by Alexei Sayle
The couple got up to the flat and knocked on the door. It was flung open and a naked Victoria threw herself into Tatum’s arms, weeping solidly. Tatum tried to comfort her without touching any body parts with his hands, in the end he resorted to stroking her with the inside of his elbows while sticking his behind out so his groin didn’t rub up against her triangle of thick black pubic hair.
‘Vic, Vic, what is it, babe?’ he said but there was no room between the crying for her to speak.
Over her lovely naked shoulder he could see into the entire open-plan apartment. The whole place had been painted black, not just the walls but the furniture, the carpets, vases, the flowers in the vases, pictures, posters, the TV, coats hanging by the door, everything.
‘So, you been decorating, Vic?’ said Tatum.
This seemed to unlock Victoria’s words.
‘It was my Miles … he did it. See he’s spent months working on the set designs for this production. Then Clive Hole … Clive said he wanted some changes in the script, like the lead character should be a dog rather than a woman and it should be set in Finland rather than Barnsley … stuff like that. So last night he came home and he did this and now he’s in a mental institution and… Oh hell.’
A big black dog came out of the bathroom barking madly.
Victoria sobbed. ‘That was a Dalmatian yesterday …’
7
Deep underground in a long corridor at Television Centre, Clive Hole was walking along accompanied by a large group of tourists trotting behind him. Speaking to the group he indicated one of the doors leading off the corridor.
‘And this is one of our new digital editing suites, each machine contains a thousand gigabytes of memory and can perform ten million processes a second. Would you like to see inside?’
A Spanish woman said quickly, ‘No, no, Mr Hole, you really have given us too much time already. To meet the head of production at the Media-facilitation was thrill enough, at Disneyland you do not expect to be shown around by Walt Disney Junior himself, certainly not for three hours anyway…’
‘Oh it’s no trouble at all, it’s important to keep the licence payers informed, after all you pay our wages.’
‘Well, we don’t actually,’ said the Spaniard, ‘seeing as we are all foreign tourists.’
‘Yes, but . .
At that moment an older man in a Savile Row suit with the big flaps at the back that denote an aristocrat came out of one of the offices. He showed surprise at seeing Clive in this technical place, then quickly approached.
‘Ah Clive, it’s handy bumping into you like this,’ he said in a languid patrician drawl, ‘I’ve been trying to track you down for weeks.’
Clive looked uncomfortable.
‘Oh ah, erm… Yes. Oh can I introduce you to some of our foreign guests.’ He turned to the group. Indicating the older man he said, ‘This is Sir Marcus Wilbey, our head of finance.’ Then turning back to Sir Marcus, ‘This is Senora Aznar from Seville, Mr and Mrs Nomura from Kobe, the Willigers from Boise Idaho, Mr—’
‘Yes, yes, if I could just have a quick word I’m sure the ladies and gentlemen will excuse us …
The tourists gave their fervent assent, Marcus took the reluctant Clive’s arm and led him a few yards away. The tourists took the opportunity to make a run for it, Clive watched them go as if they were the last hovercraft out of Khe San. Sir Marcus spoke.
‘Really a corridor isn’t the place to discuss this but seeing as you’re so elusive … I was at a board of governors meeting last week and one of the first items on the agenda was your spending…’
Clive’s heart began to quiver and flutter in his chest like a caged canary.
‘Yes, well . .
‘And everybody agreed what a terrific job you’re doing, you seem to have got the spending on programmes right down…’
The canary thumped to the floor of its cage, claws up.
Clive didn’t know what to say. The bad voice suggested he might like to speak in Spanish for a bit.
‘Si, bueno pero mi amigos esta argh umpmm… yes, no, yes ergh … well, we certainly aren’t spending as much as we used to on shows… Though there may be a slight shortfall in … erm, product … actually in actual programmes in a few months but…’
Sir Marcus smiled indulgently.
‘Oh that doesn’t matter, somehow something always gets put on, doesn’t it? I mean people have to have their telly, don’t they? Whatever awful rubbish is showing. After all if there was no telly they’d have to look at the appalling terrifying random meaningless nature of existence and nobody wants to do that, do they?’ Sir Marcus smiled and patted Clive on the arm.
