‘Great ass — for a bull,’ Kay acknowledged with a low whistle. ‘Must be the cycling. I bet she really stomps those pedals.’ He leant forward to test with a shaky paw the tightly-corseted pudding, the muscular cleavage of his fantasy. He was lucky to miss. The rest of us were too far gone in civilization to allude to Dryfeld’s startling change of image. He must have grown tired of beggars and golfing tweed. He was getting too well known. Women rushed up to touch the hem of his skirts. Children threw stones.
He had cracked Milditch’s legendary junkshop, while waiting for his turn to face the cameras. There was nothing else to do. He’d eaten two breakfasts. And the nearest serious bookshop was sixteen miles down the track. So he put the frighteners on the junkman and came away with a satchel of trade catalogues. The film business excited him. He was crazy with energy. He out-wolfed Wolfit. He laughed so loud and so long that falcons lifted from the grain silos, to hover like heraldic totems gone, badly, to seed. They’d been brought in, so Joblard informed us, to finish off the pigeons. It didn’t work. Now the silos themselves were awaiting demolition.
We cowered, and pretended that we did not know this all-too-public aberration. Dryfeld was putting the wind up even the hardened drinkers, lying under the warped pear trees in the pub garden; their faces buried in grey alopecic scuff. Tottering on six-inch heels, he gave the best imitation I have ever seen of the Widow’s television walk: the way she reels at the camera, hurdling across hot coals, and expecting some able-bodied male, some promotion seeker on the far side, to hold out his arms and catch her.
The pub was of no interest to the fruit-sucking Dryfeld. He stormed on towards the Fort. And — as he swayed and pitched — he roared out the story of his transformation: to our shame and to the undisguised delight of a party of smutty schoolboys with loosened ties and substance-abused blazers.
It appeared he had developed a fancy for the company of children. Young children. He liked to spend money on them. And hear what they had to say. He could freely indulge in childhood pleasures denied at the first attempt: helicopter flights, picnics, museums, opera — the spread of the city. He developed a decided craving for the position of Nanny. (Eat your heart out, Bette Davis.) Also: he wanted to model the uniform. He knew he had the legs for it. Sadly, he met with a series of unreasonable and unnecessarily abrupt rejections. Most wounding. He was discriminated against. The job specification required the applicant to be experienced. And female.
No problem. Surgery was on the cards, but King’s Cross was nearer. (He was buggered if he’d live with all the other stitched changelings in Hay-on-Wye.) He’d read in the Guardian about a place where you could get yourself done over in an afternoon. ‘It was amazing,’he repeated, entranced, reliving the experience. ‘Quite amazing! It lasted three hours. Assisted shower, powder, underclothes, razor, seminar in make-up. They wanted to shave off my eyebrows. I wasn’t having that. “Tuck ’em under a Veronica Lake wig,” I said. I drew the line at forking out extra for a studio portrait, “built in from the shadows — in the style of Edward Steichen”. They couldn’t guarantee I’d look like Marion Morehouse, so I told them to stuff it. Marched across the road to the station, and queued, with all the other claimants, for the photobooth. The transvestites seemed to be army officers. It was like a regimental reunion in there. They collected their snapshots in plain manilla envelopes; tore them in half, unopened, dropped them in the bin on the way out — and were home in time for dinner. Sheer waste! I’m auctioning mine to the highest bidder from a rival magazine.’
There was an armed guard on the Watergate of the Fort. We were scanned and registered by the red eye of a swivelling, vulture-necked camera. Another heritage prison. Alcatraz among the marshes. Visit the felons in complete safety, and rattle their cages. A day out for all the family. Test the electric chair at a carefully monitored voltage: snug in a pair of authenticated rubber bloomers. Amuse the kiddies.
They’d sold more tickets in the first two weeks than in ten years of boring Armada tableaux, restaged battles, cases of waxworks. The dummies had been melted down and replaced with genuine recidivists. Even as we stood waiting for the machine to process Sofya’s pass, another black-window van pulled up and shook out a stock of assorted Scotsmen: poll-tax refusniks, street-fighting parliamentarians, ginger-haired nationalists. The underground catacombs of the Highlanders were waiting. They had been whitewashed and fitted with pallets. Credit-worthy villains were given the opportunity to buy their own cells.
My outlandish improvisation, in advance of the truth, was made actual. But Sofya, a professional researcher, could not escape from the woeful inadequacy of mere facts. An unpleasant inclination towards verifiable evidence. She cruelly pointed out that the prisoners taken by Butcher Cumberland after Culloden had not, according to historical records, been held underground — but were housed in the now demolished barrack block. The passages of the powder magazine were an addition from the last war. Therefore my story was pure fiction. And my fiction was corrupted by its desire to tell a story. Lies, all lies. The text was untrustworthy; especially when it lectured its audience like a logorrhoeic tour-guide.
But still I shouted: BELIEVE ME! I developed, on the instant, a theory of the shunting of place by time. (In itself, a slippery performance.) The validity of received emotion migrates through all civil and temporal boundaries. It is a wild thing, to be seized without reference to the proper authorities. To have any real understanding of the spiritual plight of the Highlanders, it was clearly necessary to shock our complacency, our endemic cynicism. To activate the image of the tunnels.
Wind-scored men held fast in dripping darkness. The list of dead names is ‘true’. The clansmen and brothers were buried here: or thrown overboard in passage to Van Diemen’s Land. I would not libel their suffering. You can purchase that list for £1 a sheet at the Gatehouse. The cells which were illegitimately populated by real ghosts are occupied once more. Manacled men shuffle through the cobbled parade ground. Kilts are issued to every prisoner. It is impossible to outrage the baroque realism of the dying century. Imagine the worse, and then double it.
The chief electrician of our skeleton film crew was cursing at the wheel of the silver Mercedes he’d spent the morning turtle-waxing, on time and a half. His Rolex said one o’clock. And that was it. ‘Sorry, love. No can do. Dodgy ticker. I was up Harley Street, wasn’t I? See the quack, Saturday? No heavy lifting whatsoever. He placed a definite embargo on it. And no tunnels. That’s gospel. My life.’
He wedged a cellphone against the side of his head, like a malfunctioning electric razor. ‘Market’s jumpy, darling. Bit of a panic on. Shittin’ theirselves in the City. Don’t like the vibes I’m getting off of Tokyo. Resignations, sex scandals. Respectable blokes topping theirselves. They’re wading through blood out there. It’s the old knock-on effect, know what I mean? The Mexican Wave, that’s what you’ve got to look out for. I’m thinking of taking a bit of a poke at property. What d’you think? An option on a slaughterhouse in Poplar? Fancy a spin down there before it gets dark?’
Saul Nickoll could forget the Fort. As of now, the script was Fort-less. ‘Nahh, take hours, hours, to light it. You’re looking at two days, darling, to nick your first shot. Always the same, innit? These poxy location jobs are a real fucker.’ Advised the electrician, the last mastodon of the studio system. He screwed in the bulbs, pulled the switch, and waited for his redundancy cheque. Meanwhile: there were free lunches, petrol, and telephone bills. Can’t be bad? The entire shoot revolved around the mood swings of this crusty mercenary.