Rough Treatment

Nineteen

It was the key scene of the episode. Having won in excess of a million pounds and taped expensive sticking plaster over his festering marriage, the principal male character is returning from a board meeting of the pizza chain he has set up with part of his new fortune. His fellow directors have turned on him and taken control of everything from his expense-account BMW to his plans to launch a new fruit-and-salami takeaway special. Distressed and close to violence, he arrives home at the mock-gothic paradise in which he has installed his family to find his wife in flagrante delicto in the swimming pool with the newspaper delivery boy. It was a tense and marvelous dramatic moment and Harold couldn’t seem to get it right.

“I’m coming down!” he screamed into his microphone and leaped from his control-room chair.

“Harold’s coming on to the floor,” relayed the floor manager.

“Oh, shit,” came a voice over somebody’s talk-back, resigned.

The actress playing the wife was having the straps at the back of her bikini top retied and a little more body cosmetic applied to tone down the goose-bumps. The husband was pacing the studio floor, trying to retain the mood, remember the awful lines he had been given. The delivery boy, a youthful twenty-year-old with a gold earring and the residue of serious acne, was feeling up one of the makeup girls beneath her shiny blue overall.

“Trouble, Harold?” Mackenzie strolled on to the set with all the natural instincts of a shark sensing blood.

“Nothing that can’t be sorted.”

Mackenzie wasn’t about to be easily convinced. Harold threw an arm around the leading actor’s shoulders and drew him further to one side. “Listen, love, what you’re doing, it’s working beautifully for me, only it’s just the tiniest bit too-what can I say? — internalized.”

The actor looked at him in disbelief.

“You come home, you’ve been shafted, you feel shattered, you’re seeking consolation and what do you find instead? I know all that rage you’re feeling, the shock, absolute desolation; it’s there for me, but I think you’ve got to give us a little more. Outside. Show it.”

“What you mean, Harold, is you want ham, three inches thick.”

“Energy, that’s what I want” Harold gave the actor’s shoulders an encouraging squeeze. “Think what’s happening here. You see her, dripping water from the pool you bought her, the pool she’s been cuckolding you in, and you want to kill her. I don’t just want to see that, I want to feel it, smell it. Okay?”

“Yes, Harold. Understood.”

“Great! Terrific!” Harold spun away and clapped his hands. “Okay,” he called to the floor manager. “Soon as I get back upstairs.”

“Ready to go again, everyone,” cried the floor manager. Today her baseball boots were emerald green with blue numbers over the ankles; her sweatshirt expressed faded support for the Washington Redskins. “Quiet, please! Be still!”

“Right,” said Harold, flinging himself at his chair and turning back the pages of his camera script to the top of the scene. “This is the one!”

“All I’m saying is,” said Robert Deleval with hushed urgency, “if this scene isn’t made to work, the whole thing falls apart.”

Sitting next to the writer in the glass-paneled box behind the control room, the trainee design assistant switched her gum from one side of her mouth to the other and feigned interest.

“Without this,” hissed the writer, “nothing else really makes sense.”

“Nothing?”

“Exactly. It’s central to an understanding of what the piece is about.”

“Well, I suppose I can see it’s …”

“No, it is the script. The core.” Robert Deleval had one knee on the upholstered bench seat, both hands waving in the trainee’s face. “This is where the whole narrative comes together.” He jumped to his feet and carried on waving his arms. “The primary drive of the story, the themes of money and betrayal, all that stuff that’s been swimming around in the subtext, this is where it all comes to the surface. Right there in that confrontation by the pool. Don’t you see?”

She was staring up at him, slowly shaking her head. In about half an hour they should be breaking for lunch.

Deleval punched his fists against his thighs. “On one level, it’s pool as in football pools, on the other, pool as in undercurrent. If fucking Harold can’t make this work …”

“Yes?”

“We’re sunk.”

“Ready?” Harold asked.

Alongside him, Diane Woolf ran her tongue across her lower lip, hands over the buttons of the console; somehow she was managing to look at the colored annotations she had made to her script at the same time as all three camera monitors before her.

“Now or never,” she replied.

“Before we go,” Harold said into his mike.

“Oh, Christ!” whispered the production secretary. “All this fucking foreplay.”

“Remind Laurence of what I told him,” Harold told the floor manager.

“Will do, Harold. All right, everyone, silence on the floor, if you please. I can still hear somebody talking. Quiet, please! Okay. Forty-seven, take five. Action.”

Laurence pushed his way through the door and into the set of his horrendously decorated living room, just as a cry and a loud splashing sound came from beyond the partly opened French windows. The actress playing his wife, hair and body freshly sprayed by makeup, ran into the room, a towel clutched to her micro-bikini.

“Oh my God!” she screamed.

