Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 2 (2014), page 126
part #2 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
The curious thing was that although at the outset I couldn’t have rightly said why it was that I so craved Scientology, as the years went by and my capacity to suspend disbelief in narrative was increasingly hobbled, I realized that my intuition had been sound: Hubbard’s opportunistic syncretizing of Astounding Stories, the Bhagavad Gita and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life was the perfect refuge for someone like me, who found the probable impossible, and the impossible highly likely.
Besides, the Scientologists’ bizarre belief that their human bodies were only the temporary housing for immortal alien super-beings tallied with my own experience of life, in which well-established actors played even the walk-on parts – William Holden, long dead, adjusts his fedora by the ticket machine, then strolls on. The very condition of the actor, who assumes many different forms while remaining essentially himself, was like that of these Thetans – so was it any surprise that Hollywood stars, their frail psyches sprayed with incontinent regard, were also attracted to the cult?
Hubbard, whose entire life was the front-projection of a successful sociopath, naturally wanted to direct. And ended up bushed in Southern California, presiding over his own sci-fi epics with woeful results, the silvery squeezy bottle passes through the meteorite shower in the shower stall. The perplexing thing was that during the hundred-year hegemony of the movie everything had been filmed – including films themselves. Actors had played historical personages, and those personages had also played themselves, while the actors that had played them appeared in other movies – playing themselves. This poly-dimensional cat’s cradle of references had snared plenty of people with reality-testing abilities far better than my own, and I maintained a certain amused tolerance for the way I lost myself in fugal ruminations such as this:
Stanley Kubrick had used his own Hertfordshire estate as a location for his last movie, Eyes Wide Shut, starring the Scientologist Tom Cruise. In the film, London streets acted the part of Manhattan streets – a metempsychosis analogous to that of actors: the same place living through multiple locations. Kubrick was scared of flying – the young Hubbard pretended to be a fearless flyboy. Hubbard also claimed to have met Freud, who in turn had certainly known Schnitzler, whose Traumnovelle was the basis of Kubrick’s screenplay. And then … Kubrick was rumoured to have employed a special coach in order to invest Cruise and his then wife Nicole Kidman’s sex scenes with the barest plausibility – which brings me back to Saint Hill and Roger Daltrey.
You can, no doubt, see which way my mind was pelting … The completed paper ran to some forty single-spaced pages, the dense type studded with emoticons and interwoven with diagrams bearing labels such as ‘45 degrees where the sigmoidal flexure of TC’s penis is greater than 9.7’. I left it at the Scientology Centre, the pink plastic wallet also containing an explanatory note: ‘I will be staying at the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard on the twelfth of June, should anyone from the International Dianetics College wish to discuss the enclosed with a view to preventing publication’, signed with the nom de guerre Will Smith.
I kept stopping on the way back from Stockwell tube to take photographs. The bases of the limes along Binfield Road were spiky with withies among which nestled the cigarette packets and energy drink cans let fall by the multitudes that tramped by every day. The buses were nose to tail, snorting for admission to their ferroconcrete stockade. I took maybe two or three hundred shots of these lime shrines before the dusk tumbled from the rooftops into the street and night swarmed over the police crime tape looped between the lamp-posts at the junction of our road.
Several of my neighbours were gathered at the cordon. One remonstrated with the officer on duty: ‘My son is disabled! He’s only fourteen years old – you can’t stop me from going home, he needs me!’
All eyes were on the confrontation: the officer in her stab-proof waistcoat, the citizen in his dudgeon, so I ducked under the tape and moved swiftly past the technicians in their white crinkled boiler suits, who were picking at the congealed blood in the roadway. More techies were at work on the set opposite my front door: a neighbour’s Audi estate completely dusted with fingerprinting powder – under the Kliegs it looked like a whale baby coated in vernix. As I put my key in the lock the techies turned their snout masks towards me and gruntqueried; I answered by waving my library card officially, then disappeared inside.
