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It's maybe not the greatest idea ever, to put James and Michael in charge of the crèche, when filming the third in the series of the latest X-Men movies. Although to be fair, it's less the case that anyone actually put them in charge, as such... More accurate to say, they've gatecrashed proceedings, with Anne-Marie (currently visiting), Jen, Hugh and Nick in tow. And along with them, a bunch of kids' fancy-dress outfits, face-paints, and the camcorder that Nick's grandad filmed eight-hour Southend-on-sea epic holiday films on, manned by James, who keeps trying buttons and levers without knowing exactly what they're designed for. Because apparently there's a superior qualitative aspect to the camcorder experience, that rubes toting their androids will never understand. And it brings out the sniffy artiste making a directorial debut in both Nick and James . You'd think they were making frigging Dog Day Afternoon the way they carry on.
Michael has maybe, possibly, watched too many Baby Made In Chelsea trailers. He's cajoled Anne-Marie into togging Brendan up with a wig (that's somehow turned around backwards and is somewhat dangerously obscuring his vision), and there are cardboard cut-out giant wheels attached to the sides of his tricycle in a truly pathetic attempt at a mini-wheelchair. Baby Prof. X, however, is oblivious to Michael's attempts at direction, or indeed anyone's.
“Who's a bad man, B?” Michael demands, through a loudhailer that might be mistaken for a rolled-up copy of Martha Stewart Living. Not especially surreptitiously, he points vigorously at Jen's nephew Aaron, also visiting the set with his daddy, in a lurid magenta crochet over-blouse that is almost certainly not designed for either toddlers or the male of the species, and a paper hat out of a cracker that bears no frigging resemblance whatsoever to a telepathy-defying helmet.
Baby Prof. X pulls his wig up a bit – rendering his wide blue eyes suddenly visible – joggles his head around, and gets the gist. He gives his hon. Uncle a horrified look, and promptly dives off his bike. Toddling over to Aaron, he gives him an enthusiastic love-huggle and a crumby kiss on the cheek. (Muffins may have been involved in bribing the kids to wear face-paint and interesting head-gear.) Then Michael gets a chubby finger pointed in his direction. “You a bad man,” is the flat announcement, and James sniggers behind the camera.
“Out of the mouths of,” he mutters, “Many a true word...”
Baby Logan – one of the wardrobe girls' kid, and normally keen on pink and ballet, but now resplendent in beige woolly sideburns and straws taped to her knuckles in place of blades – decides to take charge of proceedings, standing up on top of the sandpit baby-table and pointing in all directions at once – since her blades have come unglued and are a bit skew-iff generally. “It's lo-o-o-ove,” s/he announces. “They loooooooove each other really! Doncha!”
Nick, Jen and Hugh are an enthralled and approving audience to this, lots of little cheers and yays going on all over the shop. Nick's doing a little dance and pointing off and on between Michael – wounded at the accusation from small Prof. - and James, scratching his head and wondering if the cap over the lens has probably nixed the last ten minutes of filming.
Aaron/Magneto, though, isn't having any. “I like Mystique best,” he says flatly, and jumps to the floor to begin rolling in the direction of a small girl with blue face paint that started on her face, but has migrated to her hands and clothes, barring a faint turquoise tint. This gets a sad moan all around.
“Many a true word indeed,” Jen mutters. “I never thought he really fancied you, Charlie.”
Anne-Marie nixes an attempt by James to get baby Prof. and baby Mags dancing to Blurred Lines - “Grossly inappropriate, and just gross. You know what alimony comes in at these days, lovey?” And also a suggestion from Hugh that the tricycle Brendan's abandoned is very very nearly, practically a golf-cart. “Health and safety issues, Jackman. Also my child issues. You know what U.S. hospital treatment for GBH comes in at, these days? From a concerned and protective parent, towards a popular and well-beloved musical theatre star?”
The telling off goes on for long enough that most of the adults aren't paying too much attention to the kids now, more enthralled watching Fassy and Hugh get their wrists slapped, by a seven-stone-dripping-wet blonde with a very pointy index finger. And her husband peering out from behind her shoulder, occasionally pausing to interject a 'how very true,' and a tut tut, a 'mai wife and I...' in quavering Queen Mum tones, until Anne-Marie gives him a slap and turns round to give it him, instead, both barrels.