‘This expenditure cut though, excellent work, well done, keep it up.
And with that he turned and walked away humming Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture, making a reasonable fist of the cannons firing and the bells of Moscow ringing out in triumph.
8
Cherry had just got into their flat, hot and sticky from a midnight to 1 a.m. kick boxing class, when the phone rang.
She called out, ‘Tatum! Tatum!’ But her husband wasn’t in so she answered it herself. She listened for a bit, said only a few words then hung up. When Tatum came in half an hour later she was sitting on their big white couch.
‘Tatum,’ she said, ‘there’s been a phone call. It’s bad news I’m afraid . .
‘Oh God, what?’ he squealed.
‘It was your sister on the phone, your dad’s had a stroke, he’s in the hospital in Ipswich.’
‘Oh thank Christ for that… I thought it was Clive Hole phoning to say he wasn’t going to make our series…’
Then realising what he’d said he burst into tears.
‘Look what he’s done to me, I’m pleased my dad’s had a stroke. Oh Jesus… Oh Jesus… I’m so unhappy… I don’t want to be like this … I don’t want to be like this … I’m having one of my panic attacks … I can’t breathe…’
Tatum took the Saab and drove through the night to Ipswich. Due to the late hour when he arrived he could park outside the main entrance of the hospital which had one of those big revolving doors with plants behind glass growing in it. ‘At least all this with my dad has stopped me thinking about Clive Hole,’ he thought. Then he realised that in thinking that he had indeed been thinking about Clive Hole. So then he wondered if the plants got dizzy going round and round like that, which got him to the reception desk. He was directed to his father’s room in intensive care. A woman was pacing outside, his sister Audrey. They hugged.
‘How is he?’
‘Not too bad. The next twenty-four hours are critical apparently, they’ve got him connected up to all kinds of machines which are supposed to help. Come in and see him.’
She opened the door slowly and carefully as if it had been booby trapped with a hand grenade and a bit of string by a disgruntled former occupant and they slipped inside.
Inside the room Tatum’s dad was one of four figures lying each on their own bed, each wired into clusters of machines as if the machines were growing old men like spider plant shoots. A sister hovered over the comatose figure. Tatum had in mind some valedictory speech but he only got as far as ‘Dad, I …’ when a frantic whooping and clanging came from all the machines connected to all the old men. Several invisible Steven Hawkingses suddenly seemed to have entered the room to shout, ‘Alert! Alert! Emergency! Emergency! Overload! Overload!’
Using intemperate language you wouldn’t expect to come from a nurse the sister yelled, ‘Fucking shite what’s happening? There’s suddenly a massive surge of microwave energy in the room!’
Seeing Tatum she rushed over to him and pulled his jacket open to reveal the two mobile phones on his belt and the three pagers clipped to his shirt.
‘Turn those fucking things off,’ she shouted.
‘Do I have to? Clive Hole might phone.’
‘I don’t care whose hole might phone! Turn them off!’ Carrying dead people around can make a young woman v
ery strong; the sister got Tatum by the arm and hauled him lopsided and yelping out of the door. She said, ‘Unless you want to kill your dad, switch them off! Didn’t you see the signs about switching phones off?’
‘I didn’t think it applied to me.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’m in television.’
A little later they let Tatum back into the room. His father was now awake and talking to him in a feeble voice.
‘Son, there’s something I have to tell you, something your mother told me as she lay dying, don’t be shocked. It’s about who your real father is. You know how fond your mother was of Ken Dodd, thought the world of him she did. Well, when he played the Ipswich Gaumont back in the Sixties she went backstage then he invited her to his theatrical digs … and well …’
Tatum hadn’t been listening to any of this. He said in a rush, ‘Yeah right, Dad. Excuse me, I’ve just got to go outside and check something …
He got up and left the room. The old man slumped back onto his pillow. Exhausted by the effort of rallying he had another series of strokes which left him unable to speak.
Tatum stepped outside the hospital and stood in the early morning Anglian mist frantically switching on all his phones and pagers. He checked them all for messages, of which there were none.
‘Shit!’ he howled.
