Fascination: Stories Read online

  The little hotel I used to stay in is now called the Hotel Carlone. In a video-shop I found an old copy of Dix-Mille Balles (Two-and-a-Half Grand). I almost wept.

  What colour is Tanja’s hair? Caramel. Butterscotch. Fudge. Toffee… All edible, all sweets.

  Idea for my next film, to be called Blue on Blue – the term used in the British Army for those occasions in warfare when you accidentally kill someone on your own side.

  Meditation on the navel: a scar that every human being carries… A baby’s cry requires no translation… A scream has no accent… A yawn is understood the world over… The banal truths of life are no less true, despite their banality.

  Saw Terry Mulvehey’s new movie The Last Rebel (how did he get into Director’s Fortnight and not me?). Completely preposterous and yet beautiful film. The story of Wings of a Dove grafted on to the American Civil War. No attempt to make the men’s hairstyles look remotely nineteenth-century. Mulvehey will sacrifice anything if it will provide a beautiful shot – narrative plausibility, character development, pace, suspense: everything yields to the lovely image. Compositionally, the film is flawless, but as a real story about real people – rien. Vanity and nullity. Tanja has not returned my calls all week. I sent her a text-message demanding to know who was Pascal’s father. I worry, perhaps, that I’ve made a crucial error.

  The Duke of Kent has been renamed The Flaming Terrapin in my absence. Curious name for a pub, but what do I know? We now have music (all but overwhelmed by the collective bellow of conversation), we now have mute televisions showing a rain-lashed golf tournament between competing bright umbrellas. I push my chargrilled Thai chicken around my plate and order another glass of golden, sun-pervaded Australian Chardonnay (my third).

  It is Friday lunchtime and you can sense the rowdy, burgeoning, weekend release of appetites. These young people in their twenties and thirties are eating and drinking and smoking as if their lives depended on it. And they do of course: their lives depend on them ceasing to eat, drink and smoke like this. Fuel Britannia. What is it about us? On the evidence of the crowd in this pub we have become a nation of careless, reckless trenchermen and trencherwomen. Strapping girls drinking pints of stout and extra-strength lager; young men with goatees and shaven heads bowed in front of their heaped plates of carbohydrate, shovelling in the pies and the burgers, the spare-ribs and the bangers, packing their pot-bellies and pot-faces. I can’t finish my Thai chicken.

  I have just pushed through to the bar to fetch another brimming glass of wine. I now realize with some alarm that these are in fact ‘large’ glasses of wine that I’ve been drinking, which is to say one glass contains two normal glasses of wine. No wonder I feel suddenly a little flushed and unsteady.

  How To Become A Successful Film Director: page one, paragraph one, line one. Don’t fall in love with your leading lady.

  A table of four dapper Japanese businessmen have just asked me to take a photograph of them and I have complied. Little do they know who framed that snapshot. Is there something odd in this image? Perhaps I should use it for the last moments of Blue on Blue – just put the four Japanese businessmen in the scene in the caff, before the hero shoots himself – in the background, taking photographs – make no comment. Cool.

  Two foreign girls – nannies? tourists? – one German, one Belgian (?), talking in English beside me on the next table, unconcerned by my drinking and my proximity. I learn that one of them, the German, has finally established a good relationship with a man, which has now endured a full month. Her friend expresses genuine, unfeigned delight. (NB. The happiness of women when a girlfriend gets a man – not an emotion shared by the other half of the sexual divide.) These girls have both been eating green salads: one drinking water, one orange juice. This is lunch for them – astonishing – what would make them come to a heaving, honking, feeding-frenzy like this? These girls are the new internationalists, roving the world, speaking good but accented English to each other, a kind of flawless Euro-English: ‘I am very bad with separation,’ the German girl says as she stands up to leave. No true English speaker would express the idea in this way, but it is perfectly comprehensible.

  Leo Winteringham has passed on Blue on Blue.

