by Nigel Planer
‘You’re filthy,’ said Liz. ‘You’ve probably caught some dreadful disease now.
I thought of Liz watching me from the top of the steps as I was pulled away momentarily by the river and wondered what her feelings might have been, if any. Whether she would have willed me further into the stream to drown. Whether if I subtracted myself from her life she would be happy at last, free to fly away to the arms of Mrs Henderson’s hubby. Maybe it wasn’t a bearded man I had seen, maybe it was just the roots of a tree, and I had merely tried to throw myself away for Liz’s sake like in my dreams with Grace.
‘I’ve got to keep moving,’ I said. ‘I’m frozen.’
She helped me up, being careful not to get any mud on her new suede jacket. As we neared the gate to the park, a fat policeman in a flat chequered hat came towards us with a waddle in his walk, like a goose from Toon Town. The guy in the shiny yellow shirt quickly took another direction and made himself scarce.
‘There was a man in the water.’ I said to the policeman. ‘He had a beard and then he just disappeared under the surface.’
‘Oh, yes, yes, yes,’ he said. He was followed by a younger policeman who had a crackling radio receiver. ‘Probably drunk.’
‘They wander in, don’t know what they’re doing, don’t care. Spook, was he?’ I do not expect your average friendly bobby to be anything other than a rampant racist.
‘No, I think he was white, actually.’
I pointed out to them where we had seen the man and turned down the offer of a blanket, since we lived nearby and I was not in the mood for hearing a racial diatribe from a cartoon duck in a uniform.
‘Could have been drowned already up at Richmond. We get a lot of them. Might have been in the water for days.’
‘He sort of breathed,’ I said, ‘and then just disappeared completely. If I could have seen where he was, I would have gone in.
‘Lucky you didn’t, son,’ said the round policeman. ‘You’d have lasted about one and a half minutes in there, with this tide. It’s a treacherous bend in the river, you know. People don’t realize that. We get it all the time. He could have been dead days ago and drifted all the way down here. Lucky you didn’t.’
As we hurried back to the house, Liz was quiet. At the front door she said, ‘There’s your sign.’
I was getting out of drenched clothes in the front hall.
‘What do you mean?’ I said.
‘You wanted a sign. To make things clear. There it is. Don’t go jumping in to try and save drowning things. It was probably just some driftwood anyway. You’d have got yourself killed, you bloody arsehole. Like the policeman said.’
She got me some towels. Old ones that didn’t matter, with trailing threads.
‘Who was that weirdo in the yellow shirt?’ I asked.
‘You see?’ she said, putting the heater on for me. ‘You go and get yourself killed and I get hit on by some mad rapist in the park.’
She was right about the sign. It was a completely foolish thing to wade in, thigh-deep, to try and save an unknown bearded man who had probably drowned some hours or even days before.
Liz’s parents separated when she was seven, so she had to learn about loss and secrets and lies as a child. A good training for grown-up life, it would seem. Sometimes I feel that having parents who did not divorce puts one at a serious disadvantage. I, whose parents had stayed together until death parted them three weeks ago, walked out into the large world with the body of a grown man and the emotional cunning of a newborn goose. Maybe this was why she was able to avoid telling me about her Bob. She felt comfortable making separate compartments out of her life: sex in one place, work in another, children another, security a fourth, and so on. She felt at ease with the deception necessary to keep the whole train going. I think of her now as one of those toy snakes made from slices of bamboo which are joined with wire — each segment a separate entity but the whole thing moving with a frighteningly real slinkiness. People like that never seem to suffer the consequences of their actions, can always shift the responsibility down a couple of segments, causing no more than a gentle ripple in the whole body, which is often mistaken by mugs like me for attractiveness. I asked her again about our lives together, hoping she would volunteer the truth. She assumed I was pressurizing her for sex again.
‘I couldn’t possibly sleep with a man I didn’t respect. Surely that’s obvious,’ she said.
‘Why do you feel you need to look up to a man before you can have a relationship with him?’ I was diving in now with pointless abandon.
