HE WAS QUITE good. Really. At least he reckoned he was. Just a couple of pints, and two sandwiches to do the blotting-paper job. And it was only a few minutes after two – well, two-fifteen – when they got back to the studio.
But Lisa Wilson’s face was unamused. It wore the kind of unamused look that, from primeval times, wives have perfected to greet husbands coming home later than they promised. Charles reflected that Mark Lear had maybe not landed so perfectly on his feet, after all. The attractions of a younger woman were presumably avid sex and blind adoration, not the cross-armed resentment of an aggrieved spouse.
‘OK, straight through to studio,’ Lisa said brusquely. ‘We’re behind schedule.’
‘Yes, just nip for a pee,’ said Charles. He wasn’t sure this was a good idea. A pee so soon after two pints of bitter could frequently be the precursor to a busy sequence of pees. Still, he did feel the need.
When he came back, Lisa was bringing Mark up to date on the phone calls she had made during the lunch break. ‘I think you should follow up on it.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Mark breezily.
‘No, soon. I’ve found out that the market’s there. I thought we’d agreed that you would do the follow-up on those kind of openings.’
‘Yes, sure, sure.’
She lifted the cordless phone off its base and held it out to him, along with a business card. ‘There’s the number.’
‘Yeah, I’m not going to do it right now.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s only half-past two. Everyone knows publishers don’t get back from lunch till three.’
‘You could leave a message.’
‘Not on a Friday afternoon. They all go home early on a Friday. POETS. Piss Off Early – Tomorrow’s Saturday.’ He sniggered at the recollected BBC joke.
Lisa didn’t share his amusement. ‘I think you’ve got an outdated concept of how publishers work these days, Mark. It’s a hard-nosed, accountable business, like everything else.’ She waved the cordless phone in front of him. ‘Come on, are you going to do it?’
‘No,’ he snapped. ‘Will you kindly allow me to be the judge of how I conduct my own business!’
‘Our business,’ said Lisa. But she didn’t press further. She put the phone back on its base, and they both seemed aware of Charles for the first time. Lisa answered the unintended interrogation in his expression. ‘Possibility of more work,’ she explained. ‘A lot of publishers going multimedia. CD-ROMs.’
‘Ah,’ said Charles, to whom these expressions were vaguely familiar, but not subjects of which he had a full understanding.
‘A lot of CD-ROM reference packages need an audio component,’ she elaborated. ‘Pronunciation dictionaries, that kind of thing.’
‘Uh-uh,’ said Charles, sounding as if he knew what she was talking about.
Lisa Wilson looked at her watch with a degree of exasperation. ‘OK, we’d better get on.’
Charles was incarcerated back in the studio, which was quite pleasant at first because the air-conditioning had been on throughout the lunch break. He set off again up the North Face of Madeleine Eglantine’s prose. It was currently the Second World War that was keeping Dark Promises’ perfectly matched lovers apart. Not only that, but the hero was also now at risk from the blandishments of a tempestuous Italian partisan beauty. Since the tempestuous Italian partisan beauty and the heroine seemed interchangeably wet, and the hero’s dullness was unalleviated, Charles Paris still found it difficult to summon up much interest in the proceedings.
But the drink had helped. His body’s individual components felt more as if they were part of some functioning whole, and the pain behind his eyes had lifted. There were a few fluffs arising from his reduced sense of inhibition, but not as many as there had been before lunch.
At least that was how the afternoon’s recording started. After three-quarters of an hour, however, the alcohol was beginning to wear off, the air had grown stale, and Charles felt his energy flagging. The dull headache had returned, his tongue seemed again swollen and ungainly, Madeleine Eglantine’s writing increasingly indigestible. As he stumbled to the end of a page on which there had been some dozen stops and starts, Lisa Wilson threw in the towel. ‘I’ve got to change the reel. Take a coffee break there.’
‘OK,’ said Charles gratefully. ‘And let me have some air, eh?’
‘Sure. Let him out, Mark.’ Lisa, preoccupied with the large reel-to-reel tape recorder, turned her back to the studio.
There was no response and Charles noticed, through the refraction of the double glass, that his friend had gone to sleep. Lisa spotted this at the same moment and, though Charles couldn’t hear the words she actually used to wake Mark up, by a combination of lip-reading and simple deduction he managed to piece them together.
