A Game for All the Family Page 22

  I give her a hug. ‘Congratulations,’ I say, and I mean it. University first: hooray. My child is sensible. Sensible enough, anyway. No tattoos, no fundamentalist religion, no body piercing, no blowing up laboratories that experiment on animals because George loves rabbits …

  ‘Wait,’ says Ellen, extracting herself from my embrace. ‘It’s not going to be a regular marriage.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘George is gay. So you see, we’ll never have sex. Oh, don’t do your “Say what?” face.’

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to … George is gay? But … then won’t he want a husband rather than a wife?’

  ‘No!’ says Ellen triumphantly. ‘We want to be married to each other because we love each other more than anyone else, and that’s who you should marry, isn’t it? Your favourite person, the one you want to commit to and spend the rest of your life with?’

  ‘Well, yes, but—’

  ‘We might both have dalliances – just for fun – with people we fancy, but that’ll be fine. We can each have as many dalliances as we like and it won’t threaten our relationship, because our marriage won’t be about that. It’ll be based on something much deeper. There’ll be no romantic or sexual jealousy like there usually is in a marriage. George says everyone should do what we’re going to do, and then fewer people would end up getting divorced when their desires change. He says romantic desires can only ever be fleeting, and it’s important to marry the person who mirrors your spirit most exactly, whether or not you want to snog them or go to bed with them. When you think about it, he’s right, isn’t he?’

  ‘Honestly? I don’t think there is a “right” when it comes to relationships. I think everyone must do what works for them. If this plan works for you and George and will make you both happier than any other plan, then go for it.’

  Or make me happy and change your mind before you reach marriageable age.

  Am I a conventional conservative at heart, despite my liberal pretensions?

  It’s unflattering to think that fourteen-year-old socially deprived George Donbavand might know more about life and love than I do.

  I don’t see why I should have to fret about this alone, so I say, ‘Dad would agree with me. You should tell him too.’

  ‘Really?’ Ellen perks up at the prospect of having two understanding parents in on the secret.

  ‘I think so.’ On impulse, I say, ‘Have you heard of Vita Sackville-West?’

  ‘No. Who’s she?’

  ‘She was part of the Bloomsbury Group and had a long, happy marriage with a gay man. She was a lesbian, I think. I’m pretty sure she had the kind of marriage you and George are planning.’

  And the only reason you’re planning it is because Professor Anne – stupid twat that she is – doesn’t realise that forcibly keeping people apart deprives them of the opportunity to get thoroughly sick of one another. If she followed a recipe entitled ‘Create a Doomed, Forbidden Love out of Nothing’, she couldn’t possibly do a better job.

  Ellen leaps up from the sofa. ‘I’m going to Google Vita Sackville-West,’ she says. ‘I hope you’re right about her. George and I aren’t telling anyone until we’re eighteen, but it’ll be easier to explain it if someone’s done it before. George says people are more likely to hate and fear things that are new and different.’

  ‘Only bigoted people,’ I whisper to myself after she’s left the room. I don’t want to be one of those. Definitely not.

  Engaged. My fourteen-year-old daughter is engaged. But it’s fine, because there’s no sexual strand to the relationship, and never will be.

  Except that doesn’t sound fine to me. A marriage should be about romance and physical love as well as friendship.

  Where did I put George’s story, after Lachlan Fisher gave it to me? I haven’t seen it since I came home. Suddenly I’m desperate to read the creative work of my future son-in-law.

  I go in search of my green bag, which isn’t in the kitchen. God, I hope Ellen tells Alex quickly – in the next ten minutes, ideally. I need someone to talk to about all this. I could do with a steer from my own mother, but she’s been dead more than ten years. I wish she’d lived and my stepmother had died instead. Julia. She’s not a bad person by any means, but I’ve always been cool towards her. It would have been immoral to allow her to like me, knowing that every time I see her, the words ‘It should have been you!’ ring out in my mind.

  George’s story is – thank goodness – in my green bag. It’s folded in a way that borders on the I-don’t-give-a-shit scrunched up. Without the announcement of Ellen’s engagement, I probably wouldn’t have looked at it.

