The Curious Rise of Alex Lazarus

by Adam Leigh

  Julian was about to say something, but realised that the performance should not be interrupted.

  “Do you boys know what we like to do next?” Brooke asked teasingly. We shook our heads like well-trained puppies, unsure what was coming. They were a weird couple. At this point I was not ruling out a satanic mass or them singing a selection of show tunes.

  “If we are going to give you a lot of money, then we need to believe that you are fighters and will make it really grow. We need to believe that you are truly competitive. Ambitious people have to win. There is no alternative to obsessively trying to get the better of an opponent.”

  Cole had got up and was walking to a modern, elegant mahogany bureau in the corner of the room. Talking to us over his shoulder, he took over from his wife and announced, “We are going to play a game. Me and Brooke versus you two. If you win, we may back you. If you fold, we will call you an Uber.”

  Julian and I exchanged bemused glances. Cole was opening a drawer and reaching for something. With the theatrical flourish of a failed actor, he pronounced, “Let the contest begin.” He was holding a box in his hand. It was time for a rather unexpected game of Trivial Pursuit.

  ***

  When I was fifteen, Nigel O’Connor dragged me for one of those inappropriate cinema trips, to endure Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 Swedish masterpiece The Seventh Seal. I can still remember my incredulity as I tried, unsuccessfully, to stay awake for one hour and thirty-six minutes of black-and-white impenetrable expressionism. The plot remains hazy, but its central action involved a Crusader Knight’s battle with Death over a game of chess. If Death won, the Knight perished. Watching the film was almost as painful as a mortal injury and I could not understand why it was revered by cinema buffs. It certainly put me off holidaying in Stockholm for a few years. However, as our unusual hosts bade us to sit at an enormous oak dining table and commence our own competition, I had a momentary vision of the chess game I had watched in the film. At the time, it seemed to be a highly risky strategy from the Knight, given his life was at stake. What if Death had read more chess books or had extra coaching?

  And now I was going to play Trivial Pursuit to validate my competitive instinct in the quest for more cash. Brooke and Cole believed that if you were any good, you would win at all costs. This seemed to be an amoral but necessary philosophy if you wanted to achieve something of significance. I was outraged that it had come to this, but also quite excited. You see, as luck would have it, I was very poor at chess but extremely handy when it came to a general knowledge quiz.

  Julian and I conferred with one another as Brooke fussed with drinks and snacks and Cole set up the board. We nonchalantly turned our backs on our hosts and, in stage whispers, tried to assess what lay ahead.

  “We have met some nutters together,” Julian muttered sotto voce, “but these may just be the biggest loons in the asylum.”

  “They’re so mechanical in their behaviour. I’m not sure if it’s an act or that they’re a pair of robots.” My excitement unfortunately made me inadvertently raise my voice and Cole seemed to stop in his tracks with a defiant look that suggested I had made him angry.

  Julian was now irritated. “I bloody hate quizzes. I don’t do trivia. I do long-form answers and elaborate strategies.”

  ‘Worry not!” I pronounced. “Do you know what my nickname at school was?”

  “Alex the Arsehole?”

  “No, the other one. They used to call me the General of Knowledge. I know my stuff. Don’t worry your pretty head.” I cracked my fingers with purpose, rolled my shoulders and thought about touching my toes. In truth, I wasn’t sure what the appropriate warm-up was for competitive Trivial Pursuit.

  Brooke handed us each some cold white wine and clinked the heavy crystal glasses with us, as if we were at a dinner party.

  “Santé. May the worthiest win.”

  “Or just the robots,” added a snarling Cole.

  We sat down at the table, which had been set for quiz warfare with meticulous order. There were pads, pristine pencils arranged symmetrically and two boxes of questions, which seemed excessive, unless they were planning to play for the next three days straight.

  “You’ll be wondering why there are two boxes,” said Cole on cue. “One is a UK edition and the other US. We realise that you know nothing about baseball, and we have very little interest in cricket, I can assure you. We have to make sure that it’s a level playing field for either sport.”

