Kitabı oku: «Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers»
Madame Depardieu and the
Beautiful Strangers
ANTONIA QUIRKE
For Ilana Bryant, best girl in New Jersey
‘You live in a dream and the dream is a cage,’
Said the girl, ‘And the bars nestle closer with age
Your shadow burned white by invisible fire
You will learn how it rankles to die of desire
As you long for the beautiful stranger,’
Said the vanishing beautiful stranger
PETE ATKIN AND CLIVE JAMES,
Beware of the Beautiful Stranger
‘You have to have a little faith in people’
MARIEL HEMINGWAY, Manhattan
Table of Contents
Epigraph
PART ONE: Mademoiselle Depardieu
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
PART TWO: Perforated Screening Mechanism
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
PART THREE: Kinerotiquana
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Antonia Quirke
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART ONE Mademoiselle Depardieu
1
First I was a sperm and an egg, and then I was an embryo, and then I got born. After that I was a baby and then I was a toddler. This is coming really easily! Then I was ten lying in bed listening to the unmistakable cadences of a man and a woman arguing downstairs. I lay there harrowed by the growing conviction that the voices didn't belong to the radio but to my parents, and trying to will a snatch of music to prove that it wasn't. But it wasn't likely to be the radio at this time of night, and we didn't have a television in those days. The muffled fight went on, and on, until it was no longer bearable. I got up and crept down the stairs towards the living room, where my parents were curled up together watching a man and a woman arguing on the eight-inch black-and-white which they sometimes borrowed from next door when something especially good was on. I can remember the luxury of my relief. I can also remember how the two of them looked altered by the shifting light, made younger by it. And instead of being sent back upstairs I was invited on to the sofa to watch with them. It was a film, a famous film, with a title so romantic it seemed to contain all the scale of adult life: A Streetcar Named Desire.
(Forgive my presumptuousness in telling you all this, by the way, but if I don't I'm going to lose my husband.)
I had never seen a movie before. Not one. I had lived ten years absolutely untroubled by the knowledge of such things. I suppose I'm a bit stupid, really. ‘That's Marlon Brando,’ my father said. ‘He's the best actor in the world.’ I watched, delighted to be up late, being initiated into the privileges of adulthood, studying this Marlon Brando, this actor, who was now at the centre of a brawl. Some men put Brando under a shower, the women fled upstairs, and Brando began to cry. He walked outside the house in his wet T-shirt, and I saw him – like Blanche Dubois sees him when she first comes to the Kowalskis' apartment in Elysian Fields, like audiences first saw him, tormenting Jessica Tandy in the original Streetcar in the Barrymore Theatre on Broadway in 1947, like Tennessee Williams first saw him, in his original stage direction: Animal joy in his being is implicit in all of his movements and attitudes. Since earliest manhood the centre of his life has been pleasure with women, the giving and the taking of it, not with weak indulgence dependently, but with the power and pride of a richly feathered male bird among hens.
I saw and I saw and I still see. I like to revisit all my favourite bits of his face, to tour them. The folds over the corners of his eyes which make it seem as if a force is pressing down on him, as if he's subject to a doubled gravity. There's a kind of thumbprint on his brow where something powerful has marked him. The Golden Gate mouth too beautiful not to be disgusted by the ugliness of the human speech it must form. The curve where his jawbone meets his neck, seemingly the locus of all the strength in his head. The T-shirt torn so that it hangs off one shoulder like an emperor's toga. Brando was calling upstairs like a tomcat: ‘Stella!! STELLA!!!’ The thunderclap volume of his voice had the power to hurt.
