The Hot Chick & Other Weird Tales Page 4

  As the rings brightened, the light fell across the writer’s desk, throwing the faint inscription on the paperweight – a gift (and expensive one at that, genuine alien artefacts don’t come cheap) from his literary agents after they’d sold the film rights to one of his earlier stories. The inscription read ‘...from the wreckage of the Huygens probe’.

  The writer glanced at the clock again. If he was not to miss the train, it was time to go.

  He picked up his patent leather briefcase, swished his tail and – pausing only to scratch a particularly itchy scale on his carapace with his left mandible – scuttled off towards the elevator as fast as his eight little legs could carry him.

  Waiting for my Mocha to Cool

  ‘LISTEN, SAYS NIKITA, as she begins to unzip my jeans. ‘At work today I overheard a couple of the girls talking about me. One of them called me Concrete Eyes. What do you think she meant by that?’

  Nikita looks up at me. I can smell the Jamesons on her breath. It’s obviously been another bad day at the office, so I lie. Well, I am a man. And a pretty shallow one-dimensional man at that. There’s stationery in my filing cabinet with more depth than me. And I am about to get a blow-job, so I make up a story I hope she’ll believe or at least will want to believe.

  But how do you tell a woman (a woman who at this very moment is tying back her long hair - using one of her Montblanc pens as a hairpin to keep it in place - and about to go down on me) that the reason the girls at work call her Concrete Eyes is because they are unusually perceptive? It took me the best part of twelve months to realise she’s possibly the most clinical, obsessed workaholic, emotionally sterile, empty, unlived-in woman to have ever walked the planet.

  Sometimes I think this is the only reason why the sex we have is so good because we both lose ourselves in the physicality of the action to escape from the world. We break up not long after this conversation.

  Nothing dramatic. No hysterics, confrontations, tears nor anything like that. That was never Nikki’s style anyway. What happens is Nikita gets the opportunity to join a Silicon Valley start-up. She takes it. It means her relocating to their Palo Alto offices. She does. And so we just drift out of each other’s orbits.

  Four years of intensive fucking, fighting and drinking and then it’s over. All that remains behind is a stack of unresolved issues like so many unmatched socks at the bottom of a laundry basket.

  It’s 11:00 o’clock in the morning. I’m sitting in a Starbucks coffee shop, in the basement of a bookstore, checking my emails, waiting for my mocha to cool, when two women catch my eye. Well, not so much the women as the sight of two amply filled pairs of designer jeans sashaying their way across my eye line with the sequinned patterns on the jeans’ back pockets swaying, in an ever-so-slightly disturbingly erotic fashion, from left to right with each step.

  The women sit at the table next to mine and, as she scrapes the whipped cream off her latte and spoons it into her mouth, I hear one of them complain that the thought of going on a diet in the New Year is spoiling her enjoyment of the Christmas party season. Her companion points a finger in her direction - an exquisitely manicured, tanning salon-hued finger. ‘Listen,’ says this second woman, ‘modern life sucks, but when you’re a natural blonde, cellulite is not an option.’

  The waitress brings over their food orders. They’ve both chosen mozzarella cheese paninis with blueberry muffins to follow. There are villages in the Sudan that eat less calories than that in a week.

  My phone rings. It’s Vonda McIntyre, she’s the Aussie features editor on one of the magazines I regularly write for. ‘Hi Lex,’ she says. ‘How’s your diary fixed for the middle of the month?’

  ‘Why?’ I ask.

  ‘There’s a tech conference in Silicon Valley we’d like you cover. Do some profile pieces on Gates, Jobs, the two guys from Yahoo! or it might be Google.’

  ‘Is there a difference?’

  ‘I’ll ignore that. Also, one of the Murdochs, Al Gore and possibly Bono. You know, the usual suspects.’

  ‘How much?’ Vonda quotes me a rate. ‘Business class flights, suite in a good hotel and the hire of a decent car?’ I add.

  ‘Of course,’ she says.

  ‘You’ve got a deal, I’m already packing.’

  ‘Not so quick, Don’t forget the party next week. I’ll expect to see you there and I want at least one dance with you,’ she says, before hanging up the phone.

