A Certain Chemistry (12 page)

She sat down on the sofa, curling one leg under her bottom.

“So, then . . .” she said.

“Yes . . .” I scanned the room hastily. There was no way I was going to sit down on the sofa beside her—not with the messages my genitals had just been sending out—so I grabbed a wooden chair from over by the writing desk and placed it down opposite where she was sitting. She twisted her lips as I did this, trying not to smile. A coffee table separated us—onto which I placed my Dictaphone. “Okay. Are you ready?”

“Sure. Do you want anything, before we start?”

“What?”

“Do you want anything? Shall I call room service for tea or coffee or something? Before we start?”

“Oh, no. I’m fine, thanks.”

“Some paracetamol?”

“Sorry?”

“For your chill—it keeps your temperature down.”

“No, no, I’ll be okay. Thanks all the same.” I ran my hand up across my forehead to wipe away a little perspiration—the action reminding me that I was wearing a “shrieking mauve” snowboarding hat (ace) over an “under-construction” haircut (double ace).

I sought refuge in professionalism and immediately began asking some questions that had arisen since I’d made a start on the book. She answered them cheerily and gave me lots of extra material too; we’d got all the biographical facts pretty much covered now, so she came up with some good anecdotes and a bit of behind-the-glamour-of-showbiz stuff I’d be able to weave in—hopefully using a voice sufficiently conspiratorial for them to appear far more excitingly confessional than was really the case.

We talked for hours. She got through about half a packet of cigarettes, and at times not only did I forget that I had a stupid hat on, I also forgot I was interviewing her for the book; we were just chatting. She’d ask me about myself or writing or publishing in general, and fifteen minutes could go by before I realized I’d been telling her
my
life story instead of the other way round. Not really a very efficient use of the Dictaphone tapes—I already knew my life story, and I
definitely
knew there wasn’t a book in it. It was the tapes, in fact, that brought us to a halt. When I came to the end of the final one I had with me, that was that. A slight irritation crept through me—a bit like the feeling you get at school at the end of an exam—“Everyone put their pens down now, please”—when you finally, remarkably, know where the essay you’re writing is going and suddenly have a head full of things to say.

I picked the Dictaphone up off the table and patted it.

“Well, that’s it, I suppose,” I said.

“It’s a bit depressing, really, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“All my life being able to fit on a few tapes.”

“Good Lord, no. First of all, it’s not
all
your life. It’s simply all your life that’s—”

“Fit to print?”

“Exactly. Next, you’re only thirty, after all. And finally, I have to say, if the situation were reversed, I’d be able to give you all
my
life just by leaving a message on your answerphone.”

“Ha—I don’t believe that.”

“Oh, it’s true. Pretty much the most interesting thing I’ve ever done is meet you.” Which I’d meant to sound gently self-effacing but, after I’d loosed it into the room, I realized seemed sickeningly fawning and then, after you’d thought about it for a bit longer, actually mildly insulting.

“Thanks,” she replied with a smile. (She obviously hadn’t reached the “insulting” realization yet. Doubtless she’d wake up abruptly in the middle of the night a few days from now and mutter, “Wanker.”)

I gathered up the used tapes from the tabletop as George twisted her cigarette to death in the ashtray. We rose, made elaborate displays of stretching, and drifted towards the door. She opened it for me, and I went out into the hallway, turning back for the final good-bye once I was there.

“Like I said, I’ve already got a few bits you can read through, just to give you an idea of the tone I’m using. I’ll send them to your agent. Any problems, just get back to me and I’ll rewrite.”

“Okay,” she replied. She was standing in the doorway, leaning with her cheek against the edge of the open door.

“And the sooner I can have those photos the better,” I added.

“I’m back in London after filming, so I might be able to get them to you by the weekend.”

“That’s great.”

She smiled. There was surely some clear signal that we’d both recognize as marking The End (allowing her to close the door, and me to walk off down the hall, without any lingering awkwardness), but we appeared to be having trouble locating it.

