‘Final?’
He seems surprised. ‘Final. Yes, final. Every day is our final day, every film our last, don’t you think?’
Scientology.
Surely that is the explanation flickering in those piggy little eyes. ‘You’re a man of . . . perspicacity,’ I say.
His eyes narrow, looking for a mockery he decides not to find. ‘Let’s tell them about our masterpiece,’ he shout-whispers, taking me by the arm and leading me across to the door to the media suite.
Stone arrived out of my semi-conscious hangover fug at 7am. A heavy but directionless beating that confused me. For a disorientating moment I thought it was something inside the room. When I realised it was a helicopter I knew that the Great Director was here. I immediately fell into a deep and near-perfect sleep, like some kind of biological threat-response.
And now another chittering.
Voices and occasional laughter on the other side of the door. I am reminded of every terrifying Breda Boys intro. Ladies and gentlemen . . .
Gallant Stone insists I go first, flashing a magnanimous tombstone smile, right hand on my shoulder while the left checks his hairpiece is still in place.
I step into applause.
My raised hand is no greeting but a fending off. The world lurches. The last time this happened I fell off the stage at the BFI Southbank, a Q&A session after the screening of the thirtieth anniversary print of A Man’s a Man. Quite the finale to the retrospective of my films, fifteen years ago now, almost as bizarre a public appearance as my next, the TV show in Japan a few days ago.
I walk very carefully up a short flight of stairs and sit on one of two leather chairs. Stone sits at the other. I am faced by a bristling of microphones on the small table between us, beyond that the crowded auditorium. Alcohol would make it easier, but that’s why I fell off the BFI stage.
In Shuzenji, I am sliding open the bamboo screen. The air is cool and I do not mind the rainy smirr . . .
‘The story is always there. But destiny calls at a given time. When that time comes the story needs to be re-told.’
Stone has been asked why he is making The Bruce.
‘This nation is flowering,’ he adds. To demonstrate, he raises a fist in front and slowly opens his fingers.
I resist the urge to close my eyes or shake my head. Buddha is right, all existence is indeed suffering.
‘The myths are rising again . . . Like salmon in your great rivers.’
I think, salmon?
‘What is the salmon but the symbol of wisdom. Strength. That’s what Robert the Bruce is. Wisdom and strength. The one who had not only the perspicacity,’ he glances my way, ‘but also the will to follow through on the story he knew he had to tell. Destiny might call but it can also suggest.’
Oh, dear God.
Yet the titters don’t come. The hacks are smitten. They ask and they scribble as Stone expands on his theme, how our myths are entertainments and while the most enduring are the most straightforward, that does not mean sacrificing truth or complexity, for we are thinking beings . . .
‘There is room in this film for contemplation, for the wind in the barley . . . we all know that famous scene in A Man’s a Man.’ He reaches an arm across my shoulder. ‘It is truly an honour to have such a legendary figure as Mr Johnny Jackson producing this film.’ He gets to his feet and starts clapping. Soon the entire auditorium has followed suit and again it goes on uncomfortably long.
‘I want to remind you,’ Stone says when the applause dies out, ‘that The Bruce is Johnny’s script. His film, not mine. I mean, I’ve read his autobiography. Would you get on the wrong side of this man?’
Laughter now. Stone flashes me another dazzler and sits down. My turn for the questions.
The trick, as ever, is displacement.
There is an empty seat beside a pretty blonde in the centre of the auditorium. I will settle there, looking back at the table and watching myself respond to the inevitabilities about why I have chosen to make another film and the enduring influence of A Man’s a Man . . . I am surprised and impressed with the gregariousness of my responses, the leavening of Sam Beckett’s usual scowl.
When the questions end we are ushered stage front. Stone puts his arm round me. Photographers cluster. A young girl in a wheelchair with a bald head and a tube in her nose appears through the side door, pushed by Erin. She is wearing a Kid Whizz T-shirt, one of Stone’s better recent efforts. She hands him an autograph book. He signs and smiles, bends for the cameras.
‘Mr Jackson?’