‘What's the matter?’ my father was suddenly saying. And something did seem to be going wrong with me. Air was coming in but it wasn't going out. Brando sank to his knees before Stella, burying his face in her thighs. Everything was beginning to shut down on me. My breathing had become an alarming fish-pant. ‘Don't ever leave me, baby! Don't ever leave me!’ the best actor in the world was murmuring, semi-audible under my breathing. My parents had forgotten the film and ferried me to the kitchen table where my father quizzed me about things I might have eaten. Maybe I'd had a peanut-stuffed lobster stashed under my pillow? I couldn't muster the breath to reply. Time was beginning to thicken and deepen. I could see very clearly the fur coat of dust on our never-used fondue set. My mother gave up trying to open the airways in my throat with a spoon and called an ambulance. It was all happening very far away – I was dying, peacefully. And like a stone in the shoe of my peace was the fear that was beginning to harden into a certainty, that although dying wasn't so bad I would not be able to bear the humiliation of having my mother know why I had died. And she knew perfectly well. She understood precisely why I was gasping like a dog on a summer's day while next door in New Orleans Marlon Brando was smashing crockery. By the time the ambulance arrived, I had stopped hyperventilating and had to listen, suffused with shame, as my parents tried to talk their way round what had happened. Everybody was standing about lying their heads off. But what would the ambulance men have said if they'd known the truth? ‘Marlon Brando, Mrs Quirke? Do you think that was wise? We've had two Montgomery Clifts and a McQueen tonight already.’
This was the formative incident of my childhood. We lived in a tiny hill village in the South of France where every Saturday old Claude would lead his donkey Napoleon up the winding rocky path to the village square, laden with dusty old reels of film. The loveable village blacksmith, Rémi, would set up his projector facing the whitewashed wall of the church, Claude would feed in those magical strips of colour and light, and everyone would abandon their baking and games of pétanque and come rushing into the square agog with excitement to see the wondrous spectacles: Police Academy 6, Porky's, Evil Dead 2, Conan the Destroyer and Turner & Hooch.
I had been banned from the magical screenings in the square since I seemed so overwhelmed by the power of these ‘movies’. Yet old Claude took pity on me and allowed me to climb up his ancient olive tree from whose branches –
Alright. It wasn't the formative incident of my childhood. Life isn't so neatly patterned. But the first time I saw Marlon Brando, I nearly died.
2
Some time afterwards you could have found me standing outside Blackwell's bookshop in Oxford with my elder brother Saul and my younger brother Ben, all three of us holding up the books we had just bought with our pocket money so my mother could take a picture. Ben's book was called Where Do I Come From? and Saul's was called What is Happening to Me? My book was called Who Am I? Who am I? I'm a girl who loves actors.
We lived next door to the writer Jan Morris, and one day my mother said to me, ‘Antonia, listen, I've got something to tell you. James from next door is now Jan. So if you see him wearing a dress, tell her how pretty it is.’ And I thought: Isn't that nice? Anything to do with sex was nice. Sex had our respect. The defining struggle of my father's life had been between the Catholic priesthood and my mother. Sex had fought with God, as an equal, until they could both see each other's point of view. The children were the winners. And so we liked sex. As a nurse, my mother tended to turn everything into biology. ‘That bit at the top,’ she would say, when Ben and I were in the bath, ‘is Ben's foreskin. And those are his testicles!’ Bodies were nothing to be ashamed of. At fancy dress parties Saul and Ben and I went naked as Adam, Cain and Eve, saving on the price of costumes. We carried an enormous brown-and-yellow-striped home-knitted snake that was otherwise used as a draught-excluder. When we grew too old to go as Adam and Eve, we attended parties as Pollution, dressed in black and trailing empty cans of tuna while our new brothers and sisters nakedly paraded the snake. We were eco-friendly. The stickers in our car said ‘Nurses Against the Bomb’ and ‘Goats Rule’.
When my father became a psychologist, we moved to Manchester and lived in a modest house with campaigning students as lodgers, and the children kept coming: Patrick, Suzannah, Luke and Molly. ‘Do you know what Mum and Dad are?’ Suzannah asked me and my friend Mischa, as the three of us whiled away an afternoon inserting Crayolas into our vaginas. ‘What?’ ‘Perverts, that's what they are.’ ‘Perverts,’ I whispered to myself, rather liking the sound of it. Mischa's glamorous Australian mother Jill wrote the questions for University Challenge among piles of textbooks in her kitchen. It was not a happy house. Jill drank, and kept a bitter eye on Mischa's father Bruce, who came and went in a chocolate Jaguar, supposedly dealing antiques from the boot but mostly parked around the corner with the woman from Thresher's.
