by Alexei Sayle
She stepped up to The Dog and pressed the stubby barrel of the .303 against the side of its long head. The creature’s ears flattened as it waited for what it knew was its end. After a few seconds Nige lowered the rifle.
‘Fuck it,’ she said to herself. ‘One more dog won’t make that much difference around here.’ Then she spoke to The Dog, looking straight into its big fearful eyes, ‘Just don’t cause any trouble, OK? You know what’ll happen if you do, don’t you?’
The Dog nodded.
DESCENDING
The rider jumped away from the pack as soon as he passed The Devil. He rose out of his saddle, stood on the pedals and sent his bike powering up the last hundred metres of the Col De Tourmalet. He thought he heard the whisper of a groan from the rest of the peloton as they went out the back. He knew none of them had an answer to his strength today plus, as insurance, his two remaining team members, his domestiques, who had come to the front with him suddenly slowed, disrupting the counter-attack and giving it no time to form before he crested the hill, after which there was only descending. And no one descended like him.
The plan had always been to jump as soon as The Devil was reached. The Devil was really a bike builder from some Eastern German town who positioned himself and his giant bicycle on a trailer towards the end of every stage of the Tour De France, dressed in a full scarlet Satan outfit complete with trident, tail and horns. When the leader appeared he ran alongside him, gibbering and jumping for the TV cameras.
For the last minute on the steep upward slope the rider had been riding through a huge, screaming crowd in a space only just as wide as his bike. Hands reached out and touched him on his head, his back, slapping him and trying to push him along. Then he felt a sudden ice-cold shock, which he always forgot was coming. There were always some of the crowd whose fun was to throw water in the faces of the riders; they pretended they were helping to cool them down but really the rider thought they were taking the rare chance to piss on the face of a sportsman. This was one of the many ways in which cycle racing was the greatest, most difficult sport of all. There was no other sport where you got a chance to do that and for free, no entry fee at all.
Then the crowd were behind the barriers, he was at the top of the hill and they were gone. The very last five metres were almost vertical, suddenly he felt a stab of pain in his chest and a spin of dizziness that put him in a confused fog for a second; when that cleared he was at the very pinnacle of the climb — below him was a twenty kilometre road more or less straight down the mountain to the finish line at the bottom. He sat back briefly and zipped his top up to the neck in readiness for the sandblast of alpine air that was to come. As long as he didn’t crash, the stage was his and tonight the yellow jersey would be on his back. All — all! — It was a very big all. All he had to do now was to freewheel down the mountain at speeds of up to ninety kilometres an hour, not touching his brakes, ass in the air, head on the bars, leaning in and out of corners, slender tyres shimmying on the gravel at the bends, looking out to a drop of clear oxygen miles below.
Descenders are the bravest men in a brave sport. Sure the sprinters pushing to the front in the last quarter mile risk slipping down and bringing fifty riders on top of them, sure the climbers push themselves to bursting, pedalling fast up the sides of mountains so steep that spectators standing looking back down the road find that the tarmac is almost touching the back of their head, and sure every rider in the Tour De France has pedalled for nine hours and more with leaking abscesses in their skin and blood trailing from wounds in their knees, and sure they all take the new drugs which leave no trace except that your life is decreased by a month or a year or two and they all know that the average life expectancy of a racing cyclist is fifty-eight, so what the hell. But the descender goes through all that and still it is only the descender who risks sailing out into space at ninety kph, legs milling away, like some aeroplane explosion victim still strapped in their seat, his feet locked into the pedals, unable to break free even when they bounce to the ground.
His speed increases as the drop begins to pull him along the road, past the pine woods that flicker away on either side in a susurrating rush. The rider changes into his top gear, biggest front cog, smallest back, but after a few seconds of grip his legs spin uselessly, the wheels turning faster in their belabouring cones than he can pedal, gravity is doing all the work now but gravity won’t be getting a bonus from the team sponsors tonight, gravity won’t be standing on the podium in a yellow jersey waving a stuffed lion about and making sure the cameras see the name of the insurance company that is written all over him, gravity won’t be the winner of the Tour De France — he will.
