by Nigel Planer
‘You’re so dependable, Guy. I still can’t get used to you smoking, though. It doesn’t look right somehow.’
Her complexion was in revolt at the stress of the last fortnight and she had unsuccessfully tried to plaster over the bumps with a thick base. A translucent pre-foundation would have done the trick more effectively but it would have been wrong for me to mention it. She was wearing an old sweatshirt and cardigan —comfort clothes — the sort of stuff you pad around the house in after getting over ‘flu, or when your husband has just gone off with another woman.
Polly came to the kitchen door in her Paddington Bear pyjamas.
‘He’s pushing my bed, Mummy, and I can’t go to sleep.’
‘Tell him to stop,’ said Susan, and then shouted up the stairs, ‘Dave! Stop pushing Polly’s bed.’
‘I didn’t. She left my computer things on the floor.’
I poured a glass of water and gave it to Polly. Susan gave her a peck and she went back upstairs.
‘I have always thought of you and Liz as the perfect couple,’ said Susan, getting in my way as I stirred in the pesto sauce from a jar.
‘Here. Why don’t you put all this on the table?’ I loaded her up with the salad bowl and things. I had to get her out of her kitchen, or this meal would never arrive. I did manage to get her sat down, though, and bringing the pasta in, we started to eat at last.
‘So what’s she like, this Arabella?’ It didn’t look as though Susan was actually going to eat much tonight. She poured herself another glass of wine. Luckily, I’d brought a couple of bottles. Since I was eating, I could measure my reply through mouthfuls.
‘She’s sort of ordinary,’ I said. ‘Not too bright — but I see what you mean, she seems to have got her hooks in.’ I had to be careful neither to build up the other woman too much nor talk her down unrealistically. Susan told me another story of some misdeed of Jeremy’s. How he’d once forgotten her birthday, or one of the kids’. Then another: the time he’d left her stranded at a BBC do and taken the taxi home without her.
It was as if she was sorting back through her diary of memories, setting in cement all the ones in which Jeremy had been a bastard so that she could now justify to herself all her feelings of loathing towards him. It wasn’t making her any happier, though, and her words were beginning to run into one another. I opened a third bottle, for myself more than for her. She was beginning to berate all things male. I didn’t like to see her turning into another ‘what’s wrong with men’ bore, so I tried to steer us back to the here and now.
‘He doesn’t care about the kids., how could he, so why should he get to see them now?’ she slurred.
‘Do they ask for him?’ I said, and lit a Dunhill. The machine in the pub next door where I’d gone for a quick drink so as not to be too early had run out of Silk Cut.
‘Dave does but he’ll have to grow out of it,’ she said.
I found it hard to imagine the Susan I knew sneaking around in the night to squeeze Superglue into .the locks of Jeremy’s car, as Arabella had told me she had.
‘Arabella Planter.’ With disgust, Susan rolled the name around her tongue with the wine, which was acrid and cheap. ‘Mrs Arabella Planter.’
‘They’re not intending to get married, I don’t think,’ I said.
‘Ha!’ she said. ‘Not and have clothes to stand in.’
‘You are being careful who you talk to, though? I mean, in the press, aren’t you?’ I said, clearing away the plates. She’d hardly touched her food.
‘Why should I be?’ Susan followed me back into the kitchen, where she took an opened family-sized bar of chocolate out of the cupboard. She offered me some but I was stuck into the wine now.
‘You can’t trust any of them, you know that. Did they offer to pay you for that interview you did the week before last? Because once they’ve paid, they can say what they like, you know.’
‘How much do you think it’s worth?’ she asked, and laughed.
Publicity and the press isn’t really my bag. I’m not that good at it and I find it tacky, but I said, ‘Two or three thousand at this stage, possibly a couple more if you can hung in a sexual perversion or two.’ We both laughed.
‘I suppose I could invent something, but the trouble with Jeremy was, he was useless in bed, after the first two months, that is,’ she said, gobbling the chocolate.
It was important for her, at this stage, to have him locked in the drawer marked ‘Cad’, and he’d been a cad, no doubt about that. She should have known, though. Didn’t her parents tell her? ‘Have fun with the cads, but marry a dad.’
