by Jonathan Coe
‘This is not Maria Granger’s room.’
‘I don’t mean her specifically: it’s the general principle.’ He peered closer at the stain on the wall, and wrinkled his nose. ‘What kind of person,’ he said, ‘what kind of scum would smear the walls of a room with their own excrement?’
‘A disturbed person, presumably. The sort of person we’re supposed to be here to help.’ She gave the stain a cursory glance, then stepped back. ‘Anyway, I think it’s probably blood.’
‘I’m going to find Mr Worth,’ he said. ‘On no account must he mention this in his article. Somehow we’ve got to keep him quiet.’
‘I’m sure Mr Worth doesn’t have the slightest intention –’
‘Have a word with the cleaning staff: immediately. Get them to wipe it off.’
When he had gone, Dr Madison remained for a few minutes in Day Room Nine, staring at the words on the wall, and at the stain: and whether it was rage at her colleague’s insensitivity, or compassion for whatever wretched creature had felt some inarticulate need to desecrate the room in this way, her eyes were soon cloudy with tears, and she found herself rubbing at the wall with her sleeve in a spasm of sudden, violent irritation: a kind of frenzy.
∗
A few weeks ago, Terry wrote, I found myself overhearing one of those recurrent dinner-party conversations about who is the ‘greatest’film director at work today. The two participants were both critics: one of them, a member of the old school, argued for the veteran Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, while the other, who seemed to think of himself as some sort of Young Turk, carried the inevitable banner for Quentin Tarantino.
It was like… well, what was it like? It was like watching two teams of blind men trying to play football on a derelict pitch, when no one had had the decency to tell them that the goalposts had been taken down years ago.
It was the Taranteeny I felt really sorry for. At least his opponent’s position had some sort of antiquated coherence. But as for the Turk (perhaps, remembering the Young Fogeys, we should coin a neologism for this specimen: the Old Turk), he didn’t seem to realize the sheer crappiness of his argument – which was that by ‘revitalizing’ B-movie cliches, Tarantino was actually achieving some sort of (and yes, he really did use this word) ‘originality’. I think, God help him, he may even have mentioned postmodernism at some particularly desperate moment.
Reader, I couldn’t find it in me to put either of these saddies out of their misery. Silent sympathy seemed to be the only appropriate response to the spectacle of two exhausted Don Quixotes still chasing after the spectre of originality in modern cinema. My one piece of advice to them, if they should happen to be reading, would be that they check out Joe Kingsley’s Chalk and Cheese 4 (PG) as soon as possible, and learn what they can from it.
Terry performed a quick word-count on his computer, and found that he had already used up almost a third of his review space. Not that it really mattered: he always enjoyed laying out his theoretical wares in this way. Still, it was probably a good thing that he had brought himself round to the film at last.
Kingsley, it goes without saying, is the master of cliche. He makes Tarantino look like a bungling amateur in this area, because he has never fallen for the neo-humanist fiction that old conventions can be given a new twist. And the Chalk and Cheese series is cliche itself – mismatched cops assigned to the same case – stripped down to its purest and most satisfying essentials. Number 3, directed by ex-pat Englishman Kevin Wilmut, made the fundamental mistake of trying to freshen things up with a romantic undercurrent and a political subplot: the dead hand of Wilmut’s literary, BBC background was all over it. Clearly, though, someone at Fox has come to his senses and put Kingsley back at the helm of the series which kick-started his career and which he has since made brilliantly, paradoxically, his own.
Four hundred and eighteen words. What next, he wondered. Summarize the plot? (But of course there was no plot.) Discuss the performances? (But the actors in this film didn’t perform, they went through motions.) Mention the dialogue? (But the dialogue was exactly the same as in the earlier films.) In truth, the film itself had barely skimmed the surface of Terry’s consciousness. As soon as it had arrived in the morning post, he had taken the Jiffy bag up to the Observation Room attached to Bedroom Three, where Lorna had shown him how to get the video working. The tape supposedly lasted for ninety-seven minutes, but it had not taken him that long to watch it. He sat in total absorption through the opening credits, enjoyed the first scene (a protracted gunfight which brought several of the other patients crowding into the room to find out what all the noise was about), then fast-forwarded through the first expository scene and any other subsequent dialogue scenes which lasted for more than thirty seconds; congratulating himself, into the bargain, on watching the film in just the way that its makers – with their eyes fixed firmly on the video market – would have intended.
