Geek Tragedy (3 page)

*

Mervyn found his room. The moment he placed his suitcase on the bed, he noticed the revving of engines. He crossed over to the window and peered out, his spirits sinking. A Mondeo Moron and a BMW Bastard were having a ‘Who’s Got the Smallest Penis?’ competition in the hotel car park. Mervyn was a light sleeper, and he just knew that he would have problems with sales reps from Crawley gunning their engines in the early hours. He needed his sleep; if he couldn’t move rooms, he would have to resort to the little coloured pills in his suitcase.

It was Mervyn’s deep-held conviction that, throughout his life, he was destined to be forever in the wrong place at the wrong time. He measured how badly located he was in life by degrees of wrongitude and crapitude. ‘20 degrees wrong…30 degrees crap,’ he muttered.

Today was particularly wrong
and
crap. He knew where he
should
be, of course. He should be lying in bed, contemplating a shower, and then a quick Tube ride to ITV’s magic castle of opulence, where the lifts contained live jazz bands, and the automatic urinal cleaners in the men’s toilets gushed forth vintage claret. He should be having a power lunch of milk and rusks with a bunch of fresh-faced media toddlers, and they would ask him how many shovelfuls of cash it would take for him to agree to adapt his best-selling novel into a stupidly successful TV series.

Yes, that was definitely where he
should
be.

The best-selling novel was, of course, unwritten as yet. It was nothing more than a few kilobytes lurking in his laptop, and the ITV toddlers weren’t having any meetings with any writers, particularly not him. They were all probably sitting in a room working out if it was in poor taste to do a mini-series on the life of Pope John Paul II starring Ross Kemp. Still, until the non-existent novel magically wrote itself and leapfrogged over the Dan Browns in the bestseller lists, the Happy Traveller would have to do.

It felt like a grim penance for his indolence: to return to the convention circuit after all these years; to be
forced
to return to the endless rounds of anecdote-telling and autograph-scribbling due to an irritating lack of cash. Something had gone badly wrong somewhere.

He toyed with the idea of seeing if he could get a change of room, but decided against it. He’d had quite enough of Simon’s benevolent tyranny for one morning. Perhaps later.

Mervyn unpacked, then had a shower, made himself a cup of tea with the tiny plastic kettle, ate the plastic-wrapped digestives, ordered a burger and chips from room service, examined the quality of the adult channels on the television, received and ate the burger and chips from room service, re-examined the adult channels, and, when he had finally exhausted the delights his room had to offer, went downstairs to brave the convention.

He opened the door, and was immediately faced with a
Vixens
fan standing across the way, emerging from an adjoining room.

The fan did a double take in his direction. A meaty grin slowly smeared its way across his face and he gave a wave.

‘Hi, Mr Stone!’

Something deep inside Mervyn instinctively recoiled. He had a notion that he was going to be in for an awful time.

‘Hello, my name is Mervyn Stone, and here I am at ConVix 15 having a
wonderful
time!’

Blast it.

‘Um…’

His mind always went blank at times like these. In all of his friends’ video cabinets, there were home movies containing parties, weddings, christenings, and a few seconds of Mervyn going ‘Um…’

‘Anyway…hope to see you soon!’

Morris looked up from the camera tripod, and held his thumb aloft. ‘Perfect. Great. Thanks. I’ll play it back in a minute.’

It didn’t sound very great, judging from Morris’s reaction, but then Morris always sounded bored. Morris was Simon Josh’s lieutenant. He handled the audio-visual equipment and was the guy who really ran the convention while Simon Josh gibbered from one room to the next.

They were all in the convention’s hospitality room, a room distastefully covered in avocado wallpaper. It was Friday morning and the guests were starting to assemble; people Mervyn hadn’t seen in years, and some he hadn’t much liked when he did.

Feeling self-conscious, Mervyn needed a friendly face to latch on to. Luckily he saw just the chap.

He helped himself to a filter coffee from the refreshment table and slumped down in an armchair next to Roddy Burgess, who, as usual had his nose deep in a glass of something liquid and amber-coloured.

‘How go things at the front, Major?’

