SSC (2001) The Dog Catcher by Alexei Sayle Page A

Enders audition. How was she supposed to remember the
woman’s fucking IVF treatment had failed for the ninth time? She decided to
phone, after all her agent was one of her best friends. She took out her mobile
but there were no ‘steps to heaven’, that’s what she called the little
ascending bars on the display that showed what the signal strength of her phone
was; there was no whisper of a signal here. The pictures had frozen on the
screen with a grinning pirate brandishing his gun. She spoke into the microphone,
‘Erm, hello … erm can I make a quick phone call on your landline, I can’t get
a signal in here on my mobo?’
    Beanie’s
voice came back at her through the cans. ‘No the phones aren’t working.’ She
was sure she’d seen one of the Orientals on the phone a few minutes ago, but
anyway it would have been difficult to talk about the fee in front of them so
she would just have to make the best if it.
    Pictures,
green light. ‘Throughout the reefs and islands in the South China Seas the
pirates are feared for their recklessness, cunning and lack of pity. Take the
practice of phantom ships, you simply order or buy a vessel for US$350,000 and
we seize a ship for you. If you want a crew on board we will keep them for you.
If you don’t, we will simply throw them overboard. Or let us say you have an
enemy, would you like this to happen to them?’ The picture on the screen was of
a large bare room, in the centre was a Chinese man tied to a chair and naked to
the waist. He looked like he was in some kind of abandoned factory. Above his
head there were bare pipes hanging from brackets, dangling chains, large
industrial metal doors and around him rough unpainted brick walls. But you
never knew; for instance, there was a sound studio called Space, off Carnaby
Street, that was done out like a spaceship, the doors to the sound booths were
like airlocks and all the speakers were housed in swoopy blobby cabinets that
looked like they were in the middle of a flashback, and there was this other
very weird studio called ADR round the back of Kings Cross where there was a
stream running half-way up the walls, all the seating was made out of the boots
of cars, Minis converted into couches, and you got upstairs to the recording
suites through a door opening out of a large tree in the corner of the
reception.
    Green
light blinking. ‘This is the famous Chinese actor Tony Cho, he thought himself
a big man, big Kung Fu expert, didn’t think he needed his old friends from
Macau.’
    She
recognised the guy, she’d read about him in the Stage in an article concerning
the dangers of working overseas unprotected by the mighty power of Equity,
though it didn’t look like Peter Postlethwaite and the general council were
going to come swinging through the windows to rescue Tony Cho. Several other
men came into view, wheeling what Zoe recognised from a week on Casualty as
one of those machines they shock heart-attack patients back to life with. But
of course Tony was alive, at that moment. One of the pirates put the paddles on
Tony Cho’s chest and gave him a jolt of electricity. He twisted in pain. Zoe
watched this intently, she hoped one day to play in Death and the Maiden and
you couldn’t pay for research material like this. They waited a bit then gave
the actor another higher shot of electricity. Suddenly he pissed himself, a
fountain of yellow urine.
    Zoe
wondered if she would be able to piss on demand; she’d been naked at the
Almeida and she’d wanked herself at the National but a stream of piss once a
night and twice on Saturdays, well that would be a thing to get a girl noticed.
It wasn’t that she wondered whether she could do the pissing from a physical
point of view, more whether she was mentally prepared for it. She hadn’t minded
the nakedness at the Almeida that much really after a while, but she’d hated
the wanking at the National. Thing was though you couldn’t demur at any of that
stuff, you