Dropped in on Sharon at SKA to ask a favour. Sharon was in the middle of a phone call, seemingly pleading desperately. She no longer had the svelte body I lusted after thirty years ago in Greenwich Park but she was still attractive to me. Three kids means it's almost a requirement to put on weight, particularly as two of them were twins who made their debut when she was in her late thirties.
'No darling you can't do that. Really. No you can't leave her! We'll work around it. We'll find a way for you to play it. I promise. Don't walk out! You know what I'm always saying: "The show must go on!" '
Sharon hung up and grinned at me, mirthlessly.
'What are you promising your clients now? Someone threatening to walk off a show?'
'My grand-nephew in Scotland. He's four. It's his birthday and he's in tears.'
'Who's he threatening to leave?'
'His mother.'
'Why?'
'She's Indian.'
'He's had four years to get used to that.'
'I sent him a recorder for his birthday. She doesn't want him to learn to play it.'
'Why ever not?'
'She thinks he'll charm snakes into the house.'
'Seriously?'
'She does have fruit cake attributes. And there's a lot of snakes in Scotland. Starting with the First Minister. '
'You should tell him to ask for a drum set, that'll soon focus her mind.'
'And send her more demented. He's going to school in September. I'm worried he'll come home in a dress. They're brainwashing kids.'
'Look on the bright side, grown men already wear skirts up there.'
'They're called kilts Ant.' Sharon, a tad unhappy that I'm not taking her concerns seriously. 'I want to gender bend some of these zealots into oblivion.'
Sharon had a world view that was not that divorced from mine and both of us were heavily influenced by Pattie who had stood for decency tempered by an intolerance of idiocy and bigotry. Which is why I phoned her about Spangler immediately after Kieran told me to let him go and why I'm in the office now.
'How is it over there?' asked Sharon, not immediately addressing the Martin issue.
'Notso? Well I still feel like I'm working with members of The Hole in the Wall Gang. I wouldn't be able to pick any of them out in a police line-up but apart from that it's just about bearable.'
Sharon considered for a moment and then: 'Martin's a brilliant writer. Why do Notso want to let him go?'
'Because when it comes to talent Kieran is a few buttons short on his remote control.'
'He does have a problem with script editors though. He walked off "Schrodinger's Dog" '.
'If you're going to write a comedy drama series about quantum physics, it's worth you knowing a bit about the subject. Martin does, his witless editor didn't. If you include the old gag "Never trust an atom, they make up everything" the editor can't change the line to "Never trust an atom, they make everything up." The plonker didn't see the difference. In fact, he said it was more colloquial. Martin protested that it changed the meaning so it wasn't a play on words anymore, let alone a bad joke, but no amount of his Banshee wailing and pulling out of his own hair would convince this bloke. So Martin walked.'
'I know a number of editors who think a play on words is a drama about writing a dictionary.'
'It's the only show he's walked out on, and it was a disaster so it didn't do him any harm. He didn't miss a deadline on "Coppers' and he did twenty episodes in seven years.'
' "Coppers" is a waste of his talent. Martin should no more be writing "Coppers" than Oscar Wilde should have been writing "I love Lucy" '.
'You sound like Pattie. He needed the money.'
Sharon swivelled in her chair and looked out of her first floor window down into St. Martin's Lane. 'The fly in the ointment regarding Martin coming to this agency is Tessa.'
'I was afraid you were going to say that. That wasn't a fly Sharon, that was a bloody great dung beetle.'
