by Nev Fountain
The first night he’d spent in his room, he’d fallen asleep at two o’clock after watching three episodes back to back, his last memories of Channel Five bleeding into his dream. There were two cops with purple faces and green hair, investigating the murder of a woman who’d been killed by atmospheric interference. She’d been scrambled all over the pavement and forced to eat squiggly black lines until she choked. Then he woke up, and he was sleeping with the head of the badger. He’d screamed. The badger had squiggly black lines down its face—it looked like it too was being interfered with by patchy reception. Still barely awake, he braced himself for it to turn greeny-purple and hiss at him.
Mervyn wondered how many guests it had landed on over the years. Had any victim ever mentioned the kamikaze badger to the staff? He guessed not. It had probably been descending on guests for centuries. Perhaps it needed a blue plaque under it: ‘This badger fell on Kenneth Grahame in 1898 and knocked The Wind in The Willows into his head.’
Mervyn measured his life in degrees of wrongitude and crapitude. The worse the location and situation, the higher the degrees of wrongness and crapness. He didn’t want to prejudge his stay after only a few days, but at least as far as his room was concerned…
‘360 degrees wrong, 360 degrees crap.’
He hung the badger up again and got dressed quickly. It was cold.
CHAPTER THREE
He was staying in a pub called the Black Prince Tavern. It was a product of 21st century rural life, where out-of-town shopping centres had scorched the Earth bare, and the remaining embers of village commerce had to become multi-skilled to survive. The pub was also a bed and breakfast, a post office, an antiques shop, a bookmakers and, Mervyn suspected from the whispered conversations at the bar, a venue for dog-fighting.
Every morning, residents came down to eat breakfast in the lounge area, passing self-consciously through the bar where they were eyed suspiciously by the pub’s regular alcoholic, sipping his fermented breakfast and muttering sweet nothings to his dog. Mervyn came down at 9.30, nodded to the drunk, patted the dog, entered the lounge, sat at a table and opened up his newspaper. The headlines about the prime minister, Simon Cowell and Russell Brand reassured him; it was just like buying an English paper when he was abroad. He felt he was on his home planet again.
But Christ it was cold. All the guests were in jumpers and coats. Steam from the teapots on the tables mingled with steam from the breath of the residents. A girl rushed by with a bouquet of cutlery. He managed to catch her eye and gave a helpless smile.
‘Good morning,’ he said.
‘Good morning. Tea or coffee?’
‘Coffee please.’
‘Continental or full English breakfast?’
‘What’s your continental breakfast?’
‘Continental is over there.’ She pointed to a table. A collection of freshly microwaved croissants were sitting in a basket.
‘Full English please. And could I have brown toast with that?’
‘Toast is over there. Next to the continental breakfast.’
There was a toaster and two opened packets of bread next to the croissants.
‘Umm. Isn’t it a bit chilly in here?’
‘Oh. No one else has said anything,’ she said in a well-rehearsed way, which suggested that plenty of people had said something in the past, but none had the courage to say anything this precise morning. ‘The heating’s on the summer timer. It’ll come on when we get to October.’
Mervyn looked at the paper. It was the 29th of September. ‘Well, I know it’s not winter just yet, but it’s quite cold now.’
‘Yes, but it’s on a summer timer.’ She looked at her watch, noting that breakfast was nearly over. ‘I’ll mention it to the manageress.’ And with that she rushed off back into the kitchen to keep warm.
*
Mervyn was severely tempted to forgo his breakfast and go back to the relative warmth of his room, but he was waiting for someone: someone who for the last two days had come down at 9.35 precisely.
Here she was. Right on time.
He’d noticed her when she came down to breakfast that first morning. He thought she looked slightly familiar, but perhaps she just had one of those faces; friendly, engaging, attractive but not overpoweringly so; normal enough to work in a bank, but pretty enough to be plucked from her local branch to become the face of some national ad campaign flogging ISAs. She had a lovely round nose and a generous smile; her hair was an explosion of brown ringlets that danced on her forehead, forcing her to twitch her head in an adorable fashion as she flicked them out of her eyes.
