Hadley, page 7
“Shoot.”
Which was exactly what the phone did, from between the Canadian sub’s shoulder and his ear, as Torment bounded in the direction of Baxter and tripped on the cord.
The Canadian was left in shock, his head bent over with his ear to his shoulder and nothing to listen to in between. Torment, oblivious to real, hard news, was about to make some more of his own brand.
With a muffled “why you bastard”, he leapt over one of the desks, landed a yard in front of Baxter and slugged him.
There was silence again. One person clapped.
“Never…” Torment said, looking down at my boss who was crawling away fast, saying, “he hit me, he hit me” under his breath, “…never tell me I’m off a story.”
Torment was walking backwards around the desk the way he had come. He was gasping.
“This story is mine,” he said. “My lifeline!”
And then whispering, his voice shaking: “My life!”
Torment was at the entrance now, panting and fumbling for the handle behind him. Making gargling noises and pointing to the ceiling, he slipped out and closed the door. Cries went up of “what a fucking prima donna” and the like as Baxter’s deputy studied the boss’s chin.
“He hit me, he hit me,” Baxter kept saying.
And then Torment came back in, walking fast, straight in my direction. The Canadian was still trying to work out what had happened.
“That man just hit that other man,” said one of the children, clearly a Rhodes scholar in the making.
Torment was waving to the deskers as if he were the Duchess of York.
“Thanks guys, that was great,” he said. “Sorry about the bit of aggro, boss. Not in my nature. No hard feelings.”
He said this without bothering to try to find out where Baxter was. Torment reached my desk and stopped.
“Apologies for the other night. The party and all that. And thanks for your help. Don’t look at me. Bit of stress. Understand you’ve got a couple of lines. Let’s shake.”
I was looking out the window at a Star Ferry slowing down to avoid colliding with another tourist junk with fake sails and extended my arm in the direction I thought Torment was standing. We shook.
“Do I know you?” Torment asked.
“Yes, Chris. You do know me.”
“Halfords?”
“Yes.”
“Good heavens. Thought the name was familiar. Well, so be it.”
He marched back towards the door. Someone clapped again and Torment maddeningly acknowledged the applause.
I TURNED TO MY SCREEN and called up a thirty-line story from Jakarta. Not the usual fare. A car had plunged from the sixth floor of a twenty-floor office block on to the road below.
“I’ll take the Indonesia car story,” I called over to Fagin, who was the morning acting duty editor.
“All yours I, but it’ll need some explaining. I mean, what was he doing up there?”
“About thirty-five miles per hour?”
I picked up the phone and hit the speed dial to the Jakarta bureau. I was aware of a girl standing just out of sight to my right.
“Hello there,” I said. “Can I help you?”
The girl raised a notebook and pen grasped in her hands.
“I’ve come to interview you, if I may. For my school project.”
I put down the phone softly. The girl, a pretty Eurasian with long hair, streaks of sunny blond among the brown, was shifting from foot to foot, pulling at a corner of the notebook, looking from side to side and twitching her nose.
“You’ve come to interview me? What kind of interview?”
The girl shrugged her shoulders. “I recognise that man who caused the fight,” she said. “He’s an old actor.”
“You’re right. He’s a very old actor. A very foolish old actor, if you want my opinion. What’s your name?”
“Amanda.”
“Well, Amanda, how can I help?”
“What’s he doing here? Why does he think he is so important? Why did he hit that man?”
“All good questions. I think actors tend to think very highly of themselves. Between you and me, I think that man is a complete idiot.” I winked. “But you want to ask me about my job, I believe.”
“Don’t journalists think very highly of themselves? That’s what my teacher says. Miss Pizza.”
“Your teacher is called Miss Pizza?”
“Not her real name, silly. She says that what all journalists really want is to be in show business, but they can’t because they’re not good enough at anything, and that we shouldn’t let any of you touch us in a million years. She says that today, in particular, we shouldn’t let any of you come within spitting distance.”
“Hadley, any luck on the car window death plunge?” This was Fagin.
“I’m on it.”
I turned back to the girl. “I don’t think your Miss Pizza has a very high opinion of journalists. She must be married to one.”
“No. She’s a miss but very pretty. She’s very thin and you’re meant to ask me now if she’s crispy but that doesn’t make me laugh. If you don’t mind, can I have your name card, please? Miss Pizza said not to ask any question I don’t have to, and if you give me your name card I won’t have to ask you what your name is or how you spell it or what your job is.”
“That is very sensible thinking. A very good first move.” I handed over my card.
“Thank you. We were also asked to think outside the box but I don’t really know what that means. I think it has something to do with asking different sorts of questions. Not the usual ones.”
“I think that’s exactly what it means. Unless we’re talking about pizza boxes. Ha ha.”
Fagin shouted over: “Hadley, CNN have the auto pilot plummet story. Just FYI.”
“Thanks, Fagin. No rush.” Then to Amanda: “Where were we?” Amanda didn’t laugh at the pizza box joke.
“You work in a box,” she said. “This office is a sort of a box.”
“Well we can go outside it, if you like.”
