98.4

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  ‘Private. And you?’

  ‘As if you didn’t know.’ She caught hold of me around the waist and gazed up while I stood. ‘I never felt so disgracefully undressed.’

  I joined her on the bed, where we lay quietly smoking, till for some reason she glanced at the electric clock on the wall. ‘Darling? Stand up. Naked.’ She watched me, motionless, as I did so. ‘I wanted to see you relaxed. All of you.’

  ‘All of me is.’

  ‘Perhaps we can have some peace around here, then.’

  ‘You’ve filleted me,’ I explained. ‘I have no bones.’

  We showered, and I said I’d have lunch sent up.

  ‘As long as you don’t order champagne, Nigel.’

  ‘Why the horror of champagne?’

  ‘I have a phobia against being launched.’

  ‘All the same you’d look pretty good going down the slipway.’

  But after lunch she dressed to go out. I caught her gaze reflected from the make-up mirror and challenged it. She paused while powdering and I knew intuitively where she was going. And she knew I knew. My spirits slumped as I said, ‘Why, for God’s sake, won’t you tell me about it?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘You know damn well what! Are you visiting your hospital, by any chance?’

  She carried on making up, but at a faster pace. ‘I work there. Just a few things to clear up, that’s all.’

  I blazed: ‘Why do you keep lying! What are they doing? Taking another blood sample? — You get more check-ups than the Concorde.’

  ‘Which shows they have everything in hand.’

  ‘Why can’t you tell me?’

  ‘Because I’m not a schoolgirl. What am I supposed to do, Nigel? Obediently report to you when I’ve cleaned my teeth?’

  ‘Louise, for God’s sake!’

  She said, angrily, plainly and finally: ‘Nigel, there is one thing called an appetite for truth. It is not to be confused with an appetite for information. I have an appointment. So have you — an important one, right next door. I will see you after that. Because that is our next date. In the meanwhile my affairs are my own.’

  ‘Aren’t you getting rather pompous?’

  She had reached the door. ‘Sometimes “pompousness” is the only way of avoiding a blazing row followed by the packing of suitcases.’

  ‘Intimidation is a poor defence, Louise.’

  ‘And curiosity is what finally killed the cat. And leave go of me! You’re not a hero in a B picture — or are you? Let me go and be your age and stop owning me like a Forsyte.’

  We both stood there for five seconds glowering at each other. But the charge was so preposterous that we both burst out laughing. ‘The trouble with Soames,’ she said, ‘was that he raped her when what she needed was a good smacking.’

  ‘Get out of here,’ I said, ‘or I’ll rewrite the Forsyte Saga ...’

  After she’d left, the creeping paralysis of fear resumed its menacing message of my spine. Death can come in packaging calculated to delude till the last.

  *

  I had no sense of mission as I went into the television building. I was impatient to get on with the meat of the job and it seemed to me pretty remote that I could change Michael Nobody’s mind about going on the air. I felt I was playing lip-service to an impossible creed.

  But maybe it was really because I’ve always felt shy of entertainment people. They always seem so sure that what they’re doing is so vital; and this impression was made good by the atmosphere in the vast, richly got-up foyer. Everything in it except me was sleek and with-it. But I’d figured how to stage my entrance and it worked.

  The correct way to enter a building when you’re not wanted is to proceed to the main entrance, walk — swiftly but unhurried — across the foyer to the lifts, and absolutely never grin at the decorative array of receptionists in the hope that Charm is any substitute for an invitation. It isn’t; and those spruce females, busting at the bras from the tightness of the belts, are masochistically responsive only to the mechanism of being ignored.

  I got that far, then found myself in a liftful of Christian-naming tele-people full of T-shirted vitality. Faded green corduroys clung protectively to none the less perfectly masculine limbs and an air of defiant anti-manhood reflected a sort of inverted snobbery among the hormones. Men who were paramountly able to take on half a dozen women per night out-darlinged each other in a frenzy of self-effacement, as if one inadvertent word from the ordinary male vocabulary would be grossly improper.

