The Right Man (33 page)

‘He’s
very good at the everyday running of things but when it comes to inspiration he’s
a bit …’ Sticking in the stiletto with a few slippery words. I wouldn’t
respect her if she didn’t. It’s business.

Doug’s
eyes kept tripping over to where the bespectacled Kemble was sitting, laughing
a carefree laugh. Irving Tellman returned from his third visit to the toilet
with Vicky and Tracey whoever. Kemble noticed, or affected to notice, a tall
guy over the other side of the room. She shouted across at him. He turned and
recognized her. It was as if everyone there was a player in her game. She had
control not only of all the pieces but of the board as well. Nay, the incline
of the surface on which the board rested.

She got
up and left her group to talk to Terry, whoever he was — I’d put my money on
photographer — and swishing past us, stood with her back to Doug Handom. She
had on tight black trousers and a wafty silk blouse, no bra. From where we sat,
her tight little buttocks were on a level with Doug Handom’s smouldering eyeline.
She’d ignored me in passing and I let her run the show. She was good. It amused
me.

Brother
Tony, on whom all this was lost, struck up with the distracted Doug Handom
again.

‘So
tell me. This dream you follow. What about your folks, your children? Don’t you
miss them? Don’t they miss you?’ he asked him. Bang on the knuckle really,
considering Doug’s hasty retreat from familial responsibility and abandonment
of everything and everybody close to him. Except me of course, his five per
cent foothold in the failing British end of the money-making fantasy.

‘Oh,
man,’ said Handom with acted miserableness. ‘I wanted to see my kid so much,
you know. But my fucking ex-missus, she won’t let me. She tries to make me feel
guilty, you know. She’s such a bitch.’

On
further gentle questioning from Tony, it transpired that Doug had turned up unannounced
on the doorstep the day before, at the baby’s bedtime, laden with gifts,
expecting some movie-style prodigal-father reunion after eighteen months of
completely non-communicative absence.

‘So,
you want it to be like, when you stop dreaming for a couple of seconds, everyone’ll
be there, available, for you to pick up where you dropped them,’ said Tony.

Doug’s
eyes shifted across to mine momentarily, as if he wasn’t sure whether he had
just been hugely insulted. I looked between him and Tony: the gorgeous but
shifty narcissistic fop and the lofty bow-legged oak tree. My job, no, my
instinct, my nature was to defend Doug, to bolster his ego up whatever. My
business, my life, depended on his dream.

‘I hate
that,’ Peter Saravan interrupted. ‘My kids are grown up now but always that
guilt, that guilt. Their mother tried to make me feel guilty.’

‘Yeah,
right,’ said Doug. ‘She’s always trying to make me feel guilty, the bitch.’ I’d
been gulping tequila for three-quarters of an hour or so, so that’s probably what
gave me the headache. It came on suddenly, accompanied by the searing sound of
a chainsaw. I didn’t need these half-humans.

‘No,
Doug,’ I found myself saying. ‘You don’t feel guilty, you
are
guilty.
Her existence just reminds you of quite how guilty you actually are.’ In Tony’s
presence, I seemed to have lost that invaluable tool of agenting: the ability
to dissemble. My brother Tony’s feet were like roots, twisting below Sally’s
maroon carpet and into the floorboards below.

‘You
scooted off after the big prize, remember?’ I continued. ‘And you got it. I
sometimes wish I’d done the same. But you can’t come back now expecting
sympathy.’

Kemble
moved away from Terry the photographer and diagonally back across the room.
Like the queen in chess, she could go in any direction she chose, and she chose
to stop ever so casually by me — one of her lowly pawns — for surveillance of
the enemy king and his bishops.

I did
the introductions, and with the ease and grace of a swan landing in the water,
she sailed the conversation past Doug Handom and on to Peter Saravan, leaving
Doug out of his accustomed spotlight.

‘So,
you’re the bloke who got done for making that video with the underaged girls,
then?’ she said with charming frankness to Saravan. She knew her stuff, this
one.

‘We
settled out of court,’ said Saravan uncomfortably.

