Amazing Disgrace

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  On my way out I pass the open door of the waiting room where the fish are still frozen in their dimensionless limbo forty feet above a London street and the diver is for ever about to be shafted even as he revels in doubloons. Erotic eventuality? What kind of grotesque urban world have you strayed into, Samper, so far from the sanities of Le Roccie and its bucolic pleasures? You must hurry home and write whatever you want to write and stop waiting on other people’s vagueness and indecisiveness, a bending lackey to their promises of loot to come. Either Millie and Lew make a straightforward proposal in the next two days or I’ll sign up with Nanty. Not that he’s so much better, pop stars being about as reliable as Hollywood film-makers where airy promises are concerned. But cap-in-hand must now give way to cheque-in-hand. Samper has spoken.

  20

  This feeling of having taken a decision lifts my spirits, already somewhat buoyed by not having been despatched urgently by Benjy Birnbaum to the Wimpole Clinic for shaving and prepping prior to surgery. Still, he has left me some tricky homework to accomplish by tomorrow. Erotic eventuality? No matter how heartening an encounter with a cock doctor, the experience leaves behind it no quickening of the libidinal pulse. Rather the reverse, I’m afraid, and I don’t quite see how I’m to fulfil this task in the allotted time. Sharing Derek’s Allure-scented flat is often comic, sometimes sordid, but seldom stimulating since our amatory tastes in no way coincide. People cavil about having to follow their doctor’s tiresome orders but right now I would be happy to forswear alcohol, sugar or salt if it also let me off having to experience orgasm before two o’clock tomorrow afternoon. I suppose that’s what comes of being fifty rather than forty. Quite infuriating to have been found out, by the way. I’m still smarting as I walk down Beaumont Street towards Derek’s rancid lair, but to take my mind off it I have already begun to sing Captain Thorogood’s doleful aria from Gilbert and Sullivan’s unfinished operetta, Durance Vile:

  The ides of March are iding,

  The cocks have all crowed thrice.

  The hours go quickly sliding

  With each fall of the dice –

  With each fall of the dice!

  If you have any familiarity with this scarcely performable but noble torso (which I rather doubt), you will remember that the Captain, unjustly imprisoned for cheating at cards, is now in the Tower of London awaiting execution for having throttled a succession of his gaolers, each of whom offered to cheer his spirits by playing games of chance with him and lost. Tonight it is the turn of kindly young Jack Lively, an apprentice gaoler barely out of his teens who has fallen in love with Pansy Thorogood, the Captain’s comely daughter who visits him daily. The Captain and Jack are about to play halma.

  Ouija boards are weejing,

  The palms have all been read.

  And tea leaves in their legion

  Have given up their dead,

  Have given up their dead!

  Young Jack survives, but barely. With extraordinary skill Sullivan manages to be simultaneously jaunty and sombre; and although we know there will be a happy ending (Jack will himself strangle Pansy in Act II when he visits her in Lowndes Square on his day off) a certain darkness tingles in the background. Impertinent burghers stare at me as I pass among them down Marylebone High Street, much as their counterparts did in Southampton the other day. There seems not much to be done about Britain’s essential unmusicality – Das Land ohne Musik, as the Germans used to call us, and that was long before the Sex Pistols. Ours is today a riffraff culture of hooli-scruffs and yobbigans with little original to say and scarcely any technique for saying it. It was not ever thus; and there are some who would blame our culture’s demise on that of the Luton Girls’ Choir in 1976. I myself would place the date a decade or two earlier, after which everything was swamped by the enduring deluge of social realism and conceptual art. But who cares? I shall be off just as soon as I’ve signed a contract and sorted out my woefully abused member.

  Today I’m too lazy to clean up Derek’s kitchen and prepare an inventive snack before his return from work. Instead I add to his phone bill by calling up last night’s fellow diner, Joan Nugent. I’ve been thinking that on balance she could be more an ally than not. Anyway, I’m prepared to take a risk. I really do need to talk to someone about the Cleat problem, knowing the great yachtswoman is safely sitting in Hatchards or Borders or Waterstones laboriously signing copies of my book with her left hand. One of the minor inconveniences of losing your writing hand, Millie once told me, is that you also lose your scriptorial identity. All of a sudden bank managers, passport officers, the DVLC and supermarket checkouts refuse to believe you’re you. But that, of course, was in the bad old days of being Mrs Clifford Cleat. Once the nation recognizes you as just plain Millie it scarcely matters what hieroglyphs you scrawl.