  I got off at the third floor, having discovered from a shifty glance at the board in the hall that Michael s Planetarians were rehearsing here in Studio C. The exhibits in the lift were not; and up they went to some loftier level of culture altogether.

  I came to one of those endless corridors in which everyone except you hails everyone else by a nickname. Some way along here was a telephone in an acoustical shell you stick your head in. As I passed, a man who was using it hung up and turned to leave. This was how I found myself face to face with Seale Taggard.

  In the one glimpse I’d caught of him on the Festival car park he hadn’t been exactly impressive. Close up the impression was so disappointing I wondered how this man could ever have carried the Murrow torch. Those severe, economically expressive features so familiar to so many back in the ’fifties were replaced here by a sort of hunched blankness. The eyes, pale blue, gazed cautiously from a defensive set of features that were fat and overblown. He might have been good-looking once, but it looked as if some glandular affliction had been at work, taking the edge off. I could understand that such a man would hardly have the impact of greatness. On the screen he would seem weak; easy meat for reactionary senators who knew how to take people apart.

  And he seemed embarrassed, as if he was aware that I in particular noticed his wrongfaced image. But that wasn’t all. Something had just happened which evidently disturbed him on a personal level.

  And for the first time I thought I knew what this might be about. But now I had an opportunity and I wasn’t going to let it slide.

  ‘I’m Yenn.’

  ‘I know. What do you want? I have a plane to catch.’

  ‘Information.’

  The pale eyes avoided mine, stared towards the studio entrance further along as a large, lively orchestra struck up what sounded like title music. I went on: ‘I want to know about the Planets thing. Why that music and how does it work?’

  It was as if I’d struck him right in the inflated solar plexus. Whether it was the timing of my question I couldn’t tell, but it shook him. He managed to reply: ‘But you saw that it didn’t,’ eyes up, ‘work.’

  ‘But before that?’

  ‘Hell. Why should I tell you? ...’ A group of thin girls came running down the corridor. He looked at them, then at me, as if embarrassed. It was so personal, that look.

  But the sudden appearance of the girls released something he probably wouldn’t have said otherwise. ‘See me? — what’s happened to me?’

  I tried to be tactful, laughing it off. ‘Well, I do remember from your shows —’

  ‘ — Cut it out. I’m fat and horrible. You think it’s glands. Right? Let’s go in there. In the bar.’ He led the way into a small room where a few executives stood around quietly having drinks. Thin music squeaked from loudspeakers in the ceiling. It helped provide privacy. Taggard ordered, we drank. He said: ‘I tried it. I wanted to see what would happen.’ He stared at me now. The sky blue eyes were uncannily projected into space between us. A trick of the light I know. It was still unnerving. ‘I took their damn drugs and I listened to their damn music and I nearly went schitz. A host of them have. The dropouts, I mean.’

  I asked quietly: ‘What does it do?’

  ‘Do? It’s simply a means of getting a thinktank for free.’ He slooshed down his scotch. ‘The Planets is the stimulus. Right? It opens the subconscious — a hole for the pills to go in. At the same time they ask the kids questions. Then the psyc
hologists analyse the result.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Hallucinations. They analyse the hallucinations.’ He spoke as though the whole thing were perfectly obvious. ‘Kind of dream analysis. That’s how they got on to the organic mikes. You know about them?

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Of course, the brain knows such things all the time. The ear is intimately linked with it. But our brains don’t talk to us — even though they’re a part of us. Until now. These people have found a way of getting the brain to describe itself ... its own processes, even how it could behave if modified by surgery. So the probers ply youngsters with drugs, stimulate them with mood music as if they were performing seals, and calmly incorporate the answers as if compiling a printed circuit.’

  ‘They get these answers straight? ... “Connect up this to that and that to this, patent pending”? ... Like that?’

