A Lifetime Achievement

She runs her hand along the back of the gold-beige velour sofa and smiles fondly at it, as she might smile at an adult child who has never stopped being her baby.

“I bought it with my first big pay cheque as a casting director. It’s totemic. Is that the word?”

He thinks about it for a moment, his eyes on the deep layer of gold fringing running round the bottom of the three-seater settee.

“Why not?” he says.

“I won’t part with it.”

He seems to understand, is an empathetic kind of man, she divines.

Joyce Maslin has never allowed a journalist into her home before. They have often asked her for interviews, wanting to dig into her mound of memories, but she has never trusted anyone enough to let go of any closely-kept names and anecdotes. This young man, however, intrigued her with his discreet manner and humility. He wrote to her. Actually wrote to her on paper and in an envelope and included cuttings of his past, rather unremarkable articles on industry professionals, the directors of photography and sound engineers that – she knew – were only of interest to colleagues and not likely to reach the wider public’s eyes. And anyway, she was on the verge of retirement and on the eve of collecting her lifetime achievement award. Why not make a slightly eccentric choice when it came to breaking her silence? He was no threat – not a tittle-tattle kind of celebrity-baiting journalist, but a solid business reporter, a nerd, a worshipper of her world, not its scourge. It was about time she let another pair of eyes into her home, allowed someone to see how she lived, and to admire it.

And so she brought him straight to her second sitting room on his arrival this mellow June morning, so that he might glimpse the swimming pool through the French windows. Or the cover on the swimming pool. The cover which never comes off the swimming pool. But he hadn’t looked that way, instead had rummaged in his bag and brought out a pen and a pad as well as a hand-held recorder and had searched for a place to set them down. That’s how they came to be standing before her magnificent sofa and why she felt it was the right moment to explain its relevance, its symbolic importance in her life.

He is squinting at it now through his alarmingly thick glasses.

“Is it too early for a drink?” she asks him, bobbing her head slightly so that she can look him directly in the face. But he bobs, too, and well away from her, intensely awkward and uncomfortable being looked at.

There is something of Doug Farnborough about him, she muses. Awkward young men. Never quite grow up. Adorable.

“Then I shan’t either,” she trills and lands on the sofa, indicating that he should do the same.

He places himself discreetly at the other end, his head still in his bag, a picture of shy preoccupation.

“I actually started as a location scout for a small British film production company,” she tells him, once he is settled and the interview has – she surmises – officially begun.

“It was the mid-seventies and I was in my early twenties and had been working as an accountant’s secretary for the past few years. Hated it. Didn’t care enough, I’m afraid. I answered a kind of ‘help wanted’ ad from a chap called Simon Heath-Moon. You’ve heard of him, of course.”

The journalist’s eyebrows raise themselves up and over the edge of the heavy black rims of his glasses. Sitting a little way along from him on the sofa, Joyce still can’t quite get at the right angle to see his face clearly. It is tilted down towards his notepad.

“Of course,” he observes, still writing. “Who hasn’t?”

“Well, it was very early in Simon’s career. I think possibly his first directing job with any budget of note. He was one of those enfant terrible kind of directors right from the start. Byronic.”

“I can guess which film,” he says.

“Go on.”

“Sylvia (Of the Woods)”.

“That’s the one. British arthouse of the 1970s. God give me strength.”

She waits for him to guffaw or even just smile and join the conspiracy, but instead he taps the pen to his lips. And so she continues.

“Anyway, he was looking for someone with a car who could go and find him the right location for the film. I suppose I fitted the bill for no other reason than I had a perfectly reliable Mini Traveller and a willingness to go anywhere. I was dispatched North – he said the light was more to his taste up there – and told to find him some ancient woodland.”

“Ancient woodland,” he echoes.

“You see,” and she stops and lays a hand on the smooth, vacant patch of seating between them, “he was a strange sort of chap. Very vague. I’ve never worked with anyone like him since. No script to speak of, just images in his head, and then the story just kind of came about.”

