Jimmy was lying with his feet on the sofa. Beside him he had arranged a beer, a glass and a bottle of Jack Daniels taken from the drinks cupboard. He was lighting a cigarette from the matches Roy had collected from the Royalton and the Odeon, smart New York restaurants, and kept to impress people.
There was no note from Clara about Munday, and no message on the machine.
Roy said, ‘All right, pal?’ He decided he loved his friend, envied his easy complacency, and was glad to have him here.
Jimmy said, ‘Got everything I need.’
‘Take it easy with the Jack. What about the bottle we bought?’
‘Don’t start getting queenie. I didn’t want to break into them straight away. So — here we are together again.’ Jimmy presented his glass. ‘What the fuck?’
‘Yeah, what the fuck!’
‘Fuck everything!’
‘Fuck it!’
The rest of the Jack went and they were halfway through the vodka the next time Roy pitched towards the clock. The records had come out, including Black Sabbath. A German porn film was playing with the sound turned off. The room became dense with marijuana smoke. They must have got hungry. After smashing into a tin of baked beans with a hammer and spraying the walls, Roy climbed on Jimmy’s shoulders to buff the mottled ceiling with a cushion cover and then stuffed it in Jimmy’s mouth to calm him down. Roy didn’t know what time the two of them stripped in order to demonstrate the Skinhead Moonstomp or whether he had imagined their neighbour banging on the wall and then at the front door.
*
It seemed not long after that Roy hurried into Soho for buttered toast and coffee in the Patisserie Valerie. In his business, getting up early had become so habitual that if, by mistake, he woke up after seven, he panicked, fearing life had left without him.
Before ten he was at Munday’s office where teams of girls with Home Counties accents, most of whom appeared to be wearing cocktail dresses, were striding across the vast spaces waving contracts. Roy’s arrival surprised them; they had no idea whether Munday was in New York, Los Angeles or Paris, or when he’d be back. He was ‘raising money’. Because it had been on his mind, Roy asked seven people if they could recall the name of Harry Lime’s English friend in The Third Man. But only two of them had seen the film and neither could remember.
There was nothing to do. He had cleared a year of other work to make this film. The previous night had sapped him, but he felt only as if he’d taken a sweet narcotic. Today he should have few worries. Soon he’d be hearing from Munday.
He drifted around Covent Garden, where, since the mid-eighties, he rarely ventured without buying. His parents had not been badly off but their attitude to money had been, if you want something think whether you really need it and if you can do without it. Well, he could do without most things, if pushed. But at the height of the decade money had gushed through his account. If he drank champagne rather than beer, if he used cocaine and took taxis from one end of Soho to the other five times a day, it barely dented the balance. It had been a poetic multiplication; the more he made the more he admired his own life.
He had loved that time. The manic entrepreneurialism, prancing individualism, self-indulgence and cynicism appealed to him as nothing had for ten years. Pretence was discarded. Punk disorder and nihilism ruled. Knowledge, tradition, decency and the lip-service paid to equality; socialist holiness, talk of ‘principle’, student clothes, feminist absurdities, and arguments defending regimes — ‘flawed experiments’ — that his friends wouldn’t have been able to live under for five minutes: such pieties were trampled with a Nietzschean pitilessness. It was galvanising.
He would see something absurdly expensive — a suit, computers, cameras, cars, apartments — and dare himself to buy it, simply to discover what the consequences of such recklessness might be. How much fun could you have before everything went mad? He loved returning from the shops and opening the designer carrier bags, removing the tissue paper, and trying on different combinations of clothes while playing the new CDs in their cute slim boxes. He adored the new restaurants, bars, clubs, shops, galleries, made of black metal, chrome or neon, each remaining fashionable for a month, if it was lucky.
Life had become like a party at the end of the world. He was sick of it, as one may grow sick of champagne or of kicking a dead body. It was over, and there was nothing. If there was to be anything it had to be made anew.
He had lived through an age when men and women with energy and ruthlessness but without much ability or persistence excelled. And even though most of them had gone under, their ignorance had confused Roy, making him wonder whether the things he had striven to learn, and thought of as ‘culture’, were irrelevant. Everything was supposed to be the same: commercials, Beethoven’s late quartets, pop records, shopfronts, Freud, multi-coloured hair. Greatness, comparison, value, depth: gone, gone, gone. Anything could give some pleasure; he saw that. But not everything provided the sustenance of a deeper understanding.
His work had gone stale months ago. Whether making commercials, music videos or training films, Roy had always done his best. But now he would go along with whatever the client wanted, provided he could leave early.
Around the time he had begun to write his film, he started checking the age of the director or author if he saw a good movie or read a good book. He felt increasingly ashamed of his still active hope of being some sort of artist. The word itself sounded effete; and his wish seemed weakly adolescent, affected, awkward.
Once, in a restaurant in Vienna during a film festival, Roy saw that Fellini had come in with several friends. The maestro went to every table with his hands outstretched. Then the tall man with the head of an emperor sat down and ate in peace. And what peace it would be! Roy thought often of how a man might feel had he made, for instance, La Dolce Vita, not to speak of 8½. What insulating spirit this would give him, during breakfast, or waiting to see his doctor about a worrying complaint, enduring the empty spaces that boundary life’s occasional rousing events!
Bergman, Fellini, Ozu, Wilder, Cassavetes, Rosi, Renoir: the radiance! Often Roy would rise at five in the morning to suck the essential vitamin of poetry in front of the video. A few minutes of Amarcord, in which Fellini’s whole life was present, could give him perspective all day. Certain sequences he examined scores of times, studying the writing, acting, lighting and camera movements. In commercials he was able to replicate certain shots or the tone of entire scenes. ‘Bit more Bergman?’ he’d say. ‘Or do you fancy some Fellini here?’
In New York he went to see Hearts of Darkness, the documentary about Coppola’s making of Apocalypse Now. He was becoming aware of what he wouldn’t do now: parachute from a plane or fight in a war or revolution; travel across Indonesia with a backpack; go to bed with three women at once, or even two; learn Russian, or even French, properly; or be taught the principles of architecture. But for days he craved remarkable and noble schemes on which everything was risked.
What would they be? For most of his adult life he’d striven to keep up with the latest thing in cinema, music, literature and even the theatre, ensuring that no one mentioned an event without his having heard of it. But now he had lost the thread and didn’t mind. What he wanted was to extend himself. He tormented himself with his own mediocrity. And he saw that, apart from dreams, the most imaginative activity most people allowed themselves was sexual fantasy. To live what you did — somehow — was surely the point.