It was a Saturday night and as usual my wife had her cronies over to play games. We lived effectively separate lives; while I wrote screenplays that would never be made, she indulged in a rich fantasy life, one in which she was always about to start shooting – the very next day! An epic! She was Helen of Troy! Mary Magdalene! Joan of Arc! It was a sure-fire smash, with an astronomical budget! So, while I clickety-clacked away in my attic room, she swansoned from chamber to chamber, trying on outfit after outfit, then discarding them for the maids to tidy away.
Except that we didn’t have any maids – a verism that made a mockery of her pretensions; instead it was our children – who had the precocious maturity associated with such neglect, and who were portrayed by a rota of superannuated child actors, gawky Macaulay Culkin, wizened Mickey Rooney, ambassadorial Shirley Temple, etc. – who did the tidying up around the gloomy Victorian house. They also did the cleaning, the laundry and the cooking – they even paid the bills and put themselves to bed punctually at eight-thirty. I’ve no idea how they found the time to go to school.
I threw a few things into a bag ready for my departure on the morrow, then went to say goodnight to my wife. At forty-eight she was still a remarkably handsome woman, and if she had been content to age gracefully I think everything might have been all right between us. As it was, I found her playing KerPlunk with her tame fags, all of them dolled up like teenagers – she in a pink velour tracksuit, her dyed-blonde hair in madly streaked bunches, the others in saggy-assed jeans that exposed the waistbands of their underpants so their pot bellies were captioned ‘Calvin Klein’.
As I came into the kitchen my wife drawled, ‘Get me a drink, darling.’ And one of the forty-somethings leapt to do her bidding. ‘Make it frothier this time’ – she waved her heart-shaped lollipop like a lorgnette – ‘and I want more marshmallows!
‘Oh,’ she deigned to notice me. ‘It’s you – don’t hover like that, pull up a chair and join us.’
Reluctantly I did as she bade me, and Frankie or Hud (I could never tell them apart, and both were played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) equally reluctantly made room for me.
‘It’s too late to join in this round,’ my wife continued, expertly feeding marbles into the tube, ‘but you can play the next.’
She smiled merrily, her coralline lips peeling back from her tiny even white teeth. There was no malice in her – merely utter self-absorption. Hud – or Frankie – who was modishly shaven-headed (or perhaps simply bald), and who had once directed her in a breakfast bar commercial, fouled up his go and as the tube lost its marbles they all cried, ‘KerPlunk!’
I played with them for an hour or so while an ancient Madonna album gently vogued through the sound system. This and the KerPlunk players’ clothes were the only contemporary props – for we had bought the house fully furnished, complete with the splayed bearskin, the miniature church organ, the looming tallboys and hammered-brass aspidistra pots. Glass domes cluttered with songbirds stuffed in mid-flutter stood about on occasional tables, while a vast mezzotint of a Holman Hunt leant against the coffered panelling – I had always felt a deep sympathy for the parasuicidal sheep it depicted, which were huddled together on an insufficiently vertiginous grassy knoll.
Talk was of reality TV shows and the indiscretions of the junior Royals; a new face cream was passed around and smelt. Around eleven I said my goodnights and went to bed with a glass of water. Passing along the hall I was seized by the police lights glaring through the panes of the front door, and so detoured into the drawing room. Here it was even brighter, the radiance lifting the rug’s pattern – trellises twined with the tail feathers of peacocks – so that it floated in the must.
The forensics team were still out there – two of them, seated in the road with their backs against my neighbour’s car. There had been no Vorsprung durch Technik, and, while it was no longer a newborn whale, nor was it a shiny aerodynamic status symbol. Instead, a pre-war Packard dusty and alone in a four-car garage scattered with dead leaves. What was it William Holden had said when the repo men took his car?
A disturbed night followed. I slept poorly on my narrow canvas cot, not helped by the screeching and giggling that floated up the stairs into the small hours. In the morning I found the superannuated child stars – three, maybe four of them – eating Sugar Smacks at the oval mahogany dining table, which was still littered with KerPlunk straws, marbles, chocolatestained mugs and Bacardi Breezer bottles. The pathos of Macaulay Culkin’s bare elbow in a smear of spilt milk was … indescribable. Frankie – or was it Hud? – had lumped up a bed out of cushions and lay spread-eagled in the corner of the room, snoring noisily.
