Comedy | Horror | Stardom | Acting | Hollywood
Comic Horror
or Davina’s Wall of Fame
This was the thing about Bruce; he was happy living in a portable cabin out in the wilds, the exact whereabouts he asked that I keep private. By the end, you’ll understand.
Bruce lived in portable dwellings to escape the banality of living in a community. The ceiling was nicotine-stained, of course, and the carpeting was of the stick-to-your-feet variety. Yes, it is an interesting dwelling. But there was more to this house than met the eye.
Lurking within the shadowed wilderness was Bruce’s family secret, Davina — hidden away from prying eyes, a ‘recovering’ actress, pricklier than your skin after two hours on a fast-tan sunbed — and married to a bilious individual, devoid of endearing traits. Both permanent fixtures behind the walls of Bruce’s portable home have been axed into obscurity.
But Bruce, ever the icon of purity, sense, and strength in his crazy, crazy world, healed demons who wandered freely. Davina was, as Bruce discovered, demonized by Hollywood.
Before Davina took up acting, she lived in Scarborough, the one in England, not the one with a fair, dressed gaudily, like a Xmas bauble — elaborate, shiny, and effervescent — and occasionally opened a garden fete in the town, ever the queen of drama, and when not opening a garden fete was often seen behind twitching curtains, her neighbor’s reported, but she was really acting up the part of a sleuth, catching herself on celluloid; a heroine; a secret-agent; a double-agent rather. But in Scarborough, the one in England, she was a cuckoo, unhinged and desperate, if ever there was one.
When the work of opening fetes in the town disappeared, Davina was ready for Hollywood. “I’m here to find out who I am,” said Davina, “I will try and fail regardless.” Bruce thinks she got that message wrong.
Davina sang a Dixieland chorus for the next two weeks, so she did.
Bruce told me, whispering because we were in the room behind which wall Davina was, “I heard her, like a foghorn — singing without any training. It’s kind of like jumping into a bullring without having ever faced a bull, all you got is wind and piss. The bull kicks you in the head soon as look at you,” Bruce sighs, “She was never bright.”
Davina was never put off; she was going to be an actress. “You know, she never once wondered if she’d done the right thing by going Hollywood.” Bruce looked hard at the wall. Then, he told me what a movie director had asked:
“What kind of actress do you want to be?”
Davina shrieked, thinking she was made and spilt her tea on the dog, an already unforgiving beast that had taken to eating her size 9 stilettoes. Devina replied dramatically, “I want to be a sleuth.”
Bruce shook his head. “Twenty or so years of physiological and social calamity stood in her way. But she couldn’t just try and fail, it would be sanctifying a taking a trip to Disneyland without any kids after a fourteen-hour flight, and discovering she’d left her handbag at home.”
Droplets of sweat burst through Bruce’s white hair.
I asked Bruce if Davina had ever fallen in love.
“When she was working, she felt great, great. But one day, we were having lunch together when she asked me, ‘Why do I never pull?’ she asked meritoriously, which caught me a little by surprise as, by this time, she was almost sixty and still wearing poppy socks. This was a teaching moment because Davina could lift her pendulous buttocks individually, easing the pressure from sitting down too long. I kept eating monotonously, understanding nothing but smiling knowledgeably as if I did.
In the end, it was the right thing to do. I didn’t want her, or the bilious fool who believed in her, never quashing all her romantic ideals, never embarrassed, never annoyed, to live to the point of realizing she had failed.
It was on a visit, and I wasn’t expecting both of them to hear a dog get savaged by another outside, that I knew Davina’s demise would sound the same way.
Looking at Davina’s turquoise-coloured nails and feeling vicariously cliched and rhetorical, I snapped. A cup of tea is more beneficial than a failing career. Then I took the bilious one first, insecure, conspicuous, and lacking the moral courage to tell Davina she was cuckoo.
I swung the axe straight down through his skull. Split it clean in half, he never felt a thing.
As Davina’s brother, kin of the same father, Jack Torrence, I was able to give her one last shining moment.
Because: Some places are like people: some shine and some don’t.*
“This portable cabin, it shines.”
*From the movie, The Shining
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