‘I said respect, not look up to,’ she said, right as usual, and started to make herself a cup of coffee without getting a cup out for me, or asking if I wanted one too.
I had followed her into the kitchen, the only neutral space in the flat.
I supposed I would have earned her respect more had I been more decisive, had I either dived straight into the water, thereby heroically drowning myself in the effort to save him, or been more realistic and known that the guy was a goner, and phoned the police myself Instead, I had run about a bit, tripped over, got myself wet and failed to get rid of the weirdo in the yellow shirt. This is what I imagine she meant by respect. I had not looked like someone you could respect. I had been ineffectual, clumsy and covered in Thames mud.
‘That’s not what I meant,’ she hurled back at me, and then, a phrase very often heard, ‘you stupid, stupid man.
It was amazing how we could talk in what I thought was English, and have apparently wholly different meanings for words, an entire vocabulary of misunderstanding.
I found myself contemplating that I had not made any allowances, in my breakdown of the hours of the week, for time spent arguing, and wondering whether a fair apportionment of rowing time would be an appropriate element to take into consideration. And in whose column ought it to go, for luvviedom’s sake?
Either way, Liz would still be the one with free time at ‘the end of the week, because she seemed to have a remarkable ability to decide when a row was finished, whereas I, on the other hand, am incapable of leaving things in a state of conflict and need to put things away neatly. I can’t just switch the computer off. I have to have everything saved as what it is, with a dated safety copy.
No doubt I exacerbated the situation by standing outside whichever room she was sulking in and demanding to know who Bob Henderson was. I shouted at her for a few minutes: things I would regret later. She locked the bedroom door — it was the bedroom this time, I think — and the sound of smashing furniture emanated.
‘Why don’t you just go and see a prostitute?’ she yelled through the tantrum. ‘That’s all you’re after!’
I decided it would be best to stay overnight at the office for a while.
THREE
IT’S VERY UN-ENGLISH isn’t it, to reveal information about money. The English economy works on an arcane gentleman’s agreement that sources shall remain secret. Nevertheless, it seems relevant to point out the fiscal realities behind Mullin and Ketts here because I have no inherited wealth and these are the figures I have to bear constantly in mind in every contact I make, in every conversation I have, whether assessing a young actress’s earning potential or contemplating education or health matters for Grace and Liz.
I know this may make me seem grubby, small-minded, like some Dickensian clerk, but that’s tough cookies, I’ll have to put up with the drop in image credibility in order to clarify my position, as much for myself as for any purpose.
At Mullin and Ketts we have ninety clients, forty mine, forty Naomi’s. The remaining ten are looked after by Tilda, who is our trainee. These clients bring us in approximately £150,000 a year in commission. We pay Tilda £12,000 out of this, or more if she exceeds her targets. The office costs us £35,000 a year in rent and expenses. Our theatre tickets, travel, stationery, etc. come to about £20,000 a year. Joan gets £9,000 and Sarah, who is part-time, gets £3,000.
This leaves Naomi and me about £25—35,000 a year
each before tax, although of course, if we have had a bad year, like ‘93, it’s a lot less, and at the beginning, we ploughed everything we could back in, to get going. We have no formalized salary agreements because it depends on the state of the industry. I tend to have more high-profile clients than her, although she does have a couple of soap stars and a commercials artist who earn well. I do have a few directors and one or two clients who write — or, like Neil, fail to write — scripts and books, but on the whole I deal in performers. Everyone knows the best client to have is a dead writer; you just collect. But at Mullin and Ketts we have no such luxuries, it’s very much a hand-to-mouth existence. Sometimes it’s been my clients who have seen us through the hard times, sometimes Naomi’s. There’s no real way of controlling it and every day is a worry. We could collapse at any moment.
