In Flickering Light #2
By the time I reached the comfort of the Horse & Hay, my memories of the screening room were already misting over.
Maggie said I looked a little peaky, and let me finish what remained of her spritzer in a couple of gulps.
The words for what I’d seen wouldn’t come, so I attempted to laugh it off with a couple of cheap jokes—one, I’m ashamed to say, at Barb’s expense.
While our friends around the table laughed, I couldn’t quite shake my feeling of unease, the sense that I’d witnessed something so strange in that darkened room that my mind was struggling to process it.
I managed to keep a couple of pints down, but then I persuaded Maggie to leave.
On the walk to the bus stop she turned to me and placed her hand on my forehead.
“What’s up with you? You looked white as a sheet when you turned up, and not much better now. Do you think you’re coming down with something?”
Try as I might, the words wouldn’t come. She held tight to my hand all the way home.
I tried to describe it to her that night—the static on the screen, the faces, the tendrils of silver light—but I was babbling so badly that it must have sounded like I was having a stroke.
Maggie held me for a while, and that seemed to make it recede, if not leave me completely.
I remember she phoned Barb’s flat in Twickenham but received no reply.
Both of us began to assume that I’d had some kind of episode, that being the only logical explanation for my hysterical state.
I didn’t speak to Barb the next day at the studio, but I saw her from a distance, fixing the makeup on one of the lead actors.
Maggie had lunch with her, and told me later that she’d seemed normal.
She’d mentioned the previous night, just to see her reaction, but Barb had simply blushed and laughed it off.
“You’d have thought I’d caught her and Purslane necking behind the bike sheds,” Maggie said.
A few weeks later the shoot ended, and before we knew it Barb had passed out of our world.
Maggie still kept in touch with her from time to time, but a couple of years later even that stopped.
By then we had moved into the bedsit in Wimbledon together, so the distance may have been of our own making.
Nobody likes to be the hanger-on. I never quite forgot what had happened that night, but it faded with the months, and then the years.
Occasionally Barb’s name would come up and I’d feel a stifling blanket of fear fall over me, but even that would pass.
It was only by chance that our paths crossed again, almost ten years after The Long Game wrapped.
I hadn’t worked for Will Purslane in the interim, although that was hardly surprising.
As you know, his star was well and truly buried after his follow-up to The Long Game — Lane End —bombed at the box office.
He pulled a Howard Hughes and withdrew from the public eye, although without Hughes’s panache.
We’d bought the house in Norbiton by this point, and Charlie and Alison had both entered our lives, although Ali was still in nappies and clinging to us like a koala.
I’d managed a rare night out in town, catching a blues act at The Grey Horse with Alan Sandford, who’d got me that first job on Mind the Gap .
Purslane’s name had come up in conversation as we waited for the band to take the stage—there were rumors of legal action being brought against him by a group of previous employees, Janet Lane among them.
It did not escape my notice that they were all women.
We both had a few more pints than we’d intended, and when we said our farewells, he slapped me across the back so hard it stung.
Looking back, I wish I’d taken him up on his offer to sleep on his sofa.
I knew I’d get grief from Maggie if I left her alone with the kids, though, so we said goodbye and staggered our separate ways.
It was as I passed under Kingston Bridge, on the path following the river, that I saw her.
I didn’t make the connection at first, partly because of my drunken state, but also because Barb had changed in the intervening years.
We’d all changed, I suppose—but she was barely the woman she used to be.
I’ve mentioned that she used to turn heads, and her appearance had always been something she prided herself on.
The figure stood under the bridge’s arches clearly didn’t care about how she looked.
Her hair was straggled and matted, thickened with grease and dirt, while the clothes she wore were several sizes too big and riddled with holes, as if something had been chewing on them.
As for her face, it was partly hidden behind a clump of hair that fell across her cheek, but what I could see was skull-like and emaciated, the skin paper-thin and pulled back over the bones.
She had a couple of teeth missing at the front, one of them cracked off, leaving a jagged nub behind.
There was still just enough of her previous self for me to make the connection after a few seconds, but only just.
“Barb? Barbara?”
I stopped opposite her, trying to convince myself that I’d made a mistake.
When she held out her hands toward me I saw that the nails were dirty and cracked, one pulled off completely to reveal raw pink skin beneath.
Even through my own miasma of alcohol and sweat, I could tell that her whispering breath stank of rot.
“Can you spare some change? Anything would help, please, if you can spare it. Some change?”
I started rooting around in my pockets without thinking, then stopped.
“Barb? It’s me. Peter. You used to be friends with me and Maggie? We worked for Will Purslane together.”
At Purslane’s name I thought I saw her flinch, but it was hard to tell beneath the baggy, shapeless clothes. There was recognition in her eyes at last, though. She pulled her hands back and tucked them under her arms, looking at me intently for the first time.