The actor beamed woozily at Mervyn. He was a man in his late 60s, the personification of ageing ham, complete with immaculate grey hair, moustache and silken cravat. His eyes twinkled above silver-framed half-moon glasses. ‘Oh, tip top, old boy, tip top, enjoying myself terribly. The troops are awfully well drilled.’ The ‘troops’ was Roddy’s pet term for the hotel and convention staff. If they fed him, gave him drink and led him around the hotel so he didn’t have to read a schedule or think for himself, they were ‘well drilled’. If they allowed him to look after himself at any point they were ‘a bit of a shower’.

‘I say, don’t think I’ve seen you in active service for a while, have I?’

‘No Major. It’s been seven years since I last did one of these.’

‘Thought so…thought so… Seven years eh? Long time to go AWOL,’ he rumbled.

‘Oh I don’t know,’ Mervyn nodded at the over-familiar faces dribbling into the room. ‘Things don’t seem to have changed much.’

There was a meaningful cough from behind the video camera. ‘Mr Burgess, would you mind taking a seat, please…?’

Roddy Burgess groaned. ‘Do I have to, old boy? I’m not on duty until 1100 hours.’

‘Just a little message will do. It’s to put on the official website.’

‘Ahm… Don’t think so, old chap. Remaining incognito for this mission, I think. Maybe next time.’

Morris let loose a sigh. ‘I think you were told in your letter that part of the requirement for guests was to contribute to publicity when requested—’

‘Are you giving orders to a senior officer, corporal?’ Roddy snapped.

‘No, but…’

‘Then until fresh orders come through, I’m staying posted right here.’ Roddy pointed his nose back into his glass of scotch.

After years of being worshipped and lauded by obsessives, trawling around the country from hotel to hotel and forced to recount the same anecdotes, it wasn’t surprising that a few stars of
Vixens from the Void
had gone ever so slightly doolally. It was even less of a surprise that they’d grown into complete barking head-cases. There was only one reason they hadn’t been given a cell with double-quilted walls long ago; the convention circuit provided better secure accommodation than the state ever could. Constant supervision, regular meals and whole roomfuls of people willing to humour any delusion they had, no matter how deranged.

Roddy was a case in point. He’d played Major Karn, the head of the Vixen guard. He hadn’t had a large role in the series, but he was fondly remembered for dying nobly in a favourite episode, and he was a good convention guest—when they were able to lever him out of the comfy chair where he’d managed to wedge himself.

He’d also been deferred to as ‘Major’ for so long he seemed to believe he was ex-army. He’d started to scatter military jargon erratically into his speech, and developed a gruff no-nonsense delivery. Truth was, the nearest he’d been to any kind of military rank was the Private Hospital he’d kept finding himself in after a variety of blurred drink-related accidents.

Morris scratched his beard wearily. ‘I do really need you to say a few words. Simon’ll be upset if you don’t.’

Roddy pretended not to hear.

‘I will have to tell him…’

‘Hello all. Everything all right?’

Speak of the devil
, Mervyn thought.

Simon Josh had glided back into the green room on one of his irrelevant missions to nowhere in particular. All of his errands had the same purpose; to make Simon Josh look busy and important. He was like a shark; he had to keep moving otherwise his existence had no meaning. He smiled like a shark, too.

Morris cleared his throat slowly and deliberately and nodded towards Roddy. ‘Roddy doesn’t want to say hello to our online customers,’ he said darkly.

‘Really?’ said Simon brightly. ‘I think I need to explain to Mr Burgess how important our official website is in our public relations arsenal.’

Here we go…
Mervyn turned back, anticipating an explosion from the old warhorse bigger than anything the BBC special effects department ever produced.

But Roddy wasn’t there.

To Mervyn’s astonishment, the old man had sprung out of his chair and was sitting happily in front of the camera. ‘Hello chaps,’ he chirped, ‘the Major here… Having a marvellous time at this convention… First-class billets, excellent tuck and well-drilled troops!’ He signed off with a brisk salute, and sprinted out of the room, casting a wary eye back at Simon.

The old man looked almost terrified.

As was now traditional at these conventions, Vanity Mycroft was holding court in the middle of the hospitality room, glass of champagne held carelessly in one hand, dwindling cigarette in the other. Slumped gracefully on a high-backed chair, she had a semi-circle of adoring faces listening to her impromptu lecture and chuckling dutifully at her outrageous statements. She looked utterly at home with her ‘audience’, as all true stars do.