“You found the woods he wanted?” asks her interviewer, and she is gratified to notice that he has raised his head and is peering at the swimming pool beyond the windows at last.

“In Northumberland, as a matter of fact. I drove up and down country roads for days, hoping for something that would do and then suddenly I just came across this forest and knew it would be right. I parked and got out and walked deeper inside and…”

“And?” he asks.

“And it did indeed seem right.”

She wonders if he is imagining the place. He’s clearly seen the movie, so he must have a sense of it.

“It’s very dated now, that film,” she observes.

“I like it,” he says.

“You know – fun fact for you! – all he told the young actress was that Sylvia had some special affinity with the woods and that she should go and hide herself among the trees and that he would walk through the wood alongside a cameraman with a hand-held camera and look for her. He wanted to come across her by accident, so that it would feel natural, like she was part of the woods.”

The reporter nods his head slowly. This is the kind of stuff they like, these nuggets.

“I must say, it worked very well. All the scenes shot in the woods were fantastic. And then she goes into the city and there’s all that stuff about the damaging effects of urban civilization and she ends up inexplicably taking her clothes off in a department store.”

Joyce Maslin laughs encouragingly. Her guest’s shoulders shake gently as he writes and so she assumes he is amused. He stops and looks at the nib of his biro, revolves a question.

“Why did you choose that location, though?”

She frowns a silent answer.

“It just felt right,” she gives him eventually. “There was a darkness to it, a sense of an enclosed world. I had a feeling, as I walked through it, that nobody had ever walked there before.”

Her heart seems to awaken, to start to run.

“I know that’s rubbish. I mean, of course people had walked there before. But I didn’t feel the presence of humanity. It must sound strange, but there you go. It was owned by a farming family and they had no problem with us filming there. Didn’t seem to care…”

“Just that walk?” he asks, his voice drifting, the pen hovering.

“What do you mean?”

“Just that walk convinced you that it was right? That walk you took into the heart of the woods?”

“I…” she lifts her hand from the sofa seat and places it against her chest. Her heart is running. Footsteps running.

They were running.

He looks up at her and she hears the running again. Feels that tightness in her chest again, the straining and the fear. The reporter removes his glasses. His dark eyes find hers and she knows at once that it is over. Just like that. A lifetime of achievement. At an end.

“Doug?” she asks.

*

What struck her first was the birdsong. It was oppressive and excessive, so much of it detonating around her, as though it were coming from trapped creatures that had multiplied in captivity and were fighting for space. It was dusk and she was tired – had been on the road all day – and yet here she was, striding deeper and deeper into the heart of a dark place she knew nothing about, agitated by the piercing cries around her.

Joyce had been tasked with finding a location that the director, Simon Heath-Moon, described as inaccessible, forgotten and laden with threat. He was very specific about that. He wanted there to be a sense of unknown creatures hiding behind every trunk, watching us.

“You see, the audience thinks they’re watching something, but I want them to get a creeping sense that something’s watching them,” he had told her on the telephone. “I want it to be primeval. D’you get me, love? Go find that place.”

She had left at once and driven North, her road atlas on her lap, veering off any main roads as soon as she could, aiming for the blank spaces, the places where there were no houses and where roads ran out.

This wood, this dense, overgrown, dark mess of a place that she hadn’t even seen on the map but come across accidentally after cresting a small hill, was surely going to please her new boss. She had pulled into a track and, without waiting, jumped from the car and plunged in. And now she was forcing her way through, with no path to guide her and no sense of where she was going. All she knew was that Simon needed the real thing, not a camera trick or a well-dressed set, but a hidden site away from the rest of the world. It felt to her like she was submerging herself in a green ocean, cutting herself off from air and light. Maybe even risking her life.

