Entanglement

Stan Mason

Description

I'm a film scriptwriter in Hollywood, with a partner called Ellie who's eight months pregnant and a film director, Harry Badella, who's rude, irascible and always applying pressure on actors and writers to get the best out of them,. However I am beleaguered by a quest I had put off for a long time. Some fifty years ago, I was evacuated to Cornwall during World War Two and fostered by a couple called the Laitys. They had a son, Patrick, and for years I wanted to go back to meet him but there was never a suitable time. Suddenly, I decided to take the bull by the horns and fly to England only to discover that Patrick had died many years earlier, Then, by accident, I learned that he was still alive and there were reasons why he wanted people to think that he was dead. I began to undertake some research which proved to have many ramifications. After delving deeply into Patrick's past, I became the target for three attempts on my life while dead bodies seem to accumulate around me, each one appearing to be an accidental death. I found myself in the company of many people who professed to have known my foster brother and then the situation accelerated to a higher level. I discovered that papers from a Roger Blake, a well-respected scientist, related to the Star Wars programme... by which nations are able to park nuclear missiles in outer space to protect themselves from attack, I soon learned that everyone was searching for Blake's papers and I embarked on a smuggling escapade to find Patrick in a whirlpool of intrigue with many twists and turns before coming across a woman with whom I fell in love. Following that, there were some nightmare situations, such as the visit from a man with an iron hand who threatened my life, and my body hanging over Hell's Mouth, where many people go to commit suicide...

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 29 janvier 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783335374
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title Page
ENTANGLEMENT
by
Stan Mason



Publisher Information
Published in 2014 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
The right of Stan Mason to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998
Copyright © 2014 Stan Mason
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any person who does so may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.