“No need to take it so literally, thank you very much. Miss Pizza has taught us what literally means. Here will do. I thought I’d ask you an either-or question, if that’s okay.”
“You’re not going to ask me about my job?”
“Miss Pizza says my story mustn’t be boring.”
“Oh.”
“So here goes, if that’s okay.”
“Okay.”
“Which would you prefer?”
“Go on.”
“Which would you prefer: to have to shower in puke-green nail polish every day for the rest of your life…”
“Puke-green nail polish?”
“Hold on. Or be in the boringest, boringest orchestra in the world and everyone throws food at you, like cucumber cups with low-fat yoghurt inside? And when you go to the bathroom, you have to go in your pants.”
I looked at the girl’s face. She appeared deadly serious. So where did this mischief spring from? Fagin, from across the room, shoulders hunched and arms extended, was giving me his impersonation of a car plunging out of an office window.
“That’s the choice?”
“That’s it.”
I tapped my fingers on the desk. “Look, are you taking the p…?”
“Piss?”
“What?”
“That’s what you were going to ask me. Am I taking the piss.”
“I was not. I would not use that kind of language with a… How old are you?”
“Twelve.”
“With a twelve-year-old. I was going to ask you if you were taking the…”
“Polygraph test?”
“Polygraph test?”
“It’s a test to see if you are lying.”
“I know what a polygraph test is.”
“My teacher, Miss Pizza…”
“Look,” I said too loudly, turning a few heads. I leant towards the girl and whispered: “Enough about bloody Miss Pepperoni Pizza.”
“Not funny. My teacher, Miss Pizza, says all journalists are liars.”
“Enough.”
“In fact, she says all men are liars. It’s a song she likes. By Nick Lowe. He’s an old man like you and she plays that song again and again. What’s your answer?” Amanda looked at my card. “Mr Arnold.”
“I’m a very busy man. I want you to go away.”
“Is it true you spend your whole day sitting at your desk? That’s what another old man told me. Don’t they give you any time to go out and play?”
“Play? Play? This is a serious business.”
“Hadley,” Fagin shouted. “The Citroen suicide. What’s the status?”
“It’s coming!”
“Don’t you know what play means?”
“Piss off. What do you want from me?”
Amanda beamed. “Now you’re really annoyed.”
“Look,” I snarled. “I’ll take the orchestra and the cucumber sandwich nonsense if you promise you’ll go away.”
“Good choice. The nail polish my mum uses really stinks. And you can’t get it off no matter how hard you try. On nails you can’t get it off, and in your hair…. Eeeuw. And imagine trying to get it off your…”
“Enough. What’s your intro going to be?”
“What’s an intro?”
“Your first paragraph. For the story you’re going to write.”
“Well it would be that you don’t want to be a journalist after all, but that what you really, really want is to be in a boring orchestra and poo in your pants.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“Yes you did. I just asked you.”
“But it was a choice, smarty-pants. A really silly choice, if you don’t mind my saying.”
“And you chose to be in the boringest, boringest orchestra.”
“It’s most boring, not boringest.”
“Well, you should know.”
“Look, go away.”
“I’m going to tell on you to Miss Pizza.”
“You dare.”
“I’m going to tell her you used the P-word.”
“I’ll deny it.”
“And the F-word.”
I pulled open my drawer and pulled out a tape recorder, switching it on in one easy motion before slamming it on the desk in front of the girl. Again, a few heads turned.
“See that red light?” I said. “That red light means this recorder has been on all this time and I have proof of what I did and didn’t say.”
“You just turned it on.”
“Prove it.”
Amanda picked it up off the desk. “It hasn’t got a tape in it, silly.”
I snatched it back and looked at the little window. Smarty-pants was right.
“And why do you use an old-fashioned gadget like this when you could use a digital recorder?” she asked. “Is it because you don’t understand new technology?” I just stared at her. “Is it because you are too old?”
“What do you want?”
“What?”
“What do you want? What can I give you to leave me alone?”
“Can I choose anything?”
“Within reason.”
Amanda slowly reached forward and prised the tape recorder from my hand, a big smile on her face. She raised her eyebrows, asking if this was within reason. I shooed her away and she skipped happily towards the door.
CHAPTER SIX
HONG KONG’S FOREIGN Correspondents’ Club was made famous by John le Carre’s ‘The Honourable Schoolboy’, in which a bunch of old hacks sit around during a typhoon flicking screwed-up napkins into a wine rack. It doesn’t sound very exciting, but the FCC is not a very exciting place. At least back then, in the mid-1970s, it was a club for foreign correspondents, on the thirteenth floor of a building where the gents overlooked the harbour. Hong Kong was still a listening post for what was going on over the border in inscrutable China and a favoured R&R bolthole from Vietnam. Shrubs had its own dedicated phone with a flashing red light in case anything was happening back in the office. Now, housed in a colonial-era brick and stucco building which once served as a cold storage depot for a dairy company, the FCC is full of lawyers, fund managers and middle-aged women wearing lots of jewellery, with the odd, old hack propping up the bar, pressing his claim that he was one of the characters in ‘The Honourable Schoolboy’.