She sat down at the table next to him. This morning, she was wearing a plain tweed jacket over a silk chemise, which gaped enticingly when she bent down to pick up her bag. He glimpsed red lace. She put her bag on her knee, a large refrigerated holdall. She pulled out a tub of probiotic yoghurt, a packet of organic muesli and a loaf of soda bread and put them on the table in front of her, just like she’d done for the previous two days.
She realised he was staring at him, and grinned, embarrassed. ‘Please don’t think I’m some kind of big city snob or anything, but I didn’t think they’d have this stuff down here.’
Mervyn grinned. He’d had the same thoughts himself. ‘Disgraceful. They make documentaries about people like you.’
She grinned back, relieved she’d found a confidante. ‘Anyway, it turns out I was dead right. They don’t sell it in the local shop.’
Mervyn picked up the muesli box and read it. He was being incredibly forward, but what the hell, he was on holiday—sort of.
‘“Genuine West Country organic muesli”,’ he read. ‘This is where it comes from… Listen. Wheat pulverised by the calloused feet of Gweek peasant ladies. Dates dried out with the hot breath of children from St Ives and Penzance.’
‘It doesn’t say that.’
‘Really?’
Maggie smiled. ‘Yes, I know they make it down here. But once they do they ship it out as quickly as they bloody well can, like it’s radioactive. They all eat Frosties down here, while this ends up in fancy little shops for the consumption of big city snobs like me.’
‘Would you and your big city breakfast like to join me?’ asked Mervyn, gesturing at the empty seat opposite him.
She looked surprised, and her head rocked back on her neck like she’d been slapped. For a moment Mervyn thought he’d made a terrible mistake (Oh well, he thought, if she does scream, at least there are plenty of tables to crawl under) but she gave a delighted grin, and Mervyn realised she was very flattered (and slightly stunned) to be asked. She’d obviously not been approached by strange men in hotels very often. ‘Why thank you, kind sir,’ she said.
Her name was Maggie Rollins. Maggie had travelled from London to be with her ailing mother, who was reaching the end of her life after a long illness.
‘She’s in a nursing home,’ Maggie explained. ‘Millpond Retirement Cottages. They have such mealy-mouthed names for these places, don’t they? So I’ve had no choice but to set up camp here, stay nearby, and wait ‘til the bitter end.’
Like an angel of death. The image popped into Mervyn’s head the moment he heard her story. He didn’t say so, he wasn’t a complete idiot. His quick writerly brain thought up something else.
‘How sad,’ he said, trying to sound sympathetic. ‘It’s like you’re a plane coming into land, but your life is on a holding pattern, waiting for the all-clear to touch down.’
‘Oh really?’ Maggie said with a cheery grin. ‘I see myself as an angel of death, brandishing my scythe, waiting to swoop down and carry her off.’
Mervyn mumbled, caught off-guard. ‘Well, I wasn’t going to say it, but…’
She laughed at him, and in that funny English way, they subtly rewrote the DNA of their relationship on the spot. Their body language changed; they stopped being awkward acquaintances and became friends.
‘So that’s me.’ She sighed. ‘I’m stuck in the middle of nowhere wa
iting for an ailing loved one to give up the ghost and die peacefully. How about you?’
Mervyn smiled. ‘The same, really.’
CHAPTER FOUR
Mervyn explained why he was there. He explained about Vixens from the Void. He explained how he co-created and script-edited the original series, writing most of the episodes in the process. He explained that Vixens was on its way back to prime-time TV; that after almost 20 years languishing in the ‘What Was That All About?’ and ‘What Were They Thinking?’ sections of Channel 4’s Clips and C**ts shows, Vixens was to be a cornerstone of the schedules once more. Mervyn didn’t explain to her why they were making it in Cornwall. He thought it would be more fun if Maggie tried to guess.
‘Go on. Why do you think we’re down here?’
‘Okay. Let me think… I bet… Cornwall’s good for filming space stuff?’
