Show Business is Murder

A woman of that sort-even once she’s recovered from the astonishing shock of being slapped like that, almost certainly for the first time in her adult life, and by a handsome young man who was smiling at her-it’s going to take her several seconds before she can bring herself to react. To raise her voice, scream, say something, tell someone. Get her breath back. Five seconds, maybe more.

And in five seconds, believe me, I’m in a different borough.

ONE SATURDAY AFTERNOON during this period of my life I was in a pub in Fitzrovia, having finished work for the day, and the old potman was telling me about some mate of his who’d died the previous day during an operation to remove a brain tumour. “Well, that’s the thing about brain tumours,” I said. “You can’t live with ’em and you can’t live without ’em.”

The potman laughed and said, “I don’t know, son, the things you come out with!” Then he went back to collecting pots and I went back to reading the international news in the paper.

I was reading about an attempt by lawmakers in Arkansas to force teachers to declare atheism or agnosticism along with previous criminal convictions on job application forms, when a female voice said in my ear: “Five hundred quid. Half now, half after, and more to come.” Of course, I looked up and smiled.

She had one of those chafed faces, as if her midwife had buffed it up the middle with a sander. It was pink, with invisible eyelashes, a bent-back tip to the nose, and a moist, quivering chin which was trying to hide behind her Adam’s apple. She didn’t look like the kind of woman who would have the confidence to say the sort of thing she’d just said, to a handsome young stranger. She was about forty and rather thin. No man had ever looked at this woman lustfully, unless it was her own father. Still, though stereotyping can be a useful tool it makes an unreliable master.

“Have a seat,” I said, standing up and touching her elbow. “Gin and tonic, is it?”

“Thank you,” she said. “No ice.”

I fetched the G &T for her and a particular beer for me. There are great beers from around the globe available easily in London, if you care enough to look for them.

“Do you,” she said, “ever watch daytime TV?”

“My life has never yet been that empty of purpose,” I admitted.

She sipped her drink. “Fair enough. Well, in that case, you won’t have seen a cable show called Libby’s Place. It’s presented by a young woman, a very forceful young woman, named Libby Priest, and it takes the form of an audience-participation discussion show, centred around a number of invited guests.”

“Not really my sort of thing. I prefer history shows.”

“Really?” She looked at me over her glass. “Any particular period?”

“All periods,” I said. “There is only one period.”

“The past, you mean?”

“The present,” I said. “From then to now, it’s always the present when it happens.”

She nodded. She wasn’t that interested. “Well. Libby’s Place can, itself, be quite educational. The invited guests that I mentioned just now, they aren’t experts or celebrities-they’re ordinary members of the public. Extraordinary ordinary members of the public. People to whom things have happened, or people who have done things, and they tell Libby about those things, and then the audience-”

“Rips them apart?”

“Discusses what has been shared.”

I finished my beer, and she went to fetch another round. I watched her at the bar, and noticed that not one man looked at her for more than a second, not even the barman. When she returned, I said: “You work on this show?”

“I’m an assistant producer. Specifically, I source guests.”

“You source them?”

“Yes.”

“And you wish to source me?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ll pay me?”

“Yes.”

“And there’s a hell of a lot more to it than that?”

She smiled. When she smiled, her face looked like something her worst enemy had done to her and then said,

“What’s the matter, can’t you take a joke?”

“Yes,” she said. “There is more to it than that.”

And that’s how I got into acting.

SHE TOOK ME out to dinner, to a Thai place, and at the table she showed me her business card and her building pass because she didn’t want me to have any doubt about her genuineness. Her name was given on both documents as Annabelle Inwood. She didn’t ask for my name. It was Jez Becker, but she didn’t ask for it.

“The trouble is,” said Annabelle, as I ate my curry and she poked at hers with a fork, “there aren’t enough genuine weirdoes to go around. This isn’t America. In California-I worked there for a while-all you’ve got to do is open the office door, grab the first half dozen people you see, and you can rely on at least four of them being completely eccentric and perfectly telegenic.”

“But not over here.”

She shook her head. The motion failed to dislodge the piece of rice which was stuck to her chin. “We are handicapped in this country by an archaic belief that personal grief should be kept private. We’re getting over it, slowly, but in the meantime-well, there are a lot of shows like mine to be filled.”

“A lot of guests to be sourced.”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t think five hundred pounds is very much.”

“Ah,” said Annabelle. “But, like I said, more to come.”

“I don’t see how,” I said. “Surely, once I’ve been on the show once…”

“You’d be surprised. Provided we handle things subtly, and make good use of lighting, makeup and so on, it’s perfectly possible for one guest to appear on many shows, over a period of time.”

“And nobody notices?”

She put down her fork. “Look, this kind of program-people don’t exactly give it their full attention, you see what I mean? It’s something you watch while you’re doing the ironing, or feeding the baby.”

“Or applying wrinkle cream.”

She snorted, and the piece of rice finally fell from her chin. “Yes, sure, whatever. So, if a guy called Joe comes on the show and says he’s just got engaged to his sister, and then six weeks later a guy called Phil, who looks maybe vaguely like Joe, only without the mustache and with darker hair, says he was born a man but he had an operation to become a woman, only now he’s had an operation to turn him back into a man because he dreams of being a professional footballer-well, who’s to notice? Who’s to care?”

I ate the rest of my meal, even though it wasn’t very good, because it is morally indefensible to waste food, and then I said: “What happens when you get caught?”

“We don’t get caught.”

“But if you did?”

She shrugged. “Slap on the wrist from the regulators. It’s not exactly genocide, is it? It’s just showbiz.”

We ordered coffee. “For five hundred pounds, who would I be?”

She got her personal organiser out, and flipped through it to find her place. “Okay, if you’re available on Monday, it’d be a choice between ‘Youth Detention Center Turned Me Gay,’ or ‘I Oppose Legalising Drugs Cos It’d Put Me Out Of Work.’ ”

I stirred my coffee. “I wouldn’t like to be a drug dealer. It might cause complications.”

“All right then, you’re a queer ex-con. Shall I pencil you in?”

“You have the money with you?”

“Half the money, like I said. Got it right here.” She tapped her trouser pocket. “I never keep money in my bag.”