Havana Adams - Remember My Name

“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.

CHAPTER 7

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 five 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 Volkswagen 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-practising 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. “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.