  I take it back to the kitchen, stretch out on the sofa and start to read.

  Only a few words in, I recognise it. I know this story, start to finish. I’m in it. Reading it feels like being tricked into attending a dreaded reunion.

  I skim quickly over the words, trying to take it in at a glance. Names of actors and directors jump out at me.

  Christ on a fucking cracker.

  I’m here, and so are my former colleagues, my reason for leaving London, for leaving my job. All of it.

  George Donbavand has written my story.

  ‘The Casting Ouch’

  or

  ‘The Ben Lourenco Affair’

  by George Donbavand, 9F

  No, it’s not a typo! If I’d meant to call my story ‘The Casting Couch’, I would have made sure to give it that title. Do you really think I am so slipshod as to send a story out into the world without thoroughly checking it first? If that’s what you think, I’m surprised you’ve progressed this far. I wouldn’t want to read a story by someone who wouldn’t check for mistakes. How could you rely on anything they wrote?

  You will see that there are two alternative titles above. That’s because the first one, while perfect if readers interpret it correctly, will inevitably be taken as a typo by some, and this cannot help but mar its perfection. So it’s no doubt safer to call it The Ben Lourenco Affair, after its tragic hero. Though in fact Ben Lourenco is not strictly speaking an embodiment of tragedy in the traditional dramatic sense, because he is not brought down by a fatal character flaw or moral weakness. There is plenty of moral weakness in the story, lashings of the stuff, but none of it is Ben Lourenco’s.

  Should I tell you that from the get-go? Too late! I already have. I’ll tell you something else as well: the yarn that I am about to relay to you is divided into what is known as ‘front-story’ and ‘back-story’, as many yarns have been since records began – or so I am told by the venerable Mr Fisher, guru of Class 9F.

  What follows is slightly different from that age-old format. Different and, I would venture to suggest, more interesting. Here, as you will soon discover, we have a known front-story wrapped around and rooted in an unknown back-story. Not unknown to everybody, natch. There are people who know what did or did not go down, but none of them are actors in the front-story. And, take it from me, there’s nothing more taxing than being expected to play a lead role in a drama based entirely on another drama whose script you cannot read and must merely guess at.

  That’s no excuse for terrible acting, mind. And you are about to encounter, in these pages, human beings acting terribly, for which I apologise. On the plus side, you will hopefully enjoy being aghast, as I did when I first heard this sorry tale. It’s completely true, which makes it so much worse. Though it also gets me off the hook for never revealing the truth surrounding the back-story. I can’t, because I don’t know it, so please take this warning of partial narrative disappointment and stash it away in your back pocket for later, as it were.

  Luckily, I know the facts concerning the front-story, which is the only reason I haven’t fired myself from my authorial position on the spot.

  And now the moment has arrived when the introductory pleasantries have been concluded and the dramatic plunge must be taken, so here goes …

  Who is Ben Lourenco? You might have heard of him, or you
might not. He’s an actor: British, originally from Billericay, which until recently I had assumed was in Ireland. The name sounds so Irish, doesn’t it? Frankly, I think it should be moved there.

  Let’s get to know Ben Lourenco a shade better. I am told he is six foot four, has big blue eyes with laughter lines around them, slightly scarecrow-esque dark blond hair, and a dimple on his chin so deep that if you were his loved one, you’d be tempted to try and scoop dust or grime out of it on a regular basis with the corner of your handkerchief. Yes, it is what you might call a substantial dimple. It’s a dimple that you’d notice and think, ‘That dimple really ought to be someone’s responsibility.’

  Ben Lourenco has never been the star in anything, but he’s been a valuable not-quite-main character in many TV dramas that see maladjusted and overlooked-for-promotion police detectives frowning their way around cloud-addled Yorkshire moors, litter-strewn London council estates and antiseptic white mortuary corridors. It’s fair to say that, in his capacity as non-lead-role-player, Ben has shone – so much so that he was shortlisted for Best Supporting Actor at the 2012 BAFTA awards. To nobody’s eternal surprise, he won. Hurrah for Ben!

  The performance for which he won this accolade was not his usual fare at all. Instead of a police drama, it was a TV movie, a romantic comedy called The Future Sex Diet. It sounds intolerable, doesn’t it, from the title alone? I wish I didn’t have to describe its plot and themes but I’m afraid I do. I promise to be as compassionately brief as I can.

  The Future Sex Diet: written and directed by Freddii Bausor, a well-known television and film director who has occasionally ventured as far as Hollywood. But in case her well-known-ness doesn’t extend to you, gentle reader, fear not, for enlightenment is on the way. Freddii is a woman now, but hasn’t always been. Or rather, her body hasn’t always been, though her essential self has. Hence the need for masses of surgery, the net result of which is that Freddii is now a woman in all senses of the word.

  The Future Sex Diet was a great success when screened on UK television. It’s the story of a young, confident career woman who is quite happy being single, sleeping around in a fun and resolutely uncommitted way, and looking like an ordinary woman and not an overly made-up Barbie doll, until …

  Have you guessed? Are you guessing? Shall I put you out of your misery?

  … until she meets a man at a work drinks party one night, falls stonkingly in love with him on the spot and decides, after he invites her out for dinner in a way that pointedly implies sex for pudding, that she simply can’t take off her clothes in front of this man until she has lost half a stone in weight. For every other man she frolicked around in bed with, her body was perfectly all right and adequate in her opinion, but this man is so divine that she feels compelled to make herself perfect for him.

  She erroneously supposes that the only thing wrong with her is the extra half-stone, and not the fact that she becomes a blithering idiot the moment a gorgeous man hoves into view, but we must leave that aside for the time being since we were not invited to offer our editorial opinion, and in any case it is much too late. This film has aired, baby, as they’re bound to say in Hollywood and BAFTA circles.

  Our brain-bypass heroine accepts the dinner invitation from this hot geezer, and off they go to a restaurant. Sure enough, after the meal that the heroine has done her best to eat only the perimeter lettuce of, the hero, in a charming and winsome way, suggests that fornication should follow. Oh, help! What a predicament! The extra half-stone! He can’t be allowed to see it, or he might run away screaming! What can our hapless lass do to avert disaster, yet still keep this good prospect hooked?

  She has a brilliant* (*wholly moronic) idea. She remembers, from many a romantic legend she has imbibed since the year dot, that men are supposed to prefer women who don’t joyously leap into bed with every halfway appealing chap that turns up. Men positively like women who make them wait and beg and suffer and petition, because they have all bought into the virgin/whore distinction (first coined by Sigmund Freud, points out the heroine’s intellectual best friend with whom no one in the movie wants to have any sex at all because she’s always lugging around a heavy book). Men think that women who are too easy are worthless, and only ever want to marry the ones who withhold sex for ages.

  Our heroine sees the solution to her problem. It’s staring her in the face! All she has to do is pretend to be one of those women for six months, while secretly dieting like mad. By the time the six months are up, she’ll be at her ideal weight, and her romantic hero will like her all the more because of all the time and effort he had to put in.

  This superb* (*utterly abysmal) plan works swimmingly for a while, until disaster strikes in the form of a chance encounter with a group of men in a bar, several of whom have done the deed of darkness with our mildly padded protagonist. These men all promptly say things that no one would ever say in reality, but that are needed to advance the plot in fiction: ‘Making you wait, is she, mate? She must have changed since we all had her! She couldn’t wait to get our boxer shorts off, I tell you – wouldn’t even let me finish my pint!’ (The real dialogue is even worse, no doubt.)

  Damnation: our heroine is revealed as a fraud! Our romantic hero is bepuzzled! What goeth on? thinks he. She admits to lying, finding herself with no choice, but does she take this excellent opportunity to tell her hapless chap the truth? Why, no. She invents a new and quite revolting lie. She pretends she recently escaped from an abusive relationship, and even bribes one of her male friends (yes, this nincompoop has friends, surprisingly) to play the role of the aggressive ex-partner.

  This hoax, too, is eventually rumbled in the most side-splitting and cringeworthy of ways, and the romantic hero dumps the heroine for being an unparalleled buffoon with appalling values. That’s where the film should end, in my opinion. Freddii Bausor evidently disagreed, because the actual ending is: self-loathing and excessive promiscuity on the part of the heroine, much weight loss resulting from misery, eventual rescuing by forgiving hero who is willing to give her another chance. (Clearly, for some men, every ethically bankrupt laughing stock is an opportunity for improvement.) But the twist is – guffaw, guffaw – he says she’s too skinny and refuses to undress her lustily until she’s gained at least half a stone, and ideally a whole stone. The final scene is the two of them eating in a restaurant, and him shovelling profiteroles into her mouth in a way that we’re supposed to find romantic, but that will make all right-thinking people contemplate joining a terrorist organisation if only for the hunger strike opportunities that might become available.

  The Future Sex Diet is the sort of film my parents would never in a million years let me watch. I have to say, I can see their point in this instance, which is not something I am always able to do. They won’t let me watch most films, and squander their disapproval on anything they think of as too adult, or violent, or potentially upsetting in any way. And don’t get me started on their musical intolerance! They won’t let me listen to any pop or rock music. I think they honestly believe that all flutes and violins will immediately cease to exist if one of their precious children catches even a note or two of The X Factor.

  If I ever have children, I’ll let them watch and listen to whatever they want – apart from The Future Sex Diet, which hopefully will have been roundly forgotten by then. Fairness obliges me to point out that the film did very well when it was aired, far better than most TV movies. It ‘won its slot’, as they apparently say in the world of TV, and slot-winning is the holy grail. It means more people watched it than anything else on television during that same time period.

  Back to Ben Lourenco, whom I hope nobody has forgotten. Ben played the heroine’s friend who pretended to be her abusive ex-boyfriend. It was for this role that he won Best Supporting Actor. It drew him to the drama world’s attention very forcibly, and so naturally he was grateful to Freddii Bausor, without whom he would be no more than a household dimple that everyone recognised but no one knew by name. />
  At the BAFTAs that night were two fairly eminent bods from a TV company called Factotum Productions, Donna Lodge and Justine Merrison. Donna was the managing director of the company and Justine was the head of development. This meant that, together, they were responsible for coming up with ideas for what programmes and films to make, and deciding which actors they would like to be in those ideas.

  Donna Lodge took one look at Ben Lourenco and decided he would be perfect for a drama series they were trying to get off the ground. The development of this drama had hit the rocks somewhat because Donna and Justine couldn’t agree about it. (My source was not allowed to tell me much about the project, as it has still not hit our screens and perhaps never will.)

  It had started off very high concept, but then Donna had worried that the concept was too high, too big a risk. Would viewers buy into it? Would the BBC, ITV or Sky commission it? Donna was in favour of removing the high concept before ‘pitching’ the drama, which means offering it to channels that might put it on. Justine disagreed. Without the high concept, the show would have no content, she argued. Imagine pitching James Bond as an idea, except, because it’s pretty implausible that he’s such an amazing, death-defying spy, you make him not a spy at all. Instead, he more convincingly wanders around his kitchen, sometimes making toast and sometimes just listening to a spot of news on the radio, but generally being a character full of depth rather than one hampered by a plot.

  When Donna Lodge saw Ben Lourenco claim his award at the BAFTAs, she leaned over her champagne glass and said to Justine, ‘Ben Lourenco would be perfect.’ Silently, Justine thought, ‘Perfect for what? A lead role in a drama about a man who mooches around?’ To make it worse, the setting of the drama and its title remained unchanged from the original idea that Justine had loved, so this show was set in a place that everyone associates with lots of amazing stuff happening, and this made it even worse that nothing amazing was going to happen. The title was suggestive of upheaval, mayhem and redemption, all three of which had been removed from the ‘treatment’* (*synopsis). Imagine a movie set in the world’s most notorious prison, called The Cells of Horror and Hope, in which the inmates are quite content and civilised and the guards are suspiciously lenient and humane, and you might begin to perceive the scale of the problem.