by Mike Hodges
‘As you know, behind every great man stands a great lady. Last night, while you were hard at work, I asked Alice Honey to be that great lady. My First Lady!’
Alice dips her head like a swan.
Herman, imagining himself as the most powerful man on earth, tiptoes further to the brink of madness. He needs only an enthusiastic mob to carry him deeper and deeper into delusion.
They always oblige.
‘And she agreed.’
Mark can vaguely hear the students cheering. His eyes glaze over as the scene before him seems to slow down and almost stop. It’s all a dream. Everybody is on their feet except Mark himself, who seems paralysed by the news. Temple beams lovey-dovey looks at Alice and wonders if the way to her bed has just been made any easier.
It hasn’t.
Whilst looking as radiant as a bride, she leans across behind him and whispers to Randy: ‘It’s cold showers for him until the divorce comes through.’ The whisper is loud enough for Herman to hear. He sinks back, dejected, into his chair.
As the tumult subsides, Mark slowly rises to his feet. He speaks quietly, like Temple. And like Temple, he immediately commands their hushed attention. Even the words are Temple’s.
‘Everything I’m about to do to you, Herman, I am really doing for you. Out of love. Love of freedom. Love of democracy. Love of the individual.’ He pauses to sip a glass of water. ‘Love of an individual like Wally Straw.’
All applaud, thinking Mark is simply expressing his well-intentioned zeal for the course. Temple, whilst suspicious of Mark’s motives, is nevertheless transfixed as he continues: ‘Wally Straw is not sleeping. He’s dead. Now, Herman, you tell us the truth.’
Temple, Alice and Randy go white as milk. Their mouths open but no words emerge as Mark continues to carefully extract his pound of flesh.
‘All you have to do, Herman, is tell us the truth. But you know what, everybody? He won’t. He’ll lie.’
Temple’s heard enough. He leaps to his feet, yelling angrily: ‘Are you prepared to repeat that in a court of law?’
‘We know that Wally died on the cross, Herman. But tell us how Claudio Cross died?’
Now Alice jumps up, screaming at Mark: ‘Claudio’s not dead! He’s back in Italy. Isn’t that right, Herman?’
Her fiancé is so shaken, he feels for his chair and plops into it. Since announcing his intention to run for the highest office in the world, Herman is not handling his first international incident with much aplomb.
His prospective First Lady, however, acts like she’s already in the job. ‘Claudio Cross was a pimp. He wasn’t even married to Emily. He was her lover. A gigolo. A parasite.’
‘Claudio Cross is dead, Alice.’
Mark, like Alice, has slipped comfortably into a new role, that of Prosecuting Counsel. ‘I might draw your attention to the fact that his mistress, Emily Cross, blew her brains out because she was told by a certain person that he, Claudio, had left her. Having interviewed witnesses, I can now reveal the name of that certain person.’ He points at the disconsolate figure sitting at the head of the table. ‘It is Dr Herman P. Temple.’
Nobody moves.
Everybody seems to have stopped breathing, lest they should miss any of these soap-operatic revelations. Mark kicks his chair away and makes for the swing-doors. There, he pauses to point at Alice.
‘Alice, you are engaged to a murderer!’
With that he’s gone.
The room is as silent as a mass grave and just about as fetid. Only eyes dare move. Alice’s frightened ones swivel to Temple’s, who shifts his uneasily to Randy’s, then to Biff’s and on to Rip’s.
Alice starts to speak, but Herman snaps at her: ‘Not now, Alice.’
He stands up and takes his instructors to a corner, where they go into a huddle. It could be time-out during a football game. Except that the game’s over. Mark’s blown the whistle on them.
There’s only injury time left.
thirty-nine
Mark, striding purposefully towards Springer’s office, stops when he hears his name called. He turns in a daze to see Harvey manning the reception desk.
‘Not now, Harvey.’
‘It’s important. A message from a Mr Snazell.’
‘That little shit!’ Mark turns an angry red. ‘Where is that fucking bastard?’
‘Room 11. He says go on up.’
‘Does he, now.’
Mark takes the stairs three at a time.
* * *
A Do Not Disturb sign dangles from the door handle of Room 11. Mark pauses to recover his breath before knocking.
‘Snazell?’
There’s no answer.
He knocks louder.
‘Snazell, are you in there?’
Silence.
He tries the door and it opens. He enters cautiously, closing the door quietly behind him. The curtains are drawn so it takes him a moment to adjust to the darkness. A crack of light comes from under the bathroom door.
‘Snazell? Are you in there?’
‘Out in a jiffy, Mr Miles. Sorry about this, but nature must take its course.’
‘If it’s a laxative you need, I’m your man.’
‘Even seeing you won’t help. I’ve eaten nothing but sandwiches these past few days.’
Mark eases back the curtains till light pours into the room. The dressing table and desk are stacked with recording equipment. It’s sophisticated state-of-the-art stuff. There are radio receivers, back-up recorders, spare miniature microphones, a tangle of leads with each source identified on gaffer tape. Several pairs of headphones lie on the back of the chair facing the desk.
‘Shit!’
Mark feels like he’s sleepwalking. He sees a stack of used tapes, neatly numbered and packaged, lying on the bed. Beside them is Snazell’s handgun with the silencer fitted. Mark’s hand hovers above it, fearful of touching it, yet, as the anger swells up inside him, sorely tempted to pick it up and use it.
‘You bastard! You set me up, didn’t you?’
‘Afraid so,’ says Snazell, breezily.
‘Was Reg in on it?’
‘Of course not. Don’t be so paranoid, Mark.’
‘Paranoid? Even Sigmund Freud would be paranoid if he’d been through what I’ve been through, you arsehole.’
‘Language, Mark. Remember what I said about coarse language?’
‘Fuck you!’
Mark’s hand touches the gun, then pulls back sharply, as if scalded.
‘What about Reg’s brother-in-law? He was certainly in on it. Presumably you paid that fucking gorilla to finger me?’
‘Absolutely correct.’
Mark is almost crying as he trawls through the events that have brought him to this room. He peers at the gun through welling tears, hardly believing that he’s ever thought of using it. Choking on his own embarrassing contribution to this farce, he still can’t comprehend its raison d’être.
‘Why me?’
‘Because you, Mark Miles, have the personality of a windsock.’
‘Thank you.’
‘And someone had to do it.’
‘Do what?’
‘Expose Herman and his monstrous Institute.’ Snazell chuckles: ‘It certainly wasn’t going to be me. If you check that ridiculous name tag around your neck, you’ll see there’s a microphone stuck to the chain.’
Mark does, and there it is, just the size of a full-stop.
‘It amused me, using your tag to tag you.’
‘You shit!’
‘Don’t be like that, Mark. Put it down to experience. After all, your name will be in all the newspapers. You’ll be the man who uncovered two deaths, possibly murders, while attending, of all things, a self-improvement course. The media will love it. You’ll be famous, which is what you’ve always wanted. The telly talk-shows will be clamouring for you.’
Mark reels. He should have known the raison d’être was money. It usually is.
‘My God, you’ll sell the
story. You’ll clean up.’
‘Too right, I will.’
‘What’s in for me?
‘A nice onyx and marble mantel clock with a battery-operated pendulum.’
Snazell is laughing so much that Mark doesn’t hear the first knock. The second he does hear – and Biff’s voice coming from the corridor: ‘Mr Snazell?’ Mark freezes, grabs the package of tapes, darts into the bathroom, slams and locks the door.
Squatting on the lavatory seat is Snazell, content as a broody hen. He lets out a furious squawk when he sees Mark. ‘You dirty pervert!’
Mark claps his hand over the man’s mouth, whispering in his ear: ‘Shut the fuck up for Christ’s sake. Biff and the others are out there.’
They hear Biff knock again.
‘Mr Snazell? Is Mark Miles in there with you? The hall porter says he is, Mr Snazell.’
Biff tries the door and it opens. Snazell and Mark listen as the instructors case the room uttering expletives.
‘Herman had better see this,’ says Randy.
‘I’ll go get him,’ says Rip.
The door on to the corridor opens and closes.
‘Shit, Biff, see that .32 on the bed?’
Sounds of the gun being cracked open and the cylinder spun percolate into the bathroom.
‘Loaded. What shit is this guy Snazell into?’
‘There are no goddamn tapes here, Biff. He must have them with him,’ says Randy.
Somebody tries the bathroom door. It won’t open.
‘Okay, come out, Mr Snazell.’
Silence.
Then the pummelling begins.
The door groans and creaks but doesn’t succumb. Snazell is beside himself with indignation, yelling with unexpected force: ‘Is there no such thing as privacy any more?’
Mark throws open the frosted window by the bathtub: ‘Let’s go.’
Although alarmed, Snazell doesn’t budge: ‘I haven’t finished yet. You know you should never force it.’
The ruckus suddenly ceases and an eerie calm follows. They both look at the door.
Whoosh!
Whoosh!
Whoosh!
Three small holes appear around the lock. Water spurts from the cistern as Snazell slumps forward.
Mark gasps: ‘Oh shit!’ which seems somewhat inappropriate. He watches, horrified, as Snazell topples from the toilet. The triple puncturing of his torso is now clearly visible.
Biff uses his shoulder to sever the door from the lock, but Snazell’s stocky body prevents the door from opening fully. Biff’s face, purple with rage, glares at Mark through the gap as he climbs out of the window on to a narrow ledge and sidles away.
* * *
Celia Cox is brushing her blind husband’s hair. She does it every night before dinner. Reflected in the dressing-table mirror, she’s startled to see a man appear behind her. At first she thinks he’s actually in the room, and only when she turns does she realise that he’s right outside the window.
Mark, clutching the tapes, is balanced precariously on the sill. Years ago, he’d paid a hypnotist to cure his vertigo. It hadn’t worked, although, curiously enough, he did stop smoking. With nothing to grip, Mark is literally petrified, barely able to tap the window pane and encourage Celia to open up. Sadly for him, Celia is a no-nonsense person when dealing with tradesman: polite but firm, she says, ‘Not today, thank you.’
And she closes the curtains.
* * *
Two chambermaids prepare a guest’s room for the night, drawing the curtains, folding away the coverlet, turning back the top sheet and placing a chocolate on the pillow.
Outside, Mark, clinging to the wall like a barnacle, finally reaches the darkened window. He manages to grip an adjacent downpipe. It creaks and a shower of rust breaks away as he slowly bends to stash the tapes on the ledge, before trying to lift the frame. It won’t budge.
The chambermaids stop chattering and listen.
‘What was that, Edina?’
Edina opens the curtains. Light from the room floods on to a blurred falling figure. The figure’s fingers clutch momentarily at the sill before they, too, slip away in the direction of the esplanade below.
‘Who was that?’ says Edina.
‘Don’t know. He was off like sodding Batman.’
‘You don’t think it was…?’ She pauses so they can say it together: ‘…the Phantom Fornicator?’
Both rush to the window and throw it open.
‘I saw him first.’
Looking down they can see the same figure clinging to the Personal Improvement Institute banner which is still stretched above the hotel entrance. They watch open-mouthed, like kids at the circus. It’s then that Edina notices the sound tapes resting on the sill, picks them up and examines them.
‘Probably his memoirs.’
* * *
It’s some time before Mark realises he’s dangling plum in the centre of the word ‘Personal’. Desperate to take the weight off his arms, he kicks his legs towards ‘Improvement’, in an attempt to piggyback the banner. He fails.
An unpleasant growl adds to his misfortune. Randy waits below, like an angry bulldog.
‘Come on, sweetheart. Come to baby.’
His tattooed arms are beckoning.
Mark again tries to propel himself up and over. This time the rope at one end parts company from the ring clamped in the wall. Gravity now takes charge: Mark swings, pirate-fashion, into Randy. The stunned instructor goes over like a skittle, rolling down on to the esplanade.
