Tabitha! Tabs! Fi’s gofer, a sweet delicate fawn. But the question in my mind about Tabs is: Has, or has not, Fiona tongue-nabbed Tabs in the ladies’ room in between her PowerPoint casting suggestions for a Ford Fiesta commercial or the Afghanistan war or God-only-knows what other appalling clients? “Hi, Tabs. What do I need to know?”
“Do you have a valid passport?”
“I do. I never know when an overseas gig might come up.” Implicit in this? Raymond Gunt is a man of the world.
“Okay, good. Umm. Like, ummm. Well …” Typical useless young person, language-wise. “Fi has asked me to drop papers off at your place tonight. Our server’s down and you’re not far from where I live. Will you be home at seven o’clock?”
Will I? “Yes. Please do drop by.”
“See you then.”
Fucking hell: my place looked like cat shit in a litter box. The last thing I ever have on my mind is visitors. I began to cull through the worst of it, but I realized a few minutes in that the worst of it was actually a fucking lot of it.
I needed to convert my bachelor’s dump into a fuck hut, and quick. Who among us hasn’t been in this situation?
How to mask the odour of furniture covered in years of rogue jizz blemishes, countless sour-smelling empty wine bottles, a sea of dead remote control batteries and Zantac packaging, a rack of never-used barbells, a Katrina-like swath of take-away food packaging, plus whatever civilization of insects was brave or stupid enough to try to forge a new world within the haphazardly created ecosystem that was my flat?
I lost some of my cleanup speed in the face of all this, but then refocused on why I was doing it: Tabs, the milky-skinned naive little doe who would look at a worldly, not-unstudly fellow like me and say, “Please, sir, I need someone to coach me on how to properly perform, as I have almost no experience and would prefer to learn from someone who can obviously teach me thoroughly and with great attention to detail.”
In the end it was simply easiest to huck it all out the back window onto the landlady’s herb garden. Fucking herbs are indestructible—it’s how they got to be herbs in the first place—nature loves nothing more than throwing a species a challenge. Technically, by nature’s standards, smothering Mrs. Radley’s herb garden was doing it a favour by speeding up evolution. In any event, that bloated pension-sucking hag was away in Penzance at a family funeral. Recent contact with death would likely make her appreciate herbal trauma all the more.
Ding-dong.
Fucking hell, seven already? Christ.
I buzzed the street door, shouting into the speaker, “Tabs, luv, come in.”
As I held the door open, I cast a glance behind me at the main room, which was actually looking okay without most of my defenestrated crap. Those monks might be on to something with minimalism and all that meditating and shit, but fuck monks, I was after pussy. “Fancy a drink, Tabs?” I said as soon as she was in the door.
“Do you have a white wine spritzer, maybe?”
White wine? Does she think I’m some bender who rises every morning in pursuit of winking boy cherry? “I’m out of white wine. Fancy a lager?”
“Lager? Oh, um … sure. I really just need to drop these off and explain one or two things.” She was looking at me funny—she was intrigued by me. I could tell. Hot dang! This might be the night!
Through the mercy of God I was able to find two actual Pilsner glasses that were clean—this could only add to my Jason Bourne–like air of urban cool. “Here you go, Tabs. Skol!” (Toasting: manly.)
“Oh, um … skol!”
Again, she was eyeing me in a way that meant more than her counting my blackheads. We clinked glasses. Soon we shall be one.
“Raymond—”
“Ray.”
“Ray … a bit of info for you. You’ll be flying through Los Angeles and passing through immigration, but that should be no problem. From there, you hop to Honolulu and then some other island in order to get to Kiribati. It’s a long slog—thirty-seven hours, all told.”
“Lovely sunsets there, I bet.”
“Huh? Oh, yes, I suppose so. In any event, I checked and you won’t require any vaccinations or a visa. The other camerapersons who’ve worked there suggested that you bring as many topical antifungals with you as possible.”
“Tabs, hang on a sec, luv. Exactly what show is it I’m working on?”
She gawped at me. “You don’t even know what show you’re working on?”
“It’s American, so it’s bound to be shit. It didn’t occur to me to ask.”
“It’s one of those reality shows where people stuck on a remote island shag each other over the course of a few weeks and then, I don’t know, turn into cannibals at the end when they get desperate for food.” She sipped her lager. “And then the last person standing gets a big bag of money. Here’s some information about the show, as well as your contracts. We’ll need to sign them right now.” Her forearms were twitching … her forearms connected to her shoulders connected to her magnificent rack. She spread out some papers, and I edged closer to her on the sofa to sign them. She smelled so clean, and her perfume was heaven: Fuck Factor Five or whatever overpriced gonk it is they’re pushing at office tarts this season.