  The last thing I want to do is spend a fortnight living out of a suitcase in a hotel on the other side of the planet. But, modern life sucks. We all have bills to pay and we all have our price.

  As I leave the coffee shop, there’s the old Robert Palmer track ‘Addicted to Love’ playing on the sound system.

  I used to go to school with Robert Palmer. He was a plain vanilla Alan in those days. He was a couple of years older than me, but I used to go to all the gigs his first band played. Even then he was so cool that when he walked into the room everyone could feel the chill. I only use this connection once and that is to secure an interview with him. Turns out it was just a few months before his premature death.

  Towards the end of the interview, with the recorder switched off and the notebook put away, we share a couple of jokes about people we both used to know back then. ‘Do you remember Annette Kay?’ he asks.

  ‘Of course,’ I say. ‘I fancied her something rotten, but she only ever had eyes for you.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ he says. ‘She haunted me for years. She was my stalker before it was fashionable to have a stalker. Thought I might have to take out a restraining order.’

  Then, just as the conversation is coming to a close, he gets all serious. ‘You know, you and me still have one thing in common. I sing the blues. You listen to the blues. And we both live the blues.’

  I never meet him again, but a few years later I run into Annette Kay. I’d gone back to my home town for a few days to sort out some loose ends after my father died. One of the tasks includes returning a stack of books to the main library and there is Annette Kay. She’s at the front desk doing almost exactly the same job at the library as when I last saw her over half a lifetime ago. I say ‘Hi’ and arrange to see her for a coffee and Danish at lunchtime.

  Sitting there in the coffee shop, she absent-mindedly stirs the froth on the top of her cappuccino and tells me how her life effectively ended when Robert died.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ she says. ‘I lost him the day he won his first recording contract, as I knew that there’d be no place in his life for a small-town girl like me. So I stayed here, married, had children - I’m a grandmother now - but there was always this feeling of emptiness, that something was missing, that all the excitement had been drained away. The one thing that kept me going was the faint, futile hope that one day Robert might come back into my life.’

  I say nothing. There were no words I could say.

  ‘Modern life sucks,’ says Annette, as she stares deep into her empty coffee cup, ‘and it sucked my world dry a longtime ago.’

  The party takes place in the corporate entertainment suite at the top of the magazine’s Bankside head office, just along from the Tate Modern. It’s a combined Christmas party and celebration of ten years in print. My ego is suitably massaged by the sight of a number of my cover stories featured among the highlights of the last decade, although this feeling of joy is somewhat dampened by the fact the first person I run into is Jason Mill.

  Mill is an executive publisher. This is magazinese for a poisonous two-faced sleazoid who’ll stab you in the back and spike your stories at a moment’s notice if he thinks the contents just might possibly upset the precious, sensitive skins of the advertisers and PRs he spends all his days and nights schmoozing.

  In a world of brown-nosers, he gets his nose so far up people’s arses he should change his name to Pinnochio. As usual, Mill is wearing a pair of pointed, lizard-skin cowboy boots with his suit, which would be fine if the magazine was based in Scottsdale, Arizon
a and not the south London borough of Southwark. Mill thinks the boots give him character. He should get out more.

  Of course, the last time Mill spiked one of my stories it all went very wrong for him.

  ‘Rowena’s mad, you know,’ says Morag, in a conspiratorial whisper as we drive up to the house.

  Morag - I never catch her full name - is the PA for the implausibly named lifestyle and organic health food guru Doctor Rowena De’ath, so when she says Doctor Rowena is mad, my heart sinks.

  I have this theory that famous people always select PAs in their own image albeit slightly inferior copies. So, a beautiful woman will always have a beautiful PA - but one that’s not quite as good looking as herself. This is what worries me, because my first impression of Morag, with her mad eyes twirling around their sockets, is that she’s certifiably barking.

  Immediately inside the front door to the house is another door, a chicken-wire screen. I assume it’s to keep any livestock outside, but soon realise it’s to keep them in. Five dogs, four ferrets, three chinchillas, two finches and one green parrot, the latter perched on a lampshade, greet us on entry. All are in glowing health, in a room that would put Miss Havisham to shame.

