The Right Man

by Nigel Planer

  Once Grace was asleep I cracked open a bottle of something and got out the week’s script pile. Again, a skim-through would suffice. Size and type of part, then check to the end to see which characters die, and if there are any major plot reveals one should know about. Drinking alone is not something I used to do, but in the evenings, with Liz out and Grace asleep, it was becoming, dare I say it, a bit of a routine. Liz wouldn’t be back until two or three in the morning now, so I’d turn in at twelve and leave the hall light on for her. I contemplated ringing her friend Heather to see if she had really gone there, but couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  I’ve discovered with Liz that equality between the sexes is a difficult thing to achieve, let alone maintain. There are 168 hours in a week. That’s how many there are in total. Not a particularly magical number, but the actual one. If we say that eight hours every day are spent sleeping, that leaves 112 waking hours. Then take away three hours a day for preparing, eating and clearing away food, and you have got ninety-one hours a week left each. It’s already looking stressful and tight. Other deductions common to us all were harder to make. Like home administration and repairs, tidying up, working to get the money in, and ablutions, of course. I found myself making allowances for her when it came to ablutions. Women are allowed to spend longer on washing. Evidently they have less naturally oily skin and so need to put on creams and things, and, of course, they are judged on their appearances so much more than men — whether we like it or not — so I gave her an extra hour a day on. that in my theoretical calculations. This made it necessary, after the ninety-one hour mark, to divide us into two, according to our gender, and that’s really where the arguments started, I suppose.

  It soon became apparent that although an hour is an hour and it lasts the same time for everyone, some hours have different values from others — rather like a currency — and it was virtually impossible to work out a fair exchange rate. For instance, Liz hates cooking and sewing, so an hour doing either would, for her, go very slowly. I, on the other hand, enjoy cooking very much and am good at it, whilst I find sewing very difficult and frustrating. I’m crap at it. Here, Liz has an unfair advantage over me, in that her mother taught her to sew from the age of four. So that although she doesn’t like to do it, she could complete all of our sewing in a quarter of the time it would take me.

  Trying to establish a fair sharing-out of the tasks became even harder when I took actual work into account. Work is impossible to evaluate. There is work you do because you have to and there is work you do because you want to, and unfortunately it is usually the former which brings in the money at the end of the week. But then, the six months or so that Liz would spend waiting for another acting job, whilst not earning us any immediate cash, might one day bring in a fortune if she got lucky.

  It became complicated, but I’d persevered, even writing down columns of figures. Whichever way I juggled them, however, I ended up, in my column, with more than the available 168 hours — an impossibility — whilst Liz usually had about six hours a week to spare.

  It was no wonder I got headaches so often, and it would have been fair enough, I thought, for me to develop some psychosomatic stress—related illness. However, it was always Liz who got these. From the flakiness around her hair line to her overwhelmingly tired and floppy stints. These attempts of mine at a Maoist kind of equality were, I think, what used to drive her out of the room, slamming the door so that the door handle fell off again, and into the bedroom. She wouldn’t talk to me then for some days. I would sit there thinking of screwing the counter-sunk lugs back on the door handle, for what must have been the twentieth time, but decided it might be better to replace the handle altogether with something perhaps less aesthetically pleasing, but which would at least survive her tantrums.

  I suspect it was my reasonableness over matters like this that must have driven her to Bob Henderson in the first place. By reasonableness, I don’t mean understanding. I wouldn’t claim ever to have understood her. Nor do I mean that I was easygoing or even-tempered. Far from it. I suppose I mean more the inescapability of my logic, or at least my inability to escape from it.

  The trouble was, if we had done things her way, obeying only our feelings, bills would not be paid. Not just because there would be no money but because she habitually left all that kind of thing to me. Accounts, administration, insurance were activities she looked down on. And she looked down too on my pedantic tenacity with them. No doubt there are other more flamboyant men who can deal with these everyday tasks with a flourish and to whom Liz would be more suited, but I am dogged about these things and this scrapes the blackboard of her nerves.

