And
with that he turned and walked away humming Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture, making
a reasonable fist of the cannons firing and the bells of Moscow ringing out in
triumph.
8
Cherry had just got into
their flat, hot and sticky from a midnight to 1 a.m. kick boxing class, when
the phone rang.
She
called out, ‘Tatum! Tatum!’ But her husband wasn’t in so she answered it
herself. She listened for a bit, said only a few words then hung up. When Tatum
came in half an hour later she was sitting on their big white couch.
‘Tatum,’
she said, ‘there’s been a phone call. It’s bad news I’m afraid . .
‘Oh
God, what?’ he squealed.
‘It was
your sister on the phone, your dad’s had a stroke, he’s in the hospital in
Ipswich.’
‘Oh
thank Christ for that… I thought it was Clive Hole phoning to say he wasn’t
going to make our series…’
Then
realising what he’d said he burst into tears.
‘Look
what he’s done to me, I’m pleased my dad’s had a stroke. Oh Jesus… Oh
Jesus… I’m so unhappy… I don’t want to be like this … I don’t want to be
like this … I’m having one of my panic attacks … I can’t breathe…’
Tatum
took the Saab and drove through the night to Ipswich. Due to the late hour when
he arrived he could park outside the main entrance of the hospital which had
one of those big revolving doors with plants behind glass growing in it. ‘At
least all this with my dad has stopped me thinking about Clive Hole,’ he
thought. Then he realised that in thinking that he had indeed been thinking
about Clive Hole. So then he wondered if the plants got dizzy going round and
round like that, which got him to the reception desk. He was directed to his
father’s room in intensive care. A woman was pacing outside, his sister Audrey.
They hugged.
‘How is
he?’
‘Not
too bad. The next twenty-four hours are critical apparently, they’ve got him
connected up to all kinds of machines which are supposed to help. Come in and
see him.’
She
opened the door slowly and carefully as if it had been booby trapped with a
hand grenade and a bit of string by a disgruntled former occupant and they slipped
inside.
Inside
the room Tatum’s dad was one of four figures lying each on their own bed, each
wired into clusters of machines as if the machines were growing old men like
spider plant shoots. A sister hovered over the comatose figure. Tatum had in mind
some valedictory speech but he only got as far as ‘Dad, I …’ when a frantic
whooping and clanging came from all the machines connected to all the old men.
Several invisible Steven Hawkingses suddenly seemed to have entered the room to
shout, ‘Alert! Alert! Emergency! Emergency! Overload! Overload!’
Using
intemperate language you wouldn’t expect to come from a nurse the sister
yelled, ‘Fucking shite what’s happening? There’s suddenly a massive surge of
microwave energy in the room!’
Seeing
Tatum she rushed over to him and pulled his jacket open to reveal the two
mobile phones on his belt and the three pagers clipped to his shirt.
‘Turn
those fucking things off,’ she shouted.
‘Do I
have to? Clive Hole might phone.’
‘I don’t
care whose hole might phone! Turn them off!’ Carrying dead people around can
make a young woman very strong; the sister got Tatum by the arm and hauled him
lopsided and yelping out of the door. She said, ‘Unless you want to kill your
dad, switch them off! Didn’t you see the signs about switching phones off?’
‘I didn’t
think it applied to me.’
‘Why
not?’
‘I’m in
television.’
A
little later they let Tatum back into the room. His father was now awake and
talking to him in a feeble voice.
‘Son,
there’s something I have to tell you, something your mother told me as she lay
dying, don’t be shocked. It’s about who your real father is. You know how fond
your mother was of Ken Dodd, thought the world of him she did. Well, when he
played the Ipswich Gaumont back in the Sixties she went backstage then he
invited her to his theatrical digs … and well …’
Tatum
hadn’t been listening to any of this. He said in a rush, ‘Yeah right, Dad.
Excuse me, I’ve just got to go outside and check something …
He got
up and left the room. The old man slumped back onto his pillow. Exhausted by
the effort of rallying he had another series of strokes which left him unable
to speak.
