by Nigel Planer
‘How to have a happy balanced relationship that lasts. The five magic ingredients that you should look for in a man that turn a passionate quickie into the real thing: 1. Sense of humour; 2. Sensitivity; 3. A caring side; 4. Self-confidence without arrogance; 5. A wizard in bed.’
I had put the Independent down on the seat opposite so that I could get my feet up without taking off my shoes and was flicking through the pages of Metropolitan magazine looking for the small piece by one of my clients. I got it at Birmingham station, happy for an excuse to actually buy a copy. I am fascinated by women’s magazines and could read them for ever, but unfortunately have to restrict my perusals to doctors’ waiting rooms or lobbies of production companies.
‘You’re a modern woman with a schedule from hell and it’s easy to put yourself last. It’s time to invest in yourself. Do it now!’ This was the copy-line underneath some glossy pictures of a new range of blushers.
‘Look at your life — if something is wrong, make it right. Work out an ideal future — then live it!’ A picture of a beautifully turned-out young woman in a suit dictating a letter to a male-model secretary, also no doubt wearing blusher but his more subtly applied. And over the page, an advertisement for a rather small new hop-about car. ‘For too long women have been relegated to the back seat when it comes to buying cars. We’re here to tell those car manufacturers that we want much more than just somewhere to put the shopping.’ A beautiful model with unbelievable hair and even more unbelievable glasses swinging her £900 handbag near the open door of a pristine mauve automobile with a natty name on the number plate. Through all of these wonderful ironic and aspirational pages, I managed to find my Jenny Thompson’s piece. It was actually a location diary of her time filming in Prague last year, but they’d bunged ‘Start getting your own back. Every woman deserves an adventure’ across the top of it in heavy print. Referring, no doubt, to the adulterous subject matter of the film Jenny had been working on and not, I hoped, to her personal life. Also, this month’s edition of Metropolitan was supposed to be themed. The overall concept being infidelity, or ‘Why having a fling is a good thing’ month. So I suppose they needed to tie it all in.
Jenny’s article was OK. A bit dull but they paid her quite well and she seemed to be getting more and more of these kinds of offer. I discussed it with her and she thought the idea of getting a regular column somewhere would be, in her words, ‘amazingly brave’. So this was just a station on the way, as it were.
On the other side of the spread from Jenny’s piece was another picture of two anodyne models. This time the chisel-jawed man was looking into the middle distance while the pouting female gazed sadly at his left ear. This to illustrate an article by an evidently eminent psychologist which had the shoutline ‘Staying faithful to an emotionally unavailable man. How to handle it so you win.’
I speed-read the first few paragraphs and found myself being hoovered into the world of victimology, where relationships are the altar we must worship at, where marriage is about winning and losing self-respect, where words like empowerment and independence and emotional maturity and cherishment are the sacrament and lack of emotional openness is the deadly sin. There was a tick-box quiz at the end, to find out on a score chart whether ‘Your man is worth staying faithful to’. This kind of stuff affects me like a cinema-sized pack of Opal Fruits. You want a couple of them for a small sugar hit and end up chewing your way through all forty and thinking the movie was crap because you came out with a headache and a confused bowel. I read through the tick-box quiz, wondering what mine and Liz’s score would be.
‘You’ve got a new boss who’s making your life hell. Does your man: a) Give you advice and then threaten to ring your boss on your behalf? b) Get angry and go down to the pub? or c) Listen to your problem and produce tickets for a weekend in Paris?’
My mood began to deflate. The scenery became more urban again. The sun went behind the batch of clouds. The train slammed into a short tunnel.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, we shall shortly be approaching London Euston.’ The microphone-happy steward made his last announcement. The men in suits began packing away their computers, mobile phones and ball-park budget brochures. I dawdled with the magazine. The train stood for some minutes, awaiting a free platform to enter. A couple of outbound trains whacked past the nearside window but we didn’t shift. I started to go through my diary of events and calls for the day. I toyed with merchandising possibilities on the Planter tour and wondered which of Naomi’s promoters would be the best to approach. I fiddled with my Psion but it was no good. Underneath it all was the jumpy feeling. The feeling that must be avoided. The one that has no name but a hell of a presence. The one to do with Liz and me. I do not have the language for this. There is no dictionary of terms other than that supplied, in buckets by magazines like this one, over whose cover I had now spilt coffee in what I supposed must be some kind of Freudian slip of the elbow. The black liquid ran towards my lap as the train noisily lurched back into action. I mopped at it with a serviette. The coffee had first splashed on to the summary of this month’s leader articles — ‘The best sex I ever had. Women confess’ — and had now dribbled down over ‘Free with this issue! Four available men!’