It would be stretching a point, Terry now wrote, shifting his chair back into the shade of the building (for the sun, reflected by the glittering ocean, was starting to blank out the screen of his PowerBook), to claim that Chalk and Cheese 4 is flawless. Kingsley’s detractors – whose uncomprehending criticisms mean, I trust, less than nothing to him – like to claim that his films resemble ninety-minute pop videos. This is in fact a sublime compliment to which he hasn’t (yet) quite earned the right. There’s the occasional falling-off, here, a sporadic tendency to flag: timing some of the shots at random, I was surprised to find that many of them were more than six seconds long. But fifteen minutes after finishing the movie, this critic isn’t complaining: I’m still high on its irreverence, its joyous contempt for the audience, its contagious hatred for political or any other kinds of correctness, its hooligan energy. An energy which, incidentally (to go back to our dinner-party duellists) is the only kind available to the filmmaker nowadays. This is the crazed, manic energy of the bull at the end of the fight, fatally wounded but ploughing ahead, driven only by pain and anger and the mindless will to go on living. This is the condition – terminal but frantic, ‘gasping but somehow still alive’ – of the American cinema in these dying days of the twentieth century. And Kingsley is its master.
A shadow crossed the computer screen, causing Terry to look up. Dr Dudden, having emerged silently on to the terrace, was waiting to address him.
‘A brief word, Mr Worth. The briefest of words. Far be it from me to interrupt your labours.’
‘That’s all right,’ said Terry, squinting into the sunlight.
‘Dare I hope – dare we hope, dare all of us hope – that this is an early draft – the first tentative steps towards your article?’
‘My article?’
‘About the work that we do here.’
‘Oh.’ Terry hadn’t given this a moment’s thought. He wasn’t even sure, at this point, that the Clinic was interesting enough to merit a piece for the Features page. ‘No, I’m still thinking about that one.’
‘Ah. Still in the planning stage.’ Dr Dudden forced a smile, which mingled practised insincerity with a desperate need to ingratiate. ‘When you do come to write it – and far be it from me, of course, to dictate, or even to attempt any sort of influence or… input, in any way – but when you do come to write it, I do hope that the small… irregularity in your day room won’t mitigate, or in any way –’
‘Irregularity?’ said Terry.
‘I’m referring, of course, to the unfortunate – erm – graffito to which you so kindly, so thoughtfully –’
‘Oh, that.’ Terry smiled blandly. ‘Well, you know, I can only record what I see: take things as they come, so to speak…’
‘Hmm.’ Dr Dudden’s answering smile was weak, uncertain. ‘I can take it that we understand each other, then.’ When this was neither confirmed nor denied by Terry, he turned, wavered, paused, turned back again, hesitated and finally managed to say: ‘We have some good news, by the way.’
‘Oh?’
‘A sm
all breakthrough last night, according to your EEC.’
‘In what way?’
‘You entered Stage One sleep. For twelve minutes: at about three o’clock in the morning.’
‘And this is the first time it’s happened?’
‘While you’ve been under my observation, yes. As I say: a small breakthrough. Naturally, I can’t take any credit for it. I’ve done nothing to treat you, as yet.’ He waited (in vain) for Terry to manifest some enthusiasm, then added: ‘Anyway, I assumed you’d want to know about it.’
When Dr Dudden had disappeared back inside the house, Terry read through the last few lines of his review and suddenly wanted nothing more than to finish the thing off as quickly as possible. For some reason, this talk of a breakthrough disturbed him, and he found it hard to concentrate, hard to regain the level of engagement which had powered him through that final paragraph. In a fit of impatience and boredom, he decided to do something lazy – to end with an obvious cliche, and assume that readers would take it as a self-referential joke in keeping with the argument of the review as a whole.
