Authors: Graham Hurley
We whisper to each other, neighbour to neighbour, wondering what
possibly might have happened. No one seems to have any information.
After a while, curled up beside Fiction G-J, I try to sleep but Billie
won
’
t let me. I want her back. I want her in my arms. Nothing else in
the world matters.
Later, I
’
m not sure when, I feel a hand on my shoulder. It
’
s Gaynor.
She squats beside me, as sane and sensible as ever, a radio in her hand.
I
’
ve never seen her in black before. It suits her.
‘
You
OK?’
she
says.
I blink. What a silly question.
‘
Have they found her?
’
She shakes her head and says there
’
s been no news. I explain about
the park, and the cafe, and the way it had happened, so abrupt, so
sudden, but I can tell from the look in her eyes that she
’
s got something
else on her mind.
‘
Why didn
’
t you tell me?
’
she asks.
‘
Tell you what?
’
She stares at me a moment, the kind of look my mother used to give
me as a child when I
’
d done something wicked.
‘
Gilbert?
’
Gaynor says softly.
‘
Are you really telling me you didn
’
t
know?
’
One
Film-making brought me to London. I was twenty-three years old. I
had a degree in media production from Bournemouth University, a
cardboard box full of windsurfing trophies, and a debt that - by
October,
1996
- was nudging
£6,000.
Most of this money I owed my
father and after his abrupt death - a stroke followed, mercifully, by a
massive heart attack - my mother was nice enough to call it quits. He
’
d
left her a modest sum in various stocks and shares and I suspect it
softened her grief to think that his passing returned me to solvency.
At the time, I
’
m ashamed to say that I was less grateful for this
gesture than perhaps I should have been. I had my own problems with
losing my dad like that and whether or not I still owed him
£6,000
was
the last thing on my mind. In any case, money was irrelevant, merely
the preoccupation of a society I was desperate to expose as greedy,
self-centred, and in most cases bloody unfair. Unlike the vast majority
of my buddies at Bournemouth, I wanted to change the world.
Was I naive? Probably. At Bournemouth, a large part of your final
year is devoted to what they call
‘
the major project
’
. This is a ten-
minute video and it counts thirty-five per cent towards the degree.
They give you a word or a phrase, like a chord on the piano, and you
develop it in whatever direction you like. Our theme was
‘
Letting Go
’
.
Bournemouth isn
’
t California, but there are lots of young people in the
town, and a great beach, and sunshine, and most of the final year opted
for various combinations of rave music, soft drugs, and moodily-lit
raunch.
To no one
’
s surprise, I went for something altogether more gritty. I
wanted to explore the urban wastelands, those scruffy inner-city
Bantustans where the underclass had been cast adrift. The link with
‘
Letting Go
’
was a bit tenuous but the invitation was there to explore
the phrase at every level and it seemed to me that poverty and a general
sense of lostness could drive weaker individuals over the brink. In
retrospect, of course, I was dead right, prescient even, but at the time
my theory was pretty half-baked, an undergraduate mix of Irvine
Welsh,
The
Big
Issue
,
and the songs of Billy Bragg.
Bournemouth, alas, was quite the wrong setting for what I had in
mind. It has its share of Nineties blight - there
’
s an alarming heroin
problem - but images are everything in video and the town looks far too
leafy and prosperous to sustain even ten minutes of inner-city grief. I
wanted rain-stained concrete, drifts of sodden chip wrappers, vandalised
cars, abandoned supermarket trolleys, flattened cans of Special Brew. I
wanted drug dealers, teenage mums, gangs of rampaging kids, huddles of
bent pensioners, faces and lives hollowed out by the blessings of the
Thatcher years. None of them were available in Bournemouth in quite
the right combination but after a three day recce I found the council estate
of my dreams in Southampton, the next city up the coast.
The estate overlooked Southampton Water. Every wall had been
spray-painted with graffiti and the man from the Social Services
warned me about leaving my borrowed car unlocked. The estate even
had tower blocks, wonderfully gaunt, where the lifts never worked,
the windows leaked, and no one in their right mind ventured out after
dark. I spent most of the day there and afterwards I sat on the crescent
of tarry pebbles by the water, committing my impressions to paper.
Behind me, the tower blocks threw long shadows across the bleak
expanse of windswept concrete and when I got back to the car I found
kids loitering nearby, waiting for me to find the flattened scabs of
chewing gum over the keyhole on the driver
’
s door.
