Graham Masterton - Mirror

'Sure, Morris,' said Martin, deliberately keeping his voice flat. 'I understand. Thanks for your valuable time.'

He left the poolside and walked across the freshly watered lawn to the rear gate. His sun-faded bronze Mustang was parked under a eucalyptus just outside. He tossed the screenplay onto the passenger seat, climbed in, and started the engine.

'Morris Nathan, arbiter of taste,' he said out loud as he backed noisily into Mulholland Drive. 'God save us from agents, and all their works.'

On the way back to his apartment on Franklin Avenue he played the sound track from Boofuls' last musical, Sunshine Serenade, on his car stereo, with the volume turned all the way up. He stopped at the traffic signals at the end of Mulholland, and two sun-freckled teenage girls on bicycles stared at him curiously and giggled. The sweeping strings of the M-G-M Studio Orchestra and the piping voice of Boofuls singing 'Sweep up Your Broken Sunbeams' were hardly the kind of in-car entertainment that anybody would have expected from a

thin, bespectacled thirty-four-year-old in a faded checkered shirt and stone-washed jeans.

'Shall we dance?' one of them teased him. He gave her a tight smile and shook his head. He was still sore at Morris for having squashed his Boofuls concept so completely. When he thought of some of the dumb, tasteless ideas that Morris had come up with, Martin couldn't even begin to understand why he had regarded Boofuls as such a hoodoo. They'd made movies about James Dean, for God's sake; and Patricia Neal's stroke; and Helter Skelter; and Teddy Kennedy's bone cancer. I mean, that was taste? What was so off-putting about Boofuls?

He turned off Sunset with a squeal of balding tires. He parked in the street because his landlord, Mr Capelli, always liked to garage his ten-year-old Lincoln every night, in case somebody scratched it, or lime pollen fell on it, or a passing bird had the temerity to spatter it with half-digested seeds. Martin called the Lincoln 'the Mafiamobile', but not to Mr Capelli's face.

Upstairs, in his single-bedroom apartment, his coffee cup and his breakfast plate and last night's supper plate were stacked in the kitchen sink, exactly where he had left them. That was one feature of living alone that he still couldn't quite get used to. Through the open door of the bedroom, he could see the rumpled futon on which he now slept alone, and the large framed poster for Boofuls' first musical Whistlin' Dixie. He walked through to the bare white-painted sitting room, with its single antique sofa upholstered in carpetbag fabric and its gray steel desk overlooking the window. Jane had taken everything else. She and her new boyfriend had simply marched in and carried it all away, while Martin had carried on typing.

The boyfriend had even the nerve to tap the desk and ask Jane, 'You want this, too?'

Without looking up from the tenth draft of his A-Team episode, Martin had said, in his BA Baracas accent, 'Touch this desk and you die, suckah!'

Jane's departure had brought with it immediate relief from their regular shouting contests, and all the tension and discomfort that had characterized their marriage. It had also given Martin the opportunity to work all day and half of the night without being disturbed. That was how he had been able to finish his screenplay for Boofuls! in four days flat. But after three weeks he was beginning to realize that work was very much less than everything. Jane might have been demanding and awkward and self-opinionated, but at least she had been somebody intelligent to talk to, somebody to share things with, somebody to hold on to. What was the point of sitting in front of the television on your own, drinking wine on your own, and laughing out loud at E.R. with nothing but a lunatic echo to keep you company?

Martin dropped his rejected screenplay onto his desk. The top of the desk was bare except for his Olivetti typewriter, a stack of paper, and a black-and-white publicity still of Boofuls in a brass frame. It was signed, 'To Moira, with xxx's from Boofuls'. Martin had found the photograph in The Reel Thing, a movie memorabilia store on Hollywood Boulevard: he had no idea who Moira might have been.

The wall at the side of his desk was covered from floor to ceiling with photographs and cuttings and posters and letters all of Boofuls. Here was Boofuls dancing with Jenny Farr in Sunshine Serenade. Boofuls in a sailor suit. Boofuls in a pretend biplane in a scene from Dancing on the Clouds. An original letter from President Roosevelt, thanking Boofuls for boosting public morale with his song 'March, March, March, America!' Then the yellowed front page from the Los Angeles Times, Saturday, August 19, 1939: 'Boofuls Murdered. Doting Grandma Dismembers Child Star, Hangs Self.

Martin stood for a long time staring at the headlines. Then, petulantly, he tore the newspaper off the wall and rolled it up into a ball. But his anger quickly faded, and he carefully opened the page out again and smoothed it on the desk with the edge of his hand.

He had always been entranced by 19303 Hollywood musicals, ever since he was a small boy, and the idea for Boofuls! had germinated in the back of his mind from the first week he had taken up screenwriting (that wonderful long-gone week when he had sold a Fall Guy script to Glen A Larson). Boofuls! had glimmered in the distance for four years now, a golden mirage, his one great chance of fame and glory. Boofuls!, a musical by Martin Williams. He couldn't write music, of course, but he didn't need to. Boofuls had recorded over forty original songs, most of them written by Glazer and Hanson, all of them scintillating, all of them catchy, and most of them deleted, so they wouldn't be too expensive for any studio to acquire. Boofuls! was a ready-made smash, as far as Martin could see, and nobody had ever done it before.

Morris Nathan was full of shit. He was only jealous because he hadn't thought of it and because Martin had shown his first signs of creative independence. Morris preferred his writers tame. That's why people like Stephen J Cannell and Mort Lachman always came to him for rewrites. Morris' writers would rewrite a teleplay four hundred times if it was required of them, and never complain. Not out loud, anyway. They were the galley slaves of Hollywood.

Although he never worked well when he was drinking, Martin went across to the windowsill and uncorked the two-liter bottle of chardonnay red which he had been keeping to celebrate Morris Nathan's enthusiastic acclaim for the Boofuls! idea. He poured himself a large glassful and drank half of it straight off. Morris Nathan. What a mamzer.

He went across to the portable Sony cassette recorder which was all the hi-fi that Jane had left him, and rewound it to the beginning of 'Whistlin' Dixie'. Those gliding strings began again, that familiar introduction, and then the voice of that long-dead child started to sing.

All those times you ran and hid Never did those things you should have did All those times you shook in your shoes Never had the nerve to face your blues You were - Whistlin' Dixie!

Martin leaned against the side of the window and looked down into the next-door yard. It was mostly swimming pool, surrounded by bright green synthetic-grass carpeting. Maria was there again, on her sunbed, her eyes closed, her nose and her nipples protected from the morning sun by paper

Sno-Cones. Maria worked as a cocktail waitress at the Sunset Hyatt. Her surname was Bocanegra, and she had thighs like Carmen Miranda. Martin had asked her for a date one day, about fifteen seconds before a huge Latin bodybuilder with pockmarked cheeks had appeared around the corner of her apartment building and scooped his arm around her and grinned at Martin and said, 'Cdmo la va, hombre?'