Mark Lester accompanied me to the end of the road and, standing either side of the crime scene tape, we said our goodbyes.
‘Look after your mother,’ I said as I kissed him on his greying blond curls. ‘She may be a little daffy, but she has a good heart.’
He removed my hand from his shoulder with professional courtesy, then enquired, ‘Will that be all, Mr Postlethwaite?’
Each purposeful stride kicked me free from the entanglements of my life, until a reveal shot done with the side of a Number 87 bus exposed the Wandsworth Road, its multicultural parade of food premises – The Sea Lamprey (Muslim fish and chips), Twice as Nice (Carribbean), El Golfo (Portuguese pasteleria) – marching beneath yellowing London brick and the arched eyebrows of gothic rendering. I was safe now, walking out of town on a June morning – if I could be captured at all it would be possible only with a hand-held camera, fitted with a revolutionary lens capable of embracing the paradox of the human visual field, with its saccadic pans, zooms, tracks and stills spuriously contriving a synoptic unity.
The airy bulk of the gasometers, the heroic hulk of Battersea Power Station, the liberating span of Chelsea Bridge, the plane trees romping in the breeze along Sloane Street, the Michelin Man squatting on top of his building, the Linnaean façade of the Natural History Museum – the only disturbing note was struck by the branch of LA Fitness on Pelham Street, which, sited as it was beside the trompe l’œil Thurloe Square – a thin wedge of terrace hiding the District Line cutting – suggested movie trickery.
I didn’t let it get to me; after all, the familiar dumpy shapes of London cabs were wrapped around with the skyline of Hong Kong or Copacabana, and besides, Hyde Park had given way to Queensway, and I was already making my way through the backstreets of Notting Hill before the dump bins of newspapers outside the corner shops began to impinge, and I started to obsess about the weighty potential of Rhys Ifans’s scrotum. The shaggily mournful face of the Welsh comic actor stared up at me from newspaper after newspaper, on rack after rack, trapped there by the protracted and public break-up from his starlet girlfriend. He had come to prominence in Y-fronts and a snorkelling mask, typecast as an out-of-work Welsh comic actor in Notting Hill (1999). And so there his representation was, in the neighbourhood the representation of which had caused him to be so represented.
I pushed Ifans’s bare back against the artex wall and took the soft gristle of his nipple in my dogged teeth, while Notting Hill grabbed the adjustable wrench of Ernõ Goldfinger’s7 Trellick Tower and whirled it around my head. I lurched through Meanwhile Gardens, and came to on a bench beside the Grand Union Canal, staring at the brown emulsion waters, the decrepitating plunge of a skateboarder in a half-pipe resounding in my ears.
As I headed west along the towpath the afternoon came puttering extended-play towards me – a broad stroke of sunlight painted by a narrow boat. Brawny young fishermen sat in the historic present: on empty milk crates, stripped to the waist to have it out with minnows, their six-packs of beer beside them, shiny as shell cases in the grass. And so by the time I reached Old Oak Common I had regained some kind of equanimity. All I had to do was maintain my course through the summery snowfall of dandelion spore and the giddy flip of the cabbage whites, not forgetting to duck when I saw Hal, sitting on a pole by the railway siding, or screwed into the masonry at the rear of the Car Giant warehouse, his brow knitted with pigeon-repelling barbs, a windscreen wiper for an eyelid. True, he might capture a few frames of me, but I doubted that I could be identified; I was merely a glyph in this panorama of subjects – bridge, lock, fisherman and lamp-post – which could be shuffled to produce an endless vista.
Morgan Freeman and Ron Howard were waiting for me where I’d arranged to meet them: beside an information board disfigured with graffiti tags. It wasn’t until I came right up to them that I could establish who it was they were playing, and then initially I thought Freeman hopelessly cast against type – like a black King Lear. However, within seconds it was clear not only that he was Nick Papadimitriou, but that he had captured my friend’s mien perfectly: the hands-on-hips-bellyout stance, the furious intensity of Nick’s stare and his slightly nasal whine.
