The Right Man

by Nigel Planer

  We’d been in the crowded downstairs bar drinking tequila for some twenty minutes by the time Kemble arrived. Well, I say that, but she could have been there for quite a while for all I knew. She was sitting, amongst a group of friends, down by the dead-log-fire end of the room, as if she’d been there all night. As if she had happened by, cool as a stick of celery jutting out of a Pimm’s. We clocked each other across the room full of miniskirts, uplift bras and big hair. She was wearing spectacles. Was there a new fashion thing I’d missed out on? Unlike Tony’s, hers were big black-rimmed jobs which made her look Joan Bakewell-ey, intellectual, smart, in control. She looked at me over the top of them, smiled and mouthed, ‘Hi, gorgeous. Doug Handom had clocked her too and Kemble’s eyes rested on him accusingly for a tenth of a second, before she turned back to her conversation with her friends, which looked from this distance as if it was very deep and fascinating. It was perfect. The only woman in the room not to want to gaze on those angular cheekbones, that famous jaw line, the vulnerable mouth which had kissed Emma Thompson and Julia Roberts in the same film, for Pete’s sake. The only woman who had better things to do and big grown-up glasses on. She was brilliant. She knew how to handle herself, this one. He was hooked and he didn’t even know it. I sat back to admire a master at work. Or mistress, rather.

  Various sycophants came and went, claiming Doug’s attention: Liz Trainer, the casting director; Anthony Durant, now a successful theatre director, who once employed Doug in some dull, provincial Chekhov or something; Greg Pride, LWT, and more. But all the while, Kemble’s poise and the way she was touching the elbows’ and knees of the men in her group were working on him. I got waylaid by bloody Jonty Forbes, BBC Comedy, who’d somehow heard about Naomi Ketts’s moonlight bunk, and I had to spin him some line about having decided last year to start up my own company. How Jeremy Planter had become a liability ages ago, difficult to work with, drunk, out of ideas, that sort of thing. It’s easy to do. It’s called sticking the knife in wherever possible. I’m sure that in another part of town at that very minute, Naomi was having an identical conversation in reverse with some semi-important possible employer. Denigrating me in any way possible. Denigrating my clients. Fortifying her own position. ‘Guy is a lovely man and I love him dearly but he doesn’t have that killer instinct.’ Or:

  ‘He’s very good at the everyday running of things but when it comes to inspiration he’s a bit …’ Sticking in the stiletto with a few slippery words. I wouldn’t respect her if she didn’t. It’s business.

  Doug’s eyes kept tripping over to where the bespectacled Kemble was sitting, laughing a carefree laugh. Irving Tellman returned from his third visit to the toilet with Vicky and Tracey whoever. Kemble noticed, or affected to notice, a tall guy over the other side of the room. She shouted across at him. He turned and recognized her. It was as if everyone there was a player in her game. She had control not only of all the pieces but of the board as well. Nay, the incline of the surface on which the board rested.

  She got up and left her group to talk to Terry, whoever he was — I’d put my money on photographer — and swishing past us, stood with her back to Doug Handom. She had on tight black trousers and a wafty silk blouse, no bra. From where we sat, her tight little buttocks were on a level with Doug Handom’s smouldering eyeline. She’d ignored me in passing and I let her run the show. She was good. It amused me.

  Brother Tony, on whom all this was lost, struck up with the distracted Doug Handom again.

  ‘So tell me. This dream you follow. What about your folks, your children? Don’t you miss them? Don’t they miss you?’ he asked him. Bang on the knuckle really, considering Doug’s hasty retreat from familial responsibility and abandonment of everything and everybody close to him. Except me of course, his five per cent foothold in the failing British end of the money-making fantasy.

  ‘Oh, man,’ said Handom with acted miserableness. ‘I wanted to see my kid so much, you know. But my fucking ex-missus, she won’t let me. She tries to make me feel guilty, you know. She’s such a bitch.’

  On further gentle questioning from Tony, it transpired that Doug had turned up unannounced on the doorstep the day before, at the baby’s bedtime, laden with gifts, expecting some movie-style prodigal-father reunion after eighteen months of completely non-communicative absence.

