Vanished Years Page 2

  I am in heaven. I don’t know why. I don’t even know what a magic mushroom is. I am completely gobsmacked. Performance is the closing door through which I bolt and now – quite suddenly – the whole of my world is a question mark. On the bus drive back to school nothing looks the same, not even Brock and Elliot and Wynton. They hated the film. Elliot only came once. Our friendships cool from this day on, and I am out of that cloister of black beetles and rugger buggers within six months.

  The inn is a blue and white colonial hotel built into the hill above a small bay a couple of miles outside Ocho Rios. Its beautiful gardens slope down to the beach. There is a croquet lawn with an old roller parked next to it. The sea splashes gently onto the beach and amazing birds – herons, egrets and pink doves – fly from one side of the rocky cove to the other, breathtaking silhouettes against the sky spattered with fluffy clouds.

  Mary is the manager of the hotel. She is a white Jamaican lady, extremely thin, dressed to the nines each night, a pirate queen in couture, with two spaniels at her feet. She runs the place as if it were her own home – a benign dictatorship where her rule of law extends to the guests who worship her. They are an eccentric group of upper-class English couples who flock to this time warp like birds to an oasis at sunset. Folded in among them are some old-school Americans, a reclusive model and her boyfriend, and, last week, the Archbishop of York in a kaftan. It is a delightful place, full of surprises, an old photograph come to life. Jackets are worn at night and a band plays oldie hits and comfortable reggae while the guests dine and dance cheek to cheek among the tables.

  I never find Honeycomb. All trace of John and Joyce has been swept away. Instead I have strangely – uncannily – found myself. The chance encounter with Anita shines a new light on old times. Sloshed on a deckchair, looking out to sea, feeling rather dramatic, it occurs to me that in fact my childhood went down without a trace that afternoon in York. Performance was the iceberg. Within a year (it takes a long time to sink a middle-class Catholic upbringing) I had thrown myself into a life of excess on the seabed. Within three I had constructed a new world for myself – or underworld – in similar darkened rooms and dank basements, and if my budget extended only to lava lamps, beanbags and Indian prints from Barker’s Bargain Basement, then those economies were largely written off by an excess of sexual ambiguity and mind-bending chemicals. The contract I later forged with show business – to disastrous effect and a risible blindness: the National Theatre was not a Nic Roeg film after all – was directly inspired by the image of these people: Mick, Anita and Michelle Breton, the third wheel of the act, living outside the law and writing their own constitution. ‘Sister Morphine’ was my theme tune, and I dreamt of being arrested as much as awarded.

  Even now the impact of that crash with Performance echoes through my life. My flat is still Moroccan Baroque, and now Anita, the ultimate goddess of my youth, has risen from the sea in wellington boots and a tracksuit, as unrecognisable as the resurrected Jesus on the Sea of Tiberias. The penny has dropped too late. The days turn to weeks but I have no further visions although she has been constantly on my mind.

  It is strange meeting famous people. One knows so much about them. Alone at dinner one night I suddenly remember that she shot a young man.

  ‘No, darling,’ says Bob on the telephone the next day. (Apart from being John and Joyce’s godson, he is an expert on anything concerning the sixties.) ‘He shot himself. It was her gun. She had taken a room in Claridge’s and no one could get her out.’

  ‘She sounds fabulous.’

  ‘Deranged, actually.’

  In his book Keith Richards describes a summer dawn – or dusk, I can’t remember which – in the sixties: he and Anita in a sports car screeching round hairpin bends through clouds of orange blossom in the hills above the coast of Spain. Keith is steering. Anita is sucking him off. The car roars and brakes, grinding through its gears as Anita drives Keith to distraction. ‘You don’t know what a blow job is until you have had one from Anita Pallenberg,’ he writes. With word of mouth like that, who needs a publicist?

  It is the last afternoon. Tomorrow I am moving further along the island. It is nearly dusk, that moment on a beach when colours intensify. Anita is walking into the ocean in a red bikini. She splashes at the water, suddenly disappears and surfaces some distance off, standing again, looking out to sea, pushing the hair from her face with both hands. She is a young girl again. She sees me and waves.

