But Jon Kay was growing increasingly agitated: his stash was gone, his thirst raged. ‘Remember me.’ His life was dedicated to forgetting. He wanted out. He snatched the wheel and drove us, head on, towards the industrial jetties at Purfleet. We skimmed the shallows, churning mud. I fought to regain control, while Joblard screamed in his ear — the sculptor’s long-suppressed stutter erupting into a paroxysm of sneezes — that Tilbury was around the next bend. We’d all take a break: a long and liquid breakfast.
II
Tilbury Riverside and the Custom House had vanished. They were hidden, we assumed, behind two white cruise liners, basking, back to back, like sharks (with Red Stars rouged on to their slumbering snouts). The skies above were monumental, a union of warring republics. They were heroic, drawn up in lines of battle. Tanks buried in snowdrifts. Ruined cities. The river was brown with the sweat of the fields. With the blood of military martyrs. A montage of symbols assaulted us: flags, waving sailors (in flat, bobbed caps), anchor chains, rushing agitated clouds.
Kay needed a drink. He had fulfilled his side of the contract and brought us down to Tilbury. It had been ominously easy. He believed (as these freaks always do, against all evidence to the contrary) that he had, somewhere, just enough smoke to get him home — if he could still remember what ‘home’ was. Now he demanded a couple of big stiff ones. He ran the Reunion in between the Russian liners, and he tied up.
We stepped ashore in a foreign land (more foreign than the rest of it, than Rotherhithe or Silvertown). No word of English fell on our ears. The seamen shouted at Jon Kay. And laughed. They mimed the universal hand pump of derision. Kay had to be dragged from the security fence that blocked our access to the Gravesend Ferry and the path to the World’s End, which lay beyond it, in the shadow of the Fort. We were waved, by uniformed officials, towards a covered walkway: a crazily angled gangplank that disappeared into the citadel of the Custom House. Even the signs were in… Polish? PASAZEROWIE POZOSTAJACY W LONDYNIE PROSZWE SKRECIC W LEWO. Sunlight laid a ladder of immigrant abstractions along the tilted boards of this glasshouse tunnel. A cleaner stood, motionless (like an onlooker at some spectacularly messy accident, who thinks he might be in the frame of the newsreel cameras), staring at us; two brooms and a shovel rested in his hands. The atmosphere was one of unrelieved Baltic gloom.
A hunched figure trudged ahead of us, plodding on sea legs, hands sunk in sullen pockets: his red, fungic chin slid chestwards in defiance of the inevitable bureaucracy on the far side of the frosted glass. He had learnt how to wait, and how to express his unbending disdain — by the slightest movement of his upper lip. A movement that offered the controlled exposure of a powerful dentato-laciniate bite. He came ominously close to actually relishing the challenge of hours of form-filling tedium: the repetitive cycle of questions in the snuff-coloured room. The boredom of ashtrays and official calendars. He was a stocky, balding man; collared and hatched in a dark blue donkey jacket. An Estonian stoker soliciting political asylum? Or a Basque pornographer caught with a suitcase of bestial snapshots?
We trailed behind him, accomplices, vacuumed into an eddying zephyr of guilt. But the benefits of quitting the river grew more doubtful with each step. Amphibian reptiles, we knew we had been tricked: there was no way back. The cleaner, self-consciously, threw open the Custom House door and gestured with his broom. Dutifully, we turned left: towards the winking red eye of the camera.
‘Mmmm, all right. OK. I s’pose that’ll do,’ commented the director — with a notable absence of vitality — in a toast-dry Birmingham Ring Road accent, that was still quite fashionable at the cutting edge of the visual arts. He was a tall man and a tired one. He didn’t believe in anything he could see in front of him. Why bother? A certified deconstructionist. Who had lost his faith in the validity of performance. Actors, hot for motivation, could hope — at best — to witness his struggle to pretend that they had already gone home. They were obstacles blocking his heartfelt longshots. And the state of their hair… Those sweaters … He shook his head. Satisfaction, we discovered, was expressed as: ‘I don’t want to sound over-enthusiastic, but…’
The methodical Pole (a sewer-rat Cybulski), who had led us into this trap, stalked over to the window; distancing himself, as far as the limits of the hall would allow, from the film crew, whose antics were no more than a source of potential embarrassment to a man of his achievements. It was Milditch, of course: earning a crust.
The Corporation has its own mausoleum for spiked scripts. Files of unachieved treatments that have not yet been infected with the black spot. A sperm bank to counter some future threat of a strike by the Writers’ Union. A prophylaxis on ideas. A drought of projects: empty restaurants. There has to be the occasional reprieve for the corridor of suggestions unblessed by accountants. ‘Yentob thinks it’s mega-interesting, baby, but too many calories. Try Channel 4.’ There have to be sleepers to foist on ‘difficult’ directors coming to the end of short-term contracts on ‘The Last Show’. That nervy collage of brilliantly achieved trailers. That culture-clash headache.
Which explained this Custom House invasion. I had abandoned my three-month ‘rewrite’ somewhere back among all those lunches and phonecalls, the motorcycle messengers waiting on the doorstep for urgent revisions — which only elicited further phonecalls. Which elicited further lunches. Which elicited…
My Tilbury story (erased history) was finally being shot under the impossible title of ‘Somdomites Posing’: which, apparently, made reference to Queensberry’s illiterate and insulting card (the fate card), left for Oscar Wilde at the Albemarle Club: ‘To Oscar Wilde posing Somdomite’.
A new director (on his way to the knacker’s yard of pop promos), Saul Nickoll, replaced the emotionally bankrupt Sonny Jaques. He determined to blow what remained of the year’s budget on a single grand gesture: the least likely script he could find. Mine was the worst by a comfortable margin. It was so far off the wall that nothing could save it. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Nickoll, ‘if things start to make any kind of sense… we’ll throw in a few clips from your home movies. Keep ’em guessing. Red frames. Bogus surgical procedures. Fountains of blood.’
And Milditch, being both actor and bookdealer, was typecasting as the paranoid, doom-laden author/narrator. I was being impersonated by a melancholy and balding market trader of doubtful reputation. Why didn’t they go the whole hog? Cable for Charlie Manson?
‘Milditch looked terrible in Spotlight,’ said Nickoll, gleefully. ‘And the portrait was seven years old. He’s perfect to play you.’
Milditch knew now he had made one of those mistakes that destroy a career. Like Dickie Attenborough doing John Reginald Halliday Christie. There’s nowhere left to go — except the colonies. Or the other side of the camera. He’d finish his days in blackface, a loincloth and a turban. This part would have been well within the compass of a ‘walker’. Even so, Milditch was ready to do the business, give it the cold-eye stare. But Nickoll wouldn’t talk to him. Nickoll wouldn’t, if he could avoid it, talk to anyone. I was beginning to appreciate the man.
Nickoll had the slight, forward-leaning stoop of a man used to looking down on people: on actors, who tended to be dwarfish, with neatly husbanded imperfections the camera was ready to forgive. Nickoll forgave nothing. He understood it; but he did not forgive it. He suffered, and he dubbed a world-weary smile. A Spanish saint on his way to the gridiron. He was darkly clad, of course; in the usual gulag chic. And he favoured a quotably minimalist haircut, close razored and modestly abrasive. His appearance was a statement. ‘No comment.’ But he was something of a connoisseur of haircuts. He collected them, pigeonholing the entire newsreel of human history by its length and style. His method was universally acknowledged as more accurate than carbon-dating. ‘Mmmm, all right,’ he’d drone, ‘late 1950s…’ 58? No, ’59. Joe Brown at the Two Is.’ And he’d stroke his notionally shaved chin.