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

couldn’t even act like it was an issue: ‘Want me to wank? to fuck? to
pee? Sure no problem, I’ll do it right here in this church hall in Shepherds
Bush, I’ll do it at a festival in Dundee, I’ll do it in front of my Auntie
Janice and go for cannelloni with her afterwards.’ If you didn’t jump to it,
directors wouldn’t use you, you’d get a reputation. And for once it was
actually worse for the boys, you couldn’t go more than three visits to the
theatre these days without seeing some poor actor’s wizened dick. Her friend
Mong from drama school said his mum had seen more of his penis in the last few
years than she had when he was a baby. It was funny really, in the non-acting
world you got a bad reputation from wandering about with your cock out, in the
acting world it was the reverse.
    The
pictures started up again and the nagging green light blinked; the screen was
split into four showing various types of criminal activity, drug smuggling,
piracy, prostitution and people being gunned down on the streets of some
Chinese town.
    She was
on the last page of script now. ‘Whatever you want we can get it for you,
drugs, slaves, ships and a speciality of ours is contract killing to a very
high standard. In many instances the authorities will not know that a murder
has occurred thinking it an accident, or an unexplained disappearance and the
target will never be aware that they have been singled out for extermination.
But be very certain before you hire us — remember, your own life is at risk if
you do not keep up payments.’
    They
went over some things a few more times and then she was finished.
    Beanie
came and let her out of the booth with a gift of fresh cold air. Zoe went back
into the control room to say goodbye to Tom and the Chinese men. This was
always an awkward time for the insecure voice-over artist, an uneasy saying of
goodbyes when they want you gone but you’d like to sniff out what they really
thought of you, but you find yourself out in the street with thoughts of the
engineer hitting the ‘delete’ button and the producer already on the phone to
Caroline Quentin’s agent. ‘Bye, bye, bye’ (she said) to everyone and Zoe was
out in the street, surprised that it was still daylight. She felt like she’d
been filmed underground for a month.
    She
must have walked for quite a while though she couldn’t really remember. She
stopped suddenly in the middle of the pavement, so that a grumpy man walked
into the back of her. Looking around Zoe saw she was on a street near
Broadcasting House, standing outside a minuscule old-fashioned sandwich bar
called the Sandwich Boutique (how Sixties was that?). So tiny was it that for
storage they used the space above the ceiling tiles. The sandwich bar man was right
then coming down a ladder backwards from a square black hole in the roof. She
had a sudden overwhelming impulse to sneak in there while the sandwich bar man
was fussing over his Snickers bars and climb the ladder up to the black square.
It looked so safe up there in the ceiling, suspended above the diced watery ham
egg mayonnaise and minty lamb on ciabatta. But just then she saw her friend
Mook from the RSC over the road so she waved to him and ran across the traffic,
shrieking. They kissed and stood there for ages chatting and then they went and
got a new kind of Brazilian bikini wax together.

 
     
    BARCELONA CHAIRS

 
     
     
     
     
     
    rupert’s haircut (whenever
people referred to him as ‘Rupert’ he’d say, ‘No, no, it’s rupert, no capital,
I’ve got a small r’ — to which more than one person thought ‘You’ve got a small
something’) cost him ninety pounds, which came out at about six pounds fifty a
hair. Still it was worth it, there was something Trevor Scorbie did, even with
such slim pickings, that was just wonderful, the man really did deserve the
term ‘genius’. What remained after each strand had been individually trimmed
with tiny silver scissors, was pale