Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite! Read online

  Being For

  The Benefit

  of Mr Kite!

  a novel

  Douglas Lindsay

  Published by Blasted Heath, 2014

  copyright © 2014 Douglas Lindsay

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission of the author.

  Douglas Lindsay has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cover design by JT Lindroos

  Visit Douglas Lindsay at:

  www.blastedheath.com

  ISBN: 978-1-908688-70-5

  Version 2-1-3

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About This Book

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  Also by Douglas Lindsay

  About Blasted Heath

  About This Book

  A flight bound for Los Angeles crashes somewhere in the USA, killing everyone on board. Everyone, that is, except one man. As the plane goes down, James Kite inexplicably finds himself transported to a beach in the north of Scotland.

  Grilled by American agents intent on establishing some connection between him and the downed plane, Kite finds himself incarcerated in a building where the notions of time and space are lost; yet, as the interrogation becomes ever stranger, he begins to realise that their interest in him goes far beyond, and much further back than the plane crash.

  A surreal story that rips along with the page-turning pace of the very best thrillers, Lindsay's twelfth novel sees his writing take off in an extraordinary new direction, as Kite is thrown into a bizarre, Kafkaesque narrative. From Dubai to Glasgow, from Warsaw to Seattle, Kite inhabits a world haunted by the mysterious Jigsaw Man, a world of coffee and the Beatles, of love and obsession, and a world where only certain people can see the red door...

  Part One

  1

  I was not long in from work, helping Baggins with maths homework. Year 7 algebra. Simplify 8(x + 9) – 3x = 8x + 45. I wasn't great at maths at school, and didn't need to go much beyond basic arithmetic at work, so I was just about hanging onto the ability to be able to help at homework time.

  The phone rang. I was drinking a glass of Pinot Grigio, even though I told myself every night that I oughtn't to start drinking before dinner. Baggins and I were sharing a bowl of Pringles.

  Brin stuck her head round the door.

  'It's for you.'

  'I'm doing this,' I said.

  I looked at Baggins and she nodded. Some things are more important than phone calls.

  'It's your agent,' said Brin. She gave me a look and went back into the kitchen.

  It'd been so long since I'd talked to my agent, it had been so long since the fact of me even having an agent had been discussed at the dinner table, that Baggins seemed surprised.

  'You have an agent?'

  I nodded.

  'What kind?'

  'Film scripts.'

  She put a Pringle in her mouth and then, contrary to all previous instructions, talked while she crunched.

  'I thought you made coffee.'

  'This is something else.'

  'Why are you always talking about coffee, then? It's really boring.'

  'Get the phone!' came the shout from the kitchen.

  I shrugged at Baggins, walked into the hall and lifted the receiver.

  'Kate,' I said.

  'How are you?'

  'I'm all right.'

  There was a pause. There was probably some other social nicety that belonged in the pause, but neither Kate nor I were skilled in the art of polite conversation.

  'Good,' she said eventually. 'Good. Look, there's someone interested in The Jigsaw Man.'

  'Why?' I asked.

  No one had ever been interested in The Jigsaw Man.

  'They love the script.'

  'I didn't realise you were still sending it out.'

  'I'm not,' she said. 'It was just floating around out there. I sent out shitloads back in the day, they can't all have ended up in the bin. Someone must have picked it up. Can you explain it? Of course not. Don't even try.'

  'OK,' I said. There was a further pause that I conventionally would have filled, but I couldn't think of anything else to say.

  'So, he's going to e-mail you. I've given him your address, just thought I'd give you a heads up so you didn't break out into assholes.'

  'OK,' I said again. There really wasn't anything else to say to that.

  'Great. Well let me know how it goes. He wants to meet you.'

  'Not sure I can come up to London,' I said.

  I had genuinely forgotten about The Jigsaw Man. Five years earlier I would... well, I would probably have been breaking out into assholes.

  'Not London, darling,' she said. 'LA.'

  I didn't say anything to that, so she hung up. Agents don't have time to hang around on the phone, unless they're talking to Michael Bay or Peter Jackson.

  I walked back through to the dining room. Baggins was no longer at the table. Inevitably I found her in front of the TV, killing Nazi zombies.

  'Come on,' I said, 'let's finish your homework.'

  'I did it,' she said, without turning.

  'I was gone for about a minute. You still had six questions left.'

  'I'm done,' she said.

  I took the easy route and chose to accept she was telling the truth.

  I turned and walked into the edge of the door.

  'Skills, dad,' said Baggins, without taking her eyes off the TV.

  *

  There were five of us. Used to hang out at the Stand Alone Café, down by the Clyde. Fanque, Jones, Henderson, Two Feet and me. We'd all just turned twenty and still had the innate optimism of youth.

  Two Feet and Fanque had been a thing since way back; I was in love with Jones, Jones was in love with Henderson, and Henderson was gay, although none of us seemed to know that at the time, Henderson included.

