by James Meek
As these crises ripened a group of BBC executives turned up at the studio without warning – just for a chat and a look around, they said.
The more anxious and pale the faces that appeared in doorways when Ritchie passed, the better he felt. This was his work. This was where he was strong, respected and necessary, and his people were right to look to him for leadership, because he’d lead them through these vexing daily difficulties, as he’d done before. He was the producer. Here in the studio he felt capable and happy in a way he hadn’t for months. Was there need for anything except work and family?
For Ritchie, almost having sex with Nicole’s mother had made Nicole lose her freshness. He felt the right thing to do would be to treat the eight months of the affair as something that had happened to the girl. It was true, he thought, that he’d been present, but he shouldn’t be selfish. The memories were properly hers and, being young, she needed them more than he did. He tended to divide his memories into two categories: things that had happened to him, and things that had happened to other people while he was there. He felt it was part of the generosity he cherished in himself. If he no longer wanted part of the past, why shouldn’t somebody else have it?
Ritchie went down the ramp towards the main stage, where the pinch-faced boys of The What, their hair swinging over their eyes, were walking stiffly to and fro with guitars, picking their way over leads. Paula grabbed his elbow from behind, looked at him with wide eyes and said that there was still no sign of Lazz, but Midge had turned up, breathing fire. Ritchie laughed, rested his hand on her shoulder, said she shouldn’t worry and told her to send Midge in.
Midge made a performance of being angry. Ritchie called the gaffer over and told him that during the next two shows he’d have to drop three small bits of kit from the lighting rig over the stage while Lazz was in shot, as if by accident. ‘We’ll get Lazz to do a big double take the first time, not so big the second, the third kind of a –’ Ritchie boggled his eyes, opened his mouth and flapped his upturned palms in the air. ‘It’ll be planned spontaneity. Running gag in the out-takes. Great laughs.’
‘Planned spontaneity,’ repeated Midge, and smiled. ‘That’s funny.’
Ritchie turned to the gaffer.
‘Just pick some safe widgets to drop,’ he said. ‘We mustn’t hurt him.’
The gaffer stood with his hands on his hips, facing the ground with his lower jaw jutting out. He looked up at Ritchie. His voice wavered. ‘I’ve been doing this all my life,’ he said. ‘I’m proud of getting it right. D’you want to see my record? One accident in forty-five years.’
‘Come on, Jeff,’ said Ritchie. ‘It’s light entertainment. It’s not life and death.’
‘I’ve lit the real entertainers,’ said the gaffer. ‘The professionals. Now what it is, it’s kids, amateurs and who’s the biggest fuck-up, that’s what gets the attention.’ He walked off cursing.
‘Stay and listen to the band,’ said Ritchie to Midge. He called to the boys on stage and they looked up through their hair. They swung their low-slung guitars to face the little group standing in front of the empty tiers of seats. There was a squawk of feedback, the singer counted them in, and they began to play.
The bass player plucked at an ominous note. The guitarist laid a rasping chord over it, sustained it, chopped it off and repeated it. After a few bars the drummer lashed the skins of his tom-toms and locked himself into a rhythm of bass and snare. The monotony of pitch, the increasing volume and the cumulative beat of the instruments ground the listeners down, making them long for the release and their hearts kick as they anticipated it. The singer grasped the mike stand, flexed his fingers, leaned forward, opened his mouth and closed his eyes.
The hairs at the back of Ritchie’s neck rose as the singer’s voice filled the studio. How could a fourteen-year-old have the confidence to set out on those steady, drawn-out notes? Where did he get the power? Where did a young boy in England find the pain in that voice, then find the bravery to put a band together?
The chord shift, when it came, seemed to lift him off the ground as the guitar and bass and the singer’s voice stepped up the scale.
‘They’re good,’ said Midge in Ritchie’s ear.
‘They’re the real thing,’ said Ritchie. ‘I can handle it, though.’