Walking up the platform, my mind had become a quagmire of 1990s mag-speak. There is no doubt that Liz feels disempowered being with me, I thought. It is humiliating for her that the money in our bank account comes only from me. That we get round it tax wise by saying she is employed by the agency. She hates to be thought of only as Guy’s wife or Grace’s mum, and not as a person in her own right. It must be awful for her, I thought. Talk about emotionally unavailable. I’m almost entirely unavailable. I have to work so hard to support us all and when I do get back home, there’s Grace. It must be degrading for Liz, knowing that the car she drives is officially a Mullin and Ketts company car. She must feel that she doesn’t exist. No wonder she used to hide the child seat in the boot. No wonder she needs to get out of the house so often. She must feel like a prisoner. I have disempowered her, that’s what I’ve done with all my privileges. I must be part of the backlash conspiracy against women. No wonder she’s ended up sleeping with Bob Henderson. Poor thing.
As I reached the taxi rank, a more familiar feeling surfaced; resentment and anger at Liz. Just because she felt disempowered, it didn’t naturally follow that I was empowered, did it? Didn’t mean that I was doing the disempowering, did it? That I was some irritatingly confident father figure, basking, wallowing even, in my authority? An easy life inherited through gender.
There’s room for two people to feel they have no choices, you know. I would love not to have to work so bloody hard, etc., et bloody cetera. But I put it out of my mind. I wouldn’t want to be accused of being a misogynist, as well as all my other well-recorded faults. I suppose I have trouble buying the idea of a misogynist conspiracy. Maybe that’s because I’ve never had the time to pursue a competitive sport, but shouldn’t a conspiracy have meetings and special signs? And aprons?
‘Largo factotem della citta largoooo.’ The cab driver was a very large man who barely fitted behind the wheel. ‘Tra la la la la la la la laaaa.’ He was in the chorus of the taxi drivers’ choir and had played several leading roles in his local operatic society, including Nankipoo from The Mikado and Rossini’s Figaro, the opening aria of which he was now giving me a rendition. I wish I hadn’t told him I was an agent. Or maybe this was a treat he bestowed on all passengers. He offered a running translation alongside the sung Italian version.
‘Basically, he’s saying like he’s a pimp and a gigolo and everyone in Seville comes to him if they want a bit of an erotic ding-dong, a bit of how’s-yer-father, right? He hears all the gossip while he’s doing his haircutting and that, and he passes bits of it on, and his name is Figaro tra la la la la la la la la la la.’ He burst into baritone again: ‘V’e la risorsa, poi del mettiere, colla donnetta, col cavaliere!’ His Italian accent wasn’t bad. ‘Oh yeah, ‘cos they were
all at it, you know, them sixteenth-century Italians. Donnetta, that’s like a young dolly-bird, and cavaliere, that’s some feller who wants to stomp her one from behind. Personally I think I was wrong for the part, being a big fellow, even though as you must know Figaro is usually played by a big fellow. Oh yeah, I had to stick on the old beard and everything, really tickles. But I think it’d be better if he was played by a little feller, you know, he’s a sort of camp sort of hairdresser sort of a bloke. Someone like Peter Stringfellow. But he couldn’t reach the notes, you see.’ He started to sing again. ‘Stringfellooo, Stringfellooo, Stringfellostringfellostringfellostringfelloooo.’
After the habitual exhortation to cheer up it might never happen, I paid the fare, declining to tip but taking his phone number on a cab card which he pressed on me. I binned it when he was round the corner.
‘Am I blonde with big tits?’
