‘Can you remember the time I left you stuck up there, on the cliffs?’
‘It kinda stays with you.’
‘Sorry. Did I ever say sorry about that?’
‘About a hundred times.’
‘I’m sorry anyway. I don’t think I’ve ever properly looked out for you.’
I sat down beside him on a flat step of rock. He was pale. He disgusted me. ‘Not really the time for this.’
‘Time for what, little bro?’
I stared at my feet. Pushed it back, back. ‘Stop calling me that. Little bro. I hate it. I fuckin’ hate it.’
He looked round. ‘What’s up with you?’
‘You. You’re what’s up with me.’
‘Whatever.’
He reached down between his legs and picked up a near-empty half-bottle of whisky. I tried to grab it from him and he wrenched it back, the two of us now standing, struggling for the bottle. I finally managed to rip it free and hurled it as far as I could, the bottle spinning and spilling.
‘Thanks a lot, little bro.’
‘What’s your problem, Duke? Why the self-pity? You’re getting married today. You forgotten that?’
He raised his face to the sky and rain and stood like that for a long time, his eyes tightly shut. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Don’t know what?’
‘I don’t know what I’m doing. I feel like if I let her go I’ll just float away.’
‘Give it a break.’
‘It’s true. I look at her sometimes and think what’s a—’
‘Girl like you doing with a guy like me?’
‘Don’t take the piss. But well . . . yeah.’
‘Christ’s sake, who’s writing your dialogue, Duke? You know what?’
‘What?’
‘Don’t be the wee boy. You let this go you’ll always be the one who couldn’t hack it.’
‘It’s not that I can’t hack it.’
‘What then?’
‘It’s not that I worry I’m going to fuck it up. I know I’m gonna fuck it up! That’s what I do. Isn’t it? Hey, she might be better off with you. Think she’d let you take my place?’ A little laugh but a careful look.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘A joke. Just a joke. Why so defensive?’
‘I’m not being defensive, I’m pissed off. The old man sent me out here to find you. Bring you in.’
‘I’m not a spy.’
‘Eh?’
‘That’s what you do with spies. You bring them in. From the cold.’ He thrust out his wrists towards me. ‘Here you go then. I give up. Slap on the cuffs on and bring me in. It’s a fair cop, gov.’
I walked away, into the wild rain, passing the bottle lying in the sand. I only turned when I reached the headland. Duke was following, about a hundred yards away, lifting the bottle now and then, still seeking the final drop. He was dawdling, but the tide still too far out to catch him.
Weddings are all the same unless you are the one getting married: a marathon of over-exposed idiocy.
I smiled for the reptilian cynics of the Fleet Street press pack, still drunk after a sleepless night in the buffet car of the Glasgow sleeper and the bone-rattler that finally deposited them at the end of the world. I waved to the locals crowding outside the church, who stared with greedy, forensic attention at the stars and the frocks with a shifting mixture of mockery and desperate hope that some of the starlight of the famous guests would briefly shine on them.
I was told that my speech in the function room of the Queen’s Hotel was hilarious. I sang along as loud as anyone else as Duke led a rendition of Mairi’s Wedding (name changed accordingly . . . ). I smiled as I watched their first dance. Yet I was not there, not really. I barely spoke to Duke and only once to Anna, a quick good luck as I had handed over the ring. She mouthed a thank you and squeezed my hand. I searched for certainty in her gaze and tried not to find it.
* * *
1963 fell on me with a great weight. A time of isolation and deep cold. In my memory it snowed for weeks.
By day, I sat in the Kilburn flat, reading cheap paperbacks in the sickly scent of the lilies that Leo bought to cheer up winter. I even heard, occasionally, a petal falling on the sideboard, like an underscore to my isolation. I would anxiously wait for the next passing train to shatter the silence.
By night, I sat with Leo in front of the fire, dissecting the films we had recently seen at the Curzon in Mayfair, these the only times I ventured further than the shop at the top of Albert Road.
I didn’t see anyone else, the old man lost in Soho, Duke and Anna on extended honeymoon.