Clapping hard, he walked to the stage and climbed up to stand among the boys. He was a foot taller than the tallest of them. They weren’t full grown, he supposed, but even so they looked malnourished, their elbow joints grotesquely large on their spindly white arms. Here and there he saw a prominent feature within the hair – an enormous Roman nose, wide red lips, dark eyes. He asked their names and they told him in turn. As they spoke they began to utter short, hissing laughs, and when the drummer gave his name, they found it hilarious.
Ritchie pointed at the guitarist’s Fender copy and held out his hands. ‘Do you mind?’ he said. The guitarist lifted the strap off his shoulders and gave the instrument to Ritchie, who played a Lazygods riff with his thumb and index finger. At the end he closed his eyes, leaned back and quivered his middle finger on the fretboard for tremolo. He opened his eyes, nodding, and looked at the drummer, inviting him to come in. The drummer stared at him without moving.
‘That was probably before your time,’ said Ritchie, handing the guitar back. ‘How many hours a day do you practise?’
The guitarist looked at the singer. They shrugged and said at the same time: ‘Don’t know.’
Ritchie folded his arms and looked from face to face. ‘What were you trying to do when you signed up for this?’ he said.
The word ‘win’ passed in a murmur from mouth to mouth.
‘This is a tough business,’ said Ritchie. ‘I’ve been where you are now. And I’m telling you, you’ve got talent.’ He waited and went on. ‘That’s our problem. What our audience is looking for is a story about kids who don’t have talent, who get some nice clothes and a bit of coaching from professionals and go from being bad at what they do to being adequate. Our message is that we can make anyone look special. Ordinary people aren’t as bad as they seem. This isn’t a talent show. It’s a lack of talent show. So I’m going to tell you now, we can’t let you win. You’re too good. Is that clear?’
The hair murmured and shook. It’s like talking to bushes in the wind, thought Ritchie.
‘You’ve shown that you’re good enough to pretend to be crap,’ said Ritchie gravely. He beat his fist in the air to stress the seriousness of his points. ‘Now my question to you is, can you do that again? Have you got what it takes to show a TV audience of millions that you’re a shit band, and then make out that you’ve got slightly better?’
The boys looked at each other. ‘We’ve got to pretend to be losers, like,’ said the singer.
‘Pretend to be losers, and then show that a makeover can turn you into guys who are definitely not losers, without any hint that you could ever have been winners.’
‘Losers, not-losers, not winners,’ said the singer slowly. Something happened to the bass player; he doubled up, as if stabbed in the stomach, swivelled round so his back was turned to Ritchie, and fell to his knees. Ritchie asked if he was all right.
‘Don’t worry about him, Mr Shepherd,’ said the singer. ‘He gets attacks. We can play shite for you.’
‘And then get slightly better.’
‘Aye.’ The singer glanced at the guitarist, who nodded as if to encourage him to take a bold step. ‘We like some Lazygods stuff.’
Ritchie laughed. ‘I haven’t played for years,’ he said. A vision of a revival charged into his head: he, Ritchie, older, wiser, powerful. He, the dead rock god resurrected at Glastonbury. Worshipped from a plain sown with waving arms, a field of limbs rippling out to the horizon.
‘We want to play with Karin,’ said the singer.
Ritchie’s grin melted like plastic shrivelling in a bonfire.
‘She’s a mother of two young children now,’ he said.
‘She can s
till sing,’ said the bass player.
‘We saw her do an acoustic gig last year,’ said the guitarist.
Ritchie turned away, waving his hand at them. ‘You do it the way we agreed and I’ll talk to her,’ he said. He made for the steps and chose to jump off the stage instead. He hesitated at the edge. It looked all of a sudden like an ankle-breaker, but he couldn’t back out in front of the kids and Midge. He bent his knees, raised his arms, closed his eyes and jumped. He landed, staggered and straightened up quickly. Over his shoulder he saw the bass player having another attack.
It was only noon, Ritchie saw, and with firmness and guile he’d solved the problems that had made his staff tremble. He offered Midge a lift to the West End on his way to pick up his mother and sister.
