Hadley, page 5
“You can’t say ‘if it were’.”
“It’s the subjunctive.”
“Oh please.”
“But it is.”
“We aren’t supposed to use split infinitives.”
“It’s not a split infinitive!”
“Especially in the pluperfect.”
Very few of the subs knew anything useful about the law. Someone would get charged with murder in Australia and the police would say he had confessed and Shrubs would run the story, breaking every rule (breaking every tort!) in the book. The law of contempt – under British law, which is what Shrubs used – says as soon as someone has been charged with a crime, you shut up. You can give details of what happened, like someone was shot and died three hours later, but you can’t start pinning the blame on anyone as the case is now sub judice, which is Latin for ‘steer the fuck clear of this’. You certainly can’t say anyone has confessed, unless they did the confessing in court by pleading guilty, and you certainly can’t start accusing people of doing things when they haven’t been charged. I was explaining some of these points to a bearded Englishman called Tim who was frothing at the mouth over a story that quoted police in Thailand as saying they knew the man in their custody, who had been charged and named, was the man they wanted in the case of the flashing of a high-ranking politician because he had a ‘singular willy’, just as the politician had said.
“This is a great, great story,” Tim said. “He had a singular willy!”
“But we can’t touch it,” I said.
“Can’t touch his willy,” said Tim. “Ha, ha! We can’t touch his willy!”
Baxter came out of his office with a smile growing on his face and I put my head in my hands.
“We can’t touch his willy,” Baxter said. “Willy, willy, willy!”
A lot of stress in my working day came from the effort of hiding my own select empty pools of knowledge and covering up for the lapses in concentration. Budget days scared me. Not because I was afraid of the vast amount of copy, the speed at which it would arrive and the speed at which it was meant to go out, but because none of it made any sense. It was all bollocks. There was no point of focus. In ordinary news – real news about crashes and diseases and people caught bonking in business class on planes – there were guidelines. Five dead in a pile-up caused by a cow wandering across a road in New Delhi isn’t a story because it happens all the time. Five dead in a pileup caused by a cow wandering across Piccadilly is a great story. Twenty killed when a train runs into a truck carrying a wedding party in rural Pakistan is three paragraphs. Twenty killed, including one American, when the same train runs into the truck is ten paragraphs, to be updated as soon as the United States woke up. But in economic news, there did not seem to be any threshold; all any crack head had to do was stand up and say something about a currency or a long bond and Shrubs would run the story. A bulletin, then the urgent, then the full story, running up to a hundred lines or more. It was all about feeding fat, rich people information to make them fatter and richer. That was it! Romance and adventure and colour scored nil points. And when the nonsense budget copy came overflowing with numbers, numbers that represented ‘economic indicators’, it was time to consider pooing in the pants and looking for the nearest exit.
CHRIS TORMENT slipped into Hong Kong quietly, but not quietly enough for me not to notice. There it was, on the back page of the South China Morning Post, which had allocated three paragraphs to the event: “Torment Arrives”. The sub responsible for that gem of a headline didn’t know the half of it.
It wasn’t long before I saw my old nemesis. I was in Tsim Sha Tsui, the tourist shopping bit of the Kowloon peninsula, where I had picked up some sheet music for my sister’s birthday, specifically ‘Cantonese Opera from the Southern Song Dynasty’, which was a crowd favourite. Pamela, a good bit younger than me, was tone deaf.
I walked slap bang into a film crew on Nathan Road outside the sleazy Chungking Mansions, which was a fire-trap warren of Indian restaurants, backpacker hostels, unkempt flats with gold smugglers on short leases, travel agencies and shady money dealerships. Torment looked like an American vice-president. Expensively groomed. It seemed that among the dozens involved in making this film, all huddled together on the pavement with clipboards, cups and earphones, no one could do anything without running it by him – without having a laugh, a turn. They bantered with Torment while the rest of the world – pedestrians packed at this time of day like wildebeest on the run and forced to step into the busiest road in Kowloon just to get by – looked across, tripped, looked again and wondered who these people were.
