The Right Man

by Nigel Planer

  After I’d eaten scrambled eggs with everything except the black pudding, and Stella had had a croissant which she filled with plum jam, she went to the ladies’ loo. Talking in a sort of invented code which included ‘overseas gentlemen’ for Arabs and Americans, and ‘newer girls’ for anyone under thirty-five, we seemed to have come to certain agreements over prices and practice: no phone-box advertisers, no fifteen-minute ‘tricks’, always a call to say when they’d arrived safely, and one when leaving, like a mini-cab driver’s passenger-on-board POB call. We would be dealing with independent women who had their own flats and mobile phones. If Stella was to be believed there was an astonishing amount of trade to be tapped. A working girl — new or otherwise — with a room and a maid could provide services to as many as fifteen clients a day or night. But that was an end of the market Stella was keen to leave behind, and I had no need to enter. We would have girls who preferred to work only once a week or so, but to spend several hours or even days on one job for fees which would make an established voice-over artist turn puce. Girls who could talk on a range of subjects, could be topical, could have an opinion. And the sex would be what Stella called a ‘further negotiation’. These would be girls who could sit and stand and walk right, and wear elegant clothes to impress and instil envy into a rich man’s business associates. Trophy girls. We were going into the escort business.

  I would retain certain Mullin and Ketts phone lines and apart from providing both clients and escorts from the exciting and ravenous world of showbiz, would place ads in hotel entertainment guides, the Herald Tribune, Harpers and Queen, The Lady, Marie Claire and also, bizarrely, in the Yellow Pages. Apart from this, my outlay would be minimal. I was amazed at some of the figures Stella mentioned, and, as I’ve said, although my mental arithmetic is slow and I didn’t have my calculator with me, even I could manage a few ball-park estimates of probable weekly income, and made a swift decision about how much of this business, if it thrived, it would be possible to accept on plastic and how much would have to remain cash. I’d have to do my own book-keeping though, I couldn’t imagine someone like Tania being able to square up to all this. I’m not so naive as to suggest that the necessity of providing for Grace, and for Liz and her lawyers, justified the ethics of my new career move, but this is life, not art. All of life is gratuitous; it is only in politics and art that we have to kid ourselves otherwise.

  Stella and I had decided to give each other a month’s trial period, and agreed a time and place for a second power breakfast in four weeks’ time — Marco’s in Shepherd Market. Sartorial matters were gone into, and we had both undertaken to change our image. Stella would get some maturer outfits befitting a woman of her age and stature. Clothes in which she could pass in the Soho club milieu: some suits, scarves, maybe a turban. In fact she would look remarkably like a casting director or agent. And I was to flash it up a bit, de-fogey myself. Use hair gel, maybe a blazer, maybe shiny ties. I poured myself some more coffee and rolled a fat one to celebrate the clinching.

  I took a Daily Mail from the rack where they were stacked in long wooden clasps like in a gentlemen’s club, and stretched my legs. On page sixteen there was a small piece with a photo, which was what set me off. Neil was dead. He’d bloody well gone and done it, the little shit. It wasn’t clear from the article how deliberate it had been. The photo was a rather silly and dated shot from, the first series of Every Other Weekend. Obviously all the Mail had on their files at such short notice. What had been a look of dopey innocence then, and had been cute and had probably got him the job in the first place, seemed, in the light of his behaviour of the last few months, to be more one of confused desperation: a deranged and deluded ingenue. Evidently he had drowned in his own vomit and as such was joining a hall of notoriety peopled by far raunchier folk than he: Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin. No light-ent sit-com players on that list. Except possibly Hancock. However, all people who possibly, just possibly, if they had remembered in their stupefied state to go to sleep lying on their sides in the foetal position instead of blanking out lying on their backs, might just have survived. When chucking up, passed out on pills and alcohol, the breathing passages sometimes clear themselves if the up-chuck goes over the pillow rather than in your face. On your back it just falls back down your throat and chokes you. A sad accident unless the savage cocktails taken were deliberate attempts to finish the cycle, end the pain. But we can never be dead-cert sure what the intentions may have been when the whole lot’s gone down, can we?

