Popcorn

by Ben Elton

  It was a sad, hopeless thought and it lasted about a quarter of a second. His agent’s blood and tissue still clung to the glass-covered poster on to which they had been propelled by Wayne’s bullet. Fresh gore was welling up inside Brooke’s mouth, threatening to choke her before she bled to death. Bruce could smell the torn and jagged flesh. There was so much stark, horrifying reality in the room it was a wonder that there was still room for the furniture.

  “How’d I know about TV?” Wayne explained. “Hey, Bruce, everybody knows everything these days. Especially TV. Think about it. Home video shows, community cable channels — real life as it happens. Not a simulation, actual footage. We’re all part of it, man. It’s an electronic democracy. There ain’t no ‘you’ and ‘us’ any more because ‘us’ is in your face every day. Appearing on your game shows. Caught on video, robbing your banks. Confessing our sins on Oprah, ‘n’ getting them forgiven on the Inspiration Channel. People are television, man, and you’re asking me how I know how to use it? Well, it sure don’t take a lot of finding out. You know, for a smart man you’re real dumb. Excuse me, I have to speak with the cops.”

  Down below, in the armoured police command vehicle, Chief Cornell was almost quivering with excitement. Wayne Hudson was playing right into his hands.

  “Get me the equipment he wants,” the chief barked at Murray. “That little ENG crew is going to be composed of armed operatives from Special Forces. We are sending in an undercover SWAT team. Two seconds after my men get in there, they will have neutralized that maniac, plus the fucking she-devil he hangs with.” The police chief was already preening himself for the press conference that would follow this heroic operation.

  The phone rang again. Both men grabbed it.

  “Now, I know what you’re thinking, guys,” they heard Wayne’s voice say. “You’re thinking ‘bout putting a bunch of damn commandos on me, right? Well forget it. The crew you send me best be the smallest crew there is. I am talking one camera operator and one recordist. That is two people, OK? Two. T-W-O. What is more, they have to come barefoot and wearing only their underwear. Y’hear me? Underwear, that’s all, and I ain’t talkin’ no baggy long-johns or old lady’s bloomers here. I am talkin’ ‘bout the smallest, tiniest, skimpiest fuckin’ bits of nothing a person can wear and still keep their modesty. I’m going to check every inch of the people you give me, plus their equipment, and if I get even the idea that there might be a piece, a stun grenade, even a fucking penknife, within about fifty yards of those two motherfuckers, I’m gonna holler to Scout to spray bullets into every hostage we got, and you know she’ll do it, on account of how she loves me and she does what the fuck I tell her. So basically what I’m saying here is that if you fuck with me, cop, four more innocent people gonna get very dead real soon, and it will be your fault, man, and every TV station in America’s gonna see it. Bye-bye, now.”

  The phone went dead again.

  This time it was the newsman’s turn to quiver with excitement. Disaster had been averted. Police Chief Cornell, had, through his crass, macho zeal, been on the verge of hijacking what was clearly a cathartic media event and turning it into a police matter. Television had nearly been prevented from taking up its rightful position at the very centre of the drama, not just covering the story but being part of it. This, the news and current affairs chief felt, was what news and current affairs had been invented for. To get cameras and, if possible, personalities deep, deep inside events, moulding them, shaping them, actually being the news; while the old forces of authority — the cops, the politicians, the civic leaders — could only watch impotently from the sidelines.

  He had so nearly lost it. For a moment there it had looked like the cop was getting ready to grab all the glory. Thanks, however, to the villain himself having a proper sense of proportion and society’s natural pecking order, the media would be centre-stage where they belonged.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Bruce’s mind was no longer reeling. It was reeling, jigging, jitterbugging and doing the mashed potato.

  “You are bringing a TV crew in here? Into my home?”

  “That’s right, Bruce, and you, me and Scout are going to make a statement.”

  “I will not make a statement with you, you crazy bastard. You can shove your damn statement up your ass!”

  Bruce scarcely knew what he was saying. Farrah and Velvet gasped at his audacity, but on this occasion Wayne did not seem to mind being cheeked.