As for Howard, I could never stand him anyway – and dying his hair red was cheap. Moreover, he was toting a large digital camera with a directional mike attached to it. Ignoring their greetings, I lashed out at him: ‘Why the fuck did you bring that?’ Then rounded on Freeman-as-Nick, ‘I told you to tell him not to bring a fucking camera – it’s crucial that there be no footage of me, if they get hold of it … What’s more, it ruins all this—’ I waved a hand at the enervated canal, the road bridge leapfrogging the canal, the empty skips piled like dirty crockery in a factory yard. ‘Now I can’t suspend disbelief in any of it!’
‘C’mon, Pete.’ Freeman, to his credit, refused to be intimidated. ‘Lighten up – if you don’t want to be filmed, that’s fine, John’ll keep you out of shot. He’s come along to film me, not you – you knew he was making this documentary about me.’
I splashed some water from the Evian bottle I was carrying into the palm of my hand and dashed it against my rageengorged face. Freeman was wearing the same white shirt, dark trousers and heavy leather shoes that I’d last seen Nick in – but, while there was pathos in the half-mast flies, the shirtsleeves rolled up pre-war high, he still looked dapper. I realized my anger was born of pride as much as anything – I’d been counting on Thewlis playing me for these scenes with Nick. My self-esteem required that I be better-looking as well as younger.
Ron-John was cowering by the info-board, so I went over to him and did my best to sound contrite. ‘Look I’m sorry, John.’
‘It’s OK, Will, really – I understand. I’ll keep tight in on Nick, and if you want to examine the camera before I go that’s fine – besides, I’m only going to tag along for a couple of miles.’
The situation remained deeply unsatisfactory for all of us. Ron-John ran on ahead, took up a stance, then filmed Nick as he walked by, then he squeezed back past us and did the same again, over and over. He’d fitted Nick with a radio mike so he could indulge in his penchant for hymning such quotidiana as the abandoned warehouses along the canal side, the Middlesex County Council shields on the lock gates and the steel-clapboard Travelodge by the North Circular Road – but, although he launched into a lecture on the industrial estate conceived as the props department of capitalism, he kept being interrupted by passing joggers and cyclists, who upon noticing who he was stopped to natter among themselves.
I’d long since accepted Freeman’s performance – barely seeing him as African-American any more – and was infuriated by this gauche behaviour. As for Ron-John, no matter how ingratiating he was, or how many high-grossing movies he made, for me he’d always be the bat-eared sycophant in a letter jersey making up to Henry Winkler. When he offered me the camera for my inspection, rather than examining the playback, I simply removed the tape cassette and chucked it in the canal. He trudged away disconsolately over Horsenden Hill, while Morgan and I went on towards Northolt.
Later, standing with him on the footbridge that crossed the A40 Western Avenue, and looking out north-west across the RAF airfield, I felt so happy to have escaped London that I was moved to embrace Freeman and cup his globe of white curls in my hand.
‘Steady on, feller,’ Nick said, but before he could disengage I was shocked by the frailty of his thin back. ‘You’ll be OK,’ he went on gravely, ‘so long as you’re prepared for Laurel Canyon.’
I realized he had been granted a deeper insight than my own, and as we went on across a half-landscaped golf course, then into a nature reserve shaded in with un-coppiced beeches and cross-hatched by reed beds, I nerved myself to ask him what he knew. Yet couldn’t – and so we reached Uxbridge and the same little boxes of ticky-tacky we had left behind in Northolt, then the Hobbiton of its suburbia, then the redbrick carcerals of its office blocks – and still I hadn’t spoken.
I left Nick at the tube station, standing by a half-century-old train indicator that promised a Metropolitan Line departure for Finchley Road. Stumbling on from one tepee of streetlight to the next, I missed him acutely. Morgan Freeman’s was the last familiar face I would see until I met up with Ellen DeGeneres in Los Angeles – unless, that is, I counted James Bond’s.
3
My Name is Bond
I had booked a bed and breakfast on the south side of the town. I’d been able to tell on the phone that the woman of the house was played by Brenda Blethyn, and now that we were standing face to face in the atrocious vestibule of her bungalow, I was glad I’d soon be rid of this supporting cast of British character actors, who, after all, had no traction in Hollywood.
