The Bunker Diary (11 page)

‘Watch yourself in there,’ he
smirked.

I ignored him and shut the door. When I
turned round, Russell was lowering himself gingerly to the bed. He looked to be in some
pain.

‘Are you all right?’ I
asked.

‘It’s nothing,’ he said,
indicating the chair. ‘Please, sit down.’

I sat.

Russell sipped his coffee and stared at the
grille in the ceiling. ‘Damnable thing,’ he said eventually.

‘What, the camera?’

‘All of it. Everything. This
place … all of you … that poor little girl …’ His voice
trailed off and he shook his head. ‘I saw her parents on television. It’s
all very disturbing.’

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t
feel the need to say anything. I just sat there. It was quiet. The walls hummed. The
time
passed. After a while Russell looked up and cocked his head.

‘That humming sound, is it always
there?’

I nodded.

He listened. He looked at the grille in the
ceiling, then put his hand against the wall.

‘Small generator,’ he said,
almost to himself. ‘Four-cylinder, diesel engine.’ He took his hand away and
looked at me. ‘This is quite an operation.’

‘You think so?’

He looked around, nodding. ‘Most
impressive. It must have taken an awful lot of time and money.’

‘What do you think this place
is?’ I asked him. ‘A basement? Do you think we can get out? What do you
think –?’

‘Whoa,’ he said gently, holding
up a hand.

‘Sorry. You must be tired.’

He smiled. ‘I’m always tired.
I’m old.’ He sipped his coffee. ‘I’ll have a good look round
tomorrow and we’ll see what we’re up against. Perhaps you’d like to
give me the guided tour?’

‘My pleasure.’

We lapsed into silence again.

After a while the silence was broken by a
faint sobbing sound from the room next door. Anja. Her cries were muffled, as if she had
her head buried in a pillow.

Russell cleared his throat. ‘The young
lady …’

‘Anja.’

‘Anja, yes. Is she involved with Mr
Bird?’

‘Involved?’

‘I heard them talking earlier on. The
walls are quite thin. He was in her room.’

‘They spend a lot of time
together.’

He nodded thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps more
than Anja wants.’

‘What do you mean?’

He shrugged. ‘She asked him to leave
her alone. She sounded rather upset.’

‘Probably just frayed nerves,’ I
said. ‘This place can get to you.’

‘I can imagine.’

A strange thing happened then. His good eye
started blinking, slowly and steadily, and then his face stilled and his eye glazed over
and he just sat there staring into space. After a while his head began to sag, as if he
was falling asleep. It just hung there, bowed to his chest. I moved my chair, squeaking
it on the floor, and then I noisily cleared my throat a couple of times. But he
didn’t seem to hear me. I started worrying that he’d passed out or
something. I was just about to get up and give him a nudge on the arm when his head gave
a little jerk and he suddenly straightened up, his eye wide open.

‘Uh?’ he said.
‘What’s … ? What?’

‘Mr Lansing?’

He looked at me. Confusion showed briefly on
his face, and then it suddenly cleared again and he smiled. ‘Linus,’ he
said. ‘Linus Weems.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Charlie Weems’s son.’

I stared at him.

‘I’m right, aren’t
I?’ he said. ‘You’re Charlie Weems’s son?’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Well, Weems is quite an unusual
surname, isn’t it? And I remember reading an article about your father a few years
ago in which he mentioned a teenage son. I also remember reading somewhere that your
father is a huge fan of the
Peanuts
cartoons,
and I seem to
recall that Charlie Brown’s best friend was a character called Linus van
Pelt.’ He smiled at me. ‘I’m not really a great admirer of the
Gribbles, but I’ve always loved cartoons and comic strips, and I think your
father’s earlier work is up there with the very best.’

Some people have the ability to get you
talking. They can get you telling stuff that you wouldn’t normally share with
anyone else. Russell is like that. I don’t know how he does it. He doesn’t
really do anything special, he just sits there, asking the odd question and listening
patiently. There’s a peacefulness about him that brings things out.

He certainly got me talking.

I didn’t mean to start telling him
everything about my dad, but once I’d told him that he was right, that I
am
Charlie Weems’s son, and that Dad’s earlier work
is
really good, and the Gribbles
are
really crap, and that Dad
did
name
me after the character in the
Peanuts
cartoons, I just couldn’t seem to
stop talking.

‘I’ve never forgiven him for
calling me Linus,’ I admitted. ‘It’s such a
stupid
name.’

‘It could have been worse,’
Russell said. ‘He could have called you Snoopy.’

‘Well, yeah, but at least
everyone’s heard of Snoopy. Most of the kids I know don’t have a clue who
Linus van Pelt is. They just think I’ve got a really stupid name.’

Russell smiled sympathetically. ‘Linus
is the one with the security blanket, isn’t he? The little kid who believes in the
Great Pumpkin?’

‘Yeah.’

We talked a bit about Dad’s cartoons
then. They’re actually nothing like the
Peanuts
cartoons. They’re a
lot darker, a lot more unsettling, and they’re not really suitable for young kids.
A lot of people compare them to Gary Larson’s
Far Side
stuff, and I
suppose they’re a bit like that. A bit surreal, a bit bizarre. But if you ask
other cartoonists to describe my dad’s stuff, most of them will compare it to the
work of a man called Bernard Kliban, who very few people have ever heard of …

Which was pretty much my dad’s
situation until the Gribbles took off.

‘Is it true that before the TV series
he never made any money from his cartoons?’ Russell asked.

‘He made a bit,’ I said.
‘But not very much. Most of his money came from the stuff he got published in
magazines, which wasn’t a lot.’

‘What about his books?’

‘Nobody bought them.’

‘So how did you manage?’

‘My mum had a job. She was a lawyer.
That’s how she met Dad in the first place. He was one of her clients.’ I
looked at Russell. ‘Dad got done for drugs, and Mum helped to keep him out of
prison.’

Russell smiled. ‘And then they fell in
love and got married?’

‘Yeah, I suppose so.
Although … well, I was only little when Mum was around so it’s hard to
remember anything very clearly, but I know they used to argue quite a lot, shouting and
screaming at each other like maniacs. Mum was always nagging at Dad to get a proper job.
She’d get really angry sometimes, telling him that she was fed up with him
sponging off her all the time. I don’t know if she meant it or not, but there was
no doubt
that Dad
was
dependent on her for money. That’s
partly why everything got so bad when she died …’

I was nine years old when my mum died.

She got ill, started staying in bed a lot.
Her room smelled bad.

She went into hospital and died.

Dad cried a lot and stayed drunk for days at
a time.

I can’t think about it.

Can’t …

Don’t want to.

‘Dad had to start selling stuff
eventually,’ I told Russell. ‘The car, Mum’s jewellery, whatever there
was. He sold it all. And we still didn’t have any money. It got so bad that he
even began looking for a job, a real job, something that would actually bring in some
money every week.’

‘Did he find one?’

I smiled. ‘All he’s ever done is
draw cartoons. He doesn’t know how to do anything else. He’s totally
unpresentable, he doesn’t like people, he’s rude, he takes drugs, he drinks
too much …’

‘Not the ideal employee
then?’

I laughed. ‘Not really.’

‘So what happened?’

The Gribbles happened, for God’s
sake.

The Gribbles.

You’ve probably never heard of them. I
mean, they’re massive in most parts of the world, especially in the Far East, but
for some reason they’ve never really caught on in the UK. Dad’s
original picture book – called simply
The Gribbles
 – was
published here but it probably only sold about twenty copies. Not that Dad cared. He
never wanted to do the book in the first place. He didn’t even like the Gribbles.
They were just something he’d drawn one day when he was bored, a few sketched
doodles at the bottom of a page. He’d never meant them to be anything. But his
publisher happened to notice the sketches when Dad was showing her something else and
she thought they’d make good characters for a children’s picture book.

‘I don’t
do
children’s picture books,’ Dad told her.

‘I can’t pay you for your other
stuff, Charlie,’ she told him. ‘I’m sorry, but nobody wants
it.’

Dad sighed. ‘So how much can you give
me for the Gribbles?’

Not much, was the answer. But that was
enough for Dad. He went to work on the Gribbles, fleshing out the sketches until he had
his basic character, which in effect was just a big lumpy head with stubby little arms
and legs (a bit like a mutant, and slightly scary, Mr Men character), and then he drew
about half a dozen different versions, gave each of them a different colour, came up
with a few little adventures for them, and that was pretty much it.

The Gribbles.

They look a bit like this:

All I can really remember about the
original book is that the colour of each Gribble was supposed to represent its
personality. So Blue Gribble was sad, Red Gribble was excitable, Black Gribble
was …

I can’t remember what Black Gribble
was. Evil, probably. Or maybe depressed?

I can’t remember.

Anyway, the book came out, no one bought it,
and the Gribbles sank without trace. And then, just at the point when everything seemed
utterly hopeless, Dad’s agent rang to say that a Japanese TV company had bought
the rights to the book and they were making a cartoon series based on the
characters.

And that’s how Dad became rich beyond
his dreams. The TV series was a huge hit in Japan, and within a year or so it had been
sold to almost every country in the world, and the money just started pouring in. And
it’s carried on pouring in ever since. Dad even gets a cut of all the
merchandising – the Gribble dolls, the Gribble lunchboxes, the Gribble pencil cases. He
makes a fortune from that kind of crap.

And, of course, he loved it at first. He
bought all the stuff you’re supposed to buy when you’re rich – the big house
in the country, the beach house in Santa Monica, the villa, the cars, a
boat … vast amounts of drink and drugs … he could buy whatever he
wanted. And he did. But after a while (and after he’d stuffed so much cocaine up
his nose that he was almost permanently up in the clouds) he began to realize (or at
least tell himself) that money alone wasn’t enough, and that what he really
wanted, above all else, was respect. He wanted to be taken seriously. He wanted to be
known as an artist, as someone with something to say. He didn’t want to be
remembered as the man who created the Gribbles.

(An interviewer once asked him if he was proud
of them. ‘
Proud
of the Gribbles?’ Dad snorted. ‘I
despise
the fucking things.’)

And now, the more money the Gribbles make
for him, the more bitter and twisted he becomes. It eats away at him every day. It
drives him crazy. And that’s why he can’t stop chasing around all over the
world, trying to get his ‘projects’ up and running – animated films, graphic
novels, experimental CGI stuff. The kind of stuff that he hopes will give him the
respect he thinks he deserves. And that’s why I’ve had to put up with too
many years of boarding school, too many years of cold grey walls and twisted teachers
and snotty kids with savage minds …

‘It got to the point where I just
couldn’t stand it any more,’ I told Russell. ‘It was driving me mad. I
mean, it probably wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d had a home to go to at
the end of the day, but I didn’t. I had to
live
there. I had to be there
all
the time. Day in, day out, night after night, having to put up with the
same old crap – the stupid jokes about my name, the nasty little comments –’

‘What kind of comments?’ Russell
said. ‘If you don’t mind me asking.’

‘Nothing much really. Just the usual
small-minded shit, you know. The kind of stuff you get when you don’t fit in –
you’re some kind of weirdo, or you must be gay or something …’ I looked
at Russell, suddenly embarrassed. ‘Sorry,’ I said quickly. ‘I
didn’t mean –’

‘It’s perfectly all
right,’ he said, smiling. ‘I know exactly what you mean. Life can be hard
when you don’t fit in.’