Turbulence/Party for One by Troy Francis

 Turbulence/Party 

for One

By Troy Francis 

Well, that’s it - Fabian’s done for. And not before time. It was inevitable he’d be convicted, - no surprise at all. Which is precisely why I have this flute of Armand de Brignac Brut Gold poised and ready. And now the man on the telly has confirmed what we knew was going to happen all along - time for a little celebratory drink!

I didn’t go to court today. Too stressful. I’m emotionally bruised, you see - that’s on top of my pre-existing childhood trauma  - and Dr Michael, who I visited last week in his consulting rooms at 57 Harley Street, told me I really shouldn’t attend the summing up. Could amount to a ‘trigger point’ apparently. So he packed me off with some Xanax and told me to rest up at home. And here I am, reclining on the B&B Italia, and it’s not turning out to be a not too bad evening.

A party for one, you might say!

Turbulence. That’s how I met Fabian. No, we weren’t members of the mile-high club! Turbulence was a play Fabian wrote and directed back in 1982. You might even remember it.  Probably not, though. But it ran for twelve weeks at the Apollo that summer - a rather dull summer, as I recall it - and I had a small role as a trolly dolly. Oh, it was frightfully exciting at the time - my first performance in the West End! The moment when I crossed the bridge from ‘model’ to ‘actress’ never to return (or so I hoped). 

Fabian Skinner seemed like a dirty old man right from the start. I was 19 and he was 32. I’d been doing photoshoots for catalogues - tights and underwear mainly. I even did a shoot with Bailey once. The pictures didn’t get used, unfortunately, but there was still that sense of 1960s glamour about it, even though it was the dreary late 70s really. And Fabian - well, he had that whole thing down pat, didn’t he? - hanging around Soho with Bacon, Jagger, Marianne, Anita and all the rest of them. His films weren’t exactly popular, but they were very fashionable in the right circles. The Damned (based on the novel by Huysmans) was the most shocking, getting curtain-twitching Daily Mail readers up-in-arms and making an underground hero of Fabian along the way. 

But notoriety alone doesn’t pay, and Fabian was finding it difficult to get funding for bigger movie projects, and that was when he got the idea of doing a play instead. Well, the overheads are lower, you see. And he had slept with so many people in the West End that securing a venue wasn’t going to be a problem. So he wrote Turbulence in 1981. God knows how he got the idea to set a play on an aircraft - who can demystify the creative process of an auteur? - but it turned out that the idea had wings, if you’ll forgive me. Three couples, each at different stages of their marriages, discuss their relationships as the plane goes through severe turbulence and threatens to crash land. The biggest expense in the whole production was creating a mechanised ‘floor’ that would shift up and down, throwing us poor actors all over the place. 

I was the second air hostess - not the most prominent role and with only a few lines, but it was a great start. Or so it seemed at the time. But it was then that Fabian’s true nature started to come to light. It was the parties, you see. Showbiz parties, every night of the week! At the end of rehearsals Fabian would stand on a stool and command - yes, command - everyone to attend a ‘social’. These would either take place at his house in Chelsea, or above a pub in Soho, or occasionally at some nightclub or other.  These days it’s exhausting just to think about it - but I was only 19 at the time and the whole thing seemed so divinely thrilling to me. 

Can you describe the incident in your own words, Ms Saunders? Yes, abso-bloody-lutely I can, your honour. It was May 1982 - quite a hot day, as I remember it - when we all piled into Cafe de Paris in Leicester Square. Late night, down that long, decadent staircase right into the heart of the action. Everyone was there: Simon Le Bon, Mick Jagger, Boy George. There were even rumours that Bowie popped in, but I didn’t see him. Oh, the music and the lights and the champagne - the champagne fizzing on my tongue making the whole scene around me seem to sparkle too. Quite lovely. I felt so alive! So bloody alive. A marvel to be here, on this planet, in this great city, surrounded by all of these magical people. And me, the daughter of a builder - albeit one who’d made a few quid. But in the early eighties it really did feel as though class were a thing of the past, as though it had melted away on this new wave of New Wave, punk disco and glamour. 

How naive I was. 

