by David Szalay
The train disembogues from London under an empty March sky. In the middle of a weekday the platforms of south-of-the-river stations are quiet. Nor is the train full, though there are a few other people obviously on their way to Fontwell Park—mostly old men with Racing Posts, and soft sandwiches in Tupperwares, and Thermoses. It has been some time since James has seen a Thermos. Watching an old man pour some tea—or whatever it is—into the plastic mug that doubles as a lid, he thinks of the large tartan one they used to take on family outings in the Seventies. Often he thinks of Katherine. His sense, when he left her flat yesterday morning, that everything was essentially okay has lost much of its positive force since then. It is now as faintly evanescent—there one moment, not the next—as the sunlight on the nodding thickets of withered wild lilac on either side of the tracks, so faint sometimes that it is imperceptible. She did have sex with him on Monday night, when all was said and done. After all the palaver, she did do that. On the other hand, he has not heard from her since, which makes him wonder, as the train winds its way through the post-winter, pre-spring landscape, whether perhaps, when she said she did not think they should see each other for a while, that was in fact what she meant.
3
The next morning he still has not heard from her. He walks Hugo. The quarter is full of students. On every street, interrupting the sombre London terraces, stand the structures where they study. More than in the past, he sometimes wonders how his life might have turned out if he had been a student himself, if he had not been so impatient, straight from school, to make some sort of mark on the world, and money. Indeed, while he was still at school he had started a salted-snacks wholesale business. North-London newsagents were his trade. He had his own van and he drove it himself, with special permission of the headmaster, who liked his entrepreneurial spirit, and singled it out on Speech Day as being a source of pride to the school and of value to society at large—the year was 1987. Perhaps encouraged by this head-magisterial shout-out in the humid marquee, the summer after his A-levels, instead of taking the usual path to university, he invested his profits in a takeaway-pizza franchise in Islington. Needless to say, he did not imagine spending his life as the proprietor of a pizza-delivery outfit. He was always on the lookout for something new. And then it turned out that one of his employees needed money to finance a film…
On Friday and Saturday nights, when they were open till two, he drove the staff home himself. Eric Garcia, who lived somewhere up the Holloway Road, was usually the last to be dropped. An introverted young man a few years older than James, he had a wide mouth and skin that was somehow simultaneously pallid and olive. He looked, James thought, not unlike a chameleon. He was about as talkative as a chameleon too, and not wanting to sit in silence while they travelled together in the front of the van, James would prod him with questions. ‘Any plans for tomorrow?’ he said one night.
‘Probably writing,’ Eric said, staring through the windscreen. ‘Yeah, writing.’
The light moved to green. ‘Writing what?’
Eric muttered unintelligibly.
‘Sorry?’
‘Just, um… mn… nm.’ Eric seemed to be looking for something that had fallen down the side of the seat.
‘Sorry, I didn’t hear…’
‘Screenplay I’m working on,’ Eric said. ‘You know, developing… nd… yeah…’ His voice trailed off.
‘A screenplay?’
‘Mm…’ He nodded.
‘What sort of screenplay?’
It was a thriller, Eric eventually said.
When he sat down with it a few nights later, James very much wanted to like Eric’s screenplay. Eric even had a director lined up—Julian Shoe—and the following Sunday they met to discuss the project.
With a smile on his bearded face, Shoe did most of the talking. Garcia studied the froth of his pint and piped up only when he was invited to speak. ‘I met Eric through post-production on my short, The Jokers,’ Shoe said, ‘and he did some special effects, and he had some post-production contacts, and had worked at—was it Harry’s?’
Garcia looked up from his pint. ‘Er—yeah—Harry,’ he said. ‘Paintbox.’
‘Yeh, that’s it.’
‘Harry,’ said Garcia. ‘Harry, yeah.’
‘So I needed special effects and I was introduced to Eric. And he helped finish the special effects, and he had written this wicked script, and you know, when it was time to think about doing a feature we were both of a like mind towards… you know, trying that venture.’