  Is it fair to say that the only truths in the world you can really vouch for are those you yourself feel and can therefore verify? ‘I am happy’ is something only you can know to be the case, absolutely. All other interpretations of the world beyond yourself are therefore suspect – merely hunches and deductions. ‘Tanja Baiocchi is an unbearably, impossibly beautiful woman’, ‘The Sleep Thief is an exceptionally bad film’ – I’m rambling – the rich Australian wine kicking in, taking its heavy toll. How does that line of Tennyson go? Man comes and tills the fields and lies beneath can you be too intelligent to live well Leo was my last hope and after many a summer dies the swan but I know nothing nothing not being sure about anything can be very stimulating creatively discuss what precisely do I know right now Tanja Baiocchi has returned to live with Pierre-Henri Duprez I am not happy I too am bad with separation the problem with me is that I never [The notebook concludes here.]

  A Haunting

  Part I. Los Angeles

  ‘My name is Alexander Rief. My name is Alexander Rief. My name is Alexander Rief – and I think I may be going mad.’

  I was sitting in the first-class cabin of a jumbo jet, en route for Los Angeles, when I wrote these words in my notebook, thinking – as I recall – that the simple reiteration of my name would give me some kind of hold on my fast-disappearing sanity. I had been looking at my sketches for the Demarco project in Pacific Pallisades and, feeling relatively fine, I had eaten and had drunk no alcohol because of the mild headache from which I was suffering. The headache started about an hour out of London; nothing so unusual in that – except that I rarely suffer from headaches – but I remember this one because it seemed almost physically to move round my head, almost as if something were crawling around the interior of my skull, starting at the nape of the neck and then shifting around the right side of my head to lodge itself in the centre of my forehead. I took two aspirin, and waited for the analgesic to do its stuff, but it seemed not to be working. The headache grew steadily in intensity so that it became impossible to ignore it. It was not blinding, it was not pulsing, but it was indubitably, naggingly there. I massaged my forehead with my fingertips, I rubbed my brow with the soothing gel that is provided in the complimentary first-class toilet bag and finally took out my work hoping that distraction would make it abate, or at least I would have something other to think about than the visions of blood clots, strokes and tumours that were beginning to nudge their way into my reasoning mind.

  So I looked at my sketches for the Demarco terraces, the sweep of walkways down to the pool and its surrounding plantations, and I took out my pencil to add a little cross hatching to the row of cypresses I had decided to plant behind the pool house.

  I began to shade in the leaf darkness and then, quite suddenly, I felt my arm growing cold as if there were a draught blowing on my right side. At the same time I noticed, but did not feel, that my grip upon the silver barrel of the pencil was strengthening, my nails flushed with blood, and a slight but discernible tremor of effort made the point of the pencil shimmer like a seismograph about to register a major eruption.

  And then I began – or rather – then my hand began to make signs, big bold signs across my delicate drawing of the Demarco terraces. The signs looked like a form of elongated ‘x’, each of the four arms of the letter drawn out horizontally. My hand was lifting the pencil from the page in order for this sign to be properly drawn, and, as I finished one, my hand would immediately begin to draw another. Soon my sketch was covered and I flipped the page to allow the writing to continue. And so it did, deliberately, quite meticulous, all the ‘x’ shapes being drawn the same size, with nothing manic or frenzied about them.

  I sat there, almost without breathing, as my right hand autonomously continued to mark the
page. At one stage I reached over to place my left hand on top of my right fist, but I seemed incapable of exerting any force, the pencil continued to move, and soon I lifted my hand and watched as the mass of x’s began to darken the page. I hunched over, to make it look as if I was writing, as the cabin staff passed up and down the aisle. By now I was sweating copiously and I was seized with a kind of terror which was unfamiliar to me. As my right hand moved across the page of its own volition I wondered if something had malfunctioned in my brain – as if the headache was the sign of the rupturing of some crucial blood vessels, or that some critical malfunction of my neurotransmitters had taken place, and I began to hear, in my inner ear, the sound of a silent wailing – a keening desperate bafflement – as if my soul, the soul of Alexander Rief, seemed to have lost control of the body it inhabited.

  The ‘seizure’, the ‘fit’, seemed to last, I don’t know, five minutes, ten minutes, I had not looked at my watch. Suddenly I felt my hand stop and the pencil point lay inert on the page. I felt my arm warm again as I touched it gently with the fingers of my left hand. I let the pencil fall and clenched and unclenched my fist. My brain seemed empty, suddenly quiet after the clamour of my inner misery and I exhaled slowly. Carefully I picked up the pencil, turned it in my fingers and I wrote down my name. ‘My name is Alexander Rief. My name is Alexander Rief…’ It was only after ten minutes or so, when I had finally calmed down somewhat, that I noticed my headache had disappeared.