Right off the bat, my mother wasn't keen on Mischa, having caught me leaning up against a bureau inhaling on a pencil and saying to Ben: ‘You are a cold-hearted prick who wants to see me hanging from a tree in the garden.’ I had been possessed by the glamour of adultery. The atmosphere at Mischa's was always one of potential murder. The phenomenal scale of the arguments. The range and randomness of the information spilled, the strength-regathering silences in between. When she wasn't working, Jill sat stiffly in an armchair in the study, her dark hair falling to her waist in one solid piece like a bin-bag. There she would relay the drama down the telephone to Bamber Gascoigne.
‘Oh, thank Christ,’ she said when Gascoigne picked up at the other end. ‘Bamber – he's here! But he's pissed.’ Bruce, sober, handed her a glass of water and some aspirin. Jill looked up at him and spoke, low, into the phone. ‘He's making me take some pills. I don't know what they are.’
On Tuesdays I rushed from my convent school to join Mischa and Jill watching Johnny Weissmuller being Tarzan on the television. Weissmuller would come down a tree like a Greek statue and rush off in his flank-flashing pants to meet people at the escarpment, a place we mysteriously never saw.
‘Those shorts look like they just about cover his scrotum,’ I noted.
‘Christ,’ said Jill in her boozy voice, ‘you Quirkes with your goats, and your Song of the Volga Boatman.’
It was at Mischa's that I saw my first videos. One was called My French Lover and involved a man and a woman carrying a big plastic doll with a moustache into a bedroom and then getting under the sheets and laughing like maniacs. I seem to have blanked the rest. When I told my parents about this, I was banned from visiting number fifteen again. I slipped off in the rain to tell Mischa but she was calm, like someone used to having the ends of things spelled out and then revoked on a daily basis. ‘Je reviens,’ I said, a line I'd picked up watching Emmanuelle with Jill.
3
Because Mischa and I weren't allowed to see each other we kept in touch by writing letters that Ben would deliver. Mischa had become very beautiful and began first to sign off as Marilyn Monroe and then to write as her. I responded as James Dean, and the two doomed stars began an affair. This grew into a very serious correspondence which required a great deal of biographical knowledge. I had a stack of Dean biographies and books of photos of him. (It never occurred to me to watch any of his films.) But Mischa was a couple of years older than me and when she went to try her luck as a trainee teacher in Tokyo, she wrote to me as herself rather than Monroe, as if Marilyn had dumped Jimmy – which offended Dean. He wrote to her from the set of Giant throughout those fraught early months of 1955. He was bewildered, hurt, jealous of Joe DiMaggio and suspicious that she might be forming an attachment with a playwright on the New York scene. But nothing came back from Tokyo, just chatter about food and friends. Was that what drove him to such near-suicidal recklessness? He burned her old letters. He'd be dead within the year.
4
I got four C's and an E in my GCSEs and failed the rest. But because I spent most of the next year recovering from an operation on my hip I didn't have to go to school and just sat in my room reading. I got four A's at A level. I convalesced in the arms of Antony Sher's Year of the King (about his Richard III for the RSC) and Simon Callow's Being an Actor and Stanislavski's Building a Character, and back to Year of the King, flicking ahead to my favourite bits, which were always about what Sher said to Roger Allam at the Arden Hotel bar. Nothing more comforting than that sense of the extended family which actors thrive in. Year of the King is just about the happiest book I've ever read, the most soothing, which is not what Sher meant at all, but there you go: actors' first neurosis is that acting is just too much fun to be art. I wanted to be in the Arden Hotel bar with Roger Allam.
So I decided I was going to be an actress and auditioned at the Contact Youth Theatre for a play called Don Juan Comes Back From the War and got the part of a bisexual dress designer who dates Don Juan after meeting him in a café in 1920s Vienna, gets dumped, strips and throws plates at his head. I petitioned my mother to hire me a sunbed so I could appear on stage with the tan I felt the part required, but she flatly refused. ‘You are what you are,’ she said.
