Vail (19 page)

‘Use your brain, diarrhoea-face. What better way to touch the heartstrings and whip up sympathy than to see this couple of old crones here with their arms full of products and tears coursing down their flaking sunken cheeks? Or Dumpy and Little Com cramming their faces with all kinds of confectionery they've hitherto only dreamt of or seen on the telly? Reet trying on a cross-your-heart bra and pampering herself with lipstick and powder and dreaming of a beau? Father standing there stunned and emotional at the sight of his family enjoying all the things he's been unable, through force of circumstance, to provide for them? And Uncle Forster and Vic …'

But here even Virgie's inspiration, when confronted by a potbellied petty crook and a vicious teenage hoodlum, peters out. What to do about Vic and Uncle Forster? Put them in a wheelchair and walking frame? She says briskly, ‘We'll shoot round them. In any case we can leave them on the cutting-room floor.'

‘You could make them the heavies of the piece,' Vail suggests (a phrase he has heard Angie use).

‘
Brilliant!
' chorus Virgie and the director. ‘We can work in incest and child abuse,' Virgie adds, smiling with all her shark's teeth.

‘It's a great dramatic counterpoint,' the director agrees. ‘Love, hate, crime and sexual perversion in a London slum-dwelling family. It's got to be a BAFTA nomination. Felliniesque.'

There is a crash of splintering timber and Father staggers in, his thumb and two good fingers wrapped around the neck of the whisky bottle. He is in a rare fighting mood, ready to take on allcomers. ‘Get this,' Virgie hisses at the cameraman.

Wails from below as Dumpy smashes Little Com over the head with the teapot. The nerve-shattered researcher has fled to the sanctuary of the front room where he finds Uncle Forster slumped on a couch watching a Selina Southorn movie on video. Vic has yet to put in an appearance.

The crew have retreated to the corner of the room as Father threshes about indiscriminately with the whisky bottle. His lank greasy hair hangs in front of his staring-mad bloodshot odd-coloured eyes.

‘M' lil gurl,' he mumbles incoherently, collapsing onto the mattress and smothering Reet in a clumsy embrace with his heavy tattooed arm.

‘Heee-ggreee-grrughh-heee-yeee.'

Granny Bertha tries to intercede but her aged limbs are incapable; she pushes Auntie Beatrice forward instead.

‘Stop him, stop him! He said never again. He wouldn't. He's your son or brother, stop him!'

‘The 11.42 is delayed because of a derailment at Harlow,' Auntie Beatrice replies, who was once a station announcer at Liverpool Street. She tugs at her wrinkled stockings. ‘Tell Norman he needn't bother. We'll collect the fish later if Emily doesn't mind.'

Father has his hand under Reet's dress. ‘Get Uncle Forster. Tell Vic,' Granny Bertha shrills at everyone and no one. ‘He's at it again. He promised he wouldn't, the swine.'

‘I'm out of stock,' the cameraman reports from his crouched position, unclipping the reel.

‘Oh fock.' Virgie stamps on her cigarette. ‘Okay, it's a wrap. Now much have we got?'

The cameraman hands the camera to his assistant. ‘Two thousand feet, five hundred mute.'

‘We'll break for lunch. Do a set-up in Tesco's in,' – she checks her watch, – ‘two hours. Holy Mother, do I need a drink.'

Virgie, Vail, Suze, the director and crew make their departure leaving Father and Reet on the mattress and Granny Bertha standing impotently over them with gnarled fists and Auntie Beatrice swaying back and forth with a bittersweet smile to the inaudible strains of
I'd Rather be a Beggar with You
sung by Al Bowlly. Downstairs the grinning lecherous urchins have broken into the kitchen and are taking turns at Dumpy over the gas stove while Little Com, a nasty purple bruise on his/her bald yellow head, is strapped to a chair yelling blue murder.

Vail, in bed in Lord Napier Place, Upper Mall, with Virgie Hance, is having difficulty in rising to the occasion. He is lying naked on Virgie's black silk sheets and she is toiling over him like a Trojan, – long straggling red hair whipping her snow-white freckled shoulders, – in sweating frenzied effort while her breasts slosh and swing about above him like a pair of prolapsed eyeballs hanging out of their sockets.

