Every time I saw her she was working hard, solving equations, creating animations on her laptop, sometimes just doodling on paper. She would draw parabolas, perfect patterns of rising and falling bodies, Volkswagen Beetles at rest and in motion, that in truth bore very little resemblance to the jumps I was watching every night.
She was also involved with the constant retuning and rejigging of her Beetle, changing its power-to-weight ratio, its gearing, its aerodynamics, the suppleness or otherwise of its suspension. The technical aspects of all this were well beyond my comprehension, whether in trajectory physics or motor mechanics, but I had every reason to believe Leezza knew what she was doing, and the proof of this was there to be seen every night. The line of Beetles grew longer but her jumps got longer still.
Even so, she was also achieving the other part of her mission; it did all look a lot less easy than it once had. There was something more serious and earnest about the way she drove the car. The take off was more violent, the jump less elegant, the landing was sometimes scrappy and barely controlled. It added to the spectacle, and it made the spectators realise that something difficult and dangerous was going on, that something was really at stake, but it also made it even harder for me to watch. At the end of the evening, when the freak show and the jumps were completed, I would stagger back to my trailer at Idle Palms in a state of exhaustion, and fall asleep the instant I got into bed, knowing that the next day I’d get up and do it all over again.
Twenty-One
Being so fully occupied no doubt made me oblivious to many things that were happening on the shoot. I’m sure there were the usual number of friendships, enmities, crushes, intrigues and what not, but I was just too busy to pay any attention, much less be involved. I still had my suspicions that Angelo might be planning some sort of palace coup, and that Josh Martin might end up as a Mad King in exile, but for now, while we all kept working, that seemed less likely to happen, and in any case I didn’t see what I could do about it. I tried to keep my head down, keep out of trouble and keep on writing.
And then one evening, about six o’clock, when I was thinking I still had another page of dialogue in me, trouble came knocking. Josh Martin arrived at my door. Cadence was there in the trailer with me as usual, twiddling her thumbs, trying and failing to be busy, but now she went into action, stapling together some sheets of paper that didn’t need any stapling.
“Come on,” Josh Martin said expansively. “We wrapped early. We should go to a bar. We should drink. We should talk. We should bond. We should bare our souls to each other.”
I feared that Josh Martin’s bared soul might be an ugly and dangerous thing, but taking everything into account I decided I might do myself more harm by turning down this invitation than by accepting. I said OK.
“I’ll slip away then,” Cadence said.
“No you won’t,” Josh Martin insisted. “You’ll come and bare your soul too.”
She giggled girlishly, and I was glad she agreed to come. She would dilute Josh Martin’s potent presence, and I suspected that after a few drinks she might prove to have a much more appealing soul than he did. Getting three people in a Porsche can surely never be easy, and I had never actually been in one before, but we managed to fit ourselves in, with Cadence draped, absolutely decorously, across me, and we drove into Fontinella, to a watering hole called a the Nerf Bar, a small, single-storey building the colour of Cheddar cheese. The Porsche looked well out of place in the car park, but then so did anything that wasn’t a pick-up truck.
Some plastic letters on an illuminated sign outside the bar announced that this was ‘Louie Louie Night’. It took us a while to realise what that meant. As we went in, a small band was already set up in the corner of the bar, and they were playing basic but efficient rock and roll. They were performing ‘Louie Louie’, a great song in its way, crude, simple, a song that anybody can play, and that anyone can sing along with, at least the chorus; the verses are inscrutable and unintelligible and meant to be that way.
Josh Martin ordered three beers and three tequila chasers and we settled into a corner booth that was upholstered in cherry-red plastic. We were as far away from the band as we could get: not very far, given the size of the bar.
“Do you live with a lot of self-doubt, Ian?” Josh Martin asked me bluntly.
We were straight into the baring of souls.
“Of course,” I said.
“Yeah, I thought so.”
“Doesn’t everybody live with self doubt?” Cadence asked.
“I don’t,” said Josh Martin. “Least I didn’t used to. Now, I’m not so sure. It’s this movie. It’s doing it to me.”
“Self-doubt isn’t the worst thing in the world,” I said. “If Hitler had had a little more self-doubt then, well…”
“Hitler,” Josh Martin said with feeling and made a lemon-sucking face. Things got no better when he said, “So how are you feeling about the movie, Ian?”
“I’m feeling good,” I said.
That wasn’t absolutely true. In reality I was actually too busy working on the script to have time to consider how I felt about it, but that seemed like no bad thing, and I thought it was best to sound upbeat. I also felt that Josh Martin wanted me to ask him how he felt about the movie, but I wasn’t going to give him that satisfaction. He’d have to do his soul baring without any prompting from me.
The band continued to play ‘Louie Louie’: it was a long version. At one point a dapper old cowboy got up and played a hot, country-style violin solo, then a pair of Latina girls sang a couple of verses, very possibly in Spanish. They looked like they were having fun; rather more than we the audience were.
“You don’t think maybe there are some flaws in the basic premise?” Josh Martin said, meaning Volkswagens and Velociraptors, not the extended rendition of ‘Louie Louie’.
“It’s a bit late to think about that, isn’t it?” I said.
“Is it?” he said. “I think about it all the time. I find myself asking where’s the art? Where’s the poetry? I think that nobody believes in the automobile any more. I think nobody believes in polluting the planet. I certainly don’t. I want to be green. I want to do something for the environment. I want to make a difference. I want to reduce my carbon footprint.”
Coming from a Porsche driver this seemed a bit rich. If you were looking for someone with impeccable green credentials Barry was surely your man. He didn’t use petrol. He didn’t use electricity as far as I could see. He certainly didn’t use much hot water. I thought it best not to mention Barry to Josh Martin.
“Well,” I said, “in the movie there are only about twenty people left on earth so, you know, global warming really isn’t that big a problem for them.”
Josh Martin tugged at his hair fiercely to show that this didn’t solve his basic objection.
“That’s just part of the same problem,” he said. “Here I am making a science-fiction movie while the world burns. Nobody believes in science any more. Nobody even believes in fiction.”
“I do,” I said.
He ignored me. “Everybody wants to see movies based on true stories,” he said.
“All stories are true,” I said.
This was a pet theory of mine — everything is true, everything is permitted — but I didn’t get a chance to explain it. Without realising it, I must have glanced at my watch.
“Somewhere you need to be?” Josh Martin demanded.