Vail (17 page)

The drug company man isn't overtly impressed. He says worriedly, ‘What kind of deformities exactly? They're not thalidomide, I hope? This is hard PR, remember, not Come To Meek Jesus Week. We don't want any adverse reflection on our long and honourable corporate tradition.' He has a widow's peak and glasses like Himmler used to wear and carries perpetual worry and fear on his corrugated brow. He has hairy knuckles and his mouth is as tight as a sutured wound.

‘No problem,' Josh Rogan assures him with his lazy charming smile which illuminates the room like a lighthouse beam. His bleached hair is artfully layered to the nape of his tanned and graceful neck. He is lean and lithe, terrifically attractive and pretends not to be, which compounds the felony. Vail wonders how many souls he has saved. ‘Congenital interbreeding. I helped obtain for them crutches and walking frames and stuff. ‘Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is His reward.' Psalms 127, Verse 3. They're cool.'

‘This clicks, I feel it. Bry, don't you? We do it on film, not studio. Get into gritty actuality. Cut the sentimental crap. Show it as it is, puke and all. Do they live in a tower block? We can fix it, whatever. Give it a Ken Loach feel. Slice to the bone, hit them hard and low, then pitch in with the big sell. It's coming together, I like it, it feels right. Suze, book the O.B. and an eight-man crew. Check make-up and wardrobe. Christ, this is better than a triple orgasm!'

Apparently the family is called the Baths. Given Virgie's enthusiasm no one is prepared to object or disagree, and Bryce Ransom seems happy to go along with it. The director has caught the bug and is busy sketching set-ups on his block of graph paper. The drug company man is making copious notes in a leather-backed book. Virgie is frigging herself under the table. Vail seems to recall that he too once had a family somewhere.

The meeting has drifted away somewhere. Bryce Ransom has gone. The room is quiet except for the slurp of Virgie's fingers. The director says:

‘Anybody seen the Bergman retrospective at Camden Screen? Superb minimalism. Stupendous montage.'

‘I thought she was good in
Casablanca
,' Vail agrees, ‘though I prefer Ava Gardner, who has a bigger chest.'

‘Say,' Josh Rogan says. ‘How about we use my group for the backing track? I could add some reeds and horns and make the
whole thing cool and mellow. Fifties' smoky jazz cellar.'

‘Uh, I like that,' Virgie says with a faint gasp. ‘Muted Charlie Parker with understated percussion. A bird wailing in the wilderness. It's coming, it's coming, I can feel it …'

‘We'll have to fly them in from LA,' Josh Rogan tells the assembly. His brown hand and long pale fingernails slip inside his V-necked T-shirt to stroke his bronzed chest. ‘We'll need an arranger, mixer, producer and studio time. Say three weeks minimum.'

‘Suze will do the fixing. What's the group called?'

‘The Joyful Messengers.'

Vail is bemused. ‘I understood you were a preacher?'

‘That's right, man.'

‘But you run a pop group?'

‘All God's work,' says Josh Rogan reverently. ‘The message is in the music. We bring joy to the hearts of men. Last year we covered 35,000 miles on three continents doing forty-two gigs.'

‘‘Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called.' Corinthians 7, Verse 20.' (Vail)

‘‘Ye see then how that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only.' James 2, Verse 24.' (Rogan)

‘‘It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise, than for a man to hear the song of fools.' Ecclesiastes 7, Verse 5.' (Vail)

‘‘Blow ye the trumpet in Zion, and sound an alarm in my holy mountain: let all the inhabitants of the land tremble: for the day of the Lord cometh, for it is nigh at hand.' Joel 2, Verse 1.' (Rogan)

‘How do you get the money for all this travelling? I mean, who pays?' Vail asks curiously.

‘We pray. The Lord provides.'

Looking at Josh Rogan's Californian tan and sun-bleached hair Vail reckons this is a more generous God than he has hitherto allowed for. Praying certainly seems to produce results.

‘Additionally we operate our own travel agency, limousine valeting service and record label out of LA, – if you ever need a flight at discount, mention my name.'

‘Thanks, I will.'

‘You're welcome.'

The drug company man looks worriedly at his watch. ‘Let's not lose sight of our theme, which is ‘caring sharing'. The Fund cares for the DIs, sees to their welfare and so on, but the public has to play its part by sharing the burden. How much are we likely to rake in?'

‘Just one second,' Vail interjects, puzzled. ‘I thought your company was sponsoring the scheme?'

‘That we are,' the worried drug company man avers. ‘But the appeal will fund it.'

‘What appeal?'

