Amazing Disgrace

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  But the long and the short of it is that the sudden growth belatedly triggered by that Chinese couple’s remarkable pills has continued; and now, seven weeks later, even Adrian would surely have to concede that parameters were being stretched and that someone on the brink of his fortieth birthday might have reason for discreet alarm. As I keep saying, it’s not just that. It’s the worry about what else might have been set secretly in motion in the Samper physique that will burst out in the form of sudden breasts or buboes or something equally extravagant. Still, as you already know, I despise this age’s narcissistic obsession with bodies and health and rattly bottles of pills. Plato was spot on when he remarked that ‘attention to health is the greatest hindrance to living.’ I must simply put these worries out of my head. Maybe if I give up taking my measurements growth will suddenly cease. These days even the dumbest scribbler has heard of the quantum effect whereby the very act of measuring something can influence the outcome. Maybe simply by takingmy dailymeasurements I am actually stimulating growth even though the Pow-r-TabsTM have long ceased working? I am rather struck by this thought and wonder whether as a layman I might not have stumbled on something that has been eluding the medical profession for centuries. I even think seriously about composing a letter to The Lancet or the BMJ and speculate about the Samper Effect in due course taking its modest place between ‘Sambucus’ and ‘Sample’ in the medical dictionary. True, there are one or two glitches in the theory to be ironed out first, such as that children whose parents don’t periodically measure their height on the back of the larder door seldom turn out to be dwarves. I must remember to consult Adrian about this.

  Then one day the phone rings and it is Frankie reminding me in unwelcome fashion that over in the real world there are still toads and commitments. Specifically, my contract with Champions Press, of which one title remains unwritten.

  ‘Congratulations, Gerry. I think we’ve hit the jackpot,’ says Frankie breezily. ‘Arvo Bungis is in town and his father wants you to write his story. I suggest you drop everything and come over fast.’

  Even I can’t plausibly pretend not to know who Arvo Bungis is. Back in June he won the Wimbledon title on his seventeenth birthday: the youngest-ever Men’s Singles champion. Nobody can quite remember which of the Baltic states he’s from but I think he may be Estonian. Behind the ecstatic headlines it is widely admitted that his Wimbledon win was something of a fluke, greatly helped by biased umpiring and a lucky series of injuries that afflicted his opponents. The psychological advantage of being so young was strengthened by the common consent that he was by far the prettiest competitor of any gender ever to have stepped on to Centre Court. A dreamy blond who bounced silently around the court like rubber, earning him the predictable nickname ‘Bunjy’, he easily outclassed in terms of his physical presence the cloned ranks of girls with sun-damaged cleavages and rawhide forearms who grunted and screamed and wailed each time they hit the ball. Young Arvo was a model of bashful modesty who, off-court, never once told a fawning interviewer that he’d ‘done real good’. Even the most hardened commentators were captivated, and the boy instantly reached that pinnacle of public adulation where any worldly reward (starlets, riches, guest appearances in Rolex advertisements) seemed trashy and inadequate.

  ‘Absolutely not, Frankie,’ I say firmly. ‘I can’t possibly write an entire book about a teenaged tennis god unless it’s a semiologicaldeconstruction à la Barthes. Nobody can. Seventeen, for pity’s sake: there’s been no life to write about. What is there interesting to say about him?’

  ‘Well, he’s the great-great-whatever grandson of their national poet, Arhusis Bungis, if that’s any good?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I looked him up on the internet … Here we are: “Arhusis Bungis (1803–57), ‘The Sweet Singer of the Baltic’, whose autobiographical poems ‘Erratic Boulder’ and ‘The Downcast Moose’ are known to every schoolchild.”’

  ‘Still no. Nobody would give a damn if he were a descendant of Shakespeare. What people want, although they’re too wary to say so, is to see Arvo playing tennis with his kit off. They don’t want a load of words getting in the way.’

  ‘Nonsense, Gerry. You’ll find a way, you always do. Everyone’s counting on you. I might mention that the alternative at the moment is a biography of Justin McPeach.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘He’s the captain of our Ryder Cup team.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about rugger, Frankie.’

  ‘It’s golf, Gerry.’

  ‘You must be joking.’

  ‘He’s keen for you to do it. Also he’s thirty-four, so at least he’s done some living. Quite a lot of it in bars, I fancy. And take it from me, nobody would want to see McPeach playing golf in the nude.’

  ‘Are those the sole choices?’ Something is nagging me. I know Frankie of old, and there’s more to this conversation than meets the ear. ‘Come on, Frankie. You’re stalling, aren’t you?’

  There comes a Benson & Hedges moment at the other end of the line: great ochre gusts of coughing. Then, ‘It’s the sainted Cleat, Gerry.’

  ‘Oh God, not again? Now what’s up?’

  ‘I don’t know how well you’re keeping up with the headlines in your Tuscan hideaway but she’s scarcely out of the news these days. So much so that Breakfast of Champions rang this morning to say they’re going to rush Millie! out at the end of this week.’

  ‘Well and good. We get our publication advance that much sooner.’

  ‘True. But the real news is that Cleat herself definitely wants you to do the sequel.’

  ‘Of course she doesn’t, Frankie. She knows I know she’s bogus from stem to stern.’

  ‘Possibly. But she needs to cash in on her new public role as Queen Neptune, quick-quick. It means she can’t afford to waste time looking for another writer of your reputation who also happens to be free and who already knows her story inside out.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound like a book for old Breakfast.’

  ‘It isn’t. This one will go to a general trade imprint in the same publishing group. It’s too big and too non-specialist for Champions Press. There’ll be a lot of money in it, Gerry. You know the global interest there is in this sort of thing.’

  ‘Oh my God … Were you serious about the Bunjy-boy?’

  ‘Oh yes, perfectly. His father has read your book on Luc Bailly and thinks you’re just the sympathetic sort of biographer his boy needs. But naturally I never imagined you’d agree. I was trying to ease you into Millie Cleat, as it were.’

  Frankie mentions the sum of money he’s proposing to ask for me to write yet another – and far more odious – book for this frightful Queen-o’-the-Seas. I am rather astonished. He assures me it’s entirely feasible – ultra-short notice, and so on – and we’ve got her over a barrel, a time-honoured nautical posture. He adds that if the publisher balks, Lew Buschfeuer’s billions could no doubt be deployed to good effect. In short, it’s all over bar the shouting, of which I do quite a bit in an enraged sort of way once I’ve rung off. Can I really have got myself trapped into doing the one thing I vowed never to do? Yes, because this time it’s serious dosh: serious enough to enable me to buy up the rest of my contract with Champions and thus free myself at last from the world of sport. Just think, Samper: no more people with syntax-free thought patterns and a vocabulary of five hundred words, every one of which is spoken in an uninflected monotone. No more having to hear how good they done. No more interviews snatched in private jets and hotel rooms, constantly interrupted by beady-eyed handlers wearing blazers and bearing news of the next photoop or phials of the latest undetectable performance-enhancing drug.

  In short, isn’t this really a blessing, even if it does come heavily disguised as a one-armed harridan with mystical pretensions? Isn’t this the break I’ve so long been looking for? Once I’ve written this book I shall be able to take at least the next couple of years off. I could literally afford to wait to write Max Christ’s biography, whi
ch will only pay a pittance anyway. Of course, I can always hope that between now and then he will do something sensationally distasteful that will make my job easier and swell the potential readership. But for now it’s a matter of ringing Derek at Blowjob, packing a bag, finding my passport and heading off to Pisa airport with gritted teeth.

  16

  If you join the motorway at Viareggio wishing to head southwards to Pisa, you collect your ticket and start by driving north, a counter-intuitive challenge designed to weed out the faint of heart. Pisa, as the nearest major city down the coast, is naturally signposted ‘Livorno’, and to get there you double back over what must be one of Europe’s more lunatic flyovers when without warning the one-way system casually becomes two-way and for a heart-stopping moment you think you’re in the wrong lane and about to have a head-on collision. All thought is blotted out by panic and the survival instinct. Despite my familiarity with this imbecilic piece of road planning it’s the same again today. But once the Samper heart rate is back below fibrillation point and the car headed south I become freer to muse about the direction my life may be taking. With any luck, and with quite outstanding irony, the dreaded Cleat will turn out to be both nemesis and saviour. Just one more book and then I can be free? It seems too good to be true. To dismiss the ordeal of writing it as ‘just one more book’ would be unguardedly blithe. The great question – and I suppose it has asked itself insistently throughout my lengthening and blameless life – is, how unserious can I afford to be in protection of my own sanity and still get away with it?

  In a professional sense this question memorably posed itself nearly seventeen years ago when I was working as a scriptwriter for a commercial production company. The client was a cross-Channel ferry operator hoping to restore his passengers’ confidence in the aftermath of the sinking of the Herald of Free Enterprise. In order to draw the attention of the travelling public – simple, suggestible folk – away from the irreducible fact that they would be going to sea, my company had decided that his ferry had best be presented reassuringly as a shopping mall that happened to be mobile. The client agreed and we went to work to produce a seductive video of the shopping facilities. As may be imagined, it was a film of devastating banality, tedium and outright untruth (‘Our selection of familiar high-street outlets ensures that opportunities for bargain hunters are unrivalled.’ Thus the voice-over against shots of the usual dreary shelves of mass-market perfume, drink, teddy bears with nautical caps and nets of chocolate doubloons.) The trashy hucksterism of it all wore us down, as did the client, who couldn’t even come up with a name for his shipborne arcade of boutiques and duty-frees that was supposedly his Unique Selling Point. In a meeting I suggested calling it ‘Mall-de-Mer’ as a gesture towards the French who, after all, would also be travelling on the ship. Months later we discovered that the client had taken this seriously, emblazoning the cheery phrase all over the ship. The ferry company was duly hurt and baffled that, whereas the Mall did brisk trade with the Brits, the French passengers stayed away in droves. Moral: never overestimate other people’s sense of humour, and never underestimate your employees’ disloyalty. I shall need to be on my guard with Neptunia Cleat. The fervent don’t do jokes.

  Having my wits about me I ignore the exit to Pisa Nord, which is exactly where you don’t wish to go if you want Pisa airport. Unwitting motorists are expected to divine this by telepathy; the first signs to the airport appear only several nail-bitten miles further on. Eventually I leave the car in the long-term park and discover my flight to Gatwick has been delayed by two hours. The reason being offered is ‘delay’. I have time to stand around and reflect that the ineffable Leaning Tower is now one with the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal and the Pyramids. Pisa is on the global map as an experience to be experienced rather than as a place to be seen. Even in October the airport seethes with middle-aged tourists, most of them rushing, including those who happen to be standing still. What is it about modern air travel that drives anxiety levels steadily upwards when getting on a plane is as commonplace as hopping on a bus and even safer? The general frenzy is in marked contrast to the slow-motion process of flying itself which is carefully designed to take up a day at the very least, regardless of the distance flown.

  I can’t imagine that anyone would ever call Samper a snob, but let me now formulate the theory that at least part of Britons’ frenetic irritability as air travellers stems from our being obliged to forfeit our social bearings. We are forced into close association with the sort of people we have spent a lifetime trying to avoid. These days cheap travel shakes everyone together into a social emulsion; but as soon as the journey is over the immiscible fluids start to separate out again into their customary layers from the bottom up, the sedimentary denizens of ultimae Thules like Braintree settling out first. Even as I formulate the thought the Arrivals portal starts to gush a new batch of passengers from Stansted, dressed for the unseasonal heatwave apparently afflicting Britain. Merely to mention grizzled men in baseball caps and shorts with fading tattoos on their arms will alert you to the literary shorthand involved here, a brief verb. sap. acknowledging that no matter how alluring the Leaning Tower Experience, these are frankly the sort of people who have no business straying outside the Costa del Sol, Ibiza, or (if young) Ayia Napa. Their cheerful, floozy-like companions – wives, possibly – have upper storeys barely contained by straining pink hawsers, while below are pillars of cellulite. And drifting rapidly away from them are the honking middle classes, the men often wearing pale, broad-brimmed hats from Austin Reed, impatient with the queue to claim their hired cars. They are eager to be off to their houses – divinely restored – tucked into the hills behind Lucca, around Siena or as far afield as Chiantishire. The degree of antagonism we Brits feel towards our fellow-countrymen abroad merits the attention of anthropologists.

  One of the tattoos bins his Daily Mail and I glimpse a minor headline that makes me retrieve the paper once its previous owner has turned his back. Under the phrase ‘Death of a Sailsman’ is the story of the sudden untimely demise of Millie Cleat’s old yachting rival, Rufus Rasmussen. ‘The Dane with the mane’, as this shaggy old Viking used to be known, was yesterday found dead and drifting in his favourite craft, an antique cutter of sorts (to judge from the picture) all dazzling sails, polished brass and gleaming teak and mahogany. He was eight years younger than Millie, who will be ecstatic although she will take care to weep crocodile tears in public. I never met Rasmussen, but from what I had gathered he was the better natural seaman as well as having no interest in the limelight. He was a loner in the Joshua Slocum tradition and an intense irritant to Millie, so I salute him on both counts. I down an espresso and mooch wearily ‘airside’, as we seasoned travellers say in our quaint insiders’ jargon that implies we have a background in military security. Just another of the little pretensions that enable us to believe we have some sort of control over our destiny, which ineluctably remains Putney Vale Crematorium or similar.

  When Derek lets me into his flat the first thing I notice is the smell, which I immediately identify as Allure. I have evidently caught him fragrante delicto, splashing himself liberally from the bottle he’s holding. Joop! has evidently been superseded, leaving me with an unwanted bottle of the stuff in my hand luggage: one of those dutiful airport gifts that mean so much these days now that the thought no longer counts. I give the air an ostentatious sniff fuelled by exasperation at having just wasted thirty euros.

  ‘Since when the Chanel?’

  ‘Oh, ages now. If you want to know, it’s Pavel’s favourite.’

  ‘Oho, so it’s “Pavel” these days, is it? I seem to remember when you last spoke about him you referred to him as “Pauline”.’

  ‘He’s a very great pianist,’ Derek says sternly, ‘and a very close friend. His Bach concerts were a wild success, you know. Such problems we had with his hair, I can’t tell you. Well, I can, actually,’ Derek adds with disarming professionalism. ‘He’s losing it at a rate of kn
ots. There was a time when I thought Wigmore Hall was all too appropriately named, but it’s wonderful what can be done with blowing and combing and thickeners. That’s Leoncine’s problem now. I’m concentrating on his hands. Frightful responsibility, you know, a pianist’s hands. These days he won’t let anybody else touch them.’

  And to think that until recently I was hoping to write Taneyev’s life. Somehow these invasive revelations kill the idea stone dead. Temperamental, we artists. ‘Obviously you’re all performing a heroic task, keeping these great public idols groomed and manicured and back-combed,’ I say. ‘Josiah Corcoran needs a classy motto on its letterhead. How about “Work on my looks, ye mighty, and despair”? The right Ozymandian touch, don’t you think?’

  But from his expression it is evident that Derek and Shelley are perfect strangers. Ah well. In any case I must hurry: I have been summoned to attend Millie in time for drinks. No mention has been made of dinner afterwards so I assume she is planning to allow me thirty seconds in which to make my case for not writing her a sequel, to be followed by an imperious five minutes in which she tells me why I shall write it and like it. In the last few months she has evidently shifted her base a little northwards up Park Lane from the Hilton to the Dorchester. The taxi drops me at the entrance and an illegal immigrant wearing a commissionaire’s costume opens my door with a bow and extends a hand as though I were the slightly paralysed Ruthenian ambassador. Really, the whole charade of antique graciousness in front of a building put up in 1931 is so provoking I press a one-euro coin into the man’s gloved hand. I then sail on through into what, after all, is no royal residence but merely an upmarket doss-house. Within minutes I find myself being ushered into The Presence by someone who looks suspiciously like a minder.

  The décor tells me at once that something is up. Her Hilton suite’s executive chic has been replaced by queenly tat: acres of powder-blue carpet pinned down by the rosewood legs of faux-Regency chairs. Heavy blue-and-maroon striped curtains are tightly drawn against the October evening and the clotted rush-hour crawl of traffic beyond the double glazing. If ever a room cried out for the Samper touch, this is it: a touch whose first stage would require a gallon of petrol and a match. Then I notice the Samper touch is already present in the form of a large reproduction of that nonexistent being, The Face. This is hung prominently in a gilt frame garlanded with flowers, looking ever more haunted and extraterrestrial. Her Majesty Queen Neptunia also looks like nothing on earth, standing in the midst of various courtiers who are sitting gazing up at her like the disciples in one of those Pre-Raphaelite paintings gathered eagerly around the story-telling old shepherd who turns out to be You Know Who. The marine monarch is wearing what appears to be an evening gown in black rubber; more eye-catchingly still, she now has two arms. When I was a small boy my mother, like any good parent, would scold me for staring at the afflicted in the street, especially amputees. But this amputee is doing her best to be stared at and my reaction is entirely that of my former and smaller self. Just as a child sees people wearing panes of glass on their noses and with little bonfires of dead leaves smouldering between their lips, so I see a woman in a rubber dress with fish swimming in her arm. For, since I last saw her, my famous biographee has replaced her missing right arm with a glass or polycarbonate replica, bent at the elbow across her body with the hand curved so it can conveniently hold what looks like a large gin and tonic. That the arm is hollow and filled with water is obvious because tiny coloured fish swim and dart in it like flakes of blue and ruby and gold. The harness she must be wearing to support the weight of this bodily aquarium is hidden beneath a black garment draped about her shoulders. This resembles a mozzetta, the skimpy cape worn by popes and cardinals, only even shorter, and I assume it’s an integral part of her weird pseudo-ecclesiastical costume. Still, few clerics outside the sort of parties Derek attends would wear vestments made of rubber or neoprene, which it has to be because it doesn’t move or hang like woven fabric. What is going on here?