‘Not really.’
‘But the wild scenery? The Eden Project? That must be good for space landscapes.’
‘No. There’s nothing here you couldn’t replicate in any part of the world with computers. In fact, it’s more difficult to make it down here than probably anywhere else.’
‘Ah… I’ve got it! You originally made your show here in Cornwall?’
‘Good guess.’
‘I knew it!’
‘We did make one episode here…’
‘Ah-a!’
‘But it was an utter disaster. At the time I pledged never to make any more television down here as long as I lived.’
Maggie frowned, and became slightly cuter in the process.
‘Right. Oh. Yes. That’s it. This TV company that’s making it…’
‘Product Lazarus Media. Yes?’
‘They’re based in Cornwall. I bet they are.’
‘No. They’re based in Los Angeles.’
‘Not in the UK at all?’
‘They have got a UK division.’
‘Yes! In Cornwall!’
‘No, in London.’
‘But they do a lot of filming in Cornwall.’
‘No. They haven’t done anything here before. They’re having to rent special offices and they’re bussing all the equipment from Bristol.’
‘All right. I give up. Why Cornwall?’
‘Because this company wants to resurrect a long dead British science-fiction show—like Doctor Who—and they think that doing it in the middle of rural Britishness is the way to do it. And Cornwall looks enough like Wales for any American. ‘
‘Okay, but why are you here?’ she said.
Mervyn shivered. ‘Let’s go to the toaster. We might be able to keep warm if we stand round it.’
They went up to the self-service buffet, where there were tiny little pots of jam and tiny little squares of butter and tiny little boxes of cereal. British hotels specialised in breakfasts for midgets. Mervyn picked up a thick slice of bread and popped it in a toaster, and Maggie reached across him to pluck an apple from a bowl; she was so close her left nipple was practically brushing one of the knuckles of his right hand. Mervyn was momentarily caught between two delicious smells; warm bread and women’s fancy soap. He felt quite intoxicated.
Mervyn tried to explain again.
‘Okay, look at this toaster.’
‘Right. I’m looking at the toaster.’
‘This toaster is a television.’
‘It’s a television?’
‘Yes.’
‘What kind of television?’
‘Um… It’s your basic toaster-stroke-television. With two settings. Dark brown Terry Wogan or light brown Terry Wogan.’
‘Oo, I like him dark brown. Okay, the toaster is a television. Now what?’
‘Okay. Television commissioning is like a monkey with a toaster.’
‘Okay.’
He pointed at the bread inside, which was nearly done.
‘The lever on the toaster is the mechanics of commissioning a television show. This lever currently represents a big-budget revival of an old, fondly-remembered science fiction show, farmed out to regional programming and overseen by a famous award-winning script writer.’
‘Okay. With you so far…’
‘But it’s the bread that’s the key. The bread inside is the magic ingredient. That bread is the passion, the talent, the will and enthusiasm to do it right, the indefinable “X”…’
The toast popped up. He held it up in front of her like a referee showing a yellow card. ‘This lovely, freshly-browned toast is your programme. This is the new series of Doctor Who.’ He pressed the lever down on the toaster again.
‘You haven’t put any more bread in.’
‘This is my point.’
‘But you could set fire to yourself.’
‘Well then, perhaps they’ll take the hint and put the heating on.’
She laughed, a hearty man-sized laugh, and Mervyn slightly fell in love with her there and then.
‘So the monkey, our commissioner, presses the lever down. The bread becomes toast. The monkey gets lovely, freshly brown toast. Yum yum. The monkey presses the lever again, because he thinks he’s going to get more toast. But he hasn’t put any more bread in. No “X”. The monkey gets burnt crumbs. The monkey presses the lever again. He wants toast. He gets more burnt crumbs. The monkey presses the lever again…’ The toaster popped up, showering the plastic tablecloth with burnt crumbs. ‘Those burnt crumbs are Vixens from the Void.’
‘Oh.’
