The Right Man (5 page)

You don’t
have to be a Zen master to work this one out. What possible good to a Bella/Chrissie/Samantha,
with her sprightly nipples and tight box, would the old representation be? Previous
alliances from his old pre-bimbo life. She would know pretty soon, if not
already, of Jeremy’s long-standing relationship with Mullin and Ketts and of my
friendship with Susan; of my being Dave’s godfather, even. None of this would
make her feel secure in her new role as Queen Planter. If this were sixteenth
century Italy, we could all soon expect poison in our soup.

Inside
the package was a note from Jeremy and his front-door key Sellotaped to the
back of an autographed Walker-print of himself. The note asked me to go round
to his place to pick up certain things for him and bring them to the office. He
would explain all when I next saw him. No pleases, no thank-yous. So it was
beginning already.

Asking
your personal representation to do little favours for you is definitely on the
cards and is normal: checking your travel arrangements, booking tickets for
you, ringing people to apologise for you. Going round to water the plants while
you are away is stretching it a bit, even for an artist with whom one has a
very personal relationship. This is something that could be left to a cleaning
person or neighbour. So Planter’s graceless request was a sign that he had
relegated me, and therefore Mullin and Ketts, to the role of skivvying for him.
I wondered if he had already been lunched by one of the big agencies, like ICM
or Peters Fraser and Dunlop. I wondered how long the ugly process might take. I
pocketed his front-door key and threw away the note. It was half past three. I
had been hoping to see round a couple of flats for my mother this afternoon,
but that would have to wait until some other time. Mum had agreed with me that
it would be best for her to move after Dad’s death. I rang the estate agent’s
to let them know, and I wrote a memo for Tania, to call up all monies unpaid to
Jeremy Planter and chase them. I went to the Planter file and took out his last
seven contracts, photocopied them, putting the photocopies in my bag, and with light-hearted
apologies said my ‘hasta lasagnes’ and left the office.

The
evening was a total bastard. I was twenty minutes late getting back from the
West End, so Liz and I passed each other at the front door. She was going to the
gym, or to see her best friend Heather, or both. For the first time, I wondered
whether all this was true. She was in a frazzled state; Grace had obviously
been winding her up all day. She doesn’t go to day nursery on Wednesday, the
original idea being that I’d be able to get back early on Wednesdays, but that
turned out not to be possible on a regular basis. Liz left without a word to
me. It must be tough for women who have to stay in all day with the baby, brain
turning to gelatine.

Grace
tried her not-eating-anything gambit again, but I soon put paid to that by
ignoring her and taking exaggerated enjoyment out of eating my own egg — the
old Tom and Jerry trick, works every time. No doubt Grace would get wise to it
sooner or later, but for the meantime it meant we’d get through another night
without ‘I’m hungry’ at a quarter past ten. I was able to watch two of the nine
videos I had to look at over the weekend after Grace had her bath. Although I
get Tilda to do most of my viewing nowadays, there are always some which I have
to watch. Not watch them properly, of course, like I used to, but fast-search
to the scenes which my clients are in. It’s no good having a client on telly
and having to explain to them the following week that you didn’t even see their
work. But there are ways of lightening the load: just taking a couple of notes
about salient points and mentioning them with emphasis can give a client the
feeling that you have been avidly following every nuance of their perf. Theatre
is more wearing on the vertebrae, of course, you have to be seen to have
actually been there, and leaving in the interval is risky — the scenery may
fall down in the second half and you wouldn’t know. ‘I thought you paced your
performance brilliantly in the second act, m’dear’ would soon be sussed if your
client had had a fainting fit in the final scene, or been too pissed to finish
the show. Not that we have any real piss-artists at Muffin and Ketts, I can’t
be doing with them.

