The Right Man (24 page)

The
thunder was still roaring in my ears as Julian divided us down the middle for
an expression-and-release-of-conflict-and aggression exercise.

I could
just leave now. I could quietly get up, retrieve my shoes and go out of the
room. But what would Rhys-Evans think? He showed no sign of wanting to leave.
Mind you, I showed no sign of it either. It would have been foolish to show a
sign of it, and now we were shouting at each other across a chalk line which
Julian had drawn along the centre of the room. He was definitely getting off on
this, probably wearing silk underwear underneath his neat, clean jeans.

‘You
fucking arsehole, you never ever ever made me feel wanted.’ The thin redheaded
guy seemed to be shouting specifically at me. He gave me full-on son-to-father
eye contact. ‘You stopped me, every time, you … you …’ He began to tremble
and cry. I couldn’t think of anything to shout back at him across the chalk
line: it seemed a rather horrid thing to do anyway, poor little ginger.

He was
sobbing hugely now and I became a little concerned. Various phrases rose above
the din.

‘I am
going to fucking kill you, I’m going to fucking kill somebody,’ recognizable to
my left from Neil. ‘Push them into the water and drown them.’ He’d certainly
got in touch with his anger this weekend, if that was what we were meant to be
doing. I turned my attention away from the redhead and shouted, ‘You idiot’ to
no one in particular. It would have been worse not to join in at all. People
were red in the face, saliva spots flecked the chalk. The sound was like having
one’s own private roadworks piped through headphones.

The
Canadian was humming again. A man dressed all in green joined him, and then a
few of the hippies. Over the top of the humming and the shouting, Julian
screeched, ‘Yes, that’s good?’ More men started humming and then some wandered,
like dazed bomb victims, across the chalk and started to hug one another.

Apart
from one or two stragglers, it was almost all humming now, except for the
redhead, who was beyond hope. He was quaking all over, and still the sobs
continued, reverberating back off the rafters. I was seriously concerned for
him now. Shouldn’t someone call a doctor? I hoped they had some professionals
around to cope with this sort of thing. Two or three guys went to hug him. More
joined them until he was lost under a scrum of shaggy love. I was jealous. No
one hugged me.

James
Rhys-Evans caught my eye and went to the other side of the room. There was no
way we were going to do any bonding or what-have-you. Imagine his position next
time he got his hand on the steering wheel of the entertainment station waggon.
You can’t cut throats in a cutthroat world if you have been workshopping each
other’s inner child the night before, now can you? We both knew that and
respected it.

The
redhead was lifted up on the shoulders of the bearded scrum and carried round
the room. His sobbing had transformed itself into manic laughter now. Too
manic. This was like a scene from a Peter Brook extravaganza, circa nineteen
bloody sixty-eight.

The
redhead needed help, I thought, and was not going to get it from Julian, whose
smile seemed also to have become Gothic at its twitchy edges. I wondered if he
was secretly videoing the whole thing for private perusal at home afterwards.

It’s questionable whether
it was a changed man who crept down the stairs of Neil’s West Hampstead house
into the chilly Monday morning. Definitely a man who needed to change his
clothes. I’d been in the same corduroys and button-down shirt all weekend. The
weekend experience had made me sweat and I hadn’t had a bath or shower since
Friday morning.

My hair
was mussed, and sleeping on Neil’s floor with a jacket for a blanket had left
me creased, crumpled and stiff. I had woken with the Sunday-afternoon communal
drumming still in my ears. It had joined the other sounds in the menagerie in
my head: the urgent rustling of poplar leaves in the wind; the dangerous
rushing of water; a baby — Grace, probably — crying as if on a tape loop; and
now, of course, this mêlée of drumming, so syncopated as to make one
homogeneous din, like the oversound in the swimming pool on schools morning:

‘Whwwrrrrroooaaahhh.’
I must remember to pay a visit to my GP.

I
clunked Neil’s front door behind me and tottered uneasily on to the street,
blinking in the light, although the day was grey. We’d ended up at Neil’s with
wine and a bottle of vodka, not drifting into sleep until at least 4.00 a.m.
The weekend had loosened Neil’s tongue and he told me things about himself I’d
never known. Things I don’t really need to know. But he’d been quite funny,
almost like I remember him before, and I had been happy to sit and listen, even
when the orange juice had run out and we were drinking the vodka with tap
water, or eventually straight from the bottle.

He told
me that originally, before he’d met his partner Karen — the trick cyclist, that
is — he’d been bisexual. And a funny story about himself in the back end of a
pantomime cow in Southend in I 977 which featured a knight of the theatre in it
somewhere. It had stopped the buzzing in my ears for an hour or so.

