Ben Elton - Inconceivable

Every taxi was full, every bus a “Not in Use. Driver in Training” let-down. The tube station had one of those chalk blackboards outside which regret that two thousand people are stuck in a tunnel below. Eventually I spotted an empty cab but inevitably another bloke spotted it too. We both dashed for it (well he dashed, I waddled) and arriving at the same time we wrestled over the handle together.

“Mine, I think,” I said. Normally I would have given up without a fight but I was desperate by this time, having only twenty-eight minutes left.

“Well, you think wrong,” said the man. “Bugger off and get your own cab. I’m having this one.”

Honestly, I don’t know how some people can be like that, so casually brutal and rude. I couldn’t do it if you paid me. It’s like when I see people throw litter out of car windows, I just think, are these people from another planet? Are they a different species altogether? I would never do that. Oh well, mustn’t get depressed about it, it takes all sorts I suppose.

Anyway, on this particular occasion, quaking at the thought of a scene though I was, there was no way I was going to let that cab go.

“Look,” I said, “I have to have this cab, it’s a matter of life and death.”

“Tough,” said the man. “I’ve got a very important meeting.”

“Well I’ve got some warm sperm up my arse and it’s dying.”

I’ll have to remember that one. The bloke let go of that door handle like it was a live snake.

“I bet you’re the sort who drops litter out of car windows as well,” I said as I got in the cab, and I meant it to hurt.

It wasn’t an easy journey, unable to sit down as I was. I had to curl up on the back seat in a sort of foetal position and I could see that the driver didn’t like it. But we got there in the end, with a few minutes to spare even, and I rushed into the clinic and handed in my sample. Actually that was a pretty gruesome moment too. I was so desperate to get there in time that I just rushed through the front door and went straight up to the reception desk. It was only as I was actually fishing the pot out of the back of my trousers that I realized that it might have been more tactful and polite to have retrieved the thing in private. The nurse stared at it as if to say, “And you want me to touch that now?” before going off to get some rubber gloves and a bargepole.

My God, I can’t believe I’ve just spent half an hour writing about taking sperm to a clinic! If I could only be half this committed and energetic at work I might not be in the shit I’m in. Things are still very edgy at the office. It seems to me only a matter of time before Nigel finds a way to get rid of me, and if I’m honest I’m really not particularly employable. Lunch-eating is not a skill for which there is much demand these days, it’s not the eighties.

Lucy keeps saying I need to start writing again. Touching, really, how she still believes in me.

I sent another note to Tosser (this time I checked the envelope three times) to try asking him again about a job. I didn’t bother with any matey-matey, beating-about-the-bush stuff this time. I just basically asked the bastard for a job. Hope I didn’t sound desperate. Does “Give us a job, you bastard,” sound desperate, I wonder? Depends on the tone, I suppose. But how does one imply tone in a letter? You can’t write “Not to be read in desperate manner” because that really would sound desperate.

Looking back over the last few pages I’ve written, I’ve come to the surprising conclusion that the American expert Lucy’s friend Sheila saw on Oprah was right: writing letters to yourself is actually a very good idea. I came home today all fired up with my success at delivering the sample on time and looking forward to telling Lucy the story (particularly the bit about hailing the cab), but she seemed all distant and distracted. She said it had been a difficult day at work and she didn’t feel like talking. Fair enough. I almost always feel like that. Still, it’s helped to write it down. Perhaps I should bash it all out into some kind of article and send it to the Observer Health section. I bet they’d give me a hundred quid for it, but Lucy would probably not approve. Besides which, I was forgetting, I can’t write.

Strange, Lucy not wanting to talk. I hope she isn’t working too hard. Actors can be such pains.

Dearest Penny

I have to tell you that something very strange happened at work today, which I hardly like to write about. I was on my own again. Sheila is still bronchial (self-prescribed cure: forty cigarettes a day) and Joanna is in LA with our one other big name, Trudi Hobson. Trudi is playing the icy British bitch in some dreadful action film. It’s a sequel called, well, can’t remember what it’s called actually. Shit Two, I should imagine. Anyway, there I am on my own and who should turn up but, yes! Carl Phipps, all brooding and Byronic looking in a big coat. Well, before I know it he’s telling me that fame is a lonely burden and asking me out to lunch! Extraordinary. I can’t imagine why he picked on me. I’m sure I haven’t given him the slightest indication that I enjoy his company or find him remotely attractive.

Well, as it happened I couldn’t go out with him anyway because I was all alone and who would man the phones? (Lots of voiceover work coming in this week, almost every chocolate manufacturer in the country seems to want one of our chaps to say “When you need a big, satisfying block in your gob…”). So I told him that I was too busy, and I said it slightly hoitily. I rather resent the assumption that mine is the sort of job that you can just drift in and out of, even though it is. “Fair enough,” says Lord Phipps and off he goes in a flurry of brooding, wuthering menace, and I thought that was the end of it.

Well! Ten minutes later he’s back with a positive hamper from Fortnum’s (perhaps not a hamper, but certainly a large plastic bag), full of fantastic stuff from their food hall. Oysters, olives, foreign nibbles and champagne no less! He said he was celebrating getting a recall for a very big American film. Usual thing, dastardly Brit to play villain. Actually, I must just say that for all that we hate political correctness, it has been a godsend for our posh actors. It seems that the English are the only racial group left on earth whom absolutely nobody minds seeing marmalized. Honestly, ten years ago it was costume drama or nothing for our boys. If nobody was making Robin Hood or Ivanhoe, they didn’t work. Now they get to crash helicopters into Bruce Willis!

Anyway, so there we were in the office, just the two of us, and I asked Heathcliff if he was celebrating, didn’t he have someone special to celebrate with? Do you want to know what he said to that, Penny? He said that that was exactly what he was doing!!!! Arggh!

Oh, my God ! I could feel myself going beetroot and that rash on my neck coming back (when I was a teenager, if ever a boy asked me out I invariably instantly looked as though my throat had just been cut). My knees became the knees of a jelly lady and the cheese straw I had been toying with disintegrated and fell into the photocopier (and completely buggered it).

Anyway, of course I told him not to be silly and asked him what he meant by such familiarities. I put on my best snooty, posh “we are not at home to callers” telephone voice and said that I was a respectable woman. Well, he didn’t say anything, he just smiled in a sort of soft way that he knew brought out his dimples and took my hand.

Yes!

Smouldering eyes, shy dimples and holding my hand. Sorry about the breathless style, Penny, but I am much moved.