The Dog Catcher Alexei Sayle

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Tatum and Cherry were two television producers who were married to each other and who both worked for the BBC. They were having a proper tea at Cherry’s mum’s house. They both liked a proper tea with cakes and sandwiches and scones and clotted cream and home-made jams but Tatum refused to pay inflated hotel prices when Cherry’s mum would do it for free. Cherry was a very handsome woman, like her mother (Tatum sometimes fantasised about shagging them both). Tatum wasn’t handsome, he was the other thing, with prominent buck teeth and a haystack of black hair. What attracted Cherry to him was that he was funny — with an instinctive understanding of comedy, he could make her laugh for hours on end. This was what she loved about him; for her it even excused his remarkable meanness, an unlovely aspect in any man.

Every time Cherry’s mum went out of the room they talked about Clive Hole. Cherry’s mum, who had been an SOE agent in France during the war, had been captured and tortured by the Gestapo and then, after her husband’s suicide, had had to bring up six children alone but who did not work in television and therefore had not had an interesting life, came into the conservatory carrying a spare cake she hadn’t thought she’d need and finding her daughter and son-in-law waist-deep in the same conversation they’d been having since last Christmas said, ‘Who is this Clive Hole you keep talking about? I’ve never heard of him.’

Tatum and Cherry thought themselves pretty unshockable (after all they had devised the TV show Anal Animals) but they were shocked.

They said in chorus, like in one of the bad sitcoms they produced, ‘You’ve never heard of Clive Hole!!!?’

‘But I’m Clive Hole,’ said the man sitting in the front passenger seat of the black BMW 7 series, with his feet awkwardly propped up on the dash. The man in the car was wearing a baggy unstructured Armani suit and frantically clutched a silver metal briefcase to himself with both arms. He was in his mid-forties, balding, with a grey-flecked beard.

The BBC security guard on the gate of Television Centre was unmoved.

‘I know who you are, sir, but it doesn’t make any difference, we are at Security State Tangerine, which is a high state and I have to search everybody’s bags.’

‘But I’m Clive Hole, I’m head of media facilitation.’

‘And I’ve still got to look in your bag.’

Clive thought for a minute, had an idea, then pretended to think for a bit longer. ‘Oh … erm, yes … I’ve just remembered I’ve got a meeting with some people from the circus .

He spoke to the large black man who was his driver.

‘Clayton, take me to the circus.

Without a beat, Clayton threw the car into reverse with a cry of, ‘Righto, Mr Hole!’

The car shot backwards into Wood Lane did a hand-brake turn like in the movies and sped away, northwards, fishtailing strips of rubber onto the road. The security guard watched it depart with bemusement.

‘Loony!’ he said to himself in Armenian.

At Clive’s instruction Clayton slowed down and turned left so that they were now running round the rear of Television Centre. On a quiet service road they came to a back lot that was being cleared to build more offices. One part of the chainlink perimeter fence of this building site was sagging so that it was only about two metres high. In the distance between the buildings he could see his office window.

Clive shouted, ‘Clayton, here, stop here!’

When the car stopped he climbed out and stood looking at the fence. ‘Could you give me a boost over?’ he asked his driver.

‘Certainly, Mr Hole,’ replied Clayton. He cupped his hands. Balancing unsteadily on one leg Clive put his foot into those hands and Clayton tossed the other man up into the air and on top of the fence like a little Jewish caber.

Clive straddled the fence like a man clinging to a wild horse that he’d unexpectedly found himself riding, one hand still holding on to his briefcase.

‘Shall I pick you up from the reception as usual at four, Mr Hole?’ asked the driver.

‘Yeah,’ mumbled Clive, then: ‘No, meet me here instead. At this hole.’

‘Righto, Mr Hole.’

Clayton began to get back in the car. Clive hung still semi-impaled on the fence. A thought occurred to him.

‘Oh erm … Clayton, did you get a chance to look at that series proposal from Tatum and Cherry?’

A thoughtful look crossed Clayton’s face.

‘You liked it? You didn’t like it?’ guessed Clive as he swung in the breeze. ‘Not enough black people in it?’

Clayton finally delivered his verdict.

‘I liked it, Mr Hole …’

‘Really? Right … OK … I might speak to them … about it then.’

