by Alexei Sayle
‘A nice piece of grilled lettuce dressed with lemon juice and there’s this new live bacteria drink tha—’
‘Yeah that’s fine. I’ll run the picture and give you a light.’
The small TV on the desk in front of her came to life. A big clock appeared on it then the images began, bright blue sea mixing to coral reefs, tropical fish darting in and out, then small tropical islands covered in palm trees. The green light flashed and she began to read. ‘The South China Seas, famous for azure blue lagoons, palm-fringed beaches and …’
She paused as the script told her to and waited for the light to come on again. As it did the image cut to shaky footage of small boats rammed with armed men smashing through the surf.
‘… pirates! Rapacious, bloodthirsty, rampaging pirates!’
The pictures stopped and Tom spoke to her over the headphones.
‘That was great, Zoe, fablious. Let’s try it once more for luck. Have a bit more fun with it.’ So they did.
Then the pictures fast forwarded a bit up to the next section they wanted her to voice over.
‘Nearly a century after Joseph Conrad wrote of the colourful robbers he called “vagabonds of the sea”, the pirates of the South China Seas are highly organised, technically advanced criminals and now they are expanding into Europe.’ She thought this sounded like one of those documentaries she’d done but why had they said it was a CD Rom? On screen the speed boats were bucking in the wake of a huge merchant ship. Grappling hooks were thrown and the men in the boats, rifles slung across their backs, climbed like racoons up the ropes and onto the unseen deck of the ship. She read on.
‘We are those pirates, the pirates of the South China Seas and we are looking to make alliances in your area. If we are your friend we are loyal and true, if you are our enemy we are implacable.’
On the deck of the freighter the gunmen had the crew lined up in front of them. The pirates began firing with their rifles and the sailors staggered about for a bit and then fell down in a heap.
Zoe suddenly had a horrifying thought. Her agent, who she usually told what she was doing every second of the day, didn’t know she was here, in fact she’d lied and said she was going to an auction of unwanted greyhounds. It would be up there on the board in the office in big felt-tip letters: ‘9/6 Zoe auct, unwnt grhnds.’ The CD Rom people had phoned her direct and offered her a buy-out flat fee of five hundred pounds which had seemed like a lot of money for something that wasn’t going to be broadcast. So Zoe’s agent didn’t know about this job, she was cutting her out of her fee, in fact the CD Rom people had expressly told her not to mention it to her agent. What suddenly struck Zoe was, was she getting paid enough for this? What if it wasn’t sufficient? What if she was getting shafted? She thought she might try phoning her agent and asking, all casual like, what the right fee for a thing like this might be. Would her agent be annoyed with her? She’d phoned her yesterday when Zoe’d thought she was pregnant to ask if she thought Zoe should get an abortion now or wait till after the East Enders audition. How was she supposed to remember the woman’s fucking IVF treatment had failed for the ninth time? She decided to phone, after all her agent was one of her best friends. She took out her mobile but there were no ‘steps to heaven’, that’s what she called the little ascending bars on the display that showed what the signal strength of her phone was; there was no whisper of a signal here. The pictures had frozen on the screen with a grinning pirate brandishing his gun. She spoke into the microphone, ‘Erm, hello … erm can I make a quick phone call on your landline, I can’t get a signal in here on my mobo?’
Beanie’s voice came back at her through the cans. ‘No the phones aren’t working.’ She was sure she’d seen one of the Orientals on the phone a few minutes ago, but anyway it would have been difficult to talk about the fee in front of them so she would just have to make the best if it.
