Geek Tragedy (2 page)

That taxi ride from the station. Murder. A complete nightmare. As he checked in at the reception desk of the Happy Traveller hotel and business centre, Mervyn’s hands were trembling so much he could barely sign for his little plastic key.

‘Coo-ee! Mervyn!’

His driver had had a nodding Buddha in the rear window, a dream-catcher hanging from his mirror and a luminous plastic statuette of Jesus on the dashboard. He believed in everything but traffic lights.

‘Mr Stone!’

All Mervyn wanted to do was go up to his room and calm his jangled nerves.

‘Mervyn! Mr Stone!’

Getting his name bellowed in the busy foyer was the last thing he needed.

‘Over here sir!’

Pity, that.

Mervyn surrendered and turned round to acknowledge the voice. A young man with an explosion of curly orange hair and big-framed glasses appeared, as if by magic, from the crowd. Mervyn’s hand was grabbed and pumped vigorously. His face froze, and his mind groped around in a blind panic for the man’s name.

‘Hello, sir! So, the prodigal returns. Such an honour. So glad you could be here, sir. When Morris told me he asked you and you agreed, I just didn’t believe him. “Morris,” I said, “the Great Mervyn Stone hasn’t done a convention in seven years, what could possibly tempt him out of retirement?”’

‘Well, I thought it was time to revisit things, you know, take a fresh look at the past…’

‘I hope the fee he mentioned was sufficient,’ said the man with a grin, as if he knew
exactly
why Mervyn had agreed to do the convention. ‘So how the devil are you, sir? I do hope your journey wasn’t irksome.’

‘Well it was a bit of a nightm—’

‘It’s just been calamity after calamity this morning,’ sighed the man. ‘The big screens aren’t up yet, the office they’ve given us is completely inadequate—the photocopier keeps jamming—and the staff are proving very obstructive. The hotel’s been taking down our signs telling people where the events are being held.’

‘Oh dear.’

Mervyn’s eyes strained to read the name badge on the man’s lapel. It was unhelpfully written in a blocky squared-off font that had been universally embraced in the 70s as ‘futuristic’.

‘They’re saying we didn’t tell them about the sellotape, and they say that’s wear and tear on their infrastructure, fixtures and fittings. We’ve put Blu-Tack on the table but they’re just not biting. We may have to work out a compromise, some kind of combination of smear-free adhesive applied on windows and other shiny surfaces as well as free-standing pin boards clear from fire exits.’

‘Right…’ What did his bloody badge say? Steven? Stefan? Sidney?

‘Do you know, I’d only been here 20 minutes and the hotel tried to stop us putting any of the original props in the main hall? “Fire regulations,” they say. I told them beforehand about the props, and so I said to them, “Look,” I said, “look, those props are part of the programme’s history, they see them every year, if they’re not there then people will feel short-changed. So they’ve got to be there, end of story.”’

Samuel? Scott? Sean?

‘“They’re our customers, and so they’re your customers,” I said to them. “If ever I’ve learnt anything from my training in management consultancy, it’s that the customers set the parameters of your business, and your business is meeting those parameters. You agreed to put this convention on,” I said, “and this convention includes those props.”’

Sandy? Spiro? Spandex? Anything was possible in this place.

The man pointed into the main hall. ‘Just look. We haven’t even got them in yet. It’s a complete madhouse in there.’

Mervyn looked. The room was filled with convention staff quietly and smoothly unfolding chairs, testing microphones and putting up speakers. It looked very sane to him. Not what he would consider a madhouse at all.

Which was ironic; because the foyer they were standing in looked
exactly
like a madhouse.

It was filled with people dressed in weird and wonderful home-made costumes. Some were flapping around with claws fastened to their extremities, others had coloured their faces bright purple and wore bathing caps on their heads. Some had covered themselves from top to toe in silver boxes and stood motionless in corners, allowing themselves the odd robotic twitch. It was the darkest, most gibbering sweat-stained nightmare of any children’s television presenter. These were
Vixens from the Void
fans, and they were truly in their element. Teased by Trekkies and Time Lords, and jeered at by Jedi,
Vixens
fans were the oddest and dampest of them all: the science-fiction fans that put the ‘sigh’ into science and the ‘ick’ into fiction. It was an accepted fact that
Vixens
fans only existed so that
Xena Warrior Princess
fans had someone to pity.

