He modelled blue crombie overcoats, left behind, in something of a hurry, at the Old Horns (Bethnal Green), and white mufflers. He disliked conversation. He had a wonderfully practised way of turning his back on anything that offended his haircut religion. Milditch’s functional crop, which looked as if it had been performed inside a coal bucket by a gang of blind chickens, gave him palpitations. He had the trick, under these distressing circumstances, of switching his attention to shoes, one of his lesser interests: until he felt able to cope with the shock to his nervous system. The aesthetic damage.
There were two ways that he signalled his emotions. When things were going badly, and it was all getting away from him, he chewed his hangnails. He gnawed voraciously at the celluloid meniscus, spitting out grey chippings like mangled grape seeds. When it was not quite so bad, and he was able to watch a scene without putting his head in a black rubbish sack, he put on his serious spectacles and gazed into the distance: to avoid the possibility of an involuntary smile.
I had every confidence in Nickoll. If anybody could turn my humble disaster into a millennial catastrophe, he was that man. He gave the impression — even now — that if only he could heave Milditch into the dock, with concrete flippers on his feet, get him out of the way, he might be able to deliver some definitively controversial footage. Meanwhile, he chewed his fingers down to the knuckles, and gummed unhygienically on soft cartilaginous tissue. He was picking out lumps of white skin from between his excellent teeth.
The teeth of the little Scottish script girl, on the other hand, were chattering like the typing pool of a fictional tabloid. The sound man (her lover) glared at her in a proprietary rebuke. She tried to invent some way to describe, for editing purposes, the fantastical lack of event unfolding in this refrigerated hall. The sound man, buried in quilts of arctic down, was in despair. There was nothing to record. Not even the lugubrious hoot of tug boats or the wind whistling through miles of corridor. He had only to keep sound out: neutralize the turbo-props battling to reach the City Airport, or the getaway drivers rehearsing a screech of three-point turns along the quays of the empty dock behind the Custom House.
Nickoll, irritated by his moping underlings, now revealed himself as a closet humanitarian. He noted the script girl’s lead-blue lips and frostbitten nose and felt obliged to pass some comment. ‘I’d rather be skinned alive with a blunt razor blade than wear a jersey like that. It puts pounds on you, girl.’
He twitched in agony: the awful embarrassment of being confronted, in flagrante delicto, by the author of the very farrago he was trying to animate. He wished he could simply hurl back in my face the pages of high-flown nonsense I had so wantonly cobbled together in some warm study, far from the front line. Authors were sick men: punishing themselves, and wallowing in the pain. And worse, much worse, expecting to implicate innocent readers by conning them into turning the first few (inevitably comic) pages.
I shared the director’s repulsion. But I had written none of this. This chamber had no place in my text. It was worse than even my damaged mind could imagine. I wanted Tilbury Fort, Highlanders in tunnels, catacombs, waxworks, cricketers, the Mahdi. I wanted the World’s End populated with post-orgy catamites and Ripper-yarning clubmen. I wanted corpses to rise out of the river, shrieking in accusation. I wanted the past to resolve itself, and the present to become habitable. I wanted fire angels, warrior/priests, horses that spoke in Latin couplets. I wanted an absence of dogs. And, most of all, I wanted this shifty troop of inadequates to have to drag all their cumbersome equipment into the deepest, darkest, dampest of the subterranean passages: the pools of stagnant air, the trapped voices of prisoners. They should confront everything that cannot be transferred on to videotape. There was no hell hot enough for the man responsible for converting Vessels of Wrath to bland stutters of electrical impulse. (Was I that man?)
The Beta-Cam, so they said, cost £50,000. It was a nasty, flat case on a thin tripod: an executive ghetto-blaster, a mail-order toy, with a trumpet of lenses protruding from its side. And it was useless ten feet from daylight. ‘Sunguns’ had been vetoed by the electrician. His word was law. The catacombs were therefore expendable. The script girl, under instruction, deleted them with a stroke of her felt-tip. British Rail (most of whose income came from facility fees from advertising agencies) wanted £200 an hour to let this mob loose in the derelict Tilbury Riverside station. They sent along a female trouble-shooter to tot up the score, minute by minute, on her pocket calculator. ‘We had Kenneth Baker yesterday,’ she said, looking me in the eye. ‘Beautiful manners, a real gentleman.’
Nickoll now proved he had the essential quality of a great film-maker: the ability to burn money. He was well on the way to landing the Corporation with a seven-minute version of Heaven’s Gate. Questions in the House would certainly follow. Resignations were in order. Heads would roll. The Widow was, at this moment, being fitted into her largest set of tombstone gnashers.
Jon Kay shuffled around the crew trying to bum a cigarette. They looked at him with open contempt. Send for wardrobe. That hair! They were green and clean, and pink of tongue: apple-cheeked, scrubbed, concerned. In perfect dental health. Snugly confident in the overweening freshness of their underpants. Milditch simply turned his back on the nodding time-warp spectre, and lit a cheap cheroot. To blow away the bad memory.
If we hang about, thought Joblard, we might score a free lunch. ‘Don’t forget to keep your bar bills,’ he warned. ‘And any others you can pick out of ashtrays or spittoons.’ Get your invoices in fast: that’s the first rule. And that was all we’d ever be likely to take out of this fiasco. A couple of corn-crusty cheese rolls and a bottle of gassy Guinness.
We retreated. Left them to it. Watching Nickoll work was like watching hairs grow from a wart. We staggered into the Passengers’ Lounge, and sat, spark out, under a mural of palm trees, coral islands, straw huts. It had been executed in a tequila sunburst of radioactive colour: Bikini Atoll, in the shimmering realization of the impact of fifteen million tons of TNT, courtesy of a bomb named Bravo. This Robert Louis Stevenson espresso bar was clearly intended to jolly the cruise victims into the mood for the high jinks ahead of them. Its effect on less well-prepared browsers was instantaneous. We slumped, heads in hands, mute, cattle-felled: contemplating a snap preview of all our best-kept fears. Fallout, mouth cancer, plague, famine, bereavement, premature buriaclass="underline" these were the lighter passages.
Sofya Court, the researcher, sat with us. A human presence, she subtly distanced herself from the rude mechanicals of the film crew. She was a modest exile; but with the will and persistence to have twitched this lifeless project into an active mode. She doubled, androgynously, for the authority of the director. There are, after all, many more subjects to be researched than directed. A chequered Hibernian overcoat, studious spectacles, trousers, black shoes. Neat badge-sized earrings to emphasize the delicacy of her ears. Fine hands. The dial of her watch on the inside of her wrist. Time hidden.