Майкл Ридпат - Fatal Error

Henry asked Guy, myself, Ingrid, Gaz and Owen for references, several each. We were all happy to oblige, apart from Guy. I overheard his conversation on the subject with Henry. He refused, saying that since his previous career was acting there was no one who would have anything relevant to say about him. Henry didn’t back down: in fact he became more persistent. In the end Guy got away with giving him the phone numbers of his agents in London and Hollywood. Henry left him alone, but he didn’t look satisfied.

Neither was I.

After Henry had gone, leaving Clare to her interrogation of Sanjay, I voiced my fears to Guy. ‘Henry thinks you’re hiding something.’

Guy nodded.

‘Are you?’

Guy looked me in the eye. ‘Fancy a walk?’

We strolled out into the small street, bathed in the gentle sunlight of an Indian summer, and made our way north towards Clerkenwell Green.

‘Well?’ I said.

‘I had a bad time in LA,’ Guy said.

‘So I can imagine.’

‘No, it was worse than London. I totally lost it. Not just drink. Drugs. Lots of them. Very little work. I became low, very low. Clinical depression, they called it. I went to see a shrink.’

‘What did he say?’

‘She had lots to say. I have issues, Davo. Issues with my father. Issues with my mother. Issues with Dominique. She almost wet herself when I told her what had happened in France. To hear her talk about it, I’m lucky I’m not a psychopath.’

‘I can’t imagine you depressed,’ I said.

‘Can’t you?’ Guy replied quickly, his eyes searching mine.

He was asking me to think about it, so I did. Guy the charmer, Guy with the capability to make everyone around him smile, Guy the centre of attention, the natural leader. But I did remember those moments of inexplicable melancholy at school, when he brooded over the failure of a particular girl to fall for him, or just brooded over nothing at all. I had dismissed them at the time as just silly. Guy had the perfect life, everybody knew that.

But perhaps he didn’t.

‘One day I woke up fully clothed on the floor of some guy’s apartment in Westwood feeling like shit. Worse than shit. It took me twenty minutes to realize it was Monday morning and another ten to figure out I was supposed to be at an audition for a part in a TV pilot. It could have been my big break. There was no way I was going to make it.

‘The guy whose apartment it was came in. He was only a few years older than me, but he looked closer to forty. “What’s up, John,” he said. He didn’t even know my name! I’d gone there on Saturday night. Sunday had just disappeared.

‘I had an appointment to see the therapist that afternoon. She wanted me to talk about my mother and my feelings about her. Which I did. My brain felt like mush.

‘Then she began talking. About how I was angry with my father, how my mother hadn’t met my expectations, I don’t know, some psychobabble. I was sitting there, and suddenly my brain cleared. She was talking bullshit. It was all bullshit. I was the one who had got myself on to that floor. I was the one who was screwing up my life. And I was the one who could stop it.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘I walked out of her office there and then. Drove up into the hills. Thought about it. Came back to England. Started Ninetyminutes.’

We walked on in silence until we came to Clerkenwell Green, where we sat on one of the benches. Of course it wasn’t green any more, but it was a relatively quiet oasis away from the traffic of Farringdon and Clerkenwell Roads. ‘You never told me this,’ I said.

‘No.’

‘You should have done.’

‘I didn’t think it was relevant.’

‘Guy!’

‘I still don’t. The point is, I couldn’t admit to myself that it was relevant, let alone to you. All that stuff is in the past. Really. You’ve seen me every day for the last five months. You can see I’ve changed.’ He turned to me, begging for my agreement.

‘Yes, you have,’ I said. ‘Do you think Henry will find out?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Guy said. ‘The only number in LA I would give him was Lew, my agent. He knows the story, or most of it, but I know Lew. His first instinct will be to lie. He’ll cover for me without really knowing why.’

‘You hope.’

‘I hope.’

He probably would. People did that kind of thing for Guy, as I knew very well.

We sat looking up at the dour façade of the Old Sessions House, the Masonic Centre for London, which seemed to frown down on the trendy bars and restaurants springing up around it. A latex-clad cyclist chained his bike to the pale-green railings of the public lavatories that decorated the centre of the green and sauntered into the one remaining caff in the area.

‘Should I tell Henry?’ Guy asked.

I thought about it. My strategy with Orchestra was to tell them everything. We would be working together through tough times and we needed to trust each other. But Henry thought Guy was flaky already: this would just make it worse. Also, I was inclined to accept Guy’s point of view. He had changed, I knew that. The past just wasn’t relevant.

‘No,’ I said. ‘We’ll leave it to him to find out, if he can.’

Henry still harboured doubts about Guy, but he definitely liked the business. Guy, Ingrid, Gaz and I made a presentation to Henry’s partners later on that week that seemed to go well. Guy and I went back to Orchestra’s offices the following day to thrash out a deal.

It took time. Essentially, we were arguing about what proportion of Ninetyminutes Orchestra’s ten million pounds would buy. After several hours we were still some way apart when Henry raised the question of Tony’s stake.

‘I’m not happy with how little of the company management will have after this round,’ he said. ‘Whatever price we agree, it’s going to be less than ten per cent. I don’t like that. Not enough incentive.’

‘I wouldn’t argue with that,’ I said. ‘Perhaps you should pay more?’

‘That’s not what I mean, and you know it,’ said Henry. ‘It’s Guy’s father. He must be diluted.’

‘That’s going to be difficult,’ said Guy.

‘How did he end up with so much of the company in the first place?’ asked Henry.

‘We were desperate,’ I replied.

‘Well, I don’t mind giving him some uplift on the value of his shares, but we need to figure out a way of getting you chaps a bigger stake.’

‘I’m not sure he’ll agree to that,’ said Guy.

‘I’ll make it easier for him,’ said Henry. ‘He’d better agree to it, or there will be no deal.’

‘We have our board meeting on Monday. We’ll discuss it then,’ said Guy.

So Guy and I went away to plan our approach to Tony. Guy had told Henry it would be a difficult discussion. Neither he nor I had any idea just how difficult.

July 1992, Mull

The airfield was nothing but a strip of mown grass with an unmanned caravan beside it, which contained a cash box for landing fees. But only a few yards away was a hotel with a Scandinavian-style conservatory giving an excellent view of my landing. None of us had any desire to fly any further that day, so we checked in. Half an hour later we were in the bar. A couple of hours after that we were all well on the way to getting plastered.

You couldn’t blame us. Guy’s nerve had been seriously shaken and alcohol was his natural refuge. I had kept mine, but had a felt a surge of relief when we had finally landed. Mel had been terrified. Even Ingrid, who had seemed to stay cool, was knocking them back. For all of us at that age and in those circumstances drink was the natural response.

None of us mentioned what had happened. Far from admitting his error, Guy indulged in alcoholic bravado. I let him. Deep down I knew that I had trusted Guy for too long and that as a result of that trust he had almost killed us. It was a truth that I was unwilling to face, or at least not yet. I was unsure whether the girls had realized exactly what had happened. I wasn’t about to tell them. I was quite happy to share in the excitement of being alive.