Popcorn

Chapter Seventeen

Wayne was still swinging the severed head about in disgust. He was clearly moved by the tawdry service Bruce was getting from his employees. He saw it as symptomatic of a national malaise, and held the head up as evidence of declining standards in general.

‘I mean, shit, man! That’s what’s wrong with this fuckin’ country. People just don’t do the damn jobs they’re paid for. No wonder we can’t get ahead of the fuckin’ Japs. Wouldn’t catch no fuckin’ Jap screwing up on his duty like that, man. No way! This motherfucker deserved what he got, Bruce. I did you a fuckin’ favour.’

On the table stood a lava lamp in the shape of a rocket. In a gesture which amply summed up the contempt he felt for the dead security guard, Wayne impaled the head on the lamp.

Bruce gulped down his rising nausea and Brooke began quietly to weep. They stared, transfixed, as the great misshapen tumours and globules of red lava slowly rose upwards through the electricgreen liquid in the lamp and disappeared into the severed neck, waited a moment and then slowly reemerged from the head and dripped down again.

‘Please,’ Bruce muttered.

‘What’s that, Bruce?’

‘Please,’ he repeated. ‘I don’t know who you are but-’

‘Oh, we’re just nocount white trash, Bruce,’ Wayne said, crossing over to rejoin Scout on the couch. ‘We ain’t nothing. Nothing at all. The only memorable thing I ever did in my whole life was kill people.’

But it was plain to see that Wayne rated himself rather highly. He was puffed up with pride like a psychotic peacock. He gripped Scout’s thigh proudly, as if to reassure her that he was only being selfeffacing out of politeness.

Scout was proud too. ‘We’re the Mall Murderers,’ she said. ‘I’m Scout and this is Wayne.’

Bruce and Brooke said nothing. Scout was a little disappointed. She had hoped her announcement would have more impact. Fearing that they hadn’t understood her properly, she repeated the main point. ‘We’re the Mall Murderers.’

Scout need not have worried. They had heard her the first time.

They should have guessed, of course, Bruce particularly. Two insane murderers? A man and a woman? Big fans of his work? People whose own activities had been consistently linked with his own for the previous month and now in his house? It had to be them. But why? Their connection was entirely an invention of the media. In reality, Bruce had nothing whatsoever to do with the Mall Murderers. This was small comfort, though, because murdering people with whom they had nothing to do was the Mall Murderers’ stock in trade.

‘Are you going to kill us?’ Bruce asked.

‘Now what kind of question is that? Me and Scout here never know who we’re going to kill till we done it.’

‘It just happens,’ Scout added, swinging her legs like a little girl talking about some game – although little girls don’t tend to have guns lying on their laps, except sometimes in Bruce’s movies and now, of course, in his lounge.

Silence returned.

Conversation was getting no easier. Again Scout felt it incumbent on her to try and oil the social wheels.

‘This is so great, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘I mean, us all here together, just sitting talking.’

Bruce was scarcely listening. His mind was racing. If these were the Mall Murderers, then he and Brooke could be dead literally at any moment. He had to do something: every second left alive with these two psychos was borrowed time. He looked at his big desk, which was positioned across the room, behind the couch on which Wayne and Scout were sitting.

In one of Bruce’s movies there would have been a closeup on the top righthand drawer and a music sting: that drawer matters.

Scout’s voice rattled on, scarcely penetrating the edge of Bruce’s thoughts.

‘Because Bruce here is Wayne ’s hero, and I’ve always admired girls like you, Brooke. So beautiful and all. Except I can’t deny I think it’s a shame about all this cosmetic surgery you ladies get done, because these days you don’t know who’s really beautiful and who’s just a nasty old rich bitch.’

Had Bruce moved? If anyone had been looking they might have thought he had. Before, he had been standing by the wall intercom. Now, he seemed to be a little closer to the desk.

Wayne was talking now. ‘Hell, it don’t matter none about cosmetic surgery, does it, Scout?’ he said. ‘I mean, if you look beautiful, you are beautiful, don’t matter how it happens.’

‘I just think it was kind of nice when a girl was what she was and that was it,’ Scout protested.

Bruce was definitely moving now, if incredibly slowly. He was making his way around the room towards that desk, that drawer. He glanced around to see if anyone was watching. Wayne and Scout were still concentrating on each other, their voices just babble inside Bruce’s head. Brooke was staring at the floor. Only one pair of eyes seemed to be fixed on Bruce, the eyes of the security guard, popping out of his severed head. It was almost as if the head was willing Bruce on. Like some creature in an insane Frankenstein experiment, it seemed to sense a man who might avenge its bloody murder. For a moment Bruce caught those eyes and they stared at each other, sharing two extreme closeups. For that moment Bruce half imagined those eyes alert in a living head, a head kept functioning by the great bloody globs of lifegiving lava that journeyed up its neck and down again.

Bruce made a supreme effort to pull himself together. His terror was making him lightheaded. The voices of Wayne and Scout, the bright eyes in the dead face and the nearcertainty that death was just a heartbeat away were all crashing about his head and preventing him from thinking. Bruce was not a weak man: his glib exterior concealed a steel core. Still only in his midthirties, he was currently the most successful movie director in the USA. This was not something that could be achieved without considerable strength of character. None the less, Bruce’s current situation was on the verge of defeating him.

‘It’s a movie,’ a voice inside him whispered. ‘Just be in a movie.’

Bruce told himself he’d seen it all a hundred times before. He was in control. He was always in control. ‘It’s just another movie.’