‘So imagine something becomes a huge hit. Ratings, reviews, all fantastic. Everyone’s happy, and naturally they’d love to fill the schedules with more lovely brown toast, but they don’t know how. They don’t know why it’s a success. That’s the thing about my industry, they always say in television that no one knows anything—so managers, as the heads of television, have to be world leaders in knowing more nothing about anything than anyone else. The best they can do is replicate what they see on paper and hope it’s going to happen again.’
‘And they get burnt crumbs.’
‘Exactly. There’s no point to it. You can’t recreate the past perfectly. If you try, you’ll fail.’
Mervyn went back to the table, closely followed by Maggie. He picked up a tiny jar of jam, disembowelled it with his knife and spread it on his toast.
‘So here I am, attached to a revamp of an old sci-fi show, and filming it in somewhere rural chiefly known for male-voice choirs and dairy-based puddings. Sort of Doctor Who, but not quite.’ He shook his head disbelievingly. ‘It’s like I’m inside a crappy parody, like those little books you see at the tills in Waterstones, the ones called Snored of the Rings or The Da Vinci Cold. But that’s what most television is; it’s a crappy parody of itself.’
Maggie nodded sagely. She was on firmer ground here. ‘Oh, I know. I remember when ITV brought out that talent show for groups, Star-Spangled Ballads. I remember thinking it was such a rip-off of X Factor. Which was a rip-off of American Idol anyway.’
‘Pop Idol, I think it was.’
‘Oh yes. Not that I didn’t watch Star-Spangled Ballads, I was glued to it every Saturday. Watched the final—and I voted! Couldn’t stand the two boys that won it, in their chunky jumpers. The Stepford Wagz—they were much better. Spunky. I liked them from the start. Glad they did well, and had all those hits, but I was annoyed all at the same time, you know? You like them when they’re not popular, but when they become really successful you feel that something is taken away from you. You know what I mean?’
Mervyn knew exactly what she meant. He had already attended science-fiction conventions in the past few years where Doctor Who fans grumbled to him about how it ‘wasn’t the same any more’, about how ‘the books were aimed at kids’ and ‘internet chat had been ruined by teenagers and their text speak’. Marginalisation and obscurity were great comfort blankets to a certain type of fan. Mervyn was about to explain to Maggie about fans, when they were interrupted. The girl had returned, heroically venturing into the freezing lounge like Scott of the Antarc
tic. Mervyn’s breakfast was laid before him.
The menu said it was ‘home-sourced’. The sausages were from animals killed up the road; the eggs freshly extracted from the chickens down the lane; the black pudding derived from—well, he didn’t know what they’d derived it from, but the insides had a red-grey diseased look, just like the complexions of the pub’s regulars. Perhaps there was a discreet soundproofed room at the back for when they passed out at closing time.
There was far too much freshly-killed flesh in front of him. Mervyn tried to soften the effect by covering the whole thing with gobbets of tomato sauce, which only succeeded in making it look like a motorway pile-up. He was about to pop a bit of startled pig into his mouth and get it out of sight when Maggie looked into his eyes and rested her hand on his wrist. The warmth from her created a charge that flooded his whole body.
‘You didn’t quite understand my question. What are you doing down here? You, Mr Mervyn Stone? Because forgive me if I’m wrong, you don’t sound like the one who wants to make this thing. Or even be here.’
Mervyn had thought long and hard about the question himself. Why was he here?
‘I haven’t the foggiest idea.’
CHAPTER FIVE
There must be a reason, but for the life of him he hadn’t worked it out yet.
‘They’ve got me down here as ‘Programme Consultant’, but I don’t know why. They haven’t exactly asked me anything since I got here. They’ve just ignored me. I haven’t even been to the Product Lazarus offices they’ve set up in Truro.’
‘Do you own the rights to the show or something like that?’
‘No. I came up with it while I was a staff writer for the BBC, contracted to the drama department. Everything I came up with was BBC copyright. Well…all except one thing, which I craftily did as a freelancer. Basically, I sacked myself, rehired myself as a freelance writer and came up with a monster that proved very popular in the show.’