Vail Page 10

  Footsteps went by outside, metallic and feminine, and I heard a voice say, ‘Oh, Miss on , a word …’

  ‘How long has daughter been like this?’ one or other wanted to know. I broke out of the light trance I’d fallen into and said, ‘Several weeks at least. I should say two months, give or take a week or two.’

  Staff Nurse Bracegirdle worked her tongue behind her lower lip and wormed it to the side of her mouth so that her cheek bulged with sardonic mischief. ‘Rather vague, aren’t we?’ she said with a raised eyebrow. ‘My goodness. ‘Give or take a week or two.’ That could mean almost anything.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘some considerable time anyway. The symptoms came on slowly.’

  ‘That’s even vaguer,’ another scoffed. ‘‘Some considerable time’ and ‘slow symptoms’, – whatever they are, – aren’t a recognised part of medical parlance. You might just as well have said, ‘I haven’t a clue’ or ‘I can’t remember’ for all the help that is. Doctors should know better.’

  ‘I’m not a doctor,’ I said.

  ‘We’ve established that,’ Staff Nurse Bracegirdle said with a touch of asperity bordering on irritation. ‘What we’re saying is not doctors ought to know better but doctors should know better, and they do. You’re not denying that, I hope?’ Again the condescendingly amused crinkle at the corner of her mouth.

  The grey incorporeal shadow that was Dr Tocktor turned its head to one side and the four staff in attendance leaned forward in collective reverence. The doctor’s thin lips didn’t move, or if they did I didn’t see them; yet Staff Nurse Bracegirdle straightened up and requested that I move my chair farther back.

  ‘Back where?’

  ‘Away from the desk.’

  ‘How far away?’

  ‘Twenty-five centimetres or ten inches.’

  I complied by edging the chair back the required distance with the backs of my knees and sat down again. Dr Tocktor, I now noticed, was looking directly at me, – still not into my eyes, but at the centre of my forehead. Were we getting somewhere at last?

  ‘If you would consider admitting my daughter for observation,’ I ventured, ‘I’m positive you’ll discover that she really is in a very serious condition.’

  The four exchanged surprised if rather tolerant looks.

  One or other said, ‘Well, that’s something of an advance, I suppose. At least now he’s positive. Before it was merely a ‘belief’, an ‘opinion’. Well, well. What is it they say, – a little knowledge is a dangerous thing?’

  ‘Learning.’

  ‘Are you a doctor?’ Staff Nurse Bracegirdle flashed.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Who is the doctor?’

  ‘Him.’

  ‘Him!’

  ‘Dr Tocktor.’

  ‘It would be well for you to remember that. You haven’t been secretly trying to edge your chair nearer the desk, have you?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘We’re watching. We can tell. None of us are fools here. We’re all very highly qualified and very experienced. Just remember that.’

  Dr Tocktor looked at his watch, the cue for Staff Nurse Bracegirdle to say briskly: ‘Come. You’ve taken up enough of doctor’s valuable time. I’m sure daughter isn’t as bad as you make out. Give her a Panadol or one of those similar kinds of small round white tablets and let her sleep it off. Plenty of fluids. Keep her bowels open. In the morning all your fears will be foolish daydreams. Take doctor’s word for it.’

  Someone tapped on the door and a hand thrust a paper in which Staff Nurse Bracegirdle snatched and read. ‘Are you the owner of a green Bedford van, registration FTJ 109V that was parked in the space reserved for AG/C2?’

  I shook my head. ‘No. Is parked in that space. I parked it there myself.’

  ‘Not any longer. AG/C2 arrived and had the police remove it. It’s been impounded. Come along,’ she bustled, ‘doctor has other patients to see besides daughter. I think you’ve had more than your fair share, don’t you?’

  She escorted me to the entrance and what she said was true: a metallic blue Volvo Estate with tinted sunroof and Disneyland stickers in the back window was occupying the space where the van had been. The glass doors slid soundlessly shut behind me as I walked down the steps carrying the tartan blanket in my arms. And would you believe it, – after all these days of fine sunny weather it was starting to spit.

