Here was Toxteth, where belated government intervention was trying to impose community spirit on a place where transience had always been the norm.
It was good to be working with an Arriflex again, feeling its lumpy weight on his shoulder, the molded eyepiece against his brow. Grey greeted the workaday camera with a sense of quiet reunion, amazed to discover how natural it still felt in his hands, how his vision was narrowed and sharpened by seeing and thinking through the viewfinder. But he was used to working with a smaller crew, and the large number of people around him disconcerted him at first. He felt he was on trial, that they were waiting to see if he still knew what to do, but within a short time of starting he realized that these were his own fears and everyone else was too busy with his own job to be thinking about him.
He settled to the work, glad to be doing again what he was best at. The first day’s shooting exhausted him because he was out of practice in other ways, and the morning of the second day his leg and shoulders were painful. The work absorbed him, though, and he knew that these few days were worth a hundred hours of physiotherapy.
The director was an experienced documentary maker, and they kept easily to the schedule. They were always finished with filming by late afternoon, leaving the evenings free. The crew were staying at the Adelphi Hotel, a glorious Victorian extravaganza in the center of the city, and each evening most of the people stayed in to drink in the large palm-filled mezzanine bar. For Grey it was an opportunity to talk shop, swap stories about old assignments, catch up on gossip about people he knew. There was talk of more jobs coming up, a chance to work on contract in Saudi Arabia, a story developing in Italy.
It was all radically different from the last few weeks when he had been obsessed with himself and Sue, her bizarre story and claustrophobic relationships. He telephoned her from his room one evening, and hearing her voice, thin and faint down the trunk line, gave him the sense of drilling a long tunnel back to something he had already left behind. She said she was lonely without him … wanted him back with her quickly … sorry about everything … different now. He uttered reassurances, feeling glib, trying to make them sincere. He still wanted her, yearned for lovemaking with her, but while he was away it all felt as different as she said.
They shot the last footage on the fourth evening. The location was a workingmen’s club, a smoky barn loud with music and raised voices. Grey arrived early with his assistants and set up the lights for the interviews, widened a few gangways for the camera to dolly along. To one side there was a small platform with a number of spotlights, musical amplifiers stacked unused under covers at the back. The acoustics were bright, and the soundman winced at the amount of echo when he took a level. Most of the club members were men, wearing suits without neckties, and the few women kept their outdoor coats on. Everyone drank from straight glasses, talking noisily over the recorded band music coming from the loudspeakers. As the place filled up and the bouncers took up their positions by the bar and the door, Grey was reminded of a pub in Northern Ireland where he had been filming a few years before. That had had the same spartan decor: plain tables and chairs, bare floorboards, beer-mats and ashtrays from breweries, overhead lights with cheap lampshades, the bar itself lit by fluorescent tubes.
They started filming: a few establishing shots of the crowded room, close-ups on a few drinkers, and then a number of interviews: how many people were unemployed, what life was like, prospects of moving away, a works closure impending.
The main entertainment of the evening was a stripper, who came onto the platform wearing a gaudy sequined outfit that had obviously seen much use. Grey took the camera on his shoulder and moved in to film her act. Seeing the camera, the woman put on an elaborate show, grimacing sexily, grinding her backside, stripping off her costume with exaggerated gestures. She looked to be in her middle thirties—overweight, with a bad complexion under her makeup, stretch marks on her belly, and pendulous breasts. When she was naked she jumped down from the platform. Grey followed her with the camera as she went from table to table sitting on laps, spreading her legs, letting her breasts be fingered, a look of grim gaiety on her face.
When she had gone and the camera was being reinstalled on the dolly, Grey stood to one side, remembering.
There had been a stripper in that bar in Belfast. He and the soundman had gone there in the middle of the evening, after a sectarian shooting had taken place. They arrived just as the ambulances and police were leaving, and all there was left to film were bullet holes in the wall and broken glass on the floor. Because it was Belfast the blood was soon mopped up and the commotion died down, and even as they were filming the drinking went on and new customers arrived. A stripper came on and went through her act, and Grey and the soundman had stayed to watch. Just as they were about to leave, the gunmen abruptly returned, pushing through the crowd near the door and shouting threats. Both carried Armalite rifles, pointed upward. Without thinking what he was doing, Grey hefted the camera to his shoulder and started filming. He forced his way through the crowd, going right up to the gunmen, filming their faces. He was there when they opened fire, pumping a dozen rounds into the ceiling, bringing plaster down in flakes and lumps. Then they left.
Grey’s film was never transmitted, but it was later used by the security forces to identify the men, and they were arrested and convicted.
Grey’s reckless act of courage had been rewarded by a cash bonus from the network, but the incident was soon forgotten. What no one, including Grey, could understand was why the gunmen had let him film them, why they had not shot him.
Standing there in the racket of the drinking club in Liverpool, Grey was remembering something Sue had said. She had reminded him of the story he must have told her, of filming in the street riot. She said: in the heat of the moment you made yourself invisible.
Had that happened in the bar in Belfast too? Was there after all something in what she said?
He completed the rest of the filming in the club, now feeling self-conscious, thinking himself an intruder into the depressing lives of these people, and was glad when the equipment was packed up and they could return to the hotel.
III
As soon as he was awake in the morning, Grey telephoned Sue at the house. She came to the phone sounding groggy with sleep. He told her that the schedule had had to be extended, and that he would not be back in London for another two days. She sounded disappointed, but did not question him. She said she had been doing some thinking, and wanted to talk to him. Grey promised he would contact her as soon as he was back, and they hung up.
After breakfast the crew met in the lobby before dispersing. Grey noted down a few phone numbers, and provisionally arranged to meet the producer in London the following week. When they had all said their farewells, he hitched a lift in the car of the assistant director, who was driving to Manchester. Grey was dropped off a short bus ride away from the suburb where Sue had said she was born.
He located the address in a telephone directory and walked through the residential streets to find it. The house was a prewar detached villa, standing in a short cul-de-sac.