  ‘I sit in the gathering gloom of this Californian garden,’ I wrote that night in my journal, ‘and wonder what on earth I went through on the plane. Pressure of work? A mini nervous breakdown? These signs of aberrant behaviour can afflict the individual out of the blue in this manner, I know, but up until now I’ve lived a life entirely free of these stress crises, however stressful the situation I’ve found myself in. Now I feel tired, but entirely normal. I called Stella in London but decided to tell her nothing of what happened. Wise? Who knows? There seemed no point in worrying her unduly. Tomorrow to Demarco’s and a walk through of the relandscaping plans. John-Jo flies in Tuesday.’

  The rest of that evening passed unexceptionally: I called room service, ordered and ate a plate of angel-hair pasta and drank half a bottle of Chardonnay, trying to stay awake as long as possible, to mitigate the effects of jet-lag, to hoodwink my body clock, still functioning on London time. I walked through the cool, discreetly lit gardens of the hotel and thought again about what had happened to me on the plane, running through the sequence of events, seeing if further analysis provided any answers. No ready explanation came to hand. Back in my room I took out my notebook, looked at my defaced sketches for the Demarco house and pondered the dense clustering of cryptic signs that my hand had written across the pages. What were those elongated x’s? What could they signify? I turned the page through ninety degrees and was none the wiser. Vertically they looked like schematic hour-glasses or egg-timers. They seemed to make no sense at all. I copied one on to the pad of hotel notepaper, suddenly wondering if this act might unleash new symptoms, but my hand was obeying my brain this time. What was it Hamlet had said to Horatio? ‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy…’ I switched out the light and went – relatively swiftly – to sleep.

  John-Jo Harrigan – my old friend and partner – ruffled his thinning gingery hair and screwed up his eyes as he shifted his gaze from the sea’s blurry blue horizon and turned to stare at me, frankly baffled.

  ‘Demarco’s very worried,’ he said. ‘He liked your original drawings. Very much.’

  ‘They were wrong. Everything was wrong. The shape of the pool was wrong.’

  ‘He wants a rectangular pool. His wife is a compulsive swimmer. Likes to do her laps every day.’

  ‘When he sees the new plans he’ll change his mind. I don’t know what I was thinking of. Wait till you see them, J-J.’ I reached forward and patted his hand. ‘The house will look sensational.’

  ‘He says he won’t brook any delay.’ John-Jo lit one of his malodorous little cigars.

  ‘I like that: “brook”.’

  ‘He’s got a Ph.D. from Princeton. He’s not a stupid billionaire.’

  ‘We’re not stupid architects. There will be no delay.’

  We walked back along Malibu pier towards the beach.

  ‘I think smoking’s allowed on the pier,’ I said.

  ‘Actually, I think what really upset him,’ John-Jo said, musingly, ‘was that you hadn’t shaved for the meeting.’

  ‘I’m a landscape architect, not an accountant.’

  ‘Are you growing a beard?’ John-Jo chuckled, as if the notion was improbable.

  I touched my spiky, raspy chin. ‘Just haven’t felt like shaving,’ I said, frowning. ‘California dreaming.’

  ‘You’re just a fucking hippy.’ John-Jo laughed. ‘I warned Stella, she wouldn’t listen. I said, I remember: Stella, darling, you’re marrying a goddam hippie.’ He smiled at me. ‘Let’s have a drink,’ he said, gesturing at a bar-restaurant that was just opening. ‘Then I’ll go and persuade Demarco you’re a genius.’

  I moved out of the elegant, impossible hotel with its dank, lush gardens in order to rework the plans for the Demarco landscaping in ideal solitude. I rented a one-room studio apartment in Venice, a block back from the beach, with a day bed, a shower room and a kitchenette. It was sparse and, after an afternoon’s housework, as clean as it could be. I bought a large block of drawing paper, some pens, brushes and coloured inks and went to work. I knew I had to produce something instantly striking: my new plans were so dramatically different from the old that Demarco would have to fall in love with them at first sight – no amount of earnest persuasion would be likely to bring him round. I had one shot – so the drawings had to be as finished as I could make them, the audacity of the concept unmistakeably there, at once, immediate.

