(1) Tony the blackmailer
Tony Skance is standing outside the South London home of his long lost friend Pete Fercoughsey. He’s just the rung the bell. You may recall, Dear Reader, that Pete and Tony played in a band together, years ago – so long ago that Pete’s wife, Carol, has never even met Tony before. Bound to be Carol
She is slim, with boyishly short hair and high cheekbones. Her face is apple-round, not angular.
Sharp tongue, though.
‘You must be Tony,’ Carol declares. Her smile becomes her, and she uses it confidently.
‘Sorry to turn up on the doorstep like this, Carol.’
Tony’s dead straight with her; no David Nivenism –
one look and he knows she’d have no truck with it.
‘I’d like to speak to Pete for a minute, if that’s all right.’
They share the love of a fairly good man, these two, but they’ve never had sight of each other until now.
Can’t help but eye each other up.
Carol waves Tony into the hall so she can shut the front door behind him. Meanwhile Tony is careful to wipe his feet, quite keen to be seen wiping his feet carefully before stepping onto the polished, parquet floor.
Paintings, lots of them, in the hall and up the stairs. All originals: oil, some watercolour, and line drawings. Not a reproduction in sight. These’ll be hers, Tony guesses (correctly). ‘Yours?’ he ventures, but Carol doesn’t reply. That is, she says something to him but it’s not an answer:
‘Pete’s in his study. Up the stairs, straight ahead at the landing. It’s at the back of the house. Please go up and I’ll bring you some coffee, or a drink.’
‘Thanks, but I’m fine for now. This won’t take long, though. Just a few minutes to sort something out with Pete. Then perhaps we could all have a drink together.’
Their eyes have already met: Carol’s drilling into Tony, wanting to know what he wants from Pete; Tony seeing so much of what Pete sees in her (if she stopped to think about this she would start feeling uncomfortable, but she’s not going to let that happen).
Lingering for a moment at the top of the stairs, it crosses Tony’s mind not to mention any of the things he came to say.
Make small talk. You could even make it meaningful, if you like. Tell Pete that your night out together has brought home how much you mean to each other. No, too strong. How much we have in common. It,s true, so why not say it and leave all the other stuff out of it?
Tony steals silently into the room. He sees books, more books and more paintings (Christ, she’s everywhere), and Pete at his desk, facing the window, back to the door.
‘Good evening, headmaster,’ Tony intones. Pete swivels round on his office chair, ready to growl at one of his children for fooling around. Seeing it’s Tony, his face breaks into a broad grin, which gets broader to make up for Carol being cool with him (her winning smile but thin-lipped underneath: Pete pictures it easily).
‘Come in, come in.’ Pete gets up to embrace Tony, who lets him. Then Pete stands back as if to appraise the visitor. ‘Wow! Twice in two weeks, has something come over you?’ This is rhetorical: he’s not expecting an answer. ‘Please, sit down’. Pete’s waving Tony to a small settee, while he returns to the office chair. Deftly closing his laptop (no need for Tony to see that he was looking at the Human Resources page of a Chinese university), he swivels half-way round to face his guest.
Pete doesn’t seem to know what to do with his arms until – can’t think of anything else – he folds them in front of him.
So, Pete thinks, here you are in my house
- just like that. All that time when you were the old friend Daddy doesn,t like talking about. Can it be forgotten, just like that? Maybe so. There could be lazy Sunday afternoons when you come round for lunch. You might even teach Lily to sing. Christ, it would be so good if the separate episodes in my life could finally fit together.
Pete’s looking tired, thinks Tony. He thrives on the teaching, I bet; it’ll be all the other stuff that’s dragging him down. Compliance, box ticking, whatever you call it at your end. Well, sorry, old buddy, there’s nothing I’m going to say that will lighten your load.
‘Shan’t keep you from your globetrotting, Pete’.
