London Noir - [Anthology] Read online

  ‘Wait, wait.’ Ostendorf raised his hand. ‘I think this part is not necessary to tell. Wait until we have the new translation.’

  ‘When could I see a fully translated version of the script?’ asked Peter. The project sounded interesting, the plot uncompromising. This was the kind of subject matter European film-makers handled so well. It was probably a metaphor for the human condition, very profound.

  ‘We will not give you the complete script unless you win the part, but you may read the pages which feature your role.’

  ‘Which part is on offer?’ he asked. Was it too much to hope for the lead?

  ‘I hope you won’t be offended when I tell you it is the part of the evil terrorist,’ laughed Ostendorf.

  ‘Not at all.’ Peter smiled back. Jonathan had thought him perfect for a meaty villainous role. He was handed half a dozen pages on which the character of DR EMIL was scored through with a yellow highlighter. In order to provide him with some interaction the producer’s assistant read the role of Jack, the hero’s captive offspring. The tone of the piece was sombre and oblique, the exchanges awkward, as though English was not the author’s first language. After the read-through, Peter raised his hand. ‘There’s a problem with the English translation,’ he pointed out. ‘It’s very stilted. I could paraphrase my lines and get a better reading out of it.’

  ‘I think for now it would be better if you stay with the words you have,’ replied Luserke firmly.

  He could take a hint. Tidying the pages, he sat back and waited for a response. The group talked quietly amongst themselves. Heads were nodding. Only the art director seemed to be in dissent. Finally Ostendorf rose and turned to him with an outstretched hand. ‘We believe we have found our evil doctor,’ he said, smiling warmly. ‘You are happy?’

  Peter thrust his hands in his pockets and beamed his thanks back at the group. ‘I am very happy.’

  ‘Good. Now we take some test pictures of you to show our backers.’

  * * * *

  ‘What do you mean, they’re shooting before signing your contract?’ asked Fanny. ‘I’ve never heard of such a thing. Your agent certainly wouldn’t allow it.’

  ‘My agent is never going to find out about it.’ He reached across the counter and emptied a container of apple juice into his cup. The gym was empty and about to close. Rain pattered against the skylight far above them.

  ‘The guy playing Jack is a big-deal star in Holland and they only have him for four days. It’s not a large part but it’s the key to the film. I’m going to be playing my lines with a stand-in. Obviously I have to do it before the set is struck, so they’ll film my performance at the same time.’

  ‘Then why not put the two of you together in shot?’

  ‘For Jack’s scene with me he’s tied to a chair with a bag on his head. He doesn’t need to be there.’

  ‘Just make sure you get the contract signed as soon as possible.’ Fanny was growing bored with all this talk of Peter’s success. He never asked her how she was doing, why she still spent her evenings serving sandwiches to walking lumps of muscle tissue when she could be pursuing her dream, running a course for disabled actors. She had known all along that she would never be much of a stage success, but she was sure she could teach. She was prepared to settle for something more satisfying than pouring coffee. What she needed now was advice.

  ‘But you’d advise me to do it even though the contract’s not through, wouldn’t you? I mean, they seem like pretty trustworthy people. It’s a big company. They’re not going to run off without paying me.’ He was looking at her intently, waiting for a opinion. She threw up her hands, knowing that he would only hear what suited him. So many actors were like that. ‘Sure, take the job, it’s what you want.’

  ‘I knew I could rely on you to steer me to stardom. He reached down and kissed her on the forehead. ‘I’d better go. Big day tomorrow.’ He swung his gym bag onto his shoulder and headed for the door. She could have killed him. It was the forehead kiss that made her most angry, as if he didn’t see her as a woman, or the possessor of any kind of sexual identity. Grunting furiously, she wheeled her way back behind the counter and began turning out the lights. Peter was a typical bloody actor, completely closed to the real needs and purposes of other people. She hadn’t seen it in him before, or perhaps she’d hoped that he would be the one to break the mould, but he was the same as all the rest. She didn’t mind them lying, but it was boring when they lied to themselves. No wonder his girlfriends never stayed around for long. She certainly wouldn’t be there for him after tonight. Far too much acting, she decided grimly.

  * * * *

  Rain blanketed the city, sheathing the rooftops behind a grey shower-curtain of mist. It flooded the gutters, coarsed over pavements, breached the drains and ruined Peter’s chances of making a decent impression with his new shoes. Filming was about to commence in another old warehouse. This particularly run-down specimen was tucked behind the tube station in Tufnell Park, hidden by a row of shops that were either covered in For Sale signs or were already derelict, and seemed to be spouting water from a thousand broken pipes.

  Peter looked for the tell-tale glare of the spotlights, but found none. Studio lighting was always turned off between takes because of the intense heat it generated. Besides, the set was supposed to be low-lit, so he doubted that anything could be seen from the road. He found the producers waiting on the second floor with a small crew (below British union requirements, certainly) and a simple set of rubble and straw, in the centre of which was a single wooden chair. Bound to it with ropes around the torso and legs was a rather unrealistic dummy, intended to represent the young hostage. Luserke came over and greeted him warmly.

