The Book of the Film of the Story of My Life Read online

  “But?”

  She holds up an assessment and reads from the back page. “‘Reader’s recommendation—recommended to be shot.’” She picks out another. “‘Recommended to be hung, drawn and quartered’ . . .” Another. “‘Don’t even think about thinking about this one.’” One more. “‘The existence of this script is proof of the existence of unintelligent life from other planets.’” Tamintha puts the scripts down. She looks over her glasses. “You know, we do have to show these to people sometimes.”

  “You do?”

  “Think you could cut the stylistic flourishes?”

  “Well . . .”

  “There’s no immediate hurry. Have a think.” Tamintha takes her glasses right off. She looks more askew than ever. “Have you . . . spoken to Sophie lately?”

  “No, now that you mention, not lately.”

  Tamintha hesitates. She opens her mouth to speak, but she is interrupted.

  BEEP BEEP BEEP. I rest my arm casually on the chair and smile. POCKETA POCKETA POCKETA.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “I’m having my blood pressure monitored.”

  “What for?”

  “Oh, just a routine test.”

  “Routine?”

  “I’m borderline hypertensive.”

  “God, Frederick, is that serious?”

  “Lord, no. It’s just a routine test.”

  “You must be stressed.”

  “Yeah, that’s probably it. Stress.”

  Her eyes flicker to the pimple on my lip. “Are you looking after yourself?”

  “Absolutely.”

  She purses her lips. “I spoke to Sophie this morning as a matter of fact.”

  “Oh, yes? Is she back in town?”

  “No, she’s still in the States. With Matt.” She glances at me.

  “How is she?”

  “Oh, I think she’s good.”

  “I saw her in Empire.”

  “Oh, that, yeah. Nice photo.”

  “Yeah, very nice.”

  “So what did Sophie have to say for herself?”

  “She’s planning to ring you, actually.”

  Clearly there’s something going on. Tamintha’s eyes stray to the Minesweeper game. She taps a key. Clearly she’s experiencing some sort of conflict of loyalties.

  BEEP BEEP.

  Luckily for her, subtlety and tact are two of my strongest suits. I stand. “Well, I guess I better get going. Say hi to Sophie if you talk to her again.”

  “How do you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “You’re just so nice about it all.”

  I shrug and smile. “You’ve got to let these things go in the end. Life’s too short.” I turn to go but she stops me again, in the doorway. “Oh, Frederick, I almost forgot. Happy birthday!” She gets up, comes right across and kisses me. “What are you doing tonight? Come round for a drink later on, if you like.”

  “I will. Thanks.”

  “I’ll be up till late. I have to call LA.”

  Outside there’s a light drizzle falling. I make my way through Soho, moving fast, my Bundeswehr boots striking hard, punishing the English pavement, the scripts swinging heavy in the bag on the end of my arm. I hit Oxford Street, turn left. The foot traffic thickens and I’m reduced to a crawl. I’m heading for Selfridges. Matt Chalmers. I want to kill Matt Chalmers. I want to kill him, I want to kill him dead. I want to throttle him, slowly. I want to erase him from the face of the earth. I want to destroy him, and all his ilk. His kith, his kin. His seed. The seed of his seed. The seed of the seed of his seed. I want . . . I want a hot salt beef sandwich. I want it now.

  I look at my watch. Hell, damn and blast. I’m supposed to be at the doctor’s.

  Chapter 2

  0700 155/102 On tube.

  0800 150/103 Breakfast. Feel like shit.

  0900 155/103 On telephone to mother.

  0930 148/105 In flat, sitting. Reading scripts.

  1000 160/98 In flat, sitting. Reading scripts.

  1030 155/100 In flat. Sitting. Cup of tea. Reading scripts.

  1100 166/101 Lying down. Reading scripts.

  1130 168/103 Sitting. Reading scripts. Sitting up. Cup of tea.

  1200 170/106 Tube. Sitting.

  1230 150/106 Walking. Arguing on phone.

  1300 144/97 Sitting in office. Working.

  1330 150/100 Walking. Soho.

  1400 167/108 Sitting. Ex-wife is going out with Matt Chalmers.

