by Jon Teckman
Natasha was still chuckling quietly to herself as she turned the pages and studied the remaining photographs. Then she interrupted me again. ‘Hey Joe, look at this.’
‘What?’
‘Look at the picture on page twenty-three – the one of Olivia getting into the back of a limo.’
She passed the magazine back to me and I looked where she was pointing.
‘What about it?’
‘The caption says it was taken after the Nothing Happened premiere in New York. That’s the night you were there, isn’t it? The night she’s supposed to have started her affair with Bennett?’
I grunted in what I hoped was a non-incriminating way, but the panic was rising as I scanned the picture. It showed Olivia sitting in the back of a vaguely familiar car. The back door was open and a man in a dinner suit was clambering in beside her. He was bent over so you could only see his bottom half and a foreshortened version of his upper body. His head, atop his hunched shoulders, was just a dark amorphous, unidentifiable blob.
‘And?’ I said, relieved. I couldn’t be convicted on this evidence.
‘Don’t you notice anything odd about it?’
‘She looks a little worse for wear, I suppose,’ I replied. ‘But it was a pretty late night. I expect she was just tired.’ I passed the magazine back to Natasha with studied nonchalance and turned back to my newspaper.
‘I wasn’t looking at her,’ Natasha persisted, pointing at the picture. ‘Look at the guy with her. Does that look like Bennett to you? It’s an odd angle, but he looks too short and fat to be Bennett. He may have been an arse but, to be fair, he did look after himself.’
The magazine was shoved back in my direction as if we were two diners fighting over the bill. I looked again. He didn’t look fat to me – and five feet eight is hardly short. I had to admit he didn’t look much like Bennett. What concerned me was whether he looked like anyone else. I took a closer look. The head was fine – too well hidden to be identified. The body, too, could have belonged to anyone of average build. It was only when I looked way down low that I spotted the problem. There it was: below the turned-up cuff of the man’s left trouser leg, revealed as he stepped up into the car – in glorious, 4 million-pixel digital Technicolor – was Mr Silly, Mr Sodding Silly on my ‘Have a Sodding Silly Saturday’ sodding sock.
‘Fuck!’ I thought. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘perhaps it’s not Bennett. Maybe they met up later. Or maybe they’ve got the caption wrong and this is a different night.’ I paused, aware I was in danger of protesting too much. I needed to change the tone of the conversation. ‘Or maybe it’s Old Ronnie Hubbard,’ I said, ‘the dirty little devil.’
It doesn’t seem funny now, but it worked then. Natasha laughed, closed the magazine and went off to the kitchen to prepare breakfast. I waited until I was sure she was fully occupied force-feeding Matthew his Weetabix, then took a black felt-tipped pen from Helen’s Angelina Ballerina pencil case and carefully coloured over that stupid, incriminating sock on page twenty-three of her stupid bloody magazine and placed it back where Natasha had left it.
CITY OF LONDON
I didn’t get much work done that day. Everyone in the office was still shocked by Bennett’s death and the story of his funeral dominated the coffee-machine conversations. People I’d never spoken to before bombarded me with questions about the whole curious business. I was glad to have four solid walls to hide behind. I could escape into my new office, lock the door, pull down the blinds and ask Polly to hold all my calls. If anyone asked, she would tell them I was working on a strategic reorganisation of the division.
Late that afternoon, as I skulked in my office, hiding away from what passed for reality in the outside world, I was wrestled from my torpor by the insistent ringing of my phone.
‘Polly,’ I said, failing to hide my irritation, ‘I thought I said no calls. What is it?’
‘Sorry to disturb you, Joe, but I think you’ll want to take this one,’ she said. ‘I’ve got Buddy Guttenberg’s office for you. They say he needs to speak to you urgently.’
‘They always think everything’s urgent,’ I replied like a sulking child, but took the call. Ten minutes later I replaced the phone in its cradle. ‘Bloody Hell!’ I said.
MILL HILL, NORTH LONDON
I left work early that evening, keen to get home and tell Natasha about the call. ‘Hi, love,’ I said, kissing her lightly on the lips as I entered the living room. ‘I’ve got some really exciting news for you. You’ll never guess what.’
‘What? No, don’t tell me,’ Natasha said, taking my coat from me and hanging it in the cloakroom. ‘Bennett has risen from the dead and taken over as head of the firm?’
‘No,’ I replied, ‘even more amazing than that.’
