Iain Sinclair - Downriver

‘Mmmm, all right. OK. I s’pose that’ll do,’ commented the director — with a notable absence of vitality — in a toast-dry Birmingham Ring Road accent, that was still quite fashionable at the cutting edge of the visual arts. He was a tall man and a tired one. He didn’t believe in anything he could see in front of him. Why bother? A certified deconstructionist. Who had lost his faith in the validity of performance. Actors, hot for motivation, could hope — at best — to witness his struggle to pretend that they had already gone home. They were obstacles blocking his heartfelt longshots. And the state of their hair… Those sweaters … He shook his head. Satisfaction, we discovered, was expressed as: ‘I don’t want to sound over-enthusiastic, but…’

The methodical Pole (a sewer-rat Cybulski), who had led us into this trap, stalked over to the window; distancing himself, as far as the limits of the hall would allow, from the film crew, whose antics were no more than a source of potential embarrassment to a man of his achievements. It was Milditch, of course: earning a crust.

The Corporation has its own mausoleum for spiked scripts. Files of unachieved treatments that have not yet been infected with the black spot. A sperm bank to counter some future threat of a strike by the Writers’ Union. A prophylaxis on ideas. A drought of projects: empty restaurants. There has to be the occasional reprieve for the corridor of suggestions unblessed by accountants. ‘Yentob thinks it’s mega-interesting, baby, but too many calories. Try Channel 4.’ There have to be sleepers to foist on ‘difficult’ directors coming to the end of short-term contracts on ‘The Last Show’. That nervy collage of brilliantly achieved trailers. That culture-clash headache.

Which explained this Custom House invasion. I had abandoned my three-month ‘rewrite’ somewhere back among all those lunches and phonecalls, the motorcycle messengers waiting on the doorstep for urgent revisions — which only elicited further phonecalls. Which elicited further lunches. Which elicited…

My Tilbury story (erased history) was finally being shot under the impossible title of ‘Somdomites Posing’: which, apparently, made reference to Queensberry’s illiterate and insulting card (the fate card), left for Oscar Wilde at the Albemarle Club: ‘To Oscar Wilde posing Somdomite’.

A new director (on his way to the knacker’s yard of pop promos), Saul Nickoll, replaced the emotionally bankrupt Sonny Jaques. He determined to blow what remained of the year’s budget on a single grand gesture: the least likely script he could find. Mine was the worst by a comfortable margin. It was so far off the wall that nothing could save it. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Nickoll, ‘if things start to make any kind of sense… we’ll throw in a few clips from your home movies. Keep ’em guessing. Red frames. Bogus surgical procedures. Fountains of blood.’

And Milditch, being both actor and bookdealer, was typecasting as the paranoid, doom-laden author/narrator. I was being impersonated by a melancholy and balding market trader of doubtful reputation. Why didn’t they go the whole hog? Cable for Charlie Manson?

‘Milditch looked terrible in Spotlight ,’ said Nickoll, gleefully. ‘And the portrait was seven years old. He’s perfect to play you.’

Milditch knew now he had made one of those mistakes that destroy a career. Like Dickie Attenborough doing John Reginald Halliday Christie. There’s nowhere left to go — except the colonies. Or the other side of the camera. He’d finish his days in blackface, a loincloth and a turban. This part would have been well within the compass of a ‘walker’. Even so, Milditch was ready to do the business, give it the cold-eye stare. But Nickoll wouldn’t talk to him. Nickoll wouldn’t, if he could avoid it, talk to anyone. I was beginning to appreciate the man.

Nickoll had the slight, forward-leaning stoop of a man used to looking down on people: on actors, who tended to be dwarfish, with neatly husbanded imperfections the camera was ready to forgive. Nickoll forgave nothing. He understood it; but he did not forgive it. He suffered, and he dubbed a world-weary smile. A Spanish saint on his way to the gridiron. He was darkly clad, of course; in the usual gulag chic. And he favoured a quotably minimalist haircut, close razored and modestly abrasive. His appearance was a statement. ‘No comment.’ But he was something of a connoisseur of haircuts. He collected them, pigeonholing the entire newsreel of human history by its length and style. His method was universally acknowledged as more accurate than carbon-dating. ‘Mmmm, all right,’ he’d drone, ‘late 1950s…’ 58? No, ’59. Joe Brown at the Two Is.’ And he’d stroke his notionally shaved chin.

He modelled blue crombie overcoats, left behind, in something of a hurry, at the Old Horns (Bethnal Green), and white mufflers. He disliked conversation. He had a wonderfully practised way of turning his back on anything that offended his haircut religion. Milditch’s functional crop, which looked as if it had been performed inside a coal bucket by a gang of blind chickens, gave him palpitations. He had the trick, under these distressing circumstances, of switching his attention to shoes, one of his lesser interests: until he felt able to cope with the shock to his nervous system. The aesthetic damage.

There were two ways that he signalled his emotions. When things were going badly, and it was all getting away from him, he chewed his hangnails. He gnawed voraciously at the celluloid meniscus, spitting out grey chippings like mangled grape seeds. When it was not quite so bad, and he was able to watch a scene without putting his head in a black rubbish sack, he put on his serious spectacles and gazed into the distance: to avoid the possibility of an involuntary smile.

I had every confidence in Nickoll. If anybody could turn my humble disaster into a millennial catastrophe, he was that man. He gave the impression — even now — that if only he could heave Milditch into the dock, with concrete flippers on his feet, get him out of the way, he might be able to deliver some definitively controversial footage. Meanwhile, he chewed his fingers down to the knuckles, and gummed unhygienically on soft cartilaginous tissue. He was picking out lumps of white skin from between his excellent teeth.

The teeth of the little Scottish script girl, on the other hand, were chattering like the typing pool of a fictional tabloid. The sound man (her lover) glared at her in a proprietary rebuke. She tried to invent some way to describe, for editing purposes, the fantastical lack of event unfolding in this refrigerated hall. The sound man, buried in quilts of arctic down, was in despair. There was nothing to record. Not even the lugubrious hoot of tug boats or the wind whistling through miles of corridor. He had only to keep sound out : neutralize the turbo-props battling to reach the City Airport, or the getaway drivers rehearsing a screech of three-point turns along the quays of the empty dock behind the Custom House.

Nickoll, irritated by his moping underlings, now revealed himself as a closet humanitarian. He noted the script girl’s lead-blue lips and frostbitten nose and felt obliged to pass some comment. ‘I’d rather be skinned alive with a blunt razor blade than wear a jersey like that. It puts pounds on you, girl.’

He twitched in agony: the awful embarrassment of being confronted, in flagrante delicto , by the author of the very farrago he was trying to animate. He wished he could simply hurl back in my face the pages of high-flown nonsense I had so wantonly cobbled together in some warm study, far from the front line. Authors were sick men: punishing themselves, and wallowing in the pain. And worse, much worse, expecting to implicate innocent readers by conning them into turning the first few (inevitably comic) pages.