Downriver (59 page)

Nickoll had the slight, forward-leaning stoop of a man used to looking down on people: on actors, who tended to be dwarfish, with neatly husbanded imperfections the camera was ready to forgive. Nickoll forgave nothing. He
understood
it; but he did not forgive it. He suffered, and he dubbed a world-weary smile. A Spanish saint on his way to the gridiron. He was darkly clad, of course; in the usual gulag chic. And he favoured a quotably minimalist haircut, close razored and modestly abrasive. His appearance was a statement. ‘No comment.' But he
was
something of a connoisseur of haircuts. He collected them, pigeonholing the entire newsreel of human history by its length and style. His method was universally acknowledged as more accurate than carbon-dating. ‘Mmmm, all right,' he'd drone, ‘late 1950s…' 58? No, '59. Joe Brown at the Two Is.' And he'd stroke his notionally shaved chin.

He modelled blue crombie overcoats, left behind, in something of a hurry, at the Old Horns (Bethnal Green), and white mufflers. He disliked conversation. He had a wonderfully practised way of turning his back on anything that offended his haircut religion. Milditch's functional crop, which looked as if it had been performed inside a coal bucket by a gang of blind chickens, gave him palpitations. He had the trick, under these distressing circumstances, of switching his attention to shoes, one of his lesser interests: until he felt able to cope with the shock to his nervous system. The aesthetic damage.

There were two ways that he signalled his emotions. When things were going badly, and it was all getting away from him, he chewed his hangnails. He gnawed voraciously at the celluloid meniscus, spitting out grey chippings like mangled grape seeds. When it was not
quite
so bad, and he was able to watch a scene without putting his head in a black rubbish sack, he put on his serious spectacles and gazed into the distance: to avoid the possibility of an involuntary smile.

I had every confidence in Nickoll. If anybody could turn my humble disaster into a millennial catastrophe, he was that man. He gave the impression – even now – that if only he could heave Milditch into the dock, with concrete flippers on his feet, get him out of the way, he might be able to deliver some definitively controversial footage. Meanwhile, he chewed his fingers down to the knuckles, and gummed unhygienically on soft cartilaginous tissue. He was picking out lumps of white skin from between his excellent teeth.

The teeth of the little Scottish script girl, on the other hand, were chattering like the typing pool of a fictional tabloid. The sound man (her lover) glared at her in a proprietary rebuke. She tried to invent some way to describe, for editing purposes, the fantastical lack of event unfolding in this refrigerated hall. The sound man, buried in quilts of arctic down, was in despair. There was
nothing
to record. Not even the lugubrious hoot of tug boats or the wind whistling through miles of corridor. He
had only to keep sound
out
: neutralize the turbo-props battling to reach the City Airport, or the getaway drivers rehearsing a screech of three-point turns along the quays of the empty dock behind the Custom House.

Nickoll, irritated by his moping underlings, now revealed himself as a closet humanitarian. He noted the script girl's lead-blue lips and frostbitten nose and felt obliged to pass some comment. ‘I'd rather be skinned alive with a blunt razor blade than wear a jersey like that. It puts pounds on you, girl.'

He twitched in agony: the awful embarrassment of being confronted,
in flagrante delicto
, by the author of the very farrago he was trying to animate. He wished he could simply hurl back in my face the pages of high-flown nonsense I had so wantonly cobbled together in some warm study, far from the front line. Authors were sick men: punishing themselves, and wallowing in the pain. And worse, much worse, expecting to implicate innocent readers by conning them into turning the first few (inevitably comic) pages.

I shared the director's repulsion. But I had written none of this. This chamber had no place in my text. It was worse than even my damaged mind could imagine. I wanted Tilbury Fort, Highlanders in tunnels, catacombs, waxworks, cricketers, the Mahdi. I wanted the World's End populated with post-orgy catamites and Ripper-yarning clubmen. I wanted corpses to rise out of the river, shrieking in accusation. I wanted the past to resolve itself, and the present to become habitable. I wanted fire angels, warrior/priests, horses that spoke in Latin couplets. I wanted an absence of dogs. And, most of all, I wanted this shifty troop of inadequates to have to drag all their cumbersome equipment into the deepest, darkest, dampest of the subterranean passages: the pools of stagnant air, the trapped voices of prisoners. They should confront everything that cannot be transferred on to videotape. There was no hell hot enough for the man responsible for converting
Vessels of Wrath
to bland stutters of electrical impulse. (Was
I
that man?)