“Bye then,” I said.

“Yes, bye,” she echoed, but she didn’t move from her position at all.

“Perhaps I’ll see you again. To talk over rewrites and amendments.”

She didn’t reply, but instead lifted herself off the edge of the door and stepped closer to me. She reached up and laid her hand across my forehead.

“You feel a little cooler now . . . That’s good.”

I said something in reply, but I don’t know what it was. It certainly wasn’t a word.

“Bye. You get yourself to bed,” she said as she closed the door, looking at me through the narrowing gap right up until it shut.

I stood there motionless for a few seconds, then turned and headed for the lift. I did consider the stairs but thought the lift would be easier. What with the erection and everything.

III

Right,
now I know what you guys is like, so I think I need to step in here—just quickly—and get something straight. ’Cause I can just see you all sitting there going, “Yeah, I know what’s happening here,” and starting to invent this big theory that I’ll never be able to get you off of. You just can’t stop yourselves. That’s part of the problem, in fact. I don’t know about what George said back there a ways about wanting to have a shrink, but I
do
know that every one of you secretly thinks you could
be
a shrink: you just love to analyze one another. If I don’t step in here, you’ll be giving it all the “this means that” and “he does such because she does whatever” and “it’s all to do with unfulfilled needs” and “faulty images of self” and “the table represents his mother” and who knows
what
you’ll end up believing. Well, before you start doing that, I’m going to say one word to you, okay? Here it is: monoamines. Got that? Monoamines.

I’ll explain this more later—now’s not the time. But I want you to stay focused, you hear me? I want you to keep on the path and, if you ever find yourself wandering off into some tangled forest of theorizing, you just say to yourself, “Monoamines,” and get yourself back on course. Think you can do that for me? Yeah, well . . . at least try—okay?

six

“Is that you, Tom?” Sara called from the kitchen as I came in through the front door.

“No. Axe murderer. Nothing personal—I was just in the area.”

She came out into the hallway—carrying what looked suspiciously like a bowl of lime jelly and tuna—and paused, looking over at me. I heaved my coat off and hung it up.

“You’re back late.”

I sighed.

“Yeah, sorry—I got tied up in town,” I said, taking off my hat and tossing it aside. “First there was this ALF bomb thing . . .”

“Och—sweet Jesus!” cried Sara, looking at me and beaming with amusement. “The Animal Liberation Front have bombed your hair!” She moved over and poked the top of my head.

“I was halfway through having it cut when the police evacuated us,” I mumbled.

“You poor wee dear. And the authorities
swore
to us this kind of thing was all in the past, after it happened to Phil Oakey all those years ago.”

“I’ll go somewhere and get it fixed tomorrow.”

Sara, still brushing at my hair, wrinkled up her nose. “You smell of smoke . . . have you been with Amy?”

“Yeah.”

Odd. I wonder why I said that?

“The Georgina Nye book?”

“Yes. Just contract stuff—little details, but you know how these things drag out. I was with her all afternoon going through the fine print.”

Sara nodded absently, gave my hair a final ruffle, and headed off into the living room. “There’s food in the fridge, if you want some,” she said.

“No, thanks,” I replied. “I’m not very hungry.”

Amy, not exhaling her smoke until she’d got it lined up precisely how she wanted it, placed her lighter on top of the packet of cigarettes she’d put on the table.

“He’s a formidable wanker, even by the high wanking standards of London agents,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s like haggling with an East End fruit seller. Never mind a literary agent—never mind even a general
showbiz
agent—Paul Dugan not only
is
but seems to be positively
proud
of being a ‘right old cockney geezer.’ ” She attempted to send her accent down to the market stalls of London for this last phrase. It crashed somewhere on the outskirts of Carlisle.

