chapter006
Edie had stood outside the Owen family residence and rung the stiff brass doorbell many times, with various motives and turbulent misgivings, not so long ago.
She and Elliot had bickered at first, Edie certain he was a spoiled monstrosity. Then they’d become friends; then they’d fallen out over a misunderstanding where Elliot possessively warned his brother Fraser off Edie, as mutual feelings deepened. Then, amid the ambiguity, she’d pitched up after Margot’s funeral – full of perspective on carpe-ing the diem, and carpe-ing his diem in particular – and flat out propositioned him. Fierce romantic entanglement ensued.
As a sort of muscle memory, Edie was almost irrationally apprehensive now. She had to remind herself that this evening she had no reason to worry, beyond wanting to continue to make a good impression on her sort-of in-laws. (Did they really think she was good enough, given their son could be dating an Oscar winner or Chanel muse? She might root him nearer home, she supposed.)
It was a short distance from her house to detached respectability in the affluent, Prius-owning suburbs, and yet it might as well have been Wollongong for her expectation of ever returning to this address. Immaculate Victorian red-brick chimney pots contrasted against a darkening winter sky.
When Elliot answered, he unexpectedly looked so preoccupied and downcast that she had a terror he’d had some sort of second thoughts. They’d parted earlier on warm terms, after a second night of trying to have silent sex at two a.m. while three sheets to the wind. It was slightly frustrating but mostly very funny.
He offered a lacklustre ‘Hi.’
OK, that was so not Elliot-like that it was clear something was up.
He took Edie’s overnight bag from her and put it inside the door. ‘My parents are at a neighbour’s cheese and wine thing. They’ll be back by half six – we can walk over to the restaurant then,’ he said flatly, with tangible despondence.
‘Is everything OK?’ Edie asked.
‘You’ve not seen the papers, then?’
Edie swallowed. So, in actual fact, he wasn’t all right with the selfie bork? Oh God, depending on how they’d angled it, she supposed … And she hadn’t told him about the Mail calling her boss.
‘No?’ she said, untying the belt on her coat.
‘Sorry, I shoulda said, but I’ve been non-stop on the phone to the usual crisis managers. Not that it’s a crisis – it’s merely bullshit.’
‘What is?’ said Edie, now petrified.
Elliot held out a hand for her coat, and as he took it, he passed her his phone with his other hand.
Edie peered at a tabloid story on his handset. There was a grizzled-looking, gaunt, pensionable-age man sat in an armchair, staring into the camera bleakly, grey hair swept back and streaked with its original black. He looked like a survivor in a dystopia. In his hands was a framed photograph of an angelic, dark-haired toddler.
EXCLUSIVE: ‘MY SUPERSTAR SON IS ASHAMED OF ME.’
Elliot Owen’s father gives first interview about his estrangement from the Blood Gold hero and begs him to answer his calls.
‘Fuck!’ Edie exclaimed loudly. ‘Answer his calls?’
She skimmed down hurriedly, heart rate increasing as she did so.
‘Wild, isn’t it? Can’t take calls he hasn’t made,’ Elliot said. ‘Kind of works as a metaphor for everything untrue written about me. But they know I won’t respond, so they’re free to invent. I’m sure he was told what to say.’
Edie read on:
‘I messed up, horribly. I’d never say different,’ says the 62-year-old, in his spartan rented flat on the outskirts of Cardiff, a far cry from the luxury lifestyle of his 32-year-old son. Final notice bills are piled up on a side table, but David is adamant he doesn’t want a penny from Owen, who’s said to have netted ￡4 million from his latest action role. The widower is candid about his chronic alcoholism, which led to his fateful decision to get behind the wheel 29 years ago. His 27-year-old wife was killed instantly when he lost control of the vehicle in South Wales. Neither of them was wearing seatbelts, and their infant son, then called Carl, was found miraculously unscathed in the footwell. David, who sustained only minor injuries, was jailed for manslaughter. His son was adopted by a barrister and his wife in Nottingham, who changed his name to Elliot.
Edie looked up. ‘The way he’s “David”, he’s our pal, and you keep getting “Owen”, like you’re defending yourself in court!’
Elliot nodded.
‘I lost the love of my life and 30 years of my life for that mistake, but losing my only child is too much,’ David says, finding it hard to speak with the emotion. ‘All I ask is that Elliot – he’s still our little Carl to me – meets me, to hear my side of the story.’
Edie looked up again. ‘You did hear his side of it? You saw him in prison?’
‘Precisely,’ Elliot said. ‘He mentions that later on, but turns out it happened very differently to the way I remember. It’s all blackmail – facilitated blackmail. Give me money or I’ll keep saying you’re a cold piece of shit and damaging your reputation.’
Edie scrolled on.
David lost his job at a garage shortly before the accident and couldn’t afford to buy his infant son Christmas presents. They were driving to see his parents in the town of Tonypandy when the accident happened. David intended to beg them for financial help. ‘There’s no excuse for what I did that day, but I was a broken man, at rock bottom. I couldn’t provide for my family. I wanted to escape my problems, so I hit the bottle. I couldn’t have imagined that mistake would cost me everything.’