And with that he fell to the ground, then he jumped up again, waved at Clayton and scurried off through the building rubble in the loping crouch of a member of the Special Boat Service. Taking the back roads of the complex where the little electric tugs rattled past, towing trailers of scenery labelled ‘Gen Game’ and ‘Kilroy — not wanted’, the top executive eventually arrived at the ground-floor windows of his office suite. He tapped on the glass of the secretary’s office. Helen, his assistant, a middle-aged, competent-looking woman glanced up from her work. She did not seem to be fazed to see her boss standing in a flower-bed.

‘Helen, can you open my office window please?’ he mouthed through the double glazing.

Helen got up, went into Clive’s office and opened the window. He clambered gratefully inside.

‘Thanks … thanks a lot. Now I’d like no calls for half an hour please, Helen.’

‘Certainly, Clive,’ she said and left.

Clive crossed purposefully to his desk and sat down, placing the briefcase in front of him. From inside it he took a large colourful box marked ‘Rainbow Valley Ant Farm’, and a jar of honey. Humming happily to himself he crossed over to a corner of the room where there was a large TV and a VCR machine. Kneeling down he took the ant farm out of the box and broke it open. He then poured honey over the fleeing ants. Next, using a pair of tweezers, he began to stuff ants through the loading slot of the VCR, then he poured more honey into the machine. Clive then repeated the process on several VHS tapes that were lying by the machine. He surveyed his handiwork with contentment and then returned to his desk, picked up the phone and dialled an internal number.

‘Paul Cliro, please,’ he said, ‘it’s Clive Hole . .

He continued to hum to himself while waiting for Paul to come to the phone.

‘Paul? Hi, it’s Clive … about those tapes you sent me of actresses for the supporting role in Airport Padre… No, I haven’t looked at them … It’s the strangest thing, when I came to try and play the tape it wouldn’t work and when I looked inside the machine, well blow me, it was full of ants! … Yeah, ants and honey! … You couldn’t make it up, could you? And then I remembered you said once that one of your kids had an ant farm… so I guess somehow the ants got into the tape when it was at your house and then into my VCR … and it’s not just your tape, there are several other tapes ruined, pilots for shows I’m supposed to decide whether they should go to series. Now I’ll have to put the decision off… bloody nuisance, eh? … No, it’s not your fault, mate … no … What I suggest you do is wait about a month then send me the tape of the actresses again because it’ll take that long for Helen to order me another machine … you know how useless she is … no, don’t apologise.’ He laughed merrily. ‘Just tell your boy to keep his ants to himself… speak to you soon, mate… yeah, bye.’

He put the phone down and sat looking at it for a minute then picked it up again.

‘Helen … can you get me Monty Fife’s agent? I’ve decided to give the go-ahead to that thing about otters.’

He was swiftly connected.

‘Betty? … How are you? It’s Clive Hole here … fine, fine … Listen I’ve got good news for Monty, I’m finally going to green light Mudlark Springs.’ His expression changed. ‘What … dead? When? … A year and a half ago? … Well, I guess I must have … no .

He considered for a second. ‘What about the otters? Extinct, really? … Oh well, bye then.’

He put the phone down and stared as if it was an untrustworthy dog.

The next afternoon Clive sat at his big desk made out of logs from New Mexico. He didn’t want to be sitting at his big desk, he wanted to be drinking a diet coke from his fridge, the fridge hidden behind an adobe-coloured door that was built in the South Western-style bookcase that was in the opposite corner of the room to where he sat at his big desk, and was stocked with New World wines, juices and other beverages twice a week by the licence payer. A couple of minutes before the automatic part of his brain, the part that usually gets on with stuff and that you hardly listen to, said, ‘Right, let’s get up, go over to the fridge hidden behind the adobe-coloured door, built into the New Mexico-style bookcase and let’s have us a Diet Coke.’ He was just about to do that thing when another voice, the voice that had for months been stopping him making any decisions about programmes by endlessly weighing the pros and cons of every tiny detail, chose this moment to expand its operations into other areas of his life. It said, ‘Hang on a minute, Clive, are you sure you really want a Diet Coke, how do you really know that is what you want? How do you know you don’t want to have a fruit smoothie? Or how do you really really know that you don’t want to get up and wee on your Navaho rug? How do you know anything, Clive?’ So he had sat there now for twenty minutes, impaled on uncertainty; he was only brought back from this internal inferno of boiling thoughts by the sounds of shouting from the outer office.

Helen looked up from her work as the door was thrown open and Tatum and Cherry bundled in. Before Helen could speak Tatum started talking in a rush.