‘Go on then,’ said Natasha, gently brushing Matthew away as he tried to fly one of his planes between our legs, ‘amaze me!’
‘Buddy’s offered me a job,’ I said, watching my wife’s face closely to gauge her reaction, ‘in LA. Executive Vice-President of Production Finance. Half a million dollars a year, plus bonus, healthcare, car. The whole nine yards, as we’d say if we were living out there. It could be a new start for us, a whole new way of life.’
Natasha’s expression had remained pretty rigid as I’d been saying all this but now it reconfigured itself into a quizzical grimace. ‘Why do we need a new start or a new life? What’s wrong with what we’ve got here?’
‘Nothing,’ I replied, ‘but wouldn’t it be a fantastic opportunity. Think of all that sunshine, cruising along Sunset Strip in a top-of-the-range convertible, the kids going to a school like in Beverly Hills 90210. More money than we’d know how to spend in the shops on Rodeo Drive …’
‘Drugs, knife crime, gangs, guns …’
‘Not where we’d be living, love. We’d be in some fantastic villa high up in the Hollywood Hills, looking down on all that from our hot tub on the terrace. How would you like that, guys?’ I said directly to the children. ‘Living in America for a while? Swimming in our own pool every day after school?’
‘Yay!’ yelled Helen and Matthew simultaneously, already starting to sound like American kids.
‘Don’t bring them into it,’ said Natasha, ‘not yet. Not until we’ve had a proper chat about it. I’m sure I could be persuaded, but it’s a hell of a move to think about. What about all our friends over here, and my mother?’
‘We’d make new friends out there. And we could hire you a new mother. We could pay Meryl Streep to pop round once a fortnight and kvetch at us for a couple of hours. You wouldn’t notice the difference after a while. And Buddy promised me he would personally spray us with cold water every day so we wouldn’t miss the London weather.’
Natasha smiled and I sensed she might be starting to warm to the idea. ‘I know,’ I said, ‘why don’t I pop out and buy us a huge Chinese meal to celebrate. Even if we decide not to go, it’s nice to be asked, isn’t it?’
‘OK, love,’ said my wife, ‘you do that. I’ll tidy up in here. Are you OK if I chuck all these papers into the recycling?’
‘Of course I am. And make the most of it – a couple of months from now, we’ll have a maid to do all that for us!’
I left Natasha sorting through a pile of papers and magazines, deciding which ones were ready for pulping and which could decorate our living room for another couple of weeks. I drove the short distance to the Chinese takeaway and spent a small fortune ordering all of our favourites: half an aromatic crispy duck, sesame prawn toast, pancake rolls, prawn crackers and spare ribs for starters, followed by far too many main courses for the four of us to get through. As I waited for my order to be delivered, I imagined what I would say to Bill Davis when I handed in my notice. To lose one Head of Entertainment and Media might be unfortunate; losing two in a matter of months would definitely be considered careless. That would give him and that blood-sucking Welsh ghoul Dai Wainwright something to think about!
I collected my order and walked back to t
he car, whistling ‘I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy’. If I hadn’t been carrying two overloaded plastic bagsful of monosodium glutamate, I would have attempted one of those hitch kicks that Jimmy Cagney used to do, clicking my heels together in mid-air to demonstrate my new-found happiness to the watching world. All the anxiety of the past few months had been lifted, leaving me feeling more content and at ease than I could remember.
Of course, moving to LA and working for Buddy carried with it the risk that I might bump into Olivia – and even that, at some point, the whole sorry story might come out – but, having survived this long, that didn’t seem too likely. Buddy had told me that, thanks to a potent combination of therapy and cod-religion, Olivia was recovering well from her traumatic experience at the funeral. He was pretty confident that she would soon be able to start working on the sequel to Nothing Happened. She never mentioned Joseph Bennett and considered that chapter of her life closed. LA was a big place and it wouldn’t be too difficult to ensure that our paths never crossed. After all, she was talent and I was just a money-man. A backroom boy. An ordinary joe.
As I drove slowly home through the busy early-evening streets, I made myself a solemn vow: never again would I look at another woman – not even on the cinema screen. From that day forward, I pledged, my dreams and fantasies would feature only my wife: Natasha with her skirt blowing up around her waist as she stood on a subway ventilation grate; Natasha emerging from the surf in a skimpy leather bikini; Natasha floating out of control in her spacecraft as her clothes fell away from her.
