The Fictional Man (9 page)

“No,” he said quietly.

“So who is it?” she asked. “Anyone I know? Who knows, maybe we’re going to the same one.”

Niles hesitated a moment. “Um, probably not. Do you... do you remember Ralph Cutner?”

“Not really. Was he a friend of yours, or –” She tailed off. “Ralph
Cutner?”

Niles said nothing.

“
Cutner’s Chair
Ralph Cutner? You’re seeing a Fictional for therapy? Is he even licensed?” She sounded like she didn’t know whether to be disgusted or find it hilarious. Or both.

“Yes,” he replied, “As a life coach.” He could feel his cheeks growing hotter, though he didn’t know why he was so embarrassed – about this, at least. It was her problem, not his. She’d always had a nasty streak of realism inside her, buried down deep – at least he’d always thought so. He remembered the way she’d treated Bob.

He cleared his throat. “Listen, there’s no need to be
realist
about –”

“Oh, fuck you, Niles. As far as I’m concerned, you and he deserve each other. And I’m throwing all this shit away.” There were four brief pips and the line went dead. Iyla’s name vanished from the phone display.

Niles looked at it for a long moment, wondering if he should call her back – it’d be a shame to download all of
Beggar On A Beach Of Gold
again – and then he put the phone on the table, picked up his notebook, and restarted the film.

INT. F.L.O.O.Z.Y. DUNGEON – NIGHT.

KITTEN:

You can do what you want with me, Mizz Harridan. But you’ll never turn Dalton Doll into one of your limp-wristed half-men!

Niles sighed, making a quick note. Get rid of that.

He’s one hundred per cent male – an A-1 swinging stud! He knows the truth about what a woman wants – that every ‘no’ on a lady’s lips is just a plea for a real man to make her say ‘yes’!

“Oh, Christ,” Niles moaned, grimacing. Definitely get rid of that. Who wrote this, anyway? What were they
thinking?

MS. HARRIDAN:

I see. It seems Mr Doll is the one who’s turned you, Miss Caboodle. Well, perhaps I can convince you to come back to the winning side.

(she cracks her WHIP in the air.)

I can be very persuasive.

KITTEN:

You twisted monster! You’re no woman – you’re a devil in drag!

MS HARRIDAN TAKES HOLD OF KITTEN’S FACE, TURNING HER HEAD so that their EYES LOCK. Then she SLOWLY DRAWS HER THUMB over KITTEN’S LIPS.

MS. HARRIDAN:

My my. Such a spitfire.

SHE MOVES AWAY, and a LARGE PLASTIC TUBE SLIDES OUT OF THE WALL to ENCLOSE KITTEN. Inside, she STRUGGLES HELPLESSLY. We get a GOOD LOOK.

Niles felt his cheeks burning. He felt like an adolescent again – a stupid adolescent watching the only pornography he could find. He kept expecting his mother to burst in. The fact that his erection was starting to come back only made him feel worse.

MS. HARRIDAN:

I hope you retain your passion when you come to serve me again - as a woman should serve a woman. Release the gas!

There is a HISSING SOUND as the INHIBITEX GAS begins to FILL THE TUBE. PSYCHEDELIC LIGHTS flash in KITTEN’S EYES and SINISTER THEREMIN MUSIC PLAYS. She RESISTS, struggling HARDER.

KITTEN:

No! I’ll never be - like you! You’re sick - evil! Something’s twisted your mind, turned you against nature! Women weren’t meant to rule the world – we need men, don’t you see? Only a man can truly fulfil a woman! Only a

“God.” Niles angrily switched the TV off. “Get rid of it,” he muttered. “Get rid of it all.”

CHAPTER FIVE

“B
OB
?”

“What?” Bob groaned. “What do you want?”

The author shook his head sadly. The Fictional’s voice sounded truly wretched, limping out of the phone and into his head like a wounded soldier emerging from a bombed-out trench. Obviously, the man had continued to drink late into the night after their parting – perhaps to dull the guilt he felt at his snide insinuations about the writer’s craft. “I’ll forgive him,” the author thought, magnanimously. “His own nature has proved punishment enough.”

“Late night?” Niles asked, trying to keep the grim smile out of his voice.

“No later than yours.” Niles could hear Bob gritting his teeth. “Just a sick headache, that’s all. Probably a migraine coming. What do you
want,
Niles?”

