Semi-Detached

by Griff Rhys Jones

  To pass the long hours he decided that we should play ‘Spoof.

  ‘Ever played before?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll teach you.’

  Spoof is a game where you try to guess what combinations of coins the other player has hidden in his hands and match them with the ones secreted in yours. If you guess correctly then the money is yours: wrong, it is theirs.

  I was a novice. To begin with, much to Mike’s satisfaction, Mike won steadily It vindicated his perception that students were as thick as pig-shit.

  Spoof was not a difficult game. I soon got the hang of it. I also got the hang of Mike’s ‘system’. If he won, Mike would start again with 10p. If he lost, Mike would start with 5p. He . never varied his foolproof technique at all, ever. I began to win money from him. It was difficult not to. Mike stopped chuckling. He became distinctly crotchety. But still, he never varied his system.

  Mike chuckling was more bearable than Mike crotchety Since Mike rarely tired of playing Spoof, to keep him relatively calm for the next six days we were to spend together, I had to pretend to lose for a while, and then pretend to win for a while. With a bit of care we would usually come out even. Hours passed in our bare hotel corridor playing an utterly pointless, mind-numbing game of total witlessness. Sometimes, I thought it might be better if I just read Dickens out loud to him.

  There were bursts of activity, like flurries of snow On the first day at about eleven came a sudden ‘Grand Hotel’ moment. ‘Aye, aye,’ said Mike. ‘Here they come.

  The Sheika’s entourage bustled down the corridor. The Sheika herself was short and hidden behind a burkha. Anna, an Anglo-Indian governess, was clucking over a three-year-old boy He ran ahead of her up the corridor kicking the doors. They were accompanied by a number of small men in dark suits. Mike stood up. I did too. They ignored us, opened the door, and all went inside. The door closed. We sat down again. It was over.

  Five minutes passed. A bell-hop (at least, I assumed that’s what he was) in a tight pair of trousers with hussar stripes and a bum-freezer jacket (that’s why I thought he was a bellhop) came around the corner. He had a large trunk on his shoulder. He was followed by four or five more porters (in varying bottom-protecting lengths of jacket) with similar cases. They swung them around, balanced them on their heads and tossed them one to the other. They were empty.

  ‘They’ve been to Harrods again,’ Mike told me. He knocked, and the porters went inside. A few moments later they emerged empty-handed and went off giggling down the corridor, and ten minutes after that, they came back round the corner, this time laden.

  ‘The Sheika’s been to the food hall,’ Mike observed. Several hampers of sandwiches, whole sides of salmon, platters of lobsters in mayonnaise, hams, sides of cold beef and towers of cream and strawberries were ferried into the room.

  ‘They’re going to eat that?’ I asked.

  ‘No, no. She’s the number-one wife and she’s the only one who’s allowed to come to London and enjoy herself, so what she does is load all that food into the packing cases and trunks and has it flown straight back to the rest of the younger wives in the harem at home in Qatar, so that they can have a nice picnic. The Sheika is the main shareholder in Qatari Airlines.’

  Did the Sheika really enjoy herself in London? She spent a lot of time in her suite, attended from day to day by her crown princes (the men in suits), which must have been slightly limiting. We once went out with her, when she wanted to have a picnic of her own. It was the only time she attempted any form of communication with us. She clicked her fingers and we hurried over. She motioned to us to go away and sit on the other side of a tree. We had been a little too assiduously playing at being bodyguards. The first wife of the Sheik of Qatar had found our presence, quite rightly, a little oppressive. Otherwise we played Spoof.

  The little crown prince liked to come over and hit Mike very hard around the ankles with a piece of solid metal tube that he had found in a wardrobe. Mike’s hugeness was clearly an object of fascination to the little fucker. Mike would take the full whack across his shins and bare his teeth.