  “That’s right, Bruce, get all that profanity out of your system. Don’t want to go using no lewd words on TV, now, do we? It might affect the ratings.”

  Scout was absolutely thrilled. “Are we really going to be on the TV, honey?”

  “Yes, we are, baby doll, and so’s Bruce here, because if he doesn’t I’ll kill his darling little girl.”

  “What kind of statement? What the hell do you want me to say?”

  “Well, Bruce, let me tell you. You are going to announce to the whole of the USA — and believe me it will be the whole of the USA because between you and us we got more celebrity right here than Elvis making out with Oprah, using Roseanne for a mattress — you are going to announce to the whole of the USA that Scout ‘n’ me are your fault.”

  Wayne smiled as if to say, “Great plan, huh?” Bruce had known it was coming but it was still a blow.

  “You are going to say that having met us and talked to us, quietly, person to person, one on one, you realize that we are just dumb, stupid, poor white trash and that you and your glamorous Hollywood pictures done corrupted our po’ simple minds.” He took up the bag which had recently contained the severed head and pulled out a bundle of bloodstained magazines and newspapers. He quoted from one: “You’re going to say you understand that your ‘wicked, cynical exploitation and manipulation of the lowest, basest elements of the human psyche has so disturbed—’ ”

  “No, I won’t do it!” Bruce nearly gagged at the man’s audacity.

  Wayne’s strolled across the room to where Velvet had gone to stand with her mother. “Open your mouth, darling.”

  Velvet burst into tears again. Unmoved, Wayne took his pistol and forced its barrel between Velvet’s closed lips so that the metal pressed against her clenched teeth.

  “I’ll bet you’ve had a lot of expensive dental work over the years, huh, baby? Let me tell you now, a bullet going through all that is liable to do a powerful lot of damage.”

  Having made his point, Wayne removed his gun from Velvet’s lips, turned back to Bruce and waved the bloodied magazines in his face.

  “You, Bruce, are going to say that we are ‘products of a society that celebrates violence’. You are going to say that we are weak-willed, simple-minded creatures who have been ‘seduced by images of sex and death’, images you create, man, and for which you have just been honoured with an Oscar. You are going to say that your eyes have been opened and you are ashamed. In fact, I got an idea, man — oh yeah! You’re going to return your Oscar. Live on TV, you’re going to give it back out of respect for your victims. The people you killed through me and Scout.”

  Bruce was not a callous man. He knew that other people had problems greater than his. He was aware that two people were already dead and that another was clearly dying. Nevertheless, at this point he could think only of the dreadful fate Wayne had prepared for him. To make the kind of statement Wayne was proposing that he make, and to make it to the entire nation, would be the most profoundly humiliating thing imaginable. Career suicide. Intellectual disgrace. The complete loss of every ounce of the credibility he currently enjoyed. The immediate end of his life as an artist. And for a lie.

  He struggled to find an argument to sway Wayne from his terrible course. “It won’t work, Wayne. It can’t. Whatever I say, it won’t change the law. You’re guilty and the law will get you.”

  “That’s bullshit, Bruce, and you know it. The law is whatever people want it to be. It ain’t never the same thing twice. It’s one thing to a white man, another to a
black, one thing to the rich, another to the poor. The law is a piece of fuckin’ Play Dough — no one knows what shape it’s going to be in next. Man, after you’ve made your broadcast me and Scout here won’t be no punk killers no more. We’ll be a hundred things. We’ll be heroes to some, victims to others, we’ll be monsters, we’ll be saints. We will be the defining fuckin’ image of a national debate. A debate which will go to the very core of our society.”

  Wayne’s eyes shone with the glory of his idea. He assumed the deep, censorious tone of the typical TV news anchor: “America will look at itself and ask itself the questions ‘Who are we? Where are we going? Did Wayne and Scout act alone? Is Bruce Delamitri to blame, or do we all share something of their guilt?’ ”

  Scout just loved it when Wayne was on a roll. He was so classy. ‘Defining image’, ‘core of society’ — those were real ten-dollar sentences. She never knew how he picked all that stuff up. Like her, he’d left school at the first opportunity, which was about three years before he was legally entitled to do so. Since then all he’d done was hang out and watch TV like everyone else in the country.

