SSC (2001) The Dog Catcher (7 page)

Beanie’s
voice came back at her through the cans. ‘No the phones aren’t working.’ She
was sure she’d seen one of the Orientals on the phone a few minutes ago, but
anyway it would have been difficult to talk about the fee in front of them so
she would just have to make the best if it.

Pictures,
green light. ‘Throughout the reefs and islands in the South China Seas the
pirates are feared for their recklessness, cunning and lack of pity. Take the
practice of phantom ships, you simply order or buy a vessel for US$350,000 and
we seize a ship for you. If you want a crew on board we will keep them for you.
If you don’t, we will simply throw them overboard. Or let us say you have an
enemy, would you like this to happen to them?’ The picture on the screen was of
a large bare room, in the centre was a Chinese man tied to a chair and naked to
the waist. He looked like he was in some kind of abandoned factory. Above his
head there were bare pipes hanging from brackets, dangling chains, large
industrial metal doors and around him rough unpainted brick walls. But you
never knew; for instance, there was a sound studio called Space, off Carnaby
Street, that was done out like a spaceship, the doors to the sound booths were
like airlocks and all the speakers were housed in swoopy blobby cabinets that
looked like they were in the middle of a flashback, and there was this other
very weird studio called ADR round the back of Kings Cross where there was a
stream running half-way up the walls, all the seating was made out of the boots
of cars, Minis converted into couches, and you got upstairs to the recording
suites through a door opening out of a large tree in the corner of the
reception.

Green
light blinking. ‘This is the famous Chinese actor Tony Cho, he thought himself
a big man, big Kung Fu expert, didn’t think he needed his old friends from
Macau.’

She
recognised the guy, she’d read about him in the
Stage
in an article concerning
the dangers of working overseas unprotected by the mighty power of Equity,
though it didn’t look like Peter Postlethwaite and the general council were
going to come swinging through the windows to rescue Tony Cho. Several other
men came into view, wheeling what Zoe recognised from a week on
Casualty
as
one of those machines they shock heart-attack patients back to life with. But
of course Tony was alive, at that moment. One of the pirates put the paddles on
Tony Cho’s chest and gave him a jolt of electricity. He twisted in pain. Zoe
watched this intently, she hoped one day to play in
Death and the Maiden
and
you couldn’t pay for research material like this. They waited a bit then gave
the actor another higher shot of electricity. Suddenly he pissed himself, a
fountain of yellow urine.

Zoe
wondered if she would be able to piss on demand; she’d been naked at the
Almeida and she’d wanked herself at the National but a stream of piss once a
night and twice on Saturdays, well that would be a thing to get a girl noticed.
It wasn’t that she wondered whether she could do the pissing from a physical
point of view, more whether she was mentally prepared for it. She hadn’t minded
the nakedness at the Almeida that much really after a while, but she’d hated
the wanking at the National. Thing was though you couldn’t demur at any of that
stuff, you couldn’t even act like it was an issue: ‘Want me to wank? to fuck? to
pee? Sure no problem, I’ll do it right here in this church hall in Shepherds
Bush, I’ll do it at a festival in Dundee, I’ll do it in front of my Auntie
Janice and go for cannelloni with her afterwards.’ If you didn’t jump to it,
directors wouldn’t use you, you’d get a reputation. And for once it was
actually worse for the boys, you couldn’t go more than three visits to the
theatre these days without seeing some poor actor’s wizened dick. Her friend
Mong from drama school said his mum had seen more of his penis in the last few
years than she had when he was a baby. It was funny really, in the non-acting
world you got a bad reputation from wandering about with your cock out, in the
acting world it was the reverse.

The
pictures started up again and the nagging green light blinked; the screen was
split into four showing various types of criminal activity, drug smuggling,
piracy, prostitution and people being gunned down on the streets of some
Chinese town.

She was
on the last page of script now. ‘Whatever you want we can get it for you,
drugs, slaves, ships and a speciality of ours is contract killing to a very
high standard. In many instances the authorities will not know that a murder
has occurred thinking it an accident, or an unexplained disappearance and the
target will never be aware that they have been singled out for extermination.
But be very certain before you hire us — remember, your own life is at risk if
you do not keep up payments.’