  ‘So, you want it to be like, when you stop dreaming for a couple of seconds, everyone’ll be there, available, for you to pick up where you dropped them,’ said Tony.

  Doug’s eyes shifted across to mine momentarily, as if he wasn’t sure whether he had just been hugely insulted. I looked between him and Tony: the gorgeous but shifty narcissistic fop and the lofty bow-legged oak tree. My job, no, my instinct, my nature was to defend Doug, to bolster his ego up whatever. My business, my life, depended on his dream.

  ‘I hate that,’ Peter Saravan interrupted. ‘My kids are grown up now but always that guilt, that guilt. Their mother tried to make me feel guilty.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said Doug. ‘She’s always trying to make me feel guilty, the bitch.’ I’d been gulping tequila for three-quarters of an hour or so, so that’s probably what gave me the headache. It came on suddenly, accompanied by the searing sound of a chainsaw. I didn’t need these half-humans.

  ‘No, Doug,’ I found myself saying. ‘You don’t feel guilty, you are guilty. Her existence just reminds you of quite how guilty you actually are.’ In Tony’s presence, I seemed to have lost that invaluable tool of agenting: the ability to dissemble. My brother Tony’s feet were like roots, twisting below Sally’s maroon carpet and into the floorboards below.

  ‘You scooted off after the big prize, remember?’ I continued. ‘And you got it. I sometimes wish I’d done the same. But you can’t come back now expecting sympathy.’

  Kemble moved away from Terry the photographer and diagonally back across the room. Like the queen in chess, she could go in any direction she chose, and she chose to stop ever so casually by me — one of her lowly pawns — for surveillance of the enemy king and his bishops.

  I did the introductions, and with the ease and grace of a swan landing in the water, she sailed the conversation past Doug Handom and on to Peter Saravan, leaving Doug out of his accustomed spotlight.

  ‘So, you’re the bloke who got done for making that video with the underaged girls, then?’ she said with charming frankness to Saravan. She knew her stuff, this one.

  ‘We settled out of court,’ said Saravan uncomfortably.

  ‘I know,’ Kemble replied. Irving Tellman too became a little uneasy.

  ‘So what did you guys have in mind to do tonight?’ Kemble said with great dignity. ‘I have a friend who works in a lap-dancing club round the corner. Do you fancy that, or do you just want to go back to your hotel for cocoa and an early night?’

  Doug Handom swallowed.

  In the urinal, I took some breaths and felt somewhat better, although the noise was still getting to me. While I was splashing my face with water, Tony came in and took a piss.

  ‘Ah, smiler. Listen, Guy, do you mind if I kind of branch out on me own from here on? You be alright, will ya?’ he asked with a quaint old-fashioned charm, and bunged a tenner at me for the wine, which I of course refused. Then, coming to wash his hands, he said, ‘Tell me. Is she married or anything?’ ‘Who?’ I asked without thinking, but knew immediately that he was referring to Sally, our Thai hostess with the mostest.

  ‘Well, I’ve never heard of a Mr Sally, if that’s what you mean.

  ‘I could do it with her,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sure you will,’ I replied.

  ‘You come back down the park and tell me how you got on, alright? And look after yourself’

  And he gave me a hug. He smelled of toolsheds and Rioja and roll-ups. I didn’t know quite how to respond. We never did hugs in my family.

  SEVEN

  IN THE BEGINNING was a long, droning, ringing tone. And something came out of the tone and it was consciousness. A possi
bly frivolous being said, ‘Let there be something,’ and there was something and that something was me, I think. So far, I was pure thought, spirit even, and was unaware of having a body. Then there was time too. After a few seconds of it spent trying to work out what I was, I recognized that I had a body too. I acknowledged its presence. It was not in any real pain. It was horizontal. I was lying face down on something. But where? Who was I and was I the only one of them? Was I the only thing that had this consciousness, or were there others? Had a big bang — or even a little one — happened and was I in fact a new universe? I lay blinking. It was dark, completely dark. I decided I must in fact be a person but had no handle on who or when. I struggled for some point of reference, something on which to pin my ranging, homeless thoughts. I moved my head a little. It had been resting on a carpet. Close by my face was the leg of a chair. I was on the floor somewhere indoors and probably in the twentieth century. I felt like rolling over, so I did and the movement jogged the memory of a name. My name. Guy. That’s who I was. Guy.