Then, in three frenzied days, I wrote Wrecking Ball, a story for my hemmed-in mood, set mostly in the cab of a crane operator as he knocks down bombed-out buildings, haunted by flashbacks to the Bethnal Green tube disaster when an air-raid panic killed 173 people, including his wife.
The day I finished the script I received another.
Charlie Goes to Tangier. This was the crap I would be forced to make instead of Wrecking Ball.
I phoned my father. That was it, I was done. He said give me three days but called back in two, telling me Earl St. John had agreed that I could direct Charlie Goes . . . My mood veered an instant 180. The old man feared only for the franchise, I know. But I was going to be a proper director.
He left it to me, naturally, to tell Duke.
I went round to Notting Hill after they returned from their Italian honeymoon. My brother opened the door.
He was smoking a cigarette in a ridiculous, white ivory holder and wearing a yellow polo neck and suede cardigan. Something about his appearance was instantly suspicious and I remembered why as I followed him inside. He was dressed almost exactly like Richard Burton in a photograph I had recently seen in a magazine. I was so infuriated I almost punched him in the face.
Then Anna was there, a whirl of movement and a bright smile at the end of the hall. Arms around me.
‘JJ! It’s wonderful to see you.’
During their honeymoon I avoided the papers and the inevitable paparazzi shots of the yacht in the bay of Capri. Duke filled me in, monologues so polished they had to be rehearsed, all ‘turquoise waters and limestone cliffs, like marble . . . meandering walks and the air like silk.’
‘Come on, Duke, you’re boring your brother.’
‘He wants to hear. Don’t you? Not every day old Dukey boy gets married, eh?’
‘Sounds wonderful.’
‘You know Capri was popular with homos? Before the First World War.’
‘No, I didn’t know that.’
He poked another cigarette into his ridiculous holder. ‘How’s Leo anyway?’
This, I decided, was the ideal moment to tell him I would be directing him in his next film.
‘You’re having a laugh, right?’
* * *
Filming took place in March. I made the welcome discovery that my remote personality, far from being a hindrance, was ideal for a director. I became notorious for my disdain for actors. ‘Essentially, he’s a psychopath,’ someone said, years later. Yet they invariably gave me what I wanted. Perhaps that deep need for validation found my contempt more gratifying than luvvie drooling.
Not that there was much angst on Charlie goes to Tangier. As Fotheringham had said, ‘We’re not making Kane.’
Still, I knew that a garrulous assistant director helped to ensure peace among the peacocks. This was Leo. Only a particular kind of misanthrope could take issue with a man who spent half his life babysitting a monkey. Even that notorious curmudgeon, Bernie Butler, director of photography, loved him, even if he suspected Leo would have taken his job in a heartbeat.
There were only a couple of occasions Duke took issue with me. Generally, he was placated by the script re-write that took me off-screen almost completely. Kidnapped by Berber bandits early on, I didn’t re-appear until near the end, leaving the film to Duke and the born-to-be-a-Bond Girl Thea de Kok, his Dutch co-
star, a pill-popping diva who put the high in high-maintenance.
Charlie goes to Tangier was the biggest hit of the franchise, Earl St John so delighted that he agreed to back Wrecking Ball. This was the first production for Breda Pictures, which Leo and I had recently set up.
‘Let’s do it,’ he said. ‘My life’s achievement should not be the ability to make a monkey smile on cue.’
‘Chimp,’ I reminded him.
We found a demolition site on the Isle of Dogs. A five-day location shoot and then four weeks in the studio.
It was mostly the same crew from Charlie Goes to Tangier but with Leo as DP. He crafted some beautiful visuals; empty, deep-focus street-scenes and over-lit POV shots in the cab of the crane. We developed what would become a trademark, the tracking shot that started just after the action began and ended just after it finished. There was something provoking, almost stalkerlike, about that slight movement, the way it led you that bit further into the scene.
The Earl of Pinewood did not approve.