Mark Lear rose to his feet, stretching, and pulled open the double doors. ‘Want to come out?’ He twiddled the key of the door’s dead-bolt, and asked inanely, ‘Or would you rather I incarcerated you in there for good?’
‘No, thanks,’ said Charles, rising from his seat and going through into the relatively fresh air of the cubicle. He too stretched out his arms. ‘Always worst bit of the day, early afternoon. That’s when most of us are at our biorhythmically lowest.’
Lisa flashed a sharp look at Mark. ‘With some people, it’s hard to tell.’
Her partner ignored the gibe. ‘Do you want a coffee, love?’
‘Please.’
‘Did you get a sandwich at lunch?’
‘Wasn’t time,’ Lisa answered shortly, as she reached for the telephone.
‘You’ve got a good business partner there,’ said Charles, when they were through in the sitting area and the kettle had been switched on.
‘Oh, yes,’ Mark agreed casually. ‘I’ve always been lucky with my back-up.’
It was a splendidly dismissive remark, the kind that a BBC producer might often have made about his secretary. Charles wondered whether Mark was genuinely unaware that Lisa was doing all the work within their partnership. But maybe that was just a reflection of another old BBC tradition. There had always been plenty of producers whose offices had been run entirely by their secretaries, and it had been a point of honour that that fact was never acknowledged. Charles wondered idly how the balance of power operated in Mark and Lisa’s personal relationship.
His head was now aching horribly again. His mouth was dry and the dryness permeated his body; parts of his anatomy seemed to grind unlubricated against other parts. Mark saw the hand Charles passed painfully across his brow and said, ‘You need a top-up.’
‘Hm.’
‘Alcohol level. Dropping below critical. Serious malfunction could result.’
The conspiratorial tone and the pseudo-scientific jargon made Mark Lear sound like a naughty schoolboy, and this image was reinforced when he showed Charles the half-bottle of Teacher’s he had hidden in the cistern of the Gents’ lavatory.
Mark took a long swig. ‘Wonderful. Ideal storage place.’ He winked. ‘No ladies come in here, by definition, and the water keeps the whisky perfectly chilled.’ He proffered the bottle to Charles. ‘Go on, this’ll pick you up.’
‘I’m not sure that I should . . .’ Apart from anything else, he was a Bell’s man. He’d never really been that fond of Teacher’s.
‘Go on.’
Charles’s hesitation went the way of most good intentions. And the injection of alcohol did give him a predictable lift. But something about the whole episode felt shabby. Two middle-aged men in the Gents’, hiding from a woman to take illicit sips of booze . . . there wasn’t much dignity in the scenario.
Of course, it put Mark in a worse light than it did him. Mark had actually set up this private cache of whisky to hide his drinking from his partner. Charles would never have done that. He didn’t hide his drinking from anyone. But then, even as he had the thought, he realised that was probably only because he lived on his own. It’s easy enough to be overt when you know there’s no one watching. If he had been cohabiting with someone who monitored his every sip, he wondered how long it would be before he resorted to subterfuge. He had an uneasy recollection of a bit of covert swigging towards the end of the time when he and Frances had lived together.
Mark Lear led the way back to their coffees with a smug, got-away-with-it smile. He produced a packet of Extra-Strong Mints from a pocket, and popped one into his mouth. ‘Hide the evidence, eh?’ He grinned as he offered the packet across.
Charles felt uncomfortable. There was something too calculating in all this, too cunning. He knew he drank too much, but he felt there was a degree of spontaneity about his drinking. Surely his own approach had never been this cold-blooded . . .? He did, nonetheless, take one of the Extra-Strong Mints.
Mark Lear grinned. ‘Should keep us going till the end of the day’s recording. The old “maintenance dose”, eh?’
Charles resented the implication. He didn’t like the way Mark spoke of their two problems as if they were the same. Mark was clearly an alcoholic, who was in chemical need of a ‘maintenance dose’. Whereas Charles, on the other hand . . . But he knew the exaggerated pique at his friend’s words rose from a suspicion that they might be all too applicable to himself.
On his way back to the cubicle, Charles thought he caught a flash of suspicion in Lisa’s face as she looked at her partner and Mark averted his eye. But the moment didn’t last. Lisa had clearly been busy on the phone during their absence.
