by Ben Elton
‘Put the blind back down. If you lift it up again, even once, I’ll kill you.’
Max put the blind down and looked at Nathan. Nathan was white with fear and shock. Max pulled the blind back up again. He and the gunman stared at each other for a few very tense moments as Nathan struggled to maintain control of his bowels.
‘Ha! I knew you wouldn’t do it,’ Max said and dropped the screen again. ‘You have to call guys like that,’ he said to Nathan. ‘It’s a point of principle.’
They drove for at least three hours. First along straightish roads, then on what they guessed were winding country lanes and finally along what were clearly dirt tracks. Nathan passed the time by continuing to dwell on the cruel irony of his longing for Flossie.
‘You see, I know now that I’ve always loved her. How could I not have known it then? I suppose, in a way, I made my biggest mistakes early on in the relationship, when I thought we were still happy…’
Max wondered whether, if he lifted the blind again, he could persuade the gunman to shoot Nathan.
The little stone cottage.
Max and Nathan were led blindfolded into a room filled with a wonderful smell. They heard their captors retreat and the door close behind them. The two men stood for a moment, unseeing and, they thought, alone, breathing in the splendid aroma.
‘Cool smell,’ ventured Max.
‘Yes,’ Nathan replied.
Something about the smell struck a chord in Nathan’s memory. It took him far back to his childhood. Back past years and years of tired, joyless, fantastically expensive media lunches in Soho, back to an almost forgotten time when he had still enjoyed food. A time when the only connection between the words ‘eating’ and ‘meeting’ was that they rhymed. A time before irradiation, before menus featured ‘lite alternatives’ and butter carried a government health warning. Yes, that smell took him back. It also plonked him right down in the present. He was hungry, very hungry.
‘Stew,’ he said out loud. ‘Stew with dumplings.’
‘That’s right, it’s nearly ready,’ they heard a soft, female voice say. It was an oldish voice with a strong Irish accent. ‘You can take your blindfolds off now, boys.’
The two men removed their blindfolds and found themselves in the kitchen of a little stone cottage. An old lady was sitting at a wooden table. A very old lady. Max would have put her at a hundred and fifty plus. Her hair was grey and there was far too much skin on her face, enough skin, in fact, for two faces, Max thought, maybe three. This wasn’t age, this was disease. Max felt a little ill just looking at her. What sort of horrible affliction could cause such deformity? Was the woman a leper? Whatever it was, Max sure didn’t want to catch it. He moved a step back towards the door.
The woman was peeling a pile of strange brown lumpy things, stranger even than she was. They looked like tumours hacked from the body of a fourth world nuclear power worker. Beside the tumours, spread out on a bit of newspaper were some weird, bent, orangey long things with hairs growing out of them and knobbly bits sprouting out at various angles. Neither Nathan nor Max had ever seen anything like these ugly-looking lumps. Instantly, the hunger which they had been feeling so keenly vanished. They did not want tumours with their stew, no matter how nice the smell. Nor hairy lumps. Perhaps it was eating the tumours and lumps that had made the old lady look the way she did.
‘Where are we?’ Nathan asked, wishing he was somewhere else.
‘Well now,’ the old lady replied, ‘we’re hardly likely to be going to the trouble of bringing you here in darkened cars, blindfolded and all, just to tell you where you are the minute you arrive, are we?’
There was a brief silence, then Max asked the question that was actually foremost in both their minds.
‘What the hell is that stuff on the table?’
‘Potatoes and carrots,’ the lady replied.
‘No way,’ said Max. ‘I’ve seen potatoes and I’ve seen carrots, and they aren’t anything like that stuff. That stuff looks like dogs’ balls. In fact, it looks like something you’d cut off a dog’s balls.’
‘I don’t wish to hear language like that in this house, young man,’ the old lady said.
The money.
Max was rather taken aback. He was so rarely ticked off by anyone that he did not know how to react. If you are a star and you live in LA, you will literally never be contradicted.