“That scene when they’re flicking screwed up napkins into the wine rack? Remember? Remember? Well, I was there at the time. Le Carre saw me. That was me.”
The rehearsals went badly. They lasted from six in the morning until eight in the evening and all for the one scene at the FCC’s grand main bar which made me feel as though I were sitting inside a huge, stale, lemon-coloured wedding cake.
Torment was throwing tantrums. Adolf Lee was charming. I tried the one line I had to speak.
“Here, where have all the babes gone? Do you… want a crisp?”
Adolf Lee’s aide forced a laugh. “Hadley, please, you must relax. What’s with the ‘do you… want a crisp’? The pause? That’s not how we want it. You’re not questioning the who or the what. It’s an instinctive, meaningless courtesy. It’s flat. It’s ‘do you want a crisp’. There is no question mark.”
“Do you want a crisp.”
“That’s it.”
“There’s no question mark. Do you want a crisp.”
“That’s much better. And don’t forget, you are glum.”
“Glum. Do you want a crisp.”
So far so good. Then came the real thing. Seventeen takes. I could not relax. I was sweating and stinking the whole bar out – stinking up the whole movie. And Torment had basically said nothing to me. He came up once and offered me some toffee, but that was it. James, the guy playing Magnus, was a complete prick. Adolf Lee, not sitting on a bus this time but on what looked like a tennis umpire’s chair in my favourite corner of the bar, said: “Okay everyone. Let’s do it. Let’s try it one more time.”
“Do you want a crisp. Here, where have all the babes gone? Do you want a crisp. I think I’ve got it this time. I think I’ve got it.”
“Pull your finger out, Hadley Arnold,” Torment said at last.
“Okay, Hadley.” This was Adolf Lee. “Chris, James, are you ready?”
Torment heaved a sigh and nodded. He leant against the bar.
“Okay, bar noises, background conversation. Traffic and… action!”
Torment started going through the motions. Put on his pained Englishman look. Cut short a couple of smirks – an annoying habit he had stolen from Dustin Hoffman. Played with a bar mat.
“There’s something they’re not telling us, Magnus,” he said, frowning. “I’ve been racking my brains…”
“It’s the new regime, Scott,” Magnus said faultlessly. “It’s something we’re going to have to get used to.”
I admired their presence. And I was convinced I could match their professionalism with my one, strategically important line. I breathed in deeply and launched:
“Here, where have all the crisps gone?”
Torment slapped the palm of his hand down hard on the bar.
“That’s it,” he said.
“Babes! Where have all the babes gone!”
“That’s not good enough and that’s it,” Torment said. “And don’t look at me.” He slapped the bar again. “Adolf, James, time is precious to me. Time is precious to you. We are expensive people. We don’t need – I don’t need – to work with… arses like this.”
“It wasn’t deliberate,” I protested. “And I’m not an arse.”
“Yes you are.”
“Guys, guys, let’s move along,” Adolf Lee said. “It’s almost there. Just a little hiccup. Chris, you are so real.”
“Thanks, Adolf. I felt it. But that was the seventeenth take. For a piss-poor scene that anyone could do in their sleep…”
“Don’t worry, Hadley,” Adolf said. “We’ll get there.”
“Can’t we just scrap the line?” This was Torment.
“Scrap the line?” I cried. “Exit glum man in bar?”
“It has to have an edge,” Torment said looking at the floor. “You don’t know what I’m talking about but it’s not working. Even when you get the line right. It has to be harder.”
“That’s what he said last night.”
“Oh go away, you feckless fool. Shoo, shoo.”
“We’re not scrapping the line,” Adolf ruled. “Take five everybody.”
Another two takes and it was in the can and I felt on top of the world as I left the FCC. Two Bangladeshi security men were standing at the open door. Security men were outside the door too. They were all over the place, and out of uniform.
“I’m in the movies,” I said to one, a big smile on my face.
“Congratulations, sir.”
So this was how it felt to be in the movies. It was a huge lift. Imagine this magnified a hundred times, a thousand times, if you were a major star and had hundreds of lines, not just one. It would transform your life. No wonder Chris Torment was so… unbearable. It was instant fame, a drug I wouldn’t be able to get enough of and I would become an arrogant piece of shit like… Chris Torment.
“Get in, Hadley,” said Joe.
The stretch limo had pulled up as I marched along with my thoughts, striding up the street like an SS officer on an airstrip called to the phone. The back door opened and I looked down at a sulking Panda Koo. Her lips were too good to be true. In Chinese literature, they would be described as persimmons. I didn’t have a clue what a persimmon was but suspected it was something lush and sensuous and unavailable in the Fens.
“Hello, Hadley,” she said.
I climbed in and sat opposite her. My eyes rested on the lips. “Hello Panda,” I said. “You know my name.”
Joe put a hand on Panda’s knee and smiled at me. Next to him was a bucket of champagne standing on a magazine with a picture of Cary Grant on the cover.
“Well, that went very well,” he said. “In the end. You know Panda, right?”
“Yes, we’ve met a few times on the set.” Panda smiled briefly. I was breathing heavily. “I blew my lines, Joe. Or rather, my line. But I got there in the end. How do you know it went well?”