‘The lovely Bec,’ said Midge.
‘You’ve got a lot of testosterone in you for a small man. Keep your dirty paws off her.’
‘She’s not my type. I only like the skinny ones. Is she free, then?’
‘She’s still seeing Val Oatman.’
‘Do you think Val Oatman was crazy and made his newspaper crazy, or did it make him crazy when he started editing a crazy newspaper?’
‘He’s not right for her,’ said Ritchie. ‘She doesn’t know about him.’
‘I know what Val Oatman does. I can’t say the same about Bec. Can you?’ said Midge.
‘She’s my sister.’
‘But she moved into a world you don’t know anything about.’
‘I know what she does.’
‘Really? Tiny creatures swimming in her blood, birds of paradise? Could you explain it to me right now?’
Ritchie laughed and changed the subject.
8
Two days earlier the newspaper editor Val Oatman had proposed to Bec and she, taken by surprise, said yes. He gave her a gold ring with a diamond surrounded by smaller rubies and she took it between the thumb and much-pricked fingertips of her left hand and stared at it as if she were admiring it before giving it back. He had to tell her to put it on, and she did. It was a horrible feeling as the gold band slid over the skin of her knuckle. He told her fondly that it had been his dead wife’s engagement ring.
They didn’t stay together that night. They agreed to meet the next day. When she got home to her flat in Kentish Town Bec took the ring off, put it in an envelope and after much dithering over safe places stowed the envelope in the freezer compartment of her fridge. She didn’t tell anyone she was engaged. She felt no happiness, only a jangled feeling, as if she’d been in an accident.
Missing his wife, Val had been asking Bec for kindness, and she’d been giving it. He asked her to sleep with him and she did. It probably made him think she was in love with him, she supposed. I didn’t say that, she thought. I did what he asked me to do.
It seemed to her that scientists ought to be able to keep track of numbers such as how many times they’d slept with someone, yet she’d lost count like a small child. After three, all numbers were ‘lots’. As long as she kept the number in her head, she’d been able to hold Val at a distance; she’d forgotten it, and the man she’d slept with a few times was now her fiancé.
In a series of papers in scientific journals, Bec had proposed a new way to ward off malaria. Her peers said it was unsafe. One called it ‘baroque’. The version she was being allowed to trial in Tanzania was a remnant of what she’d wanted to do. Val said he wanted to visit her while she was there and she’d been able to let it pass without them deciding. When he reminded her a few days later she had to say ‘Of course.’ She didn’t want him to come but she didn’t have the courage to tell him not to. They were supposed to meet in London the Sunday before she left and there was no need for Bec to put in extra hours but when Val called to arrange it she suddenly craved to be with chicken blood and microscopes in the clinical alcohol smell of the lab. She yearned to toil until she fell unconscious. The thought made her stomach flutter.
‘I can’t meet up,’ she told Val. ‘We haven’t made enough haemoproteus.’
‘I know what that is,’ said Val. He said he could see her on Monday.
‘I’m having dinner with Ritchie and my mother.’
‘I could join you.’
‘It’s a family thing.’
‘I’m going to be part of your family.’
‘About the man who killed Dad.’
‘What did your mother say when you told her we were getting married?’
‘I haven’t told anyone yet.’
She heard Val breathing. He said: ‘Tuesday night, then. Before you go.’
‘I’ll be happier once I’ve cultured a few billion parasites.’
‘You work too hard,’ said Val, and when she didn’t answer, he said: ‘As long as it’s that. I’ll call you. On your landline at work.’
Bec didn’t feel she’d been unlucky in men. She was thirty-three; her heart had been broken properly once, so that though it was mended it would always show the crack, but that was the only time. It’d been back in her twenties. She’d lived with Joel for three years while she got her doctorate in Sacramento. He followed her to the post she won in London, looked around, didn’t like the set-up and went back to the States.