‘I just think you should try and keep it under control, that’s all,’ I said. ‘For everyone’s sake. For Dave and Polly’s sake.’
‘What if I did an interview for money? You’d take ten per cent of that, would you?’
‘Look, I’m not Max Clifford. This isn’t my scene. I don’t want either of you to get hurt any more than is inevitable. It’s difficult for me, I like you both.’
This was a mistake. Susan was not in the mood for a balanced appraisal of the trickiness of my position.
‘Mrs Arabella Planter,’ she said again, with painful relish. ‘Dave and Polly Planter. Every fucking thing Planter. I should have given them Christian names like “Beloved First Wife”, or “Betrayal”. That would have given the fucking bitch problems at cocktail parties. Here are my stepchildren, Betrayal Planter and Beloved First Wife Planter. Ha!’
Her laugh was gluey and set her off coughing because of the chocolate. She caught herself in the mirror and sat up straight, tucking in her waist and pushing out her tits.
‘I suppose she’s got a perfect figure?’ she sneered. 1 decided to remain silent.
‘He’s not even a good game-show host, he’s just a Catch-phrase Charlie.’
‘It’s an unfair business. You don’t necessarily need talent to get to the top.’
‘You do need to be a complete bastard, though, and Jeremy fits that bill.’
We were sitting on the sofa together now. It was quite warm and relaxed and, as usual with Susan, not sexually charged. My leg could be alongside hers, for instance, without either of us particularly being aware of it, without any subtle flicks of eye contact. To try and join in with her mood a little, I told her about the list of names I’d seen on the wall of the casting director a couple of months before, in which Jeremy’s name had appeared in heavy print. When I’d asked what the heavy print meant, I was told it meant ‘book ‘em even if they’re crap’. There are a select few artists who get all the offers because, in theory, they put bums on seats. Everyone in the business knows that they’re crap but everyone also knows it’s a business. This is why you see people like Mick Jagger trying to act in films or tennis players making pop records. Or, indeed, why someone like my Neil was hired to write a novel.
I thought Susan would be pleased to hear that Jeremy did not have the respect of his peers, but this was another mistake because, of course, it was a measure of his success and popularity and power.
‘I hope his new show plummets and he ends up having to do sports links for local radio,’ she said. ‘I know that would be bad for you, Guy, but can’t you afford to have one client’s career go down the toilet in a humiliating way? You could arrange that, couldn’t you, just for me?’
This wasn’t put seriously, and we laughed. She leaned her head on my shoulder, fanning the smoke out of the way. Dave came in. I don’t know how long he’d been standing at the door.
‘Is Guy staying the night, Mum?’ he asked.
‘No, of course not, Dave, go back to bed,’ she said, and instinctively pulled away from me. ‘He’s got his own family to go to.
Actually I would have liked to have stayed the night. It was warm. I could have curled up on the sofa or put cushions on the floor. Anything rather than go back to the office, where the flashing light from the strip-joint on the other side of the street wheeled across my ceiling every other second and where the noise o
f the street crept into your dreams.
Thoughts of that and of Liz, and then of the gap where Grace should be, escaped into my body, making me cold. Susan seemed to mistake this for some kind of sexual frisson, and she shivered and got up to close the door. She wouldn’t risk an intimate chat with me if she thought I might respond physically to her.
I got up and made leaving noises. Dave obeyed his mum and went back upstairs to bed, though no doubt not to sleep until he had heard me leaving. Quite right. Seeing me off the premises at ten years old. Territorial. Proprietorial.
I called for a cab and said Fulham, changing the destination to Soho only when I was in it and Susan had closed her front door behind me. I was drunk again. The mini-cab driver was completely silent. His car radio calling out jobs was the only noise between us, and outside the roads were almost empty. It must have been quite late. My head lolled against the seatbelt strap.
Once, as a godfatherly thing, I’d taken Dave to the Natural History Museum to see the moving dinosaur models. Grace must have been a baby at the time because it had just been me and Dave one Sunday afternoon. Like most children under eight, he knew more about dinosaurs than any adult does.
