The Book of the Film of the Story of My Life

by William Brandt

  I sit at the bar, beside Melissa, who’s in a kind of Diana the Huntress outfit. Suits her too. Charles is serving the drinks. “Whiskey, thanks.”

  Melissa looks up. “Where have you been? You missed the screening.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “So how did it go? Mission accomplished?”

  “Not exactly.” Charles slides the drink across to me. “Happy birthday, Charles.”

  “Cheers, mate.”

  “Charles?”

  “Mate?”

  “Can I ask your advice?”

  “Sure, mate.”

  “I mean, seriously.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I’ve been told that you have this whole other side to you. That you can turn things around for people. Entire lives. Is that in fact the case?”

  “I’m famous for it, mate.” He leads me down the beach. We sit on a couple of abandoned beach chairs. The clouds are gathering, sweeping across the sky like a curtain and the sunset is going to start any minute now and it’s going to be insane. It’s going to be a riot. Sheer madness and it happens every day. “What’s it all about then, mate?”

  “It’s like this. I came to this island hoping to win Sophie back. Melissa is not my girlfriend. She’s a prostitute. I hired her to seduce Matt to get him away from Sophie. But I’ve just learnt that Sophie has in fact been cheating on me for the last three years. She’s pregnant to another man, she’s not entirely sure who. The only thing she’s absolutely sure of is that it isn’t me.”

  Charles rubs his jaw.

  I hold up my hand. “That’s just by way of background. Now. I’m forty-two. I have no job, no sense of direction in my life, no particular skills apart from the ability to spend money—money which I still depend entirely on my parents for. I have no looks, no children, no one to love and no prospect of improvement in any of these spheres. I’m dysfunctional to the point of complete inability to express or experience physical affection or emotional intimacy. I hate living in London but I’m too ashamed to go home. I’m suffering from hypertension. And my teeth are driving me nuts. Do you have any advice or any suggestions?”

  Charles thinks, long and hard. He rubs his jaw. He puts a hand on my shoulder. “Sensodyne.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Sensodyne. Fix those teeth in no time, mate.”

  “Okay. Thanks, Charles, that’s good.” I wait.

  Charles claps me on the shoulder. “No worries, mate. Any time. Any time at all.” He heads back to the bar. Rebecca walks past, disguised as the Queen of Hearts.

  “Rebecca. Can I ask you something?”

  She stops and stands with a hand on her hip.

  “Did you know all along about all the other men and women that Sophie was sleeping with? For all those years?”

  She raises an eyebrow. “So she finally told you about it?”

  “She told me.”

  “Yeah, I knew. Sure. She confided in me regularly.” I guess that explains it about Rebecca. At least she looks apologetic. “But I mean, there was nothing I could do, was there?”

  “Do you have any advice to offer me?”

  “Advice?” She sucks her lower lip. “Well, my advice would be to pull yourself together.”

  “What does that mean?”

  She shrugs.

  I return to the bar. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.” It’s Russell. He eyes my whiskey. “And you’re drinking. What’s wrong?”

  “Tell me, Russell, would it surprise you to learn that Sophie had in fact been systematically betraying me for the last three years?”

  Russell stares at me. His eyes get bigger and bigger. His lower lip begins to tremble.

  “Forget it, I was just kidding. Bad joke, bad joke, it’s okay.” I put a hand on his arm. “Come on, pull yourself together.”

  “That’s not funny, Frederick.”

  “No, you’re quite right. It’s not funny.”

  “You shouldn’t kid around with other people’s feelings like that.”

  “I apologize. I sincerely apologize.”

  That’s when I feel it. There’s something tickling my heel. I shift my foot, and there’s a sudden, sharp, stabbing pain. Looking down, I catch sight of a black and yellow striped tail flickering away into the shadows. I reach down and feel my bare heel. My hand comes up spotted with a tiny drop of blood. I stare, stupidly. “Hey, Russell.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You know those snakes.”

  “What snakes?”

  “The ones that never bite.”

  “Oh. The sea snakes. Yeah?”

  “One just bit me.”

