From his crow-high porthole the Controller weighed the options, comparing, unfavourably, the visible reality of the broken-down lido with the optimistic and rhetorical plans that were spread out on a table at his elbow. The Four Horsemen romped across the paddy — and with them a hook on which he could surely hang his future. Plague! They should get it corralled fast, put their brand on it; make it pay.
Within hours a crude conversion was under way that retained the original concentration-camp fencing and watchtowers, while shifting the pool itself into a ‘basically Neo-Templar ambience’: from hydro to hospice in fourteen days. The ironies implicit in this transaction were thrown away on its perpetrators: a primary source of infection should find itself recast as the ashram of its final flowering.
The pool was submerged in drapes of lemon-and-white canvas, divided into individual cubicles. The surround was tiled, and saturated with fountains. The feel the architect wanted to go for was ‘non-denominational Moorish’. No disturbing images to invoke the past. Just the wind in the trees; reflections of clouds; plashing water falling on stone. The once-sordid changing sheds became ‘day rooms’, with low couches and the (piped) music of strings.
On fine afternoons the living skeletons lay outside on recliners, gazing listlessly at the agitated sails of the trees; as they shifted and quivered, and breathed. There was something heroic and improvised about the whole affair. In the fullness of time, naturally, the baths could be ‘themed’ from diving boards to buffet, and a reasonable charge levied: payable in advance. The destitute could take out insurance, or make their own arrangements, under the sponsorship of caring libraries — if they could find any. This was a transitional phase. The developers were ready, on the nod, to ‘get into bed’ with the council. They were quite willing to sponsor the publication of leaflets, available on request, from all registered gyms, saunas, launderettes, and secondary schools: ‘Holy Communion — Is There a Safe Method of Using the Chalice?’ ‘AIDS and the Trade Unions’.
The local authority that had once tolerated Roland Bowman’s T3 Classes (Therapy-through-Theatre) now transferred him to the lazaret. It was easier to turn the ‘outpatients’ loose than to have them poncing about on a stage, ‘expressing themselves’ and getting ideas. They’d had more than enough of Roland’s subversive readings of the minor classics: all-male, all-female; all paid for by the taxpayer. There was no percentage in it. Roland was a nuisance. One of these days a bored critic might leave Shaftesbury Avenue and review a play staged in a synagogue. They saw their chance and ‘invited’Roland to develop a scenario that had proved highly popular in San Francisco: ‘How to enjoy a fully satisfying relationship with a mortally-disadvantaged partner.’
Does love end with death? The sunshine theory was that it did not; many spiritual climaxes lay ahead — if the groundwork was tactfully handled. The bones of the thing had been shamelessly lifted from the Natural Childbirth propagandists — ‘breathing’, stages, levels of pain: unashamed Tupperware Buddhism. The dying were to be taken, step by step, through death; which was, apparently, a kind of wind. They learned to sing their way out, to cut free from their old lives and their worn flesh. They joined with the wind. They moved among the leaves of the trees. They faced what lay ahead. They were instructed to fantasize a picture of the beloved one; then to strip the picture of all its physical attributes, reduce it to a flame; to step into that flame, burning away all memories, all regrets. Love curves around them, like a fault.
As Roland instructed them, with disinterested affection, and with strength, they did indeed begin to taste smells, to hear colour. Their sensuous faculties had never been so acute, because they no longer had the will to oppose them. They were able, by their own volition, to enter a place of safety; a place of which Roland had no knowledge whatever.
Neb and his inherited dog leapt joyously around the fringes of this mantra-chanting seminar, performing his own spinningdervish celebration. He took in marginal details that were of no value to any other human creature: blue plastic streamers caught on the wire, or the last red rays of sunlight picking out the jagged glass fragments in the windows, making them into maps, outlines of islands to be visited by the saints. The tranced neophytes swayed and moaned, while Neb muttered his dark imprecations to the older gods. His lips bubbled with white pellets. The shape of Roland’s dance had conjured a truce with time. His naked white-bone feet were scarcely touching the cool green tiles. The low drone ran out across the park, shadow-spokes through the dark grass: the angry courage of the dying men.
V
Sonny Jaques, the director, had learned by rote the rules that he now preached with all the fervour of a convert. The camera could never remain still for more than nine seconds. The camera may not move unless it is following some person on a legitimate quest. When in doubt: cross-cut. Somehow, half a dozen stock situations, visited briefly, in and out like a milkman, were assumed to be more interesting than any solitary sequence doomed to stand on its own feet. The validity of this argument was always endorsed by quoting the success of ‘EastEnders’. At which point, Fredrik swallowed hard, and thought of the kill fee.
Sonny had to admit, after a night of agony, that he was ‘unhappy’ with Roland. (He had, at the last head count, been sufficiently unhappy with Dryfeld and Joblard to pogrom them from the script altogether. Poor Milditch never made it, even as a kitchen concept.) He liked Roland. Of course he did. He loved him. There was enormous ‘potential’ there, but… we didn’t quite have it in focus yet. I knew we were heading for trouble when I saw those pause bubbles (…) streaming from Sonny’s nostrils.
When Sonny was in a state of doubt, his face gelled into a grin set in plaster of Paris. I wanted to tap him with a hammer, and watch it shatter. He kept an admonitory finger wagging, chopping steadily like a Sabatier blade against a herb-board. ‘Um, um, um. Ah, ah. Um. Ah.’ The tension ran out in rings. The coffee turned to mesozoic mud in our cups. I was all for resolving the matter, unilaterally, with a swift kick in the nuts; but Fredrik had a wonderful way of simply ignoring these local difficulties, cranking the scene on as if they had never occurred. He would suck in a long breath, swallow all the philosophical loose ends still lying on the table, and let rip with a twelve-minute speech, which totally anaesthetized all resistance, and caused the flies to drop dead from the ceiling.
What Sonny wanted to know was: how could we write anything down before we knew what was going to happen? And, if we didn’t write it down, so that it could be approved by three producers and a finance watchdog, then nothing would happen… ever. These ephemeral and unreasonable ideas had to be stiffened up: our ghosts had to be solid, so that we could cut away from them. We had to appreciate the awkwardness of his dilemma.