Vail (2 page)

Pete Rarity drops the crushed polystyrene cup between his bony knees and puts his hand onto Vail's empty groin.

The seats rock and creak.

If it is really true, as Vail reflects, that he is the spitting image of the copy man at B&B, might this not, in one way or another, by some deviously plotted strategem, present itself as an Opportunity?

Not so long ago he had had a past, a green van with a faulty transmission, a wife and child beyond the wire. The memory beckoned to him seductively like lust. Even now inside his own head it was compact and complete, unimpeachable. He could recall many things with absolute sharpness of clarity. The doctor's grey insubstantial presence in the room with the hard chairs and uncurtained window. The limp tartan blanket in his arms, dear to him as breath …

Obscurely he felt betrayed, not knowing by what. The scales hadn't completely fallen from his eyes; his thoughts were still confused. The taint of corruption and decay was everywhere,
interfering with his senses. He still had, however, his intention, his resolve, – the good deed in the naughty world, – to carry out the supreme act of retribution. That at least, alone, was safe.

Pete Rarity says, ‘The smell of urine in here makes me sick.'

The street is quite as crowded as before: drunks and addicts slump in doorways. The police leave the area unmolested because it is better to contain a cess-pool than have it spilling all over the place and contaminating everything else.

[With his scant knowledge of London Vail thinks this scene of degradation and despoliation is typical, whereas it isn't, just symptomatic.]

Men and women of both sexes parade up and down selling orifices. You can buy any shape, size and combination of orifices you fancy here for a few quid. Some of these suck you in while others secrete fluid, depending on whether you want to be swallowed whole or spat upon. In some dank booths you insert a coin and press your face to a cardboard slot and watch a black girl cavort her hips to the disco-throb of a transistor. She pushes sweating flanks close enough to smell and invites you with a moist erect finger to feed in more money if you want to see her have a
really
good time. For paper she will go berserk.

They walk through the sweltering city with no particular destination in mind. It is the height of summer and those with yellow cards are making money hand over fist. The feeling in the air is that the country is booming like never before: video shops going full blast, 5th generation microprocessors selling like there's no tomorrow, Oxford Street thronged, millions of square metres of denim hanging stiffly on plastic rails before being stretched and pummelled to accommodate bulging beef-fattened flesh (a manufacturing base, hoop-la!) while the cars negotiating the choked streets and parked amongst the detritus on buckled pavements are sleek and shiny under their coating of electrostatic dust. The restaurants and pubs are doing a roaring trade, the theatres are packing them (foreigners) in, there is so much frenetic activity and consumption that you wonder how the sewers can cope with it all. Vail has not seen the like in all his thirty-seven years.

The intersection of Foley Street and Cleveland Street is sterile, cordoned off because of a bomb blast. This is in the vicinity of a hospital, so the theory goes that somebody of importance receiving treatment there was a marked target. Who can it be? Did the terrorists get the VIP? Imagine killing hundreds of ‘innocent' people in order to dispose of just the one individual.

Vail would like to poke his nose in to find out how it's done but one glance at the mirrored visors and blunt black stun sticks is enough to warn him off. In any case this method is too crude and indiscriminate; he prefers the intimacy and accuracy of direct confrontation, the inexorability of having the target in his sights and making deadly sure of the outcome.

‘Would you like to meet a friend of mine?' Pete Rarity asks him. ‘He's a producer at Thames. Lives in Notting Hill. Keeps open house. If we're lucky we can get a meal on his expense account. We were at school together and he must be making thirty K a year. He's kept his nose clean, adopted a low profile, and consequently they trust him. Might even get a bed for the night. Better than any old soapbox.'

They make their way via Knightsbridge and through the barricades catch a glimpse of workmen swarming over scaffolding in the latest phase of the Harrods' rebuilding programme. Signs curlicued with barbed wire proclaim proudly
We Never Close
and
Business As Usual
in the grand British tradition.

Notting Hill is quiet and riotless these days since the ghettoes were broken up. Families still live in the burnt-out boarded-up shells and fragant cooking smells of braised rat emanate from the gratings.

Everything is peace and harmony.

