The Afterparty

by Leo Benedictus

  Date: Tuesday, 3 November 2009 09:12:24

  Sorry for the delay on this – I was totally wiped out by that flu thing last week (not swine, thankfully) and yesterday was a day of frantic catch-up… but anyway, I think this is great. Why the bloody hell not, I say! It’s no synopsis, of course, but it shows you are a man with a plan. Will waft it in front of our editors next Monday and see what gives. And have you thought about a date for that lunch? Let’s just get something in the diary. Next Weds would be good for me.

  Valerie x

  PS ‘The real crisis’ eh? I’m looking forward to it!

  * * *

  From:williammendez75@gmail.com

  To:valerie.morrell@nortonmorrell.co.uk

  Subject: For your publishers…

  Date: Friday, 6 November 2009 14:45:14

  Chapter 6 – The Real Crisis

  Hi Val – I hope this reaches you in time to include in our submission. God, I’m suddenly *really* excited! And I’ve started to have loads of ideas about how we might publicise the book. Is it too early to bring that up? I’ve been waiting for this for so long…

  Oh, and yes, next Wednesday is fine. See you then.

  William

  Saturday, April 2 2005

  03:09

  WHY WERE BOYS like Calvin always in a hurry? Mellody had forgotten the fevered lip-to-lip assault; the fist up blouse on bra clasp; metal tooth levered into human spine; fine underwear, not always replaceable, twisted and desperately stretched for access. Was such lack of skill supposed to demonstrate his passion? The fulfillment of a screen-learned dream of culminating lust? If it was, then Calvin had met her too late. At fifteen, twenty maybe, Mellody might have succumbed to ravishment. Back then it thrilled her, men’s ragged hunger for her flesh – back when it still surprised. Though even then … Yes, even then it had not chiefly been with sexual delight that she beheld her boyfriend devouring the adolescent proto-breasts her friends had always recommended that she be ashamed of. It had been with pride. A sense of technical accomplishment, almost, that she could cause desire.

  Now Calvin was burgling a hand down the front of her jeans. Extending a finger, which straightaway began to loop insistently through the same short cycle on her clitoris, as if in battle with a stubborn stain. Mellody was embarrassed for him. Had he operated a woman before?

  And yet.

  Well, she didn’t want him to stop exactly.

  She pushed him away and began to unbutton her blouse herself. She could remove it quickly if she wanted – catwalk work had given her that at least. Instead she chose to do it slow. Instructively slow. But Calvin was too busy taking off his own clothes, fast, to be instructed.

  Fear was at home in Hugo’s body. A regular guest. It knew how the dishwasher worked. Mostly it dozed in the conservatory, or read a book. But right now it was doing none of these. Right now it was tearing at the wallpaper with shattered fingernails. It was spitting and pissing and shitting on the floor. It was screaming through the letterbox until its throat was just vibrating strands of flesh.

  It was happening. The thing that he had never thought about before was happening at last. That thing.

  He was losing his mind.

  Gripping hard, he lowered himself down the stairs, Mike obedient behind.

  He had come loose from the world. A piece of him – something so fundamental to the mechanism of consciousness that sane people could not notice it – had broken. He saw the banister rail, and felt it, and smelled the smoky depths of the media room rising up to meet him. But what were these things? How did they work? He used to know. Used to think they were easy.

  Perhaps he had had a stroke? Some cerebral rill had swollen through its toleration point.

  Fear opened its mouth and howled despair. Bars of spit stretched and snapped between its teeth.

  He should say something. A bit of safe, normal talking. One of those things that normal people say to each other all the time. If he could just do that then he would feel better. Normal. That would prove he had not had a stroke.

  In a minute. He’d do it in a minute. As soon as he remembered what other people were and how he could communicate with them.

  At the bottom of the stairs. A large screen. He remembered having it installed. (Very expensive.) Pope. Men and talk of death. Could he make it go away? He did not know how to find the remote control, or how to work it, or what it was.

  He sat on the sofa.

  ‘Shall I pour it?’ Mike said.

  Hugo was not frightened of him. That was good. He nodded.