  Jones was the first to leave. Finally got the place at RADA she'd been dreaming of. Nearly didn't go when it came to it, but we forced her out the door, me heroically at the front, pushing the hardest, and off she went to London. She was, of course, already playing a part, and there'd never been any doubt about her going. She acted reluctant for our benefit. She kept in serious touch for about a week, then managed another couple of months of intermittent communication. And then life got in the way.

  Fanque sent Two Feet packing when she found out about him and Janine, the waitress at the Stand Alone. That Two Feet and Janine the waitress had done anything together, other than receive a cup of coffee, pay a bill or exchange the most meagre of small talk was some surprise to all of us. He was
twenty, Janine was forty-seven. Neither of them was anything to look at, although Two Feet at least had youth on his side. Janine? Not so much youth. Guess she had experience.

  Fanque never came back. Two Feet came once, and then started suggesting that us three remaining men ought to drink someplace else. Somewhere that served alcohol, he thought. That never really worked out, and shortly afterwards Henderson drifted off. He'd been friends with the women, and now that they were gone there was nothing left for him.

  And that was that for the Stand Alone, except I always liked it and had no intention of not returning. So I'd go there on my own, to read the paper or to people watch. The place was always quiet, even when there were plenty of customers. The coffee was good, the pastries were fresh, and there was a wonderful view of the river.

  Then there was the Jigsaw Man.

  I'd mention the Jigsaw Man to people every now and again, and they'd assume he was one of those petty little Glasgow hitmen you read about in the Daily Record. A money lender, living in a council house in some miserable scheme on the outskirts of the city, who'd once removed a client's ear with a jigsaw for not coughing up the £10 he owed him by the Friday evening.

  That wasn't it.

  Or perhaps he was the Wolf. He was the go-to guy when you needed something put back together, be it a relationship, a strategic plan, or a money laundering deal. The Jigsaw Man, fitting the pieces together, sorting out your life while you stood and watched.

  That wasn't it either.

  The Jigsaw Man used to sit in the corner of the café and do jigsaws. He was the owner and, as such, I guess he was living the dream. He got to sit there all day, taking a table to himself, on which would be laid out an on-going 5,000-piece jigsaw. He was fond of 15th and 16th century art. Sometimes ancient maps. I don't think I once saw him go to the bathroom. He'd sit in the same position, barely ever looking up.

  Sure, he talked to us if we stopped for a chat. Part of his dream must have been to be the town sage. So he'd sit behind his jigsaw dispensing wisdom.

  Maybe he was the Wolf. He'd sort you out, just do it without ever leaving his seat.

  Then one day he left his seat. I went in for coffee one Tuesday morning and he was gone, a jigsaw unfinished on the table.

  'Where's the Jigsaw Man?' I asked Janine.

  She looked round at his table, as if she hadn't realised he wasn't there. It was possible of course that he'd finally nipped to the bathroom after all these years. But there was an emptiness about his chair, and about the entire café, that suggested his absence was more permanent.

  She looked at his chair for a while and then turned her eyes to the river. The Clyde was high, the late morning sun glinting off the top of the water. An empty wine bottle floated past, upright, only the neck visible.

  'He's gone,' she said. 'Travelling. Went to Laos. Didn't say when he'd be back.'

  I nodded. She turned and gave me a strange look. We held each other's gaze for a while.

  'You're the first one to ask,' she said.

  'Who's running the place?' I asked.

  She shrugged.

  'It kind of takes care of itself. Tony and I will just keep it going.'

  Tony was one of the guys who made the coffee. There were a couple of others, but you couldn't tell their coffees apart.

  I looked over at the table with the unfinished jigsaw. Janine followed my gaze, and we stared at it together, bound by melancholy, for a length of time that we both quite lost track of.

  I didn't like to ask.

  'He wouldn't mind,' she said.

  I nodded, but didn't say anything. I didn't go and sit at the table that day, but I did the next. When I was walking to the café, I was nervous in case I'd get there to find someone else sitting in the seat.

  2

  'What does an agent do?' asked Baggins.

  We were eating spaghetti bolognaise. It was a regular fixture on our dinner table, as Baggins only ate pasta and mashed potatoes.

  'You write something, you give it to your agent, and then your agent takes it to a publisher or a filmmaker or a television chap or whoever, and gets them to give you money for it.'

  'Or not,' Brin threw in.

  We'd both been excited when I'd been taken on by the agency in the first place. With time that excitement had been stripped away. I didn't imagine I'd ever get excited about the film script again, and an impending e-mail from someone in LA was proving that.

  'Why don't you send it to these people yourself?' asked Baggins.

  'Ha!' said Brin. 'Exactly.'

  I poured myself a third glass of wine, and Brin her second. The bottle was nearly finished.

  'Writers want agents because agents know who to send things to,' I said. 'They have contacts. And agents are good at talking to people, while writers are miserable, reclusive deadbeats who lurk in the shadows.'

