Vail Read online

  ‘Replaced scheduled transmission twats. If network clash Week 14 we didn’t sense but hasn’t instead? No. They couldn’t lick elbow over arse with following wind.’

  ‘What’s Kenny like to work with?’

  ‘Nothing fired-up didn’t have the nous to string it. Could but didn’t so bloody sure not. After all, as if he notched 17.9!’

  ‘Didn’t he?’

  ‘If seventeen’s max then slip in wet uptight cunts. Not in jolly with Vere, though. He’s filleted.’

  Pete Rarity nods sagely in the most servile manner imaginable. Has he understood this gobbledygook? Vail wonders mutely. If not, it is a valiant attempt and successful pretence at same.

  Is this how all television producers talk? Or only at Thames? How do people underneath them understand what’s to be done, or doesn’t it matter? Is it a positive benefit, an essential attribute for the job, to be totally unintelligible to everyone else, particularly those to whom they are supposed to be giving orders?

  These questions plague Vail, though never having been near a television studio he can only surmise in ignorance.

  Apparently, – missed by Vail in the staccato blizzard, – Bryce Ransom, – Bry to his friends, – has asked them to stay to dinner.

  Pete Rarity accepts on Vail’s behalf, though it isn’t dinner they’ve been asked to stay for at all, but a party of sorts. Other people appear in the top-floor flat. A supply of tall willowy girls with long straight hair the colour of a SunSilk commercial that cascades over, and is separated by, their pointed shoulders so that golden sheaves fall fore and aft. All these girls are beautiful and refined and speak so slowly and correctly that Vail has time to boil an egg between sentences. They speak to his face as into an empty cardboard box. They have lovely teeth and sweet breaths and tiny pinched nostrils.

  Somebody brings news of the hospital carnage involving the INLA (thirty dead, lots more injured) but luckily the Minister for Media and Tabloids was in his missile-proof lead-lined private room on the tenth floor and escaped without a scratch. This, then, clearly isn’t the way to set about it (as his instincts had told him). If the Inner London Education Authority can’t succeed, what chance has he?

  Vail mingles, keeping an ear open for hints and possible openings. There are several men wearing thin gold chains and Adidas training shoes, one or two as slender as the girls. Pete Rarity winks at him from across the room and gives him the thumbs-up. The place reeks of red wine and asparagus quiche. Vail hears an American accent which he is familiar with from TV but has hardly, if ever, heard in the flesh before; it is like being in a B movie.

  ‘Weird Ache,’ says the American thrusting out a brown fist.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Your name?’

  Vail tells him and the American says, ‘Veal?’

  ‘Vail.’

  ‘Vole?’

  ‘Vail.’

  ‘Vail. Right. Weird Ache.’

  ‘Weird Ache?’

  ‘Wayde. Dake.’

  ‘How do you do, Mr Dake.’

  ‘Weird.’

  ‘Wayde.’

  ‘You’re into … ?’

  ‘Into?’

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘Me? I’m in video.’

  ‘Conception, production or packaging?’

  ‘Integrate following let who fucks who tight, wouldn’t they,’ says Vail, taking a leaf out of Bry’s book. It seems to work; the American nods vigorously. ‘Too damn right. Somebody has to.’

  ‘What are you in?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘CP/M security and surveillance.’ He proffers a card. ‘Need an ALU, BCD, LSI or LCD and I’m your man. We can interface any number of peripherals and give you a menu, modem, matrix, or mouse. Pick a random number and we can scroll it, synthesise it, simulate it, spreadsheet it, sprite it and stack it.’

  ‘All at once?’

  ‘Yep or sequentially. Don’t forget, the world is running to a dead end. We have to speed up the process.’

  ‘I thought we had to slow it down?’

  ‘No. You’ve got to stay one kilobyte ahead. Tomorrow’s advance is yesterday’s stale fish. Be there.’

  ‘I’m not up with all this, I’m afraid.’

  ‘We can help. Outfit you with PEEK, PROM and POKE and you’ll fly like a turtle. You’ll never look back,’ the American avers.