  ‘Mellody OK?’ Sloshing whisky into glass.

  ‘Erm,’ Hugo said.

  ‘Most people seem to have gone home by now anyway. I don’t think there’s many left for her to make a scene for.’ Mike chuckled.

  That was happy chat. That was joking. Hugo had seen it done before.

  ‘Erm,’ he said.

  Urinary tract infection, went the television. Renal failure.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Mike asked, placing a glass in Hugo’s hand.

  He sipped. This was his chance to share. He saw a self-indulgent movie star, the luckiest man alive, complaining about his excess of attention, his money tower, his paid-for friends. He saw that movie star, droning on about his artificial feelings when there were people out there with real ones. But then Mike had asked. Was he OK?

  ‘Oh you know …’ he began casually. ‘You know when you just get really nervous? Lot of pressure?’ The words were jagged and uneven, but Hugo was pleased to hear them. They gave him sense and comfort. If he was having a stroke, then surely he would not be able to speak.

  ‘Mmm,’ Mike agreed.

  ‘I’ve just, you know, got a bit of that now.’

  It was a footstep.

  Fear hid behind the door with a sharpened screwdriver.

  ‘Right. Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Do you know,’ Hugo roused himself to manage, ‘for years I’ve had this thing – loads of actors do – that I can use to make myself cry.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Mike’s voice was interested.

  ‘Yeah.’ Calmer. Keep going. Stay in the words. ‘There’s different schools on this. Some people say that if you’re just in the character, really living through his feelings, you know, then you’ll cry when it’s time to cry. And if your character doesn’t want to cry, you don’t.’ This was good. This was helping.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘But that’s not always what the director wants. I mean, male leads don’t do a lot of crying, so if the script says I cry at some big moment, then I cry. You can’t talk them out of that one.’ He even smiled.

  ‘So what do you do?’

  ‘I cheat. Some people use onions, or they’ve got a machine that’ll blow cold air in your eyes – I was offered that on a movie once. But it’s kind of old hat now. I think we’re just supposed to cry on cue. When you pay someone $5 million a movie you don’t expect him to bring his own onions. Anyway …’ He swilled his ice cubes in a circle, watching. ‘Anyway. So what most people do is they keep some memory in the back of their mind that they know will make them cry – like when their dog died, or when they won the Oscar or something. And that’s what I do. I used to think about my old dog, but I’m not that sad about him any more. So I always think about this other story instead. I don’t know why it works.’

  ‘What’s the story?’

  ‘What’s the story?’

  Everything was just so great for Michael. An adventure, a new friend, a story, a wonderful whisky, and soon, when he found an opening, perhaps the chance to try another?

  ‘Well,’ Hugo said, ‘when Little Steve came out it changed everything. People – casting agents, waiters, other actors, journalists, everybody really – started treating me like a star. I mean they talked to me as if that was what I’d always been, but it was still new to me. I was sharing a flat in Kensal Rise, for fuck’s sake. Anyway, so Ben Kingsley, like, summoned me to go and have lunch with him in this restaurant in LA. M
y agent got a call from his agent, and I was in town, so I went. I didn’t know you could do that if you were a star, just pick out interesting people you’d never met and arrange to meet them. But it was really nice, you know. He said he thought I’d been great in the film, gave me a couple of pointers, not on acting, but on dealing with people in Hollywood, choosing roles, stuff like that. It was actually really helpful, and I was just glad to be asked. So anyway, I’d always felt pretty grateful about it. And a couple of years later I was doing well, and I saw this really brilliant little movie at the London Film Festival by this new English film-maker I’d never heard of. David Neighbour, his name was. And I thought, why don’t I get Renée to set up lunch with him? Why not just ask? It might even help his career, like Ben helped me. I only wanted a relaxed chat, you know, and to talk about his film.’

  There might have been a tremor in Hugo’s voice just then. Michael was not certain.

  ‘So yeah,’ Hugo said abruptly, as if wrenching back his mind from something else, ‘I liked his film and I just hoped we would get o-on.’

  That was definitely a wobble.