  Mike was philosophical. ‘When they leave, that’s when it’s all worthwhile,’ he told me. ‘One bloke, he had chauffeured these sheiks around all summer and his last job was to take them to the airport, so he drove them there and hung about waiting for the tip, but they never gave it, so he followed them to check-out, carrying the bags all obsequiously, but they never gave him a tip. He went all the way with them to the departures gate, but no tip, no nothing. They just sailed on through. He called after them, ‘Oi, what do you want to do with the car?’ And they turned round and said, ‘Keep it, my friend, keep it.’

  Mike told this story to a number of people. He told the porters, when they flourished the fistfuls of flyers they’d just been given. He told it to Colin the ex-driver, who just looked ever more rueful. He told it to the plumber who arrived with a sink plunger. (‘I shouldn’t be doing this. I’m a trained heating operative.’)

  ‘You see, what he’s doing,’ Mike explained when the plumber had gone inside, ‘is unblocking the toilet. They all go and use it, one after the other, and nobody pulls the chain.’

  Unlike many, Mike was scrupulously non-racist. He never called them towel-heads. ‘They have different customs to what we do. It’s probably ‘cos they live in the desert, they have to be very careful about wasting water.’

  It sounded plausible to me. The plumber emerged looking happier. They’d bunged him for his un-bunging.

  But Mike never told his stories of largesse beyond the dreams of avarice to the nanny Anna was in her late forties, the daughter of a Welsh train driver. Her employers paid her twenty pounds a month, and she sent most of it back to her own husband and daughters in India.

  In the end, disastrously, we missed out on the big bung.

  I hardly deserved it. I had only been there for a week. They left in the early morning before our shift began. I met Douglas a little later. ‘Mmm. Interestingly,’ he said, ‘she just handed me two hundred pounds without a word.’

  Our team was broken up. The security company didn’t want to let me go. They had other work for me. I was transferred to bomb-checking.

  In the mid-seventies, the hotel had been blown up by an IRA bomb. As a result, a small table was installed in the entrance and two men in blue uniforms were stuck behind it to examine the hand-luggage of anyone entering the establishment. Another operative guarded the back entrance. The security company also manned a little booth at the staff entrance. A typical twelve-hour shift involved two-and-three-quarter-hour sets on the front desk, and two-and-three-quarter hours on the back and staff doors. The spare time was given over to ‘breaks’. There were five operatives altogether: four to check handbags and one to stand in and supervise.

  I was now in a blue shirt and wearing those rather cleverly designed uniform trousers with high waists, deep pockets and little buttons that seemed to be able to fit anybody Nonetheless, this was a bit of a climb-down. I missed the erroneous status of ‘bodyguard’, but, more significantly, I missed the chair and, whenever Big Mike dozed, the reading opportunities.

  At least on the front desk, when we weren’t poking about in the bags, there were still two of us. Brett came from Bromley.

  ‘I expect it can get quite busy about lunchtime.’

  He turned and looked at me. ‘I expect it can get quite busy about lunchtime?’ He put quite a lot rudimentary satire into the riposte. It was neither an auspicious nor a particularly sparkling conversational gambit. I tried other sallies, but they were met with barely audible grunts. He had said enough for the next hour or so.

  Brett was seventeen. He did explain later, in simple terms, that commentary on your surroundings or state of being was a waste of breath. He was more forthcoming with the supervisor, who turned out to be his uncle. The two of them agreed that only mugs would exert themselves to make money. At other times any challenge to the trance-like state of utter immobility
was met with ferocious annoyance.

  During the day there were bags to be checked anyway Brett opened a case, and it was full of guns. The man looked him in the eye. ‘The hotel knows all about this,’ said the man. Brett’s uncle came over and peered at them. With the natural regard that stupid authoritarians have for people with guns he waved him through.

  I reassured hamburger-smugglers who were trying to avoid the exorbitant room-service prices that I didn’t give a damn what they took up to their room and tried to calm Americans who became incensed at being called ‘sir’. (‘What is this? What is this British fake deference?’) I referred people who wanted to see ‘the general manager’ about our intolerable intrusion to the concierge.

  What they didn’t realize was that ‘the general manager’ of the hotel was only ever seen in the lobby once a day at about eight-thirty. He descended in the lift, an elderly, French, fat man with the demeanour of a dowager in a lavender garden, and took his tiny white dog out to defecate on Park Lane.

