The Modeliser (8 page)

He grimaced unfolding his tall frame from the car. He’d
already walked up the path towards the apartment block when he realised that
he’d left the car unlocked with the keys in the ignition. As he turned to go
back to the car, Alex spotted movement at the entrance to the building, a chance
to get in. He approached the doors quickly as a woman emerged from within and a
tiny dog on a leash immediately beginning to yap.
           

“Nice dog.” The woman, a petite redhead in a pink velour
jogging suit looked up at him and then a smile burst across her face.

“Wow, you’re Alex Golden,” she said. “Shay really works for
you?” Alex loved these chatty types.

“Yes, do you know her?” He turned on the charm, giving the
blonde the full benefit of his blue eyes.

“Sure, she’s right above me.” Alex nodded.

“That’s 4…” He trailed off hoping.

“No 5b.” Alex shot her another smile as he manoeuvred past
her into the building.

“Thanks.” He called back over his shoulder.

“What
the fuck?”

It was not the welcome he’d have liked but still Shay hadn’t
kicked him straight out and he was sprawled on a tiny sofa, in her doll’s house
proportioned apartment. Alex looked around disconcerted. He cleared his throat.

“Shay, I pay you well, don’t I?” Shay padded back into the
living room. She watched Alex shaking her head with irritation and with a
measure of affection that she couldn’t quite hide.

“Why have you driven all the way here, in like the middle of
the night?” She set down the steaming mug of coffee on a coaster on the table.

“You weren’t answering my calls.”

“Because I didn’t want to talk to you.” Alex looked hurt and
Shay clicked her tongue until he cleared the hound dog expression off his face,
she’d quickly grown immune to his charms in her first months working for him.

“What am I supposed to do without you? Everything’s fallen
apart since you left.” Shay took a deep breath and tried to remember all the
reasons why she’d quit working for Alex. “Avital’s screwing me and now Max
Maguire has signed up to do Defender.” Shay sighed, as her quiet evening
watching back episodes of Medium receded further away. “Do you think I’m past
it?”

“Alex, it was one bad opening, it wasn’t your fault.”

“Is that what you really think? That I’m just being
paranoid?” Shay took a deep breath as she weighed her answer. Sure she’d walked
out on Alex, but she expected that he’d talk her round as he always did and
she’d go back to work for him. But if she told him the truth now, she knew it
might end their relationship. There was that mantra she’d seen once, ‘In
Hollywood truth and business don’t mix,’ yet even as she resolved to say
nothing, the words were already spinning out of her.

“Alex the films are shit and you’ve turned into just another
Hollywood cliché – fast cars, fast life, easy women. It’s tired. That
sexy English guy, that’s what we wanted and you’ve gone all Hollywood and not
in a good way. Max Maguire is sort of you 5 years ago.” Shay took a deep breath
as the words finally stopped tumbling from her.
 

“Don’t hold back," Alex snapped and Shay sighed.

“You asked for the truth.” She read the confusion in Alex’s
eyes and once again an overwhelming desire to protect him rose up in her. But
she squashed it down quickly. Alex Golden was no vulnerable man-child in need
of her mothering or her advice even. He was The Modeliser; he’d be fine. Men
like him were always fine and yet as she stared into his troubled blue eyes,
she wondered if the depths she sometimes sensed hidden, didn’t hold more
vulnerability than Alex liked to admit.

“What do I do? Even if I wanted to, how do I go back to being
that guy?” Alex asked the question quietly.

“I don’t know Alex, I really don’t know.”

They
continued to sit facing each other for a long moment as their coffees went
cold. Finally Alex stood, his tall frame making her tiny apartment seem even
more miniature in size.

“Will you come back?” Alex asked and the hint of
vulnerability was gone Shay noted and now he was all business.

“I’ll think about it.” She replied and Alex nodded.

“Well, while you think about it, could you help me figure out
how to access my messages, I had a little accident with the phone.” Shaking her
head Shay reached for her phone quickly tapping in a number and then when
prompted an access code. She flicked the phone onto speaker, taking a sip of
her lukewarm coffee.

“You have 6 new messages," the automated voice informed
them.

Alex dropped back onto the sofa, closing his eyes. Shay
watched him, in the dim orange light of the room. How often had she fantasised
about him being here in her apartment; on the sofa, in her bed. The convoluted,
ridiculous scenarios she had dreamt up that would lead him to her, that would
make him see her as anything more than his girl Friday. Shay was startled from
her musings by the sharp English accent.

“Alex call me.” The message clicked off abruptly.

“Shit Helena. I’ve been meaning to call her back,” Alex said,
slowly sitting up as the next message clicked on and began to play.

“Christ Alex, call me back, it’s important.” Shay leaned
forward and frowned. She’d rarely heard Helena, Alex’s sister sound so clipped.
And yet beneath the formality of her stiff messages, there was a thread of
something. She watched as Alex too straightened up, he’d heard the catch in his
sister’s voice. Another message clicked on.

“Alex, it’s me. It’s Gramps. He’s dead. He died. Please call
me back.” And then the sound of soft broken sobs before the message clicked off
abruptly. Shay watched Alex rise to his feet; the colour had drained from his
face. The easy grace with which he normally carried himself was gone and he
stood like a newborn deer, awkward and ungainly, faltering. Shay was filled
with compassion for him.

“Oh Alex, I am so sorry.” He turned away from her, as though
looking around the room for something. Finally he looked at her, a bleakness in
his blue eyes that she had never seen before.

           
“I
have to go. I have to get to London.”

Shit!
Shit! Shit!