He clocked it, then. But of course; also, that Pete doesn’t want to dwell on it. Like a good guest, Tony accedes to the wishes of his host, and moves swiftly on: ‘Just need your assurance on something.’
This by way of setting up the topic. Now he takes the first line, proper:
‘I have come to ask for your assurance that whatever happens to me, whatever you hear people saying about me, you won’t go to the police? You won’t cooperate with them. Is that clear?’
Pete’s eyebrows rise like circumflex accents; or the convex roofs of two, adjacent houses. Yet aside from his exaggerated face-making, he is genuinely concerned for his friend.
‘What is it Tony? What have you got caught up in?
Has somebody got their claws into you?
‘My dearest friend.’ Tony’s fingers are fidgeting.
Looking for a fobwatch, perhaps, or a waistcoat pocket to plant themselves in. Anyhow, he’s going all Dickensian. ‘Great expectations, Pete, are my birthright. And I have embarked on a course of action to remove the possibility of a small but significant disappointment in my life.’
Much more of this and Tony will surely be sucked into a TV screen, destined to live in the alternative world of Sunday night costume drama.
‘More than this, I cannot say. And you, dearest Peter, know better than to ask. But as it happens, I’ll tell you something of my predicament.’
Change of accent; change of writer. We’re in 21st century South London, aren’t we? So Tony turns more Billingham than Dickensian.
‘There’s someone I buy cocaine from. Not often and not a lot.’
No, Tony, don’t stop to do Paul Daniels.
‘He’s in trouble,’ Tony continues, ‘and, so I hear, his usual way of getting out of trouble is to drag other people into it. Anything he can find to say about high profile clients, that might prompt the police to conduct additional enquiries. My name has never come up so far, so I guess I’m due a turn in the barrel. One of the unwelcome side-effects of public life nowadays.
‘What I mean, Pete, is that there might be some chapter and verse on some of the things I used to get up to in the old days. And it might be used against me. But whatever happens, whatever the blue boys are saying about me, just stay away from them, OK?’
So far, Pete’s unimpressed. The police would hardly be concerned about Tony’s misdemeanours from, what, 20 years ago? Pop singer takes drugs; dog bites man.
Pete’s thinking that there’s got to be more to this than Tony’s letting on. Likely the bit about the drug dealer was just a preamble for telling me to stay away from the police, which means the kind of trouble he’s in is something completely different.
Bloody hell, if he wants to buy my silence, he could pay me some respect.
Start by telling it like it is.
‘Come off it, Tone. There’s something else bothering you.’ If I’m going to help out, Pete says to himself, at least I need to know what I’m helping out with. ‘Let’s have it’.
‘I’ve already said, Pete. You should know, you do know, when’s not the right time to ask. All I need is to know that you won’t tell anyone about private matters, business that only concerns you and me –
and especially not the police, no matter what some people are saying about me.’
Pete hesitates. He who hesitates is lost.
Procrastination is the thief of friendship. It would be the end of our time, thinks Pete, if I don’t agree to his request. So I will, but not unreservedly.
‘It’s not easy to make a firm promise, Tony, when you’re being so flaky about...whatever it is you want me to commit to. But you know me. In principle, as a matter of
principle, I don’t do police. I prefer not to have anything to do with them. Always felt like that, don’t ever expect to feel any different. That good enough for you?’
‘It’s good enough, Pete, yeah. And I know you’ve always stuck to your principles. But I want you to know how important it is that you stick to them through thick and thin.’
Robert De Niro is perhaps the most famous example of an actor reckoned to be far less animated in person than the characters he impersonates. Who only comes fully alive when performing; living someone else’s life.
Well, Tony must be affected by the same syndrome. And now, for once in his life, he’s stopped performing: no roles, no puns, no cultural reference points. His voice, his expression, are unusually straightforward (for him). On the level. Pared down. Hell, he’s not even looking askance.
Is this the same guy? You may well ask.
Unfortunately, it is; unfortunately – because without the performance element, Tony Skance is lacklustre, nondescript, boring.