Sipping a McDonald’s coffee, I monitored every self-conscious turn of Torment’s head, the pushing back of the hair, the wide smiles – gestures I remembered from decades earlier and hated anew.
Some action. Torment reached up with a light meter or hygrometer or some other cinematic device, and targeted it at the roof of the Holiday Inn. All heads were turned his way. He read the dial. I heard him gush: “This looks really good.”
I chose my quiet words carefully: “What a fuckwit.”
Torment was handsome, no doubt, and in good trim. But there was something missing. Some substance. Some part of the ageing process seemed to have passed him by, despite the graying hair. He gave the impression of being the same age he had been at school. Like a big, bullying, white paper bag, heavy makeup hiding the cruelty lines. What was he doing, always cavorting? The truth now: he liked to be liked. Torment had spent his entire adult life prancing, trying to make people like him. He had allowed himself no time to consolidate.
I saw Candy Kam. And there was Panda Koo, wearing fur and smoking what looked, from where I was standing, like a pipe. There was fur all round her head, as if these were the playing fields of Halfords, not Hong Kong. I looked at her face and lips and thought of her without a stitch of clothing on. She would be chilly, first off, and something would have to be done about that. I wondered if, at that very moment, there could be anyone as attractive, anywhere. The director, Adolf Lee, was standing on the roof of a bus and I wondered, after I’d finished thinking about Panda Koo stark naked, if he had done a bit of casting couch hanky-panky. Maybe casting couch hanky-panky was all Adolf Lee ever did in between shoots like this when he would celebrate by climbing on to the roof of a bus. I walked closer, caught Candy’s eye and pushed my way through.
Candy gave me a quick, half smile and then looked down at her clipboard.
“What are they waiting for?” I asked. Candy mumbled something I couldn’t catch. “For a minute there, I had a bit of a wry chuckle. I thought maybe you were all waiting for me to clear off. You know, wait until the amateurs were out of the way.”
Candy didn’t look up. I was focused on the back of her head and smiling.
“They are waiting for the new light meter,” she said.
“I’m sorry?”
“The important light meter. They are waiting for it.”
“I see.”
This was the woman who would get me into the movies. She was getting me into the movies, according to Joe, albeit with Torment. A one in a million chance. The fame thing was bollocks, I was sure. The closest thing to it I had known was an occasional by-line in the Jakarta Post, the Bangkok Post, or the South China Morning Post. Or walking out of an airport with hundreds of eyes on you, at your weathered face and baggage. And then you are among all those people who had their eyes on you, and they now had their eyes on someone else. You were just a departure, or an arrival, or another nob with a trolley. Torment had never been the nob with the trolley, that was the point. Even back at our crappy school, Torment had a thing for the movies. He also had a thing for high-brow opera, the theatre and pre-war German electrical appliances. He wore cravats at weekends and gave impromptu poetry readings in the bog. When he wasn’t bullying or beating, conspiring or caning, he ponced around the place like a right Oscar Wilde. Even on a good day, Torment would make my life a misery.
Athletic, good looking and academically dull, Torment had played the lead in all the school plays. I hadn’t, but I had been in a lot of school plays. I was a pirate in ‘The Pirates of Penzance’. I’d played a boy in ‘Oliver!’. My most challenging role, as mentioned, was as Queen Anne in ‘Richard III’, wearing the billowing gown and white pointy hat. And Torment had played Richard! That play had gone to Holland in the Easter holidays. I had smoked cigarettes in the wings.
“Put that cigarette down, before I Gravel you and send you to Big Track,” Torment had barked. “What’s the matter with you?”
What was the matter with me? What was the matter with him? What was he talking about?
Within three or four years, the now puffed-up Chris Torment was a name in English television, appearing in Jane Austen and George Eliot serialisations. At twenty-two, he played the vicar, Mr Elton, in a big-screen version of ‘Emma’. I went to see it at a huge, cold cinema in Wisbech. Alone in the circle, I watched Elton mince around Emma like some tacky Disney-on-Ice manoeuvre until she tells him where to get off.
“You tell him, Emma. The moron.”