Hugh settles down crouched on a toddler's plastic chair, to enjoy the tables being turned, but is disturbed by Aaron coming up and kicking him in the shin, paper hat falling down the side of his disgruntled face. “Time!” the little one announces, like he's making a point so obvious only a dunderhead would fail to get with the program. “Time!”
“What's he jibbering about?” Nick asks, although most of his attention is devoted to the camcorder he's rescued from James, who was getting some terrific shots of grass and tarmac while enjoying his marital smack-down.
“Oh! Oh God, yeah!” Jackman erupts, because the light has dawned. “We haven't travelled through time yet! Where's Kitty?”
Kitty – also known as Molly, Jackman's youngest, and currently mostly interested in martial arts movies and the revamped Dora the Explorer, is found still in her pushchair, nanny on her phone and conveniently inattentive. She's wearing a black ladies' sweater over her dungarees, that isn't entirely convincingly recreating the gothy industrial army fatigues look of DOFP-Kitty, but is sleeping sufficiently restlessly that Brendan giving it loads on the xylophone is sufficient to wake her. Well worth the nanny beating Hugh round the head with her phone, and yelling about how he's abrogating her contractual in loco parentis oversight and rendering her liable for prosecution.
“Look, we're going to get nowhere without a Kitty to govern and direct the course of the time-travel going on here,” Jackman excuses himself. This, in response to the glares and tuts he's getting from Anne-Marie and Jen, the coddling coos and sympathy Kitty is getting for her outraged wails.
Candy only temporarily assuages and quiets the little tyke's affront and fright: and when she sets off again it's not the only problem the fledgling directors face. “She's either willing to send our heroes back through the space-time continuum or she's not,” Nick points out, peering around the camcorder with an earnest auteur's grimace overlaying his youthful cutieness. “And if she's not, then we need to re-cast, and pronto, right? We need to capture the light: it's qualitatively superior to the post-4pm vibe and if we don't get the right atmosphere then – ”
“I WANNA GO BACK IN TIII-III-IIME!” Brendan/Prof. X wails, at this threat of a promised treat being withheld. “I wanna go back to yesterday and have dim sum for tea again!” He's wailing – and clutching on hard – to James' leg. Then alternates his wailing with biting, which is usually a pretty good guarantee of adult attention. It works this time, at least.
Brendan held at arms' length, James crouches down before Kitty's stroller, where she's red-faced and furious, disregarding Anne-Marie's clucks and Jen's lullabies. “Okay, let's get down to brass tacks, kid,” he says, businesslike. “You're playing hard-ball in this negotiation, your agent's got us by the tender bits, all we want to know is – what's it gonna take? Say you take Mags and Bre- Professor X, here, back in time one year – how much candy is it going to take, for you to be willing to oblige us?” The cock of his head to the side is bright-eyed, beady and unintimidated. Ah, he knows he's dealing with a wily customer. Plain dealings, folks, straight talk! Don't insult the talent with obfuscation and argy-bargy, with all these circumlocutions!
And seeing she's got a big hitter taking her seriously and making a credible offer, Kitty shuts her mouth abruptly and examines him with a narrow regard, tears running now disregarded down her plump cheeks. Her mouth purses. “Candy,” she says thoughtfully.
And James lets go of Brendan - who wanders off to jab Michael in the knee, where he's arguing with Nick about light-quality and Method and who's in with a chance on X-Factor - and slaps his knees. “The lady drives a hard bargain!” he announces to the assembled company, at least a quarter of whom are actually listening at this point.
“It's outrageous!” Michael yells, over from where he's conceded to Nick that the fish-shop girl with the big lungs is going down, all right, 'cause the audience do enjoy a bit of outrage and a fixed fight. “All I got for Frank was a hotdog and all the cornchips I could eat! None of this extravagant excess, no demands for liquorice and green M&Ms! Bloody cheek!”
“Shut up, man,” James says. “If the marketplace says you're worth candy, you get candy. You, you're lucky to get a Gregg's steak pasty. Now, little lady,” he says carefully, clearly easing into a stage of the negotiations that is going to require extreme tact and a little wheeler-dealering, “I hear you. I see your one year of time-travel equates to candy gambit, and I raise the following: five years, little lady. What does five years of time-travel get you? According to this scheme?”