  ‘Not like that, Yenn. The kids act the thing out symbolically. Then these people use computers to work out what’s meant. The dream things can be horrifying. I should know, I’ve had them.’ I re-ordered for him, and that one went straight down too. He gulped: ‘With the youngsters you tend to get sexual displays — Freudian. It can be obscene, usually is. Invariably it’s disastrous to the victims ... drives them mad. Stergen originally started this process to develop NCBMS. Finally brains got shoved into little boxes — a lot of God damn boxes littered around labs and connected with bits of plastic! But you know.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Don’t play dumb, Mr Yenn. You must have guessed who I am and to whom I find everything out the hard way. Get it?’

  *

  The door to Studio C was a great thick wadded affair with a row of lights across the top. But it stood open and the rehearsal light was off. I peered in, looking for Michael. Brilliant lamps and the smell of hot rubber and carbon-tetrachloride and apparent confusion as people were directed into new positions. A man evidently called George-darling who wore cans stamped about importantly and half the girls seemed to be naked, or practically. In this form they were astonishingly unalluring; they just looked like people who happened to be halfway through their bathroom routine and couldn’t be bothered to go on with it. Glare from the lighting on sallow skin made them into over-exposed prints from which most of the detail had been etched away. An orchestra, countersunk in a large square hole in the floor from which microphones rose thickly like chromium-plated sunflowers, was silent now as a lighting man experimented with different effects. The disembodied voice of the talk-back groaned boredly: ‘Camera-One, are you plugged in? ... George-darling, be a pet and tell Malcolm to ... Ah, thanks.’ George-darling, pet that he was, had done the necessary with jacks and patchboards. The voice on talkback wasn’t Michael’s.

  I gazed at the screen of the nearest monitor. I thought the teenage faces in close-up were certainly ripe for some sort of explosion. Unlike the occupants of the lift the performers here didn’t camp around or joke with each other; nor was this explained by concentration and obedience to the director. They kept giving odd sidelong glances. Their guitars could have been packed with nitro-glycerine.

  A boom operator trundled past with a mike extended on the end of its telescopic pole. I took a good look at the instrument. It didn’t sprout ears. But then, even if some organic thing was really being used, it could perfectly well have been contained inside the perforated case that surrounds any microphone. The casing here was that of a Standard Telephones cardioid — quite large enough to conceal a very unStandard piece of equipment.

  ‘All right,’ commiserated the voice on the talk-back, ‘we’ll break for thirty minutes and try a run-through at three forty-five. George-darling, come up to the control room, there’s an angel.’

  Michael paused centre studio. When he saw me, he didn’t react, just ran long fingers thoughtfully through blond hair which shone in the brilliant lighting. So lit, he looked odder than ever. Like some abstracted plasma from outer space he seemed enshrined, remote from my pinstripe world of overdrafts and Chelsea and today. Then someone killed the lights and the studio dulled.

  I saw now that a little tittering group of semi-naked girls were watching as Michael drew towards me ... then they fell silent, as if he were giving off some elusive mental radiation through some part of the spectrum I couldn’t receive. The impression of unnatural linkage between these people was a frightening one.

  Michael armed me along the corridor out of sight of the groups before he spoke. We were following an arrow directing us towards the canteen. The place was almost deserted ... mere coffee and buns could not have hoped to satisfy the weird palates of the participants. But we sat down in front of thick white canteen cups and ridiculous cakes with no real inwards, except a sticky white substance, masquerading as cream.

  ‘I wish,’ said Michael, using his most reasonable voice, ‘you wouldn’t miraculously appear like the Cheshire cat.’

  ‘Who’s smiling?’ I had learned with this character that you had to get down to business quickly and I didn’t leave room for abstruse dialogue. ‘I want to know your motive for arranging this TV show.’

  ‘Does one need a motive? Lots of people do shows?’

  ‘Don’t play games with me. Whatever it is you’re planning to bring to a head, I’ve got to know.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because six years ago your mother asked me to do something I failed to do. I still want to do it; but my lines could get crossed up with yours.’

  ‘That’s an intriguing possibility! ... Tell me, did you think that on the mention of my mother I would bury my head in my hands and sob?’

  ‘I didn’t anticipate anything so histrionic. Let’s try to be objective. Jemma talked sense-more than I realized. I was wondering if she said anything to you — about NCBMS for instance — that gave you food for thought.’