  Other snippets followed on the tail of this discovery. I was relieved to have limitations. To come out of the void and build up something tangible. I was Guy and I was in a hotel room. That’s where I was. I was asleep on the floor, fully clothed. My knee itched and I scratched it. The rolling-over and the scratching were enough movement for the meantime. I closed my eyes again. The noises inside my head had homogenized into one thin and constant ringing tone. To escape further from it I filled in other historical details about myself It is educational waking up not knowing who you are, or even if you are. And then the memory puts you through a crash course of the last thirty-five years, bringing you with alarming speed to recent crimes and misdemeanours. There had been a night before, there had been brandy, B 52s, tequila slammers, many of them, and champagne from my kitchenette fridge. There must also, I presumed, have been some late-night stumble or taxi ride to get me here. But of that I had no recollection. However, now there was recall of much inordinately bad behaviour.

  Oh, ghastly memory. Naughty naughty Guy. There had been thee- and four-way sexual intercourse on the floor and desks of my office. Not with me as a participant — I hadn’t been on the same expensive drugs as the others — but I had witnessed, facilitated even. There had been Kemble, goddess of domination, controlling her slavering subjects with a sweet and enigmatic humour. A brilliant performance. There had been more laughter than I thought was humanly possible. In short, there had been the kind of night before that ends up in the morning editions were it not for the privacy afforded by the little office in Meard. Thank God no one videoed it.

  And there had been the complete and somehow delicious degradation of my role. I would not be working as agent for Irving Tellman in the future. Nor Peter Saravan. Nor Doug Random probably, after the things I said to him. And as more memories clamoured into this consciousness, I thought it unlikely that I would be working as an agent for anybody ever again, because there had been insults to Jonty Forbes — BBC Comedy — in the foyer of Sally’s, there had been pouring of drink over Caroline Armitage and then laughing at her, and there had been the sticking of the tongue into the ear of Tom Gutteridge. Howl howl howl, as Old Queen Lear would say. I’d more than blown it, I’d torn it up, I’d thrown it away, I’d pissed on it.

  I heaved myself into a sitting position. My head weighed as much as an elephant seal. The hotel room was empty, I had it to myself The heavy curtains were drawn, but the digital clock read 10.46. I pulled myself on all fours into the swanky marbled bathroom and switched on the bath taps, putting in lots and lots of bubble bath. I hauled myself upright and took a piss. How did I get here? Had Kemble given me some American producer’s room key? Whose room was this? I looked in the bathroom mirror. The person standing staring back at me with his flies still undone had some kind of food in his sticky hair, and brown cakey blood all over his right hand.

  I took my clothes off slowly to get ready for the bath, checking to see if there might be any more blood elsewhere. Perhaps I had injured myself There wasn’t. My right hand hurt a little. I ran it under the basin tap. There was hardly a graze on it. Whose blood was this tricking down the posh plughole? My alcohol-poisoned memory would not provide this information yet. I got into the bath through a foot and a half of white bubbles. The crunchy noise they made was delicate and sweet, and intercepted the ringing tone momentarily. The heat from the water below them soon made my face and scalp sweat. Apart from in my head, there was peace.

  I stretched and luxuriated. I let the memory return at its own speed. I smiled right down to my balls. I closed my eyes. I felt as if I was floating on a river boat in summer … We’d bumped into Jeremy Planter sauntering along Old Compton Street with Arabella Stanton-Walker, and I had punched his face. Not once, several times. I think I’d even shouted things like ‘And that one’s for Dave and Polly, and that one’s for Susan, and this one’s from me,’ or words to that effect. Embarrassing script, but adequately delivered, I feel. What the hell, my dears, what the hell.

  Apart from the shower cap, I made sure to open all the little hotel bottles and soaps: the body cream, the shower gel, the shampoo. I slipped the emergency sewing envelope into my jacket pocket and gave my brogues a rub with the shoe buff. Putting my trousers back on — having made sure to dry myself using all of the beautifully stacked white towels — I found a roll of dollar bills in my pocket, as if some good-luck elf had put them there. I had no memory of how they had arrived there. Maybe I had stolen them, maybe this was hush money from Hollywood, I don’t know, maybe I had won a bet. Stupidly I double-checked that these were in fact my trousers. There was getting on for six hundred dollars. Had I woken up in someone else’s life?