There
were about fifteen people at the West End Lane bus stop and I joined them with
my jacket collar turned up, hoping that nobody in the business would be heading
for Soho this early in the morning and clock me in my current dishevelled
state. Hardly a good advertisement for Mullin and Ketts, nor indeed for those
in the representational field in general.

I began
to get nervous. The time was ticking noisily by, the drumming noise was
growing. I needed a distraction. A cab came round Dunlever Road with its yellow
‘For Hire’ light shining invitingly.

I
hailed it, feeling like a heel, leaving them all standing there in the cold.
Guiltily, I acted looking at my watch again as I got in, so as to deflect their
imagined evil thoughts towards me, and slumped back into the seat.

‘Women.
Huh. They axe for money, they say it’s for the children, but I tell you, how
much goes to the children, eh? You see?’

‘Well,
it’s very hard for women these days, you know,’ I replied, glad for the
internal wash of sounds to stop.

‘First
she take you, know what I mean? And then it’s your wallet. You end up with
nothing. I tell all men in my cab now, never get married.’

‘But it’s
fair enough for the man to share in bringing up his children, isn’t it?’ I
shouted back over the traffic noise.

‘I tell
you. The Child Support Agency, man, it worse than the poll tax, man. The money don’t
go to the woman, it go to the Government. They take all. All.’

‘Yes,’
I shouted. ‘Yes, you’re probably right.’

‘I tell
you this advice: go to prostitutes. It’s cheaper in the long run and it’s more
convenient.’

The
cabbie let out a brassy and wheezy laugh, repeating ‘more convenient’ several
times and flashing his gold teeth in the rear-view mirror. It turned out he had
thirteen grandchildren to help support, and a fancy woman he saw once a month.

‘I tell
you, my wife, she got no complaints, as long as I don’t put her money down.’ He
laughed again.

We
parted quite jovially and I had spent the last tenner from my wallet. I’d have
to go to a cashpoint later on, but right now I needed a full valet service
before the women arrived.

And
then, a rather dated comedy sketch happened.

The
taxi had dropped me at the junction of Wardour and Meard. I clonked up the
crooked stairs, bursting for a piss and aching for a coffee, or three. I undid
the double lock and swung the door.., and… I’d come to the wrong office. It’s
the oldest gag in the book, isn’t it? From Alan Bennett’s ‘Visiting T.E.
Lawrence’ monologue, to Noel Edmonds’
House Party.
Even Jeremy Planter
has used it on at least two occasions: build up a sketch with jokes and
misunderstandings, then tag it with the ‘You’ve come to the wrong house, mate,
you want number twenty-seven over the road’ routine. Often used in Walter Matthau
movies about infidelity in the 1960s, as a matter of fact.

In
front of me were three large empty rooms with — apart from one computer — empty
tables and desks in them. I checked the keys, stupid, they had opened the door
for me, for crying out loud. A fourth desk, through a glass-partition door, still
had phones and answer-phones and in-trays and out-trays, and framed posters
lined the walls in there, but in the main rooms even the corkboards were bare. Silence.
Total silence. The lack of noise rang hard in my head. The walls were dirty
white without anything on them. The place was bare, like a newly converted flat
for sale, but there was no estate agent with me now. The red light on the
answer-phone on the fourth desk blipped silently with messages. I counted them.
Eighteen blips. I let out a short laugh involuntarily and pulled aside the
curtain to the kitchenette. It was still a cluttered shambles in there. The
camp bed roughly folded against the wall where I had left it on Friday evening,
the coffee cups unwashed up, the sugar-spill still stuck to the drainer. This
was Mullin and Ketts but with the innards ripped out. The main rooms seemed
much larger and airier now empty. Had we really had this much space? It had
always felt so cramped, so cosy. I walked through the glass-partition door to
where the fourth table with the answer-phone was. This was my office. Nothing
in here had been removed. My room seemed inappropriately cluttered, its
reassuring homeliness like a night-watchman’s den at a loft art gallery.

What
little sunlight there was filled the other three bare rooms and filtered
through the glass partition to my desk. On my desk was a bulging envelope with
my name on it. My full name. Not just Guy, but Guy Richard Mullin, and the
date. It was the only foreign object. I picked it up and went to the
kitchenette to put on the kettle. The mini-sofa was still there in the main
room but the magazines were gone from the coffee table. Almost all of the box
files were gone from the shelves. The up-to-date
Spotlight
casting
directories were gone. The piles of hopeful ten-by-eight photographs were gone,
the Z-cards from the corkboard, two of the computers and the year planner on Tilda’s
wall were all gone. In Naomi’s room, the grey metal filing cabinets were empty,
the sounds I made opening empty drawers reverberated off the walls slightly. My
God, the carpet was filthy! We hadn’t realized with all our stuff in, but now
grey and brown speckles drew the eye embarrassingly to the floor, and around
Tania’s desk a scuffed and grizzly patch where Cleopatra had spent her days
sitting patiently waiting to be walked. I opened the letter.

