The Right Man

by Nigel Planer

  Someone must have come in from the street downstairs, because a draught rushed under the door and made her shiver. I felt a twinge of cramp in my left foot. It was OK, though, I’d left my socks on. There was a man’s voice on the stairs and then a door slammed.

  ‘You need a break,’ she said, pouring the last of the vodka into our funny glasses. ‘You’re a very tense man and I should know, I’ve seen some very tense men.

  ‘I’m missing my kid,’ I managed to say. ‘I don’t see enough of her and there doesn’t seem to be a way around it all.’

  ‘Aaah, you poor man. It’s very hard on men these days, isn’t it? They get a rough deal, I think. I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t see my daughter. She’s the only reason I do this. And my trips, ooh, I like my little trips.’

  She told me about her holidays in Tenerife and all the things she got up to when drunk. She showed me her scars from gashes over twelve years old, inflicted by her man in Leeds before she’d walked out on him taking only her daughter, a bin bag of clothes and her Yorkshire terrier, Scraggy, who had now passed away, God rest its soul.

  ‘He was always telling me what to wear. “You’re not going out in that!” you know, that sort of thing. He told me I was ugly, I was ugly, and after a while I looked in a mirror and I was ugly. So I just upped and left, had enough.’ A bitterness entered her voice momentarily when describing the father of her child, but was blown away briskly by another gust of wind outside.

  ‘Still, you’ve got to move on, haven’t you? Just draw a line in the sand, walk over it and never look back.’ Second time I’d heard that recently.

  ‘I wish I could do that,’ I said. Feeling sorry for us both now. I wished I had some scars to show her, but all I have is a vaccination one on my left shoulder and a mole removal one somewhere around my lower back.

  By now, we were lying squished together on the bed, quite cosily. The pressure on me to perform seemed to have subsided. I was limp but it didn’t matter.

  ‘Does this often happen to you? I mean, do lots of guys come in and sort of, not actually … you know?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘It takes all sorts, you know. Some of them just want to tell you their problems. I’m like some therapist, really. There’s a lot of very lonely people out there. I mean, you get some right psychos, you know, who want to do horrible things to you, but we don’t like them. Soon sort them’ out. You’re lonely, aren’t you?’

  ‘I don’t have time to be lonely,’ I said.

  ‘Anyway, we’re not just going to talk, are we? We’re going to be very naughty tonight.’

  My half-hour was nearly up, but for some reason, in the last five minutes I became aroused and achieved an orgasm into the condom. I felt relieved that I had not let her down. She wrote her number on a piece of card and I was on the street in seconds with my collar turned up, looking for a cab.

  There were none, and wind-broken branches were strewn along the pavement. There was a sharp, hot rain in the wind which buffeted me from the front and the back. I was pissed now but the strength of the storm alone was enough to make me totter like a drunkard. I kept walking, not really heeding in which direction. Small broken branches and twigs from all the Conduit Street chestnuts were scuttling along the ground like terrified crabs.

  By now I’d turned into Park Lane and the wind and sheet rain had not abated. The traffic was minimal and there was nobody out walking. No one was this foolish. There were massive branches strewn and blowing across the dual carriageway here. Hyde Park, the other side of the road, looked a tangled mess. In the morning, there would be big clearing-up to do before the rush hour.

  In the grassy central aisle of Park Lane, an old ash tree had fallen in its entirety, impacting on the metal crash barrier and twisting it into nonsense. It lay half on and half off the road, pointing away from me like a fallen Don Quixote. Where the tree had stood was now an earthy crater some seven feet across, churned up by the snapping roots. The massive upturned underside was exposed to me, a round inferno of twisted limbs, a gorgon’s hairdo turned to stone, and at its centre, the dark central avenue to the heartwood of the tree, like an ancient and mythical vagina, a hole which had sucked up life from the ground for two hundred years.

  Back in the hollow safety of Meard Street, as I tried to sleep, the wind still rang in my ears like the aftermath of a rock concert.

  FOUR

  ‘OH, Hi, GUY, I thought you were one of Karen’s patients.’ Neil ushered me inside, past the double downstairs room and up the stairs without any further explanations as to why he was wearing a mauvy-pink frock, full make-up and pendulous earrings.

  I followed him up the stairs of the rather grand house, past some portraits of what I assumed must be the great and the good in the world of psychotherapy and into his tiny attic room, which was a maze of piled books, stray paper and unwashed coffee cups. There was a mattress on the floor with a rumpled sleeping bag flopped across it. He still hadn’t shaved and there was a row of empty vodka bottles along the windowsill. The rest of the house had seemed well kept, bourgeois, even, but in here it was a poet’s den.

  ‘Shall we go for a drink?’ he said.

  ‘Well, it’s a bit early for me, but, sure, fine,’ I said, and then, ‘Love the outfit. Do they go in for that sort of thing down your local?’