Through a strict lifestyle of avoiding daylight, dedicated Doritos consumption and a rigorous regime of ill-health, most looked inhuman enough at the best of times—and this was a chance for them to go that extra mile, strap on a tentacle and look completely alien for a weekend.

The man prattled on: ‘Anyway, they say they
might
agree to sell us a man with a bucket of sand, and I’m trying to persuade them to use one of our people with a bucket of sand, but they say the person holding the bucket has to be trained. How does one get trained to hold a bucket of sand?’

The hotel doors crashed open, and three people struggled into the foyer, their official mauve ‘ConVix 15’ sweatshirts clashing with their gasping red faces. They were grappling with one of the disputed props. To the uninitiated, the object looked like a huge moth-eaten piece of fibreglass and papier-mâché, a green shell-like structure about the size and shape of a golf buggy. To those in the know, of course, it was the casing of one of the galaxy’s most fearsome creatures and implacable arch-enemy of the Vixens. They plonked it down in front of Mervyn and the man.

‘Simon!’ shouted one of them, a big man with a heavy ponytail and an exhausted scrappy beard that had tried to reach his face but had given up and died somewhere below his chin. ‘What do you want us to do with this?’

Simon. Simon
Josh
. It all came flooding back. Simon Josh, convention organiser and über-fan. How could he have ever forgotten?

‘Careful with that, Morris!’ Simon snapped. ‘That’s an original Styrax Sentinel from series two. It’s irreplaceable, and very delicate.’

‘But
where,
Simon?’ gasped Morris.

‘Now you know where you’re supposed to put that,’ said Simon to Morris.

Morris stared breathlessly up at Simon, bent double with his hands on his knees. His eyebrows were raised helplessly, as if to say ‘How the hell should I know?’ Simon gave a long-suffering sigh.

‘It goes on the middle stand of course. In amongst my most precious collection of knick-knacks.’

From the expression on Morris’s face, Mervyn had an idea which particular precious collection of Simon’s ‘knick-knacks’ he’d like to put it amongst, but all he managed were a few breathless nods.

Simon beamed, and rested his hand on the Sentinel’s flaking carapace as if posing for a photo. ‘Marvellous isn’t it, sir? I bet it takes you back. What does it feel like to once again be in the presence of the most evil creature in the universe?’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t put yourself down, Simon.’

Simon stopped talking for a few blessed seconds, then he realised what Mervyn meant. ‘Oh very droll,’ he said, flashing one of those smiles given by those who are congenitally humourless but have learned to detect the shape of a joke and move their faces accordingly. ‘You writers!’ he clucked. ‘Your schedule’s in this programme leaflet.’ He handed Mervyn a programme ‘leaflet’, which was about the size of a telephone directory for a large village. With no small effort, Mervyn stuffed it in his pocket. ‘Autographs at eleven, panel at one, and I know you’re going to love this, you’ll be judging the fancy dress in the evening.’

Mervyn looked around at the foyer, at the creatures clad in cardboard, tissue paper and bubble wrap. Fancy dress? Surely everyone here had peaked far too soon? There was nowhere else for them to go in the ‘acting like an evil alien’ stakes, unless they went down the road and invaded Brent Cross shopping centre.

Simon was talking Mervyn through the schedule, running his finger along some insanely complicated boxes and offering a translation. ‘You’ll be signing autographs in “Arkadia’s Boudoir”—that’s what we call it. It’s actually room 1013. And after that it’s the panel in what we call “Vixos Central Nerve Centre”, and that’s the main hall here, and the fancy dress is also in “Vixos Central Nerve Centre”. I’ll get someone to show you up to your room.’

‘And what’s my room called?’

Simon grinned a humourless grin, and Mervyn caught a flash of something nasty beneath. He realised he’d made one joke too many.

‘Room 2224,’ Simon said, a little too loudly.

Out of the corner of his eye, Mervyn noticed a hairy herd of bespectacled creatures in rock T-shirts and jeans. They were shuffling in their direction. He was sure some of them had overheard where his room was.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Mervyn, ‘I’ll find my own way.’

He started to walk away.

Very, very fast.

CONVIX 15 / EARTH ORBIT ONE / 9.00am start

EVENT: REGISTRATION AND IDENTITY TAG COLLECTION.

LOCATION: Prison Planet Docking Bay (hotel foyer)

EVENT: ‘THE BURNING TIME’ EPISODE SCREENING.