  Hugo paused.

  Calvin snatched the second roll of denim from his foot and tossed it sideways hard. His belt buckle streaked across the floor and cracked against the pedestal of a basin. Left foot, right foot: socks torn off like sticking plasters and discarded with the same disdain.

  He was naked.

  He advanced on Mellody, as she fiddled with her jeans and boots. He took hold of a breast and sucked its little nipple. Wonderful. But not enough. He went for the other, did the same.

  More!

  At last!

  More!

  With an unsteady, one-legged tug, her jeans and pants came off together. Staggering, she gripped at him for balance. Her bush pressed soft against his thigh.

  (Blonde too. Fancy.)

  Calvin pushed a finger in.

  Hot US princess breath gasped upon his back.

  And another. More! More! More!

  She staggered again, bobbing back into the corner on her heel flesh. Flat palms smacked for purchase on the walls. She looked smaller now. Not like in her pictures. The under-Mellody. The real thing. What he always wanted. Now it was his.

  David Neighbour was late.

  Hugo looked at his ice cubes and remembered.

  On his own at the table. The jilted diner. Studying the menu for half an hour. Artichoke, monkfish, Montrachet.

  The waiter approached. Smiling. Embarrassment by proxy. Would Hugo care for another drink while he waited for his guest?

  Why not? He would take the Montrachet now.

  Still no messages on his phone. He should not check too often. People were looking. Hugo would have looked. That’s why stars were always late, because they could not risk being early. Perhaps the young film-maker knew this and had delayed himself nearby. Or he could just have been terribly unlucky. Hugo remembered his early days: struggling from audition to audition on broken buses and suspended tubes. The sweat, the stress. He was going to tell the young film-maker all about it, with a big smile, when he arrived. ‘Seriously, do not worry about it,’ was what he was going to say, deflecting all apologies with flattened hands, meaning every word.

  And then the film-maker did arrive. And he wasn’t young at all. At first, in fact, Hugo did not realise that the crumpled fiftysomething who approached him was the man he had been waiting for. But that was the only explanation that remained when the waiter offered him the empty chair and relieved him of his overflowing bag.

  ‘Hi,’ Neighbour said.

  ‘Seriously,’ Hugo said, shaking his hand, ‘do not worry about it.’

  Neighbour gave no suggestion that he was worried about anything. He was dressed without ceremony and not entirely shaven. Hugo did not want to be deferred to – that was the first thing he did not want – but in his imagination this man had been at least as excited by the lunch as he was, if only for the food.

  ‘It’s good to meet you at last,’ Hugo added with a smile. ‘I loved your movie.’

  How had he got the idea that the man was going to be twenty-six? The film had been so bold and vivid. Somehow he had just assumed …

  ‘Yeah,’ said Neighbour. ‘I saw you at the screening.’

  Not ‘Thank you’ or ‘It’s good to meet you too.’

  ‘Oh right,’ said Hugo. ‘I wanted to come and find you afterwards, but I had to dash off.’ This was true, though of course it sounded like a lie.

  ‘That’s OK.’

  ‘Anyway.’ Hugo pressed on. ‘I did love the film. I honestly have not seen anything so original in years.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Neighbour. ‘I just wish someone would buy it.’

  It was clear now that he was in an irritable mood. No one Hugo asked had ever heard of the guy, so perhaps he was always this way. Directors often were.

  ‘Having distribution problems?’ Hugo was matey, a colleague.

  ‘If no distribution at all can be called a problem, yes.’

  ‘I see.’ Bad thoughts, unhappy feelings, had begun to form an orderly queue. For some reason, he now realised, this lunch had been very important to him. He had been looking forward to it since it was booked, and it had never occurred to him that he would not have a wonderful time.

  The man was looking at his menu.

  He ordered the steak.

  They ate in silence, punctuated by Neighbour’s complaints about the film industry. The lack of opportunities, the closed elites, the institutional dullness.

  Hugo had planned to ask humbly to be considered for any future roles that might suit him. He had toyed with mentioning some names, good producers and sympathetic investors that he knew. Instead he simply ate, and said none of these things.

