They both knew it, of course.
The old man folded his arms and looked at me. ‘So, Master Johnny. You decided yet? You still retiring?’
‘What do you need me for anyway? Duke’s the big star. That’s why you changed the story, eh?’
‘Don’t be jealous, son.’
‘I’m not.’
‘It’s just the act. What does it matter who dragged three half-deid chinks out aw the sea? You know the truth. We know the truth. So what if no-one else does? Would you be happy trotting out the tale every time some journalist wants to hear it? Never mind telling stories, you clam up when someone asks you the time. We’re on the move here. Need to make some hay while the sun shines, and trust me, it’s dazzlin. Everyone wants a piece of The Breda Boys.’
‘The Breda Boys?’
‘Trips off the tongue, eh?’
Then Duke. ‘It’s just an act, JJ, you said so yourself.’
‘Ok, so you get to be the hero. What do I get?’
‘You get the monkey,’ said the old man.
‘The monkey?’
‘Sure. Everyone loves the monkey.’
Everyone loves the monkey. It would be the final line in The Breda Boys go to Monte Carlo.
Five
The lawyer, Peterson, is one of our entourage, a nervy, whey-faced man of indeterminate age and personality.
There is also Erin, Akira and myself and three security guards, two of whom followed me around Tokyo and out to the Shuzenji compound last night. Yet there is no irritation to be found in their faces. Perhaps it’s in the eyes hidden behind the Ray-Bans, although I suspect a more Android-like disinterest.
We sweep into Narita Airport like a flock of black-suited vampires, black-shaded against the day that has transformed during our high-speed drive from cemetery grey to vivid autumn blue. I glance up, a last look at those delicate watercolours and then we’re inside the terminal.
As VIPs, we elicit gawps and unclipped security barriers, a time is money arrogance undermined by my slowing, old man shuffle. Each time Erin glances back impatiently, Akira’s grip tightens on my arm.
In my dotage the contrary has come to please me. The absurd too. I doff an imaginary hat at a wedge-faced boy sitting on his father’s lap. His smile will help me through the weirdness. For although the VIP brings a private gate, it offers no shade from the white masks and gloves of the Customs People, who patiently wait for us to remove our shoes and shades and jackets.
Still, departing is easier. I shudder at the thought of the return flight, remembering the last one I made, years ago.
Eleven hours from LAX into Tokyo dawn, a customs officer thrusting a sheet of paper with cartoons of people blowing their noses. ‘Bird flu, you have fever?’ I decided not to waggle my arms like a chicken, and shook my head, stepping to another officer asking about pork. Did he say pork? I Indeed he had, for importation of pork products to Japan is illegal. I patted my pockets and reeled deeper into strangeness, the retinal scan and closed-circuit mugshot that instantly transformed me into a terror suspect, the drug dog with an alarming interest in my crotch. The craze of Tokyo was still to come, yet I had already been disassembled into a million, neon-lacquered pieces . . .
I am being beckoned impatiently forward by a security officer.
‘I have no salami in my pants,’ I tell him as he efficiently pats me down. ‘I have not eaten spam in years.’
Beside me, Erin frowns.
Slow-burning dementia. It’s what they think now and probably then, back in the late-eighties when I was removed as CEO. I can understand it. I was in a manic phase. Who knows how long it might have lasted.
Ironically enough, the film that is now the prestige, fiftieth anniversary production of Breda Pictures was the straw that sent the camel sprawling. I had jettisoned a board agenda to present the latest script for The Bruce. I had even hired actors to read through the pivotal scenes.
The manicured hands that fidgeted with such exquisite awkwardness wasted no time in swiftly propelling me down the back stairs. I had long since lost all interest in the company by then anyway. It was a small miracle that they hadn’t bumped me years before. The board was magnanimous, however, making me president. And, like most presidents, I have no power at all.
Erin glances again at the portfolio bag containing my storyboard and script re-works. For the next twelve hours she will fear the demented daftie babbling on about a movie that isn’t his to make. Not that she’ll care, guilt being an emotion somewhat alien to Erin. She was too young to be part of the coup that replaced me but it felt like its final act when she became CEO years later.
