The Star Witness Page 5

  “You mean, resign?”

  “Yes, but with specific reference to broomsticks.”

  I go into a tailspin of anxiety.

  “She’s right though, isn’t she? If I suddenly disappear off air, it does give the impression that I’m guilty.”

  “They’re using you for cheap publicity. They’re a bunch of deviants. Just walk, man.”

  “But, if I walk…”

  “Just walk. You know you want to. You’ve wanted to for years.”

  That was only half true. Part of me had wanted to walk for years; but it was the weaker part. After several attempts, I manage to get through to Sandra who tells me to act normal; I’ve done nothing wrong, so have nothing to hide.

  “Just go into work as normal,” she says, “hold your head high, look Jade straight in the eye and say ‘I’m not scared, you lying bitch’…Though not out loud, obviously.”

  So, over the ensuing weeks, that is what I did. I did my best to behave normally. It wasn’t easy. I was attracting a lot of comment. In theory, I had not been charged with anything, but that didn’t seem to inhibit the newspapers. The Daily Mail said: “Clearly, it would be inappropriate to comment on the details of this tawdry case, but given the drunken antics of these so-called stars, we have to question whether it is wise to pay such ridiculous sums to infantile debauchees.”

  And a columnist in the Sun wrote: “Whilst not wishing to comment on the case itself, it is obvious that Kevin Carver is a very arrogant man.”

  And the Star ran an interview with a waitress I’d screwed in Preston: “Kevin was a very unimaginative lover. He took no interest in my pleasure. After he’d drunk several tequila slammers, we performed a sexual act and then he fell asleep. I was gutted.”

  I have no recollection of this woman whatsoever.

  I vaguely remember a waitress, but I thought that was in Burnley. Also, that was at least nine years ago. Sandra and I had just broken up and…well, let’s just say that it was not my finest hour.

  As the days crawled by, more and more column inches were written, every paragraph twitching with innuendo. And a lot of the great British public seemed to have made up their minds about me.

  One night, at about eleven o’clock, I am shopping in Tesco’s, wearing my baseball cap and trying to be invisible. I am reading the label on a ready-cooked chicken when this old boy, in his seventies at least, comes alongside and as he reaches across me for some salami, he quietly says “cunt” and then walks off.

  This man had never met me, didn’t know anything about me, apart from the fact that I was a cunt. Over the last sixteen years, many obscenities had been shouted across the street at me – mostly by scaffolders – and I had walked away from many foul-mouthed drunks who wanted to pick fights with Lenny, but the quiet, casual brutality of that old man left me stunned. For several minutes I stood, solitary and frozen, in the interrogating light of the supermarket, with a ready-cooked chicken in my hand.

  * * *

  The weeks dragged by with still no word from the police as to whether I would be charged.

  Somewhere in the middle of all this madness came Mac’s wedding. I offered to drop out, because I knew I would attract the vultures and I did not want to destroy the happy couple’s day. But Mac would have none of it. He insisted that he still wanted me as his best man, which was a mistake.

  His new bride, Julie, seemed very pleasant, probably too good for him, to be honest. Sandra was there with some bloke Ivan. He seemed decent enough, if a little bland. It’s possible I might have told her that; which would be another mistake.

  By the time I got to my feet to deliver my best man’s speech, the world had turned blurry and bendy. Much, much drink had loosened my tongue and decommissioned my brain.

  Sadly, from my point of view, I was being filmed. The following night Mac and Julie came round to play me the DVD to, as Mac put it, “give me a laugh”. I watched through my fingers as I told my audience, repeatedly, that I was “as proud as punch” to be Mac’s best man “yet again”. Solemnly, I informed them that I had had a few drinks so they might have to bear with me. Momentarily, I blanked mid-sentence, unable to remember the bride’s name. I then blethered on about how stressful a time this had been for me and how touched I was that Mac had shown this faith in me, although I did notice he had issued the bridesmaids with headguards. I laughed. Alone.

  Unfortunately this ill-judged gag found its way on to page 5 of the Daily Mail thanks, Mac suspects, to one of the catering staff.