  “That’s very thoughtful,” I said. “Perhaps I can explain some of the basic rules of cricket? It’s so much more sophisticated than your national game of rounders.”

  It was an achievement to make Cole increasingly angry, but he frowned and muttered to himself, “Best game in the world, baseball. Arsehole.”

  Julian was evidently delighted by my enduring discomfort and announced with a smirk, “How odd, he knows your school nickname, Alex.”

  Brooke, sensing collective tetchiness, tried to shift the mood. “Boys. Boys. Let’s calm it down a bit. We’ll just have the anthems and then we can start.”

  Confused, I inadvertently looked around for signs that an invisible band was going to strike up the opening bars of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, but then saw the Johnsons laughing heartily at my expense.

  “You see, Alex,” Cole bellowed, “we Americans do have a sense of humour. Now, let’s roll to start. Best of three games. First answer only and a minute per question. You have to answer as a team. Got it?” We nodded like obedient schoolboys.

  And so, it began. I’d always associated the game with lazy Sunday afternoons in winter, fires blazing in the hearth, a cup of tea and a piece of home-made fruit cake. Lots of arguing, wrapped in the amiable competitiveness of family life. The only fruit cake today was Cole and there was no banter, only silence punctuated by the reading and answering of questions and some hushed conferring on answers. The house, nestling in a huge sequoia forest, was eerily still. A few minutes in and I felt tense. We had got off to a bad start as I made some poor calls.

  “What year was Lady Chatterley’s Lover published in the UK after D.H. Lawrence finished writing it in 1928?” said Brooke in a monotone.

  “1930?” ventured Julian.

  “No, it’s a trick. It was banned for years – there was that high-profile trial in the 1960s. I’m going to say 1961.”

  Julian shrugged his assent and Cole, trying not to smile, replied with insincerity: “Sorry fella. You’re a year out. It’s 1960.”

  They then went on a pie spree (well, I don’t know how else you describe the little segments you go around the board gathering) and quickly devoured a number of tricky questions.

  “How many bones in a giraffe’s neck – seven, fourteen, twenty-one or twenty-eight?” Who cares? But for future reference, the answer is the same as the human neck. Seven.

  “Point to your septum, please, Cole.” How ironic, given he was wearing a tee shirt that read ‘Cocaine Made Me Rich’. As he placed a stubby finger to it, Brooke enthusiastically nabbed the little green Science and Nature piece.

  After this, they stumbled over the literature question, which I asked doing my finest impression of Sir Ian McKellen: “Which character in Shakespeare’s Richard II speaks of ‘this sceptred isle… This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England’?”

  Brooke looked to Cole with imploring eyes that seemed to say: You were an actor once, you must know every Shakespeare play, just answer the question you schmuck. Cole’s swagger crumbled. He was embarrassed, and in the voice of a child floundering in class, he proffered an answer in hope rather than certainty.

  “Falstaff?”

  Without any triumphalism (well, a bit, I suppose), I told him the answer without even turning the card over. “Wrong play, mate. It was John of Gaunt. No need to check.” Galvanised by this patriotic speech about home, I went for it big time, answering a host of questions without pausing or even looking to Julian for agreement.

  “Kalahari.” (Yes, th
at’s where you find meerkats.)

  “Moving Picture Experts Group.” (If you wondered what MPEG stands for.)

  “Perennial.” (Not the quality of my jokes, but a plant that lives for more than two years.)

  Despite me and mute Julian not knowing that Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz both invented calculus, Brooke and Cole were unable to convert this final opportunity and garnered only a couple more bits of pie before failing with the US historical question of which Founding Father was born on the island of Nevis. Remember, it was only 2014 and Hamilton was not yet on Broadway.

  We clinched the first game and the second game was something of a rout. I was galvanised and set a personal best (not that I had ever measured my performance before) with one sequence of nine successive questions. Eventually, we got to the final question on geography, needed to clinch victory. Cole, who by now exuded the resigned and disgruntled air of a man who would rather be in the dentist’s chair than in our company, petulantly asked us the decisive question.