  I pictured Neil’s beard all tangled and sodden with the contents of his rebellious stomach, and wondered what colour it all would have been. This image of Neil as an ancient gargoyle with green sprouting out of his gob would, no doubt, play on my guilt for ever after. The back of my throat felt clarty from the eggs. The article was under one hundred words long — about the size of two postage stamps — and after mentioning that he had not managed to revive his career since EO W, ended with the sentence: ‘Neil James was unmarried and leaves behind no children.’ A teeny layer of sweat zipped up to the surface of my skin under my shirt. Stella came back from the loo.

  ‘Y’e alright, me duck?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I showed her the newspaper. ‘Except one of my clients has just snuffed it. He topped himself. Sort of all my fault.’

  I was what you’d call crying a bit now. By which I mean I had watery plates in my eyes and my throat felt restricted and gluey. But then something awful and for an Englishman completely embarrassing happened. It took over and it came from down below my stomach. Bloody Neil James had lobbed a pinless grenade into the recesses of my intestines where half-digested feelings lay fermenting. Its arrival involuntarily detonated the loudest noise I have ever made. A sort of ogre’s belch, or the rutting call of an overweight impala.

  When a baby is going to really bawl its head off, there is sometimes that ominous two-second silent hiatus of hypertension before the racket begins in earnest. In this tiny pausette, Stella said, ‘Oh right. Here we go then.’

  And then came a torrent of heavy weeping, right there in the Parkside Lounge. Most un-Hugh-Grant-like, most un-Cary-Grant-like, nothing at all to do with any self-effacing British movie stars called Grant. A blubbering splatter of honking and salivating and gasping. I felt like a foaming racehorse or Juliet Stevenson in Truly Madly Deeply. This couldn’t all be for Neil. The little dying bastard had hacked into my central system and was making all my programmes crash like the narcissistic virus he was. I was quaking all over now and out of control, as one by one Neil triggered all my nerve centres like a laughing clown with a big plastic master switch: the drowning man, Grace, Liz, Naomi Ketts all slammed into me like oncoming trains. My fear was that this would be never-ending, that once unleashed this state of affairs would reign forever: the real me at last.

  Stella did not try to comfort me, touch me or say anything. Just as well, she would have been thrown off in an instant. She knew when to leave well alone. I’d managed to wail, ‘I’m sorry about this’ a few times before the oleaginous man in the green suit arrived at our table with a concerned but irritated expression on his face. He took Stella’s elbow and was trying, with hotel decorum, to usher us away from the dining room and from the disturbance to his other customers.

  ‘Go fuck yourself, buster,’ said Stella to him. ‘We’re leaving anyway.’ And then, ‘I think it’s your milk that’s off, mister.’

  She half picked me up, still howling, and led me to the street exit. On my way I managed to peel off some dollar bills and shove them in the fist of the bottle-green man, who was now holding the door open for us to leave as soon as possible. I could have given him hundreds of dollars for all I know. Outside, the air and the traffic slowed me up a tad, but there was still a yeasty ball of pent-up dough in me, waiting to rise.

  ‘I’m sorry about this,’ I sobbed. ‘It’s my father. He died last month and I hadn’t really come to grips with…’ but then I was off again.

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bsp; ‘Did you love him specially?’ Stella asked, leading me to a pedestrian traffic-light crossing.

  ‘No, hardly at all,’ I said, ‘that’s the point. Hardly ever …’ I was bent double now and tottered with Stella across the road and unto Hyde Park, where she took us to a bench. She was not being tender or using any expressions of care, merely getting on with her job. She sat beside me for a minute or two while I retched like a cat vomiting grass. I was thankful she didn’t pat my back or touch me in any way.

  As a chap there are two things you learn by the age of five. The first is that if there is a war — whether your side’s fault or the other’s — you can be forced to go and have your skull shot at. And the second is that to blub where other people can see you is suicide. Your conkers will be stolen, your business sequestered, your girlfriend gang-raped. A discarded page from yesterday’s Daily Mirror flapped at me mockingly from the path: ‘Eastenders star shows his soft side’ below a picture of a tough guy holding a baby. Alright for him, he’s the one who head-butts people for fun, he can afford to do a bit of designer-infant publicity. If you’re male, it’s OK to cry so long as you do it nobly like Ralph Fiennes or Daniel Day-Lewis.

  ‘Are yer done, mate?’ said Stella matter-of-factly.

  ‘Just about, I think so,’ I snivelled, and wiped my nose on my sleeve. I apologized again. ‘I didn’t know there was anything there,’ I said. ‘I mean, about my dad.’

  ‘Don’t worry. Happens every day. I seem to have this effect on men. They can’t do it in front of their wives, can they?’

  ‘You mean guys pay you just to sit with them while they have a bucket?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. All the time. Half of those women don’t know what they put their fellers through.’

  ‘Do you charge a normal rate for that, or is it extra?’ I snorted a laugh.

  ‘Well, how many of those dollars yer got left, me darling? You bin shedding them like they were autumn leaves.

  I took out the wad and gave her half without counting it properly.

  ‘That’ll do for starters,’ she said, and got up. ‘I’ll see you around, Big Jim.’

  I thanked her profusely, but this seemed to make her cross.

  ‘And don’t start going all gooey on me, mate. None of this tart-with-a-heart shit, OK? Because I definitely have not got one of them when it comes to fellers, right?’

  ‘Whatever you say,’ I said. She walked off stuffing dollars into her handbag.

  There were still fallen trees in the park from July’s storm. They’d been moved out of the road and some had been chopped into neat piles, but one or two were still awaiting the tidy-up, their mangled roots dry now in the summer sunlight. I sat, dazed and deflated, thinking back over the events since my father’s death. Wondering whether I had ever actually seen a drowning man in Bishop’s Park, or whether I was psychic and what I’d seen was in fact a premonition of Neil James drowning in his own vomit. If so, maybe I could start doing tarot readings from Meard Street as well. That should bring in a few bob.

  What had Neil been trying to tell me? Like me, he had been out of his depth, lost. We had both been drowning long before these events. Frustrating that he was unreachable now, unknowable. And why was I alive and he was not? Just because I’d fallen asleep on my stomach and not my back? I found myself resenting him for not having finished his bloody novel. Not just because of possible posthumous royalties — which thought did occur to me, I admit, however shamefully — but more because he no longer needed me in any way. We were separate now. I was alive and he was dead, the creep. I breathed in deeply. My sinuses were beginning to clear. I would get in touch with his Karen, of course, and do all the right things. Poor Neil. I had another, minor flurry of tears for him before leaving the bench.

  When I got back to Meard Street, Kemble had tidied up the office and put fresh flowers everywhere, making it all homey, the angel. There was a note: ‘Bye, gorgeous. See you at BAFTA.’ I wrote her a funny card and put it in my out-tray.

  And that’s it really. Sorry to carry on for so long, but sometimes just being able to talk things through, or even write them down is meant to help, isn’t it? Just the act of admitting them. I think I know that now. You can never prepare for every eventuality, you can’t spend your life trying to avoid Peter Pain; it hurts too much.

  Knowing, as opposed to feeling or believing, is a reflective thing. There is no combustion in it. The moment something is known it loses its motility. As if the process of gaining knowledge were a dampener. In that instant when instinct becomes describable, accountable, it is frozen as knowledge forever. Nobody really knows what they’re doing, or why.

  We busy ourselves in everyday talk and tasks, tinkering with our histories to assign motives — base or exalted — to our or others’ actions. But these are no more than so many household gods, mini-deities on the shelves of our security. Beneath even our collective unconscious, if such a thing exists, is where our real motors charge. We are all just sperm, the forces working on our survival or destruction outside even our subliminal cognizance.

  I’d like to be able to say how Liz is enjoying her new life, how she has adapted, but I can’t because I don’t know. We dared not speak to each other apart from at the counsellor’s, which went on for a couple more sessions before petering out with no conclusions other than that Grace should be with me every other weekend, the accepted norm. I was grateful for that at least.