I can’t recommend this film highly enough, he wrote. It’s a laugh, it’s a riot, it’s a refreshing blast of stale air. In short: fun for all the family.
Next, he inserted a page break and typed out his invoice.
TO: Writing review of Chalk and Cheese 4
654 words @ £1 per word = £654.00
Plus VAT @ 17.5% = £114.45
Total = £768.45.
Halfway through making this calculation, Terry was distracted by the noise of a window opening high up in the house. He turned, craned his neck and found that the window in question was one he recognized. It belonged, in fact, to a room which he was intending to explore again, as soon as the opportunity presented itself: the room he had once lived in, up on the third floor, a long, low garret which (he now remembered) gave access directly on to the roof. Someone had pushed the window open, but he couldn’t see who it was. Then, a moment later, something flew – or was thrown – out of the window itself. At first Terry thought it was a seagull, then a racing pigeon: a blur and a flutter of white against the sky’s perfect, midday blue. But if it was a bird, it had forgotten how to fly, for after riding the currents of air for a few seconds it began swooping down to earth in slow, decreasing spirals. As it came closer, Terry recognized it as a large paper dart, which now hovered briefly above his head, took a sudden turn and shot out towards the sea, then described a perfect curve of 180 degrees, came straight towards him at chest level, then dipped, lost momentum, and finally, using his computer keyboard as a landing strip, came to graceful rest on his lap.
Terry heard the window being pushed shut again. He stood up with the dart in his hand, shielded his eyes and looked to see if any figure could be made out behind the distant, reflecting glass. But it was too late.
Then he smoothed open the paper and read the scrawled message: ASK HIM ABOUT STEPHEN WEBB.
5
Robert’s long, nocturnal conversation with Sarah had a profound effect. Treasuring the memory of her kindness as she had listened to him, the soft burr of her voice as she had offered her own confidences, he quickly sank into a romantic coma from which there seemed to be no awakening. He loitered in the kitchen, waiting for her to appear; lurked in the corridor outside her bedroom; haunted the television room in the evenings; went for superfluous walks along the cliff path at the hour when he guessed her lectures would be over, rehearsing phrases of surprised greeting. He bought presents for her and threw them away almost at once, finding them unsuitable, inadequate; he combed his hair hourly and shaved twice a day (including his legs, although this was not for her benefit). But for most of the day he merely sat in his room, while his work lay neglected, and stared sightlessly at the walls, his mind acting as a private cinema screen upon which ever more tantalizing scenes would be projected: scenes in which he would be stroking her hair, reaching out for the first tentative clasp of her hand, brushing his lips against the immaculate curve of her ear, kissing the fine down on her neck. For days he sat in his room and dreamed like this. For days he convinced himself that the next time they met, their love for each other would reveal itself abruptly, spontaneously, in some sweet and irresistible outpouring.
There was one problem, however. Sarah seemed to have disappeared. Nobody in the house could remember seeing her lately, and her bed, according to Mrs Sharp, the caretaker’s wife, had not been slept in all week.
When more than eight days had passed in this manner, Robert found that he could stand it no longer: he would have to leave the house and look for her on campus. An hour and a half’s exhausted trawling of the Library, the Arts Centre and the Union building yielded nothing, however, and finally he took a bus into town and made for the only other place where a student might conceivably be found on a wet Saturday morning: the Café Valladon. Here he discovered no customers at all apart from his old friend Terry, sitting in the corner with a chaotic spread of essay notes laid out on the table in front of him.
First-time visitors to the Café tended to expect something quintessentially Gallic and sophisticated, all café noir and pain au chocolat. Instead they found heavy pine tables and benches, old milk bottles thick with candle wax, and walls covered with antique nautical instruments and row upon row of hardback and paperback books purchased from jumble sales. They found almost inedibly chunky oatmeal cakes, slices of granary bread with cheddar cheese and honeyglazed ham, and huge mugs of black coffee and sweet aromatic tea. They found a perpetually dim, cavernous interior, with Slattery sitting behind the counter and never rising to his feet to serve the next customer until he had finished the latest sentence of whichever philosophical volume he was then immersed in. And they usually found, it has to be said, something more vibrant in the way of social and intellectual life than this thin, pasty, earnest-looking film student, who glanced up when Robert entered and signalled his greeting by pushing out his three-quarters-empty mug, grunting, ‘Same again, will you?’ and returning to the contemplation of his papers.