Talia sat stiff as a board, her spine straight as she waited
in the empty office for her boss’s appearance. Though he had asked to see her,
Rick himself had yet to turn up and Talia stared stiffly around his office, her
eyes darting at the papers and notes pinned up on the corkboard that lined the
walls on either side of the room. As her eyes ran down the list that marked out
when the show's cast had holidays booked and the various shooting schedules,
Talia could sense that there was trouble on the horizon. She could feel it
coming, though for now at least she could not say for sure, what form the
attack would take. She might still be relatively new, had only been in the TV
industry for 5 years but she’d seen too much, witnessed too many long knives in
action not to anticipate, that something rotten lay in store for her. A painful
knot formed in her stomach, as it did during moments of tension and stress,
when suddenly the door was wrenched open and Talia turned to see Rick enter the
room, followed closely by Damian Sanderson, the show’s executive producer.
Talia’s stomach dropped further. Something had to be seriously amiss, to rouse
Damian to come down from his tower.

The general sense of foreboding that had dogged her all day
now crystallised into something more certain. As she met Damian’s eyes, she
knew with an instinctive sense of self-preservation that somehow, she was
fucked. Damian strode casually across the room and Talia watched him fold his
ridiculously tall frame into Rick’s chair behind the desk. Rick himself hovered
uncertainly as he tried to figure out where to place himself in his own office.
Rick finally dropped into a soft sofa, which placed him several inches below
Damian and Talia watched silently as Damian pushed his jaw length hair behind
his ears. He stared at her, as though he was the interrogator trying to psyche
out the perp in some police procedural show that was playing out only in his
imagination.

Talia knew that something had gone wrong and somehow she was
now in the line of fire but with the fear came an unexpected, uncharacteristic
spark of determination, she would not go down quietly. She had never liked
Damian and she’d sensed that the feeling was mutual. She hated the way he
cultivated a sense of avuncular detachment, the way he strode through the
department like some benign earth father constantly talking about his yoga
sessions, his three children at prep school, his yummy mummy wife. Even as he
continued to stare at her in silence stroking his ridiculous stubble, Talia was
determined that she would not be the one to break this silence.

Finally Rick spoke, “Well Talia ..”

Immediately Damian cut him off. Even though she was the one
caught in the crosshairs, Talia felt a moment of sympathy for Rick. He was the
backbone of the production team, he was the one who lived and breathed the
show, but he simply hadn’t played the game as well as the slimy Damian. Now he
found himself saddled with a boss, who threw orders about and made demands but
who had no idea about what production entailed or the ramifications and
consequences of the pieces he moved about on the board in his tower office.

“Talia…,” Damian said as he leaned back in the chair. He was
enjoying himself. He let her name hang in the air and then he continued.
“Frankly,” he said, “You’re in something of a predicament, aren’t you?” Talia
let the breath that she had been holding escape her and suddenly a face flashed
into her mind. Chris Priestly, her predecessor, who one day had simply not
returned to work. His desk had been cleared and Chris was gone, never to be
seen or heard from again. That was how it worked in television; like the mafia,
once you were out, you were out. You disappeared into the ether, into some
unmarked grave never to be spoken of again. Randomly months later, during an
impromptu break to visit her mother, Talia had run into him in a service
station outside of London. He’d been gaunt, with a look in his eyes that had
stayed with Talia, the look of a man who had given all that he had, the look of
a broken man.

“The thing is,” Chris had said to Talia, “ you’ve got to be
in the driving seat. TV is just one big appetite, it will take and take and
take, it never says when and it’s never satisfied. But at least if you’re going
to crash and burn, make sure you’re in the driving seat, make sure that you and
only you drive yourself off the cliff.” He shook his head with a bitter smile
and Talia had watched him climb back into a battered Volkswagon before driving
away. She’d watched him go and wondered what had happened to his BMW, which had
been his pride and joy when he’d worked on the show. She hadn’t thought about
that chance meeting in over a year but now his words raced back into her mind.

“A predicament?" She pushed the words out through dry,
parched lips. “How do you mean?” she watched as a small sneer spread across
Damian’s face.

“ You’ve seen the photos, haven’t you?”

Talia nodded.

“Of course. But what has that to do with me?” Talia tried for
directness even as something inside her died, so this was what Dom had been
talking about, what he had tried to warn her about.

“Don’t play about Talia, we know everything.” Talia watched
Damian sit back with a satisfied sneer. She’d never bought into Damian’s act
and the fact that she’d once caught him exiting Tamara’s dressing room whilst
doing up his fly had cemented their mutual dislike. For all his talk about his
kids and his yoga-practicing wife, Damian wasn’t above fooling around with the
cast. Talia turned to Rick.

“What’s going on Rick?” Talia watched as Rick shook his head
a mix of confusion and anger on his face. Gruffly he spoke, barely meeting her
eyes.

“It doesn’t look good Tal.” He gestured at the collection of
compromising newspaper front pages. “Big bosses are going mad, saying we have
to suspend Angelina, maybe even sack her.”

“What’s that got to do with me?” Talia repeated.
 

“Don’t pretend to care now.” Damian spat the words out with
irritation. “We know that the photos were leaked by you – the emails were
sent from your email. You weren’t even smart enough to cover your tracks
properly.”

“What?” The word exploded from Talia, as Damian threw down a
sheaf of papers on the table. She glanced down at them but her mind was a whirr
of activity. She barely took in the text on the printed sheets of paper as
slowly it all fell into place. Between Dom and Tamara, she’d been played. She
looked up at the smug look that played on Damian’s face; perhaps he had also
been in on it. Slowly the scale of the shitstorm she was in became apparent to
her. “I’ve been set up.” Even to her it sounded weak and she watched the
disdain on Damian’s face and the look of confusion on Rick’s face. “Rick, I
work harder than anyone, you know that. Why would I do this?” But she wasn’t
winning him over, even in her daze she could see that.