I’d called her the previous night and asked if we could meet up in a pub at lunchtime, saying I wanted to talk about the book deal. I was interested in the deal, of course, but more than that I kind of wanted to erase the—pointless, utterly pointless—lie I’d told Sara by
actually
having a meeting with Amy. Okay, not quite when I said I had—I was having it a day later—but still, that changed it from an outright lie into more of a trivial discrepancy about the chronological details of the statement really, didn’t it? Wednesday? Thursday? No big deal.

“He didn’t like our call for ten percent of their advance, then?”

“He did that thing where he pretended it was so outrageous that he actually found the idea funny. Laughed out loud.”

“Tosser.”

“Abso
lute
ly. He said he was thinking more along the lines of seven percent.”

“What did you say?”

“I laughed out loud.”

“Good for you.”

“So, I asked him how many books he thinks they’ll sell. Being a chancer, he naturally goes over the top; instead of being realistic he says, tear in his eye, he doesn’t reckon on more than about seventy-five thousand.”

“Bollocks.”

“Boll-abso
lute
ly-ocks. But that’s where I have him. I say, Okay, we’ll take seven percent . . . but if we produce something with such a broad appeal that it far exceeds his expectations—say, oh . . . combined format sales of two hundred thousand—then we get
thirteen
percent. ‘Surely, Paul,’ I say, ‘
surely
the extra publicity having such a massive hit would generate is worth the money on its own?’ ”

“And?”

“Shits himself, obviously.”

“So what happens then?”

“He goes off on a long tale about all sorts of arse—really, stuff even I wouldn’t try to get away with. Finally, we settle on nine percent but—’Oh, the agony—me poor ol’ sainted mother’ll be selling matches on the street this winter, she will’—eleven if we shift over two hundred K.”

I nervously drew a circle of moisture on the tabletop with the bottom of my glass of lager. “And will we?”

“Georgina Nye? Aye . . .
easy
. Her publicity machine will be smoking. So will M&C’s. You knock out a good read—interesting, funny, something anyone will enjoy—and if they haven’t shifted
at least
two hundred K by this time next year, then we’ll come back here and I’ll blow you, on top of this very table, in front of the whole pub.”

“You’re still the only agent in Edinburgh to include that clause in their agreement, you know.”

“Fucking right I am.”

She stubbed out her cigarette and leaned back in her chair.

“Oh, there’s another thing that came up while I was talking to Paul,” she said, leaning forward and lighting up again. “M&C are having their in-house sales bash down in London at the end of July. Naturally, they’ve asked Nye to go, but she’s away in America. She suggested you as a stand-in, so Paul asked if you’d be up for it.”

“Did he also suggest any theoretically possible ways in which that might not be the worst idea ever? I can just see the faces of the people expecting to meet Georgina Nye when they find I’m there instead. And I’d have to slog down to London and back too—quite apart from my having to spend an evening being nice to people.”

“Oh, they aren’t likely to care about not meeting a celeb—they’ll all be from sales or marketing and burnt out
years
ago. And Paul did point out that if someone needs to talk to the people who are going to have the job of selling the book to the shops, then you’d be the right person—you’ll have the best idea of what’s going to be in it. Plus you’d get a hotel room and travel expenses.”

“Would
you
do it?”

“Would I bollocks.”

“And I see no reason to question your judgment.”

“Okay. I’ll get back to Paul later and say we’re very flattered that they thought of you, and you’ll do everything you can to ensure the success of the book, but they can both fuck off and die.”

“Cheers.”

“Hey—it’s my job.” She took a drink from her glass of wine—impressively managing to swallow gulps of it while at the same time exhaling smoke through her nose. I tapped along to the song playing on the jukebox, chinging my nail against the side of my glass for the few moments it took for her to finish.

“So,” she said, once more leaning back in her chair, “I’ve held out for as long as I could . . . what’s with the stupid fucking hat?”

“Oh. Haircut situation. I’m getting it fixed later.”

Sara had to work on Saturday. She had to work a lot of Saturdays, it being the busiest day at the shop, but she always hated doing it.