As she walked, the trees seemed to grow more tightly together, as if forming a barrier. Was it already night or was this density of foliage blocking out the sky entirely? She pushed on, ducking her head to avoid the whip-like branches networked around her.

And then suddenly the trees ended and she stepped out of the forest. Or it wasn’t the end of the forest, she realised, but a clearing. A perfect circle of grass. And at the other end of the clearing was a hut. Dammit! She’d been certain that no one had ever been there before. But now there was this affront to the perfect location – this shabby little sign of humanity. Simon need not know. She would make sure that the crew never reached this spot.

She turned her back on the hut.

Turned back again to face it.

Why on earth would anyone build anything in such an inaccessible place? A quick inspection would be harmless. Now that she thought about it, an area where they could keep their equipment when it rained would be perfect. It was her job to know these things.

Joyce crossed the clearing and stood at the entrance. There was no door, only an opening and darkness beyond. It smelled of ancient, compacted mud, of dereliction and – very faintly – of animal.

She braced herself against the door frame and leaned in, waiting for her eyes to adjust. There were no windows, and there was no light except the meagre amount from the clearing, which illuminated next to nothing.

“A quick look and I’m off.”

She said it aloud as insurance. If anything was in there it would have heard her and either run away or at least responded, if it were human. Not that there would be anything in there. She could sense the void, could hear it and feel it. No harm to take a quick turn around. And so she entered and, stepping cautiously in the dark, kept to the right, her hand against the wall. In this manner, she managed to make her way around the hut unhindered and arrived back at the main entrance in less than a minute. Nothing. Time to go.

A rustling and a sighing stopped her. She froze and listened. A ripple of a breath. Then a scratch of … of a claw, was it? A shifting of feet. A shaking of fur – or perhaps feathers. And then – low and miserable – a whine. A plea. A longing for release.

Not even acknowledging her fear, not really understanding it, she re-entered the darkness and this time, with no wall to anchor her, she stepped into the centre of the hut and there she met with bars. She had found a huge cage. Inside it there was something desperate and trapped and silent, yearning for freedom. No point waiting for her eyes to adjust to this dark. They never would. She was being called on. She was acting on orders. And she was breaking an order. She was showing compassion. And she was playing with fire.

She moved around the cage, feeling for a door, and when she located it, she checked it for a latch, and she found that too.

Joyce lifted the latch, opened the door, and ran. She ran through the woods, her heart pounding, her breath struggling, and the birds screamed around her, furious and afraid.

*

“But you don’t look like him,” she says.

“Are you sure?” he asks. “Look again at my eyes.”

It is Doug. He is there looking back at her, but then so are so many, many pairs of eyes.

*

Simon, the director, had seemed very pleased with the location and had declared that he wanted Joyce to be present when they were filming the woodland scenes, perhaps as a kind of reward. She felt duly honoured, had never watched a movie being shot before, stood in awe and out of the way, while endless discussions were had. The lead actress – Sylvia (of the woods) – was a slight, rather vacant girl called Jacqui, whose blond hair hung long and thick below her narrow shoulders. She was in an orange floral gypsy dress and white sandals. At about midday on the first day she was let loose to go and hide in the woods.

“Maybe someone should go with her,” Joyce suggested to Simon’s assistant.

The assistant was a gentle, self-effacing and uncomplicated young man with frizzy sideburns and slow, brown eyes. He was an aspiring actor and hung around the director because he was, as he put it, learning his craft from a master. He looked up from his notes and tried to fathom who she was.

She thrust out a hand. “Joyce Maslin,” she said.

“Doug Farnborough,” he replied. Then: “Are you worried about her?”

She squirmed.

“Well, you see, I’ve been deeper in there and it’s quite tricky getting your bearings and I would hate her to really get lost.”

“Simon’s really adamant she should be hard to find.”

“I know but…”

He sighed and got up and, with a charming, rather roguish grin, he told her: “OK. I’ll follow her from a distance. Don’t tell Simon. We’re not insured for lost actresses.”

I could like him, she thought. She felt he was a rare and beautiful soul and one that she might benefit from knowing better.

*

“I’m nearly 80,” she tells him.

The young reporter, who could be Doug – who could be so many people now she thinks about it – struggles in his skin. He appears intensely uncomfortable on her sofa. Outside, the day is bright and the yellow walls of the living room give off a refined, reflected heat. He squints and shrugs and shakes and, for a moment, she feels that she is sharing her beloved settee with an animal, not with a human at all.

“I’ve had enough,” he tells her. “I’ve come here to finish it.”

*

The actress had been found and filmed and the long day was ending, the air beneath the trees chilling, the light fading.

“OK, that’s a wrap,” announced Simon, and the dozen or so members of the cast and crew at once busied themselves with packing up and moving off.

“Anyone seen Doug?” asked the director.

Joyce raised a hand, put it straight back down again. The truth was she hadn’t seen him, so what could she contribute? As the party moved off, she lingered, glancing anxiously from face to face. No one seemed perturbed. They assumed Doug was already packing one of the cars with equipment.

But there was no sign of him at the cars either.

Simon said he would wait a while and insisted that Joyce and Jacqui and a couple of other crew members should head off for the hotel. No point waiting. Joyce scanned the

woodland verges as they drove, her sinews tight with guilt, expecting to see him step out from the dark interior and wave at any moment. It was her fault. Everything was her fault.

*

It was two years later that he came to her. He arrived at her Soho office with no warning and announced himself through the intercom. She came bounding down the narrow staircase and flung open the door.

“Oh my God, Doug! I thought I’d never see you again.” She led him upstairs and sat him down opposite her desk and tried to enjoy his appearance, but his eyes were darting round the room and he couldn’t seem to sit still long enough for her to take him in properly. He’d lost his serenity, she noted sadly.

“So, you do casting now?” he asked.

“Yes. I worked with quite a well-known director who got me into it. I’m building up my books. I just got a lucky break, that’s all.”

“Can you find me some work?” he asked.

She was about to tell him that it didn’t work that way, that her clients were directors and producers, she wasn’t an agent, but she felt she owed him something. Not just that. She liked him, had felt attached to him from the moment they had met. But he wasn’t quite the same young man with whom she’d laughed and idled away hours on the set of Sylvia (of the Woods). She assumed he was using drugs now or drinking too much. He had that jumpy, neurotic way of moving. Often, he’d jerkily run a hand over his face as if to try to wipe something off it. And – disconcertingly – he’d show his teeth, bare them like a dog might, just for a moment.

“Are you alright?” she asked him gently.

“Find me a film,” he told her.

A fortnight later she went for a meeting with an eminent director and two co-producers. They were planning a movie about young athletes, Olympians from all walks of 1930s British life. It was a major production with a huge cast. They needed fit young male actors, the director explained. Interesting faces, stripling bodies. She didn’t make the connection at first, but by the time she’d returned to her office she had remembered Doug and had added his name to a list of other potentials on her books.

Joyce Maslin made her name with that film. She also made a substantial amount of money, some of which she invested in a fabulous three-piece suite, of sheeny gold velour and shivering tassels. A few years later she bought a newly-designed bungalow in Berkshire, with boundless floor space and – what she’d always dreamed of – French windows looking out onto a paved garden and pool. Like Hollywood. She had the walls papered in yellow chinoiserie and kept her bedroom purest white. It was gracious, expensive living and it reminded her that she should work hard and remain pre-eminent in her field.

Doug Farnborough died young. No one was sure of what. His obituary read that he could have been great, but that he led a dissipated life. In all likelihood his liver had packed in, although this was never confirmed on his death certificate. Instead, it remained a rumour in the industry. Those who knew him at the end – and Joyce could not count herself as one of them – described a man in perpetual, satanic struggle with his demons. His demons. What a throwaway line. What does it even mean?

