Page 51 of What Would Dolly Do?

W e all left the Midnight Variety Show later that night with a newfound admiration for the skill of stagecraft.

The athleticism of Tatiana, the tongue-twisting skills of Freddy the Vent and the mind-meltingly fascinating work of Jeff the hypnotist all showed how hard performers work to make their incredible acts look easy.

I was wowed. But more importantly, I was utterly triumphant.

Guy’s lies and deceit had been thoroughly exposed to an audience who were transfixed by such a dramatic turn of events.

From laughing uproariously at Guy’s crazy antics, they went to stunned silence as he admitted in detail all his dastardly deeds.

You could have heard a pin drop as the story unravelled in front of them.

What’s more, Dorrie’s band of vaudeville villain-catchers had made it slick and showbiz.

Jeff, or rather The Great Marveloso, had produced the mobile phone he had swiped earlier from Guy’s pocket and returned it to him.

He explained he hadn’t stolen it but he had ‘borrowed’ it for a reason.

One by one he repeated each of the incriminating things he had discovered on the phone and asked Guy to explain himself.

In his hypnotic state Guy had been told he was unable to lie, everything he said had to be the absolute truth.

It worked like a charm. Guy didn’t even look like he was trying to fight the urge to spill his guts.

He readily admitted everything, from having me arrested for a crime he knew I didn’t commit to writing vicious one-star reviews for Sonny’s Bar on TripAdvisor.

It was decidedly strange to hear him talk about it all in such a matter of fact way.

He showed no emotion but he did appear to have complete clarity about the information he was sharing.

The audience held their breath as The Great Marveloso led him through the story of how he had developed such a grudge against a woman he’d worked with he’d become obsessed with doing everything he could to hurt her.

The real question I wanted answering was why?

Guy gave more than one reason for hating me so much.

The first was my obvious revulsion at his creepy advances which had made him feel insulted.

‘I’m a good-looking man,’ Guy said with a lack of humility that made several people in the audience gasp.

‘I’m in good shape and expensively dressed.

She appeared to be this mousy little thing when I first met her.

I thought her a bit drab to be honest, I’m used to the women in California who are much more groomed and glamorous.

I thought she’d be flattered by the attention but she acted like the thought of me touching her made her feel sick. ’

I felt prickles of humiliation myself as he described me as ‘drab’ and ‘dowdy’, the bloody cheek of him! But I also felt a shiver of pride at the fact he had at least got the message loud and clear that his sexual advances had repulsed me.

So my lack of interest and unwillingness to accommodate his egotistical sexual appetite had annoyed him, so far so typically #MeToo, but there was more.

It seemed Guy’s dislike of me had deepened into something more hateful when he began to suspect his own parents preferred me to him.

Ahh there it was, the veil torn back from the green-eyed monster …

jealousy. Pure and simple jealousy, the most corrosive and poisonous of all emotions had driven Guy to continue with a vendetta against me long after he had driven me from working at his family’s jewellery shop.

But why had that not been enough? Why not stop once I was no longer an employee?

Once I’d lost my job why did he feel the need to keep on goading me?

The Great Marveloso gently peeled back the layers of Guy’s motivations like an expert chef dissecting an onion and with Guy now programmed to tell only the truth the final piece of this maddening puzzle finally clicked into place.

Guy was broke. He had lost his prestigious, well-paid job in California and he’d only answered the call to come home to Edinburgh and take over the family firm because he’d well and truly burnt all of his bridges in the States.

There was much more to find out about the scandal that had ended his Silicone Valley career but I had my suspicions about what might have occurred there.

Once a sleazebag always a sleazebag in my book.

Despite losing their only source of income Guy, his trophy wife JoJo, and their designer label-obsessed daughter Kourtney had not eased up on their spending.

As Guy described how they had been haemorrhaging dollars trying to keep up appearances of a Hollywood-style lifestyle I almost felt sorry for him.

Almost. The shame he felt in losing his power, status and spending ability was obvious, it was the only thing to pierce his Teflon persona.

