The Right Man (23 page)

‘Sometimes
I just want to kill someone. Push them under the water and drown them.’ This
was Neil’s throaty voice. I hoped he didn’t mean his agent.

‘I’d
like a harem,’ said a down-to-earth voice nearby suddenly. ‘I’d like to have
enough money to hire a different expensive hooker every day, or maybe two, and
have them do whatever I told them and never have to work again.’

There
was a nasty moment’s silence. Someone laughed in it. Julian, our facilitating
leader, coughed a little cough.

‘That’s
OK?’ he said sagely. ‘Remember, we’re meant to be saying whatever we feel,
whatever comes into our heads? However awful it might seem?’

The
earthy voice continued: ‘I’d like to whip them with belt straps and make one of
them talk dirty in my ear, while another one sucks my knob.’

Unfortunately,
I couldn’t crane my neck round to see who was speaking without it being
obvious. Then came the Canadian guy’s voice.

‘After
my divorce, I had to get away. I took an old camper waggon and lived down by
the ocean for a few months, with the waves and the sky. It was good.’

I felt
certain that, like me, the general democratic majority of the group were
waiting to hear more from the harem belt-buckle bloke and were not really that
interested in the Canadian guy s commune with nature.

There
was another little silence. The professor had stopped wheezing.

‘Anything
else?’ said Julian the facilitator in a nursery-school tone. He was referring
to the group as a whole, but his remark seemed to refer in our minds only to
the pervy guy on my right. We all waited to hear if this lone voice would have
any further exciting revelations for us. He didn’t let us down.

‘I’d
like to invite all my friends round to fuck my ex-wife, one after the other,’
he continued. ‘I’d watch. Two or three of them at a time. The queue of men
would go round the block. She’d be wearing a blindfold.’ I wondered if it was
his black book that I was holding.

‘The
whole thing would go on for hours. After the mess she’s made of my life, after what
she’s put me through, it would be a pleasure to see her suffer. They could
flick her up the arse. Some of the men would be allowed to kick her. I’d laugh.
Then I’d drag her out across my front drive, scraping her face on the gravel ..

He
paused because a lump of saliva had come up in his throat. While he swallowed
and took breath, Julian facilitated.

‘OK,
right. And now we can open our eyes?’ He stood there still on tiptoe, in his
lemon-yellow Marks and Spencer cardigan, smiling.

‘So we
can see, there’s a lot of this aggression in us.’ He mimed quote marks around
the word aggression, as if he were making some deep intellectual point.

‘And it
can be even, well, frightening? Yuh?’

I don’t
think I was the only man there secretly thinking it can also be a bit of a
turn-on. Lovey.

Immediately
on opening our eyes, we all looked to my right to see if we could identify the
monster man, but there were only two very gentle hippy-looking guys and the
Canadian in the suit. The large bald paedophile was right over the other side
of the room, so it wasn’t him.

As you
can imagine, lunch was a tawdry affair. Organic everything and small portions
of rice. There was a thick chocolate brownie cake but that had run out by the
time I had got to the head of the droopy queue. There was plenty of carrot
cake, of course. There’s always plenty of carrot cake.

I
drifted with my paper plate through the alternative bookstall. A thousand
pamphlets about men and yet nothing which mentioned football, birds or lager.
Tell a lie, there was a small flyer leaflet called ‘Men, Violence and Alcohol,
a Weekend Intensive’, with a photo of the big bald paedophile on the cover,
Simon Dukowski, Group Co-ordinator.

‘Do you
think anyone would notice if we nipped out for a beer?’ I turned round to see big
Mr Dukowski himself looking at me.

‘Only
joking,’ he said, and laughed all by himself at his own magnanimity. One of his
front teeth was missing. ‘How’re you finding it?’ he asked. And while I
stumbled for an appropriate and believable expression of appreciation, he
continued, ‘It’s better than last year’s, I think. More experiential. Mind you,
I couldn’t really get into that possessions exercise.’

