Читать книгу The Wig My Father Wore - Anne Enright - Страница 7

Keeping It Wet

Keep it wet, says Frank, the director on the LoveQuiz, because he thinks we work in a whorehouse. I say Thank you Frank, but I work in a professional organisation.

OK. So I work on the LoveQuiz. Pass the barfbag. I work on the LoveQuiz. I believe in the LoveQuiz. To an extent. I get drunk and defend the LoveQuiz and I defend what people do and what we make people do on the LoveQuiz which is, after all, a matter for their own free will.

Stephen has ideas about free will, being an angel and full of shit.

The LoveQuiz is pink. It is a success. It has a cosy and dangerous host, fake games, real sex and a lot of laughs. It is a great and embarrassing show. Sometimes it is just embarrassing, but there you go, we usually get drunk on a Friday.

The office is a mess, full of the clatter-bang and howlaround of airwaves in crisis. People run around like it was a labour ward for the blind. They shout to make themselves clear, they whisper that the baby has no eyes. The phones are ringing, the vases stand empty, a male pin-up is stuck to the filing cabinet, ripped at the waist. In the corner is the hiss of an empty television, switched on, with nothing coming through. It is not simple.

On the wall is a board that says:

We used to knife each other a lot but we don’t bother any more. It never made any difference anyway.

Most things soak away and are forgotten. Marcus and I have forgotten that we had a carnal moment, or didn’t have a carnal moment or nearly had a carnal moment back in the good old, bad old days when everyone drank too much and said too much and ended up in hospital or in Channel 4; the days when we used to stay in the office to help shove the show out on the air, like crashing a truckload of carrier pigeons. We’d get a crate of beer and shout at the food and the mud and the water and the money. Then we’d shout at each other while I stole a bottle of whiskey from the Love Wagon’s office and tried to persuade either Marcus or Frank to piss in her bottom drawer, because I couldn’t do it all by myself.

These days we just work together and have a bit of a laugh. The show rolls on and doesn’t care. We blame the Love Wagon, because she is the boss. Not that she is ever there, but someone has to be getting something out of all of this.

The Love Wagon stands in the middle of Marcus and Frank’s mezzanine. They are always running up the down-escalator towards her, or sailing past on their way to the wrong floor. They discuss her like she was a person; her clothes, her decisions, her breasts, her lies, whether she is fierce, or gentle, or real at all. Meanwhile, the escalators slow down or speed up, or change from up to down and she stands there, looking, with the phone in her hand.

I don’t let her affect me one way or the other. She is a woman. She has been up and down herself a few times. Now she is up. She drinks.

When she is drunk she talks about Television. She makes Right and Wrong sound like a body odour; something exciting, banal, something she can never quite wash away.

When she is sober she talks about danger, about keeping the show dangerous. She decides that the station has lost its bottle, that a guest doesn’t smell right, that we are getting drag from the studio floor, that our presenter is two coupons short of the toaster. When she is drunk she says that we are helping to build a new Ireland.

When she is sober she says ‘Great show you guys’, because she believes in giving credit where Credit is due.

THE CREDITS

Series Producer The Love Wagon

So fifteen seconds to the Opening Animation. Stand by on the floor. Coming out of this to 4 on the top shot, camera 3 on the wide, then 2 on the fat bastard. I didn’t say that. VT Rolling. (Sorry I have to smoke.) Aaaaand Take It. (Tumpty tumpty tumpty turn) Standby Grams. Coming to the track on 3. GO GRAMS. And 3. And OFF you go Peter. Nice.

VOICEOVER: Ladies and Gentlemen it’s… the LoveQuiz! And here is your LoveHost… DAMIEN HURLEY!

Applause applause applause. Cue Damien and 2.

STOP! STOP!

Keep going. Coming to Camera 1 on the guys.

Stop-it I-love-it-do-it-again. More More More!

Camera 3 Audience shot. Audience shot. Take it fuck him and 2.

No really. No really. MY we’re all excited. We’re all of a tither toNIGHT.

Back on script.

So who’s going to find LOVE on the LOVEquiz this week? YOU won’t believe what we’ve got lined up for YOU tonight. I PROMISE there won’t be a dry

LEG in the HOUSE.

Retake later.

And speaking of LEGS, here’s this week’s lovely lady. She’s the gal who’s going to pick the lucky fella. She’s de-lovely, she’s delightful MARIE from Donny-CARNEY!

Cut 4! Camera 3 give me Marie. Cue Marie Cue Marie. And 3.

Whoops. Hang on Marie. Hang on everybody. Hey! Just testing. Yes you’re right! It’s the FELLAS first!

Get back on 1. Cue applause. Get back. Get back. Take it. That’s our edit. And 2. Suffer on.

I don’t know what there is to worry about. Nothing really untoward has ever happened on the LoveQuiz despite the fact that it is all in the hands of one unknown girl. The ache of one hundred and forty planning meetings, the agony of seventy weekend shoots, the anguish of six hundred and twenty-three phone calls to Props, bunches up and halts, breathless, waiting for her word, her simple whim. ‘I choose number 3.’ She could have chosen 2 or 1, but statistically speaking she will choose 3, which is why we put the most attractive down that end.

No-one has ever said ‘I choose number 15’, for example. No-one has ever declined to choose. No man has stood up in the audience and said, ‘I object, this woman is betrothed to another.’ No woman has shouted ‘Dyke!’ No clerk-of-the-court has unfolded, solemnly or not, the birth certificate to show that she is under age. No man in a rumpled suit has walked across the studio floor, excused himself in German and pulled up her dress to show the penis underneath.