  At night, the hotel became more enjoyably sinister. It hosted boxing nights. Rather than the mug punters who came in during the day, these were attended by proper gents (not toffs — everybody hated toffs). The proper gents didn’t tip more. It was sheer force of repellent personality that impressed. Our job became a major entertainment.

  ‘Ha ha ha. Go on, darling. Let him have a look. If you find any money in there, let me know, my friend.’

  Over three months I never found anything compromising of any kind in any woman’s handbag but I spent hours trying to persuade heavily perfumed, twittering ladies to open the wretched things.

  As the evening concluded and the ballroom emptied, the guests swept out to argue over taxis, new guests arrived to enjoy the ‘007’ disco on the seventh floor and sometimes single ladies walked in. Brett enjoyed his duty to keep ‘tom’ out of the hotel. ‘Where do you think you’re going, darling?’ he would ask salaciously If unaccompanied, they were invited to leave the premises. He was indiscriminate. To Brett, any woman, even of a matronly demeanour, was bound to be on the game.

  ‘No, I think you’re making some mistake.’

  ‘No, I tell you what. You’re making the mistake. Whores are not allowed in here.’

  The investment banker (something of which Brett, so it seemed, had never heard) stormed off, promising retribution. Brett was uncowed by ‘the cow’. After all, in the early hours of one morning, just before Christmas, a manager escorted a well-spoken and expensively dressed woman to the door. She swung around in the entrance. ‘Will you get your hands off me,’ she snapped. He let her go. She addressed the lobby in a carrying voice. ‘There’s nobody in this place that could afford me, anyway,’ and exited to a round of applause.

  Our world was bounded entirely by the reception area: the white shining marble vestibule floor, with the porters’ desk to the right, the entrance to the basement cocktail bar just by it, the jeweller’s shop to the left that nobody ever looked at, let alone went into, and, behind us, the lower seating area. Opposite the reception desks, two staircases ran down to the hateful back entrance.

  Brett’s uncle usually stuck me down behind the lift shaft after midnight. Six hours, standing guard over nothing. Few used this entrance during the day, and after midnight almost nobody did. Originally, we had been allowed to sit down, but late one night, following a gruelling workout at the 007 nightclub, the boss, Mr West Junior himself, came down into the lobby and found his men lounging about reading. He was incensed. This was not the alert, twenty-four-hour bomb-proofing he had undertaken to provide. An order from above came down via Roy and Brett’s uncle: ‘No sitting, no lounging, no reading, ever!’

  Do you ever feel that life is too short? I spent half my entire existence standing in that grim space. The muzak was switched off at 1.30 a.m. precisely It came on again at seven, sounding, suddenly, as blaring as a colliery band. The rest of the time I was left in silence. I recited poetry, I wrestled with half-remembered philosophical problems, I followed the geometric pattern on the carpet, round and round, up and down through imaginary mazes, along imaginary paths until I knew it better than its designer, while the seconds crashed past like waves on a beach.

  I used to ration myself. After I could stand it no longer, I would sneak a look at my watch. I was always disappointed. Disconcertingly, the last ten years have passed more quickly than one of those shifts.

  But I knew I would escape eventually It was an interlude. All I wanted was the money. In a few weeks I would be off back to Cambridge to fill up the time before I started proper work. There was a chance I might direct some more plays back there. It wasn’t real professional work, but it would tide me over. Apart from Brett, all the other operatives were, like me, just putting in a bit of duty a couple of tours.

  Ken had been a journalist on the Scottish Daily Express, which had recently been shut down. It wasn’t bad, was it? Eighty quid a shift was a lot more than he got for writing up court cases in Glasgow Come the summer he was going to be off. He was even hot-bunking with a friend in Bermondsey They shared .a bed-sit. He worked the night shift. His mate worked the day He got into the bed that his mate had just got out of. They were thinking of sharing shoes. That way they could save even more. He already had a few thousand, plus his redundancy money stashed away He was just waiting for the summer and then he was going to go camping in the South of France, and then he was going to find himself a proper job.