Reading the story so far, you could have criticised Tony for being a trickster; you may dislike him because the games he plays are nearly always self-aggrandising. You might have wanted him to be on the level, but you surely didn’t think he’d be on this level; tedious, monotonous, boring.
Which is why what he says next is all the more shocking. It’s a mundane man doing a straightforward thing: issuing a mean and nasty threat. But on this occasion Tony’s threatening behaviour can’t be ascribed to an exaggerated sense of drama, a predisposition towards the theatrical. This is plain Tony, cinema verite Tony – brutish and banal.
‘It’s so important to me to be able to think of you as a man of principle, Pete, that I’m going to remind you of something I don’t especially enjoy thinking about, and I reckon Carol would like to hear about it even less. But should you turn out not to be a man of principle, it might well come to her attention.
‘You remember a particularly pretty girl from our home town – what was her name? Robbie, Roberta, Robin – whatever. The night before we did Top of the Pops for the first time, there was a party and we all lined up to give her one. She wore a blindfold – do you remember now? Said she’d know each one of us by our knobs.
‘Years afterwards – you’d already left the band so I don’t think you know about this – she started saying it wasn’t an orgy, it wasn’t even a gang bang, it was gang rape. Which it was not. Bad sex is a much better description, and that’s the term my lawyer persuaded her to agree to. But apparently she’s been dining out again on the gang rape story. It’s doing the rounds once more. If she takes it further
– well, the courts can spot an old boiler who’s been taking all comers for 25 years, but you still wouldn’t want this story to circulate anywhere near Carol, would you, Pete?’
Thankfully, this mean and malicious man is about to snap back into the Tony we know and love. Nasty, yes, but at least he’s normally stylish with it.
‘Your Carol’, says Tony, relishing what he’s going to say next. ‘Still a bit of a feminist, isn’t she?
If she knew about this, she’d have your balls for earrings.’
As Tony intended, Pete is aghast. It’s not that he’s having visions of Carol getting the knife out, but he can picture the shameful way he behaved – they all did – in that drunken scenario, all those years ago. She was the best looking girl in town, they were the rising stars, and they all had her as if by right. No, it wasn’t rape because she didn’t object.
But would it have made any difference if she had?
That’s what they were capable of, then, in the name of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll.
And now we are older and more cynical, Pete thinks, what else could we bring ourselves to do, given half a chance?
Tony’s managed to plague Pete with self-doubt. He’s pretty much succeeded in making him hate himself.
But Pete’s holding on for his life, in defence of the other life he’s made in the past 20 years.
You’ve done all right, he tells himself.
You got out and you made a go of it. No need to go back into that Tony world. Certainly not for his benefit.
Pete knows he’s spread dangerously thin. Partly, he’s back there and then, partying before TOTP, and sick at the sight of himself doing it – doing it to that girl. But even in the here and now, there are two of him: one with Carol, in their home, living a life of long term plans, with the prospect of growing old in reasonable comfort and seeing their children have children of their own. The other is in Tony’s territory, where the dialogue is sharper and it can get very unpleasant but you can be sure there’s more to life than growing old gracefully.
Just get him out of here, Pete. Whatever happens between you and him, this is not the place for it to happen.
Carol and I, thinks Pete, will go through the motions of seeing Tony out of the house. Thankfully, he’s already walking down the stairs, me behind him. She will have heard us making our way down. As we get to the bottom, Carol duly emerges from the kitchen, wiping her hands. Tony’s saying no to a drink. ‘Sorry, can’t stop’. She makes as if she’s making conversation but really it’s all part of scooting him out, shooing him away: ‘It’s a shame we can’t ask you to stay for supper, Tony. If I’d known...’
Or something like it. It’s working anyhow. Tony’s stepping out of the house, the door is shut behind him, and Pete glances back at it to make sure there are no demons coming back in.
Keep out, he thinks. Let’s keep the whole world out, at least for tonight.
