Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall (14 page)

It was a Tuesday and hot in the tube.
Cans of human stewed in their own farts
. I used to observe the anonymity that crowded in on me and at least see its feeling face. Not any more. Now I saw the features ageing would impose on all these suburbonauts as they rumbled through the clayey void; they were wearing not space helmets – but time ones. It was hotter still above ground, and the plane trees in the triangular plot beside St Stephen’s were sticky with sap and fret-worked by caterpillars. I stood, pissing, hidden by a redbrick buttress of the derelict church, then climbed back gingerly over the railings and continued downhill to the hospital.

Busner must, I thought, be seventy by now – yet to me he appeared unchanged. For as long as I’d known him he’d been a little overweight, yet his fleshy face, with its suggestion of jowls, resisted wrinkling. It seemed I had been doing the
deteriorating for both of us. He was standing with his back to me when I squeezed through the door – in his shirtsleeves, with a Vaseline sheen on his fat neck as he rearranged his coprolites.

‘How has the CBT with Shiva Mukti gone?’ he asked without preamble, or even turning.

‘OK, I s’pose.’ I looked about for a chair – they were all piled high with ring binders, loose papers, and even some dry cleaning still perving in its polythene. I began clearing one.

‘He’s a well-meaning fellow, Shiva,’ Busner said; ‘perhaps a little prosaic.’

‘He shot films of me while I was in my ... obsessive phases; then played them back to me.’

‘Did it help?’

‘Um, help ... well, with film maybe, and a little bit with reality as well.’

‘A little bit, eh – how about the survivor guilt?’

I didn’t want to talk about the events on Foula; I could still see the human stain on the rocks below the Kame, the wheeling gulls and the plastic trousers – a speck on the swell.

‘I don’t know about that,’ I said testily, ‘but the fact is I haven’t written anything serious since last September and I’ve got mouths to feed. I’ve an idea for an investigative piece and I’d like to pursue it.’

‘And this involves a trip?’

He was behind his desk and at the tie again, rolling and unrolling. I’d once asked him how long, on average, it took him to twirl one to shreds. He said nylon ones lasted the longest – but he hated the feel of them. Silk was pretty good – but too expensive. Wool he found most comforting – and mohair in particular. ‘It’s a sort of carding, really,’ he told me. ‘I’m
straightening my own neurons and glia, smoothing out my cortex so that I can spin it into threads of thought.’ Frankly, it was a little rich that such a man believed he could help anyone else with their neuroses.

‘Yes, I want to walk to Hollywood.’

‘All the way?’

‘Don’t be facetious – you know my methodology: I’ll walk from my house to Heathrow – probably via Pinewood Studios where they’re shooting the new James Bond film – then I’ll fly to LAX, and walk from there on to Hollywood.’

‘Dangerous territory for you, I should’ve thought – given the events of last year.’

‘That was different, I, I was caught unawares – I didn’t have an objective.’

‘I see, and what’s your objective now, precisely?’

I didn’t like the way this was going; it wasn’t exactly that Busner was being hostile – it was more that his tone was off, his voice pitched a shade too low. And, now that I stopped to consider it, wasn’t there something sinister about the way he hadn’t aged over the years? He wasn’t merely familiar to me – I knew every hair that sprouted from the tragus of his annoyingly complicated ear – but
overly
familiar; his mannerisms were exaggerated, his coughs studiously rehearsed. It seemed he was an accomplished actor, called upon to play the part of Dr Zack Busner.

I swept this useless paranoia aside: I needed him to share my enthusiasm.

‘I want to find out who killed film – for film is definitely dead, toppled from its reign as the pre-eminent narrative medium of the age. I don’t know if film was murdered – but I suspect there’s a killer out there!’

My melodramatic words hung in the air – THERE’S A KILLER OUT THERE! – meaning-motes aglow in a sunbeam projected from between the louvres.

‘Ahem,’ Busner cleared his throat,
frog in Froggy
. ‘I see. There may be something in what you say – change is definitely in the, ah, air – new media, streaming, that sort of thing ...’ His fingers fluttered so as to suggest he was entirely au fait. ‘But why now? I’ve never known you take any especial interest in film.’

‘Me?’ I snapped back. ‘I’ve been a film critic – I’ve even written a screenplay ... well, most of one. You, on the other hand, probably don’t even know there’s a screenwriters’ strike on, and I can safely say that in all the hundreds of hours I’ve spent talking to you I’ve never heard you reference the movies once. Once!’

He was unfazed by my anger.

‘It’s all those credits that get to me,’ he remarked, swivelling to face the scuzzy window. ‘You know the kind of thing: Fifth Assistant Director, Manuel P. Zlotnik; Personal Assistant to Miss Pearlstein, Carol Goodenough – then, marching up the screen, entire squads of carpenters, electricians, best boys, gaffers, gofers and key grips, to say nothing of the special effects technicians ... In my day all it took to make a film was Will Hay and the Fat Boy ... Anyway’ – he rotated back to face me – ‘I know you like walking, but why walk to Hollywood? Los Angeles is hardly pedestrian-friendly.’

‘I – I, well, to be frank I think it’s safer that way – it’ll mean I can slip beneath their radar.’

‘They have radar? And there’s a “they”?’

‘Obviously I’m not suggesting there’s a conspiracy.’ I was wary of appearing paranoid; tolerant as Busner was of my more exaggerated phases, he’d never made any secret of the fact that
he would section me if he saw fit. ‘I’m speaking figuratively: windscreens are screens, after all – or lenses. Vehicular transport is either a cinema that you sit in passively while the world is shown to you, or else, if you drive, you’re operating a camera, directing the movie of your journey.’