  After Christmas, I left. I got another session as a bodyguard in the spring. But I never did handbag checking again.

  But in the early eighties I had gone back to the same hotel for a big television awards ceremony I was wearing a dinner jacket and was in an overexcited state. ‘I used to work here as a security guard,’ I giggled, and the other members- of Not The Nine O’Clock News who were with me laughed in astonishment. ‘Yes, yes, and Douglas too.’ How they roared. We pushed through the revolving doors. The lobby was still bathed in the unearthly glittering white of dozens of pin-sharp spots. There was the jeweller’s shop. The head porter’s eyes flickered over me, but paid me no more attention than he did to the hundreds of other punters that he guessed wouldn’t be worth that much in tips. But I let the others go on ahead a bit. The table was still there. And behind it, so was Ken.

  ‘Hey, Ken.’

  ‘Griff, how you doing?’

  We greeted each other as veterans. I couldn’t help myself.

  I asked, ‘I’m just surprised to find you still here.’

  ‘Oh yes. Yeah, well. Not for much longer,’ Ken said. ‘You know, it’s good bread, and you get used to it after a while.’

  19. Pigs May Act

  It is Sunday, 20 February 2005. The temperature has fallen overnight to zero. My daughter has just celebrated her eighteenth birthday. It’s her last day of half term, so it’s her choice, and she wants to eat sushi for lunch. I have grumbled halfway into Soho and all the way back about the sensation-less gastronomic experience of eating raw fish in a snowstorm.

  Still hankering after nursery food, I take ‘her’ dog to the park for its run (and mine of course). As I pull up, I notice a man in a track suit leaning against the people carrier in front of me. It is John Chapman. As a returning old-boy director he made me wear a gold nappy and a pleated wing cloak as the Governor of Malta in his Marlowe production at the Cambridge Arts Theatre in 1974. Well, well. He is still in a state of resuscitation after his own health experience, and I have to remove my glasses before he is able to recognize who it is gesticulating at him through the windscreen. We pause in the chill Regent’s Park air and talk about his TV work at Granada, our children’s gap years and the perils of running, which we both do now we’re getting old, and would never have done at all when we were young enough to enjoy it.

  Later, half-way around the park, I nearly knock over a woman trying to stop her Labrador puppy eating a discarded sandwich. This is Hero. When I first moved to London, I lived in her house (where I now realize she must still live, since it
is just across the way). We can’t do much more than note that our dogs are related by a mutual interest in my ex-Cambridge girlfriend Charlotte’s dog, Molly, because Jacob, the puppy, won’t leave the picnic alone and because I don’t like to stop for anything once I have got running, I jog on past the zoo, feeling bemused by my village connections in a city of ten million. It seems incredible that I can so casually bump into, greet or knock flying friends I had first made thirty years before. Had I kept on running I could have gone into Primrose Hill. I might have met Nick Hytner. I might pass John Makinson. I would see Jon Canter in a few days when I went to Suffolk. The night before I had talked to Clive Anderson. I still get daily text messages from Rory McGrath. All this jelly was setting in 1975.

  It was a year of behaving badly As I laboured in Park Lane pretending to be a bodyguard, Charlotte got a lowly job at Sotheby’s, clerking in the Islamic Art and Antiquities department, and I busied myself ruining her life.

  Twelve-hour shifts doing nothing at my bomb-checking work left little time to do nothing at home. My surroundings rather discouraged loafing, anyway Hero had inherited a Nash Regency villa in Park Village East. It overlooked a big, sooty wall behind which mainline trains from Euston Station clunked up and down in a massive culvert, but inside Cassandra, Hero, Charlotte, Penelope and me — the grubby and frankly untrained interloper, tolerated and indulged like Jacob the Labrador puppy — padded about, drinking Earl Grey tea, eating wilted greens and listening to hearty soups plopping on the stove. Nick Hytner tells me I visited Cambridge one weekend, threw my hands in the air, and snorted, ‘They spent all last week sewing a chair!’ It was Friends as written by Jane Austen.