They
went over some things a few more times and then she was finished.

Beanie
came and let her out of the booth with a gift of fresh cold air. Zoe went back
into the control room to say goodbye to Tom and the Chinese men. This was
always an awkward time for the insecure voice-over artist, an uneasy saying of
goodbyes when they want you gone but you’d like to sniff out what they really
thought of you, but you find yourself out in the street with thoughts of the
engineer hitting the ‘delete’ button and the producer already on the phone to
Caroline Quentin’s agent. ‘Bye, bye, bye’ (she said) to everyone and Zoe was
out in the street, surprised that it was still daylight. She felt like she’d
been filmed underground for a month.

She
must have walked for quite a while though she couldn’t really remember. She
stopped suddenly in the middle of the pavement, so that a grumpy man walked
into the back of her. Looking around Zoe saw she was on a street near
Broadcasting House, standing outside a minuscule old-fashioned sandwich bar
called the Sandwich Boutique (how Sixties was that?). So tiny was it that for
storage they used the space above the ceiling tiles. The sandwich bar man was right
then coming down a ladder backwards from a square black hole in the roof. She
had a sudden overwhelming impulse to sneak in there while the sandwich bar man
was fussing over his Snickers bars and climb the ladder up to the black square.
It looked so safe up there in the ceiling, suspended above the diced watery ham
egg mayonnaise and minty lamb on ciabatta. But just then she saw her friend
Mook from the RSC over the road so she waved to him and ran across the traffic,
shrieking. They kissed and stood there for ages chatting and then they went and
got a new kind of Brazilian bikini wax together.

BARCELONA CHAIRS

rupert’s haircut (whenever
people referred to him as ‘Rupert’ he’d say, ‘No, no, it’s rupert, no capital,
I’ve got a small r’ — to which more than one person thought ‘You’ve got a small
something’) cost him ninety pounds, which came out at about six pounds fifty a
hair. Still it was worth it, there was something Trevor Scorbie did, even with
such slim pickings, that was just wonderful, the man really did deserve the
term ‘genius’. What remained after each strand had been individually trimmed
with tiny silver scissors, was pale yellow going on white with a hint of urine.
Below were eyebrows of vaporous grey, scallop-coloured eyes, skin the pink of a
prawn cocktail. On his thin body a lapel-less suit by Yamamoto, collarless
shirt by Paul Smith, slip-on shoes by Patrick Cox. He thought that there was
something purposeful about the ‘lessness’ of his clothes, like he just didn’t
have the time to fuck about with lapels and collars and laces and buttons and
shit like that. (Not that any of these people with their names on these things
had actually made them. They had told somebody else who’d told somebody else
who’d told somebody else who’d got some hard-up women in lands far away to
really run up the clothes.)

rupert
looked in the mirror and liked what he saw. But then what he saw possibly wasn’t
what you saw. rupert was an architect and after modern artists, architects are
the next best people in the world at seeing what isn’t there. You might see,
for example, a building that was a rust-streaked concatenation of concrete
forsaken on a traffic island, they would see a subtle evocation of the baroque
cathedrals of Europe set on the confluence of mighty rivers. They talk a very
good edifice, architects do; pity they aren’t quite as good at building the
flickers.