The Beta-Cam, so they said, cost £50,000. It was a nasty, flat case on a thin tripod: an executive ghetto-blaster, a mail-order toy, with a trumpet of lenses protruding from its side. And it was useless ten feet from daylight. ‘Sunguns' had been vetoed by the electrician. His word was law. The catacombs were therefore expendable. The script girl, under instruction, deleted them with a stroke of her felt-tip. British Rail (most of whose income came from facility fees from advertising agencies) wanted £200 an hour to let this mob loose in the derelict Tilbury Riverside station. They sent along a female trouble-shooter to tot up the score, minute by minute, on her pocket calculator. ‘We had Kenneth Baker yesterday,' she said, looking me in the eye. ‘Beautiful manners, a
real
gentleman.'

Nickoll now proved he had the essential quality of a great film-maker: the ability to burn money. He was well on the way to landing the Corporation with a seven-minute version of
Heaven's Gate
. Questions in the House would certainly follow. Resignations were in order. Heads would roll. The Widow was, at this moment, being fitted into her largest set of tombstone gnashers.

Jon Kay shuffled around the crew trying to bum a cigarette. They looked at him with open contempt. Send for wardrobe. That hair! They were green and clean, and pink of tongue: apple-cheeked, scrubbed, concerned. In perfect dental health. Snugly confident in the overweening freshness of their underpants. Milditch simply turned his back on the nodding time-warp spectre, and lit a cheap cheroot. To blow away the bad memory.

If we hang about, thought Joblard, we might score a free lunch. ‘Don't forget to keep your bar bills,' he warned. ‘And any others you can pick out of ashtrays or spittoons.' Get your invoices in
fast
: that's the first rule. And that was all we'd ever be likely to take out of this fiasco. A couple of corn-crusty cheese rolls and a bottle of gassy Guinness.

We retreated. Left them to it. Watching Nickoll work was like watching hairs grow from a wart. We staggered into the
Passengers' Lounge, and sat, spark out, under a mural of palm trees, coral islands, straw huts. It had been executed in a tequila sunburst of radioactive colour: Bikini Atoll, in the shimmering realization of the impact of fifteen million tons of TNT, courtesy of a bomb named
Bravo
. This Robert Louis Stevenson espresso bar was clearly intended to jolly the cruise victims into the mood for the high jinks ahead of them. Its effect on less well-prepared browsers was instantaneous. We slumped, heads in hands, mute, cattle-felled: contemplating a snap preview of all our best-kept fears. Fallout, mouth cancer, plague, famine, bereavement, premature burial: these were the lighter passages.

Sofya Court, the researcher, sat with us. A human presence, she subtly distanced herself from the rude mechanicals of the film crew. She was a modest exile; but with the will and persistence to have twitched this lifeless project into an active mode. She doubled, androgynously, for the authority of the director. There are, after all, many more subjects to be researched than directed. A chequered Hibernian overcoat, studious spectacles, trousers, black shoes. Neat badge-sized earrings to emphasize the delicacy of her ears. Fine hands. The dial of her watch on the inside of her wrist. Time hidden.

‘What happened to Sonny?' I asked. I was mildly curious, but the effort of putting the question was enough. My interest in him had, I found, faded before she could reply. Sonny was out of it. Out of the screenplay.

‘Ah, yes,' she smiled; so transiently it was possible to miss it, ‘Sonny.' He evaporated as she mentioned his name. A shadow slithering across a tile floor. Moisture at the pool's edge. ‘I do see him sometimes in the corridor. But what's left to say? We can never decide who'll nod first.' Freelance producers, it seems, come and go with the seasons: the
realpolitik
marches on. Only researchers are immortal. ‘I believe they're sending him to… Paraguay.' She made it sound like a one-way ticket. They don't want him back.
Ever
.

This whole episode was cranking into back-lot Dostoevsky.
The unshaven beer-breathed trio, in from the river; rancid with boredom. Swamp scum. Drooling, mumbling glossoplegics awaiting their next appointment with the Grotesque. Outpatients sharing a squeaky banquette with their fantasy salvation, a golden-haired Slav. A soft-spoken waif who
chose
to live and work in Whitechapel; to involve herself with demonstrably unhealthy material, morbid life-forms. And all to the despair of her family who suffered so much, and worked so long, to escape the place and all its memories. Our children, in one afternoon, unpick the ambitions of a generation. How innocently they enact our unspoken nightmares!