Once
Grace was asleep I cracked open a bottle of something and got out the week’s
script pile. Again, a skim-through would suffice. Size and type of part, then
check to the end to see which characters die, and if there are any major plot
reveals one should know about. Drinking alone is not something I used to do,
but in the evenings, with Liz out and Grace asleep, it was becoming, dare I say
it, a bit of a routine. Liz wouldn’t be back until two or three in the morning
now, so I’d turn in at twelve and leave the hall light on for her. I
contemplated ringing her friend Heather to see if she had really gone there,
but couldn’t bring myself to do it.

I’ve
discovered with Liz that equality between the sexes is a difficult thing to
achieve, let alone maintain. There are 168 hours in a week. That’s how many there
are in total. Not a particularly magical number, but the actual one. If we say
that eight hours every day are spent sleeping, that leaves 112 waking hours.
Then take away three hours a day for preparing, eating and clearing away food,
and you have got ninety-one hours a week left each. It’s already looking
stressful and tight. Other deductions common to us all were harder to make.
Like home administration and repairs, tidying up, working to get the money in,
and ablutions, of course. I found myself making allowances for her when it came
to ablutions. Women are allowed to spend longer on washing. Evidently they have
less naturally oily skin and so need to put on creams and things, and, of
course, they are judged on their appearances so much more than men — whether we
like it or not — so I gave her an extra hour a day on. that in my theoretical
calculations. This made it necessary, after the ninety-one hour mark, to divide
us into two, according to our gender, and that’s really where the arguments
started, I suppose.

It soon
became apparent that although an hour is an hour and it lasts the same time for
everyone, some hours have different values from others — rather like a currency
— and it was virtually impossible to work out a fair exchange rate. For instance,
Liz hates cooking and sewing, so an hour doing either would, for her, go very
slowly. I, on the other hand, enjoy cooking very much and am good at it, whilst
I find sewing very difficult and frustrating. I’m crap at it. Here, Liz has an
unfair advantage over me, in that her mother taught her to sew from the age of
four. So that although she doesn’t like to do it, she could complete all of our
sewing in a quarter of the time it would take me.

Trying
to establish a fair sharing-out of the tasks became even harder when I took
actual work into account. Work is impossible to evaluate. There is work you do
because you have to and there is work you do because you want to, and
unfortunately it is usually the former which brings in the money at the end of
the week. But then, the six months or so that Liz would spend waiting for
another acting job, whilst not earning us any immediate cash, might one day
bring in a fortune if she got lucky.

It
became complicated, but I’d persevered, even writing down columns of figures.
Whichever way I juggled them, however, I ended up, in my column, with more than
the available 168 hours — an impossibility — whilst Liz usually had about six
hours a week to spare.

It was
no wonder I got headaches so often, and it would have been fair enough, I
thought, for me to develop some psychosomatic stress—related illness. However,
it was always Liz who got these. From the flakiness around her hair line to her
overwhelmingly tired and floppy stints. These attempts of mine at a Maoist
kind of equality were, I think, what used to drive her out of the room,
slamming the door so that the door handle fell off again, and into the bedroom.
She wouldn’t talk to me then for some days. I would sit there thinking of
screwing the counter-sunk lugs back on the door handle, for what must have been
the twentieth time, but decided it might be better to replace the handle
altogether with something perhaps less aesthetically pleasing, but which would
at least survive her tantrums.

I
suspect it was my reasonableness over matters like this that must have driven
her to Bob Henderson in the first place. By reasonableness, I don’t mean
understanding. I wouldn’t claim ever to have understood her. Nor do I mean that
I was easygoing or even-tempered. Far from it. I suppose I mean more the
inescapability of my logic, or at least my inability to escape from it.

The trouble was, if we had
done things her way, obeying only our feelings, bills would not be paid. Not
just because there would be no money but because she habitually left all that
kind of thing to me. Accounts, administration, insurance were activities she
looked down on. And she looked down too on my pedantic tenacity with them. No
doubt there are other more flamboyant men who can deal with these everyday
tasks with a flourish and to whom Liz would be more suited, but I am dogged
about these things and this scrapes the blackboard of her nerves.