‘It’s quite the plane,’ Peterson says as we strap for take-off. He’s sitting beside me, the man who drew the short straw and feels he must now engage.
‘It is that.’
‘Global Express 600.’
‘What?’
‘The name of the plane.’
Peterson, Akira, Erin and I sit in a square of seats with a table between us. We each have an octagonal, port-hole window and an angular, light and dark grey seat like something out of Star Trek. The internal fuselage has the same two tones, the bulkhead separating our compartment from the next, decorated with an abstract design of marbled greys. Like mountains, or stylised breasts.
‘Cruising speed 500 knots. 6,000 nautical mile range,’ says Peterson.
‘Do they look like tits to you?’
He blinks a few times then turns, following my gaze. On my left Erin too looks up. Another frown.
There will be a board meeting on the plane. As president, I periodically drop into these meetings, just as a reminder that if it wasn’t for me there would be none of them. Today, the spectre will again squat at the feast, with the regional directors patched in via some high-faluting tech link.
My wisdom, Duke.
They may imbibe if they so wish. I am a giving man. Yet even wisdom must prepare, for the wise man is also humble, yes? I ask Akira to get me a drink, throw it back and ask for another. Opposite me, Peterson pulls a screen down from the cabin roof and connects a projector to Erin’s iPad. I finish the second whisky and Akira re-fills the glass. This time he leaves the bottle.
This is why I love him.
That’s right, Duke, you heard. Raise those cartoon eyebrows high and higher, high as they reached at the punchline, turning to the laughing audience as I stood hands on hip all mock-offended, the butt of another joke as the curtain closed and the band crescendoed, the two of us exiting stage left, the old man’s arm around your shoulder, a grin in the fog of a cheap cigar . . .
‘Hadn’t you better slow down?’
Erin has assumed a look of concern.
‘There’s no rules in the sky, pet.’ I raise my glass. ‘Up here in the blue we is . . . free.’
‘What about your DVT socks?’
‘What?’
‘Deep Vein Thrombosis.’ She leans down and pulls up her trousers, revealing a pair of long red socks that come up her skinny knees. ‘They stop blood clots forming. Stop them reaching the brain.’
‘Blood clots.’
‘It’s an issue.’
‘That so?’
‘On long-haul flights.’
Now I am looking down at my legs. Peterson too. And Akira. All of us peering down and wondering about the time bombs about to detonate in our heads. Erin proceeds to hand out packets of socks.
Ah, people, the life of the Global Executive. That sleek private jet you see parked up as you queue forever to cram into a budget airline that charges you a pound to piss, you wonder and dream, do you not, about the champagne and the caviar, the undoubted mile-high kicks? Perhaps this will finally be you, one day, puce-faced and embarrassed as you roll up your tailored trews to reveal your bunioned tootsies, struggling into a savagely tight pair of red safety socks.
Erin seems pleased.
She fiddles on her iPad and some graphs appear on the projector screen. ‘Look at the numbers.’ The numbers, the numbers,
once upon a time I too was greedy for those Kabbalistic shiftings. Erin says, ‘Twenty points up and rising.’
I imagine one point for each thousand feet we climb to the cruising altitude of thirty-eight thousand and whoa Trigger, let’s plateau awhile, no need to overheat. I see my father. The unimpressed Scotsman. One of the biggest companies in the world, ye say?
S’no bad.
And a puff on the foul-smelling cheroot. Even with all that poppy in his pocket he wouldn’t splash out on a decent Cuban. Ever the stretch for a respectability to which he was genetically indisposed.
What a sprawl I created. First Breda Pictures then Breda Investments. Both became subsidiaries of Breda Inc. when we branched out in the seventies, more affiliates following, an all-consuming media and leisure monster. Few of these later ventures and acquisitions had anything to do with me. Yet the original sin was mine, the decision to ‘aggressively diversify our portfolio’.
Can you remember, Duke, how I actually used to say things like that? Early on, say, when we turned the idiosyncratic Sirocco hotel in Mustique into soulless clones, one on each continent, boutique hideaways for the super-rich. Or later, when we turned Jefferson Publishing into Breda Books.
