Reference Begins

Marty seems preoccupied whenever I speak to him lately and sometimes I wonder if he just wants me to give up on the whole 'Terry Badge' thing but doesn't want to tell me straight because we go back so far together. I tried discussing it again this week and did seem to get some response from him. He said that he'd been talking about the idea with one of his screenwriters - Sandy Merkin, in fact - and that he wanted me to speak to Sandy about it, so he set up a lunch for us.

I was excited as I knew that Sandy Merkin was the lead writer behind 'Rubbersnatch', which is one of my favourites. Anyway, I met up with him and Marty at a very fancy restaurant favoured by the meedja in-crowd. Marty had got us the best table, obviously, but didn't seem terribly focused on things at all. He sat there typing messages on his Wifi Dangleberry and didn't even hang around for food, so it was just me and Sandy in the end. I think that Sandy used to be an actor way back in the 60s and 70s but it didn't really work out so he went into screenwriting which turned out to be more lucrative for him. He certainly looks like an ageing-thesp - a bit gaunt with striking features and a distinguished roman nose and an immaculate 'fifties pompadour hair-style. I remember that he held out his hand to shake with the palm facing downwards - like a lady does.

He seemed pretty morose when we arrived and kept fidgeting but perked up when Marty had left as if he could relax and speak more freely. I ordered lobster and Sandy ordered soup. When the waitress asked him what kind of soup he just snapped back "any kind of f-ing soup." She didn't seem fazed by it at all but just muttered back his exact phrase to herself as she jotted it down, though exactly what she could have written, I can't imagine. When our food arrived, Sandy looked furtively around then pulled out a 250ml bottle of Smirnoff Blue Label Vodka and poured the entire contents into his bowl.

We started talking about 'Badge' and Sandy said that he and Marty had discussed it and had come up with some ideas to make it more commercial but that I wasn't going to like it. "You're not gonna like it, kid" is what he said. He kept calling me "kid" even though every time he did it I emphatically corrected him with my name. Anyway, he said that if it was going to be a runner they wanted to make Terry a surgeon who owned a restaurant and was a chef in his spare time. They could get TVChef to endorse it and produce a whole line of tie-in recipes and cook-in sauces. The dark side of this medic-restaurateur character is meant to be that he can't seem to be able to stop himself sauteing up some surgical waste every now and then and serving it in his gaff. I know, it's ridiculous isn't it but they said they know what sells.

Sandy could see that my shoulders had dropped in disappointment as he was telling me this - and he put down his spirit-scented spoon and leaned over the table towards me. "Listen kid," he said, "if you wanna make it in the biz we call show, you gotta get commercial. Forget art, forget self-expression, forget beauty, you gotta pen what sells. Look, you got a pension, huh kid? You wanna see my pension, here's my pension..." and he pulled out a photo from his jacket and threw it on the table. It was an under-exposed Polaroid picture of a hand-gun in a fridge.

I said to him that I'd spoken to the BBC and they'd tried to change Terry into Thomas Bufheiney.

"Rosie Hoal-Riemer was it?" he asked. "Yeah, thought so. Don't listen to her kid, she's behind the times. I know her. Me and Rosie, we used to have a bit of a 'thing' going. I wasn't good enough for her, though. Said I had writer's hands - and she needed 'the arms of an artisan awound her'" and he stared despondently at his hands outstretched in front of his face.

Then he leaned back and started waving his arms expansively, gesturing round the restaurant and talking loudly about how we all lead 'fictional lives', anyway. "First thing in the morning, you wake up and boot up and the universe clicks into view as your brain interprets the barrage of raw sense data into a consistent, cognitive whole, yeah?"

He slurped up a big spoonful of vodka-soup. "That's the first level of stories we tell ourselves, kid. Then, we get up and walk around and interact with the world and make sense of events by coming up ex post facto with a whole bunch of mini-stories from the chaotic cloud of causality which envelops us - little mini-stories that make convenient empirical rules to make us think we can explain why one thing leads to another. We group our experiences together by interpreted meaning - a synchronous, superstitious organisation of our lives regardless of the linking of events in the underlying true reality."

By now people on the other tables were watching Sandy as he waved his spoon in the air and held forth - "and on top of all that, there's the next layer of stories we make up. The memetic emergence of things we just don't talk about and pretend don't happen. The crazy thoughts, the mad rituals, the insane quirks which we all have, which we all do, which we often suspect each other of having but which we all keep secret deep down inside. You see, in the fictional lives we lead, these things don't happen - the bad thoughts, the bizarre perversions, the irrational tics - they don't figure in consensual conversation and we all pretend they don't live in our world. We have a smoother, artificial narrative devoid of prejudicial neurosis - one which is is free from real human manner, one of idealised humans - humans that don't really exist - which we have all conspired to agree is really real - and so we continue our lives of fiction - OUR FICTIONAL LIVES!"

He stopped, checked himself and went quietly back to his soup, muttering softly to me "and that's why you gotta pen what sells, kid. Makes no odds what the stories are. I gotta take a leak. Don't touch my soup." He got up, paused, eyed me suspiciously and then hawked up a big glob of phlegm in his throat and spat in his soup, stirring it in with his spoon.