Robert had not seen much of Terry this term, and noticed, when he came back to his table with the refilled mug, that he looked if anything even more unhealthy and bloodless than usual. His eyes were puffy, and as he scribbled away manically on his notepaper he would have to pause every twenty or thirty seconds in order to let out an enormous yawn which would momentarily suspend the operation of all his other faculties. Terry – as Robert had come to know during their two years’ friendship – abhorred sunlight and could only really be happy in one of three locations: the inside of a cinema, the Café Valladon itself (where the habitual gloom suited him down to the ground) and, best of all, within the darkened interior of his own bedroom, which is where he would, by choice, spend most of the day: for it was Terry’s claim, during this period of his life, that he needed an absolute minimum of fourteen hours’ sleep, without which he was good for nothing. Not that he found sleep in any way a relaxing experience, or even that rest was his primary object whenever he sought it out. The business of sleeping was, in his case, tantamount to setting out on a nightly quest, and it was this, presumably, that accounted for the hungry and careworn look which haunted his endlessly tired eyes. For Terry was plagued by dreams: dreams, he insisted, of nearparadisal loveliness; dreams of sun-dappled gardens, heavenly vistas, ambrosial picnics and perfect sexual encounters which somehow combined physical ecstasy with prelapsarian innocence. Dreams which took on the quality of the most pristine and idealized childhood memories, which were beyond the inventive powers of the most fertile, accomplished and assiduous fantasist. Every night he was visited by these dreams. Every night they seduced and tormented him: this much, at least, he knew. But at the same time he was never able to supply any specific details, because it was their peculiar characteristic, every morning, to slip from the reach of his grasping memory in the few fatal seconds it took him to regain consciousness. Terry was addicted to his dreams: they constituted the purest, most vital, most prec
ious part of his life, and for this reason he spent at least fourteen hours a day pursuing them through his sleeping mind. But it maddened him that he was able to remember only the most teasing fragments, so that he could never describe them to anybody else, or take comfort from their memory when he was awake. Every so often, it was true, tiny shreds and scraps of a dream would suddenly bob to the surface, and he would write them down as quickly as possible, on anything that came to hand: so that it was not uncommon for his lecture notes on (for instance) constructions of femininity in film noir to be punctuated by cryptic phrases such as ‘the smell of roses; the warm breath of a lion’, or ‘a valley; a woman; thistledown’, or ‘naked, between the branches of a pear tree’. But this was small recompense; not nearly enough, he felt, to compensate for the terrible knowledge that he was being offered nightly visions of a better world which was fated to dangle forever out of reach.
‘You look dreadful,’ said Robert as he sat down.
‘I feel it. You look pretty dreadful yourself, if it comes to that. What are you doing here, anyway?’
‘Looking for someone. And you?’
‘Waiting for Lynne.’
Lynne was Terry’s latest girlfriend. He had a habit of drifting in and out of relationships, none of them lasting more than a month or two: women who initially found him interesting were soon, it seemed, put off by his eccentric sleeping habits and his single-minded obsession with cinema. (On a bad day he was quite incapable of conversing on any other subject.) Terry himself rarely noticed when any of these relationships had gone into decline, and always professed himself surprised and baffled when finally confronted by the irrefutable evidence that they had been terminated: the sudden disappearance from his wardrobe, say, of all his girlfriend’s clothes, or his dawning realization, emerging into the mid-afternoon sunshine from the blackness of some screening room in the university’s Film Department, that it was more than a week since he had last seen the woman who was supposed to be sharing a room with him. Whether something like this was about to happen with Lynne, Robert had no idea. He merely asked a non-committal question: