by Tony Parsons
“Jack’s not in town,” our researcher said. She was a small, nervous girl who wouldn’t be doing this job for much longer. Her fingernails were already chewed to the knuckle.
“Leonardo DiCaprio?”
“Leo’s unavailable.”
“Clint Eastwood?”
“I’ve got a call in with his office. But—doubtful.”
“Robert Mitchum? James Stewart?”
“They’re dead.”
Marty shot her a vicious look.
“Don’t ever say that,” he said. “They are merely unable to commit to the show at this moment in time.”
He looked at me in the mirror, his beady eyes blinking inside a cloud of orange foundation.
“Why can’t we get any of these fucking screen greats, Harry?”
“Because none of the people you mentioned have any product out,” I told him, as I had to tell him every week. “And when they do, we still have to fight for them with all the other talk shows.”
“Did you see the news tonight?” the makeup girl said dreamily, the way makeup girls do, completely oblivious to the nervous breakdowns that were happening all around her. “It was really interesting. They showed you those protesters out at the airport. The ones chaining themselves to the trees? Protesting against the new terminal?”
“What about them?” Marty said. “Or are you just making conversation?”
“I really like their leader,” she said. “You know—Cliff. The one with the dreadlocks? He’s gorgeous.”
Every woman in the room muttered agreement. I had seen this Cliff character up his tree—skinny, well-spoken, dreadlocks—but I had no idea he was considered a sexual entity.
“That’s who you should have on the show,” the makeup girl said triumphantly, dabbing Marty’s face with a powder puff. “He’s much more interesting than some old superstar with a hair transplant and an action thriller on general release.”
“Cliff’s not a bad idea,” I said. “But I don’t know how to reach him. Although he can’t be as difficult as Clint Eastwood.”
“Well, I’ve got a cell phone number for him,” someone said from the back of the makeup room. “If that’s any use.”
We all turned to look at her.
She was a slim redhead with that kind of fine Irish skin that is so pale it looks as though it has never seen the sun. She was in her early twenties—she looked as though she had been out of the university for about forty-five minutes—but she still had a few freckles. She would always have a few freckles. I had never seen her before.
“Siobhan Kemp,” she said to no one in particular, blushing as she introduced herself. “I’m the new associate producer. Well—shall I give Cliff a call?”
Marty looked at me. I could tell that he liked the idea of the tree man. And so did I. Because like all television people, what we worshiped above all else was authenticity. Apart from genuine, high-octane celebrity, of course. We worshiped that most of all.
But we were sick of junior celebs pushing their lousy product. We hungered after real people with real lives and real stories—stories, not anecdotes. They offered us great television at rock-bottom prices. We offered them therapy, a chance to get it all off their chest, an opportunity to let it all just gush out over a million carpets.
Of course if Jack Nicholson had suddenly called up begging to appear on the show then we would have immediately called a security guard to escort all the real people from the building. But somehow Jack never did. There were just not enough celebrities to go ’round these days.
So we revered real people, real people who felt passionate about something, real people with a story to tell, real people with no career to protect. And someone up a tree with police dogs snapping at his unwashed bollocks sounded about as real as it gets.
“How do you know him?” I asked her.
“I used to go out with him,” she said. Marty and I exchanged a glance. We were impressed. So this Siobhan was a real person too.
“It didn’t work out,” she said. “It’s difficult when one of you is up a tree for so much of the time. But we managed to stay close and I admire him—he really believes in what he’s doing. The way he sees it, the life-support systems of the planet are nearing exhaustion and all the politicians ever do is pay lip service to ecological issues. He thinks that when man enters the land, he should leave only footprints and take only memories.”
“Fucking brilliant,” Marty said. “Who’s his agent?”
***
I was up in the gallery watching a dozen screens showing five different shots of Marty interviewing a man who could inflate a condom with it pulled down over the top half of his head—he was actually pretty good—when I felt someone by my side.
It was Siobhan, smiling like a kid on her first day at a new school who has suddenly realized that she is going to be okay.
In the darkness of the gallery, her face was lit by the monitors on the wall. They are TV sets, that’s all, but we call them monitors. They provide the director with a choice of shots for transmission. Monitors don’t show only the image that is going out, but all the images that could be. Siobhan smiled up at them. She had a beautiful smile.
“I thought that this Cliff didn’t do interviews,” I said. “Not since he was stitched up by that Sunday paper who said he was just in it for the glory and the hippy chicks.” Then I remembered she had gone out with him. “No offense meant.”
“None taken,” she said. “That’s true, but he might do this one.”
“Why? Because of you?”
“No,” she laughed. “Because he likes Marty. He doesn’t consider him part of the media establishment.”
I looked at Marty on the monitor, almost gagging with laughter as the condom exploded on the guy’s head. If anyone was part of the media establishment, it was Marty. He would have considered it a compliment.
“And most of all,” said Siobhan, “because we’re live.”
It was true that we were practically the last live show on TV. By now, most shows were what they called “as live”—meaning they faked the excitement of live television while always having the safety net of recording. Phony as hell.