Dinosaurs is standard nursery school project fare. After the dinosaurs, we got lost trying to find the exit and an ice-cream, and found ourselves wandering through the primate room with models of gibbons, chimpanzees and gorillas from floor to ceiling. There was one model which fascinated Dave. it is only small, about a foot in diameter. It is of a group of orang-utans sitting around a rock.
The king orang-utan has a few of his wives sitting around him but one of them, one of his wives, is just the other side of the rock. He’s looking at her, she’s looking back at him over the top of the rock. Unbeknown to the king, and hidden behind the rock, is a young male orang-utan, shagging the wife as she smiles at her husband. The little label by the side of the glass case containing this model explains that it is in the interests, genetically speaking, of the female to have as husband and protector the biggest, strongest old orang-utan, the king. He will fend off predators whilst she rears her young, his mortgage was paid off long ago. So he’s the best bet as a permanent mate, he’s the king, he’s big daddy. But it is also in her interests, genetically speaking, to have sex with younger, more genetically varied males. This of course must be kept secret from the king, lest he kill her adulterous offspring. It is in the genetic interests of the male orang-utans to sleep with as many of the females as is possible. if not by being king, then through affairs behind rocks.
I had to pretend to Dave that the shagging orang-utans were from another family down the way, just visiting from the land beyond the rock, so there I was, perpetuating the myth of the family with my godson.
Funny things, genes. I wonder if our behaviour is really dictated to us genetically, as it is currently fashionable to think. As the mini-cab bumped up over the Hogarth flyover, I imagined what it would be like to be a digitally reincarnated gene.
‘Hmmmmmm. Which gender is the body I’ve found myself in this time? What’s my ammunition? What balls, what racquets?’
‘Well, you’ve landed in a female this time, so you’ve got a limited number of food-rich, high-investment eggs which, if fertilized, are going to take two years of your life, so it’s quite labour-intensive. So you’ve got to find a good specimen worth mating with who’s going to stick around and help bring up the kids, and fight off enemies. Oh, and can he have a nice bum, please?’
Apart from the bum, Susan was right, Liz had picked the right man in me. A right mug. The thought made me angry. So what about my genes? The ones who found themselves in my male body, poor bastards.
‘Well, you’ve got sixty million chances a day to replicate yourself, so go for quantity of women but make sure they’re fertile. Thin waist and wide hips would probably be a good indicator. Oh, but there’s one problem I forgot to tell you. There are seven billion other guys around like you, who want to have access to the limited supply of eggs, and they are all going to try and stop you replicating. Same as you’re going to try and stop them. So there may well be a few wars. Also, even if you do manage to get a woman pregnant, if you don’t hang around to help her bring the kid up, these other guys may move in on her and kill your kid. All part of stopping you replicating. More room for them and their issue. So your best bet is probably to find a good one as a wife and then shag around in secret.’
Either way it seems we are all genetically programmed for infidelity. Better not let Liz know, she’d think that lets her off the hook.
Half an hour later I was lying on my back on the camp bed in Meard Street, staring at the ceiling, when the buzzer went.
‘Hi, gorgeous. It’s Kemble Stenner.’
I buzzed her up. In the minute or so it took her to climb the stairs, I put my trousers back on and tidied up a bit. Closing the curtains on the now rather sordid-looking kitchenette which contained my camp bed.
‘Hello,’ I said as she breezed past me into the main office area, carrying an already opened bottle of red wine. ‘Did you ring earlier?’ I asked.
‘No. Saw your light on. Thought I’d ring the bell. See if you fancied a drink.’
She went to the window and peered out through the blinds. The buzzer rang again.
‘Oh my God! He saw me coming in here. Don’t answer that,’ she squealed. ‘Pleeeeeeease.’
It buzzed again, more insistently. She sat down on the floor by the window and took a slurp from the wine bottle. She offered it to me. The buzzer went again.
‘Ignore it. He’ll go away in a minute.’ She giggled. ‘Nice wine, though — it cost him sixty quid.’
I took the bottle and drank from it. It was bloody good.