  The floors, the carpets, the walls, the furniture, as well as sundry leather goods that had once graced horses long since rendered into dog food, are encrusted in a two-inch thick layer of dog hairs, feathers, feaces, mud and coal dust. If the asbestosis doesn’t do for us the emphysema, anaphylaxis and psittacosis will.

  ‘Rowena’s been tidying up,’ says Morag, ‘I’ve seen it much worse than this,’ she adds.

  Clad in a frowsy dressing-gown, with a Wellington boot on her right foot and a sheepskin slipper on her left, we discover the good doctor cleaning out the parrot’s cage, ladling the droppings into an overflowing bucket that lives beneath the kitchen table which is still cluttered with the debris from last night’s meal.

  ‘Rowena has two doctorates,’ says Morag, as if this somehow excuses the squalor. It is then that the parrot attacks me.

  Leaving Mike (my photographer) and I to fight with the parrot, Morag bustles off to help prepare Doctor Rowena for our interview. This takes place about five minutes later in the study, apparently the only clean and tidy room in the house. Rowena is now all bleached-white smiles and starched white coats, but the damage is already done. And I’ve made sure Mike has taken plenty of shots of the lovingly framed qualifications that decorate the walls of the study.

  Back at my office, a little research soon unlocks a petri dish full of secrets. If ‘Doctor’ Rowena’s qualifications had been cut from the back of breakfast cereal packets, they couldn’t have had any less credibility.

  Her alma mater is not accredited by any recognised educational authority. Then there is the little matter of five outstanding complaints being pursued by advertising standards authorities and the fact none of her range of herbal additives to enhance sexual performance have ever been approved by medical or healthcare product regulators, either here, in Europe or in the US.

  What starts as a hagiography ends as a hatchet job. I’m pleased with it, but Mill is not amused. Turns out the Doctor De’ath’s business is a subsidiary of one of the magazine’s largest advertisers, so he spikes my story.

  This is one of the occasions when it helps to be a freelance rather than a staff writer. The article is still mine so I run it by a couple of other titles and eventually Wired picks it up. Six months later it wins an award, leaving Mill to explain to his masters why he let this opportunity slip through his fingers. Modern life sucks, but people always get what’s coming to them.

  ‘Still not drinking,’ Mill says, eyeing my can of RedBull.

  I resist the temptation to crumple the empty can on his prematurely balding head and console myself with the thought that in the morning not only will I not have his hangover, but I’ll also be able to remember the names of each and every woman that laughs in his face when he tries to make passes at them later this evening.

  I escape Mill’s company when Amanda Brierley swans into view. ‘Ciao Lex,’ she says, proffering her cheek for me to air-kiss. She doesn’t acknowledge Mill’s existence, save to hand him her empty glass. She probably thinks he’s a waiter and is wondering why waiters are wearing cowboy boots these days.

  Amanda and I go way back to a magazine we worked on together many years before. But, while I remained a writer, she jumped ship to become a suit and is now the CEO of a whole publishing, TV and radio empire.

  ‘Good to have you onboard for the Silicon Valley job,’ she says. ‘Listen,’ she adds, I’m sorry to have to love you and leave you, but I need to get back home. It’s fucking unbelievable but we have babysitter problems. I can’t attend my own company’s fucking Christmas party because my fucking nanny’s attending a fucking Christmas party of her own, with a bunch of other fucking nannies somewhere in Chelsea tonight.’

  ‘Behind every great woman there is a great babysitter.’ I say.

  ‘Too fucking true,’ says Amanda. ‘Modern life sucks and we are the suckers who made it this way.’ She kisses me on the cheek and sweeps out in a cloud of Guerlain and Donna Karan.

  ‘Glad you could make it’ a voice says from behind me. It’s Vonda, making her way back from the bar with two fistfuls of drinks.

  We air-kiss. ‘Love what you are doing with your hair.’ She’s had it highlighted in a neon blue.

  ‘Why thank you, kind sir,’ she replies in a faux Southern belle accent. As she makes her way back to her table, she turns and calls back, ‘And don’t forget that dance.’

  ‘Catch you later,’ I say. Halfway across the room she turns my way again. Is she looking back to see if I am looking back to see if she is looking back at me? I decide to ask for that dance sooner rather than later.