‘Well, you did bleach your hair that time when you got back from Ibiza, and I would have said your breasts were definitely of the more—than—adequate type.
‘Guy! Look at me! Am I blonde with big tits?’
‘No.’
‘Then why are you trying to fuck me?’
The news of Jeremy’s new career plans had not impressed Naomi Ketts.
‘The man — if we can call him that any more — has less acting talent than a mollusc, and he couldn’t write or direct his way into or out of a paper bag. He’s a frigging game-show host, for frig’s sake, who’s poking the totty! Your client, Guy. Your problem.’ End of conversation.
We had these kind of days every now and then at M and K. But I suspect Naomi’s somewhat hostile and OTT outburst had more to do with her irritation at having to face my shaving things by our coffee sink than with any of Planter’s high-flown new ambitions.
It was a few days after Birmingham, and my little sojourn in Meard Street looked like turning into a full-scale siege. By the end of the week, I could no longer pretend that my overnights were for business purposes, and, except for Tania, the women respected my reticence in not coming forth with any explanations. If things were bad at home, that too was my problem. Much as they may have secretly disliked Liz, she was the woman after all, and in any confessional they would take her side. Tania, on the other hand, pestered me with love and advice. She left me the phone number of a cranial osteopath by whom she swore, and tried to convince me that I should cut out dairy products.
On Friday after work I returned home to Fulham to see parked on the driveway by our front sitting room window a very recent model Porsche with the cherished number plate BH 123. All silver and shiny and clean and glistening in the early-evening light. Sitting there like an overfed shark. No rubbish on the floor of this car. No sweet wrappers, no kids’ toys. No ice-cream stain on the baby car-seat. No baby car-seat. Porsche, the car designer lauded and subsidised by Adolf Hitler. Porsche. Sitting there on my front drive under the large elm growing out of my front fence, with a humourless and complacent smile on its radiator grille, while Grace slept inside the house.
Some time during the next week, while Liz was out, I went home and packed a proper load of things to bring to Meard Street. I admit it, I did check through all of Liz’s drawers, but found no incriminating sexy diary, no extravagant receipts, no raunchy polaroids with which to hurt myself I also went through the mail. There were various bills to pay and policies to renew. Liz never does any of that. Maybe there was more to Neil’s right man story than I had thought. Here I was prowling through this woman’s affairs, making sure her premiums were up to date and none of the roof tiles had fallen off. I again had the feeling that Neil was writing my life. I must pay him a visit to find out the end of the plot. I slunk back to Soho with plastic bags of bumf.
It was a hot Monday night with many sirens in it, I couldn’t sleep, my feet seemed to have swollen beyond endurance in the claggy heat. I prowled around the office again slurping a mug of ‘poo and then, when I’d had enough of fidgeting — and taking a couple of scripts and a copy of Broadcast with me — I nipped over the road to the Jade Tree to eat.
The crowded street was full of hard staring faces like a bad acid trip, or at least what I imagine a bad acid trip would be like. My younger brother Tony would know more than me about that, of course. I made a .mental note to call in on him and see how he was. He didn’t have a phone, which meant one had to take time out to see him. This seemed to have left Tony with a much more trouble-free existence than us normal people. Bastard. Sometimes I wish I had his mental problems; everyone accommodated Tony. He hadn’t been to see Mum since my father died. He never really got involved in family things. That was my job.
Out of the Soho fog of strangers there was a face I recognized; Simon Renman, the producer, coming out of a tacky strip-joint. I smiled at him and instantly wished I hadn’t.
‘Hello, how are you? How are you coping with the twins?’ I said without realizing that he would have preferred a cursory nod. Sometimes my memory for people’s personal details is a disadvantage.
‘Oh, hello, Guy,’ he said tensely. ‘I’m researching a script about strippers so I have to, you know …’ indicating the dive behind him. He paused, lost for words. I hadn’t asked.
‘That’s your excuse and you’re sticking to it,’ I said with the nearest I could get to a boysy chuckle.
‘Sorry?’ he said.