  Instantaneously I realize that I’m spaced. There’s no particular sensation to it, I’m just spaced. I look at the drink. Stupidly. It’s getting farther away.

  The table is getting farther away.

  Russell is getting farther away.

  I don’t feel right. I decide to stand, only I can’t. I haven’t the strength.

  “Are you okay?” It’s Russell, he’s looking at me strangely. Melissa too.

  “I’m not well,” I say, from a thousand miles away. I seem to have cotton wool in my ears. I can’t hold my head up. “I’m seriously ill.”

  I can’t stay upright on the chair. I sink, slowly, toward the sand. My strength is ebbing.

  I want a doctor. I want one, I realize, urgently.

  Russell is standing, watching me. I’m now on my hands and knees. This could be serious. The process of enfeeblement is continuing and I’ve started to moo. I’m on hands and knees, still sinking, slowly, listing to starboard, my head arcing toward the sand. Gravity is winning and I’m mooing for a doctor. “A doctor. I need urgent medical attention.” I speak slowly, fighting to enunciate, using strangely elaborate phrasing. “I am in urgent need of medical attention,” I repeat. My head slowly hits the sand, chin first, then cheek, then temple. I’m lying on the sand, which feels cool and supportive. The rest of my body settles behind my head like a dying cow falling in slow motion to the ground. I moo again. “Moo. Help me. Help me.”

  All I can think about is medically qualified personnel. I’m so far from the nearest hospital. A helicopter. I need a helicopter. I need to be urgently evacuated to the nearest fully-equipped western hospital. I want medical staff in crisp white uniforms with stretchers and oxygen and syringes and machines that go beep. Technology. I want technology and lots of it. I want the works. Pull out the stops. Spare no expense. But it’s too late. How long would it take a helicopter, even a fast one? Too long. I’m shutting down. I’m almost gone.

  It’s over. Forget the helicopter. Face it. It’s too late. It’s all over.

  I’m dying.

  I think of my mother. She’ll never see her boy again. I think of my father. Ditto. I think of Sophie. There will never be any sort of reconciliation. Will she be sorry that I’m gone? Of course she will. My vision is contracting. That’s all, folks. Show’s almost over. I can see it getting smaller and smaller. When it’s all gone, I’ll be dead. It’s happening now. I figure I have time now for one last thought maybe. I realize that I’m not afraid. I’m too busy dying to be afraid. I suppose that’ll have to do for a last thought. It’s almost a relief, yes, it almost is. I relax utterly and cast myself into oblivion. It’s almost, but not quite, interesting, lying there, letting everything fade.

  There’s something on my shoulder. A hand. “What’s his name?” There’s a voice somewhere above my left ear. “Frederick. Can you hear me?”

  To my surprise, I realize I can.

  I’m not dead. I’m surrounded by a crowd of strangely garbed onlookers, peering down at me in the torchlight. There’s Russell, and Ella and Brian too. Melissa is kneeling over me, preparing to give me mouth to mouth. Up the back, I think, I see Sophie but I’m not sure.

  “Frederick, I’m a doctor.” Oh, God, yes, a doctor. I have a doctor. I have hope.

  “Hello. I’ve been bitten by a snake.”

  A light
shines in my eye. Something cool is pressed against my back. A firm but gentle hand grasps my wrist. “Can you move your hand?”

  My hand, as it turns out, is lying about seven inches from my nose. I can see it curled up loosely on the sand. “Yes. Yes, I can move my hand. I’m moving it now.”

  “Frederick, I think you’re all right. I think you’ve had a bad shock but you’re quite all right. We don’t think you can have been bitten by a snake. They never bite.”

  “This one did. It bit my heel.”

  “We’ve had a look at your heel. I don’t think you’ve been bitten. I think you’ve had a panic reaction. Possibly low blood sugar. Have you eaten much today?”

  “But I felt it, on my heel. Does anyone have a red-hot poker?”

  “All right, now just relax. We’re going to get you somewhere more comfortable, give you a cup of tea with lots of sugar and we’re going to see how you are in half an hour. We’ll monitor the situation, don’t worry. We don’t think it can have been a snake.”