On stage, I felt I had mainlined into acting. The aperture opened wide and I saw the abyss. ‘Listen, you bastard,’ I had to say, fetching a photo of the Don out of a drawer. ‘Our child is gone. That's right. Gone. Vanished. And I can never have another. Who was it I reminded you of, hmmmmmmm? Go on. Tell me. Who was the bitch?’ I took a needle, poked holes through the photograph's eyes, lashed out furiously at a table, and thinking what the hell, I can do anything picked up a chair and broke its back off by smashing it against the floor, and then leaned up against the wall, panting.
I got a glimpse of what I would be like as an actress: a nightmare. Acting was shocking. It was more than just the power of having other people look at me, or the power of being another person. It was the utter freedom and violence and irresponsibility available. Don't think I'm saying that the performance was any good whatsoever – I just thought: I could easily spend my life in the service of this feeling. I'd come off stage weeping uncontrollably and sink into a kind of post-coital woolliness that lasted until we got to the pub where none of the rest of the stage-school cast would speak to me because, presumably, they all found me completely terrifying.
My family came and were stunned by my noise and rage as I clomped around on the stage balling up my fists like someone who'd been well and truly screwed over. In the car on the way home, my father turned round and said, ‘I'll never believe you again.’ And for a moment I had an instinctive feeling – something more than just the inculcated social instinct that being an actor is a bit silly – that if I kept this up I would be permanently releasing a sort of person that I might not like. When the next play was cast, my mother pointed out the ad in the local paper, but I said I didn't want to do it. I would have liked to have called this book ‘I've Been Marvellous: Seventy Magical Years at the Top’, or simply ‘QUIRKE: The Autobiography’, but I'm not allowed to. I forgot about being an actress and never thought of it again.
5
Let's start with a whole man. Let's lay down a brief marker, an ideal to measure the rest by. Who should it be, this person who, if the movies were asked what a man was, they could reply with? Someone with a bigger heart than Brando. More longevity than De Niro. Less neurosis than Cary Grant. Let's not use Steve McQueen or Gregory Peck or Al Pacino or Denzel Washington or Valentino. Let's use Robert Mitchum as our marker. Why? Because of all actors he explains himself the most, needs analysis the least. He tells you, more than anyone else, that a body is what a soul looks like, that the way you speak and move is all there is and nothing more need be said. You don't explain it, you just love it. In Mitchum's case, the eyebrows like droplets sliding off a windshield and the genius for standing still, as if he is both moving and staying put at the same time. The way his gaze comes at you through the second set of transparent eyelids he seems to have, like a crocodile. The upswing in his voice as if he's continually stopping himself from drifting off. The mysterious depth of experience implied by so many of his gestures as if he is laughing at the smallness of movies compared to life, which goes back forever. All great movie stars know that they will bore you in the end. Avoiding being boring drove Brando nuts. But the anxiety of being boring never crossed Mitchum's mind. The virus of boring-anxiety – which all actors carry – never made it past his antibodies. He is the undiseased. And, having read more pages on Mitchum than I have on anyone in this book, I've learned two things: 1) I have nothing whatsoever to say about him, and 2) nobody else does. So let Robert Mitchum, like a post driven into the ground to stake a claim over a landscape, be our marker. I like being silenced by him. He shuts me up like the right answer. He simplifies everything for me until I can think ah, Bob Mitchum, so that's what a ‘man’ is, is it? Got it. And what an amazing thing! Just look at that. Aren't they amazing, these ‘men’? And so many of them! It's raining bloody men! Let me tell you about a few others …
6
After my A levels I got a job selling insurance at Scottish Amicable in Manchester where every day I was convulsed by psychosomatic illness. But the job was useful because it enabled me to pay for all the drugs which my boyfriend and his friends liked to take.
‘What are you talking about? What are you on?’ my mother asked one day across the kitchen table.
‘Ecstasy!’ I beamed, happy to inform.
It was 1989 in Manchester and, had I but known it, my boyfriend was very cool. I had seduced him by the length of my jumper. I hadn't seen my own hands in eighteen months. He was a musician called Mark who looked a bit like Peter Firth in Letter to Brezhnev, I thought, and I adored him. I loved him. There was nothing else. But when he suggested that we should go to bed together, I was baffled. It was as if he had suggested that we move to South America, or that we weren't English at all, but French. Or aliens. A bizarre and totally irrelevant suggestion. Sex was abstract and ever present but it never actually happened. Like maths. I was horrified by the voice-over on Betty Blue which insisted that the principals had been ‘screwing for a week’.
