Not Dead Yet

aftershave lotion, skin balm, an electric toothbrush and several luxurious black towels on the heated rail. There were moisture droplets inside the shower cabinet, indicating it had been very recently used, and a strong, lingering smell of a man’s cologne filled the room.
    ‘What is the owner’s reason for selling?’ she asked.
    ‘He’s a detective, I understand, with Sussex Police.’
    She said nothing.
    ‘This was his marital home,’ he went on. ‘I understand he’s separated from his wife. I don’t know any more, really. I can find out for you if you’re interested?’
    ‘I’m not interested.’
    ‘I’ve got a cousin in the police,’ he went on. ‘He said the divorce rate’s very high among coppers.’
    ‘I can imagine.’
    ‘Yeah. I suppose it’s their lifestyle. Lot of shift work. Late hours, stuff like that.’
    ‘Of course,’ she said.
    He led them downstairs, into the narrow hallway and through into the sitting room, which was decorated in a minimalist style with futon sofas, and a low, central Japanese table. In one corner stood an antique jukebox, and on the floor in front of it was a mess of old vinyl records, some out of their sleeves, and several untidy piles of CDs. ‘This is nice, big windows and a working fireplace,’ he said. ‘A good family room.’
    She stared around, while the boy continued playing his game, an uneven beep-beep-beep, beep, beep-boing coming from his device. In particular she stared at the jukebox. Casting her mind back to her life of ten years ago. Then they walked through into a large, open-plan kitchen-dining room.
    ‘I understand this used to be two rooms which the owner knocked into one. It could of course be kept like this, or changed back to a separate kitchen and dining room,’ he said.
    Of course it could! she thought. And then she noticed the goldfish. It was in a round bowl on the work surface close to a microwave, with a tall plastic hopper for dispensing food, clipped to the side.
    She walked over and pressed her face close to the bowl. The fish looked old and bloated, opening and closing its mouth in a slow, steady, gormless rhythm. Whatever golden orange colour it had once had was now faded to a rusty grey.
    The boy suddenly looked up from his game, followed his mother over and peered into the bowl, too. ‘ Schöner Goldfisch! ’ he said.
    ‘ Wirklich hübsch, mein Schatz! ’ she replied.
    The estate agent watched her curiously.
    ‘Marlon?’ she whispered.
    The fish opened and closed its mouth.
    ‘Marlon?’ she repeated.
    ‘ Warum nennst du ihn Marlon, Mama? ’
    ‘Because that’s his name, mein Liebling! ’
    The agent frowned. ‘You know its name?’
    Could a goldfish live this long, Sandy wondered? Over ten years? ‘Maybe,’ she replied.

53
    ‘Larry, we have a bit of a problem with the script,’ the film’s veteran director Jack Jordan said, peering up at the massive chandelier in the Royal Pavilion Banqueting Room. The craggy, world-weary film director, a few days shy of his seventieth birthday, seemed even more gloomy than usual. His eyes, shrouded by the long peak of his baseball cap, looked like two reluctantly prised-open molluscs.
    Having forked out his last $100,000 to keep the production going, Larry Brooker was in no mood for yet another tantrum from this chronic worrier. He ended his phone call to their sales agent, who had the great news that he had just managed to sell Romanian rights in The King’s Lover for 50,000 bucks. The agent assured him this was a very good price for Romania. Yeah, right, it might be, but at their current rate of cash burn, 50,000 bucks was barely enough to keep the pre-production going for four more days; and that was before deducting the 20 per cent sales commission that would be sliced off the top.
    Brooker was feeling particularly spaced out and irritable today – a combination of jet lag, and the sleeping pill he had taken to counteract it which felt like it was only kicking in now, some fifteen hours after he had popped it. Problems. There were always problems on productions. As the producer, you had to keep the whole thing together, and you were always up against the wall of the schedule, with every conceivable event you could imagine conspiring against you to get less footage in the can each day than you needed – and as a consequence to send you soaring over budget. Production on any movie became a morass of many different, simultaneous problems melded into one giant