Anne Billson - Stiff Lips

'Oooh,' she breathed, impressed. 'The Drunken Boats? Drunken Dreamboats , I call them. That Jeremy Idlewild is really fab, though my friend Mandy much prefers Hugo.'

'Perhaps you'd like to meet them,' Gordon said with a cunning smile.

'Would I?' squealed Ann-Marie. 'The Drunken Boats! They're just the grooviest.'

Graham winced. 'All a bit bogus, isn't it? The dialogue's wrong. And the clothes are iffy as well.'

'He was working on a shoestring budget.' I didn't know why I was being so defensive on Walter Cheeseman's behalf, though I had to try and justify having dragged Graham all the way down into the basement to watch Down There . I'd already recognized the familiar la mort toujours la mort on the soundtrack, but Graham had never heard of The Drunken Boats, and had started to fidget.

'Hasn't your pal got any Clint Eastwood?' he asked. He scanned the nearest stack of videos, reading the titles aloud. 'The Naked Bun. The Cooch Trip. Beauty and the Breast . These sound like good clean fun.'

'I want to carry on watching this,' I said. 'Walter said Marsha was in it.'

'Who's Marsha?'

'She lives here. Ground floor. Walter shot some of the film in this very house.'

'Why? Couldn't he afford a proper studio?'

'This is a location ,' I said. 'It's got history. Things happened here. Someone said it should have a Black Plaque on it.'

'What's a Black Plaque?'

'It's like a Blue Plaque,' I said, 'only black.'

'Sounds more like something you scrub with a toothbrush,' said Graham.

While Gordon lured sweet little Ann-Marie back to the house in Hampshire Place and gave her a cup of instant coffee into which he'd surreptitiously slipped several large sugar-lumps soaked in LSD, I told Graham all I knew about the Butcher of Balham.

Graham didn't seem impressed. 'You mean he didn't even commit the murders here? Where's the fun in that? It's a statistical probability that half the houses in London have had murderers living in them at one time or another.'

I admitted the information on its own wasn't particularly impressive, but when one also took into account that a) a woman had plunged to her death from one of the upstairs windows, and b) a man had stood in front of my bathroom mirror and cut his throat, then one was forced to start looking at our surroundings in a whole new light.

'Maybe it's lunar,' I said. 'Or magnetic.'

'You mean like ley lines?' asked Graham, perking up for the first time that afternoon. 'You mean there are ancient and powerful interplanetary forces which intersect at this particular point in time and space?'

'Maybe,' I said. 'I see it as more of a San Andreas fault. Every so often the pressure builds up and there has to be a sort of quake to relieve it.' I stopped and thought about what I'd just said. It made a crazy kind of sense. 'A quake of pure evil,' I added, pleased with the melodramatic ring of the phrase.

Graham wrinkled his nose. 'If that's the case, you'd better start working out when the next tremor's due, so we can stand well back.'

By now, Ann-Marie was slipping into a drug-induced fantasy sequence involving lots of wide-angle lens camerawork and strobe effects. The other guests were transformed into ghosts and skeletons and vampires. The frills on someone's floppy shirt turned into doves which fluttered up into the air and disappeared, and a man climbed into a sleeping-bag which metamorphosed into a caterpillar and wriggled across the floor, carrying its screaming occupant away with it.

Graham shielded his eyes and said he could feel a migraine coming on, but at least he was sitting up and taking an interest. It wasn't hard to see why. Many of the actresses had shed items of clothing and the screen was awobble with bare bosoms, some with flowers painted on them.

'This is more like it,' said Graham.

'Don't get too excited,' I said. 'We know what's going to happen.'

'We do?'

'Sweet little Ann-Marie is going to take a swan-dive out of that window and die horribly impaled on the railings underneath.'

'I thought you hadn't seen this before.'

'I haven't.'

'Then how do you know what happens?'

'Because that's what happened in real life.'

'You're telling me this is a documentary?'

'No, but Walter always based his films on real life.'

'You're telling me The Cooch Trip is based on real life?'

'I mean his serious films.'

'This is supposed to be serious?' asked Graham, his eyes bulging. On the screen in front of us, a tall, dark stranger clad in nothing but a magician's hat and cloak was daubing astrological signs in red paint over Ann-Marie's naked body. Meanwhile a voice on the soundtrack wailed, 'Gonna get ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-high tonight,' and the walls flashed from black to purple to scarlet and back to black again.

'I guess he used a certain amount of artistic licence,' I said.

'So when's she going to jump?' asked Graham, sitting back with his arms crossed expectantly.

'Not right this second,' I said, checking the label on the empty video box, 'because we've still got forty minutes to go.'

'Can't we fast-forward?'

'I'd rather not,' I said, and even as I said the words I caught sight of a familiar face. 'It's Marsha!' I roared triumphantly. 'There she is, at the back.'

'Her tits are enormous,' observed Graham.

'She is a big girl,' I agreed.

'And in all the right places.'

Then I spotted someone else, someone who made me grab the remote control handset from Graham and drop to my knees right in front of the screen, like a handmaiden worshipping the great god Television. Graham, feeling less of a man now he no longer had control of the handset, began to whinge.

'I'm just going to run through that bit again,' I said.

'Must you?' said Graham.

'Thought I saw someone,' I said. I rewound, reran it, and punched the pause button. 'Look!' I said, jabbing the flickering image with my finger so that the screen crackled softly. 'It's Lemmy! The one with the moustache.'

'You mean Lemmy who can't speak English?' asked Graham, who had met Lemmy and Dirk on a couple of occasions. 'Lives round here, doesn't he? I bet all these extras live round here. I bet Cheeseballs invited them to this shindig and got them stoned so he could make use of them for free.'

I scanned the extras in earnest, hoping to catch sight of Dirk as well, but none of the other bopping figures scored on my recognition chart, and I didn't see Lemmy again. Marsha made a couple of further appearances and said one line — 'Who's got the butter?' — as the action degenerated into one big orgy of softcore groping.

The film ground on. A couple of unfunny comic subplots reached their unfunny denouements, and Ann-Marie gained carnal knowledge of most of the men, women and sleeping bags around the room, but the windows to eternity remained firmly shut.

Graham yawned. 'Isn't it time she took the plunge?'

I checked my watch. 'Any minute now.'

But Ann-Marie stayed away from the windows.

'Jump,' urged Graham. 'Jump! '

But she didn't.

We watched it to the bitter end. As the cold light of dawn crept into the sky outside, the extras stood up and, one by one, got dressed and tiptoed home. But Ann-Marie, naked and pale except for the astrological signs on her body, stayed slumped and unmoving where she was. The tall, dark stranger who had been wearing the wizard's hat but who was now dressed in a plain black suit bent down to shake her by the shoulder. Ann-Marie's head flopped forward on to her chest. He shook her again, lifted her eyelids with his thumb, took her pulse.

Nothing.

'My God,' he announced in a flat accent. 'She's dead.'

'Dead?' I yelled. 'Dead?'

'Not possible!' shouted Graham. 'You can't overdose on acid. It's a well-known fact!'