‘Screwing for a week! Screwing! Screwing? Screwing! Skerreww-ing! For a week?. Can you imagine?’
‘Yes,’ said Mark.
I would roll around the floor of the Hacienda in a three-hundred-person embrace while Mark talked record deals with an old man who used to hang around called Tony Wilson. ‘Very pleased to meet you, Shaun. You too, Manni,’ I would say at five o'clock in the morning out of my tree on ecstasy and speed before removing Mark's hand from my thigh. Just what kind of girl did he think I was? What was he on?
Eventually, I acceded to Mark's request. ‘Tonight, on the 12th December 1989, I, Antonia Quirke, became a woman,’ I thought tremulously to myself. Or had I? A couple of days later I thought: ‘Tonight, on the 14th December 1989, I, Antonia Quirke, almost certainly became a woman.’ The day after that I thought: ‘Bloody hell. Bloody hell!’ and proudly munched my way through half a packet of Anadin. I was immensely lucky to have Mark as my first boyfriend. My first love. He had great talent as a musician and the dedication to back it up. He was as sincere and grave as any prince in an Oscar Wilde fairy story and bought me a ring whose inscription, love you baby blue, obliquely thanked Beatrice Dalle for her help in binding us together. In his blue and serious gaze I was wide open. I was invisible, I had no secrets to conceal. That's young love. Not because it's the first time but simply because you are young, before Life thins into that pointed little thing, A Life. Before time turns your life into a one-woman show.
On the strength of my convalescence-assisted A levels, I got a place at UCL to read English, which gave Scottish Amicable the excuse to sack me they had long been looking for. As I descended in the lift from the fourteenth floor for the last time, the nausea and palsy which had gripped me for a year unclenched themselves floor by floor until I arrived at reception and walked out into Piccadilly a new person. The only truly strange thing that has ever happened to me. It was like I'd been sacked into reality. Everything around me suddenly came into its full life. The traffic sounded out, the shadows of sandstone buildings on dusty concrete became delicately blue, sunlit Georgian granite sprang into heat, the Pennines showed up, windy and bright and in focus thirty miles away, and I felt for the first time, in the nicest way, like I was on my own. I have never felt more well than I did at that moment. In this lofty mood I was reluctant to take money off my parents for university and told them that I had won a ‘special grant’ to cover my costs in London, which I hadn't. I wanted to do it on my own, like Melanie Griffith in Working Girl. The afternoon I arrived I managed to get a job at Habitat on Tottenham Court Road for six days a week, and at a pub in the evenings, leaving me absolutely no time for lectures or tutorials, but I reckoned I could work around this if I chose only those courses where you don't have to do any thinking (like Phonetics) and stole all the books I needed from the Waterstone's on Gower Street.
‘How's college?’ my father would ask at Christmas and Easter, then at the Christmas and Easter after that, and I'd think: Don't ask me.
But I couldn't go back. Midway through my first year, Mark's band had got to Number 3 in the charts with a dance hit that went ‘If there ain't no love then there ain't no use’. When they went on Top of the Pops I stood at the back of the studio smiling a false smile with the other girlfriends and watched him on stage working his keyboard as soothingly as if he were peeling an apple, knowing like you know there are dead flies in the cutlery drawer that I was not built to be a popstar's girlfriend, with girlfriendly skills. While I could hardly grasp the idea that something as infinite and boundless as he and I could have an end, I knew that knowing that meant that somewhere it had already ended. Lessons, by definition, are always too late. In the furniture department at Habitat I listened to couples arguing on sofas with their eyes squeezed tightly shut in frustration and watched the streams of students pass the windows, wondering how to enter their lives.
One day I was walking from Maple Street down to Oxford Circus to buy strawberries from the stall that used to trade outside the chapel on Tottenham Court Road when I realised that a man had been following me for the past ten minutes, so I turned on him and demanded an explanation. He had a red flick like Eric Stoltz in Some Kind of Wonderful.