‘Come on, you bastard, come on!' she grates at him from the corner of her mouth, scattering cigarette ash into his eyes and hair. ‘Make it stiff, you horny swine!' and other similar implorations, all to no avail.

This is rather strange, to Vail as much as to anyone, because not forty minutes earlier, during a recording of
Bootstraps
in Studio 9, Virgie had scuttled on all fours over the tangle of cables, crawled underneath the desk at which Vail was sitting reading from autocue and, while ostensibly whispering script changes to him, had unzipped his flies and given him head.

Vail's performance on camera, as observed by those in the control box, had been his best so far. The director had clapped his hands and Suze had to keep moistening dry lips. The climax of the show had happily coincided with Vail's personal climax, as was evident from the thrusting incisiveness of his delivery and the shining zeal in his eyes. Afterwards, while Virgie wiped her chin, the entire studio broke into spontaneous applause.

It was a ‘wonderful' show and a ‘tremendous performance' on Vail's part, as Mrs Stretcher, watching on a monitor, later reported to Laine Vere Jumper.

Still hot and rabid and lusting for more, Virgie had bundled Vail into the car and ordered the chauffeur to put his foot down and stop for nothing and no one, which nearly resulted in a nasty accident as the Merc took the entrance lane on the way out and narrowly missed a car coming in, driven by Anthony Quayle, the world famous and much-respected actor, who was arriving to do a voice-over for a travel documentary.

Luckily for Vail, Virgie and Mr Quayle, the black chauffeur was an expert driver and took evasive action by mounting the central reservation and demolishing a directional bollard.

Once in the flat they got straight down to it, a tumbling, giggling, squealing mass of flesh and limbs as they tore off their own and each other's clothing. At this point Vail was still fairly eager, had sufficiently recovered his virility, so he thought, to put up a creditable performance, and indeed was quite looking forward to it.

But. Now. Virgie slumps back exhausted after pumping away at nothing for ten minutes, disappointed and hurt, grinding her gapped teeth in frustration. She lights a fresh cigarette from the one smouldering in the corner of her mouth and sucks in a revivifying lungful. There is silence except for the wheezing of her chest.

Vail slumps too, staring at the ceiling. There is a faint but persistent tingling sensation in his groin, like the buzzing of an electrical current. He wonders if Virgie's incessant pounding and grinding has broken something, and gently probes the turkey's gizzard containing his testes.

‘Jesus, you're
not playing
with yourself, I hope!' Virgie retorts, rounding on him angrily, cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, eyes screwed up against the writhing worm of smoke. ‘Don't tell me you'd rather wank than screw, you working-class jerkoff!'

‘I think you might have damaged my equipment, that's all.'

She leans over his nether quarters, mouth gaping aslant to suck in air, and cups him in her hand. Vail recoils as the burning tip of the cigarette, carelessly and unheedingly stuck between her lips, hovers within inches of his flaccid, defenceless manhood.

She weighs him in her palm, frowning, and it is Virgie and not Vail who stiffens.

‘Holy Mother shit!'

‘What, – ?'

‘You've got three balls.'

‘No, just the regulation two.'

‘I can feel three.'

‘Two are mine, the third is an implant. Wayde Dake's idea. Or rather, Ed Flesh's. He thought that I ought to be bugged for my own protection.'

‘You've got a bug in your balls?' Virgie says in a tone of quiet stupefaction.

‘It's out of the way; normally I never notice it.'

‘You mean to say they're monitoring this? Some guy is sitting in a darkened room somewhere wearing headphones listening to this and taping the sounds my cunt makes on his focking machine?'

‘I don't think it's that sort of bug. According to Wayde it sends out pulsed signals so that they know where to find me any time day or night. Your secret's safe with me.'

At this, however, Virgie seems somewhat downcast. The possibility that her intimate body sounds are being recorded for posterity has caused the muscles in her vaginal walls to contract and fluid to be secreted in copious amounts.

With her fingertips she feels the implant in its pulpy sac and speaks to it: ‘Testing, testing, testing. One two three. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy hen. Over.'

‘You won't get a reply.'

‘Not even if I extend the antenna?' Virgie says craftily.

‘You're welcome to try,' Vail says, lying back submissively, a smile burgeoning on his lips.

