The Juliette Society(59)

After Bundy was born, Charmaine cleaned up and felt in need of something to fill the void in her life where the narcotics had been. Anna told me she turned to religion, but treated religion like everything else in her life, like being a compulsive shopper or experimenting with different combinations of pills and powders. And now, she thinks she’s tried them all.

New Age, Christian, Judaism, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, Muslim.

Every time she found a new religion, she couldn’t quite bring herself to drop the old one. So she added to it instead, adopting new rituals, superstitions and icons. They’ve each left their mark on her person. She has henna tattoos on her hands, Native American charms around her wrists, and a Jesus piece around her neck. She practices yoga, chants, goes to confession, observes the Sabbath and takes the fast. She’s a walking contradiction of God’s word. As if she believes in all religions and none at the same time.

Anna had also told me about Bundy’s dad, Richard Savoy Tremayne, how he took a similar but slightly deviated path. He kicked drugs, got out of banking and set up a self-help group to assist others who wanted to do the same. Without realizing it, just like Kubrick, he hit upon a rich seam of need in the financial sector. His business thrived. Junkie bankers flocked to his door, all looking to Richard for support and advice. The self-help group grew into a sect, made up of former crackhead account managers, heroin-addicted CFOs and tweaker traders, with Richard as their figurehead and guru, and Charmaine at his side. Bundy was raised in the sect, until he reached puberty and started to rebel.

Around the same time, Charmaine briefly converted to Islam and took a Muslim name – Leila. She came to the realization that she’d only married Richard for his name because it so rhymed nicely with hers. So she left him. And he cut her off and left her without an income.

Watching her on the TV, I can tell by the look on Charmaine’s face that she really doesn’t get enough sex, or the right kind of sex. She’s like one of those female office supervisors who’s so uptight and stiff that she drives her male colleagues to distraction, and behind her back, they all say, ‘she just needs a good fucking’.

And they all think they’re the ones to give it to her. They’re probably right, she probably does just need a good fucking. But at the same time, I’m not sure if it’s quite that simple. I think starving yourself of sex breeds an insanity that rots your body and your mind – from the inside out – like syphilis, and eventually it shows on your face, in your skin, your behavior and your entire manner of being.

Charmaine Tremayne has sacrificed her soul for her son. But she’s only agreed to appear on Forrester Sachs to save her condo from foreclosure. What Charmaine doesn’t know is that she’s at a distinct disadvantage. All she knows is that Bundy is missing. She thinks she’s on the show to play the grieving mother, like all the rest, pining for the return of her baby boy. When she’s really there to play the scapegoat.

‘I’m proud of my son,’ says Charmaine. She must have had a few drinks to steel her nerves before this because her eyes are a little glassy and her diction’s pretty shaky. ‘He’s a businessman. A self-made man. He’s a success.’

‘He’s a sex predator, Charmaine,’ says Sachs. And the words ‘sex predator’ roll off his tongue so beautifully that he was probably up all night rehearsing how to say them with casual indifference, just a dash of righteousness and no apparent malice.

‘No,’ she says, ‘No.’ Like she’s not quite convinced of her denial. If we could see Charmaine’s feet now they’d be unsteady.

‘He drove those girls to suicide, Charmaine,’ says Sachs, and he’s looking down at his notes nonchalantly as he says it, because he knows he’s so fucking good at this that he could do it in his sleep. And I wonder if someone is paid to write this stuff or whether he does it himself.

‘No,’ she says, ‘No.’

And this time it’s because she really can’t think of anything else to say. You can tell Sachs isn’t really interested in what she has to say anyway. That, to him, her answers are immaterial. Just dead air while he takes a breath before tossing out another volley of slander posing as inquiry, because this has all been scripted in advance. To make Forrester Sachs seem like the hero, the big man who’s standing up for all the little people in the world. He’s an anchorman with a Messiah complex in a Tom Ford suit, with arms so big they could embrace all the victims of the world.

When, really, he’s just perpetuating the cycle, victimizing them in death as much as they were in life. Airing everybody’s dirty laundry without any regard for the consequences. Sacrificing his subjects on the altar of his vanity. I wonder how he sleeps at night, I really do.