1. TRIUMPH
I spend four years writing and mostly rewriting this screenplay. The film goes into production last summer. A little less than a year later the finished article has its big opening night in Leicester Square. Home of James Bond premiers, Mission Impossible openings and Harry Potter first nights. Now home of the film I wrote. This is the point when long held dreams turn real. It’s actually happening and it’s happening now. I want to get a good look at it all so I stand way back on the other side of the square and soak it up. A crowd, tourists mostly, hang off temporary barriers as pristine people pile out of the succession of sleek cars that keep sliding up. Every time ‘a face’ appears the crowd coo and bleat while this bank of paparazzi opposite them ignites the whole scene in a ticker tape of glitter. The whole square shimmers in a strobe of endless luminescent applause.
A cheer goes up as the three lead actors arrive, one after the other, each in their own chauffer driven car. They get together, arms entwined with triumphant smiles on their fabulous faces and they pose for the paparazzi before they’re wheeled away by a small press woman dressed in black with a headset on. They’re guided over to the crowd by the barriers, the civilians, where they stop to sign pieces of paper, shake hands and pose for messy pictures taken on smart phones. After this short moment of chaotic yet carefully constructed intimacy with their darling public the press woman ushers the three stars on once more and they fall towards the little solar system of people floating around in front of the cinema itself.
The director, the producer, the assistant producer and the line producer. The editor, the musical director and of course those four city boy execs whose money made this fiction fact. The four fat felixes are with their bejewelled cougar wives whose smiles purr with breathless excitement at attending such a glamorous event in such a glorious setting. Constellations of more faces appear from more cars as more stars who had nothing to do with the film at all explode on the scene as firworks dazzling up the night. Actors, actresses, models, singers. TV presenters, celebrity chefs, footballers, girl groups. Boy bands, talent show judges, reality TV stars, fashion designers. Comedians, chat show hosts, columnists, novelists. That other model. What’s her face, the one with the ears. In they glide as gilded swans past the shimmering banks of the snapping paparazzi and the cooing crowd behind the barriers. Then they all gather together, team fabulous, a galaxy of the great and the good outside the wide glass doored entrance of the cinema itself.
I spot my agent too. There he is in a dark blue suit with a light blue silk lining that’s so striking I can see it from here. His strangely ageless still-handsome-at-fifty face is charm, calm and smarm. This is his arena, his field of expertise. He’s at home in this zodiac of well known faces. He moves swiftly between the constellations with consummate ease and with each face he passes he manages to be totally attentive and intensely charming yet he never settles. He is his very own astromancer, an astrologer to his self, and he reads the stars to seek knowledge of his own future for each star is a potential client whose career he could guide onto even greater heights. His dance is a dazzling demonstration of sophisticated micro manners where no one is left wanting or waiting or wilting. His pitch perfect poise is made even more sonorous by his attractive forty something wife who floats nearby but never too close to cramp his considerable style. She’s in an extravagant purple pashmina shawl which unintentionally or perhaps intentionally shows off her bohemian leanings for this is the author of seven prize winning best sellers on both sides of the Atlantic. Her novels have the rare knack of achieving both critical and commercial acclaim and two of them have been made into award winning movies. Her standing is such that for the last three summers her books have been chosen in the lists of Top Five Beach Reads Of The Year by the broad sheet newspapers. With my immaculate agent they are a true power couple, one of the power couples of London’s glitterati. They make for a resonating double act.
I should really be going over to join in but the truth is I can't because the film is such a piece of fucking shit and I absolutely hate it. I hate the way it was shot, I hate the performances of the actors and I hate the daft as fuck soundtrack dreamt up by some Brit Pop guitar star of the previous century. But most of all I hate the way my sweet little baby of a screenplay has been butchered, chopped apart and carelessly hacked into this stomach churning placental expulsion. Some fucked up discharge. The film is a stillbirth, born dead and it’s entered the public arena as an over dressed corpse. No, I can’t go on. I just can’t do it. I can’t sit there and cringe at every lumpy line of dialogue that apparently came from my own wretched head. I can’t gawp in the dark at the bizarre twists of a plot so unnecessarily complex sometimes even I don’t know what the fuck is going on. I just can’t go though it again. All I can do is stand back, alone and distant, and gaze at these rarefied bits of driftwood floating in on the high tide. It’s time for me to go. Yes. I’ve got to get out of here or I’ll do something, yet another thing, I’ll come to regret. I’ve got to go. I’ve got to go now.
I slide a tin of Special Brew out of my suit jacket pocket and swig it so violently I get some on my face. Then I lean into the crowds and with a belch I am gone. I don’t even know why I came. Curiosity lead me here and loathing is making me leave. I can’t deal with the tube so I take the bus and rather than getting out at the stop near my flat in Tulse Hill I get off in Brixton specifically so I can hook up with Nunu who spends most of his time hanging about outside Brixton tube. Nunu gets people leaving the tube to give him their travel cards so he can re-sell them to people entering the tube. He’s forty years old but he looks around sixty. He’s thin, bearded and homeless but he’s a junky as opposed to a drunk so he doesn’t reek of piss and shit. He can hold a conversation too.
If Nunu isn’t moaning about how fucked the travel card market has been since the introduction of ‘them fucking Oyster Card things’ he’s telling me of his former life in Portugal. Nunu talks of Lisbon with the same fondness a person may recall their first love. Soft, tender, yearning, perfect. He tells me about the weather, the women, the wine and the food. But most of all Nunu tells me about his football for Nunu is a junky with a past. He was once on the books with Sporting Lisbon and he also played right midfield for the Portuguese Under 16 team where, due to his speed on the ball along with his light stature, he was known as The Gazelle. Among his team mates for Portugal Under 16 were Luis Figo and Rui Costa, both of whom went onto celebrated professional football careers of fabulous wealth and international mega-stardom. And I let Nunu spin his stories. Fuck it. Everyone needs a dream.