  The rest of the DVD made no easier viewing. The speech just got more and more embarrassing. And I did do the Amsterdam anecdote, but in completely the wrong order.

  “Sorry, mate,” was all that I could think to say, as Mac removed the DVD from the machine.

  “Hey, listen,” he chuckled, “that speech was memorable.”

  “Sorry, Julie.”

  “Forget about it, Kevin. It’s OK,” she said. But I’m not sure that she meant it.

  During these months of anxious uncertainty there were various meetings in Graham’s office, where he and Nina Patel updated me. As I recall, the content was always the same. They were badgering the police to make up their minds about whether I would be charged. The police were being uncommunicative. Nina Patel’s view was that the evidence they had was minimal, but there was probably some internal, political reason why they had not dropped the case. The court of public opinion seemed to have decided I was guilty, so perhaps the Director of Public Prosecutions was nervous about the flak he might get if he walked away. Graham usually ended the meetings by reiterating his view that the indications were that it was highly unlikely that I would go to trial.

  On February the 12th, uniformed men took away my laptop and various documents, all of which they returned a week later. Once again, the paparazzi seemed remarkably well informed and gathered in numbers outside my house on each occasion. By now I was losing weight and was infected with the slow poison of fear.

  Much of the fear hinged around one incident. It had happened a few weeks earlier, on set, and I could not help playing it over and over in my mind. In fact, even now I can relive it instantly.

  I am on set preparing to do a love scene with Jade. We had already managed to get through quite a few of these, both approaching it the same way. It was easy, in a sense. We made no eye contact, nor even spoke to each other, until we heard the word “action”.

  It’s the usual bedlam. I am sitting in a chair as Polly prunes my eyebrows and Simone complains about my dandruff. But the crew are different around me now. The men are less blokesy and none of the women flirt with me any more. Nigel’s still the same. He is bellowing into his headset.

  “What do you mean, Gavin’s crying?…Eh?…Well, what’s his problem?…‘low self-esteem?’…No, Sigmund fucking Freud, I mean, what’s the literal problem that’s stopping him from coming on set now like he’s supposed to?”

  The second assistant’s voice limps through Nigel’s earpiece.

  “Right,” says Nigel, calmer now. “OK, I see.”

  Next thing I know Nigel is standing next to me with his head in his hands.

  “Gavin’s mother’s had a stroke. Just my fucking luck.”

  Polly lets out a gasp. I ask Nigel to calm down. He pouts for a moment, then coughs violently for a good fifteen seconds before the phlegm shifts and he can shout at his second assistant again.

  “All right, give Gavin twenty minutes to compose himself, we’ll crack on with the rest of the scene.”

  I notice Jade ghost across the back of the set.

  “OK everyone, listen up, first positions.”

  Wearily, I rise from my chair.

  “We’re going as far as the moment when Gav…Jasper enters.”

  I breathe in, deeply, through my nose, consciously lifting my ribcage.

  “Last checks, OK? Roll tape…”

  “Speed,” says the camera operator.

  “And act-ion.”

  Suddenly Lenny is implori
ng in a hushed, low voice: “Melanie, I love you. Don’t you understand? You’ve totally changed my life.”

  “I love you too, Lenny,” sobs Melanie.

  “I want to be with you for the rest of my life, Mel,” says Lenny. “I’ve never felt this way before…”

  “I just need time.”

  “But there is no time…I…Jasper? What are you doing here?”

  “A-n-d cut!” calls Nigel. I walk away, so does Jade. Louise’s drawl drifts out from the wings.

  “Are we going for another one, Nige?”

  “Just waiting to hear from the gallery…why?”

  “Well it’s just I thought it might be nice on the line ‘But there is no time’, if Lenny sort of grabbed Melanie and shook her…hard.”

  I fix Louise with a glare and tell her, firmly, that her idea is not going to happen.

  “Why not?” she asks, with apparent innocence. “It’d be in character…for him.”

