by William Boyd
‘Where’s the meeting?’
‘The Metropole Grande, Mayfair. Ten thirty, Monday morning.’
‘Any idea what this film’s about?’
‘A “dystopian thriller” is all they told me.’
Story of my life, I thought.
‘I’ll be there.’
Now, I have appeared in many films and I know the industry’s cruel and ruthless disappointments as well as anyone but, despite my better judgement, I allowed myself a little frisson of pleasurable anticipation. After all this bad luck – the burglary, the totalled car – here was the world paying me back. I liked dystopian thrillers – I’d already had minor roles in at least two – and I sensed that something about my looks, my track record, word of mouth, had paid dividends this time. I hadn’t worked in three – no, five – months and money was running very low and, despite my better judgement, I allowed myself to fantasize that I’d get this role. What do they say? Earn your own luck. I reckoned I’d earned it, all right.
The Metropole Grande was one of those smoked-glass eight-storey blocks just off Park Lane. On entering, you left London and could have been in Singapore or Dubai, Tokyo or Acapulco. Granite, marble, palm trees, chilled lounge-muzak, foreign staff in black, zipped jumpsuits and a curious transnational clientele.
I was shown up to the conference suites on the third floor where a young woman called ‘Shirlee’, according to her name badge, asked me to wait in an anteroom. Is there a script I could read, I enquired? I’m afraid the script is embargoed at this moment of speaking, she said. I handed over my résumé and she disappeared behind heavy teak doors.
I drank some water from the water-cooler. I looked down at the traffic silently circling Hyde Park Corner. I switched my brain to neutral – it’s work: don’t be picky, don’t be pretentious, I told myself. Be nice to everyone.
Shirlee opened the teak doors and ushered me in. A thickset man, forties, swarthy, unshaven, in a loose V-neck T-shirt and carefully distressed and torn jeans came round from behind a desk piled high with scripts and shook my hand.
‘Hi,’ he said, introducing himself. ‘Ron Suitcase. There’s been a blunder. I’m so sorry.’
‘A blunder?’
‘I’m expecting a twenty-three-year-old young woman called Alexa Dunbar.’
I felt like falling to the floor. This had happened on three previous occasions.
‘I admit,’ I said, ‘I am not a young woman. But I am a thirty-five-year-old man called Alec Dunbar. Any good?’
‘It’s so easy for things to go wrong,’ Ron Suitcase said with a sad smile. ‘One vowel.’
‘And one consonant,’ I added.
‘What? Oh, sure … Coffee? Iced tea? Water?’
I sat down and Shirlee brought me a double espresso as we commiserated. Casting agents – you’d think they’d do their bloody homework. Tell me about it. Nightmare. Alec/Alexa Dunbar. I recounted my Alec/Alexa anecdotes – the misdirected (obscene) fan mail; the twenty-five paparazzi waiting outside a restaurant for me to emerge and their collective rage; the phone calls offering me swimwear-modelling work.
‘One of you should make a change,’ Ron suggested.
‘I was there first,’ I said. ‘Apparently her real name is Agatha Duguid.’
‘What can I say?’ Ron rose to his feet – the meeting was over. ‘If there’s a part for you in Transfigured Night I’ll call your agent. Stay in touch, Alec. Be well. Take great care.’
He handed me his card and I glanced at it: Ronaldo Sudkäsz, Alcazar Films. There was an address on Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles. I slipped it into my jacket pocket and we shook hands amiably – for the last time, I assumed.
Shirlee showed me out and handed me back my résumé. I was feeling that leaden sense of failure that we actors experience occasionally: a kind of existential certainty that somewhere early in our lives we had taken the wrong turning.
‘How did it go?’
I looked round. A young woman sat there on a sofa, a script open on a coffee table in front of her. She had thick shaggy blonde hair and one of those long lean faces with a nicely prominent jaw. I’m drawn to long lean faces with a nicely prominent jaw.
‘A sex confusion,’ I said. ‘I’m meant to be a twenty-three-year-old woman called Alexa. Alas, I’m not.’
‘Didn’t they spot it instantly?’ she said. ‘I did.’
I was intrigued and sat down opposite her, stuffing my résumé into my rucksack.
‘You’ve a script, at least,’ I said. ‘Good role?’
‘I’ve got pages. I get to speak,’ she said. ‘That’s a plus.’
For some reason I unburdened myself, telling her about the persistently annoying Alec/Alexa confusion, my run of bad luck, how I was stupidly counting on this part in Transfigured Night to put everything right and that I was now bracing myself for the next kick in the teeth.
She listened sympathetically, not interrupting. She had green eyes.
‘Burgled as well,’ she said. ‘Did you lose much?’
‘Funnily enough they only stole my clothes – my best clothes. Strange selection. Three suits, an old leather jacket that I loved, a pair of new, unworn shoes, swimming trunks, T-shirts. I think they were going to steal my computer – someone had been fiddling with it – but I guess they were spooked and ran off.’
‘Yes. What did Shakespeare say? When sorrows come, they come not as single spies –’
‘– But in battalions. Yeah. Tell me about it. I’d better go,’ I said. ‘Thanks for hearing me out. And good luck.’
I stood, gave her my little brave soldier salute, and just as I turned away she said:
‘How would you like to earn £1,000 in twenty-four hours?’
I paused and then sat down again.
‘That depends,’ I said. ‘I charge more for a contract killing.’
‘I need something hand-delivered, something precious. It has to be in Scotland tomorrow.’
‘Can’t you courier it?’
‘Too fragile.’
‘Catch a plane?’
‘It would have to go in the hold. That’s impossible. It has to be driven north. Hand-delivered, as I said.’
‘Why don’t you do it yourself?’
She eased her posture and drew her left leg out from under the coffee table. Her ankle and lower leg were encased in a bright blue plastic boot leg-cast.
‘I’ve broken my ankle.’
‘Ah. I see,’ I said.
We looked at each other. I was definitely attracted to this pretty young blonde woman in the leg cast but I tried not to let that affect my judgement.
‘Look, it was just a spontaneous idea,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll find someone else. Not a problem.’
‘Cash?’ I said.
‘In advance,’ she said.
Shirlee appeared at the teak doors.
‘Miss Devereaux?’
‘I’ll be right there,’ Miss Devereaux said, standing with some difficulty. I had a name. She smiled at me. ‘Nice meeting you,’ she said. ‘Good luck yourself.’
‘I’m in,’ I said, quickly. £1,000, twenty-four hours. What the hell – it was better than nothing.
‘Do you have a car?’ she asked.
‘Ah. No. It’s off the road.’
‘Okay. I can lend you mine.’ She glanced at Shirlee then lowered her voice.
‘Meet me at the Peace Pagoda in Battersea Park this evening at six o’clock. We’ll sort everything out.’ I gave her my details – phone, email, etc. – and then she limped into the room for her audition with Ron Suitcase.
The Peace Pagoda was constructed in Battersea Park in 1985. When I first saw it, when I moved to London to go to drama school, I thought it a shocking affront, an act of vandalism to construct an oriental temple in a stretch of landscaped Victorian urban greenery facing the select mansion flats of Chelsea across the River Thames. How had it obtained planning permission? Who had been bribed? But, over the years, I became used to it, and starte
d to rather like it, and now as I stood there looking at it, set in its backdrop of autumnal plane trees, the river at high tide, I thought it was rather wonderfully inappropriate – a symbol of London’s easy welcome to the polyglot, multicultural presences drawn to this great sprawling city. Bring it on – we can take it, the city seemed to say. Pagodas? Yeah, no problem.
I leant on the embankment wall looking at a cormorant diving for fish. It was twenty past six and no sign of my actress and her £1,000. Some kind of sick joke, I thought, another young woman messing with my head, another sign of my bad –
‘Alec!’
I picked up my rucksack and headed towards Miss Devereaux. It was absurd that I didn’t know her first name. She was standing in the car park to the east of the Pagoda, leaning against an old grey sun-bleached, weather-battered Land Rover Defender, long-wheelbase variety. The door on the driver’s side was a pale salmon pink. On the door, still legible, was a faded black stencilled code-number. KT-99. Legacy of some trans-Sahara 4x4 rally, I assumed, or something. This motor had had an interesting life, clearly.
We shook hands.
‘What’s your first name?’ I asked. ‘By the way.’
‘Stella,’ she said handing me the keys. ‘You’re insured to drive it, by the way, also.’
‘Good. What am I delivering?’
She opened the rear door and took out a cool box, unclipped the top and lifted out a thick glass flask about nine inches tall. Its lid was sealed with rubber and held down by metal clamps, like a large Kilner jar – airtight. It contained a pint of clear fluid, I calculated.
‘This is water from the River Jordan,’ Stella Devereaux said. ‘My godson is being christened tomorrow in Scotland and this is my gift to him and the family. Holy water. I’d have driven it there myself, but –’ She pointed to her plastic leg cast.
‘Where in Scotland?’
‘The west coast, south of Skye.’ She reached in to the front seat and brought out a plastic envelope-file. ‘A church, St Mungo’s, in a small village called Alcorran.’ She showed me maps, addresses, a slip of paper with her telephone number and email address on it. ‘You’ve got everything there. But it’s a long drive,’ she said. ‘You’ll need to go all night.’
‘I’ve done it before,’ I said, half lying. I’d endured a three-day, non-stop ‘drive’ across the USA in a film called Beyond the Edge (2007) so I vaguely knew what was required to keep you going. ‘No worries,’ I said, smiling reassuringly at her – she was really rather attractive; such thick, tousled hair …
‘Did you get the part?’ I asked.
‘What part?’
‘Transfigured Night.’
‘Oh. They’re calling me back,’ she said.
‘Bravo,’ I said. ‘When are they shooting?’
‘Ah … Later this year.’
‘We’re already in October.’
‘Or early next year.’
‘Well, your ankle will be fixed, at least.’
‘Yeah. Of course.’ She smiled and rummaged in her pocket, taking out a crumpled envelope and handing it over. I glanced inside. A wedge of £50 notes, twenty of them. This is all beginning to seem just a little bit weird, I thought. What was really going on? But I stopped thinking – £1,000 in the hand. I was just a delivery boy. What else was I going to do tomorrow?
‘You’re very trusting,’ I said.
‘You’ve a trustworthy face.’ She leant forward and kissed me on the cheek. ‘Bon voyage, Alec Dunbar.’
She limped off into the dusk, heading for the gate on Chelsea Bridge Road.
I sat in KT-99, familiarizing myself. I’d driven a Land Rover Defender in Delta Five Niner, an SAS, behind-enemy-lines film (I played a sergeant) that was never released, not even as a DVD. ‘Straight to radio’, as we say in the business, but at least I felt at home behind this wide wheel and dashboard. I eased the seat back from Stella’s cramped driving position (I’m six feet two) and looked at the many maps of Scotland she had given me.
London to Glasgow, then the A82 up the west side of Loch Lomond. To Arrochar and Loch Fyne and on to Inverary. Then Loch Awe and on up to Oban, Fort William – and there was Alcorran, south of Mallaig, right on the coast across the sound from the southern tip of Skye … I should be there by noon, all being well. That gave me eighteen hours, all told. If I made good going I could even have a nap on the way.
I felt strangely excited: this was an adventure, out of the blue. A beautiful woman had offered me this bizarre opportunity – and a lot of money for one day’s work. This was what life was all about, I told myself – to be lived to the full, come what may. Happenstance. The roll of the dice. I had £1,000 in my pocket and I was sitting at the wheel of a Land Rover Defender in Battersea Park ready to drive through the night to deliver holy water to a small church on the west coast of Scotland.
Route determined, I searched my rucksack for my iPod. Every type of driving music was available to me. All I needed now was an overdose of caffeine. I started the engine, revved it, flexed my shoulders. Off we jolly well go, I said to myself, and pulled out of the car park, on to Chelsea Bridge Road, crossed the river and headed for Marble Arch and the north.
Part Two: Headlights in the Mirror
I drove steadily out of London following the A40 to Hanger Lane and then right on to the North Circular and on up to the start of the M1 north. It was dark by now and I was listening to Steve Reich’s The Desert Music. I found these cool, minimalist ostinatos perfect for long drives. The mesmeric loops kept me awake, paradoxically, as if my brain were searching for a moment when they would break down rather than endlessly repeat themselves. It maintained me at a nice pitch of concentration.
My first stop was at the Watford Gap service station. London was eighty miles or so behind me now and I was well on my way. I strolled into the fluorescent, swarming echo-chamber of the cafeteria and ordered three double espressos and a bottle of Evian. I took them to a table, let the espressos cool and then necked them as if they were cough medicine and washed them down with a gulp of water. I felt I could drive all week.
I sat there looking at my fellow human beings – as they scoffed food and drank sweet liquids, as they laughed and chatted – conscious of the unique nature of my business, here, on the road north to Scotland and feeling somewhat distanced from all this routine banality of driving, of getting from A to B. I often experienced this sensation of slight remove from everyday life and I wondered if it was because of my profession. If you act in movies for a living then sometimes everything you do seems like a scene from a movie – even if you’re pouring milk on your cornflakes, having a shave, posting a letter or taking your shirts to a dry-cleaner. It can be fun – this sense of a heightened reality – as if you’re lit and made up, that there’s a camera turning over somewhere; but it can also be dangerous: real life is different. Real life is never, never as simple as a movie.
I was thinking about this as I motored down the exit road from the service station and saw the small band of hopeful hitch-hikers with their signs: rare beasts in this day and age. There were three young soldiers in their fatigues, a car-delivery man with his special number plate and, most oddly, a girl dressed in white. Not so much a girl, I noticed as I slowed instinctively, passing her, but a young woman in her late twenties. This was what I was trying to express: all of a sudden I felt I was taking part in somebody’s film.
She had dark short tousled hair and was wearing a white denim jacket and grubby white jeans and trainers. She was holding a piece of torn cardboard with ‘Scottlan’ scrawled on it. Nice touch. Who thought of that? She had a pretty, gaunt, feral face and, somewhat disturbingly, seemed to be staring right at me. She was fourth behind the three soldiers. Could I stop for her? Should I stop for her? No, Dunbar, you fool, I told myself – your agenda is clear. Concentrate.
I pulled on to the motorway and accelerated off into the night, Philip Glass’s Violin Concerto keeping me company.
North of Manchester on the M6, now,
I saw the fuel gauge was dipping below a quarter. Also I had run out of chocolate. I turned into the next service station and filled up. I paid at the counter and bought more chocolate. Sugar, coffee, music – all I required. I felt surprisingly alert and I was making excellent time – no traffic, no roadworks. I’d be in Scotland in an hour or so, at this rate. Perhaps I could stop somewhere for a snooze.
As I was about to climb into KT-99, a five-axle articulated lorry pulled up at the pump with an immense catarrhal wheeze of airbrakes. I looked round and, three seconds later, saw the feral girl in white walk round from the passenger side of the cab. She wandered into the service station shop and I saw her buying cigarettes.
I stood there for a moment – unsettled – taking this in, wondering how the movie had changed so suddenly. Was this significant, this new crossing of paths? Was I meant to play my role now? All the signs seemed to be indicating that an encounter should take place. Scene seventeen. Motorway service station. Night. Action.
I climbed into KT-99, started the engine and drove away from the pumps, parking up in the bay beyond and sauntered back to find the girl.
She was standing outside the door, smoking.
‘Hi,’ I said, ‘can I give you a lift? I’m heading north to Scotland.’
‘I not going to Scottlan no more,’ she said, calmly. She had an eastern European accent, I thought. Polish? Czech? Russian? She had big dark eyes and a nervous fidgety manner about her. She drew heavily on her cigarette, as if it contained some essential life-enhancing ingredient.
‘That’s okay,’ I said. ‘It was just that I saw you before – at Watford Gap – and saw your sign.’
‘I want to go Edinburgh,’ she said.
‘Edinburgh’s in Scotland,’ I said.
‘You go there?’
‘No.’
‘Where you go?’
‘I’m going to Glasgow and then further north.’
‘Where north?’
‘Far north. Mallaig, Skye.’
She thought for a moment, then dropped her cigarette on the ground and stood on it. ‘Is no good for me,’ she said. ‘I need to go Edinburgh.’