‘I’ve talked to the publishers.’
‘Oh yes?’ Mark sounded Olympian, detached. He was glad to have staff to sort out the minutiae for him, and glad they kept him up to date with their progress.
‘They’re doing a version of a Thesaurus on CD-ROM and, yes, they are accepting tenders for the audio content.’
‘That’s good,’ said Mark smugly, as if all his careful planning was about to come to fruition.
‘I’ve fixed a meeting for Thursday afternoon. You’ll be free, won’t you?’
‘Not sure,’ Mark replied, with the air of a man in whose diary an empty space was an endangered rarity.
Lisa’s lips pursed. ‘Well, we’d better get on. Find out what new excitements Dark Promises has in store. Through you go, Charles. Afraid I’ll have to switch off the air conditioning again.’
The last session of the recording was the most constructive of the day. Charles Paris was more fluent, he found the rhythms of Madeleine Eglantine’s prose less alien, and a good few pages got safely recorded. Only in the last half-hour, after five-thirty, did his concentration go. Sheer tiredness took over. His voice became croaky, and the fluffs proliferated.
At ten to six, Lisa Wilson gave up the unequal struggle. ‘OK, let’s call that a wrap. Well done, Charles. Last bit was very good.’
‘Thanks.’ He acknowledged the compliment with a tired grin. But inside him was the lurking fear that the recording wouldn’t have been so good without that mid-afternoon injection of alcohol. Had he really reached the stage when he needed a ‘maintenance dose’?
As he went through into the cubicle, he ached all over, but it was a better ache than that brought on by the hangover. This was the tiredness of having achieved something.
‘Only about twenty pages behind where we should be,’ said Lisa, with a hint of approbation in her voice. ‘You picked up the pace quite a bit.’
‘Well done,’ Mark agreed. ‘I’d say that deserves a drink.’
Charles saw the tiny spasm go through Lisa’s face, as she bit back her instinctive response. She had been living with Mark long enough to know that direct confrontation wasn’t the best way of dealing with him.
‘You coming, love?’ her partner asked, a slight tease in his voice, once again daring her to express disapproval.
‘No,’ she replied lightly. ‘Got to do a Sainsbury’s run when I finish in here.’
‘OK. Well, if I’m not home when you get back, we’ll be in the Queen’s Head.’
‘Fine,’ said Lisa Wilson, and only someone who, like Charles Paris, had witnessed her relationship with Mark throughout the day, would have known that what she meant was actually far from ‘fine’.
‘Happy coincidence.’ Charles raised his glass, took a long swig and felt the warm glow of a second large Bell’s irradiate his parched system. ‘I mean, your studio being in Bath and our show opening in Bath.’
‘What is the show? I know you told me, but I can’t remember.’ Mark Lear was also on the whisky, which he was downing as if the world’s supplies were on the verge of exhaustion.
‘Not On Your Wife!’
‘Don’t know it.’
‘Well, you wouldn’t. It’s a new play. By Bill Blunden.’
‘Oh.’ The monosyllable contained all that snobbish resistance the playwright’s work usually inspired in people with university educations. Bill Blunden may have been an audience-pleaser, but he didn’t strike much of a chord among the intelligentsia. When, every now and then, Sunday newspaper reviewers took it into their heads to rehabilitate farce as an acceptable medium of entertainment, they would home in invariably on Feydeau, Pinero or perhaps Ben Travers. Bill Blunden was too ordinary, too mechanical; his plays were mere clockwork toys designed to entrap laughter. He would never attain intellectual respectability; his only comfort would have to remain the huge international royalties which his plays brought in.
‘And you’re touring it, Charles, is that right?’
‘Mm, three months. Fortnight in Bath, then single weeks. Bill Blunden always takes his shows on the road, works on them, does lots of rewrites, sharpens them up.’
‘With a view to the West End?’
‘Ultimately, yes. But some’ll have three or four tours before he’s happy.’
‘So you haven’t got a West End option in your contract?’
‘Nothing so grand, no. They did check my availability for three months hence, but that’s as far as it went.’
‘Oh, right.’ Mark Lear chuckled with sudden recollection. ‘Checked with your agent, eh? I’ve just remembered, when we last worked together, you were with this incredibly inefficient agent . . . what was his name? Maurice Skellern, that’s right. He was a kind of a joke throughout the whole business, the worst agent since records began.’ Mark shook his head and chuckled again. ‘Who represents you now?’