‘These are my Y—fronts and I’m sticking to them,’ I said, compounding my error and embarrassing the spunk out of him. He was lying about the script research then. He was guiltily haunting the wank palaces, and I’d caught him at it. So the rumours about his marriage must be true. He sloped off into the multinational night leaving me certain that I must keep any trouble between myself and Liz under wraps. It’s a tricky old biz, show-biz, and anything that puts you at a disadvantage —anything — may be taken down and used against you, and don’t say trousers. I was already logging his domestic troubles in my mental file under ‘Well Sorted Films’, the name of his production company. Not the right time to invest, I fear.
After a meal which was too fatty for ten thirty at night, I returned to the office and rechecked everyone’s desks, emptied the bins, straightened the noticeboard, that sort of thing. There was one new message on the answer-phone.
Kemble Stenner, now there’s a good name. Worth representing just on the strength of it. Nice voice in the message. Was a child actress for years. Must be all of twenty now. I looked her up in the Spotlight and the photo was pretty gorge too. Barbara’s granddaughter, although brought up mostly by her dad, who was a producer I think — big in the seventies — and a series of second, third and fourth wives of his. I don’t think Barbara had seen her particularly from one year to the next, and her mum was Sandra Peters, of whom the less said probably the better. I don’t know if you remember Crofter’s Way? Yes? Well, Sandra Peters was the token totty in that, you know, the one with the plastic hair? Yes. For five years, and then nothing. Except for a couple of embarrassingly drunken appearances on Blankety Blank or Celebrity Squares or whatever it was at the time. Wise move of young Kemble to take Grandma’s surname and not Mum’s.
Kemble Stenner, and a bit of a stunner! And from the answer-phone message, funny and pushy and clever to boot. I made a note to return her call in the morning.
I sat on the small cane sofa we have by the window at Mullin and Ketts, partly because it was the only non-work piece of furniture in the place, and partly because I’d bought a cigar and I didn’t want to fug the place up and have to explain myself in the morning. I looked at the phone. It looked back at me. Grace would be long asleep by now, so no point in ringing Liz again. She had evidently had a reasonably good day but had scribbled in wax crayon on the bathroom wall. Personally I can live with her extempore murals, but I’d promised to do something about it next weekend. I suppose it’d be different if she’d graffitied the office.
Another siren two-toned by. I sat in my underpants smoking my cigar and drinking the rest of the champagne and flicked thr
ough my phone book. My own phone book, which is a much smaller affair than my Mullin and Ketts one. I sat with the phone in my lap, looking through my black address book. We didn’t even have a radio in the office. I suppose the phone is more important than sex, especially since AIDS. No wonder British Telecom just made ten million profit. It was too late now to ring anyone out of the blue without appearing to be a lonely old pervert in the middle of the night, which is what I suppose I was. There was an uncomfortable buzzing in my brain which I wanted to put an end to through conversation. I would have liked to ring Lottie or Maggie, or even Lesley: girlfriends of mine prior to Liz arriving on the scene — two actresses and a dental hygienist — but you can’t just call someone up like that at midnight after years of silence, can you, and expect to be taken on board as a normal human being. Actually, that’s a slight fib when it comes to Lottie. I have spoken to her a few times over the last three years. Not to keep any doors open, you understand, just to keep in touch. Of course, I never told Liz. She would have found it intolerable, especially when pregnant, to know that her feller had any kind of a confidante of the female kind. ‘When a man wants to talk alone with a woman,’ I could hear her say even now, ‘it can only mean one thing.’ Or was that her mother who said that?
Barbara Stenner, she’d be awake, most likely hitting her second or third bottle of wine by now, and would love to drop everything for a long talk about the seven chakras of my kundalini and whether my energy paths were being blocked or what have you, but then the effort required to talk to dear old Barbara was always greater than the result. In any case, it’s not my place to ring clients when I feel like it. That’s not the deal. It works the other way round, they ring me day or night when they need something — usually help in making some decision or other, like whether to go to Manchester to do a nice part for no money or stay in London and wait for lucrative but unrewarding pap to arrive. They are, most of them, under the illusion that I am sitting on invaluable information about what the future holds for them. I was through to the end of my little book now:
