Eleven

by Sarah Rayne

  The director turned to glance at him through his teary eyes, seemed to weigh up the question, and then said decisively, ‘My film’s a pile of shit.’

  Chris’s wish to console the man competed with his integrity as a cinemagoer. Compassion won the battle.

  ‘I thought it was pretty good.’

  ‘You’re just saying that,’ the director protested, and then, in a sudden burst of fury, repeated in an angry, pointless shout, ‘You’re just saying it!’

  He thumped the hand-dryer, which had the unfortunate effect of setting it off and drowning out the next part of his lament. As the machine roared out its air, Chris inched closer to the man and laid an arm, gently, on his shoulder. The director turned and almost threw himself at Chris in despair, burying his head in Chris’s chest and continuing to sob.

  ‘A hundred thousand dollars. Eighteen fucking months. And the thing’s no good. The thing’s no good. I knew all along.’

  Chris, knowing that the screening was about to end in the auditorium, quickly steered the bedraggled auteur out of the toilets, and – acting on instinct – up the ladder into the projectionist’s box.

  ‘This is the only place you can get some privacy,’ explained Chris, who had been coming here for so much of his life that he knew most of the staff by name.

  The big man, as feeble as a child, followed him. The projectionist, with his black T-shirt and long, lank hair, looked up in surprise and irritation at the sound of approaching footsteps, but relaxed when he saw Chris’s familiar face, only to revert to surprise again at the sight of the director.

  ‘He’s depressed about the film,’ Chris explained. ‘I’m trying to tell him it’s all right.’

  ‘It’s a pile of shit,’ muttered the director.

  ‘It is actually passable,’ ruled the projectionist helpfully, ‘just not the film it could have been.’

  Shortly after this, once the final credits had rolled and the muted applause had died away, the projectionist went downstairs to oversee the after-show party preparations, and Chris was left with the director, who had by now stopped crying, and was staring, with a mixture of sadness and relief, down into the ghostly, empty auditorium and the blank screen where his disappointing work had played itself out.

  ‘See,’ Xavier said, ‘in the end, it’s OK. It’s just a film.’

  ‘Sure,’ the director agreed, sniffing. ‘I’ll get to make another one.’

  They sat there for a good few minutes in silence, Chris’s arm on the director’s shoulder, the director thinking he had made a fool of himself, Chris thinking that Matilda would be wondering where he had got to. But she had guessed and, when he came down from the projectionist’s box with the sheepish director in tow, her face softened into a signature smile – somehow sentimental and knowing at the same time – whose meaning he knew very well.

  The weekend that followed was full of joyous, emphatic sex; when he turned up on Saturday night, she answered the door naked, standing there for a few moments in full view of anyone who might be passing, and led him to the bedroom, arms pinned behind his back, without saying a word.

  The memory of Matilda’s face, that shaky column of freckles, and its sister pattern of tiny moles all the way down her belly to her thighs, sends a strange hybrid of sexual electricity, wistfulness and something almost like grief through Xavier. Cut it out, he tells himself, scanning the Square for the inelegant figure of his friend. Toughen up.

  When Murray eventually arrives, exactly a minute before the scheduled start, he is not only panting and sweaty but wearing a red tie. The event is strictly black tie – even a modest premiere has to keep up some sort of appearances – and everyone else here has a bow tie on.

  Xavier gestures helplessly.

  ‘What the hell . . .?’

  ‘I couldn’t find a ber, bow tie.’

  ‘Could you not hire one?’

  ‘I didn’t realize I didn’t have one.’

  ‘So instead you went for a red tie? Not a black tie, say?’

  ‘I thought any tie would be better than no tie.’

  ‘No. A red tie is worse than no tie. A red fucking tie!’ Xavier shakes his head in a combination of chagrin and reluctant affection. ‘Look, take mine.’

  ‘How do I put it on?’ Murray’s big fingers fumble with the prissy object as if he were a walrus grappling with a mobile phone.

  ‘It’s a clip-on one, Murray. You clip it on.’

  There is an announcement: the screening is about to start. Xavier grasps Murray by the lapels and fixes the bow tie, then takes his sleeve and guides him towards the auditorium. Halfway into the darkened room with its modest buzz of anticipation, Murray turns back, trying to grab a glass of wine from a tray, and causes a logjam of latecomers around the main doors which will still be straightening itself out as the lights go down for the start of the film.

  The film is watchable but bland, roughly on a par with the level of expectation. At the end, there is a mass chirping and bleeping, like an electronic dawn chorus, as hundreds of mobile devices are switched back on at once. By the time they get to the reception, the queue is three-deep at the free bar, and Murray goes off to battle it. Xavier is watching a PR representative for the film flirting with journalists when someone tugs at his sleeve. It’s the TV producer he last met at Christmas. Now, as then, she is supported by a pair of long, pencil-thin heels; it must be like trying to walk on crabs’ claws, thinks Xavier. Her non-champagne hand grabs his and she leans upwards for a kiss on the cheek which he feels obliged to give.

  ‘How are you?’ he asks politely.

  ‘I’m great. Who are you here with, the girlfriend . . .?’

  ‘No, I’m with a friend,’ he says, gesturing to the bar.

  The woman – he can never remember her name, it’s something like Hannah or Hayley – glances over her shoulder and, as if politely, stifles a chuckle at the sweaty Murray, bow tie askew as he hefts himself, drink in each hand, between two skinny girls in low-cut dresses.

  ‘Your sidekick.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Still enjoying the radio show?’

  ‘It’s fun.’

  ‘Good for you,’ she says. ‘Well, when you’re ready to move on, remember, just drop me an email. I’ve been speaking to a couple of people about you.’

  ‘I will.’

  Xavier makes his excuses as Murray returns.

  She whips out her BlackBerry – people all over the room are doing this each time they move between conversations, as if the gadgets contain instructions on how to move – and stilt-walks away, tugging someone else’s sleeve as Murray hands Xavier a glass of wine.

  ‘Is that Hannah Woodrow?’ Murray looks back at the miniature woman, already immersed in a new conversation.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What were you talking about?’

  ‘Just about the film.’

  ‘I should try to talk to her. She’s a good person to get in with.’

  ‘What do you mean, “get in with”? For what?’

  Murray shrugs.

  ‘You never know. It’s always good to have options. I mean, at the moment, the show is perfect, but we’ve got to look ler, ler, ler, ler, ler, ler, ler. Long-term.’

  ‘I guess.’

  Murray fingers the ill-becoming bow tie.

  ‘You just concentrate on the show. Leave the tactics to me. I’ve been in this game a while.’

  Xavier watches him move, heavy-footed, to the periphery of the producer’s new group, where he waits with his hand poised to shake hers, like an autograph-hunter hoping to catch a passing star. Xavier is surprised to find himself wondering about Pippa: where she is at the moment, what she’s doing. Watching TV, he supposes, or maybe out with her sister; she seems like the sort of person who could work all day and then go out at 4 a.m. She could be doing anything – jogging in the dark, country dancing, life modelling, playing the kazoo, nothing would be a surprise. But then, she could just be relaxing. He briefly imagines her in the b
ath, pink knees rising imposingly from a cloud of suds, and is surprised at himself again. He reaches to loosen his bow tie, but it’s not there. Murray, with Xavier’s bow tie drooping around his neck, is still at the corner of a conversation, his smile flagging at the edges.

  Ollie Harper spends the following workday grappling with irritations. His replacement phone suffers from an unwieldy keypad, and of course contains none of his clients’ numbers, so he’s spent quite a lot of this week so far just making up lost ground. He hopes something bad happens to the fat fuck who stole his BlackBerry. His only consolation has been exchanging flirtatious texts with his colleague Sam, who sits on the other side of the office all day twirling her hair, answering the phone – ‘Hello, Frinton’ – and grilling callers for personal details. It’s a Frinton rule that every caller, however casual, is logged on a database with a mobile number and, if possible, an email address which will receive details of available properties for years to come. ‘Even if they don’t end up buying with us this time, or renting with us this time, there’ll be a next time,’ as Roger, the boss, points out tediously often. He is so obsessed with the database, Ollie sometimes thinks, that he’d be happy if they never completed a sale again, as long as they had ten thousand people’s email addresses.

  This morning Roger gave the staff a typically laboured talking-to about motivation. With the ‘current financial problems faced by the globe’ – as he grandly put it – everyone had to work twice as hard, but he’d been getting the impression some people were working half as hard. He looked straight at Ollie as he said this.

  Ollie has never liked Roger and the dislike is, he assumes, mutual. Roger has foul breath, as if years ago he ate something which still haunts his mouth; he’s short, balding, and lacking in charm. Ollie and Sam have been batting insults about him back and forth between their phones, insults which are becoming increasingly rude given the increasing level of sexual tension. Ollie knows that Nicola, pregnant back home, would be appalled if she knew he was compulsively texting another woman, but she’s lucky, really, he thinks; if he wasn’t getting it out of his system this way, he’d be actually fucking someone else, like half his mates, like most men deprived of sex in a long-term relationship.

  Sam wears short skirts and coloured tights, red, or even purple on occasion, an eccentric choice by the standards of a high-street estate agent. From time to time Roger makes a halfhearted attempt to talk her into greater conservatism, but it’s a battle he has no stomach for.

  While he considers himself slightly better than her as an all-round agent – and the figures bear out his opinion – Ollie has to admit that Sam is very good, and she’s only been in the business a couple of years. She’s got excellent phone technique (it’s almost impossible to end a conversation with her without surrendering details to the database) and he bets she’s great at viewings, too, persuasive without seeming to be pushy, never allowing a door to close: Well, if you change your mind . . . Well, if you want to have another look . . . I happen to know they will take a lot less . . . using all the agent tactics people believe they are wise to, but cave in to nonetheless.

  And she’s a good texting partner. He likes seeing her eyes flicker in amusement over the screen of her mobile, even as she’s putting on a grave voice to placate a disappointed vendor on her desk phone. He likes the anticipation as her fingers trip nimbly over the keys to send a reply up into space, only to land ten metres away on his screen. In a sense, Roger was right to lecture them – they probably could be doing more – but it’s flair that sells homes in a climate like this, not graft alone.

  The phone rings.

  ‘Frinton, Ollie speaking.’

  It’s someone calling about one of the properties in the window, a nice place with a double garage and decent garden, actually sold some weeks ago, but kept on display in the hope of luring customers in from the stagnant high street towards other purchases.

  ‘Let me check.’ Ollie pretends to shuffle some papers on his desk. ‘Yes, now that one has actually been sold already, I’m afraid. But we do have a couple more places which have very similar—’ He’s cut off. The caller has heard this kind of shtick before. The invisible could-have-been-client wriggles off the hook of the database. Sam, who’s on the phone herself, gives him a hard-luck raise of the eyebrows, but this is immediately cancelled out by Roger, who looms behind him.

  ‘What you want to do, Ollie, in that situation,’ says Roger, ‘is be more proactive. Ask them to come in and talk to you about the property. Then when they’re here, then you tell them, oh, it’s sold, but here are some more. Much more difficult then for them to get away, if they’re sat right here.’

  ‘Thank you, Roger,’ says Ollie in what he hopes is a tone of acid sarcasm, ‘you are very wise.’

  The phone barks at him again.

  ‘Hello, Frinton. Briars Road? Let me see. Yes, now that one has been sold. But we do have some other very similar details.’ To hell with Roger; Ollie is going to do it his own way. This time, the caller is snagged: Ollie can hear it. ‘So if I could just start by taking some details? Could I get your name?’

  It’s as simple and quick as that, when it works, the flipping of the conversation so that the caller, having rung up in search of information, ends up feeling it is quite natural to part with it, instead. From here, it’s easy. Ollie can do the patter without engaging his brain, which is instead put to work tapping out a message to Sam on the unwieldy face of the replacement phone he’s still fucking stuck with. If he comes and breathes anywhere near me again I’m going to vomit . . .

  He sees Sam’s phone light up for a second, reads the amusement in her grey eyes. This is the kind of thing you miss when you’re married, he thinks: making someone grin, seeing them react to tricks which your partner has seen a thousand times. Freshly minted emotions, the rawness of it. A message comes back from her. His breath is incredible, it’s like he ate shit!

  Ollie almost snorts at this, but manages to keep his tone neutral.

  ‘Right, and can I take an email address that I can send details to? And then we’ll move on to talking about your specific requirements.’ He takes up the baton of her last text. Maybe that’s what he’s into . . . some people are . . . Somehow it makes it more enjoyable that they’re spelling words in full, no abbreviations, no stupid little icons and pictures; it gives a full-blooded quality to the flirting, makes it feel less teenage. He sees Sam smirk and begin work on her response. He’s hoping she’ll pursue the topic of kinky habits, but she simply writes: You’re going to make me throw up! His poor wife!

  ‘Right. So you’re looking to pay, ideally, around £250,000. Now I’m going to ask you a question. If I found your ideal home – your absolute dream place – how far could you stretch? Two sixty? Two seven five? Just to give me an idea of parameters.’

  Ollie has the receiver tucked under his chin. He is inputting the caller’s data with one finger and trying to compose a new text to Sam with the other hand, though first he has to read a message from someone else. He laments, once again, this stupid temporary phone, with its over-clever way of preempting words, its baffling menu system. If you were Roger’s wife you’d have only yourself to blame for not bailing out when you smelled his breath . . .

  The caller is becoming slightly tetchy – is this going to take much longer? As he rolls his thumb around his temporary address book, Ollie is forced to concentrate on the conversation again.

  ‘OK, David, listen, instead of me grilling you over the phone like this, what about if I book you in for an appointment and we—’

  His heart jumps. It feels for a moment as if it has actually dislodged itself and is rattling around like a cog loose in a machine.

  He’s sent the text about Roger to Roger.

  Ollie concludes the conversation as fast as possible, puts the receiver down. His hands are shaking. Sam can see the change in his face. Ollie paws helplessly at the mobile, the stupid shitty fucking excuse for a phone whose alien workings confus
ed him into this disastrous short-circuit of the brain. And it even included his name: not even Roger can fail to understand it. Ollie curses himself, the phone, the fat piece of shit who stole his BlackBerry, Roger, Sam, Nicola, but mostly himself again.

  He thinks wildly of trying to steal Roger’s phone. One of them could distract him while the other one nicks it and deletes the message, but no, Roger will have it in his pocket as always, his fucking trouser pocket, those trousers which are slightly too short and ride up to give glimpses of his bony white ankles, he’ll have the message in his pocket right now, it’s a time bomb. Ollie feels sick. He dabs his lips with his suddenly dry tongue and wonders if there is any miracle way of getting out of this one.

  Xavier is woken by a raucous scream from Jamie downstairs at nine thirty on Saturday morning, and goes to buy a few groceries from the corner shop, along with some extra varieties of tea, in case Pippa turns out to have a preference for peppermint or something. He’s not sure whether he is really trying to be a good host or just hoping to amuse her with the formalities. He returns home and begins the superficial pre-clean for her arrival, but in truth not much needs doing: over the course of her few visits the flat has reached a tipping point of tidiness. This poses the question, of course, of whether he really needs her to keep visiting on Saturdays. He can’t entirely remember how this became the firm routine it already feels like now.

  At about ten to twelve, the bell rings. Xavier pauses: he was just about to put on a slightly less rumpled shirt than the one he’s wearing. She always seems to come a bit early or a bit late. But when he goes down to the door, it’s not Pippa. Another woman is standing there, fake-tanned, in a black T-shirt, with some sort of photo ID around her neck and a clipboard under her arm.

  ‘Hi,’ she says. ‘I’d love to just take a few minutes of your time to tell you about a great way to help people less fortunate than yourself. Have you ever considered helping people less fortunate than yourself?’

  ‘Er . . .’ says Xavier.

  Just out of the University of Melbourne, he sponsored a child in Ghana, paying $25 a month, but that came to seem a pitiful gesture, a drop in the ocean, so for a while he also gave $30 a month to a homeless shelter, and then went and worked there as a volunteer with Matilda some Saturdays. That in turn led to a stint working for an AIDS charity, and so on for a couple of years, each piece of do-gooding only highlighting to the still impressionable Chris how many more deserving causes there were. In the end, a period of financial hardship put an end to these charitable commitments and he now looks back on the whole thing with a certain embarrassment.