Jon Kay, ever the literalist, tried to lay his head on Sofya's lap. He leered up at her. A lost soul crying for a mate to share his purgatory. She made a tiny adjustment to the line of her coat. Kay's pipe-dream died. He slid floorward, and began to snore.

Sofya probed me, discreetly, about the fate of my tale,
He Walked Amongst the Trial Men
, which had initiated all this termite activity: brought us out on to the rivers and railways. (That stuff had been recycled more times than a Brick Lane pint.) It was her business to gather information, to interrogate, to forget nothing. The story, which she invoked, had originally been commissioned by the magazine,
Butts Green
, a defunct student publication from Cambridge, kibitzed into multinational stardom by the hard-nosed marketing strategies of Bull Bagman, its American proprietor. The magazine, which had previously limped along on a diet of unpaid effusions from E. M. Forster (Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Thom Gunn – and anybody else who wanted to audition for Faber), now showcased the hottest properties in World Lit. If you were a near ‘name' or a future ‘maybe', one issue would confirm your bankable status.

But Bull and I shared a trivial secret. I knew all about Bull's previous identity. He was once a terminally distressed fenland bookdealer, going under the stagename of ‘Mossy Noonmann'. Fame, in the form of a libellous caricature in a forgotten novel, did him in. Put paid to the old lifestyle (if that is what you could
call it). Tourists clogged up his cellar, staring at him in disbelief, as at a chained lunatic. And worse: the landlord noticed the long months of rent arrears. The commercial advantages of an instant eviction. Mossy was defenestrated, unhoused, cut loose. Most of his ‘stock' gave itself up voluntarily to the exterminator. The rest made a dash for the drains.

Two months later, and forty miles south, Mossy was riding into Silicon City. A change of name, a change of pitch: he was a power in the land once more. And this time – it was for real! The wilder his schemes, the more the bankers loved it. He couldn't ask for enough money. But he could try. He'd been trained in the right school. All the 1960s scoundrels were getting out of books and into publishing. Much more scope on a sinking ship. Room to manoeuvre. And, anyway, the Americans had stopped buying antiquarian literature and started collecting imprints, conglomerates, prestige Georgian properties.

‘Bull loved bits of
White Chappell
,' said the worthy young man, deputed to make the offer. ‘He never finishes anything. He skim-reads. But he has the hunch you could work up something lowlife, London, topographical – basically,
downriver
.' I didn't answer. I was lost in admiration for the style of my potential patron, who was occupied with a courageous, single-handed revival of the Colin Wilson look. Drab: with balls.

We were sipping our tepid half-pints in an unlikely hostelry, off Trafalgar Square, crammed to the doors with paroled business folk. I hadn't partied in this zone since my eldest daughter was born in the (transferred) cockroach hospital around the corner. The ambulance, on that occasion, had broken down a mile shy of its destination. We walked the streets, carrying our suitcases (how much stuff do you
need
for an unborn child?); into the building, stepping over the sprawled ranks of junkies puking on the floor of Casualty.

‘I hope you don't object to line-editing,' warned the bespectacled go-between. ‘Bull likes to keep a tight grip on the text. That's the house style. Delusions of empire building. He thinks
he's putting out the
New Yorker
. He chops everybody. Except Jeanette Winterson. And Martin Amis, of course.'

I was caught off-balance: being
asked
for a ‘piece of writing', and promised real money, the front window, display space alongside the cash register. I went along with it. I should have known better. But now, a year and a half later, I was living (
living
?) on kill fees; and feeling like a resurrectionist when the graveyard has just been covered in concrete.

I showed Sofya the great man's final letter of rejection. ‘
I'm confused by it, confused about what is being depicted… I remain at a loss
.' We were, up to that point, and despite our cultural differences, in complete agreement. The man had sweated as he wrestled with this thing. The typescript was devastated by saline smears, honey blobs, burns, wine-spits. Holmes could have gathered up enough ash for a library of monographs. Bagman truly wanted it, wanted to hack and slash, transplant, transpose, transform: until
his
‘piece' came into a focus that would hold. He wanted to achieve a finished object that could be honourably exploited.