Script Extract
London
was ours.
Well not ours exactly, in the sense that we
didn't own it.
Noone really owned London of course,
certainly we didn't.
We owned some things, but no big cities at
all, come to think of it.
Oh, I'm getting sidetracked here and I don't
want to be.
London, you see, was where we all lived and
we, as much as anyone else living there, saw
it as our place. We kept everything that
belonged to us in London; So London, then,
belonged to us.
No, that's not right, is it.
We really belonged to London, if anything.
Oh no, this is becoming like the opening to
Manhattan except with London instead
of New York.
Not that Poppy would know that movie, since
she'd never heard of Woody Allen. To her it
was as if he'd never even existed.
Oh, Hell. I knew this would happen. I knew
I'd get muddled.
It's just that I promised someone I'd start
the story with the sentence 'London was
ours.' It was meant to be firm. Sort of
definite. Really get things going.
I don't particularly like the sentence -
it's wrong, you know. I think I've made that
clear.
But I needed to start somehow. Oh, the last
sentence is 'You took your time to call.'
And I guess the in between stuff is coming
up.
I
guess it all started with a lie I told at
Dolly's party. She's an old work colleague
from a TV show called The Gulag. We'd take
someone from an easy job and force them to
work really bloody hard for a while. Made
good TV. She's done the flat all out in
micro-minimalism where not only is
everything totally white but what storage
spaces and fittings there are are incredibly
tiny. It's like being a giant at the North
Pole.
Dolly is hoping to get it featured in the
new issue of Interiority Complex, the new
taste fascism magazine and she's keen for a
good turnout.
Who's here? Let me do my meerkat.
I can see Bobby, who makes Nicotine Patch
Kids. These are dolls for children whose
parents are trying to give up smoking. The
dolls steadily put on weight and their mood
becomes grouchier the more the kids play
with them. The chip inside is programmed
with phrases like "Not now, dammit!" and "If
you knew what I was going through!"
There was Scarlett, the inventor of Emotion
Detectors, devices you install around your
house that sense your Kirlian aura and if
they see you're a little blue an alarm goes
off and it tells you to cheer up, it might
never happen.
She was talking to Fran, a video games
designer who had just launched Prima
Ballerina 99 onto the Playstation. You
controlled a dancer as she jumped,
pirouetted and curtseyed around the top
opera houses of the world. It was very
boring.
People were showing their various faces,
alternate versions of themselves like
they're the same character played by
different actors. A typical party.
I wanted to find Jim, my sort of best mate.
We don't speak that often these days and
when we do it's guarded talk. See, I'm a
believer in mate tectonics. Most of the time
we're at rest or, at worst, in drift with
people we know. At other times we scrape up
against them causing friendquakes. Jim and I
were experiencing the aftershocks of a
particularly nasty one to do with work. I
won't explain. We all have them.
I don't want to tell him about the programme
I'm developing, Gameshow Alpha, so I spin
him a line about a BBC daytime quiz called
Call My Bluff... If You Dare.
I tell him how we'd have the usual people,
Thora Hird, Stephen Fry, Alan Coren, but
they'd all be armed with a secret weapon
under the desk. These would vary from a
peashooter, say, filled with Amazonian snake
venom, to maybe an AK47 or Gurkha machete.
The opponent would have to guess which of
the three definitions of the strange word
was accurate but take into account his
accusee's skill with the weapon.
He came back and said he was working on a
show called The Love Armoury, a sort of
Blind Date for gun enthusiasts. I knew he
wasn't, but he had to stay even. I smiled a
Ming the Merciless smile as I knew he'd be
telling everyone about CMBIYD, which as I
said, was a lie, but sometimes you have to
use your friends for your own ends. You have
to be cruel to them to be kind to yourself.
I felt bad about lying to Jim and I knew I
would have to make it up to him sometime.
THE NEXT DAY OUR STORYTELLER MEETS A GIRL CALLED POPPY WHO MAKES AN IMMEDIATE IMPACT ON HIM. . .
We
headed for a cafe. Dave had to drop off the
film, so it was just me and Poppy. We spent
the afternoon talking. She was making a
customised Monopoly board starring her
standing in front of all the addresses in
the right colours, holding the right amount
of money. She was going to send it out as a
Christmas present for her friends around the
world to remind them of London and her. It
sounded great.
We talked about so much stuff. My work, my
family. Her family, her work. Her hobbies,
her joys. We venn-diagrammed our lives and
found a massive shared middle.
It's
hard for me to explain now how amazing this
girl was. She smiled at everything. She had
a toyshop mind and eyes that looked like
laughter. A heart big as an open continent
and a smile like a warming morning. And she
had such an fantastic outlook. Her
philosophy was that there was no point in
worrying about things you've got control
over, cos if you've got control over them,
there's no point in worrying. And there's no
point in worrying about things you've got no
control over, because if you've got no
control over them there's no point in
worrying about them.
Meeting her was like visiting a place you've
only read about and finding it's even more
fantastic than you had imagined.
We eventually had to make our moves. She
gave me her number. And I smiled all the way
home.
IT ALL SEEMS TO BE GOING SO WELL. . .
We
had another date at the weekend. I had
wanted to go to watch the Royal Linedancing
Company do Swan Creek, but Poppy was
insistent. She seemed to win her arguments
through a technique of ever increasing
enthusiasm for her cause so that it was
virtually impossible to maintain a contrary
position. It's why they don't let puppies be
barristers. So we went up to Hampstead Heath
to stroll and shop. She bought some formal
trainers with little rubber high heels, I
got a Scalextric set that had obviously
fallen off the back of a lorry - the cars
all had false number plates. We headed up to
the Heath and splashed in all the puddles.
Must have been a Big Dog I said whenever we
went past a particularly large puddle and
this seemed to make her laugh as much as it
did me whenever my Dad used to say it.
God, I loved this girl. There was something
so right about her, about me when I was with
her.
I took a photo of Poppy. I had a camera with
the new watercolour film. Have you seen
them? It takes the photo, and in the
developing process the picture comes out as
if it had been painted with watercolours.
You could get oil, charcoal and pencil films
too. Soon you would be able to buy a
Rembrandt or Turner or Constable chip for
the camera. Then all the photos you would
take would automatically be filtered to look
like they had been painted by whichever old
master you wanted. The Munch chip was a
scream. One of Jim's ideas. A good one too,
I had to admit. Well done.
There's a reason I don't have that photo
anymore, but I still carry that image in my
mind's wallet, as precious as a hundred
pound note.