  Which was, of course, the point.

  Wayne had been watching TV his entire life, and it had not all been sit coms and re-runs of Star Trek. Decades of surfing the remote had meant a million bites out of the Discovery Channel, CNN, Oprah and Sixty Minutes, a never-ending diet of ‘information’ and ‘in-depth analysis’. With their inexhaustible supply of doctors, therapists, psychologists and ‘experts’ of every type, news and chat shows have introduced entire nations to the instant-coffee version of a vocabulary of words and ideas that traditionally take years of study to acquire.

  An intelligent man is going to pick up an awful lot of earnest bullshit and portentous psychobabble if he watches TV his entire life; and Wayne, as Bruce was discovering, was a very intelligent man.

  Because Bruce knew that Wayne was right. Right, right, RIGHT. A villain could get turned into a hero inside a single soundbite. And, as in Bruce’s case, a hero could end up a villain.

  He attempted a defence of sorts. “Oh yeah. Well, what happens when I go on the TV tomorrow and retract everything? When I tell the world you forced me into accepting responsibility?”

  Scout didn’t think Bruce was giving Wayne sufficient credit for his brilliant plan. “You might be dead by then, Mr Big Shot,” she said. “You might be dead any time.”

  Wayne laughed. “You tell him, baby. But frankly it don’t matter what you say tomorrow, Bruce — always assuming you’re alive to say it. By tomorrow our little story here will have a life of its own. Every talk show, every paper, will be asking the question ‘Who’s guilty?’ Whatever you say tomorrow won’t wipe out today. This is the image, man. This is the defining moment, the one they’ll all remember — bigger than the Rodney King video, bigger than O.J.’s committal, bigger than the Kennedy motorcade.”

  “Hey, don’t undersell yourself, Wayne,” said Bruce through gritted teeth.

  “Come on, man! It doesn’t get any better than this. The king of Hollywood, two mass murderers, a dying Playboy centrefold, a rinsed-out old hag of an ex-wife, a spoilt, sexy little weeping teen…blood, guns…we’ve got it all. Nobody will ever forget this. It’ll be burnt into their minds for ever.”

  Wayne walked up to Bruce and put his face right up close. “And every time anyone sees you, Bruce, they’ll remember this image above all the others. They’ll remember you with your arms round me and Scout, your daughter weeping, your girlfriend bleeding at your feet. And you saying, ‘America, wake up! We sow a wind and we reap a whirlwind. These two poor benighted sinners could be kin to anyone of us. They are my kin. My son and daughter. I begot them. My sins were visited upon them…’ ”

  “Now, how ‘bout that drink?”

  THIRTY

  Oliver and Dale had been in their studio conference room, preparing to present that morning’s edition of Coffee Time, when the call came.

  “I need high-profile personalities central to the action,” the head of NBC News and Current Affairs had demanded, “anchoring not from the studio, but from inside the story. The nation needs a friend in that house.”

  Murray had already won the battle to be the station which would provide the crew for Wayne’s broadcast. “We were the company of contact and we should have priority,” he had pointed out rather pompously to the other networks, adding, “What’s more, if you don’t let us do it I shan’t tell you what their demands are, so the people you send in will get it all wrong and get killed.”

  Having achieved the priority he desired, Murray had only to persuade Oliver and Dale, in whose celebrity the station had so much invested, that they should be the station’s representatives at the centre of the drama. He didn’t have much time. Wayne had demanded only a camera operator and a recordist, there had been no talk of presenters. Dale and Oliver would have to do the work of the technicians. They would need to be told how to use the equipment and the minutes were ticking away.

  There was of course much to tempt the two slap covered hairspray heads into accepting the job…It was a tantalizing prospect, to be elevated in a moment from famous person who reads an autocue and interviews celebrities, to news hero of the decade.

  On the other hand, the people inside the house were mass murderers.

  “You’re sure he guaranteed safe conduct?” Oliver asked. “I’m only concerned for Dale, you understand.”

