Work Text:
It was possible, James thought, to pinpoint the start of the decline fairly exactly. It was of course the moment when Top Gear Dog left them for bigger and better things, her fluffy tail receding into the distance without so much as a backwards glance or a wag for her former colleagues.
They still saw her – increasingly, in fact – her face was on billboards, there was that West End musical she'd written and she'd been good enough to send them tickets to, and now that chat show that was so cruelly – thank you, ITV1 – scheduled opposite them on Sunday nights.
He'd never thought they'd have to start … seeing people. To make ends meet, that sort of thing. Keeping them in petrol. Oh, he'd had his fair share of casting couch misdemeanours – who hadn't? – but this was different. Hammond seemed to have taken to it a little more readily than the others, which was faintly disturbing in a way, and as Jeremy himself had put it, "when it comes to sucking cock to pay the congestion charge it's not the blowjob that bothers me."
James sat pensive in his dressing room. At least they weren't short of custom, although admittedly most of their … dates … seemed to be after Top Gear Dog's phone number more than anything else, and she'd changed that because – well, not to go into too much detail – Jeremy … kept getting catastrophically drunk and calling her and begging her to come back. Basically.
Although he at least managed to find a steady line of Greenpeace members who, for reasons best known to themselves, got off on the idea of being fellated by Jeremy specifically. James supposed it was to do with them being able to yell, "suck my dick, Clarkson!" and actually have it happen.
With any luck, the producers had said, the new Top Gear Pet would give them the ratings boost they so desperately needed. That and Top Gear Dog's chat show being moved to Saturday to catch the prime viewers. She was competing with Graham Norton now, had trampled Ant 'n' Dec into a second-rate Geordie mush. The boys had, of course, been less than enthusiastic about the change.
"You can't replace Top Gear Dog!" James had wailed at the meeting, while a studio runner looked on uncertainly, a cup of coffee in each hand and a coffee stain on the front of her shirt.
"I was just getting used to being the cutest and smallest thing on the show," Richard had muttered, looking a little put out. "Although obviously May was always going to win the fluffiness contest." His following had increased in the dark, Top Gear Dogless days that followed her departure. The little traitor.
"I don't care," Jeremy had said stoutly, somewhat undermined by the number of times he'd called her. "She was a bitch – "
"Technically true but there's no need – " James had interrupted.
" – and it's time we moved on."
"But you can't expect the viewers to accept a cheap imitation of Top Gear Dog," James had pointed out, quite reasonably, he thought.
"Yes they will," Richard had said, gloomily; "they're idiots."
"Are you familiar with the term 'Daddy needs new shoes'?" Jeremy had asked.
"Yes, but – "
"Are you familiar with the phrase, 'shut up'?" Jeremy had contrived to loom at this point, and the newer runners, who hadn't yet learned to ignore his moods on the grounds that he was a big pussycat really (the producer's words, obviously), leaned away in mute terror. "Shut up, Slow."
It was really too early to tell, James reflected, if Top Gear Squid was a popular addition to the show.
There was a tentative tap on his dressing room door.
"Come in," James called, but no one did. Instead, a piece of paper slid cautiously under the door frame. Even from where he was sitting, hairbrush dangling absently from one hand, James could see that it was covered in the most appallingly awful handwriting imaginable. He could just imagine the content (as with writing like that it was almost certainly Hammond), another dreadful note:
James,
I've got no idea what's bothering you, you look like you've swallowed a really angry chicken. Anyway, Nicky Clarke called & says he wants to violate you with a can of hairspray. You weren't here so I said sure and he's going to be here at five.
Richard.
P.S. Get him to cut your hair. He did a lovely job on mine.
But as he picked it up he realized that the handwriting was too bad even for Hammond's chicken-scratchings. He looked at it carefully. It was splodgy, in brownish ink, and a briny smell arose from the paper. Odd.
The note appeared to be a sort of poem. James would be among the first to admit that he wasn't exactly an expert on poetry (in fact, he would be the only person to say that, given his propensity), but he had the impression that they were meant to have some form of rhythm, and be written in a less imperative voice. The crude and blotchy stick-figure illustration was however quite informative. James went red, and folded the little love note between his fingers hesitantly.
Jeremy looked up in surprise and irritation at the sound of a bicycle bell outside his trailer. He put aside his typewriter – the Guardian would just have to bloody well wait a little longer for his indignant letter – and got up to open the door.
"Boris?"
The flaxen-haired imbecile with the bicycle gave him a worryingly perky smile.
"Are you canvassing?" Jeremy groaned, preparing to slam the door in his smug Etonian wanker face.