That desire to get ever bigger . . .
It was almost physical, an anxious churning in the gut, like the swelling logo on the projector screen, a tiny black dot becoming recognisable as the familiar monkey in silhouette, side profiled, the tail curling up to the right of the head and Breda Inc. in small, black block capitals underneath, becoming bigger until it fills the whole screen before reappearing as the tiny, swelling dot.
It is wise, I feel, to get drunk, even if it means breaking my promise to hold back until we reached China. Sentimentality demands it too. Look there, a little Chinese boy hurrying home from school, stopping to look up at the contrails, as we used to stop and look up, Duke, whenever a plane passed, hands cupped over our eyes and who was it, up there, would we travel like that one day, the possibility so unimaginably distant that it didn’t even cross our minds to be envious . . .
I have no choice but to raise a glass, at exactly the moment, I hope, that the little boy looks up.
‘Erin?’
‘Viggo?’
I look up at the projector screen, now showing five smaller screens in the pattern of a domino. Each has a clock in the top left-hand corner and a location underneath, as you might see behind the reception of an old-fashioned hotel. New York, 10.32; London, 06.32; Johannesburg, 08.32 . . .
‘Peterson?’
‘Erin?’
‘Viggo?’
Peterson frantically taps on the laptop. A sudden meld of multicolour rectilinear shapes appears on the centre screen, greens and reds shifting as the image behind the digital shatter tries to assume form. I have met Viggo a few times. Chief Financial Officer. I can hear but not yet see him.
‘Ah, Viggo.’
‘Erin!’ Viggo’s face beams. His skin is a shiny pink, like ham. He looks as if he has been chemically peeled. ‘Mr Jackson,’ he adds, the forehead creasing as the video feed reveals my unexpected presence. ‘A pleasure.’
‘Liar,’ I say.
He explodes into laughter that sounds like Bluto from Popeye. ‘Nothing changes, nothing changes.’
‘Gentlemen,’ says Erin.
The screens are filled. Five faces and five locations. London. New York. Johannesburg. Los Angeles. Mexico City. Personality-type or location, all are interchangeable.
Like any other corporation, ours is Old Testament in its will to create a world in its own image. The faces are introduced to me, nebulous interchanging entities. I imagine Anna Bernstein in the top left of the domino falling asleep in her LA penthouse and waking in London, but only the vaguest sense of dissonance as she limos down to Canary Wharf, something about the sad pasty faces, the absent sun . . .
Did I really enjoy this? Did I talk like this, back then?
Abbreviations. Not a wasted syllable. It is how a spreadsheet would talk. Such a pressing need to cheat time. Except there isn’t. When this meeting is over we will have nowhere to go. To speed with hyper-efficiency through each agenda item is all too quickly to bring the realisation that up here in the sky there is only time. And nothing to kill it, each one of us with a sociopathic inability to engage in small talk, never mind the sharing of confidences.
Erin sits very straight. The five screens become one as she taps the iPad, the face of each director filling the screen in turn. Between each report she clicks back to the five-screen view, as if to check the reaction from the rest.
Her movements are precise. I realise that she has never stopped turning the dial of the short-wave radio set that used to obsess her. She remains on that perpetual quest to tune in and I am struck again by the absolute contrast to her carefree and hopelessly innocent mother.
She should crack her face and make her arse jealous . . .
Quite right, Duke.
The sketch lacks a punchline. The drone-faces are confusing me. I crave complete sentences. Yet something is happening in Mexico City. I know this. We’re back to the five-screen view. Viggo is talking and Erin makes no move to click to the one-screen view, perhaps unnerved by the thought of Viggo’s hammy face in movie size. The deal is on the table. The price right.
‘JJ?’
‘Hmm.’
‘Well?’
The faces are peering. A patient expectation. To my right, Peterson has leaned away, as if making room in the space between us for my wise and erudite response to a question I have not heard.
‘The acquisition of Cinematica,’ says Erin, gently.
‘What about it?’
‘What do you think?’
It is touching for them to seek an opinion they don’t care about. ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.’
The drone-faces blink.