  Liz carried on denying that she was seeing Bob Henderson in any kind of serious way, even swore affidavits to that effect. Must have been on the advice of Ralph Tropier-Potts, because Henderson Giggs could sting me for more cash if she was not cohabiting with anyone, particularly one of the partners in their firm. That wouldn’t have looked so good in court, would it? If it had ever come to that, which thankfully so far it hasn’t. No. In fact the only person I know who’s been anywhere near a court this autumn is my brother, Tony, who got a small fine for hacking down the main overhanging branch of the elm tree in my front drive in Fulham at 6.00 a.m. on the morning of 18 September. The eleven-foot branch fell, rather satisfyingly for me, on to Bob’s cherished BH 123 Porsche below, denting the roof, smashing the windscreen and — deep joy — cutting a large gash in the plush white-leather driver’s seat. Our Bob paid for all the damage himself rather than press charges, which would have meant owning up to staying the night there. And Tony was only done for borrowing council equipment: chainsaw, belaying pins and parrot-beak pruner. He used his own rope. I paid his fine. In cash, of course. Everything seems to be cash nowadays and I like it like that. There’s nothing like having a wedge in your pocket at all times.

  I smoke little Café Crème cigars now, instead of roll-ups, which I light with a chunky lighter with my initials on it in gold plate. And I have leathery tassels on my slip-on shoes. I don’t wear ties at all any more, leaving my shirts undone a few buttons to show off the silver-inlaid shark’s tooth dangling there. I suppose I look like a ponce now, but there’s nothing like a little shark’s tooth to stop people saying to you, ‘Cheer up, mate, might never happen.’ I had to buy an entirely new wardrobe in any case, because of the weight gain.

  I sometimes get a beer and a bag of chips and sit in the Soho churchyard with the Green Man gargoyles. Sometimes I stay there all afternoon just for the hell of it and get drunk. It’s nice to do the wrong thing.

  I’ll be out of Meard Street soon enough. I’ve found a two-bedroom residential over in Berwick Street above the fruit market, and Darius, the landlord from the betting shop, says I should be able to move in there in the new year. It’s all favours. I bought the tickets for Tenerife today. Yeah, tacky I know, but I feel like a bit of the old slip-slop—slap tanning, and it’ll make Stella happy. Liz has said she doesn’t mind me taking Grace for a whole week at half-term. Malcolm Viner advised me to get that un writing. He’s right, I know, but I don’t want to inflame the situation, it’s nearly almost just about OK. Grace will be grown up anyway by the time the lawyers have finished dipp
ing their fingers into our arrangements.

  ‘Daddy? My noise has stopped.’

  ‘What noise?’

  ‘My big noise. My shouting noise. Hey, I just realized, it’s gone.’ Grace and I were sitting in what used to be Tania’s spot on the old Muffin and Ketts sofa, having finished a supper of Batman spaghetti and fish fingers.

  ‘When did it go?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. It was very angry.

  ‘A very angry shouting noise?’

  ‘Yes, like monsters. And drums.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I know what you mean.

  ‘Did your shouting stop, Daddy?’

  ‘Yes, it did, I think.’

  ‘Where did you put it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think it must have just got bored and went away.

  ‘Is it coming back?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I hope not.’

  ‘Why?’

  She was tugging my ear lobe hard now with one hand, and sucking her thumb with the other.

  ‘I’m not going to start all that “why” stuff, Grace. It’s way past your bedtime; you should’ve been asleep ages ago.

  ‘If it comes back, I’m going to bite it hard on its bum so it cries.’

  ‘Good idea.’

  ‘I’m going to kill it.’

  ‘You do that.’

  We sat for a moment in silence. The strip-joint tape loop started up again below.

  ‘Daddy?’ She was a little bit sleepy now and ready for bed. But what the hell, we could crash on the sofa.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Why are we all alive?’

  I suspected Grace’s new teacher at big school was a born-again. Grace had been coming back with a lot of ‘Baby Jesus’ stuff since the end of the summer.

  ‘Erm. How do you mean? Do you mean like Baby Jesus, and because God loves us and that sort of thing?’