Mr Toppit (28 page)

• • •

It was raining when the limo drove off the main road and up a long gravel drive to the set. In the distance I could see the roof of a house, but before we got there we turned off and ended up in a large field. It looked like a gypsy encampment. There were caravans and trucks all over the place and the field was churned up and brown with mud. In some places, duckboards had been put down to make walkways, along which people with parkas and heavy boots were maneuvering themselves to avoid great pools of water.

Our driver had told us we would be there in time for lunch and already people were queuing in front of a van with an open side, out of which food was being served. At the far end of the field there was a decrepit double-decker bus to which they were heading with their plates.

“Isn’t this fun?” Rachel said. “Are we going to eat in the bus? Claude would love this. I knew we should have asked him. Isn’t it an amazing place?”

Martha stared out of the window gloomily. “It looks like Zagreb after the war,” she said.

A girl called Roxy came to pick us up. She held open the car door with one hand, a big umbrella in the other, and helped Martha out. It seemed we weren’t going to eat in the bus: Jake had organized lunch for us in his caravan. We followed Martha as she teetered along the duckboards under Roxy’s umbrella.

Jake was waiting for us in his caravan doorway, arms outstretched. I had never met him before. He was small and tubby, with the rictus grin of a nervous schoolboy, quite different from how I’d imagined him—or, rather, quite different from how I’d
imagined a producer to be. He was wearing a baseball cap with
Hayseed—Main Unit
embroidered on it.

“Martha!” he said, giving her an awkward kiss. “And Rachel—everyone’s really excited. Particularly to meet you, Luke,” he said with a nervous whinny, as he put out his hand to me. “You’ve met Roxy? My PA?” A shadow passed over Roxy’s face. “We’ll need lunch now, Rox. And weren’t you going to get napkins for the table? Come on in. This is the nerve center.”

The caravan rocked a bit as we entered. It smelled of old dog and wet socks.

Roxy, who was standing outside on the step, said, “Are you sure you don’t want lunch on the bus, Jake? It’s going to be a bit crowded in there.”

It was true. We had to squeeze ourselves round a little table, Martha, Rachel, and I on a padded seat against the window with Jake opposite. Next to each of our places was a
Hayseed
baseball cap in a plastic bag. Jake had his back to us, talking to Roxy, and in a rare moment of family unity, we caught each other’s eye. Surely he wasn’t expecting us to wear them, like putting on the paper hats out of Christmas crackers?

Roxy was reciting what was on the menu: “Roast pork and veg, vegetarian chili, ham salad, and then Black Forest gâteau or strawberry cheesecake.”

“I’ll have a cup of strong, black coffee,” Martha said. Rachel didn’t want any food either. Jake looked disappointed, so I said I’d have the pork.

“Rox,” Jake said, “There’s some wine in the fridge. And I don’t want those plastic things. Find some proper glasses. I’ll have a Diet Coke as well.”

Roxy looked at her watch. “I said I’d give Paul a hand with the call sheets.”

“Then you better be quick getting our lunch.” Jake turned back to us. “They don’t call me the Mr. Toppit of this set for nothing.” I could see Roxy raising her eyes heavenwards.

Another place was laid next to Jake’s. I hadn’t thought about it because I presumed Roxy would join us but just as she had turned to leave, Jake said, “And what about Toby?”

“I did tell him, Jake.”

“Well, will you tell him again?”

Roxy might have slammed the door, or it might just have banged shut in the wind.

“Toby Luttrell’s going to have lunch with us. He’s longing to meet you all. Quite a character, is our Toby. I think we’ve created a bit of a star.”

Roxy brought the food in, then Jake made her go back because she had brought Coke when he had asked for Diet Coke. There was no sign of Toby. In the meantime, after a second bottle of wine had been opened, Rachel had put on her
Hayseed
baseball cap and Jake was trying to tell us how well the shoot was going, how the rushes were fantastic, how happy everyone was even though the weather had been terrible and they were running several days behind schedule. Martha was on a different tack. She had brought Jake a present, a little book about a famous crusader castle called Krak des Chevaliers and was telling us a story about it. In some detail she described how the castle, the most perfectly fortified construction of the medieval age, had been brought down not by a battle but by a trick in which some enemy sultan had forged a letter from a crusader commander ordering the person in charge to surrender.

