Rhode Island Blues. Fay Weldon

on Concorde, is in search of an occupation. The Mach meter showed 2.2. More than twice the speed of sound. The metal against which my arm rested became uncomfortably hot. I thought maybe the whole machine would melt. I expressed my worry to the steward. He felt the wall of the plane, and studying his once handsome face, grown soft from the habit of an unfelt politeness, and petulant from the obligation to justify, justify, justify, I thought I saw alarm writ there. As one does.

      

      ‘Oh it does that sometimes,’ he said. ‘If we overheat the pilot will cut back.’ Even as we spoke the Mach meter fell rapidly to 1.5 and the metal cooled almost instantaneously.

      

      ‘There you see,’ he said, triumphantly. The woman beside me snorted and fell asleep. I slept too and dreamed of Aunt Alison, who looked like one of the motherly types you see on packets of cake mixes. She folded me in her arms and said, ‘There, there.’ That was all but when I woke up there were tears on my cheeks.

       9

      The film had been unlocked, that was what had happened, why I had been sent for. A rare event. Young Olivia’s female live-in lover Georgia, slighted by Olivia’s claim that she was no lesbian but the mere victim of child-abuse at the hands of a female teacher, had made an unsuccessful bid to end her life, first e-mailing the news desks with her suicide note: she had been stomach-pumped in time. Georgia’s parents had not helped, joining in the media fray, accusing Olivia, our film’s gentle heroine, of seduction of their daughter, who had been all set to marry a parson. The PR panic was sufficient to infect the studio back in Hollywood. They flew over to sort things out, which only happened in real emergencies. Had they been able, they would have cut off my head and had my brain pickled and turned into some sort of memory bank unit, always accessible, but they couldn’t do that, so they had to pay the price of a Concorde ticket and have my body as well as my brain in the editing suite. They breathed down my neck and shuddered when Harry smoked, which he did more than usual for their benefit. ‘The Studio’ consisted of a sharp young man and a sharper young woman with big hair and a narrow tiny face. She had LA hips, which are wider than those you see skittering about in New York. Californians are built bigger, spreading into available space. Texas is not so far away, in perceptual reality.

      

      The decision finally reached was that I was to recut the love scenes between Leo and Olivia to show an absence of passion rather than a surfeit, as both young people struggled to define their gender identity. This was no great problem for me, since it reflected the actuality of what went on between them on camera. The end was to be changed, which fortunately there was sufficient random footage around to do: a conventional happy ending became one rather less conventional but more convincing. Olivia went off into the sunset with her best friend: Leo with his. The suggestion that the same-sex friends were shortly to be lovers I was able gently and delicately to imply. The film could now be described as brave and edgy, pushing back the frontiers of contemporary experience, it no longer had to be a heart-warming story of young love. It would not please the overseas Islamic markets, but would do fine in the non-Catholic West. ‘The Studio’ were thrilled by their own decision, seeing it as, I quote, ‘seminal to a new generation of gender cinema’. We went into a London pub (their idea) to celebrate and they drank gassy water and managed to score some coke – the supply side in LA had recently run into some trouble, apparently – and got the last flight home.

      

      Nearly everyone was happy about this new turn of events, except by all accounts Krassner, who bit my neck as I did what I was paid to do, and handsomely paid at that. Krassner’s artistic integrity was acknowledged to be under threat, though I had the feeling he would be laughing like the rest of us if he didn’t have a reputation to preserve. The writer was not particularly happy, either, but then writers never are, and Clive our producer, whose film was now going to come in way over budget, was white and exhausted, and in a state of shock, but this is what producers are paid to be.

      

      ‘Please do not bite my neck,’ I said to Krassner. But I had come to almost like the slightly sweaty, anxious, obsessive smell of his breath as he craned alongside me towards the screen, and it mingled with mine. Stray strands of black hair interwove with my red tendrils, which by sheer bulk and energy won any encounter. If I tossed my hair out of my eyes, as I did from time to time, a few strands of his would leave his scalp and end up in mine. There seemed an intimacy between us, the greater because we had failed to spend the night together. Matters were still all promise, no disappointment. My bed had held a companionable waft of Krassner as I snatched a couple of hours’ sleep before getting to the cutting room, and to my surprise I hadn’t minded one bit. He’d left a note saying he had wormed the cat: a homey touch, though he had not shaken out the duvet. But then, neither had I before he got under it.

      

      ‘I’m not biting,’ he said, now. ‘I’m neurotically gnawing.’ It was true, his teeth – all his, and perfectly capped or veneered or implanted or whatever they did with the teeth of the older man nowadays – slipped gently over the surface of my skin, his full lips following. You don’t get anywhere in film by claiming sexual harassment: that’s for people about to get out of the business anyway. You can get a handsome award but you never work again. For some it’s worth it. Not me. And I liked him gnawing me.

      

      We were three hours into editing when Krassner got a personal phone call from LA. His turn to disentangle his hair from mine, leaving a few more of his strands behind. He took the call. ‘Why hello, darling,’ he said. ‘Yuh, the rumours are correct, we’re up shit creek again. I’m stuck here. Why don’t you fly over to me instead of me going over to you?’

      

      I stopped listening: how stupid I had nearly been: I cut off all reaction. Any shoulder in a storm, that was all my shoulder was to Krassner. Someone nudged me and said that’s Holly Fern on the line – I’d heard of her, who hadn’t: she being the new talent on the block, singing and dancing, according to her people, just like a reborn Ginger Rogers – I thought that was pretty stupid because whoever these days had heard of Ginger Rogers – and with a degree in philosophy which publicity also foolishly did to death. It was from a crap college. ‘Against stupidity,’ my mother Angel once said to me, ‘the Gods themselves strive in vain.’

      

      Nobody had hair as good as mine, but hair isn’t everything, and just because I got up ordinarily with mine in the morning, didn’t mean others couldn’t get the same effect out of a hair salon, if they were prepared to spend half a day achieving it. I wiped Krassner out of my mind, moved my shoulder out of his line. Back at the console he dug me in the ribs and said, ‘Whatzamatter with you?’ but I didn’t deign to reply. It doesn’t do to aim too high, the fall’s too hurtful.

       10

      That night I called Felicity. I tried to get her to tell me more about Aunt Alison but she wouldn’t.

      ‘I shouldn’t have brought it up,’ she said. ‘What’s the point?’ She quoted from Tennyson’s The Lotos-Eaters.

      ‘We have had enough of action, and of motion, we, Roll’d to starboard, Roll’d to larboard, when the surge was seething free,

       Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea.’

      No, she hadn’t heard yet from the Golden Bowl but if they wouldn’t have her she would sell up anyway and go round the corner to the nearest residential house. Joy’s brother-in-law Jack had turned up and made an offer on the house and she had had to disappoint Vanessa.

      ‘How much?’ I asked.

      ‘$750,000,’ she said.

      ‘But that’s lower!’ I was shocked.

      ‘It’s