A Certain Chemistry (8 page)

“Whereabouts do you live?” She swept her eyes back and forth, waiting for me to tell her where in the vista she should look.

“Ha! Nowhere you can see from here. I live way out over there—in a gray-walled semi that used to belong to Sara’s parents. Absolutely
anything
you can see from here we couldn’t remotely afford. Anyway, is it okay if I . . . ?” I pulled the Dictaphone from my pocket and waved it questioningly. She shrugged amiably and I started recording.

“Right . . . Hold on . . . one two, one two . . . Okay. So, I take it you don’t come from Edinburgh, then?”

“No. I come from a village in East Ayrshire called Mauchline.”

“I see. Interesting place? Anything we can use?”

“Robert Burns lived there for a while.”

“Ahh . . . so rare to find a place in Scotland that boasts a Burns connection. Anything else?”

“Nothing springs to mind.”

“Never mind. I’ll investigate—see if I can flannel something up.”

“I left when I was seven years old, you see, so I can’t really remember all that much about it.”

“Oh, right. Where did you move to?”

“Coventry.”

“Jesus.”

“It was for the work.”

“I imagine it’d have to be.”

“My father got a job in the car plant there.”

“I see. And how long did you stay in Coventry?”

“Until I was eighteen.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Then I moved to Stoke Newington.”

“Right . . . right. Where do you live now?”

“Chiswick.”

I rubbed my nose a bit.

“Mmm . . . Don’t take this the wrong way . . . but you’re not
tremendously
Scottish, are you?”

“I was born here. And I still come up nearly every week for filming. The studios are in Glasgow.”

“I’m sure it’ll be okay. ‘Give me the child until seven,’ as the Jesuits say, eh? It’s just that, if we’re going big with the whole Scots angle, I’ll have to play up Mauchline, and play down Coventry and Stoke Newington.”

“I see.”

She looked sort of apologetic, as though she was sorry for causing me the bother. It was obviously false, of course—polite, professional regret; precisely the face a shop assistant gives you along with “Oh, I’m
so
sorry, that item isn’t in the sale. It was simply displayed right in the middle of lots of other massively more rubbishy items that are . . . by some regrettable quirk of fate.” It was quite endearing, though. She could easily have just shrugged—she was paying me to do the work, after all.

“Not that playing down Coventry and Stoke Newington is ever going to be that tricky,” I said.

“And Chiswick?”

“Mmm . . . Let’s see if we can avoid mentioning Chiswick altogether, shall we?”

I questioned her methodically to find out the basics: parents, siblings, friends, education, names, dates, and all that kind of thing. After that I let her ramble, with just the odd nudge in some direction here and there. She did, indeed, like talking about herself, so it wasn’t the draining ordeal I sometimes had. I could get a rally driver, say, who would talk excitedly for
hours
about axles, but when you tried to find out some details of his school days (so the reader would find him human and engaging, and thus
care
about what axles he had used in later life), you’d get “My school days? Pretty normal. Same as everyone else’s,” and then silence. And then more axles. George, in contrast, was almost embarrassingly forthcoming. I got her first sexual encounter (that’ll be “First Love” in the book, I can tell you now) related to me in evocative detail when I’d only asked her what she did after school in Coventry . . . I mean, she even did the voices.

The tape came to an end, and I paused to turn it over. Always an awkward moment, oddly. People feel they should say
something
while you do this—just as you feel the need to make a comment to the barman while he’s pouring your Guinness or the mechanic who’s taking a first look into your engine—yet, given that this is the point where the tape’s not recording, they want to be sure that what they say is something of no significance or interest whatsoever.