  ‘Hello?’ rasps Joan’s nicotine-pickled voice from the phone. ‘Get away, blast you, I’m feeding Sandy.’ A storm of yapping on the other end. ‘Go on, get away, Bo’sun. You’ve had yours. Greedy bugger. Who is this? Oh, Gerry. Sorry about that. Just feeding the dogs here. Bedlam as usual. Glad you’ve called, actually. We never did finish our conversation last night. I want to know what you know about those ruddy transponders, among other things.’

  ‘Even as we speak they’re trying to retrieve them from the seabed.’

  ‘Ha! I was right. You do know more.’

  I tell her the story of the container that was swept overboard but lie when I say I have no idea how the recording of the transponders’ electronic Babel came into Millie’s hands.

  ‘Huh, it’ll be one of those marine boffins,’ says Joan astutely. ‘For some reason they’ve got it in for her. I don’t yet know why but I’m going to find out.’

  Now tread carefully here, Gerry. There must be no mention of the EAGIS affair otherwise this old crony will warn Millie of the plot against her. ‘Don’t quote me on this because I don’t know anything for certain, but I suspect at least some of the scientists at BOIS will have taken against her over this Neptune business. It’s all too flaky and New Age. I’d guess they feel it’s squandering the opportunity of having a celebrity who might otherwise raise awareness in a serious and intelligent way. Possibly they think she’s more interested in grabbing a new constituency of admirers for herself.’ ‘Suspect’, ‘guess’, ‘possibly’. I hope I’m covering my tracks well enough but this butch old girl at the other end is nobody’s fool. ‘It might be a kindly act if you warn Millie about the transponders, at any rate. You obviously know far more about marine salvage than I do, but whether or not they retrieve this gear I’m afraid the story’s going to break sooner or later. I’m sure Millie will want to distance herself from alleged recordings of the Spirit of the Ocean addressing the human race from the seabed. In short, if I were her I’d throw those nutty scholars – what’s their names, Tammeri and Brilov – to the wolves.’

  There is a silence at the other end, unless one counts what sounds like a pack of the very wolves in question. Joan’s terriers would surely make equally short work of the misguided linguists if thrown them at dinner time.

  ‘Right,’ she says at length. ‘Yes, I don’t see she has any alternative. Not that she ever had. I’m afraid there’s this streak in Millie that imagines she can get away with anything.’

  ‘You noticed.’

  ‘It’s as if reality’s never going to catch up with her.’

  ‘That shark did.’

  ‘Yes, but she’s never spotted its more metaphorical aspects. She only thinks of it as having been an agent of change for the better in her life. I’ll tell her, Gerry. That’s loyal of you. While we’re about it, do you know of anything else that might steal up and bite her when she’s not looking?’

  ‘Well … Not really, no.’ Why is it that conspiracies are so tempting to divulge? Why do we find it so flattering to hold some titbit of knowledge over somebody’s head?

  ‘May I ask how you come to have contacts in the marine sciences, Gerry?’

  ‘O
h, sheer chance,’ I tell her. ‘Friends of friends. It came in handy while writing the book when I had to check some details about navigation. You can imagine – being a landlubberI needed to bone up on winds and tides and currents and compass bearings even if I didn’t actually use the information.’ It’s just like talking to Benjy Birnbaum. I’m so plausible when I ad-lib. We Sampers can think on our feet. I really believe there must be oratory in our genes. ‘You wouldn’t credit the weird contacts and knowledge I’ve needed to acquire over the years while writing these stupid books. Skiing, competitive eating, motor racing, sailing – you name it.’

  ‘Competitive eating?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. That was a few years ago. They were trying to have it accepted as an Olympic sport with strict rules, accredited trainers and regular testing for drugs such as regurgitation suppressants. As a matter of fact I believe they still are.’

  ‘You’re having me on.’

  ‘By no means. Look it up on the internet. It’s still mainly US-led but the world champion hot-dog eater for the past five years has been a Japanese boy, and if you’re thinking sumo wrestler you’d be wrong. He’s quite small and hasn’t an ounce of fat on him. Apparently it’s all about training the stomach to expand. I had to learn a lot about the human digestive system, the vagus nerve, the physiology of the stomach lining, all that.’