He
reached deep into his tracksuit trousers pocket, which jingled with keys and
change — seemingly groping around his balls — and took out what looked like a
large carwash token, on which was embossed the words ‘Three Years’ and the
initials NA. Narcotics Anonymous. Uh oh.

‘That’s
my most treasured possession, but when it came to it I copped out, you know? I
couldn’t bring myself to show anyone?’

He
seemed to have caught the upward inflection disease from Julian.

‘Three
years?’ he said proudly. ‘I keep it in my pocket at all times so that I can
just hold it if I start to feel a bit, you know, wobbly?’

‘But
you don’t mind showing me?’ I said. I was catching it now too. My remark did
not seem to register with him.

‘Three
years since I have had any kind of narcotic.’

‘Well,
that’s very … impressive.’ But my voice trailed off with my attention, which
was drawn over his shoulder to a man standing alone on the other side of the
room. A man I recognized and whom I hoped would not recognise me. James
Rhys-Evans. Until last month Head of Series and Serials at the BBC, and before
that Head of Drama at Central. What was he doing here? I leaned my weight
behind the large, shaven-headed, toothless ex-drug addict, using him as a
shield. Rhys-Evans was standing, miserably eating from his paper plate. He
must have only just arrived or been in the other group for the morning session,
because he hadn’t been, in my workshop. I hoped it was the latter, because I
didn’t want to be caught publicly airing confidences and sharing treasure with
an important TV exec, however experiential the experience might be.

‘And
they’re doing more on alcohol and drug-related problems this year, which is
good,’ the shaven head went on, through mouthfuls of his second banana. It was
he who had had the last of the brownie, too. It sat there on his paper plate,
waiting for him to finish both bananas. I could see over his shoulder that
Rhys-Evans had noticed me and was as studious as I was in avoiding a
recognition of this if at all possible.

‘Oh,
well. Body sculpting this afternoon. That should be good,’ said Simon Dukowski
cheerfully, starting at last on the brownie.

Body
sculpting with Julian turned out to be possibly my worst nightmare on legs.
Also, they had reselected us into a larger group in the big hall, to allow more
room for physical self-expression — something I tend usually to keep down to a
minimum by choice — so I had to face up to Rhys-Evans and he had to face up to
me.

I
shouldn’t have been so worried, I suppose. He was not one of the five really
big cheeses in television and he had just been made redundant, so he might be
now a spent force, a non-person in a silk suit. An executive with nothing to
execute. But those in power change jobs about once every eighteen months, so
one can never be sure where they may suddenly re-emerge with added attributes,
departments and even share-option schemes to boot.

Obviously,
being an agent, I can’t name these heavy five grands fromages, let alone say
what I really think of them, well, not until they fall from power anyway, and
then one has to be pretty sure there is absolutely no chance of a rebirth from
the ashes as head of some independent film commissioning body or what-have-you.

As an
agent, one is part of that gagging throng who have a vicious claw at those in
power as they plummet from favour, all from the safety of one’s own throne of
non-commitment, of course. Actually, why should I care any longer? OK, there’s
Stephen ‘Mr Indecision’ Ronson, there’s Matthew ‘The Pudge’ Praslin, there’s
Peter ‘The Big Man’ Winner — we like him this season — there’s Jane ‘Give me a
Crotch Shot’ Poke-Warner —we’ve all gone off her, too much of a self-publicist,
not enough actual television being made — and lastly, there’s Sir David Frost, ‘Frostie,’
or Kellogg, as he’s known.

Of
course there are far more important people behind this lot, accountants and
shareholders and executives who wield the money power. But for the producers,
directors, writers, actors, technicians, designers and, of course, agents,
these five are the ones that matter, and don’t let any head of department or
independent production company exec tell you otherwise. Any proposal to end up
on British TV will have had to have passed across one of those five desks. So,
if you have been turned down by one, you might as well go home. They don’t like
taking each other’s cast-offs and they all read the same papers and they all
eat in roughly the same places and they all, funnily enough, live in the same
area of London, apart from Peter Winner, of course, who, seeming not to care
how naff he looks, lives in a newly built home in Hertfordshire. We all love
him for that. ‘Up yours’ he seems to be saying to the poncy privileged crowd.
Mind you, we are fickle, we like him this year because he had such a success
with
Pointings,
which gave so many of our clients work and won a clutch
of awards.