Chapter One
The nightmare used to come at least once every month... stark, agonising, terrifying! In the deepness of sleep, I screamed out some kind of mumbo-jumbo which stopped sharply at the moment of terror. I opened my eyes to awaken in pitch-black darkness saturated with perspiration. My body felt like a wet rag... as thought every ounce of energy inside me had been sapped. Worse still, my brain felt tormented and abused which affected my morale and enthusiasm and all the decisions I made. Murder, mystery and intrigue lay at the root of the world; ordinary people like myself were mere pawns in the game to be moved around at will. Now, once again, I was sitting up in bed bathed in sweat. The nightmare had returned! Closing my eyes tiredly, I let my mind drift all the way back to the beginning.
***
I had driven out of Hollywood on a fine morning, taking off in the direction of Nevada. On this particular day I felt that I could touch the sky, seduce nature, and reflect the colours of the rainbow. I had awakened to the real world of sense and sensitivity but my ego drove my mind to greater heights. After clearing Los Angeles, the car sped swiftly through miles of parched desert until I spied a large rock in the distance and made towards it. I stopped the car beside it and rested there in the heat of the sun thrashing out reason and fancy. Reason told me to forget the whim and go back to work; fancy suggested that if I didn’t leave now I would never go at all. As a film writer, I was responsible for hundreds of characters in film scripts over the years. With my skill, they carried out daring deeds, adventurous exploits, devious plots, fugitive escapes, political activities, community-inspired pursuits, and popular romantic interludes. On this occasion, however, it was a decision affecting my personal life in the real world. To someone who thrived on nostalgia, and acted on impulse, it was unacceptable to stifle along-life desire. I was a free spirit. I had to be free to go where I wanted. But there was always a barrier... a hurdle... in the way. This time it was twofold. Firstly, there was Ellie... beautiful Ellie! Twenty-three years my junior and nearly eight months pregnant.
‘What do you mean you’re going to England?’ she demanded. ‘I’m almost eight months pregnant. How can you even think of it? Is that all I mean to you? Someone to share your bed! Someone to have your child while you’re out of the country!’
‘It’s just for a few days. Ellie,’ I explained weakly. ‘Just a few days. I was raised there during World War Two. You know that.’
‘But I’m almost eight months pregnant! It could happen at any time!’
‘You’re over-reacting, honey,’ I told her. ‘If I don’t go now, I never will. I mean, once the kid’s born... ‘
‘Kid!’ she riposted sharply. ‘Kid!’ Her hackles rose.
In that moment I realised that all reasonable discussion had ended. When Ellie got mad, all logic flew out of the window.
‘I’m not buying it!’ she shouted. ‘You’ll get hung up over there for weeks... maybe months! You may not even come back!
The golden rule was never to argue with Ellie when she was in such a mood, so I walked out of the house to avoid further conflict. Maybe she was right. She was having a baby. I ought to stay... at least until after the baby was born. However everyone has their own needs and mine was to go back to my roots while I still had the chance.
The second factor in the way was the contract I had signed with Cross-Atlantic Films to write a provocative film script. Harry Badella was the most miserable, heartless, meanest film director in the business. He leaned heavily on everyone. It was in his nature to place everyone under severe pressure to get the best out of them If I told him I was going to England on a vacation, he would go crazy.
‘Mike,’ he had told me as I put my signature to the contract, He always called me Mike even though it wasn’t my name. ‘This movie’s gonna be one of the greats like Casablanca. You wait an’ see!’ He said the same about all his movies but success always eluded him.
‘Sure... sure!’ I responded casually, humouring the man.
‘So get me that script by yesterday. You got it! I knew his next words by heart ‘I wanna low-budget, low-cost feature, worked in tight short-time schedules. And, I repeat, get me the script by yesterday.’
That was always the problem, I had become a robot script writer for second-rate films. There was no time for excitement or fun any more. After so many years had passed by without notice, I had to get to Cornwall before I was too old to care.
Unlike anyone else in Hollywood at the time, I had experienced war in its raw state. I was five years old when German bombers invaded by night and I still recalled the moment when the bombs fell all around me in London. My mother had carried me to a public shelter that night and when we returned the whole street had been flattened by the Luftwaffe. Fires blazed everywhere. Some people were dead; others were screaming for help trapped under tons of bricks, mortar and other rubble. It was no place for a child. The authorities realised this and sent all the children to remote parts of England for the duration of the war. I ended up in the far south-west... in Cornwall... and I vowed to return some day to visit my foster parents and their son Patrick.
Cornwall was beautiful! I reflected the rugged coasts, the wonderful beaches, and the huge rocks with rising precipices which towered like great grey giants as well as the relentless rushing waves ebbing and flowing constantly with the tide along an enormous range of coast. There were the quaint winding lanes and extensive lush green pastures and the honest farming and mining folk with simple ambitions and no pretensions who devoted their lives to an elementary way of life in the towns and villages. It was far removed from the plastic world of charades in the film-making business of Tinseltown in California.
I remained on the rock until the sun reached it’s zenith. The glow hung across the sky for a long time and I perspired in the heat with a strange feeling in my heart. What had happened to those people who had taken such great care of me during the war? They had been so generous to have accommodated someone else’s child., accepting me warmly into their home in a period of national crisis. Deep inside, I felt ashamed. It had taken me forty-five years to spur myself into action. Nostalgia had surfaced on many occasions, but something had always prevented me from making the journey. In my mind’s eye, I could see the tiny old cottage at Ponjeravah built of solid granite blocks, capped by a well-worn slate roof. A Cornish wall surrounded the property on three sides; the fourth was bounded by a fresh water stream well-stocked with fish. Life was extremely basis. There was no mains water or electricity. An old water pump, halfway down the lane, served the cluster of four houses and an infants’ school. At night, the only light available was from a paraffin lamp which filled the tiny parlour with a strange pungent smell. Appliances were non-existent with the exception of an old radio, served by two accumulator batteries filled with acid which had to be taken to the local hardware shop each week to be recharged. My foster father, Tom Laity, grew his own vegetables, kept his own chickens, caught rabbits in the fields with ferrets, and fished the stream for trout and eels. The family was pretty much self-sufficient. Ration books were used sparingly. We never used coupons for clothing or furniture. As poor farming folk it was necessary to make do and mend. Best of all times was the summer. In those days, the weather could be trusted... glorious June, warm July, hot August and an Indian Summer in late September... I revelled in it!
What a contrast to the capital! As a child, I had been only aware of the concrete jungle near to the London Docks. The atmosphere there was polluted with dust and there were regular ‘pea-soupers’... thick fogs which filled the air with smoke and smut from coal-fire ash issued from the plethora of chimneys. The East End of London was always hustling and bustling with traders and merchants who employed people to work long hours in the filthy swear-shops which proliferated in the slums. By contrast, being evacuated to Cornwall pitch-forked me into an entirely different environment. To my delight, there were farms, fields, streams and rivers, lots of countryside, fresh air as well as cattle and sheep. It was a world of open space, rural life, and peace. Eventually, when the war ended, I was thrust back into the dusty dirty realm of the docks area... back to the ‘pea-soupers’.
By now, forty-five years later, a lot of water had passed under the bridge. My foster parents were unlikely to be alive as they were about forty-five years old when I came under their care. They son, Patrick, who was a year younger than