‘Alright, Helen, we’re here for our four o’clock meeting with Clive and don’t tell us he’s not in because we’ve been watching his office since he came back from lunch and we know he’s still in there.’

Cherry added, ‘And he can’t say we haven’t got an appointment like he’s done the last five times because I recorded him saying we’ve got an appointment on my Psion…’

She held up her personal organiser and pressed a key. First there was the sound of some muffled shouting then Clive’s voice came out of it sounding agitated.

‘Please Cherry, for Christ’s sake, I’m trying to donate sperm here for my wife’s IYF, I’m… oh, oh, oh, Jesus, shit … too late.’ There was a pause, then Clive again:

‘Look are you satisfied? That is never going to come out of suede.’ Then there was some more mumbling, followed by: ‘Alright. OK. This is stupid but alright… do I speak into this here? I, Clive Hole, swear on my word of honour as head of media facilitation that I have a meeting with Tatum and Cherry in my office at four on Thursday… Are you happy now? Can I have my magazine back if you’ve finished with it?’

Helen leant forward and spoke into the intercom on her desk. ‘Clive? Tatum and Cherry are here for their four o’clock meeting.’

Clive’s voice came out of this other machine.

‘Sure, just give me a couple of seconds and then send them right in.’

Tatum and Cherry smiled in triumph, hovered and then entered Clive’s office. The two producers stared about them in consternation: the office was empty, the summer breeze blowing through the open window stirred the curtains.

Tatum was feeling terribly agitated because of Clive Hole. He blamed Clive for the fact that he was having this little relapse. He said to the young man, ‘We’ve written this detective thing called Bold As Bacon, it’s about this father and son team who go around the markets of Lancashire selling bacon from a stall, they’ve still got some fabulous Victorian markets… Preston, Lancaster… but they don’t just sell bacon, they solve crimes as well! Plus it’s set in the Seventies so you get all that great glam music for the soundtrack. Took us nearly a year and a half to write six one-hour episodes, I gave C live the scripts nine months ago and since then nothing! I’ve called, I’ve e-mailed, I’ve sent jokey little cards on Valentine’s day and he just won’t speak to me about it. I bumped into him in the street a few weeks ago and he pretended he was a Portuguese tourist.’

The young man just looked bored so they went to the cemetery. Once they had found a nice mausoleum the young man got down on his knees, undid Tatum’s trousers and began to suck his cock. All the time while this was going on the only thing Tatum could think of was Clive Hole, Clive Hole, Clive Hole. On his face was an abstracted and worried expression, his mind miles away and not concentrating on the blow job in hand.

The five-a-side pitch was part of the sports centre, the sports centre was part of Arsenal’s football ground. In the British style the building had no aesthetic attributes whatsoever. It was a big ugly shed with a lattice of girders holding up the roof and pitiless neon lights shining down on the ten middle-aged men who huffed and limped up and down the pitch chasing the ball. Their shouts and the squeak of their trainers bounced off the shiny brick walls. Several of the men were strapped into corsets or their legs were encased in bright blue supports, velcro and carbon fibre vainly trying to hold up their drooping muscles. One of the men wearing the most body armour was Clive Hole, he was pretending to be a striker dropping off behind the front two and pulling defenders out of position: in reality he was an old man stiffly running about.

On the sidelines in the banked seating Tatum and Cherry sat watching the men. Tatum was dressed in football kit. He pointed at the men playing football, ‘Look at them, the heads of every major TV channel and production house in the country … what do they think they look like?’

Cherry said, ‘They think they look quite … well, alright; not great, like when they were young but OK. They think that at least they keep fit. And that’ll mean as long as they keep fit and can keep playing football then they won’t die. They’re not playing each other, they’re really playing death.’ Tatum hadn’t been listening.

‘And you think this is a good place to force him to talk to me?’

‘He can’t get away from you if you’re on the pitch with him.’

‘How do you know I’ll get a game?’

Cherry laughed. ‘Look at the state of them. There’ll be an injury in the next five minutes, I guarantee it.

Tatum gave voice to a variant on the only thought he’d had for months.

‘It’s bloody ridiculous this, why won’t he make a decision about anything?’

‘Cos as long as he doesn’t make a decision he can’t be wrong about anything. He can’t be accused of making mistakes if he doesn’t make anything at all.’