Another splash and her toy-boy lover was right behind her, looking concerned, looking beautiful in an obvious kind of way, looking hungrily for the camera.

“So this is what I splashed out all that money for, is it?” emoted Laurence. “So that you could turn our home into some suburban Sodom and Gomorrah!”

“You’ve got it all wrong,” pleaded his wife. He had, she thought, desperately struggling to improvise a reply. There was nothing about Sodom and Gomorrah in the sodding script!

Upstairs, Harold Roy let out a constricted cry of anguish.

Robert Deleval pounded both hands against the glass.

“Now I can see at last what a petty bourgeoise little Whore of Babylon you’ve always been!” roared Laurence, declaiming in a style that would have taken the RSC back at least a decade.

“Oh, Christ,” moaned Harold, “he’s giving us his Othello.”

“Strumpet!” howled Laurence, flinging out an arm and tearing away the top half of the bewildered actress’s bikini.

“Cut!”

“Shit!”

“Bastard!”

“Bitch!”

Harold’s head slammed forward hard against the end of his microphone; not once, but twice. Diane Woolf closed her eyes; the production secretary held her breath.

Suddenly Mackenzie was there in the control room, face shining. “Fine, Harold. Terrific job. You really did the business this time.”

Harold swiveled his chair, propelled himself to his feet and punched Mackenzie smack in the mouth.

“You know,” said Maria. “Harold and I never do this.”

“Never?”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Never now or not ever?”

“Once, maybe. A long time ago. Even then it was a mistake.”

“How come?”

“He was out of his head and lost his footing. Fell in.”

Grabianski laughed. He had, Maria thought and not for the first time, a wonderful laugh. Loud and open, like a man who isn’t afraid to let go. So different to Harold in this as in all other things. Whatever her Harold was about, it wasn’t letting go. A shelf or more in the medicine cabinet stacked with laxatives, and still he was as constipated as a church mouse.

“Poor fool doesn’t know what he’s missing,” said Grabianski, scooping almond-scented lather into his hands and sliding them between Maria’s arms and over her breasts.

“I know.” Maria leaned back against him, twisting her neck until she could kiss him. Grabianski’s legs were wrapped around her, knees above her knees, calves resting inside her own. Oh God, tongue in his mouth, she could feel him stiffening again against her buttocks. His age, how did he do it?

“Maria,” he said gently.

“I know.”

“Harold-is he going to say what we want him to say?”

She pulled her head clear until they were both facing the taps. “What else?”

“I don’t know.”

“What then?”

“Sometimes, when they’re pushed into a corner, men’ll do strange things.”

“Harold?” Maria scoffed, laughing.

Grabianski loved the way her hair clung dark to the nape of her neck; he loved having his arms, his legs, full of this woman.

“When’s he meeting this dealer?”

“I told you, I don’t know. For sure. Tonight, some time. After the studio. It must be.” She leaned forward just far enough to allow her hand to slip back between them. “Don’t worry. You’re not worried about it, are you?”

“No,” Grabianski shook his head. Honestly, there was no reason for him to worry, little enough.

“You think the water’s starting to get cold?” Maria asked.

“A little.”

“Maybe we should move back to the bed?”

“In a few minutes,” said Grabianski. “In a while. Relax.”

Mackenzie had still been stemming the blood from his split lip when Harold Roy drove his Citroën out of the car park at a speed that made the wheels spin. The production secretary was gently applying a plaster to the cut as Harold overtook a brewery lorry and then swung in front of it and almost immediately skidded left into his own road. “Listen,” Mackenzie said into the telephone, “that solicitor we use, give me his name and number.” The Citroën came to a halt half on the gravel, half on the grass.

“What was that?” asked Grabianski.

Maria, facing him now, straddled above him, head thrown back, failed to reply.

It was only with the slam of the front door that Grabianski was certain.

“Maria! Up!”

“Yes!” yelled Maria. “Oh, yes!”

A voice rose like a muffled echo from below and then there were footsteps hurrying up the stairs.

“Maria?”

Grabianski seized hold of her arms and held her as he levered himself backwards, leaving her to splash through the lukewarm water as he pushed himself to his feet and swung one leg over her astonished head, jumping from the bath as fast as he was able.

“Who …?” gasped Harold, clinging to the handle of the bathroom door. “Who the fuck are you?”

He was staring at a naked man, a few sad bubbles of foam hanging desolately from his erection. Behind him his wife was trying to submerge herself below the level of the water.

Harold wasn’t tempted to have any truck with Sodom or Gomorrah, never mind Babylon. “Go to it, you bitch!” he encouraged. “Drown your fucking self!”

“Harold Roy,” said Grabianski, extending a soapy hand. “Jerry Grabianski. Let’s go outside,” he said, grabbing at a towel. “We’ve got a lot to talk about.”