Tatum
stepped outside the hospital and stood in the early morning Anglian mist
frantically switching on all his phones and pagers. He checked them all for
messages, of which there were none.
‘Shit!’
he howled.
On one
of his phones he dialled a number. When it answered he said, ‘Hello … yes, I’m
a subscriber to your message service and I’m expecting … well, a message
obviously … and I just wondered if sometimes they didn’t get lost, messages,
because of sunspot activity or something? … No? I see, well, thank you.’
He
stood looking thoughtful. A man with enormous muscles came up to Tatum.
‘Hi.’
‘Hi.’
‘I’m in
town for the “World Wrestling Association Bonecrusher II Roadshow” and it’s my
night off, I wonder if you know an all-night sauna?’
‘Sorry,
mate, I’m not really from around here.’
He
turned and went back into the hospital, leaving the wrestler staring after him.
9
Clive Hole sat at his desk
trying to read Tatum and Cherry’s script for episode one of
Bold As Bacon,
but
the words danced in front of his eyes like those black shapes you get if you
punch yourself in the eye. He didn’t know what to do. Placing the script
carefully down he despairingly put his head in his hands. After a few seconds
he was drawn back to the external world by the sound of work outside. Through
his window, in the distance he could see some workmen repairing the fallen down
bit of fence that he had been escaping over. The men doing the job were
supervised by Cherry. She looked in his direction and gave him a contemptuous
stare.
Then he
had an idea; it swam away from him but he managed to grab onto it and follow it
like a runaway kite out of his office and into the small and neglected part of
TV Centre where programmes were sometimes made.
Clive
entered a basement corridor dimly remembered from his days as a producer, and
came to a door marked ‘Make-up Room B’. Inside, a couple of make-up girls were
sitting in their big barbers’ chairs comparing photographs of their cats. They
looked up when Clive entered, one of them had worked with him a few years ago
on a sitcom called
Dim Lights, Small City,
otherwise they wouldn’t have
known who he was.
‘Hello,
Clive,’ she said.
‘Hello,
Clarice,’ he said, then rushed on before the decision he’d made was buried
under all the counter arguments that were tumbling up from his brain. ‘Yes, I’m
erm … I’m doing a sketch in erm, for erm Comic Relief … as erm a
ginger-haired erm … man and I erm … need fixing up with … well, a ginger
wig and beard … yes, a ginger wig and beard to be a erm ginger-haired man in
a sketch.’
‘Are
they shooting that now? I didn’t think they were doing Comic Relief this year.
‘No,
yes, no in a few days they are and I’d just like to get used to the idea sort
of thing… of erm …
‘Being
a ginger-haired man?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Eugenie,’
she said to her assistant, ‘can you go to the wig store for a ginger wig and
beard.’
A
little while later the happy figure of Clive Hole, disguised as a ginger-haired
man, walked through the foyer, past the large Henry Moore sculpture of a
reclining figure that people said Moore had sculpted while waiting for a
meeting with Clive Hole and out of the main gate. Tatum, who was watching all
the people leaving using an infra-red sniper’s scope from his office window,
didn’t see him go.
He
stood in Wood Lane for a bit then lurched towards the White City tube station;
he seemed to remember it contained a form of transport he had used before the
BBC had started driving him about. He searched through his pockets for change.
In his hand he noticed a coin that looked almost the same as a one-pound coin
but wasn’t. Examining it closer he saw it was a Spanish one hundred pesetas
piece, how had it come to be in his pocket? Had he been going to Spain without
knowing it? He was pretty sure he hadn’t, but it struck him that he didn’t know
for certain, he only had the information in his mind to go on and he knew by
now that his mind was an unreliable witness.
‘A
ticket, please,’ he said to the man in the ticket office.
‘To
where?’ asked the man.
This
was an unexpected problem for Clive who’d had enough trouble getting into the
tube station, walking backwards and forwards past the entrance several times
like a timid man planning to visit a sex shop. ‘Oogh erg dunno, tube ticket.’