Touching down gracefully on the steps, Mark calculates that even with Randy still lying sprawled on the pavement, his escape route towards the town is cut off. He runs back into the hotel foyer, only to find Herman, Biff and Rip coming down the staircase. Veering away from them, he piles into the Resident’s Lounge.
Afternoon tea is being served so the lounge is full.
Every seat is taken.
Heads, shrivelled and lined like old apples, rest against every antimacassar in the room. These guests literally come out of the woodwork at teatime. Mark can see Temple and his instructors conferring in the foyer and realises that only a bold gesture will save him.
He moves to the centre of the lounge and screams: ‘Murder!’
There’s no reaction.
It’s as if they’re all hard of hearing and, indeed, most of them are. An agitated head waiter, new to the job and unaware that the lunatic in their midst is the hotel’s marketing director, hurries across, but not before Mark shouts again: ‘Wake up, for fuck’s sake!’
That does the trick.
The f-word still registers on the Richter scale with this generation. So he lets them have some more, at the top of his voice: ‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’
It’s like waking the dead.
Major Jellicoe’s monocle falls with a loud plop into his cup of tea. Harvey, now waiting on Madge Trafalgar, looks around at the commotion and inadvertently pours milk into her lap. She screams and jerks her mechanised wheelchair into reverse. It careers off at speed, sending tables flying and causing Freddie Mason, a retired judge, to suffer a heart attack. His face plummets into a plate of trifle and stays there. Jellicoe lets out a savage cry as the wheelchair careers over his desert boots, while the head waiter, now distracted from apprehending Mark, trips over Lucy Turret’s stick and collides with the cakes-and-dessert trolley. This vehicle now takes off at speed. It heads straight for the swing-doors just as a late arrival opens one, stands aside in astonishment and watches it sail out into the foyer.
The jellies and blancmanges ripple as the trolley rolls past Temple, Biff, Randy and Rip, all standing in the foyer. The quartet are as still as a display in a wax museum. A porter, unaware of the approaching puddings, opens the front door to welcome a guest. This accidental choreography is like that of a silent movie. The trolley passes neatly through the open door, and bounces down the steps on to the esplanade.
The trolley finally comes to a rest in front of a weather shel
ter. Inside sits a tramp with a white shovel-shaped beard. He lowers his tattered newspaper and can’t believe his eyes.
Nor can Ace, watching from his office.
He begins to shake, not just his hands but all over, when he sees the tramp stick a dirty finger into a towering gateau and lick it. Springer sinks his latest brandy, wondering if this heralds the onset of delirium tremens. ‘Steady on, old boy.’
If he retains any doubts, they’re blown away when Avril bursts into the office, screaming: ‘For Christ’s sake, get the police! Number 11’s been murdered.’
The tramp scoops a large piece of cake into his mouth and idly looks out to sea. Unnoticed by him, three liquorice-black Cadillacs with mirror windows, returning from London to collect ‘Dr Temple and Party’, glide on to the far end of the esplanade and proceed towards the Grand Atlantic Hotel.
forty
The atmosphere, after Herman and his platoon leave the Dining Room, is one of desolation. The students look stunned. Some hold their head in their hands; others contemplate the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean and think they can see, on the horizon, the tip of the torch of the Statue of Liberty.
It’s only a mirage and they know it.
Alice sits in a catatonic state, unchecked tears pouring down her carefully blushed cheeks, her dream of becoming the fourth Mrs Temple on hold while she considers her next move. Loreen and Marjorie watch her closely, trying to look concerned but unable to contain the delight bubbling in their eyes.
‘Alice ain’t in Wonderland no longer,’ whispers Loreen.
‘Shame. She’d have made such a lovely First Lady,’ whispers Marjorie.
Unfazed by recent revelations, Roger Buckle finishes off a third helping of trifle. Wiping his mouth with his napkin, he stands up, lovingly rubs his belly and guffaws: ‘Hey, everybody, I feel personally improved – and that’s the truth.’ His Falstaffian laugh shatters the dam of built-up resentment and recrimination.
‘Shut up, fatty.’
‘You haven’t fucking improved.’
‘Have any of us?’
‘Why did we come on this dumb course, anyway?’