  ‘Where have you been?’ I shout, accusingly.

  ‘Here.’

  ‘I’m leaving tomorrow for Firefly.’

  ‘From Honeycomb to Firefly. What are you? An elf?’

  She comes out of the water, tottering slightly as she is carried by a wave onto the beach. She sits down, dripping, suddenly ancient.

  ‘I’ve had so much to do up at the house. Can’t you stay one more day?’

  The same line years later, a different Performance. Maybe I should write a short story. A travelling player with broadening hips and a femme fatale from the sixties marooned in a colonial hotel at the end of the world. Complete strangers. Destination unknown. She is wise and childlike. He is foolish and complicated. Both have a shadowy past. Her nerve endings have shrivelled and died in those shadows – hence the codeine. He has lost his nerve coming out of them.

  ‘How’s your book going?’

  ‘It isn’t. Actually I might start with a short story about you looking for the missing pimento tree in the park.’

  Anita laughs. ‘A very short story.’

  The setting sun plays tricks. For a moment it shines directly at her, throwing razor-thin shadows along every line of her face. Suddenly she is the dark witch of legend, the evil beauty whose terrible deeds I have heard of for as long as I can remember. It’s just for a moment. The world rolls over, the shadows deepen and her smile cuts through them as a good-looking waiter with a gold watch and a tight white shirt arrives with a coconut. He gives it to her and she is a child again. He is extremely flirtatious. I am impressed.

  ‘You’ve still got it, Anita.’

  I laugh as we watch his tight arse walk back up to the hotel, dragging a long shadow behind it across the lawn.

  ‘Not bad for nearly seventy, eh?’

  We chat on as the night draws in – old friends catching up after a lifetime, although in fact we have hardly met. Anita is a blonde Buddha, open and empty, affectionate and humorous. She expresses no rancour for the past, nor expectation for the future, beyond the desire never to winter in England again, if she can help it. She has survived with dignity, on her own terms. Once she was at the epicentre of an exploding universe. Now she is a solitary diamond flickering in the night sky. As the light falls from her face it seems to me that she is changing again, ebbing with it, almost invisible as life reduces to a single point in the darkness. The water behind her is blood red for a minute. The stars appear one by one as the last orange squiggle melts into the sea and we are silent as the same thought hits us both. It is extraordinary just to be here.

  Anita is still my ideal. Tomorrow I will begin my book.

  CHAPTER TWO

  An Escort Called Joe

  I am sitting at the bar. I am leaving early tomorrow. A man in pink trousers with a matching face introduces me to his wife. Next season I should really get a job playing the piano here. It would be the perfect end. We discuss various films I have or have not made. They are sweet and old-fashioned, extremely courteous.

  ‘Bad show about The Apprentice,’ he says expansively, as they get up to leave.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I can’t think what he is talking about.

  ‘Walking out like that. We were watching.’

  ‘Oh. I see. Yes. Wasn’t it awful.’

  ‘It showed a complete lack of moral fibre.’ His wife tries to pull him away.

  ‘Come on, darling.’

  ‘It couldn’t have been that bad?’ He beams ferociously.

  ‘You had to be there.’

&nbs
p; He sits down again. I groan inwardly.

  ‘Do tell us about it. Dorothy adores Piers Morgan.’

  *

  I am sitting at a table in a sumptuous hotel suite with three men. I do not know them but we are straining every nerve to connect because we’re a team, taking part in a reality TV show for charity. Circling us silently, like sharks, are three figures with cameras. Their lenses scrutinise us – weird glassy black holes that we try to ignore, dilating as one of us says something funny, coming in close so that our skins shiver. They feel like living creatures, these cameras, while their operators are possessed drones and our brains go into a performance overdrive for their sake. Cables are held by obedient vassals. They are fed with care through doors into other rooms where banks of winking computers have replaced beds and the action next door is compressed into TV screens standing one on top of another. Production assistants watch intensely, making notes on clipboards and whispering to each other. The air throbs with a vibration I have not sensed since leaving boarding school at the age of fifteen.

