The Wrong Kind of Money by Birmingham Stephen;

Author:Birmingham, Stephen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media

12

Brief Encounters

“Thank you for showing me your script, Noah!” she says.

She is sipping coffee from their breakfast tray.

“A travelogue,” she says. “Yes, I see what you mean. I like that idea. Now, go back to that third or fourth shot, the one of the ferry dock in the little Scottish village. Try starting with that one. That’s how you’d enter the village, right? If you were just stepping off the ferry …”

“Right,” he says, finding the slide she wants and placing it at the head of the conveyor of transparencies. “This one?” he says as the image appears on the screen: the ferry dock, the little village, the houses of the picturesque town rising from the grassy banks of the loch.

“That’s it.” She sits, in her stocking feet, her legs tucked beneath her, on the sofa beside him, while he, in his shirtsleeves, operates the carousel. She begins to talk, in a low, calm voice that is also rich with excitement, and he immediately sees that she is writing his presentation for him: “For me it all began in the tiny Scottish village of Ballachulish, population three hundred and sixteen, not far from the entrance to the Firth of Lorne. It was in the early summer of 1992, and the air was crisp and fresh and new. What was I doing in this little town, so small and remote that it doesn’t appear on most maps, a town that reminded me of Brigadoon, that magical town that reappears only every hundred years, and only for a day? It was because I’d heard that here lived a man named Angus Kelso, who distilled a single-malt whiskey that was like no other in the world.…”

“Hey, this is great!” he says eagerly. “One of us should be writing this down!” He rises and begins pacing the floor.

“Don’t worry, I’ll remember it. I’m a quick study when it comes to lines. But I’m thinking, Noah—what about a little music? Not all through the show, of course, but just right here, at the beginning? A tape playing, very softly, one of the songs from Brigadoon. And then maybe, at the very end, a reprise of the same song? What do you think of that?”

“I think that would be—just great!”

“A tape shouldn’t be hard to find. I’ll pick one up today. Now let’s cut straight to that close shot of Mr. Kelso.”

He rearranges the slides again, and the image of the redheaded, smiling Scotsman appears on the screen, and she continues her narration: “Meet Mr. Angus Kelso. What would you guess his age to be? Forty? Forty-five? Mr. Kelso is actually sixty-nine, and the secret of his eternal youth may just be his whiskey, which he tells me he pours on his breakfast pancakes every morning. Pause for a laugh. He also assures me that his whiskey cures barrenness in women and impotence in men. Pause for laughter. Incidentally, his whiskey also cures the common cold. Oh, and I almost forgot—it also cures cancer. I hope

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