‘How else am I going to meet you if I don't follow you?’ he said.
I simply could not discover the flaw in this logic. I was so completely stumped for an answer that I went home with him to his flat near Russell Square where his flatmate shared his bed as if this were a ménage à presque trois. The thing about being innocent is that you can never be quite sure what constitutes seediness and what doesn't. I thought: Russell Square! This is where Ted Hughes used to live when he was first going out with Sylvia Plath! It seemed to open the city for me, unlock the British Museum, and all the print shops on Coptic Street, and the tall white sycamore-shaded houses of Bloomsbury, and the pale yellow Peabody Trust flats blooming among them, and the little square off High Holborn with its bronze of Gandhi sitting cross-legged; and beyond, all the pubs on Theobalds Road outside which young lawyers in their first suits anxiously smoked, looking pressed for time, and then the Regency terraces of the Gray's Inn Road and the flops of Euston. I had been asked home by somebody and – lo and behold, so to speak – I was home. London. So I kept going home with people. And Mark turned up one day to find he had been deceived. It was the usual sad end to first love. You don't leave them for anyone, you leave them for everyone, and it was as messy as hell. The violence of breaking up was infinitely more surprising and disorientating than losing one's virginity. Mark floored it down the M6 to splinter my door, but somewhere under my own hysterics I was reassured that love was all it was cracked up to be. Telling you this makes me feel old, but it's true.
In my third year an American entered the Man in the Moon in Camden where I worked and told me that he was looking for a place to live. ‘I've run into some trouble back home,’ he said in a Texan accent. He was the first American I had ever met and seemed almost supernaturally exotic. I brought him home in much the way that Elliot brings home ET.
‘Who is he?’ my flatmate Susie said.
‘He's an American!’
‘But who is he?’
‘He's an American!’
When I got home from the pub, I would get into bed with Wilson and ask about his life in Salado, Texas. His voice was a McConaugheyan velvet coat. He wasn't a man, I now saw. He was just a kid like me. A handsome Texan boy with a twist of a harelip that turned my heart over. In the mornings he would physically open my eyes to wake me. He got a job as a binman and started bringing back gifts for me from work, like out-of-date pancake mix. So I made out-of-date pancakes, and delicious they were too. But I didn't know what to do with the other salvage, like the little wheels off discarded roller-skates: I cleaned and polished them and put them on the mantelpiece as one might arrange an exhibition of totems of a collapsed society. I couldn't understand why he cried so much throughout that autumn until he eventually told me about his trouble back home. He had shot a man dead for two hundred dollars: ‘I didn't think it meant I would never be able to go back,’ he said. It was so dark I couldn't see his face.
‘After I did it, I went up and looked at the body, even though they'd told me not to. He had this small tattoo on his arm. Of a Swiss chalet.’
If it was just acting, it was just acting. And if it were true, then he couldn't be any more unhappy than he already was. The city closed in, black and orange at four o'clock, a world of buses wheezing through puddles, a world covered in leaf mulch or car-shit which seemed as bleary and smeared as if you were seeing it through an uncleanable windscreen, the conditions of life such that you could do nothing but shrivel under them, never quite clean, never quite dry, and all scrawled over with an illegible graffiti of fear, about money, for Wilson, and of guilt about Mark, who had burned everything I had given him in the front garden of my parents' house. Being sacked from both Habitat and the Man in the Moon allowed me to get a job in a travel agency where the more regular hours let me make it home to Wilson before his binman's bedtime. He feared sheep and had to be reassured of their absence from Hampstead Heath.
‘Sheep'll watch ya,’ he said. ‘It'll always watch ya, like it watches everything.’