‘You see a lot of…lesser people…let’s call them TV reviewers…’

‘Smoky’ didn’t begin to describe her voice. ‘Cured like a kipper’ was a more apt description.

‘No, no, let’s call them by their proper name… You see, a lot of bastards…’

This elicited a polite chuckle from her followers.

‘They looked down on us; they looked down on me… They looked at
Vixens
and they said “What a load of rubbish”…’

Cue sympathetic noises.

‘And they were right of course… It is rubbish…’

As the sycophantic chorus were all fans of
Vixens
, this polite chuckle sounded a little more forced.

She meandered on. ‘But the mistake they made was going: “It’s rubbish, so it’s all rubbish… So the acting’s rubbish.” But it’s not. It’s the most marvellous acting there is. It’s better than the RSC, you know.’

‘Oh I agree,’ one was eager to chip in. ‘It’s just what I’ve been saying for years. It’s what I said in the piece I wrote for
Into the Void
fanzine… “Both
Vixens
and Shakespeare have metaphor and meaning that strike to the very heart of the human condition.”’

‘That’s right, Darren darling,’ Vanity agreed drunkenly, nodding vigorously but not listening to a word. ‘Absolutely… I mean, any old fart with a cravat and an Equity card can make Shakespeare sound good… But to make the crap we were forced to spew up week in, week out sound like it wasn’t written by an illiterate hack…’ She raised her voice so it could reach the other side of the room. ‘No offence, Mervy dear…’

‘None taken, dear,’ yelled Mervyn affably, who knew Vanity of old.

‘No, to make that old toss sound decent. That took
real
talent… Hmm? Hmm?’ Her head swivelled around glassily looking for endorsement, but she found only terrified smiles.

‘I’ve got a present for you. I got it at auction,’ cooed Darren, seizing his chance to stem her tirade. Reaching behind a table, he pulled out a Sketchleys bag. Tearing the plastic covering off, he revealed an eye-watering tangerine outfit which was a shiny basque combined with lycra sleeves and tights, and bedecked with silvery epaulets and a shimmering cloak. He also produced some fearsome-looking knee-length boots, and a hat which he perched on the ensemble—something not unlike a Roman legionnaire’s helmet, but with a very 80s-style mirrored visor fastened to the front.

‘Now this, would you believe…’ he said with a breathless pause ‘…is one of your actual costumes from the original series.’

Vanity wrinkled her nose and blew a drunken raspberry with her lips.

‘It smells a bit, I’m afraid,’ grovelled Darren. ‘I think it’s mothballs.’

‘More like fag ash and KY jelly…’ said a voice in an incredibly loud stage whisper.

The level of noise in the room dipped as every third conversation ended. Everyone knew that the ill-disguised whisper came from Katherine Warner.

Here we go,
thought Mervyn,
again
.

Actresses don’t have face-to-face cat-fights. Mervyn had never seen the screeching, face-slapping, cheek-scratching, hair-tugging or blouse-ripping found in 1970s British sex comedies. In his experience, actresses do their scrapping while pretending to do something else—like magicians; ostentatiously flourishing their cuffs and talking nineteen to the dozen to distract the audience’s attention from what they’re
really
doing.

By way of example, Vanity Mycroft’s eyes didn’t flicker. She didn’t look over to Katherine Warner, or even acknowledge she’d heard anything. She simply carried on her conversation, patting Darren ostentatiously on the knee and raising her voice. ‘Don’t worry about the smell, Darren dear. It’s a lovely gesture…’ She held it admiringly. ‘It’s nice to have it. I don’t expect they kept yours, Katherine darling. They probably sent it back to the hire shop with all the other
extras
’
costumes…’

Over in the corner, Katherine continued talking to a man who’d been invited because he’d played one-third of a crab creature in 1988. She also acted as though she hadn’t heard anything, but her smile intensified, her conversation grew more animated and her laughter tinkled in the air as if crab-man was the most fascinating person she’d ever met. It didn’t escape Mervyn’s attention that the red-slashes of her fingernails were massaging the flute of her glass as if they were contemplating smashing it on the table and shoving the jagged remains into someone’s face.

‘But surely,’ one of the fans said to Vanity, with a touch of desperation, ‘you must have some affection for the time you spent on the show…?’