‘I
know,’ Kemble replied. Irving Tellman too became a little uneasy.

‘So
what did you guys have in mind to do tonight?’ Kemble said with great dignity. ‘I
have a friend who works in a lap-dancing club round the corner. Do you fancy
that, or do you just want to go back to your hotel for cocoa and an early
night?’

Doug Handom
swallowed.

In the
urinal, I took some breaths and felt somewhat better, although the noise was
still getting to me. While I was splashing my face with water, Tony came in and
took a piss.

‘Ah, smiler.
Listen, Guy, do you mind if I kind of branch out on me own from here on? You be
alright, will ya?’ he asked with a quaint old-fashioned charm, and bunged a tenner
at me for the wine, which I of course refused. Then, coming to wash his hands,
he said, ‘Tell me. Is she married or anything?’ ‘Who?’ I asked without
thinking, but knew immediately that he was referring to Sally, our Thai hostess
with the mostest.

‘Well,
I’ve never heard of a Mr Sally, if that’s what you mean.

‘I
could do it with her,’ he said.

‘I’m
sure you will,’ I replied.

‘You
come back down the park and tell me how you got on, alright? And look after
yourself’

And he
gave me a hug. He smelled of toolsheds and Rioja and roll-ups. I didn’t know
quite how to respond. We never did hugs in my family.

SEVEN

IN THE BEGINNING
was a long, droning, ringing tone. And something came out of the
tone and it was consciousness. A possibly frivolous being said, ‘Let there be
something,’ and there was something and that something was me, I think. So far,
I was pure thought, spirit even, and was unaware of having a body. Then there
was time too. After a few seconds of it spent trying to work out what I was, I
recognized that I had a body too. I acknowledged its presence. It was not in
any real pain. It was horizontal. I was lying face down on something. But
where? Who was I and was I the only one of them? Was I the only thing that had
this consciousness, or were there others? Had a big bang — or even a little one
— happened and was I in fact a new universe? I lay blinking. It was dark,
completely dark. I decided I must in fact be a person but had no handle on who
or when. I struggled for some point of reference, something on which to pin my
ranging, homeless thoughts. I moved my head a little. It had been resting on a
carpet. Close by my face was the leg of a chair. I was on the floor somewhere
indoors and probably in the twentieth century. I felt like rolling over, so I
did and the movement jogged the memory of a name. My name. Guy. That’s who
I
was. Guy.

Other
snippets followed on the tail of this discovery. I was relieved to have
limitations. To come out of the void and build up something tangible. I was Guy
and I was in a hotel room. That’s where I was. I was asleep on the floor, fully
clothed. My knee itched and I scratched it. The rolling-over and the scratching
were enough movement for the meantime. I closed my eyes again. The noises
inside my head had homogenized into one thin and constant ringing tone. To
escape further from it I filled in other historical details about myself It is
educational waking up not knowing who you are, or even if you are. And then the
memory puts you through a crash course of the last thirty-five years, bringing
you with alarming speed to recent crimes and misdemeanours. There had been a
night before, there had been brandy, B 52s, tequila slammers, many of them, and
champagne from my kitchenette fridge. There must also, I presumed, have been
some late-night stumble or taxi ride to get me here. But of that I had no
recollection. However, now there was recall of much inordinately bad behaviour.

Oh,
ghastly memory. Naughty naughty Guy. There had been thee- and four-way sexual
intercourse on the floor and desks of my office. Not with me as a participant —
I hadn’t been on the same expensive drugs as the others — but I had witnessed,
facilitated even. There had been Kemble, goddess of domination, controlling
her slavering subjects with a sweet and enigmatic humour. A brilliant
performance. There had been more laughter than I thought was humanly possible.
In short, there had been the kind of night before that ends up in the morning
editions were it not for the privacy afforded by the little office in Meard.
Thank God no one videoed it.