But The Marty Mann Show was the real thing. When you watched that guy with a condom on his head, it was actually being inflated at that very moment.
“The way these eco-warriors see it,” Siobhan said, “the only place in the media where there’s no censorship is live television. Can I ask you something?”
“Go ahead.”
“Is that your MGF down in the parking lot? The red one?”
Here it comes, I thought. The lecture about what cars do to the muck in the air and the hole in the sky. Sometimes I despair for the young people of today. All they ever think about is the future of the planet.
“Yeah, that’s mine,” I said.
“Nice car,” she said.
***
They were all asleep by the time I got home. I brushed my teeth and undressed in the darkness, listening to my wife softly breathing in her sleep.
The sound of Gina sleeping never failed to stir an enormous tenderness in me. It was the only time that she ever seemed vulnerable, the only time that I could kid myself that she needed me to protect her. She stirred when I slid into bed and wrapped my arm around her.
“Good show tonight,” she murmured.
She was warm and sleepy and I loved her like that. She had her back to me, her usual sleeping position, and she sighed as I snuggled up against her, kissing the back of her neck and letting my hand trace the length of one of those long legs that had knocked me out when I first met her. And still did.
“Oh, Gina. My Gina.”
“Oh, Harry,” she said softly. “You don’t want to—do you?” She brushed me with her hand. “Well. Maybe you do.”
“You feel great.”
She sat up in bed, pulled the T-shirt she was wearing over her head and tossed it to the floor. She ran her fingers through her hair, and smiled at me, her long, familiar body lit by the street light seeping through the blinds. It was never really dark in our room.
“Still want me?” she said. “Even after all these years?”
I may have nodded. Our lips were just about to touch when Pat began to cry. We looked at each other. She smiled. I didn’t.
“I’ll get him,” Gina said as I flopped back against the pillow.
She returned to the bedroom with Pat in her arms. He was sort of gasping for breath and tearfully trying to explain his nightmare—something about big monsters—while Gina soothed him, rolling him into bed between us. As always, in the warmth of our bed his sobbing immediately stopped.
“Make spoons,” Gina told us.
Pat and I obediently rolled over, his warm little legs in the brushed cotton pajamas tucked up inside the back of mine. I could hear him sniffing, but he was okay now. Gina threw one of her long thin arms over the pair of us, nestling up against Pat.
“Go to sleep now,” she whispered. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
I closed my eyes, the boy between us, and as I drifted away I wondered if Gina was talking to me, or to Pat, or to both of us.
“There are no monsters,” she said, and we slept in her arms.
four
Gina’s thirtieth birthday had not been completely painless.
Her father called her in the early evening to wish her a happy birthday—which meant she had spent all of the morning and all of the afternoon wondering if the worthless old bastard would call her at all.
Twenty-five years ago, just before Gina had started school, Glenn—as her dad insisted everyone call him, especially his children—walked out the door, dreaming of making it as a rock musician. And although he had been working behind the counter of a guitar shop in Denmark Street for a couple of decades, and all the dreams of glory had receded along with his hippy hairline, he still thought he was some kind of free spirit who could forget birthdays or remember them as the mood took him.
Glenn had never made it as a musician. There had been one band with a modest recording contract and one minor hit single. You might have glimpsed him playing bass on Top of the Pops just before Jimmy Carter left the White House.
He was very good-looking when he was younger—Glenn, not Jimmy Carter—a bit of a Robert Plant figure, all blond Viking curls and bare midriff. But I always felt that Glenn’s true career had been building families and then smashing them up.
Gina’s little family had been just the first in a long line of wives and children whom Glenn had abandoned. They were scattered all over the country, the women like Gina’s mother who had been considered such a great beauty back in the sixties and seventies that her smiling face was sometimes featured in glossy magazines, and the children like Gina who had grown up in a single-parent family back when it was still called a broken home.
Glenn breezed in and out of their lives, casually missing birthdays and Christmas and then turning up unexpectedly with some large, inappropriate gift. Even though he was now a middle-aged suburban commuter who worked in a shop, he still liked to think he was Jim bloody Morrison and that the rules that applied to other people didn’t apply to him.
But I can’t complain too much about old Glenn. In a way, he played Cupid to me and Gina. Because what she liked about me most was my family.
It was a small, ordinary family—I’m the only child—and we lived in a pebble-fronted small house that could have been in almost any suburb in England. We were surrounded by houses and people, but you had to walk for half a mile before you could buy a newspaper—surrounded by life yet never escaping the feeling that life was happening somewhere else. That’s the suburbs.
My mom watched the street from behind net curtains (“It’s my street,” she would say, when challenged by my dad and I). My dad fell asleep in front of the TV (“There’s never anything on,” he always moaned). And I kicked a ball about in the back garden, dreaming of extra time at Wembley and trying to avoid my dad’s roses.
How many families are there like that in this country? Probably millions. Yet certainly a lot less than there were. Families like us, we’re practically an endangered species. Gina acted as though me and my mom and dad were the last of the nuclear families, protected wildlife to be cherished and revered and wondered over.