  I bet Liz’s lover-boy, Bob Henderson, doesn’t care about things like equality between the sexes. I bet her Bob is casual and confident in his power. I bet, being a proper man, he would not tell her of impending bankruptcies, would not trouble her little head with the everyday bureaucracies of their lives. I bet he is on-line to his bank. I bet he is connected by modem to his accountant and I bet a piece of paper only ever crosses his desk once. Smiling girls with clean hair talk to him on those mini-microphone headset telephones about how his shares are doing. And when his washing machine breaks down, the service company not only answer the phone, they actually specify a time when they can turn up, so that his au pair can know when to be in. But of course, he would have one of those German washing machines that never break down, made by a company who got big using slave labour from the concentration camps during the Second World War. But that thought would not trouble him, would not occur to him. Men like Bob have in-built opposite magnetism to suffering. Suffering’s southern pole is repelled by his unrelenting northness. Robert Henderson. Old Hendo. Our Bob. A man blessed because the day he was born, God had run out of consciences.

  Grace was playing on a pebbly beach. I’d taken her there. The sound of receding surf sucking at the shingle was irritating, nauseating. She was laughing and enjoying jumping over the little incoming waves as they sauntered in, mockingly. At each new ankle-deep incursion she was further from the shore, and looked back to me for reassurance, which I gave her. Go on, my daughter! Grow! Learn! Swim! Then came a moment when she was frightened. The water was up to her waist now and the noise of it dragging on the stones beneath our feet was overwhelming. I had brought us here, I had encouraged this expedition into the treacherous tide. As usual, at the last minute, I put myself between her and the vengeance of the pulling water, waded in up to my chest, letting the sea claim me instead, leaving her on the land. Luckily I was saved from the moment of watery lungs by waking up.

  Liz was snoring like a lorry. Three a.m. She farted and rolled on to her side. After ensuring that she was still asleep, I farted in sympathy. The thing now was to fight the temptation to creep out of bed into Grace’s room to check if she was alright. It was only a dream, my problem. My rational resolve didn’t last long. After a minute or so of monitoring Liz’s breathing, I slipped out from under the duvet and went silently to stand in Grace’s doorway for a few moments. I couldn’t hear anything so I went in a few feet, then a few feet more until I was right over the safety bar of her bed. Very quietly, and from what seemed a long way off, I heard the gentle lapping of her breath. I went back into the bedroom where Liz had rolled again, cocooning herself in the duvet. I lay on my side of the bed with no cover for a few minutes, until, realizing I was cold, I quietly reached for my T-shirt on the chair and slipped it on.

  Later in the night, I must have managed to reclaim some of the duvet, because I woke in the morning with a corner of it over my shoulders. I got up and dressed quietly, making Liz a cup of tea. I had to go to work. As I prepared to leave, Grace woke and started bawling at me. She wouldn’t let me go. I ended up bunging her in with her mum — much to Liz’s annoyance — plucking her off me like an unwanted burr.

  TWO

  IN HINDSIGHT — SOMETHING we don’t usually have time for in this business — it was probably a mistake to let Neil James meet Marc Lins
ey at all. Neil had changed more than I had appreciated since Every Other Weekend had gone off air. EOW was a situation comedy about two divorced fathers and their children, quite big a couple of years ago, completely forgotten now. Neil was somewhat type-cast as the soppy one, remember? No, I’m not surprised, it wasn’t earth—shattering stuff, but it was a good little earner and an easy gig for Neil which looked like going on for at least a couple more seasons. But then came the franchise débâcle and all the ministers of television had a cabinet reshuffle. Every Other Weekend was dropped as being too ‘blokey’ and Neil was left with a rather small commission from the publishers and 100,000 words to write. It was my fault really. I just don’t get the rime to stay on top of clients as much as I should any more, since Grace. Not even my heavy seven. If I’d known what kind of a state he was in I think I’d have somehow engineered to keep them apart.