‘Maurice Skellern,’ Charles Paris replied.
‘Oh.’
‘I hope today was all right . . .?’ said Charles tentatively. ‘I mean, the recording.’
‘It was fine.’
‘I felt awful, arriving so hungover and –’
‘Don’t worry, we’ve had many worse through the studio.’
‘I didn’t think the studio had been open that long.’
‘Well, no, not through that studio, but when I was at the Beeb . . .’ A hazy look came into Mark Lear’s eyes. ‘I remember once doing a play with Everard Austick, and he was virtually on an intravenous drip of gin.’ The retired producer let out a little melancholy laugh. ‘Good times we had, back in the old days . . .’
Charles could see what had happened. In Mark Lear’s mind, the BBC, the institution he had spent all the time he worked there berating, had become a golden city in his recollection. Now he wasn’t there, it was perfect. For Mark, perfection would always be somewhere he wasn’t. Charles suspected that the same pattern obtained in his friend’s private life too. While he had been with Vinnie, all his young girls on the side had represented the greener grass of happiness. And now he was with Lisa . . . Charles wondered where Mark’s fantasies hovered now.
‘No, but I hope the recording was all right. Lisa didn’t seem very happy with what I was doing . . .’ Charles ventured.
‘Don’t worry about Lisa. She gets very po-faced about the whole business. What she doesn’t realise is that the creative process should be fun. She’s always clock-watching and budget-watching . . . and number-of-drinks-watching. Do you think, if I’d had that kind of attitude, I’d ever have produced any of the great programmes I did when I was at the Beeb?’
Charles Paris was too polite to ask which ‘great programmes’, as Mark went on, ‘No, creativity is a wild spirit. It’s the untutored, the anarchic, the bohemian. That’s what creates art – danger, risks being taken in the white heat of rehearsal – not a bunch of accountants poring over spreadsheets in offices.’
Charles searched for a safe, uncontroversial reaction, and came up with ‘Hm.’
Mark Lear shook himself out of his ‘misunderstood artist’ mode. ‘Right, same again, is it?’
‘Maybe I should move on to the wine . . .’
‘Time enough for wine. A couple more large Scotches first.’
Well, Charles comforted himself, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t worked hard. He’d earned some kind of reward. No, all things considered, his first day of reading an audio book hadn’t been too bad. And Dark Promises by Madeleine Eglantine was by no means an easy read.
As for the hangover, well . . . that’d probably been mostly nerves. There was a definite pattern to these things. Charles’s hangovers always seemed to be at their worst on days when he had something important to do. Days when he was relaxed, when he wasn’t stressed, he could wake up feeling fine, however much of a skinful he’d had the night before. He never quite knew whether it was the challenge of a difficult day ahead that exacerbated the hangover, or whether his anxiety pushed him to drink more the night before such difficult days. Either way, he knew he was feeling better now.
It wasn’t a bad achievement, actually, fitting in a couple of days’ reading in the middle of the rehearsal schedule for a play. That was the kind of thing stars did. ‘Doing a telly on that free Sunday before we open,’ actors like Bernard Walton would say airily, while the rest of the cast would sit, shrouded in misery, thinking, ‘There’s no justice. The bugger’s already being paid twenty times more than me for this show, and he’s cleaning up with a quick telly as well.’
Charles Paris’s current position wasn’t quite on that financial scale, but it was still rather heart-warming. Mark Lear had specifically asked for him to do the reading of Dark Promises, and had been happy to fit the dates into the brief break in the Not On Your Wife! rehearsals when the show transferred from London to Bath. That was quite a novelty in Charles Paris’s theatrical career – shoehorning bookings into a busy schedule, rather than planting tiny, distantly spaced oases of work into the arid wastes of his diary.
And he put from his mind the thought – no, the knowledge – that Mark had turned to him only because he was familiar, someone who wouldn’t shake the boat, someone who was safe.
The third large Bell’s was as welcome as its predecessors. Must watch it tonight, something in the recesses of Charles’s mind mumbled, just moderate intake tonight – OK? But who was going to listen to a voice like that, when the alcohol tasted so good?
‘Who’s directing this tatty show of yours?’
‘David J. Girton.’
