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      He had opened the door to Eppstadt’s favourite word: ‘Maybe. I don’t know. We’d have to see. But the way I look at it, you haven’t got much to lose getting the work done anyway. You’re a heart-throb. An old-fashioned heart-throb. They want to see you kick the shit out of the bad guy and get the girl. And they want their heart-throb perfect.’ He stared at Todd. ‘You need to be perfect. Burrows can do that for you. He can make you perfect again. Then you get back to being King of the Hill. Which is what you want, I presume.’

      Todd admitted it with a little nod, as though it were a private vice.

      ‘Look, I sympathize,’ Eppstadt went on, ‘I’ve seen a lot of people just fold up when they lose their public. They come apart at the seams. You haven’t done that. At least not yet.’ He laid a hand on Todd’s arm. ‘You go have a word with Dr Burrows. See what he can do for you. Six months. Then we’ll talk again.’

      Todd didn’t mention his discussion about Dr Burrows to Maxine. He didn’t want the decision process muddied by her opinion. This was something he wanted to think through for himself.

      Though he didn’t remember having heard of Burrows before, he was perfectly aware he was living in the cosmetic surgery capital of the world. Noses were fixed, lips made fuller, crow’s feet erased, ears pinned back, laugh-lines smoothed, guts tucked, butts lifted, breasts enhanced. Just about any piece of the anatomy which gave its owner ego problems could be improved, sometimes out of all recognition. Traditionally of course, it had been women who were the eager and grateful recipients of such handiwork, but that had changed. One of the eighties muscle-men, who’d made a fortune parading a body of superhuman proportions some years before, but had begun to lose it to gravity, had returned to the screen last year looking more pumped than ever, his perfect abdominals and swelling pectorals – even his sculpted calf muscles – surgically implanted. The healing had taken a little while, given the extensiveness of the remodelling. He’d been out of commission for five months – hiding in Tuscany, the gossip went – while he mended. But it had worked. He’d left the screen looking like a beaten-up catcher’s mitt, and come back spanking new.

      Todd began by making some very circuitous inquiries, the sort of questions which he hoped would not arouse suspicion. The word came back that the procedures were far from painless. Even legendary tough guys had ended up wishing they’d never invited the Drs to mess with them, the process had been so agonizing. And of course once you began, if you didn’t like what you saw you had to let Burrows make some more fixes; wounds on wounds, pain on pain.

      But Todd wasn’t discouraged by the news. In fact in a curious way it made the idea of undergoing the procedures more palatable to him, playing as it did both into his machismo side and a deep, unexplored vein of masochism.

      Besides, was there any pain on God’s green earth as agonizing as reading Daily Variety and finding that once again you weren’t in its pages? That other actors – names sometimes you’d never heard of – were getting the scripts, the parts and the deals that would once have dropped into your lap as a matter of course? There was no pain as sharp or as deep as the news of somebody else’s success. If it was an actor older than himself that was bad enough. But if it was a contemporary – or worse, somebody younger, somebody prettier – it made him so crazy he’d have to go pop a tranquillizer or three to stop himself getting morose and foul-tempered. And even the happy pills didn’t work the way they had in the old days. He’d taken too many; his body was too used to them.

      So: what to do, what to do?

      Should he sit on his slowly-expanding ass and start to avoid the mirror, or take the bull by the horns and get an appointment with Dr Burrows?

      He remained undecided for about a week. And then one evening, sitting at home alone nursing a drink and flipping the channels of his sixty-inch TV, he came upon a segment from the telecast of last year’s Oscar ceremony. A young actor, whom he knew for a fact was not one of the smartest bunnies in town, was receiving his third Oscar of the night, for a picture he had – at least according to the credits – written, directed and starred in. The latter? Well there was no disputing that. He was in every other frame of the damn picture, back-lit and golden. He was playing a stuttering, mentally unstable poor boy from the Deep South, a role which he claimed he had based on the life of his father’s brother, who had died tragically at the hands of a lynch mob that had mistaken him for a rapist. It was all perfect Oscar-fodder: the ambitious young artist bucking the star system to tell a tale of the human spirit, rooted in his own family history.

      Except that the truth was neither so moving nor so magical. Far from having been lynched, the ‘dead’ uncle was still very much alive, (or so gossip around town went) having spent twenty-two years in jail for a rape that he did not to this day contest. He had received a healthy pay-back from the studio that released the picture to stay conveniently quiet, so that his story could be told the Hollywood way, leaving the Golden Boy with his ten-thousand-watt smile to walk off with three Oscars for his mantelpiece. Todd had it on good authority that his directorial skills extended no further than knowing where his Winnebago was parked.

      He wasn’t the only one aspiring to snatch Todd’s throne. There were plenty of others, chirpy little cock-suckers swarming out of the woodwork to play the King of Hollywood, when Todd had yet to vacate the role.

      Well fuck ’em. He’d knock them off their stolen pedestals, the sons of bitches. He’d have the limelight back in a heartbeat – all that glory, all that love – and they’d be back on the casting couch in a week with their fannies in the air.

      So what if it cost him a few weeks of discomfort? It would be worth it just to see the expressions on their pretty little faces when they realized they’d got greedy a decade too early.

      Contrary to recent opinions, the King of the Heart-throbs was not dead. He was coming home, and he was going to look like a million dollars.

      Chapter 4

      On the day Todd had booked to see Burrows for a first consultation, he had to cancel at the last minute. ‘You’re not going to believe my excuse,’ he told the receptionist, ‘but I swear it’s the truth.’

      ‘Go on.’

      ‘My dog’s sick.’

      ‘Well that’s not one we hear very often. So, gold star for originality.’

      The fact was that Dempsey, his mutt, was not looking too good that morning; he’d got up to go out into the back yard for his morning piss and he’d stumbled, as though one of his legs was numb. Todd went down to see if he was okay. He wasn’t. Though he still put on a happy face for his boss, his expression looked strangely dislocated, as though he was having difficulty focussing on Todd.

      ‘What’s wrong with you, boy?’

      Todd went down on his haunches in front of the dog, and stroked his ears. Dempsey growled appreciatively. But he felt unsteady in Todd’s arms; as though at any moment he might keel over.

      Todd called Maxine and told her he’d be at the vet’s for the next few hours.

      ‘Something wrong with that flatulent old dog of yours?’

      ‘You’ll be flatulent when you get to his age,’ Todd said. ‘And yeah. There is something wrong. He keeps falling over.’

      He’d had Dempsey eleven years. He’d bought the dog as a pup just before he’d started to shoot Gunner. As a consequence the dog’s first real experience of life beyond his mother’s teat was being carried around a movie studio by his owner and adored; all of which he thereafter took as his God-given right. Dempsey had been with Todd on every set since; the two were inseparable. Todd and Dempsey; Dempsey and Todd. Thanks to those early experiences of universal affection he was a confident dog; afraid of nobody, and–unless somebody was afraid of him–predisposed to be friendly.

      The vet’s name was Dr Spenser; an ebullient black woman who’d been looking after

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