Funny Girl(119)

If she were to bet on whose funeral they’d be attending next, then her money would have to go on Bill, but the odds wouldn’t be very good: he looked awful. The long, yellowy-white beard was regrettable, and the walking stick that only just enabled mobility put years on him, but beards and sticks weren’t going to kill him; the drinking and the smoking would do that. Except, of course, that they hadn’t, and he was older than Sophie, and if he dropped dead tomorrow, nobody would talk about a life cut tragically short by his addictions. He’d lived his life. They all had. Any years remaining to them were a gift, if that was the right word. Oh, of course it was the right word. She wished she and her friends could stop speaking like that. She was almost certain that they made those bitter jokes just to disguise their pathetic, doomed hunger to live longer.

‘How much are you going to pay us?’ Bill said.

‘You really want to talk about that now?’ said Max. ‘In front of everyone?’

‘He’s going to pay you a tenner, Bill,’ said Clive. ‘Now what?’

‘Oh, it’ll be more than a tenner,’ said Max, at a volume and with a conviction that suggested fifteen would be closer to the mark.

‘I think Clive’s point was that it’s a buyer’s market,’ said Tony. ‘It doesn’t matter what you pay us. We haven’t got any other work.’

‘Tony, you don’t want to think about shutting up, do you?’ said Bill. ‘You’re costing us money.’

‘I’ll just have a chat to your agent about all that, shall I?’ said Max.

‘You do that,’ said Bill. ‘We’ll lend you a Ouija board.’

‘Ah,’ said Max.

‘I’ve still got an agent,’ said Tony. ‘You can speak to her.’

‘Do you just do this sort of thing at random?’ said Clive. ‘Are you a regular ambusher of old duffers?’

‘No,’ said Max. ‘It was you I wanted.’

‘I’ll bet you say that to all the girls,’ said Sophie.

‘I’m actually a bit obsessive about Barbara (and Jim).’

‘I’ll bet you say that to all the sitcom couples,’ said Clive.

‘It’s true,’ said Max. ‘I can prove it.’

‘In a way that doesn’t involve you providing a synopsis of every single episode?’ said Bill. ‘Because we had a lot of that tonight.’

‘There were sixty-four made, right?’ said Max.

‘And twelve have survived,’ said June.

‘Well, I’ve got twenty-two,’ said Max.

He had their full attention.

‘How?’

‘Oh, you don’t want to know. But they’ve cost me a few quid.’

Bill hit him with his stick, hard. He’d clearly intended to crack him over the head, but Max thrust his arm up just in time and took the blow on his elbow.

‘What the FUCK?’ said Max.

June, it turned out, had done a first-aid course in preparation for a holiday with the grandchildren, and for a moment she was concerned that a bone had been broken. But after Max had walked around the room for a couple of minutes, stretching his arm and swearing, June decided that a hospital visit would not be required.

‘What did you do that for?’ said Max.

‘That’s our money,’ said Bill. ‘Ten episodes are two whole DVDs.’

‘Nobody’s buying DVDs any more.’

‘Repeat fees,’ said Bill. ‘Downloads. All that malarkey. You owe us thousands of pounds.’

‘We’ll do all that when we put the stage show on,’ said Max. ‘If I decide I do want to work with a f*cking lunatic.’

‘Excuse my friend,’ said Tony. ‘He’s been down on his luck.’

‘Thousands of pounds,’ said Bill again.

‘You’d only have pissed it up the wall,’ said Clive.

‘My prerogative,’ said Bill.

Something had just happened, Sophie thought. It didn’t really matter what it was, or that at its root was a pitiable desperation; tomorrow morning she would be able to call Georgia and tell her that Bill had walloped a young man with his walking stick, and Georgia would laugh, and express disbelief. Usually she had to listen to stories – about Georgia’s work, or her useless ex-husband, or the children. If she ever had anything to offer in return, it was something from the library, an illustrative anecdote about Christian in Majorca in 1975, or Chatterton Avenue in 1987, and Georgia had usually heard it many times before. (Georgia would never pretend that the story was fresh. She wasn’t that sort of daughter.) Sophie never had anything new. Already, Max’s play was worth more than the money she could earn from it. She wanted to do it more than she had wanted anything for years, apart from all the obvious, impossible things.