Bonfire Night shook him something terrible. The smell of the fires in the parks around Muswell Hill, the blackened sparklers on the pavements, the bins full of charred fireworks and ash, the way it seemed to extend for a month of random bangs and shrieks – a season of burning – threw him into prayer. He knelt at the foot of the bed in the posture of the child on the bookmark I had received at my First Holy Communion and gave himself up to a terror of hellfire, craving God's forgiveness. It stunned me. I wanted him to leave, to get away from me, but I knew that I would pay if I asked him to go. I loved him. Yet I had no margin. I envied God the many mansions of His house. It was easy for Him to forgive and accommodate Wilson, yet He never would. At the end of every day, Wilson opened the curtains and looked up at the starless winter sky, and actually – out loud – thanked his lucky stars that he'd found me. I betrayed him then by wishing him away, much worse than I had ever betrayed Mark. I was learning another lesson – that not everybody grew up accustomed to love, and those that hadn't couldn't defend themselves from those that had. But Wilson was a ship going down in a black and cold city, and I wanted only to escape the vortex of his sinking.
By February, he had stopped talking entirely, merely dribbling a yo-yo up and down for hours on end. At the travel agent's I sold round-the-world tickets to students in my year who looked at me like they recognised me but weren't quite sure how. It made me feel like a ghost. By April, Wilson started to talk again and told the Anabaptists in whose basement off the Archway Road we lived that he was a professional gigolo. They wanted us out. Doing my exams was like writing cheques I knew were going to bounce. On a spring day, while I was basing my Chaucer paper around the one couplet I could remember – ‘And as thou art a fightul lord and juge / Ne yeve us neither mercy ne refuge’ – Wilson had a fight with one of the Anabaptists and cleared out for good, leaving his passport behind in the pocket of his one good winter coat.
7
The single greatest performance by a British actor in the 1990s was by David Thewlis in Mike Leigh's Naked, as (say the following very fast from the back of your nose, like John Lennon) a cheeky fucking manky Mancy monkeh called Johnny, a hyper-articulate autodidact ignoramus – are you following me, love? – who flees the north and ends up dropping off the radar enfuckingtirely in London, because it's just such a great warm welcoming fucking carnival out on the streets in the Big Shitty, knoworrimean, that he practically perishes from stuffing himself with the free poxy fucking marzipan the pearly kings and queens are giving out, are you with me, love? Peachy fucking creamy.
Johnny talks like this all the time. He takes a linguaphiliac delight in polysyllables and goes at everyone like a razorblade with his half-baked conspiracy theories and his patchy understanding of Nostradamus and the Book of Revelation and Chaos Theory – a performance which is forensically accurate about a certain type of smart-arse Mancunian educated at a time when comprehensives still did The Odyssey and Paradise Lost. I knew this Johnny. I had met about six of him. Undefeatable in argument, destructive, self-destructive, too clever by three-quarters, both frightening and irresistible to women. And Thewlis's creation was a note-perfect capturing of a type no one had ever captured before, a type whose essence was that you could never capture him, whose whole raison d'être was to evade capture. This was news, a new species for the zoo, grabbed from the world so gleaming and fresh that the rest of the film and indeed the rest of Mike Leigh's work – which we all regarded as the acme of realism – looked like a cartoon.
Thewlis's Johnny has those beautiful wrist-bones which you want to grab to stop his even more beautiful hands from slapping you. His voice quarries out every bit of music contained in the Manchester accent. The mouth beneath the ratty overbite is incapable of anything but sarcasm or supersincerity. That fast, straight-backed walk, like a cursor gliding along a line, looks like the walk of someone walking out on you. And all of these – hands, voice, mouth, walk – are fuelled by that peculiar youthful delusion: integrity. Only when you're young are you so hounded and harried by the fear of being fake, as if a single lie will curse you forever. The God of Integrity wants you to keep running, to never do anything twice, to worship the present tense, to reject comfort as a Siren. He is a cold god who would only really be happy if everyone were on their own, and only the young dream of him. But Thewlis is ten years older than Holden Caulfield, and Johnny is ten years deeper into hell, drowning in north London, in Bounds Green and Southgate and Edmonton, among those tall houses whose white stucco looks like icing in a Richard Curtis movie and like armour plating in Naked. It wasn't wishable-away, this performance, like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Thewlis turned the film into a horror flick for the lower middle classes. He scared the living daylights out of me.
8
Two days before the end of my final term, I was stopped by a Modern English Language tutor on the stairs of the department after finding I had failed my degree. He asked, a little hurt, why I had never been to one of his lectures in three years or, indeed, to anyone's lectures or classes whatsoever.
