Movie rogue, p.8
Movie Rogue, page 8
John-Henry was already at the bar. He pointedly ignored me.
‘Evening, John-Henry. How’s it going?’ I said, joining him at the bar.
He gave me a very slow inspection. I had the distinct feeling that if it came to me and a cockroach, the cockroach would win. ‘Well, I was doing a lot better until you came along.’
‘John-Henry!’ I said, with a light touch of the elbow.
‘Don’t you touch me!’ he said.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Look – I’ve apologised for what happened at the RAC. And I’ll apologise again. I’m very sorry.’
‘I have never been so humiliated in my entire life.’ He caught the eye of the barman and ordered a couple of bottles of Rioja and a tray of glasses.
‘Here, let me get these,’ I said.
‘You buy my drinks?’ John-Henry said. ‘I don’t think so!’
‘OK,’ I said, before pacifically adding, ‘Great story you had last week about that navy admiral.’
‘Do they have admirals in the army – in the air force?’ he asked.
‘They’ve got red admirals down the butterfly farm,’ I said.
He ignored me and took his tray of Rioja and glasses off to one of the far tables by the windows, the better to enjoy the glorious views out over the River Thames and, doubtless, the better to bitch about me.
Well, couldn’t be helped. I was more than aware that I was not everyone’s cup of tea, though I did think it was a little unnecessary of John-Henry to take his RAC suspension so personally. It wasn’t as if I’d meant to earwig into Sir James’s damnable conversation in the toilets.
I consoled myself by having a lightning-fast pint of Stella and a double Glenfiddich chaser, and then bumbled off to the toilets. I’d taken up position at the furthermost urinal and had just undone my flies when there was a bang on the door and in came my esteemed Deputy Editor, Spike, who was short and bristling – never was there such a fitting case of nominative determinism. He grunted when he saw me. It certainly wasn’t a grunt of delight; it had more of the flavour of an eyeball roll – an “Oh it’s you” kind of grunt. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched him take up position at a urinal two down from me. He then unbuckled his belt, unbuttoned his trousers and unzipped himself, so that the entire front of his trousers was at half-mast. He unfurled himself – so to speak – and then stood at the urinal with both hands on his hips. I didn’t like to look. There was now no prospect whatsoever of me having a pee. With Spike doing his alpha-pisser impersonation, I was dry as the Sahara.
He looked over at me and sniffed. Under normal circumstances I might have said something – on the lines of ‘How’s it going?’ or perhaps even, ‘Watching the game tonight?’ – but since Spike was the boss, I decided to leave the opening conversational gambit to him. Maybe he didn’t want to talk. Maybe he just wanted to have his majestic pee without being disturbed by an underling.
As it turned out, Spike was in the mood for a chat. ‘What have you been cooking up with Grubby?’ he said.
‘I’m sorry?’ I said.
‘What’s this thing you’ve been doing with Grubby?’
‘Err,’ I said. ‘How do you mean?’
‘It’s perfectly simple, Kim. What have you been doing with Grubby?’
‘Oh, well, yeah,’ I said. ‘How do you know about that?’
Pee at an end, Spike tidied himself up, the zipper was zipped and the belt was buckled. ‘Since when do I, the deputy editor, have to tell you, a news reporter, about my sources?’
‘Of course, of course,’ I said, speedily buttoning up my flies. ‘Just didn’t think that anyone knew. Apart from me and Grubby.’
‘Start talking,’ he said. Not for Spike such fripperies as soap, water or hand-washing. He adopted the same pose that he had in front of the urinal, hands on hips (though now, thankfully, with trousers buttoned up).
I washed my hands. ‘It’s like this,’ I said. ‘There’s a film…’ I trailed off. I noticed that one of the cubicle doors was not only closed but locked – and we just know what can happen when a conversation is eavesdropped in a toilet. I jerked my thumb at the cubicle. ‘Walls have ears.’
He was grinding his teeth as if there were nothing he’d like so much as to take a large chunk out of my neck. ‘Tell me in the pub.’
‘Of course,’ I said, and suddenly felt a desperate urge to pee. ‘I just need a quick pee. Then I’ll come and join you.’