  “Which is the highest capital city in the world?”

  I smiled and turned to Julian, ready to embrace in victory.

  “Got this one too, Julian. It’s Addis Ababa.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Honestly, go with me on this one. I’ve answered a version of this question before. Lots of people say Mexico City, and no one expects it to be Addis Ababa.”

  “And you’re sure?”

  “You bet. I know it because I once cheated in a quiz as a friend was setting the questions and gave me a few answers in advance. This was one of them.”

  Julian frowned with surprise. “Never had you down as a cheat, Alex. Didn’t think you were nearly brave enough.” He never missed an opportunity for a barbed comment.

  “Nope, I’m a bone fide macho man, as you know, afraid of nothing. Now can we give the answer and win the game?”

  “Well, tell me this, Einstein. Why, on my honeymoon, when I travelled through South America and arrived in La Paz, did every guidebook, hotel and street-corner sign say ‘Welcome to the highest capital city in the world’? I spent most of the three days vomiting with altitude sickness. You are simply wrong.”

  I was now a bit discombobulated. After all, recalling trivia is instinctive. Your brain tells you immediately you have the correct answer or remains largely inactive if the question is unfamiliar. I remembered cheating when told the Addis Ababa answer, but now I wasn’t sure of the actual question. Maybe it hadn’t been the same? I ran my hand through my non-existent hair, a tic that always indicates anxiety.

  “Perhaps you’re correct? You’ve got me doubting now.”

  “I am. I can’t name the cast of EastEnders like you, but I know when I’m right. It’s a useful skill. You should learn it sometime.”

  “All right, we’ll go with La Paz. It’s La Paz, in Bolivia,” I shouted so loudly I could be heard in New York.

  Looking up at Brooke and Cole, they were sitting with arms firmly folded and totally expressionless. Cole reached over for the final blue wedge and, like a slow-motion mime artist, placed it in our counter. They stared at us, unblinking, in cold judgement.

  After an age, Brooke’s mouth was beginning to twitch. She was stifling a smile, and Cole could contain himself no further and began to laugh manically. Giants sobs of uncontrolled hysteria broke the hush. They were convulsing, trying to catch their breath between the spasms. Julian and I sat bemused. Eventually, Cole took a few yoga-like inhalations and spoke.

  “And you thought I couldn’t act. What a performance from us, Brooke.”

  “You nailed it, baby,” said Brooke, giving him an exaggerated high five.

  “What are you talking about?” asked Julian with rising irritation.

  “We hate Trivial Pursuit.”

  “Worst game invented. So trite,” added Brooke.

  “Then why have we just played for two hours as if our lives depended on it?” I jumped in.

  “Because, my little would-be entrepreneur… what a good way to see you two in action,” Cole replied.

  The penny dropped instantaneously for us both. This was not a test of our competitiveness but of our relationship. Brooke confirmed this when she added, ‘We have learnt a lot, haven’t we, Cole?”

  “Certainly have. These two boys have given the game away.”

  “What game?” Julian asked timidly. He hated feeling vulnerable.

  “Well, it’s pretty obvious. Alex, you are very bright and have a head crammed with ideas and facts, but Julian, you are the strategic one,” Brooke continued.

  “And you are very competitive with each other. You both want to be right. Alex, you want to prove yourself to Julian. Julian, you really do look down on Alex.” Cole finished the report with a coup de grâce.

  “Your marriage is rather rocky, and you have simmering resentment for one another. You will need to make a big decision. Can you work through your problems or are you going to go your separate ways? Look at me and Brooke. We have the perfect marriage. It is an arrangement we have worked hard to craft. We even drafted a contract of conduct. You might want to consider doing the same?”

  I couldn’t now tell what Julian was thinking, but I wondered if he felt the same as me. We’d been undressed in public and it was embarrassing. Brooke smiled in victory, but then brought us back to the reason we were sitting there in the first place.