  ‘I hope the late hour does not upset you, Mr Tipping,’ he said apologetically, ‘but we have been having some trouble with the lights.’

  ‘Nothing serious, I hope?’ Peter looked over at the single cable trailing behind the set. There didn’t seem to be enough lighting here to go wrong. But then, the scene they were about to film was an intense one, and every element had to be exactly right.

  ‘You will be pleased to know that our “Jack” is so far very good,’ the director continued, anxious to please. ‘He finished his part of the scene today. I would have liked him to stay here for your lines, but he is a big star in his country because of a television show, how you say “sitcom”, and he will not sit with the bag like so.’ He indicated the linen sack gracing the head of the mannequin, whose left leg looked as if it was about to detach itself completely. Wherever the money was being spent on this production, thought Peter, it certainly wasn’t going into the props.

  ‘The dummy doesn’t look very convincing,’ he complained. ‘Couldn’t you make the scene more realistic by getting someone to take its place while we film?’

  ‘I think we will not need to do so. Watch please.’ He gestured to one of the crew and the set lights came on, throwing a dingy blue haze across the chair and its occupant. With the figure half buried in indigo shadow, its imperfections were lost to the darkness. ‘I am more concerned with your close-ups tonight, and your speech, which we will do in one take. I think we will not need to feature our Jack in clear focus. If you would like to take your mark on the set -’

  ‘I haven’t been made up yet.’

  ‘Made up.’ The phrase seemed new to him. Luserke looked over to his producer, who said something in German. ‘Now I see. This was not made clear to you before I think. No make-up for this scene. The light, the blue light will be on your face.’ Peter looked back at the low glow of the set and hoped it would be bright enough for his facial expressions to register. This was to be an emotionally draining moment. He didn’t want his performance to be lost in the gloom, like it had been with the extras on the hill.

  He made his way past the shattered-looking writer who was sitting with his head in his hands, nodded to Ostendorf, who was whispering into his mobile phone, and found the gaffer-taped cross on the floor of the set. Ostendo
rf had told him that he only needed to learn two pages of dialogue for this first night’s shoot, which involved the end of his scene with the hostage, and the moment of fury in which he kills him. The producer felt that as he would be addressing a plastic dummy rather than a live actor, it would help to start with the least interactive part of the sequence.

  Peter studied the lolling strapped-up figure and rolled the handle of the carving knife between his fingers. Although to his eyes the set appeared absurdly unrealistic, he knew that through the camera lens it would take on a strange reality so that even the luminous turquoise lighting would somehow be appropriate. The lengthy scene was divided into sections, the last part involving a ranted monologue from Peter which culminated in him stepping forward and thrusting the knife into the mannequin’s chest.

  By the fourth rehearsed take of his ‘fury’ speech, the crew were egging him on and applauding. Encouraged by Luserke, who sat forward on a stool beside the camera studying Peter’s every movement with glittering eyes, he grabbed the chair-back with one hand and with a despairing scream thrust the knife deep into the gut of the dummy, splintering the plastic shell to bury his fist deep within the kapok and foam interior. The director wanted his inner rage to surface, to slam against the floor and walls until it exploded into unstoppable violence.

  During the final rehearsal Peter caught himself thinking; this is what it’s really about, to be in the centre and in control, to reach inside and draw emotion from the heart, to feel the sheer naked power of performance. He had reached this point by his own efforts, not through some agent looking to cream off a percentage. This was just the start, the tip of the future making itself clear to him, a fabled city appearing through a calming sea. Enjoy the moment, he told himself. Make it last.

  They took a short break and the film magazine was loaded for the first take. Peter returned to his mark and stared across at the battered dummy strapped to its chair, chunks of torn rubber clinging to its cream plastic chest.

  ‘Peter, could you come here a moment please?’ Luserke called him over to query an inflection at the end of the monologue, tapping the speech with a nicotine-stained finger.

  ‘I can handle it that way if you like,’ he conceded, ‘but it’s a long speech, and by the time I get to the end my voice has risen so high it’s hard to control.’ Peter promised to try his best, but he knew that he’d do it his way. The matter was out of his control. He could only give his talent full rein and shape the power as it grew within him.

  ‘Your mark, please. Quiet everybody.’ The crew quickly returned to their places. Peter reached his spot and looked up. Rain still blurred across the skylight. The knife handle was warm in his hands. The lights dimmed even lower than in the rehearsals, and the room fell silent, so that the only sounds came from the rain above and the breath catching in his chest. He could see nothing beyond the shadow of the dummy and the straw-lined edge of the set.

  Slowly, carefully, he began the speech.

  The anger flowed from him as he accused the captive young man of having all the things he could never have, of squandering his inherited power, of wasting a life that paid service to truth and decency while perpetuating an immoral, divisive society. He felt the bile rise within him, felt real hatred for this golden boy who knew nothing of the real world, who had never tasted the hard lives of working men and women, and forward he ran with the knife at his waist, thrusting it out into the bound ribcage of his captive in an explosion of bare rage.