  Brin made some small rueful noise. Just a few months earlier she would have found some joke to make at my expense, but she didn't make jokes anymore.

  'Fortunately, I'm not a writer, I'm just a guy who wrote a script once,' I added.

  'But doesn't that make you a writer?' asked Baggins.

  'No,' I said, 'it doesn't. Just the same as when you make me or your mum a cup of coffee, it doesn't make you a barista.'

  'You said I was a barista,' said Baggins, invoking that thing where your child can remember everything you ever said in order to make you feel bad.

  'I just said that to make you feel better because the coffee was rotten.'

  'Don't be cruel,' said Brin. 'Don't listen to him, you make better coffee than your dad.'

  Baggins gave me her best evil look and tossed her mum a conspiratorial glance.

  'So,' I continued, 'the people who make the films and publish books etc, they like agents because...'

  'Bored now,' said Baggins.

  And so we stopped talking about agents.

  *

  Text of the e-mail from Mr Marion Hightower, Vice-President, Macaw Films:

  Dear Mr Kite,

  I wanted to say that I'm really excited to be writing to you about your early draft movie script, THE JIGSAW MAN.

  We are a small, LA-based production company, and although you are unlikely to have heard of us, we have close working ties with some major movie companies you will have heard of, such as Columbia and Fox.

  We absolutely love your script and we love the Jigsaw Man, and we'd love to option the script from you and move forward into a phase of further development of the project.

  As soon as we have the go-ahead from you on this, we will be showing the script to Creative Artists, the agency for Jason Statham, as we feel Jason would be perfect in this role. We will also be speaking to some directors with whom we've worked in the past.

  We'd love for you to come out to Hollywood at your earliest convenience, naturally at our expense. If you could send a contact number by return e-mail, one of my people will give you a call to make the necessary arrangements.

  I look forward to working together.

  Best

  Marion Hightower

  *

  I was sitting in bed looking at my iPad when I read the e-mail. It was like it was happening to someone else. No, that's too melodramatic. It was like it wasn't real. It read like the e-mail someone would write if they wanted to trick someone into thinking they were about to get a Hollywood film deal. The movie equivalent of an e-mail from Nigeria requesting that you send £500 so they can deposit several million pounds in your bank.

  I handed the iPad to Brin. She read it, and then made that little noise she makes when she thinks you might be looking for her to be impressed and she's keen to let you know she's not.

  'It sounds fake,' I said. It seemed wrong that neither of us should be excited, but that was how it had to be. I was genuinely not excited by it, and Brin was genuinely not excited by anything these days. At least, nothing that was related to me.

  'It's from Hollywood,' she said. 'Of course it's fake. Everyth
ing in Hollywood's fake. They make things up. So even if it is serious, which I highly doubt, it's still done in the style where it looks like they're making something up.'

  I took the iPad back from her and re-read the e-mail.

  'Like the man Marion said,' she continued, 'they're buying your ticket, so if you turn up at the airport and you have a seat on the plane, and you haven't had to pay for it, then I suppose there'll be something in it. Just don't stay too late at all those Hollywood parties.'

  I didn't say anything. Maybe she was right. It seemed absurd that they'd mention the name of an actor straight off – and Jason Statham was not the Jigsaw Man! – but on the other hand, it was exactly the type of thing that you would expect from Hollywood. Chutzpah.

  'Google him,' she said.

  I stared at the iPad and then handed it to her. I didn't want to Google him. She Googled him.

  Marion Hightower had been executive producer on a lot of movies that we'd never heard of before. But at least it appeared that he did exist.

  *

  I was manager at the local Starbucks. Of course, I'd once imagined sitting in the corner, doing a large jigsaw every day, whilst I dispensed wisdom. That had never been going to happen. Not in a chain café. I just ran the place, it wasn't mine.

  I aspired to having my own café one day, but even then, was I going to be able to do what the Jigsaw Man had done? I'd be copying him, that's all. I would be trying to be someone else, and consequently I'd likely feel incredibly self-conscious. When he did that thing I so admired, the Jigsaw Man was himself; I'd be someone else. It wouldn't be so different from putting on a mask and cape and fighting crime in the middle of the night.

  Anyway, even though I had my table picked out, there was never any chance of me setting up a jigsaw at Starbucks.

  Sometimes I did jigsaws at home. I was the Jigsaw Man in my own home. I never seemed to be particularly wise though.

  I must have been distracted that day, even though I was trying not to think about the impending phone call from Marion Hightower. He was due to call me that evening at home. 7:15 my time, 11:15 in the morning in LA. Brin had woken up sceptical.

  'What are you thinking about?' asked Ruby.

  I was working behind the counter in the café that morning as Alex hadn't made it into work and we were short. Always happy to do it. More comfortable serving coffee than looking at a computer screen and making projections and filling in reports.