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‘Excuse me, Mr Loser, sir, but your Rolls is blocking the entrance to the staff canteen.’
‘Don’t interrupt me while I’m creating, you numbskull!’ snarls Loser, ‘see my chauffeur. My God! Did Eisenstein have to put up with this?’ Nobody seems to know the answer to that one so he continues with his instruction. ‘So remember, use your bodies like weapons. When you embrace you are preying on each other. Your lips are wine, your bodies bread. Devour! Devour! Devour!’
I must say Loser knows how to get results. The clapper boy has not finished doing his stuff before a big, dark bird pulls me on to her mouth like I am an oxygen mask, and tries to suck all my teeth out. For a moment I am a bit taken aback but a glance round the set tells me that nobody else is bothering to exchange visiting cards so I get stuck in with a will – or willy as it is more commonly known. Really! Some of the things that are going on about me I would not credit if they were happening at a Young Conservatives’ wine and cheese party, let alone in front of a dirty great movie camera. People seem to have no shame these days. I have not seen so much groping since grandma’s dentures rolled under the table at Aunty Helen’s silver wedding knees-up and Dad went after them with Mrs. Blackburn. The miserable old git is a completely different proposition with a few ales inside him as Mrs. B found out to her cost.
‘Combine! Conjoin,’ bellows Loser through his megaphone. ‘You’re hungry, savage beasts rebelling against a million years of serfdom!’
‘Oh baby, baby!’ groans the bird I am grappling with, ‘do it to me! Do it to me!’ I must say that with all the writhing bodies around me and Loser doing an Ike Turner through his megaphone, the prospect does seem one not to be sniffed at.
‘To think we get paid for this,’ I pant as I feel my friend’s rearside shock absorbers bouncing against my tightening fingers.
‘It’s extra for physical contact,’ groans the chick. ‘The union demands it.’
The union is not the only one, I think to myself as strong female fingers plunder Percy’s private pad. I turn my head and the couple next to me are actually having it away on the trestle table.
‘Have you ever worked for Ken before?’ breathes my friend; ‘he’s fantastic – he gets things out of you that you never knew you had.’
My dark-haired chum is obviously a lady after Loser’s own heart, although I knew I had what she is getting out.
‘OK, cut!’ howls Loser. I sit up obediently but around me the set is still a writhe riot.
‘CUT!’ Still not a sausage. The couple on the table seem to have gone into orbit.
‘Oh baby, let’s use it while we’ve got it,’ pants my eager little friend. ‘We’re just two grains of sand on the beach of time. Tomorrow we’ll be infinity.’ This is a subject I would like to discuss further but Loser roars down his stepladder and starts breaking up the action with his riding crop.
‘Cut! Cut! Cut!’ he hollers. ‘There’s plenty of time for that in the deathbed scene.’
‘Too bad,’ says my chum, giving my old man an affectionate squeeze. ‘Maybe we’ll meet in the next orgy.’
‘I’ll keep my fly open for you,’ I say wittily.
‘That was a bit saucy, wasn’t it?’ says Sid when I speak to him a few minutes later.
‘It didn’t worry you at all?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, you don’t think all that groping and stuff is a bit – er, well?’
‘Not if it’s art, Timmo. I have no complaints at all. Mr Tymely explained all about Mr Loser and how he is trying to liberate the hidden meaning of the subtext and how he is seeking to shock people out of their complacency. I think it’s very good. He’s socially committed, you see. As long as the sex and violence is used for a didactic purpose it must be all right, mustn’t it?’
It is obvious that Sidney has been nobbled. Words like ‘subtext’ and ‘didactic’ fall from his gob more rarely than pig’s trotters from a horse chestnut tree.
‘It can’t be bad for raking in a few shekels at the box office either, can it?’
Sidney shakes his head as if wounded. ‘You look too closely for the profit motive sometimes, Timmo,’ he says sadly. ‘There are other things, you know.’
I feel like being very unkind and asking him for a list of three that does not include moola but am prevented by being called back to the set. This time I am forming part of the background to a scene featuring Bill Sikes and Nancy, or Glint Thrust and Dawn Lovelost as their agents call them – which is probably very rarely.
As already mentioned, Glint and Dawn find it marvellously easy to resist each other and their only interest is booze. When not trying to ram his nasty up anything in a skirt that does not talk with a Scots accent and wear a sporran, Glint is frequently to be observed holding a bottle of the hard stuff at an angle of forty-five degrees above his parched lips. Dawn is more discreet in her booze intake and takes most of her snifters in her dressing room where all her scent bottles are rumoured to be full of brandy.
Whatever the source of intake, there is no doubt that both Glint and Dawn have had a very adequate ration of liquor before coming on to the set and a whiff of their breath would be enough to kill a St Bernard’s sense of smell stone dead for three weeks. In such a condition it might be persuaded to rescue Ken Loser, whose sheepskin is currently ponging something rotten.
‘Right, Lovelost,’ says the ageing boy genius, favouring Dawn’s shoulder with his arm. ‘I want you to give everything you’ve got.’
‘Is that the best she can do?’ sneers Glint.
‘Shut your face, you piggish lout,’ snaps Dawn. ‘Why don’t you concentrate on remembering your lines or, better still, write them on the back of a whisky bottle so you’ll always have them with you.’
‘Darlings, keep this tension. This is wonderful,’ hisses Loser. ‘Now Dawn, remember. First the knife through his hand pinning it to the table, then the mulled wine in his face. Glint, grab her by the hair and drag her across the table. You revile her then kiss her. Hold it while we pan from the kiss to the blood spurting from your hand. Have you got that, Mac?’
‘Got it.’
‘Extras crowd round as the knife goes in. Emote, erupt.’
‘Interrelate?’ says a voice hopefully.
‘If you want to, but the camera will be on the protagonists. Right, ready? Roll ’em.’
‘Blimey,’ murmurs the extra sitting next to me. ‘This coffee tastes like cold piss.’
‘So today it’s cold.’
‘Yeah. But I’ve never known it taste like this.’
‘Where did you get it from?’
‘From the urn. Blimey. Do you know what I think? They’ve put the stuff that’s supposed to be mulled wine in the urn and the coffee –’
‘Oo-o-o-o-oow!’ My friend is right. Glint collects a face full of hot coffee and his scream shakes the dust off the roof girders. ‘You bitch!’ Dawn cops a meaty left-hander.
‘You sod!’ Dawn’s fingers rake Glint’s cheek.
‘Filthy whore!’ Glint has both hands round her throat and is shaking hard.
‘You’re impotent! Impotent! Impotent!’
‘How dare you,’ shrieks Glint. ‘They call me “stud”!’
‘It should be “collar-stud”