‘Thought you’d already had a pee.’
‘I suffer from shy bladder syndrome,’ I said. ‘I can’t pee in public.’
Spike muttered some sweary expletive to himself, and the door banged again – why was he always slamming doors, what on earth had happened in his childhood? – and I was left to make my second attempt at a pee. I undid my buttons; how on earth did Spike know what I’d been doing with Grubby? Had he bugged the News International offices? I wouldn’t have been the least surprised. I had just started my well-deserved pee when the cubicle door opened behind me. I couldn’t see who it was, but I could heard the man sauntering over to the washbasins. I could sense that he was looking at me, but as I was stuck at the urinal mid-pee, I was at something of a disadvantage. The steady flow turned to a trickle and stopped.
‘Must be terrible having a shy bladder,’ he said. ‘Did it all kick off at that posh school of yours?’
I glanced over my shoulder and after the most momentary of flinches, speedily zipped myself up.
It was Bain, my opposite number on the Sun’s deadly rival, the Daily Mirror. He had the dubious honour of being my number-one nemesis. I’ve got plenty of other nemesises (nemeses?), all the way down to number twenty, but Bain had the top slot.
‘Bain?’ I said. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
‘Ma-a-a-te,’ he said, and that single word was enough to put my teeth on edge. ‘Got a tip for you.’ He started to give himself the most luxurious handwash, for all the world like a surgeon scrubbing up, sleeves back, soap between the fingers, the works. He looked me up and down. ‘Best to wear dark suits in the office – the pee doesn’t show up so much round your crotch.’
I looked down at my crotch and, blast him, there wasn’t so much as a drop of pee on my trousers. ‘How’s it going with the fairy stories?’ I said. ‘Got yourself a kiddy book publisher yet?’
‘At least I’m getting some stories in the paper.’ He winked and gave me a cheery smile; he had all the charm of chewing tin foil. ‘You haven’t had an exclusive in over a month. Not surprised you’re off on this film lark with Grubby.’
I couldn’t believe it. Bain, from the Mirror, was busting my chops on my home turf. He was at a Sun leaving party! God, he had a nerve. ‘At least I haven’t yet resorted to wholesale fiction,’ I said.
‘I guess that’s the reason why Spike’s tapping me up for a Sun staff job,’ he said. He grabbed a handful of paper towels.
‘You really are in cloud cuckoo land!’ I said.
‘And offered me a handsome salary with it,’ Bain said. ‘He said… now what did he say?… Oh yes! He said the news team was getting a bit stale. Needed beefing up. Needed what he called a heavyweight.’
He gave me a little wave and walked out.
‘Spike wouldn’t touch you with a bargepole,’ I called after him, but the door had already swung shut.
With much to mull over, I returned to my urinal. The toilets now thankfully empty, I was finally able to complete my pee. I returned to the bar and bought myself another pint of Stella. Spike and Grubby were at a round corner table by the window. Spike was laughing, and to my horror I saw that Bain was also at the table.
‘Take a pew!’ Bain said, dragging over a spare chair from the neighbouring table.
‘Thank you,’ I said with stiff formality.
‘Charlie’s just been telling us how he got that great scoop last week,’ Spike said. ‘He dressed up in a chicken costume!’ And at that he let rip with another howl of laughter. Charlie? Charlie?? Since when had Spike been on first-name terms with Bain? No, no, no! Nobody called him anything but Bain! That was his name! Bain was his name! Bane was his nature! Another example of nominative determinism.
‘Here’s to you,’ Spike said, chinking Bain’s glass.
‘Your very good health, Spike,’ Bain said, chummy as can be as he got to his feet. ‘I know you’ve got much to discuss about this movie scoop that Kim’s cooked up with Grubby, so I’ll leave you to it.’
‘Good to see you, Charlie,’ said Spike, once again toasting the scum-sucker. ‘And you’ll let me know?’
You’ll let me know?? What the hell did that mean? Let him know about what? An icicle tip tripped down the back of my spine. Was it possible?