To me, of course, my family was on the staid side. All that car washing, all that peeking from behind net curtains, all the nights spent in front of the TV, all the B&B holidays in Devon and Cornwall or a rented cottage in Frinton. I envied Gina’s exotic background—her mom a former model, her dad a would-be rock star, the pictures in the glossy magazines, even though the pictures were fading now.
But Gina remembered the missed birthdays of her childhood, a father who was always preoccupied with his more recent, more exciting attachments, the promised vacations that never happened, and her mother going to bed alone, growing old alone, getting sick alone, crying alone, and finally dying alone. Gina could never be cavalier about an ordinary family. It wasn’t in her.
The first Christmas I took Gina home, I saw her choking up when my mom gave her a little present—just some smelly stuff in a basket from the Body Shop, some soap in the shape of polar bears covered in saran wrap—and I knew I had her. She looked at those polar bears and she was hooked.
You should never underestimate the power of the nuclear family. These days, coming from an unbroken home is like having independent means, or Paul Newman eyes, or a big cock. It’s one of life’s true blessings, given to just a lucky few. And difficult to resist.
But those unbroken homes can lull their children into a false sense of security. When I was growing up, I took it for granted that every marriage would be as stable and everlasting as my mom and dad’s marriage—including my own. My parents made it look easy. But it’s not easy at all.
Gina would probably have washed her hands of Glenn years ago if her mother had lived. But she died of breast cancer just before Gina walked into the radio station and my life, and suddenly she felt the need to salvage the few ragged bits of family she still had left.
So Glenn came to our wedding and rolled a joint in front of my mom and dad. Then he tried to get off with one of the bridesmaids. Pushing fifty, he seemed to be under the impression that he was nineteen years old and everything was still before him. He wore leather trousers that went creak-creak-creak when he danced. And, oh, how he danced.
Gina had been so upset that Glenn couldn’t manage even the vaguest impersonation of a father that she didn’t want to send him any photographs of Pat when he was born.
I had to put my foot down, insisting the man had a right to see pictures of his only grandchild. And I secretly thought that when Glenn saw our beautiful boy, he would be instantly smitten. But when he forgot Pat’s birthday for the third year in a row, I realized that I now had reasons of my own to hate the old hippy bastard.
“Maybe he’s terrified of being a grandfather,” I said. “Freaked out—isn’t that what he’d call it?”
“Yes, there’s that,” Gina said. “And there’s also the fact that he’s a selfish asshole who never grew up. Let’s not forget that.”
Unlike Gina’s mother and father, nobody had ever thought my parents were a golden couple. Nobody ever thought that their union summed up the spirit of an era. My mom’s picture had never appeared in a glossy magazine—although her prize-winning tomatoes had once been prominently featured in the local rag. But my parents had stayed together for a lifetime. And Gina and I were going to do the same.
We had friends who had met someone, fallen in love, married, divorced, and sta
rted to hate their ex-partner’s guts all since our wedding day. That would never happen to us. Though our backgrounds were different, they meant we wanted the same thing.
I wanted a marriage that would last forever because that’s what my parents had. Gina wanted a marriage that would last forever because that was exactly what her parents had never had.
“That’s what is so good about us,” Gina told me. “Our dreams match.”
Gina was mad about my parents and the feeling was mutual. They looked at this blond vision coming up the garden path with their little grandson and the pair of them seemed to visibly swell with pleasure, smiling shyly behind their reading glasses and geraniums.
None of them could believe their luck. My parents thought they were getting Grace Kelly. Gina thought she was getting the Waltons.
“I’m going to take Pat to see your mom and dad,” she said before I went to work. “Can I borrow your mobile phone? The battery’s flat on mine.”
I was happy to lend it to her. I can’t stand those things.
They make me feel trapped.
***
A shiver of panic ran through the gallery. “The fly’s back!” the director said. “We got the fly!” There it was on the monitor. The studio fly. Our fly was a huge beetle-black creature with wings as big as a wasp’s and a carcass so bloated that it seemed to have an undercarriage. On a close-up of Marty reading his teleprompter, we watched the fly lazily circle our presenter’s head and then hank off into a long slow climb.
The fly lived somewhere in the dark upper reaches of the studio, up there among the tangle of sockets, cables, and lights. The fly only ever put in an appearance during a show, and up in the gallery the old-timers said that it was responding to the heat of the studio lights. But I always thought that the fly was attracted to whatever juice it is that human glands secrete when they are on live television. Our studio fly had a taste for fear.
Apart from the fly’s aerial display, Marty’s interview with Cliff went well. The young green started off nervously, scratching his stubble, tugging his filthy dreadlocks, stuttering his way through rambling sentences and even committing television’s cardinal sin of staring directly into the camera. But Marty could be surprisingly gentle with nervous guests and, clearly sympathetic to Cliff’s cause, he eventually made the young man relax. It was only when Marty was winding up the interview that it all began to go wrong.
