Page 91 of Private Lives

And now? Now he was standing in the living room at his Chelsea Harbour apartment, crapping himself about calling an Edinburgh comedy venue and speaking to the manager about the possibility of hiring out the space.

‘Stop being such a knob,’ he said out loud, striding over to the phone and snatching up the receiver. Unused to making his own professional phone calls, he quickly tapped in the number and waited, wondering what he should say.

Hello, it’s Sam Charles. No. That didn’t cut it. That phrase used to open doors, get him reservations in the best restaurants; now it sounded grubby and embarrassing. ‘Sam Charles’ used to be synonymous with ‘top actor’ and ‘British heart-throb’; now it was synonymous with ‘love rat’ and ‘thug’. He couldn’t have buggered it all up more if he’d actually tried.

He jumped as the front door opened and Mike McKenzie almost fell in, carrying two straining carrier bags of shopping. ‘Hey there, bro,’ grinned Mike. ‘Thought you’d gone out. I’m doing fish pie for lunch, that okay?’

Sam put the phone back in its cradle and watched Mike thump the bags down on the kitchen counter and start unloading: celery, a bunch of basil, some fancy olive oil, free-range eggs. Sam winced. It was only a bag of shopping, but it seemed to be loaded with criticisms of his life. His empty kitchen, his single status, his inability to cook. In fact, if he was honest, he wouldn’t have had a clue where to find the nearest supermarket – it had been years since he’d bought a pint of milk. And now his friend – the famous burn-out and mental case, no less – was here looking after him, making him a pie because he couldn’t be trusted to do things for himself.

But that was why he had come back. To change. To make a fresh start, to begin a new way of living. Back in his London flat, everything felt more real. From his wrap-around penthouse window he could glimpse the King’s Road, Battersea Park and Stamford Bridge, home of his beloved Chelsea Football Club. And while he couldn’t exactly go shopping, watch a match or go for a run – he’d been besieged by paparazzi when he had popped out for a packet of cigarettes – it still felt more like home than LA had ever done.

He felt a pang of regret at how he had neglected his birth city in the pursuit of fame. When he had moved to LA seven years ago to star in a short-lived pilot for ABC, he had promised himself he would return to London every three months. But as time slipped by, and he got bigger, more successful, there seemed increasingly little reason to do so. His parents had both died a decade earlier, which had severed his greatest tie with the country, whilst he had less and less in common with his old friends from the capital’s acting circuit, most of whom had disappeared into non-acting jobs whilst they were ‘resting’ from their sporadic theatre and soap-opera gigs.

‘I’ll just get this in the oven and then we can get back to work,’ said Mike breezily. ‘How have you got on this morning?’ he went on as he busied himself at the stove. ‘Any blinding inspiration?’

‘A few ideas,’ said Sam, smiling.

‘Ah-ha!’ said Mike, pointing at him with his spatula. ‘I knew it. You’ve come up with something good, haven’t you? I can see it on your face.’

It was true. The one good thing to come out of all this mess was the two-man show that Mike and Sam had decided to do for the Edinburgh Festival. The two men had arrived back in London within hours of each other, and had got to work on the script immediately. Predictably, Mike had come up with a dozen brilliant gags and situations. But slowly Sam had found that he was having his own ideas – ideas that were actually making Mike laugh. So far they had written dozens of gags and set pieces, many of them Sam’s, send-ups of their status as fallen stars.

The project had distracted Sam from the savage reviews for Robotics, which had taken three million bucks in its opening weekend; great box office for a small indie movie but a disaster for a major studio summer release. Jim Parker was being bullish out in LA, but Sam could tell that the scripts and offers had stopped coming, and Eli was talking about making a shift over to TV. ‘Look at Glenn Close, and Forest Whitaker in The Shield,’ he said. ‘They had Emmys coming out the wazoo. We get you something like that, we can write our own ticket when you go back to the studios.’ When you go back. Was it really all over already?

But if Hollywood was closing its door to him, why shouldn’t he go back to doing the thing that, looking back, had made him most excited? The early days of his career. The buzz from the stage after a live performance. Okay, so Mike’s comic genius had overshadowed him back in uni days, but things were different now – actually, he and Mike were on level pegging: the world saw them both as massive fuck-ups.

Scripting the Edinburgh show was hard work, but he was enjoying it more than anything he’d done in years, and best of all, he wasn’t doing it as a career move; he was doing it for fun, for the hell of it, to help Mike out – whatever. But still, there was a nagging thought . . .

‘So did you make the call to the Hummingbird Club?’ asked Mike, chopping an onion.

‘Not yet,’ Sam replied vaguely.

‘Why not? The festival’s already bloody started. We’ll have to pitch up at the bottom of Arthur’s Seat and perform there at this rate.’

‘You should do it.’

‘Why? Your name opens doors.’

‘I think we should keep my involvement under wraps. Until the gig starts anyway.’

‘What for?’

‘Because it could get hairy. Hecklers, press.’

‘I see your point.’

‘But what if no one comes?’ he asked suddenly. ‘What if they come and walk out?’

‘Thanks, mate. I know I’m not a big draw any more, but still . . .’

‘This isn’t about you. It’s about me. Trouble is following me around at the moment. Jess believes in karma, and maybe there’s something in it. I’ve been a bastard. The way I treated Jessica. Firing that lawyer, who, to be fair, probably hadn’t done anything wrong. I didn’t even treat you properly. When you had your breakdown I should have flown over, brought you back to LA. But no, I was filming in Queensland. If no one comes to the show, it’s what I deserve.’

Mike put his knife down.

‘So what?’ he said. ‘So what if no one comes to the show so long as we enjoy it? You’ve got enough money to last ten lifetimes. For me, this is just a holiday from Eigan.’

‘But it will be embarrassing,’ said Sam uncomfortably.