  The crew seem uneasy. Micro-glances fly around the set. For a split second, a faint shimmer seems to flit across Jade’s eyes. Is she enjoying this?

  “Tell you what, Louise,” I say, spreading my arms expansively, as if I’m relaxed, “I’ve got a better idea. On that line you identified, why doesn’t Lenny suddenly give Melanie a whopping great bunch of flowers?”

  Louise pulls a face. “Flowers?”

  “Yeh, tulips. I think Lenny is a tulips man.”

  She shifts her weight on to her heels, weighing up the pros and cons of having a confrontation over this. The moment is punctured by another horrific bout of coughing from Nigel.

  “Send him home, for Christ’s sake,” mumbles Simone.

  A tinny voice rattles down Nigel’s earpiece. “OK, listen up,” he splutters, “Gavin’s coming down on to set now, he’s bound to be a bit fragile, so steer clear of anything to do with mums, strokes or death. And just remember, if he goes to pieces, nobody is on overtime. Thank you, everyone.”

  It is crystal clear what Louise is up to. She is milking an opportunity. For the past few weeks, the ratings have been creeping up nicely thanks, presumably, to the public’s rancid interest in my real-life subplot. Our figures are out-gunning the other soaps and we are comfortably outperforming the sensationalist new reality show on C4. We even beat the episode where the bi-polar surfer drunk bleach. Our show is, to use that hateful little word, “hot”. So, Louise is cashing in.

  Next thing I know I am heading back to make-up. Suddenly, I bump into Jade in the corner. She had so far made sure that she was never alone with me since she filed the complaint, while my legal team had stressed to me, again and again, that under no circumstances was I to try to speak to her. But now, here we are, face-to-face, with no onlookers, and I can’t help myself; it feels like a last, desperate chance.

  “Jade, listen—”

  “Will you let me pass, please?”

  “This is madness.”

  “I said, let me pass.”

  “But—”

  “Please.”

  “Why are you doing this, Jade?”

  “This is not on.”

  “Why are you lying?”

  “I am not lying.”

  “You know I didn’t hit you.”

  “You did hit me!” she yells, her eyes blazing. “You hit me, that’s the truth! And you’re a lying bastard, Kevin!”

  Then she runs down the corridor, sobbing, quivering with anger.

  There is no mistaking what I had just witnessed. She meant it. Totally. Sincerely. She’s not that good an actress.

  It’s hard for me to describe how chilling that encounter was. It made me question what sort of chance I would stand if our case went to trial. The conviction in those wounded blue eyes filled me with dread.

  * * *

  Eventually, Nina Patel came up trumps. She wrote a succession of increasingly intimidating letters pointing out how unreasonable it was to continue to make me perform alongside Jade. She argued that it was causing me considerable stress and that my employers were failing in their duty of care. So, the legal department put pressure on Louise until she agreed that Lenny and Melanie should take a sudden mystery trip to Australia. Jade and I no longer had to endure the indignity of being a freakshow.

  I thought I would be relieved at not having the tension of pretending to work as normal, but, in fact, it was worse to be at home, alone with my thoughts. I grew a beard. It came out grey and straggly but I had stopped caring about my appearance. Besides, it made me look less recognisable at a time when I didn’t want to be recognised, though I didn’t go out. I sat in my house, quiet and still, like some hibernating mammal. I had only moved into the house eight months before and I’d barely spent any time in it, so I took comfort in the idea that I could just bunker down in my new home and let the busy world pass by.

  But even the house turned on me.

  Several of the radiators started to leak. Taps started to drip. The bathroom door warped in the damp weather to the point where it was impossible to close. The garden pond began to drain slowly into the lawn. The dishwasher broke. The extractor fan in the toilet started making a sound like a demented cricket. The pump in the loft kept surging and thumping. Yet I ignored it all. I didn’t care. I wasn’t prepared to call out workmen because that would mean having strangers in the house.

  There was the occasional visitor. Nina Patel drove by to get me to sign some paperwork.