Last
year Stephen Ronson was fave, because he was new and he seemed to be
commissioning new dramas like they were Pringles crisps. Now he’s faded from
grace because of the
Ice Cream in Barcelona
fiasco, which actually wasn’t
of his making; he inherited it, so it is totally unfair. We are fickle, it is
unfair. Not that our nittering and nattering makes an ounce of difference. We
are like a colony of mice, whose offices are joined by interconnecting passages
beneath the floorboards, with occasional holes in the skirting through which
we push young narcissists, blinking in the glare. Every specialized trade
serving the industry is like this. Ask a make-up artist what she or he thought
of
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
and they will say, ‘Terrible film, you could
see the wig lace.’ Whereas a member of a camera crew will go on about the lens
filters used, or mention the name of some new computerized editing technique,
like ‘Harry’ or ‘Skid’.

‘Now,
this afternoon I’ve stacked all the chairs away, so there can be no hiding in
the wings, OK?’ said Julian, slipping out of his lemon-yellow cardigan and
delicately rolling up his sleeves, ready for some kind of action. We had had to
take off our shoes and put them round the edge of the hall. Unavoidably, Rhys-Evans
and I acknowledged each other at the row of shoes. Neil was already in the
centre of the room, swinging his arms by way of a warm-up. Alright for him, he
was a performer, a thesp, a doer. There was no workshop on the schedule called ‘Persuading
People to Do Things By Talking on the Phone’, so I was not to be in my element
all weekend. Nor, I suspected by the look of him, was James Rhys-Evans.

‘OK,
that’s good? A few deep breaths and relax and then I’m going to say a word, and
what I want you to do is allow yourself to express your feelings about that
word… through your body.’ Inverted commas again. ‘Just through your body. You
can make noises and move around the room but not too much thinking, OK?’ Big
joke. ‘Just let it come out through your body, like making a sculpture?’

I had
that feeling when you climb up to the diving board at the swimming baths and it’s
obvious the moment you get there that you’re not going to have the guts to do
it. But you can’t just climb back down again in front of the whole school, so
you compound the embarrassment by standing pointlessly a foot from the edge for
the next twenty minutes.

‘And
the word is …’ an elfin smile on his soft-skinned face, ‘the British economy.

That’s
two words, I thought, well, three if you count the ‘the’. But the old professor
guy, with his glasses restored, was already squatting down beside me and
howling, in rather badly acted agony. Next please, daughter, I thought.

The
Canadian started a low hum and his eyelids flickered. Obviously, for him, the
British economy had something to do with transcendental meditation. Fair
enough.

All
around me, bearded men were rising and contorting themselves. Their willingness
to join in was disturbing. Lawyers, hippies and estate agents groaned and swore
and wriggled in simulated pain on the floor. The collective gibberish rose into
the echoey ceiling, like thunder breaking backwards. The individual noises ran
into, one another, making an ugly and frantic non-stop bark. The British
economy yapping in the rafters. So this was how men needed to change, this was
what they wanted to change into. A bunch of naff amateur dramatics auditioning
for the part of Caliban in an all-canine production of
The Tempest.

Thinking
only of the British economy, I curled into a ball on the floor and tried to
blank out the deafening roar above. Neil was doing a sort of t’ai chi mime
show; James Rhys-Evans had disappeared into the rugby scrum at the centre of
the hall.

‘And
… freeze?’ shouted Julian, clapping his hands together.

Simon Dukowski,
the fat druggie, was caught on one leg and tried, meaningfully, to stay like
that.

‘Now, I
want you to think of the sculpture you have made of yourself? And, in your own
time, slowly return to your normal position?’