‘I see.’ He was looking at me vacantly, but I blanked him right back and continued:

‘If I want to discover who – or what – did for film I’ll be better off walking. Walking is so much slower than film – especially contemporary Hollywood movies, with their stuttering film grammar of split-second shots – and it isn’t framed, when you walk you’re floating in a fishbowl view of the world. There can’t possibly be any editing: no dissolves, no cuts, no fades, no split-screens – and, best of all, no special
effects, no computer-cheated facsimiles of the world. You see, if I walk to Hollywood I’ll be creeping along outside the ambit of the filmic – like a Vietcong insurgent tunnelling through the jungle – and they won’t be able to see me coming!’

Despite myself I had become overexcited, singing out the last line as if it were an affirmation of faith. Busner ignored this. He had retrieved yet another Riddle set from his desk drawer and was bridging the lumpy summits of his coprolites with the brightly coloured little planks. THEY WON’T BE ABLE TO SEE ME COMING! still hung between us, the air around it puckered up as if by heat convection. I rose from my chair and walked across to the title: when I poked it the letters had the slippery resistance of inflated plastic, while my own words continued to resound in the catacombs of my mind: ‘... they won’t be able to see me coming!’

It dawned on me, as I stood looking down at Busner fiddling with his toy, that I had already exited sideways into a discarded scene, the chopped-up frames of which lay curling on the cutting-room floor. It had been bothering me that although there had been establishing shots and even flashbacks, the main narrative had begun without a credit sequence: no slow-revolving globe pierced by photons, no torch-bearing Grecian goddess, no searchlights playing over monumental 3-D type, and – most of all – no Dolby histrionics, the orchestra of thousands chuntering away: ‘Chun-chunn! Chun-chunn! Churrrurrrl-chun-chunn! Ta-tatta-taa! Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-tatta-taaa!’ With Hollywood, I thought, the climax always came at the beginning – all the rest was an insensate nuzzling, as the camera roved over the silvery skin.

Another title materialized in the stuffy office, replacing my graphic paranoia: ONE YEAR EARLIER. I walked round
it. From Busner’s side the plain white capitals were reversed:
– not that he was paying them any mind, as he’d dropped a Riddle tile and was now getting down awkwardly on his hands and knees to search for it in the kneehole of the desk.

I admired the title, which was positioned just so: in stark counterpoint to the cluttered shelves, the half-open door revealing a wedge of stock corridor, the dimply dullness of Beuys’s topographies. The title both moved things forwards – and backwards – while filing the current scene away. Not that it had been exactly a year previously – it was more like thirteen months, but the imprecision was forgivable dramatic licence.

I was in a bistro in the Place Wilson in Toulouse. My POV was not from behind my eyes but disembodied, looking down at a 45-degree angle from somewhere near the ceiling at a table of diners. There was me, the writer Jonathan Coe, the journalist Simon Tiffin and his wife Alexa, Marianne Faithfull and François Ravard, and Yann Perreau, the organizer of
Le Marathon des mots
, the literary festival that had brought us all to town. It was a well-lit and wide shot, sharply focused so that all the detail of the scene – white napery, grey meat, red wine – was instantly caught. I could almost feel the snag of the diners’ teeth, taste the grease on their lips, and smell the foody vapours funnelling up their noses. Moreover, as it was an episode from my own life, I experienced an immodest thrill at the work expended by the production designers, lighting
cameramen and all the other techies Busner was so dismissive of, in order to re-create it for the screen.

As for the casting – it was excellent. The man portraying Jonathan Coe had a strong likeness to the writer – the same symmetrical mop of greying hair, the same half-handsome features. François Ravard’s role had been nabbed by a swarthy little fellow, on whose broken nose the trademark heavy-black-frame spectacles appeared drawn on as if by a bored child. But perhaps because of this discord, François’s Gallic rolled
r
’s, his exasperated clucks and wheedles of annoyance as he dealt with Marianne – who,
très fatiguée
, was demanding to be taken back to the hotel – seemed all the more authentic. Marianne was played by a dyed-blonde at least a decade younger than the real thing – but she husked to perfection.

I couldn’t assess the Tiffins’ performance, because they were mostly silent, absorbed in the spectacle of François and Marianne’s pantomimic co-dependency. As for Yann Perreau, I couldn’t remember what he’d looked like at all, and, true to my agnosia, the filmmakers equipped his actor with a mask of featureless flesh.

The sound was as good as the camerawork, so that as I zoomed in the clatter of cutlery and the kvetching of François and Marianne became muffled, while Jonathan’s gently emphatic voice increased in clarity; he was saying to the man sitting beside him: ‘Yes, I know what you mean. I sat on the jury at last year’s Edinburgh Film Festival, and of the ten films we shortlisted for the Best British category not one got a theatrical release; they all went – if they went anywhere at all – straight to video.’

‘Mm, mm,’ affirmed the man playing me – he was chewing some bread. ‘It just goes to prove my point: film is dead, its
century-long reign as king of narrative has ended, and we are in an interregnum, and, as Gramsci observed of such periods between political hegemonies – now the strangest freaks and sports will arise.’

I was disappointed, obviously, that my part hadn’t attracted a leading man, although there are worse fates than to be played by a classy British character actor. I couldn’t fault me on my mannerisms: the deep-sea waggle of the hammerhead, the lazy flap of the cartilaginous hands; the voice, too, was spot-on: nasally posh, whiningly mockney. But was this David Thewlis (too young, too good-looking) or Pete Postlethwaite (too old, too ugly), whose head, together with that of the Coe-alike, filled the screen as I closed on them?