*

“I know it was you.”

She is trapped by his eyes now.

Without being able to look away, she tells him that she doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

She can’t bear to lose all this, her congenial existence, her bright, light-filled life. She is a known person. A respected person. Actors try to ingratiate themselves with her. Producers come to her for advice. She has created fame in others, played a role in countless successes. But it’s more than that. This is her home. Her beautiful, gracious, private place. Why did she ever let anyone into it?

“What do you want?” she asks him.

“I want you to see what Doug saw.”

She doesn’t dare ask him any more, but cannot move in any case, is held prisoner by his eyes.

“What did he see?” she whispers.

“He saw a terrible, appalling thing. It flew at him and hovered before his face. For a second they looked into each other’s eyes and then it was gone.”

Where did it go? She wants to know. She wants to know it but she’s not going to ask.

“I came about from nightmares, from the fears of ancient people, who understood nothing but retribution. They captured me and they worshipped me, thinking it would placate me. But I was captive all the same. They moved me from cage to cage over the years. They knew that I could inhabit any one of them and once that happened, I would pass from one to the other, use them up, keep moving on. They stopped my progress. They locked me up and they kept me in the dark.

“As you can imagine, I was rather angry.”

She nods. Mute.

“I wasn’t a thinking thing, a feeling thing. I simply existed. I didn’t even know that I existed! I was animal.

And I was an infection.”

She can remember running, so fast among the trees that it couldn’t catch her. She can remember her heart beating with terror and she can remember the smell of it. She had sensed the enormity of her crime that day, the massed accusations of the birds milling around her.

“The host might last four or five years at the most, Doug only three. And so I left him for a girl, an actress in his last film. I left him behind and moved on to her. Three years later, I was finished with her, had consumed her, and she, too, was abandoned.”

“Her name?” she asks quietly. “What was her name?”

“I was called Clare. Clare Hesketh.”

“She had an overdose.”

“That’s wrong. I didn’t have an overdose.”

He pauses and, for a second, she thinks she can see Clare among the eyes set deep in his sockets, sinking away. A beautiful girl, very ambitious. Only made a couple of decent films. Forgotten by everyone but her.

“After that an older man, Jeremy Lane.”

She cries out. How many jobs had she found for Jeremy Lane! How deeply she had felt for his confused wife who had found him so aggressive in his final years. Nina had been convinced that he’d had a brain tumour, he’d been so different to the man she married. And then his sudden passing. Worn out. He looked awful, like he’d been fighting for years.

“There were many more. I went from film set to film set. I don’t know why. Because that was the world I now inhabited. I used one up and then I’d move to the next. And then this strange, sorry little man was hanging around a set and I leapt to him. A journalist. He brought me back to you.”

“I’m not ready,” she cries. “Tomorrow they’re giving me an award. It’s for a lifetime of work. Great work.”

“There won’t be a tomorrow for either of us.”

She doesn’t understand, tries to wriggle free of his gaze, but it isn’t possible. He holds her.

“Something changed in me as I went from host to host. All those years caged and alone I hated you all. I wanted you to suffer. And so I tormented you, lived inside you while you suffocated and struggled and eventually gave up. But as time went on, the animal in me receded, and something like consciousness arrived. I started to understand. I started to think. I didn’t want to feed any more. I was more than that. I am more than what I was. I had to tell someone. I had to… I suppose I had to confess.”

“Why confess to me?” she sobs. “I don’t want to be the end of the chain. I never meant for this to happen. I thought I was doing something good in letting you free.”

“You are doing something good,” he says and smiles, closing his eyes.

The journalist falls to the ground and Joyce falls back against her settee, tries to get away but a terrible, awful, face arrives suddenly from nowhere in front of her. It appalls her. Its eyes are huge. It’s mouth a beak. It’s nostrils wide. There are scales. And there is an unbearable smell of sweat and blood. It all happens for a second and then it is gone.

And so is she.