  Why am I here? A complicated question that may take a little time and some soul searching to answer. There is a lady named Emma Freud. She is married to a man called Richard Curtis. He is the wunderkind of the British film business. Curtis, for anyone who doesn’t know, is to Blair’s Britain what Leni Riefenstahl was to Hitler’s Germany, and Notting Hill, a film he wrote and produced, was the silver-screen face of Cool Britannia. A grim, lifeless romantic comedy about ‘the special relationship’ between Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant. But already I digress. Focus.

  Richard Curtis’s life is a movie (Richard Actually) and Emma is his perfectly cast cohort. Impeccably connected, she is the daughter of Clement Freud, the niece of Lucien and the great-granddaughter of Sigmund. Her brother is the official diabolical nuncio Matthew Freud, himself gastrologically aligned for power, married as he is to the daughter of Rupert Murdoch, our recently deposed puppet master, and all these people live very close to power. Emma knows all the backstairs routes that connect number ten with number eleven. (I know only routes between numbers one and two. And not Downing Street.) These people have always avoided me, as I have them.

  A few years earlier, Robbie Williams asked me to compère his swing concert at the Albert Hall, and sing with him the track we had recorded together. It sounded like fun. Richard Curtis was the director. It sounded even better. Richard was preparing Love Actually at the time. My brain went into overdrive. Maybe during the Robbie rehearsals I could grab the leading role from the jaws of Hugh Grant. Yes, I would be more amusing, more debonair, so deep that Richard would turn to Emma in bed one night and say: ‘I think I’ve had enough of Hugh. Rupert will be my new muse.’

  Well, at first it all went according to plan. I sat with Richard and Emma during rehearsals. There wasn’t much directing to do. Robbie was a one-man band. He knew how to work a crowd, and at the Albert Hall concert he reached his zenith. We all just sat around, waiting for our turn to be sucked dry by his hoover-like magnetism. Richard wrote my part, and we had a little rehearsal. The show was a great success. The BBC got a record number of complaints, which is always the sign of a hit. After the show, Richard came into my dressing room.

  ‘You were absolutely marvellous,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks, Richard,’ I replied, pinching myself just to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. Was it all going to work out as I had planned? ‘I hope we see each other soon,’ I ventured hopefully.

  ‘Yes, that would be lovely. Here. Let me give you my number.’

  Orgasm. Images of renewed Hollywood stardom burst across my brain like fireworks. ‘And the winner is … Rupert Everett for Love Actually.’ I could hear the applause.

  Unfortunately, a party of hags and swamp bitches had congregated in my dressing room and were all dangerously drunk. One of them, drunker than the rest, was the director John Maybury, a friend of mine from the dawn of time. He lurched towards us, his blue eyes glittering dangerously, and thrust his face in between Richard and me.

  ‘This is my friend John Maybury,’ I stammered, smelling trouble and alcohol on the same breath.

  The room suddenly turned silent. I looked round. John’s boyfriend Baillie was looking at me with a frightful grimace, arms outstretched. Everyone else – Princess Julia, Antony Price, Huge Crack, Les Childs and Connie, my PR – stood and gaped. It must feel like this on a beach momentarily drained of sea before the onslaught of a tsunami.

  ‘Oh, hello, John,’ said Richard, pleasantly. ‘I did so enjoy Love Is the Devil.’

  John thought for a moment and cracked a smile as huge as the Cheshire cat’s. He had a big famous mouth in more ways than one.

  ‘Why, thank you, Richard,’ he replied. ‘But look at your own achievements. You have single-handedly destroyed British cinema.’

  ‘Aw my gawd!’ muttered Princess Julia, but otherwise silence.

  Richard’s pupils dilated slightly, and the tip of his nose flushed. I broke into a sweat.