  Bends and hills were pure torture. At every turn in the road I had to hold my breath as a tidal wave rippled and sloshed the length of the tank and went over my head. Bad enough to be drowned, you might suppose, but it was icy cold into the bargain and I had lost all feeling in my feet, and my hands gripping the aluminium struts were frozen into claws.

  When the tanker went downhill and its liquid load submerged me for lengthy periods of time I just had to hang there in the freezing darkness, lungs aching, and pray that the hill was of short duration. Going uphill was easier, because then the load shifted to the rear and left my head clear above the white frothing surface. But the cold was the worst, I can tell you.

  Coming out of the woods I had seen the United Dairies’ tankers being filled under floodlights at the depot. Thirty or more were lined up behind a chain-link fence, their round stainless steel lids open at an angle like tank hatches in war films, and it had been child’s play to scale the fence, climb the short ladder to the fretted catwalk of the nearest tanker and drop down into the empty blackness inside. At this point I was warm, perspiring from my exertions; but that soon changed when they began to pump it in, refrigerated to bollock-shrinking level.

  When it reached my chest I got worried, and when it lapped my chin I panicked.

  By then I was floating with my head bumping the roof. If they filled it snug to the brim that would be that, I remember thinking, the end of the line for the Vail family: one strangled and buried just off the A422, another tenderly smothered in a tartan blanket and placed under stones reverently piled in a wood somewhere (I had no implement with which to dig a hole), the third drowned in milk.

  My bequest to the nation would be several thousand noses wrinkling over their breakfast cornflakes and a stack of complaints to the Customer Liaison Officer of United Dairies.

  The tanker passed through the wire just north of Sandy on the A1 in the very early hours of a drizzly August morning. My choice of transport, as it turned out, had been most opportune: commercial vehicles entering the South were subjected to an X-ray scan to detect arms shipments and stowaways, but milk was exempt from this regulation due to reasons of possible spoilage.

  In this manner I arrived in London, safe, in one piece, but suffering from frostbite.

  LONDON (II)

  [1]

  Vail is washing the dishes, dusting the furniture and Hoovering the floor when Pete Rarity rings him up to tell him that Bryce Ransom is impressed with him and would like to arrange an interview. Pete Rarity sounds as pleased as if he were the one going for the interview, absolutely chuffed about it. The thing that discomfits Vail is that although he has made it perfectly plain that he doesn’t like Pete Rarity, hates him, positively detests him, this doesn’t deter Pete Rarity one little bit. Pete Rarity can’t fail to know that Vail can’t stand the sight of him, yet he hangs around, rings up for drinks and so on, all the while acting as if he and Vail were the best of chums, and Vail is at a loss to know what to do about it.

  He will come upon Vail in a supermarket, say, and thrust his face into Vail’s with heroic cheerfulness and a breezy, ‘Hello, John, how are you! Long time no see. How are you doing? How are things going? Are you well? What’s happening?’

  As very little of any consequence is happening in Vail’s life, his response is invariably to shrug and mumble a few phrases and move on to the tinned fruit, searching for Bartlett pears in syrup, a delicacy Angie is unable to live without apparently.

  ‘Why does he want to see me?’ Vail asks, silencing the Hoover with his toe. ‘We hardly exchanged three words and I d
idn’t understand any of them.’

  ‘Who cares why, it’s a Golden Opportunity,’ Pete Rarity tells him breathlessly. ‘He must have seen something in you.’

  The prospect of an Opportunity, Golden or otherwise, attracts Vail. And what has he to lose? Only his Hoover, his apron, and his dishpan hands.

  ‘You mentioned an interview.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘When? Where?’

  ‘Thames. Thursday. Eleven.’

  ‘Will you be there?’

  ‘Me? Me?’ Pete Rarity laughs raucously. ‘Bry wouldn’t invite me. He thinks I’m a pillock.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Bry seems to think so. Besides, I’m too ugly to appear on television. Frighten the horses.’

  ‘What do you mean, ‘on television’? He doesn’t want me to appear on television, does he?’

  ‘Why not, John? You’re presentable. You’ve got what it takes. Bry’s an ace spotter, I’ll say that for him. He saw something in you and he wants to exploit it.’

  ‘I’m not exploitable.’