  ‘What was your book called?’

  ‘We never got that far, it all came to nothing. The cash wasn’t there. Believe me, Joan, the money needs to be reasonable enough to supply incentive, at least. When I was still doing the preliminary interviews I once had to spend the night in the same small room as the reigning world champion baked beans eater.’ I thought back to those awful hours in a caravan behind a fairground outside Dewsbury. Never again; not least because the forty-stone Yorkshireman expired a month later, deafeningly, after losing his title in Oslo. He was only twenty-seven. It’s a complete no-no, trying to write about people who are likely to up and die on you. I’d always thought motor racing risky enough when it came to writing a champion’s biography; it’s a wealthy sport so the risk is probably worth taking. But competitive eating still inhabits the roustabout world of country fairs. Try as it might for Olympic status there’s always the ghost of a barker with a megaphone in the background shouting ‘Roll up! Roll up! Fifteen poundsa sausages in ten minutes, gennlemen ’n ladies! Fifteen pounds!’ There’s another aspect, too, from the would-be writer’s point of view. Most sports are pretty sickening at close range but competitive eating can be literally so. Try watching somebody stuff himself with a huge chunk of naked butter against the clock and without ‘regurgitating’, as they euphemistically call throwing up. After witnessing a professional butter eater put away a kilo in five minutes, trying with his spare hand to stop it coming back down his nose, I ate nothing for a week and spent much of the time in a darkened room with cologne compresses reading Proust. We writers suffer for our art.

  ‘So,’ I conclude, ‘my knowing the odd oceanographer falls well within the boundaries of normality for me. I can tell you honestly, Joan, that my boundaries are set pretty wide these days but they definitely do not include the likes of Brilov, Tammeri and my other neighbour last night with the big, er, jacket.’

  ‘And eyes.’

  ‘And eyes, yes. Debra Leather, that’s it. She’s another of these mystical scholars. As I say, to the wolves with them.’

  ‘Definitely. I’ll let Millie finish her book signing and then I shall get on to her and make that very point. Ciderpresses, my arse. Balls to Neptune! Me and the girls have been thinking it for a long time, mind you, but we couldn’t find the right lever to move Millie. Really, she’s been beyond reason in some ways, for Pete’s sake don’t quote me, but this time I shall talk her around. It will take two minutes, the way I’m going to do it. We’ll simply put the blame on those blasted groupies for misleading her with all that mystic garbage. We Navy girls are about to reassert ourselves. You’re a star, Gerry.’

  So there you are, Samper. Congratulations. For all the right reasons you have probably just talked yourself out of a plum contract, one that would have enabled you to step off the treadmill for a good long time. I have no doubt tough old Joan with her nautical tattoos will pound some sense into Millie and Lew. My bet is that Millie will pretty soon announce she’s standing down from her short-lived leadership of the loony Neptunies for reasons of ill health. When her awful lapse in taste and intelligence has receded in the public’s mind – in about a week, given that organ’s attention span – she can maybe start lending her name to some serious marine enterprises and political initiatives. But the salient thing is she is no longer going to want me to write her a book about her awareness of divine presences twenty thousand leagues under the sea. I suppose I should keep ahead of the game by contriving a different book for her, an altogether more sensible book, a sort of David Attenborough-ish book about the ocean and its threatened future, as told by world-renowned yachtsmoll Millie Cleat. But I’m weary of the woman. And besides, the sea’s future is in no way threatened. It will still be there long after Millie and the rest of our race have vanished, washing its hands of us over and over on its thousand shores.

  *

  Wise in the ways of the world, the next day I put off calling Nanty until after midday. In my limited experience, boy-band leaders are seldom up before noon and often not much before 4 p.m., depending on the toll taken by last night’s gig. Slightly to my surprise I catch him sounding frisky and compos mentis.

  ‘Doin’ me exercises, mate,’ he tells me. ‘Physio for the old gluteus maximus. Bet you don’t know what that is.’

  ‘I do, too. It’s what you sit on.’ Minimus in poor Derek’s case, of course.

  ‘I gotta hand it to you, Gerry, you know a lotta stuff. So what did you think of that dinner the other night?’