  ‘For you, Guy, I’ll change.’ The frock came off to reveal purple silken French knickers. He slung on a pair of waisted blue slacks which zipped up the side, and a voluminous cream blouse with floppy wide lapels. The earrings stayed where they were, dancing as he spoke. ‘It’s not really fair, is it? A woman can go 0ut in anything she likes. She can wear a skirt, a suit, trousers if he wants, make-up, no make-up, but if you’re a bloke …’ he was wiping his face with an old tissue now, ‘… they just assume you must be a poof.’ Complete weirdo more like, I thought, with two and a half weeks’ growth on your chin. Still, he did seem to have had a bath. We must be grateful for mini-mercies.

  I’d never known Neil had TV leanings. That’s TV as in transvestite, not television. I wish he’d told me, it could’ve been useful.

  ‘Also, since Karen started her own therapy practice, she’s been using the downstairs rooms as her clinic, and we get all these uptight neurots visiting through the day. I’m supposed to keep in the background because they’re not meant to know anything about the therapist’s home life, you know, in theory. So I just see if I can’t fuck their brains a bit by wafting around in a dress at the top of the stairs every now and again. It’s a laugh. Drives Karen mad.’

  Client-led, that’s what I am. That’s the basic principle behind my work. It was high time I paid that visit to Neil. He was obviously going through a hard time, and there must be something I could do about it. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the neat physique of a Julian Clary, nor the vampish poise of an Eddie Izzard. He just looked, well, garish, unhinged. His decline. must be my fault. I wasn’t looking after him properly, too involved in my own stuff, no doubt. And besides, I couldn’t face going back to the camp-bed room for another night and staring at the phone. I couldn’t vizzog it. As far as my attitude to the state Neil was in went, I’ve learned not to let anything judgemental so much as flicker across my face. My opinion on literally anything is the least important part of the equation. For example, I don’t even know any more whether I actually like musicals or detest them — whether I prefer classical drama to soap opera. My field of operation need only concern itself with what may or may not work — for instance, I might have a client who can tap dance and sing, so I will be excited by the latest five-person show looking for a theatre in the West End, or I might have a method-trained serious young student of Acting with a capital A, so I will be thrilled that the BBC are doing a season of studio-based American drama. I do not prize one over the other. My personal taste jury went out a long time ago, and stayed there. I am lucky in that my own likes and dislikes do not really trouble me. It’s about people, and people change. Like Jenny Thomp
son, for instance. Started out in agit prop and political theatre, wouldn’t touch anything unless it was changing the world, done for charity or written by David Hare. Now, eight years later, she’s writing diary pieces in Metropolitan magazine helping women with their sex lives, and doing stills sessions in designer clothes for Sunday lifestyle sections. And good for her. So if Neil wanted to grow a beard and wear a purple frock, my job was to follow wherever he led, waiting only for the right moment to pop questions about possible bankability.

  In this game anything is not only possible but preferable. Well, almost anything. Child pornography is obviously out, in fact all kinds of pornography are out, although nowadays one has to be quite flexible about definitions.

  For example — neat little anecdote, this — I had an enquiry call for Annie Schuster, a brilliant voice artist, ex-client of mine. An American woman on the end of the line wanted to know if Annie was available for filming immediately on a daily-rate basis. I said yes, depending on the rate of course. It was very good, so we proceeded. Then she explained the work might involve nudity, I said a tentative yes but asked for a little more information.

  ‘Well,’ said the woman, ‘it involves a certain amount of action.’ This word said with emphasis. But the daily rate would obviously go up, the more action Annie was willing to provide.

  I took her number and said I would check with Annie first. Thank God. Because as I punched up Annie’s number, it took only a second to realize it was the same one. Annie had been doing Rory Bremner on me. Agents beware. Annie’s not the most in-demand voice artist in the biz for nothing. She was just having a laugh and testing me out at the same time, to see what kind of a company she was working for. Luckily I passed the test and she stayed with me for several years before leaving to marry an Italian record producer and have children in the Tuscan hills.

  So I had to think positively about this new Neil in front of me, this bearded apparition in 1950s Doris Day casual wear. It was just a question of adaptation, flexibility, inventiveness. Obviously he was no longer in the running for a nice eight o’clock slot sitcom. Nor appearances on daytime telly or any of the more ‘civilized’ fairways of entertainment.

  I would have to think again. Find some niche, some artistic bunker in which he could hole up, be happy and earn us all a living.

  A one-man show perhaps? Edinburgh in drag? Maybe he’d like to direct? In the early days he’d been so eager to please. He’d let me help him with his image, his hair, clothes, audition technique, and his attitude to authority — always an important one, that. Now he had developed a wilfulness and a rather alarming bluffness.

  We sat in the pub in silence for a few minutes, me feeling awkward and flimsy in my linen jacket and tie, Neil with a creased brow, glaring at the beer mats on the table.

  ‘Can I have one of them?’ I asked him as he lit a third Silk Cut.

