This Other Eden (20 page)

‘Where
are we?’ Nathan asked, wishing he was somewhere else.

‘Well
now,’ the old lady replied, ‘we’re hardly likely to be going to the trouble of
bringing you here in darkened cars, blindfolded and all, just to tell you where
you are the minute you arrive, are we?’

There
was a brief silence, then Max asked the question that was actually foremost in
both their minds.

‘What
the hell is that stuff on the table?’

‘Potatoes
and carrots,’ the lady replied.

‘No
way,’ said Max. ‘I’ve seen potatoes and I’ve seen carrots, and they aren’t
anything like that stuff. That stuff looks like dogs’ balls. In fact, it looks
like something you’d cut off a dog’s balls.’

‘I
don’t wish to hear language like that in this house, young man,’ the old lady
said.

The
money.

Max was rather taken
aback. He was so rarely ticked off by anyone that he did not know how to react.
If you are a star and you live in LA, you will literally never be contradicted.

In
movie language, a star is known as ‘the money’. This is because it is very
difficult to get a project financed without a star attached. In any industry,
money is virtually all that matters. Hence in the entertainment industry, stars
are virtually all that matter. Their power and influence are awesome and far
outstrip any talent or ability they might have. This is not to say that stars
have no talent, many are fine actors. It is just that it is not physically
possible to be talented enough to justify the kind of money that really big
stars earn. God simply does not make human beings that good. This is why stars
are not measured by ability, but by what they earn.

‘Hey,
granted, the guy’s screen presence was hewn from a block of solid teak, but
have you any idea how much he
earns?’

The
star is not an actor. He or she is the money. Hollywood is an industry town.
Everyone has a script to be read or a portfolio they want looked at. You do not
get those sort of breaks by badmouthing the money. Hence, no star is ever
contradicted.

Back
in the cottage.

The old lady, however,
(whose name was Ruth) did not have a script she wanted reading, or a portfolio
to be looked at. It was years since Max had met anyone like that.

‘You
don’t walk into a person’s kitchen and start being foul about her veggies,’
Ruth said. ‘What on earth would your mother think?’

Max
considered a moment.

‘My
mother wouldn’t mind,’ he said. ‘She likes foul. In her case, foul is a
life-style choice. She just did a centrespread in
Penthouse,
split
beaver, the lot.’

Now it
was Ruth’s turn to be taken aback. She raised an eyebrow as if to say ‘it takes
all sorts’ and returned to her peeling. The door opened and an old man entered.
He had clearly contracted the same disease as the old lady, for his face too
was baggy and creased. If anything, he seemed to have the plague worse than
her, for there were great sacks under his eyes, red veins all over his nose and
great tufts of pubic hair coming out of his ears. Max was nearly nauseous.

‘This
is my husband, Sean,’ the old lady said, putting the chopped potatoes and
carrots into boiling water. ‘My name’s Ruth. We’re Rosalie’s grandparents.
She’ll be along in a while. Meanwhile, will you have something to eat? It’s
nothing much, stew with dumplings, ‘taters and carrots.’

Both
men hesitated.

‘Those
potatoes?’ Max inquired.

‘These
are what spuds actually look like, you know,’ Ruth said. ‘The knobbly bits and
the eyes, that’s a real potato.’

‘You’re
kidding me,’ said Max.

The
great visual food joke.

But the old lady was
right. Generations ago, before the great visual food joke had been perpetrated
upon the public by supermarket owners, potatoes had eyes and carrots had
hairs.

Unfortunately,
real food is notoriously volatile. Filled as it is with endless bacteria and
trace elements, it is delicate to grow and goes rotten easily. This is a bugger
for accountants trying to use shelf-space cost-effectively. What the food
suppliers needed was to get the public to accept vegetables and meat which were
entirely anaesthetised and uniform. Anaemic, tasteless crap of a constant shape
and size that would be easy to grow and transport and would last a long time.
The joke was that it turned out that the public actually preferred their food
this way because it looked nice. People were attracted to small, hard pale red
tomatoes and small, hard pale yellow potatoes, they looked clean and fresh,
with no horrid bits to have to cut out.

Only
two groups objected: the blind, obviously, and the makers of magazine-style,
public involvement TV programmes. The programme makers’ problem was that they
had, of course, lost their best visual gag. With uniform-shaped vegetables
there were no longer any to be found that were shaped like genitalia. The
vegetable nob gag was a hardy annual which had kept generations of television
viewers amused. People had vied with each other to send in the rudest shaped
carrots and the most suggestive marrows. Sadly, the great visual food joke had
put an end to the laughter.

Revelation
stew.

Max and Nathan could not
believe their tastebuds. The meal was a sensation. Never had they imagined such
carrotyness or potatoeyness. The lamb in the stew tasted as though a thousand
lambs had been blended into a single chop. The onions and herbs created an
orgasmic richness that left their tongues lying at the bottom of their mouths,
exhausted, satiated and saying, ‘That was wonderful, darling’.

‘We
still farm organically here,’ said Sean. ‘You can’t do it entirely properly
—
the water table’s as poisoned for us as for everybody else — and we have to
use artificial sun. But we do all right.’

‘You do
fantastically,’ said Nathan, mopping up the gravy with bread. For a moment he
almost felt happy, then he remembered that Flossie didn’t love him anymore and
reminded himself that he would never feel happy again.

‘And
that’s not all,’ said Ruth, having modestly received Max and Nathan’s
unstinting praise. ‘Look at this!’ and from her apron pocket she produced a
carrot that looked exactly like a big dick with two little bollocks. ‘1 just
couldn’t bear to cut it up until I’d shown it to Sean,’ she said, her eyes damp
with laughter. ‘Isn’t it a scream?’

