Popcorn

‘I am threatened by your attitude,’ said Dove.

She could not have said a worse thing.

‘Threatened? My God! So what? Who cares? I’m crying here. We all feel threatened, babe. You should be threatened with a baseball bat sometime and get things into perspective. There was a time when if someone said something you didn’t like you told them to shove it. Now you go to court and say you’ve been conversationally harassed.’

‘Bruce, please.’ His friend was still trying to calm him down, but Bruce wasn’t talking to him, or to Dove. He was talking to Professor Chambers and Dale and Oliver and the MAD mothers and the two mad psychos who were out there somewhere, stealing his plots.

‘Victims! Everyone is a fucking victim these days, and we’ve all got our victimsupport groups. Blacks, whites, old, young, men, women, gays, straights. Everybody looking for an excuse to fail. Well, it’ll kill us all, that’s what it’ll do. A society which defines its component groups by their weaknesses is going to die. We are losing more kids a year to violence than we did in the Vietnam war. But do we blame the violent people? No, we blame my fucking movies!’

‘Go home, Bruce,’ said his friend.

People were already drifting away. Dove had turned on her heel in disgust. His friend was right. It was Bruce’s night but he’d spoilt it. He was bored and boring. He decided he should go.

Then he saw Brooke.

Through the glittering hordes, way, way out across the bosom shelf he saw her: Brooke Daniels. Coincidence or what? Synchronisity surely. Everybody has some special fantasy figure, a particular pop singer or actor that comes number one in the ‘if you could have anyone for a night who would you have?’ party game. Up until a couple of days before Bruce would probably have answered Michelle Pfiefer in her Batwoman costume. Then he had happened to be glancing through a copy of Playboy Magazine at his agents office. Brooke had leapt instantly to the top of Bruce’s league. And now here she was, in the flesh, looking even better without the creases and the staples.

‘Excuse me,’ he said to anybody who cared to hear it, and plunged into the crowd, pushing his way through to where the woman of some of his more recent dreams was talking to a small man in a hired tuxedo.

‘Hi, pardon me for butting in but I won “Best Picture”, so I can do what the hell I like.’ All Bruce’s angry petulance disappeared instantly and was replaced by his more familiar charm.

‘Not at all, Mr Delamitri, and congratulations. I’m Brooke Daniels.’ Brooke smiled, pulling back her shoulders the tiniest fraction in order to add further lift to her magnificent figure.

‘I know who you are. I saw the Playboy spread – it was wonderful.’

‘Thank you. I don’t seem to be able to get away from that. I do acting too, you know.’

The little fellow in the borrowed tux shifted from one leg to the other, which was not a long journey.

Brooke remembered her manners. ‘This is… I’m afraid I didn’t catch your name.’

‘Kevin.’

‘Oh yes, of course, Kevin. This is Kevin. He’s from Wales, in England. This is Bruce Delamitri, Kevin.’

‘I know,’ said Kevin. ‘I saw Ordinary Americans. Bloody hell, I’m glad I didn’t take my gran.’

There didn’t seem to be an obvious answer to this, so Bruce didn’t offer one. Brooke hastened to fill the silence that followed, feeling for some reason that the responsibilities of playing hostess lay with her.

‘Kevin’s a winner too, Bruce. “Best Foreign Animated Short”. It’s about a boy called Midget-’

‘Widget,’ Kevin corrected her.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Brooke. ‘And he has a pair of magic Yfronts. What are Yfronts, Kevin?’

‘Underpants. They’re called Yfronts because they have an inverted Y on the front, which provides an orifice through which a bloke can poke his old fella.’ Kevin hoped she’d find his British bluntness charming.

‘Oh, I see.’ It didn’t look as if she did.

Bruce decided it was time to get rid of the Welshman. ‘Wait a minute, you mean you’re Kevin?’ he said, light apparently suddenly dawning. ‘The guy that makes the animated shorts? Jesus, are you a lucky guy! Sharon Stone is looking for you… Yes, that’s right, she wants to talk about your Widget… No I’m not kidding… I don’t know, maybe she likes Welsh guys, but she told me that when she saw your movie it made her nipples hard… That is what she said, word for word: it made her nipples hard… You’d better go talk to her.’

In a pub back home Kevin might have spotted that he was the victim of a less than elaborate hoax, but at the Governor’s party? Talking to Bruce Delamitri? He had just won an Oscar, after all, so surely anything was possible, even the notion that the work of the Welsh Cartoon Collective (in association with the Arts Council of Great Britain, Channel Four Wales and some high street bank’s Youth Initiative) could make Sharon Stone’s nipples go hard. He thanked Bruce for the tip and scurried off.

‘That was a little cruel, wasn’t it?’ Brooke enquired.

‘No way. How many guys get to spend five minutes of their life believing Sharon Stone is interested in them?’

Bruce felt much better already. ‘Great dress,’ he volunteered, and of course what he meant was great body, the dress, such as it was, being merely what might be called garnish, or figuredressing.

‘Thanks. Bold, I’ll admit, but it’s tough to make an impact these days. Did you see the Baywatch Babes make an entrance? It was like silicone valley in earthquake season. It’s getting so that the only women who get noticed are the tattooed lesbians from New Zealand.’

A little later they danced. It caused quite a stir, Bruce being nearly at the end of a very public divorce.

‘Can I say something embarrassing?’ Brooke asked.

‘Sure.’ Bruce hoped desperately she wasn’t going to comment on the fact that he had been pushing his erection against her stomach for the past five minutes.

‘I didn’t see your picture. The one you got the Oscar for, Ordinary Americans.’

For some reason Bruce was pleased. ‘That’s OK, I don’t insist. It’s probably just as well, anyway. Maybe you’d have gone out and shot up a shopping mall.’

For a moment the bitter memory of his speech intruded on Bruce’s burgeoning seduction. He forced such unhappy thoughts from his mind and concentrated on the extraordinary body he held in his arms.

For her own part, Brooke seemed to feel that some apology was called for. ‘I can’t imagine how I didn’t get to see it.’

‘Well, I guess you just never visited a movie theatre when it was playing…’

They danced for a moment in silence. Bruce had a thought. It was so long since he’d asked a girl to leave a party with him he’d been wondering how to broach the subject. Now Brooke had offered him the perfect opening.

‘Maybe you’d like to see it now?’

‘Now?’

‘Sure. I have a print at the studio. We could grab some beers and dumb bits of cracker with blobs of caviare on them and go watch it on my editing machine.’

‘My God, I’ve had guys ask me to the movies before, but this is the first time the guy with the Oscar offered me a private view. Quite a date.’

‘So you’ll come?’

‘No, I have netball practice. Of course I’ll come, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Great. I think you’ll like the picture. One word of warning though: it does contain scenes of graphic violence.’

Chapter Twelve

INTERIOR. NIGHT. A 711 STORE.