‘But he fought so hard to get the job, remember those rumours that went round about Tony Cliff who everybody thought would get the job? Well, it turned out Clive had bought the goat… Oh he loves the job, he loves it so much he doesn’t want to do anything to lose it… like making any programmes. The other neat touch is that he doesn’t like the thought of anybody not liking him. He won’t tell anybody he’s not going to make their show because he doesn’t want to upset them.’

‘But everybody fucking hates his guts!’

‘But he doesn’t know that because people are always nice to his face, they still think he might green light their shows…’

At that moment one of the fatter, balder players dove wildly for the ball, from inside his groin came a snap that could be heard all over Islington. He squirmed on the green-painted ground yelling in pain until he was taken away by paramedics.

‘There you go,’ said Cherry. ‘Paul Feinberg, head of programming at LWT and winner of the Christopher Reeve award for self-inflicted sports injury.’

Tatum got up and stood by the pitch.

‘Er … you need another player?’ he said to the men. Several of them recognised him as BBC, one of themselves, so they gave their assent before Clive Hole could stop them.

Tatum jogged onto the pitch and took up the same defensive position as the injured man. After a time Clive got the ball and despite the fact that he knew Tatum was waiting for him he headed for goal. The younger man skilfully got in front of Clive and prevented him from moving forward while at the same time not taking the ball off him. At one point Clive even tried to ‘pass to a team-mate but Tatum simply kicked the ball back to his feet. ‘Clive, I’ve really got to talk to you about Bold As Bacon,’ he whispered into his ear.

‘Can’t we talk about this at the office?’ gasped Clive.

‘I tried to talk to you at the office and you climbed out of the window… And I want you to make a decision, right now, about whether we go ahead or not.’

A look of complete panic came into Clive’s eyes. Abandoning the ball he ran full tilt into the wall, knocking himself out cold. Tatum looked on in exasperation as everybody else gathered round Clive’s prone form. Back in the seating Cherry rose and took off her coat. Underneath she too was wearing football kit.

‘Looks like you need another player, boys?’ she said.

Tatum and Cherry were going for dinner at the home of their friends Victoria and Miles. Victoria was a make-up artist and Miles was a set designer at the BBC. They were buzzed into the mansion block via the entryphone. It sounded like Victoria was sobbing but those things often made you sound like that.

The couple got up to the flat and knocked on the door. It was flung open and a naked Victoria threw herself into Tatum’s arms, weeping solidly. Tatum tried to comfort her without touching any body parts with his hands, in the end he resorted to stroking her with the inside of his elbows while sticking his behind out so his groin didn’t rub up against her triangle of thick black pubic hair.

‘Vic, Vic, what is it, babe?’ he said but there was no room between the crying for her to speak.

Over her lovely naked shoulder he could see into the entire open-plan apartment. The whole place had been painted black, not just the walls but the furniture, the carpets, vases, the flowers in the vases, pictures, posters, the TV, coats hanging by the door, everything.

‘So, you been decorating, Vic?’ said Tatum.

This seemed to unlock Victoria’s words.

‘It was my Miles … he did it. See he’s spent months working on the set designs for this production. Then Clive Hole … Clive said he wanted some changes in the script, like the lead character should be a dog rather than a woman and it should be set in Finland rather than Barnsley … stuff like that. So last night he came home and he did this and now he’s in a mental institution and… Oh hell.’

A big black dog came out of the bathroom barking madly.

Victoria sobbed. ‘That was a Dalmatian yesterday …’

Deep underground in a long corridor at Television Centre, Clive Hole was walking along accompanied by a large group of tourists trotting behind him. Speaking to the group he indicated one of the doors leading off the corridor.

‘And this is one of our new digital editing suites, each machine contains a thousand gigabytes of memory and can perform ten million processes a second. Would you like to see inside?’

A Spanish woman said quickly, ‘No, no, Mr Hole, you really have given us too much time already. To meet the head of production at the Media-facilitation was thrill enough, at Disneyland you do not expect to be shown around by Walt Disney Junior himself, certainly not for three hours anyway…’

‘Oh it’s no trouble at all, it’s important to keep the licence payers informed, after all you pay our wages.’

‘Well, we don’t actually,’ said the Spaniard, ‘seeing as we are all foreign tourists.’

‘Yes, but . .

At that moment an older man in a Savile Row suit with the big flaps at the back that denote an aristocrat came out of one of the offices. He showed surprise at seeing Clive in this technical place, then quickly approached.