Next came a couple more TV series, some World War Two prisoner-of-war nonsense. Halfords, abandoned for the Christmas holidays, doubled as a German castle. This was the BBC’s idea of Colditz. Everyone thought the wind noises were great at first, but they went on and on. A bit over the top. Actors were getting ear infections and the wind had to be edited out. Then a couple more movies until it was time for the English press to speculate on Chris Torment taking over as the next James Bond, for heaven’s sake. He never did, or hadn’t yet – surely he couldn’t ever? Torment was now in his forties, I reminded myself again cheerfully. Middle-aged.
Torment and Joe. What were they up to? Who were these guys?
Earlier in my career, I had laid out feature pages for a London Sunday tabloid. One edition was devoted to speculation about who should take over as the next James Bond, as the incumbent at the time, Roger Moore, was getting on a bit. The pictures and words I had been given were all about young wet English actors, who were all Chris Torment in one way or another. Patrick Mower of ‘Callan’, ‘Target’ and more recently ‘Emmerdale’ fame, got a mention and was looking good, I remembered. There were also a couple of loose-jawed Americans. Neither Timothy Dalton nor Pierce Brosnan got a look in. Mower certainly was not the favourite for the ‘licence to kill mantle’, according to the festering pile of words I had to deal with, which used the phrase ‘licence to kill mantle’ five times. A poll of the readers, James Bond aficionados every one, had put Richard Gere at the top of the list. One reader was quoted as saying he had chosen Gere “because he didn’t look like a right prat”. But if some prat had to play James Bond, it had to be a British prat, and Patrick McGoohan (long my choice for the role) was by then far too old.
This was the gist of the words that slopped onto the page under a few pictures of the leading candidates (inset of Patrick McGoohan). Thunderballs.
TWO WEEKS after the audition, I was summoned back to the Lion Dance Practice Room for an evening promotion party for the film. The cast of thousands was to be there, and I was one of them. I was to meet Adolf Lee and co-producer Gretel, Panda Koo and Torment. A letter from Gretel’s assistant said my “unbounded enthusiasm” during the audition had won them all over and would I be free for forty-eight hours to rehearse and shoot my part, which would include some lines.
I was in the door of the entertainment business. I had made it. I told the others on the Shrubs desk and cheers went up. The gaunt Fagin, whose desktop popcorn machine had been stolen, walked across and clapped me on the back.
“You arsehole,” he said and walked away.
A tall, young American came over. “I heard that. What’s with him?”
“No, it was friendly. A term of endearment. He was congratulating me. He’s Scottish.”
I was given a script with the cast list (preliminary) stapled to the front. Someone had moved pretty fast. I searched for my name. It was like being back at school. There was Chris Torment at the top. Very near the bottom was the entry:
GLUM MAN IN BAR – HADLEY ARNOLD
Glum. That’s okay. I could do glum. I skipped through the pages but couldn’t pin down my lines. I started reading at random. Page seventeen…
MRS HOLLAND
As you know the West Country is famed for many things: moors, beaches, cream. Many famous writers have found their inspiration there. Many people who, in the innocence of youth, have seen their lives in distant fields, have returned to the West Country because that is where, first and last, they be drawn.
NORMAN
Good heavens.
COLONEL (in thick Devonshire accent) Please go on. That’s where they be drawn.
MRS HOLLAND
So imagine my dilemma as a Somerset potter…
I found myself retching, like I did when I smoked without a drink. I dipped in again, at page seventy-three. Scott was speaking. Torment was Scott.
SCOTT
Someone once said Brighton, a resort on the south coast of England, always looks like it’s been helping police with their inquiries. Well, Hong Kong is like that too. She has her own persona.
LING-LING
What’s that?
SCOTT
She’s a grand, confused duchess in a string of pearls. She’s bedecked with gems that dangle and twinkle from the dank hilltops of Victoria…”
I felt a stab of pain behind my right eye and hoped I wasn’t coming down with something. I hoped I hadn’t been bedecked by a bug. And who was Victoria? I imagined Ling-ling saying “What’s that?”. Like in the ‘Teletubbies’. You fool, Scott. She isn’t asking about Hong Kong’s persona. She’s asking what a persona is! I persevered, skipped a few pages, glanced askance at page forty-four…
MAGNUS
So Philip, how’s that young filly of yours?