  1430 150/99 Walking.

  1500 155/103 Walking.

  1530 160/104 Walking.

  1600 155/103 Walking.

  1630 160/104 Walking.

  1700 155/106 Home lying on bed. Staring at ceiling.

  1730 158/102 Home lying on bed. Arguing on phone.

  1800 159/106 Walking.

  1830 162/107 Dinner. Spaghetti.

  1900 160/104 Walking.

  1930 154/90 Home, lying on bed. Reading script.

  2230 170/98 Walking.

  2330 177/100 Walking.

  0000 175/107 Walking.

  0100 180/108 Walking.

  0200 150/99 Walking.

  0230 187/109 Asleep.

  0300 150/90 Asleep.

  0330 150/95 Reading. (Dostoyevsky.)

  0400 140/88 Asleep.

  0730 160/77 Eating breakfast. Feel like shit.

  0800 166/105 Tube.

  0830 168/106 Waiting room.

  Dr. McVeigh looks up from her desk. “And this is a normal twenty-four-hour period?”

  “In essence, yes.”

  “You often go for a three-and-a-half-hour walk between ten thirty and two a.m.?”

  “I find it clears my mind.”

  “And you sleep about four hours a night?”

  “Off and on.”

  “And while you’re awake you read Dostoyevsky?”

  “Could be Kafka.”

  “No wonder you have trouble sleeping.” Dr. McVeigh looks back down at her notes. She has a faint Scottish accent. Her hands, like her face, are narrow and lightly freckled. She clasps them loosely on the desktop. She is younger than me, probably in her mid-thirties. Under her white coat, she is wearing a simple cotton dress. Her wedding ring is a plain gold band. This is my third visit to the St. Mary’s Hypertension Clinic, and Dr. McVeigh has not smiled once. Not when I smile at her, not when I make self-deprecating comments, not even when I tripped over the rubbish bin. Not so much as a sympathy smile. I’m not unreasonable. An insincere smile is fine. Just so long as it’s a smile. Everyone knows you smile. You come in, you greet the person, you smile. It’s just so basic. I want to jump and sing. I want to run around the office. I want to scream. Smile, bitch, smile!! It’s true what they say about Western medicine. You’d think that at some point in her ten years or more of intensive medical training someone would have mentioned sometime that, oh, by the way, it’s a good idea to smile at your patients from time to time. Wouldn’t you think that?

  “How many units of alcohol do you consume a week?”

  “Ten. I counted them last week.”

  “And that’s normal consumption?”

  “Yes.” This is a little white lie. I got to ten units by Tuesday. But then I stopped counting, so I did count ten units.

  Dr. McVeigh nods. “And you don’t smoke, do you?”

  “Never.”

  “For a hypertensive patient who smokes, the risk of heart attack, stroke or thrombosis rises dramatically.” She looks up, severely.

  “Absolutely. I never smoke.”

  “I’d strongly advise you not to start.” She looks down again at the chart lying on the desk in front of her. Suddenly I’m very, very scared. My heart is hammering. Sweat in my hairline. She knows I’m lying. I am lying. I smoke other people’s all the time. I just never buy them. Dr. McVeigh unclasps her hands and lays them flat on the table. “The results of the twenty-four-hour test show that your daytime diastolic pressures are consistently high.”

  I’m going to die
.

  “Normally, blood pressure drops during periods of sleep. Some people, even though they have abnormally high diastolic levels during the day, drop to more normal readings at night. In the long term, this reduces the cumulative stress on the vascular system to acceptable levels.”

  I’m going to live.

  “Unfortunately, in your case the diastolic pressures remain abnormally high during sleep periods as well . . . such as they are.”

  I’m going to die.

  Dr. McVeigh looks up. Her eyes are windows on a midwinter sky. “My diagnosis is therefore moderate to mild hypertension. By this I mean that, taking into account the various risk factors such as weight, lifestyle, current age . . .” She opens a file, finds the chart she’s looking for and runs a finger down a column of figures. Her finger pauses. She has found the figure. She looks up. “. . . your risk of death by stroke or heart attack before the age of fifty-five is currently running at six percent.” She closes the file. “Which compares to a population average of less than one.”

