‘What did you do.’
‘I sued them. I rang Curtis & Curtis, got Mr Benson at home. Ten minutes later I walk into the kitchen — there’s a Pakki on his back with his tongue up the funnel. No charge. No grief. It’s brilliant. I do it all the time now. Took the motor in for a service. Four hundred quid. So what did I do.’
‘You sued them.’
‘I sued them. Fucking right. “How would you like to pay, sir?” he asked me. “Cash or cheque or credit card?” I said, “I’m not paying. You are. I’m fucking suing you, mate.” They go all pale. Thirty-six quid I ended up paying. I sued the tax-inspector last week.’
‘Beautiful,’ I said.
‘Don’t you love it?’
I said I did, and returned to the sorry-looking chaos of my desk. I’m supposed to be tying things up here, sorting things out. The antique desk-drawers are buckled stiff with ripped paperwork: five years without paying any tax — that’s why I’ve got all this money. . . The feeling in the office is that I am moving on to better things. Sometimes I wish they had consulted me about this. But they just roll their eyes and whistle and rub their hands encouragingly. I have been interviewed in Box Office, featured in Turnover, profiled in Market Forces. My thirty-five-minute short, Dean Street, won the guest critics’ special-mention award at the Siena Film Festival last year. I am a headliner, a highroller. Peter Sennet did it. Freddie Giles and Ronnie Templeton did it. Jack Conn — he did it. They all live in California now. They have all bled out of the ordinary world. They all have new houses, new wives, new tans, new rugs. In V8 Hyenas and haunchy drophead Acapulcos they cruise the road-margined seas, gunning to the medical zone for their daily DNA boosters and plasma rethinks. Twice or three times a month they wing out for a long weekend on Thousand Island, a world that time forgot, down in the sea of joy. Everyone thinks that this will soon happen to me. Me, I don’t see it somehow. I have a sharp sense of my life being in the balance. I may never look back, or I may never recover. I tell you, I am terrified, I am fucking terrified. ‘Just give me the fucking money okay!’ I want to shout this all the time. And if you fail they don’t take you back … I was in Cal myself this January — Los Angeles. I did cool deals there and it all looked possible. On the leisure side, though, things didn’t go so well, and I got into some seriously bad business. Let me tell you about it sometime. It’s a good one… I met Fielding on the flight back to New York. We both happened to be travelling first class.
‘Where d’you fancy, John? The Breadline? Assisi’s? The Mahatma?’
Terry Linex and the boys want to take me out to lunch. Keith Carburton has just walked in, razzing his hands. There has been quite a bit of this sort of thing recently. It feels to me like a new way of superannuating people. But I’m keen. After my morning, I need the , . fuel, I’m almost out of gas. I go, of course I go — as I will go when the time is right, when I get my big break. I hope it doesn’t break me, my big break.. . So we come bobbing out of cabs in our high-shouldered cashmere overcoats. The girl in dike suit and streaming salmon tie (I think I could go to bed with her, if I liked, but it might be just her professional style to put this idea about) shows us fondly to our table. But it is the wrong table! Before Terry Linex can sue the restaurant, Keith Carburton takes the girl aside. I can hear him dully reminding her how much money we all spend here. The chick is impressed. So am I. Very soon we have another table (an old man is backing away with a napkin still frilling his throat), a better table, circular, nearer the door, and bearing a bottle of free champagne.