  Now. This looks promising. This could be a way in. If he can get hold of a security and surveillance system there’s no telling where it might lead, – not to mention the PEEKs, PROMs and POKEs and other things. He could gain access to all sorts of places: Buckingham Palace, Downing Street, the Houses of Parliament, Harrods. Say he bought a pair of headphones with dangly wires and wore a white coat and wandered in with the rest of the technical crew? Would they spot him? He could mumble CP/M scroll POKE Kbyte and look preoccupied. Nobody ever stopped a man in a white coat who mumbled and looked preoccupied; you could operate on the Queen Mother if you did that, and most of them had.

  So Vail sets about to pick the American’s brains, who, it transpires, comes from Austin, Texas. He is a massively broad fellow, creased and hard and gnarled as an olive tree, with craggy slits for eyes. His teeth are square white slabs in a mouth as wide as his head. He has a solid moustache burnt yellow by the Texas sun. It seems he will accede to Vail’s request for CP/M security and surveillance information if he (Vail) will arrange to have one of the tall willowy correctly-spoken girls spend the night with him (Dake).

  He must think I’m an old friend of Bry’s, thinks Vail, with some kind of influence over the people here. What should I do? And if I agree, how do I arrange for one of the girls to spend the night with him? They won’t look at me anyway, for myself, much less as a go-between or sexual intermediary. Wouldn’t you think too that a broad tanned rich American (all Americans are rich) would have a far greater chance of pulling a bird than a specimen like me? Unless the American supposes there is some significant difference between American girls and English girls, that a different approach is required, and he (Way de Dake) feels insecure in dealing with females of an alien culture, – for all his wealth and aplomb and slick expertise in security and surveillance systems unsure which social and emotional triggers to press to activate the desired response.

  ‘I know all about that,’ says Wayde Dake, having read Vail’s mind, ‘and much of it is true, partly anyway. Will you give it your best shot? I’d be appreciative.’

  ‘I’ll do the best I can,’ Vail promises, his mind agog with openings and opportunities.

  The party has speeded up considerably as more people arrive in droves. Outside the streets lurk with unmitigated violence and squalor; here in the top-floor flat it is hot, oppressive, fume-laden, noisy with conversation and shrieks and thumping disco-throb. Drugs are taken, weed smoked, smack inhaled.

  Bryce Ransom pauses to have a brief chat with Vail but the result is as incomprehensible and inconclusive as before. His verbal bullets spatter Vail’s face, eyes crinkling astutely behind his twisted wire-frame specs, exposed bony temples writhing with wormy blue veins.

  It crosses Vail’s mind to wonder whether this isn’t a deliberate ploy. The motive? To see how many people pretend to understand because they don’t wish to offend a television producer, thereby affording much secret amusement to Bryce Ransom as well as being an instant litmus test of the cretinous, the gullible, the sycophantic: in other words those prepared to debase themselves to the nth degree in order to win the favour and approbation of an important personage. What a clever wheeze! Laughing up his sleeve at the world while passing off a spate of gibberish as incisive intellectual pyrotechnics. You have to admire the fellow, though Vail doesn’t, finding him tiresome.

  But, – this Vail’s banal perplexity, – how does the producer from Thames go about buying groceries or ordering a meal in a restaurant? Is it all done by gesture and dumb show? ESP? Semaphore?

  It seems sound policy to con
centrate on one girl in particular. Besides, he can’t talk to them all at once, it would be too confusing.

  For a tall willowy blonde English girl Angela is extraordinarily short, dumpy, dark-haired and Australian. She works as an editor for BBC Publications, speaks with an Aussie accent and prefers to be called Angie. Vail enters into conversation with Angie by the simple expedient of overhearing a reference to an author called John Folwes and expressing his liking of and admiration for said author’s works, even though he has never read a single word John Folwes has written, much less heard of him.

  There follows an animated dialogue concerning Folwes which Vail, for his part, makes up as he goes along. Angie doesn’t appear to notice any glaring omission or discrepancy: apparently Folwes is an author you can discuss in considerable depth without ever having read a line.