  ‘Let Bry be the judge of that. Place yourself in his capable hands. You won’t regret it!’

  Angie is all for it, says, ‘You can get your yellow card, ever think of that? Television companies can fix anything short of assassinations. They make or break people just like that.’ She snaps her fingers. ‘Take your apron off and let’s have sex. I’ve been panting for it all day while poring over proofs. We’ll do it on the carpet.’

  ‘I’ve just Hoovered,’ Vail objects.

  ‘All right, in bed. Get the Bartlett pears. Afterwards we can read John Folwes together and fall asleep in each other’s arms.’

  Just as sex equates Bartlett pears in Angie’s philosophy, sleep equates John Folwes in Vail’s.

  Reports on the 5.45 news include radiation leakage at Dungeness B, which turns out to be a scare story put about by irresponsible elements, the PM in Geneva to receive the World Peace and Social Harmony Prize, a man with no arms and legs who started his own computer software company, the world famous swimmer and sportswoman Sharon Davis signing an advertising endorsement contract worth half-a-million dollars, and questions raised in Parliament about the deteriorating quality of Britain’s milk. ‘As if a tramp had been swimming in it with his socks on,’ complained one distraught MP, several of whose Surrey constituents had written to him to say that it had made them quite ill.

  This is followed by a quiz show, Feet ‘n’ Porridge, in which contestants have to identify the naked feet of various entertainers and showbiz celebrities in exchange for lavish prizes; however if they get it wrong they have to wade up to their knees through a trough of cold porridge while singing a song or reciting a poem. Vail gets two right, and had he been a contestant would have won a fortnight’s holiday for two in Santiago.

  ‘Nothing on the news about your wife and kid,’ Angie remarks. ‘They can’t have decomposed yet, so they mustn’t have been found.’ She strokes his bare thigh in the tiny cluttered bedroom. They aren’t, strictly speaking, ‘in bed’, because there is no bed, just a mattress on the dusty floorboards underneath a shadeless bulb pumping out all of forty watts of electrical energy.

  ‘It happened on the other side of the wire,’ Vail reminds her. ‘Probably censored.’

  ‘This is a democracy don’t forget,’ Angie says, licking the inside of his leg with a pointed tongue, ‘with a free press. No murder goes unreported, especially a grisly one involving the working classes.’

  ‘What about the deliberate dumping of toxic chemicals and radioactive waste in densely-populated areas? Why don’t they report that?’

  ‘Rumour and hearsay. It’s more than a journalist’s job’s worth to print stuff not properly authenticated and verified by independent sources. In addition you have to have balance. Without balance all is chaos,’ she says, nuzzling his scrotum. ‘Remember what Lord Reith said.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I forget now, but it was crucially important. It set the standard for all that was to follow.’

  ‘All what that was to follow?’ asks Vail, genuinely puzzled.

  ‘Can’t talk,’ Angie mumbles indistinctly. ‘Mouth full.’ And so it is, Vail discovers, easing back with a silent gasp against the pillows.

  [2]

  The heat in the capital seems to have dissipated. People are still making money hand over fist however. Computer, video and sex shops doing a roaring trade, etc. The cooler weather doesn’t appear to affect them one way or the other. Consumption and titillation thrive in all temperatures.

  At Thames (yet more glazed reception areas, this time with jungle foliage) Vail sinks deep into a sofa while he waits to be called. He muses on the irony of being taken up by Bryce Ransom when he himself entertained no such desire or intention. Others were clamouring to be let in, lying, cheating, stealing and fornicating for the whiff of a chance to achieve admittance to the white hot centre of the universe, and were left standing on the pavement outside while he, a down-and-out, a no-hoper, a fringer, had been granted the Golden Opportunity.

  He looks up to see Lyndsey de Paul, hair cascading her shoulders, walk through with a tall bearded man wearing a gold earring. They are in animated conversation. The bearded man says something amusing and the talented singer-songwriter laughs with her pretty red mouth and beautiful teeth.

  My God thinks Vail, I could meet somebody famous here. I could actually converse with them, crack a joke, and they might even laugh. Their worlds and mine intersecting – incredible thought! I could watch them eating in the canteen and observe them on the way to the lavatory. Still, he reflects, television stars and top entertainers have to defecate like the rest of us. Unreasonable to expect otherwise.