Jake was beginning to look a bit desperate, even more so when Rachel, not under the same obligation to be polite as he
was, began talking over Martha to ask about Mr. Toppit. Although the six half-hour episodes they were shooting mainly covered the first two books, with a bit of stuff from the third, the time would come, if they did a second series, when they would have to face up to the contentious appearance of Mr. Toppit at the end. The audience would have to see someone who was never seen.

“You can’t just use some actor,” Rachel said. “I mean,
obviously
you can’t show his face.”

“The sultan was called Baibars. He was a Mameluke,” Martha said.

“Claude and I had an idea—”

“The Mamelukes were slaves originally, descended from freed Turkish slaves. That’s social mobility.”

“You’ve seen
Ben-Hur
? Claude and I thought there was something rather clever in that. There’s this whole bit about Ben-Hur converting to Christianity because he sees Jesus on the way to the cross …”

“It’s a mesmerizing place, Jake, it really is. Extraordinary. The light,” Martha said.

“…  but you never
actually
see Jesus’s face. He’s wearing a kind of cowl, a hood thing, so his face is always in shadow. The only bit of him you see is his feet because Charlton Heston falls to the ground and slobbers over them. You just see a pool of darkness where his face is.”

“I’m staggered you haven’t been there,” Martha said. “Staggered. Didn’t you have field trips? How do they teach things at university these days?”

“I didn’t study it at university. It’s more of a hobby, really,” Jake said.

Martha looked at him in astonishment. “But didn’t you say—”

“Can we talk about your marmalade sultan some other time?” Rachel interrupted aggressively.

“Will you take that ridiculous
hat
off?” Martha hissed at her.

There was a moment of silence, then the door flew open and banged against the wall of the caravan.

I presumed it was Toby Luttrell in the doorway. He had a bag of crisps in one hand, a can of beer in the other, and a
Hayseed
baseball cap, worn the wrong way round, on his head. He raised the beer in a casual greeting to us. “You lot my family?” he said, then lay down on the window seat opposite us and burped.

Jake, who I had thought was nervous around us, was positively fizzing with anxiety now. He leaped to his feet and stood between us and Toby, either to form a conduit or to shield us from him.

The first thing to say about Toby was how extraordinary he looked. In the books Luke’s age was never stated. The first was published when I was seven and the last when I was twelve, but Luke remained more or less the same in Lila’s illustrations. Obviously he was a child but he often behaved with a wisdom that was not precisely that of a child, so I could understand why Jake had gone for someone older to play him. Toby was just sixteen but, like an optical illusion, you could look at him askance and he would suddenly appear much, much younger. He couldn’t have been more than an inch or two over five foot. He had a husky voice but not an adult one, more like that of a kid with a bad throat, and his face was the size of a child’s but with large features, like plants that had outgrown the pots they were in—huge eyes, a snub nose, and full lips. His hair had obviously been dyed for the part and was a strange shade of straw blond under the baseball cap.

“Toby’s been longing to meet you all,” Jake said, rather unconvincingly.

“Anyone got a light?” Toby stuck a cigarette into his mouth.

“Tobeee!”
Jake said, with a nervous laugh. “You’re not meant to be smoking!”

“Mrs. Hayseed is,” he said, with a child’s undeniable logic.

Rachel took Martha’s lighter off the table, went over, and lit Toby’s cigarette. “You must be exhausted,” she said. “Aren’t you in every scene? Are you loving it?”

“I hate the mornings.” He moved his legs so Rachel could sit next to him.

“He uses the driver as an alarm clock,” Jake said, with an attempt at jovial laughter. “Waits until he honks the horn, then gets up. We’ve had a few late starts, haven’t we, young Toby?”

“I love your hair,” Rachel said.

“Do you? They have to keep touching up the roots to keep it like this.”

Rachel had taken off his
Hayseed
baseball cap and was picking through his hair as if she was examining it for nits. “It’s very dry. You should use conditioner.”

There was a moment’s silence, then Jake said, “Is there anything you want to ask, Toby? About the books or the character? It might be useful to have some background. These are the people who know.”

Toby shrugged. “Not really. I just learn the scenes as I go along. Can I have some of that wine?”