  ‘You don’t smoke,’ he said.

  ‘I know, but I feel like one right now.’ I had to find some way of crossing the bridge between us.

  A man with a sheepish grin came over to our table and hovered a moment over Neil.

  ‘It is you, isn’t it?’ He loomed, recognizing Neil from Every Other Weekend.

  ‘No, I’m his bad twin brother,’ said Neil. I smiled nicely at the guy.

  ‘What? You haven’t got the kids this weekend, then?’ said the guy, as if he was making the most original and hilarious joke in the history of comedy.

  ‘It’s not real. It was a television programme, you know. Fiction. Stories. I don’t actually have any kids.’

  The guy laughed as if Neil’s reply had been equally hilarious.

  ‘You lot. It’s just a job to you, isn’t it?’ he said, with smug reverence. ‘So, you got anything else coming up? Or just resting?’ Why does the word ‘resting’ cause such amusement to members of the Great British Public?

  I thought it appropriate, at this point, to slide into the conversation, if you can call it that.

  ‘They may be repeating the second series of Every Other Weekend on UK Gold this autumn, if you get that?’

  The guy ignored me completely.

  ‘What’s the beard for then, getting ready for a new role, are you?’

  ‘No. This is the real me,’ said Neil, and at last managed a sort of half-smile. He jiggled his earrings. It was enough at any rate to satisfy the guy, who wandered back proudly to where his friends were, at the bar. They all turned and smiled across the room at us, nodding and thumbs-upping at us.

  ‘Didn’t even offer to get us a drink,’ said Neil. I started to inhale the ciggie. What the hell.

  ‘So how’s the writing going?’ I dared to venture.

  ‘I’ve had to start again from the beginning,’ said Neil.

  ‘Oh, shit.’

  ‘You were right, it was all bollocks, so I chucked it all away.’ Oh, God.

  ‘Oh, that’s not quite fair, I didn’t say it was all bollocks. I think there was an awful lot of really good stuff in there. It just maybe needed a little bit of reworking,’ I squirmed.

  ‘Too late now, I’ve binned it all and started again,’ said Neil. ‘I want to write something about the difference between men and women, more like a sort of self-help thing.’ Oh, no. RFA. Double RFA. Sound the submerge hooter! Men in orange overalls slide down fireman poles! Neil helping people! Abandon ship!

  ‘Maybe you need a break from it, Neil,’ I said. ‘Think about something else for a month or so and then get back to it with a fresh brain?’

  ‘No,’ said Neil. ‘I couldn’t do that.’

  A woman from the gang at the bar came over to our table.

  ‘I’m sorry, but would you mind signing this for my daughter?’ she asked, putting a beer mat and a biro on the table.

  Neil obliged automatically, and while he was writing, she added, ‘Could you put, “Get to bed now or else …!”‘ The nearest thing Neil had to a catchphrase in EOW.

  He did, and handed the mat and pen back to her.

  ‘You can say you’ve been recognized now,’ she said, as if offering Neil charity, and returned to the group at the bar, who nodded and thumbs-upped us again.

  ‘I’ve got about five thousand words but I can’t work at home, the phone keeps ringing. Karen’s got patients coming in and out all day long and her teenage son is coming back from university next week. If I had the money, I’d get a room somewhere and just write.’

  Before Grace, I would have instantly offered him my own flat during the day. Now, not possible. We had more drinks and I smoked another cigarette.

  But I didn’t leave without telling him what I thought, however tactfully I may have put it.

  On the way back to Soho I made a note to ring Bill Burdett-Coutts about a possible Edinburgh booking for Neil. I felt sure that, if the gig was there, he’d rise to the occasion, he’d have to.

  All the phone conversations I had at work the next day seemed to be happening in a place other than my head. I could participate and function perfectly well, listening, responding, thinking even, but the old aeroplane was on automatic and air-traffic control had gone AWOL. Inside my head there was a dank, dead acoustic, like the ‘thunk’ a spoon makes on the side of a bowl of whipped cream. It was as if I was underwater and Guy Muffin was up there above the surface, gabbing on and on in some untranslatable patois. I made it through the day like this. And I made it over to Susan Planter’s in Chiswick, where I’d been invited for dinner à deux and a chinwag about the evils of Jeremy.

  ‘And how’s Liz?’ Susan asked.

  ‘Oh, she’s very well. Very well indeed.’

  ‘And Grace?’

  ‘She’s fine. Fine. Starts big school in September.’

  In fact I hadn’t seen Grace for six whole days. The longest time ever. She could have grown a shoe size or forgotten all about me by now for all I knew.

  ‘Liz picked the right man in you, Guy.’ Susan Planter ran her hand through her hair and refilled her wine glass. I took the pasta off and asked her
where the strainer was. I was meant to be talking to her while she cooked us supper, but it was turning out to be the other way round. She was looking considerably the worse for wear. Poor love.