He stalked out of the screening room without a word and summoned us to his office the next day. He was furious. He thought he’d been hoodwinked by a couple of god-damn beatniks. The ending, in particular, appalled him, the police turning up en masse to arrest Dan Smith, who laughs maniacally as he swings the steel ball and smashes their squad cars one by one. I had only seen a man having a nervous breakdown, not a countercultural attack on the social order.
I thought we would have to re-shoot the ending. Then I thought it would be canned altogether. In the end, it was strangled it at birth. Rank had five hundred plus cinemas and we made it into thirty. We premiered not at the Leicester Square Theatre, but the Curzon, Mayfair.
The old man put in an appearance. Wrecking Ball perplexed him. For once, he had little to say, just an indecisive ‘S’interestin’, I’ll gie ye that.’ Press interest fell away when Duke declined to attend, Leo and I taking the applause of an auditorium full of people we knew from all the evenings we too spent there. Sight and Sound liked it as well, offering praise to a ‘sombre study in Polanski-like paranoia.’
I heard from my brother a few weeks after the premiere, through Anna, a phone call inviting me for dinner.
Duke let me in.
‘Aha. Orson McWelly is here!’
A supercilious grin and again a cigarette in that ridiculous holder. Anna appeared and hugged me. As beautiful as ever in a white and yellow checkerboard shift dress, but weary, it seemed, overly made-up. She sat me next to her on a garish, purple velour sofa I hadn’t seen before.
‘We saw your film,’ Duke said, leaning forward in the red pod chair that clashed horribly with the sofa.
‘And?’
‘And what?’
‘What did you think of it?’
He took a drag on the cigarette. Considered the ceiling. ‘A bit . . . niche, don’t you think?’
‘I liked it,’ Anna said.
‘That’s not what you said,’ Duke shot back. ‘You said it was interesting.’
‘Yes, and interesting means I liked it.
‘Something can be interesting and shite.’
‘Don’t listen to him, Johnny.’
I felt the familiar tension. They were looking at me intently, expecting the conciliator to step in. I refused, for once. I wanted to ratchet that tension, ratchet and not release it. Screw them both.
‘So you thought it was shite?’
Duke smirked. ‘I didn’t say that.’
I considered him for a moment then said the one thing guaranteed to provoke. ‘So you didn’t understand it?’
He leaned forward. ‘I understood it. I’m not an idiot. I mean, it’s not exactly going to make a lot of money.’
‘Like Charlie Goes to Tangier?’
‘Yes. See, you can make something entertaining!’
‘Well, why don’t you give it a go?’
He smiled. A bit coy. ‘I’ve got ideas. Maybe I’ll surprise you one day.’
‘Why not start with the next Breda film?’
‘Maybe I will. It’s not going to be you.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Stop it. Just stop it!’ Anna burst into tears and rushed out of the room.
I looked at Duke, whose face was impassive. He shrugged and sat back in the chair, took another drag.
‘She gets like that,’ he said, vaguely.
I found her in the kitchen. At the sink, staring at her disembodied reflection in the window, a G&T in her hand. When she saw me she quickly wiped her eyes, turning to me with the saddest of smiles.
‘I missed you,’ she said.
‘I missed you too.’
‘I don’t know what to do, Johnny.’
She held my gaze, waiting for me to say the right thing, the definitive something I could never find.
I said nothing.
Her look of helplessness was utter, then gone, becoming a swift defiance. I will do this myself, it said.
‘You’re still writing,’ I said, absurdly, an eternity later.
She sounded tired. ‘Yes, Jay. I’m still writing.’ She swirled her drink. ‘Tales of excess and debauchery.’
‘Are you ok, Anna?’
And though her face immediately fell, there would be no more tears. I had missed my cue, once more.
‘Happy as anyone else,’ she said. She even managed to sound bright.
It was then I noticed, high on her cheekbone where the make-up had smudged, a red mark; a bruise.
Nine
Dusk is falling.
I sit up front with Akira. We return from The Clachan to the Castle. In the backseat is my new mirror.
Nostalgia.
I fight my nausea. I watch seagulls cartwheel above a morose sea, the lights of the promenade elegant curve from brightness to uncertainty. I decide not to ask Akira to put on some jazz.