And
there had been the complete and somehow delicious degradation of my role. I
would not be working as agent for Irving Tellman in the future. Nor Peter Saravan.
Nor Doug Random probably, after the things I said to him. And as more memories
clamoured into this consciousness, I thought it unlikely that I would be
working as an agent for anybody ever again, because there had been insults to Jonty
Forbes — BBC Comedy — in the foyer of Sally’s, there had been pouring of drink
over Caroline Armitage and then laughing at her, and there had been the
sticking of the tongue into the ear of Tom Gutteridge. Howl howl howl, as Old
Queen Lear would say. I’d more than blown it, I’d torn it up, I’d thrown it
away, I’d pissed on it.

I heaved myself into a
sitting position. My head weighed as much as an elephant seal. The hotel room
was empty, I had it to myself The heavy curtains were drawn, but the digital
clock read 10.46. I pulled myself on all fours into the swanky marbled bathroom
and switched on the bath taps, putting in lots and lots of bubble bath. I
hauled myself upright and took a piss. How did I get here? Had Kemble given me
some American producer’s room key? Whose room was this? I looked in the
bathroom mirror. The person standing staring back at me with his flies still
undone had some kind of food in his sticky hair, and brown cakey blood all over
his right hand.

I took
my clothes off slowly to get ready for the bath, checking to see if there might
be any more blood elsewhere. Perhaps I had injured myself There wasn’t. My
right hand hurt a little. I ran it under the basin tap. There was hardly a
graze on it. Whose blood was this tricking down the posh plughole? My
alcohol-poisoned memory would not provide this information yet. I got into the
bath through a foot and a half of white bubbles. The crunchy noise they made
was delicate and sweet, and intercepted the ringing tone momentarily. The heat
from the water below them soon made my face and scalp sweat. Apart from in my
head, there was peace.

I
stretched and luxuriated. I let the memory return at its own speed. I smiled
right down to my balls. I closed my eyes. I felt as if I was floating on a
river boat in summer … We’d bumped into Jeremy Planter sauntering along Old
Compton Street with Arabella Stanton-Walker, and I had punched his face. Not
once, several times. I think I’d even shouted things like ‘And that one’s for
Dave and Polly, and that one’s for Susan, and this one’s from me,’ or words to
that effect. Embarrassing script, but adequately delivered, I feel. What the
hell, my dears, what the hell.

Apart
from the shower cap, I made sure to open all the little hotel bottles and
soaps: the body cream, the shower gel, the shampoo. I slipped the emergency
sewing envelope into my jacket pocket and gave my brogues a rub with the shoe
buff. Putting my trousers back on — having made sure to dry myself using all of
the beautifully stacked white towels — I found a roll of dollar bills in my
pocket, as if some good-luck elf had put them there. I had no memory of how
they had arrived there. Maybe I had stolen them, maybe this was hush money from
Hollywood, I don’t know, maybe I had won a bet. Stupidly I double-checked that
these were in fact my trousers. There was getting on for six hundred dollars.
Had I woken up in someone else’s life?

I drew
the curtains and was slapped in the face by daylight rushing in from Hyde Park
the other side of the four-lane road. I was quite high up, eight floors or so,
I’d say. This room must cost a fortune. I opened the door into the corridor, I
was in Room 6031. At my feet was a copy of the
Herald Tribune;
apart
from that the corridor was empty. I brought the newspaper back in. The knuckles
of my punching hand were throbbing now and a bruise was galloping to the surface.
Above the mini-bar I found some Nurofen. This was a very swanky hotel. I rang
room service to order coffee.

‘Yes,
Mr Saravan,’ said the receptionist. So where in the name of copulation was he? In
a police cell? Lying prone on the ratty threadbare carpets at Meard Street?
That would have been a ruder awakening than mine. Or still at it with a fresh
supply of women? I dialled out to the office but got the answer-phone with Tilda’s
outgoing message on it still. I tried a few hellos, but no one picked up on me.

The
coffee came in under four minutes. This was a very special hotel. I hesitated
before signing for it, using Saravan’s name. The girl in the dark-green
waistcoat and pencil skirt hesitated as well. She knew I wasn’t him. I took
pleasure in peeling off a twenty-dollar bill from my roll and pressing it into
her hand. What the hell. She smiled at me — wouldn’t you? —and scurried away. I
might not be Peter Saravan, but I seemed to have his wedge.