No remorse was shown for any of his disgusting actions though, I noticed.

Yeah, I pitied him but I wouldn’t be crying tears for Guy Grayson any time soon.

I did now understand why he’d almost taken leave of his senses as far as I was concerned.

He was relying on running the family business to get him out of a hole and, at some point, expected to inherit everything his parents had worked hard for so many years to establish.

It was all he had left, pinning his hopes on the Bank of Mum and Dad.

But he saw me as a potential rival to all that.

Clearly, I could have run Grayson’s better, I knew the systems, the stock and the customers and he even admitted I had more of a natural flair for the trade than he had ever demonstrated.

I also knew Gordon and Morag had a lot of faith in me.

They’d probably said as much to their son but, knowing them, I feared they may have over-egged the praise and made him feel threatened.

I had no reason to think I would ever be included in their wills, handed the keys to the shop or bequeathed so much as a diamante hairpin, but Guy was judging other people by his own, double-crossing, low-life standards.

So he’d wanted to run me out of town like he was a gunslinger in a bad spaghetti western and along the way had totally lost the plot.

Once it was all out in the open Jeffrey, The Great Marveloso carefully brought Guy out of his hypnotic, truth-telling state.

The audience sat rapt and engaged and the energy in the room was charged with both judgement and expectation.

Guy knew the gig was up. He accepted the situation with an incline of his head as Jeffrey explained both to him and the audience that as a professional hypnotist he maintained the highest professional standards and so revealed a trained counsellor was waiting in the wings to speak with Guy.

The audience gave The Great Marveloso a hearty round of applause once Guy left the stage and they filed out of the make-shift theatre space whispering about the astonishing show they had just experienced.

I thought I was going to feel jubilation.

Instead I just felt relief. The vendetta was over and any future disruption to my life or threat to my reputation from Guy had just been neutralised.

It took time to sink in but, as it finally did, it was a real rush to the head.

I was almost drunk on the feeling but Dorrie, Stella and Tatiana felt we needed a proper drink to celebrate.

We made our way down the Royal Mile in pairs, me and Stella following Dorrie and Tatiana, the pavements far too crowded to walk four abreast. It was almost one o’clock in the morning but the Fringe Festival revellers were out in full force now.

Several clubs and bars we passed had music blaring out and there were impromptu performances erupting on the pavements as we tried to navigate our way along.

At this time of the night … or early morning …

lots of the show people themselves – actors, singers, musicians, comedians, performers of all sorts – were out letting off steam after their own shows were done for the day.

A sort of Fringe-madness hits town by mid-August, the pace of the festival is relentless and when every day is spent trying to drum up ticket sales and then perform a show (sometimes more than one show) the temptation is strong for cast members to party just as hard as they work to bring some sort of counterbalance to their crazy lives.

We were now in the last few days of the festival and the desperation and desire of people trying to showcase their talent was reaching a peak.

The air crackled with drama and heightened emotion as the comedy and tragedy of both performance and real life merged and played out all around us on the streets of Edinburgh

Stella and I linked arms as we moved through the madness; there was a real danger we could lose each other if we didn’t keep tight hold.

‘Your knack of knowing trash from treasure has been clearly demonstrated once again,’ Stella said loudly into my ear as we headed towards the Pleasance Courtyard.

I looked at her quizzically.

‘You sussed Guy Grayson was dodgy as soon as you met him.’

She was right about Guy. I’d known he was rotten from the moment I’d met him and tonight all my suspicions had been proved to be true.

But my rhinestone radar had failed me with Tom Coltrane!

I could have sworn he was a genuine treasure, a diamond guy with a pure heart, but maybe I’d just been dazzled by the brilliance of his fame.

Stella saw me grimace and she read my mind: somehow, she knew I was thinking about Tom.

‘Don’t be so hard on yourself,’ she said, squeezing my arm. ‘You’d have to have a heart of stone to resist that man, it could have happened to any of us.’