‘Ah Clive, it’s handy bumping into you like this,’ he said in a languid patrician drawl, ‘I’ve been trying to track you down for weeks.’

Clive looked uncomfortable.

‘Oh ah, erm… Yes. Oh can I introduce you to some of our foreign guests.’ He turned to the group. Indicating the older man he said, ‘This is Sir Marcus Wilbey, our head of finance.’ Then turning back to Sir Marcus, ‘This is Senora Aznar from Seville, Mr and Mrs Nomura from Kobe, the Willigers from Boise Idaho, Mr—’

‘Yes, yes, if I could just have a quick word I’m sure the ladies and gentlemen will excuse us …

The tourists gave their fervent assent, Marcus took the reluctant Clive’s arm and led him a few yards away. The tourists took the opportunity to make a run for it, Clive watched them go as if they were the last hovercraft out of Khe San. Sir Marcus spoke.

‘Really a corridor isn’t the place to discuss this but seeing as you’re so elusive … I was at a board of governors meeting last week and one of the first items on the agenda was your spending…’

Clive’s heart began to quiver and flutter in his chest like a caged canary.

‘Yes, well . .

‘And everybody agreed what a terrific job you’re doing, you seem to have got the spending on programmes right down…’

The canary thumped to the floor of its cage, claws up.

Clive didn’t know what to say. The bad voice suggested he might like to speak in Spanish for a bit.

‘Si, bueno pero mi amigos esta argh umpmm… yes, no, yes ergh … well, we certainly aren’t spending as much as we used to on shows… Though there may be a slight shortfall in … erm, product … actually in actual programmes in a few months but…’

Sir Marcus smiled indulgently.

‘Oh that doesn’t matter, somehow something always gets put on, doesn’t it? I mean people have to have their telly, don’t they? Whatever awful rubbish is showing. After all if there was no telly they’d have to look at the appalling terrifying random meaningless nature of existence and nobody wants to do that, do they?’ Sir Marcus smiled and patted Clive on the arm.

‘This expenditure cut though, excellent work, well done, keep it up.

And with that he turned and walked away humming Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture, making a reasonable fist of the cannons firing and the bells of Moscow ringing out in triumph.

Cherry had just got into their flat, hot and sticky from a midnight to 1 a.m. kick boxing class, when the phone rang.

She called out, ‘Tatum! Tatum!’ But her husband wasn’t in so she answered it herself. She listened for a bit, said only a few words then hung up. When Tatum came in half an hour later she was sitting on their big white couch.

‘Tatum,’ she said, ‘there’s been a phone call. It’s bad news I’m afraid . .

‘Oh God, what?’ he squealed.

‘It was your sister on the phone, your dad’s had a stroke, he’s in the hospital in Ipswich.’

‘Oh thank Christ for that… I thought it was Clive Hole phoning to say he wasn’t going to make our series…’

Then realising what he’d said he burst into tears.

‘Look what he’s done to me, I’m pleased my dad’s had a stroke. Oh Jesus… Oh Jesus… I’m so unhappy… I don’t want to be like this … I don’t want to be like this … I’m having one of my panic attacks … I can’t breathe…’

Tatum took the Saab and drove through the night to Ipswich. Due to the late hour when he arrived he could park outside the main entrance of the hospital which had one of those big revolving doors with plants behind glass growing in it. ‘At least all this with my dad has stopped me thinking about Clive Hole,’ he thought. Then he realised that in thinking that he had indeed been thinking about Clive Hole. So then he wondered if the plants got dizzy going round and round like that, which got him to the reception desk. He was directed to his father’s room in intensive care. A woman was pacing outside, his sister Audrey. They hugged.

‘How is he?’

‘Not too bad. The next twenty-four hours are critical apparently, they’ve got him connected up to all kinds of machines which are supposed to help. Come in and see him.’

She opened the door slowly and carefully as if it had been booby trapped with a hand grenade and a bit of string by a disgruntled former occupant and they slipped inside.

Inside the room Tatum’s dad was one of four figures lying each on their own bed, each wired into clusters of machines as if the machines were growing old men like spider plant shoots. A sister hovered over the comatose figure. Tatum had in mind some valedictory speech but he only got as far as ‘Dad, I …’ when a frantic whooping and clanging came from all the machines connected to all the old men. Several invisible Steven Hawkingses suddenly seemed to have entered the room to shout, ‘Alert! Alert! Emergency! Emergency! Overload! Overload!’

