Mr Toppit (34 page)

Merry might have been crying when she came out of the water or it might have been when we got inside while Travis was sorting out the lines and cutting up another lime for the tequila but she kept saying it was only because she was so happy. Of course, it was colder when we got out of the pool but we wrapped ourselves in towels and sat on Travis’s bed. What she was so happy about, she kept saying while she was crying, was that she had read the books and had realized that while they were about me they were also about her. She knew who Mr. Toppit was, she was saying, not who he was, like being a person you could recognize if you saw him in the street, but who he was if he was in your family. I wasn’t really concentrating because I was trying to sort out the things I needed to tell her. To be honest, I wasn’t feeling so clear-headed now. The pulses that had been pounding in unison now seemed out of synch, operating at different levels and frequencies.

What she was crying about was that she knew Mr. Toppit was Rick, and reading the books reminded her of when she was a child and of what he had been like with her then. She forgave him, she kept saying. She loved him, she would always love him, but he shouldn’t have been like that. He shouldn’t have lost his temper. He shouldn’t have shouted all the time. She remembered the bruises on her arm. It had been worse for Jerrilee. She remembered Jerrilee screaming in a corner with blood on her face. She could forgive him now. That was why she was happy, even though she was crying. Wade had helped her. The chakra healing had made it come to the surface. That was the cool thing about it: it revealed things but it made them heal, too.

Then she wasn’t crying anymore, which I was quite glad about, but by then she had cupped my balls in her hand and was
licking the end of my prick and when I was putting it inside her it felt like getting into the swimming pool all over again, not her wetness but the incredible warmth, not just of her cunt but her whole body. The pulses seemed to have sorted themselves out and were now back in unison. Everything was working. It wasn’t difficult at all.

“Go on,” she kept saying, “go on,” and there was a moment when I thought she wasn’t talking to me but to Travis, who was sitting on the floor in the far corner of the room moving his hand up and down his prick, his tongue curling up round his lip, the same grim concentration on his face as when he was chopping the drug. Maybe he had been there all the time, or maybe he had just sneaked in. Anyway, what did it matter who she was talking to? I was the one inside her.

“Go on, go on, go on,” she repeated, over and over again, but this time she was whispering it, her face right up against mine, her mouth by my ear, and I thought she was probably talking to herself by this stage, but I knew she was talking to me when she was kissing me and she was saying, “Go on, go on, go on, fill me with your hayseed.”

Travis didn’t really want to go and, to be honest, neither did I, but Laurie had organized it and presented it to us like a big treat so we had to try to look enthusiastic. I couldn’t get there unless Travis drove so he had to come. Anyway, we didn’t have anything else to do. Merry seemed to have stopped coming over so much and Travis spent a lot of time in the poolhouse working on his songs, or just moping.

Laurie had seen a piece about it in the listings section of the
LA Times
and had got tickets for us: “Film Legend’s 75th
Birthday—BAFTA Tribute.” BAFTA was some British film organization and they were going to show a movie called
The House on the Hill
, which Wally Carter had made in 1946, with him doing a Q and A session afterwards. They called him Wallace Carter, of course. Rachel and Claude would have loved it, except they would have probably seen it already. “It’s going to be in black-and-white,” Travis said gloomily as we were driving there. “I hate that. Why did they make films in black-and-white? You can’t believe something if it isn’t in color.”

Even though Wally Carter was quite a famous director—he had won a couple of Oscars—you wouldn’t have thought many people would turn out on a Sunday night to see an obscure film he had made years ago but, in fact, the place was pretty crowded. As we were heading towards the bar I realized, not surprisingly, that a lot of people were British and most of them fairly ancient. It was odd now to see Travis looking as if he’d come from another planet with his pink T-shirt saying,
You Know You Want It—You Just Don’t Know How To Ask
, cargo shorts, and long blond hair tied back in a ponytail. We must have been the youngest people there by about twenty years. While we were waiting to get a drink, I listened to two Englishmen next to us talking.

“Wally’s last one was so bad I’m amazed they released it.”

“Was that after his stroke?”

“He has a stroke and he
still
goes on working. God, the luck of the man!”

“Didn’t his girlfriend write it?”

“I hear she’s good with her hands.” They roared with laughter.

“What happened to his wife?”

“Which wife?”

“Wasn’t she a lezzer?”

“What was that awful ocean liner film of his? Talking of going down.”

“
Neptune
.”

“Made a fortune, of course.”

“Lucky bastard. I never liked him.”

Travis and I headed into the auditorium so we could get a seat near the front. It filled up really quickly and then the lights dimmed a little. There was a microphone on stage and a middle-aged woman climbed the steps to a lot of clapping. She was rather nervous and, with her plummy English accent, might have been happier announcing the winner of the best chutney at the village fête.

“Our honoree tonight can honestly be described as a legend. He sometimes jokes that he’s the oldest working film director in Hollywood, and he’s about to enter his sixth decade in the industry with many projects in development. Today we celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday and we’re proud to show his first feature,
The House on the Hill
, which he made in 1946. It’s based on Dickens’s novel
Bleak House
, but the distributors, Rank, insisted on a title change because, for a depressed post-war Britain, the original title sounded too, well,
bleak.”
She was pleased with her joke and a titter ran through the audience.

“Actors always queued up to work with Wally. Margaret Lockwood stars as Lady Dedlock with the young Jean Simmons as Esther Summerson, and the extraordinary Alastair Sim as John Jarndyce. As an interesting footnote, you might notice a small credit for Additional Dialogue going to Arthur Hayman who, many years later, became famous as the author of the
Hayseed
books.”

Travis gave a great surfer’s whoop. “You didn’t tell me, bro!”

Everyone turned to see where the noise had come from.

“I didn’t know,” I whispered, and sank down in my seat. Luckily she had finished her speech and the film began. I had done the book for A-level English so I knew the story pretty well, even though they had cut masses out and changed lots of things. Travis had difficulty following it and talked almost from the opening frames.

“That looks so fake,” he whispered, when we first saw Bleak House. “It’s got to be a model.” Then, “Why’s she got such bad skin?” when Esther Summerson appeared.

“She has smallpox,” I whispered.

“What’s that? Like an acne thing?”

“It’s a disease.”

Travis went on and on. “The old guy with the bad teeth, he’s, like, a lawyer, right?” and “Are they, like, suing them? Why don’t they settle out of court?”

Finally, the man in the row in front of us turned round and said loudly, “Will you please shut up?” For the last half-hour Travis stayed silent even though he did a lot of shifting in his seat.

When the lights came up at the end there was a big round of applause.

Travis said, “Man, that was the worst movie I’ve ever seen,” then added hastily, “I mean, I’m sure your dad did great work.”

The woman was back on stage now and someone was bringing some chairs on. “Where are you, Wally?” she called.

A spotlight ranged round the audience in a random way, then came to rest in the front row. A cheer went up as a small, balding old man got rather hesitantly to his feet. He looked nothing like Graham. Dressed in a tweed jacket with a Viyella shirt and a knitted tie, he was more like a retired bank manager than a famous Hollywood director, except for the huge pair of square
black spectacles that dwarfed his face. Then, to more cheers, he did a creaky
Rocky
-style victory punch with his arms over his head.

A young Japanese girl, who was sitting next to him, helped him to the stage with an arm through his while he leaned on a cane with the other. It seemed to take a very long time. There were three chairs on stage now, and the woman who had introduced him gave him a big hug, then helped him to sit down and adjusted a microphone in front of him. The Japanese girl sat next to him and held his hand.

The woman said, “Many happy returns, Wally. Tell us how you came to make
The House on the Hill.”

He said something incomprehensible, and the woman moved the microphone closer to him. He cleared his throat and started again, in a rather hesitant, slurred voice. “They said, ‘The British are coming,’ but I was here before the lot of them.” Round of applause.

The woman looked rather confused, but decided to move on. “What’s next for you, Wally?”

I think his stroke must have been quite bad, because he appeared to have drifted off somewhere and the woman had to ask him the question again.

“A little
Candide
story, which Ryoko and I are writing about …” He stopped. He appeared to be out of breath. The girl next to him—Ryoko, presumably—whispered in his ear.

“Fish out of water,” he said, then stopped. There was a long pause.

The woman waited. Then she attempted a little joke. “Another sea story, like
Neptune
?” she said, a little too brightly.

“No, not
Neptune
, that was a picture about an ocean liner,” Wally said.

“But your new film?” she said rather desperately.

“A little
Candide
story,” he said. “No guns.”

At this point, Ryoko got up and whispered in the woman’s ear, then sat down again.

“Ah,” she said, happy to be back on track. “Ryoko tells me it’s about the adventures of a Japanese girl who arrives in Beverly Hills with no money and speaking no English. What fun!”

“No guns,” Wally said again. He took off his glasses and began cleaning them with the end of his tie.

“Shall we take some questions from the audience?” the woman said desperately.

A hand went up. “I’m studying film at UCLA and I wondered, Mr. Carter, if you thought there were some thematic links between your early British work and your later movies in Hollywood.”

“Too much cutting, these days. Everything’s cut-cut-cut.” He made a chopping movement with his hand.

“Yes, but would you say that—”

“Where are the characters? That’s what I always ask.”

“Next,” the woman said, a little too hastily. “We’ve got to wind up in a minute. Third row, the lady in the middle.”

“I was fascinated to hear that Arthur Hayman worked on your film. What are your memories of working with him? Did you see then how talented he was? Did you think he would become so famous?”

“Arthur,” Wally said. “Arthur. Arthur. Arthur.” Maybe he was trying to jog his own memory. I hadn’t known you could give a word so many different inflections. He looked down at his shoes and said something quietly that the microphone didn’t quite pick up. I thought I understood what he had said but I was hoping I was wrong. I wasn’t. He repeated it, closer to the
microphone now so that everyone heard: “Sad man,” he said. “Such a sad man.”

I wanted the next question to come very, very quickly.

“What does he mean?” Travis whispered.

I hadn’t cried for a long time, but if ever I was going to it would have been then.

After a few more questions, the woman—obviously relieved that the evening had finally come to an end—thanked Wally again and everybody clapped. Even before the lights had come up I was scrambling out of my seat and barging past people to get out. I could hear Travis behind me, saying, “Hey! Luke! Hold on!”

I waited for him outside the building. It had been air-conditioned inside and it was lovely to be back out in the hot night air with the cars rushing by. It was like getting into the swimming pool the other night.

Travis looked a bit hurt when he found me. “Hey, bro, what happened?”

“Sorry,” I said, “I felt a bit sick. I’m fine now.”

“Let’s call Merry. We could go to that bar on Melrose. She loves that place.”

There was a phone booth on the other side of the road and Travis headed off to it. Most of the people had come out by now and were dispersing down the street. I was leaning on the wall by the entrance, watching Travis make his call, when I heard the distinctive English voice of the woman who had been on stage. She was a few yards away, standing next to Wally Carter, who was leaning on his stick beside Ryoko.

“The car should be here in a minute,” she was saying. “I’m so sorry. They’re normally awfully reliable. I can’t tell you how grateful we are, Wally. Just a marvelous evening. And you, too, Ryoko, of course.”

Wally seemed to be staring into the middle distance. “Would you like me to get you a chair?” the woman said.

“I think he’s okay,” Ryoko said. “Maybe glass of water.”

It’s probably best to think about things before you do them. As the woman headed inside, I walked over to Wally and Ryoko. I felt like I was on wheels. I wasn’t really sure what I was doing.

“Excuse me,” I said. I didn’t know what to call him so I opted for “Mr. Carter.”

“I really enjoyed the film.”

I seemed to tower over them. They were both quite small. His head didn’t move, but his eyes swiveled up to look at me. “Nice little picture,” he said. “It’s all guns now.”

I put out my hand. “I’m Arthur Hayman’s son.”

“Mmm?” he said. My hand stayed there between us—he couldn’t shake it because he was leaning on his stick and Ryoko was grasping his other hand.