‘Well,’
said the man behind the plexiglass whose therapist had suggested that it might
help his anger-management problems if he tried to be nice to the customers, ‘why
don’t you buy a One Day Off Peak Travel Pass, which entitles you to unlimited
use of buses and tubes so that you can decide where you want to go and if you
don’t like it you can go somewhere else for free.’
This
seemed like a gift from heaven to the vacillating Clive. Almost in tears he
said, ‘What a wonderful thing, how much is it?’
‘Four
pounds ninety pence,’ replied the man.
Clive
who ate in restaurants where a side order of a little dish of tiny peas cost
£3.50 gasped, ‘What excellent value!’
The
ticket booth man’s natural sarcasm couldn’t be restrained. ‘You’re ‘avin’ a
larf ain’t ya?’ he said.
But
Clive wasn’t having a laugh at all. He went down to the platform and got on the
first train that came in. This took him to Ealing Broadway where an African woman
in a uniform told him to get off because it was going no further. Clive went
outside and jumped on a little bus that pulled up on the station forecourt.
Showing his pass to the driver made him feel like a detective whose badge got
him in everywhere. The bus went to a place called Rayners Lane, where he got
another tube train back into town. Clive managed to get off at Baker Street
without being told to and from there he took another bus to the edge of Soho.
Walking along Old Compton Street he passed a doorway with a hand-written sign
on it which read: ‘Tania 18 year old Aussie Girl. 2nd Floor.’ Again he had an
idea. Clive waited wearily for the argumentative voices to chip in but they all
seemed to be in agreement on this one, so he went up the rattly stairs.
He
entered a very shabby room where a woman who was neither eighteen years old nor
Australian sat at a dressing table filing her nails and smoking. Clive said, ‘Erm
where’s Tania?’
Without
looking up the woman said, ‘She went back to Queensland, dear. Terrible floods
they’ve been having in Queensland, she went back to help dry everything off.’
She
finally looked at Clive. ‘So what can I do for you, dear?’
‘Well,
I want something a bit unusual .
‘There’s
nothing I haven’t done, love, though it might cost you extra. What is it you
want?’
He took
the script for
Bold As Bacon
from his coat pocket and proffered it to
her.
‘I
wondered if you’d read this script and tell me what you think…’
‘Well,
that is a new one,’ said the prostitute. Taking a pair of reading glasses from
out of a drawer in the dressing table, she licked her thumb in a very
old-fashioned way and began to read. Clive perched on a hard chair, fidgetily
watching her. After half an hour she finished the last page and put the script
down.
‘So what
do you think?’ he asked.
‘Bold
As Bacon?
Well, I think it’s too plotty in the
first episode and the characters need a lot more development, they’re a bit one
dimensional at the moment. Shooting on film?’
‘Digi
Beta.’
‘I
prefer film, more texture, know what I mean? But, yeah, should do well in a mid
Sunday evening slot.’
‘So if
it was up to you you’d make it?’
‘I don’t
see why not.’ There didn’t seem anything more to say after that. After a pause
the woman said, ‘Do you want that blow job now?’
Clive
froze but was saved from making a decision by the woman undoing his trousers.
‘You’re
not a ginger-haired man everywhere then?’ she said.
10
In a Thorntons chocolate
shop Cherry listened to an obvious actress sitting on the floor and talking on
her mobile phone as customers stepped over her.
‘…course
I’m not in as bad a situation as Jenny Tracter, the poor cow. She was about to
start on this detective series, starring role. It was about Jane Austen going
around solving all these crimes in Georgian England.
Jane Austen, Discreet And
Commodious Enquiries,
it was called. You know, one week she’d be a spy at
the Battle of Borodino, having an affair with the young Count Tolstoy, the next
she’d be trying to assassinate Napoleon. Anyhoo, the day before shooting starts,
Clive Hole says there aren’t enough Afro-Caribbeans in it and he wants the
scripts totally rewritten and a part found for Lenny Henry, so now she’s out of
work for nine months and if you think I’m mental .