James nodded. Shoe was, he thought, quite impressive. He had presence—sitting next to him, Garcia seemed on the point of disappearing. He seemed faint and substanceless, like a film projected in a sunny room.
They were waiting for James to speak.
Though he let them wait for a minute, though he took a slow pull of his Bloody Mary, his mind was made up. They needed money to make their film; that was the purpose of the meeting. That was why Shoe wouldn’t stop smiling, why Garcia was so nervous. James had told him that he had money to invest, which was not strictly true—he would have to mortgage the pizza place.
Shoe sighed and said, ‘We’ve been to every funding body in England.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’ He shrugged. ‘You know.’ He was still smiling, wryly now. ‘It just seems nobody wants to help low-budget film-makers, for some unknown reason.’
Garcia said, more or less to himself, ‘No, I know the reason. It involves money. People just don’t want to give money to inexperienced film-makers.’
‘Look, this is a money-making venture we’re in,’ Shoe said, with fresh impetus, looking James in the eye. ‘You know. Film-making. It’s about making a profit, ultimately. We understand that. I don’t think a lot of people in the British film industry understand that. You find this really snooty attitude in the British film industry, that just because we’re not ashamed of wanting to make money, people don’t take us seriously. And then you look at American films, and the success of them.’ He shrugged exasperatedly. ‘You know.’
The film was made for not much more than £20,000. While James wondered where the money went—it did not seem to be up on the screen—Garcia and Shoe showed every sign of being pleased with what they had made; and probably feeling his inexperience, James was inclined, throughout the long and expensive process of post-production, to doubt his own intimations of mediocrity. And he wanted to doubt them. He very much wanted to doubt them.
In May, they took the film to Cannes, hoping to find a distributor there. It was shown twice in the south of France, in a screening room under the monstrous concrete molar of the Palais du Festival. They were not staying in town, in one of the luxury hotels overlooking the sea. Instead they had a mobile home in the Camping Belle Vue, somewhere miles inland. The place had a pre-season feel. The weather was tepid. The swimming pool was still under wraps, and most of the other mobile homes were unoccupied. A few tattooed pensioners in trunks promenaded under the trees, or sat in folding chairs in front of their mobile homes, or watched television inside them.
On their first evening there, James left the silent, frightened Garcia, the sulky Shoe, and went into town on his own. He parked on a meter near the station, and set out on foot for nowhere in particular, except that through some instinct he seemed to be making for the sea. Other than the ubiquitous posters, the only sign of the film festival were some tired-looking men porting video equipment through the streets. It was early evening. As he neared the seafront there were more people in evidence. Most of these people, however, were walking the other way, and when he stepped onto the windy esplanade, under the tall palms and umbrella pines, it seemed to be emptying. The African hawkers were still there with their trays of watches and lighters, but even they were sitting on the lawns under the trees, smoking. Out on the water the yachts and the superyachts, though starting to fade into the smudge of the horizon, had not yet s
witched on their lights.
In the mothy twilight of the hôtel de plein air, Garcia and Shoe were finishing off a litre of warm vodka, taking the stuff out of mugs, mixed with warm orange juice. Shoe kept slapping his large white legs—he was wearing shorts—as the invisible mosquitoes went for them. ‘What are we doing for dinner?’ he said when he saw James, though he was inspecting his own legs when he said it. ‘I’m starving.’
‘I’ve eaten, mate,’ James said.
‘Oh. Well what about us?’
‘Take the van. Get something. Whatever.’
‘Can’t take the van.’
‘Why not?’
Shoe held up the Smirnoff. ‘I’m too pissed,’ he said.
‘Well… you should have thought of that.’
‘I thought you’d sort something out.’
‘Why?’ James laughed sourly and went inside.
Shoe had turned out to be a lazy prima donna, always whining about something—he had made a fuss about not staying in a proper hotel, for instance—and leaving all the promotional heavy-lifting to James.