George said, “Lovely day.” Then, however, she did something that quite shocked me. It shouldn’t have, of course, but it did, so I was further quite shocked that I was quite shocked by it. She pulled off her hat and then, placing it down next to her like a bowl, took off her sunglasses and tossed them into it. Instantly . . . she was Georgina Nye. Her distinctive dark, bubbling hair poured out across her shoulders like a pan of jet-black milk boiling over, and there—
there,
right in front of me—were the eyes that the camera held in close-up so many times as they looked out of frame at a villainous factory owner, a tragic car crash, or an unexpected pregnancy. The famous usually don’t look quite right in real life. They’re often shorter than you expect, or oddly brown, or tired or old or—most often—jarringly ordinary. But George—perhaps because I’d got used to her half hidden under her hat and glasses and now here she was unexpectedly complete—didn’t have disappointment lying a single glance behind her celebrity at all. In fact, I suddenly got it: I understood why she stood out from the countless other pretty but unemployed actresses in the country. I couldn’t say precisely what “it” was—some subtle combination of things; a magically winning constellation of tiny flaws, perhaps—but “it” was got now, definitely. I summed up all these thoughts in one involuntary exclamation.

“Fuck.”

“What?” asked George. She saw my expression and quickly scanned her top—presumably looking for stains or escaped breasts—and then, finding nothing, went cross-eyed trying to examine her own face.

“Sorry. You just turned into Georgina Nye. I wasn’t expecting it.”

She grinned at me. “Oh,
darling,
that’s so sweet.” She rested her thumb and finger on the palm of her hand, miming a pen and paper. “Who would you like me to make this out to?”

“Yeah, yeah . . . Okay.” I smiled back. “I didn’t say I
liked
you or anything, I was just surprised to
see
you.”

“Sure, backpedal all you want. You have this whole anti-fame thing going on, but then you encounter my . . . um, my
presence,
and your entire philosophy lies in ruins.” She plucked a packet of cigarettes from her shirt pocket and lit one. “Is it running yet?”

“Uh?”

She nodded towards the Dictaphone.

“Oh, right, hold on . . . Okay. We’re going.”

More biography poured out. Ironically—as I’d just seen how remarkable she was to look upon—what she was saying was deeply
un
remarkable: to be honest, I was going to have to work pretty hard at making her life remotely book-shaped.

I tried to keep from just staring at her and drifting off. It was an added difficulty when I really needed to hunt out anything useful I’d be able to put down on paper. One problem was that there wasn’t a stand-out incident to work around. If you’re doing an autobiography because the person has taken gold in the World Nude Hula-Hoop Championships (which I’ve just invented, of course, but which I suddenly realize is actually something that’s a very good idea indeed), then there’s your story: I dreamed, I practiced, I competed, I won—hurrah! The same thing, just a different shape, if it’s the tale of a lottery winner or someone succeeding after a debilitating accident or having been born with ridiculous ears. George wasn’t really like that; she was just persistently famous. What everyone wants if the person is persistently famous is “revelations.” Something shocking about their costars, or a nice little Percodan addiction that they’ve struggled to hide, overcome, and which, “in some ways, readers, has made them a stronger person.”

George, on the other hand, was telling me how she’d had real trouble with the people who’d fitted the shelves in her flat. I was beginning to feel that I’d have to pay someone to trick her into smuggling a plaster Buddha stuffed with heroin out of Malaysia so I had any sort of third act. It was almost as though she was doing it deliberately to wind me up: her parents hadn’t abandoned her, none of her boyfriends had abused her, all her friends were really nice, and she’d never had anything worse than chicken pox—what kind of a life was that? Maybe I ought to push her off the National Monument right now? It was a good six feet to the ground, and at least a nasty fall would give me
something
to work with.

I realized I was just staring at her and had drifted off again.

The interview went on for almost two hours before she had to leave for another appointment. I’d got lots of facts, and I enjoyed her company immensely—she was remarkably charismatic and talked with an intimate, easy confidence. It wasn’t at all that she was dull, personally—absolutely the opposite—but she hadn’t given me a single thing I could get any mileage out of. The damn book was going to read like Pinter.

“Well, I’d better get going,” said George, tapping the face of her watch. “You’ll want to do another one of these, I suppose?”

“Yes.” Yes, give me a chance to uncover the bombshell of that time you went up to someone in the street and touched their shoulder but it turned out not to be the person you thought it was, just someone who looked quite like them from behind. That can be our big finish. “Yes. I’ll go off and work on some things, and that’ll probably throw up a few questions. If we could meet up again to go over them, that’d be great.”

“Okay. I’ll give you a ring, then. Look forward to seeing you again. It’s been fun.”