The producer who keeps a low profile at Thames for thirty K a year is in his middle thirties, tallish, thinnish, with John Lennon wire-frame spectacles wrapped around large pale ears. Short fine
hair brushed forward like a cap over a bony protruding forehead, the veins in his temples resembling blue bulbous worms throbbing beneath a millimetre of pale soil. In speech he is rapid and staccato, in manner brusque and buzzing with nervous energy, as if it is a constant struggle to keep pace with the fleeting moment. He isn't fond of Pete Rarity and, by association, is suspicious of Vail.

For his part, Vail can make out only about one word in ten from the stuttering blizzard of sentences, and no sense at all.

‘Fast overrun tight schedule. Damn rewind fucking VTR edit. Silicone pricks. Take studio time and wrap-up ridiculous. Even they couldn't if he tried. But partly Kenny's fault, see to trouble dumb for must, drink or money.'

[An accurate verbatim transcript would have sounded like this to Vail's ears. Yet Pete Rarity appears to have no trouble understanding him: indeed he responds with a toadying question to which Bryce Ransom replies:]

‘Replaced scheduled transmission twats. If network clash Week 14 we didn't sense but hasn't instead? No. They couldn't lick elbow over arse with following wind.'

‘What's Kenny like to work with?'

‘Nothing fired-up didn't have the nous to string it. Could but didn't so bloody sure not. After all, as if he notched 17.9!'

‘Didn't he?'

‘If seventeen's max then slip in wet uptight cunts. Not in jolly with Vere, though. He's filleted.'

Pete Rarity nods sagely in the most servile manner imaginable. Has he understood this gobbledygook? Vail wonders mutely. If not, it is a valiant attempt and successful pretence at same.

Is this how all television producers talk? Or only at Thames? How do people underneath them understand what's to be done, or doesn't it matter? Is it a positive benefit, an essential attribute for the job, to be totally unintelligible to everyone else, particularly those to whom they are supposed to be giving orders?

These questions plague Vail, though never having been near a television studio he can only surmise in ignorance.

Apparently, – missed by Vail in the staccato blizzard, – Bryce Ransom, – Bry to his friends, – has asked them to stay to dinner.

Pete Rarity accepts on Vail's behalf, though it isn't dinner they've been asked to stay for at all, but a party of sorts. Other people appear in the top-floor flat. A supply of tall willowy girls with long straight hair the colour of a SunSilk commercial that cascades over, and is separated by, their pointed shoulders so that golden sheaves fall fore and aft. All these girls are beautiful and refined and speak so slowly and correctly that Vail has time to boil an egg between sentences. They speak to his face as into an empty cardboard box. They have lovely teeth and sweet breaths and tiny pinched nostrils.

Somebody brings news of the hospital carnage involving the INLA (thirty dead, lots more injured) but luckily the Minister for Media and Tabloids was in his missile-proof lead-lined private room on the tenth floor and escaped without a scratch. This, then, clearly isn't the way to set about it (as his instincts had told him). If the Inner London Education Authority can't succeed, what chance has he?

Vail mingles, keeping an ear open for hints and possible openings. There are several men wearing thin gold chains and Adidas training shoes, one or two as slender as the girls. Pete Rarity winks at him from across the room and gives him the thumbs-up. The place reeks of red wine and asparagus quiche. Vail hears an American accent which he is familiar with from TV but has hardly, if ever, heard in the flesh before; it is like being in a B movie.

‘Weird Ache,' says the American thrusting out a brown fist.

‘Pardon?'

‘Your name?'

Vail tells him and the American says, ‘Veal?'

‘Vail.'

‘Vole?'

‘Vail.'

‘Vail. Right. Weird Ache.'

‘Weird Ache?'

‘Wayde. Dake.'

‘How do you do, Mr Dake.'

‘Weird.'

‘Wayde.'

‘You're into … ?'

‘Into?'

‘What do you do?'

‘Me? I'm in video.'

‘Conception, production or packaging?'

‘Integrate following let who fucks who tight, wouldn't they,' says Vail, taking a leaf out of Bry's book. It seems to work; the American nods vigorously. ‘Too damn right. Somebody has to.'