Edie paused. ‘You kill your wife and you almost kill your son, and you’re the victim?’
‘Of course he is,’ Elliot said. ‘I was wondering why he didn’t use the fact he’d no idea where I was or what I was called until that hack biographer told him I was a celebrity. Then I realised, it was because it’d show he didn’t give a shit what happened to me until then.’
Edie couldn’t quite believe the extent of the scumbaggery.
… The only time that David cries during our conversation is when he says: ‘The thought of never meeting Carl’s children, the only grandkids I’ll ever have … that absolutely breaks my heart. When I go to sleep at night, I think about how I’m going to die, having never seen their faces.’
‘As if you’d ever let him anywhere near your kids after what he did to you,’ Edie muttered, then regretted speaking unguardedly in her rush of defensiveness.
Your kids. Their eyes met. It was a totally unbroached topic between them. Edie was thirty-six, and she knew they’d have to tackle it at some point reasonably soon. This very much didn’t feel like the moment.
‘Well, quite,’ Elliot said, after a pause.
There was only the soporific ticking of a large clock to soundtrack the tiny yet telling silence that ensued. Breaking eye contact to carry on reading was welcome.
… Owen gave an interview to the Guardian earlier this year, having become a patron of a charity for children in adoption and foster care. In it, he revealed he and David had no relationship by mutual agreement. ‘Not true,’ David says, shaking his head. ‘He met me once in prison after he got famous, to tell me not to embarrass him by talking to the newspapers.’
Owen also told the Guardian that he considered his adoptive parents his ‘mother and father in every single meaningful sense.’
‘That cut like a knife, truth be told,’ David said, explaining he wasn’t warned that Owen was going public about his background. ‘I know they’re well off and have provided for him, but blood is blood.’ He stumbles as he says this, aware of the heavy irony that Owen’s beloved alter ego Prince Wulfroarer in the hit television series Blood Gold was heroically loyal to his family crest. As David speaks, a man clearly laden with regret and not in good health, you can’t help hoping that Elliot Owen finds some mercy for his real-life relations while there’s still time.
‘Haha, oh my God, this is such manipulative drivel,’ Edie said. ‘What the fuck has a character you’ve played got to do with it? The show also had killer bats who could survive fire – do they think that’s eerily significant?’
‘It’s hinting: Elliot’s a big fake, he’s got all the power and not this poor old shattered abandoned guy who can’t pay his gas bill,’ Elliot said. ‘None of it has to make sense – it builds a mood. Also, the reporter no doubt thinks what I do of my dad. But it’s better copy to trash me as some ice-hearted VIP.’
Edie scrolled further and reached an image of a striking young woman with shoulder-length brown hair, eyelashes spider-legged with mascara. It had the bleaching light and impassive expression of a passport booth photo. Edie put the parents’ faces together and made Elliot: the hard angles and high cheekbones of his father’s pinched scowl and the feminine, generous prettiness of his mum’s features.
Owen’s mother, Suzanne. The star was almost three years old when she was killed in the car smash that he miraculously survived.
Edie looked up at Elliot in concern, now saying nothing. She could see he knew exactly what part she was reacting to – he already knew the article by heart.
‘I’d never seen her before,’ Elliot said, in a low voice.
‘Never?’ Edie said.
Elliot shook his head.
Finally, Edie fully understood the nature of this particular hurt. Elliot knew who his father was: he’d met him; he’d confronted that disappointment. And Elliot had been forewarned that some sort of tell-all was coming, even if he hoped his birth father wouldn’t do it. His mother was an unknown quantity, and she’d always be that way.
‘I don’t think the adoption agency had much, if anything, to give my parents, bar a handful of Polaroids of me in a crib. When I found out the truth of this when I was eleven years old, I was very, very anti knowing any more. So she’s only ever been a name to me. It hadn’t occurred to me they’d use a picture, stupidly.’
‘I can’t imagine how strange and … obscene this must feel,’ Edie said.
‘Maybe I’m strange and obscene. Who avoids ever seeing a photo of their own mother?’
‘You weren’t given the choice!’
‘There’s a whole person I’ve disregarded. A person who gave birth to me. For all I know, she did what she did in getting into that car because she was scared of my father? Maybe she was drinking because he was? I mean, he’s not telling the truth about me and him, is he?’
‘No.’
His phone started to vibrate and flash, and Edie looked down to see an international number.
She’d never known Elliot drop a call before, but he took it, put it down on the hall table, and pulled Edie towards him.
‘I wish I’d never done this job,’ he said, face buried in her shoulder, and she realised he was crying. ‘I fucking hate what they’re able to do to me. All I do is put on masks and take them off again and avoid real life. In return, they get to say what they want about me. I’ve spent so much time being angry today that none of it’s true, but maybe it is? Am I Carl or am I Elliot? Is Elliot a mask? I don’t know who I am, Edie.’
She held him tightly and said: ‘I do.’