Now the editor was warming to his task. He made short work of the knockabout book-dealing picaresque featuring the Nigerian, Iddo Okoli. (Racist? Afro-American sales?) A firm grey line removed it entirely. We (Bull and I) limped along in a nervous truce for several more pages. ‘Destot’s gap’ was the next provocation, eliciting an agonized ‘HUH???’ The medico-theological debate over the point of passage of the nails, hammering Jesus the Nazarene to the cross (palms of the hand or gap in the wrist?), had gone unremarked in Cambridge. And why not? There were sexier topics out there in the slums and shanties of magical realism. Travel was sexy. Poverty was sexy. The New Physics was sexy. Sex was not sexy. (Except for Martin Amis.)
The jig was up. All patience expended, Bagman bombarded the innocent pretensions of the flinching text. ‘Bishopsgate Institute?’ he snarled, ‘what Institute?’ The Princess Alice went down for the third time, cleaved by the editor’s anguish. ‘Too compressed. What slaughter? What psychopath? What nickname?’ Guilty. Guilty on all counts. Tumbled. I (I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I) have been found out. Deconstructed. Spike it. ‘Let’s do lunch sometime and talk about happier things.’ Bull remains ‘a big fan’ and begs to be the first to refuse further ‘sketches’, ‘evocations of the city not dissimilar from Tilbury’. So there might still be an outside chance of getting my spoon in the gravy.
‘That’s Butts Green for you,’ said Sofya, ‘those dinky sentence rhythms, straight out of Enid Blyton. I love Bull. He’ll change tack when he stops having to read bedtime stories.’
The trouble with Butts Green, I believe, is not Bull — but his readers. The magazine is a huge market-forces success. A jewel in the Widow’s crown. It’s a way of participating in literature without getting your hands dirty. It synthesizes and it addicts: culture crack for provincials. Mail-order sampling. ‘The Last Show’ in your pocket.
I was rapidly being written out of my own story. ‘Saul didn’t think you’d be up to doing yourself,’ Sofya said. ‘He thought you were too shifty and, basically, too bald. He’s changed his mind after two days of Milditch. But he’s absolutely ecstatic about Dryfeld. He told me to thank you. It’s really the haircut he’s fallen in love with. We’re calling Dryfeld’s agent as soon as we get back to the office. Saul wants him under personal contract.’
Dryfeld? It was getting worse. If we had to have Dryfeld in the film — couldn’t we afford an impersonator? I knew that Raymond Carver was dead, but I’d settle for Alexei Sayle. We’d have to act fast. The medics kept telling Dryfeld if he didn’t stop drinking, he’d be dead in six months. The man was a teetotaller.
I’d only ventured to Tilbury in the first place because Milditch put me on to a junkshop that turned out to be a howling dog. I asset-stripped a few of the more blatantly fictional elements — and ran for my life. I was then bullied by Butts Green into cutting and cutting again; line-editing, clarifying, glossing, paraphrasing and — finally — casting to the winds. Only to discover, as I lurched from the river’s grasp, that my fragmented nightmare was being captured on videotape. The film existed before the book could be completed. The book had therefore been declared redundant by all interested parties. And they wanted the advance returned by the first post. If I could find an even hungrier hack to ‘novelize’ the mini-saga then I wouldn’t have to pursue this madness to its inevitable climax. I could sit back and read the pulp version in the comfort of my own room. Later, after relishing the exhibitionist wrapper, I could sell it.
Sofya told Nickoll we’d walk on, ahead of the crew, to the Fort. They had only to can a selection of failsafe cutaways and it was a wrap. They could break for lunch. The technicians wouldn’t, at any price, eat a second time in the World’s End. They were going to shoot off with their Egon Ronays to road-test a place near Stanford-le-Hope.
Joseph Conrad lived there once, I thought. But the only scholar I knew (an ex-postman) who had tried to search out the house, achieved nothing more remarkable than an old man, spitting in a hedge, claiming descent from Tunstall, who — he said — either shot, or was shot by, Billy the Kid. He couldn’t be sure. But it was definitely in the film. One of the family came over once from New Mexico, wearing a white stetson and a string of liquorice around his neck: took photographs. ‘We’re searching out all the living Tunstalls in Essex, England. And then in Ireland.’ The old man didn’t say whether he qualified. He’d never heard of Conrad anybody, not in Stanford-le-Hope. No Poles of any description.
The road between Tilbury Riverside and the World’s End is the strangest in Europe. A bank of earth (mercifully) hides the river. Unwary tourists usually opt for the elevated route, enjoying an uninterrupted vista of mud and tide: the timeless roof-stacks (in slate, mustard, replacement vein tissue) of Gravesend. Distance lends a false appeal. Imagined pleasures will never be sweeter. And yet some lingering masochistic fret sends us trundling down the low road: at the mercy of white-knuckle winos in clapped-out Cortinas, convinced that last orders have already been called. The marshes, to the north, are the training ground for a pack of the rat-hunting undead; who are armed with nothing worse than lead-tipped clubs and blood-rusty forks.
Sofya pauses to take a snapshot. It is certainly a spectacle: this foolishly reclaimed swampland. Let them have it, I say. Give it all back to the waters. Erase these sunken levels, these broken industrial toys. Sheds. Straw bales. Pylons. Ditches. Undeclared violations. I’m beginning to love it. That’s how far I have degenerated.
Jon Kay can’t cope with the size of the sky. He’s snorting like a horse, an asthmatic Welsh cob. Joblard and Sofya are relishing the discovery of a scatter of teenage female runaways, lying in (rag) heaps beside the road, legs spread, auditioning for La Strada; smoking with little dry-lipped sucks, not inhaling — blowing out a suggestive rinse of bad air, picking brown tobacco shreds, with chipped and scarlet nails, from between their tiny teeth. Self-packaged White Trash hopeful of Russian sailors. Ready to lean over backwards for international relations. By the state of their dress, they have been waiting for months in the couch grass. The set was far too theatrical for us to consider: a promo-nostalgic 1950s blackout. Jon Kay felt comfortable for the first time since we stepped ashore. He even scored an American cigarette.
Manhandling a multicolour bicycle towards the World’s End was a glamorous dyke: a stone-freezing scowl and bellow of greeting revealed the exotic creature as the lowlifer’s lowlifer, Dryfeld. The perceived universe of logical linear progressions was coming apart in front of our combat-weary eyes.