“I don’t believe that. I know how much that suit must have cost.”
“You can’t live in a suit, can you?”
“So where do you live?”
“Sheffield,” he said. “Sheffield, Sex City.”
“But in London.”
“Park Lane, Hackney,” he said. “But I’m not living there. Just staying there.”
She went across and looked at her map to see where it was.
“I’ve never been there,” she said.
“You’re lucky.”
“What do you do for a living?” she asked.
“Let’s watch some films, yeah?”
The collection of videos that Mick had assembled did not by any means constitute the complete filmic works of Justin Carr, but the examples were representative enough to form a good introduction. They also came from the raunchier end of his catalogue. None of them was remotely pornographic but there was often nudity, even if it was mostly female and mostly tasteful.
The first of them, called Red Fins, was a kind of English road movie, and Mick watched intently as the plot unfolded. Carr had a lead part as a wheeler-dealer who imports classic sixties American cars from California. He was even better-looking on screen than he had been in the stills. He was animated yet vulnerable, tough yet boyish.
There was a cops and robbers plot involving drugs and stolen cars and Mick was engrossed by it, but Judy saw the way he became even more involved whenever Carr appeared on screen. It was as though he was an obsessive fan of the actor, seeing only him and only his performance.
In a coda after everything had been worked out, Carr and an actress had sex on the bonnet of a Cadillac while it was parked on a beach in Northumberland. The scene was apparently shot at dawn, the sky was icy blue, and the two actors looked freezing and windswept as they flailed about on top of the car. However, it was shot from a great distance so that although they were both completely naked the scene was scarcely explicit at all.
The moment the film ended, as the credits started to roll, Mick pounced on the machine and put in the next video. This time it was some kind of Australian co-production, called Roo, set in the Outback, with Carr the only English actor surrounded by a cast of leathery character actors who all looked vaguely familiar from other Australian films and soap operas. There were a couple of mystical Aborigines who kept staring off into the distance in a knowing manner, and there was love interest in the form of a female photographer who was there taking pictures of the local wildlife.
This time Mick couldn’t be bothered to watch the scenes where Carr didn’t appear and he hit the fast forward button whenever Carr wasn’t on screen. There was a brief sex scene between Carr and the photographer in an end-of-the-world desert motel, while the radio played ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’. The lighting was very dim and orange and the actress held a sheet around her most of the time. Carr undertook a little breast-fondling and kissing, but in fact they never got very far with it since they were disturbed by vile animal noises coming from outside the motel.
Once that scene was over, even though it was some way from the end of the film Mick yanked the video out. He’d seen enough.
He slotted in the next video, Unhappy Jack, a coming-of-age movie set in an unnamed London suburb in 1980 just before the Falklands War. Carr had an unpromising role as the boyfriend of the eponymous fifteen-year-old hero’s older sister. Mick only stayed with it as far as the moderately kinky sex scene in which, after a drunken night out, Carr watched while the sister did a nude dance for him, pouring wine over her breasts so he could lick it off.
“You mentioned something about a take-away,” Judy said as Mick pulled the tape out of the machine.
“Oh yeah, sure,” said Mick and he extracted a twenty pound note from his pocket and handed it to her.
“Any preference?” she asked as she went to the phone.
“No, no preference,” said Mick, as the fourth film began. This time he skimmed rapidly, not even watching the whole of scenes in which Carr had a major part. It was called Rochester, and in Mick’s opinion it didn’t look like a real film at all. The tides, even the packaging, didn’t look the way a film was supposed to look.
It was a long, arty experimental movie, a series of ‘meditations’ on the life of the seventeenth-century rake. It looked as though it had been largely improvised; the dialogue rambled and occasionally died completely.
There was a fair amount of nudity, although Carr was fully dressed throughout, and in his biggest scene he tried with increasing difficulty to read an obscene poem by Rochester while a female skinhead, naked but for black stockings and a ruff, fiddled around inside his trousers and distracted him. But by and large it was all talk and no action. Mick paid it little attention and when the pizzas were delivered he was able to look away from the screen and eat without feeling he was missing much. He ran the final third of the film through on fast forward and found nothing worth stopping for.
The final movie was called City of Skin and was the classiest of the bunch; one of those late-eighties movies about corruption in the City, about public and private morality, in which the lead characters lived in opulent converted warehouses, drove Porsches and talked about Docklands development, took cocaine, did ruthless financial deals, and had athletic and empty sex. Carr was the leading man. His sex scenes (there were two) both took place in his massively over-designed penthouse looking out over the Thames. The first scene was shot in daylight and after romping all around the room he pressed his naked co-star up against the flat’s big panoramic window, and there was an external shot from the river showing her breasts and belly squashed flat against the glass. The second scene was shot at night and made great use of reflections. The blinds were open and the lights were on in the penthouse so that this time the windows reflected the two people having sex inside the room while the lights of London outside were superimposed over them.
Again the rest of the film scarcely interested Mick, but this time he rewound the tape and watched both sex scenes again. Then, at last, he’d seen enough. He knew what Justin Can-looked like from all angles. He glanced at his watch. It was very late. He hadn’t been much of a guest and he reckoned he must have overstayed his welcome. He turned towards Judy and was ready to apologize but he saw she’d fallen asleep beside him on the divan. He looked around and found a coat to drape over her, then without waking her he let himself out and walked home, leaving the videos behind but being sure to take his A — Z with him.
A FUNNY FEELING INSIDE OF ME
With a wide, innocent, slapped-on smile across his otherwise vacant face, Mick rang the doorbell belonging to Justin Carr. He stood outside the white mews house, one of a dozen or so clustered together in a safe, still Kensington enclave. There were a number of untidily parked cars along the mews, a woman was out washing a green Peugeot and two girls were visible at desks in one of the properties that had been converted into an office, but the street was as quiet and calm as any spot in London.
Mick looked up at the first-floor windows of Carr’s house. The curtains were open and the overhead light was on to keep away the dark afternoon. Mick rang the bell again. It was a long time before he heard heavy feet on the stairs, descending to the hall, and when the front door was opened, it was thrown wide with uncoordinated abandon, with no hint of the retiring film star.
Mick didn’t immediately recognize the actor in the doorway despite having watched so many of his videos. Justin Carr stood there wearing a white bathrobe, his feet in heavy black workboots. His hair was short but tangled, his face unshaven and unwashed. It was hard to tell whether he was drunk or hungover, but something about him wasn’t quite steady. He looked fatter than on screen, his face less angular, less defined, less itself. He appeared shorter too, but Mick had expected that.