  “Anyway, you’ll be wanting to know our decision. Subject to scrutiny of your numbers and your agreement to have some mentoring on your relationship, we love PrimaParent. I mean, come on. You have persuaded Clyde Pilestone to commit publishing suicide. You guys are the real deal.”

  “Congratulations, guys,” added Cole with new-found warmth. I reflected that asking for money was becoming a ritual humiliation. Test after test from powerful people, pretending to be one thing in order to assess how good we really were. Why did the need for funding entail a series of conversations with fragile and complicated egos more interested in game-playing than business-building?

  Several celebratory hours later, drained and emotionally exposed, Julian and I sat in a taxi back to our hotel. We had the money. It was just contingent on the promise we had made to have couples therapy.

  15. Uncivil Partnership

  “A coach, let me tell you, Alex, is something a football team uses to get to a match. I am not going to embark on some touchy-feel examination of our relationship. I managed to avoid Catherine’s pleas to speak to someone to save our marriage and I have no intention of starting with you.”

  It was three weeks after our trip to California and we had just received final notification of major funding from the Johnsons, having finished a video call with their phalanx of lawyers, advisors and accountants. Cole had announced that we were good to go, and the posse of suits and buttoned-down shirts had broken into whoops and cries of enthusiasm as if they had just won a major sporting event. There were only five of us at the other end of the call, sitting with awkward English restraint. We produced a ripple of applause as if at a piano recital.

  There had been one unusual contractual stipulation, the product of our bizarre character examination. Julian and I had to produce a quarterly report from some form of executive coach, who would verify that our business partnership was functioning. They wanted to check we were more Ben & Jerry than Tom & Jerry.

  I had researched potential candidates and wanted to review them with Julian to start the process. The thought of agnostic adjudication of our increasingly strained partnership was horrendous. Julian’s ego and lack of empathy were to blame. Everyone could see that. Still, a deal was a deal and we wanted to progress with the support of the Johnsons, even if it meant some excruciating sessions for the two of us. Julian, however, was not so willing to be flexible or obedient to the ludicrous demands of our new backers and would not read the profiles of the individuals I was presenting to him. Like a child refusing to eat his broccoli, he was not that reasonable. After a little bit of back and forth, he folded his
arms and stated: “You could tell me Steve Jobs had risen from the dead to give us an individual masterclass. I would still say no.”

  “What do we do, then, to meet that particular clause in the contract? You know, that irritating little piece of paper that reminds us of our legal responsibilities.”

  “You have no imagination.”

  “And you have no scruples. Let’s call it an honourable draw.”

  “No, I know what I’m saying. You are totally blinkered by obeying the rules. That’s why you need me so much, to show you how to break a few.”

  “All right, Che Guevara. I get it. You foment revolutions and dismantle the establishment. May I remind you, though, Brooke and Cole will dismantle us if we don’t do what we’ve promised.”

  “Relax. We will absolutely send them a report. We’ll just take turns to write it and it’ll make us seem so adoring of one another, they’ll suspect we’re lovers.”

  “It’s a bit high-risk, isn’t it?”

  “It’s less risky than actually meeting with someone who tells Brooke and Cole the truth about us. Besides, you’d probably spend a real session in tears, and how awkward would that be for everyone?”

  “You make a fair point.”

  I paused. It was dishonest but extremely attractive, and meant my feelings would remain hidden and Julian’s could remain buried beneath a ton of non-emotional concrete. He had it all worked out.

  “Very simple. We get one of the team to build a website for a fictitious coach and we make it look like we’re using someone very impressive but discreet. Then we write a compelling description of a session in which you reveal that you’re in awe of me, can’t deal with your sense of inadequacy when in the same room. Well, that’s my starter for ten anyway, but I think it’s pretty spot on.”

  Amoral, yes, but very compelling. We would control the narrative and avoid unsettling our new backers. Brooke and Cole had given us $15m for effectively a 10 per cent share of our business, based on an agreed valuation of $150m. Thanks to Clyde Pilestone, we were now major players and did not need our squabbles to undermine our ebullience.