The music was too loud, and Marianne could barely hear herself think as she manoeuvred her way through the bustling townhouse. It was Sympathy for the Devil, the new Stones song on a seemingly endless vinyl, and she loathed it. Cigarette smoke clung to the papered walls and the under stairs toilet was bursting with a polite queue for the mound of cocaine above the sink. She entered the kitchen and offered a faux smile at the suited, rolling-eyed drunks that flashed her the same over their lolling wines and drooping ash. She made it to the French doors at the back and forced her way out to the crisp, clean London air, sealing the depravity and hellish noise within.
She was on a short balcony that overlooked a pleasantly over-grown courtyard, with Japanese plants and Korean sculptures hiding in the shaded crevices like timid riddle-ranting beasts. She couldn’t fathom the cost of it all: ‘eye-watering’ was as close as she could get, as she lit her own cigarette and exhaled up into the cloudless Kensington sky.
“There you are.” A thin voice interrupted her peace, along with a flurry of chatter and music (Prodigal Son now, she thought with an internal eyeroll) that was allowed to escape by the briefly opened door.
“Here I am.” She said with a cold defiance. Chivers brushed down his suit and panted after his discombobulating sojourn through the party.
“You’re hiding from me.” The voice was firm, beneath a faux-joviality that Marianne abhorred.
“Don’t take it personally, I’m hiding from everyone.” She said from within a cloud of cigarette smoke that bloomed wildly around the two of them in the still, chill winter air.
“I’m your boss, I have to take it personally.” His voice was tight as it forced its way through lips that were clamped around his own cigarette, Marianne following the dancing tip with her lighter.
Marianne rolled her eyes and Chivers narrowed his own, from the smoke or a reflexive disdain, she could not tell.
“This is your party, right?” His voice had slipped back to its cockney roots, aided no doubt by the brandy that danced around the bulb in his weighty palm. “You should enjoy yourself.”
Marianne cringed but held back another roll of the eyes. “I hate obligation.”
“I am your boss. Take it as a demand. Enjoy yourself: have a dance, drink too much, make some bad decisions.” His laugh was a vibrating razor-wire of accumulated vice.
“It’s not my scene.”
“This is the scene, Mary!” He raised his arms to the forlorn, dumb sky as he yelled, and Marianne flinched at the distasteful explosion of noise and abbreviation of her name. “This is what we live for.”
“That feels like a more subjective pursuit.”
Chivers’ shoulders dropped and his drink lolled over the glass’s edges as his hands descended in melodramatic despair. “Why are you like this?”
“The patriarchy.”
“Christ.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, smoke pouring from his cigarette and smothering his forehead and thinning hair with a rolling, foreboding wave.
“He started it.”
“Look, if you don’t want to be here, then I’ve a perfect job for ya’.” He leaned in, his breath ripe and his stare violent, inches from her face. Marianne held her breath, a calm fear gripping her, a note of regret rising at the tone she had taken. “We need more.”
“More?”
“More Barnstormers. From our friend, The Creator.”
“That’s impossible.”
Chivers shrugged after a delay, almost in slow motion, his eyes unfocused and wandering. He’s drunk, she realised and fought with all of her might to keep her eyes from cartwheeling her distaste. “It can’t be.”
“It was all from the diary his daughter sold us. His estate will give us nothing else.”
“One series is not enough. Look at how celebrated it is!” He spun and pointed at the crowd within that had continued to grow as they were speaking: illustrators, editors, journalists, voice-actors, showrunners.
“It’s just a kids’ show.”
“Yeah, but it’s fucking bonkers. Crazy.” He smiled and his face retreated into premature horizontal lines. “Everyone watches it. They want to see what else will come up.”
“His estate won’t release anything else. Not with the state he’s currently in.” She felt hot, despite the gathering chill, flustered and angry, knowing this was becoming something that she would not be able to talk herself out of, if it ever had been in the first place.
“Then you go direct to the source.” The smile was a livid red-brown - some poor intern’s lipstick melded with the nicotine stains - around off-white teeth. “And that, my dear Mary, is a fucking obligation.”
The drive out of London was lonely and seemingly endless, and Marianne drifted in and out of sleep. It was a rolling into history, where the buildings lost any sense of modernity, and stood individually as rigid thumbed rock against the cloudless, cold sky. The green was a visceral reaction to the monochrome of the city, almost vulgar in its ubiquity, and every inch of leaning tree, or blooming bush, demanded a second glance, a song, and swoon. The sanatorium was made of equal parts decay and grandeur: leaning slightly, it loomed in three stories in an off-white that exacerbated any blemish to mark its age. Here he is, then. Marianne had never met The Creator, Mr. Childs, only his daughter and the family solicitor, but - from what she had heard - there was much to be anxious about. After writing a bestselling novel, he had been unable to write anything that might be deemed good enough; he had set his own bar to high. What followed were some cryptic, haunting diaries, and then complete silence. The public believed he had emigrated, retired from writing, but the truth was he had been committed after a mental collapse. Barnstormers had been concocted from a diary that a lackadaisical publisher had ushered through to release, but it was widely ignored as an avant-garde epilogue to an erratic career. He was forgotten. Just not by us, she thought as she stepped out of the car onto the gravel driveway, not without a hint of regret at having pursued the televisual adaptation in the first place. We, relentless entertainment machines.