Using intemperate language you wouldn’t expect to come from a nurse the sister yelled, ‘Fucking shite what’s happening? There’s suddenly a massive surge of microwave energy in the room!’

Seeing Tatum she rushed over to him and pulled his jacket open to reveal the two mobile phones on his belt and the three pagers clipped to his shirt.

‘Turn those fucking things off,’ she shouted.

‘Do I have to? Clive Hole might phone.’

‘I don’t care whose hole might phone! Turn them off!’ Carrying dead people around can make a young woman very strong; the sister got Tatum by the arm and hauled him lopsided and yelping out of the door. She said, ‘Unless you want to kill your dad, switch them off! Didn’t you see the signs about switching phones off?’

‘I didn’t think it applied to me.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’m in television.’

A little later they let Tatum back into the room. His father was now awake and talking to him in a feeble voice.

‘Son, there’s something I have to tell you, something your mother told me as she lay dying, don’t be shocked. It’s about who your real father is. You know how fond your mother was of Ken Dodd, thought the world of him she did. Well, when he played the Ipswich Gaumont back in the Sixties she went backstage then he invited her to his theatrical digs … and well …’

Tatum hadn’t been listening to any of this. He said in a rush, ‘Yeah right, Dad. Excuse me, I’ve just got to go outside and check something …

He got up and left the room. The old man slumped back onto his pillow. Exhausted by the effort of rallying he had another series of strokes which left him unable to speak.

Tatum stepped outside the hospital and stood in the early morning Anglian mist frantically switching on all his phones and pagers. He checked them all for messages, of which there were none.

‘Shit!’ he howled.

On one of his phones he dialled a number. When it answered he said, ‘Hello … yes, I’m a subscriber to your message service and I’m expecting … well, a message obviously … and I just wondered if sometimes they didn’t get lost, messages, because of sunspot activity or something? … No? I see, well, thank you.’

He stood looking thoughtful. A man with enormous muscles came up to Tatum.

‘Hi.’

‘I’m in town for the “World Wrestling Association Bonecrusher II Roadshow” and it’s my night off, I wonder if you know an all-night sauna?’

‘Sorry, mate, I’m not really from around here.’

He turned and went back into the hospital, leaving the wrestler staring after him.

Clive Hole sat at his desk trying to read Tatum and Cherry’s script for episode one of Bold As Bacon, but the words danced in front of his eyes like those black shapes you get if you punch yourself in the eye. He didn’t know what to do. Placing the script carefully down he despairingly put his head in his hands. After a few seconds he was drawn back to the external world by the sound of work outside. Through his window, in the distance he could see some workmen repairing the fallen down bit of fence that he had been escaping over. The men doing the job were supervised by Cherry. She looked in his direction and gave him a contemptuous stare.

Then he had an idea; it swam away from him but he managed to grab onto it and follow it like a runaway kite out of his office and into the small and neglected part of TV Centre where programmes were sometimes made.

Clive entered a basement corridor dimly remembered from his days as a producer, and came to a door marked ‘Make-up Room B’. Inside, a couple of make-up girls were sitting in their big barbers’ chairs comparing photographs of their cats. They looked up when Clive entered, one of them had worked with him a few years ago on a sitcom called Dim Lights, Small City, otherwise they wouldn’t have known who he was.

‘Hello, Clive,’ she said.

‘Hello, Clarice,’ he said, then rushed on before the decision he’d made was buried under all the counter arguments that were tumbling up from his brain. ‘Yes, I’m erm … I’m doing a sketch in erm, for erm Comic Relief … as erm a ginger-haired erm … man and I erm … need fixing up with … well, a ginger wig and beard … yes, a ginger wig and beard to be a erm ginger-haired man in a sketch.’

‘Are they shooting that now? I didn’t think they were doing Comic Relief this year.

‘No, yes, no in a few days they are and I’d just like to get used to the idea sort of thing… of erm …

‘Being a ginger-haired man?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Eugenie,’ she said to her assistant, ‘can you go to the wig store for a ginger wig and beard.’

A little while later the happy figure of Clive Hole, disguised as a ginger-haired man, walked through the foyer, past the large Henry Moore sculpture of a reclining figure that people said Moore had sculpted while waiting for a meeting with Clive Hole and out of the main gate. Tatum, who was watching all the people leaving using an infra-red sniper’s scope from his office window, didn’t see him go.