  The first spray of warm liquid jetted into his face, blinding him as the next boiled hotly over the fist which still clutched the knife. He tried to pull his hand free from the dummy’s chest but it was trapped, caught between the flesh and bone of the hostage’s ribcage. There were no lights at all now, only the scuffling of feet and the slamming of a distant door. As he fell to his knees he knew he had cut into a real, living body with the foot-long blade, and that even now the roped-up figure was sinking fast within the coils of death, leather-soled shoes drumming madly on the floorboards until the chair toppled onto its side and the form bound to it lay still and silent, but for the steady decanting of its blood.

  The crawl across the room in darkness seemed to last a lifetime. When he finally found a light switch he was frightened to turn it on. Two bare bulbs served to illuminate his blindness. He looked down at his shirt, his hands, his trousers, at the gouts of blood, as if someone had emptied the stuff over him in a bucket. The camera, if that was what it had been, had gone. There was nothing left in the room except the ‘set’, a pile of bricks and straw, a pair of gel-covered standard lamps set on the floor in either corner, a wooden chair and the cooling corpse of a young man, bound at the hands and feet, and taped at the mouth.

  It took him a moment to realize that the room wasn’t quite empty. Something else was over everything. His fingerprints - on the body, the chair-back, the floor, the walls, the knife.

  And even as his confusion lifted to be replaced with mounting fury, he wanted to know not why but how, how had they come to choose him, of all people? Because even now he could not see the blindness in himself.

  And then what hurt most of all, what really cut into his heart and burrowed into the little soul he had, to lie there stinging and burning in a wormcast of purest agony, was the disappearance of the audience who had witnessed his greatest performance, and the knowledge that his moment had not been captured.

  It was a pain he had only just begun to nurse when the police broke in the door.

  <>

  * * * *

  MARK TIMLIN

  CHRISTMAS (BABY PLEASE COME HOME)

  S

  oho - the capital’s centre of vice. Only minutes from the glittering lights of Piccadilly that shine like the jewels in the crown of Great Britain’s major city, lies this blot on our nation’s conscience.

  Blimey, I thought. Where do Channel 4 dig up these funny old short movies to fill the time between the commercial break and The Oprah Winfrey Show? And as the pedantic tones of the narrator droned on, the grainy old black and white film switched from a view of Eros, to Compton Street, where half a dozen elegant-looking women in high heels, pencil skirts and short fur coats patrolled the deserted pavements. Then to the front of the old Windmill Theatre, and inside, where half a hundred geezers in long macs and trilby hats were watching a tableau of naked girls standing so still on stage that you could almost count the goose bumps on their upper arms.

  Back here in the real world it was five p.m. four days before Christmas, and rods of almost solid, freezing, black rain beat down onto the window of my office from the dark mass of cloud that seemed to sit only inches above the roof of the boozer opposite, where the warm, golden light that seeped from the front door and the gaps in the curtains seemed to beckon me over.

  So that was the deal. An hour of Oprah interviewing a woman who’d hired a killer to shoot her husband, and after the contract had gone sour, had spent four years in prison, and then returned, reconciled, to hubby’s loving arms. After that, an hour in the pub, then off home with a bag of fish and chips for another evening in front of the TV watching the rest of the world get ready for the annual festivities. Me, I wanted none of it. And intended to spend Christmas Day in bed with a good book, a micro-waveable spaghetti bolognaise and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. No cards. No presents. No funny hats.

  The narrator’s voice on the soundtrack of the film continued with the story of the Windmill, and just as I was sure he was going on to tell us how the place never closed, the door to my office opened to admit a man and a woman, water dripping from their umbrella, and I’d never know. I switched off the TV and looked up from the chair I was sitting in at my visitors.

  ‘Is your name Sharman?’ asked the man. He had a northern accent. He was well built with thick, short dark hair.

  I nodded.

  ‘Thank goodness. We thought we’d never find you,’ said the woman. She was blonde and quite nice-looking, though her eyes looked tired. Her accent was
northern too. And slightly stronger than the man’s.

  ‘I’m usually here,’ I said.

  ‘But this is such a big city and we didn’t have your proper address,’ she went on. She was wearing a red cloth coat, the skirts of which were dark with moisture. The man was dressed in a rich-looking leather jacket and jeans, with a scarf knotted at his throat and leather gloves. They both looked to be about forty.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ I asked.

  ‘Find our son,’ said the woman. ‘He’s disappeared.’

  ‘You’d better sit down,’ I said, and got up, pulled my two clients’ chairs in front of my desk and took her coat. It felt expensive and I noticed that the label was from Lewis’s in Manchester, as I hung it up to dry close to one of the two central heating radiators. Underneath she wore a simple dark blue dress and a cardigan.

  ‘My name’s Himes,’ said the man as I did it. ‘Douglas Himes. This is my wife, Mona.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you. Do you want some tea? Coffee?’ I said as they sat.