Viggo lets out a savage laugh, Bluto with Olive Oil, Popeye tied to a barrel of dynamite and the fuse lit.
Cinematica, I come to learn, is an independent Mexican film production company. A workers’ cooperative, in fact, two words relayed by Viggo with the most perplexed of emphases, like a naturalist looking in wonder at a species long thought extinct. Several films in the bag. Neo-realist and edgy. A route here. The 25–35 demographic. Huge emerging market. We benefit from their credibility . . .
And here they come again, the ghost-words that have accompanied every one of my successes, whether earned or vicarious.
Well done, son.
The old man’s sentiment is as grudging as ever. Once more it is me and not you, Duke, who has succeeded, whose company has acquired Cinematica, the latest in a forty-year stretch of accumulation.
‘Twenty million plus,’ says Viggo. ‘The re-make projections of their Mexican hits. Porfirio closes tomorrow.’
‘Still a risk,’ says Erin. ‘But what’s life without a few of those?’
On-screen, the five faces become Porfirio’s alone. The man delegated to drown Cinematica’s independent spirit in a waterfall of dollars nods his acceptance of the role. ‘She has cojones, your niece,’ Porfirio says, then a dirty laugh like Eli Wallach in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Except he doesn’t, being the cliché not of the sleazy Mexican but the Harvard Business School graduate.
The plane suddenly lurches, dropping into turbulence. Peterson gives an odd little squeal and grabs my hand. He seems reluctant to let it go, as if waiting for the next pitch of the plane. When it doesn’t come, he looks up sheepishly. His touch was clammy. I want to wash my hands.
‘Sorry.’
I refill my drink. Peterson’s eyes follow the glass from table to mouth to table. He licks his lips and I shake the glass. He refuses the offer by clearing his throat and turning back to the screen.
I close my eyes and settle back. It is an incredibly comfortable seat, a perfect ergonomic fit for my skinny frame. I raise my whisky and the ice rings against expensive crystal, a tiny, lingering sound like a distant temple bell. I am fill
ed with a vertiginous longing for our cottage by the Sound, Duke.
Some wonder about the next stage of human evolution, but surely the ability to delude ourselves with the most forgiving of nostalgia is already the pinnacle.
Our father would have been astonished by all this. If his brain hadn’t exploded in Soho, all the gaudy baubles of wealth would have done for him soon enough: the starlets, the mansions and the swagger. I can see him, Fat Croesus in the Jacuzzi with Brigitte Bardot, washing his socks. Bring on the money. Money meant acceptance and he sought both with epic singularity.
Erin too has the family ruthlessness.
She clicks unhurriedly from face to face, the goddess of her flying Olympus, dispensing condescension and encouragement but, more than anything, uncertainty. None of the domino faces have any clue where her whim might take them tomorrow, a week, or a month from now, an unease in their eyes like the bands of colour swelling off the starboard wing, aquamarine stacking upwards through mauve, deep purple and black, as if outer space is falling down on us.
The plane banks to port and downwards, trying to outmanoeuvre the storm, but when we straighten up, the same troubled colours are on now both sides, the storm coming in from all directions, no escape from the deepening gloom. Soft uplighters flick on beside each seat.
The plane begins to shudder.
I am smiling like a child.
Beside me, Peterson grips the armrests. I reach out and pat his hand, his eyes turning to me in bemusement and not a little alarm. He is likely wondering about my smile, my grinning death’s-head silhouetted by sudden lightning flash as the plane drops violently into an air pocket.
‘You have to admire it,’ I say.
‘What’s that?’
‘The drama of it all.’
‘If you say.’
‘I do say, I do say.’ I raise my glass to the roof. ‘To the great director in the sky.’ I drain my drink.
Somehow, the internet connection survives the turbulence, now and then a pixilation on one of the screens but the face always re-emerging. My grand-daughter’s only reaction to the violent rollercoaster is a slight frown, her body elegantly shifting into each lurch of the jet. She is a goddess, I am convinced of it, Duke! She will bring us safely through by sheer force of will to get to the end of the agenda, which finally arrives at the blessed relief of Any Other Business.
The Accidental Recluse Page 6