Spike took a quick sip of stout. ‘Spit it out,’ he said, quickly reverting to type.
I was still thoroughly discombobulated by what had just happened. Bain? Please God, don’t tell me he was going to be joining the Sun. That would be just the end!
I fenced to find out how much Spike already knew. ‘What’s Grubby told you?’ I said.
‘I ask the questions.’ Spike started picking his nose, his thumb delicately edging at the rim of his nostril. He inspected the crusty piece of snot, absent-mindedly rubbed it between thumb and forefinger and then – and I promise I’m not making this up – flicked it straight at me. ‘Why has Grubby been filming you?’
‘Gosh, you’ve got good sources,’ I said. ‘Have you really bugged the offices?’
‘You better start talking, Mr Shy Bladder.’
‘It’s like this,’ I said, looking over my shoulder to see where Bain had got to. The human oil slick had managed to insert himself onto John-Henry’s table. ‘The two biggest stars on the planet, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, are making a film with Stanley Kubrick. I’m trying to get on the set as an extra.’
‘So you want to be an extra with Tom Cruise? Is that right?’
‘That’s right,’ I said.
‘Sounds pretty boring to me,’ he said, and poured more stout down his throat, eyeballs still on me as his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down like a yoyo. ‘Who the hell cares if we get a few snaps of Cruise making a film?’
‘True, so very true.’ I could have pointed out that the Sun’s sister paper, the News of the World, had just run with a whole load of grainy pictures of Tom Cruise wandering around Pinewood studios, but instead decided to play my one and only trump card. ‘But it’s not any old scene – it’s an orgy.’
‘Tom Cruise is going to be filming an orgy?’ Spike said.
‘That’s right.’
‘Will he get his kecks off?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But what I can tell you is that there are going to be a lot of women in the orgy.’ I flipped out the photocopied text from Schnitzler’s Dream Story. It was the two-page description of the orgy.
‘What’s this?’ Spike held the piece of paper between thumb and forefinger.
‘This is from a book by the legendary Viennese writer Arthur Schnitzler—’
‘Arthur Schnitzler?’ Spike said. ‘How the hell can he be a legendary author if I’ve never heard of him?’
Now there indeed was a question: could anyone on the planet be “big”, let alone “legendary”, if Spike hadn’t heard of them? ‘He was big in his day,’ I said magnanimously. ‘Anyway, this is Schnitzler’s orgy scene – and this is what Tom Cruise is soon going to be filming in Suffolk. The women are wearing black lace masks with dark veils around their heads. But apart from that they are completely and totally naked.’
Spike pulled out some reading glasses from the breast pocket of his shirt; for some reason I was reminded of the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood who, having eaten the granny, settles himself in the old lady’s bed and puts on her round-rimmed glasses. Spike started to read. Grubby spotted his chance and took it. ‘Get either of you two gents a drink?’ he said before lumbering off to buy more stout and more Stella.
Spike read it through once and then reread it. (I assume he was reading it – he may just have been a very slow reader.)
The glasses were folded up and returned to the breast pocket. ‘How do you know all this?’ he said.
‘I overheard the producer talking about it in the toilets of the RAC.’
‘So that’s why they duffed you up?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Good.’
I didn’t know whether he meant the eavesdropping or the duffing-up was good.
He finished the last of his stout and stared out of the window. I joined him in contemplative silence, watching the great river roll by, and thinking, I don’t know, of all those thousands of great men, power exuding from their very fingertips, who had once stared out of those same window panes.
Grubby returned with the beers, and he, also, knew better than to disturb Spike’s melancholic moment. Perhaps Spike was thinking about Paddy’s retirement, and how, soon enough, he himself would just be another ex-hack, summarily deprived of his army of minions and only able to lord it over his pet hamster. ‘People have been sitting here for nearly five hundred years,’ Spike said. ‘And now they’re nothing but dust.’
I glanced at Grubby. He shrugged. Well, of course they were all dust – that was sort of the nature of being dead for four centuries. But I had no idea how it was even remotely connected to the matter in hand: me becoming an extra on Tom Cruise’s latest film.
‘Are you all right, Spike?’ I said.