‘
Brilliant,
’
I
remember scribbling at the bottom of my location notes, underlining
the word three times.
Making the video was harder going than I expected. For one thing,
the people I wanted to feature wouldn
’
t let me anywhere near them. I
’
d
pick up gossip about battered women or schoolgirls on the game or -
in one block - rumours of a black guy who was dealing huge quantities
of stolen amphetamine. Yet when I knocked on the relevant door, or
ambushed a particular individual in the lift, I got nothing but silence or
a shake of the head. However hard I earbashed them, these people just
didn
’
t want to know. They were, I told myself, totally alienated,
totally out of it. In the spirit of our final year project, society had let
them go and this was the result.
Happy that I was on track, I abandoned documentary and settled for
actors and a script, threading a number of my precious storylines through
the video, cutting the grainy black and white pictures to a track from my
favourite Counting Crows album. The finished piece was wonderfully
depressing, a sour cocktail of Nineties angst, exactly the kind of personal
statement I wanted to put in front of my fellow cineastes. Already, I knew
I was tipped for a First. When the summons to appear for a viva arrived, I
looked the external examiner in the eye, warming up our encounter with
my usual rant about the iniquities of capitalism. He listened with great
courtesy, making the odd note, and when I finished by asked him what he
felt about the piece, it was his turn to be direct.
‘
You
’
ve got a good eye for a shot and I like the music very much,
’
he
smiled.
‘
Maybe you should think about MTV.
’
I got the First but what stuck in my mind was the line about MTV.
Was he serious? Had I really condemned
myself
to an eternity of music
videos? Was I kidding myself trying to carve out a career as the new
Ken Loach? For three months, like a couple of thousand other media
graduates, I wrote to every address I could find, enclosing my CV,
pitching my id
eas, begging for work. The main
stream broadcasting
companies didn
’
t want to know. The smaller production houses
mostly didn
’
t answer. Even when I descended to the level of provincial
advertising agencies, the replies were less than encouraging. I was
beginning to think seriously about wedding videos when a letter
arrived with a London
N1
postmark.
It came from a man called Brendan Quayle. He was one of the
founding partners of Doubleact,
a biggish London production com
pany. He
’
d seen my letter and my CV and my eight outlines for
various documentary series, and he wanted to meet me with a view to
discussing a job. I read the letter twice then looked for my mother to
share the good news. Our patience with each other was beginning to
run out. Only the previous week she
’
d been making serious noises
about secretarial work or looking for a job where I could use what she
termed
‘
my looks
’
.
My looks, incidentally, are nothing special, at least not according to
the evidence I see in the mirror. My mouth is slightly crooked,
giving
my face a lop-sided cast
, my chest is unfashionably large, and I
’
d kill
to be another couple of inches taller. Put these items together, and I
totally fail to understand the effect I seem to have on men. They talk of
my long blonde hair, and my
‘
Scandinavian
’
cheekbones and the sexy
way I
’
m supposed to wave my hands about. One ex-boyfriend even
likened me to a Victoria plum. I was, he said,
‘
ripe
’
.
Doubleact operated from a handsome three-storied house in Islington.
I waited for forty minutes in a
cubby
hole on the ground floor, listening
to the girl on the switchboard trying to cope with floods of incoming
calls. Doubleact had made themselves a nice little corner in late-night
entertainment. Most of their stuff went out on BBC
2
or Channel Four,
mildly anarchic quiz shows, fuelled by barbed wit and close-quarters
nastiness. Their latest offering,
Don
’
t
Call
Me
Luvvie
,
Luvvie
,
had
been one of the surprise hits of the summer season. Guest actors
slagged each other off for half an hour while the quizmaster drove the
wagon forward at breakneck speed. It was news to me that Doubleact
should be remotely interested in my sort of documentary work, but I
certainly wasn
’
t there to complain.
Brendan Quayle had an office on the top floor. Autumn sunshine
flooded in through the big sash windows and he seemed to have angled
the desk so that most of it landed on the huge pile of scripts beside his
telephone. On the wall behind the desk he
’
d hung framed press ads for
some of Doubleact
’
s shows.
Luuvies
featured a blow-up of the best
weekly audience figure, a big fat
5.6
million.