As I move through the photos I began to hear Ellington. Such Sweet Thunder. I look up and see Lewis standing by the CD player in the kitchen. He’s uncomfortable, knows he’s pushed it too far.
‘Any other melodrama you want to roll out, son? How about sticking on a DVD of A Man’s a Man?’
‘Shouldn’t I choose one of yours if I’m doing that?’
An instant steeliness. I remember the anger from earlier and recall a line from one of his emails. All these people, how disappointed they’d all be. I look back at the photos. ‘It’s quite the collection.’
‘Didn’t you say that making a film was all about squatting in someone else’s life for a while?’
‘Squatting, not stalking.’
He ignores the insult. ‘You’re right,’ he says. ‘It’s all about the immersion. I never really got that until now. I’ve made loads of films. I started in high school. Little scenes. I ran them together and called it Inveran 101. No-one’s seen any of them except my dad. He bought me my first camera.’ His face is red with embarrassment. ‘The documentary’s for him, really.’
‘So when do I get to see the great masterpiece?’ Instantly, his face clouds again. ‘What’s it called?’
He looks coy.
‘Let me guess. The Shinigami?’
‘Why not? It’s the perfect illustration of you.’
‘Of my tragedy?’
‘Not your tragedy. Everyone else’s. All that death you’ve brought.’
‘You’re losing me.’
He sniffs. Then comes across and re-fills my glass. ‘You’re so refined, aren’t you? Cause and effect, you’re beyond all that. Buy low and sell high. Every one of your accumulations is someone else’s loss. Doesn’t matter to you. You just see the columns turning red to green.’
‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘I know you don’t.’
‘What the hell have I ever done to you?’
‘My dad. He’d still be here if it wasn’t for you.’
‘You’re losing me again.’
‘The Royal Inveran.’
‘The hotel?’ I glance across at the picture on the wall. The proud man standing outside the entrance.
‘You probably don’t know what happened when you opened the Inveran Castle.’
‘It wasn’t my decision to open that hotel.’
‘Wrong. You set up Breda Inc. in the first place. That pretty much makes it your decision.’
‘C’mon, son, don’t be dragging original sin into it. That’s the trump card, where’s the fun in that?’
‘I asked if you knew what happened to the Royal Hotel?’
‘It closed down a few years back.’
‘Bingo. My dad owned it. Poured his life into it. And overnight the guests disappeared. Pissed off up the coast to your new place. JJ Jackson, Local Legend. He should have cut his losses there and then. Too proud. I’ve got a standing, he said it over and over. I’ve got a standing in this town. He poured more and more into an empty hotel. Then we were bankrupt. Funny that.’
I am now grateful to Ellington, filling the space that has shrunk between us. ‘I’m sorry, I truly am.’
‘I don’t give a shit about the hotel.’ He grabs the whisky bottle. ‘It was this. He climbed inside this and never got out. I’d get calls from pubs, telling me to come and get him. Then one evening it was the police at the door. He’d been hit by a train. They called it accidental death but he meant it, why else was he down the fuckin’ railway?’ He stares at me for a few more moments. Then the anger suddenly dissipates. He sees the bottle in his hand and pours me a top up. ‘I worked in the hotel bar. Old Simon Warner used to come in now and then. He came to the funeral too. He had some choice things to say about you. He didn’t like you too much either.’
I remember Simon’s face on the laptop.
‘It seemed crazy, you know, what he told me. But I did some digging. It’s amazing what you can find out when you really dislike someone. Enough for a book. Then I thought, why not a film?’
He looks at me with absolute disdain. The affection I felt for this man is almost comically out of place.
‘So you think you know all about me.’
His eyes brighten. ‘Not everything, I’m sure.’ He’s expectant. He wants me to ask again if I can see it.
Instead, I close my eyes and listen to Ellington. After a while Lewis suddenly gets up. He returns a few moments later with the laptop, setting it up as Sonnet to Hank Cinq reaches its tentative crescendo.
‘Just watch it. Please. That’s all.’
The last of the late-afternoon light is on the quick-slide to darkness. Lewis hurries into his waterproof and leaves me alone. He has taken a torch. I watch his light bob down the slope and westwards.
On the table the film waits at the menu page. The Shinigami fills the top half of the screen. Bold white capitals on black. Below the title is a definition. Shinigami (death spirit, the Grim Reaper) – supernatural figures or gods from Japanese religion and culture that are related to death. Below this are the words play film and scene selection, each accompanied by a small representation of a demon’s face.
The style is blundering from the off.
I click the play film demon and the screen goes black. It remains that way for so long I think it has crashed. Then music fades in, a wistful piece played uncertainly on what sounds like a Bontempi organ.
Suddenly, there is a scream of keys, as if all have been pressed at the same time. The Shinigami instantly fills the screen in those same, bold white letters. They slowly fade into a static shot of the Sound of Skerray from our cottage and a voiceover begins, an over-solemn Lewis.
Inveran, Scotland. February 1956. A young man has leapt into the boiling sea to save three drowning sailors from a stricken ship. This is Duke Jackson. At home, his brother Johnny has no idea of the myth they are about to be catapulted into. These will be the Breda Boys, and myth it most certainly is.
Again, the scream of keys. The Shinigami flashes onto the screen once more.
Only curiosity stops me switching off. I feel embarrassed for Lewis, but I am also astonished. The feeling grows the longer I watch. Again, I almost switch off. It is increasingly shocking to see my story laid out like this. Lewis knows. He’s found out things even I don’t know. Yet the incompetence of it and the strident tone, so different from the memories which have scrolled in my head for so long, somehow undermines what is unerringly true.
I pour another drink. The film has returned to the title page. I stare at the words and wonder if a Shinigami also has the ability to invite itself to its own death. If so, I offer my summons, my glass in the air, Duke, so ridiculous an idea given my essential cowardice that I begin to laugh.
I find another torch in the cupboard under the kitchen sink and go out into the night, taking the bottle.
* * *
The tide is out. I walk the beach. The torchlight is dim. My shoes and jacket are soaking from my earlier fall. Shingle becomes sand and I have no idea where I’m going. I think I must have reached the beach at Edmonton Bay by now. Emigrant boats once left from here, overseen as I am by the tinsel stream of the Milky Way. I have been all over the world and never seen skies like this.
Lewis is standing a few metres away. I passed him wordlessly some time ago. I didn’t have to glance back to know that he had started to follow. He is observing me but pretending he isn’t.
Yet his gaze too must now be drawn upwards. A vague, milky green has appeared on the eastern horizon. I watch it flare across the sky in a huge and incandescent arc. Then a pastel pink emerges, swelling to mauve and back to pink, languidly following the arc of green and abruptly vanishing, reappearing moments later. Vague white contrails begin to pour vertically through the pulsing rainbow. Behind, against the purple-black background, I can still see the stars.
Lewis comes closer, looking up. There is something unsettling in the careful way he puts one foot directly in front of other, like an
animal. The colours deepen and again draw my gaze, the silence magnified by the psychedelic skies. It is so overwhelming that I expect a great fanfare of never before heard music. Only something otherworldly could explain the eerie dancing rhythm.
Lewis is now right beside me. ‘The Mirrie Dancers’, he says. ‘What they call the Aurora Borealis.’
‘I watched your film,’ I tell him.
‘What do you think?’
‘It’s quite the story.’
‘Do you think it works?’
He is so anxious. I feel a sudden and growing contempt. ‘Is that all you want? Praise. My blessing?’
‘No, I just—’
‘It’s stunning. You’ve made a masterpiece.’
We stand in silence for a long time. The aurora dances on the beach, the water. I feel him looking at me.
‘You think you know me,’ I say. ‘But it’s just a snapshot. All those people we are in a life, all the ones we forget. I don’t know half of them any more. I know some of them less than I know you.’
‘You think I’m judging you?’
‘No. That’s the problem. Where’s the commitment? Judge me for Christ’s sake.’
Out of the corner of my eye I see him look away, upwards. ‘Why did everything have to happen this way?’
I don’t know what he means. I don’t even know if the question is for me. He sounds so disconsolate, a little boy on the verge of tears. I almost feel I should apologise for hurting his feelings. It is all too much, Duke. I tip the bottle. I too will withdraw into these beautiful, shifting skies.
Sixteen
I hardened, I know, although I do not see this as my fault alone. I was a man of wilful silences and ballooning weight, midnight pastries and a glass in hand, pondering the desolation of a domestic life I was too dim to understand and too timid to confront. Yet somehow, an inscrutable beacon reassuring me I was still able to do something right, Breda Inc. exploded with success.
Film production I left to Fatty, convinced by the disaster of Blues my touch was hapless. Business-wise, I was Mr Midas, spending the rest of the seventies on a resolutely prolific accumulation bender.
Our property investments surged, a windfall used to acquire the Sirocco boutique hotels and the Palisades chain of top-end golf courses. Duke would have enjoyed the golf deal, a latecomer to the game when fame came calling, all plus fours and Harlequin socks, a one-man divot machine at the Inveran links. Jack Nicklaus designed the Palisades courses and they flew him to Palma, Majorca, to dazzle me with so much starlight that I wouldn’t notice the jacked-up price. He asked if I played and I told him I’d avoided cults since I stopped attending the Free Presbyterian Church, this confusing the Golden Bear who thought anyone from Scatlan must surely love golf. He stood beside me for the publicity shots with a face to shank a drive into the Med.
Anna had no problem with these trips.
She became the dreamiest of presences, no longer insisting on my nightly return to Wendlebury. Instead, as Erin grew older, she quietly encouraged my absence. I would return to the most distant of smiles and a doubt I couldn’t shake that she hadn’t actually noticed I’d been away.
Yet after reading the final instalment of The Party, I wondered if I’d been wrong. Anna’s column in the Express ran for a surprisingly long time, and here, at the very last, the strange Director finally spoke at length, a tender monologue about the tragedy in beauty and the sadness in knowing you’re not truly of this time. I thanked her for finally making me sympathetic.
She was puzzled. ‘Really? That’s how you read that?’
Then she patted my hand. That way she patted my hand. Yet every time I came back to Wendlebury Anna and Erin were still there. And although I was relieved they were, I never quite grasped why. We were the most reluctant of families, every holiday a Mexican stand-off.
Erin grew into a subdued little girl, dominated by her mother. Only rarely did friends from her primary school visit. Instead, it was mother and daughter who played games, painted and watched movies.
Her eventual interests were solitary or obsessive. For a while, she made lists, the longest rivers, the highest mountains, accompanied with intricately drawn maps. When she was ten she discovered short-wave radio via a Soviet-built, Vega 206 advertised in a newspaper. Both hobbies seemed wilful statements of her need for space.
Anna was hurt. She’d stand at her daughter’s bedroom door, Erin with her headphones on, turning the dial with epic patience, writing mysterious signal transmission codes in a leather-bound logbook: 34333 . . . 24212.
In a heroic effort to engage, I built a radio shack for her at the bottom of the garden. I worked on the plans for days, honing the design that took me a month to actually build. I only needed assistance in the last stages to raise and secure the walls, and brought in an electrical engineer to fix up a dipole antenna so Erin could scour the bands for even more remote stations.
Some evenings, I would stand outside the conservatory, looking down across the garden, the shack in the distance, a dim yellow glow in the window. I wondered about other families and the idiosyncrasies of intimacy and distance, and how many others had sombre ten-year-olds proudly present them with their latest postcards from Ecuador, Russia, Australia . . .
These were ‘QSLs’, I learned, sent in return for reception quality reports, sometimes with stickers, calendars or other little gifts, once a proselytising letter from a religious broadcaster in Nigeria telling Erin that only Yahweh forgives. From the God-free zone behind the Iron Curtain she received such frequent letters from Radio Moscow that I expected a visit from MI5. She mounted the cards very carefully in a folder and took them to school with her every day, occasionally updating us on her favourites. Once it was a series of postcards of Soviet Architectural Achievements, sent by the grooming commissars of Radio Moscow’s English bureau. Each was embossed in gold lettering with MOCKBA: blocky buildings on Gorky Street; the egg-yolk yellow presidium of the Academy of Sciences; the brutalist skyscraper of the Ukraina Hotel.
‘Which do you prefer?’ she asked.
I chose the gunmetal grey Krymsky Bridge, empty of people and traffic apart from three presumed Ladas.
‘Mum?’
‘That one.’ These were the cathedrals of the Moscow Kremlin, bathed in apocalyptic, reddish light.
‘Hmm. Smithy likes this one best.’ It was a mid-shot of an impossibly cute girl holding a red flower in the yellow-flowered gardens of the Bolshoi Theatre, a composition straight out of Socialist Realism 101.
‘Who’s Smithy?’ asked Anna.
It turned out Peter Smith was a twenty-six-year-old with learning difficulties who worked as a decorator. He too was a collector, of stamps, and saw Erin showing her cards at Wendlebury Primary when he was painting the gym. He had driven her home several times, stopping before the gatehouse to let her out. Erin said Smithy hadn’t touched her inappropriately and no action was taken.
Anna was beside herself. She withdrew Erin from school and harassed the police to bring charges they couldn’t justify. Then she insisted I bring in the Breda lawyers who, likewise, found no way to sue the school for negligence. The reception room became a classroom, mother becoming teacher, happy in the midst of trauma at finding a way back to her daughter.
I shouldn’t have mentioned Bad Jack to Anna.
Leo called it fascist nonsense, Fatty saw box-office gold. Anna read the script in an afternoon and insisted on punishment by proxy for Peter Smith. Bad Jack, a revenge tale about a farmer who kills a group of Manson-esque hippies who rape his teenage daughter. My opinion swung it and I produced. Bad Jack was a controversial smash, prompting for and against demonstrations outside cinemas by the National Front, who saw in Jack a hero of post-sixties reaction, and the Women’s Liberation Movement, outraged by the deliberately ambiguous rape scene.
A week after the film was released Peter Smith was beaten into a coma by an anonymous gang which broke into his house. It took him over a year to recover. ‘The system’s
broken,’ Anna said to the policeman who told us. ‘Sometimes there’s no problem with a bullet in the head.’
It was 1978 and the Moral Panic was upon us. As with A Clockwork Orange before and Video Nasties and Natural Born Killers later, Bad Jack took the tabloid rap for film violence causing all manner of social ills. The manor was picketed for weeks, Breda Productions London office as well. I had dreams where I was looking out from the top floor of the house, watching a vast crowd of people swelling in the distance like in a David Lean epic, flooding towards me . . .
Febrile.
I didn’t know what it meant when Leo said it. He’d come over one weekend, to ‘break the siege’. We drank vodka and sat outside, on the vast lawn which seemed to symbolise the astonishing distance between Kilburn and the present day, what our relationship once was and what it had become. We skirted around all that I wanted to talk about; my unhappiness and Anna’s quiet anger, Erin’s monosyllables that detonated like tiny cluster bombs of despondency.
‘You live in a febrile atmosphere,’ he said at the gatehouse as he was leaving.
I looked it up. Leo was bang on. I was overtaken by the most urgent need to get away, all of us.
When I suggested a long trip, Anna’s one insistence was that we leave it three weeks until the school holidays. The itinerary appeared as an end-of-year project, presented to me in an A4 folder (each of us had an identical copy), a list of ten locations from Scotland to Auckland that Erin and Anna had decided we would visit over the next three months, complete with hand-drawn maps and stats about GDP, key export sectors, cultural practices, top attractions . . .
* * *
The trip began in Inveran. An epic drive north in a brand-new Mercedes 240-D that ended in the gloomiest of visits to Anna’s mother. She was sixty-seven but looked twenty years older, the outriders of dementia in her watery grey eyes and already an unsettling, repetitive pulling at her bottom lip.
The Accidental Recluse Page 22