“Well, to tell you the truth,” Niles said, “I’m not having that fantastic a time myself. I’m completely blocked on this
Mr Doll
thing and... well, I’m just having a terrible morning.” He decided not to tell Bob about the row with Iyla. They’d always acted a little strangely around each other, probably because of Bob’s Fictional status. Iyla’s reaction to the news about Ralph Cutner had only confirmed her closet realism in his mind.

Best not to burden Bob with it, anyway. “So I was thinking... lunch? My treat.”

Bob groaned wearily into the phone. A bad sign. “I can’t, Niles. Not today. It’s not a good day.” He sounded like a man on the verge of collapse.

Niles frowned. “You’re sure? It might take your mind off your troubles. I, ah, I can pay...” He tried to be as delicate as he could about the fact that Bob had no work coming in at the moment, and increasingly limited funds. He’d freely admitted to Niles the week before that he wouldn’t be able to pay the rent on his place past August. Niles had offered Bob the couch, but Bob had declined, saying that he’d have somewhere he could move into if the need arose. He was fairly tight-lipped about where that was – Niles hoped that didn’t mean it was under a bridge somewhere.

“Not a good day, Niles. Not a good day. I’m staying in bed.” He coughed, a great hacking mucus cough that made Niles yank the phone away from his ear as if some of Bob’s snot would come tumbling out of an app. “Jesus, I hope I’m not getting flu...”

“Can, um, can Fictionals get flu?” Niles asked, and immediately wished he hadn’t. “So, you’re, you’re absolutely sure you’re not coming out?” He blustered on, before Bob could respond. “Because I really could use a listening ear –”

“Well, that’s why God invented therapists. Or in your case, life coaches. Ow.” Bob groaned. “Listen, do me a favour and let me die in peace, will you?”

Niles laughed, trying to get Bob engaged in the conversation. “I think I missed the part of the Bible where God invented the life coach...” It was a weak joke, and he knew it. Still, he was confident if he could keep Bob talking, he might agree to –

“God died in 1985,” Bob muttered, and ended the call.

Niles stared at the phone for a moment, then scrolled through his contacts for another number.

“Buddy! How is every little thing?” Maurice seemed to be feeling much more chipper than Bob was.

Niles smiled to himself. Maurice’s enthusiasm always had an uplifting effect on him, and he was starting to feel a little better already.
The agent sounded eager to treat the author to a lavish meal – a meal well deserved after
Pocketful Of Posies: A Kurt Power Novel
had been delivered a mere six weeks after the prescribed deadline.

“Well, it’s been a bit of a pisser of a morning, if I’m honest,” he said. “Had a blazing row with Iyla – my ex-wife –”

“Hey, don’t talk to me about ex-wives,” Maurice interrupted, “I got two of them and let me tell ya, the day Aline becomes number three cannot come soon enough. You ever meet Aline?”

“Once,” said Niles, wincing. It wasn’t a pleasant memory.

“Well,” Maurice chuckled, “don’t you worry about me, buddy. I got wife number four lined up right now. She’s a massage therapist – you get my meaning?” Another chuckle. “So anyway, how’s the pitch going, huh? What’s your genius idea for
The Dangerous Mr Doll?
That’s your new title, by the way. No need to thank me, it came to me in a dream. The universe wants this to happen, buddy.”

Niles bit his lip. “Well... funny you should ask about the pitch, because...”

“Because it’s done! I knew it! Lay it on me, Niles. Tell me how you’re bringing the swinging ’sixties screaming into the right now.” Maurice lapsed into an expectant silence on the other end of the line.

Niles marshalled his thoughts. “Well.”

“Don’t leave me hanging here! C’mon, start us off the way God intended. ‘We open on,’ dot dot dot...” He paused, evidently waiting for the magic to happen.

Niles wasn’t feeling particularly magical. “The thing is, Maurice,” he said, picking his words with care, “I’ve realised
The Delicious Mr Doll
may, perhaps, not actually be... well, very good. At all.”

He waited for a response from Maurice. There wasn’t one.

“I mean, obviously I loved it when I was younger. I still do! It’s a camp classic – of its kind, anyway. But when I, ah, look at it with a
writer’s
eye... well, to start with, it’s a bit unreconstructed.”

Nothing.

“When I say unreconstructed, I mean sexist. Aggressively. It’s, it’s very misogynistic indeed.”

Still nothing.