Vail's car and chauffeur are waiting in the cold dead street as he leaves Lord Napier Place, Upper Mall, at three in the morning.
The chauffeur grins, as one male to another, and says, ‘How'd it go, bawz? You boogie on down wid dat chick?'

Vail nods wearily and sinks back into the moquette. He has, so he believes, aquitted himself manfully, but at considerable cost to his psychic reserves of equilibrium and wellbeing: he is a man on a knife-edge, balanced precariously between, on the one side, the headlong rush of exotic events, happenings and circumstances, and on the other, the total black emptiness of failure of nerve and lack of resolve. The trouble with being seduced, he has found, is that it's so seductive.

The car glides off through the quiescent city taking a tired Vail not, as he thinks, back to his flat, but to a secret destination somewhere south of the river; and the big black chauffeur, hired to protect him, is in fact none other than the leader of a terrorist cell by the name of Fully Olbin.

The plot thickens.

When Vail opens his eyes (the ride having lulled him into a gentle doze) he discovers that the car has stopped in a mean little street hemmed in by derelict warehouses. A boat toots nearby, but otherwise all is peaceful and silent as the grave. The tall slablike empty-eyed warehouses shut out the night, rising, so it seems, endlessly into the sky. They, – Vail, Fully Olbin, – might be in a tunnel, or in a groove cut deep into the earth, such is their isolation from the rest of sleeping London.

‘What are we doing here?' Vail naturally wants to know, having expected the flat, a nightcap, and the soft ocean of bed.

Fully Olbin's split-melon grin has gone, along with his Uncle Tom patois. ‘There's a score to be settled, a debt to be paid, Jack,' he informs Vail in a brisk, matter-of-fact manner. ‘Follow me. Any funny business and I'll break your toothcaps.'

Vail sensibly does as he's told and enters the building behind Fully Olbin, who bolts the door behind them. There is a smell of wet newspaper. They climb umpteen flights of echoing stairs in
the darkness and come finally to a long dusty room that takes up the whole of one floor. Fully Olbin leads the way across floorboards worn smooth by generations of porters, warped and soft and dangerously rotten in places, to a meat locker in the corner, the size of a room in itself. He swings open the heavy thick door and gestures Vail inside. Vail enters, feeling something click in his groin, and is confronted by two men, or rather one man and a boy or youth, sitting on packing cases at a table fashioned out of more packing cases. The man is Urban Brown and the boy or youth Vail recognises as the boy or youth from the Sandbach stat who gave him the
Temporal
in exchange for a favour not yet, he recalls with a sudden sickly feeling, discharged.

The door thumps solidly shut and Fully Olbin works the long iron handle to seal it. Even the silence outside cannot penetrate. The walls and ceiling consist of dull leaden-looking sheets of metal riveted together as in a ship's hull. There is a single caged wall light and several rows of metal bars fastened by struts to the ceiling, S-shaped meat hooks with sharpened ends hanging from them.

‘Guess what,' the boy or youth says. ‘I've been trying to ring you.' His grimy torn T-shirt reads:
Smash the Blood-Sucking NHS
. His hair lies lankly on his shoulders.

‘That was you was it?' Vail says lightly with a grin, hoping to make conversation. He tries not to notice a large area of dried blood on the floor with hair stuck to it. ‘You must be Tex Rivett.'

‘Right first time,' the boy or youth says, grinning with mildewed teeth.

‘Sit down, Jack,' Fully Olbin says.

‘After you.'

‘No, I'll stand. You sit.'

Vail sits. His balls are aching. That damn Virgie Hance had very nearly ripped them off.

‘You must have been expecting something like this, Jack,' says Fully Olbin, stripping off his black gloves to reveal his black hands and large pale fingernails.

‘Something like what?' Vail asks, blinking a little.

‘You owe us one, don't you?' Fully Olbin says, massive in his chauffeur's neatly-buttoned grey uniform, gloves clasped in both huge hands at his groin, booted legs straddled apart on the bloodstained floor. ‘Remember?'

‘Why yes of course I do. I was just waiting for you to make contact. You know, get in touch. He, – Tex, – said you would sooner or later. Yes you could say I was expecting something like this, yes.'

‘We've been waiting for the right moment. And this is it. Now we can move. Now that you're where we wanted you to be, we can act. That's why we waited, bided our time.'

‘I see.' Vail frowns. ‘Where exactly am I that you wanted me to be?'