No one showed up to the first screening. The slot was a poor one—two o’clock, when everyone was still lingering over liquid lunches or taking siestas in their seafront hotels. Still, it was a sad moment when they told the indifferent projectionist that he might as well take the film off the spools. And while Garcia and Shoe got morosely smashed, slumped in cane chairs in the British Pavilion, James spent the whole afternoon—it was humid and hazy—schmoozing strangers to ensure that the same thing did not happen the next day.
In that, he succeeded. Half a dozen industry types turned up to the second screening, and all left within ten minutes.
So that was that.
Except, for James, there was a postscript.
On their last night one of the Hollywood studios hosted a junket in the Chateau de la Napoule, to which he had managed to wangle spare invites from someone in the British Pavilion. Still locked into his promotional mindset, he moved through the party, sweating in the dinner jacket he had optimistically packed, and trying to set up an interview for ‘the talent’. The place was full of would-be showbiz journalists, with their microphones and hot little lights, and squinting into one of these lights Garcia and Shoe played for the last time at being in the movies. Their interviewer was a young woman dressed for a party, in figure-hugging black with a peach silk rose on her shoulder. She was not English; her voice had a very slight foreign intonation. Probably she was Scandinavian, though she did not look Nordic. She was short, and her hair, except for some silvery threads, was dark and wiry. Her eyes were topaz. ‘And how did you go about getting actors?’ she said.
‘Just rang up agents,’ Eric answered, drunk. ‘Just rang up agents. Spoke to people. Agents…’
She looked uninterested. James had only just managed to persuade her to interview his men, and they were not making a strong impression. Garcia, in particular, was all over the place.
‘And… And what sort of reaction have you had?’ she said, shifting a lock of hair from over her eye.
Standing off to the side, in the shadows, James looked at his polished shoes. There was a pause. He looked up. Julian was smiling steadily. ‘Well, put it this way,’ he said. ‘We’ve had only one person—of all the people who’ve seen this film here—we’ve only had one person who actually hated it.’
The interviewer laughed tactlessly, and James found himself liking her. ‘What did they say?’ she said.
There was another pause.
‘They weren’t very polite,’ Julian said. ‘Let’s just say they weren’t very polite…’
It had been an American, who stood up no more than ten minutes into the second screening and muttered, ‘Thanks for wasting my time.’
To which Shoe, with hurt British fury—‘Thanks for giving us a fair shot.’
‘I have given you a fair shot,’ the American said, making his way noisily to the exit. ‘This is the worst picture I’ve ever seen here. The worst. Saying something.’ Which elicited some nervous laughter from the other members of the audience. The heavy sound-proof door thudded to—and then, following an interval of perhaps a minute, the whole place emptied out.
‘And,’ said the Scandinavian interviewer, struggling for questions, ‘what would you say about independent production?’
‘It’s excellent.’ Garcia.
‘Why?’
Garcia laughed as if it was a stupid question. ‘Nobody can argue with us. You know, if they tell me I can’t write… There’s the proof. It’s there, on the screen. If they tell Julian he can’t direct… If they tell James he can’t produce… There’s the proof…’
‘James?’
They turned to him.
He smiled warily—and immediately Garcia and Shoe were pulling him into the white light, were holding an arm each, ignoring his modest protests. He no longer wanted to be publicly paraded with them. They embarrassed him now. And the small Scandinavian interviewer was quite attractive, in a pixie-ish way. Garcia’s arm was heavy on his shoulders; Shoe was still holding his left wrist.
‘This is James,’ Garcia said, showing a leery smile. ‘Say hello, James.’
‘James’s the money man,’ put in Shoe.
‘Thanks, Julian,’ James said, freeing his wrist. He wanted to shrug off Garcia’s ponderous embrace too, but decided that any attempt to do this—if it led to a scuffle—might just make things worse. Smiling faintly, the interviewer was looking at him, twisting a strand of her tough hair around a finger. ‘Well I would be the money man,’ he said, trying to make light of the situation. ‘If there was any.’ He noticed that she had exquisite skin, exactly the shade of very weak and milky Nescafé.
