Ben Elton - Popcorn

‘It’s a movie,’ a voice inside him whispered. ‘Just be in a movie.’

Bruce told himself he’d seen it all a hundred times before. He was in control. He was always in control. ‘It’s just another movie.’

He tore his gaze away from the dead head and viewed the room in a wide shot. Nobody was looking at him. He was in deep background. Infinity focus.

‘How about Brooke here? Do you reckon she’s real?’ Wayne was saying. He leant back into the cushions of the couch, relaxed, and clearly feeling at home. Scout cast a critical eye over the woman sitting opposite.

Brooke shrank before her gaze. An observer might have thought it strange how absurd a really sexy evening dress can look when the person wearing it is cowed and scared. One has to carry glamorous, sexy clothes off with confidence, otherwise it’s possible just to look like a sad, desperate tart.

‘Real? Get out of here!’ Scout exclaimed. ‘Why, Brooke here’ll have been cut up and stretched back and sucked out and pumped up and I don’t know what. Ain’t that right, Brooke?… I said, ain’t that right, Brooke?’

The star of Bruce’s movie was nearly at the desk now, nearly at that special drawer. All he needed was a few more moments of inattention from his tormentors.

Bruce did not realize it but he had a costar in his drama. It might not have appeared that Brooke was aware of his tortured journey across the room, but she was. While staring at the floor, she had caught fleeting shots of Bruce’s feet moving across the back of frame. She knew that Bruce had some kind of plan and that Wayne and Scout must remain diverted. She knew that it was up to her, that she must enter the conversation and enter it arrestingly. She raised her head and stared Scout in the eye.

‘It’s none of your fucking business.’

Scout and Wayne were certainly surprised. Brooke had shown little spirit up to this point, but now she was coming out punching. Her voice was hard and tough; it commanded the room. Bruce seized the opportunity and advanced a whole step.

Wayne glared at Brooke. ‘Now that is where you are wrong, Miss High and Mighty fuckin’ bald snatch Daniels. It is our business on account of the fact that you belong to us. You hear? You be fuckin’long to me ‘n’ my baby. Now, answer my baby’s question. Unless you think you’re too good to talk to her. In which case, you can talk to this.’

Wayne raised his machinepistol to his shoulder and pointed it at Brooke. Her POV was the gaping end of the barrel with Wayne ’s grinning face behind it, chin resting against the stock.

But beyond Wayne ’s head, in deep background, Bruce was still edging through the rear of frame.

Brooke knew she must keep Wayne ’s attention. Bravely she met his stare, fixing on to his eyes as they hovered above the blackhole snout of the gun.

Slowly he closed one eye in a cheerfully grotesque wink. He was taking aim.

Brooke attempted not to flinch, which was not an easy task. ‘All right, pervert, if you must know’ – it was terrifying to risk annoying him in this way, but she knew that above all she must keep the focus on herself until Bruce got to that desk – ‘I’ve had the wrinkles round my eyes and lips dealt with, some cellulite removed from my thighs, I have had breast implants and my navel has been remodelled.’

As she spoke Bruce opened the drawer. Wayne was never going to be more distracted than he was at that moment. It was Bruce’s best chance, and he took it.

He watched his own hand in closeup, pulling open the drawer. He watched the hand disappear inside.

The drawer was empty.

As Bruce frantically felt to the very back, there should have been a musical sting. Something harsh, like a scream, or, seeing as it was Bruce’s movie, perhaps something ironic, like a sit com ‘wah wah waaaah’ but discordant and sinister. There was no sting, however, because Bruce had stopped playing his desperate little movie game. His defeat was too real, too complete.

‘Oh, Bruuuuce.’ It was Wayne ’s voice, nasty and sarcastic. ‘Is this what you’re looking for?’

Wayne had not even bothered to turn round to face Bruce. All Bruce could see was the back of Wayne ’s head above the cushions and his hand protruding over the arm of the couch. From one finger of Wayne ’s hand hung a small pistol.

‘You see, Bruce, I can smell guns,’ Wayne said, still without bothering to turn round. ‘I smelt this one a while ago. I went over to fix me a drink and I thought, mmmm, what’s that smell? I like it. I do believe it’s a gun. And guess what? It was! Can you believe that?’

Bruce did not answer. Not for the first time that night, he was incapable of speech.

‘Also, I must confess that it is not uncommon for a man to keep his piece in the top drawer of his desk. For an Oscarwinning filmmaker, Bruce, you are not very original.’

Bruce shrank a little inside. For a moment there he’d been a fighter, he’d had a plan and a chance. Now he was a fool, casually outwitted and outmanoeuvred by the dregs of a small town truck stop.

It was six a.m. and Bruce’s appointment with nemesis was well under way. His old life was already over. Even if he survived his ordeal, nothing would ever be the same again.

Outside in Los Angeles, of course, and Americawide, like him or loathe him Bruce remained the lion of the hour. His Oscar triumph was still a top story on the morning news. Sadly, not the top story. It would have been so under happier circumstances, but the massacre at the 711 store was necessarily number one on all the channels. Even in California, fourteen dead while doing a bit of shopping is big news, particularly if surviving witnesses are prepared to swear that after they had committed the massacre the perpetrators actually coupled, like two wild animals on heat, against the Slurpy Pup dispenser.

‘Sex and death in America today,’ said the reporters, as the ambulances squealed off into the dawn. ‘It could come straight out of a Bruce Delamitri picture.’ An observation which coincidentally segued very nicely into the preedited Oscars report.

‘I stand here on legs of fire,’ said Bruce.

‘Why’d the guy have to make such a vacuous speech?’ the news editors complained. ‘My God, if he’d said something about violence and censorship, would we have had him this morning!’

Wayne did not bother turning to Bruce even now. He was more interested in the conversation he’d been having. He put the little pistol he had taken from Bruce’s drawer on Scout’s lap, and strolled casually round the glass table to stand over Brooke. As he passed the severed head, it seemed again for a moment as if it might rotate on its gory plinth in order to follow Wayne ’s movements with its bulbous dead eyes. It didn’t.

‘You know something?’ Wayne said, standing over Brooke, leering at the curiously unnatural semicircular definition of the top of her breasts. ‘I’ve always wanted to know what faketits feel like. Well, I guess there ain’t a working man in the United States who hasn’t thought the same thing. Like, you know, are they hard? Soft? Can you feel that bag of stuff they put in? Do they move around?’

Wayne ’s right hand had been resting casually on the butt of the pistol stuck in his waistband. Now, he let go of the gun and blew on his fingers to warm them, clearly making ready for an inspection. Brooke did not look at him. She brought her knees up to her chest, clasped her arms round them with her shoulders hunched forward, and stared straight ahead, her chin on her knees.

‘Don’t you dare fucking touch me.’ Her voice was quiet and shaky; she was almost muttering.

‘Pardon me, ma’am,’ Wayne replied, ‘but I guess I didn’t hear you right.’