LOCATION: The Catacombs of Herath (video lounge room 1024)

EVENT: WHY VIXENS FROM THE VOID IS BETTER THAN STAR TREK FAN PANEL with Graham Goldingay, Fay Lawless, Craig Jones, Darren Cardew.

LOCATION: The Seventh Moon of Groolia (room 1002)

Tomorrow People and Blake’s 7 schedules are found inside free copies of Into the Void available from Checkpoint Doomworld (reception desk).

The Happy Traveller hotel was tucked behind a slip road somewhere around the M25. It was a modern hotel, a square ugly building in orange and yellow brick. The only difference between it and an open prison was that the hotel had a bigger sign, smaller rooms and palm trees in the car park.

The reason
why
hotels wedged in such sweaty rectums of the country decorated themselves with palm trees always eluded Mervyn; presumably to entice the kind of person who gets impressed by pineapple
and
ham on pizza.

The carpet that Mervyn jogged along was from the same identikit book of bland hotels. It was covered in a pattern of vomit-coloured splat shapes arranged about 10 inches apart, designed that, should anything vomit-coloured and splat-shaped descend upon it, the mess would be cunningly disguised. Unfortunately, as no one has ever yet learned to vomit precisely 10 inches apart (even engineering undergraduates), the nastiness usually showed up anyway.

Why was he running? Because he was special.

Not special in many respects, of course. He was in his late 40s, hovering on the wrong side of stout, with soft, perplexed features and a large nose. Middle age had mercifully left him his hair, which was grey and thick, and grew in every conceivable direction but down. Mervyn looked like a hedge that had been dragged through a man backwards.

His dress wasn’t particularly exceptional either. He wore the standard uniform of television writers everywhere; black jeans, black shirt and black corduroy jacket. There were certain writers’ panels he’d been on in years past that looked more like a convention of retired and rather portly Milk Tray men—the ones who’d skipped the speedboat, given up on the sexy lady and kept the chocolates for themselves.

No, he wasn’t special. Not in any respect. Except one.

Mervyn had
Vixens from the Void
on his CV, and that made him very special indeed.

*

The Happy Traveller had played host to a lot of strange and wonderful gatherings in its history, but this particular event took the complimentary plastic-wrapped biscuit.

The convention—known as ‘ConVix’—had been in existence for 15 years now. It was a convention devoted to many forms of cult television. For this event, there were a smattering of
Tomorrow People
cast members, a few luckless red-shirted extras from
Star Trek
and one rather dog-eared space rebel from
Blake’s 7
—but mostly ConVix was concerned with celebrating the exploits of the
Vixens from the Void
.

Mervyn had co-devised and script-edited a brazenly cheap and exploitative piece of sci-fi kitsch that cast a day-glo spell over the BBC1 schedules in the late 80s to early 90s.

In the mid-80s, TV sci-fi was unfashionable at the BBC.
Doctor Who
had been prescribed a rest,
Blake’s 7
had been tragically cancelled, and
The Tripods
had been even more tragically made. It would have been suicide to propose another space series in this climate, but BBC drama, with that appetite for suicide shared by most publicly funded organisations, decided to make one.

Mervyn came up with an epic that contained elements of classic BBC serials such as
I, Claudius
and
Fall of Eagles
, but on a much larger scale, recounting the decline and fall of a vast intergalactic empire through in-fighting, betrayal and war.

That wasn’t how he pitched it to the BBC, of course. He wasn’t completely mad.

He sold it shamelessly like a whore, dressing it in primary colours and daubing it with cheap lipstick, showing it off in a way that would make sense to the brain of the average BBC boss. He winced as he remembered the first line of his proposal document: ‘Think of
Dallas
meets
Dynasty
…but in space!’ Mervyn reasoned that, even if they didn’t understand science-fiction, they might at least understand science-fiction containing nubile young women in corsets and skin-tight lycra a little better.

He wasn’t alone in pitching an SF series—not by a long shot. There was also an ‘I see this as
Howards’ Way
—but in space!’, an ‘Imagine the kids from
Fame
—but in space!’ and then an ‘It’s like
The Money Programme
—but in space!’ Mervyn couldn’t imagine how
that
one would have worked. He’d even heard of one old and rather baffled producer who went into a meeting with the words: ‘Think
Star Trek
—but in space!’