Tessa single-handedly runs SKA's literary wing. She looks after seven writers and each one is pretty successful. Trouble was the 2019 Audio Academy Awards. Martin had been up for best adaptation for his version of Virginia Woolf's 'Orlando', about the gender bending poet. He didn't win. What's more his girlfriend heard in the toilets two hard core gay women fulminating vituperatively that a man had been commissioned to write the adaptation and how unacceptable this was and castration was in order. Said girlfriend, Pamela, reported back to Martin who was quietly drowning his sorrows as only a snubbed writer can do. Martin's an alcoholic but without the preceding adjective 'recovering' to mitigate his condition. Although he no longer drinks for Great Britain he does feel that a monthly bender keeps him on his literary toes. Which is fair enough, the world would never have had the divine Grace Slick's 'White Rabbit' without a tab of acid. Inspired by his fifteenth tequila and news of his imminent gelding Martin went off on a rant about political correctness (he's so last century sometimes) and where would literature be if you couldn't write anything that wasn't an extension of yourself? Men couldn't write women, whites couldn't write blacks, blacks couldn't write whites, straights couldn't write gays and on and on. He had a point but the awards were still continuing and some poor sop on the podium was trying to make a speech and give thanks for being voted best radio ventriloquist or some such as Martin bellowed that literature would have been 'mightily buggered' if Twain hadn't written 'Huckleberry Finn' and Beecher Stowe 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.' Let alone Shakespeare and 'Othello' or Lee and 'To To Kill a Mockingbird'. Poor Pamela, a psychiatric nurse by trade, tried to soothe his furrowed brow. I mean, he had a point but there's a time and place for everything.
Anyway the upshot was that Martin humiliated Pamela (like only a drunk can) for trying to calm him down, saying she made Nurse Ratched look like Mother Theresa. Tessa, who was a guest of Pattie Regan Associates and knew Martin, steered them out of the auditorium in order to restore peace. Martin ranted at the pair of them for ganging up on him and stormed off, positively not going gentle into that good night. Tessa comforted Pamela, Pamela was grateful and the denouement was a night between the sheets together bouncing on each other's bones.
'He didn't have a point, not to the woke lobby anyway.'
'The woke brigade can boil their arses. Anyway he was drunk.'
'No excuse. The counter argument is that Twain et cetera were a different era. Blacks - mostly - couldn't write about being slaves then. Most couldn't even read let alone write. And women were pretty oppressed.'
'I get the history Sharon. But I also resent gender politics and critical race theory emasculating the imagination.'
'Even so, after that debacle I'm not sure Tessa would want to represent him.'
'Despite the fact she knows him?'
'Well since she shagged his girlfriend there might be a bit of bad feeling don't you think?'
'Thirty years ago I would have bought tickets.'
Sharon grinned at my licentiousness. 'Thirty years ago we nearly had a consummation devoutly to be wished.'
'I don't think Hamlet was talking about sex in the front seat of a frog-eyed sprite.'
'It didn't have a back seat.'
'Technicalities.'
'To die, to sleep, perchance to dream? I dunno, it fits pretty well. Since the orgasm is La Petite Mort and one sleeps afterwards and possibly dreams…'
'There are no Austin Healey cars in the text of Hamlet.'
'Technically it was an MG Midget, but I know you always liked to call it a frog eye.'
'Poetic licence. I represent writers, remember.'
'You don't know what you missed Ant.'
'Not a bad back, I know that.'
I reminded her that she was nineteen and I was forty and sex had never crossed my mind until she had put her hand on my knee and asked to stop in the park for a few minutes. Whereupon she attempted to kiss me whilst divesting herself of her t-shirt and dungaree straps. It was dusk and the top was up because it was raining and my pathetic attempt at a seat adjustment led to a mighty muscle spasm and my back has never been the same since. Moreover, her leaving her bra on the passenger seat was the reason my marriage ended.
'Much better that our tryst had run its course to mutual gratification then Anthony. At least, you would have had something to show for it.'
'How does a woman forget her bra?'
'34 double A, Ant. Didn't know I was wearing one half the time.''
'Not anymore. 34 double A' I said, nodding at her chest.
'Children. If you'd had any and put on weight your bra size might have increased as well.'
'I'm a child of the sixties, I burnt my bras.'
'And it wasn't on the passenger seat like a bad motif in an even worse movie, it was in the foot well.'
'Yeah but to leave it in the car - '
'You know why, your shriek of pain could have doubled for an air raid siren. It was the two coppers bearing down on us in consequence which required a hasty recovery of my t-shirt to avoid arrest for indecent exposure.'
And then, as I recall, she scuttled down the hill without so much as a goodbye leaving me to conjure up a fable for our boys on the beat about practising my downward facing dog when my back cramped up. One of the coppers said he hadn't seen a dog but if it was in this part of the park it had to be on a lead and was I being negligent? To be fair when I explained it was a yoga asana, which I had to specify to the dim plods meant posture, and there was no actual four legged creature running rampant, they took me to the train station since I couldn't drive. I would have thought it was very nice of them in the normal scheme of things except the buggers had my car towed away.