PHILIP
Not too shabby actually.
MAGNUS
That’s good, because I was wondering…
It was touch and go, but I managed to keep my bowels closed. But hold on, this was the bar in the FCC. I was the ‘glum man in bar’. I flicked through the pages. Nothing. Nothing. And then:
SCOTT
There’s something they’re not telling us, Magnus. I’ve been racking my brains…
MAGNUS
It’s the new regime, Scott.
GLUM MAN IN BAR
Here, where have all the babes gone? You want a crisp?
I searched for my next line, but it seemed that was it. I read it again and scrutinised it for hidden meaning, innuendo. Apparently it was some kind of comic relief, the drunk club bore, glum, breaking up a serious conversation with a question about babes. Hmm, I could do something with that. Perhaps a lurch away from camera as I look for the girls – maybe I see one just before I say ‘babes’. It would require a sharp double-take, a lascivious, drawn-out “helloooo”, like Leslie Phillips in one of the ‘Doctor in the House’ films. It would be a challenge. I could spill my drink. Perhaps I could put on a stutter. That was it – the upper-class twit reporter soaking up the booze in the former colony. D-, d-,d, do you want a cr-, cr-, crisp? Plenty of material there to discuss with Adolf and his aides. But there was the rub, I thought, feeling the collywobbles coming on again, setting off through the colon and hovering in the chest. I had yet to meet Torment and I didn’t want to meet Torment. Would I be able to disguise my sneering contempt?
I crossed the floor of the Lion Dance Practice Room thinking: am I disguising my sneering contempt? Chris Torment was holding court, expanding, jabbing, lecturing and expostulating. I felt like I was approaching a crowd gathered around a street magician. I was welcomed by two pretty assistants, met a couple of fellow extras and had a word with Gretel. I listened to a welcoming speech by Adolf Lee in which the stars were introduced to the crowd as Torment looked down and shuffled his feet, trying to seem bashful. I saw the hint of a smirk. Who did Torment think he was fooling? But he got a lot of applause, as did the immaculate Panda Koo, who looked as arrogant as Torment was trying to look shy. She wore loose khaki jeans, a white top showing a bare midriff, and had her hair tied back in a ponytail. Suzie Wong eating melon seeds on the Star Ferry.
Torment was now barking a series of pompous lies, shimmying and gesticulating all over the shop. I forced my malevolent scowl into a smile, swallowed hard, lowered my head and listened.
“… but of course this is not my first time in the tropics, if indeed we are indeed in the tropics…” (Some of the audience, mostly Chinese girls, laughed at this. They laughed.) “… actually I’m not sure where we are. Is it, is it a bird, a plane?”
The laughs, again. I thought: what kind of world is this?
“But seriously,” he went on, “of course, what one loves most about the tropics, at least from my point of view, is that ability, that sheer wanton…” Torment was searching for the mot juste, staring at the ceiling, drumming his free hand at the air, the fingers of the other hand dipped into a tight, gold-braided waistcoat pocket. “That sheer wanton call of nature, if you will, to sleep au naturel, with the windows wide open.”
No one, I realized, knew what Torment was on about. He was just a big, loud, famous gweilo with flailing arms and a weak face. There was some polite tittering behind hands as a couple of the girls caught on that he was saying something slightly risqué. I was thinking: life is too short. Torment had brushed his gaze across me a couple of times during his speech, but there was no sign of recognition. How did I look now compared with back then? A scary thought. The hair was much the same, but I wore glasses now and many of the blood vessels in my nose had exploded within the last few years, blown to smithereens by booze. And the eyes – the eyes definitely had had it. At Halfords, desperate for some sort of street credibility as a rogue, I applied a touch of black Kiwi shoe polish under my eyes. I wanted bags. I walked into the corridor outside my study and the other boys had looked at me, stared at my face, but did not speak. They were thinking: why has this prick put boot polish under his eyes? I thought they were thinking: look at Hadley. He’s been doing serious drugs.
