Prospects

Below is the opening gambit of my novel, Prospects, published in 2024. If you like it, let me know and I'll send you a free eBook. 💕

“We are such little stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded on a sleep.”

- Prospero

Day 6: The End

The brunchers sit at sun drenched tables measuring out their lives in green juices and matcha lattes, ordering egg white omelettes with half an avocado on the side. “Is this a California avocado?”

To the casual observer the mid-morning scene at The Castle is seductive, elegant, maybe glamorous, but the lounge offers a counter-narrative. It spills the secrets from the night before. A ray of sunlight dances across a red wine stain and a cigarette burn. A cleaner removes an Instagram handle written in Chanel’s Opportunity across the glass of an arched, steel-framed window, more suited to a church. Gucci loafers kick prescription pills under a patio table where they perform a scrum in the protective grooves of the checkerboard tiles. A waiter discovers a set of pornographic polaroids secreted behind the terracotta pot of Canyon Snows. “How old could she possibly be?” he asks the Maître D’, distressed.

She has spent many hours in these rooms, just a stride or two from the mid-century house in the Hollywood Hills She lived in all those years ago. She celebrated her 21st birthday here, when a pop star sent over a round of tequila shots, but She was too drunk to notice or to thank her properly.

She had met the Director in these vaulted rooms, first with San Pellegrinos under the professional auspices of working together, then with Martinis and a Sonoma Pinot Noir when they toasted his successes, with vintage champagne while they were lovers, and with his lawyer to sign the settlement and the NDA. There is no appropriate liquor for washing down an NDA.

Her Mother made this her base and refuge for a short time while she retreated from London to recover from traditional cancer treatments—surgery, chemotherapy, radiation—and drove up and down to a clinic on the Mexican border for those of the non-traditional kind—shark fin injections, bee venom, coffee enemas. “How was your morning, Mum?” She asked when She called to check in. “I’d be much happier if they stopped delivering my macchiato via my rectum.”

Once, while they were sat in the corner of the lounge, enjoying the quiet and privacy afforded by the high-backed sofas, She had watched a murderous, crimson flush creep out of her Mother’s blouse, fingering her gold jewellery and throttling her neck. “I think I’ve had too many of these,” her Mother had exhaled through pursed lips, indicating the cyanide-laced apricot kernels someone said would keep the cancer at bay.

The Director and her Mother had even sat here together one afternoon, drinking High Balls by the pool while he shared stories about meeting Roman Polanski on the red carpet of a film festival in Europe, breathless and magnetic with boyish excitement, no doubt hyperbolic in his eagerness to impress. Her Mother had been quite taken with him and sent the gift of an antique match striker with a note that read, “If you are going to chain smoke cigarettes while visiting a woman with terminal cancer, you can at least do it with style.” Adding a post script, “I have bought a hat.”

This morning, She is in the taciturn company of a Mulberry handbag so coveted as to require a seat of its own, a selection of dog-eared books about early California, and her phone. She scans photographs of movie stars to find and scrutinise a black and white picture of the inaugural Academy Awards ceremony in 1929: a few hundred filmmaking pioneers celebrating one another’s work over a modest repast of broiled chicken on toast and string beans in the Blossom Ballroom of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, just a stone’s throw from The Castle. She uses her index finger and thumb to enlarge the image and inspect individual faces, but the pixillation is insufficient to distinguish Mary Pickford from Janet Gaynor, Charlie Chaplin from Jesse L. Lasky.

She is dressed in shades of blue, braless, loose jeans pulled over a cornflower camisole with an oversized cobalt cardigan draped across her shoulders. She is comfortable in the liminal space between these juxtaposed worlds of Saturday night and Sunday morning. She welcomes the hangover, a more familiar feeling than any of those that swept over her in the hours after her own diagnosis. There is a certain nostalgia to a good hangover and a particular pride to be found in it. At least She went out. There have been too many nights in; too many months of commitment to the singular, heroic goal of the transplant, now off the surgeon’s table; too many sacrifices that had not paid off.

As She had prepared for her trip, one of her brothers had challenged the purity of her motivations. “There is no such thing as altruism,” he had said. “It’s alright—it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Most people would give an arm and a leg for a month in LA to revisit their youth. You’re willing to give a kidney.” Perhaps he was right, She thought. There are no heroes.

An Allen’s hummingbird has found himself the wrong side of the patio doors, inside rather than out. He is regal and magnificent, puffing his crimson breast as a gentle breeze lifts his ornate golden collar to reflect the sun. He is, She surmises, just an English robin trying to reimagine himself in Los Angeles, donning his red carpet attire and readying for the photo-call. The tiny bird settles on a low chandelier, just above a woman in head-to-toe Chanel, his tail feathers fluttering threateningly, the Maître D’ feigning ignorance.

A Waitress wears a satin slip dress that skims the skin of her thighs and frames half a dozen circular dark bruises across her upper back, each about four centimetres in diameter, purple moons rising above her shoulder blades. She catches her eye, “Bloody Mary with Belvedere, please. Double shot.”

As She waits for her restorative, She breathes in the room and sharpens her focus on lips and mouths, teeth and tongues, attuning her ear to the brunchers’ conversations. Two themes emerge. First, “the business”: box office, back-end deal terms, bankability. “This film is the one—this is my Unforgiven.” Second, health, the body, and what you might call “wellness”: what to eat and drink, how much weight has been gained or lost, the reduction of wrinkles and enhancement of breasts, the preferred pilates class and the newest trend in supplements. “I’m telling you! I feel like I’m twenty-five.”

She scans the faces of the congregation and clocks the more familiar ones. Among them, an Actor who has recently been accused of drunkenly soliciting a seventeen year old boy for sex sits sheepishly in the corner insisting, “Just a glacier water for me, thank you.” A grotesque Producer talks too loudly about a Napa Valley vineyard and his plans to produce a mythic Nebuchadnezzar in honour of his wife’s forthcoming birthday. He ogles the waitress, draping a thick arm over the back of his chair and forcing her to brush against his sweaty hand with her buttocks as she passes the table, a thread of her sheer dress getting caught on a gaudy, gold Rolex watch and a multi-coloured yawa band. An award winning playwright is perplexed by his West Coast anonymity, his eyes searching the assembly for some hint of recognition as he pretends to read the Back Story section of the LA Times.

These fuckers. Dining out on their success and their rude health while She has neither.

*****

“A profound meditation on celebrity, illness, failure and death…. And a brilliantly funny book.” Sarah Gavron

“An achingly beautiful book.” Simon Beaufoy

“Prospects holds a harsh and humorous mirror up to our society’s race for health and wealth in a game that often leaves us sick and poor. The book made me laugh out loud many times, and moved me to tears in others. A poignant, brave and witty page turner about a woman haunted by reality whilst chasing dreams.” Lily Cole

If you enjoyed reading these few pages and would like to read more, please send me an e-mail by reply and I’ll send you a free eBook. Or you can order a copy from unmentionable on-line stores or, preferably, directly from me here. I have a lot of copies… really, really, really a lot. 📚

Thank you! And, as ever, please share this with any other reader who might enjoy it.