Kitty purses up her mouth, wiggles it back and forth a little bit like she's already chewing at a delectable wodge of Haribo sours, in anticipation. “Five years?” she repeats dubiously, and James nods, solemn as he can be. “That's a lot.”
Michael has wandered up behind James, and stands with hands on hips, whistles. “Tough cookie, this one. She's gonna beat you down like she's Alan Sugar and you're a clueless apprentice, Jamesie.”
“Shut up,” James suggests, not affording him a glance. “Anyone with your taste in TV has nothing to say in the matter. This is about coming to an understanding between two profound and subtle artistes. Yeah, Kitty, it's a lot. But I trust you will be sufficiently impressed, when I tell you that, for five years via Tardis, I am authorised and empowered to offer you... drum roll please...”
Jen has found a Bontempi trumpet from somewhere, and begins tooting on it for want of a drumkit. Jackman grabs a penny whistle out of the toybox, and gives a particularly tuneless blast. It's not exactly an orchestra – it's not the star line-up on America's Got Talent – it's not even the Alan Carr house-band. But James sighs, and says, “A lot of candy. Okay, kid? I'm gonna make you a star and give you a lot of candy.”
“This scheme is looking more dubious by the minute,” Fassy mutters from behind him. “Kid, if you're going to go taking candy off of strange men then there are less strange men you could pick. If he was even capable of manning a steering wheel on a bloody golf course and ….”
“More than a lot.” Kitty is screwing her face up and looking less than impressed. More like a prima donna with piles, truth be told.
“Okay, okay, you're going to bankrupt me here. More than a lot of candy,” James concedes. “But what we're really looking for, little lady, is to go back twenty years.” Jackman whistles, impressed.
Nick gives it some Izzard and wails, “But no-one was alive then!”
Fassy smacks him. “We're going on a journey through time and space...” he intones.
“Huge big lotta candy mister,” Kitty mutters into her hands: then she sticks them over her face, and blows on them like they're lucky dice, and luck might be a lady tonight. She's three years old: it's rather impressively coherent from this little prodigy. And also some hard bargaining. “And Maltesers.”
“Maltesers, huh?” James says, considering. It's not that it's impossible to get British sweeties over here: it just might involve hassling someone's assistant, or trekking out to a deli that stocks unusual delicacies and proper tea. (Might be worth it, at that.)
On the other hand, Hugh has a Brit-candy addiction and the pockets of his Barbour, slung over the wendyhouse, are often a ready source of...
“Hey! You value your manly parts, you lay off my Maltesers, Macavoy!” comes the indignant cry. And Jackman launches himself across the sandpit, to save his sweeties from James' crafty rifling. If he was only tooled up with his blades then he might do some damage or cop him in time. But as it is, the packet is open, in little Kitty's hands and being rifled for delicious pure sugar booty in less time than... well, less time than it takes for Jackman to land in front of her with a piteous and despairing look on his manly and rugged features.
“What, you're going to take them away from her?” Anne-Marie calls over. “Candy from a baby, Hugh, really?”
And Kitty – gobstoppered up to the hilt with about half the packet, as much as she can stuff between her infant chops – eyes him with a grave suspicion, and clutches the half-empty packet into her chest protectively. “Twenty years, my Maltesers!” she announces defensively, and James reaches down a hand to shake on it.
“Little lady, you got yourself a deal,” he vows, as Jackman grizzles like a two-year-old behind him, muttering things about grand larceny and pilfered candy. “You get top quality sweeties, we get a trip through time in the old Tardis, it's a sweet deal and everybody's happy, right? Shut it, Jackman,” he throws in his wake. “I said, everybody's happy.”
But his attention is distracted, and most everyone else's too. The wail that suddenly booms out like an air-raid siren from the kiddy-pit is louder than a fire-alarm and more piercing than a fish-knife through the eye-socket. It's difficult to tell what's going on, as most everybody rushes to the source of the din. A protesting kiddy is a source of endless nuisance and disruption, and should be shut up at the first possible opportunity, by any means necessary short of homicide or gratuitous E-numbers.
Probably short of homicide? Definitely short of tartrazine.
(Everybody barring Jackman, and Mystique. Jackman is sneaking the kids' Haribo, where it's stashed in the Lego tin. And baby Mystique is trying to get a photo of him doing it with someone's phone she's nabbed, presumably for blackmail purposes.) But everyone else – Nick's filming the brou-ha-ha, James is fruitlessly trying to grab the camcorder back off him and take over, no hope there as Nick raises it up out of reach. Anne-Marie and Jen are doing their womanly duty and trying to soothe a bunch of shrieking toddlers, half done up in some semblance of superhero/combat gear.
And in the middle of it, Baby Mags is howling magisterially, like someone with a tuba located down deep in his guts, parping away deep and solemn and true, and holding up his chubby little hand. “Dead! He made me dead!”
“What the hell?” Fassy enquires, leaning in from behind on the outskirts of the assembling throng, bewildered. And James abandons his camcorder-snaffling attempts, and leans into him, grinning. “Charlie bit me,” he says, as if that explains everything, and he points at Brendan. Who is standing about two feet away from Baby Mags, up on the seat of his trike/ad-hoc wheelchair, and doing some pointing and bellowing of his own. “Nice work, son of mine!”
And Mags is indeed sporting some small but visible tiny red puncture wounds, commensurate with tiny toddler teeth, on his sweetly chubby little wrist. He holds them out indignantly, with a quite adequately explanatory cry of, “Teef!” and a reproachful look at Brendan/Prof. X. Who is gazing off into space, dignified and remote and conspicuously oblivious.
Jen leans down, hands on her knees, and has a word. “Honestly, Charles. I know he's been a bit naughty, what with the whole beach palaver and everything. And the genocide. But biting, that is definitely beyond the pale. Biting, Charlie! What does Mummy say about biting?”
And Anne-Marie's just about to step in and remind him of what, exactly, she's had occasion to say about biting on many an occasion and oft, when his Dad has had to schedule in an emergency trip to the ER and a tetanus shot in between takes. That's when a shot echoes out in the air, and everyone's attention gets somewhat distracted from a measly little wild human animal attack. And it's Fassy, struggling to get in on the bitey-bitey action, who's on the scene first at the other side of the kiddy-pit and paddling pool.
“Jackman!” he cries, hands in his hair and honestly appalled, boogly-eyed. “You can't give a BB gun to a toddler!”
And Hugh gives him an unimpressed stare, not a whisker out of place, undisturbed. “Says the man who let McAvoy get behind the wheel of a golf cart,” he observes. “Because nobody would have thought that that was going to wind up in disaster, bloodshed and an international incident. It's you and James who are barred from possessing any type of projectile toy, driving any vehicle or giving alcohol to any other cast member, remember. And for damn good reason, too. Any one of those things would be safer in these kids' hands than with you two let loose. Anyway, she's a natural. Look!”
And it's honestly pretty impressive. Jackman has set up a mini-shooting range using a brit-poppin' target on someone's T-shirt, pinned to the wall of Fassbender's trailer. And 'Mystique' is taking aim again, to fire on the target that's already showing the damage from her previous attempts. It's a little bit terrifying: not in the sense of imminent injury and death threatened to passersby from stray pellets, but rather her unnerving accuracy. Jackman is right, the kid's a natural. “Deadeye Dick, here,” he says proudly. “Anyone interested, I'm laying odds and taking bets, I'll take ya money off ya.”
Really, there are a multiplicity of adults present, quite enough to keep a batch of toddlers in fancy dress under control and well-behaved. That's what you'd think, anyhow. It doesn't appear to work the other way around, though. Not judging by the horde of batty and enthused international film-stars who leap as one body of limbs on Jackman, waving wads of cash and shouting their bets out.
Shocking. Appalling. And also wasted effort. They're all dislodged, swerved around at least forty-five degrees, and abruptly find themselves smacking into walls, floors in motion and banks of blinking electronic lights. The kids get a softer landing: by and large, landing on one or other of the adults, with little fists and feet making satisfying contact with adult kidneys and abdominal cavities.
Something has materialised around them. There's a WOOSHY-WOOSHY-BRRRUM-WOOOOSH noise surrounding them all about, and even a whole lot of yelling and some uninhibited swearing – James, honestly – isn't quite enough to drown it out. It's relatively dark. They're indoors. Why are they suddenly indoors, fuck's sake?
It takes a good five minutes for gravity to re-assert itself, things to calm down and silence to settle. At the end of it, there's a bunch of kids standing around looking quite unfazed, and a bunch of adults curled up into balls, or sitting hunched up on the floor with their knees around their ears.
They're in a... well. A control room, of some sort. Lights and switches everywhere. It's frigging materialized around them, that's what. And a smartly dressed chap in a natty suit, grey-haired and assertive-looking and fierce of eye, is standing in the middle, hands in his pockets and observing them. A young woman is resting her arse on the central banks of lights and switchiness, technical jiggery-pokery. And smirking at the lot of them, like they're something funny.
Fassy is the first to recover, beyond the kids. “We're in a fucking spaceship,” he observes, accent intensifying noticeably as he looks around them. He sounds quite calm – the kind of calm that might descend into screaming and jibbering at any moment, flat-out hysteria.
“Language,” Anne-Marie says, climbing to her feet. She has 'Mystique''s hand in hers: the nearest kid, and the most self-possessed of the lot of them.
“Don't worry, we don't mind a bit of that around here,” this chappie says breezily. He's coming towards them with his hand outstretched for the shaking, while the young lady watching him lounges back like she's seen it all before, maybe one too many times. “Malcolm Tucker, madam, at your service. The Doctor. Or you could call me Twelve. I don't really appreciate being associated with some of the other cunts who've borne the mantle. Some of the extras and Companions, they were acceptable. Buddy of yours, that Sir Ian? Sound lad: in and out of the TARDIS like he's hiding out from invading Orcs.”
And Anne-Marie dives, to protect little baby ears, plant her hands over Mystique's ears. But she's torn: one hand still goes out for the shake, instinctive. It's fruitless, though.
It's not her hand he's shaking. It's Mystique's. Who holds her chubby paw forth in the most regal manner imaginable, giving him a haughty look as she's welcomed. “Madam, we received your call from the depths of the galaxy three wormholes down, and treated it as an emergency on the basis of your extreme telepathic volume. I trust we arrived in time to avert disaster?”
The adults are staggering to their feet, Anne-Marie, Jen, James, Fassy, Nick. And Hugh, who's looking the most ominous, the most gob-smacked, the most ready for a bit of argy-bargy. “This is a spaceship. A spaceship! We're on a fucking spaceship! Why are we on a fucking spaceship!” And he faces up to Tucker, gets in close with a very sharp look from an unimpressed Mystique. “Why have you kidnapped us onto your fucking spaceship, pal? And also, are you seriously telling me it's Mystique who's the telepath? Don't fuck with canon, pal: it'll only get you unending grief.”
It would be more impressive, perhaps, if he was more than five foot eight in his stocking-feet, barely having it over James in the height department.
But Malcolm Tucker draws himself up with the most regal air and leans a millimetre or two forward, too, all hauteur and disdain. He's learned a trick or two from Mystique in the past three minutes. “Kidnapped? Exfuckingcuse you, pal. No gratitude from some people. It works both ways: what if I took Patrick Stewart's attitude? You materialise once on the deck of the Starship Enterprise, he never lets you hear the fucking end of it. Look, buddy. We answered an emergency call, isn't that right, Clara?” And he nods over at his companion.
Who now has her feet up on the main bank of lights, arse in a deckchair that's sprung from nowhere. “Whatever you say, Tucker,” she yawns. “All I know is I'm missing Guy Martin for this rodeo, and his sideburns have it all over that,” she nods at Hugh “pathetic pretender to the facial hair crown. If we don't get back for 2014's new season of the show there's gonna be a ruck.”
And Mystique kicks Jackman in the shins for a bit of attention. “Twenty years,” she advises him. And wanders off, at his gobsmacked hopping outrage, to join Baby Mags and Prof. X in the corner, where they've curled up and settled down for a nap, heads resting on each other's shoulders, sweet as bunnies and scrapping, biting and failures of brotherhood forgotten. They all three curl up together, perfectly bound in brotherhood and amity, and leave the adults to it, as the Tardis begins an ominously big impressive woosh through twenty years of space and time. The last thing little smeary-blue Mystique hears, before sleep takes her, is Anne-Marie accusing a Timelord Malcolm Tucker of flirting with her husband, calling him a slag, and inviting him to step outside. Into a whirling galaxy of bright bright stars, presumably.
“Babies,” she mutters, eyes fluttering shut. “Children.” Baby Mags mutters something in sleepy unconscious accord. Prof. X snorts, starts awake, kisses Baby Mags' cheek, and sleeps again.
Kernezelda Sun 23 Nov 2014 06:19AM UTC
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