“And I think it might be a little bit homophobic as well, at least when it comes to gay men. And, um, and lesbians. Also it’s racist. A little bit. Probably. It’s, it’s hard for me to tell, but now I come to think of it I’m reasonably certain that it probably almost definitely is quite racist.” He swallowed hard. Still nothing. “Maurice?”

“Wait, that’s it? That’s everything?” Maurice’s voice echoed from the speaker. “I thought we had a real problem. Just tell anyone who asks it’s hard-hitting and controversial, you’ll be fine. Listen, buddy, I’ve got faith in you, I know you’re going to turn this around, you’re gonna make everybody very happy, but I got a, uh, a
massage
to arrange, so sayonara and all that jazz. You can give me what you got in a couple hours. Or tomorrow. Make it tomorrow. I got some, uh,
business
I need to take care of, you get me?” He chuckled in a way that made Niles think of filthy raincoats.

“Maurice, I don’t even know where to start with –” Niles began, but he was already talking to a dead phone. He turned on the TV again, opening
The Delicious Mr Doll
in his queue and then idly scrolling to a random point somewhere after he’d stopped watching. Maybe he could get that sense of excitement back.

GUARD:

Ooooooooh, ducky!

“Fuck this for a game of soldiers,” said Niles, crisply, turning it off again. “I need a drink.”

“C
AN YOU TURN
it up?” Niles said to the barman, taking a fortifying gulp from his pint glass. “I want to see if there’s any more news about this Sherlock Holmes killer.”

The barman shrugged, turning the volume on the TV up a little louder. There was nobody else in the Victoria – unsurprising, since it was lunchtime and there were somewhere around a thousand places in that particular part of LA that would serve food better, cheaper and with more regard for the basic health regulations. Anyone coming to the Victoria for food – people without tongues, the suicidal – would have been treated, presumably in the interests of preserving a fictional ‘Englishness,’ to overdone sprouts, burnt steak and kidney pie with week-old gravy and a basket of greasy, heart-attack-inducing ‘chips’ that were to your average British chip-shop chips what Piltdown Man was to Homo Sapiens: primitive, embarrassing and fake.

Niles found himself vaguely hoping Dean would come in to sample them. While Dean choked on his inedible meal, Niles could inform the coked-up cretin of a few salient facts about Mister Dalton Doll.

“For instance,” the author snarled, spitting his words into Dean’s bulgy-eyed, powder-nosed little rodent face, “giving Mister Doll a fleet of Predator Drones to blow up Occupy Wall Street with is actually, believe it or not, fundamentally less
‘dark’
and
‘edgy’
and
‘serious’
than leaving the woman-beating little cherry-hater exactly as he is! Seeing that right now he’s wandering the casinos of the world telling every woman who walks past him in a dress made of precious metals that the word ‘NO’ has always been at war with fucking Oceania!”

He grabbed Dean in two meaty hands, tore his head from his body, and crushed his skull to a fine white powder.

“Snort that, you freak,” Niles muttered.

He stared at the TV, keeping a tired eye on the running news ticker for reports of the on-going Holmes controversy while some sports scandal played out above it. Partly, he was honestly curious about whether he’d dreamed the whole affair, but he also wanted to know if the murder would mean any changes to the laws that might affect future work. This was the first time a Fictional had killed anyone, after all. Although the victim was a Fictional too – did that make it less newsworthy, or more? He had a feeling that even asking himself the question had some realist undertones.

He sighed heavily. Thoughts of realism brought Iyla back to mind, and her reaction to Ralph. He’d have a lot to say to Ralph when they saw each other again. But would Ralph have anything to say back? Or would he just act like he did? Was he capable of anything else, in the end? Was Bob?

Niles shook his head, draining the rest of the glass, and tried to concentrate on the television. Suddenly, he didn’t care about Sherlock Holmes or Ralph Cutner or Bob or any of the rest of them. He wanted to empty his head, not think about Fictionals for a while, about their endless existential issues. He probably was being a realist, but he didn’t care. He focused on the screen across the bar. The Sports Desk. Excellent. That was still an arena for real people.

“– and finally,” the sportscaster grinned from the screen, “we’ve got a story that takes us from the world of the stage and screen to the wide, wide world of sports with the news that the New York Yankees have signed none other than Joe Hardy, the Fictional baseball legend of the musical stage and screen, who most recently appeared in a performance of
Damn Yankees
at the Shaftsbury, London, England –”