  ‘Why should she know anything useful? — She was just a filthy old drunk.’

  I refused to react to this irritant. ‘On her own, I agreed she couldn’t have done. For a long time that’s what puzzled me. It was also what held me back. I didn’t act because I didn’t think.’

  After a brief look around the canteen. Michael got out a small tin. Inside it was a ready-rolled reefer. He lit up, then gazed through the smoke at me. ‘And what’s this great new Thought, that makes all the difference?’

  ‘Your mother wouldn’t have had access to big wheels in Washington, in the normal course of events. Her connections were in Chicago ... where you were born.’

  ‘She knew a lot of people.’

  ‘Not people, ‘ I said quickly, ‘who would have confided affairs of state. For one thing, she was — as you so charitably explained — a drunk. For another she was rash —’

  ‘— positively hysterical.’

  ‘Whatever. But she did have a link. Didn’t she? ... You see, I’m just wondering why she didn’t tell me.’

  ‘Tell you what?’

  ‘Who your father was.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, leaning back with a fetching twist of the hips. ‘Sherlock does it again! — Alas, poor Seale. Well, he came up here a minute ago. Did you see him?’

  ‘I saw him.’

  I must say as a Sherlock Holmes you’re somewhat slow on the tiny uptake, though. Seale is a fair example of decrepitude, is he not?’

  ‘I can understand why.’

  Michael laughed cynically. ‘Can you? — Seale thinks his downfall is due to certain ... experiments. Actually it’s because he’s spent twenty-five years indulging his own conscience without once doing anything about it.’

  ‘He did do something about it. He cared about Youth.’

  ‘Oh, that! In the first place, the word “youth” makes me a trifle bilious; and added to that Seale should have acquired an effective deodorant before attempting to expiate his massive guilt complex in such close proximity to the young. Is your mission in coming here the same one as his?’

  ‘Michael. What does this show of yours mean?’

 
‘Mean? ... Oh, not in the artistic sense.’

  ‘Not. And I don’t believe that guitar groups and naked girls are all you’re concerned about.’

  He giggled. ‘I agree about the second item. What do you want? — the script? You can see it if you like.’

  ‘I have a feeling you’re not going to stick to it. Were you at the Festival Hall?’

  ‘Ah. You’re quite bright, really.’

  ‘It’s not only me. Certain other people —’

  ‘— Great heavens, these cryptic phrases! Say what you mean, Yenn. You’re always implying that I skirt around the point. Aren’t you doing it?’

  Okay, I had to risk telling him what he might not know. There was no other way of getting him to show his hand. ‘You, Michael, are supposed to have been responsible for a battery of teenagers supplied to Group Three. Among other things you enticed them away from the drug unit at Louise’s hospital. You co-ordinated the operations for Stergen but at some point you got bitter and twisted — probably when he rejected you as a lover —’

  ‘— Poor Nigel! How embarrassing it must be for you to use that terminology!’

  ‘Then when Louise and I saw you at Harrods you still couldn’t make up your mind what stand to take. So you diverted attention away from Stergen’s real aims and objects by encouraging my interest in your organic recording techniques.’

  ‘The only person who could have told you about that was Louise. I didn’t mention it.’

  ‘But you knew she would mention it to me in connection with the record. Did you get her to take me up there? — to the record department?’

  ‘Oh. I had the teeniest idea she might come along.’

  ‘With me. Then came the concert. Was it a surprise to you that the long-haired fraternity would explode all over the Festival Hall? — Or was that what made up your mind finally?’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘To use network television so as to tell the whole world what Group Three really is? — that what seems, in the records at Bush House, to be merely a large business corporation is also the code name for a giant military department?- — that Stergen’s altruistic medical aims to do with brain transplantation are in reality a cover for the operational manufacture and launching of brain-guided missiles? ... Isn’t that what you’re doing? And isn’t your motive merely spite? ... to encourage these poor dupes into, what will, in effect, trigger a one-way war? Once exposed, do you imagine that Stergen will just ... stop?’