“Peter? You look different. I’m not one to talk, though, am I. I’m…I wish you hadn’t seen me like this. Not my best, is it? Is Maggie well? Are you still together?”
And just like that we slipped back into idle gossip and domestic news, as if we were two friends catching up over a cup of coffee.
I told her about our kids, and saw the first smile flicker across her lips.
Maggie’s fashion line was starting to take off, which gave us something to talk about other than the obvious.
Not once did I ask her how she had ended up begging for change beneath a bridge, although I assumed drugs were involved, and at least one toxic relationship along the way.
Even as I thought it, I remembered Purslane, and what I’d seen that night.
“Did you see me?” I asked without warning, crossing a line that I’d promised myself I’d left far behind. “In the studio, the screening room? When I walked in on…whatever? I don’t know if?—”
“I saw you,” she interrupted, the clearest sentence she’d spoken.
“It isn’t what you think. I can’t explain, but Purslane—Will—opened my eyes to something magical.
He did, truly. It’s in here now,” she tapped the side of her head, “and here,” her wrists.
“Nothing seemed real after that. I think the real me is waiting back there in that studio. Someday soon I’ll wake up. I look forward to that, Peter.”
She slumped suddenly, as if her strings had been cut, and I was too drunk to do anything other than lunge forward and try to catch her.
Her fall was broken by a mat of stacked cardboard boxes and a filthy, stained sleeping bag, which she pulled across her shoulders as she turned her face to the wall.
As I bent down to tuck a five-pound note—the only cash I had—under the sleeping bag, I noticed a strange silvery residue crusted around her earlobes, as if something metallic had leaked from them and dried.
There was a smell of damp, unwashed clothes too, and something sharper, like bleach but more pungent, dirtier.
I drew back and staggered off down the path, pausing after a few steps to empty the contents of my stomach over the railing into the river.
I received the cold treatment from Maggie the next day, and rightly so.
Once I was sufficiently recovered to offer an apology, I told her about Barb, and the state she was in.
I could tell it upset her, more than I’d expected, so I promised to dig out some old clothes—and some more money—and take them to her after work.
The idea that we had somehow been complicit in Purslane’s abuse left a bad taste in my mouth.
As I drew close to Kingston Bridge the following evening, I could already smell that rancid bleach smell, stronger than before.
There were a few other stragglers on the path, most making their way home from work.
I saw a couple of them cough and cover their faces.
We’d talked about letting Barb come into our house to use the bathtub, but I’d put my foot down, fearful of allowing a junkie into a home with two small children—now I wondered if I’d been too hasty.
Maybe her need was greater than our fear.
As it turned out, though, the offer came too late.
Drawing nearer, I could make out her form bundled up in the dirty sleeping bag, and my first assumption was that she’d fallen asleep or passed out again.
When I shook her shoulder there was no response, so I pulled the top of the sleeping bag down a little, hoping the fresh air might bring her round.
Her face was rigid, the mouth and eyes wide open, her skin even paler than before, a deathly gray.
She must have died shortly after I’d talked to her, and I couldn’t help wondering how many people had walked past her during that time, unseeing, uncaring.
It filled me with sadness that the lively, vivacious girl we’d known only ten years earlier should have fallen so far off the grid that her passing went unnoticed.
I pulled the sleeping bag back over her head, but before I did, I took one last look at her face.
There was that strange silvery crusting around her nostrils too, and tiny grains of it in the corners of her eyes.
Her mouth was stuck wide in a frozen scream, and it struck me suddenly that I’d seen it before.
I couldn’t be certain, but there was a residual memory of that exact image from the night I’d stumbled upon whatever she and Will Purslane were doing in the screening room, branded into my memory along with the rest of that terrible incident.
I’d never mentioned it to anyone, not even Maggie, but I could have sworn that her emaciated, screaming face was one of those that I’d seen, briefly, in that sickening image they’d been projecting onto the screen.
When the ambulance finally came, I gave them my contact details and left them to it, eager to hurry away from the stench under the bridge.
I’d hoped that would be the last time I thought of Purslane, but I was disappointed.
As you’ll know, the case was brought against him at the Old Bailey two years after I found Barb’s body.
The Met had been granted warrants to search his flat and several garages he owned around the city, where they discovered a now notorious haul of snuff tapes and pornography.
The press reported that the find included a number of homemade films of previous employees, recorded without their knowledge or consent.
You’d have to read to the bottom of the list to find the entry for a film projector of unknown origin, the only markings in German.
The projector itself was destroyed by the Metropolitan Police following the trial.
When I recall it from time to time, as I sometimes do, I hope they buried its ashes deep beneath the ground, many miles from Barb’s lonely grave.