In movie language, a star is known as ‘the money’. This is because it is very difficult to get a project financed without a star attached. In any industry, money is virtually all that matters. Hence in the entertainment industry, stars are virtually all that matter. Their power and influence are awesome and far outstrip any talent or ability they might have. This is not to say that stars have no talent, many are fine actors. It is just that it is not physically possible to be talented enough to justify the kind of money that really big stars earn. God simply does not make human beings that good. This is why stars are not measured by ability, but by what they earn.
‘Hey, granted, the guy’s screen presence was hewn from a block of solid teak, but have you any idea how much he earns?’
The star is not an actor. He or she is the money. Hollywood is an industry town. Everyone has a script to be read or a portfolio they want looked at. You do not get those sort of breaks by badmouthing the money. Hence, no star is ever contradicted.
Back in the cottage.
The old lady, however, (whose name was Ruth) did not have a script she wanted reading, or a portfolio to be looked at. It was years since Max had met anyone like that.
‘You don’t walk into a person’s kitchen and start being foul about her veggies,’ Ruth said. ‘What on earth would your mother think?’
Max considered a moment.
‘My mother wouldn’t mind,’ he said. ‘She likes foul. In her case, foul is a life-style choice. She just did a centrespread in Penthouse, split beaver, the lot.’
Now it was Ruth’s turn to be taken aback. She raised an eyebrow as if to say ‘it takes all sorts’ and returned to her peeling. The door opened and an old man entered. He had clearly contracted the same disease as the old lady, for his face too was baggy and creased. If anything, he seemed to have the plague worse than her, for there were great sacks under his eyes, red veins all over his nose and great tufts of pubic hair coming out of his ears. Max was nearly nauseous.
‘This is my husband, Sean,’ the old lady said, putting the chopped potatoes and carrots into boiling water. ‘My name’s Ruth. We’re Rosalie’s grandparents. She’ll be along in a while. Meanwhile, will you have something to eat? It’s nothing much, stew with dumplings, ‘taters and carrots.’
Both men hesitated.
‘Those potatoes?’ Max inquired.
‘These are what spuds actually look like, you know,’ Ruth said. ‘The knobbly bits and the eyes, that’s a real potato.’
‘You’re kidding me,’ said Max.
The great visual food joke.
But the old lady was right. Generations ago, before the great visual food joke had been perpetrated upon the public by supermarket owners, potatoes had eyes and carrots had hairs.
Unfortunately, real food is notoriously volatile. Filled as it is with endless bacteria and trace elements, it is delicate to grow and goes rotten easily. This is a bugger for accountants trying to use shelf-space cost-effectively. What the food suppliers needed was to get the public to accept vegetables and meat which were entirely anaesthetised and uniform. Anaemic, tasteless crap of a constant shape and size that would be easy to grow and transport and would last a long time. The joke was that it turned out that the public actually preferred their food this way because it looked nice. People were attracted to small, hard pale red tomatoes and small, hard pale yellow potatoes, they looked clean and fresh, with no horrid bits to have to cut out.
Only two groups objected: the blind, obviously, and the makers of magazine-style, public involvement TV programmes. The programme makers’ problem was that they
had, of course, lost their best visual gag. With uniform-shaped vegetables there were no longer any to be found that were shaped like genitalia. The vegetable nob gag was a hardy annual which had kept generations of television viewers amused. People had vied with each other to send in the rudest shaped carrots and the most suggestive marrows. Sadly, the great visual food joke had put an end to the laughter.
Revelation stew.
Max and Nathan could not believe their tastebuds. The meal was a sensation. Never had they imagined such carrotyness or potatoeyness. The lamb in the stew tasted as though a thousand lambs had been blended into a single chop. The onions and herbs created an orgasmic richness that left their tongues lying at the bottom of their mouths, exhausted, satiated and saying, ‘That was wonderful, darling’.
‘We still farm organically here,’ said Sean. ‘You can’t do it entirely properly — the water table’s as poisoned for us as for everybody else — and we have to use artificial sun. But we do all right.’