‘David J. Girton? From the Beeb?’
‘Right.’
‘Good Lord. Presumably he’s left the old place?’
‘No longer on staff. Gather he still goes back to work on individual projects on contract.’
Mark Lear let out a harsh laugh. “‘Individual projects on contract”? Oh, that’s what they all say. It’s the equivalent of that movie euphemism, “having a script in development”, or “consulting” in advertising, or “wanting to spend more time with your family” if you’re a politician. Means he’s out on his ear.’
‘No, David did say he was going back to produce another series of one of his long-running sitcoms next month. I think it’s called Neighbourhood Watch.’
‘Oh?’ The news clearly pained Mark. It was all right so long as all his former colleagues were in the same boat, so long as they’d all been unceremoniously dumped, as he had. But he didn’t like the idea that one of them was still reckoned to be of value to his former employer. The thought brought a new viciousness into his tone. ‘He’s a lucky bugger, that David J. Girton.’
‘Oh?’ Charles prompted innocently.
‘Yes, a few years back he was extremely fortunate not to lose his job.’
‘What happened?’
‘Bit of financial fiddling.’
‘But surely that was always common practice in the Beeb? I thought doing your expenses was one of the most purely creative parts of the job.’
‘David’s fiddling was on a rather bigger scale than that.’ In response to Charles’s interrogative expression, Mark was about to say more, but changed his mind. ‘Let’s just say, he was lucky to keep his job.’
‘Ooh, you do know how to tease,’ said Charles in the voice he’d used as the outrageously camp Gorringe in Black Comedy in Ipswich (‘One of the best arguments for heterosexuality I’ve seen in a long time’ – Eastern Daily Press).
‘Who’s in the cast then, apart from you?’
Mark Lear raised an eyebrow at the mention of Bernard Walton. ‘He’s quite a big name. They must have hopes for the West End if he’s involved.’
‘Oh yes, I should think Bernard’s secure, but the rest of the company might change a bit on the way. Bill Blunden’s shows have a reputation for touring with a cheapish cast, which gets more upmarket when the show “goes in”.’
‘So you think you might not stay the course?’
‘I’d like to, obviously, but . . .’
‘Hm.’ Mark Lear nodded his head thoughtfully. ‘Well, of course, Charles, you always have been a cheapish actor . . .’ He seemed unaware that he might have said anything mildly offensive. ‘And if Maurice Skellern’s still your agent . . .’ His grimace completed the sentence more effectively than any words could have done. ‘Bernard Walton, though,’ he went on. ‘Well, you should be all right. He’s definitely bums on seats, isn’t he?’
‘That’s the idea. Though apparently the box office advance isn’t as good as they were hoping for.’
‘Probably pick up by word of mouth.’
‘Maybe. You ever work with Bernard, Mark? I’m sure he did radio back in the early days.’
Mark Lear shook his head. ‘No. I was first aware of him on the telly. That ITV sitcom . . . forget the name . . .
‘What’ll the Neighbours Say?’
‘That’s the one. So who else have you got in the cast?’
Charles continued his run through the dramatis personae of Not On Your Wife! His friend reacted to the mention of Pippa Trewin.
‘Do you know her, Mark? Have you worked with her?’
Mark shook his head in puzzlement.
‘It’s pretty unlikely you would have done, actually. She only finished drama school last year.’
‘Hmm . . . No, I know the name in some connection, can’t remember where.’
Charles pointed to Mark’s whisky glass. ‘That rotting the old brain, is it?’
But his friend didn’t respond to the jocularity in the question. ‘Perhaps it is,’ he replied slowly. ‘Certainly there’s a lot of stuff I don’t remember these days. Not that it matters much. I’m not doing much these days that’s worth remembering.’ With an effort, he shook himself out of this melancholy downward spiral. ‘You have that problem, Charles? The old memory? Can you still remember your lines?’
‘Pretty well.’ It was true. Memorising lines was simply a matter of practice, and Charles hadn’t lost the knack. When that facility went, then it really would be time to cut down on the booze.
Strange, he contemplated, how many of his thoughts these days finished with the phrase, ‘then it really would be time to cut down on the booze’. If he ever actually screwed up a job because he was too drunk or too hungover to do it, then it really would be time to cut down on the booze. If he ever woke up somewhere and genuinely couldn’t remember how he’d got there, then it really would be time to cut down on the booze. If he found he was consistently impotent, then it really would be time to cut down on the booze.
