Free The Thief of Time by John Boyne Page A

to drink that night and alcohol does bring out the schoolgirl in her. She called him the next day and invited him out for a drink; he declined. So she faxed him and invited him to dinner; he passed. Then she sent him an e-mail with her address and the promise that if he came around ‘NOW’, he would find the front door open and her lying naked on a Persian rug before an open fire, and that a bottle of champagne was chilling in an ice box even as she typed. This time he laughed and phoned me up to tell me what my girlfriend was up to. I was disappointed but not surprised and took his place on the date, arriving at her apartment to find her in exactly the position she had described. She looked surprised to see me but recovered well and tried to pretend that she had thought I might call around and wanted to surprise me. I told her that she was lying, that I didn’t mind particularly, but that it was all over between us now and it would be best if we returned to a strictly professional relationship.
    The following Sunday, she wrote an article in a prominent Sunday newspaper – ‘Tara Says: Just Say No!’ – claiming to have recently been involved in a relationship with a famous soap star (unnamed, but the description made it obvious to whom she was referring). She alleged that their sexual activities had bordered on the illegal and that she had enjoyed acting out all of this young man’s fantasies and forcing him to act out hers. She chose to end their affair, she said, only when he tried to drag her into his world of alcohol, heroin and cocaine abuse. ‘I saw the look in his eyes as he offered me the silver spoon and Bunsen burner of disgrace’, she wrote hysterically, ‘and knew that I could never be the woman he wanted me to be. A woman who was as much of a mess as he was. A woman who would do anything for that next fix, sell myself on the streets perhaps, rob old ladies, push drugs on to babies, a worthless nothing. I took one look at him and shook my head. “Tara says: Youre dumped,” I told him.’
    Tommy – the innocent party in all of this, although everything she imagines about his private life is no doubt true – was summoned into the offices of his executive producer on the Monday morning after publication where he was informed that had Ms Morrison actually named him he would have been fired immediately. As she hadn’t, and as they couldn’t prove that it was him she was referring to, he was to consider himself on an official warning. He had a responsibility to his fans he was told, the young girls who dreamed of marrying him, the teenage boys who were following his battle with testicular cancer with dread. They acknowledged that he was far and away the most popular character on the show, but said they would have no qualms about involving him in a car crash, or having him shot, or giving him AIDS if he stepped out of line again.
    â€˜You mean my character, of course,’ said Tommy. ‘You’d do those things to my character.’
    â€˜Yes, whatever,’ they muttered.
    The incident had preceded a particularly bad couple of months in Tommy’s life, where the tabloids were hounding him at night to see what he was digesting, inhaling, swallowing, smoking or injecting, whom he was kissing, touching, fondling, molesting or screwing, and exacerbating the problems which he had already developed through the lifestyle they had forced upon him in order to help their circulation. Although I expected nothing more from one of the Thomases, I was less than happy with Ms Morrison for her part in his troubles and made my feelings clear to her at a stormy meeting a few days later. I’m not one to lose my temper, but by God it got the better of me that day. Since then, we had kept a distance from each other and, far from being concerned about her departure for pastures new, I was pleased by the idea. With us, she was a big fish in a small pond.