'By the way, does Martin know Notso is letting him go?' Sharon suddenly back to business, not wanting to admit the slightest culpability in respect of my matrimonial discontinuance.
I shook my head, 'I owe it to him to tell him face to face and as of yesterday he's in Wales for a two week break. Not that he's keen to come to the office. He can't understand why I've gone to Notso.'
'You'd think with his penchant for conspiracy theories he'd have worked it out.'
'What do you mean?'
'Ant, I'm not stupid. I know you didn't go there to subsidise your expensive taste in Chardonnay and I know the reason you didn't want to come to me was not because of a failed fumble sometime last century. I know what you're up to.'
'You're losing me Sharon.'
'And I'm sure Martin can work it out. You, playing Inspector Clouseau. Trouble is, you have no idea what you might be getting into. And, probably, nor does Martin. And now I might be crossing some boundaries.'
'What?'
'I have a little tidbit for you.'
'More flirting. Do you ever stop?'
'Talking of Tessa and Pamela…''
'We were?'
'Apparently they reignited their Audio Academy flame last week. Pamela had come to town and wanted to drop by to say hullo to Martin. Martin was behaving strangely because she had turned up unannounced, out of the blue. He was very jumpy. Pamela stayed with Tessa. You know what she told Tess?'
'No Sharon, because I never became a paid up member of the Cleethorpes Clairvoyant Club. Of course I don't know what Pamela told Tess.'
'You've always been convinced Pattie didn't kill herself haven't you?'
'I have.'
'Well maybe you are right.'
'What?'
'According to Pamela, Pattie had asked Martin to do some sort of private research for her before she died. And Pamela thinks that's why he's getting so jumpy when people come to his flat unannounced.'
'I'm not following.'
'What if this research was something certain people didn't want anyone to know about?'
'What?' I couldn't have been more astounded if someone had told me that, due to a genealogical screw up, I was the real king of England, not that woman currently occupying the throne.
'Martin's a pretty good researcher, right?'
'He's a brilliant researcher. He's uncovered all sorts of lies the establishment is still peddling. But why are you only telling me this now?'
'Tessa only told me two days ago. And, apart from your misgivings, I had no reason to think that Pattie didn't kill herself.'
'What research?'
'No idea.'
'Is this a tease Sharon? Like that night thirty years ago in my frog-eye.'
'That wasn't a tease! It's not my fault you were such a lanky oaf!'
'But this is a bit of drama for a Thursday morning right? You're sexing things up.'
'It's terribly undignified for a man your age to be obsessed with sex Ant.'
'Sharon!'
'No, I'm not sexing things up!'
Her shouting had an exclamation mark all of its own. I was already startled by what she had just said. Last thing I need at my age is to be in the pages of a John Le Carré novel.
'Up until about two weeks ago I thought I was the only person who thought Pattie's death was suspicious. Now it seems Martin might know something, which means Pamela and now Tessa could also have their suspicions. And Tanya Parker of The Guardian said something a couple of weeks ago…' I trailed off pondering the implications. 'Perhaps we should start a special club.'
'You were with her the night before. What were you talking about?'
'We talked about a lot of things.'
'Anything that indicated she might be in trouble?'
'No, she was on top form. Which is why I know she didn't kill herself. The only hint of any trouble was worrying the police might come crashing through her flat door since we were in lockdown.'
'You never told them you were with her the night before did you?'
'Confess to breaking the law? To a couple of acne-ridden twelve year olds impersonating CID officers like they were bad actors in one of Martin's "Coppers" episodes?'
'Maybe we need to ask Martin what she asked him to research.'
'Bugger me!'
'No thank you.'
A glint of light had suddenly illuminated my senescent memory banks. Innocuous conversation now assumed greater pertinence. 'The night before. Pattie and I talked a lot about Kubrick's films. We're both fans. She was obsessed with Eyes Wide Shut, which I don't rate much. She went on and on about how I'd missed the point. To the extent that she was insinuating I was stupid. I just thought she'd had one Jack Daniels too many. But what if she was dropping hints?'