  But Angie has read all his works, some of them several times over in the continuing search for a meaning to life, and in Vail believes she has found a like mind, a soul-mate, of course exemplified by their shared literary taste. Expressing an admiration for Folwes, Vail discovers, is like belonging to an exclusive club or society whose members wear revolving beacons on top of their heads. You can easily spot them fifty metres across a crowded room and, should you be so minded, home in like a motorway sparrow hawk pouncing on a small furry rodent.

  Thus it is that in a cramped corner next to a rubber plant and a Munch woodcut reproduction in a stainless steel frame on an off-white rough-cast wall, pushed chest to chest by the crush and holding their glasses of wine underneath their chins, they explore the labyrinthine symbolism and essential message of Folwes while their eyes delve into the murky hidden recesses of the other, noting in passing his unshaven paleness, lined mouth and blank grey eyes and her brown freckled skin and small breasts with dark prominent nipples.

  The din and clatter all around shrinks to a blur of sound; the music heard as a reverberation through the soles of their feet; the wine and heat and sensual attraction swimming in their heads like lazy goldfish.

  ‘Have you noticed that people at parties seem to have no past?’ Vail nods, then shakes his head. No, he never has.

  ‘Well,’ Angie says, licking wine from her upper lip. ‘They arrive out of nowhere, – literally. Materialise from the abyss. Know what I mean? As though they’ve been instantly created for the occasion. Normally they’re kept stacked flat in airless storerooms and only brought out and assembled and arranged about the place as required, – like those kids’ pop-up books which as you turn a page erect themselves into a scene complete with people and furniture.

  ‘I mean, think about it:

  ‘All these people turn up here tonight, who you’ve never seen before, and it takes a supreme effort of imagination to convince yourself that their lives were going on before you laid eyes on them. Well, doesn’t it? They were created the instant they walked in. Never existed before, – stacked flat in airless storerooms.

  ‘Take the extremely tall guy over there with the spotted bald head, pink glasses and velvet bow tie. He’s just this minute been invented! He doesn’t exist at any other time! Impossible to believe he got out of bed this morning, had a wash, ate his breakfast of muesli and toast, ran for the train at Sutton, arrived at the office, had a stand-up lunch in the pub (cheese and pickle sandwich, half a lager), went back to work, so on and so forth.

  ‘Even you, – or me,’ Angie goes on and on, gazing up fiercely into his eyes. ‘We’re like characters in a novel who only come into being the moment the author sets pen to paper. They have no past, and neither, for one another, do we. We could be stricken out by a swipe of the pen. I don’t believe you have a past and you don’t believe I have one either. Why, until just a few minutes ago you didn’t even know I existed, – and I didn’t!’

  Vail wafts himself, saying, ‘It’s very hot in here,’ not knowing what else to say. (He was doing great with Folwes, holding his own, but events seem to have taken a turn for the worse. Is he meant to respond to this, and, if so, with what?)

  ‘For all you know I could be one of the ready-made people stacked flat in an airless storeroom just waiting to be assembled!’ – triumphant!

  ‘Well, yes,’ Vail is prepared to concede, not entirely sure where this gets them. ‘You could be.’ Angie might be fictitious (even though she works for the BBC) but his own past is inviolate. He knows full well where he came from and precisely where, – sidetracks, dead ends, wrong turnings notwithstanding, – he’s going.

  Somewhere the Opportunity lies in wait for him. It might come from any direction, from any slight quirk of events or random juxtaposition of circumstances. He is prepared to explore all possibilities.

  Already, in the space of a few hours, a number of interesting avenues have been revealed, come to light, as it were:

  1. He has been mistaken for a copy man.

  2. He has become acquainted with an incomprehensible television producer.

  3. An American has asked a favour of him in exchange for certain information.

  4. An Australian girl with small breasts and dark prominent nipples has come into his life.

  For a fictitious character Vail reckons he is doing all right.

  [6]

  In the normal course of events there ought to be a sex scene here between Vail and a tall blonde willowy English girl who happens to be small, dark-haired, Australian and works for the BBC.

