“Thank you, Libby, we’ll have two large glasses of your fifty pee Chardonnay.”
“Now you know perfectly well we don’t have a fifty pee Chardonnay, Brendan.”
“Yes you do, you charge four pounds fifty a glass for it.” And Brendan roared at his own joke and slapped his thigh as the waitress, with a pitying sigh, mock-flounced off to the serving hatch.
Yes you do, you charge four fifty a glass for it. He should be writing these down. He could use that in the Union bar back home. Except the stupid prats would get the feedline wrong. “Fifty pee?” they’d say. “Good to tell how long it is since you last bought a drink.” Forget it.
Four fifty a maring glass, though. And it would be his round next. Nine quid, ten if you had to bung the waitress as you would have to do in this kinder place. Jesus.
Ellis Hugo Bell of Bell Famous Productions Ltd, opposite, was concluding what was obviously only one of an endless series of calls on his mobile: “… I’m half in bed with a guy in LA whose name I daren’t even breathe, but if he offers me anywhere near a deal I’d go for it and make it a co-production, fact with his name I’d settle for associate …”
He went on, having paused to await a reply that was evidently not forthcoming: “So whaddya think?”
Alex knew what he thought all right. The guy was a tosser of the first order, a right wankah. But it had nothing to do with him.
“We’ll talk, then. Ciao.”
The waitress brought over two brimming goblets of white wine. Cut glass, they were. They needed to be, at that blurry price.
Bell, not pocketing but depositing his mobile on the coffee table for immediate future use, picked up and toyed with a long-empty glass.
“Don’t buy me a bloody drink, then, will you?” sighed Bell as the waitress hovered.
“Ah, you noticed!” boomed Brendan genially. Bell half shook his head, half helplessly shrugged at the waitress, who departed.
With an up and down, can-he-be-trusted glance at Alex, Bell then asked: “I don’t suppose you happen to have a line about your person, Brendan?”
Brendan, obviously feigning ignorance, asked innocently: “A line of what, dear friend? Washing? Or in what? A line in repartee? I never give my lines away, they’re far too valuable. If you mean the bottom line, then of course given the right bottom I could be interested.”
“Piss off.”
None of this meant much to Alex. It was how they talked to one another in this So-oh place. It was their manner of speaking.
He knew what a line was, of course. They were supposed to snort it off fifty-pound notes in these kinder places. Fact, from what he’d heard, most of the money circulating round here had been up so many nostrils you could score a hit just by opening up your wallet and sniffing it. Mary Jane, that’s what they called the stuff now, so Selby had told him. In Leeds it was known as Bolivian marching powder. Not that Alex had ever done drugs, apart from Es or disco biscuits as they were known, and the odd puff of wacky baccy. Couldn’t afford it, not on what he had to live on.
“Listen, I wanna ask you something,” Ellis Hugo Bell of Bell Famous was now saying. “You’re into S and M and all that, right?”
“Who says I am?” asked Brendan Barton quickly.
“Well, let’s say you take an interest in that sort of scene.”
“I take an interest in music but that doesn’t make me a pianist.”
“All right, then tell me this, Brendan, let’s say from your wide knowledge of the world. Is it conceivable that somebody could deliberately get themselves murdered for kicks?”
“It’s not only conceivable, it has actually happened,” drawled Brendan evenly.
“Blurry hell, where?” put in Alex, incredulous. Was he taking the piss? You just couldn’t tell with this bloke.
“Southern California, of course, where else? Woman advertises on her web chat room for someone to come round to her apartment and strangle her. Murderer obligingly does so. She was probably getting a buzz simply from placing the ad, but in the event she was taken at her word — throttled with one of her own stockings. Killer never found.”
“Bollox.” This was from a young man who had draped himself over the back of Brendan’s sofa while he called up a number on his mobile.
Without turning round Brendan said: “Tell me, do your bad manners come naturally or did you have to go on a special course?”
Write it down, Alex, write it down. He could get a reputation as the Metro wit on what he was picking up down here.
“The killer was never found because he didn’t exist,” the young man persisted. “It’s one of these urban myths, like the dead granny in the car boot.”
What fookin granny? They were a difficult lot to keep up with, these Londoners.
Still without turning his head, Brendan asked conversationally: “Do you know that game where you have to rearrange a number of words to make a well-known phrase or saying? Off fuck.”
Yeh yeh yeh, Alex knew that one. So did the young man. “Bollox,” he reiterated as, unabashed, he wandered off, braying into his mobile: “No, not you, Justin, I was talking to the second biggest prat in Soho.” Evidently they went in for recycling their lines. Just like Leeds.
“So when’s this murder supposed to have happened?” asked Bell.
“Couple of years ago. Didn’t you read about it?”
“No,” said Bell thoughtfully. “But I bet I know someone who did. Listen, got a proposition for you, Brendan. How would you like to write the screenplay? Name in lights, eh?”
“Name in very small print, you mean. Not my forte, old man. Besides, I prefer to see my name on big fat cheques.”
“You’ll get your big fat cheque with lots of lovely noughts, soon as I’ve got it all packaged, trust me. No? You’ll regret it when you see the queues winding round your local multiplex.”
“No doubt. My life is a raft of regrets, heading for the Niagara Falls of disappointment.”
The things he came out with. Alex noted with alarm that, taking a generous swig of his wine, Brendan had already nearly emptied his glass. Bang went another tenner — and he’d probably have to offer one to this producer prat, too.
Ellis Hugo Bell persisted: “Or if you want your money to do the work for you, you could always invest in a hundred-pound unit in my Internet project. Have I told you about Walk On By?”
“Frequently.”
“What’s that then?” Alex thought to ask, not because he was remotely interested but because he reasoned that so long as the bugger was talking it would keep him from drinking.
“Walk On By? Simple. I mount a rostrum camera in a doorway — could be here, could be the Groucho, could be Kettner’s, could be anywhere — and all we do, we film everyone walking past over the course of a day, unedited. Cut. Print. The National Film Theatre will give their eye teeth for it. Never been done.”
“Bollox,” snarled Brendan. “That bugger Charles Pathé did it in the year fucking dot. It was a boring idea then and it’s a boring idea now, but at least he had the nous to knock it on the head after one reel. You want to go on for twenty-four bloody hours. Who the fuck’s going to watch it?”
“Anyone who visits bellfamous dotcom,” said Bell, the light of fanaticism in his eyes. “If they’ll click in to see a cigarette smouldering in an ashtray, which they do, why not hundreds of people walking past a doorway? And talking of walking on by —” Here, to Alex’s relief, Bell seamlessly put down his empty glass, seized his mobile and shot to his feet. Gabbling “’Scuse, man, dog,” which Alex rightly interpreted as having to see a man about a dog, he bounded out of the room just as an unkempt, green-corduroy-clad figure, looking like the kind of lecturer who taught English but only to screw everything in sight, shambled across to fill the space he had vacated. While clean-shaven, he looked somehow as if he had only recently shed a beard.