‘All
further correspondence to be referred to Ketts Stanton-Walker, 191 Regent
Street …’ fax, phone, e-mail, etc.

Headed
note paper already, my dears. Ketts Stanton-Walker and a rather fetching logo,
with the K bigger than the S-W.

At the
bottom of the page, in small print, the registered office — a firm of
accountants I had never heard of — and a list of directors: Naomi Ketts, Tilda Bonelli
and Arabella Stanton-Walker. So, Naomi had found someone to buy her out at
last, someone with money. Arabella Stanton-Walker. Jeremy Planter s new
bedfellow. A past-her-sell-by-date hoofer who had shagged the leading man and
bought his agency with money saved, or money from Daddy in Surrey more like.

With my
coffee, I sat down on the sofa and smiled. That involuntary nervous mirth
common in the face of sudden disaster. Surprise is not an actual feeling, it’s
more like an absence of feeling. Or had I known all along that this would
happen, omitting to acknowledge the signs until now? I could not concentrate on
the rest of the large letter. I scanned it, looking for the word ‘sorry’, a
note even, anything personal. But it contained only legal details and
contractual bumf. I shrugged and let it fall to the floor. ‘Twas ever thus. The
hot-water system rumbled into action. Pipes a couple of floors below gurgled.
It was quite a pleasant sound. In fact, I felt OK. It would take a few days to
sort out the details, the lease, the photocopier, which clients were gone —
Jeremy Planter, obviously — but it was OK, honestly it was. My breathing was
surprisingly steady. I rang my mother on the cordless. She always took at least
ten rings to answer.

Twelve
years. Twelve years I’ve known that Ketts woman. No, fifteen if you count
before we started the company. Fifteen years I’ve seen that woman every day,
well, virtually every day. I’ve been through all her moods with her, her weight
loss, her weight gain, her fucking hopeless relationships, on and on about her
fucking relationships. I’ve been drunk with her on countless occasions at do’s
and even at don’ts. I must have spent more time on the phone to her — any time,
day or night, she’d ring — than I’ve had conversations with everyone else put
together, certainly more than I’ve spent having sex; she always would choose
the worst moments to ring. And never, as far as I can remember, a ‘How are you?’
or an ‘Is this a good time to call?’ Always straight down to business, always
the next thing, always ‘Guy, I hear they’re casting a new detective series at
Yorkshire and there’s a part which would be good for Peter or Mary or Solomon
or Tunde, and Guy, you know Theresa Undrell, don’t you, she’s casting, can you
get her to see Tunde?’ Never an apology, never a break, never a let-up. Always
the pink jacket, or the horrible sky-blue suit, or the new shiny shoes, or the ‘How
do you like my hair, I’m trying to look like Michelle Pfeiffer this week.’ I’ve
seen Naomi make mincemeat of lesser folk — several trainees have resigned in
tears — and I thought I was OK, I was special, I thought I could handle her.
When people complained about her overbearing, insensitive nature, or some
slight she had inflicted on them I would defend her: ‘That’s Naomi, I’m afraid.
What you see is what you get,’ I’d say, or, ‘Yes, she’s not exactly easy, is
she? But she is good.’ Or simply, with a knowing smile, ‘That’s Ketts for you.’
She is good. That’s the trouble, she’s really good, but that’s all she is. She’s
a machine. She must have realized some time ago that I was turning into a
liability. She must have been thinking of this for months. And then seen her
opportunity when Jeremy got shacked up with that bimbo. I wonder how long. She
must’ve known about Arabella Stantonshit-Walker all the time. Two years? Since
Grace’s ear infections at least. And there’s me, like some patsy, some complete
jerk-off, some stupid, gullible old crystal-gazing hippy-chick, trying to be
nice, trying to make everyone happy, to make everyone feel good. Ruthlessness,
that’s an attractive quality, isn’t it? Bugger it, if I was a client, I’d
rather have Naomi Ketts represent me than me. I have to admit it. Damn. You
don’t want someone kind looking after you, do you now? You want someone
ruthless, someone with no conscience, someone who can fight off all the other
predators, and fight dirty for you if necessary. Niceness, kindness, what’s the
point? Naomi Ketts would make a good daddy.