He stood in Wood Lane for a bit then lurched towards the White City tube station; he seemed to remember it contained a form of transport he had used before the BBC had started driving him about. He searched through his pockets for change. In his hand he noticed a coin that looked almost the same as a one-pound coin but wasn’t. Examining it closer he saw it was a Spanish one hundred pesetas piece, how had it come to be in his pocket? Had he been going to Spain without knowing it? He was pretty sure he hadn’t, but it struck him that he didn’t know for certain, he only had the information in his mind to go on and he knew by now that his mind was an unreliable witness.

‘A ticket, please,’ he said to the man in the ticket office.

‘To where?’ asked the man.

This was an unexpected problem for Clive who’d had enough trouble getting into the tube station, walking backwards and forwards past the entrance several times like a timid man planning to visit a sex shop. ‘Oogh erg dunno, tube ticket.’

‘Well,’ said the man behind the plexiglass whose therapist had suggested that it might help his anger-management problems if he tried to be nice to the customers, ‘why don’t you buy a One Day Off Peak Travel Pass, which entitles you to unlimited use of buses and tubes so that you can decide where you want to go and if you don’t like it you can go somewhere else for free.’

This seemed like a gift from heaven to the vacillating Clive. Almost in tears he said, ‘What a wonderful thing, how much is it?’

‘Four pounds ninety pence,’ replied the man.

Clive who ate in restaurants where a side order of a little dish of tiny peas cost £3.50 gasped, ‘What excellent value!’

The ticket booth man’s natural sarcasm couldn’t be restrained. ‘You’re ‘avin’ a larf ain’t ya?’ he said.

But Clive wasn’t having a laugh at all. He went down to the platform and got on the first train that came in. This took him to Ealing Broadway where an African woman in a uniform told him to get off because it was going no further. Clive went outside and jumped on a little bus that pulled up on the station forecourt. Showing his pass to the driver made him feel like a detective whose badge got him in everywhere. The bus went to a place called Rayners Lane, where he got another tube train back into town. Clive managed to get off at Baker Street without being told to and from there he took another bus to the edge of Soho. Walking along Old Compton Street he passed a doorway with a hand-written sign on it which read: ‘Tania 18 year old Aussie Girl. 2nd Floor.’ Again he had an idea. Clive waited wearily for the argumentative voices to chip in but they all seemed to be in agreement on this one, so he went up the rattly stairs.

He entered a very shabby room where a woman who was neither eighteen years old nor Australian sat at a dressing table filing her nails and smoking. Clive said, ‘Erm where’s Tania?’

Without looking up the woman said, ‘She went back to Queensland, dear. Terrible floods they’ve been having in Queensland, she went back to help dry everything off.’

She finally looked at Clive. ‘So what can I do for you, dear?’

‘Well, I want something a bit unusual .

‘There’s nothing I haven’t done, love, though it might cost you extra. What is it you want?’

He took the script for Bold As Bacon from his coat pocket and proffered it to her.

‘I wondered if you’d read this script and tell me what you think…’

‘Well, that is a new one,’ said the prostitute. Taking a pair of reading glasses from out of a drawer in the dressing table, she licked her thumb in a very old-fashioned way and began to read. Clive perched on a hard chair, fidgetily watching her. After half an hour she finished the last page and put the script down.

‘So what do you think?’ he asked.

‘Bold As Bacon? Well, I think it’s too plotty in the first episode and the characters need a lot more development, they’re a bit one dimensional at the moment. Shooting on film?’

‘Digi Beta.’

‘I prefer film, more texture, know what I mean? But, yeah, should do well in a mid Sunday evening slot.’

‘So if it was up to you you’d make it?’

‘I don’t see why not.’ There didn’t seem anything more to say after that. After a pause the woman said, ‘Do you want that blow job now?’

Clive froze but was saved from making a decision by the woman undoing his trousers.

‘You’re not a ginger-haired man everywhere then?’ she said.

In a Thorntons chocolate shop Cherry listened to an obvious actress sitting on the floor and talking on her mobile phone as customers stepped over her.

‘…course I’m not in as bad a situation as Jenny Tracter, the poor cow. She was about to start on this detective series, starring role. It was about Jane Austen going around solving all these crimes in Georgian England. Jane Austen, Discreet And Commodious Enquiries, it was called. You know, one week she’d be a spy at the Battle of Borodino, having an affair with the young Count Tolstoy, the next she’d be trying to assassinate Napoleon. Anyhoo, the day before shooting starts, Clive Hole says there aren’t enough Afro-Caribbeans in it and he wants the scripts totally rewritten and a part found for Lenny Henry, so now she’s out of work for nine months and if you think I’m mental .