(2) Set ups and press-ups
Desired login name: osamaobama. Check availability.
Hey! Actually is available. Didn’t think it would be. Nah, can’t use that, they’ll know it’s a joke straightaway. But the joke’s on Tony Skance, so who cares?
Password: London2012explosion. Very secure, it says. And so it should be.
Don’t want London 2012 to be anything less, do we, Dinky? And now for your security question, will you write your own? I see: how long is Tony’s prick?
But even his has to be longer than that.
And Tony appears again, I notice, in the ‘recovery email’ address box: tony.
[email protected]. You know that means he’ll be implicated, don,t you? Coz they’ll trace every connection to the new email address the moment they get the pictures. Of course, you do. Silly of me not to catch on.
Makes you wonder, though, whether Tony’s putting you in the frame, same as you’re doing it to him. What is it between you two, anyway?
Dinky alone. It’s getting dark but there are no lights on in the house, only the blue-white glow of his laptop. He’s following Tony’s instructions and setting up a new email account, though the details, from Tony’s point of view, leave a lot to be desired.
Anyhow, Dinky’s just pressed the button: I accept.
Create my account. And now there’s a Welcome message coming in from the Email Team, ‘Congratulations on creating your new account, osamaobama’.
With so much assonance in that wonderful name, you’re bound to do something foolish.
Dinky hasn’t eaten anything all day. There’s stuff in the freezer, not very appetising but edible enough, if only he could make the effort. He won’t, though. Eating seems sort of chavvy, right now.
‘Gross’, his kid sister would say.
Anyhow, he’s feeling light-headed for lack of food, suffering occasional dizzy spells, and quite enjoying it.
‘Wow! That was a good one’. He catches himself saying this aloud when the top of the kitchen table jiggled in front of his eyes; and it still hasn’t come right back into position.
Not-eating is the new amyl nitrate.
Should I stay or should I go? Do I dare, or will I turn back and descend the stair?
Dinky wanders around the empty house, looking through windows into the softening dark (and catching your own re
flection, brown-eyed, handsome boy), sitting on various chairs, a sofa, the bottom step of the staircase, the kitchen table, a cushion on the bedroom floor, before getting up for a drink of water, to pee, pick up a magazine, find a book, or put it back where he found it.
He can’t settle because he still hasn’t decided. The question is...
Och, you know the question.
Do some press-ups, then. At least it’ll put a stop to this fidgeting. Shoes off, and find a space on the bare wooden floor. Breathe out, push your hands down and outwards in that tiny, private ritual of yours –
a familiar gesture to expel the noise in your head, the interference running wild through your body.
Now stretch yourself out, at arm’s length above the floor, and look, think, only of that pattern, there, where the grain of the wood curls into a swirl. Cut out everything else, starting from...
Now.
Slowly down; count (out loud); slowly up. Repeat.
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat... So far your body doesn’t seem to weigh anything at all. You’re cruising.
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat...
Dinky is on 50 repetitions, and his arm muscles are starting to feel the strain. Don’t tense up! Admit it (yes, it’s going to hurt), accept it, and keep going. Up to 80: his arms are beginning to wobble on the ascent; 84, 85 – now also on the descent. At 90 his mouth is splayed out in a twisted grin, and the sinews in his neck are sticking out like lengths of string. Head and shoulders would make a page in Gray’s Anatomy (the medical textbook, not the TV
series).
But now he’s taken his big breath – holding it in, and he’s determined to get to 100. One at a time, Dinky: 96, 9-7, 98, 9-9, 100.
Struggling up to 100, he’s down again on the instant; face on the floor, left cheek resting on the cool wood.
Refreshing. This surface feels refreshing because I did it. 100, just as I said I would. Can't decide what to do with my life. Can’t decide whether to destroy my life. But this much I can do, to put myself at rest.
Tomorrow, perhaps, the test.
(3) Tweet, Tweet, Yeah!