At the building in Meard Street, we have four rooms, well, three and a half really. There’s Naomi’s office, my office, the main room and a sort of kitchenette the other side of the stairs which has just enough room for a camp bed in it for overnights when working late in town, and it was here that I stayed some nights when things were becoming fraught between Liz and me. A couple of times I’ve even gone back home to bath and bed Grace and then if Liz wasn’t going out, I’ve come back up to the office. Couldn’t really get any proper work done obviously, because most people have gone home. A call to LA was always a good excuse, though.
A night in the office was a strange affair. Really nothing to do but phone. There were no real books or anything in there, and, anyway, being so near to work made concentrating on anything else almost impossible. I sat worrying about Susan Planter and decided to check Jeremy’s income slips since they’d been in such a mess at his home. That would be useful. There were definitely a few irregularities, our fault. I made a note to get Joan on to it in the morning. And one rather large late payment, again our fault. Our expenses book wasn’t being filled in properly any more either. Any one of us could have been driving around in our own chauffeur-driven limo for all that was down on paper. You have to do everything yourself, it seems. Lucky that the office girls don’t know what my real nickname is, what it was at school, I mean: Muggins.
I became agitated and decided to leave business for the night. I cracked open the emergency champagne and poured myself some into a coffee mug. I’d replace it in the morning. I stared at the phone. The ventilation system from the Chinese restaurant three floors below was humming, and in another fifteen minutes the tape loops from the strip-joint next door would start up again and then I’d be done for. ‘We’re gonna make this a night to remembaaaa …’ over and over again. Somehow, in the day, with all the women in the office and the buzz of deals and the banter, the sound of Soho did not intrude into the consciousness. Once everyone was gone, though, the noises crowded in as reminders of the harshness and cheapness outside. The loud woman next door was screaming at her man again, ‘Don’t come back here! Go to her! Fuck her! Go to her!’ This seemed to be a nightly ritual followed by noisy sex. Occasionally this pre-coital slagging match would include the sound of kitchen utensils clattering against the wall. Once I heard gunshots down the street, but there was nothing about it in the papers the next day.
Grace was playing near the river, too near, she was toddling still and in her sun hat and a nappy. By now, I’d had this dream, or a version of it, so often that I knew, even asleep, what its outcome would be. It was almost a ritual. I looked around for the wooden danger sign. Sure enough, it was to my left. ‘No bathing: dangerous water’, it said, but it was broken and there were weird symbols painted on it as well. That was new. Grace looked behind at me, before putting her foot too close to the edge. In that moment when I would have found myself falling into the shiny blackness of the water in Grace’s place, there was a heaving sound. Suddenly, Neil James was there, coming out of the water like a corny special-effects giant. It was Neil, or the drowning man at Putney, or both, they were the same. Neil’s beard had grown to Biblical dimensions and horrible green stuff was coming out of his mouth and nostrils, just like the drowning man. Neil held me back, his presence preventing me from throwing myself over the edge for Grace. Neil submerged exactly like the drowning man had done, taking Grace with him. Leaving the surface black and rippling and shiny. I could not see Grace. She was gone. I awoke as if landing from a great height. Bloody Neil. Getting into my dreams now and messing them about.
I lay in the grey dawn on the creaky camp bed with the cold street lighting intruding across the ceiling. Maybe Liz was right, I should go to a prostitute. Have a bit of in-out. Get rid. Maybe that was all there was to me. Maybe she would respect me if I was like that, if I was more honest about being like that. I could live down to her expectations and she could relax into resenting my mobility. Like proper mummies and daddies. Once when driving through Bayswater with Grace in the back baby seat, I stopped at the lights and, turning round to talk to her, my move was mistaken by a skinny leather-mini-skirted streetwalker for interest. She hadn’t seen Grace in the back there. She approached the open front passenger window and stared in at me with stark, drug-glazed eyes and said, ‘Fancy a blow job?’ before she noticed Grace. As the lights changed she gave us both a look of such hatred that had I believed in the evil eye, I would have asked the garage to exorcise the car next time it went in for a service.
It was six thirty, I might as well get up now anyway. The morning dust cart had started its grinding mere yards away in Dean Street, and it was making the windows rattle in their frames. I could go and have coffee somewhere Italian and look as if I was the kind of guy who had breakfast with important American producers.