‘The appeal to the public. We show the plight of this family, – the Baths, – ask for charitable donations, and they send them in. The public shares what it has with us.'

‘Who's ‘us'?'

‘Well, when I say ‘us' I don't mean ‘us'
us
, the corporation, if that's what you were thinking. Only a reasonable and fair proportion will come to the corporation for out-of-pocket administrative, advertising, travel and personal expenses and so on. The rest will go towards caring for the DIs, paying for medication, prosthetics, artificial limbs and the like. It's really very straightforward.'

‘What exactly are you doing by way of sponsorship then?' Vail asks, feeling stupid, feeling he has missed something.

‘Lending our name, our prestige, our goodwill,' the worried man from the drug company informs him. ‘For a small consideration. After all, this is a Govt initiative; you can't expect a commercial enterprise to pick up the tab. The fact that certain Cabinet Ministers have shares in the corporation is neither here nor there, let's get that clear. This is straight-down-the-middle altruism on our and the Govt's part.'

‘Good, that's settled, that's out of the way,' Virgie says firmly. ‘How many in this so-called family?' she asks, turning to the California Baptist.

‘Eight. Father, – he's the normal one, – Granny Bertha and Auntie Beatrice; Uncle Forster, he's in his late twenties and is
really the brother of seventeen-year-old Rita who everyone calls Reet; Vic, nineteen or twenty, vicious and bored; Dumpy, she's twelve; and Little Com, who's of indeterminate age and sex.'

‘No mother?'

‘She ran off with a big black man.'

‘How big?' Virgie asks with a little catch of breath. ‘Huge?'

Josh Rogan shrugs indifferently. ‘I never met him.'

The drug company man is not happy; he is distinctly worried. ‘They sound pretty average to me. Father, granny, uncles, aunts, kids of indeterminate age and sex. We're talking real deformity here, or at any rate that was my impression. I mean, are these people just regular oddballs, mental defectives or what?'

‘He has a point,' Virgie says to Josh Rogan. ‘Crutches and walking frames are all very well but they don't make for good television. We need harrowing scenes that bring a lump to the throat and a hand to the wallet. Are the Baths really primetime we have to ask ourselves?'

‘Relax. They'll freak you out. Really. Trust Forte.'

‘What do you think, Jack?' Virgie says.

‘What about?'

‘Well … about all this … you know … this …'

‘The table? Looks all right to me. Smooth veneer, nice shine.'

‘The show. What do you think about the show?'

‘Fine. Wonderful. Couldn't be better. So far so good.'

‘Suppose I pan to some rusty railings and do a slow dissolve into the little kid's face.  – Has it got a face?' the director asks Josh Rogan. ‘Great! Then pull back to a two-shot in its mother's arms, – '

‘Haven't you been listening, dumbo, the mother ran off!' Virgie Hance hisses.

‘Granny's wizened arms, that's even better. Dolly in to the gnarled arthritic hands clutching the kid and go into soft focus …'

No one is paying heed to this mumbo-jumbo. Virgie Hance is dwelling languorously on the physical attributes of large black men. The drug company man is calculating his expenses and worrying about the hair he keeps finding on the pillow every morning. Josh Rogan is checking airline timetables and mulling over II Samuel Chapter 3 Verse 7. Suze, the slender-arsed PA, isn't thinking about anything in particular, except perhaps her I Ching forecast for the coming week. As for our hero, he's misplaced his daughter's name and can't for the life of him find it.