I heard her downstairs—performing her “
Symphony of Irritation
for low, grumbling noises and slamming cupboards”—until she finally left the house. Meanwhile, my famously disciplined regime extended to not working on Saturdays—whether I wanted to or not—and lying in bed until about ten-thirty—whether I wanted to or not. There’s little as pleasing as waking up on a Saturday morning and realizing it
is
a Saturday morning, and you can therefore continue to lie there. I wasn’t about to give that up just because I was my own boss, didn’t have to work office hours, and could, in theory, lie in bed
every
morning. You have to work at pleasure, you see, invest effort in it. It’s like damn well going on every ride in the amusement park, say, now you’ve sat in a car for three hours to get there and paid twenty quid for it: it doesn’t matter that you’re cold, tired, every queue is forty-five minutes long, and you have a pulsing headache that you rather suspect won’t be improved by being strapped into a cage and flung around upside down at thirty mph. No, you’re here now, and you’re going to have all the fun you can, however unpleasant it might be. So, I sprawled in bed, resignedly gazing at the clock-radio digits climbing up to 10:30. When they finally made it, I got up without having to suffer any self-recrimination about having succumbed to weakness and cut short my weekly lie-in.

I ambled downstairs into the kitchen, picking up the morning’s post from the floor on my way past the front door. Three letters went straight into the bin, unopened, as they all had on them the telltale signs of junk mail—two implied I’d won something, and the third declared, “Open immediately: time-critical documents enclosed.” The fourth was a Jiffy bag; I flicked on the kettle and then set about tearing at the lavish amounts of tape that had been used to fasten it shut. Inside was a brief note (“Hope these will be of use. Let me know if you need any more. Love, George xxx”) and about a dozen photographs. Two or three of the pictures weren’t really personal—George at parties chatting to major international celebs—but they would be useful for the book in any case; the rest were family photos. She’d been an ugly baby.

I couldn’t say how long this had lasted. However, she’d certainly started on her way to becoming the arrestingly attractive Georgina Nye we knew today by the time she was eight or nine. The photos of her at this age (one at a picnic with her parents and siblings, another posing with a sporadically toothed grin by a birthday cake) included her masses of black hair, and the seeds of her later features were discernible in her round child’s face. George had written brief notes on the back of the photos for me. She’d loved that dress and refused to take it off, even for bed; her mother had had to remove it each night after she’d gone to sleep. The dog was called Snowy (it was black, so clearly someone in the Nye family had a powerful sense of humor) and had been run over by a Hillman Avenger shortly after the family had moved to Coventry—its being that particular model had seemed to have an occult significance to the young, newly transplanted Georgina, and she said she’d felt a final, loosening relief when she learned that production of the car had ceased in 1981. Her brother had taken the Christmas one with the Polaroid camera he’d had for his present; later she and her sister had found a big pile of the tear-off, black backing strips in the bin. They revealed, in eerie negative, what a sporting sort his girlfriend clearly was. (Until he’d eventually managed to find and destroy the evidence, they’d pretty much ruined his life using them for close to eighteen months. Whenever she and her sister got together, they still laughed about it.) The inevitable holiday beach photo was not George aged four, patting a sandcastle with her plastic spade. It was George aged about nineteen, running out of the sea in a black one-piece bathing suit. Her legs and arms glistened, her face was jeweled with droplets of sea, and her wet hair ran down over her upper body like sticky, shining tar. Perhaps she’d fallen over, or leapt recklessly into the water. Whatever had happened, she was running towards me grinning the type of grin you only brought out after some kind of impulsive, splashing, visually exciting, Pepsi-advert moment, and only if the person holding the camera was your lover, with whom you would be having the most riotous sex back in the hotel that evening. I felt a pang of . . . well, I supposed it must be hunger. So, I put some bread in the toaster and made myself a cup of tea before shuffling into the dining room and tossing the envelope full of photos onto the table.