On the Northern Line Clive’s mobile phone rang, it was Helen his assistant. In a burst of enthusiasm and decisiveness he gave the go-ahead to a huge number of projects including Bold As Bacon. He rang off and sat back in his seat, happy that his terrible inability to make a decision seemed to have gone away, thank God for that, he felt so much better now. This warm sense did not last very long. While at the front of his brain he was smugly content, in the back room where the bad things were brewed up his thoughts were worriting away at some anomaly. Suddenly a cold, miserable shock ran through him. Mobile phones didn’t work deep down here on the Northern Line! He couldn’t have had a call from Helen, had he imagined the whole thing? Had he sat there mute and daymaring or had he taken out his phone and shouted mad stuff into it? The looks the other passengers were giving him suggested the latter.

Clive knew then that he was going mad and it wasn’t at all how he imagined it. He’d always thought somehow that if he went mad, he wouldn’t be there, that it would be like a dream, or something that he could stand outside of, calmly observing at a distance. Or that in the experience of madness he would be so changed that it wasn’t Clive at all who was insane but some other person that he didn’t have to worry about. Instead he felt himself monstrously, unbearably, still to be Clive, but a Clive whose thoughts had run away from him to operate on their own, screaming and rattling away to a logic of their own devising.

He had once owned at his cottage in Gloucestershire a two-stroke American lawn mower called a ‘Lawn Boy’. He’d bought it for the name partly. This machine, either through design or through some fault, just before it ran out of fuel would suddenly speed up to an insane degree, its blades whirling with the force of a fighter engine, giving it enough power to chop garden furniture and bird tables into fragments if he didn’t switch it off quickly enough. That’s how his thoughts felt now, spinning and razor-edged, chopping and scything and sending clods of earth flying.

A tube, a train, a bus, another bus and he was in a place called Croydon. It was a busy place, there was a market with two different Caribbean stalls run by white people, a place called Brannigans that said it provided ‘Drink, Dancing and Cavorting’. Clive did a mad little skip and jump when he read the word ‘cavorting’. There were big ugly 1 960s buildings and there were trains. Red and grey trains that slithered almost silently along the pavement. A Number 2, destination Beckenham Jnc, appeared over the brow of a hill, travelling at twenty miles an hour. Clive found himself walking rapidly towards it on his short little legs. He wasn’t entirely sure that this was a good idea so he consulted the voices in his head. They weren’t much use. Some said it wasn’t a good notion, that he could be killed, but others drowned them out saying that walking in front of a tram might be a lark, while others said that there was really no way he could be sure that he was in Croydon walking towards a tram at all, so it didn’t matter what he did. Closing with the tram he saw it advertised on its side a Malaysian Buffet restaurant in Wimbledon, that offered forty dishes for £5.50. He had a little laugh to himself thinking of him trying to decide what to choose from forty dishes; he wouldn’t even be able to pick up a plate. He was very close to the tram now: he could see the driver and he could hear a bell beginning to clang. ‘So,’ he said to himself, ‘are we really certain we want to do this?’ And he replied, ‘Well, it’s hard to say; on the one ha—’

Tatum stood at his father’s graveside and wondered why he couldn’t cry. He had driven up that morning from London. Waking early he had got into a panic because he couldn’t find his only white shirt. He’d shouted at a still drowsy Cherry, ‘I can’t find me shirt, where’s me shirt? Do you know? Where’s me shirt?’ She didn’t know but he’d finally found it hanging in the wardrobe where it had been in plain sight all the while.

A light rain began to fall on the small clot of mourners making the graveyard a perfect picture of Victorian melancholy, yet Tatum still could find no tears. He felt a buzzing in his pocket as if a big bee was trapped in his trousers. It was one of his pagers saying it had a message for him. Turning away from the grave, the other members of his family thinking him grief-struck, he surreptitiously took out the device and read its message. It was from Cherry, it read: ‘Have been appointed Acting Head Of Media Facilitation. Am cancelling Bold As Bacon forthwith. Seems dated, and anyway can’t be seen to be helping a relative. XXX Cherry.’

Then he cried.

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