  “I tell you, it was a snake.”

  “If it was a snake I doubt that you’d be arguing the point.”

  “Could this be it?” Melissa is holding up a broken glass. “It was under his chair.”

  Oh, the humiliation. Hands are under my armpits, my knees, my back. I’m lifted up. I’m carried away by torchlight and laid in the tent. I’m visited by a succession of well-wishers. Melissa. Charles. Tamintha. Ella and Russell. Ella doesn’t say much. She just holds my hand. Russell holds the other. Brian holds my nose.

  Chapter 19

  “OH CHRIST, WE’RE GOING TO BE LATE.”

  “Relax.”

  We’re sitting in traffic on the harbor bridge. We’ve been here for thirty minutes. Melissa is driving. Yes, Auckland has grown and it’s big enough now to have all the features of a major city—traffic jams, crime, pollution, everything. You can get a snarl-up on the Takapuna off-ramp to rival any of the great congestion capitals of the world.

  For the first fortnight I hid. Melissa got me on a plane, suitably tranquilized, and I came off the plane in dark glasses. They were all there to meet us. We got straight in the car and I drove straight home and that’s where I stayed. Shut the door and didn’t go outside at all. I sat in my room and stared at the sea and Rangitoto. They love Melissa, by the way. Absolutely love her. Can’t get enough of her. She loves them too. She was up on the roof last weekend clearing the guttering.

  After the first fortnight, I poked my nose out the door. I knew what was going to happen. What was going to happen was I would walk ten yards down the street and I would immediately bump into one of those people you don’t really know but have always pretended to know because you always bump into them in shopping centers in Brown’s Bay or Newmarket and they always look so incredibly thrilled and pleased to see you that you wonder how they’ve managed the two years since the last time. These people, you swear, must live on the streets of Newmarket and Mount Eden village. These people never do anything, except change their hairstyle. In other words, people like me.

  In the end, though, I decided to face it. I went outside, because, eventually, you have to. I tried a few little local walks, and then a couple of outings—and nothing happened. I didn’t bump into anyone. So I went a little farther, and I did a few malls and I went to the movies and I realized that they’ve gone. Everywhere I looked were unfamiliar faces. It’s official. The coast is clear. Auckland is the one place on the surface of the globe where you can walk down the street and hold your head up high and know that there will be no New Zealanders. They’re all in London, Paris, Munich, Moscow. I can go anywhere, I can do anything, in complete security. I am an anonymous traveler and Auckland is a mysterious new land, a land of good coffee and more Chinese restaurants than bus stops and Turkish food and Thai and Indonesian and Greek and Japanese and cheap electronic goods and incredible service everywhere. The sales assistants in this country have to be experienced to be believed. Friendly, with a no-nonsense, can-do, number-eight-wire sort of attitude, yet at the same time not remotely servile or weaselly or anything else you don’t want to know about. It’s a bit like California, only sincere.

  I’ve got so bold I even looked up a few old friends the other day. They’ve all got kids. They’ve all got mortgages. They’ve all got jobs, wrinkles, hair loss, knee trouble, plans, problems, hopes, grounds for optimism. They all seemed pleased to see me. No one seemed to mind about anything. In fact they hardly seemed to notice. It’s such a wonderful relief to realize that no one really cares—well, not that much.

  Yes, Auckland has grown, and Auckland has changed. But really, Auckland hasn’t changed. Say, for example, you go down the road in search of a loaf of bread and you park the car on a semi-familiar corner with a Dick Smith electronics store where the dairy used to be and while you’re standing on the footpath scratching your head and looking around and wondering if you should just forget the Vogel’s and go for a cappuccino and a croissant instead, you feel a sort of a tingling in the air and you breathe in.

  And that’s it.