[Up to this point Vail has not acted so much as been acted upon. This is understandable, given his traumatic circumstances. He has been swept along by events, been content to be, because he could not see what else he could do. What sustained him in the early days following his arrival in the capital was an unformed desire to take some kind of action, to take negative and not positive action, and for a while this desire remained comatose, traumatised, undirected, until the moment outside the electrical retailer's when he saw the face on the screen repeated twenty-two times and the unformed desire hardened into focus and resolved itself into a cold deadly ambition (not hate, – nothing so fine and noble as hate) which gave him direction and a kind of iron-tasting nihilistic hope for the future. So even though these events may have seemed arbitrary at the time and Vail a man without motive and purpose, inwardly he had set his mind, his heart and soul on the attainment of a goal that, fantastic as it might have been, was to him practicable and achievable, given time and the random sway of circumstances and events. Because, unlike so many others who have given up the ghost, Vail still had, and has, a touching faith in the ordered mechanism of the universe, in the balance of forces, in the opposing poles of the electromagnetosphere which impose order onto chaos and decree that for every atom of darkness there shall be a photon of light and for every particle its antimatter equivalent; in other words those immutable laws without which there would be no paper, no pen, and no hand to set down these words, and no one to read them. What has happened is that he has become confused and non-directional in his aspirations, or rather, in
his lack of them. He had quite made up his mind to kill, because killing seemed obvious and natural and right (reinstating the ordered mechanism, restoring the balance of forces, etc) and he had no moral qualms about the act because morals are man-made and not God-given. (Even though, perversely, he does not believe in a god, or ‘God', as such.) The act was to be one of reinstatement and restoration, simply that, which explains why he was not even angry or rageful or motivated by hate, nor even revenge. (Though it could be argued that revenge is concomitant to the perfect order of the universe, balancing the equation, – so to speak, – equilibrating one powerful emotion with another of opposing yet equal strength. For if the desire for revenge didn't exist there would be a void, and as we all know nature abhors a vacuum.) Then time and distance and atrophy set in, and worse, corrosion of the spirit, so that he became merely a plaything of shallow sensation, a water insect skittering over the skin of bogus reality, and almost, but not quite, forgot his cold rageless purpose. Soft cushions and a full belly make us all forget, so we must forgive Vail his weakening of resolve, particularly as he has an excess of nubile women, a white Merc, and a continual stroking of the ego, beneficial as a hot scented bath into which one slides with smirking lassitude. But now fear has entered into the equation, and fear is like a white-hot needle inserted into the anus. What is he afraid of? Like everyone, of being found out. Of not ‘coming up to the mark'. Without being told, or having to be told, he knows full well that he has failed to live up to that commitment which resolved itself while watching the twenty-two selfsame images on the television screens in the electrical retailer's window. (There is, too, the lesser fear of receiving mysterious telephone calls from a terrorist cell, but this has simply triggered the larger, latent fear of his own inadequacy, paltriness of spirit and shortness of memory.) What has happened, he now realises, is that in crossing the wire he has also crossed over into Dremeland, a place where everyone has sunk, some knowingly, some unwittingly, into a light pleasant doze, cosily insular and protected. The frenetic activity in Oxford Street fools no one: they are asleep too, deeply asleep, mere jerky somnambulists buying stuff to pad their dreams with. By voluntary consent
everyone is living a daily game of
Feet ‘n' Porridge,
and the more empty and shrill the laughter the more content they are. And yet, and yet, this Dremeland is a terrifying place, and the sleepwalkers feel it in their bones and nightmares and know it in their heart of hearts. This is one reason for the ceaseless activity: keep moving and the surface tension of Dremeland will support you: stop for even one brief marginal second and you will sink down and down into unfathomable, unimaginable, murky depths. No wonder they skitter! There are charms and spells and incantations to prevent this disastrous sinking, such as the constant repetition of the leader's name, which obviates all necessity to think and wards off attacks of the heeby-jeebies. Thus in times of doubt (dangerous!) you chant until stupefied the same two syllables of iron-clad certitude. Yet another method is a wanton suspension of disbelief, widely used and very popular, in which your natural incredulity is blighted, annulled, indeed stopped dead in its tracks by the sheer breathtaking effrontery of naked, blatant lies. But these, it should be added, are very clever lies, cunningly designed to seduce and take advantage of those base impulses that lurk inside all of us. The lies whisper, – or do they thunder? – that to be kind you have first to be cruel, that to protect the weak you have to be repressive, that to show compassion you have first to demonstrate brute strength, and, above all, that by helping yourself you are, by some impenetrable, convoluted piece of schlock logic, helping others. It is a superb philosophy because it enables you to indulge in soft cushions and a full belly to your heart's content while at the same time salving your conscience (or the flabbily dormant faculty which passes for such) as you skitter merrily along on the surface tension of your own wilful ignorance, blindness and callous stupidity. But those depths, – my God, those depths! – are but the thickness of a millimetre away! Poke one toe beneath, break that surface tension, and Dremeland will shimmer and fragment and vanish before your eyes. It is not built on rock, not even on shifting sand, but on the illusory premise of enlightened self-interest, a concept so flimsily ramshackle that no one, not even monetarists, dares scrutinise it for fear that both it and they will turn out to be self-evidently non-existent. As for Vail, instinct rather than intellect has convinced him of much of the above, so that in his bones and nightmares and heart of hearts he knows what he must do; yet the wearing of silk socks and Gucci shoes has immured his toes to the touch and feel of the surface tension and prevented him, even had he wanted to, from penetrating it. That and the endless and readily available supply of women who yearn to have their nipples sucked by a pair of famous lips and to become conjoined, however briefly, to a media personality. And when all is said and done, who can blame him? His bread is buttered both sides and there is ample jam today in Dremeland for everyone.]