He tore his gaze away from the dead head and viewed the room in a wide shot. Nobody was looking at him. He was in deep background. Infinity focus.

‘How about Brooke here? Do you reckon she’s real?’ Wayne was saying. He leant back into the cushions of the couch, relaxed, and clearly feeling at home. Scout cast a critical eye over the woman sitting opposite.

Brooke shrank before her gaze. An observer might have thought it strange how absurd a really sexy evening dress can look when the person wearing it is cowed and scared. One has to carry glamorous, sexy clothes off with confidence, otherwise it’s possible just to look like a sad, desperate tart.

‘Real? Get out of here!’ Scout exclaimed. ‘Why, Brooke here’ll have been cut up and stretched back and sucked out and pumped up and I don’t know what. Ain’t that right, Brooke?… I said, ain’t that right, Brooke?’

The star of Bruce’s movie was nearly at the desk now, nearly at that special drawer. All he needed was a few more moments of inattention from his tormentors.

Bruce did not realize it but he had a costar in his drama. It might not have appeared that Brooke was aware of his tortured journey across the room, but she was. While staring at the floor, she had caught fleeting shots of Bruce’s feet moving across the back of frame. She knew that Bruce had some kind of plan and that Wayne and Scout must remain diverted. She knew that it was up to her, that she must enter the conversation and enter it arrestingly. She raised her head and stared Scout in the eye.

‘It’s none of your fucking business.’

Scout and Wayne were certainly surprised. Brooke had shown little spirit up to this point, but now she was coming out punching. Her voice was hard and tough; it commanded the room. Bruce seized the opportunity and advanced a whole step.

Wayne glared at Brooke. ‘Now that is where you are wrong, Miss High and Mighty fuckin’ bald snatch Daniels. It is our business on account of the fact that you belong to us. You hear? You be fuckin’long to me ‘n’ my baby. Now, answer my baby’s question. Unless you think you’re too good to talk to her. In which case, you can talk to this.’

Wayne raised his machinepistol to his shoulder and pointed it at Brooke. Her POV was the gaping end of the barrel with Wayne ’s grinning face behind it, chin resting against the stock.

But beyond Wayne ’s head, in deep background, Bruce was still edging through the rear of frame.

Brooke knew she must keep Wayne ’s attention. Bravely she met his stare, fixing on to his eyes as they hovered above the blackhole snout of the gun.

Slowly he closed one eye in a cheerfully grotesque wink. He was taking aim.

Brooke attempted not to flinch, which was not an easy task. ‘All right, pervert, if you must know’ – it was terrifying to risk annoying him in this way, but she knew that above all she must keep the focus on herself until Bruce got to that desk – ‘I’ve had the wrinkles round my eyes and lips dealt with, some cellulite removed from my thighs, I have had breast implants and my navel has been remodelled.’

As she spoke Bruce opened the drawer. Wayne was never going to be more distracted than he was at that moment. It was Bruce’s best chance, and he took it.

He watched his own hand in closeup, pulling open the drawer. He watched the hand disappear inside.

The drawer was empty.

As Bruce frantically felt to the very back, there should have been a musical sting. Something harsh, like a scream, or, seeing as it was Bruce’s movie, perhaps something ironic, like a sit com ‘wah wah waaaah’ but discordant and sinister. There was no sting, however, because Bruce had stopped playing his desperate little movie game. His defeat was too real, too complete.

‘Oh, Bruuuuce.’ It was Wayne ’s voice, nasty and sarcastic. ‘Is this what you’re looking for?’

Wayne had not even bothered to turn round to face Bruce. All Bruce could see was the back of Wayne ’s head above the cushions and his hand protruding over the arm of the couch. From one finger of Wayne ’s hand hung a small pistol.

‘You see, Bruce, I can smell guns,’ Wayne said, still without bothering to turn round. ‘I smelt this one a while ago. I went over to fix me a drink and I thought, mmmm, what’s that smell? I like it. I do believe it’s a gun. And guess what? It was! Can you believe that?’

Bruce did not answer. Not for the first time that night, he was incapable of speech.

‘Also, I must confess that it is not uncommon for a man to keep his piece in the top drawer of his desk. For an Oscarwinning filmmaker, Bruce, you are not very original.’

Bruce shrank a little inside. For a moment there he’d been a fighter, he’d had a plan and a chance. Now he was a fool, casually outwitted and outmanoeuvred by the dregs of a small town truck stop.

It was six a.m. and Bruce’s appointment with nemesis was well under way. His old life was already over. Even if he survived his ordeal, nothing would ever be the same again.

Outside in Los Angeles, of course, and Americawide, like him or loathe him Bruce remained the lion of the hour. His Oscar triumph was still a top story on the morning news. Sadly, not the top story. It would have been so under happier circumstances, but the massacre at the 711 store was necessarily number one on all the channels. Even in California, fourteen dead while doing a bit of shopping is big news, particularly if surviving witnesses are prepared to swear that after they had committed the massacre the perpetrators actually coupled, like two wild animals on heat, against the Slurpy Pup dispenser.

‘Sex and death in America today,’ said the reporters, as the ambulances squealed off into the dawn. ‘It could come straight out of a Bruce Delamitri picture.’ An observation which coincidentally segued very nicely into the preedited Oscars report.

‘I stand here on legs of fire,’ said Bruce.

‘Why’d the guy have to make such a vacuous speech?’ the news editors complained. ‘My God, if he’d said something about violence and censorship, would we have had him this morning!’