Pictures, green light. ‘Throughout the reefs and islands in the South China Seas the pirates are feared for their recklessness, cunning and lack of pity. Take the practice of phantom ships, you simply order or buy a vessel for US$350,000 and we seize a ship for you. If you want a crew on board we will keep them for you. If you don’t, we will simply throw them overboard. Or let us say you have an enemy, would you like this to happen to them?’ The picture on the screen was of a large bare room, in the centre was a Chinese man tied to a chair and naked to the waist. He looked like he was in some kind of abandoned factory. Above his head there were bare pipes hanging from brackets, dangling chains, large industrial metal doors and around him rough unpainted brick walls. But you never knew; for instance, there was a sound studio called Space, off Carnaby Street, that was done out like a spaceship, the doors to the sound booths were like airlocks and all the speakers were housed in swoopy blobby cabinets that looked like they were in the middle of a flashback, and there was this other very weird studio called ADR round the back of Kings Cross where there was a stream running half-way up the walls, all the seating was made out of the boots of cars, Minis converted into couches, and you got upstairs to the recording suites through a door opening out of a large tree in the corner of the reception.
Green light blinking. ‘This is the famous Chinese actor Tony Cho, he thought himself a big man, big Kung Fu expert, didn’t think he needed his old friends from Macau.’
She recognised the guy, she’d read about him in the Stage in an article concerning the dangers of working overseas unprotected by the mighty power of Equity, though it didn’t look like Peter Postlethwaite and the general council were going to come swinging through the windows to rescue Tony Cho. Several other men came into view, wheeling what Zoe recognised from a week on Casualty as one of those machines they shock heart-attack patients back to life with. But of course Tony was alive, at that moment. One of the pirates put the paddles on Tony Cho’s chest and gave him a jolt of electricity. He twisted in pain. Zoe watched this intently, she hoped one day to play in Death and the Maiden and you couldn’t pay for research material like this. They waited a bit then gave the actor another higher shot of electricity. Suddenly he pissed himself, a fountain of yellow urine.
Zoe wondered if she would be able to piss on demand; she’d been naked at the Almeida and she’d wanked herself at the National but a stream of piss once a night and twice on Saturdays, well that would be a thing to get a girl noticed. It wasn’t that she wondered whether she could do the pissing from a physical point of view, more whether she was mentally prepared for it. She hadn’t minded the nakedness at the Almeida that much really after a while, but she’d hated the wanking at the National. Thing was though you couldn’t demur at any of that stuff, you couldn’t even act like it was an issue: ‘Want me to wank? to fuck? to pee? Sure no problem, I’ll do it right here in this church hall in Shepherds Bush, I’ll do it at a festival in Dundee, I’ll do it in front of my Auntie Janice and go for cannelloni with her afterwards.’ If you didn’t jump to it, directors wouldn’t use you, you’d get a reputation. And for once it was actually worse for the boys, you couldn’t go more than three visits to the theatre these days without seeing some poor actor’s wizened dick. Her friend Mong from drama school said his mum had seen more of his penis in the last few years than she had when he was a baby. It was funny really, in the non-acting world you got a bad reputation from wandering about with your cock out, in the acting world it was the reverse.
The pictures started up again and the nagging green light blinked; the screen was split into four showing various types of criminal activity, drug smuggling, piracy, prostitution and people being gunned down on the streets of some Chinese town.
She was on the last page of script now. ‘Whatever you want we can get it for you, drugs, slaves, ships and a speciality of ours is contract killing to a very high standard. In many instances the authorities will not know that a murder has occurred thinking it an accident, or an unexplained disappearance and the target will never be aware that they have been singled out for extermination. But be very cert
ain before you hire us — remember, your own life is at risk if you do not keep up payments.’
They went over some things a few more times and then she was finished.
Beanie came and let her out of the booth with a gift of fresh cold air. Zoe went back into the control room to say goodbye to Tom and the Chinese men. This was always an awkward time for the insecure voice-over artist, an uneasy saying of goodbyes when they want you gone but you’d like to sniff out what they really thought of you, but you find yourself out in the street with thoughts of the engineer hitting the ‘delete’ button and the producer already on the phone to Caroline Quentin’s agent. ‘Bye, bye, bye’ (she said) to everyone and Zoe was out in the street, surprised that it was still daylight. She felt like she’d been filmed underground for a month.