  We can all imagine such a scene for ourselves. It will no doubt feature certain named portions of male and female anatomy, quiescent and in motion; it will be either soft and rapturous or hard and brutal, or possibly a combination of both. He (Vail) will perform certain acts upon her (Angie) and she will reciprocate in kind, insofar as their physical dissimilarities allow. There might even be net curtains billowing gently in the humid breeze (it is a hot night, remember) and soft-focus prose about heaving mounds and entwining limbs and sheens of reflected light on damp skin. It might also include, God forbid, elements of erect allegory and limp symbolism.

  Instead of this titillating sideshow let us press on.

  Some women like to know everything there is to know about a man, and the more he goes against the grain, the more he fails to fit or resists the accepted patterns of behaviour, the more insatiably voracious they become in pursuit of knowledge, to possess him, control him. Perhaps Angie is attracted to strays and fringers, who knows? At any rate she finds him ‘interesting’, a man with a mysterious and alluring past, and this because of rather than despite his long and matted hair, crumpled evil-smelling clothes, the hollow defeated look about him, especially noticable in the sag of his cheeks and the puffy dark bags under his eyes.

  Even the difference in ages, – Angie is twenty-three, – could be said to be another factor in his favour: a further disparity, departure from the norm, which excites her worst dark thrilling suspicions.

  They leave the party and go back to her room, which isn’t very far away (Sheffield Terrace), walking through the prowling streets after midnight, a risky thing to do in this day and age. She makes coffee (no milk for Vail) and they listen to a black singer called Joan Armourtrading while Angie sits cross-legged in the classic pose at Vail’s disreputable feet, her small round face upturned attentively, dark eyes watching his mouth, comfortable in the knowledge that he is to stay the night and therefore happy that the sexual potency quivering in the air between them will be discharged in good time, leaving only an interim period to be filled with pleasant non-combative conversation.

  ‘I get so depressed.’ Angie tells him, ‘looking for a deeper meaning to life. There must be one and yet I can’t find it.’

  ‘Where have you looked?’

  ‘Everywhere.’

  ‘At the BBC?’

  ‘In Australia, at the BBC, sitting on the lavatory, everywhere.’

  To Vail she sounds desperate and at the same time complacent, as if looking and not finding a deeper meaning to life is an enviable state to be in; smug confirmation of one’s proper intellectu
al status.

  ‘There must be more to it than this,’ Angie goes on with some vehemence. ‘I mean, look at it. Orthodox religion up shit creek, we’re poisoning ourselves with toxic waste, Dallas has more murders per year than England and Wales combined, the universe is expanding out of control, you can’t get fresh milk delivered to your doorstep any more, we’re slaughtering baby seals to make eyeshadow, leaded petrol is making children into morons, we’ve stockpiled enough nukes to kill every man, woman and child on the planet fifty times over, billions of people are starving in the Third World, you can’t walk down the street without being grabbed and raped, in Russia they put dissidents into psychiatric wards and pump them full of Majetpil, we force-feed animals to get a juicy steak, there’s too much violence and pornography on television, entropy is increasing exponentially, you can’t get a decent meal in a restaurant under £20, they’re chopping down all the trees in the Amazonian Basin, everybody’s in it for what they can get, the trains are filthy and don’t run on time, you can’t go outside the wire without getting shot, old people die of hypothermia, people spend more on gambling than they do on health care, wives are being battered, there’s less than ten percent real meat in sausages, shoals of haddock have been wiped out by nuclear runoff, – ’

  Vail ventures a timely interruption.

  ‘I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausages and haddock by writing them down.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that, – all I know is that I’m sick to death. Everyone thinks it’s wonderful working at the BBC but it isn’t. Fagwir from it. The canteen meals are disgusting. I gave better slop to my dingo back in Perth.’

  Vail says, ‘You’ve got your yellow card and you’re not plagued by gwiches.’

  Angie’s interest perks up at once. ‘Did a gwich ever shop you?’

  ‘Not yet. But I have to be careful.’