'In what way?'
'She said those sort of secret societies as seen in the film exist and she'd love to find out who or what was the driving force. She mentioned Skull and Bones, which started at Yale. I didn't think anything of it at the time but she said she'd love to find out more.'
'Martin?'
'I can't remember much detail. It didn't have much significance at the time. But she did mention conspiracies godammit. A lot, I seem to remember…as in what conspiracies do I suppose run the world… I think. I thought she was being paranoid, too much booze, Hadn't seen her drink that much for ages.'
'She asked Martin to research?'
'I don't know. But he's conspiracy personified.' Suddenly I'm somewhat troubled.
'How did you think Pattie died if you thought her death was suspicious?'
'I hadn't come to any conclusion. At first I thought it might just be some mugging gone wrong. But the police eventually dismissed that and pushed the suicide theory hard. So hard I thought it was questionable. And if it wasn't a bodged robbery, what was it? Were the police pushing suicide to cover something up? Those last months she had become quite vague and I'd put it down to lockdown. Now I'm thinking something was bothering her, while at the same time she was excited by it. Even so I'm loathe to think…'
'Think what?'
The government. MI5? CIA? Organised crime? All or any of them?'
'CIA? Organised crime?
'They cover most areas of intrigue. And are often interchangeable.'
'Oh hell, perhaps it's time to look into semi-retirement on Tahiti selling Gauguin forgeries.'
'Why hasn't Martin told me what he was supposed to be doing for Pattie?'
'Because he's scared? Pamela told Tess he was very, very jumpy.'
'Or Pamela's spinning us a line and there was no assignment.'
'Why bother?'
'Then might it be connected with Pattie and Kieran meeting at her offices at midnight?' A rhetorical enquiry uttered out loud.
'How would I know? You're the one who saw them.'
Yeah, completely by accident as it turned out. I was pretty hammered after an illicit visit to a Covid Speakeasy in January during the same lockdown and couldn't drive home. I'd concocted a story about needing to go to a certain hospital if I'd been stopped by Plod but the stench of alcohol would have given me away so I couldn't risk the car. And since it was lockdown there were no cabs. As our offices were four streets away and I had a couch in mine I elected to sleep there. Which is when I saw Kieran with Pattie who were also there illegally, whatever the reason for their meeting.
So now we have Martin possibly on a secret assignment for Pattie and Kieran and Pattie meeting clandestinely at midnight in her offices. Two people who allegedly can't stand each other. And then Pattie going on and on about 'Eyes Wide Shut' the night before she died. Was she dropping a hint? Or am I, like a bad critic at The Guardian, reading too much into this? So far, incomprehensible intrigue. What's the connection? Agatha Christie, eat your heart out. If Pattie has deliberately kept me out of the loop I'll kill her…Oh wait.
'Still, look on the bright side,' I piped up eventually.
'There's a bright side?'
'I was going to suggest Tessa owes Martin for stealing his girlfriend and should take him on as a client but I know that's a weak motivation. But what if Martin knows something or Pattie has put him onto something that is quite mind-blowing? Like the scoop of the century…'
'Connected to what you and Pattie were talking about before she died?'
'Which I can't really remember.'
''Probably best you can't. Otherwise it'd definitely be time for Tahiti.'
'But Tessa has to take Martin on now. What if he has incontrovertible proof that the Royal Family are shape shifting lizards for example? Do you want another agency to handle that?'
'Abso-bloody-lutely.' Sharon looked at me as if she was a bad actress in an Ed Wood movie witnessing a monster appearing from a fog laden lagoon. 'Are you stupid? Why Would SKA want to be an unwitting target for assassinations? You think I'd want Tessa to market material that could be wildly inflammatory? Look what happened to the publishers of The Satanic Verses.'
'All part of the fun,' I said unconvincingly.
Well well! This is getting spicy! Admittedly, some of the references I have to look up. But worth it to get the joke. Bitingly funny. Also, the part about Sharon’s post partum body- I resemble that remark! Having twins in my thirties and then another kid at 40 didn’t do me any favours. However, nice to not give a damn about bras now whereas you wouldn’t have caught me dead without one in my 20s.
Can’t wait for the next one! Let’s see what Martin has to say!