‘You do fantastically,’ said Nathan, mopping up the gravy with bread. For a moment he almost felt happy, then he remembered that Flossie didn’t love him anymore and reminded himself that he would never feel happy again.
‘And that’s not all,’ said Ruth, having modestly received Max and Nathan’s unstinting praise. ‘Look at this!’ and from her apron pocket she produced a carrot that looked exactly like a big dick with two little bollocks. ‘1 just couldn’t bear to cut it up until I’d shown it to Sean,’ she said, her eyes damp with laughter. ‘Isn’t it a scream?’
They all agreed that it was indeed a scream and, after they had stopped laughing, Max and Nathan had second helpings. When they had all finished eating, Max felt so kindly disposed to the two old people that he decided to bring up the subject of their illness.
‘Listen, guys,’ he said nervously, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but I’m sure I could recommend someone who could help. You know with your … faces.’ Ruth and Sean were clearly not following Max’s gist, so he attempted to explain. ‘You know, all the flaps of skin and the ear hair and … well, there are doctors who can … Ouch!’
He said ‘ouch’ because Nathan had kicked him under the table. Nathan understood that there was nothing at all wrong with Ruth and Sean. They were just old. Although, even to Nathan, who lived in a far less cosmetically adjusted world than Max, the old couple did look weird. Just about everybody had something done when their faces began to fall. A little tuck, a touch of electrolysis, a hint of colour, but these two had absolutely left nature to take its course.
‘There’s lots like us, you know,’ said Sean.
Max hoped not.
The meal over, they sat around with a glass of beer and chatted. They could have talked about anything. Between them they had a world of experience. However, within thirty seconds Nathan had worked the subject around to him and Flossie.
‘People say I’m just experiencing classic jealousy, but I don’t agree. You see, Ruth, I love her, I truly do, I know that now…’
Fortunately for Nathan, just as Max was about to strangle him, they heard a truck outside. Dawn had not yet broken but when Ruth crossed nervously to the window she could make out a familiar shape. Moments later, Rosalie had joined them in the cottage.
‘Hello again,’ said Rosalie to Max as she entered, hanging up her beret and gun.
Max did not know what to say. What he felt like saying was, ‘Hubba! Hubba! Hubba!’, which was the preferred method by which he and his friends at school had informed each other that they had met the girl of their dreams. If Rosalie had spoken to the depths of Max’s soul before, now she was shouting through a loudhailer. To see her in the wild country (anywhere out of town was wild for Max) with a beret and a machine-gun, was to see a vision, a vision of strength and sauciness. Max thought about asking her to marry him, but he recognised that this might be considered a little presumptuous on only their second meeting. Anyway, he had only been divorced a few days, and did not wish to appear flighty. Particularly in front of his future granny-in-law.
‘Hi,’ he said, feeling that he could have done better.
‘Well now,’ said Rosalie. ‘Who’s your friend?’
‘His name’s Nathan Hoddy.’
‘I’m a screenwriter,’ said Nathan, ‘and I thought I didn’t love my wife but then she left me and it turned out that I did love her after all. Actually, you and I met at Plastic Tolstoy’s, when you tried to kill him and had to hide in the rain forest, but you probably don’t remember.’
The long arm of the law.
Outside, the Garda, as the Irish police are known, were surrounding the cottage. They were acting on a request from the FBI who wanted, as Judy had learnt from Maw, to bring Rosalie back to the United States in order that she might face trial for the DigiMac hit. Had the FBI not wanted Rosalie the Garda would have happily left her alone. Europe was full of terrorists. If a police officer really felt like busting one, they could be picked up in the local pub. There was certainly no need to schlep all the way across the country to do it. Particularly if it meant creeping about in the damp grass. ‘For Christ’s sake, will you stop your complaining,’ the Garda sergeant said to his constables. ‘Some coppers have to work for a living, you know, and it’s not as if this is going to tax your powers as police officers.’
The sergeant was right. It certainly did not look as if it would be a difficult arrest. The truck that had brought Rosalie had left, as had the limo in which Max and Nathan had arrived. The cottage was entirely undefended and the occupants were on their own.