He was pleased not to have to spend another night in the mobile home with Garcia and Shoe, who snored so sonorously that the people in the next-door home had insisted on being moved. The hôtel de plein air was a low, humid spot, pleasing to mosquitoes, where the turf was squelchy underfoot and the duckboards in the showers were mildewed and black. Not that Miriam was staying in the belle-époque elegance of the Carlton. She had an overpriced shoebox near the main-line station, within earshot of the platform tannoy, especially in the quiet of the early morning, through open windows. It was at such an hour that James walked through lemony sunlight to where he had left the van, with his silk-lapelled jacket over his arm.
Shoe was sitting on a white plastic chair on the smear of concrete that passed for a terrace in front of the mobile home. He was wrapped in towels, even his hair. Walking down the hill, James was surprised not to stir with irritation at the mere sight of him sitting there, towel-headed, his narrow beard still damp from the shower.
‘Morning,’ he said.
Shoe just nodded. He was on the phone. He spent several hours a day on the phone to his wife. For the last four mornings, James had listened to one side of an ill-tempered and seemingly endless dispute through the negligible partitions of the mobile home. This morning, however, he was pleasingly impervious to the self-importance and monotony of Julian’s voice. He even felt sorry for him, to see him sitting there in his towels, negotiating some tired issue of matrimonial politics. He left him out in the mild morning air, and went inside.
There was no sign of Garcia, and when Julian finally tossed the phone down on the white plastic table, James stuck his head out and said, ‘Where’s Eric?’
Eric, Julian said, had vanished overnight. He had left a note. Initially, Julian had thought it was a suicide note. By the time you read this I will be gone… In fact, Eric had simply taken a train to Paris, and from there another to London. In the note, he said he had had to leave immediately—unable to stand another moment of slow-motion failure—and that he did not want to see either of them ever again.
It was nearly noon when they set out in strong sunlight, leaving the wreck of their hopes on the Côte d’Azur. They stopped for lunch at a motorway service station near Avignon
—Julian eating his fill, as always when the production (i.e. James) was paying, loading his tray with starter, steak frites and pudding, wine, while James watched in silence. It was, however, a vacant and not a savage silence. In his pocket he had a piece of paper with Miriam’s London number on it, and while Julian fed he stared out the window, at fleecy flotillas standing still in the shining monochrome sky.
* * *
The very springiness of the still air seems sad to him. Perhaps it is just the way the warming air, on these early spring days, is so sharp with transience. The end of something, the start of something new. Time. It is intrinsically sad. Last night, for instance, James had woken in the dark to hear Hugo lapping at his waterbowl in the kitchen, and for some sleep-fuddled reason he had thought—Many years from now, when Hugo is long dead, I will remember this specific moment, in the middle of the night, and the sound of him lapping innocently at his waterbowl. And with a start of sadness it had seemed to him that Hugo was long dead—how short his life was!—and that he was hearing the sound of his thirsty lapping from a deep well of time. He unleashes him. St George’s Gardens is a little graveyard. Daffodils sprout eagerly between the tombs. Hidden behind the School of Pharmacology, it is usually very quiet—this morning, the only other human presence is a man tidying away last year’s leaves. Hugo trots over to a white stone obelisk, and pisses on its pitted plinth.
Somewhere, in one of the trees, the first tit of spring is singing. He stands there listening to its song—its up-down song. Two notes, starting on the higher one. Up-down up-down up-down up-down up-down. It sings them in sets of five. The sound of spring in London. Up and down. Like the next few days. The next few days are up and down.
When he finally spoke to her, for the first time since leaving her flat on Tuesday morning, she sounded irritable. (That he took to be a positive sign, since it was not him she was irritated with.) She said someone was off sick…
‘What, someone else?’
‘There’s a flu going round.’