Still
smiling into the mirror, rupert dwelt on how his life in the last few years had
really turned around, after all he hadn’t always been so content. At one point,
like one of the modernist buildings he so admired, rupert had been going
nowhere. It had dawned on him after seven years of university and fifteen years
of private practice that apart from the big bastards of the building world, the
Richard Rodgers and the Norman Fosters, the work tended to be of the piddling
kind. Mostly in rupert’s case it was too rich, too little taste, private
clients who spoilt his grand designs by whining about mundane practicalities,
demanding shelves to put their horrible knick-knacks on and ruining his spatial
flow by insisting on stupid things like walls and doors. At least, he consoled himself,
he hadn’t fallen so low that he’d been forced to do any work for local
authorities. If you worked for them, apart from the more or less continuous
meetings, you had to design hideous bloody ramps all over the fucking place,
just on the off chance that any passing spastic (or whatever they were called
these days) chose to drop in. Though he had made a very good living, rupert had
not been satisfied with being piddling, who would be? He wanted to be a player
like Norman Foster or, even better, he realised he wanted to be the top half of
a player couple like Richard and Ruthie Rodgers. Richard was pretty much the
architect of choice for the new Britain and Ruthie of course ran the River Café
in Hammersmith, which had been at the forefront of a revolution in British
catering by setting new standards for what you could get away with charging for
stuff you could have bought in a shop and plonked on a plate. See that’s why
Norman wasn’t as big as Richard because nobody knew what Mrs Foster did or even
if there was a Mrs Foster. Equally, if Norman was gay he should start taking
the boyfriend to awards dinners and stuff like that and should get him to give
an interview to the papers about a friend who’d died of Aids, if he really
wanted to get on that is. rupert’d observed that if both you and your wife were
famous, then there was an exponential increase in your celebrity. When you
stood in front of some bloke, said some words, signed some forms, then right
away the media power of the two of you wasn’t suddenly just doubled or tripled,
instead it was squared or cubed, thus all kinds of incompatible people got
strapped together till falling ratings did them part. Fame-research scientists
called it ‘The Liz and Hugh Effect’.

So at
that low point in his life rupert decided to take it all in hand and his first
project had to be his own wife who’d been dragging her arse for far too long.
Helen, who he’d met at college, had seemed to be satisfied with being at home,
raising their two kids, Mies and Corbu, but he was having none of that.

Once he
knew what he wanted then rupert generally got what he wanted. As a child he
would simply go on and on at his parents or his Scout troop leader or his
sister till they did what he wished them to do, moved the family to a
lighthouse, made him troop leader or jerked him off. He even gave this process
of going on and on a pet name: after trying out ‘Persuagement’, ‘Coercetration’
and ‘Argueforcement’ he finally settled on ‘Forcesuasion’. He saw no reason not
to continue this behaviour as an adult. So once it had been decided that Helen
his wife needed to get out of the house and play her part in his rise he would,
day and night, go on at her. He would point out successful women in magazines
and say how good they looked, he would point out younger, more successful women
at parties and imply he might fuck and then marry them if she didn’t pull
herself together. She got the message.

Now
Helen had her own highly successful, flag cleaning business. Casting around
desperately for some way to make herself a big success she had noticed one day
how grimy and torn were the flags of all nations flying from the Arding and
Hobbs department store in Clapham (just like life, Zaire was in a particularly
tattered state). Enquiring of the manager she found that the care of the flags
was nobody’s responsibility. She pointed out to this woman that not only did
the condition of the flags make the store look scruffy but they were risking
offending wealthy Zairean shoppers by the state of their flag and they also
risked annoying peripatetic Ukrainians, whose beloved national standard, symbol
of freedom, icon of the throwing off of a thousand years of Russian
imperialism, was flying upside down. She got the contract to clean and maintain
the flags and since then had obtained many more. At the moment she was in the
midst of pitching to look after the flags of the entire Italian Navy, that’d be
a big job if she pulled it off. If it hadn’t been for rupert she would be a
simple housewife instead of a woman with her own Audi A6, internet capable
mobile phone and six hundred thousand unused air miles.

It was
reading that had made rupert want to be an architect. From an early age he had
read everything he could get his hands on, except fiction. rupert simply had no
time for works of fiction; he would happily read a newspaper or a hi-fl
magazine or an engineering text book, or of course any sort of web site. You
could learn something from them, fiction though? He couldn’t see the sense in
it. Who could possibly care about the actions and doings of made up,
non-existent, fabricated persons? Whether they jumped under trains or solved
crimes or got married, who gave a fuck? They didn’t exist! They didn’t have
identities! They didn’t have phone numbers or dicks or lawn furniture and they
most certainly didn’t give dinner parties where rupert could meet powerful
people. They were no fucking use at all.