  Not shaving can look pretty good on actors, and execs can turn up to high-powered do’s with a few days’ growth these days. Even heads of departments at major broadcasting houses sport a just-got-out-of-bed look. It’s a way of showing that you are one of those people who still care about content of programmes, that you have definitely not turned into an accountant. But there’s not shaving, and there’s Not Shaving, the latter having something to do with not washing either. As he shambled into the downstairs dining room at the Soho House, half an hour late, Neil might as well have had ‘I have let myself go to pieces’ emblazoned on his T-shirt. Maybe he felt that now he was a bona fide commissioned novelist it meant that he didn’t have to change his underpants or say hello to people properly any more. As he lurched towards the beautifully linened table where Marc and I were chatting about babies, a young waiter with a music journalist’s haircut asked him if they were making any more of Every Other Weekend. Neil brushed past him without even an acknowledgement. Not good to do that to Josephine Public, not good at all. Bad for Betty Business. I clocked Marc sneaking a side glance at his watch, so I cut the pre-chat chat and suggested we order. Neil looked at the menu as if it were a breakdown of ex-Tory MPs’ private earnings and sneered at me for ordering Gravadlax and a rocket salad. While we waited for the wine, he finished all the breadsticks and lit a Marlboro. And before I make it sound as if he was cutting an artistic or even romantic figure, let me add that he had also ‘put on at least two stone. Oh, Lord.

  I decided to accept a glass of wine although I had no intention of taking more than the merest sip of it. Marc, being in publishing, was happy to drink at lunchtime, and Neil joined him. After a few words of positive encouragement about the original quality of Neil’s writing, his unique turn of phrase and Marc’s continuing interest in the basic idea, Marc came gently on to the matters in hand. He wanted to establish an understanding over certain aspects of the so-called story, questioned Neil’s proposed title, The Right Man, and then — as I was dreading — asked quite firmly about possible delivery dates. This seemed to make Neil’s pulse rate increase. The Soho House had run out of their own brand of mineral water so I was gulping down the fizzy, which I never like.

  To tell the truth, I had been surprised that Marc Linsey had accepted the initial, and I thought rather flimsy outline, but I had, possibly wrongly, kept my misgivings to myself The ‘right man’ of Neil’s story was a stalker, a prowler who sneaks around the same woman’s house for years so that he knows every creaking floorboard, what time of the month it is for her, what she is wearing that day, which garments need mending. But he never makes himself known, this man, and he never does anything nasty other than the snooping. So despite the lack of gratuitous or even comical violence this thing was hardly going to be a zappy comedy. Marc pointed out gently that this idea did not afford Neil the opportunity of writing any dialogue, or indeed any action. Neil looked exasperated and assured us that it was based on a real case he’d heard of, although there’s no reason why that should have made it good fiction, let alone funny. I’ve been in many script meetings where the producers complain that a scene doesn’t work, to be told by the writers, ‘But it actually happened.’ Nobody cares whether it actually happened or not. Actually happening is not an excuse for putting it on telly, or in a script or, in this case, a book. So with Neil’s outline, rip-roaring and roller-coasting were not descriptions which sprang immediately to mind. However, we’d got this far into the water, so we had to swim or choke.

  Neil was talking rather a lot now roused, and Marc sat quietly listening, with that little curly smile people have when they are the ones who can pull the plug on you. Evidently, Neil’s ‘right man’ was also going to be like the elves in the night — you know, the ones who help the shoemaker to meet his deadlines by nocturnally doing all his mending. He was going to secretly fix this woman’s fridge for her, or darn her clothes, or help get her children off drugs, I don’t know. Neil’s point being, if I understood it correctly, which is unlikely, that no matter how much a man may think he is trying to help a woman, in the end he is only interested in power over her. Possibly a valid one, but it didn’t inspire one to think of Neil’s name embossed in silver on paperbacks in airport bookshops. Marc Linsey’s attention was evaporating.

