Collected Stories (3 page)

Jimmy said, ‘Got everything I need.’

‘Take it easy with the Jack. What about the bottle we bought?’

‘Don’t start getting queenie. I didn’t want to break into them straight away. So – here we are together again.’ Jimmy presented his glass. ‘What the fuck?’

‘Yeah, what the fuck!’

‘Fuck everything!’

‘Fuck it!’

The rest of the Jack went and they were halfway through the vodka the next time Roy pitched towards the clock. The records had come out, including Black Sabbath. A German porn film was playing with the sound turned off. The room became dense with marijuana smoke. They must have got hungry. After smashing into a tin of baked beans with a hammer and spraying the walls, Roy climbed on Jimmy’s shoulders to buff the mottled ceiling with a cushion cover and then stuffed it in Jimmy’s mouth to calm him down. Roy didn’t know what time the two of them stripped in order to demonstrate the Skinhead Moonstomp or whether he had imagined their neighbour banging on the wall and then at the front door.

*

It seemed not long after that Roy hurried into Soho for buttered toast and coffee in the Patisserie Valerie. In his business, getting up early had become so habitual that if, by mistake, he woke up after seven, he panicked, fearing life had left without him.

Before ten he was at Munday’s office where teams of girls with Home Counties accents, most of whom appeared to be wearing cocktail dresses, were striding across the vast spaces waving contracts. Roy’s arrival surprised them; they had no idea whether Munday was in New York, Los Angeles or Paris, or when he’d be back. He was ‘raising money’. Because it had been on his mind, Roy asked seven people if they could recall the name of Harry Lime’s English friend in
The Third Man
. But only two of them had seen the film and neither could remember.

There was nothing to do. He had cleared a year of other work to make this film. The previous night had sapped him, but he felt only as if he’d taken a sweet narcotic. Today he should have few worries. Soon he’d be hearing from Munday.

He drifted around Covent Garden, where, since the mid-eighties, he rarely ventured without buying. His parents had not been badly off but their attitude to money had been, if you want something think whether you really need it and if you can do without it. Well, he could do without most things, if pushed. But at the height of the decade money had gushed through his account. If he drank champagne rather than beer, if he used cocaine and took taxis from one end of Soho to the other five times a day, it barely dented the balance. It had been a poetic multiplication; the more he made the more he admired his own life.

He had loved that time. The manic entrepreneurialism, prancing individualism, self-indulgence and cynicism appealed to him as nothing had for ten years. Pretence was discarded. Punk disorder and nihilism ruled. Knowledge, tradition, decency and the lip-service paid to equality; socialist holiness, talk of ‘principle’, student clothes, feminist absurdities, and arguments defending regimes – ‘flawed experiments’ – that his friends wouldn’t have been able to live under for five minutes: such pieties were trampled with a Nietzschean pitilessness. It was galvanising.

He would see something absurdly expensive – a suit, computers, cameras, cars, apartments – and dare himself to buy it, simply to discover what the consequences of such recklessness might be. How much fun could you have before everything went mad? He loved returning from the shops and opening the designer carrier bags, removing the tissue paper, and trying on different combinations of clothes while playing the new CDs in their cute slim boxes. He adored the new restaurants, bars, clubs, shops, galleries, made of black metal, chrome or neon, each remaining fashionable for a month, if it was lucky.

Life had become like a party at the end of the world. He was sick of it, as one may grow sick of champagne or of kicking a dead body. It was over, and there was nothing. If there was to be anything it had to be made anew.

He had lived through an age when men and women with energy and ruthlessness but without much ability or persistence excelled. And even though most of them had gone under, their ignorance had confused Roy, making him wonder whether the things he had striven to learn, and thought of as ‘culture’, were irrelevant. Everything was supposed to be the same: commercials, Beethoven’s late quartets, pop records, shopfronts, Freud, multi-coloured hair. Greatness, comparison, value, depth: gone, gone, gone. Anything could give some pleasure; he saw that. But not everything provided the sustenance of a deeper understanding.

His work had gone stale months ago. Whether making commercials, music videos or training films, Roy had always done his best. But now he would go along with whatever the client wanted, provided he could leave early.

Around the time he had begun to write his film, he started checking the age of the director or author if he saw a good movie or read a good book. He felt increasingly ashamed of his still active hope of being some sort of artist. The word itself sounded effete; and his wish seemed weakly adolescent, affected, awkward.

Once, in a restaurant in Vienna during a film festival, Roy saw that Fellini had come in with several friends. The maestro went to every table with his hands outstretched. Then the tall man with the head of an emperor sat down and ate in peace. And what peace it would be! Roy thought often of how a man might feel had he made, for instance,
La Dolce Vita
, not to speak of
8½
. What insulating spirit this would give him, during breakfast, or waiting to see his doctor about a worrying complaint, enduring the empty spaces that boundary life’s occasional rousing events!

Bergman, Fellini, Ozu, Wilder, Cassavetes, Rosi, Renoir: the radiance! Often Roy would rise at five in the morning to suck the essential vitamin of poetry in front of the video. A few minutes of
Amarcord
, in which Fellini’s whole life was present, could give him perspective all day. Certain sequences he examined scores of times, studying the writing, acting, lighting and camera movements. In commercials he was able to replicate certain shots or the tone of entire scenes. ‘Bit more Bergman?’ he’d say. ‘Or do you fancy some Fellini here?’

In New York he went to see
Hearts of Darkness
, the documentary about Coppola’s making of
Apocalypse
Now
. He was becoming aware of what he wouldn’t do now: parachute from a plane or fight in a war or revolution; travel across Indonesia with a backpack; go to bed with three women at once, or even two; learn Russian, or even French, properly; or be taught the principles of architecture. But for days he craved remarkable and noble schemes on which everything was risked.

What would they be? For most of his adult life he’d striven to keep up with the latest thing in cinema, music, literature and even the theatre, ensuring that no one mentioned an event without his having heard of it. But now he had lost the thread and didn’t mind. What he wanted was to extend himself. He tormented himself with his own mediocrity. And he saw that, apart from dreams, the most imaginative activity most people allowed themselves was sexual fantasy. To live what you did – somehow – was surely the point.

In his garden in the mornings, he began to write, laying out the scenes on index cards on the grass, as if he were playing patience. The concentration was difficult. He was unused to such a sustained effort of dreaming, particularly when the outcome was distant, uncertain and not immediately convertible into a cheque or interest from colleagues. Why not begin next year?

After a few days’ persistence his mind focused and began to run in unstrained motion. In these moments – reminded of himself even as he got lost in what he was doing – the questions he had asked about life, its meaning and direction, if any, about how best to live, could receive only one reply. To be here now, doing this.

That was done. He was in a hurry to begin shooting. Private satisfactions were immaterial. The film had to make money. When he was growing up, the media wasn’t considered a bright boy’s beat. Like pop, television was disparaged. But it had turned out to be the jackpot. Compared to his contemporaries at school, he had prospered. Yet the way things were getting set up at home he had to achieve until he expired. He and Clara would live well: nannies, expensive schools, holidays, dinner parties, clothes. After setting off in the grand style, how could you retreat to less without anguish?

All morning his mind had whirled. Finally he phoned Clara. She’d been sick, and had come downstairs to discover Jimmy asleep on the floor amid the night’s debris, wrapped in the tablecloth and the curtains, which had become detached from the rail. He had pissed in a pint glass and placed it on the table.

To Roy’s surprise she was amused. She had, it was true, always liked Jimmy, who flirted with her. But he couldn’t imagine her wanting him in her house. She wasn’t a cool or loose hippie. She taught at a university and could be formidable. Most things could interest her, though, and she was able to make others interested. She was enthusiastic and took pleasure in being alive, always a boon in others, Roy felt. Like Roy, she adored gossip. The misfortunes and vanity of others gave them pleasure. But it was still a mostly cerebral and calculating intelligence that she had. She lacked Jimmy’s preferred kind of sentimental self-observation. It had been her clarity that had attracted Roy, at a time when they were both concerned with advancement.

Cheered by her friendliness towards Jimmy, Roy wanted to be with him today. 

*

Jimmy came out of the bathroom in Roy’s bathrobe and sat at the table with scrambled eggs, the newspaper, his cigarettes and ‘Let It Bleed’ on loud. Roy was reminded of their time at university, when, after a party, they would stay up all night and the next morning sit in a pub garden, or take LSD and walk along the river to the bridge at Hammersmith, which Jimmy, afraid of heights, would have to run across with his eyes closed.

Roy read his paper while surreptitiously watching Jimmy eat, drink and move about the room as if he’d inhabited it for years. He was amazed by the lengthy periods between minor tasks that Jimmy spent staring into space, as if each action set off another train of memory, regret and speculation. Then Jimmy would search his pockets for phone numbers and shuffle them repeatedly. Finally, Jimmy licked his plate and gave a satisfied burp. When Roy had brushed the crumbs from the floor, he decided to give Jimmy a little start.

‘What are you going to do today?’

‘Do? In what sense?’

‘In the sense of … to do something.’

Jimmy laughed.

Roy went on, ‘Maybe you should think of looking for work. The structure might do you good.’

‘Structure?’

Jimmy raised himself to talk. There was a beer can from the previous night beside the sofa; he swigged from it and then spat out, having forgotten he’d used it as an ashtray. He fetched another beer from the fridge and resumed his position.

Jimmy said, ‘What sort of work is it that you’re talking about here?’

‘Paying work. You must have heard of it. You do something all day –’

‘Usually something you don’t like to do –’

‘Whatever. Though you might like it.’ Jimmy snorted. ‘And at the end of the week they give you money with which you can buy things, instead of having to scrounge them.’

This idea forced Jimmy back in his seat. ‘You used to revere the surrealists.’

‘Shooting into a crowd! Yes, I adored it when –’

‘D’you think they’d have done anything but kill themselves laughing at the idea of salaried work? You know it’s serfdom.’

Roy lay down on the floor and giggled. Jimmy’s views had become almost a novelty to Roy. Listening to him reminded Roy of the pleasures of failure, a satisfaction he considered to be unjustly unappreciated now he had time to think about it. In the republic of accumulation and accountancy there was no doubt Jimmy was a failure artist of ability. To enlarge a talent to disappoint, it was no good creeping into a corner and dying dismally. It was essential to raise, repeatedly, hope and expectation in both the gullible and the knowing, and then to shatter them. Jimmy was intelligent, alertly bright-eyed, convincing. With him there was always the possibility of things working out. It was an achievement, therefore, after a calculated build-up, to bring off a resounding fuck-up. Fortunately Jimmy would always, on the big occasion, let you down: hopelessness, impotence, disaster, all manner of wretchedness – he could bring them on like a regular nightmare.

Not that it hadn’t cost him. It took resolution, organisation, and a measure of creativity to drink hard day and night; to insult friends and strangers; to go to parties uninvited and attempt to have sex with teenage girls; to borrow money and never pay it back; to lie, make feeble excuses, be evasive, shifty and selfish. He had had many advantages to overcome. But finally, after years of application, he had made a success, indeed a triumph, of failure.

Jimmy said, ‘The rich love the poor to work, and the harder the better. It keeps them out of trouble while they’re ripped off. Everyone knows that.’ He picked up a porn magazine,
Peaches
, and flipped through the pages. ‘You don’t think I’m going to fall for that shit, do you?’

Roy’s eyes felt heavy. He was falling asleep in the morning! To wake himself up he paced the carpet and strained to recall the virtues of employment.

‘Jimmy, there’s something I don’t understand about this.’

‘What?’

‘Don’t you ever wake up possessed by a feeling of things not done? Of time and possibility lost, wasted? And failure … failure in most things – that could be overcome. Don’t you?’

Jimmy said, ‘That’s different. Of mundane work you know nothing. The worst jobs are impossible to get. You’ve lived for years in the enclosed world of the privileged with no idea what it’s like outside. But the real work you mention, I tell you, every damn morning I wake up and feel time rushing past me. And it’s not even light. Loneliness … fear. My heart vibrates.’