In the year after he left it seemed to her that she’d been reassigned, against her will, to serve as a container for misery. There was a cold corrosive goo that sloshed around in her and stung when she tried to move towards the light.
That was her first year at the Centre for Parasite Control. She was a zombie technician, able to move and communicate mechanically, but not to use her senses for much more than counting, measuring and inputting data. This turned out to be exactly what the centre wanted. After twelve months, when the colour and warmth came back, she found her stock was high and her ideas were listened to. When Bec’s principal investigator Meena went on maternity leave Bec stood in for her, mentoring the post-grads, teaching and trying to break away from Meena’s obsession with parasitic worms. One day, soon after her twenty-seventh birthday, she had told her mother she was going to Papua New Guinea.
‘You know who else dots around the world the way scientists do?’ said her mother. ‘Catholic priests. Three years here, two years there. You won’t find a man willing to trail around the world after you.’
‘I’m not looking for one of them,’ said Bec. ‘You’ve got grandchildren.’
‘Why do you always think I’m selfish? It’s about you.’ Her mother drew on a cigarette and took another sip of Ayurvedic tea. The packaging spoke of its potential for karmic enhancement. ‘You have to learn to accept constraints in life.’
9
A pair of married Stanford professors, an ornithologist and an entomologist, had recruited Bec for Papua New Guinea on the strength of her paper on sexual conflict among parasites, which Ruth Nickell called ballsy. ‘It’s Nickell,’ she told Bec on the phone. ‘I’m insects, he’s birds.’
Her husband Franz had come across a translated paper written by a long-dead parasitologist attached to the Japanese army that invaded PNG in the Second World War. It described how a unit of military engineers building a camp in the interior remained almost immune to malaria while troops further down the valley succumbed in their hundreds. The Japanese scientist found a biting fly that fed indiscriminately on the blood of men and birds of paradise. He speculated that an unknown parasite was being transferred from the birds to the men, and that this parasite gave immunity from the parasite that caused malaria. Before he could continue his research the Japanese were attacked and driven from the island. The scientist lost his photographs, drawings and the wooden slide case carrying the soldiers’ blood samples in the chaos of retreat.
Bec flew to Australia and from there to Lae. Ruth picked her up and drove her to the bungalow in the little town where they’d set up a research base. She drove fast, overtaking buses and trucks, bashing the horn, pumping the lights with her scrawny hands. She questioned Bec about life and family in an amiable, new-roommates way, and when Bec ment
ioned the death of her father, Ruth nodded and responded with the story of their grown-up son and how he was in trouble with the authorities, as if to say Oh yes, we have one of those. Ruth turned from the road to Bec and back, and her ponytail, her breasts, untethered under a baggy t-shirt, and the ankh on a cord round her neck swung to and fro.
‘My husband can be kind of cranky, but don’t underestimate the depth of his intellect,’ said Ruth. ‘He’s also great in bed.’ She gave a squeaky laugh.
On the edge of their destination they passed a huddle of shacks made of bamboo and tin and old fertiliser bags, sunk in mud and woodsmoke, swarming with potbellied children and moulting, pestilential chickens whose heads sprouted bedraggled feather crowns.
‘It looks like the outskirts of a bigger place,’ said Bec.
‘Oh my God, isn’t it depressing?’ said Ruth. ‘These poor guys come down from the hills and try to set up shop in nowheresville. From the forest straight to the grid. No sanitation, no schools, no hunting.’
Franz was a stocky, paunchy, bearded man exposing melon calves between the hems of baggy khaki shorts and the tops of his Timberland boots. Bec prepared herself not to underestimate his intellect but after shaking her hand he turned away without saying anything to her, took his wife to his laptop and began murmuring quietly with her as if Bec wasn’t there.
Blushing, she went out on foot to explore, ending up in front of one of the shacks in the shanty town, learning pidgin words from a crowd of children and fending off the settlement’s punk chickens, which tried to perch on her head. After an hour Ruth found her and pulled her into the car, telling her she was crazy.