She simply says ‘I choose number 3’ and with music, tears and laughter, as the credits unroll their speech of modest thanks to the women who arranged such lovely flowers, she kisses and walks away with her Number Three. The studio walls give way, the plane stands ready in the scene dock, the band plays as it mounts into the sky, while an ecstatic air hostess waves and lets fall a bloodied sheet on to the camera below.

‘No,’ says Damien, blowing into hospitality. He’s a rotund little boy, one of the great dictators. When he looks at you, you feel like you are the only person in the room, when he looks away, you despise him. We get on really well.

Frank, who was in the box directing, is twitching in the corner with a large gin and a face as blank as the breeze. They ignore each other. Instead Damien comes up to me, not because it’s my show this week, but because I like him.

‘No,’ he says.

‘No what?’ I say. ‘It was great.’

‘No more little wankers from Dun Laoghaire.’

‘He made the show.’

‘I make the show.’

‘Fuck off and have a drink. It was great.’

‘Where were my cues?’ He says he was standing there like a prick at a dykes’ picnic waiting for his cue when he gets a load of custard in the face. I say that was the best bit, even though the custard hit a camera which went down. Even though those cameras cost as much as a five bedroom house on the southside, now missing a back wall. He says ‘Was my reaction OK?’

So he set the custard gag up himself — anything for attention. He knows I know, so he blames Frank. You have to hand it to him for nerve.

‘No cues. Fucking snob. He cuts my best line. We had to retake the opening without my best line.’

‘That wasn’t Frank’s decision. That was my decision. Now go over and complain to the LoveWagon. She’s looking lonely.’

‘Fucking right. Fucking producers.’

Ten minutes later the audience is doing a conga down the corridor and abusing the security man. Damien sits down for a brief stupor on the couch before leaping up and slapping backs like some kind of backslapping machine. The LoveWagon goes around the room and is muttered at — by Damien, by cameras, by sound, by the guy from the farting cushions company. She nods a lot, especially at Frank.

Frank is a good director. He is also my friend. Maybe this is why he lets his fingers land on my thigh like he can’t remember whose leg it is.

Every week he tells me that revenge is a complicated thing, that murdering Damien would be nice, but not as effective as just putting him on screen. When he dips his head to take a drink, it’s like he’s probing his gin like a flower.

Marcus comes up for a fight. ‘Sorry about the date package, the cameraman had diarrhoea.’

‘Swings and roundabouts.’

‘Here we go,’ says Frank, even though I haven’t opened my mouth.

Because Marcus has green eyes or brown, depending on the light. The brown eyes like me well enough, the green eyes call me a fucking animal. In the old days Marcus used to say ‘I wonder about you. I wonder if you are a woman at all.’ Tonight he just says:

‘The custard was good.’

‘Thanks.’

‘What about Your Woman?’ says Frank.

‘Awful,’ says Marcus. ‘Brilliant.’

‘I’m in love,’ says Frank.

I say, ‘I think she’s in her dressing room.’

‘Right.’

‘I think she’s having a little weep.’

At which point Marie from Donnycarney comes in, her eyes red and excited. We tell her she was wonderful and the room gives one last surge, shatters and heads for home. The LoveWagon exits like the Queen Mother, stumbling at the door. Marcus cools down. Frank falls out of love. Half an hour later the three of us are bored again, standing in the middle of the road trying to flag a taxi into town.

We split up in the nightclub. I see a man I slept with once or twice. I roar at him over the music. I say ‘You think I’m a woman. You think I’m a woman. Don’t you? You think I’m a woman.’ So he takes me home. As we leave I can see Marie from Donnycarney trying and failing with Marcus. Her LoveDate is moping in the corner. They should both be tucked up in their beds, but I can’t work all the time. I hope that Marcus will sleep with her so I can fry his ass next Monday, but I doubt it. He was never that kind.

The next day is Saturday — the morning after the night before, swimming through the show that is still swimming through me, waiting to be ambushed as I turn a corner by a little piece of dead adrenalin floating through my heart.

I am late. Jo is sitting quietly at her desk staring at the phone. The crew is at the airport waiting for Marie who is nowhere to be found.

Jo chases flights, while I chase Marie, who has not booked out of the hotel. When I arrive, her clothes are still scattered across the empty room. The phone rings. It is Jo with three near options — not near enough. We decide to go to Killarney instead. I consider calling the LoveWagon, decide against it, consider resigning, wash my face and sit down to wait.

There is a pair of shoes on the bed. There is a pair of tights abandoned on the ground. I want to switch them around. I want the shoes to be on the floor. I want the tights to be on the bed. Still, I can’t touch them. They belong to someone else and they are used.

I am sweating. If Stephen were here he would pick up the tights and fold them. If Frank were here, he would put his arm around me and tell me about the sins of a married man. Marcus would ignore them, lie down on the bed and ask me what it was all about. Small mercies.

I catch the smell of last night’s man. It is light and warm and I smile. I have been trying to track it down all morning. Then I find it. It is the smell of a baby’s hair. The hangover hits.

Marie walks into the room. She bends down, picks the tights off the floor, then turns to me without surprise.

‘Seven pounds fifty they cost me,’ she says, ‘and they laddered the minute I put them on.’ She sits down on the bed and switches on the television with the remote control.

‘Hotel bedrooms,’ she says, ‘aren’t they a laugh?’ Oprah is on, talking to people who have been struck by lightning.

‘Now I heard that somewhere,’ says Oprah. ‘Is that your experience? Is it your experience that when somebody is struck by lightning, that person is thirsty for the rest of his, or her life?’

‘They’ll have to do,’ says Marie. ‘Sorry I’m late.’ And she starts putting on the tights, ladder and all.