‘There’s a time and a place for frantic sax.’
He glances across.
‘This isn’t it,’ I add.
‘Do you feel ok, Johnny? I can stop the car.’
I feel a slight acceleration. He wants to get me back to the hotel quickly, before I cover the windscreen in a watery omelette of vomit, no visibility, the car veering, smashing through the seawall.
‘They’ll be waiting,’ I say.
They are. Top-lit by the light outside the staff entrance as we drive into the back courtyard of the Castle Hotel.
Erin is wearing a long coat and has her hands on her hips. On each side of her, their hands clasped at the stomach, stands a black-suited minder. They look like the start of a dance routine.
My niece is cold fury. An assault about to happen. People keep out of our way. This is how God might pass.
‘Why are you laughing?’
‘Because I’m a daft old man.’
‘Knowing it doesn’t mean you should indulge it.’
‘You couldn’t be more wrong, pet.’
‘Where’s your cell phone anyway? It keeps going to voicemail.’
‘Japan.’
‘Japan. Right. Of course . . . ’
Akira opens the door to the suite and she quickly pushes past him. I catch up with her in the lounge, slumped on the sofa. ‘I missed lunch then.’
‘Don’t worry. So did Frank. Some problem with his chopper. Who calls it a chopper, for Christ’s sake?’
My mood plummets. I haven’t avoided Frank Stone after all.
‘You can’t disappear like that.’ She’s insistent, genuinely concerned. I form my fingers into a gun and point it at my head.
‘Look at you. You’re a mess. Did you really think we’d let you direct a hundred-million-dollar movie?’
I chuckle. Yes, I chuckle. A chuckle that says I don’t care when I clearly do. I go through to the bathroom. Splash cold water. Do my best to avoid the mirror. When I lift the towel she’s there.
‘Read this.’ She thrusts a piece of paper at me.
I have no choice.
Mr Shi
nigami. I saw you in town today. This is a time of nostalgic return, I suppose. Therefore, I can understand the mirror. I hope you mount it in a very prominent place. Somewhere unavoidable. All those faces. It’s coming, you know, that reckoning, don’t overindulge the . . .
‘He’s following you. Can you understand now why you need to be accompanied?’
By now I’m laughing.
I’m thinking of Frank Stone. One of his OTT studies in big-budget melodrama. We need music, the spook of skeleton strings as I peer into the mirror with a concerned frown, wondering who the maniac might be. Cut to a dark apartment, a three-bar electric fire, someone with his back to us. We see fingers slowly typing, another email taking shape on the blue screen.
I look up at Erin. This time I circle a forefinger and point it at my temple. A moment later she’s gone. I saw a look like that once on a chef hammering a schnitzel flat in a Munich restaurant.
I sit down on the toilet and read the rest of the email. I am advised to fend off my inevitable hangover with a painkiller, maybe codeine. I am told to go easy, don’t mix it with alcohol . . .
Now my heart is hammering. I scrunch the paper up and throw it in the toilet, flush it away.
* * *
It’s impossible to believe now, but Frank Stone was a 1970s heart-throb. The winsome teenage lead in Babes in Brooklyn, a comedy about a gang of street kids in 1920s New York, The Waltons meets Happy Days.
Fading from view in the eighties, he re-emerged in the late nineties as a sentimental visionary with a mystical ability to milk the multiplex masses. The man with the wizard’s touch transformed himself, All-American Jock into wannabe auteur favouring black suits à la Warhol.
‘JJ!’ he exclaims and gives me a bear hug.
‘Look,’ he adds, stepping back and holding out his arms, offering me up to the consideration of his entourage. ‘The legend himself. Johnny Jackson. I can’t tell you how this man has guided all I’ve done.’
He is indeed a man who can fill a room, not with the gravitas he craves but through simple insistence. I smile indulgently. I let him take me aside, where he whispers loud enough for everyone to hear that he is humbled and indeed honoured to contribute to my final work.
The Accidental Recluse Page 11