"I, I, I rather thought I was pretty much assured of your vote anyway," Boris ventured, leaning his lumbering bulk against his bicycle. Elsewhere an assistant director was yelling at someone and two lighting techs started making fun of a runner. Jeremy wondered what sort of idiot had let this twit onto the set in the first place.
"Well, you thought wrong," Jeremy snapped. "Until one of you lot has the balls to scrap the entire bloody thing instead of just pissing about with the Western Extension, no one is getting my vote." He swung the door outwards, ready for a good hard slam. "Now naff off."
"I say, that's, er, that's no way to talk to a paying client," Boris spluttered.
"What?"
"I'm here for, er, for, er, for, ah, for business reasons."
"Oh no," Jeremy groaned, quite tempted to just slam the door anyway. "Why you? Why me? And for that matter – go and bother Hammond, you two can talk bikes between bumming – "
Boris looked almost devious, which was an unfamiliar and unwelcome addition to his repertoire of stupid facial expressions and not what Jeremy was expecting to cross his pink public schoolboy face. "Other candidates," he said, sounding like he was reading off an internal autocue – and reading it accurately, which was another alarming first – "may cry, 'Oh bugger Clarkson', but I will be the only person to, er, the only person to, blast it, to follow up on my promise," he said triumphantly.
Jeremy gave him a look of woe mixed with incredulity and disgust. "You really think that's going to win you votes?"
Boris shrugged. "Worth a shot, I thought. Cheaper than coming up with an actual campaign slogan, you know."
The plus point of being the Housewives' Favourite, Richard knew, was that unlike his co-presenters he got to see female clients. The downside was that they were … well. Housewives.
"How're the kids, Maureen?" he said weakly as the flab rolls of the latest Mrs. Thing were unfurled before him in a wave of pale and stretch-marked flesh. She'd tinted her hair especially.
Maureen sighed. "Oh, Richard, I come here to get away from all that." Maureen was three inches taller than Richard and about twice his weight; she shoved him lightly in the chest and sent him sprawling back into the table, and as he tried to rise from his helpless position she demanded, "now ravish me!"
There was a nervous knock at the door.
"Busy!" Maureen barked just as Richard breathed a relieved 'come in'.
A sheet of paper slid under the door, and Richard picked it up with a confused expression. The paper smelt briny even over Maureen's liberally applied cheap perfume and the contents were, if unexpected, very clear. Someone using a lot of brownish ink had depicted an unflattering Maureen – spherical and excessively breasted - and drawn something that looked like a wobbly spider decapitating her, followed by a large question mark.
The moral quandary he faced was as immense as Maureen's nutcracker thighs. Richard turned the paper over, accompanied by a growl of "what's that?" from an impatient Maureen, and wrote "Y" on the back in biro. He pushed the paper back under the door.
All in all … it was at least over quickly.
There was no decapitation that Richard saw. The door opened, a huge tentacle snaked in through the gap and coiled around Maureen's fat ankle and, like the heroine of some cheap B-movie horror flick, the woman scrabbled and yelled her porcine way to her doom.
Richard winced as the yelling stopped with an ominous squelch.
"That," he said as more tentacles edged into the room, "was a little dodgy, ethically speaking."
There were a lot of things that Richard had never had cause to consider before: how to get chewing gum out of his hair, how to make an outboard engine out of fireworks, organ donation, that sort of thing, but Top Gear had brought all these things into his life. Can a squid shrug? was, even by Top Gear standards, quite an unexpected query.
Top Gear Squid managed to give the impression of shrugging, at any rate.
"Look, Top Gear Squid – " he began, but Top Gear Squid silenced him with a gentle tentacle pressed over his lips, like a very large slimy finger. There was a rustle, a splat, some scratching noises, and another tentacle held up a grubby piece of paper at eye height.
It read:
I'm an OCTOPUS, not a squid. I'd really appreciate it if you could make the effort to make the distinction and get it right as I find "squid" quite offensive.
The tentacle slid from Richard's mouth. He considered his options. On the one hand, Top Gear Octopus didn't really have the same ring to it as Top Gear Squid. On the other, a fucking enormous deadly mollusc that could inexplicably live in air had asked him very, very politely, and had also just eaten his paid date.
His mouth felt dry.
"So, er, what did you want to see me about?" Richard asked, "Was it just this?"
Rustle, splat, scribble, and another drawing presented almost coyly for his inspection. It was not very artistic, but it was very graphic. There was no way in which he could mistake what was being suggested. Richard went an interesting share of pink, and the octopus mimicked him, turning quite an attractive shade of coral.
It occurred to Richard that he didn't even know if Top Gear Squ - Octopus - was a girl-octopus or a boy-octopus, which seemed like something of an oversight when they were colleagues. He was also aware that he didn't actually give a fuck either way.
Top Gear Octopus gave him an expectant look. He looked at the picture again. Oh well. At least he wasn't going to have to dress up as a schoolgirl this time, and that always seemed so popular in the kind of pictures he normally saw along these lines.
"Sure," Richard said with quite a genuine smile, beckoning his new invertebrate lover into the room, "why not."
Ratings were definitely up, James noted happily, despite Jeremy's tendency to become unamusingly sullen if anyone mentioned the Tories. He thought their increase in popularity was probably down to the unavoidable onscreen chemistry.
It couldn't be helped. Ever since he and Top Gear Squidtopus had begun their flirtation he couldn't stop himself from glancing over at his new-found suitor admiringly now and then. He was sure the air between them sizzled with unexpressed passion that was visible to the viewers, even if his colleagues completely failed to notice it.
And he kept finding splotchy little love notes in his dressing room, characterised as much by their modernist poetry as by the fishy smell that adhered to them, and sometimes – if his reply was especially florid (James had taken to borrowing books of sonnets from the library) – he would find a bowl of water-lilies or a box of Bird's Eye Fish Fingers on his table.
James was surprised to learn just how much he enjoyed being romanced. It was the most care anyone had ever taken to ensnare his heart, and he was quite sure by now that this fragile organ beat within the slippery tentacles of true love.
He was almost beside himself when, after filming a segment on the promised changes to the Congestion Charge in which Jeremy did nothing but scowl and look like he was about to burst into tears, he came back to his dressing room to find a little slip of paper detailing a restaurant booking for that night, and a large sloppy ♥ drawn on a separate sheet in mollusc ink.
James all but skipped around the dressing room, his heart beating a giddy fandango of joy. At last! A proper, actual date where someone wasn't paying him or trying to get Top Gear Dog's phone number! He dabbed himself with eau-de-mer and fluffed his hair until it looked appropriately shaggy, and bounded out to his car with nary a care in the world.
"Really," Boris insisted on the other end of the phone, "just one more time and woosh, the whole C-zone will go. I promise."
Jeremy glanced down at the stationary speedometer, and up at the wall of traffic that lay ahead of him.
"It makes my knees hurt," he said eventually.
"I'll get you a cushion."
Jeremy banged his head on the steering wheel.
The restaurant wasn't perhaps all that swanky, but it looked good enough. It might not have been The Ivy, but James had always thought that the likelihood of running into a Winehouse or something was really a mark against a dining establishment. He beamed quite unnecessarily at the waitress and said, "Hello, I think there's a table booked – name of, er, Top Gear Octopus?"
To his surprise she smiled back quite enthusiastically and said, "Just through here, Mr. May. You know, I was always a big fan of Top Gear Dog – "
James sighed and braced himself for the inevitable request for her autograph or phone number. This wasn't what he needed at the start of his first real date with Top Gear Octopus.
" – but I think she's sold out – become too easily accessible, you know? That's why I'm totally a Top Gear Octopus fan now." She gestured rather unnecessarily – a forty-foot-long sea creature is usually hard to miss – "There you are."
When James reached the table his happy smile wilted like month-old roses. Hidden behind Top Gear Octopus's body was a third chair, containing an unexpected addition to the party.
"What the – " James began, more shocked than angry.
"What fuck are you doing here?" Richard snapped back, leaping effortlessly from nought to enraged in a millisecond, and out of his chair like a rocket. A pocket rocket, presumably.
Top Gear Octopus pushed them apart with a couple of patient and gentle tentacles; another held up a note whose purpose was unmistakeable. The little stick men were clearly labelled, even. The ink on the picture was suspiciously dry.
James and Richard both spluttered and went puce. "Not with him," James moaned.
"What's wrong with me?" Richard demanded.
Top Gear Octopus made a rather graphic gesture with two more tentacles and startled a passing waiter.
"Oh cock," James said in a resigned fashion.
"What the hell," Richard sighed, giving his best shrug.
They didn't even make it to dessert.
"And that," Jeremy said proudly, "is how I got the Congestion Charge lifted for the whole city."
The Stig did not react.
"He even tipped me," Jeremy ran his hands over the Veyron's beautiful shining bonnet. "Oh yes. I am the best."
The Stig shook his head in disbelief and wandered off, but Jeremy didn't notice. He was happy in his own petrol-scented world; it had all been worth it.