  We’re still together when the DJ plays the last dance of the evening. ‘Give you a lift home?’ I offer.

  ‘Why,’ asks Vonda, ‘are you my designated driver?’

  ‘No,’ I reply, ‘but you’re the perfect accessory for my car. It’s cerulean blue like your hair.’

  She laughs, we collect our coats and head for the lifts. We get one to ourselves and although I know she’s had too much to drink and I’m taking advantage of her, I lean over and kiss her. No cursory air-kisses this time as she responds with an urgent moist kiss on my lips.

  Do our mouths remain pressed together for longer than is strictly necessary? Is that her tongue against my teeth? I pull her close to me, so close I can feel the hard metal of her nipple piercings jutting through her blouse and brushing up against my chest. By the time the lift opens on the ground floor I’ve got my tongue half-way down her throat and she has one hand down the front of my jeans.

  I drive her back to her flat. We go in, she doesn’t even pretend to offer me coffee. Instead we head straight for the bedroom and take our clothes off. We’ve both been here before and we both know what happens next. Only this time it doesn’t.

  I’m lying on the bed and she is straddling me, but as I look up into her face I sense something is wrong. It’s not the usual pre-coital oh-shit-I’m-drunk-and-behavingly-stupidly-and-am-about-to-fuck-someone-I-hardly-know-and-then-he’ll-never-call-me-again-which-will-make-me-bad~but-not-as-bad-as-I-already-feel-about-being-unfaithful-to-my-regular-partner-who’s-very-nice-but-just-a-little-bit-boring-which-is-the-whole-reason-why-I’m-having-extra-curricular-sex-in-the-first-place remorse we’ve all encountered before.

  This is different. She’s lost, lonely and 10,000 miles from home.

  ‘We don’t have to do this now,’ I say. I can see tears welling in her eyes, as I pull her down towards me and hold her tightly as she sobs herself to sleep. Modern life sucks and sometimes we all need to seek solace in the arms of strangers rather than face another day of desolation alone.

  In the early morning, as dawn’s rosy glow is just starting to illuminate the concrete canyons of Camden Town, I go to the bathroom. On impulse I open the cupboard over the sink. In it there is e
nough Nembutal to kill a rampaging rhino. I remove the packets of pills and put them in my jacket pocket.

  Later that morning she brings me oranges and a mug of green tea. It is Japanese genmaicha tea served in souvenir mugs from The Prisoner shop at Portmeirion. The slogan on Vonda’s mug reads: ‘I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered,’ while the one on mine says: ‘I am not a number, I am a free man.’

  ‘About last night,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry it didn’t turn out the way you wanted, but thanks for being there for me and providing a shoulder to cry on.’

  ‘Never explain, never apologise for having real emotions or showing true feelings. They’re scarce-enough commodities in this world. Listen,’ I then say, ‘you know I’m off to the States tomorrow? When I get back perhaps we can meet up and, well, see what happens?’

  ‘I’d like that,’ she replies, adding, ‘You do mean it don’t you?’

  At the time I say it, I do mean it. But we never make that second date. Ten days later Vonda is dead. A suicide bomber explodes his backpack on the bus she is taking to work one morning.

  By then I am in California and it’s only as I’m sitting in a Starbucks on El Camino Real in Palo Alto, leafing through a five-day-old copy of The Times, waiting for my mocha to cool, that I see her picture and read her name in the casualty reports.

  Time stops. My mocha goes cold. So many wasted lives. So much precious time squandered. So many opportunities missed.

  Time starts again when walking into that coffee shop and back into my life comes Nikita.

  Although I’m sitting in an alcove, not in direct view, I realise trying to avoid her is not possible. So, I wait until she’s collected her order and taken a seat before inhaling a deep breath and walking over to her table.

  ‘Hi Nikki,’ I say, ‘California clearly agrees with you, you’re looking great.’ She looks up from her cappuccino. She’s a lot leaner, wearing her hair in a short almost boyish cut, sun-tanned and verging on muscular in a Madonna Ciccone style. ‘I’m over here on an assignment for a few days and I, I . . .’