‘Is it drugs?’
‘Well, no. I just haven't washed my hair for a while. I've been a bit all over the place.’
‘You're sure it's not drugs? It's always drugs. Sure? Well, why didn't you come and see me? Everyone else does – the place is swimming in doctors' notes. It's exams.’
I figured what the hell and told him everything, including how I'd been sacked from the travel agent's for absent-mindedly selling forty tickets to Glastonbury on a coach that didn't exist, and he looked at me, still very kindly, and said that if I'd come and told him about all this a month ago he could probably have bumped me up to a Pass, though some of my papers had been truly terrible, he said, really, for shame. ‘You just wrote “no time to finish!” at the bottom of all these blank pages.’
Through the window of his room, where he had ushered me, you couldn't quite see the Waterstone's where I had stolen the books. I told him about that too. He nodded and said nothing, leaning forward in his chair with his hands latticed on his knees, occasionally unfolding them to hand me a tissue and looking down at my feet, dirty in their sandals, so that I could cry unwatched.
‘It's too late to do anything about all the paperbacks. But since you've clearly never opened the textbooks, you can simply put them back, can't you?’ he said, as gently as Denholm Elliott chiding Helena Bonham Carter to be a better person in A Room with a View. ‘What are you planning on doing now? Isn't there anything you're interested in doing? Something you particularly like?’
I couldn't stop crying long enough to reply. Where was Wilson? Who was going to protect him?
‘Nothing you like? Nothing you love doing?’
‘I like the movies …’ I said, uselessly.
He asked if I'd be interested in a work placement on a local paper where he knew the deputy editor. I said I didn't think I'd make a very good journalist, but he looked so pained I immediately changed tack and agreed, putting on a face that I hoped suggested I was worthy of redemption. Later that week I did what he advised about the books, like a tooth fairy – one that leaves Bauer's Grammatical and Lexical Variance in a heavy bag by the lift. As I made my way out of the shop, an assistant pursued me with the bag.
‘But I don't want it!’ I said.
‘Well, neither do we, to be honest. We have trouble giving this stuff away in the holidays.’
So I went round to Foyles and left it there instead.
9
From the top, then. Very, very fine, dry blond hair which conforms to the shape of his head and, as he has aged, looks like a wig or the helmet-like hair you clip onto a Lego man. Good hair for a David Lynch. A forehead which is still miraculously smooth, the skin very tight to it, the bone very tangible, the first great curve of his head a section of a sphere. His whole face is full of spheres. The eyebrows are faint and fall away. The bridge of the nose is where there has been an impact of pain. There are two, not deep, vertical lines which, taken with the declining eyebrows, make him look harrowed. The curve of the eyeballs is very visible under his eyelids – his face has started to become beautiful. And unusual. He cannot seem to open his eyes very wide, as if the eyelids have too far to travel back up the curve of the eyeballs. The eyes themselves are ethnically unplaceable, a speckled pale blue. Under them are deep pre-Raphaelite shadows (which in time have become real pouches). These shadows are immensely beautiful. And now you begin to see just how exquisite the face is. The nose is incredibly fine and straight, a nose which ladies in Beverly Hills might pick from a catalogue. The ears are sleek to his head: he looks like a bird. In the hollows beneath the cheekbones, like ripples playing on the underside of a bridge, lines of beauty continually form and reform. Everything about the face keeps getting finer – you feel you could crush his bones like a sparrow's bones. The outline of the lips is as sharp as the outline of a baby's lips. The cut in his top lip is like the V of a child-drawn seagull. There is a gap between his teeth which adds to the general feeling of sickness – again, you notice how beauty and sickness are bound together here in this pre-Raphaelite way. The lips are red, like the lips in a Tennyson horror poem. They might be poisonous. Take the head in your hands and turn it to a three-quarter profile. It's heart-shaped, and the line that runs from his forehead to his sharp chin, full of double curves, is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen. You're at a loss to say why – it's explicable by mathematics, no doubt – but that line looks like the definition of beauty. And everything is amazingly smooth and golden. A sick beauty, made of gold. The most beautiful: Christopher Walken.
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