We are talking about a movie here.
Inside the cottage, Nathan was making his pitch. Pitching in the only way he knew how, desperately. As if he was in that terrible land of pale bungalows where ideas went to die.
‘We see this picture as committed, ideology-wise, it will be very committed. Bimbo pic, this is not. No way are we in the business of compromise. Principle is a big word to us, prim-see-pull, three very important syllables. But we want to be number one. Of course we want to be number one. We don’t know any other numbers. We want to be number one and you want to be number one because nobody remembers the guys who came sec —‘
‘Excuse me,’ said Rosalie, who had never been pitched at before and hence was unused to such copious quantities of bullshit. ‘Would you mind leaving aside the crap at all?’
‘Of course not, no way! Let’s leave the crap aside,’ Nathan agreed.
Nathan always agreed. He was a writer and so during any pitch he simply agreed on instinct. The only way a writer can get his ideas across is through a process of aggressive agreement. The process is simple. The writer states his or her idea and then waits for the executive’s objections. Having heard and considered them, the writer then fervently agrees with everything the executive has said, adding that he or she feels a complete fool for not having seen it himself. The writer then repeats his or her idea as if it were a summation of all the executive’s points, thanking the executive for making it all so clear.
It sometimes works, but only if the writer is talking to an executive. Rosalie was not an executive and she was deeply unimpressed.
‘Will you let me get this straight?’ she said. ‘You say that your man Plastic Tolstoy wants to do a movie about Mother Earth, and you want me to let you join my active service unit so that you can get all the details and the atmosphere down perfect. Am I right?’ she asked.
‘Exactly,’ Nathan agreed, ‘I think that’s what I was trying to say, but I did not see it so clearly until you explained it.’
‘You do recall, I’m sure, that I’m the woman who just tried to shoot the very fellow you want me to work for?’
‘Ah, but that’s the point,’ Max chipped in. ‘Plastic thinks he’s going to use you, but really you’re going to use him. We’re in the driving seat! I’m the star, I have veto on any director, Nathan here will write it. Don’t you see? We’re in control. We can do a movie that makes you people look great, that makes
you look great. A real hero.’
‘I never heard such nonsense,’ said Rosalie, and how Max loved the way that she spoke. ‘I’m sure I don’t know much about Hollywood, but I do know that the only person in the driving seat on a Plastic Tolstoy film would be the man himself.’
‘Fillum?’ asked Max. ‘What’s a fillum?’
‘Film,’ Nathan translated, ‘Rosalie means a Tolstoy movie.’
‘Oh, right … Well, sure we’ll have to put the case for Claustrosphere a little in the fillum too,’ Max conceded, ‘but balance is good.’
‘I like balance. Balance is sexy,’ Nathan agreed.
‘Damn balance,’ Rosalie said, adding, ‘Sorry, Granny.’
‘I agree with the point Rosalie just made about balance,’ said Nathan, ‘I don’t think we need it. I’m sure Granny agrees with me on this one.
‘Of course we need balance,’ said Max.
‘Exactly,’ Nathan agreed furiously. ‘We need balance, we don’t need balance. It’s a both ways thing, it has to be.’
‘That’s right,’ said Max. ‘Balance shows what big people Mother Earth are. People who are not afraid to see the other guy’s point of view. Vulnerability is very big right now.’
‘It’s huge,’ Nathan agreed, ‘believe me, Rosalie. Vulnerability is huge. There was a new fillum premièred last month: no vulnerability, it died. Complete turkey. You could smell the gravy and the Brussels sprouts from outside the theatre.’
‘You’re both completely out of your little minds.’ Rosalie picked up her mobile phone. ‘I’ll give the fellows who brought you here a call — they’re only in the village. They’ll take you back to Dublin.’
‘What? Now?’ asked Max.
‘Certainly, now. The sooner you complete idiots go away and stop wasting my precious time the better. And I might add that I don’t care if I never see or hear from either of you again.’