  I had a phone but I decided to give no one my number. I arranged with the hotel to keep my messages and checked in with them a couple of times a day. I did not tell John-Jo or Stella I had moved. When I called it was as if I was still at the hotel – it was an easy subterfuge to maintain. Later it was to rebound devastatingly upon me.

  ‘May 15th. Tuesday, I think. Good work the last two days, intense and concentrated. I could sell these drawings to a gallery. One curious event. My beard was growing; I hadn’t shaved for the four days since my arrival and I was beginning to scratch and itch. I went to shave and found I could shave my jaw but not my upper lip. I placed the razor beneath my nose but I could not make my hand move. I tried my left hand but with similar lack of success – it was as if my muscles froze. Would not obey the command from my brain. Elsewhere on my jaw and chin I scraped away problem-free. I washed the soap off my face and saw there the beginnings of a fine, wide moustache, a moustache whose ends did not stop at the edge of my lips but whose bristles continued down and up on to the cheek in a vague handlebar swoop. Funnily enough, I liked what I saw. I reminded myself of old photographs of certain famous cowboys: Buffalo Bill, Wyatt Earp – very nineteenth-century and, I thought to myself, due for a revival.’

  Why was I so unperturbed? I had never grown a moustache in my life, so why now? I rationalized it as an unconscious desire to blend in in Venice, to become a denizen of this bizarre suburb on the sea, tucked in between respectable Santa Monica and the industrial wastelands around the airport.

  I spent most of the day at home, working, made trips to the laundromat or the supermarket for provisions, slept soundly on my narrow bed and each morning when the sun rose went for a run on the beach. My moustache grew. I remember catching a glimpse of myself in a shop window as I wandered home clutching a brown bag of groceries – I was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, my greying hair was wild and uncombed – and for a brief second I did not recognize myself. A moustache can alter a familiar visage profoundly. I stopped, turned and stared: I liked what I saw. No one would know it was me, I remember smiling to myself as I wandered homew
ard. I called Demarco and fixed up an appointment for the next day – the drawings were ready to show.

  That night I went to a bar, called ‘Moon’. It was dark and pretentiously decorated with a pronounced lunar theme – multicoloured moons were everywhere. The music was loud and harsh but, this being Venice, its clientèle was remarkably varied – all ages, all looks, the beautiful and the grotesque – so I felt quite at home. I sat myself at the bar and ordered a cocktail called, ‘the Sea of Tranquility’, blue in colour, strangely sour-sweet in taste – I was indifferent to its contents. I sipped my drink, my attention held absolutely by the girl behind the bar.

  ‘May 19th. This girl was not pretty, she had a hardpinched face with soft uneven teeth and a pointed stud set in her bottom lip. Her right shoulder was darkly tattooed with some swirling kabbalistic sign. She wore a faded singlet, spandex cycling shorts and heavy mountaineering boots. After my third Sea of Tranquility and my third two-dollar tip she finally smiled at me and asked if I was celebrating. ‘Tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Put the champagne on ice.’ She had rings on all her fingers, including both her thumbs, I noticed. ‘Big spender, huh?’ she said, not impressed. ‘Where are you from, anyways?’ She swept the dollars away. I was drunk but I wanted her, wanted to feel that lip stud graze my body. So I told her who I was and where I was from and that I would be in tomorrow night for my champagne. She told me her name was Leandra.’

  I walked down to the beach. It was a Sunday and the Sunday crowds had all but gone, leaving only the odd rollerblader or cyclist whizzing up and down the concrete paths. The Venetians were still out and about: the hawkers, the bodybuilders, the beggars, the tarot-card readers, the monologuists and various other lost muttering souls meandering up and down. I passed a guitarist (a double amputee as it happened) sitting in a barber’s chair playing a slow sequence of chords and the combination of the music, my Seas of Tranquility, the unseen ocean with its wavecrash and the warm breeze stirred in me a profound and epiphanic moment of happiness. I felt that I had reached somewhere significant in my life – not a turning point or a watershed – just one of those markers, those milestones. A benign sense of ageing, perhaps, of the body clock sounding the hour.