On one of his phones he dialled a number. When it answered he said, ‘Hello … yes, I’m a subscriber to your message service and I’m expecting … well, a message obviously … and I just wondered if sometimes they didn’t get lost, messages, because of sunspot activity or something? … No? I see, well, thank you.’
He stood looking thoughtful. A man with enormous muscles came up to Tatum.
‘Hi.’
‘Hi.’
‘I’m in town for the “World Wrestling Association Bonecrusher II Roadshow” and it’s my night off, I wonder if you know an all-night sauna?’
‘Sorry, mate, I’m not really from around here.’
He turned and went back into the hospital, leaving the wrestler staring after him.
9
Clive Hole sat at his desk trying to read Tatum and Cherry’s script for episode one of Bold As Bacon, but the words danced in front of his eyes like those black shapes you get if you punch yourself in the eye. He didn’t know what to do. Placing the script carefully down he despairingly put his head in his hands. After a few seconds he was drawn back to the external world by the sound of work outside. Through his window, in the distance he could see some workmen repairing the fallen down bit of fence that he had been escaping over. The men doing the job were supervised by Cherry. She looked in his direction and gave him a contemptuous stare.
Then he had an idea; it swam away from him but he managed to grab onto it and follow it like a runaway kite out of his office and into the small and neglected part of TV Centre where programmes were sometimes made.
Clive entered a basement corridor dimly remembered from his days as a producer, and came to a door marked ‘Make-up Room B’. Inside, a couple of make-up girls were sitting in their big barbers’ chairs comparing photographs of their cats. They looked up when Clive entered, one of them had worked with him a few years ago on a sitcom called Dim Lights, Small City, otherwise they wouldn’t have known who he was.
‘Hello, Clive,’ she said.
‘Hello, Clarice,’ he said, then rushed on before the decision he’d made was buried under all the counter arguments that were tumbling up from his brain. ‘Yes, I’m erm … I’m doing a sketch in erm, for erm Comic Relief … as erm a ginger-haired erm … man and I erm … need fixing up with … well, a ginger wig and beard … yes, a ginger wig and beard to be a erm ginger-haired man in a sketch.’
‘Are they shooting that now? I didn’t think they were doing Comic Relief this year.
‘No, yes, no in a few days they are and I’d just like to get used to the idea sort of thing… of erm …
‘Being a ginger-haired man?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Eugenie,’ she said to her assistant, ‘can you go to the wig store for a ginger wig and beard.’
A little while later the happy figure of Clive Hole, disguised as a ginger-haired man, walked through the foyer, past the large Henry Moore sculpture of a reclining figure that people said Moore had sculpted while waiting for a meeting with Clive Hole and out of the main gate. Tatum, who was watching all the people leaving using an infra-red sniper’s scope from his office window, didn’t see him go.
He stood in Wood Lane for a bit then lurched towards the White City tube station; he seemed to remember it contained a form of transport he had used before the BBC had started driving him about. He searched through his pockets for change. In his hand he noticed a coin that looked almost the same as a one-pound coin but wasn’t. Examining it closer he saw it was a Spanish one hundred pesetas piece, how had it come to be in his pocket? Had he been going to Spain without knowing it? He was pretty sure he hadn’t, but it struck him that he didn’t know for certain, he only had the information in his mind to go on and he knew by now that his mind was an unreliable witness.
‘A ticket, please,’ he said to the man in the ticket office.
‘To where?’ asked the man.
This was an unexpected problem for Clive who’d had enough trouble getting into the tube station, walking backwards and forwards past the entrance several times like a timid man planning to visit a sex shop. ‘Oogh erg dunno, tube ticket.’
‘Well,’ said the man behind the plexiglass whose therapist had suggested that it might help his anger-management problems if he tried to be nice to the customers, ‘why don’t you buy a One Day Off Peak Travel Pass, which entitles you to unlimited use of buses and tubes so that you can decide where you want to go and if you don’t like it you can go somewhere else for free.’
This seemed like a gift from heaven to the vacillating Clive. Almost in tears he said, ‘What a wonderful thing, how much is it?’
‘Four pounds ninety pence,’ replied the man.