  ‘Inedible, mostly.’

  ‘Yeah. What about that neighbour of yours, though, eh? Not the dyke – the one with the boobs? Tasty, or what? Giving you the old eye, I thought. “Wonder if old Gerry’s up for it?” I said to myself. “She’s making it a bit obvious.”’

  ‘Well, Nanty, it can’t be my body so it must be my mind. Or maybe even my suit.’ Those pop eyes swim up into my mental vision, reminding me of my passing ailment and by extension of my repeat consultation with Benjy Birnbaum this afternoon. I push them firmly under again. ‘Anyway, Nanty, I have your note and here I am, calling you as requested.’

  ‘Cool. What I need to know, mate, is are you on ter write this book about me? Thing is, me agent really went for that plan of ours before I had me deliberate – that’s what I call me accident, because it wasn’t; it was a carefully planned heist, like the papers said. You remember: that idea of yours to build me up for the future.’

  I certainly do remember. It was a plan of campaign for nothing less than the later career of a rock star whose days as Brill, the plausible leader of a boy band, are severely numbered. There is a limit to how much longer a bald man of thirty-two can continue to hold the attention of thirteen-year-old girls in a way that won’t lead to his arrest. With the famous Samper ad-libbing skill and over a glass or two of Fernet-Branca I had sketched out a scenario for which any PR company would probably have charged him at least fifty thousand pounds. It was to begin with a bestselling autobiography and continue with a plot to associate Nanty increasingly with the sort of serious mainstream artistic projects that get huge publicity. True, they commonly give scant pleasure to anyone except the celebrity in question, but at the barest minimum he usually gets the OBE, much as the fat boy at the back of the class gets a merit mark for trying. I rather think I suggested an AIDS Requiem (African instruments, Liverpudlian guitars, Kiri Te Kanawa and the singing strings of the LSO); but that could now easily be transformed into a Mass for the Planet (words by Nanty, translated into Latin and sung by the pious monks of San Bernard augmented by Balinese instruments, Liverpudlian guitars, selected Sperm, Blue and Minke whale soloists plus the singi
ng strings of the CSO under Max Christ). Whatever project is chosen its theme should be agreeably tragic. It ought to involve celebrity performers far enough past their sell-by date to merit adjectives like ‘well-loved’, and the whole thing would have to contain that irreducible quotient of tackiness that gives British public enterprises their unmistakable character. This, I reasoned, would propel Brill out of the kiddie-band charts and Nanty into the wrinkled pantheon of those whose eventual knighthoods in the Birthday Honours List elicit peppery remarks such as ‘Who?’ and ‘Good Christ!’ in Tunbridge Wells.

  On the other hand, the project need not necessarily be musical. Obviously there is always room for another Holocaust memorial somewhere – you can never have too many of them and they usually win prizes, too, like Paralympians. Possibly a little ambitious for the likes of Nanty, however. Maybe wacky as well as tacky was the way to go, with a postmodern ‘event’ of sorts? From time to time I’d wondered if it was the right moment to resurrect the old idea of tear bottles: tiny flasks in which pining lovers once caught their tears as a way of quantifying their hurt. I fancied it might be possible to conduct a global weep-in on behalf of the environment. Well, if not actually global then confined to the EU or just to the UK, like Red Nose Day. Brill could lead a day of weeping in which people meditated on threatened species, dying pandas, starving koalas, bludgeoned seal pups and similar mammalian tearjerkers while catching their lacrimosities in little plastic vials which they would then drop off at collection points in shopping malls, post offices, etc. This would lead to a nationally televised ceremony when great vats of British blubberings would be poured into an empty swimming pool. Brill would compère the show while an immense ballcock moved the hand of a Weepometer. Thus would the nation gauge the literal depth of its concern for environmental matters. A bit on the weird side but surely worth a CBE at the very least. By one means or another I was aiming for Nanty’s regular inclusion as a well-loved figure in Christmas TV spectaculars by the time he was forty. Thereafter he was on his own and free to follow the normal trajectory of yesterday’s celebrities: a divorce or two, a drug bust or two, a newspaper outcry following the assault of a paparazzo outside a nightclub, a crotchety letter to The Times about the scandalous unavailability of Vegan food in motorway diners. Meanwhile …