He notices the motorbike-borne TV cameras have gone and he is alone, their pilots can’t keep up with a descending racing bike, titanium alloy and carbon fibre, wires and chain weighing only seventeen pounds and a rider who weighs not much more. He glances down at the computer on his handlebars, forty kilometres per hour, forty-five kilometres per hour coming up and now there is nothing to do except hang on.
Unusually during a race he has time to think and to look around.
The police keep all the cars and the crowds away from the drop so he is by himself, himself and the onrushing air. For a few seconds the woods stop and the road flattens, on one side there is a meadow coated with alpine flowers, a lovely small, crystalline pond filled with water lilies. At the side of the pond a family is picnicking. A woman, two small children, they wave and call to him in his own language to stop and rest with them, are they crazy? This is the culmination of his life. This day is what he has avoided the entanglement of friendship and family for. He can’t stop now.
When he had started racing as a boy the communists had still been in power, at the academy they had told the boys and girls that their deeds brought honour on the people’s republic. Well, not their deeds but their wins, their losses counted for nothing. To win, they were told, was simple; all they had to do was to dedicate their entire lives to the idea of winning. To only associate with winners, to eat what winners ate, to think what winners thought. Sometimes there was no medicine in the hospitals but the state’s laboratories could always manufacture poison for him to put into his body, or there might only be size two shoes left in the shops but he always had the latest Italian components for his bike. He didn’t think about it, a winner didn’t.
After the communists went and the democrat playwright briefly took over, and then the democrat playwright went and the gangsters who seemed to be a lot of the old communists took over, he joined a team based in Belgium. His life didn’t change that much: the people’s republic was replaced by the insurance company, he didn’t take much interest in the world outside of cycle racing, he never went to plays or the cinema, never read a book, the only thing he watched on the TV was sport. Somebody had told him that things were bad back home, he couldn’t remember who or what.
The trees seem darker now, almost black and very tall, shutting out a lot of the light as he rips past. Then a gap appears and he gets a view of the valley below: a man in strange old-fashioned dress is ploughing and behind him, unnoticed, some kind of hang-glider with wings made out of feathers seems to be about to fall into the sea. Sea? There shouldn’t be any sea here, he must have imagined it. He can’t check, the trees close around him again, a fast right-hand bend comes up, he sticks his knee out to add a little extra gravity and hurtles round it not touching the brakes, then a plateau, and another gap on the right. There seems to be a huge lake, black and polluted with dead trees around its edge and half-sunken ships poking out of the tarry waters. Then that vision too is gone and it is more rocks and scrub on both sides and steep downhill again, faster and faster, flicking left and right and left again, not slowing for a second.
The road flattens now, almost coming to the end of the drop and a village is approaching. Doesn’t look like a French village though, more like the wooden board and picket-fenced houses from back home. Several of the buildings are on fire
and others are black burnt shells. In the main square just off the road, an armoured personnel carrier pulls up to the door of an onion-domed church and opens fire with its turret-mounted machine gun, the tracer rounds soon set the building on fire. A woman and two children run out into the road and wave at him but the rider swerves round them — after all, the Tour’s own corps of gendarmes on their blue BMWs will be along in a second and they’ll be able to deal with whatever the hell is going on. Some kind of farmers’ demonstration perhaps.
Around the final bend now, doing a steady thirty-five K, the finish line coming up, but where are the crowds? Must be something to do with what’s going on in the village up the road. The only one there is The Devil — how did he get down here so quick?