To my amazement – it really was my lucky day – I found a parking space right in front of our house, carefully balanced the bags of food on my thigh as I pressed a button on the key fob to lock the car and walked down my front path, bursting with a renewed exuberance and joy. I still felt guilty about what had happened to Bennett – and to Olivia, too – but my priority now was to make sure that nobody else suffered because of my stupid, selfish actions. I had done something unforgivable and wrong and had had to dodge a fusillade of bullets, but now it felt like everything would work out for the best. Tomorrow would be another day. Life could still be wonderful. As wonderful as in the movies.
I rang the doorbell with my shoulder and waited for the door to open. I would let the comforting warmth of our meal thaw Natasha a little more before I returned to my campaign of persuasion, I decided. LA was famous for its Chinese food – just imagine the banquets we would enjoy over there!
The door opened and I looked into the eyes of my wife standing at the entrance to our home. Not the smiling, welcoming eyes I had been expecting, but red-rimmed, crying eyes – eyes filled with accusation, enmity and fear. I heard the snuffling of a distraught child and looked down to see Helen hugging one of her mother’s legs while Matthew gripped the other, his hands wearing what looked at first glance like glove puppets but on closer inspection I realised were a pair of black socks. Black socks with a picture of Mr Silly and the motto ‘Have a Silly Saturday’ embroidered in red cotton upon them. Slowly, I looked back up, forcing myself to take Natasha’s stare.
‘You bastard,’ said my wife, holding up a finger stained black with ink, ‘you lousy, cheating bastard.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
… to everyone who has helped Ordinary Joe on the long journey from inside my head to into your hands – and that begins with you, Dear Reader, for doing me the honour of choosing to read my story when there are so many others you could have chosen. You would not be reading these words now but for the help and support, inspiration and perspiration of many, many people.
In the beginning were my parents, my brothers and sisters who put up with me when at times it must have been tempting to have me put down instead. So this is for you Sidney, Stephanie, Julie, Mike, Pete and Kate (and all my assorted nephews, nieces and in-laws). There is no greater fortune in life than to be born a Teckman.
This is also for my wonderful wife Anne who took on the mantle of principal carer in my adult years and kept me going when all I really wanted to do was stop, and still found time to raise our two amazing boys, Joseph and Matthew. Without the three of you, this really wouldn’t have been worth doing.
This novel first began to see the light of day at an Arvon Foundation course way back in 2007. Some of my earliest critiques and encouragement came from that group of Amazing Writers. My thanks to Anne, Kathy, Chris, Joel, Claire, Jan, Lisa and Charlene.
My first big breakthrough came when I was selected to attend the inaugural Curtis Brown Creative six-month novel-writing course. Many thanks to Anna Davis, Christopher Wakling, Rufus Purdy and all the CBC team for choosing me and for all your constructive, instructive advice. Thanks also for introducing me to the most extraordinary group of fellow writers, all of whom gave me invaluable feedback on the developing manuscript. I won’t be truly fulfilled until I am reading the acknowledgements pages in your novels: Chris, Dan, Eleanor, Fran, Jacquie, Jayne, Karen, Lauren, Mariko, Olivia, Sally, Sam, Sara and Tim.
It is no small challenge to fight your way through an improperly formed, unedited, as yet unpublishable manuscript but many people did just that for me with earlier drafts of this work. Some of you even made it right through to the end! Your comments and enthusiasm gave me great confidence to carry on. I’m sorry that I don’t have the space to mention you all individually but you know who you are and I really cannot thank you enough.
Many thanks also to David Parfitt and Ivan Mactaggart at Trademark Films who know a good story when they see one and saw one in Ordinary Joe. And to my great friend Steve Abbott who acted in loco agencis for me, offering much needed and always sage advice whenever it all became too complicated for me.
And finally, and in many ways foremostly, you would not be reading these words if it hadn’t been for Katie Espiner and her fantastic team at Borough Press who took the courageous decision to pluck me from mid-life crisis obscurity and make my dream come true.
Thank you.
Jon Teckman
July, 2015
About the Author
Jon Teckman was born in Northampton in 1963. He served as an advisor on film policy to both Conservative and Labour governments before becoming Chief Executive of the British Film Institute in 1999. He now lives in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire with his wife Anne and sons Joseph and Matthew. Ordinary Joe is his first novel.
About the Publisher
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