  The chair I’m sitting on is tilting slowly backward. She catches the expression on my face. “That doesn’t mean that you’re going to drop dead the minute you walk out of here.”

  “How long have I got?”

  “All we can say is that you belong to a statistical group with elevated risk. We’re saying nothing about you as an individual. Even in the absence of treatment, you could quite conceivably live a long and healthy life. But, statistically, you are less likely to do so than the average person.”

  “I see.”

  “Some people tolerate high blood pressure perfectly well. However, there are associated risk indicators we can look for. Vascular damage can show up early in the retinas or the feet, for example. Another thing we look for is thickening of the heart wall. This indicates the heart is having to work harder than it should. In your case an echocardiogram you took last month has shown a definite thickening of the heart wall. Although, looking on the positive side, you have the retinas of a young man.”

  “Couldn’t I just happen to have a thick heart?”

  “Once again, it’s all statistical.”

  “But . . .”

  She reaches into a drawer and lays a small white-and-pink cardboard box on the desk. “I’d like to put you on a course of beta-blockers. Beta-blockers work by slowing your heart, and thereby reducing the force with which it pumps the blood around your body. This is a relatively low dose, of five milligrams. We’ll start there and see what effect that has.”

  “How long will I have to take them?”

  “As we age, we tend to get more hypertensive, not less. It’s a natural process.”

  “You mean I’ll be taking these for the rest of my life?”

  “Most likely.”

  “What about side effects?”

  Dr. McVeigh talks more rapidly. “Some people experience dizziness, tiredness or loss of libido, however in the majority of cases . . .”

  “Loss of what?”

  She pauses. “Libido.”

  “Oh, man. Can’t I just relax more? I mean it’s all just stress, isn’t it?”

  She shakes her head. “‘Stress’ is a much misunderstood term.”

  “What about bleeding? Couldn’t you just bleed me from time to time?”

  She shakes her head. “I’m afraid that wouldn’t work.”

  “But there must be something I can do. Maybe if I stop drinking entirely.”

  She glances at the clock. “Mr. Case, I think the solution for you is medication, but there’s no great hurry. Take the pills with you. We’ll give it a month. If you decide to start the medication, fine. Or if you want to give yourself another shot at bringing your pressure down by cutting dietary salt, alcohol, and losing more weight, you can do so. Make an appointment to come back and see me in a month’s time and we’ll talk it over.”

  Dr. McVeigh lays both hands on the desk. She smiles.

  It’s getting raw and dark outside St. Mary’s, traffic loud in the damp air. A light drizzle falling. A young black woman in a tracksuit walks by, singing quietly to herself. She doesn’t see me. I wonder if perhaps I’m a ghost. I feel weak and cold. I pull my Swedish Army greatcoat closer. I want to believe that somehow, somewhere, someone has made a mistake. But there is no mistake. It’s all over. I’m finished. I stagger in what I think is the general direction of Paddington Station. I’m going to have to get serious about this. I’m actually going to have to stop smoking and drinking. Outrageous. A great sense of loss wells up inside me. No, more than that. Fear. No, more even than that. Existential terror. Cigarettes, alcohol and stylistic flourishes—without them, what else remains?

  Chapter 3

  Hi, Frederick, how the wether in London?

  Light drizzle, low cloud base. How’s Helsinki?

  I’ve been playing a lot of Internet chess lately. E-Heaven on the Bayswater Road has become a second home. Friendly faces, reasonable coffee, almost comfortable chairs. I make my moves—a Scotch game, a Sicilian and something indescribable—and check my e-mail. I’ve already eaten at the nearest Stockpot and soon it’ll be time to think about getting on to Tamintha’s. There’s a message from my mother, but it turns out to be a photograph of a Palestinian sniper victim. My mum has been doing a lot of this lately. She’s on a number of mailing lists. Aged sixty-eight, she’s still trying to change the world. There are also a few birthday messages from friends wanting to know where the hell I’ve got to. If I ever find out, they’ll be the first to know. There’s one from Russell and Ella, which is very sweet. Lots of different fonts, which shows they really do care.