Jake looked rather annoyed. “The photographer’s going to be ready for you and Luke soon, Toby. You’ll have to go to Costume and Makeup in a minute.”

“Can I come with you? I’d love to see the costumes,” Rachel said.

“What photographer?” I said.

Rachel turned to Jake. “Is that okay?”

“What photographer?” I said.

“I’m sorry about Toby,” Jake said to Martha, after Toby and Rachel had gone. “He can be a bit offhand sometimes.”

“I like the boy’s spirit,” Martha said unexpectedly, then poured herself more wine.

“What photographer?” I said, for the third time.

Jake turned to me as if he was surprised I was still there. “We thought we’d do some stills,” he said. “You and Toby.”

“Me and Toby doing what?”

“You know, the two Lukes.”

“You’ll have to stand up straight,” Martha said. “You always slouch.”

“I don’t want to, thanks.”

“Look at your round shoulders. Just make sure he stands up straight, Jake.”

“Toby in costume with you. The press people thought it would be fun. We’re getting great publicity already. We had a crew from America last week from Laurie Clow’s show shooting loads of stuff.”

“And brush your hair.”

“I don’t want to,” I said.

“It won’t take long,” Jake said. “Anyway, Toby’s got to be back on set in half an hour. We’re running late today. The rain—God, this weather!”

“I’d rather not,” I said.

“We’ve got it all set up,” Jake said, sounding astonished. “He’s coming specially, the photographer. He does stuff for
Vogue.”

There was another silence, and although I had turned away, I could sense something passing between Jake and Martha.

“I’ve just got to talk to someone,” he said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

Martha picked up her cigarettes and lit one. She looked out of the little window. It was still raining.

“I’m not going to. I don’t want to,” I said. “Rachel can do it.”

Martha brushed the hair away from my eyes. “You’re really a nice-looking boy,” she said. “You should stop biting your nails, baby. No girl’s going to let you touch her with hands like that. Can you believe that Jake’s never been to the Krak des Chevaliers? It’s absurd. He’s not interested at all. What kind of scholar can he be?”

“He’s a producer. He never said he was a scholar.”

“Even as a producer you need some kind of intellectual rigor. Someone was saying what a nice boy you were. Who was it? Nice and kind and thoughtful. Decent, but …”

“But what?”

She gazed up at the ceiling as if the word she was looking for might be found there. “But ordinary,” she said.

I turned away.

“You need to work hard to be special, baby,” she said. “Everyone does. Special is hard. What are your passions? You spend the holidays moving from one sofa to another.”

I was concentrating as hard as I could on a patch of damp above the window. “Who said?”

She sighed wearily. “Oh, baby, what does it matter? People are only trying to be helpful.”

“I don’t need help.”

“We all need help.”

The damp patch had looked first like a map of Britain, but now it had become hazy and seemed more the shape of that
statue of a naked man with his head resting on his fist, thinking. I was keeping my head still—held back and still—so that the tears in my eyes wouldn’t spill over.

“You’re luckier than most,” Martha said. “Your father gave you something, a kind of gift. These little books make people at least
think
you’re special.”

I didn’t want to engage with this but I couldn’t help blurting out—more like a cry than I had intended, “I don’t want to be special that way!”

“Use what you’ve been given, baby,” Martha said. “You don’t know how many chances you’re going to get.”

How many people does it take to do a photograph? There was the photographer, an assistant, a makeup person, a costume person, someone who called themselves a stylist, Jake, and, of course, Rachel, who by the time I arrived, was fussing round Toby and seemed to have taken control of the whole thing.

“Don’t you want his hair to be more tousled, more sort of
wild
? If you just—”

“He’s fine,” the makeup girl said curtly, and guided Rachel away from Toby.

“This is going to be wonderful,” Jake said clapping his hands.

I thought it would be grotesque. Nobody was fussing over my hair and makeup. It seemed I was only there to add an extra color or two to Toby’s dazzling spectrum.

They had set up a backdrop in a kind of forest green, speckled and mottled with muddy brown. Hanging from the top were tendrils of real ivy, like a kind of curtain. I think it was their idea of the Darkwood. While everyone was milling about, Toby was standing in front of the backdrop smoking,
in his Luke costume, and I stood next to him, self-conscious and awkward. I don’t know why—he was the one who looked like an idiot.