  All I could see were eyes. John’s were bloodshot fried eggs and Richard’s were narrow and icy, like a ferret’s. Mine were enormous and about to pop out of their sockets and roll across the floor. John took a generous gulp from his glass and waited for the ball to be lobbed back, with the same killer smile cutting his face (one of them) in half, but Richard just looked at his watch.

  ‘Well, let’s be in touch. All the best.’ And he left the room.

  Needless to say, I did not get a part in Love Actually or anything else actually, then or since.

  So when Emma Freud called me and asked me to take part in a charity version of The Apprentice, I should have just said no. But I didn’t. I never can.

  ‘When is it?’ I asked lamely.

  ‘Not for a couple of months. There is a task,’ explained Emma on the phone, ‘and it’s made for you. It’ll be a doddle. Only four days’ work.’

  Four days in two months’ time was a dot on the horizon, and I said yes. I didn’t have a television and had never even seen The Apprentice, but I imagined it was something along the same lines as The Avengers, so I gurgled encouragingly back down the line and thought no more about it, hoping I’d get the Purdey role. I should have asked, what kind of task would be a doddle? What is a doddle in the Curtis–Freud world? But I put down the phone and thought no more about it.

  The day before the show was due to begin, a lady telephoned and told me to pack enough clothes for four nights away.

  ‘But I’m not going away,’ I said.

  ‘They want all the teams to stay together during the task.’

  Teams?

  ‘Oh well, I can’t. I have to go home to my own bed.’ Silence. God, I remember thinking, I’ve always hated Red Nose Day, and now this …

  The next evening a car came with the same lady inside to collect me and take me to the secret venue where I was to meet with the rest of my team, and the other team, and, of course, Alan Sugar.

  ‘Who on earth is Alan Sugar?’ I laughed, intrigued.

  ‘You don’t know Alan Sugar?’

  ‘No, I don’t. Is he a singer?’

  ‘No. He is the star of The Apprentice.’

  ‘Aha,’ I said knowingly.

  It was just before Christmas. People tumbled about the streets in Santa hats, drunk from the office party. Soon we left the West End behind, then west London. Where the fuck were we going? Finally we arrived at a kind of disused warehouse, where there were a lot of other cars and vans, and more official-looking ladies bundled up against the cold, breathing smoke, waving clipboards and screaming red-carpet jangles into their walkie-talkies.

  ‘Copy that. Go for Ginger. I have Mr Everett.’

  I was taken into a dimly lit scene dock where twelve celebrities were gathered in the gloom. The walls were black and it felt like being in a gigantic aquarium. Cameramen circled the stars like sharks around bloody meat, pilot fish at their shoulders, expressionless lads holding mini lamps, which were shone on the weird pasty faces of our favourite d
ishes. There was a gnawing tension in the air as everyone tried to acclimatise themselves to the cameras. The women’s team were huddled together, and I wished I was one of them. Susannah Constantine, Cheryl Cole and Jo Brand. They were acting normal, heightened, slightly hysterical, but to anyone in the know their eyes gave them away, momentarily swivelling round, looking for the familiar things: the bar, the PR, the way out. They carried suitcases and seemed to have barricaded themselves behind them against the onslaught of the male team who were circling with the cameramen, trying to get some juicy dialogue going for the show.

  This team of men, this band of brothers, glistened with testosterone in the spotlights. It oozed from their every pore like sap and froze me to the marrow. Alastair Campbell, Piers Morgan and Ross Kemp had their suitcases in their hands as if they were getting on the school train. In fact the whole thing reminded me of school. Here were the same rugger buggers and bullies I had escaped all those years ago, wearing the same slouchy sixth-form clothes. I could think of one thing only. Escape.

  Emma Freud sidled up to me, and I had to restrain myself from breaking her neck. A camera swept in with her.

  ‘So you know the task?’ she giggled. ‘Everyone else does.’

  ‘No. No one told me.’ My eyes were about to pop out. I had to send a message to my eyelids.

  ‘You’re going to love it.’

  ‘Am I? Are you sure?’