  “Absolutely safe conduct,” the chief assured them, “and I trust him. Why would he harm you? He needs you. The guy is feeding off the media. With our co-operation he’s a star, a superstar. Without it he’s just a nobody who’s going to get the chair. He needs us as much as we need him.”

  Dale and Oliver exchanged nervous glances. It occurred to them both that a person who craved fame could get quite a dollop of it by murdering the Coffee Time team on live TV. On the other hand, what an opportunity! They would be fearless seekers after truth, war correspondents, risking all to bring the number-one story of the decade into the nation’s lounges.

  Their boss pressed home his advantage. “I’m telling you he’s given us an unequivocal guarantee.” He lowered his voice. “But listen, we don’t have to tell the world you got that guarantee. We can let the world think you’ve gone in there with no guarantee of your safety at all, because that’s how much the people’s right to news and current affairs means to you.”

  “Wow,” said Dale.

  “ ’Wow’ is right. They’ll probably give you the medal of honour,” the chief added.

  “And of course we do have a very real duty to the public,” said Oliver, who was ever conscious of his self-appointed status as one of the nation’s premier moral guardians.

  “So that’s settled,” said the chief. “The equipment is fairly simple. I’ll get one of the guys to run through it with you, and after that all you’ve got to do is take your clothes off and we’re cooking.”

  He nearly got away with it. For a moment he thought he had.

  He hadn’t.

  “Take our clothes off?” Dale stared, aghast.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s no problem,” said Murray, trying to hustle them along.

  “You mean change our clothes, surely,” said Oliver. “You mean you want us to put on combat fatigues, no doubt.”

  Like all news reporters, Oliver relished the idea of donning a flak-jacket and looking like a soldier.

  But the Chief of News and Current Affairs did not mean change their clothes. “I mean you’ll have to take your clothes off. The guy’s worried about concealed weaponry. What’s the big deal?”

  “Ahem,” said Oliver, clearing his throat nervously, “I think the question is one of presentation.”

  Dale and Oliver looked good and were proud of it. Their image was the classic template of the news anchor team, the standard by which all other news anchor teams were judged: he silver and dignified in his late fifties, she cute and feisty in her mid-thirties. In the studio, with their make-up, h
airspray and designer power clothing they looked, quite simply, superb. The American dream behind a desk; like some splendid ambassador and his gorgeous second wife.

  The problem was that underneath the story was rather different. As, indeed, it normally is.

  He, for instance, wore a corset. She was midway through a cellulite-reduction programme. He had two massive and unpleasant hernia scars. She had an insane tattoo on her thigh, smudged by botched efforts to have it removed.

  He suddenly remembered that his housemaid was sick and he was into the second day of his last, rattiest pair of jocks. It suddenly occurred to her that she was planning an après-show tryst with her new lover, the second assistant floor assistant. She had therefore come to work wearing a pair of lacy scarlet split-crotch panties with a heart-shaped hole cut out of the bottom.

  “Hey, we can get you new underwear for Christ’s sake,” Murray said. “We can put make-up on your blemishes.”

  “I don’t think so, boss,” said the head make-up artist, who was hovering in the background. “Oliver and Dale use quite a lot of foundation on their faces. If the same proportions are applied to their whole bodies, I don’t think they’ll actually be able to walk.”

  “I really do think, Chief,” said Oliver, “that the proper place for the nation’s premier anchor team in a crisis like this is in the studio — controlling the operation from the centre, so to speak. After all, generals don’t go into battle, do they?”

  “I’ll do it, but only with a body double,” said Dale, who had not really thought it through.

  And so Oliver and Dale missed their chance at media immortality but, much more importantly, they kept their nasty bits under cover. Considerably relieved, the two of them retreated to the studio, where their wonderful researchers had already lined up an exclusive interview for them with Dove, the actress whom Bruce had reduced to near tears at the Bosom Ball.

  As it happened, Police Chief Cornell, already miffed at having his authority usurped by the news broadcasters, would not have allowed Oliver and Dale to do the job anyway. “We’ve got to use an experienced news-gathering team,” he insisted, “preferably one that’s seen combat. If we send in someone who fumbles or fucks up, it could push this guy over. I want the best two journalist-technicians you’ve got.”