MY LUCKY PIG
The door when she found it was not what Zoe expected. Usually, in her experience, sound studios these days were in pretty swanky office buildings. This was not a swanky office building, it was the sort of apartment block that she imagined was used as safe flats by the secret services of countries that didn’t have a lot of money. She wondered if Salman Rushdie had ever stayed in Mycroft Mansions, and if so did he and his coppers have happy memories of it? Still it wasn’t that unusual, she told herself after all, she had recorded voice-overs for documentaries and radio ads and training films in all kinds of strange buildings all over London. At least the studio was in a part of London where a lot of the best voice-over studios were, north of Oxford Street in the garment district which spreads east from Regent Street for a couple of blocks till it runs up against the straggle of the Middlesex Hospital’s many outstations of sickness. Pity though, it was the pukka proper studios that she really liked, where a boy in baggy pants went and got you any kind of coffee you wanted and there were bowls of sticky chocolate stuff for you to clagg up your mouth with.
Radiotracks, where they only had bowls of apples and mini choc bars for you to eat free, was in the next street, she’d done the narration there for a documentary made by the Discovery Channel about blunderbusses. And of course there was Saunders and Gordon back of the Tottenham Court Road with its big squishy sofas and help-yourself bar stacked with pain au chocolat and Danish pastries, loads of different teas and coffee, all the mags and the day’s newspapers. Though like any leading actress she didn’t actually read the newspapers, it was considered bad form. You were allowed to bring a copy of the Guardian to rehearsals or onto the set but only to do the crossword between takes. Other actors were disapproving if you were too clued up on foreign affairs or the stock market, if you ostentatiously read the Economist or Frankfurter Aligemeine at rehearsals; it implied a lack of interest in the real world, which was the interior world of the actor. When Zoe got a commercials job at Saunders and Gordon she tried not to eat the day before and to turn up as early as possible and get discreetly stuck in. Rory Bremner was usually in there talking about cricket to the pretty receptionists in six or seven of his four hundred different voices but as far as she could see he wasn’t getting a free meal, he just didn’t seem to have anywhere else to go.
Zoe looked down the brass plate that seemed to have at least a thousand door bells on it. There it was at the bottom: Soda Soundstudio, Basement. She pressed the button, there was a buzz and the iris of a little video camera squirmed open and stared at her. ‘Errogh?’ said a mutilated voice in the wall.
‘Oh hi,’ she shouted, ‘Zoe Renoir, twelve o’clock, I’m here to do the voice-over for the CD Rom thingy!’
‘Baismeng!’ said the voice and let her in with an electric rattle of the lock. She entered a long dark hallway with blank doors leading off every couple of feet, suggesting each flat was about thirty inches wide. A voice called her from a stairwell leading down into blackness at the other end of the corridor. ‘Sonsoodio, don ear.’ Her fingers found one of those timer light switches that you press into the wall. For perhaps one second the hallway was grimly illuminated before the switch sprang back out with an emphatic ‘boing!’ like it wasn’t its job to light up the corridor. So instead she felt her way along the wall till a dim light from an open door at the bottom of the stairwell allowed her to descend the stairs.
The basement flat had a large metal studded door painted a dirty white, the head of a small Oriental-looking man was poking round it. ‘Sonsoodio in ear,’ he repeated and held the door open. Zoe entered and found herself in another ill-lit passageway. The man led her into what had once been the living room of the basement apartment. It was rather charmingly decorated and would have been a nice room if there hadn’t been a huge sound mixing desk of the latest kind, several gigantic speakers and a bank of TV monitors rammed into it. Sitting at the desk in a big leather office chair, like that black boy with the weird sunglasses thingy who drove the Starship Voyager, was a tubby young man with long greasy hair; on a low sofa were three other men, one instantly spottable as a London advertising type in the standard issue Paul Smith suit, the other two smartly dressed Orientals in suits not made by anybody called anything like Smith. The sound engineer ignored her while twiddling various knobs on his desk in a random way, the other three on the couch rose as Zoe entered.