Clive who ate in restaurants where a side order of a little dish of tiny peas cost £3.50 gasped, ‘What excellent value!’
The ticket booth man’s natural sarcasm couldn’t be restrained. ‘You’re ‘avin’ a larf ain’t ya?’ he said.
But Clive wasn’t having a laugh at all. He went down to the platform and got on the first train that came in. This took him to Ealing Broadway where an African woman in a uniform told him to get off because it was going no further. Clive went outside and jumped on a little bus that pulled up on the station forecourt. Showing his pass to the driver made him feel like a detective whose badge got him in everywhere. The bus went to a place called Rayners Lane, where he got another tube train back into town. Clive managed to get off at Baker Street without being told to and from there he took another bus to the edge of Soho. Walking along Old Compton Street he passed a doorway with a hand-written sign on it which read: ‘Tania 18 year old Aussie Girl. 2nd Floor.’ Again he had an idea. Clive waited wearily for the argumentative voices to chip in but they all seemed to be in agreement on this one, so he went up the rattly stairs.
He entered a very shabby room where a woman who was neither eighteen years old nor Australian sat at a dressing table filing her nails and smoking. Clive said, ‘Erm where’s Tania?’
Without looking up the woman said, ‘She went back to Queensland, dear. Terrible floods they’ve been having in Queensland, she went back to help dry everything off.’
She finally looked at Clive. ‘So what can I do for you, dear?’
‘Well, I want something a bit unusual .
‘There’s nothing I haven’t done, love, though it might cost you extra. What is it you want?’
He took the script for Bold As Bacon from his coat pocket and proffered it to her.
‘I wondered if you’d read this script and tell me what you think…’
‘Well, that is a new one,’ said the prostitute. Taking a pair of reading glasses from out
of a drawer in the dressing table, she licked her thumb in a very old-fashioned way and began to read. Clive perched on a hard chair, fidgetily watching her. After half an hour she finished the last page and put the script down.
‘So what do you think?’ he asked.
‘Bold As Bacon? Well, I think it’s too plotty in the first episode and the characters need a lot more development, they’re a bit one dimensional at the moment. Shooting on film?’
‘Digi Beta.’
‘I prefer film, more texture, know what I mean? But, yeah, should do well in a mid Sunday evening slot.’
‘So if it was up to you you’d make it?’
‘I don’t see why not.’ There didn’t seem anything more to say after that. After a pause the woman said, ‘Do you want that blow job now?’
Clive froze but was saved from making a decision by the woman undoing his trousers.
‘You’re not a ginger-haired man everywhere then?’ she said.
10
In a Thorntons chocolate shop Cherry listened to an obvious actress sitting on the floor and talking on her mobile phone as customers stepped over her.
‘…course I’m not in as bad a situation as Jenny Tracter, the poor cow. She was about to start on this detective series, starring role. It was about Jane Austen going around solving all these crimes in Georgian England. Jane Austen, Discreet And Commodious Enquiries, it was called. You know, one week she’d be a spy at the Battle of Borodino, having an affair with the young Count Tolstoy, the next she’d be trying to assassinate Napoleon. Anyhoo, the day before shooting starts, Clive Hole says there aren’t enough Afro-Caribbeans in it and he wants the scripts totally rewritten and a part found for Lenny Henry, so now she’s out of work for nine months and if you think I’m mental .
11
On the Northern Line Clive’s mobile phone rang, it was Helen his assistant. In a burst of enthusiasm and decisiveness he gave the go-ahead to a huge number of projects including Bold As Bacon. He rang off and sat back in his seat, happy that his terrible inability to make a decision seemed to have gone away, thank God for that, he felt so much better now. This warm sense did not last very long. While at the front of his brain he was smugly content, in the back room where the bad things were brewed up his thoughts were worriting away at some anomaly. Suddenly a cold, miserable shock ran through him. Mobile phones didn’t work deep down here on the Northern Line! He couldn’t have had a call from Helen, had he imagined the whole thing? Had he sat there mute and daymaring or had he taken out his phone and shouted mad stuff into it? The looks the other passengers were giving him suggested the latter.
