cry of “What the fuck?” from Jenny Foster; and Dominic Mouret – for it was he – fled the room.

              “You never heard of knocking?” Lyra growled.

              “What the
fuck
is going on here?” Jenny demanded, storming into the room and coming briefly into my keyhole-sized viewing area.

              “Jenny,” Lyra’s voice seemed to have a smile in it, “Dominic and I were discussing chapter sixty-nine in the biography.
One of my favourite chapters.
”

              “Keep your hands off him.”

“Hands?” Lyra’s tone, even from where I sat, had a sneer in it. “Oh, I promise not to put my hands anywhere near him. Can’t promise what’s gonna happen with various other parts of my anatomy, mind you.”

              And then all hell broke loose. From my vantage point I couldn’t tell who slapped whom first, but suddenly there was a crack, a squawk, a cry of “
Bitch
” mingled simultaneously with “
Slag
” and the sound of a selection of cosmetic bottles being knocked over.

              I stood and was gripped with existential angst.

              Any moment now, I was sure, somebody would step in and separate the two hellcats; tear them bodily apart and...             

              Bullshit; nobody was coming.
Story of my fucking life
.

              I walked in on them as Jenny had Lyra flat on her back. The older woman’s knee was firmly embedded in her stepdaughter’s chest as the younger woman strained to make the most of her grasp on her stepmother’s throat.

              Lyra thrashed a hand out and slashed at Jenny’s face, removing two fingernails in the process and eliciting a grunt from the straining figure, who dodged left, avoided the knee, settled right on the diva’s surgically enhanced chest and closed both hands around the throat that was costing me a week’s bar takings.

              Lyra squawked, kicked, thrashed back with her claws and spat obscenities.

              “Alright Love,” I roared, in my best bouncer’s baritone, “you’ve ‘ad enough.” I hooked both arms under Jenny’s armpits and unceremoniously dragged her backwards.

              “
Everything
,” the girl squawked, “you take everything. Why?
Why
?”

              Lyra, freed from the death grip, stared up at the girl, a triumphant smile curling her lips and said “
Because I can
.”

              Which was not, perhaps, the verbal equivalent of oil on stormy waters.

              Jenny – who’d been half upright at this point – suddenly screeched, pitched forward and pulled me with her so that she ended up with her face embedded in Lyra’s crotch whilst my head was slammed into the diva’s bosom.

              I righted myself, pulled the still spitting and slashing woman upright, put the screamed “
I’ll fucking kill you, you fucking bitch
” down to youthful high spirits and dragged her from the dressing room, as Lyra staggered to her feet, cackled like a fishwife, cried “
Get to the back of the queue, bitch
,” and ordered me to send up some ice.

              “And a lemon, if you have one, in this dump,” she added, as her stepdaughter wrenched herself free of me and stalked off down the stairs.

Chapter Nineteen

              “Blimey,” Christie sniggered, as the door slammed shut on the still ranting Jenny. “Hope the rest of the night’s a bit quieter. Any more drama and the punters’ll fuckin’
riot
!” He sniggered into his champagne as his mobile suddenly began to play
Smoke on the water
.

              He pulled it from his pocket, glanced at it, blanched, straightened up, coughed and answered it. “’Ello sir. Yes. Yes, all well. Yes.”

              Christie put the glass on the bar, slid off the barstool, nodded at me and left the bar.

              “Well,” Caz announced, ditching the champagne flute and pouring herself a half pint of Moet, “it’s all going very well, isn’t it?”

              At which point the ASBO twins tottered out of their lair.

              “Awright Lady C,” Dash called. “This do?”

              I turned my head and gaped.

              The two – blond and bronzed and displaying the easy smiles and natural muscle tone that only the very young and the very beautiful can – were, apart from the tightest white underwear, as naked as the day they’d been born.

              My jaw dropped, as Caz slipped from her seat and oozed round the bar, handing each a glass of fizz.

She leaned close in to Dash. “You did your own brows,” she stated.

“You said…” he responded.

“I did,” she interjected, producing a pair of tweezers and plucking at the very edges of his brow line, “and you’ve done wonderfully. Not too ‘polished’, a little edgy. Perfect.”

She stood back, appraised him as though he were Africa and she were one of her colonialist ancestors – lingering rather too long on what I can only describe as his Sahara Desert – and nodded approvingly before transferring her attention to Ray.

“Oh dear,” she frowned, “pop back upstairs, there’s a dear and re-shave that chest. It’s looking a bit sandpapery.” Her gaze slid downwards and her frown deepened. “And,” she murmured, “you can remove the padding. You appear to have overstuffed the, um, lower chamber”

Ray frowned back, blushed and admitted “I was gonna pad, just like you said, but it was a bit tight already…”

Caroline pursed her lips, reached out and tweaked the boy’s fringe. “Are you wearing the medium sized pants?” she enquired.

He nodded, uncertainly.

“Forget the chest,” she instructed. “Put on the smalls and charge every customer at least two quid more than the list price.”

She turned back to me. “Barmen. We need hot, sexually desirable barmen.”

I was unsure how comfortable I was with describing what were, roughly speaking, my nephews, as gay bait, but the pride with which both boys were comporting themselves made me think they were at least enjoying their objectification.

Ali – with the bionic hearing that any barmaid needs – suddenly appeared, took one look at the duo clad only in their scanties and removed the glasses from their hands. “Here to work, boys,” she announced. “Bubbles later. Right now, them shelves need stocking. But first,” she said, waving a few tenners, “one of you needs to get dressed, take five of these tenners and get change.”

One of the twins shrugged and reached for the cash. As he did so the door swung open, presenting the waxy moon face of Leon Baker looking like Munch’s
The Scream
in a cagoule.

“Is Lyra still mad at me?” He enquired pathetically.

“Right, that’s it,” Ali announced, shooing him out. “We are not open for the paying public. I’m locking this front door; it’s in and out the back door from now on. Anyone’d think this place was ready for business.” She shot me a dark look and I knew exactly what she meant.

Chapter Twenty

              I’d delivered Lyra’s ice and lemon and she’d theatrically opened a bottle of Perrier, inhaling the vapours and rhapsodising on the purity of the water, whilst failing to pour a drop of
eau minerale
till I’d left the room.

              None of her sad little entourage had returned and I actually felt sorry for the woman. Until I remembered what would happen to me if she failed to perform.
Give her twenty minutes
, I thought,
then pop back up and catch her in the act of necking the voddie
.

              The bar was empty, but a pounding was shaking the door as I re-entered it.

              “Come on,” Liz Britton’s voice called through it.

              I slid the bolts and opened the door. She looked hearty, raring to go and displayed no trace of the sobbing basket case that had fled the joint a short time ago.

“More blusher,” she announced dramatically, waving a Boots bag above her head. “I think we’re going to need a lot of blusher. And mascara!”

“She’s a bit of a mess,” I told her and Liz grinned.

“Mess? See these hands?” and she held up a pair of slabs with fingers. “These hands are magic.”

“I think she’s been drinking.”

Liz’s face changed, her eyes becoming flinty. “We’ll bloody see about that,” she muttered and with that, headed up the stairs.

All was quiet...

I resumed my seat at the bar, nursing my soda and lime. As the winter light faded, the night stole in, the bar staff (Ali and my scantily clad family) worked their magic in transforming the place into a public house capable of presenting a welcoming space to two hundred pre-ticketed punters and slowly, individually, the clearly mental headliners husband/manager, stepdaughter and would-be biographer drifted back in.

Morgan headed straight up to the dressing room, whilst Jenny and Dominic took up places on opposite ends of the bar and proceeded to soundly ignore each other.

Caz came down at one point, swathed in a small fortune’s worth of Marc Jacobs, which I recalled seeing in the last mood board before we both got the boot from
Glamrag
. She dragged me off to be embedded in the Prada suit she’d procured for me and, as I rested my butt on the squat bulk of the antique safe in the office and she zipped up my Kenneth Cole boots, I heard Lyra’s sound check below me and had to admit that she sounded good.

“
I didn’t dance,
” her voice echoed up, as the track for
Give ‘n’ Take
, one of her most famous disco-Lyra hits kicked in, with the strings swirling around, “
Preferred to stand aside
,” I looked down at Caz and she smiled back at me as if to say:
This night is going to go down in legend.

“
Then took a chance, and now I’m open wide
,” Lyra’s voice boomed, as she reached the songs bridge and the wah-wah guitar kicked off, “
You’re such a mover, I feel such a fake, well if you’ve love to give boy, then I’m on the take
...”

Everything would be OK. I’d been fazed by the sheer weight of what was riding on tonight. I minced down the stairs to the sound of Lyra Day performing
I hope you’re happy (But I wish that you were dead)
from ‘Lyra in Memphis’ and stepped into the bar as she reached the key change. As she winked at me, her eyes sparkling, her lungs
belting
out the song, I knew that everything would be OK.

Then, the sound check over, Lyra, accompanied by Liz and Morgan, swept past me. Ms Day snarled “We need to talk” at me, and my heart sank.

Moments later, the doors opened and everything became confused...