  Neil was in need of some good-luck elves himself, but none had been forthcoming. His first deadline had come and gone without really a murmur from this affable and lunch-providing editor. People are always late, we said. Ben Elton is probably late, we said. Probably even Martin Amis is late. When, last September, Neil had delivered a few thousand words only, of unpublishable masturbatory fantasies without a gag in sight, slight alarm bells began to sound. I intercepted, and that draft, if you can call it that, had never appeared on Marc Linsey’s desk. Thankfully, Neil had accepted my position.

  I had tried, but not over-hard, to distract him by finding him work elsewhere, but he seemed to have become obsessed with the thing. He’d stopped ringing in for work. Always a bad sign. I tried to move the conversation on to the hopefully less contentious subject of the proposed title.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ said Neil between gulps of Chardonnay. ‘It’s got nothing to do with looking for Mr Right or singles bars or anything like that.’ Oh. Pity, I thought. ‘It’s a psychological term and it’s sometimes used in the profiling of serial killers. A right man is someone who has to be right whatever happens. Like Peter Sutcliffe thinking he was a saint saving all those women he banged over the head with a hammer.’ The wine was making him garrulous, or maybe he’d had a couple of drinks already before coming into town. Either way, the lunch was definitely not going the way I would have liked.

  ‘Maybe you should just call it Right Man?’ I offered, with my helpful raised-eyebrow look. ‘Too many books have a “the” in the title. Too many first books by TV comedians. The Liar, The Gun Seller, The Gobbler, The Tosser …’ I ran out.

  ‘So this guy is a serial killer, right? I mean, he’s a serial killer, is he? That’s right?’ said Marc, looking marginally more interested.

  ‘No, he’s not,’ said Neil, becoming a tad aggressive now. ‘No, no, no, no, no. It’s like a complex, you know? A right-man complex. It’s about a man who can’t see that he is damaged, so he thinks the world must be. It’s sometimes called the Roman Emperor Syndrome.’

  ‘That’s quite a good title,’ said Marc.

  ‘Or just Roman Emperor Syndrome,’ I said, trying to make sense of my own logic. ‘I mean, it’s not The Crime and the Punishment, is it? It’s not The Pride and the Prejudice.’

  Neil was not touching his pasta, but had poured himself another glass. The conversation had veered a long way from where I wanted it to go.

  ‘So where does fixing this woman’s fridge fit in?’ asked Marc with barbed innocence.

  ‘I’m trying to show that when a man thinks he’s caring for a woman, he is in fact patronizing and manipulating her. That there’s not much difference between chivalry and violent abuse,’ said Neil, whazooming straight over Marc Linsey’s beautifully coiffed head, and mine too, if I’m an honest bunny.

&nbs
p; Neil’s cheeks were burning and his heart rate was creeping up past the safety zone. ‘Neil,’ I wanted to say, ‘you are not Oliver Sachs. You are, or were, a reasonably successful television comedy actor. All this talk of violent abuse does not sit well, and what’s more, you’re confusing the man with the chequebook.’ As my brother Tony would say, if you’re in a hole, stop digging.

  ‘So there’s no murders but he fixes the fridge of this woman he’s never met?’ said Marc, who was more used to editing books about homoeopathy for pets or cellulite in the Royal Family.

  ‘Fuck you,’ said Neil, ‘fuck you.’ He was breathing heavily and was obviously nursing some deep creative angst which he was incapable of sharing or even communicating to us. And then — worst scenario — he was up and walking. He was walking and finishing his glass of wine as he went. He was leaving the dining room. Agent’s nightmare. People you want to bring together fall apart. A chasm opens, money falls down it, but worse than that, feelings are hurt, pride is bristled, niceness is deflowered, deals crumble, pillars tumble. A crashing, creaking, awful sound.