And yet he’d been close to all of those situations. A harsh critic might say he’d been in all of those situations. The prospect of having to cut down on the booze was stalking Charles Paris, a looming, distant shadow on the horizon, but a shadow that was drawing closer all the time.
This sequence of reasoning always prompted the same two thoughts in Charles. First – but if I gave up the booze, it’d ruin my social life; everything I do in my leisure time involves drinking.
Second – could I actually give up the booze if I wanted to?
And, that particular evening, the two recurrent thoughts were joined by a third. What did happen between me and Cookie Stone on Thursday night?
Mark Lear continued asking Charles about the cast of Not On Your Wife! The other name that prompted a reaction from him was Ransome George.
‘Old Ran. He still up to his old tricks?’
‘Which tricks are those?’
‘Borrowing money. Sponging. He always used to be entirely blatant about it.’
‘Oh,’ said Charles.
‘Had a terrible reputation. You’d think everyone in the business must’ve heard about it, but he’d still always manage to find some innocent sucker to bum a fiver off.’ Mark chuckled, shaking his head at the follies of humankind. ‘There’s one born every minute, isn’t there?’
‘Ah,’ said Charles.
Mark Lear was caught by something in his tone and looked up sharply. ‘He hasn’t tried to touch you, has he? You haven’t fallen for the old “left my wallet at home” guff, have you?’
‘Good heavens, no,’ said Charles.
Mark looked thoughtful, then chuckled again. ‘Well, your company seems to have more than its fair share of skeletons in its cupboards.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘David J. Girton . . .’ Mark mused, ‘and Ransome George . . .’
‘What? Do you know something bad about Ran? I mean, apart from the fact that he bums money off people and doesn’t pay it back?’
‘Oh, yes,’ replied Mark, enjoying the power of telling his story at his own pace. ‘Yes, I know something very considerably worse about Ransome George than that. Goes back to the early 1970s, I suppose . . .’
But suddenly the producer’s manner changed. The slyly conspiratorial was replaced by the irresponsibly drunk. Charles followed Mark’s eyeline to see that Lisa Wilson had just entered the bar. She looked stem, a mother come out on to the recreation ground to tell her son it was bedtime – and no arguments.
As if it was some ritual the two of them had been through many times before, Mark played up to the image. He whinged to Lisa like an eight-year-old about what a spoilsport she was, and how she wouldn’t let him have a life of his own, and how he was a grown man, for God’s sake, and at least Vinnie never treated him like – ‘Well, I’ve got to be off, anyway,’ said Charles. He didn’t want to get caught in crossfire of a domestic argument. ‘Haven’t checked in at my digs yet.’
‘OK,’ said Lisa. ‘Ten sharp in the morning, for more Dark Promises.’
‘Sure,’ said Charles. ‘I’ll be there. Can’t wait. You never know – tomorrow may be the day that either the heroine or the hero shows a spark of character . . .’
And he left Lisa Wilson to gather up her recalcitrant charge. Somehow, Charles reckoned that the minute he’d left, Mark Lear would turn all docile and follow her obediently home. But he also reckoned, once Mark had got home, that he would continue drinking.
Charles Paris’s accommodation had been sorted out from London. The stage door of the Vanbrugh Theatre, Bath, kept a digs list, and he’d easily found a suitable landlady who had a vacancy for a couple of extra nights before most of the not on your wife! company arrived.
She was a pale, anonymous woman – Charles Paris never seemed to end up with the larger-than-life, characterful landladies who people theatrical legend. The one in Bath was possessed of either a permanent sniff of disapproval, a bloodhound’s nose for alcohol, or a bad cold. She showed him the room, which was fine, offered him an evening meal, which he declined, and directed him towards a late-opening supermarket, where he bought a chicken pie and, it has to be admitted, another half-bottle of Bell’s.
By his standards, he didn’t reckon he’d had that much, but the effects of alcohol are cumulative and, as he slipped, later than intended, into a drunken sleep, Charles Paris knew he’d have another hangover with which to face his second day of reading Dark Promises by Madeleine Eglantine.
His last thought, before he surrendered consciousness, was once again – What did happen between me and Cookie Stone?