ROUGH CUT



A novel about the movies, a traveller without maps and the tsunami


By SIMON HOWARD





© Simon Howard



***


In memory of John Kennedy Toole, who had to kill himself to prove a literary point.



***



‘The most beautiful cinema is perhaps the one on the Boulevard de Clichy, near the Place Pigalle…because it possesses the atmosphere of a great quay for those departing who knows where…’


Robert Desnos, Picture Palaces (published in Le Soir and Cinéma, and translated into English in The Shadow And Its Shadow).




*****





Part One

WIDE ANGLE






1. INTERIOR. SITTING ROOM. DAY





FLASHBACK
IN VISIBLE LIGHT

Tom Lindow is standing at what must be the last bus stop before New York (or Labrador), which is thousands of miles away to the West. He’s photographing a dark, mysterious island several miles out in the rippling sea.
Click.
A car passes. Click click. A front door opens nearby, and a young woman lets out her two children dressed for school. Click.
‘Lovely day,’ she says to Tom, who smiles back at her, knowing that anything this side of a downpour is a lovely day to people in the West of Ireland. He’s known it all his life because he’s spent loads of time in Ireland. He’s done a lot of writing, photographing and filming here.
More schoolchildren appear. A school bus approaches from the other end of the village, flying over a hump in the road.
‘Jeee-sus!’ shout the happy piping voices of the kids on board as they’re thrown into the air above their seats.
The bus hits another hump.
‘Jeee-sus!’
The bus stops, and Tom photographs the schoolchildren climbing aboard. It circles and flies over the humps again.
‘Jeee-sus! Jeee-sus!’
Tom is alone. He looks at his watch. No sign of his bus. Another car passes, click, then a man on a bike. Click.
‘Morning,’ he calls. ‘Lovely day!’
‘Hello. Lovely!’
It’s silent again. Tom feels like Cary Grant in North By Northwest, waiting for the non-existent George Kaplan before the crop-duster plane arrives. He looks up at the looming clouds as a distant crackle of thunder sounds. Time passes slowly.
A white van appears in the distance, eventually stopping at a shop near Tom. The driver jumps out and leaves milk bottles and bread on the doorstep.
‘Is it the bus you’re waiting for?’ he asks.
‘Yes. The 8:42.’
‘Oh, that won’t be coming. I’ll give you a lift. Are you heading for the island?’
‘Yes.’
‘I can drop you near the harbour. There’s a ferry after the Angelus. Get in.’
Tom picks up his cases and climbs aboard. As they drive out of the village, he turns to the driver.
‘That’s a bit odd, isn’t it – saying there’s a bus at 8:42 when there isn’t one?’
‘It might be odd,’ says the driver, ‘but it isn’t unusual.’


***


‘Scene 263. Interior. Sitting room on the island. Day.
Harper raises a glass to his lips. It is clear that he has already –‘
Ring ring ring. Tom stops typing on the keyboard and answers the portable phone on the desk.
‘Hello.’
A brusque voice at the other end.
‘Robert?’
The answering machine clicks into life, and Robert’s message cuts across them.
‘Hello, this is Robert…’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ says Tom.
‘Robert – this is Daphne!’
Robert’s message continues. ‘…I’m away, I’m afraid, but if you’d like…’
‘Christ!’ shouts Tom, grinding his teeth.
‘…to leave your name and number…’
Tom stabs a button on the machine. Robert’s message stops.
‘Robert!’ shouts the brusque voice.
‘He’s away. I’m Tom, his brother. I’m flat-sitting for Robert.’
‘Oh, God. This is a crisis. I’m calling from the basement flat. The garden committee are going to cut down a tree!’
‘Where?’
‘In the garden!’
Tom gets up, carries the portable phone into the bedroom at the back and looks out of the window at the communal garden below. It is thick with trees.
‘Robert’s gone for a fortnight, I’m afraid. Didn’t he tell you? He’s in Tajikistan.’
‘It’s outrageous – give me his number!’
‘In Tajikistan?’
‘Hurry up! We need his support.’
‘Well, I don’t have a number, but he’s staying at the Inshallah Hotel in Dushanbe.’
‘Right, I’ll ring International Directories.’
Click. Dialling tone. All very brusque.
‘Charming,’ says Tom, resuming his thoughts.


***


Now this Tom Lindow was going through a bit of a crisis at the time. Nothing odd about that: he usually was. Most of his friends were too. Except he’d lost his home – or rather he’d been forced to let it out to pay his debts. Fully furnished. His life was a struggle to buy writing time. Film time. The first paragraph of his one-paragraph autobiography, abandoned earlier that year, read: ‘Now, things were going badly wrong at that point. I won’t deny it. I’d fucked up again…’ The realisation had stopped him in his tracks, created writer’s block. It was the mid-Nineties. No different for him from the Eighties.
He goes back to his screenplay.
‘It is clear that he has already consumed several glasses of whisky – whiskey’ (Irish spelling). ‘He looks wistfully at the gun in front of –‘
His mobile rings, and Tom mistakenly picks up the receiver of Robert’s phone.
‘Hello.’
All he can hear is the dialling tone, so he stabs a button.
‘Hello, this is Robert…’
The mobile continues ringing.
‘…I’m away, I’m afraid…’
Tom slams down the receiver and answers his mobile.
‘Hello?’
‘Is that Mr Thomas Lindow?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s Wardour Cutting Rooms, Finbar O’Dell speaking. About the bill for your documentary film, and the three months you kept an editing room –‘
‘Yes, Mr O’Dell, I hope to pay you as soon as I’ve sold the film – or the screenplay I’m writing. It’s about Ireland.’
‘Well, I could give you another week…’
‘Thank you very much, Mr O’Dell. Goodbye.’
Tom clicks off the mobile. The keys tap on his keyboard.
‘He looks wistfully at the gun – revolver – in front of him on the polished mahogany table –‘
The telephone rings. Tom snatches the receiver before the answering machine can start.
‘Hello!’
A meek voice comes on the line.
‘Robert?’
‘No, he’s away. I’m his brother, Tom.’
‘Oh, dear. Where is he? It’s Maggie from next door. Please tell him he’s got to go down to the garden and save a tree.’
‘He’s in Tajikistan.’
‘What?’
‘Tajikistan.’
‘But we’ve all got to form a ring around the tree and hug it.’
‘I thought that sort of thing went out years ago.’
‘Oh, no…’
The mobile rings.
‘I’m sorry, my mobile’s ringing – I have to go. Goodbye.’
Tom replaces the receiver and answers the mobile.
‘Hello.’
‘It’s Rex. It’s our anniversary.’


***


He hears the deep Brooklyn tones of Rex Hammerstein. Rex enunciates his consonants very clearly, occasionally making them resonate, slowing downnn the worddssss… Other words he-speeds-up-by-seemingly-joining-them-together. He always starts a telephone conversation low-key, as if they’ve spoken earlier that day – even if it’s been months or years.
‘It’s Rexxx. What’s-going-on?’ is the usual mantra, so this anniversary talk was a bit different.
‘Rex! Where are you?’
‘Coney Island, of course. Hub-of-the-planet. How is that terrible England? Is the TV still terrible? Do they still show chessss on TV? And bridggge? What-a-place!’
Rex hates England and the English. In fact, Tom is the only Englishman he’s ever liked – and that’s probably because Tom complains about England even more than Rex does: Tom’s happier in water-logic countries than rock-logic ones, but this could never be said of Rex, who believes that Coney Island is civilisation’s greatest achievement, eclipsing Florence in the Renaissance and classical Athens under Pericles. Tom is happier in the East rather than the West; Southern Europe more than the Protestant North (though he prefers the North of England to the South, because it’s more water-logical and less Protestant – or so he’s told himself).
Some years earlier, Rex had taken Tom on a tour of Coney Island, in order to explain his roots. They strolled along the Riegelmann Boardwalk from Brighton Beach, looking at the old people sitting on benches, gazing East and dreaming of a peasant past in Russia, Byelorussia, Latvia, Lithuania… They walked in Luna Park, past the Ferris wheel, around the rusted skeleton of the abandoned roller-coaster, The Cyclone. They went on a terrifying rocket ride, and to this day didn’t know why they hadn’t fallen out and been killed by its metal girders. As they tore past, Tom glimpsed the beach where Weegee famously photographed thousands and thousands of bathers in 1940. Chewing on a huge, juicy frankfurter outside Nathan’s, at the junction of Surf Avenue and Coney Island Avenue, Rex waved his arm, as though embracing the geography, the culture.
‘Who could ask to be brought up anywhere better than this?’ he asked, sucking in the mustard and ketchup.
There was a problem, though. As with ancient Rome, the Nickel Empire had been invaded by barbarians. And this terrible event produced another of Rex’s mantras.
‘It’s the blacks…’
Then, when he saw people disagreeing with him – in this case, Tom – he’d produce a look of amazement and a shrug, followed by: ‘What-can-I-say?’
‘It’s the blacks…’ Look of amazement. Shrug. ‘What-can-I-say?’
Sometimes, though, the blacks might be replaced by the Arabs or the Mexicans.
Tom didn’t know the Mexicans, but he’d spent a lot of time among the Arabs and, more recently, the Berbers, making his documentary film, Morocco Bound.


***


‘Are you still a poker player?’ asks Tom. ‘Are you making films?’
‘Listen. It’s our anniversary. It’s however many years since I came to London to go to the film school. What’s-going-on? What are you doing with your life?’
‘I’m broke,’ says Tom. ‘I’m living out of a suitcase. I’ve let out my flat, and my brother’s lent me his place while he’s in Tajikistan.’
‘Whatttt? What do you mean? What happened to your allowance? Your stipend? What are you living on? What happened?’
‘I ran out of money.’
‘Money! I’ve been playing poker so I’m buzzing. I’m a bit up. I just took a couple of tabs of valium to help me sleep…’
‘It must be the middle of the night over there.’
‘Four a.m. It’s early.’
‘It is for you. I thought you never went to bed before eight.’
‘I play less poker now. Listen, I’m going to be teaching a creative writing course. They’re doing Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, James Joyce…’
Tom is amazed.
‘Have you read any of them?’
‘NO! Well, I’ve started reading The Little Foxes. I’ve seen the movie of The Thin Man. I don’t even know what James Joyce wrote. Did he do Ulysses, or was that Hermann Hesse? Anyway, I’ll talk to them about the main human emotions. Love, hate, desire, anger. What all the basic stories are about. I’m going to let them dissscusss, and I’ll-just-nod-my-head.’
‘What about guilt, shame, revenge?’
‘Huh!’
‘So what are you living off if you’re not playing poker all night?’ asks Tom.
‘I’m selling porn.’
‘Again?’
‘Don’t knock porn! It got me through film school. I’ve been selling it all my life. My father taught me when I was a kid. ‘
It was true. In Coney Island, Rex the child had learned his father’s trade: watching porn movies being made, selling the videos at school. At his barmitzvah he’d been given enough material to keep his entire class erect for a month. (His father had stolen most of the cash presents while his top star Randy Seaman gave Rex an hour of her time.) When Tom visited him his biggest earners were Anal Intruder, Twin Cheeks and First Lady – she put the vice in the president.
‘I’m working for him again, the bastard. It’s all CD Rom now. Forget videos. My fucking family! My brother stole ten thousand dollars from me.’
Rex was always having trouble with his family. All the members of it. His father had proposed to hold the barmitzvah at the Plaza, as long as Rex gave him half the cash. When Rex refused, they held it in Coney Island, and the father still got the cash.
‘I’ve got to go to Las Vegas for the Porn Video Oscars. And then I’ll try to go down to New Orleans from there. It’s-just-next-door. Well, it’s nine hundred miles away, but it’s near enough – and they’ve got riverboat gambling there. I need to get away. Also, I’m-having-a-crisis. There’s a major birthday coming. My life has become completely different. I still think I’m nineteen, but I’m not. I used to play baseball, but now I’m taking up Kung Fu – don’t ask me why. What are you doing with your life? What the hell happened to your stipend? How do you pay the bills?’
‘I’m trying to finish a documentary, and I’m writing a screenplay about a man at the end of the line. And the land mass. But my brother’s neighbours keep ringing up and pleading with me to help them save a tree. And my creditors are onto me.’
‘Forget documentary!’ roars Rex. ‘Stick with features. Come over here, and I’ll get my asshole father to give you a job making porn. And never forget what Whistler said about debt…’ (Tom never ceases to be amazed by the unevenness of Rex’s education and cultural references.) ‘When they asked him if he worried about owing money, he said, “I let my creditors worry about my debts.”’
A terrible crackle comes onto the line, and Rex’s voice begins to break up. Until all that Tom can make out is a ghostly imprecation.
‘Get…out…of…that…dumppp…’



*****

2. CROSSING THE LINE





‘He looks wistfully at the revolver…’ Tap tap tap. ‘…LYING in front of him on the polished mahogany table. The gun sits at an angle of forty-five degrees –‘
The mobile rings. Immediately Tom answers.
‘Rex!’
‘Hello? Mr Lindow? Good morning, Ealing Rostrum Camera Services here. Yvonne Arndale-Abushani speaking. I was wondering, Mr Lindow, whether you’d received our invoice of last month?’
‘Yes, yes, thank you very much,’ says Tom. ‘I’ll be dealing with it shortly. Just dashing out. Thank you so much for calling. Goodbye!’
Hurriedly he stabs the red button on his mobile, but immediately it rings again.
‘Rex?’
A mild Central European accent is heard, slightly reminiscent of Peter Lorre’s.
‘Tom. Peter Pavlov here. I was wondering if you would like to celebrate a century of cinema by teaching some film in my drama, media and sociology department? At least I think that’s what it’s called.’
Tom’s refusal is instant.
‘Very kind of you, Peter - but no, thanks. I’ve got to finish my script.’
‘I thought you needed money for your documentary.’
‘I need money to live,’ says Tom. ‘But I have to buy writing time. That’s why I’ve let out my flat and I’m living out of a suitcase. I arrived at this place last night and I’ve written three lines this morning. Besides, I did some teaching last year and I found it odd. I taught drama to film students.
Peter groans down the line.
‘We’re desperate. One of my colleagues has just taken an unexpected sabbatical. They’ll blame me. I’ll be made a scapegoat. They hate me because I’m Jewish.’
‘No, they don’t.’
‘Then they hate me because I’m an emigrė from a Communist background.’
Tom is confused.
‘Because you’re a Communist, or an emigrė from Communism?’
‘I don’t know yet. I’m still trying to work it out. I must find somebody for tomorrow. Please do it. It’s so easy to teach film. Like Quentin Crisp and the tap-dancing classes. He took the class in the morning and gave it in the afternoon. Just be one lesson ahead of your students. Or sometimes one lesson behind.’
Suddenly Tom hears the sound of swilling water at the other end of the line, and Peter’s voice starts to gurgle as he seems to speak from underwater.
‘They’ll try to get rid of me,’ he gurgles.
‘Why are you talking like that?’ asks Tom.
The water swills again, then Peter speaks normally.
‘Because I’m in the bath with my duck. It’s yellow and it’s got beautiful eyes.’
‘I’m sure you’ll find somebody, Peter, but you should hurry –’
He is cut off by a huge swilling sound and a massive underwater plea from Peter.
‘HE-E-E-E-LLLLL-PP-PPP! HA-A-A-AAAN-KA!’
‘Goodbye, Peter,’ says Tom, switching off the mobile.


***


‘The gun sits at an angle of forty-five degrees…’ ‘The gun sits at an angle of forty-five degrees? No!’ ‘He looks wistfully at the revolver…’ ‘Mmmm…’ ‘…LYING in front of him on the polished mahogany table. The gun POINTS at an angle of forty-five degrees –’
The phone rings. Tom moans.
‘Oh, God!’
He snatches up the receiver.
‘Hello!’
‘Daphne here, from downstairs. I can’t get hold of Robert’s number. Are you sure you haven’t got it?’
‘Quite sure.’
‘Well, they’re coming to chop down the tree tomorrow, and we’ve all got to save it. You’ll have to come in Robert’s place.’
‘I’d love to help, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I’m very busy.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Writing a script.’
‘I’ve heard about you. Robert said you were unemployed.’
‘I work in film.’
Silence.
‘I said I work in the film business.’
‘I heard.’
‘I have to visit a cutting room.’
‘The garden committee are planning to murder a tree so that one of them can get more light in his kitchen.’
The mobile rings.
‘I’m terribly sorry. My mobile’s ringing. I’ll have to go. Try Robert’s office. Goodbye.’
He replaces the receiver and answers the mobile.
‘Hello!’
‘Hello, Mr Lindow. Angela Carter here, from Farquhar and Farquhar. We’re handling the letting of your flat…’
Yes, thinks Tom. My only source of income.
‘The thing is, Mr Lindow – rather bad news, I’m afraid. Your tenant has just done a bunk without paying the rent. But not to worry, I’m sure we’ll find you another very soon. Not quite the best time of year, of course. Still, leave it with me, Mr Lindow. Oh! Almost forgot - he took one or two pictures with him, but I’m sure they weren’t your favourites. Anyway, I’ll get on with finding a new tenant right away.’
‘Thank you so much,’ says Tom flatly.
‘By the way, I’m afraid our fees are going up by another two per cent. Sorry!’
‘Thank you.’
‘Bye-bye, then.’
The dialling tone purrs in his ear, followed by silence. Suddenly he shouts to himself.
‘Which pictures?’ Pause. ‘Oh, who cares?’
He does nothing for a couple of minutes, then riffles through the pages of his address book. (He’s never got round to entering names and numbers in his mobile.) He sings out loud. ‘Whenever I feel alone, I whistle a happy tune…’ He whistles as he riffles. Then:
‘Farmer, Farquhar, Francis - Frobisher!’
He rings on Robert’s phone. A calm baritone voice answers.
‘Hello. William Frobisher.’
‘William, I need to see you. I’d like to take you out to lunch.’
‘I’m your accountant, Tom. You can’t afford to.’
‘Oh –‘
‘I’m just filling in your tax return. It makes ghastly reading.’
‘Oh…’
‘I’d say your position’s desperate.’
‘Oh!’
‘Or worse.’
‘Ah. But I’ve let out my flat. I’m living out of a suitcase. What more can I do?’
‘You could get a proper job.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘One that pays wages.’
‘My films –‘
‘By the way, what shall I describe you as on the tax return? Writer, producer, teacher or director?’
‘Call me a sacrifice on the altar of British cinema.’
‘Writer, then. Goodbye, Tom.’
The dialling tone sounds very loud this time.


***


‘Hello, Mr Lindow, it’s Maggie from next door…’
Tom moans quietly. Maggie continues.
‘Look, we’re going to have to call on you to take Robert’s place in our tree hug –‘
The mobile rings.
‘I’m sorry,’ lies Tom, ‘I’ve got to answer my mobile. I’m expecting a call from Hollywood. Goodbye.’
Tom replaces the receiver and answers the mobile.
‘Hello.’
‘Tom, it’s Robert. I couldn’t get you on my line. It was engaged. I hope you’re not running up a huge phone bill.’
‘No, no –‘
‘I’ve just had a message from my office, saying there’s a crisis about a tree. My neighbour Daphne got onto them.’
‘I’ll bet she did.’
‘What?’
‘Carry on…’ soothes Tom.
‘Now, listen – this is murder. The garden committee are behaving like Nazis. Democracy is under attack. You must all go and tie yourselves to the tree at once…’
His words start to break up somewhere between Tajikistan, Notting Hill and space.
‘Do…hear me? …family honour…your hands, you…’
The line goes dead.
Tom is amazed. He rang me all the way from Tajikistan to tell me that? He sits quietly for a minute, then dials Peter Pavlov’s number.
‘Hello?’ says Peter, sounding just like Peter Lorre.
‘Peter, I’ll do it. I’ll sell my soul. I’ll bite the bullet. I’ll enter the enemy camp. I’ll teach the ignorant. I’ll put on my tap-dancing shoes…’
‘Good. I shall pick you up in my car at 8.30 tomorrow morning.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Then I can tell you all about my problems with Hanka.’
‘Who’s Hanka?’
‘My new Moravian girlfriend. Should I marry her or should I send her back to Moravia?’
‘What will I be teaching?’
‘The theory of montage. Or the history of the vampire movie. I can’t remember which. Maybe both. Do some reading tonight.’
‘But I don’t know anything about vampire films.’
‘Oh, don’t worry. Just throw in lots about Foucault, Derrida and Lacan.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘And talk about decoding things.’
‘Decoding?’
‘Every time a student asks an awkward question, tell them to try and decode whatever it is they’re asking about.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Or tell them to deconstruct it.’
‘Deconstruct it…’
‘Don’t worry. Mostly they’re very stupid and don’t know anything. This is a university for the educationally sub-mediocre. Bye-bye. I must go and dry my duck.’


***


FLASHBACK
THE ANGEL OF DEATH

Black triangular flags ripple in the breeze. They suggest mourning but are, in fact, only the markers for dozens of lobster pots lying on the quayside. Beyond them are stacks of large purple containers waiting to be loaded onto some ferry, or perhaps they have been offloaded from one already and are waiting to be taken somewhere by road. They look as though they’ll wait a long time at this almost deserted harbour. Tom finds it a funny coincidence that their colour is also funereal.
He carries his luggage past a handful of fishermen tending their nets aboard small trawlers. (He’s had a large Irish fry-up for breakfast in a café nearby.) A distant church-bell rings the Angelus. One of the older fishermen makes a Sign of the Cross and stops his work to say a Hail Mary, so Tom stands still, not wanting to disturb the old man’s devotions.
A toot sounds, and a bus appears at the entrance to the harbour. It drives along the quayside before stopping near Tom. The passengers get out and all greet him with friendly but shy hellos while arranging their luggage on the ground.
Another toot marks the arrival of the ferry, which soon appears around the old harbour wall. The fishermen get on with their work. Time moves slowly.
Once the ferry has docked, the passengers disembark and greet the ones waiting to board on the quayside. Last down the gangway is a black-haired boy of about eighteen. Seeing him in profile, it’s obvious to Tom that the boy is extremely beautiful, with soulful black eyes. But as he steps ashore, Tom is shocked to see a long, deep scar running the length of his left cheek. The Angel of Death, says a voice in his head.
‘Hello,’ says the boy in a clear, friendly West of Ireland voice.
‘Hello,’ says Tom. ‘Where are you going?’
‘I’ve to go into town to see the dentist. I’ve a terrible toothache. Have you a place to stay on the island?’
‘No.’
‘Well, me mam does bread and breakfast,’ says the boy, handing Tom a card. ‘I’ll be home tomorrow.’
The bus toots and he slings an overnight bag across his shoulder.
‘Nice chatting to you. ‘ He offers Tom his hand. ‘I’m Séan.’
And with that he hops onto the departing bus, which Tom watches drive along the quayside. Just as it vanishes from view, Tom spots a hearse coming the other way. It passes the mournful lobster pots and the purple containers before stopping beside the ferry’s gangway.


***


‘He looks wistfully at the revolver lying in front of him on the polished mahogany table.’ Tap tap tap. ‘The gun RESTS at an angle of forty-five degrees. Slowly he leans forward and picks it up, then turns it towards himself until he is staring straight into the dark chasm of its barrel. Sweat has formed on his brow, and his face shows not only fear but the unmistakable evidence that this is the bleakest moment of his life – a moment of terrible existential despair – to be endured here on the island, at the very edge of Europe: the last stop before Ellis Island (or Labrador)…’



*****

3. ST. JUDE’S





Tom closes the door of Robert’s flat as quietly as he can, horribly aware of the neighbours he has been avoiding since yesterday. He is appalled by the crunching noise the key makes when he turns it in the lock. Hurrying down the stairs, he hears a door open and slam shut in the basement. He reaches the hall but drops his pile of books and papers while trying to open the front door. The sound of purposeful footsteps resonates in his ear.
‘Are you Robert’s brother?’ booms Daphne, who could be aged anything from 28 to 62.
‘Yes,’ says Tom, picking up his things as Daphne watches, not helping.
‘Where are you going?’
‘To work.’
‘Nonsense! Follow me into the garden. The Visigoths will arrive shortly with their chainsaws and paraphernalia for committing the most dreadful arboreal slaughter.’
This woman – if that is what she is, thinks Tom – is from the same genetic pool as P. G. Wodehouse’s aunts, whose natural form of communication, he remembers, was baying.
‘I’m going to teach. Someone’s waiting for me outside.’
‘Rubbish! Robert’s office assured me you’d help.’
In a suitably Pavlovian response, Peter Pavlov blows his car horn in the street.
‘That’s for me. Must dash. Sorry!’
He opens the front door and runs down the steps into the street.
‘Peter!’ he calls and throws himself into the shabby car as lorries and buses thunder past.
But his escape has been blocked. A tapping on the passenger window makes him turn to see a youngish woman in several jumpers and a headband smiling at him.
‘You must be Tom Lindow. I’m Maggie.’
Daphne is running down the street towards them.
‘Stop him, Maggie!’ she yells.
‘What’s going on?’ asks Peter.
‘Drive!’ commands Tom.
Peter’s short legs stab the pedals and, with a throaty cough from the exhaust, his car screeches away, almost colliding with a lorry.
‘You fucking bastard!’ shouts its driver.
‘Daphne, they’ve called off the execution for a day,’ says Maggie, ‘so the council can come and inspect the tree.’
‘Right!’ bays Daphne. ‘We’ll get the little shit tonight. The fight goes on!’


***


The terrible throaty rasp of Peter Pavlov’s exhaust is engulfed in the sea of traffic noise.
‘What was all that about?’ asks Peter.
‘Don’t ask.’
‘I have to warn you that I’m driving an illegal car. My exhaust – symbol of both my sexual and intellectual powers – is dropping off.’
‘What am I going to talk to these students about?’ asks a desperate Tom.
‘Teach them the principles of editing.’
‘Do they understand the principles of film-making?’
‘Of course not! Nobody knows anything. The Professor read a book on film and decided to start a course. So now the department is being split in two – the sociology of film and sociology of theatre – and they’ll both be bad. They’re Gemini, like me, travelling in two directions on my bed. They’ve destroyed my genius –’
He is interrupted by an extra throb from his exhaust and a terrible screech of brakes as he nearly collides with another car, whose driver screams at him.
‘You fucking cunt!’
‘Oh, shut up! Should I marry Hanka, or let her go? I feel so randy. I want to make love to everyone but her.’
‘Is she tiring you out sexually?’
‘She’s insatiable.’
‘Imagine you’re climbing a mountain in a storm – and cling on,’ says Tom helpfully.
‘That’s my life,’ Peter replies. ‘I need looking after. I need warmth. I come home and get a warm bowl of soup –‘
Another screech of brakes brings the car to a halt. A workman is operating a loud drill in front of them.
‘Why are they always digging up the road? The bastards!’
As the car pulls away again, Tom turns to Peter pleadingly.
‘Will these students know anything?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Will they despise me?’
‘All is decided when you enter that lecture room. Your entrance is vital. You will encounter distaste, loathing and fear. You’ll learn everything in that moment about the nature of the predator and the predatee. Here we are –’
‘Mind that priest!’ shouts Tom, and Peter swerves the car away from the university chaplain, scraping the hub caps along the kerb. The exhaust finally falls off at the back and drags along the college drive.
‘That’s why I’m not very popular with the Catholics,’ says Peter.
The car whacks into a bollard and stops.
‘Welcome to my great seat of learning.’
He grabs some paperwork from the back seat and thrusts it into Tom’s hands.
‘Here’s some bumph.’
Tom reads out loud.
‘”Saint Jude’s University exists to advance and develop higher education, research and scholarship…”’
‘Read on.’
‘”And is very well placed to suit all your shopping needs…”’
‘Exactly. Come, I will introduce you to your fellow vampires. Oh, here is one.’
Footsteps sound on the gravel as the sinister bass voice of Dr Christopher Irving greets them. He looks like a tall Hannibal Lecter.
‘Good morning, Peter,’ he growls silkily. ‘Is this our replacement?’
‘Tom, I want you to meet Dr Irving, who is directing our vampire course.’
‘Tom Lindow. How do you do?’
‘Do call me Christopher. I trust you won’t find our little factory hens too pale first thing in the morning.’
‘They’re easily tired by too much deconstruction,’ explains Peter.
‘You mustn’t expect the world of them,’ adds the Doctor comfortingly.


***


‘So you see,’ says Tom to the sleepy class, ‘that was an example of editing by the master of montage, Sergei Eisenstein…’
A student yawns.
‘Who?’
‘Eisenstein.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘What?’
‘Who’s Einstein?’
‘Eisenstein. The man who directed this film –’
Another student, Brian, butts in accusingly.
‘Nobody’s ever mentioned him to us.’
‘Well, he also directed the film I’m going to show you a clip from next – October.’
A glamorous mixed-race student named Karen pipes up.
‘Why’s it called that?’
‘Because it’s about the Russian Revolution.’
‘What’s that?’
‘What’s what?’
‘The Russian Revolution.’
‘We’ve never heard of it,’ says the yawning student, yawning.
‘You never learned about it at school?’
‘No,’ says Brian defensively.
‘No-o-oh,’ yawns the other student.
‘Don’t they teach history in school nowadays?’
‘Yes,’ says Karen, also yawning, ‘but it’s optional.’
Tom looks around the class, disheartened.
‘Why are you all yawning?’
‘Because it’s very early,’ says Brian, yawning.
‘And we’ve had to come all the way from our hall of residence,’ yawns the yawning student.
‘Where’s that?’
‘Next door.’
‘Right,’ says Tom desperately. ‘October, and how, with this film, Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein changed the world…’
Everyone yawns, and Tom stabs the play button on the video player.


***


‘Tom!’ Peter Pavlov calls across the crowded senior common room. ‘Come and tell Christopher and me how it went. What did they make of you?’
‘How long do you think it’ll take them to decode you?’ asks Dr Irving.
‘Some time, probably,’ says Tom, ‘judging by how little they know about anything.’
‘I shouldn’t worry about that,’ soothes Peter. ‘Once I was teaching them about the post-psychology of Oedipal Deviance – a subject I’d invented – and they’d never heard of Freud. When I told them about the Oedipus Complex, they were so shocked that half of them walked out of the class.’
A desperate, frail cry sounds from the other end of the room.
‘Peter! Peter Pavlov!’
Peter turns white.
‘Oh, my God – it’s Professor Mather, our head of department! He wants to persecute me. He hates Geminis. He’s Libra!’
‘Peter – what have you done? The students are in a state of uproar. Come here at once!’
‘Peter, what have you done?’ asks Dr Irving malevolently. ‘You’ve deconstructed the faculty.’
‘Oh, God,’ mutters Peter, shuffling through the coffee-drinking academics, their assistants and secretaries. ‘This place is destroying me.’
‘Poor Peter,’ says Dr Irving, turning to Tom with a long-toothed smile. ‘Always looking for a new womb to settle in. Yet he lives in fear of being expelled from the womb, of becoming a deconstructed foetus. To him, Paradise was a womb. I’ve never known anyone who misses the umbilical cord so much.’
‘It’s a tightrope, the umbilical cord,’ says Tom sagely.
‘Or a Gordian Knot,’ adds Dr Irving, sipping his coffee and eyeing Tom with even more interest. ‘It’s a very post-modern scenario.’
‘Do the students understand a term like post-modern?’ Tom asks morosely.
‘Yes. They think it means they don’t have to read any books.’
Peter Pavlov returns, groaning.
‘It’s a nightmare. They all want me out. I showed the students Weekend by Godard without warning them that a pig is killed in one scene – and now they insist that I’m punished.’
‘If you had warned them, would they have watched it?’ asks Tom.
‘Of course not. I hate them! I hate this place! I used to be a giant of an intellect before I came here. Look what they’ve done. They’ve dwarfed me. I’m a bonsai! What do they think I want from any of them? I’m no threat to anyone. I don’t want sex with them. I don’t want anybody’s job. I just want to be happy –‘
‘That’s exactly what the vampire Hitler said when he started on his career of deconstructing Europe,’ says Dr Irving, sipping his coffee. ‘Peter, you’re at war with your unconscious mind. You must learn to decode yourself better. Try to see the unconscious as an archive of all the films you have starred in but cannot recall.’
‘I haven’t starred in any. I’m always failing the screen test.’
He gulps his coffee but continues to stir the empty cup.
‘Why are you doing that?’ asks Tom.
‘Because I need warmth!’


***


FLASHBACK
THE COFFIN ON THE BOAT

The undertaker and his three assistants jump smartly out of the hearse, and one of them opens the door at the rear. Gently they lift out the wooden coffin, which has a solitary yellow and white wreath on top. Tom watches them carry it carefully along the gangway onto the ferry, discreetly photographing them. The passengers bow their heads in respect as the coffin is taken below.
When the men have returned to the hearse and closed its rear door, the ferry toots and casts off. Tom looks back at the vanishing quayside and, when they round the harbour wall and the sun bursts through the clouds, he scans the horizon for a sight of his destination. The sea sprays like thousands of sparklers as the ferry churns up the bright water.
‘You look excited,’ says a man standing next to him at the rail.
‘I am.’
‘There’s the island,’ says the man, pointing to a dark mass way out in the silver sea.
It looks like the sort of place they’d keep the Holy Grail, thinks Tom, but he doesn’t say it.
‘I’m Michael.’ He shakes Tom’s hand. ‘Every bit of grazing has been sown there by men and women – except where the graveyard is, of course, or the wild grass above the cliffs. ‘Tis all limestone otherwise, and only seaweed used to fertilise it.’
Just then Tom hears a retching sound and turns to see a woman being sick over the side of the boat. Michael smiles at him and whispers:
‘As James Joyce said, that’ll feed the herrings.’



*****

4. WAITING FOR GODARDOT





Hard rain is pounding the gutters of Robert’s street. The horrible, throaty noise of Peter Pavlov’s exhaust roars and clanks along the road, almost obscuring the sound of the engine. All is soon eclipsed by a terrifying screech of brakes as the car performs a ten-yard sideways skid. The passenger door creaks open as Tom steps out, shaking.
‘Peter, what can I say?’
‘Don’t mention it.’
‘Tomorrow I’ll take the Tube, so I can read.’
‘Very well. I shall play my Japanese language tape as I drive along. I am considering emigrating to the land of the bonsai as there are sixty-three and a half million polite and compliant women waiting for me there.’
‘I suppose I’ll have to meet Professor Mather sometime.’
‘Don’t talk about that man! He knows nothing. But you must meet him. And don’t forget to sing my praises when you do.’
‘Will I have to talk to Christopher Irving again?’
‘Yes. You know, he only likes the students who remind him of vampires. Tall and thin. He sees them rising penis-like from the sarcophagus. His sexual orientation is very perverse, but he hasn’t decoded it yet.’
The car croaks off, clanking along the rain-drenched road, and Tom runs alongside the flooded gutter.
‘You!’ roars Daphne, who has been lying in wait under an umbrella.
‘Sorry – must dash. Important phone call!’
‘Oh no you don’t!’
She gives chase, and Maggie’s plaintive wail sounds amid the plashes.
‘Mr Lindow, we’ve all got to hug together!’
Tom charges up the steps and through the open door, slamming it after him.


***


‘Freedom!’ shouts Tom as he shuts the door of Robert’s flat behind him. Immediately, the telephone starts ringing. ‘Bugger!’
‘Hello, this is Robert. I’m away, I’m afraid, but if…’
Rain smears down the window-panes while Tom switches on the lights, puts down his papers and starts taking off his wet clothes.
‘…you’d like to leave your name and number, I’ll call you when I get back.’
Click. Daphne’s voice on the answering machine.
‘Come out, Lindow!. We know you’re in there!’
‘Daphne, do be gentle. Just tell him that our dear sweet tree will love him back if he’ll trust in the power of hugging –‘
‘Oh, balls! Get down here, you fucking worm!’
‘Oh, dear.’
The next deafening click is followed by a short, though epic, silence.
‘O-o-ohhh…’ Tom sighs. ‘Bugger. Robert’ll hear that when he gets back.’
He stabs a button. A computerised voice speaks.
‘Play – your – messages?’
‘No!’
‘Message – received – at – ten – thirty – today.’
‘Shut up!’
He stabs another button, and the tape rewinds. Click.
‘Tom. Robert here. I’ve spoken to Daphne, and she says you won’t chain yourself to the tree. It’s disgraceful. I thought you were more socially and politically committed than that. Pull yourself together and listen to me. They’ve had a stay of execution, but tomorrow’s D-Day. These Nazis on the garden committee must not be allowed to get away with it. Do you hear? The one who wants more light in his kitchen’s a Jew, of course. Now act at once!’
Tom suddenly remembers that in the drama of the day he has forgotten to check his own messages on his mobile, which has been switched off since the morning. A smooth voice tells him he has three. He listens to the first, left by a man with a Brummy accent.
‘Hello, Mr Lindow. Frank Dubovny here from Poseidon Laboratories. Um, a bit of bother, I’m afraid. We seem to have mislaid the entire negative of your documentary film. But don’t worry, I’m sure it’ll turn up. Could you give us a buzz? Bye-ee.’
Tom groans.
‘Angela Cartwright of Farquhar and Farquhar Lettings. Hiya. Just a teensy-weensy problem while we were showing a client around your flat this morning. Er, he was a smoker, and his cigarette just happened to burn a tiny hole in the carpet. Next to the bed. Which meant that the sheets and duvet and pillows went up. But the curtains were only a weeny bit singed and shouldn’t be difficult to replace. Perhaps you could give me a call…’
Tom braces himself for the last message.
‘Tom. William Frobisher. I’ve just been doing your accounts, and it’s getting worse. For a start, you’ve let the insurance on your flat run out, so you haven’t been covered for the last two months. I hope you’ve got a reliable tenant. Give me a call. Bye.’
Silence. Until the mobile rings.
‘Hello.’
‘It’s Rexxx. What’s-going-on?’
‘I’m in Hell.’
‘That’s what I always said about living in England. What did you do today?’
‘I taught film.’
‘To whommm?’
‘Degree students.’
‘Do they know anything?’
‘No.’
‘What did you teach them?’
‘Montage. And a bit of film history.’
‘Who did you tell them about?’
‘Eisenstein.’
‘Eisenstein?’
‘They’d never heard of him.’
‘Potemkin?’
‘Never heard of it.’
‘October?’
‘They’d never heard of the Russian Revolution.’
‘What? How do they think the Russians got there? Do they think it was always like that?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How do they think the Berlin Wall came down if they don’t know why it went up?’
‘You tell me.’
‘What films did you show them? Like real films. You know what I mean, don’t you? Nothing French. Real movies. European movies don’t count. Did you show them Andd Thenn There Were Nonnne?’
‘No. I showed them vampire films.’
‘Vampire movies? What did you show them? Did you show them Bela Lugosi?’
‘No.’
‘What? You didn’t show them Bela Lugosi? Did you show them Christopher Lee?’
‘No.’
‘You didn’t show them Bela Lugosi and you didn’t show them Christopher Lee. What did you show them?’
‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula by Coppola.’
‘Whatttt? Gary Oldman in that wig? If you ask anyone to tell you about Dracula, who do they describe? Huh? Bela Lugosi! Did you show them Lon Chaney Junior? Now he was another great one. But his evil seductress temptress wife, she’s-up-to-no-good. So what do you think Lon Chaney does? He sticks a killer-gorilla onto her. What else is going on?’
Tom braces himself before listing the catalogue of disasters.
‘Someone nearly burned down my flat, and the lab lost the negative of my documentary –’
‘What’s it about?’
‘Morocco.’
‘Morocco! You went there a lot, didn’t you? Your last one was about Indians or West Indians or something. You’re always going to these crazy retarded countries where they wear turbans no doubttt. The cab drivers in New York wear turbans now. Fuck Morocco! You should make a movie about Notting Hill Gate! What else?’
Tom decides to swing away from his own problems.
‘One of my colleagues says he’s going to live in Japan.’
‘Japan! I couldn’t deal with the culture. I couldn’t deal with the raw fish. I have no interest in those countries. Australia I could probably deal with. You could probably get a steak. But Japan I couldn’t handle because I-reckon-the-TV’s-no-good. Paris is good. London was just a collection of Agatha-Christie-villages-linked-by-the-Underground. Who burned down your apartment? Is all your stuff destroyed? You were always so careful about all that old furniture. What happened to your five thousand-year-old chair? You know, the one with the cord across it that I nearly sat down on once and you were very unhappy about it? If you want to know my opinion, I think you’re a little anal. You should move to New York. I’ve been telling you that for years. There’s only one country that counts. And you wanted to stay in England in the Fourth World. Everybody’s into body-piercing here. And tattoos. Do they do that in England? I can’t remember. I saw a guy – he had a stick in his tongue. I said did it hurt and he said “Like a motherfucker, but that’s the point!” It’s a ritual thing, he said. But ritual what? I’ve got a hangover from the valium…
‘Even a man who is pure of heart,
And says his prayers by night,
May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms
And the Autumn moon is bright… Who said that?’
‘Edgar Allan Poe?’
‘Maria Ouspenskaya! She said that to Lon Chaney Junior in The Wolf Man.’
‘I thought she was the only character who didn’t say it.’
‘Listen. My brother tried to steal ten thousand dollars from me. I saw the same scenario on Dallas in ’87. My own flesh and blood tries to steal ten thousand bucks from me, and they’ve already done it on Dallas. Or was it Dynasty? So, to avenge myself I give his VCR to my uncle. And then my aunt and my mother tell my uncle to give it back to my brother. Then they tell me not to be mean to my brother. Now there’s no Thanksgiving, no Jewish New Year. A family has been splittt asunnnder! My mother says, “How can you treat your family like this?” I say, “What kind of family is this? My brother’s trying to steal ten thousand dollars from me!” What does she know? The day she got divorced I saw her attorney get into my father’s automobile and drive away with him. My father’s a bastard. He said I could have my barmitzvah at the Plaza if I agreed to give him all my present money…’ (This is a slightly different version from the last one Tom heard.) ‘…I said fuck off and had it in Coney Island instead. How can you stay in England? It’s a dumppp. They don’t do any movies there. They’ve got one studio left – right? Shepperton? The TV’s terrible! How can you live in England if you want to make movies? If I wanted to sell cotton could I live in New York? England’s good for drinking beer, and-that’s-it. What else is England good for? Do they produce a car or something? BMW? Beer – that’s all. And my heroine, Dame Thatcher. She helped people to get rich. Isn’t it nice that she allowed that man in Singapore to steal ten billion dollars? Come with me to Las Vegas for the Porn Oscars.’
‘I haven’t got any money.’
‘Las Vegas can be cheap.’
‘Not cheap enough. Anyway, I’ll have to go back to Morocco.’
‘Morocco! You can travel to all seven continents and you won’t come to Las Vegas. You bet low. What’s that Billie Holliday song? How does it go?’
Rex starts singing.
‘You’re welcome to come
But don’t take too much… If you won’t come to Las Vegas, then come to New York. You can stay here. You won’t spend much. I’ll get you work selling porn. I’ll arrange for you to see a porn movie being made. You can direct one. I’ll talk to my schmuck father about it. It’s hard work for the guys in those films. They have to keep it up for hours. It’s not like watching chesss!’
‘Will you have bread and milk in the fridge?’
‘Say, you have to come with some money! This is not Calcutta! Don’t be anal. Wake up to reality. Rid yourself of that Fourth World mentality. Throw away your anality! Break out of your five thousand-year-old chains. Whatever happened to your stipend?’
He pauses.
‘I’ll tell you what to do…’
‘What?’ asks Tom.
An epic pregnant pause ensues. Then:
‘Sell the fucking chair!’
The line goes dead.


***


There is a second’s silence before an almighty thump lands on the door, and Daphne’s furious voice blasts through it.
‘Lindow, open up at once! Come on out, you fucking little worm of a thing!’
‘I’m very busy.’
‘It’s lucky for you, Lindow, that the council have granted another stay of execution. But the day after tomorrow you’d better chain yourself to that tree with the rest of us – or else!’
Maggie’s voice implores meekly.
‘Oh, Daphne… Mr Lindow. May I call you Tom? I beseech you to believe in the power of love, Tom. If we love this tree enough, we can save it. We can hug it back to salvation –‘
Tom has had enough. Violently he grabs the handle and throws open the door.
‘Bugger your tree! Bugger your hugging! And bugger you! I am not going to hug your fucking tree for a second, or chain myself to any of you! If I could get one minute’s peace, I’d be attempting to write an earth-shattering screenplay about human suffering and the meaning of existence, broaching important allied subjects such as the nature of betrayal, warfare, retaliatory bombing and genocide. As it is, I’ve left my protagonist, since yesterday, sitting with the barrel of an enormous fucking revolver shoved up his mouth on a remote Irish island! And if you disturb me once more, I’ll do the same fucking thing to myself – and, quite possibly, you! Goodnight!’
He slams the door shut. A few moments later he opens it again and yells into the abyss of the stairwell.
‘And another thing! You may be interested to know that I once made a documentary film about the destruction of two hundred and fifty million trees in the tropical rainforest! Two hundred and fifty fucking million of the fucking things! It won an award!’


***


FLASHBACK
THE PRIEST ON THE QUAYSIDE

The ferry follows the shoreline of the island. Some of the landscape is made up of walled green fields with a few animals grazing in them. The rest is bare limestone. Tom is thrilled to be arriving.
They chug into a small harbour, where a few people are waiting on the quayside, including two men with ponies and traps – the island’s taxi service. Then Tom notices a small group standing a little way from the others. A priest dressed in a long black cassock with a purple stole draped around his neck is reading aloud from a missal to the people behind him: a boy server in a surplice, two thin middle-aged men in worn dark suits and a gaunt old woman in black. Next to them is a farmer waiting by his tractor with a trailer behind. Discreetly, Tom photographs them from the deck.
The side of the boat scrapes against the harbour wall. The priest makes a Sign of the Cross and continues to read from his missal. When the gangway crashes down onto the quayside, the two thin men and the farmer hurriedly board the ferry. A boatman politely holds back Tom and the other passengers who watch them carrying the coffin off the gangway towards the tractor, then loading it onto the trailer. The priest blesses the coffin and recites prayers as the farmer climbs aboard the tractor and drives off slowly, followed by the others, towards the village on the other side of the bay.
‘Who are they burying?’ asks Tom.
‘Oh, that’s a sad, sad story…’ says Michael.
Tom never finds out.



*****





5. GARY OLDMAN IN THAT WIG

‘Scene 264. Interior. Sitting room. Night.
Harper is sitting in the same position, though it is clear that time has elapsed, turning day into night. He is still clutching the gun…’ ‘No!’ ‘He is still HOLDING the gun, though it no longer points towards him. Instead, it hangs limply from his hand, hovering a few inches above the floor. Bleakly he mutters to himself: “Jammed. The bloody thing jammed. Jee-sus!” Then, very slowly he –‘
Tom has been distracted by something in the window opposite. He squints to make sure he isn’t seeing things that aren’t there. His mobile rings.
‘Tom. Peter here.’
‘Peter, someone’s masturbating at the window over the road.’
‘Man or woman?’
‘Man.’
‘Oh, how interesting.’
‘Seems rather odd, doesn’t it – doing it in the window?’
‘Quite normal.’
‘It seems very odd to me,’ Tom says, shaken.
‘Is the street tree-lined?’
‘No.’
‘Some people need to compensate for that,’ says Peter. ‘You have to see the whole gestalt. He’s making up for the lack of erectile structures in his life.’
‘Well, it seems very odd…’
‘What does he look like?’
Tom peers at the figure in the window.
‘He looks like Christopher Irving.’
‘I don’t think Christopher gets enough sex,’ says Peter ruminatingly. ‘Even with himself. He builds a world of ritual and literature around it. Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Christian Metz. But he’s not actually doing it. He thinks the world hasn’t decoded that – but we have. Just a moment… Hanka is asking me how she should prepare the chicken. As it says on the packet, Hanka – shall I help you?’ He reads from the packet. ‘“Pierce outer film –“ Tom, how many times should I pierce the film?’
‘I don’t know, Peter. Do you mind if I get back to my script?’
‘I’ve been thinking. I may move to China instead of Japan because there are five hundred million women there. There must be lots of beautiful ones. I only know ugly women, and I get to know them in the hope that they’ll introduce me to their beautiful friends. But the friends turn out to be even more ugly than them. It’s ghastly. What, Hanka? All right – coming! I must go and help Hanka to turn the knobs of the microwave. I will pick you up in the morning. Bye.’
‘No, Peter –‘
Click.
‘I’ll take the Tube.’
Robert’s phone rings. Tom groans.
‘Hello, this is Robert…’
Tom punches the machine, and it goes silent. He is triumphant.
‘Hah!’
‘Bleakly he mutters to himself: “Jammed. The bloody thing jammed.” Then. Very slowly he…’ Tap tap tap. ‘…raises his arm and examines the treacherous revolver –‘
A fax machine whirrs into life, and a handwritten message feeds through. When it stops, Tom rips out the paper and reads.
‘Dear Tom,
Have you taken decisive action yet? Or are you a snivelling little coward like you were the time I fired a crossbow arrow into your leg when you were eight? Does democracy mean nothing to you? Are you content to be pushed around by loudmouthed Nazi bullies who want to pull down forests just to let more light into their kitchens so they can see more clearly to chop up animal carcasses and feed them to their useless snivelling Nazi Jewish friends? Where are your principles? Do you know what principles are? Principles are what led me very generously to buy your beloved stamp collection for one-and-six when you were ten because you didn’t have enough money for a packet of Polo Mints. Are you principled, Thomas – or should I be ashamed to call you brother? Act at once! Stand up for my (crossed out) YOUR rights and fight! Your brother, Robert.’
Tom crumples the paper in his hand and throws it in a high arc into the bin. Then he switches off and unplugs everything – telephone, fax machine, answer-phone, mobile – and even takes the entry-phone receiver off its hook.
Right, he thinks. No more distractions. Silence. Just me and my art.
‘…he raises his arm and examines the treacherous revolver. “Fuck you,” he murmurs. “I’m better off without you. I’m going to live. I’m going to go out there and do something about all those bastards with their bombs and their money and their crack cocaine and their uniforms. Yes! You just try and stop me…”’


***


That night Tom dreams in film. In black and white.

Interior/Exterior. Dracula’s castle. Graveyard. Las Vegas theatre. Lecture room. Robert’s flat. Sahara Desert. Night/Day.

Heroic war music cross-fades with the dark Satanic theme music from Bram Stoker’s Dracula by Coppola. An owl hoots. A raven screams. Gary Oldman is seen, as Dracula.

GARY OLDMAN
I am Drakoolaah!

Rex appears eating a frankfurter.

REX
Gary Oldman in that wig!

Ketchup drips from his mouth like blood. The music cross-fades with that of the 1931 Dracula. Bela Lugosi speaks.

BELA LUGOSI
I am Dracula. I bid you welcome.

REX
Lon Chaney and his evil seductress temptress
wife!

The music cross-fades with that of The Wolf Man. Evelyn Ankers (Gwen Conliffe), Claude Rains (Sir John Talbot) and Fay Helm (Jenny Williams) speak out of sync with one another.

ANKERS, RAINS & HELM
Even a man who is pure of heart,
And says his prayers by night,
May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms
And the Autumn moon is bright.

Wolves howl as the music cross-fades with Dracula.

BELA LUGOSI
Listen to them – children of the night.
What music they make.

The loud ringing of a telephone drives away the music and the howling. Rex’s voice crackles down the line.

REX’S VOICE
Don’t be so anal. You bet low! It’s your move.
Are you a king or a pawn?

The theme music from Dynasty. A master of ceremonies makes an announcement.

MASTER OF CEREMONIES
Ladies and Gentlemen – Miss Joan Collins!

Applause from the ecstatic audience. A glittering Joan Collins enters, carrying an envelope. She announces from the podium.

JOAN COLLINS
The Las Vegas Porn Oscar for the most anal performance
ever given in a lecture room goes to…

She opens the envelope and pauses.

JOAN COLLINS
Mr Tom Lindow and his swimming yellow duck with the
beautiful eyes!

More applause, and swelling Oscar music. The telephone rings. Peter Pavlov’s outraged voice yells down the line.

PETER PAVLOV
How dare you! That was supposed to be my award.
You’re so Oedipal. You stole my womb! There are
no erectile structures in your life!

A jolly Oriental song plays from Greenaway’s The Pillow Book. A Japanese woman’s voice plays on a language tape.

JAPANESE WOMAN
¥¤§ µ¶¦ø ĦħώФ ХЦЧ ЪЗЭ Юпф ךלم≠≈ ☺

GARY OLDMAN
Drakoolaah!

Karen appears, yawning seductively.

KAREN
Oh, Mr Lindow, sir, I wonder if you’d like a bit of
montage à trois. Just you, me and Foucault…

She yawns post-coitally as the phone rings. Finbar O’Dell of Wardour Cutting Rooms is on the line.

FINBAR O’DELL
Er, we’ve cut up your film by mistake, I’m afraid.
All fifteen thousand feet of it. Sorry.

Another ring. Angela Cartwright speaks.

ANGELA CARTWRIGHT
Teensy-weensy problem, Mr Lindow. We’ve burned
your five thousand-year-old chair.

Tajikistani/Turkmenistani mouth music plays as Robert comes on the line.

ROBERT
Tom! When are you going to make a sacrifice?
Have you no shame? Are you worth the price
of a packet of Polos?

The music plays on deafeningly, further disrupting Tom’s sleep – if that is possible. Then it cross-fades with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby singing the title song from The Road To Morocco. They are riding a camel.

BOB HOPE & BING CROSBY
(Singing.) We’re off on the road to Morocco.
This taxi is tough on the spine…

The telephone rings. Bob Hope speaks over the ringing sound as the music continues.

BOB HOPE
Say, Tom, why do you always answer the phone
when you could just leave it off the hook?

TOM
People in the film business don’t do that.

BING CROSBY
Oh yes they do.

BOB HOPE & BING CROSBY
(Singing.) Off – off! – on the road to Morocco.
Hang on till the end of the line. I hear this country’s
where they do the Dance Of The Seven Veils…

Ring ring.

TOM
Hello?

WILLIAM FROBISHER
I’ve been looking at the figures, Tom. I’d say
you’re fucked.

BOB HOPE & BING CROSBY
(Singing.) We certainly do get a-rou-ou-ound.
Like Webster’s Dictionary, we’re Morocco bound…

Tom tosses and turns desperately. When he wakes up, the only good thing he’ll feel is that Daphne didn’t beat her way into the nightmare.


***


FLASHBACK
THE FORT ON THE CLIFF

‘Would you like a taxi, sir?’ asks one of the men with a pony and trap.
‘No, thank you,’ replies Tom. ‘I like walking.’
‘To my sorrow!’ says the man, mock sad.
Tom follows the road to the village. Soon he’s standing in front of a Celtic cross proclaiming the heroic deeds of martyrs killed during the Troubles. Michael is already drinking at the pub nearby, standing in the doorway.
‘Will you have a drop?’ he calls.
‘I won’t, thank you. I’ve got to tackle the cliffs later.’
Before long he’s standing outside the door of Séan’s house, where a Yale key sits in the lock, waiting to be turned by whoever comes visiting. Tom knocks.


***


A seagull shrieks as the wind tears up the cliff-face and disturbs the nests in the long wild grass at the top. Then, by contrast, a delicate tinkling is heard, like the sound a wind-chime makes in a breeze. Stones are moving underneath Tom’s feet as he walks along a dry-stone wall a little way back from the cliff. He’s exploring an ancient fort thousands of years old and one of Europe’s earliest fortified places. Its enormous walls are comprised entirely of loose stones skilfully laid on top of one another. Tom photographs them with wonder under a huge sky, which stretches uninterrupted to America (or Canada).
The mix of landscape and ruins makes him think of other lost civilisations: of Asia Minor and Mesopotamia, of ancient Greece and Mesoamerica. A fort overlooking a barren land and secret-hiding sea, a place where pre-Christian soldiers on sentry duty would no doubt have conjured up images of terrifying monsters on cold dark nights. A place where myths began.
Tom approaches the cliff-edge and, in a gesture of fantastic and possibly heroic abandon, hurls himself off, trusting that the power of the wind will force him back. He seems suspended for a moment as the wind tearing up and around the cliff-top plays with him, dangling his life over the rocks and sea hundreds of feet below.
‘A suitable place to die!’ yells Tom, who likes the idea of a dramatic death and fears a ridiculous one. Drowning in a violent sea has always appealed to him, possibly in the Indian Ocean or the Bay of Bengal. The sound of his voice is drowned out by the fury of the wind and the attack of two dozen screaming seagulls viciously protecting their threatened nests.



*****





6. A LITTLE LEARNING





Toshiro Mifune as Taketoki Washizu and Izuzu Yamada as his wife Asaji are talking to each other in Kurosawa’s Throne Of Blood when a riderless horse gallops into the courtyard outside a room in the fort. Japanese soldiers shout. Tom pushes the pause button, freezing the image, as a few of the assembled students snore.
‘Now what did you think of that…’ He looks around at the yawning faces. ‘…Karen?’
‘I quite enjoyed it, actually.’
‘Yeah,’ yawns the yawning student. ‘It was better than that Einstein stuff.’
‘Or that Dracula bollocks,’ chips in Brian.
‘Thank you, Brian,’ says Tom primly.
‘Yes,’ Karen goes on, ‘it was all quite still and peaceful until that horse came galloping on.’
‘Yeah, like origami.’
‘Or kamikaze.’
‘Harakaze.’
‘Very restful.’ She purrs like a beautiful cat.
Suddenly a mobile phone rings, waking up the sleeping students and startling the rest. Brian answers it.
‘Hello? No, nothing important. Go ahead, man. Yeah. Half an ounce. OK, I’m coming now.’ He hurries to the door, calling over his shoulder. ‘Gotta go. Sorry. Bye.’
Tom surveys the class despondently.
‘Well, I think we’ve pretty much covered it for today…’
He winces as chairs scrape noisily on the floor and the students shuffle out of the room. He calls after them.
‘And don’t forget those essays! I want them in by tomorrow.’
It seems fantastic to Tom that these essays should be required in less than a fortnight, or even a month – but so many of St Jude’s activities and expectations are mysterious to him. As is Karen, who has stayed behind. She sidles up to Tom, who is removing the cassette from the player, and places her mouth close to his ear.
‘Could I have a word?’
‘Yes, of course,’ says Tom, bolting upright. ‘Something you wanted to know about Kurosawa?’
‘Well, no, actually. I’d like your advice.’
‘Certainly. On what?’
‘The thing is, I’ve been offered a part in a film…’
‘Excellent,’ says Tom. ‘Is the director good?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, what’s it about?’
‘It’s a martial arts film, and they want me to play a topless waitress. I was wondering what you thought. You seem very sensitive.’
‘Well…’
‘You always look so sad when we tell you we haven’t heard of all these films.’
‘Have you discussed it with your family?’
‘My father thinks it’s a really good idea.’
‘What about your mother?’
‘She did it herself when she was my age.’
‘Oh.’
‘It’s just… Do you think I’m photogenic enough?’
‘Of course, Karen. You’re a very beautiful young woman.’
‘I know. But these –‘ She cups her breasts and pushes them towards Tom. ‘Are they?’
‘Your…?’
‘Yes. What do you think?’
‘They’re…great.’
‘But what will they look like on film?’
‘They’ll look wonderful.’
‘You must see them properly. Here, have a good look.’
Tom is flabbergasted.
‘You want me to audition your breasts?’
‘Yes,’ says Karen, starting to remove her sweater.
‘No, stop! You mustn’t take off your sweater in the lecture room.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because, because…’
‘I know it’s wrong,’ beams Karen as she throws away the sweater and starts to undo her bra, ‘but I like it.’
‘You shouldn’t,’ mumbles Tom, desperately collecting his papers and failing to avert his eyes.
‘I should.’
‘There are rules, fire regulations…’
‘I decoded you the minute you walked into this room yesterday,’ she murmurs in Tom’s all too confirming ear.
‘Karen, I… I… I –’
Yet again in his unfortunate life Tom has been betrayed by the previous night’s dream. It knew all too well that he had entered the lecture room of St Jude’s yesterday morning as no more and no less than a hopeless predatee. And he should have known better than to spend part of today showing them scenes from a Japanese version of The Scottish Play.
Montage à trois indeed. Poor Tom.


***


‘Tom!’ calls Peter from inside his croaking, clanking car.
The passenger door creaks open, and Tom hears a Japanese woman’s voice speaking on a language tape.
‘¥¤§ µ¶¦ø ĦħώФ ХЦЧ ЪЗЭ Юпф ךלم≠≈ ☺’ she says.
‘I’m emigrating to Japan after all. Half a billion Chinese women would be too much for me.’
‘ĦħώФ ХЦЧ ЪЗЭ’
‘Peter, I’m feeling fragile. Could you turn that off?’
‘Of course. Mind those essays! Throw them on the back seat.’
Tom gets in, and Peter drives the car straight at the chaplain.
‘No!’ screams Tom, who is a shadow of his former inglorious self.
‘You fucking arse!’ yells the chaplain before making a Sign of the Cross.
‘I don’t think a Shinto monk would speak like that, do you?’
‘He might. Have you considered emigrating to somewhere nearer home?’
‘Define home.’
‘Western, Central or Eastern Europe?’
‘No.’
‘Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia?’
‘Certainly not.’
‘Austria?’
‘Ugh! It’s a ghastly place. All that terrible sweet ice cream. All that cake! It’s the worst country in Europe.’
Tom has been looking thoughtful for a few seconds.
‘Do you know,’ he says to Peter’s profile, ‘I think I might have actually taught them something about film today…’
‘It’s an illusion.’
‘I wonder what their essays will be like.’
‘Awful.’
‘How many words do they write?’
‘Very few.’
‘How much have yours written?’
‘I will never know because I won’t ever read the essays.’
‘What?’ says Tom, amazed. ‘How do you mark them?’
‘I throw them against the wall and see which ones bounce back the furthest. The highest marks go to the longest essays because they travel further.’
Peter nearly runs over a group of shoppers stepping onto a zebra crossing. Tom hardly notices.
‘You do that with all of them?’ he asks, appalled.
‘No. Some of them I sniff. Hand me the one on top of the pile.’
‘This?’ says Tom, before reading the title out loud. ‘”Decode the post-structuralist dynamic of persecution in film, with special reference to its historical, cultural and ideological specificity, foregrounding the problematic of the relationship between the filmmaker and the filmgoer.” Who thinks up these titles?’
‘Christopher Irving. He adapted that one especially for me.’ He sniffs the essay as Tom hands it to him. ‘Mmmm… Smells like a D-minus.’
‘Does anyone complain?’
‘Of course not. All the students will have cheated anyway. They just copy what last year’s lot wrote because Christopher sets the same essays over and over again. He hasn’t decoded the fact that they’ve decoded him, and then deconstructed the questions.’
‘So I can look forward to reading whole theses of bollocks?’
‘Exactly. Theses of faeces – a poor joke, but ’tis mine own. Welcome to Academe.’ Peter blows his horn at a blind man and nearly runs over his guide dog, which snarls at the vanishing car.
‘Oh, by the way – never accept any of their excuses for handing in essays late. One of them told me she couldn’t get hers done in time because her pet ferret had died. Bugger her ferret! “I don’t care about your pet ferret!” I told her. “May it rot in the heavenly pastures! Sayonara!”’
At this point several children are forced to flee for their lives amid a screeching of brakes and shedding of tyre rubber, a throaty roar and the terminal clanging of the exhaust pipe as it hits the deck for the last time and flies off in the opposite direction from the car – and, mercifully, the children.


***


Tom reckons that all he’s got to do to avoid being caught by Daphne and Maggie is this: open the gate to the communal garden and shin up the fire escape. Piece of cake. He finds the key on Robert’s key-ring in his pocket. He opens the gate in a side-street. He enters the garden. An owl hoots. He starts to climb the old iron fire escape. In the dark he trips over the chain which Daphne and Maggie have placed there earlier, ready for tomorrow’s assault. He falls down the fire escape, banging his leg as he goes.
‘Aagh!’ he cries.
‘Who’s there?’ roars Daphne from the back door of her basement flat. ‘They’re probably trying to cut down the tree under cover of night, the Nazis! Grab a spade, Maggie. I’ve got the rake!’
‘Do be careful, Daphne,’ bleats Maggie. ‘Perhaps we can reason with them.’ She calls timidly into the dark. ‘I say, can you hear me out there? We come in peace.’
‘No we fucking well don’t! Show yourself, you miserable cowardly sod!’ Daphne wallops the fire escape with her rake and sees a shadowy figure pick itself up and start running up the steps two at a time, injured leg or not. ‘Face me like a man!’ She clangs her rake again.
‘Ow!’ yells Tom.
‘Be careful, Daphne.’
‘Thief in the night! Show yourself, you miserable worm! Hah – it’s you, Lindow. You measly little prowler. Explain yourself!’
‘Oh, poor Mr Lindow. Poor Tom. Daphne, do be careful with that rake.’
‘Speak up, Lindow. What are you doing out here, slinking about? I suppose you’re a pervert too.’
‘I’m trying to get into Robert’s flat.’
‘Well, you look like you’re perverting around the place to me. And if you don’t want me to call the police, you’d better be out here at eight o’clock tomorrow morning.’
‘Bugger off,’ says Tom, rubbing his leg.
‘Oh, Tom. Do try to love –‘
‘You bugger off too!’
‘Eight a.m.’ warns Daphne. ‘Or else.’
‘If you call the police, I’ll ring the fire brigade and tell them you’ve blocked up the fire escape with all your gardening equipment.’
At this moment Tom has an out-of-body experience and sees himself from the top of one of the many trees – he is sitting in the highest branch, next to the owl which has stopped hooting while it eyes him suspiciously – and he realises that he has ceased to be a dignified person, and that quite possibly this has been the case for some time. He suspects that he has learned nothing from his love of film and the cinema.
‘Eight a.m.’ bays Daphne.



*****





7. THE VIEW FROM CONEY ISLAND

FLASHBACK
THE CRUCIFIX ON THE ROAD

In the pink light of evening a huge rutted limestone landscape stretches to what appears to be infinity. None of this part of the island has been fertilised with seaweed. It’s as harsh and unyielding as the surface of a distant planet, thinks Tom. The only things to soften it are the tall wild grass and the light, lending the place a terrible beauty.
He walks back towards the road, where the telegraph poles are ranged along it, with the mainland coastline behind them in the distance, dark grey against the pink sky, which has grown more intense. Turning a corner, Tom is suddenly confronted by the bloodied face of a sculpted Jesus, anguished and beautiful under its Crown of Thorns, the perfect body wracked with pain. It is a life-sized Crucifix, here in this remote part of this remote island at the end of Europe. The sea murmurs below.
As Tom photographs it, two little boys ride past on bicycles, saying hello shyly as they go. He includes them in the frame with Suffering Jesus.


***


‘Are you after getting your snaps?’ Michael asks him tipsily from the pub doorway in the dying light.
‘I am, but I was nearly blown off the cliff.’
‘Well, aren’t you lucky it wasn’t a windy day? Come in and have a drop.’
Daylight dazzles its last moments away through the gaps in the dry-stone walls as Tom enters the pub.


***


‘Now here’s the view from Coney Island, the core of Civilisation as I know it. I’m looking out my window at Nathan’s. Do you remember when I took you there? Did you honestly ever taste anything nicer? Now I’m not saying this place hasn’t changed, and for the worse. The wrong people are moving in. It isn’t what it was when I was a kid. Then it was all Jewish. Now it’s everyone else. But it’s still-the-hub-of-the-universe. I can see things very clearly from here. And what I see is that you’re making some wrong moves in your life. I happen to be very accurate on this sort of thing. You’re living in a country where the guys in the suits pick the Prime Minister. It’s tougher getting elected Prime Minister there than becoming President. At least here you can appeal to the people. There, it’s always the guys in suits. Europe stinks. Here’s my prediction. Europe will become one country, run by the Germans. The Nazis will rule Europe. They’re going to rise again. What you have to remember is I’m right on everything all the time. I’m Mr Perception and Mr Sensitive. If everyone was like me there’d-never-be-another-mugging.
‘Tom, I’m on a powder habit. I gave up cigarettes. Every time I wanted a cigarette I took a line. Luckily I don’t have an addictive personality, but I’ve learned that I have a split personality. I’m Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Or I’m a manic depressive. And I’m a sore loser at poker. Rexxy Tears is my nickname at the tables. When I lose a game I start kicking walls. Then I do a line. I’ve just done a couple and I see it all clearly. The view from Coney Island is this. How can you stay in England? It’s a dumppp. Get out of there. Go to Tinseltown if you must – but get out of England before the shippp sinkkss!’
That was the first message waiting for Tom. And this is the second, delivered in deep, sinister tones.
‘Tom. Christopher Irving here. I know you passed on the essay title to your students today, but I thought you might like some back-up material so I’m going to read you a few notes to help. Stand by with your pen. Ready? Here we go, then… “This module will provide a selective study of the formative encounter between film and cultural studies comma outlining the theoretical frameworks brackets phenomenological comma psychoanalytic comma structuralist comma post-structuralist comma post-modernist close brackets developed to examine and explain cinematic practices in their historical comma cultural and ideological specificity full stop…’
Tom fast-forwards the message.
‘It will interrogate the processes governing the generation of meaning comma paying particular attention to formulations of readership comma viewership and reception full stop…’
He fast-forwards again.
‘…comma centring on representations of gender comma race comma sexuality and class dash elaborated by special reference to brackets A close brackets Britain and Britishness and brackets B close brackets HIV and the vampire film comma introducing critical theories in the context of empirical investigation…’


***


‘Scene 265. Exterior. Battlefield. Day.
A tank trundles towards Harper across the open, muddy…’ Tap tap. ‘…the muddy, open… the muddy… the open…
Exterior. Sky. Day.
A Hercules bomber trundles across the drab sky as Harper…’ Tap tap tap ‘…the AZURE sky as… as…
Exterior. Sky. Day.
A megaton bomb falls towards Harper through the vaporous air as…
Exterior. Day.
The tank clunks over a rift… the bomb floats down…
Interior…
The bomber’s crew are resolute yet strained as they… as they… as Harper…’
The mobile rings. Tom puts his head in his hands.
‘I’ve lost it.’ Ring. ‘I’ve completely lost it.’ Ring ring. ‘I’ll never write again.’ Robert’s phone starts ringing simultaneously. ‘Aaaa-aaagh!’ (But because he’s a writer he wonders for more than a nanosecond how you spell that.)
He seizes both telephones and says hello. In one ear he can hear Tajikistani mouth music and Robert shouting ‘Hello!’ In the other, Angela Carter says: ‘Mr Lindow. Angela from Farquhar and Farquhar…’
‘Robert here. What are you up to? Explain yourself!’
‘Teensy-weensy bit of bad news, I’m afraid, so I didn’t want to leave a message on your machine…’
‘Tom! Why don’t you answer? Are you there? Speak up, I can’t hear you!’
‘It’s like this, you see, Mr Lindow…’
Tom braces himself.
‘Angela. Just answer one simple question. Is more than half my property left standing and not smouldering?’
‘Well –‘
‘Tom, pull yourself together and answer me properly!’
He clicks off one phone and slams down the other.
I need to relocate, he thinks, before becoming aware of chanting from the street. What’s that they’re saying? Sounds like Daphne and Maggie. What are they chanting?
‘Lin-dow out! Lin-dow out!’ is what they’re chanting, and Tom doesn’t like it.
Then Daphne booms alone: ‘Come to the window, Lindow!’
‘Lin-dow out! Lin-dow out! Lin-dow out!’
A dog barks in solidarity. The mobile rings. And you and Bob Hope are probably wondering why Tom answers it, but he does. Because that’s Tom for you.
‘It’s Rexxx. What’s-going-on?’
‘Don’t ask.’
‘Have you heard from Susie?’
This is one of Rex’s bolts from the blue. Susie had been at the film school with them. Her parents were Hungarian, and when Tom told her the definition of a Hungarian was someone who followed you through a revolving door but came out ahead of you, the whole of her troubled past was explained to her, and she was eternally grateful to him. It didn’t help her with relationships, though. Later, when Tom asked her why it had failed between her and Zoltan, another film student, she told him: ‘He thwarted all my expectations.’ (Tom thought her expectations unrealistic.)
‘No,’ he replies to Rex’s question.
‘I don’t know what happened to her. A few years ago she came to New York and said she wanted to move in. There was always a mutual attraction there, but I was only twenty-whatever and I thought I was still seventeen and I was just a kid. She was nearly thirty and that’s a big deal for a woman. Then the next time she was in town she didn’t even want to come over and she was about to marry this guy she met through the Twelve Steps.’
‘Was she an alcoholic?’
‘She could hold her liquor. Once, in London, I bought a tenth of vodka, and the next day there-was-only-one-glass-left. Did you watch the OJ trial? Where were you when the verdict came in? Can you remember? Never mind about when Kennedy was shot. Did you see it live?’
‘No,’ says Tom, bracing himself for what’s coming.
‘So this means it’s OK for black men to murder white women. Did you see the Farrakhan march in Washington? A million black men. I want to know if crime rates went down in every other city that day. This black Nazi says that only black men can march. They’re all thieves unless you go in with those crazy religious people. The message is if you want to come over here and live off welfare and become a drug dealer then-that’s-OK. What-can-I-say? I blame this schmuck president, Clinton, and his evil Macchiavellian wife. Do you like them? Don’t tell me you do. There she was at Rabin’s funeral, and she sat there with sunglasses as if to hide her tears. He’s been President for five minutes and she’s the President.’
‘She put the vice in the president,’ chips in Tom, only just content that this rant is keeping out the chanting from the street below. ‘I suppose you were furious there were Arabs at the funeral?’
‘Well, if my leader was in favor of peace –‘
‘Wow!’ Tom is amazed to hear this. It is the first time Rex has ever gone off-message. But the message has changed, and Rabin had paid the price. Rex is obviously moved, but he hardly misses a beat.
‘What about Reagan?’ he demands. ‘Someone should kill him. And her. And your Prime Minister. The minute he came on, the-TV-cut-him-off. He’s no Dame Thatcher. Major? He should be called Minor.’
‘What did you think of King Hussein’s speech?’
Pause.
‘It was good. But the best speech came from Rabin’s granddaughter.
‘Our TV cut her off.’
‘How does a seventeen-year-old girl write a speech better than the King of Jordan or the President of Egypt? She said her grandfather was the campfire around which we warm our hands. Someone wrote the speech! Then Clinton said they were old friends. How many times do you think they met? Six? Eight? He went to hug the wife. I wonder if he ever met the wife. I watched Ross Perot on TV last night. It’s OK when you’ve got ten zillion dollars. I was hoping Colin Powell was going to stand, but he checked out.’
Tom is amazed again. ‘You?’
‘What-can-I-say?’ Three thousand miles away Rex must have just done his shrug. ‘He has a good military background. He was a general. You know, there’s a show on TV now to replace the OJ trial. It’s a series that goes on forever. Like the country went through an OJ withdrawal, so they came up with a show that took its place. I forget the name…’
For some reason a little iron enters Tom’s soul.
‘Hold on a minute, Rex. Don’t go away.’
He puts down the mobile and opens the window.
‘Lin-dow out! Lin-dow out!’ booms up at him.
Tom shouts down at Daphne and Maggie in the street.
‘I give in! Leave me alone tonight, and I promise I’ll be there tomorrow morning at eight!’
Silence below.
‘I mean it! Just let me write tonight.’
The owl hoots on the garden side. From the window opposite, the masturbating man calls out from his open window. ‘Bravo!’
Tom is appalled. ‘Oh, put your trousers on,’ he calls weakly.


***


FLASHBACK
THE WRATH OF GOD PRIEST

‘I met my love by the factory wall!’ sings a rasping, gravel-like voice, accompanied by an accordion.
‘Dirty old town, dirty old town!’
‘I’d like you to meet Father Davey,’ shouts Michael above the din, breathing porter and whiskey over Tom. ‘Father Davey! I must introduce you to a feller just out from England who’s staying at Mrs Furey’s.’
‘Davey O’Shea,’ says the priest Tom saw earlier at the quayside. He smiles pleasantly at Tom and offers him a drink.
‘We had a terrible old Wrath of God priest before Father Davey came,’ says Michael in a loud stage whisper. ‘Six masses on a Sunday and not a mention of Gentle Jesus anywhere. On Good Friday you’d think he was actually pleased to be burying our poor Lord. It was a different God they were selling us then – ah, don’t be shocked, Father Davey, you know it’s true – will you have another pint? Petey, drinks all round! As I was saying, Jehovah, Yahweh – all pure Jansenism! “Exorcise the violent God!” was the cry. But a lot of people didn’t want it exorcised. They preferred the violence left in. Offer Him more sacrifices, bung more innocent children into His mouth, feed Him like Moloch! Here, drink up, Tommy me boy… But they didn’t want him sated – they were addicted to the pain He brought them. Have you noticed how very hard Irish people are on one another?’ Michael gulps mightily from his glass. ‘It didn’t save any of them, though. There was hardly a person on the island he hadn’t consigned to the old fiery furnace.’ He smiles and pats Father Davey on the back. ‘Never forget how unspriritual men of God can be – not this wonderful priest here, Tommy, but those Wrath of God fellers.’ He drinks again. ‘He was right, of course, the Wrath of God priest. By treating them like that, he made them ungodly, primitive. Father Davey here has to work the house, so to speak.’
‘I bloody well do,’ says Father Davey. ‘When were you last in church, Michael? Have another drink, for God’s sake.’
The next morning Tom will realise that he forgot to ask whose coffin was on the boat with him.



*****





8. AND THEN THERE WERE NONE





‘How are you looking? Are you ageing? Have you got hair?’ asks Rex.
‘Less than before,’ confesses Tom.
‘You’re not doing any back-combers, are you? For God’s sake don’t do that! What happened to that guy in Dame Thatcher’s government who wrote novels?’
‘Hurd?’
‘No.’
‘Jeffrey Archer.’
‘Him.’
‘He got into trouble for some funny deals but it didn’t do him any harm.’
‘What happened to the opposition guy who was always talking but never got anywhere?’
‘Neil Kinnock? They booted him out. He’s in Brussels.’
‘And that other guy, in the Gang of Four? The doctor.’
‘David Owen. They made him a lord and sent him to Yugoslavia, but he couldn’t sort it out.’
‘He had a classy accent, he wore nice suits, and he talked good, but-he-fucked-up. So he didn’t sort out those Yugoslavs? Just like all these fucking Mexicans coming in here. What-can-I-say? Here’s what’ll happen. The US will have to go to war with South America and bomb all those drug barons. Israel will have to make peace with the Arabs…’
Tom is amazed yet again.
‘The Nazis will rule Europe, as I said on my message. Blah-de-blah-de-blah. I’m so liberal. I look for the best in people. The Pope is such a nice guy. If everyone was like the Pope –‘
‘There’d never be another mugging.’
‘And the poor Queen. She had one schmuck kid after another. What’s going on there? Did you see the Princess Di interview? We didn’t get it till Friday. You should go into politics. I’m too radical to go into politics. I’m too conservative for the Democrats and I hate those Christian Fundamentalists in the Republicans. And I happen to be an expert in everything political. Don’t you think it’s your civic duty to go into politics? You can articulate. You can talk good. You’re not saying a lot now, but you can say it fancy when you want. You can wear a suit, can’t you? You can get up and say, “You ninnies, why don’t you go to work?” You could do that – Oh, my God, here she is! On TV! Princess Diana! And Camilla Parker-Bowles – the bitch! It’s heartbreaking. It’s terrible…’
A pause as the moment passes. Then: ‘I can sing any song. Ask me to sing anything. I have a photographic memory. Tell me a singer!’
‘Ol’ Blue Eyes,’ suggests Tom.
‘Chicago! Chicago!
It’s a helluva town…
Tell me another!’
‘Perry Como.’
‘Whattt?’
‘Tony Bennett.’
‘I’m not going to sing San Francisco.’
‘Sinatra again.’
‘New York, New York!
It’s a helluva town!
What movies have you seen? Did you see Casino yet?’
‘No. It’s just been at the London Film Festival. I hear it got good reviews in the States.’
‘It got good reviews,’ says Rex, ‘but I hear it’s nowhere near as good as Goodfellas. Now for some reason they’re saying that Sharon Stone should be nominated for an Oscar. Did you see Apollo 13?’
‘Hated it.’
‘What else?’
‘Crimson Tide.’
‘Did you like it?’
‘I think Denzel Washington gets better and better. He was the only good thing in that awful smiling Much Ado bollocks last year.’
‘Yeah, but how much can he do? No one’s gonna go and see him. Black people only want to see films about rappers killing each other. What would they rather go and see? Could they relate to a private dick in 1930s L.A.? Look at the figures. Sylvester Stallone makes twenty million dollars a movie. John Travolta makes twenty-one million dollars a movie. Demi Moore makes twelve million dollars a movie. And forget Robert Redford and Julia Roberts. They’re such big stars they just refuse to act in movies. Did you see Waterworld?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you like it?’
‘No.’
‘I had a question. They lived underwater and they were all smoking cigarettes. Where did they get them from? It cost a hundred and seventy-five million dollars. What did they spendd ittt onnn?’


***


Lon Chaney Junior limps across a graveyard as Daphne and Maggie rail at Tom.

DAPHNE
Crucify him on the tree!

MAGGIE
Drive a stake through his heart!

Rex makes an announcement.

REX
Lon Chaney Junior and his evil seductress
temptress Macchiavellian wife!’

Music from The Raven. Bela Lugosi speaks.

BELA LUGOSI
What torture, what delicious torture…

Peter Pavlov rages down the telephone.

PETER PAVLOV
Kill him like the pig in Weekend!

Daphne bays.

DAPHNE
Kill him like Piggy in Lord Of The Flies!

Maggie rants.

MAGGIE
Make him squeal like a pig!

The banjo music from Deliverance plays as the raping hillbilly urges Tom on, tauntingly.

HILLBILLY
Squeal like a pig.

Daphne and Maggie chant.

DAPHNE & MAGGIE
Kill the pig! Kill the pig! Kill the pig!

Dr Christopher Irving reads from a paper he has written.

DR IRVING
The vampire module will consist of students
masturbating at the window while providing
a selective study of the formative encounter
between film and drama studies comma
outlining theoretical frameworks such as the
post-modernist comma structuralist comma
post-structuralist comma post-coital comma
psychoanalytic comma phenomenological
and Oedipal comma with special reference
to Lacan comma Derrida comma Foucault
and Lon Chaney Junior…

BELA LUGOSI
To die, to be really dead, that must be glorious!

A chainsaw revs as Peter speaks again.

PETER PAVLOV
Stick him in the microwave and pierce his film!

DAPHNE
Burn his filthy film!

REX
Set the killer-gorilla on him.

Music from The Black Cat. Bela Lugosi as the vengeful doctor.

BELA LUGOSI
I’m going to tear the skin from your body –
bit by bit…

MAGGIE
Chop him down!

Music from White Zombie. Bela Lugosi as Murder Legendre.

BELA LUGOSI
For you, my friend, they are angels of death…

Music from Casablanca. Conrad Veidt as the evil Nazi, Major Strasser.

CONRAD VEIDT
Are you entirely certain which side you are on?

Silence. Darkness. A door creaks open. Tom’s protagonist, Harper, steps inside Robert’s sitting room before speaking.

HARPER
Scene 265. Interior. Sitting room. Nightmare!
Harper stands in the doorway, pointing a gun
right at your empty heart, you blood-sucking,
tree-murdering, Nazi-loving shit!

A loud pistol shot makes Tom gasp. Then the door slams shut, leaving a deep echo. It sounds like the door of Hell closing. Rex’s voice rings out to the music from The Wolf Man.

REX
Andd Thenn There Were Nonnne!

Maria Ouspenskaya speaks as Maleva the gypsy.

MARIA OUSPENSKAYA
The way you walked was thorny, through no
fault of your own. But as the rain enters the soil,
the river enters the sea, so tears run to a
predestined end. Your suffering is over.
Now you will find peace for eternity…


***


He finds it for two hours, actually, because the telephone wakes him at 3 a.m.
‘Harper,’ he murmurs, ‘come back… Zzzzzz… Don’t leave me…’ Ring ring ring. ‘Get that, Harper… Zzzzz…’
Ring ring.
‘Bloody hell.’ He answers the mobile. ‘Who’s that?’
‘Tom…’
‘Karen?’
‘Do you mind me calling you Tom?’
‘Why are you ringing at three in the morning?’
‘I just had to speak to you.’
‘How did you get my number?’
‘I climbed along the roof of my hall of residence and broke into the office. I opened your file.’
‘That’s disgraceful.’
‘Now I know all about you. There’s a photo.’
‘Karen, I could have you rusticated.’
‘But you won’t.’
‘You shouldn’t have done that.’
‘I couldn’t help myself. I just had to see your face, and then I had to hear your voice.’
‘You’re very naughty,’ he says, shocked at the rapidity of his erection.
‘I should be punished.’
‘Very naughty indeed.’
‘I know. And I’ve done something even naughtier.’
‘What?’
‘I was tired and hot after all that essay writing…’
‘What have you done?’
‘I’ve taken off all my clothes and I’m naked, with your photograph in my hand.’
‘Karen, don’t –‘
‘I’m kissing it.’
‘Don’t.’
‘Now you’re caressing me…’
‘No.’
‘All over…’
Tom gulps.
‘My breasts…’
‘Please.’
‘My bottommm…’
‘Please stop.’
‘You’re auditioning me.’
‘Stop.’
‘You’re the director.’
‘Oh…’
‘On the casting couch.’
‘Ah…’
‘You can do whatever you like…’
‘No.’
‘Don’t you wish the rest of you was here with me?’
‘Mmmm.’
‘What did you say?’
‘Yes.’
‘Mmm?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Say it louder, darling.’
‘Yes!’
‘And again.’
‘Yes – yes!’
‘Again.’
‘Yes, yes, yes – YES!’
He doesn’t get much more sleep that night.


***


FLASHBACK
THE ROAR OF THE SEA

The ferry toots as it approaches the little harbour. Tom is sitting on a wall, nursing his hangover in the sunshine. The two pony-trap men wait nearby, with a group of islanders. Tom searches for Séan among the passengers on deck, but cannot see him. When they disembark, an old woman kneels and makes a Sign of the Cross, relieved to be back on terra firma.
Tom turns to leave, certain that Séan has not made the crossing, but he is stopped by a clear, friendly ‘Hello!’ behind him. Séan is standing at the top of the gangway, his overnight bag slung across his shoulder.
‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ says Tom.
‘I was asleep inside. I’m still a bit drowsy from the gas the dentist gave me.’
‘I’m staying at your house.’
Séan beams and runs down the gangway. Tom is a little embarrassed by his enthusiasm. The pony-trap driver calls out to him.
‘Still fond of walking?’
‘I am, I’m afraid,’ confesses Tom.
‘’Tis a terrible thing, all this fondness for exercise! Toothache better, Séan?’
‘Yes thanks, Dick,’ answers Séan as he and Tom amble towards the village like reunited lovers.


***


The sea roars as waves crash against the boulders at the foot of the cliffs. High above them, Tom is watching Séan demonstrate how to cast a fishing-line from the cliff-top. He swings the line round and round above his head and plunges it into the churning sea far below him. Then he reels it in around a stick in his other hand.
‘Here, you have a go,’ says Séan. ‘I’ll show you.’
He hands the line to Tom, who swings it self-consciously in a wide circumference above his head.
‘Hold on,’ says Séan, moving nearer. ‘Do this with your arm…’
Gently, he places one hand on Tom’s shoulder, and the other on his arm, making them revolve in a smooth, liquid movement until the line flies in an exquisite arc over the cliff and into the air. Out, out, then down…



*****





9. RED BRICK IN BLACK AND WHITE

The trees are alive with birdsong. And the loud thud of a hammer banging in nails.
‘Ow! Does it have to be quite so uncomfortable?’ asks a drowsy Tom, jangling the chain pinning them to the condemned tree.
‘Yes it does!’ booms Daphne. ‘We’ve all got to be chained together.’
‘It bloody well hurts.’
‘Poor Tom,’ whimpers Maggie.
Thud.
‘Ow!’
Daphne jangles the chain.
‘Stop complaining. It’s a great honour to be chained to this tree.’
‘It isn’t.’
‘Anyway, it’s far more difficult for me! You try hammering nails in when you’re chained up.’
It’s true. Daphne is banging the nails into the chain which is wrapped around the three of them. And it’s very difficult indeed. Tom has thought of volunteering for this job, but rejected it on the grounds that he would drive a nail into Daphne’s heart, should such an organ exist. Maggie whimpers again.
‘I do hope we’re not hurting the poor dear tree.’
‘Bugger the tree. What about human suffering?’
‘I don’t mind a bit of pain,’ boasts Daphne, hammering.
‘I was talking about human suffering.’ Tom realises he is being a bit cheap, but doesn’t care.
‘Oh, do shut up! We’re all in the same boat. Now, let’s sing! ‘
‘Martyrs of England, martyrs of England…’
It is a ghastly, tuneless sound, and not helped by Maggie joining in. Tom can’t put his fingers in his ears because his arms are pinned to the tree by the chain.
‘Martyrs of England, martyrs of England…’
‘Would you mind telling me why, if the Visigothic tree-felling Nazi hordes of West London are planning to murder this tree we’re nailed to, they haven’t come over the horizon yet? It’s half past eight.’
Daphne stops singing. The birds go quiet. The chain jangles.
‘Maggie!’
‘Yes, Daphne?’
‘Maggie…’
‘Oh dear…’
Another uncomfortable jangling of the chain. The birds wait patiently in the branches.
‘We’re waiting, Maggie…’
‘Oh, let me think now. Er – how many days are seventy-two hours?’
Tom, bound, strains to look at her.
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘Oh!’
‘Maggie!’ roars Daphne. ‘You’re an absolute idiot!’
‘So sorry.’
‘A complete fool!’
‘O-o-oh!’
‘Right,’ announces Tom, ‘I am now going to teach film to the uneducable. Or is that ineducable? Where are the pliers?’
Silence. Followed by an embarrassed jangling. And a solitary whistle from a hidden bird.
‘Er, what pliers?’
‘What?’
‘Er…’
‘Martyrs of England, martyrs of England…’
A cuckoo calls, though it is Autumn.


***


A pendulum clock ticks in the almost deserted senior common room. Earlier it played host to a convention of market researchers and accountants who were the latest non-academic band to hire St Jude’s plentiful facilities. (They are currently engaged in a role-play session in the gym and will later stage a play in the studio theatre. Ironically, they are the only people in this place under the age of thirty who have read a word of Shakespeare.) Now Tom and Peter have the common room to themselves, and are drinking coffee.
‘You’re lucky to be alive,’ says Peter, stirring in his sugar furiously.
‘There’s nothing lucky about being alive.’ Tom is feeling extremely sorry for himself.
‘You’re a persecuted man.’
‘This is all so primitive,’ he moans. ‘We had to be rescued by the wife of the man on the garden committee who wants to chop down the tree. After two hours chained to those two I was ready to get out the chainsaw myself. On what other planet would people behave like this about one stupid bloody tree? The millennium is almost upon us. We have to advance. Do you know, it’s quite likely that by 2020 we’ll have detected radio signals from another world.’
‘The aliens will hate me.’
‘They won’t be able to tell us apart.’
‘They might be Jewish,’ says Peter. ‘Chanucha ex machina.’
A knock on the door, and Brian pokes his head into the room.
‘Er, Mr Lidlow –‘
‘Lindow!’
‘About this essay, Mr Lildow…’
‘What about it?’
‘It’s rather difficult, actually.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ says Tom, taking a copy of the title from his papers on the chair beside him. ‘Let’s see… “Analyse the phenomenological influences of the vampire film on an AIDS-impacted, post-structuralist Britain, foregrounding representations of gender, sexuality and plasma as key sites in the deconstruction and reduction of consciousness, reflective and/or constitutive of power relations and ideological formations.”’ He looks up at the wretched Brian. ‘Now, what’s difficult about that?’
‘I don’t know what reflective means,’ he bleats.
‘Well, look it up!’ shouts Tom, whose nerves are shot.
‘Brian,’ says Peter, ‘if it’s any help, writer’s block comes to the best of us. For instance, Milan Kundera –‘
‘Who’s she?’
‘He.’ Peter is experimenting with patience. ‘Kundera, who wrote The Unbearable Lightness of Being…’ He waits for light to dawn in Brian’s eyes, but it doesn’t. ‘Once he couldn’t write for days because he was trying to work out whether his female character gave her lover oral or anal sex.’
Silence.
‘It was one of his love stories.’
‘That’s gross,’ says Brian.
‘Thank you, Peter. May I suggest, Brian, that you visit the library before you begin writing your essay…’
Silence.
‘You do know where the library is?’
‘Well…’
‘Oh, God,’ groans Tom.
‘You look a bit disappointed sometimes, Mr Lildow. Like if you ever need anything, you know, just let me, er, know. I can see why, though. I mean, life’s a load of crap, innit? You go to school, take your exams, go to college, get a degree, find a job, have two-point-four kids, and die. It all seems so pointless. But I’m the only one around here who’s worked that out.’
‘Very perceptive.’
‘And reflective,’ adds Peter. ‘There, you’ve defined the word yourself.’
Brian’s mobile rings.
‘Hello. Cool. Yeah, two dozen. Great! On my way.’
And with that he’s gone. Peter looks at Tom knowingly.
‘By the end of marking these essays, Tom, I will expect you to look like an exhausted old man. When I come to pick you up I don’t want to see a hedonistic youngster waiting on the doorstep.’
‘You won’t.’
The door swings open, and Professor Mather rushes in, looking extremely flustered.
‘Peter. Peter Pavlov! What have you done?’
‘Oh, God!’
‘How dare you set the students such a difficult essay! I’ve had them weeping in my office. I had to send three home and I’ve told the rest to write no more than two pages each.’
Tom realises that these essays will have to be sniffed rather than thrown against the wall.
‘Quite right, Professor,’ says Peter soothingly. ‘We mustn’t damage their delicate minds.’
‘Well really, it’s not good enough. The last thing we want is students resigning from the course. Need I remind you, Peter? No students, no jobs.’ He turns to Tom. ‘I hope you’ve set a more reasonable essay, Mr Lindow.’
Tom smiles meekly.
‘You can rely on me, Professor.’
‘Good. Now I must go and find Dr Irving.’
And with that the scholastic old booby departs, leaving Tom looking more dejected than ever. He pours himself another cup of coffee.
‘I should have realised that when Christopher Irving called them factory chickens, that’s exactly what they are.’
‘But stupider,’ adds Peter.
‘Poor buggers. They’re put on a conveyor belt and processed by the dozen.’
‘Think what they’d be like without the conveyor belt.’
‘It’s a dangerous thing we’re doing.’
‘Not as dangerous as the alternative.’
The telephone rings, and Peter answers it.
‘Hello, Senior Common Room… Just a moment. Tom, it’s for you.’
He hands Tom the receiver and goes in search of more coffee.
‘Hello. Tom Lindow.’
‘Hello,’ says a sexy voice, ‘I wonder if you can guess who this is. Look up and you’ll see me at my window, Mr Lindow, sir.’
‘Er…’
Tom looks out of the window, towards the hall of residence next door. Karen is naked at her second floor window. He starts to choke on his coffee.
‘It’s really warm in here,’ says Karen silkily. ‘I thought if you came up, I’d read you my essay.’
Tom whispers into the phone.
‘Karen, will you please put your clothes on!’
‘I’ll try the first sentence. “The vampire film is a veritable feast of female flesh, fellatio and fetishistic fantasies…’
Pause.
‘I’m on my way.’


***


FLASHBACK
THE STONES

Séan’s lithe body scampers over the stones of the fort while Tom photographs him.
‘Our civilisation won’t leave anything as permanent as this,’ says Tom, snapping away.
Séan stops and examines the huge, ancient walls.
‘Perhaps we don’t need to,’ he says.
Tom stops photographing and looks at him.
‘Your great great great great great great great great great-grandfather’s great-grandfather helped to build it.’
‘Not mine,’ says Séan. ‘I don’t know who my ancestors were. I’m adopted.’
In his surprise, Tom accidentally lets his foot dislodge a few stones from the wall.
‘I’ve undone the work of five thousand years,’ he says guiltily.
‘I could be from anywhere,’ says Séan. ‘Part Spanish, or Portuguese, perhaps a bit Arab. Look at me…’
Tom looks. Click.
Click.


***


Rain drips onto Tom’s umbrella as he trudges wearily along the pavement and climbs the steps to the front door of Robert’s house. If the aliens are anything like Karen, he ponders, they’ll wear us out. He unlocks the front door and crosses the hall towards the stairs.
‘Lindow!’
‘Don’t say a word, Daphne. Tomorrow morning. Eight a.m. Goodnight.’



*****

10. A BUMPY NIGHT





Rain is smearing down the window-panes of Robert’s sitting room as Tom plonks a huge pile of essays on the desk.
A load of bollocks about rubbish I don’t care about, thinks Tom as he pours himself a drink. Written by people I don’t know or care about. About a load of rubbish they don’t know or care about. For someone they certainly don’t know or give a toss about. I’ll be up all night…
‘Analyse the phenomenological influences of the vampire film on an AIDS-impacted, post-structuralist Britain…’
Is it a post-structuralist Britain? he wonders.
He takes a mighty swig and gives the first essay a quick sniff before beginning to read.


***


‘The bastards – they’ve all written the same essay! Minor variations here and there, but the same essay. One work – but it’s good. It’s very good indeed. It’s well-informed, well-researched. It even mentions pixelation, which I’d never heard of. That’s the speeded-up bits. I’ve learned from it. I was one lesson behind, but I’ve caught up. And the vampire film is a veritable feast of female flesh, fellatio and fetishistic fantasies. They can spell! I can’t believe it. Fantastic! I must give them all A-plus.’
He’s talking to himself, and it’s late.
‘Fucking bastards!’ he shouts more realistically. ‘There’s a secret source. They’ve tapped into one of last year’s students. Or perhaps he or she – I think it’s a woman – tapped into an earlier one. Once upon a time there was a bright, intelligent, sensitive scholar who understood something about the confusion of this strange, popular, esoteric film form called the vampire movie. What might she have written about Eisenstein or Kurosawa? Ozu, Mizoguchi? Or Godard, Bresson, Straub? Kinugasa? Jorge Ivens, even? Where is that student now? I want to sit at her feet!’
Now Tom isn’t the first person from St Jude’s to have been affected like this. Most of the staff – the turnover rate is high, as you’d expect – are amazed to be handed anything actually recognisable as English. (Though, of course, they never associate the name on the essay with its authorship.) Frequently they overreact. Some of them don’t return, the shock proving too great. Tom is the replacement for someone last seen jumping onto a 22 bus and never heard of again.
The entry-phone buzzes.
‘You forgot your pen.’
‘Karen!’
‘I’m soaked through. The rain’s making my clothes cling to me.’
‘Shhh – you’ll wake the neighbours!’
‘One of them’s awake already. He’s tossing himself off at the window opposite.’
‘Shhh!’
‘Are you going to buzz me up? I need to take off my wet clothes.’
Martyrs of England, thinks Tom as he reflects on the things he occasionally does for the country he often doesn’t like. He buzzes her up and inserts in the CD player a Maronite chant from Robert’s collection, Fil-layli (On the eve of His passion), sung by Sister Marie Keyrouz.


***


FLASHBACK
THE ROUNDS

A group of islanders are circling a raised stone monument near the shore, mostly women and children, but with a handful of men. As they pass the monument, each person touches the inscription on it and makes a Sign of the Cross before struggling up the uneven ground and beginning the circle all over again. Father Davey blesses them as they go.
Tom and Séan are standing some way off, watching. Tom attaches a telephoto lens to his camera.
‘That looks like hard work,’ he says. ‘What are they doing?’
‘They’re doing the rounds. It happens once a year, on the eve of our patron saint’s day.’
‘St Patrick?’
‘No, the island’s –’
‘How did you come to be adopted here?’ asks Tom, interrupting.
Séan looks at him for a while, then speaks.
‘Well, I was illegitimate, you see…’ He checks Tom’s reaction and goes on when Tom gives him a gentle smile. ‘Born on the mainland. Me mam and dad adopted me from there. They already had a son, my brother James, who was three years older than me. When he was seventeen he got a job on the mainland, and I’d go over and visit him sometimes. Anyway, about a year later, on his eighteenth birthday, I went over to spend it with him. It was winter and dark. You’ve no idea how dark it gets here in winter… He drove me back to the harbour – where I met you – to catch the last ferry. He’d borrowed a car… We were parked on the quayside: somehow the handbrake came off and the car went over the edge into the water. James had been drinking. I tried and tried to save him.’ He points to the scar on his beautiful face. ‘That’s how I got this. The whole island went mad with grief. So did I. Everyone was drunk for three days and nights. A lot of them must have felt it was an awful shame me mam lost her real son and not the adopted one. I miss him so much.’ He smiles to stop himself crying. ‘Do people always open up to you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’ll make a confession to you, then. When the handbrake came off, I was kissing him.’
He scampers off towards Father Davey and the islanders performing their tortuous journey around the monument.


***


‘Zzzzzz…’
Birdsong can be heard outside as the bedclothes rustle within. Snuggling up to Tom, Karen speaks in a soft and sexy early morning voice.
‘I like a man who snores.’
‘Zzzzzzzzz…’
She starts to kiss him. In the communal garden, the cuckoo calls. Then a chainsaw coughs a few times. Tom wakes to see her standing naked at the bedroom window, bending over slightly while she peers below. Again he is astonished at the rapidity of his erection as he studies the beautiful, slim exclamation mark dividing her coffee-coloured buttocks.
‘Doesn’t the breeze make you want to –‘
The chainsaw bursts into life.
‘What the hell’s that?’ shouts Tom above the din.
‘There are two men down there, and one of them’s got a huge chainsaw.
‘My God!’
With one bound Tom is standing next to her, naked as Adam – but with an erection, which his promiscuous Eve starts to do something about. Orally. Anally.
‘No, no!’ he calls with surprising self-discipline.
Windows are flying up in buildings around the communal garden.
‘Hey!’
‘What’s going on?’
‘It’s seven o’fuckingclock!’
The telephone rings. The entry-phone buzzes impatiently. Daphne’s voice booms from below.
‘You Nazi bastards – get out!’
Tom watches her charge at the Visigoths with her rake. She thrusts it at the teeth of the chainsaw, and sparks fly terrifyingly as the two beasts tear bits out of one another. Amid the mayhem, she glances up at Tom’s window.
‘Get down here, Lindow! And what’s that floozy doing to you?’
The chainsaw operator, seeing Karen, gives his machine an extra rev. The telephone is still ringing, and the entry-phone buzzing. The chainsaw starts to eat into the tree as the second man fends off Daphne’s rake with a shovel.
The naked Karen runs to answer the entry-phone in the hall, and Tom picks up the phone in the bedroom.
‘Someone called Maggie wants you in the garden,’ Karen calls to him.
‘Robert!’ says Tom into the phone. ‘Bad timing.’
‘Why? And what’s that awful noise?’
Tom is staring out of the window in disbelief. The sound of the chainsaw has given way to an ominous, drawn-out creaking. The tree is starting to fall towards him.
‘Er, Robert –‘
With a deafening roar, the top branch crashes through the window, taking with it part of the outer wall and several pieces of Robert’s bedroom furniture. Dust and glass fly everywhere.
‘Tom!’ he yells from Tajikistan.
Tom picks himself up from the rubble, naked and covered in dust. In truth, he feels nakeder than the day he was born. And dustier than Adam.
‘Tom!’ shouts Robert. ‘What are you doing to my property?’
Silently, Tom replaces the receiver as Karen wraps her own temptingly naked body around his.
‘Darling,’ she purrs, stroking and caressing him all over.
Yet again he is astonished at the rapidity – and bad timing – of his erection. Pages of essays float in from the sitting room, disturbed by the force of the catastrophe.
‘This is all your fault, Lindow!’ bays Daphne from below.
The tree which has nearly killed him is not the Tree of Knowledge.



*****

11. DAY OF ATONEMENT





‘It’s Rexxx. I’ve flown away from Coney Island, centre of the Universe, and gone to Las Vegas early, for a bit of poker…’
Tom is listening to Rex’s answering machine. He has riffled through his address book to find the number. ‘Habgood, Habib, Haddenham, Hammerstein.’ As a background effect, Rex has recorded Elvis singing Viva, Las Vegas! which skilfully segues into Ol’ Man River by Paul Robeson.
‘…After that I’ll be doing the Porn Oscars, followed by riverboat gambling on the Mississippi. Call me Gaylord Ravenal Hammerstein. At all times I will be completely unavailable, and may fetch up in other places, depending on my luck. But one thing is certain: the only spot on the face of the planet you will definitely NOT find me is England, land-of-static-TV. Don’t bother to leave any messages unless you owe me money and there’s more than a three to one chance you’ll pay me back. If you’re a member of my family – fuck you, it’s too late! The Day of Atonement has passed.’
‘He just keeps rolling along…’ sings Paul Robeson.
Click.
Bugger, thinks Tom. That was my last hope.
The entry-phone buzzes.
‘Yes?’
‘It’s Peter.’
‘What do you want?’
‘Tom, that’s very ungracious.’
‘I’m under attack.’
‘You’re a victim. Let me in.’
‘The house has fallen down.’
‘Your masturbating neighbour is waving at me. How interesting. He wants me to join him over there. I don’t think I should go. Let me in quick!’
Tom buzzes him in.


***


‘What are all those fire engines doing in the street?’ asks Peter as he walks into the flat, clutching his yellow duck with the beautiful eyes. ‘Oh!’ He has just spotted six firemen in the bedroom, sifting through rubble and glass and the large chunk of tree. ‘And why are you wearing only a bath-towel?’
‘Don’t ask too many questions, Peter. These are troubled times. My clothes are under all that.’ Tom indicates the pile of rubble.
At this moment Karen emerges from the bathroom, sporting a skimpy dress fashioned from essay pages and sellotape. It covers the middle of her voluptuous body, leaving her long legs and photogenic cleavage fully exposed. The firemen wolf-whistle.
‘Karen!’ bleats Peter.
‘Oh, hello, Mr Pavlov, sir.’ She effects a little curtsey which nearly tears one of the pages along the word deconstruction.
‘This is most irregular, Tom. You could both be booted out of the university.’
‘I don’t care. Why are you here?’
‘I’ve left Hanka. She was too insatiable for me.’
‘And why are you holding that duck?’
‘Because I’ve left home and I need reassurance.’
‘Well, you won’t find any here.’
‘The earth moved,’ says Karen helpfully.
‘I can imagine,’ says Peter, imagining.
A meek tapping is heard at the open front door. Maggie steps inside, bearing a huge tray of food and drink.
‘Oh poor, poor Tom,’ she mutters, close to tears. She spots the tree. ‘Oh poor, dear tree. We didn’t love you enough, did we?’
‘I’m very poor and very dear,’ says Peter, recognising a sympathetic type when he sees one.
‘Well, you’d better have a nice warm cup of tea,’ answers Maggie, just daring to smile, ‘and a cheese and pickle sandwich.’ She starts dispensing tea and sandwiches to everyone, and cries when she strokes the murdered tree, which the firemen are cutting up.
‘There, there…’ soothes Peter, oozing sympathy back at her.
‘It’s so terribly, terribly sad,’ weeps Maggie, leaning her head awkwardly against his diminutive chest.
‘As Godard says,’ continues Peter, desperately searching for the perfect empathetic touch and failing to find it, ‘er – power to the proletariat.'
‘That’s beautiful,’ she blubs.
‘It’s a load of fucking bollocks!’ booms Daphne, storming into the flat, still clasping her warrior’s rake.
Peter looks alarmed, and the firemen eye her cautiously, none of them dreaming of wolf-whistling in her direction. Instead, they gulp their tea and speed up their dismembering of the felled tree.
‘You just wait till Robert sees this, Lindow. It’s all your fault, you over-sexed worm!’
‘It is not all my fault, actually,’ Tom shouts back. ‘In fact, it’s got bugger all to do with me! And as they cut it down before the council inspected it, I can only assume that you buggered up somewhere along the line. Also, I noticed that nobody else came to help us. Not a single volunteer other than Maggie! Not one neighbour rushing to your side. None! Seeing as how you’re the most unreasonable person –‘
‘Least reasonable…’ A tall, dapper, middle-aged figure is standing in the doorway, dressed in a smart Savile Row suit. ‘Sorry to be pedantic.’
‘Sir Cedric Rosenberg, tree Nazi!’ roars Daphne.
‘In view of many things, including my name, that’s an unfortunate and inappropriate appellation.’
Peter has dropped his duck and is gaping at Sir Cedric with his mouth wide open.
‘Er…’
Tom looks at him.
‘Peter, are you all right?’
‘Er…’
‘Are you going to be sick?’ asks Maggie.
‘Er…’
‘Peter!’ shouts Tom, concerned.
‘Sir Cedric,’ grovels Peter, ‘forgive us for what we – he – has done.’ He points an accusing finger at Tom. ‘T-T-T-Tom, this is Sir Cedric Rosenberg.’
‘Yes, we know that, Peter.’ Tom eyes Sir Cedric coldly. ‘How do you do? Excuse my informal dress.’
‘A little al fresco,’ says Sir Cedric, extending his elegant hand.
‘There’s rather more light in here than we’d intended,’ Tom adds ungraciously. ‘As you can see...'
‘Sir Cedric is Rector of St Jude’s,’ says Peter solemnly.
‘Oh.’
The firemen, quick to spot a tricky situation, continue dismembering the tree with renewed vigour. From somewhere within the rubble, Sister Marie Keyrouz sings her Maronite chant, Tisbohto-I-moryo (Upon the Cross, the Son of God gave up the ghost).



*****