Sure enough when I lurch off the bus a mere twenty five minutes after departing the fabulous scene of glitter in Leicester Square I spot him hustling the stream of misery spilling out of the harshly lit entrance of Brixton tube. Even though rush hour has peaked hundreds of people still make their way out into the night. They head home with heads down in silence. While the stars outside the cinema shone under the shimmer of the paparazzi and lingered in the lovers glow of their lives within fiction these people shuffle off into the night, their very essence greatly dimmed by their lives within reality. The remorseless repetition of a working life in the city. While my agent played the crowd with skill and charm Nunu just gets in the way or gets ignored. He weaves through the stream of people while trying to sell his wares but he ends up just getting under their feet as if he’s some annoying little mouse that needs to be kicked away. I cross the busy main road and dart through the traffic. I’m drunk. Someone hoots but I don’t even care and don’t even look. The moment Nunu sees me spewing out of the cars his bearded face splits into a rotten toothed beam. He’s so happy he even gives me a short burst of applause. CLAP CLAP CLAP! Then he’s all whispers and whiskers.
“Hey Jimmy. My man. I been thinking of you!”
I smile sheepishly but don’t actually say anything. I don’t really know how to react. Nunu is totally delighted to see me but his delight has nothing to do with me at all. His delight is because of my money. Even here on the street, perhaps even more so on the street, money is a demented king that demands total respect at all times. Money is God. An entity so holy it should be spoken of in hushed tones. For Nunu and I aren’t just mere friends. No, no, no. We have a business arrangement that makes our friendship more vital and more volatile. I use Nunu to score crack and heroin for me and whenever I do I always buy an item for him as well. This way it means he won’t run off with my money as he always gets his kickback. It also means I’m treated very well. The generosity of my patronage demands a decent service. Today the service is unusually swift and in less than fifteen minutes I’m back on the bus with a four and four. That’s four white and four brown. Four bits of crack and four bits of heroin. Total cost ninety pounds; ten pounds an item plus a ten pound tip for Nunu. Each bit is approximately 0.2g and wrapped in a tight plastic ball so the drugs can be carried in the mouth. In the unlikely event that the police stop you all you do is merely swallow and deny, swallow and deny, as opposed to attempting to throw the drugs from your pocket and getting spotted and busted, spotted and busted.
Once back at my flat I get straight into it and smoke the white first. As usual it’s filthy stuff. I don’t even know why I do it. Crack has this weird pull on the head where the idea of doing the drug is usually stronger than the drug itself. It’s strange. As the smoke is expunged from the lungs the hit is the merest dazzle that then lingers long in the mind, all the while gently taunting you into buying some more. Once I’ve smoked the crack I feel wired; all white noise, jaw action and nowhere to go so I tuck into the brown to take the edge of everything. The quality of the brown varies massively. Heroin in London is never pure or even close to being pure. It’s always cut with a lot of crap like quinine, caffine, dimethocaine, procaine, mannitol, starch and fentanyl. I don’t even know what half of that shit is but what I do know is that when heroin liquefies and it’s a little red in colour rather than a deep dark beetle of brown it means its cut with mannitol which is an osmotic diuretic used to treat urinary problems due to kidney failure. Most of the Brixton shit burns red which means its cut to fuck and tonight is no different. I’m smoking some mix of heroin, mannitol and a whole load of something else. But enough of the science bit. There’s enough of the real stuff in there to give me some of that droopy eyed drift. It hits me in an almost medicinal manner that makes heroin pretty much unique from every other drug I’ve ever done and I must confess that I’ve done them all. The effects of heroin border on the benign, it’s nothing really, which is perhaps what make it so deadly. A little poison now and then produces pleasant dreams!
My mobile phone starts ringing. It makes this god awful racket that demands attention, some mechanical screaming baby, a toothless gob in search of a teet. I stick the horrible thing on loudspeaker but don’t answer. I just listen in and people leave me drunken messages wanting to know where I am. Posh voices bumble in the background. They’re all buzzing about at the premiere party of that abortion of a movie for which I am ashamed to admit that, yes, I am indeed responsible for. The post movie premiere party is being held in this glorious Soho swankery called Domus Of Dean Street, the place to be seen. That’s Domus pronounced Doe Muss or even Doe Mousse but never Doh-Mus like its some extended varitaion on Homer Simpson’s much recited catchphrase. Doh! No, Doe as in doe a deer, a female deer. Right now it doesn’t get any hotter than Domus Of Dean Street. I should be there too but I can’t stand there with glass in my hand, my back on the wall as various people I don’t even know sashay up to me and blink: Loved the movie. So much depth of character. Love to talk to you about your process. No I can’t go through with that. Not tonight. Not ever.
Once I’ve got through all the drugs it’s late enough to be considered early so I head upstairs to my pit. I close the curtains and stretch out on my bed which is a single mattress sitting on top of a base with no legs. I take my suit jacket off and toss it on the floor. I don’t even bother with the trousers. My shirt’s sticky like maybe I’ve been sweating more than I would want to. I feel cold, I shiver, so I pick my suit jacket off the floor and use it as a cover. As I drape it over me I can’t help noticing the label on the inside collar - Made in England by Anderson and Sheppard 60 Saville Row London - possibly the finest tailors in the world. The label even has my surname printed beneath the logo. Lashing esq. I pull the suit jacket up round my shoulders and curl into a foetus. Then I’m just still in the gloom, dead to the world like I’ve never been born.