‘Well, it’s nice of you to pop round on the off chance. I’m Guy Mullin. Er, how do you do. Lucky I happened to be working late.’ The buzzer went again, this time more insistently. ‘Is everything alright?’
‘Oh, yeeaah,’ she said, stretching her vowels like a teenager. ‘He’ll give up in a minute. He’ll probably call me in the morning, or try to give me something again.’ She took a mobile phone out of her bag. ‘He gave me this last week. Good, eh?’ she said, while dialling. And then, into the phone, ‘Look, fuck off, OK? Leave me alone.’ She switched the phone off and popped it back in the bag and, laughing, took the wine bottle back off me.
‘Who is he?’ I asked.
‘Oh, just some bloke. Record producer. Took me to Silverstone last week. I met these really interesting guys, they let me drive one of the cars. I smashed up a whole fence and a hot-dog stall. It was fun.’
She got out an empty packet of ten Silk Cut and chucked it on the table. I offered her one of my Dunhills. We lit up. I didn’t know what to say. She noticed the Z-cards of model boys plastered on the corkboard and went over to it.
‘Pfooaarr!’ she said. ‘Oh yes, we like him! Gorgeous. Look at those thighs!’ Then she noticed a recent Walker-print of Doug Handom on Joan’s desk. ‘Oooh. Doug Handom, I’m in love with him. I’d like to tie him to a seatless chair and use him as a gear stick.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘he seems to have that effect on women.’
She picked up the photo and put it in her bag.
‘Can I keep this to have a wank to later?’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said, ‘we’ve got hundreds.’
From the street below, a man’s voice was shouting her name up at us.
‘Kemble!?’
‘Don’t answer,’ she said, and then, ‘He wants me to go away with him next weekend, but I’m not sure I want to go to a hotel in Monterey with him.’
‘Is he your boyfriend?’ I asked, and she looked at me as if I was about seventy years old and needed putting in an institution.
‘So,’ she said, sizing me up, ‘you look like you need a damn good shagging.’ And she walked towards the kitchenette and pulled back the curtain. ‘Working late, were you? Kicked out by the wife and sleeping in the office, more like.’ And she laughed li
ke a ten-year-old. There seemed to be many extra decades between us.
I smiled along with her, trying to hide my embarrassment.
‘Well, it’s difficult sometimes to…’ I mumbled, wondering whether her observation about my needing sex had been a suggestion, or merely a statement of fact. It’s true, I must have looked as if I needed a damn good shagging, but I wasn’t sure whether I needed one with her. If that was indeed what she had in mind.
She went back to the window and peeped out. She was wearing tight black leggings over her skinny legs, a skimpy T-shirt and a man’s leather jacket, far too big for her. Another gift, no doubt.
‘Good, he’s gone. I’m starving, do you want to take me out for a meal?’
I reflected to myself for a moment. Yes, I did want to take her out for a meal. That would be fun. To get out of the office. I put on my jacket. I could be one of those tom cats who dines in several different households every night.
Out in the street, she linked her arm in mine, as if we were old friends, and rested her long auburn hair on my shoulder. I stood up straighter. Feeling uncomfortable with her uncalled-for familiarity and yet secretly enjoying the warmth.
‘By the way, I don’t do sex,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Not with people I like.’
‘And you like me?’ I asked, trying not to sound disappointed, which I suppose I wasn’t really.
‘Oh, yeah. Anyway, you’re old enough to be my father.’ And she snuggled up closer. ‘Not that that’s made any difference in the past.
I steered us past the Soho House and the Groucho and anywhere where biz-folk might be. I didn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea, or the right idea come to that. I didn’t want anyone to have any ideas. I just wanted to be with company. There was a frisson of excitement too, I suppose.
We went to a little-used Lebanese, off Broadwick Street, which was just as well, because Kemble Stenner’s sense of fun extended to throwing bread rolls at me and saying lewd things in a very loud voice.
‘That was so good, when you went down on me yesterday morning, You’ve got an amazingly long tongue,’ she shouted, as the waiter brought us our starters. Men at other tables goggled at us. Throughout the meal, we were on the edge of being asked to leave as Kemble pushed harder and harder to embarrass me out of my skin.