“He’s having a good day.” The nurse said over her shoulder as Marianne was led through several lengths of thin, faded-white corridors. “He might not remember who you are, of course, but he’ll be glad of the company all the same.”
“Great.”
“You’re his…”
“…niece.” Marianne lied.
“Lovely.” The nurse faked a smile. “Just in here.” She eased open a door and directed Marianne inside, before walking at pace away from her down the corridor. Marianne frowned into the brightness of the room and tried to arrange her thoughts. Was the nurse desperate to stay outside the room? Or was she just busy? Did she know I was lying? But as her eyes accustomed to the light and the contents of the room took shape, all questions fizzed away as inconsequential.
“Madeleine!” A bright voice beamed, and the shape of a man approached.
“Hello?”
“You’ve come at last!” The voice was rich with emotion and the smiling face of a man appeared before her own. He looked younger than she had expected, a bright life glittering in his eyes, with a mess of red-brown hair and full, red cheeks. Tears clung to his deep eyes that betrayed an emotional exhaustion. He took her hand gently and guided her to a chair.
“Thank you.” She muttered, wincing into the overbrightness of the sun that beamed in through the floor-to-ceiling windows. “My name is Marianne.”
“Would you like tea?” He ignored her as he pottered about, moving items unseen from one surface to another, occasionally muttering and wiping.
“No, thank you.”
“Two sugars?”
“No, tha-”
“-I don’t know why I bother asking.” He smiled brightly as he placed a child’s plastic saucer and cup in her hands filled with nothing but sunlight. “I know you inside out, my dear.”
“It’s perfect.” Marianne lied, knowing that pressing against the delusion would only make it worse, make it something stressful and troubling, so she nodded and clutched her empty teacup, smiling at the man she had never seen before in her life as though they were lifelong friends.
“How long has it been?” Mr. Childs asked as he took his own seat opposite her.
“At least a lifetime.” She squinted a smile. “Do you not have curtains?” She nodded at the sun with her eyes almost completely closed.
“Indeed.” Mr. Child’s eyes narrowed for a moment and then the smile returned, “how’s the family?”
“Good.” Marianne restrained a grimace at her discomfort: she was in too deep. I need to get out of here, and quick.
“Well, what’s the latest?” He crossed his pyjama’d legs and smoothed out the material on top, nonchalantly.
“I actually came to speak to you about Barnstormers.” She watched his face closely, looking for a reaction to the word. Something that would confirm he was in there, aware of the real world, the past, his successes, his askew celebrity.
There was a frown, and his eyes moved in every direction before landing on her own again. “I don’t know what that is.”
“It’s from one of your diaries?” And then it clicked for her: he never called it Barnstormers that was the name devised by the writing and production team. She looked up to the ceiling and scrolled through her memories for the original title, scrawled vertically down the margin of his dog-eared notepad. “Weasel, Whack and Whim?”
Blood drained from Mr. Childs face as he rose to his feet. “Are they here?”
“Pardon?”
“Them.”
“Weas-”
“-DON’T SAY IT AGAIN.” He yelled and writhed on the spot, beginning to hyperventilate and wheeze.
“I’m sorry, I-”
“-I won’t go back there! I can’t! You cannot make me!” Tears rolled down his face and Marianne found her feet - her plastic cup and saucer tumbling to the floor - holding out her hands to steady him or calm him or reset him back to some form of sensibility.
“It’s okay.”
“And… CUT.” Mr. Child’s exhaled as a voice from somewhere outside made the sun explode.
“Good scene, my dear.” The man that was Mr. Child’s only a moment before tapped her on the shoulder and walked straight through one of the floor-to-ceiling windows, which put up no resistance. “She’s getting better, more natural.” He remarked off-handedly to someone in the shadows. Marianne followed him with her eyes, her mouth ajar. The windows weren’t windows at all, but a big gap where a group of people clicked and prodded and gathered their electrical equipment. The exploded sun was a light that had been clicked off, the sanatorium a construction of card and plastic. The nurse wandered past, slurping from a can of coke with a vacant smile on her face and a shining piece of metal in her hand that demanded all of her attention.
Then Chivers was in front of her with his smoky smile and thin eyes, “well done, my dear, quite the performance. You are learning, aren’t you?”
“What is this?” Marianne managed, but her voice felt abrasive and distant, there was a metallic taste in her mouth.
“This is living.” Chivers said, with a paternal edge that calmed her, his voice a familiar comfort she leaned into. He reached up behind her ear. “You can rest now, for a while.”
There was a click and then everything went black.