‘What the hell’s it got to do with you?’ he snapped.
‘Nothing, nothing!’
He drank more stout. ‘So you want to get on this big-deal movie set?’
‘I do!’ I said. ‘Get all the pictures – get all the gossip. It’ll be fantastic.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘So you get these pictures, but it’s still just a hill of beans. It’s not like when you were a Buckingham Palace footman. Now that… that was a national security scandal. But this…’ He gave a dismissive flick of his hand and looked out of the window again. That view must have really been giving him the hump. ‘Big deal.’
A big deal? Excuse me – was this not a big deal? Digging up pictures and dirt was what Sun reporters did for a living. Day in, day out, this was precisely the sort of stuff that filled the pages of the Sun newspaper! Who cared whether there wasn’t any particular scandal attached to this new Kubrick film – certainly not the Sun’s 10 million readers. No, what they wanted – and, indeed, what I wanted to give them – was pictures of Tom Cruise surrounded by a bevy of beautiful topless women. Was that too much to ask?
But Spike, it seemed, was having an existential crisis which made him question the very essence of what it was to be a tabloid journalist. (Answer: digging up every scrap of gossip there was to be had on the world’s biggest superstar – and if there were pictures to boot, then so much the better.)
Spike continued his inner monologue. ‘Apart from anything else, Kubrick will probably hit us with an injunction before we’ve even gone to print. He’s a real litigious bastard.’
‘Yeah, you’re right,’ I said. I was really getting into the spirit of things.
Spike’s shoulders slumped – probably the effect of having a drink with Bain. ‘Well, if you get picked, I suppose you better do it,’ he said.
‘Great,’ I said, trying to sound full of vim and vigour. ‘Fingers crossed.’
‘Mind taking it out of your holidays?’ he said.
‘What?’ I said. ‘You cannot be serious! I’ll be sweating my guts out on this set trying to bring you a world picture exclusive and you want me to take it out of my holidays?’
Spike presciently moved onto the final matter at hand. ‘How long do you think you’ll be on set?’
‘Don’t know,’ I said, before idiotically blurting out, ‘Maybe a couple of weeks.’
‘We can just about stretch to that,’ he said – but at that stage, what did he know and indeed what did I know of the movie-making methods of that great auteur Stanley Kubrick. Two weeks? After two weeks at Elveden Hall, Kubrick had barely put film in the camera.
Chapter 8
Nina and the rest of the girls were picked up at 9.30 a.m. sharp, but instead of being taken back to their usual rehearsal studio, they were driven to the film set. They had no idea where they were going. Everything about the film had been so utterly secret that, despite four months of rehearsals, not one of the girls knew where they’d be filming. Nina had a hunch it was going to be Elveden Hall – Timothy Dalton had been James Bond there a few years earlier in The Living Daylights – but it wasn’t until they were being driven through Elveden’s entrance gates that she knew for sure.
The girls stared at the hall in silence as they were whisked up the drive – not only was it vast, but a vast fleet of vehicles was parked outside the front, trucks and cars and double-deckers and even a pair of silver Winnebagos. It was just a little… daunting. This was for real – a huge production, with a huge star and a slightly terrifying director. It was Vicky – of course – who broke the ice. ‘Ready to get your tits out, girls?’
A runner, Olivia, checked off their names on a clipboard; Olivia was different from the other runners because she had a lot of tattoos on her arms and on her throat – not really to Nina’s tastes, but nor were a lot of things. They were told to go and get some coffee and cake from the catering lorry. Mandy and Nina were far too excited to sit tamely in a canteen – there was a movie set to be explored! Despite being dressed in jeans and overcoats, they sparked quite a reaction. And thinking about it, of course there was going to be a reaction. They were going to be filming an orgy! With Tom Cruise! And not a bra between them! And since the crew – mainly men – had been filming for over eight months, it stood to reason that they were probably looking forward to the orgy. All right: salivating. Even Nina – normally impervious to a person’s looks – could concede that the girls were a good-looking bunch. En masse, they were slightly terrifying. As doubtless the lads of Bury St Edmunds had already discovered.