  She is wearing perfume. She is sitting next to me, very close, leaning across me as she presents documents for signature and I notice, for the first time, my total loss of libido. An attractive woman is millimetres away and I feel nothing. What is even odder is that the nothingness doesn’t disturb me. Something that once seemed so important – that defined me – has disappeared and yet I can’t even muster a shrug. In fact, it might be a relief to no longer be dragged round by the idiot in my trousers.

  I am still pondering all this when I realize that she is asking me a question.

  “How do you feel about the trial? If there is one. Mentally, are you feeling prepared?”

  “Well, I’m hoping there won’t be one.”

  “Yes, but we need to prepare you, just in case.”

  “Right.”

  “We’d need to do some sessions, y’know, pretend cross examination, to get you used to being knocked about a bit. Their barrister’s bound to play pretty rough.”

  “If there’s a trial.”

  “Of course. You’re not thinking of keeping that beard, are you?”

  “No that’s just…I…it’s not going to stay.”

  “Good. You look like a hobo.”

  “Cheers.”

  She starts putting documents away in her briefcase, brisk, business-like.

  “We might have to do some work on you.” She flashes a short smile. “You’re going to have to lose the arrogance thing.”

  “Arrogance thing?”

  “Oh, come on, Kevin, you know what I’m talking about. That sort of general air of ‘fuck it. I can’t be bothered with you’.”

  She is amused by the look on my face. “I’m not criticising you, I’m just saying, you have a manner. And it’s very handy for when you’re playing Lenny, but if you end up facing a jury, then…”

  “I don’t think I’m arrogant,” I say, limply.

  “OK, whatever, it’s—”

  “It’s…I’m…well, I’d accept that I’m…self-contained.”

  “Self-contained, exactly, people hate that. Me? I quite like it, but juries like you to open up.”

  She heads for the door. “Just a bit of vulnerability, Kevin. That’s what they’ll want. Take it easy.”

  The door closes and I’m alone again with the clicking radiators and the rattle of the extractor fan. I switch on the TV and blip through the channels, emptying my brain.

  3

  The Escape

  One Saturday night during this half-life, as I sat watching Match of the Day, I heard the doorbell ring. At that time of night, I thou
ght it was probably kids or pissheads, so I stayed put in my chair.

  But then the bell sounds again, long and piercing, like it’s an emergency.

  So, muttering curses, I drag myself out of the chair and shuffle down the hall. Now the doorbell is one continuous jarring ring.

  “Who is it?” I call.

  “It’s Scarlett Johansson,” comes a muffled, Scottish growl.

  I open the door and Mac sweeps past me carrying a suitcase.

  “Oh right, are you coming to stay then?”

  “This suitcase is for you,” he says, as he heads for the kitchen. “I’ll make a cup of tea while you pack.”

  “Pack?”

  “Yeh, you need a break. Look at the state of you, what’s with the beard?”

  “It stops people recognising me.”

  “Oh, OK, I thought you were auditioning for Robinson Crusoe. Go on, just a few days’ stuff is all you need.”

  He clanks the cupboard doors open and shut as he hunts for the tea.

  “You’ve lost weight,” he says. “You look like a very ugly, hairy supermodel. Come on, don’t just stand there like a fucking statue, let’s hit the road.”

  “And where are we going?”

  “That’s a surprise.”

  “Well, maybe I don’t want to go anywhere.”

  “Why not? What, you want to stay here?” His eyes drift to the television in the kitchen. “Oh God no, Chelsea—Man City, two teams I loathe equally.”

  Then he picks up the remote, turns off the TV.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” I exclaim.

  “I’m being a friend. Come on, move, pack something warm.”

  “I’m happy where I am.”

  “Oh p-lease.”

  “I don’t want to go anywhere…there’ll be people and…”

  “Don’t worry, I’ve thought of that. This milk is on the turn.”

  He stops sniffing the bottle and pours the contents down the sink.

  “Come on, Kev, don’t be a tosser.”

  I stand stock still, making a point.

  “What? You’d rather sit around in here, picking away at all the wee scabs of self-pity?”