They
all agreed that it was indeed a scream and, after they had stopped laughing,
Max and Nathan had second helpings. When they had all finished eating, Max felt
so kindly disposed to the two old people that he decided to bring up the
subject of their illness.

‘Listen,
guys,’ he said nervously, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but I’m sure I
could recommend someone who could help. You know with your … faces.’ Ruth
and Sean were clearly not following Max’s gist, so he attempted to explain.
‘You know, all the flaps of skin and the ear hair and … well, there are
doctors who can … Ouch!’

He said
‘ouch’ because Nathan had kicked him under the table. Nathan understood that
there was nothing at all wrong with Ruth and Sean. They were just old.
Although, even to Nathan, who lived in a far less cosmetically adjusted world
than Max, the old couple did look weird. Just about everybody had
something
done
when their faces began to fall. A little tuck, a touch of electrolysis, a hint
of colour, but these two had absolutely left nature to take its course.

‘There’s
lots like us, you know,’ said Sean.

Max
hoped not.

The
meal over, they sat around with a glass of beer and chatted. They could have
talked about anything. Between them they had a world of experience. However,
within thirty seconds Nathan had worked the subject around to him and Flossie.

‘People
say I’m just experiencing classic jealousy, but I don’t agree. You see, Ruth, I
love her, I truly do, I know that now…’

Fortunately
for Nathan, just as Max was about to strangle him, they heard a truck outside.
Dawn had not yet broken but when Ruth crossed nervously to the window she could
make out a familiar shape. Moments later, Rosalie had joined them in the
cottage.

‘Hello
again,’ said Rosalie to Max as she entered, hanging up her beret and gun.

Max did
not know what to say. What he felt like saying was, ‘Hubba! Hubba! Hubba!’,
which was the preferred method by which he and his friends at school had
informed each other that they had met the girl of their dreams. If Rosalie had
spoken to the depths of Max’s soul before, now she was shouting through a loudhailer.
To see her in the wild country (anywhere out of town was wild for Max) with a
beret and a machine-gun, was to see a vision, a vision of strength and
sauciness. Max thought about asking her to marry him, but he recognised that
this might be considered a little presumptuous on only their second meeting.
Anyway, he had only been divorced a few days, and did not wish to appear
flighty. Particularly in front of his future granny-in-law.

‘Hi,’
he said, feeling that he could have done better.

‘Well
now,’ said Rosalie. ‘Who’s your friend?’

‘His
name’s Nathan Hoddy.’

‘I’m a
screenwriter,’ said Nathan, ‘and I thought I didn’t love my wife but then she
left me and it turned out that I did love her after all. Actually, you and I
met at Plastic Tolstoy’s, when you tried to kill him and had to hide in the
rain forest, but you probably don’t remember.’

The
long arm of the law.

Outside, the Garda, as the
Irish police are known, were surrounding the cottage. They were acting on a
request from the FBI who wanted, as Judy had learnt from Maw, to bring Rosalie
back to the United States in order that she might face trial for the DigiMac
hit. Had the FBI not wanted Rosalie the Garda would have happily left her
alone. Europe was full of terrorists. If a police officer really felt like
busting one, they could be picked up in the local pub. There was certainly no
need to schlep all the way across the country to do it. Particularly if it
meant creeping about in the damp grass. ‘For Christ’s sake, will you stop your
complaining,’ the Garda sergeant said to his constables. ‘Some coppers have to
work for a living, you know, and it’s not as if this is going to tax your
powers as police officers.’

The
sergeant was right. It certainly did not look as if it would be a difficult
arrest. The truck that had brought Rosalie had left, as had the limo in which
Max and Nathan had arrived. The cottage was entirely undefended and the
occupants were on their own.

We
are talking about a movie here.

Inside the cottage, Nathan
was making his pitch. Pitching in the only way he knew how, desperately. As if
he was in that terrible land of pale bungalows where ideas went to die.

‘We see
this picture as committed, ideology-wise, it will be
very
committed.
Bimbo pic, this is not.
No way
are we in the business of compromise.
Principle is a big word to us, prim-see-pull, three
very
important
syllables. But we want to be number one. Of course we want to be number one. We
don’t
know any other numbers. We
want to be number one and
you
want
to be number one because nobody remembers the guys who came sec
—‘

‘Excuse
me,’ said Rosalie, who had never been pitched at before and hence was unused to
such copious quantities of bullshit. ‘Would you mind leaving aside the crap at
all?’

‘Of
course not, no way! Let’s leave the crap aside,’ Nathan agreed.

Nathan
always agreed. He was a writer and so during any pitch he simply agreed on
instinct. The only way a writer can get his ideas across is through a process
of aggressive agreement. The process is simple. The writer states his or her
idea and then waits for the executive’s objections. Having heard and considered
them, the writer then fervently agrees with everything the executive has said,
adding that he or she feels a complete fool for not having seen it himself. The
writer then repeats his or her idea as if it were a summation of all the
executive’s points, thanking the executive for making it all so clear.

It
sometimes works, but only if the writer is talking to an executive. Rosalie was
not an executive and she was deeply unimpressed.

‘Will
you let me get this straight?’ she said. ‘You say that your man Plastic Tolstoy
wants to do a movie about Mother Earth, and you want me to let you join my
active service unit so that you can get all the details and the atmosphere down
perfect. Am I right?’ she asked.