I wore the red dress: that one that made everyone stop and look. Oh yes, I knew the effect it had, and I don’t mind confessing that it made me feel even more giddy than the champagne. All those looks from the menfolk. Most of them you wouldn’t touch with a bargepole of course, but who cares? It’s the sense of power when you’re young. Things were different back then: all through our childhoods we young girls had been taught that men were the strong, dominant, powerful ones. And well, look at that power now, shaking and then crumbling entirely just because of that cheap red dress, a cheap, highly flammable little thing from Topshop. 

Fabian wasn’t immune either. There were five of us actresses in the play, including big names like Carly Abbott, but I was - and I say this with all the humility bequeathed to me by my passing years - the prettiest. Well, he’d cast me because of my modelling photos - nothing to do with any acting ability I may have had. And yes, I’d seen him checking me out in rehearsals - men can never quite hide those sly looks can they? And tonight he was as drunk as a lord - completely blotto. Not an unusual circumstance as he’d often have a couple of liveners in the French House in the mornings before coming into rehearsals, but today he was a wreck and so when he came up to me and started slurring and drooling all over me I really wasn’t surprised. 

‘That damn dress’, he said. ‘You look an absolute cracker in that damn dress’. 

I coloured - as they say in Victorian novels - and smiled politely, but his blood was clearly up since he continued. 

‘You really are a marvel, Sienna,’ he said, slurring and throwing an arm around me. ‘You’ll have the world at your feet if you carry on like that.’ 

‘Thank you,’ I said, disentangling myself. Well, I wasn’t going to be slobbered all over like that. ‘I’m going to go and find Lilly now,’ 

(Lilly was another one of the actresses). 

I turned my back on him and was about to walk off when . . .  THWACK! I heard it before I felt it, his hand striking my ass. Not that it was painful - a mild sting easily overwhelmed by the alcohol I’d imbibed - but imagine my mortification. I tuned and glared at him - his stupid, fat, booze-reddened face grinning back at me like that slap had been nothing at all. 

Of course, the sky didn’t fall in. The music - Kajagoogoo, as I recall - continued. People laughed and smiled and danced as I pushed my way through the crowd, angry and humiliated. 

But I had no recourse. Nothing happened to men like Fabian in those days. They could do what they liked, as though women were an inferior species. No accountability whatsoever until nearly forty years later. 

But then they do say revenge is a dish best served cold, don’t they?

A snide text from Simon my brother - a garrulous, querulous and generally onerous person. ‘Congratulations on your partial win’.

Partial win? They threw the bloody book at him! Just because minimal damages were awarded, so what? I don’t need the money. It’s his apology I want - his humiliation on the steps of the crown court. ‘I, Fabian Skinner, apologise unreservedly for my obscene behaviour towards Sienna Saunders 39 years ago’. 

No, more than that - I want him to prostrate himself, to castrate himself if at all possible, the shit. 

I’m not saying that the entire trajectory of my career was affected by what he did, but it certainly didn’t help. We limped along afterwards, didn’t we? The movie thing never worked out - a thousand auditions, a thousand honeyed promises and zero roles. A hundred TV parts -  as the mistress or the girl who is the second to be murdered at the country house right after dinner - and lots of supporting actress gigs in the West End. A botched singing career (one album, Femme Fatale, 1997, reached number 73 in the charts) radio presenting and a regular spot on Loose Women.

But I am absolutely convinced to the very core of my being that if that ‘man’ (I hesitate to use the word) had not abused me in the way he did things would have been VERY different.

I must say that the Brut Gold is sliding down nicely. To augment it or not, that is the question. A gin and lemon perhaps? Yes, that’ll go down nicely, methinks. 

I try to call Edward. It  goes straight through to voicemail of course. Well, what do you expect? - fuckboy’s are going to fuckboy. I met him at some fragrance launch at Selfridges a few months back. Curly hair. Pectoralis excellentia. 32 years young. Some kind of personal-trainer-stroke-Instagram-model - goodness knows how the young make their money these days. Although actually he explained it to me - right now he’s being sponsored by a company specialising in tooth whitening products. All he has to do is post videos of himself flashing his pearlies and they shower him with cash. Imagine! A shame it wasn’t so easy when I was a kid. Even lockdown hasn’t touched him - his work is all online, you see. 