  Because all of a sudden, wham! there it is, your childhood, coming at you, and nothing has changed and you’re ten years old again because Auckland still smells the same and nothing has changed that and I don’t believe anything ever will and suddenly you’re feeling feelings you forgot you’d ever felt, feelings you’d forgotten you even could feel, because they’re feelings without names or faces, feelings you felt in the days before you had words to describe them, feelings so familiar and so strange and at the same time so much a part of you that you don’t understand how you could ever have forgotten a feeling like that and still have been you, all that time, all those years. And for all that time, that smell and that feeling has been here on this street corner just waiting for you to happen by again. You breathe it in and there it is and best of all it doesn’t mean a damn thing, it’s just beautiful.

  Takapuna has changed. The houses along the beach are all huge concrete nightmares now, every one architect-designed yet sort of the same, each with its electronic security system and halogen searchlights and eight-foot wall and central heating and plateglass windows and built-in wall-to-wall millionaire. Truly, Auckland has made vast strides in social inequality over the last few years. It’s a very impressive achievement. Why, if you look back even twenty years we hardly even had social inequality. It was just some newfangled idea from overseas.

  But really Takapuna hasn’t changed. If you stand on the beach now and you look out to sea, if you look out to Rangitoto, past the upwardly-mobile people with dogs and pushchairs briskly enjoying their morning constitutionals, past the Jet Skis and the Windsurfers—if you look out to sea and breathe in—no, Takapuna hasn’t changed.

  My folks have changed. My dad has changed. He’s always been a worrier, but now he worries about different things. He used to worry about the exchange rate, export incentives, stock market fluctuations and the quality of locally-sourced aluminum. Now my dad worries about falling over. About his afternoon nap. My mum has changed too. Instead of worrying about the consistency of her cheese omelettes she worries about the consistency of my dad. So, no, I guess maybe they haven’t really changed either.

  I stand on the beach and turn and there’s an old guy on the grass. I want to stop and stare and stare and I have to pinch myself and say this is my dad. This is my dad. I had a good long talk with my dad. We sat on the front lawn of his multimillion-dollar beachfront property on a pair of semi-rotten striped canvas deck chairs that I actually remember him buying at The Warehouse in 1992 or thereabouts for about five dollars each. We sat and we looked out across the sea to Rangitoto. We talked about a lot of things. Then we fell silent and my dad cleared his throat, which took him a little while. Then he spoke again.

  “You know,” said my dad, in a perfectly conversational sort of voice, “I’m going to be kicking the bucket. Sooner rather than later.”

  Now, as we all know this is not the sort of talk you encourage in you
r parents. It’s just not acceptable to talk like that. So I opened my mouth to say “rubbish” or “don’t talk like that” or “nonsense, you’ve got another ten years at least—you’ve got the constitution of an ox.” Only I didn’t say any of those things because at that moment I looked across at my dad and I saw him sitting there and he didn’t have the constitution of an ox. He used to be able to bench-press two hundred pounds. But no more. He was just stating the truth, plain and simple. A dirty trick to be sure, but that’s parents for you. So I shut my mouth. My dad looked across at me.

  We both sat there and we looked out at Rangitoto. I wasn’t sure who I was supposed to be feeling sorry for, him or me. I breathed. I took a deep breath and breathed in every moment I’d ever had in that house and on that beach and with that dad in that front garden. I took it all in, in one big breath, and I held it. I held it in there.

  My dad re-cleared his throat. “I’ve been wanting to have a talk to you about money.”

  So we talked about money. My dad explained the situation. He even took me inside and we had a look at the accounts. I have to admit I was shocked. The situation was rather more serious than I’d imagined. I had no idea it was that much. My dad said he was sorry to have to ask but he said really he’d be very grateful if I’d be willing to accept more money, preferably large sums on a regular basis. He said he didn’t know what else to do with it and it was frankly getting embarrassing, plus the family trust was facing a serious tax situation. The others were all taking their fair share. If I didn’t want to take cash, would I at least consider shares or property?

  Well, I didn’t like it, but I had to accept it. The hard cold truth—and I’m just going to have to learn to live with this—is that money is never going to be a problem in my lifetime. Some people have money problems, I don’t, and no amount of wishful thinking is going to change that. The only way I could possibly end up bankrupt and penniless would be to remain in the film business. And I’m not doing that. Not for any money.