“I’ve enjoyed it too.”

She put her hat and glasses back on, leaned over, gave me a media-issue kiss on the cheek, and then, with an easy athleticism, jumped down onto the grass. I watched her walk away towards the town. She turned back just before she went out of view and waved; I held up a hand in reply. She was an interesting woman. Pity she didn’t do any interesting things.

“Oh, Hugh,
don’t
.”

I was in Hugh’s office at McAllister & Campbell for an initial state-of-play meeting. I’d arrived a few minutes early, so predictably enough Hugh was using the time until the others arrived to tell me about his prostate.

“No, no, listen,” he continued. “I’m just telling you so that you’ll know when you start having prostate examinations yourself.”

“But I don’t
want
to know about them until I actually start having them, Hugh. It’ll spoil the surprise.”

“Though, you might want to begin having your prostate checked out even at your age, you know—you can never be sure,” he went on, not listening to me. “So, you know how the doctor checks your prostate, right? He, or she, pokes a finger up your rear.”

“Nice one. They use the same method to cure a stutter, I believe.”

“Okay, you might say, ‘Fair enough’—”

“My very words.”

“But do you know what I find the biggest problem is?”

“No.”

“Guess.”

“Hugh, my head is already full of the most frightening images—things that could haunt a person for years. I
beg
you not to make me think about it any further.”

“Chatting. I go into the doctor’s office, pull my trousers down, and bend over the examination table—”

“I’ve heard this one—it turns out to be a chip shop, doesn’t it?”

“. . . and he—or she—slips on a rubber glove, applies a bit of lubricating jelly, and then inserts his—or her—finger.
That’s
when it starts getting awkward.”

“Surely not, Hugh? That’s
the best bit
.”

“The doctor is feeling around in there, I’m bent over the table . . . and I feel I should say something.”

“Reminds me of Georgina Nye and my Dictaphone.”

“What?”

“Never mind, it doesn’t matter.”

“So, I feel I should say
something
—you know, to break the silence. But, well . . . what do you say? If you’re hunched forward with someone’s finger up your bottom and you say to them, ‘Did you see the football last night?’ it just sounds kind of odd coming out of your mouth. I desperately want to say something to fill this terrible silence, but I simply cannot find the right level of informality for the situation.”

“Don’t they have an etiquette column in the
Daily Telegraph
? You should write in.”

“And the worst of it is, it starts to play on my mind even while I’m waiting outside for my appointment. I get all tense.”

“Which is something of a hindrance to what’s coming next. I see the problem.”

“I get all tense, and I panic over what I should say. I run all the different subjects through my head. Nothing feels appropriate. If you went in with a bug, you’d probably make small talk by asking if it was going around at the moment, but you don’t feel right asking someone with his finger stuck in your behind if he’s been doing it a lot recently. And there’s not only what to say, there’s when to say it. Leave it too long and the silence has become an issue already, but start right away and, well, you feel like one of those dolls where you push a button and they start talking . . .”

“Now
that’s
the Barbie I want.”

“How long after insertion is
just right
to ask if they get much chance for a holiday in their job?”

“I don’t know, Hugh. And I’ll tell you something else: I’d be profoundly worried about myself if I did.”

Hugh gave me a pained expression, though I couldn’t say whether this was due to the conversation we were having now or simply his mentally reliving his last prostate check. He opened his lips to say something further, but just then Amy burst into the office and his mouth snapped shut immediately.

“Hiya, Tom! Hugh! Hi! You miserable fucker!”

“Hello, Amy.” He began tidying some papers that were already tidy.

“Right,” said Amy. “If we’re all here, then we might as well—”

“Oh, Fiona’s not here yet,” Hugh pointed out.

Amy knew perfectly well that Fiona wasn’t there. “Fiona? . . . Och,
Fiona
.” She took a cigarette from her handbag and placed it between her lips. “Should we start without her?”

“Sorry, Amy, you know you can’t smoke in here.”

“I’m not smoking, Hugh. So, should we start, or is it important we wait for her . . . for some reason? I mean, she’s clearly late. Because I was late, and she’s not here yet.”