I turn to an earnest-looking young man with a Dictaphone. ‘The dispute, do you have a comment?’
‘What’s that?’
‘The union recognition dispute with your hotels? We’re in one of them right now. The underpaying of—’
He is jostled in the sudden movement around me. There are hands on my shoulders and a calm voice saying, ‘This way, Mr Jackson.’ The journalist shouts after me as I am hurried through the side door.
As it closes, I glance back and see the little girl in the wheelchair. She is crying, shrunk down and clasping her autograph book while the journalist still shouts his questions, Dictaphone in the air.
‘I love it!’ Stone says.
We are in The Ghillie’s Bar, the VVIP annex of the main lounge, hustled in like politicians to a safe area following an assassination attempt. Erin strides to a far corner, fury on a phone.
‘I most surely do,’ he adds.
He scurries back and fore in front of a buffet set out on either side of a vast fireplace, stopping now and then to pop another grape in his mouth. After a few circuits he stops, suddenly reflective, and wanders to the window. There, he becomes a silhouette, looking out on a flat expanse of patchy snow that ends like an infinity-edge pool and becomes the gauzy grey of Inveran Bay.
‘Incident,’ he suddenly bellows and throws his arms wide, turning around. ‘What is life without incident?’
He’s delighted. LA life is as regulated as a call-sheet. The most innocuous of departures becomes an Event.
‘It reminds me of this one time,’ he says as he comes back over, then tells me something about Aspen, Colorado, and an environmental protest. A sudden claustrophobia sends me to the bar. I feel Erin’s eyes drilling into the back of my head as I ask for a bottle of beer, yes, just a beer, Duke, a little settler, to deal with the grape-munching burbler that is Frank Stone.
Lewis with the big ginger beard, who I met when we arrived at the hotel, places the bottle in front of me. There is a momentary pause in Stone’s monologue, filled with rehab judgement and envy (he knows old Betty fairly well). Lewis takes the opportunity to say something but Frank’s off again before he can. I roll my eyes at the barman and watch him turn away. Soon, a sense of great ease flows through me. I watch how Stone’s mouth makes a little pout when he talks, the voice somehow emerging from just behind the teeth rather than the throat.
And his hands. He has the most extraordinary hands, oddly small and rounded palms but long Nosferatu fingers. I wonder briefly about what the journalist had said. Then I gesture to Lewis.
‘I’m making a film, a documentary,’ he blurts out as he places down the beer, his face colouring to an alarming red.
‘Good for you,’ I say. ‘I hope it’s better than ours.’
Stone starts laughing. A cartoon yuk-yuk-yuk that grows into a full-throated guffaw. He’s worked on that laugh, I know he has. Lewis too seems alarmed, smiling nervously and backing away.
* * *
As Akira and I had the day before, we leave from the back entrance. I sit in the back of the Mercedes, Erin beside me. On my insistence, Akira is driving. On Erin’s, a minder sits up front with him. Another car pulls out behind us. The incident at the press conference and the latest email have spooked them.
The schedule dictates a visit to MacIntyre’s Cave, where the famous scene with Robert the Bruce and the spider will be recreated. Then on to my old primary school and a performance in my
honour. The possibility of subversion – as at the press briefing – seems remote, although an attack by eight-year-old anarchists with cream pies cannot be completely ruled out.
‘You’ll listen now? You see?’ She clicks her fingers. ‘How it happens?’ She looks out the window and I follow her gaze into the rush of passing spruce. I have a flash of childhood, the windblown conifer in Dulston Wood; the bird’s skull, white pebble and toy soldier I placed in the roots, a strange altar I felt somehow compelled to build. Imagine coming across that on a stroll in the forest.
‘Nebulous intelligence. It sometimes coagulates. You know, like blood?’ She turns back to me. ‘Could have been blood. Why not? That journalist. Maybe he had a knife. A gun. He was in the strike zone.’
Strike zone?
I am convinced, again, of my niece’s basic madness. The staccato sentences remind me of the way she described the share prices on the plane. She lives in a Manichean world. Profit is up or down. People are friend or foe. Abbreviation is the psychotic tell. There is only danger in nuance.
‘Did you notice his hands,’ I ask.
‘The journalist?’
‘Stone.’
‘Stone?’ Her momentary confusion becomes weary resignation. ‘No, Jay. I didn’t notice his hands.’
‘Quite extraordinary. Look at mine.’ I hold them up, the backs of the palms facing her. ‘I’ve got liver spots like Rorschach blots. Do you think he’s had plastic surgery? He’s not much younger than me.’
‘You know what, Jay? You’re right. You’re absolutely right. It is all a big joke, the cave we’re turning into a bloody film set, Frank’s hands, I mean, how can we take any of it seriously?’
Sarcasm has always made her ugly. A narrowing of the eyes, teeth bared to the gums. Like a baboon.
The car comes to a sudden stop.
Erin turns and peers through the windscreen. A lorry stacked with logs is emerging from a track leading into the spruce woods. A skinny man in a yellow bib is standing directly in front of us, one palm face-out towards us, the other beckoning the lorry forward onto the main road.
Two minders from the following car have materialised. They stand one on each side of ours.
The lorry eases into a slip road just ahead. The driver’s door has opened. I look up as we pass. He’s smoking, leaning down to talk to the man in the bib, who starts to laugh, then doffs an imaginary hat.
As we drive away, Erin continues looks out the back window.
‘Maybe you’re right. Did you see the way they looked at us?’ She turns back to me. ‘You wonder how people see us, really see us. All our self-importance. It must seem completely bizarre.’
As if on cue, I glance outside and see the sign for the cemetery, which Akira and I passed yesterday. Erin too has noticed it but says nothing. She will not speak of that place, not yet. As I will not tell her that McIntyre’s Cave is somewhere else she has been. If she is meant to remember, she will.
I see it all again, of course.
Don’t laugh, Duke, at these incessant thoughts of time and how nothing truly passes. In McIntyre’s Cave, King Robert the Bruce is still watching the spider try and try and eventually succeed in spinning his web, while as my car reaches the brow of the hill and McIntyre’s Bay spreads beneath me a day from long, long ago continues to spool, gloweringly grey, a young girl with a red kite scampering across the sand towards the incoming tide and I’m shouting, shouting, my voice catching on the wind and Erin finally hearing my warning, rushing back towards me and into my arms, her smile fading as she looks at her mother, beside us but a universe away, a woman who would walk, if we let her, into the implacable surf, water to knees, waist . . .
The caves now have a clifftop car park, commandeered for the production. A man with a clipboard waves us through the security barrier. Two marquees have been set up. People with beards and wellies rush around. Straightaway, Erin walks to the fence and looks down on the arc of white-yellow beach. Joining her, I notice that she is breathing deeply, in and out to the rhythm of the surf. For a startling moment, I am sure it is her breath drawing and releasing the waves.
‘Just a beautiful place,’ she says, opening her eyes. I know now that she does not remember being here before. She turns to me and smiles. She seems to be offering both reconciliation and invitation. All I have to do is follow. I feel the same claustrophobia as in The Ghillie’s Bar.
* * *
I stand at the cave entrance and watch him. Frank Stone. The colossal echo of his laughter, the waving of his strange hands. He walks slowly from one side of the cave to another, stopping to touch the floor. I remember an interview. Jay Leno, I think, Stone gushing about his ‘obsessive need to inhabit the worlds I create’. Dear Lord, what I would give for a falling stalactite . . .
Then he sees me. A hurrying, an arm round the shoulders. He guides me out of earshot of anyone else.
‘What do you think of the set?’
From the entrance, the cave funnels into a bulbous chamber some thirty feet wide and high. Lighting rigs have been positioned in front of the entrance, bathing the set in a dim mustardy light, an ethereal strangeness enhanced by the uplighting of various stalagmites. The crane camera has a platform, complete with heated seat. Up there will loom the Stone God with his toasty bum.
‘It’s coming together,’ I say.
‘Coming together?’
It isn’t enough for Frank. There’s a fretfulness in his eyes. He needs validation I cannot give. My storyboard perfected these scenes years ago. Their essence is sparseness, the only prop a rough blanket on which Bruce lies and looks up at the spider, the only lighting a mean little fire. He’s on the run. He would not have had that chair and table, or half a dozen candles. Nor a wooden bed . . .
A spotlight snaps on from a lighting rig. A technician directs it to an overhang of rock. I understand straightaway. This is daylight, pouring through an opening in the cave’s roof, picking out the spider at its web. It will be a cudgel-like depiction of Bruce’s epiphany. Brad Renner will sit up on his bed and look suitably illumined, a swell of strings as Frank intercuts a montage of victorious battles to come with the spider’s painstaking but ultimately successful efforts.
‘It’s going to be a dream sequence,’ he says.
‘I love it.’
This seems to reassure him. He takes me on a directionless meander round the set, arms flailing and those fingers, those fingers, like a wizard’s, casting spells. Maybe that explains his two Oscars.
‘We’ve had trouble though.’
‘It’s a complicated staging.’
‘No. The set. It’s been vandalised. Generator lines cut. Some lights smashed. It’s why we beefed security up top. Incident follows you about, like at the presser? I thought the locals were friendly?’
‘Make a friend, you make one for life. Make an enemy . . . ’
‘Rabbie Burns. Right?’ He pronounces it like rabies.
‘No. Johnny Jackson.’
He looks confused then slaps me on the back and laughs. ‘Tell you, Mister Jay, you’ve still got it, still got it.’
As I wonder what I still have, a young brunette in an oversized, fur-collared parka and clipboard appears with a deferential flush, the thrust of a wilting hand and the declaration of ‘Susie, a pleasure.’
Again, I am compelled to follow. Susie points with proud uncertainty to two canvas seats, printed, in neat gothic script, Frank Stone, Director, and JJ Jackson, Executive Producer.
‘Do you like it?’
She takes my arm and walks me towards my chair, still holding on, gently helping the old man down.
‘I’m counting on you, Jay.’ Frank Stone plonks down beside me. He’s pointing at my face with a serious look. ‘That eye of yours. Standing on the shoulder of giants. That’s all I’m doing. Tune me in.’
I get up and walk the set. I make a pretence of studying it. I see Akira by the entrance tunnel and offer a little gesture. He turns and disappears. A few minutes later I meet
him outside. We walk across the watery sand into a razor-edged wind and flurries of snow. He hands me the hipflask. By the time we turn back the snow is heavy. The pouring light from McIntyre’s Cave has become a gauzy yellow, making an uncertainty of the figure waving and shouting to me as I once called to her.
Though only mid-morning the day already seems to be calling time. The cold deepens. I hike up the steps and across the car park. A fleeting smell of coal smoke makes me close my eyes, breathe deeply.
Erin is already inside the car. ‘We’re running late.’
I nod, trying to catch my breath. ‘The kids won’t mind.’
‘You need to take it easy.’
‘Tragedy might improve the PR.’
A massive heart attack in the assembly hall of my old primary school, say, at the very culmination of the special event being held in my honour, the children’s singing becoming horrified screams.
‘True.’ This seems to cheer her up.
She spends the journey back along the coast to Inveran staring out the window and humming a little tune I can’t place, eagerly following each winding of the road, the revelation of every spectacular seascape. ‘Look at that,’ she says, and ‘isn’t that something.’ She wants me to join in. To agree. As with everything she says or does, her cheerfulness is relentless, exhausting.
A lassie of pairts, my mother would have said. Knows what she wants and how to get it. But my mother wouldn’t have liked her. It’s ok to be that go getter but gonna go get it somewhere else?
In some ways my approach to Erin’s upbringing was much like my mother’s. A dour just get on with it. That first day of primary, Duke, it was likely the same for you as for me, Mum unclasping your gripping hand at the top of Campbell Street and shooing you away towards the school, where the other mums were crowding the gates, hugging goodbye to their children. I remember that walk so vividly. The dreadful uncertainty mixed with anticipation.
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