Chapter 3

SOFIA BRADBURY

‘Tell me where I’m supposed to be going because I can’t bloody remember,’ Sofia Bradbury snapped.

‘Again?’ Rupert replied, exasperated.

Sofia was in no mood to be patronised. The painkillers and anti-inflammatory tablets she’d swallowed at breakfast along with a tumbler of brandy were doing little to ease the discomfort of the spinal osteoarthritis in her lower back. It also didn’t help that her hearing aids were malfunctioning, making some words hard to hear.

‘The hospital, remember?’ he continued with a note of weariness.

‘Please assure me you’re in the car now?’

‘No, I’m in a bloody spaceship. Where do you think I am?’

‘I’ll send the address to your GPS.’

‘My what?’

‘Oh Jesus. The map on your screen.’

Sofia watched as coordinates appeared on the centre console and calculated the route her vehicle was to take from her home in Richmond, London. The car’s gullwing doors automatically locked and the vehicle began its journey, the only sound coming from the gravel of her lengthy driveway crunching under the thick tread of the tyres.

‘And why am I going there again?’ Sofia asked.

‘I’ve already told her once this morning,’ she could just about hear Rupert saying. She assumed he was addressing the boy with the effeminate mannerisms interning in his office. Rupert went through assistants with alarming regularity, she thought, and they always shared a similar appearance – skinny T-shirts, skinny jeans and skinny torsos.

‘Rupert, you’re my agent and my PR; if I ask you a question, I expect an answer.’

‘It’s the meet-and-greet with the young cancer patients.’

‘Oh yes.’ A concern sprang to mind, causing her brow to furrow.

However, her facial muscles were still too paralysed from last week’s visit to the dermatologist to feel anything move above her mouth. ‘This is not going to be one of these events where nobody knows who the hell I am, is it?’

‘No, of course it’s not.’

‘Don’t “of course it’s not” me like it’s never happened before.

Remember when I went to that school in Coventry and they were all too young to recognise me? It was humiliating. They thought I was Father Christmas’s wife.’

‘No, as I explained to you earlier, this group are patients in their early teens and I’ve been assured they are all huge fans of Space & Time.’

‘I finished filming that a decade ago,’ Sofia dismissed.

‘No, it hasn’t been that long, has it?’

‘I may be seventy-eight, but I’m not bloody senile yet. I remember it as clear as day because it was the last time you got me an acting job on prime-time television. I’m hardly likely to forget it, am I?’

Despite reading the script a dozen times, even while filming, Sofia had no idea what the storyline was to the popular sci-fi show. All she grasped while acting against a green screen – and running away from an off-camera man with a tennis ball attached to a stick – was that an alien’s head would be added to the shot in post-production. Not that Sofia had ever watched the finished product. She rarely viewed her own work, especially in her advancing years. She didn’t take any satisfaction in seeing herself age.

Lately, her acting work had become sporadic, and the parts offered, stale. Sofia had tried to remain relevant by waiving her fee for a handful of film student projects, and she’d toured the country in acclaimed regional productions of Macbeth and The Tempest. She had also been offered huge sums of money to join the casts of two long-running soap operas. But she

didn’t relish playing grandmothers clad in charity shop costumes and little make-up, and had turned both parts down without hesitation.

Instead, she lifted her spirits by lifting her chin and her breasts with the help of a Harley Street surgeon’s knife. Now, the wrinkles and creases on the backs of her hands were the only tell-tale signs of her true age.

‘Oh Oscar, what have you eaten?’ she scolded the sleeping white Pomeranian lapdog lying by her side and tried to waft away the toxic smell he omitted with her hands. He briefly opened one brown eye, shuffled his body further towards her thigh, then closed it again.

Sofia unhooked the clasp of her vintage Chanel handbag and removed a compact mirror. She applied another coat of her trademark crimson colour to her lips and watched, displeased, as it bled into vertical lines under her nose. She squinted at how pale her grey eyes had become and made a mental note to ask Rupert’s assistant to research medical procedures that might reduce their milky hue. With her veneers, enhanced cheekbones, hairpieces and breast augmentations, momentarily she wondered if all that was left of the original Sofia Bradbury was her ambition.

‘Do you have any new scripts for me to read?’ she asked Rupert.

‘A couple have appeared but I don’t think they’re right for you.’

‘Surely I should be the judge of that?’

‘Well, one is playing an aging prostitute with terminal cancer in a long–

running hospital drama and the other is in a music video for a girl group.

You would be … playing a ghost.’

‘Oh, for the love of God,’ Sofia sighed. ‘So they either want me on my deathbed with my legs apart or returning from beyond the grave.

Sometimes I wonder what the bloody point of it all is.’

‘I’ll send the treatments to the car now and you can read them en route.’

By the time Sofia had rolled her eyes, the characters’ outlines were available to view on her windscreen, which at the flick of a switch turned the glass into a panoramic monitor and television. She only needed to read the first couple of lines of each character description before dismissing them.

It wasn’t a wage that she needed; it was recognition and appreciation.

And annual appearances at sci-fi conventions or TV chat shows would not suffice. It riled her that the British Academy of Film and Television Arts had yet to offer her a lifetime membership despite her having first trod the boards at the age of seven.

Do they know? she asked herself suddenly. Have there been rumours?

Does BAFTA know what you’ve done so they’re punishing you? She hated that voice. It had haunted her for almost four decades. She shook it from her head as quickly as it appeared.

Sofia sank her aching back into the seats and pressed a button to massage it with deep, penetrating vibrations. She poured herself another brandy from the refrigerated armrest. She decided the best thing about driverless cars was being able to drink and drive legally. She ran her manicured fingernails across the plush calfskin. Then she tapped the Macassar wood panelling and dipped her bare feet into the thick Peruvian vicuna wool carpeting. By dispensing with her driver, she could afford a top-of-the-range Imperial GX70, the most expensive autonomous vehicle in production. She had no idea how a driverless car operated and she didn’t care – as long as Rupert ensured she got from A to B remotely and on time, that was all that mattered.

‘Rupert?’ she asked tentatively. ‘Are you still there?’

‘Of course. How can I help?’

‘Will my … will … Patrick … be joining me today?’

‘Yes, his account is still linked to your diary. He expressed an interest in attending so I’ve a car booked to pick him up from the golf course. He’ll meet you at the hospital.’

Sofia let Rupert’s response hang in the air knowing the complications her husband’s appearance might bring. ‘I’ll speak to you later,’ she said quietly, not waiting for his reply before hanging up. Her nails were embedded in the palm of her hand before she realised she was close to drawing blood.

‘Good morning, Sofia,’ a male voice she didn’t recognise began.

She glared at the console, assuming she had touched something accidentally and answered a phone call. ‘Rupert? Why are you putting on a silly voice?’

‘It’s not Rupert,’ the voice replied. ‘And it might surprise you to learn that your vehicle is no longer under your control.’

Sofia laughed. ‘It’s never under my control, darling. That’s why I have people. To make sure things are controlled for me.’

‘Alas, I am not one of your people. However, I am in charge of your destination.’

‘Good for you. Now, can you stop playing silly beggers and put Rupert on please?’

‘Rupert has nothing to do with this, Sofia. I have programmed your car to take you on an alternative route this morning. And in two hours and thirty minutes, it is likely that you will be dead.’

Sofia sighed. ‘I’ve read the script, darling; I’m not playing a bloody dying whore on a Saturday night hospital drama. I am Sofia Bradbury and I think Sofia Bradbury is worth a little more than that.’

‘You will hear from me again soon.’

The car fell silent again.

‘Hello? Hello?’

Sofia glanced at the map on her windscreen and it was only when she saw icons for the M25 and M1 that she realised she was leaving London and heading north, and not towards a hospital in Essex.

‘Rupert?’ she said. ‘Rupert? What in God’s name is going on?’

Suddenly, Sofia narrowed her eyes and cocked her head to one side like a penny had dropped. A broad smile spread across her face. ‘Rupert, you sneaky little devil, you did it, didn’t you? You got me on that programme.’

She felt a twinge in her back when she moved to the edge of her seat.

She winced as she looked around. ‘Where have they hidden the cameras or are they just using the one in the dashboard?’

There were just three television reality shows that Sofia had ever considered participating in. However, Rupert’s attempts to organise meetings with producers had been repeatedly rebuffed. Sofia had been judged too unfit to dance and too old to stay in a Peruvian jungle for a month. But Celebs Against The Odds was the new water-cooler show that everyone was talking about and which every entertainer whose career had stalled was desperate to appear on.

In the opening episode of each series, ten famous faces were snatched without warning from their day-to-day routine. They were whisked away to an unknown destination to compete in a series of physical and mental tasks.

Cameras recorded their every move for a week. A year earlier, Sofia had watched in envy as Tracy Fenton, her acting rival for more than four decades, had been one of the chosen few. She, too, had been taken while in her car, and her popularity resurgence led to her being cast in two high-profile network dramas. Now it appeared the Celebs Against The Odds producers wanted Sofia.

She balled her fists to contain her excitement – her comeback was imminent, she could feel it. It wasn’t going to be by playing aging grandmothers in soaps. It was by being herself, beamed into homes, vehicles, telephones and onto tablets every night of the week.

Sofia removed the mirror from her handbag again and checked her make-up from all angles, dabbing, smoothing and contouring where necessary. Then she took another painkiller and washed it down with a swig of brandy.

‘This is it, Oscar,’ she said proudly as she petted his head. ‘Mummy’s on her way back to the top. Just you wait and see.’

She held her smile firm and looked directly into the camera, and for the first time in years, she wasn’t afraid to stare at her own image as it appeared on the screen before her.