  I drew the curtains and was slapped in the face by daylight rushing in from Hyde Park the other side of the four-lane road. I was quite high up, eight floors or so, I’d say. This room must cost a fortune. I opened the door into the corridor, I was in Room 6031. At my feet was a copy of the Herald Tribune; apart from that the corridor was empty. I brought the newspaper back in. The knuckles of my punching hand were throbbing now and a bruise was galloping to the surface. Above the mini-bar I found some Nurofen. This was a very swanky hotel. I rang room service to order coffee.

  ‘Yes, Mr Saravan,’ said the receptionist. So where in the name of copulation was he? In a police cell? Lying prone on the ratty threadbare carpets at Meard Street? That would have been a ruder awakening than mine. Or still at it with a fresh supply of women? I dialled out to the office but got the answer-phone with Tilda’s outgoing message on it still. I tried a few hellos, but no one picked up on me.

  The coffee came in under four minutes. This was a very special hotel. I hesitated before signing for it, using Saravan’s name. The girl in the dark-green waistcoat and pencil skirt hesitated as well. She knew I wasn’t him. I took pleasure in peeling off a twenty-dollar bill from my roll and pressing it into her hand. What the hell. She smiled at me — wouldn’t you? —and scurried away. I might not be Peter Saravan, but I seemed to have his wedge.

  I put my feet up and riffled through the Herald Tribune. The coffee .was good. Now I needed a smoke. In a hotel this good they didn’t question or even pause at my old codger’s request for half an ounce of rolling tobacco, some Rizla reds and a box of Swan Vestas. It did take nearly twelve minutes to arrive, though. Tut tut. I must remember to complain to the manager next time I invite him on to my yacht.

  The only spoiler was the ringing in my head, which persisted. I supposed I must have tinnitus. That’s incurable, isn’t it? I could ring down for an acupuncturist, or for Mr Saravan’s personal masseuse. I felt like having an enormously unhealthy breakfast as one does after an enormously unhealthy grapple with the demon alcohol. As if the heart were competing with the liver to see which can collapse from abuse first. I also felt like company with whom to share this temporary luxury. Tony wasn’t on the phone and in any case was probably at this moment happily cooking up a Thai breakfast with Sally in some So
ho kitchen. Kemble Stenner would know how to enjoy this, but heaven knew where she was. I rang reception and asked to be put through to Irving Tellman’s room in case she had ended up there, but there was no reply. So I rang Stella, my new business partner. She was in.

  ‘Hotel visits are a hundred and fifty plus cab fare,’ she said, and anyway I’m too old for all that lark. You need a younger girl with all the right clothes, and it’s early in the morning. I can find yer one, Big Jim.’ For a moment I toyed with the idea of hiring five hundred dollars’ worth of dolly birds to come and cavort, but Stella was right, it was early in the morning and cavorting sounded too much like hard work. I told her that what I had in mind was more of a business meeting over breakfast. She still wasn’t interested. I said I’d pay her sixty dollars for the pleasure of her company, and with a laugh, she agreed to come and brunch with me at my Park Lane address.

  Twenty-five minutes and several more Nurofen later, there was a call from reception. Stella had been intercepted on her way to the lift and they were calling me for verification of her claim to be visiting a hotel resident. They seemed to think she was some street hooker! Suitably appalled, I went downstairs to fetch her. When I got there I could see what they meant. She was got up like a parody of herself fake eyelashes, short red leather skirt, bosom plopping out of exceedingly low-cut black bra and a see-through turquoise macramé top.

  ‘Erm … sorry, Mr Saravan, but this lady claims to be a business associate of yours,’ said a nervy young man in a bottle-green uniform. Stella was standing a couple of yards off with one of the concierge women.

  ‘It’s just ‘cos I got a brown skin,’ she announced in loud Brummy to the lobby in general.

  ‘We’ll eat in the Parkside Lounge,’ I said, fobbing off the anxious man with a fifty-dollar bill, and, taking Stella by the arm, I swanned through the marbled hall down plush steps to dine.