Will Self - Walking to Hollywood

Stanley Kubrick had used his own Hertfordshire estate as a location for his last movie, Eyes Wide Shut , starring the Scientologist Tom Cruise. In the film, London streets acted the part of Manhattan streets — a metempsychosis analogous to that of actors: the same place living through multiple locations. Kubrick was scared of flying — the young Hubbard pretended to be a fearless flyboy. Hubbard also claimed to have met Freud, who in turn had certainly known Schnitzler, whose Traumnovelle was the basis of Kubrick’s screenplay. And then… Kubrick was rumoured to have employed a special coach in order to invest Cruise and his then wife Nicole Kidman’s sex scenes with the barest plausibility — which brings me back to Saint Hill and Roger Daltrey.

You can, no doubt, see which way my mind was pelting… The completed paper ran to some forty single-spaced pages, the dense type studded with emoticons and interwoven with diagrams bearing labels such as ‘45 degrees where the sigmoidal flexure of TC’s penis is greater than 9.7’. I left it at the Scientology Centre, the pink plastic wallet also containing an explanatory note: ‘I will be staying at the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard on the twelfth of June, should anyone from the International Dianetics College wish to discuss the enclosed with a view to preventing publication’, signed with the nom de guerre Will Smith.

I kept stopping on the way back from Stockwell tube to take photographs. The bases of the limes along Binfield Road were spiky with withies among which nestled the cigarette packets and energy drink cans let fall by the multitudes that tramped by every day. The buses were nose to tail, snorting for admission to their ferroconcrete stockade. I took maybe two or three hundred shots of these lime shrines before the dusk tumbled from the rooftops into the street and night swarmed over the police crime tape looped between the lamp-posts at the junction of our road.

Several of my neighbours were gathered at the cordon. One remonstrated with the officer on duty: ‘My son is disabled! He’s only fourteen years old — you can’t stop me from going home, he needs me!’

All eyes were on the confrontation: the officer in her stab-proof waistcoat, the citizen in his dudgeon, so I ducked under the tape and moved swiftly past the technicians in their white crinkled boiler suits, who were picking at the congealed blood in the roadway. More techies were at work on the set opposite my front door: a neighbour’s Audi estate completely dusted with fingerprinting powder — under the Kliegs it looked like a whale baby coated in vernix. As I put my key in the lock the techies turned their snout masks towards me and grunt-queried; I answered by waving my library card officially, then disappeared inside.

It was a Saturday night and as usual my wife had her cronies over to play games. We lived effectively separate lives; while I wrote screenplays that would never be made, she indulged in a rich fantasy life, one in which she was always about to start shooting — the very next day! An epic! She was Helen of Troy! Mary Magdalene! Joan of Arc! It was a sure-fire smash, with an astronomical budget! So, while I clickety-clacked away in my attic room, she swansoned from chamber to chamber, trying on outfit after outfit, then discarding them for the maids to tidy away.

Except that we didn’t have any maids — a verism that made a mockery of her pretensions; instead it was our children — who had the precocious maturity associated with such neglect, and who were portrayed by a rota of superannuated child actors, gawky Macaulay Culkin, wizened Mickey Rooney, ambassadorial Shirley Temple, etc. — who did the tidying up around the gloomy Victorian house. They also did the cleaning, the laundry and the cooking — they even paid the bills and put themselves to bed punctually at eight-thirty. I’ve no idea how they found the time to go to school.

I threw a few things into a bag ready for my departure on the morrow, then went to say goodnight to my wife. At forty-eight she was still a remarkably handsome woman, and if she had been content to age gracefully I think everything might have been all right between us. As it was, I found her playing KerPlunk with her tame fags, all of them dolled up like teenagers — she in a pink velour tracksuit, her dyed-blonde hair in madly streaked bunches, the others in saggy-assed jeans that exposed the waistbands of their underpants so their pot bellies were captioned ‘Calvin Klein’.

As I came into the kitchen my wife drawled, ‘Get me a drink, darling.’ And one of the forty-somethings leapt to do her bidding. ‘Make it frothier this time’ — she waved her heart-shaped lollipop like a lorgnette — ‘and I want more marshmallows!

‘Oh,’ she deigned to notice me. ‘It’s you — don’t hover like that, pull up a chair and join us.’

Reluctantly I did as she bade me, and Frankie or Hud (I could never tell them apart, and both were played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) equally reluctantly made room for me.

‘It’s too late to join in this round,’ my wife continued, expertly feeding marbles into the tube, ‘but you can play the next.’

She smiled merrily, her coralline lips peeling back from her tiny even white teeth. There was no malice in her — merely utter self-absorption. Hud — or Frankie — who was modishly shaven-headed (or perhaps simply bald), and who had once directed her in a breakfast bar commercial, fouled up his go and as the tube lost its marbles they all cried, ‘KerPlunk!’

I played with them for an hour or so while an ancient Madonna album gently vogued through the sound system. This and the KerPlunk players’ clothes were the only contemporary props — for we had bought the house fully furnished, complete with the splayed bearskin, the miniature church organ, the looming tallboys and hammered-brass aspidistra pots. Glass domes cluttered with songbirds stuffed in mid-flutter stood about on occasional tables, while a vast mezzotint of a Holman Hunt leant against the coffered panelling — I had always felt a deep sympathy for the parasuicidal sheep it depicted, which were huddled together on an insufficiently vertiginous grassy knoll.

Talk was of reality TV shows and the indiscretions of the junior Royals; a new face cream was passed around and smelt. Around eleven I said my goodnights and went to bed with a glass of water. Passing along the hall I was seized by the police lights glaring through the panes of the front door, and so detoured into the drawing room. Here it was even brighter, the radiance lifting the rug’s pattern — trellises twined with the tail feathers of peacocks — so that it floated in the must.

The forensics team were still out there — two of them, seated in the road with their backs against my neighbour’s car. There had been no Vorsprung durch Technik , and, while it was no longer a newborn whale, nor was it a shiny aerodynamic status symbol. Instead, a pre-war Packard dusty and alone in a four-car garage scattered with dead leaves. What was it William Holden had said when the repo men took his car?

A disturbed night followed. I slept poorly on my narrow canvas cot, not helped by the screeching and giggling that floated up the stairs into the small hours. In the morning I found the superannuated child stars — three, maybe four of them — eating Sugar Smacks at the oval mahogany dining table, which was still littered with KerPlunk straws, marbles, chocolate-stained mugs and Bacardi Breezer bottles. The pathos of Macaulay Culkin’s bare elbow in a smear of spilt milk was… indescribable. Frankie — or was it Hud? — had lumped up a bed out of cushions and lay spread-eagled in the corner of the room, snoring noisily.