The Media bloke held out his hand: ‘Zoe, um Tom Mantle from Earwig, the production company, these gentlemen are the clients, Mr Urapo and Mr Sweichian.’ Both men bowed and shook Zoe’s hand. Tom waved in the direction of the engineer, ‘That is Beanie.’ An abstracted wave. The man who had shown her in did not get introduced. ‘Now I don’t believe you ye seen the script.’
‘No,’ said Zoe. ‘Which is a pirry, ‘cos I usually like to have a good look at the script, get familiar with it, almost learn it,’ she lied. Zoe did at least one voice-over a day and she forgot them as soon as she did them, indeed she didn’t pay much attention as she was doing them, singing the words up and down while thinking of other things.
‘Yomp, sorry about that, still you’ll pick it up as you go along. You’ll be voicing a CD Rom with pictures which will be distributed to certain key figures in the industry that our clients are wishing to enter as new players, they can play it on der computers. So here’s the script.’ He handed Zoe five stapled-together sheets of paper with closely typed words on them. ‘Might as well get started, you wanna go into the booth?’ For the first time she saw in one corner what was formerly a small box room, now converted into a sound-proof booth. She skipped in. Beanie shut the door behind her and locked it with a chromed metal lever. She was in a space four foot square, looking back out into the living room through a small double-glazed window of thick glass. Inside was a table with a TV monitor on it, a table lamp, two pencils, a chair, a set of headphones, a green light on a wire and a big German microphone on a stand with a mesh shield in front of it to catch spit and flying food.
Zoe sat down in the chair. No sound entered the booth. The actress stared out at the quintet moving their mouths like well-dressed men-fish in an aquarium. She felt not quite right. It had been dinned into them at the youth theatre then at drama school that they had to do everything they could to advance their careers, it wasn’t nearly enough to be talented, the business of acting had to be the only thing in their lives, they had to make contacts, get along with people — but she didn’t know where she was with this lot, there was a funny vibe she’d never encountered before. Her friend Trink from drama school had one of those Psion Organisers, a 7a, the most advanced kind he said. He could talk into it, tell it things and later it would talk to him and tell him things back. What he did was, he would make a note of anybody who could help his career, up and coming directors, casting directors, writers and so on and enter all their details into his Psion, then if he met them at a first night or something he could slip off to the loo and get a briefing, then come back and act like their biggest fan. Many people had been freaked out to hear Trink’s voice coming from a lavatory stall at the Old Vic, whispering secrets to himself in RADA-trained tones. Still, she thought a Psion, even the more powerful 7a, was no substitute for a nice pair of tits. Most actresses were good-look
ing, beautiful even, and being amongst so many pretty ones taught you not to value your looks but it was also implied that you would use them whenever you could. Zoe wasn’t stupid though, she knew instinctively not to try anything fresh with anybody in that other room; she might as well have tried to get off with the Procurator of The Free Church of Scotland as to try anything with Tom, Beanie, Mr Urapo or Mr Sweichian.
She turned in the chair and put her Tellytubby backpack on the floor, looked inside it and realised with a jink of fear that she didn’t have her lucky pig with her. Well, that wasn’t a good start. She liked to have her lucky pottery pig with her when she did a job or went for an audition or had a cervical smear. She was so frightened so much of the time and she thought her pig kept her safe, protected her like a guard pig, standing square on its stumpy pottery legs, defying the forces of evil to harm her … brave pig. There were so many of them, actors, actresses, like you would watch in The Bill and apart from the regular cast there were loads of actors in it and in the next episode there was a whole different bunch of actors and you never saw the first bunch again on the telly ever, and those were the successful ones who got on the telly even the once.
The CD Rom had a timecode running along the bottom of it, giving minutes, seconds and tenths of a second. The bits that needed voice-over would be played to her and a green light would tell her when to start talking, the timecode was also printed on her script and that told her when she needed to stop speaking by. Beanie spoke to her over her headphones. ‘I need a sound level, tell me what you had for breakfast.’
