“What has lager got to do with anything?”
“Nothing. But the name of the lager was Harp. And my name’s Sharp, you see.”
“OK. Then what have harps got to do with anything?”
“Angels are supposed to play them.”
“Are they? Should we have said he was playing a harp? To make it more convincing?”
I told her that, in my opinion, the addition of a harp to the portrait of the Angel Matt Damon that we had painted was unlikely to have helped convince people of its authenticity.
“And anyway, how come it’s all about you? We hardly get a fucking mention.”
I had many other phone calls that morning—from Theo, who said that there’s been a lot of interest in the story, and who thought I’d finally given him something he could work with, as long as I was comfortable talking to the public about what was obviously a private spiritual moment; from Penny, who wanted us to meet and talk; and from my daughters.
I hadn’t been allowed to speak to them for weeks, but Cindy’s maternal instinct had obviously told her that the day Daddy was in the papers talking about seeing messengers from God was a good day to reinstate contact.
“Did you see an angel, Daddy?”
“No.”
“Mummy said you did.”
“Well, I didn’t.”
“Why did Mummy say you did?”
“You’d better ask her.”
“Mummy, why did you say Daddy saw an angel?”
I waited patiently while a brief conversation took place away from the receiver.
“She says she didn’t say it. She says the newspaper says it.”
“I told a fib, sweetie. To make some money.”
“Oh.”
“So I can buy you a nice birthday present.”
“Oh. Why do you get money for saying you saw an angel?”
“I’ll tell you another time.”
“Oh.”
And then Cindy and I spoke, but not for very long. During our brief conversation I managed to refer to two different types of domesticated female animals.
I also received a phone call from my boss at FeetUp. He was calling to tell me that I was fired. “You’re joking.”
“I wish I was, Sharpy. But you’ve left me with no alternative.”
“By doing what, exactly?”
“Have you seen the paper this morning?”
“That’s a problem for you?”
“You come across as a bit of a nutter, to be honest,”
“What about the publicity for the channel?”
“All negative, in my book.”
“You think there’s such a thing as negative publicity for FeetUp?”
“How do you mean?”
“What with no one ever having heard of us. You.” There was a long, long silence, during which you could hear the rusting cogs of poor Declan’s mind turning over.
“Ah. I see. Very cunning. That hadn’t occurred to me.”
“I’m not going to beg, Dec. But it would seem a little perverse to me. You hire me when no one else in the world would give me the time of day. And then you fire me when I’m hot. How many of your presenters are all over the papers today?”
“No, no, fair point, fair point. I can see where you’re coming from. What you’re saying, if I read you correctly, is that there’s no such thing as bad publicity for a… a fledgling cable channel.”
“Obviously I couldn’t have put it as elegantly as that. But yes, that’s the long and the short of it.”
“OK. You’ve turned me round, Sharpy. Who’ve we got on this afternoon?”
“This afternoon?”
“Yeah. It’s Thursday.”
“Ah.”
“Had you forgotten?”
“I sort of had, really, yeah.”
“So we’ve got no one?”
“I reckon I could get JJ, Maureen and Jess to come on.”
“Who are they?”
“The other three.”
“The other three who?”
“Have you read the story?”
“I only read the one about you seeing the angel.”
“They were up there with me.”
“Up where?”
“The whole angel thing, Declan, came about because I was going to kill myself. And then I bumped into three other people on the top of a tower-block who were thinking of doing the same thing. And then… Well, to cut a long story short, the angel told us to come down again.”
“Fuck me.”
“Exactly.”
“And you reckon you can get the other three?”
“Almost sure of it.”
“Jesus Christ. How much will they cost, d’you reckon?”
“Three hundred quid for the three of them, maybe? Plus expenses. One of them’s a… Well, she’s a single parent, and her kid will need looking after.”
“Go on, then. Fuck it. Fuck the expense.”
“Top man, Dec”
“I think it’s a good idea. I’m pleased with that. Old Declan’s still got it, eh?”
“Too right. You’re a newshound. You’re the Newshound of the Baskervilles.”
“What you’ve got to tell yourself,” I told them, “is that no one will be watching.”
“That’s one of your old pro tricks, right?” said JJ knowingly.
“No,” I said. “Believe me. Literally no one will be watching. I have never met anyone who has ever seen my show.”
The world headquarters of FeetUpTV!—known, inevitably, to its staff as TitsUpTV!—is in a sort of shed in Hoxton. The shed contains a small reception area, two dressing rooms and a studio, where all four of our homegrown programmes are made. Every morning, a woman called Candy-Ann sells cosmetics; I split Thursday afternoon with a man called D J Goodnews, who speaks to the dead, usually on behalf of the receptionist, the window cleaner, the minicab driver booked to take him home, or anyone else who happens to be passing through: “Does the letter A mean anything to you, Asif ?” and so on. The other afternoons are taken up by tapes of old dog races from the US—once upon a time the intention was to offer viewers the chance to bet, but nothing ever came of it, and in my opinion, if you can’t bet, then dog racing, especially old dog racing, loses some of its appeal. During the evening, two women sit talking to each other, in and usually about their underwear, while viewers text them lewd messages, which they ignore. And that’s more or less it. Declan runs the station on behalf of a mysterious Asian businessman, and those of us who work for FeetUpTV! can only presume that somehow, in ways too obtuse and sophisticated for us to decipher, we are involved in the trafficking of class A drugs and child pornography. One theory is that the dogs in the races are sending out encoded messages to the traffickers: if, say, the dog in the outside lane wins, then that is a message to the Thai contact that he should send a couple of kilos of heroin and four thirteen-year-olds first thing in the morning. Something like that, anyway.
My guests on Sharp Words tend to be old friends who want to do something to help, or former celebrities in a boat not dissimilar to my own—holed under the waterline and sinking fast. Some weeks I get has-beens, and everyone gets wildly over-excited, but most weeks it’s had-beens. Candy-Ann, D J GoodNews and the two semi-clothed ladies have appeared on my show not just once, but several times, in order to give viewers a chance to get to know them a little better. (Sharp Words is two hours long, and though the advertising department, namely Karen on reception, does its best, we are rarely interrupted by messages from our sponsors. The theoretical viewer is highly unlikely to feel as though we have barely scratched the conversational surface.) Attracting people of the calibre of Maureen and Jess, then, constituted something of a coup: only rarely have my guests appeared on the show during the same decade that they have appeared in the newspapers.
I took pride in my interviewing. I mean, I still do, but at a time when I seemed to be able to do nothing else properly, I hung on to my competence in a studio as I would to a tree root on the side of a cliff. I have, in my time, interviewed drunken, maudlin actors at eight in the morning and drunken, aggressive footballers at eight in the evening. I have forced lying politicians to tell something like the truth, and I have had to cope with mothers whose grief has made them uncomfortably verbose, and not once have I let things become sloppy. My studio sofa was my classroom, and I didn’t tolerate any waywardness. Even in those desperate FeetUpTV! months spent talking to nobodies and never-weres, people with nothing to say and no ability to say it, it was comforting to think that there was some area of my life in which I was competent. So when Jess and JJ decided that my programme was a joke and acted accordingly, I suffered something of a sense of humour failure. I wish, of course, that I hadn’t; I wish that I could have found it in me to be a little less pompous, a little more relaxed. True, I was encouraging them to talk about an unforgettable experience that they hadn’t had, and which I knew they hadn’t had. And granted, that imaginary unforgettable experience was preposterous. And yet, despite these impediments, I had somehow expected a higher level of professionalism.