Эндрю Миллер - Oxygen

The meeting had been arranged by telephone the week before by a young actor called Ranch whom Larry had first met at the party of a man in the glamour industry who owned a beautiful house in Sausalito. Ranch, looking like an Armani cowpoke, had been trying to impress a very tall black model with his display of karate kata, but the girl, listless from some dieting drug, had wandered off halfway through the action, a level of interest that might have provoked a moment’s resentment in most men, but Ranch had merely shrugged and grinned with chivalrous regret at the swing of her backside as she disappeared into the next room, and then immediately introduced himself to Larry, complimenting him on how ‘fucking great’ he was looking. Since then there had been other parties in other beautiful homes, where Larry had explained some of his predicament, and Ranch had promised to help him somehow, an idea that Larry had not, for a single moment, taken seriously.

But it was Ranch who opened the door to 2714, dressed in a dark suit and purple open-neck shirt with a large collar, his sideburns razored to knife points, his eyes back-lit by the morning’s consumption of something considerably stronger than coffee. He embraced Larry as though he meant it and led him to the television screen where something wet and bloodily intrusive was going on.

‘What is it?’ asked Larry, wincing.

Ranch laughed. ‘It’s the in-house channel. The dentists have got their own TV show!’ He laughed again. ‘Sick fucks,’ he said, then in a quieter voice added, ‘TB’s out on the balcony.’

For a moment Larry hoped it might be the same balcony he had seen Reagan on in the picture, but as he stepped out into the glare he saw that it was more modest, a different grade of opulence altogether.

T. Bone was on a sun chair set in an angle of shade. He didn’t stand when Larry came out, but smiled, and offered a small soft hand like a mole’s paw.

‘Quite a view from up here,’ he said, turning his head slightly to where the afternoon sun and the day’s emission of CO 2had nebulized LA to a fine haze in which the buildings seemed carved from smoke. ‘Shirley Temple used to play down there. And once upon a time it was Tom Mix’s ranch. We like to come here when we’re meeting new friends. It creates a certain “atmosphere”. Have a seat, sir. Ranch, fix Mr Larry something cool and dangerous to drink.’

‘Comin’ up,’ said Ranch. He disappeared through the drapes into the bedroom.

‘He’s first rate,’ said T. Bone, leaning forward confidentially. ‘Found in a carpetbag in the ladies’ conveniences at Union Station. In and out of institutions all his life. Convinced he’ll meet his mother on “the other side”, poor lamb. Tell me, Larry. Do children in England still have those little Barnardo boxes for collecting money for the orphans?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Larry, who vaguely remembered that he and Alec had once had such a box. A little yellow cottage with a slot in the roof.

‘One hopes so,’ said T. Bone, settling back and smiling from the shadows. ‘It encourages them to think of those less fortunate. There’s so little of that these days. N’est-ce pas? ”

‘Last days of the Empire,’ said Larry, flippantly.

‘Oh, not yet,’ said T. Bone. ‘No. I think we’ve a little more time.’

This man, thought Larry, returning the other’s amused gaze, contained within himself such depths of fraudulence you would never come to the end of him. To look at he was a benign, slightly eccentric figure in his sixties with an uncanny resemblance to the older John Betjeman. He wore a Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts and, on his very white legs, some manner of surgical support socks finished off with a pair of highly polished brogues. His accent was the sort of camp upper-class English little heard since the death of Noël Coward, but beneath it, like the faint pattern of old wallpaper under whitewash, Larry detected another voice, something grimly urban, provincial and brutish, so that it was not difficult to imagine him, somewhere in the 1950s, a little slicked hoodlum in a bombed-out and rain-damaged city like Plymouth or Slough, the type of character who carried a sharpened steel comb in his pocket.

Ranch’s cool and dangerous drink arrived, blue and gin-dry and delicious. Ranch and Larry put on sunglasses, an event followed by ten minutes of small talk concerning the heat, the merits of Mexican food, the flight of the comet. Finally, after a lengthy pause during which the ice cracked and tinkled in their glasses, T. Bone said: ‘We all adored you as Dr Barry.’

‘Jesus, yes,’ said Ranch.

‘Thanks,’ said Larry.

‘They should have made more of you,’ said T. Bone, ‘but television is run by morons. Don’t you think?’

‘Morons,’ crooned Ranch, as though he were at a revivalist meeting.

‘I’m glad to be out of it,’ said Larry, watching from the corner of his eye Ranch flick peanuts into the air and expertly catch them in his mouth.

‘We have a little project,’ said T. Bone, ‘we think would be perfect for you. Nothing extreme. The kind of viewing enjoyed by thousands of healthy Americans every day.’

‘Except,’ said Ranch, resting a hand on Larry’s shoulder, ‘it won’t be Americans watching it.’

‘Just so,’ said T. Bone. ‘You would be dubbed into Portuguese and Spanish for our South American market. Sun Valley has been playing in Brazil and Argentina for months. You’re a great favourite there. Particularly, one imagines, with the dusky housewives.’

‘You got fans in places you ain’t even heard of,’ said Ranch. ‘Bacabal, Xique-Xique…’

‘We make our little productions very simply,’ said T. Bone, looking now like Sir Ralph Richardson playing a Borgia pope. ‘We remain the true auteurs. We are an industry of enthusiasts.’

‘How long would the shoot take?’ asked Larry.

‘A week,’ said Ranch, ‘two weeks max.’

‘For which we can offer you a fee of twenty thousand dollars,’ added T. Bone. ‘Naturally we’d like it to be more but these days we have to compete with the Web. However, we can arrange payment so that you need not worry about the gentlemen at the revenue.’

‘And I wouldn’t have to do anything I could get arrested for?’

‘It’s all kosher,’ said Ranch.

‘No Lolitas or animals?’

‘I am a father,’ said T. Bone, ‘and a nature lover.’

‘One more thing,’ said Larry. ‘I’m going to be in England from next week. I don’t know how long for. Not long, I think.’

‘I’ll make a note of that,’ said Ranch, flicking another peanut into the air.

Twenty-seven floors below, where Shirley Temple had once played, a lone swimmer pulled himself across the green eye of a pool. Back and forth, back and forth, like a water beetle. It was a fine day for a swim but something in the figure’s progress, or lack of it, was disturbing. Presumably he was counting off his daily quota of lengths, getting himself in shape, but it looked unprofitable, forlorn, like that Greek in hell who pushed a rock up the hill all day just to watch it roll to the bottom again.

‘OK,’ said Larry. ‘Why not? Count me in.’

‘A great day for us, Larry,’ said Ranch, clapping his hands.

‘Delighted,’ said T. Bone. ‘Happy et cetera.’

‘What now?’ asked Larry, glancing from Ranch to T. Bone, aware that something more was expected of him.

‘Ranch will take care of you,’ said T. Bone, pulling a copy of the Hollywood Reporter from under his chair. ‘Then a bite of luncheon, chez moi.’

Larry followed Ranch into the bathroom, wondering what the statistical incidence of people murdered in LA hotel rooms was. Inside the bathroom a card propped up on a shelf above the gleaming sink announced that ‘Milagros’ – the name was inked in by an uncertain hand – was the room attendant, and that she took pride in her work.