  I’ve done the e-mail. I’ve done the chess. This is the time to close it down. But I don’t. Instead, I run a search on Sophie. I shouldn’t. It’s a kind of a bad habit. Humiliating. There’s the usual swag of reviews, filmographies and the like, all of which I’ve seen before. But since Shag City came out I notice a different element is creeping in.

  Like:

  Sophie Carlisle in the Nude!

  We are the only site to carry this

  shocking explicit material!

  Or:

  Sophie Carlisle: Nasty Pics!

  I’m here to tell you that Sophie in the nude is neither shocking nor nasty. What are these people on? And then if you really want a laugh, there’s always Sophie’s fan site. It’s run by a guy called Brad somewhere in Ohio. It’s not official. Appalling design. Illegible mauve font on a violent green background with expanding star clusters and a stupid little revolving smiley. Music too. “Greensleeves.” Sophie doesn’t even wear green. It makes her look bilious. He wrote to her once. I read the letter. The guy is completely mad, and he can’t spell “passionately.” In the letter he claims that when she smiles at the camera in the last scene of Transcendental Punishment, he felt that it was “specially for him.”

  She gets mail all the time. Mainly it’s handwritten scrawls from adolescents, which is sort of forgivable but the ingrown adults, they’re scary. We used to read them out for fun but they just kept coming and coming and it very quickly got depressing. For a while she wrote replies (For God’s sake, get a life/Your suggestions are sick and disgusting and you need help/Never write to me again, etc.) but we quickly figured out that that was a bad idea. It doesn’t matter what you say, it only encourages them. Now she never replies. She just bins them.

  Hi and Welcome to the Official Number One Sophie Carlisle Web Site, the web site for everyone who thinks Sophie Carlisle is the most amazing chick on the entire planet!!!!!

  Biog

  Pics

  Filmography

  Links

  Got any Sophie Carlisle updates or anecdotes? Don’t keep it to yourself, guys!!! E-mail me!!! Now!!

  I haven’t visited the site for months. The last time was a few weeks after the big break. I was in a bad way. I logged on and I e-mailed the guy.

  TO:[email protected]:

  RE:Marital Status.

  She’s split up with her h
usband.

  He e-mailed me back: How do you know?

  Because I’m the husband.

  Guess what the reply was? Dream on, buddy.

  You know you’re in trouble when mad, sad, fan site operators think you’re a crank. Still Brad missed a golden opportunity there because I’ve got the dirt all right. I’ve got it all, the inside story. I could tell him stuff that would make his creepy little toes curl. Yes, indeedy. I click on the Biog page. It hasn’t been updated.

  Born in 1972 in the peace and quiet of Auckland, New Zealand (that’s in Australia, for you folks who don’t know your geography), Sophie has come a long way since then. Her first ever professional stage appearance was at age four in a Christmas pantomime. She played one of Santa’s elves. Lucky Santa!!!!!!!

  It’s a good thing for Brad that exclamation marks aren’t carcinogenic. It goes on like that for pages. And pages!!!!!!! As for the thing about New Zealand being part of Australia, all I can say is, if I ever meet you, Brad, I will do my very best to make you part of Australia.

  I click on Recent News.

  Hey Guys! The best of all possible news! Sophie is single again! As you are no doubt aware, until recently she was living in London with her kill-joy husband (boo . . . hoo . . . hey, no fair, come on guy, share and share alike!!!) . . . but no longer! She’s dumped the guy!!! Yeah!!!!! Way to go, Sophie!!!!! Queue from the right fellas!!!!!!!

  Arsehole. I wonder where he gets his information from.

  Sophie now with new boyfriend Matt Chalmers. (Awwww!!!!! Come on Matt, share and share alike!!!!!)

  Up to date, I see. Although in fact if you really want to know, Brad, she was with Matt Chalmers before she left me.

  The next one, I read, and reread. And read again.

  Sophie is pregnant!!! (Lucky baby!!!!! Come on, hey no fair, queue from the right . . . ) That’s right, guys, Matt Chalmers ain’t shooting no blanks!!!!! Hey, way to go Matt, name it after me . . . !!!!!