They wouldn’t even see Neil for the Ayckbourn tour. I’d had to spend some minutes obliterating self-doubts, and think positive. The biggest kick you can get as an agent is persuading someone to see a client they wouldn’t normally have thought of for a job. This has to be done with great skill. Maybe you have an actress who is commonly perceived as a light comedienne, who normally does cute and cuddly — a Felicity Kendal, say, or a Penelope Wilton — and she wants to develop her range, and you know she can do it and she’s ready — kids grown up, or recently single, for example — and there’s a role in a TV film as an alcoholic having a breakdown, or a politically active barrister, or an AIDS victim wife, or whatever. You must enter into casual talks with the casting director, going through all the obvious choices for the part, rounding up the usual suspects, and subtly deriding them with remarks such as: ‘Yes, so and so could do it, but we all know she could do it.’ Late on in the conversation, almost as an afterthought, with self-deprecating innocence, you must pong in the name of the client you have in mind, as in:
‘Well, we haven’t discussed Felicity, or Penelope or whoever, because no ordinary person would even have thought of seeing her for the part, but God knows, if anyone’s brave enough to give it a try then you are.’ You must help them to think they had the idea. You must facilitate their adventurousness.
I’ve never been proud about flattery. However outrageous it becomes, however much it might be denied, people inevitably place flattering remarks on a reserved shelf in their minds, a special inner mantelpiece for the Oscars, but nothing could persuade this lot to consider Neil. I even tried telling them of his recent weight gain in the hope that they would see him for the side-kick dickhead part, but zilch. They already had what they wanted firmly fixed in their minds, and for some reason, Neil it wasn’t. I couldn’t push it too far because I was in the midst of negotiating the finer points of a contract with them for dear old Barbara Stenner to play the lead part in the same tour, and we hadn’t yet discussed her billing, touring allowance and days off. I didn’t want to queer Barbara’s pitch. It was a depressing phone call all round, especially since I’d had Barbara on the phone earlier saying she’d rather not do the tour at all. ‘The last thing on earth I want is to take this tired old pair of tits round the provinces again,’ as she had put it.
One has to be careful how one sugges
ts things to Barbara. ‘Darling, I’ve got something which I’m sure you won’t be interested in but I thought I should at least run it past you’ was how I’d put it to her the week before. She’d been a Rank starlet in her youth, so the ‘darling’ was appropriate, nay, obligatory. ‘How would you feel about another Ayckbourn tour, darling?’
‘Darling, do you even need to ask, darling?’ she’d replied, as I could have predicted.
‘OK then, darling, I’ll get out the Big Fin,’ I said, meaning I’d ask them for far too much money, like a proper shark. I got her a grand a week, which is actually piss these days, but she had accepted it, as I knew she would, because at least it wasn’t insulting, and films, TV and class theatre had long since slipped from her grasp, sad old thing.
Barbara Sterner was my first name client, and as a rookie agent I was proud to get her, so I’ve sort of hung on to her ever since. Her faded glamour gave trad credibility to the agency early on. It meant we had the official stamp of show-biz on us, and it meant I could go to first nights and meet other folk who’d been around for aeons, and have a forage amongst them. She was my bridge. She spent her life now doing revivals in the home counties, her recognizable face on posters from Guildford to Exeter.
Having her and keeping her meant endless negotiations over holiday entitlements, dressing rooms and cars to pick her up; also long conversations about the healing power of crystals and astrological rebirthing, and having to attend one or two Buddhist chanting sessions in Primrose Hill. But she was worth it. She was a good stick, was Barbara, with a proper deep actress’s voice, which she’d got through a combination of diaphragmatic muscularity, vocal cord fatigue and gin, due to many years of shouting in the evening for a living. Her famous pout was so exaggerated that by now she had become incapable of saying her s’s. What came out instead was a sort of soft shushing noise rather like the gentle trickle from one of the bonsai fountains in her very Japanese garden in Barnes.