She must have walked for quite a while though she couldn’t really remember. She stopped suddenly in the middle of the pavement, so that a grumpy man walked into the back of her. Looking around Zoe saw she was on a street near Broadcasting House, standing outside a minuscule old-fashioned sandwich bar called the Sandwich Boutique (how Sixties was that?). So tiny was it that for storage they used the space above the ceiling tiles. The sandwich bar man was right then coming down a ladder backwards from a square black hole in the roof. She had a sudden overwhelming impulse to sneak in there while the sandwich bar man was fussing over his Snickers bars and climb the ladder up to the black square. It looked so safe up there in the ceiling, suspended above the diced watery ham egg mayonnaise and minty lamb on ciabatta. But just then she saw her friend Mook from the RSC over the road so she waved to him and ran across the traffic, shrieking. They kissed and stood there for ages chatting and then they went and got a new kind of Brazilian bikini wax together.
BARCELONA CHAIRS
rupert’s haircut (whenever people referred to him as ‘Rupert’ he’d say, ‘No, no, it’s rupert, no capital, I’ve got a small r’ — to which more than one person thought ‘You’ve got a small something’) cost him ninety pounds, which came out at about six pounds fifty a hair. Still it was worth it, there was something Trevor Scorbie did, even with such slim pickings, that was just wonderful, the man really did deserve the term ‘genius’. What remained after each strand had been individually trimmed with tiny silver scissors, was pale yellow going on white with a hint of urine. Below were eyebrows of vaporous grey, scallop-coloured eyes, skin the pink of a prawn cocktail. On his thin body a lapel-less suit by Yamamoto, collarless shirt by Paul Smith, slip-on shoes by Patrick Cox. He thought that there was something purposeful about the ‘lessness’ of his clothes, like he just didn’t have the time to fuck about with lapels and collars and laces and buttons and shit like that. (Not that any of these people with their names on these things had actually made them. They had told somebody else who’d told somebody else who’d told somebody else who’d got some hard-up women in lands far away to really run up the clothes.)
rupert looked in the mirror and liked what he saw. But then what he saw possibly wasn’t what you saw. rupert was an architect and after modern artists, architects are the next best people in the world at seeing what isn’t there. You might see, for example, a building that was a rust-streaked concatenation of concrete forsaken on a traffic island, they would see a subtle evocation of the baroque cathedrals of Europe set on the confluence of mighty rivers. They talk a very good edifice, architects do; pity they aren’t quite as good at building the flickers.
Still smiling into the mirror, rupert dwelt on how his life in the last few years had really turned around, after all he hadn’t always been so content. At one point, like one of the modernist buildings he so admired, rupert had been going nowhere. It had dawned on him after seven years of university and fifteen years of private practice that apart from the big bastards of the building world, the Richard Rodgers and the Norman Fosters, the work tended to be of the piddling kind. Mostly in rupert’s case it was too rich, too little taste, private clients who spoilt his grand designs by whining about mundane practicalities, demanding shelves to put their horrible knick-knacks on and ruining his spatial flow by insisting on stupid things like walls and doors. At least, he consoled himself, he hadn’t fallen so low that he’d been forced to do any work for local authorities. If you worked for them, apart from the more or less continuous meetings, you had to design hideous bloody ramps all over the fucking place, just on the off chance that any passing spastic (or whatever they were called these days) chose to drop in. Though he had made a very good living, rupert had not been satisfied with being piddling, who would be? He wanted to be a player like Norman Foster or, even better, he realised he wanted to be the top half of a player couple like Richard and Ruthie Rodgers. Richard was pretty much the architect of choice for the new Britain and Ruthie of course ran the River Café in Hammersmith, which had been at the forefront of a revolution in British catering by setting new standards for what you could get away with charging for stuff you could have bought in a shop and plonked on a plate. See that’s why Norman wasn’t as big as Richard because nobody knew what Mrs Foster did or even if there was a Mrs Foster. Equally, if Norman was gay he should start taking the boyfriend to awards dinners and stuff like that and should get him to give an interview to the papers about a friend who’d died of Aids, if he really wanted to get on that is. rupert’d observed that if both you and your wife were famous, then there was an exponential increase in your celebrity. When you stood in front of some bloke, said some words, signed some forms, then right away the media power of the two of you wasn’t suddenly just doubled or tripled, instead it was squared or cubed, thus all kinds of incompatible people got strapped together till falling ratings did them part. Fame-research scientists called it ‘The Liz and Hugh Effect’.