I bet
Liz’s lover-boy, Bob Henderson, doesn’t care about things like equality between
the sexes. I bet her Bob is casual and confident in his power. I bet, being a
proper man, he would not tell her of impending bankruptcies, would not trouble
her little head with the everyday bureaucracies of their lives. I bet he is
on-line to his bank. I bet he is connected by modem to his accountant and I bet
a piece of paper only ever crosses his desk once. Smiling girls with clean hair
talk to him on those mini-microphone headset telephones about how his shares
are doing. And when his washing machine breaks down, the service company not only
answer the phone, they actually specify a time when they can turn up, so that
his au pair can know when to be in. But of course, he would have one of those
German washing machines that never break down, made by a company who got big
using slave labour from the concentration camps during the Second World War.
But that thought would not trouble him, would not occur to him. Men like Bob
have in-built opposite magnetism to suffering. Suffering’s southern pole is
repelled by his unrelenting northness. Robert Henderson. Old Hendo. Our Bob. A
man blessed because the day he was born, God had run out of consciences.

Grace
was playing on a pebbly beach. I’d taken her there. The sound of receding surf
sucking at the shingle was irritating, nauseating. She was laughing and
enjoying jumping over the little incoming waves as they sauntered in,
mockingly. At each new ankle-deep incursion she was further from the shore, and
looked back to me for reassurance, which I gave her. Go on, my daughter! Grow!
Learn! Swim! Then came a moment when she was frightened. The water was up to
her waist now and the noise of it dragging on the stones beneath our feet was
overwhelming. I had brought us here, I had encouraged this expedition into the
treacherous tide. As usual, at the last minute, I put myself between her and
the vengeance of the pulling water, waded in up to my chest, letting the sea
claim me instead, leaving her on the land. Luckily I was saved from the moment
of watery lungs by waking up.

Liz was
snoring like a lorry. Three a.m. She farted and rolled on to her side. After
ensuring that she was still asleep, I farted in sympathy. The thing now was to
fight the temptation to creep out of bed into Grace’s room to check if she was
alright. It was only a dream, my problem. My rational resolve didn’t last long.
After a minute or so of monitoring Liz’s breathing, I slipped out from under
the duvet and went silently to stand in Grace’s doorway for a few moments. I
couldn’t hear anything so I went in a few feet, then a few feet more until I
was right over the safety bar of her bed. Very quietly, and from what seemed a
long way off, I heard the gentle lapping of her breath. I went back into the
bedroom where Liz had rolled again, cocooning herself in the duvet. I lay on my
side of the bed with no cover for a few minutes, until, realizing I was cold, I
quietly reached for my T-shirt on the chair and slipped it on.

Later
in the night, I must have managed to reclaim some of the duvet, because I woke
in the morning with a corner of it over my shoulders. I got up and dressed
quietly, making Liz a cup of tea. I had to go to work. As I prepared to leave,
Grace woke and started bawling at me. She wouldn’t let me go. I ended up
bunging her in with her mum — much to Liz’s annoyance — plucking her off me
like an unwanted burr.

TWO

IN HINDSIGHT — SOMETHING
we don’t usually have time for in this business — it was probably a mistake to
let Neil James meet Marc Linsey at all. Neil had changed more than I had
appreciated since
Every Other Weekend
had gone off air.
EOW
was a
situation comedy about two divorced fathers and their children, quite big a
couple of years ago, completely forgotten now. Neil was somewhat type-cast as
the soppy one, remember? No, I’m not surprised, it wasn’t earth—shattering
stuff, but it was a good little earner and an easy gig for Neil which looked
like going on for at least a couple more seasons. But then came the franchise
débâcle and all the ministers of television had a cabinet reshuffle.
Every
Other Weekend
was dropped as being too ‘blokey’ and Neil was left with a
rather small commission from the publishers and 100,000 words to write. It was
my fault really. I just don’t get the rime to stay on top of clients as much as
I should any more, since Grace. Not even my heavy seven. If I’d known what kind
of a state he was in I think I’d have somehow engineered to keep them apart.