  And there it was.

  He paid the bill without pudding.

  A shadow through the frosted pane. Tears were at the door.

  Mike placed a hand on his shoulder, and something inside Hugo burst.

  Fear fell to its knees.

  Ah.

  Actually, she could go for some of this.

  Mmm.

  Lots of energy. Got to give him that.

  Aaa-ah.

  A good cock, despite the coke. Stiff and springy, like a sapling stripped of bark.

  Lovely …

  And he was working hard. Pete never worked this hard on anything.

  Jesus!

  A swift smack on her ass. Sure, why not?

  Yeah.

  Or Hugo.

  Ah, yeah!

  He hadn’t touched her for …

  Fuck, YEAH!

  … she did not know how long.

  Aa-AAah!

  She would be surprised if he even jerked off these days.

  ‘Uh!’

  Calvin leaning towards her face. The scent of candy from his hair.

  ‘Uh!’

  What was that smell?

  ‘U-uh!’

  Caramel! That was it.

  ‘Oh Mellody!’

  Erm …

  ‘Oh, Mellody!’

  He was talking to her.

  ‘Oh yes!’

  Was she supposed to say something back?

  ‘Oh yes!’

  This was so embarrassing. Did he think he was at a soccer game?

  ‘Oh Mellody! Oh Mellody!’

  She wished he was.

  ‘Oh God, Mellody!’

  He was just a dumb kid.

  ‘Oo-oh!’

  What was she doing?

  ‘Oooo-oh!’

  What was she doing?

  ‘Ah!’

  Nearly over. Come on.

  ‘Oh!’

  Nearly there.

  ‘You …’

  There was drama behind his eyes.

  ‘You are the only …’

  Oh God. Breathe.

  ‘… person …’

  Walls shaking. Cracks appearing.

  ‘You are the only person …’

  His mum and dad. He kept
picturing his mum and dad at home.

  Please let him be able to get the words out.

  ‘… I have … been able …’

  By force. He would get there by force.

  ‘… to … talk … to …’

  Tears streamed welcome channels across his skin.

  Hugo knew that he was drunk. He didn’t care.

  Blindly, he reached out a hand. Mike took it, squeezed formally, let go.

  ‘My fucking wife …’ Did he dare to say the rest? ‘She’s upstairs right now … with your mate. That kid from fucking X-Factor!’

  He prayed for Mike to say something.

  ‘He’s not my mate,’ came in the end. ‘I only met him tonight.’

  ‘I just …’

  And again.

  ‘… can’t …’

  Boiling up.

  ‘… any more … And …’

  ‘Uh-huh?’ Mike said, sipping his drink.

  ‘It’s just. I’ve been … having a er …’

  Waters mounting.

  ‘… I’ve been having …’

  Meniscus slipping across the brim.

  ‘… a really hard time recently.’

  A howl that Hugo did not recognise. Grief-taut sinews curling up his body to an S.

  Mike’s hand upon his shoulder.

  He fell forwards on the sofa, shaking.

  Fear had left.

  Sorrow had arrived.

  Relief. Relief. Relief.

  ‘Give me a minute, will you Calvin?’ Mellody said.

  ‘Sure,’ he said back.

  Good idea, actually. He could use a moment’s rest himself. Still out of breath. He packed himself back inside his trousers and sat down heavily in a leather seat. The surface gripped his naked back. The skin across his stomach folded to resemble the roll of fat that he knew was not there. Where were his cigarettes? He was so happy.

  ‘No, I mean could you let me use the bathroom?’

  ‘Oh right. Yeah. Sorry.’

  He unglued himself from the chair and bent to retrieve his vest.

  Girls were funny. You’d strip them naked, do everything you could think of to them, get more familiar with their privates than they would ever be, and still they were ashamed to have a piss in front of you. (Calvin preferred not to go in front them either, but that was different. It was different when you could see the pee.) The point was, girls had rules. Girls always had their funny little rules. Even Mellody, who he guessed might be a little tougher. Perhaps as he and she grew closer things would change.