So at that low point in his life rupert decided to take it all in hand and his first project had to be his own wife who’d been dragging her arse for far too long. Helen, who he’d met at college, had seemed to be satisfied with being at home, raising their two kids, Mies and Corbu, but he was having none of that.
Once he knew what he wanted then rupert generally got what he wanted. As a child he would simply go on and on at his parents or his Scout troop leader or his sister till they did what he wished them to do, moved the family to a lighthouse, made him troop leader or jerked him off. He even gave this process of going on and on a pet name: after trying out ‘Persuagement’, ‘Coercetration’ and ‘Argueforcement’ he finally settled on ‘Forcesuasion’. He saw no reason not to continue this behaviour as an adult. So once it had been decided that Helen his wife needed to get out of the house and play her part in his rise he would, day and night, go on at her. He would point out successful women in magazines and say how good they looked, he would point out younger, more successful women at parties and imply he might fuck and then marry them if she didn’t pull herself together. She got the message.
Now Helen had her own highly successful, flag cleaning business. Casting around desperately for some way to make herself a big success she had noticed one day how grimy and torn were the flags of all nations flying from the Arding and Hobbs department store in Clapham (just like life, Zaire was in a particularly tattered state). Enquiring of the manager she found that the care of the flags was nobody’s responsibility. She pointed out to this woman that not only did the condition of the flags make the store look scruffy but they were risking offending wealthy Zairean shoppers by the state of their flag and they also risked annoying peripatetic Ukrainians, whose beloved national standard, symbol of freedom, icon of the throwing off of a thousand years of Russian imperialism, was flying upside down. She got the contract to clean and maintain the flags and since then had obtained many more. At the moment she was in the midst of pitching to look after the flags of the entire Italian Navy, that’d be a big job if she pulled it off. If it hadn’t been for rupert she would be a simple housewife instead of a woman with her own Audi A6, internet capable mobile phone and six hundred thousand unused air miles.
It was read
ing that had made rupert want to be an architect. From an early age he had read everything he could get his hands on, except fiction. rupert simply had no time for works of fiction; he would happily read a newspaper or a hi-fl magazine or an engineering text book, or of course any sort of web site. You could learn something from them, fiction though? He couldn’t see the sense in it. Who could possibly care about the actions and doings of made up, non-existent, fabricated persons? Whether they jumped under trains or solved crimes or got married, who gave a fuck? They didn’t exist! They didn’t have identities! They didn’t have phone numbers or dicks or lawn furniture and they most certainly didn’t give dinner parties where rupert could meet powerful people. They were no fucking use at all.
When rupert was growing up in the 1960sall the features in the newspapers seemed to be about the future, the past you couldn’t give away for sixpence. Papers and magazines were overflowing with visionary line drawings, Rotring-enscribed prophesies for the rebuilding of the World. Siefert’s plot to replace Covent Garden with tower slabs; the long-forgotten ‘traffic expert’ Colin Buchanan who schemed to lay six-lane motorways where Canterbury Cathedral stood, taking up valuable land, doing nothing and looking old; T. Dan Smith’s Newcastle. Abroad, whispering the names of future cities with impossible enchantment: Brazilia, Canberra, Ottawa; and at home, of course, the magic that would become Milton Keynes. All done by young men in architects’ offices, thin black lines rendering stark towering workers’ housing, shopping precincts, industrial zones, flowers growing where they were told to grow in conical concrete tubs, white families walking hand in hand. There was usually a monorail in there somewhere and the sun always shone. Who wouldn’t want to live there, in Skelmersdale New Town? Or even better, how great must it be for ‘there’ to be your creation. To change the real world, to jumble it up and to spit it out looking different, not for good or ill but simply to change it, to say:
