by Nev Fountain
‘I’m sorry, I don’t speak Ikean. What are you saying?’
‘Are you able to jiggle your middle?’
The lack of oxygen had made Mervyn a bit befuddled. ‘You mean like a belly dancer?’
‘The middle of the Styrax. If you jiggle the door, you might free the loop.’
Mervyn jiggled, and kept on jiggling until his arms were aching. The loop rattled enticingly but the hatch stayed stubbornly in place. He finally gave up. ‘That’s it. I can’t do it any more.’
‘That’s it!’ shrieked Stuart. ‘When you let it fall back just then. The loop’s free. It’s not under the notch anymore. Just ease the hatch open…slowly.’
Mervyn did so, and the door creaked open. He hauled himself out of the Styrax like a swimmer breaking the surface of the water, his nostrils gaping as they sucked in the cool air. He wobbled over to the Maaganoid. He released the catch and Stuart appeared, making similar grateful gasping noises; he wobbled about rubbing his legs and then stood there for a long time, his hands on his knees, staring at the carpet.
He pulled himself up and looked at Mervyn, who was lying across three seats in the first row, hands on chest, nose pointed at the ceiling. Stuart jerked a finger at the Styrax. ‘Did…phew…did you notice how the insides of those monsters are padded with papier-mâché?’
Mervyn didn’t answer, he just nodded and gave a breathless thumbs-up.
‘That’s what makes them so hot. All that newspaper. Have a look.’
‘No thanks. I’m well aware.’
‘Oh. Ah…huf…’ Stuart straightened up. ‘Okay. Good. Thank heavens we’re out of there. Now we can investigate properly,’ he said.
Mervyn stared at him disbelievingly.
‘See you in your room in half an hour,’ Stuart hollered cheerily, and ran out of the door.
It was only after he’d disappeared into the depths of the hotel that Mervyn realised he hadn’t actually told Stuart his room number.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
If Mervyn and Stuart had bothered to hang about a few more minutes, they’d have seen Roddy Burgess coming back into the main hall. He walked up to the stage, and wrestled the back off the Styrax. He peered into the sweaty interior.
Nothing. No one in there.
Just as he thought.
‘I know your game, you foul robot fiend,’ he growled, backing away. ‘Both of you. Don’t think I don’t know what you lot did. Your leader killed that quisling Josh. Very clever to lure him inside like that. Not that I blame you chaps, of course. But I know your sort. One’s never enough for you, is it?’
The Styrax and the Maaganoid didn’t answer. Roddy tapped his forehead and gave a sly look.
‘So you think you can pull the wool over the old Major’s peepers? Pretend to have an old chum trapped inside, give out an SOS, and then get me to come near you on a “good Samaritan” mission, and what then? It’d be lights-out for the old Major, wouldn’t it? Fiendishly clever.’
He made to leave, pausing at the door. Then he pointed his finger at the Styrax and cocked his thumb. He made a clicking noise in his cheek, taking an imaginary safety catch off.
‘Just to let you know, I’m wise to you chaps. The Major’s watching you hawkishly, just like the proverbial. So just watch it.’
CONVIX 15 / EARTH ORBIT TWO / 2.00pm
EVENT: ‘DAY OF THE STYRAX’ REMEMBERED—JOSEPH McANDREW, TIM WARNE, BRYCE CAMPION, RICK AMORY
LOCATION: Vixos Central Nerve Centre (main stage, ballroom)
EVENT: ‘ ‘WINGS OF THE WARLOCK’ EPISODE SCREENING
LOCATION: The Catacombs of Herath (video lounge—room 1024)
EVENT: ‘HOW TO BLOW UP EVERYDAY OBJECTS-2—WORKSHOP, BERNARD VINER
LOCATION: Hyperion Bridge (room 1010)
EVENT: PHOTOS—RODERICK BURGESS, Katherine Warner
LOCATION: Transpodule Chamber (room 1030)
EVENT: ‘NEW VOIDS—FANVIDS EXPERT PANEL with Graham Goldingay, Fay Lawless, Craig Jones, Darren Cardew
LOCATION: The Seventh Moon of Groolia (room 1002)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
So I found a little love nest for us! It was a stroke of genius on my part, if I do say so myself. I suppose I should explain a bit more about the Styrax. I’ve mentioned it a lot, so I better had. ‘What?’ I hear some of you cry. ‘What on earth is a Styrax?’
For those of you who don’t know (those of you who became a fan of my work through my year on the hit soap Memory Lane or my critically acclaimed vodka commercials—and who’ve never even watched Vixens from the Void—lucky you!), the Styrax is this big nasty robot that’s meant to be a kind of evil murderous supercar from the future. Not as far-fetched as it seems—you should see the way I drive!
Anyway, we had lots of dinky little ones, like dodgem cars, and one bloody great big one, really huge, and the reason why it was so massive was because it was built around a real full-sized Mini Metro. Truly. It was evil, with glowing eyes on the outside, beige plastic and velour on the inside.
I mean, how perfect is that? The amount of times I’ve had a fumble in the backs of vehicles. When I was at RADA I had a rather naughty time with a well-known Coronation Street actor in his rather nicely upholstered Rolls-Royce. I must say I was more proud about doing it in a Rolls than doing it with a household name!
A Mini Metro’s hardly as posh as a Rolls, I grant you! But you’ll be surprised at the Rolls-Royce experience—there’s not as much leg-room as you might think. A Mini Metro actually has surprisingly good back seats, quite wide, and a Rolls is very narrow—and as us girls know it’s the width that really matters! So I thought it was worth investigating what the more economy-sized person was able to give me in the way of thrills—it felt right to try him out in an economy-sized car…!
Anyway, with all the bits and bobs they’d put on it, it looked bloody stupid, like a big fairground ride. But, it was clean, it was warm and most important, the windows were covered in fibreglass, so it was out of the way of prying eyes.
So everyone broke for lunch, and I crept inside the props room. I couldn’t put the lights on because someone would have noticed and investigated, so I had to grope my way (which is easy for me—groping is my speciality, just ask anyone!) in the pitch black. I got inside and waited for my little lothario to make his presence felt. I didn’t have long to wait. He’d managed to get in there before me! All of a sudden, I felt a pudgy little hand on my…
*
Stuart stopped reading aloud. He coyly skipped to the end of the page.
…you know that most dwarves are double-jointed? Well take it from me, it’s true! As for whether his bits were—ahem—‘in proportion’ to his size, well it was too dark to draw a picture, but they certainly didn’t feel small!
He might have been small, but what he didn’t have in stature he certainly made up for in stamina! I was starting to wonder if he wasn’t a midget at all, just a normal-sized person who’d worn himself down to a frazzle with sexual athletics!
I was so exhausted that I fell asleep, and when I woke up, I was alone. Not that I’m saying that Smurf was a ‘love ‘em and leave ‘em’ type. I guessed he’d gone back to work, filming the final scenes of season two in his robot monster costume. I’d already finished filming for the day, giving my all as the cruelly betrayed Arkadia that morning (darling, I was marvellous!)
So I just lay there on the back seat, allowing my undercarriage to cool off, watching the world go by through the grille in the front, hoping to catch another glimpse of Smurfy.
I must have slept for hours, because they’d finished filming for the day. And who would come back into the props room but Mervyn Stone? The lovely and talented script editor of VFTV. He was lugging stuff around because most of the lazy lot who worked at the BBC hadn’t turned up for work that day (typical unionised types—don’t want anyone else to do their jobs, but don’t want to do it themselves), and the sight of a sweating and cursing Mervyn zipping in and out, grappling with boxes and bags, hi
s lovely little bottom disappearing and reappearing like Tinkerbell’s light—I can tell you, the old undercarriage was getting ready to be lowered again!
I must tell you at this point that Mervyn and I have a bit of a history. You know the old showbiz joke, the one about the actress who was so stupid she slept with the writer? Well guess which stupid actress did exactly that! And let me tell you, I didn’t feel stupid at all! It’s true, though; bedding a writer is hardly a great career move, but at that time of my career I was so successful I could actually pick my bedfellows based on their parts, not on their ability to GET me parts! Those desperate days (see chapters 3–10) were long, long past, let me tell you!
I was aching to grab him and drag him into my makeshift boudoir, but he was never on his own. Nicholas was sitting there, dismantling a Styrax and packing away props in huge cases the whole time, while Mervyn zipped in and out carrying ray guns and bits of the set—and then soon enough they were both finished, and left. I was alone and…
*
‘Are you going to sit there and read all of it out loud?’
‘Don’t you want to read it?’
‘Read it, yes. Listen to you read it, no.’
‘I’ve read my copy three times already. It gives you a real insight into the chaos that the production team was going through. It’s just mad. When we did our fan videos it was nothing like this. The producer and the script editor didn’t have to lug boxes around.’
‘Well, we shouldn’t have either. If anyone saw me touching a prop they would have gone on strike. Thank God Vanity didn’t mention it at the time.’
‘All in all,’ Stuart said smugly, ‘our production was much more professional and efficient, and was all the better for it.’
Mervyn gave a long-suffering grunt. He’d already tuned him out.
Stuart had turned up ten minutes ago, breezing into Mervyn’s room after being semi-invited in (meaning that Mervyn had opened the door to his knock and didn’t immediately slam it in his face). Mervyn felt quite uncomfortable in Stuart’s presence—not least because Mervyn had leapt into the shower to wash the smell of smoke out of his hair and skin and was wandering around self-consciously in a dressing gown, gathering up his clothes so he could get dressed in the bathroom.
There was another reason for his discomfort: Stuart had turned up in his Vixens costume. Mervyn could only guess what the room service might think if she wandered in to find a half-naked middle-aged man entertaining a young transvestite.
Stuart had started talking about Simon, listing possible suspects, but soon got on to his favourite topic of ‘restoring’ episodes until they were ‘better than the original’. He even brought his laptop to show Mervyn some more computer-generated effects dropped unsubtly into the middle of old Vixens episodes.
Mervyn was surprisingly relieved. He didn’t want to talk with Stuart about Simon’s murder. Despite the young man’s enthusiasm, and the fact he was a sort of police officer, Mervyn didn’t feel right discussing it with him. He hadn’t shared with Stuart anything about what happened in Simon Josh’s hotel room; Bernard and Nicholas’s break-in, the crude suicide note he’d found, or the fire in the litter bin. Thankfully, Stuart was now occupying himself reading Vanity’s book.
‘I can’t believe she did all those naughty things in the Styrax with a dwarf.’
‘That’s Vanity for you.’
‘It’s just not right,’ mumbled Stuart. ‘Think of the damage she might have caused.’
‘Oh, dwarves are sturdy little chaps…’
Stuart missed the joke completely. ‘I meant to the Styrax. It’s very irresponsible! I mean to say, you were there on the final recording day, filming the final scenes of the final explosive episode of series two when the Styrax took over the planet Vixos! She could have broken a bit off and ruined the season climax.’
‘Not the most well-chosen of phrases, Stuart.’
‘Nothing like that happened on the set of my fan videos. When we did ours no one had sex inside the props.’
‘I’m glad to hear it.’
‘This book is dynamite.’ Stuart flicked to the inside front cover. His face fell.
‘Oh. It’s not signed. Why didn’t you get it signed when you bought it?’
‘I didn’t buy it!’
‘Oh, she gave you a complimentary copy.’
‘No. That’s the strange thing. It was just left outside my door in that jiffy bag. Vanity said it wasn’t from her.’
‘Was there a note?’
Mervyn allowed a look of dumb surprise to wander on to his face. ‘Do you know, I didn’t look. I was more worried about what she’d written about me.’
Stuart picked up the envelope and slipped a hand inside. ‘There’s something in here, it’s a compliment slip I think, or… Oh.’
‘What?’
Stuart pulled out an A4 sheet of paper. He unfolded it slowly and placed it on the desk. It was a photocopy of a newspaper which covered most of the page; a jagged and faded clipping from The Daily Mail. Bits of it were so denuded that the photocopying process had left blank fuzzy spaces on the page. Peering at it closely, Mervyn could just make out the date. It was from 1986. He could clearly read an excitable profile of the Duke and Duchess of York’s wedding, alongside a picture of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson displaying large shiny eyes and huge toothy smiles, like a pair of straw hat-wearing donkeys on a picture postcard.
But that wasn’t all. Written across the newspaper, in fat marker-pen scrawl, was:
376—229—22
HANDS OFF—GINGER!
SAFE
Mervyn eyed it suspiciously, like he would a first-draft script from Andrew Jamieson.
The silence got too much for Stuart. ‘Does it mean anything to you?’
‘Nothing. Not a thing.’ Mervyn examined it close up, turned it upside down, and finally held it up to the light. ‘“HANDS OFF—GINGER!” Who’s “Ginger”?’ Sarah Ferguson—she’s got red hair…’
Stuart leapt up behind Mervyn and pointed over his shoulder, causing Mervyn to flinch involuntarily.
‘Well… Have you got any connections with the royal family at all?’
‘There was that one-night stand with Princess Margaret, but I don’t like to talk about it.’
‘You’re being sarcastic, aren’t you?’
‘No. Not in the slightest.’
‘Wow. Seriously?’
‘No. I was being sarcastic. You see, when I said I wasn’t being sarcastic just then? I was being sarcastic.’
‘Okay… Well… Have you at least met any of the royal family, then?’
‘No. Oh…yes. Well, sort of. I did fleetingly meet Prince Edward once.At a Children in Need bash at the BBC. The year the Vixens from the Void cast danced the Time Warp, from The Rocky Horror Show…’
Mervyn stared at the paper again, concentrating on the words, rather than the background. ‘Simon Josh had ginger hair. Perhaps “HANDS OFF—GINGER!” was a warning to him?’ Simon’s face swam unbidden into Mervyn’s head. The smug expression, the silly glasses, and most vividly, the huge tangle of bright red hair.
Stuart looked doubtful. ‘What about the numbers?’
‘A safe combination? It says SAFE. But safe numbers are normally one or two digits aren’t they? These seem too big.’ Mervyn shrugged. ‘I still don’t know why it was sent to me, though. And what’s it got to do with Vanity’s autobiography?’ Mervyn turned the sheet over. On the other side was a tidy message in courier font.
Hello Mervyn.
Sometimes the memory cheats… I think Vanity’s book has thrown all sorts of interesting things up, don’t you agree? You know what they say… Can’t keep anything from us fans! I think we should have a little meet-up; discuss terms for your NEXT appearance at one of my conventions. I’m sure you’ll agree, and I’m thinking that perhaps you should accept a more reasonable fee next time. Hope that’s okay.
See me? 8.30pm, room 1024.
Your obedient servant. S. Josh
.
‘Oh my God. I don’t believe it!’
Stuart snatched the paper from him and read it. He looked as stunned as Mervyn.
‘Simon Josh is blackmailing you…from beyond the grave!’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
‘So do you have any idea how he was going to try to blackmail you?’ whispered Stuart.
Mervyn and Stuart were exploring the venue Simon had suggested for his ‘little meet-up’ with Mervyn. But there was nothing interesting about room 1024. It was just another conference lounge, like the room they’d signed autographs in that morning. Bare walls. Carpet tiles. Spindly chairs. Fiendish blinds on the windows.
Their search was made difficult because it was in pitch darkness. In its other, more fantastical life, the room was ‘The Catacombs of Herath’, and it played host to video screenings of Vixens episodes throughout the day. It was usually the darkest, smelliest part of the convention. And this year was no exception.
‘No idea.’
‘Oh, you must have some idea!’
‘Shhh!’ A lump of something vaguely fan-shaped glared at them and put a finger to its mouth.
‘I’ve done many things in life I’m ashamed about Stuart,’ Mervyn whispered. ‘As no doubt you and the other fans are aware. I’m sure they’re all listed on a website somewhere.’
Stuart leapt to his feet. ‘Right, let’s go and see.’
‘No, Stuart! The point I’m making is I’ve done lots of embarrassing things, but nothing that’s so shameful I’d be willing to get blackmailed over it.’
‘That time you got arrested for smashing that restaurant window?’
‘Stuart…’
‘Or the time that actress—Shelley Bolan—cited you in her divorce?’
‘Stuart!’
‘Shhh!’ The lumpy fan made another noise, like he or she was slowly deflating.
Mervyn lowered his voice. ‘They’re not secret are they? How could he blackmail me with them if they’re not secret?’