Inconceivable (15 page)

The police were upon us almost before we knew it. We did not hear them coming because Sam was leaping about beating his hands between his legs and shouting, ‘Ahh! Ahh! Get a stick! Ahh! It’s going for my bollocks!’ I think that the squirrel must have seen the coppers first, actually, because by the time they arrived Sam’s trousers appeared to be empty (apart from him, of course). They were nonetheless still very much unhitched, which was all rather embarrassing. I was all right because I had only to shake my dress back down, but Sam got into an awful mess trying to pull his trousers up. I think that somehow he managed to get his foot through his belt loop and as the officers breasted the hill Sam was still bent double wrestling to free the whole thing up. He had his back to them and I regret to say that the sight that he must have presented to them in the torchlight could not have been pleasant. I should mention here that Sam’s Donald Duck pants were also round his knees so that there was a second full moon shining on Primrose Hill tonight. I think we were very lucky that they didn’t do us for indecency.

Anyway, as I say, had Sam not insanely attempted to give the police a false name I think they would have let us off there and then, but instead they took us in. I certainly think that Sam’s following up his false name debacle by warning them that he was an intimate of Downing Street made matters worse. I mean, you do not try and pull rank on the rozzers, particularly if you haven’t got your trousers on. I didn’t really mind getting run in, it sort of made me feel even more pagan and dangerous, like a witch or an outlaw, as if the forces of order had tried to constrain our tryst but had arrived too late! And anyway, I knew they’d let us off in the end. After all, it isn’t a crime to assume a pseudonym, is it? I don’t think it is, or what would they do about stage names? In the acting profession if you have the same name as somebody else, Equity actually make you change it, so it can’t be illegal, can it?

Well, anyway, we sat about a bit at the police station and after a cup of tea and one or two off-colour innuendos from the young constables they let us go. Sam got quite shirty about the jokes the coppers made, which I thought was stupid since they were no worse than the sort of rubbish he commissions every day. They even dropped us off back at our car, which I thought was nice of them.

Anyway, it’s all over now, for better or worse, and here I am, lying in bed. Sam’s already snoring, sleeping the sleep of the great and powerful lover, but I’m wide awake, clutching my crystals, humming Celtic hymns and praying to Gaia to deliver new life into my body. Let Mother Nature make me a mother too!

In my heart and my soul I truly believe she will.

Well, it’s now the evening following our Primrose Hill tryst and today has not gone well.

In fact, today has gone worse than I could have dreamt possible.

On the plus side Lucy is very happy about our success last night.

She seems to have convinced herself that the power of positive thinking has been the missing factor in us getting pregnant. She has therefore decided to believe absolutely and fundamentally that Primrose Hill will work its magic. When I got home this afternoon I found her sitting in front of the fire watching a Saturday afternoon film on Channel Four and looking wistful, sipping camomile tea and gently trying to will her eggs to envelop my sperm. It’s a strange thing, but you know she did sort of look pregnant, I can’t really say why, but sort of serene and womanly and, well, fertile. I know it’s silly to say that, and particularly silly to get our hopes up, but then perhaps it’s not.

Perhaps Lucy is right. Perhaps positive thinking is what we need.

Anyway, if there’s any balance of fair play in the world we’ll be pregnant; because the rest of my life is double buggered squared.

I have not mentioned my inner torment to Lucy, of course. When she asked me how things had gone today I said, ‘Fine.’ I did not feel that in her present state of self-induced mystical empowerment she would want to be told that her husband was an utter joke. I did not feel it fair to tell that sweet, trusting, potential nestbuilder that the career of her champion and protector now hangs by less than a single thread. That we are shortly to be paupers. I simply could not bring myself to tell her that the Prime Minister’s visit to
Livin’ Large
was the most right royal cock-up since Henry the Eighth discovered girls.

Therefore, Book, unable to seek support from my preoccupied wife, I am turning for solace to you. It happened like this.

Despite my late-night run-in with the law on the previous evening, I was up bright and early this morning.
Livin’ Large
goes out live at nine a.m. and I had promised to take my niece Kylie along, which meant going to the studio via Hackney to pick her up. Kylie is the daughter of my sister Emily and has apparently, of late, taken an interest in politics. My sister, anxious to encourage this new maturity in a girl who up until now has liked only ponies and Barbie, asked me to take her along. To add to the excitement, Grrrl Gang, a kind of post-post-Spice Girls group, are also appearing on the show and Emily says that Kylie worships the ground they walk on. Or, in fact, more accurately, given their ridiculous shoes, she worships the ground they walk seven inches above.

Kylie was something of a shock. I had last seen her about six months before at a family do and she had been a very sweet and pretty little eleven-year-old who had a picture of a horse in a locket round her neck. I’m afraid to have to report that the butterfly has reverted to a caterpillar and that Kylie or ‘K Grrrl’, as she now wishes to be known, is a horrid little pre-teen brat.

Her nice blonde hair has red streaks inexpertly dyed into it. She has a nose stud (Emily says she got it done on a school trip to Blackpool and that Kylie has threatened to run away if it is removed). She wears enormously baggy army combat trousers into which eight or nine of her could be fitted. Her tummy is bare save for a tattoo of a rat holding a hypodermic needle (mercifully a transfer). Her crop-top T-shirt has the words ‘DROP DEAD’ printed on it and her once-pretty face is now contorted into a permanent sulky scowl.

I asked her if she was excited about going to the studio. The look of astonished contempt she gave me would have scrambled an egg.

‘Oh
yeah
!
Right, as if
! Like I’m
really
going to get excited about going to a crap
kids
’ show. Yeah,
right
, that’s
really
likely.’

I could not have felt more withered if I had been a sultana. This girl made me feel like a piece of one-hundred-year-old shit. I was grateful that I’d done my duty by Lucy on the previous evening because this child was in danger of un-manning me entirely. I did my best to engage her interest, which was, of course, fatal.

‘The Prime Minister will be there.’

‘The Prime Minister is a meat-eating fascist.’

‘Grrrl Gang will be playing live.’

‘Grrrl Gang are crap and sad. They don’t even sing on their records because it’s all done by a computer,
if you
didn’t know.’

‘I’ll introduce you to Tazz.’

‘Tazz is a moronic duh brain who wouldn’t have got anywhere if all the sad old men at the BBC didn’t fancy her.’

I thought this was extremely unfair. Tazz is an excellent presenter and a lovely girl. Yes, it’s true that she’s fairly gorgeous and does indeed have the factor that in showbiz is traditionally called ‘something for the dads’, but there’s far more to her than that. Being consistently perky for three hours on a Saturday morning is more difficult than a lot of people think. It takes real talent.

‘Don’t you like
Livin’ Large
, then?’

‘Oh
yeah
!
Sure, as if
!
Livin’ Large
is crap.’

‘Well don’t come, then.’

‘No,
I’ll come, I suppose
.’

And so we went. Kylie, like most young people of my acquaintance, wanted it both ways.

We got in the car and Kylie sorted through my tapes, rejecting every one with pained groans of contempt before turning up the radio full to prevent further conversation. Actually I wished that Lucy had been with us to see her. Kylie has always been such a nice little girl. Lucy tends to see her as an example of the joys we are missing out on by being childless. Up until now I have agreed with her on this point. Kylie’s dolls, her love of stories, her obsession with all animals has always been just so cute (a word I hate), but that’s what Kylie was. We went on holiday with them the Easter before last and it rained all the time. Kylie spent the week lying on her tummy in front of the fire reading the entire Narnia saga. It was a lovely thing to see and Lucy and I had wished she was ours. Well all I can say is that if ever we do have one she can go to a boarding school for the grumpy pubescent bit, because it is
not
attractive.

Anyway, back to my disaster. Whatever Kylie might have felt, I personally was very much looking forward to the morning and meeting Tazz. She really is gorgeous and quite simply every bloke in the country fancies her. Heterosexual blokes, that is. I realize that these days it is not done to presume that people are necessarily heterosexual. Although, quite frankly, if I was gay I reckon Tazz would turn me around, but then I said that to Trevor and he said, ‘Well, does Leonardo di Caprio turn you around?’ To which the answer is a very big ‘No.’ Quite frankly, I think that Leonardo di Caprio looks like Norman Lamont. It’s just that Tazz is so
perky
, the most pathologically perky girl on television, perky beyond all reasonable human expectations, a living, breathing perky force. She is also, I’m told, very nice, and a real enthusiast about things like Comic Relief. Besides all this, she wears tiny little crop-tops and microscopic little skirts which for somebody like me who spends his time at TV Centre talking to plump, grumpy, unshaven comedians about whether they can say knob before nine o’clock is a very welcome change.

This morning, rather disappointingly, Tazz was wearing trousers.

Probably a directive from Downing Street. I don’t think the PM is an ogler, but he’s only human, for God’s sake. Many a strong man’s eyes have twitched downwards to check out the knicker triangle when facing Tazz on the ‘Hot Seat’ sofas. The word is that even Cliff Richard took a peek. The last thing Downing Street wants is the PM caught having a perv on a twenty-two-year-old’s gusset.

Having such a gorgeous girl presenter is an essential part of kids’ TV these days. I mean the kids themselves would probably be just as happy to watch an enthusiastic old granny, but the bleary, beery students who haven’t gone to bed yet want something sexier, as do the dads who say, ‘Let’s watch Tazz on the BBC.

She’s much better than that computer-generated ferret they have on ITV.’

The show started off fine. I got Kylie sat down amongst the other kids whom at first she affected to despise but I soon noticed that she had hooked up with two eleven-year-old sisters whose mother seemed to have dressed them as prostitutes, in so much as their skirts were the merest pelmets and their tops barely covered the fact that there was as yet nothing to barely cover.

Having seen Kylie settled in, I went up to the control box. It’s rather fun being an executive producer. People bring you coffee and things and I was surprised to discover that I was clearly the most senior figure present. I recall reflecting how generous it was of Nigel to stay away and let me take my rightful place centre stage as the BBC’s official Prime Minister host. Ha! And double ha!

Anyway, after the usual half-hour of cartoons (‘We hate showing them but it’s what the kids want’), Tazz introduced Grrrl Gang.

Despite my niece’s snooty contempt for them, having Grrrl Gang on was quite a coup (what’s more I spotted Kylie screaming with all the other little grrrls). Grrrl Gang are the newest girl group, tougher and more street than whatever the last one was. None of these groups is ever going to do what the Spice Girls did in ‘96, but Grrrl Gang are pretty hip at present. They were ‘In the Dock’, which was another of these sections in which the star guest takes questions from the kids in the audience and on the phones. Which in reality means a series of tremulous voices from Milton Keynes and Dumfriesshire asking, ‘How do you get to be a pop star?’

To my surprise the answer to this turned out to be quite simple.

‘You just got to be yourself, right? Livin’ it large. Kickin’ it big.

That’s all it takes,’ the grrrls of Grrrl Gang assured the kids of Britain.

‘You gotta kick it, girl! Big yourself up!’

‘Yeah, and don’t let no one disrespect you, right?’

‘Cos it’s about babe control, right? Grrrl strength. Like if you tell a teacher you wanna be a pop star, right, or an astronaut? And she says like,
no way, babe
, you’ve got to work in a factory or go on the dole! You tell her you are going to be a pop star or an astronaut, right? Cos you can be whatever you want, grrrl. A pop star or an astronaut…or…anything.’