‘What are you in?'

‘Excuse me?'

‘What do you do?'

‘CP/M security and surveillance.' He proffers a card. ‘Need an ALU, BCD, LSI or LCD and I'm your man. We can interface any number of peripherals and give you a menu, modem, matrix, or mouse. Pick a random number and we can scroll it, synthesise it, simulate it, spreadsheet it, sprite it and stack it.'

‘All at once?'

‘Yep or sequentially. Don't forget, the world is running to a dead end. We have to speed up the process.'

‘I thought we had to slow it down?'

‘No
. You've got to stay one kilobyte ahead. Tomorrow's advance is yesterday's stale fish.
Be
there.'

‘I'm not up with all this, I'm afraid.'

‘We can help. Outfit you with PEEK, PROM and POKE and you'll fly like a turtle. You'll never look back,' the American avers.

Now. This looks promising. This could be a way in. If he can get hold of a security and surveillance system there's no telling where it might lead, – not to mention the PEEKs, PROMs and POKEs and other things. He could gain access to all sorts of places:
Buckingham Palace, Downing Street, the Houses of Parliament, Harrods. Say he bought a pair of headphones with dangly wires and wore a white coat and wandered in with the rest of the technical crew? Would they spot him? He could mumble CP/M scroll POKE Kbyte and look preoccupied. Nobody ever stopped a man in a white coat who mumbled and looked preoccupied; you could operate on the Queen Mother if you did that, and most of them had.

So Vail sets about to pick the American's brains, who, it transpires, comes from Austin, Texas. He is a massively broad fellow, creased and hard and gnarled as an olive tree, with craggy slits for eyes. His teeth are square white slabs in a mouth as wide as his head. He has a solid moustache burnt yellow by the Texas sun. It seems he will accede to Vail's request for CP/M security and surveillance information if he (Vail) will arrange to have one of the tall willowy correctly-spoken girls spend the night with him (Dake).

He must think I'm an old friend of Bry's
, thinks Vail,
with some kind of influence over the people here. What should I do? And if I agree, how do I arrange for one of the girls to spend the night with him? They won't look at me anyway, for myself, much less as a go-between or sexual intermediary. Wouldn't you think too that a broad tanned rich American (all Americans are rich) would have a far greater chance of pulling a bird than a specimen like me? Unless the American supposes there is some significant difference between American girls and English girls, that a different approach is required, and he (Way de Dake) feels insecure in dealing with females of an alien culture, – for all his wealth and aplomb and slick expertise in security and surveillance systems unsure which social and emotional triggers to press to activate the desired response
.

‘I know all about that,' says Wayde Dake, having read Vail's mind, ‘and much of it is true, partly anyway. Will you give it your best shot? I'd be appreciative.'

‘I'll do the best I can,' Vail promises, his mind agog with openings and opportunities.

The party has speeded up considerably as more people arrive in droves. Outside the streets lurk with unmitigated violence and squalor; here in the top-floor flat it is hot, oppressive, fume-laden, noisy with conversation and shrieks and thumping disco-throb. Drugs are taken, weed smoked, smack inhaled.

Bryce Ransom pauses to have a brief chat with Vail but the result is as incomprehensible and inconclusive as before. His verbal bullets spatter Vail's face, eyes crinkling astutely behind his twisted wire-frame specs, exposed bony temples writhing with wormy blue veins.

It crosses Vail's mind to wonder whether this isn't a deliberate ploy. The motive? To see how many people pretend to understand because they don't wish to offend a television producer, thereby affording much secret amusement to Bryce Ransom as well as being an instant litmus test of the cretinous, the gullible, the sycophantic: in other words those prepared to debase themselves to the
nth
degree in order to win the favour and approbation of an important personage. What a clever wheeze! Laughing up his sleeve at the world while passing off a spate of gibberish as incisive intellectual pyrotechnics. You have to admire the fellow, though Vail doesn't, finding him tiresome.

But, – this Vail's banal perplexity, – how does the producer from Thames go about buying groceries or ordering a meal in a restaurant? Is it all done by gesture and dumb show? ESP? Semaphore?