  Vail is directed to Room 606 where Bryce Ransom, temples throbbing, spectacles glinting, pounces on him and drags him by the arm to a leather couch which sucks him in with much creaking and escaping of stale air.

  ‘Impossible trying twat in for all of us combined. Asked me twice to cut but interference scheduling cock-ups as per semblance of priorities. I wouldn’t could but do he? Could he slag off Studio 9 in place? Could he mustn’t. Anyway, last time ducks out isn’t for want of piling agony, even through bread in his mouth wouldn’t cunt if it was or didn’t. Tea or coffee?’

  ‘Coffee without milk,’ Vail says thankfully, both for the offer and for having understood three words from this torrent of gibberish.

  Already he is getting a headache in dreadful anticipation of more of the same. He can’t last out, he knows this. Another half-hour of Bryce Ransom and Vail will leap through the double glazing to the paved forecourt six floors below. Either that or throttle him with the stringy tie that the entertainment producer wears loosely knotted around his perpendicular veined neck.

  Bryce Ransom gulps scalding coffee. His thin mat of forward-brushed hair reminds Vail of a sparse covering of grass on top of a limestone cliff. The face trapped inside the wire spectacle frames is twitchy with spasms of uncontrollable brain impulses. Probably Bryce Ransom doesn’t himself understand half of what he’s saying; probably it doesn’t matter, and even if it does, who cares?

  Further torrents ensue, during which Vail detects continual references to one Virgie Hance; though who this Virgie Hance is and what he has to do with Vail’s visit, Vail can’t decipher. By the sound of him he’s American, and the speculation enters Vail’s mind that he’s about to be flown out to Hollywood, all expenses paid, to undergo plastic surgery on his teeth. Perhaps Bryce Ransom is talent-spotting for this Virgie Hance person, and perhaps he isn’t, it’s anybody’s guess.

  This state of affairs can’t go on for much longer because Vail really does have a headache now, a real beauty, and is rapidly nearing the leaping-through-double-glazing or throttling-with-stringy-tie point of the interview, and this after barely ten minutes.

  ‘Impetus counts could nullify if not precautions, especially at the time dreaming fat fuck, isn’t?’ Bryce Ransom asks rhetorically, mak
ing Vail grind his teeth in impotent rage. This was as bad as, – worse than, – discussing the erotic symbolism of John Folwes with Angie. How could Thames employ such a person? Surely all television producers didn’t speak in this fashion?

  The lean and rangy producer suddenly reaches out at full stretch and presses a tab on the intercom, shirt riding up his back to reveal a slice of pale freckled flesh. There is a brief staccato exchange and he coils back to sit beside Vail on the creaking leather sofa, a smile straining his skinny rawboned face.

  He nods alertly at Vail. ‘Okay true?’

  ‘Yes. Sure. Why not?’ What has he let himself in for now? Vail wonders dismally. He half-expects the door to burst open and a red-haired woman come striding in with a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth like a Liverpool docker.

  This is what does, in fact, happen.

  Before he can rise, out of politeness, the woman is pumping his hand and observing him shrewdly through eyes screwed up against the shroud of cigarette smoke. She is young, thirtyish or thereabouts, quite slim, with gaps separating her teeth. She is attractive when she doesn’t speak and terrifyingly frightful when she does. Her voice and manner obliterate all feminineness, yet her physical body is desirable. Vail desires and is revulsed all at once.

  ‘Have a good trip? Bry’s told me all about you. Where are you staying? Sorry I couldn’t meet you. Where do you want to eat? I know a little place. Pity you can’t join us, Bry. You’re not going to quibble over money, I hope. Hell of a tight schedule. You’re not under contract to anyone? Bastard to park round here. No doubt Bry’s told you already. We’d better chat. Where’s your coat? We can walk from here. Service is lousy but the wine’s superb. How tall are you? Listen, we’d best be going. Will you be around later, Bry? Week 14, don’t forget. See you later. Are you coming? We can talk on the hoof.’

  They are along the corridor, down in the lift, across the reception hall and out into the street walking fast before Vail has time to put lard on the cat’s boil.