A glug of Slingsby and I call him again. No answer. I don’t leave a message. Carly - yes, I’m still in touch with her -  says I shouldn’t chase. Treat them mean, keep them keen. And, well, he’s twenty-six years younger than me. Twenty-six! I won’t say it was a mistake but . . . I’m such a terribly silly person sometimes. Plus now that lockdown restrictions have eased goodness only knows what he’s doing out there - and with whom. You shudder to think. 

‘A partial win’. The bloody nerve. But Simon’s always been the same. Always one to grasp the upper hand and never let go. You wonder sometimes if we’re real siblings, even. We look alike, that’s true. But we are as different in temperament as it’s possible to be. And he’s always gone out of his way to sabotage me. A prime example being that infamous time when he told dad about me and John - John being my Oxford Educated and thoroughly pleasant Nigerian boyfriend at the time. Well that didn’t go down very well with Cyril (father) did it? Nor was it intended to. Simon had tipped him off, which is why he materialised at just the wrong moment when we were getting to know one another better on the sofa in front of Tomorrow’s World. A lot of shouting and screaming and nonsense, and then John stalking out -  ‘well if that’s what you think of me then I’m definitely never coming back here again’ - me chasing after him, and catching a glimpse of Simon’s smug face as he sat at the kitchen table. The bastard. Unhappiness breeds unhappiness, you see. Always seeking to undermine. Never happy until all light has been extinguished everywhere . . .

Ah, here he is - on the telly now! Fabian’s just about to make his speech, right there on the steps of the crown court, just like I’d visualised it (they say that visualisation works, don’t they, and it looks like they’re right). Look at him - nervous is a suit that doesn’t fit him so well. You’ve lost weight, haven’t you Fabian? Was it all the stress? Poor boy! Right, let’s hear it, then. Your mea culpa. Your de profundis. Your grovelling apology to me and all womankind. Your tearful recognition of the pain and trauma you’ve caused - of the failed female lives you and your kind have begotten. 

This is my time, the moment of my recompense, and I will savour every second of it. Another glass of Brut Gold? Just the ticket. 

‘Good afternoon. I would now like to make a brief statement in light of my conviction . . . ’

Once upon a time, many years ago now, I was sitting in a pub near Charing Cross with old Cyril (dad), a smoky, cavernous place with little underground booths amid the dusty wine bottles. He was drinking a scotch - naturally - and smoking his usual Mayfair. Gaunt and thin with bright eyes, still, but the lines on his chin and forehead looked like ridges carved in stone.

It was four p.m. and we were many hours into what had turned out to be something of a  boozy lunch when I turned to him and asked if he’d ever really loved me - as a child or now. Well, he took a drag on his cigarette, looked at me for a long moment then looked away again and said . . . precisely nothing. Not a word left that man’s lips. Nada. Silence, that was all. 

I have never in my life felt so diminished before, as though I was a small black dot becoming ever, infinitesimally smaller every second ad infinitum. 

‘ . . . the pain and suffering my actions have caused to Sienna Saunders and many other women . . .’ 

Oh look - the boilerplate rhetoric continues apace. So this is my moment of glory - the moment of recompense when the greatest wrong of my life is righted. This. And of course it means nothing. Absolutely nothing. Nothing will change, for better or worse. Life will continue as before. No cosmic reordering, no celestial reset - just the same old existence. That  same old turbulence. 

Well, at least this champagne passes the taste test. Time for another, methinks. It’s nearly the end of the day, after all. They say you drink to forget - but some memories are impervious even to the demon drink. Like when that thin-lipped solicitor read out the will after Cyril’s death. The majority to Simon, naturally - well, he has a wife and kids to take care of. And for me? A pittance. Even the word derisory would be derisory. And Simon’s mirthless smile, mocking me. 

But it wasn’t about the money, oh no - it was about what it meant. That Cyril had never loved me, and that I was going to have to find a way to live with that. Every day for the rest of my miserable life on this doomed, spinning globe.