You ran outside, filled with euphoria. You felt like a shaken bottle of carbonated water. You wanted to shriek, you wanted to roar. You ran up the steps and over Waterloo Bridge. You weren’t looking where you were going and you ran into a lamp-post. A swelling the size of a doorknob rose on your forehead. You didn’t mind.
And you loved the job, you loved it so much. You answered phones, you took messages, you made coffee, you inputted what you learnt was called data into databases (this turned out to mean typing addresses). You were amazed that, at the end of the month, money appeared in your empty bank account. The miracle of work! The next month, there it was again. It seemed such a simple, alchemical transaction. You were required to arrive at the office at ten a.m., to stay there until the evening, doing whatever it was the people wanted you to do, and then they gave you money.
You searched the narrow columns of the newspaper and found a room in a shared flat: own bed, near tube, sixty pounds per week. The room was marginally larger than the bed, overlooked a main road and had no curtains, but you didn’t care. You sent your new address to your mother, to your brother, to your friends, to all the people you knew. You couldn’t have been prouder.
The head of the Society was solicitous and said things like ‘someone of your calibre’ to you. You didn’t know what she meant by that but you smiled and tried harder not to reroute her phone calls accidentally. She let you sit in on meetings, go out on what she called fact-finding missions, asked you to read documents for her. She wanted you to ‘learn the ropes’, she said, to ‘bring you forward’.
She took you shopping and made you try on collared shirts in dark colours, trousers that covered your feet, shoes with laces and stacked, rubberised soles. You painted your room the white-grey of the London sky. You had a drink with your friend on the newspaper and she told you the hours she worked, her salary, the difficulty of fixing a mortgage. Most nights, you went downstairs from the office and into the flickering dark of the Society’s cinema and watched films until it was time for the last tube home. You ate popcorn for dinner. There was so much to know, so much to watch, so much you had missed out on. You didn’t want to forget a thing so you watched most of the films two or three times.
When a director or actor came to give a talk or a lecture, it fell to you to book their hotels, their flights, their restaurants. You made sure they had drink and food in the green room; you put them into a taxi at the end of the night. You were surprised, sometimes, by how nervous they could be. An acclaimed French director went away to throw up just moments before he went onstage. An actor who had appeared in huge blockbusters before producing a low-budget indie film said he couldn’t go on without a double whisky inside him.
You took care of it all, every whim, every request. You were good at this, you discovered.
You moved to a different flat; this one was closer to the tube. Your room was painted yellow and had a bed reached by a ladder. You would lie in it at night, when you got back late from work, and feel as though you were in the rocking cabin of a ship, being carried by night, that you might wake up in an entirely different place from the one in which you’d gone to sleep.
Opposite the bed was a small oval window. You wanted to take off the curtain but you couldn’t reach it. You liked to look out at the city at night. You told yourself you would paint the walls grey-white but you never found the time.
You knew the city now. You were part of it. You no longer carried a map in your pocket. People asked you for directions and you could give them. You looked like a Londoner, you dressed like a Londoner, you walked like a Londoner, fast and without eye contact. You tried to phone your mother once a week but you often forgot. Yes, you told her, I’m OK, everything is good, yes, I’m eating, yes, the job’s fine. She didn’t really understand what your job was. You suspected she was telling people you were a film director.
The Society held a series of events on the new wave of cinema coming out of Europe. You arranged flights for a group of young, foreign-language directors and their entourages: some came from Berlin, Milan or Barcelona, some from LA. There was great excitement about these events. Journalists rang, wanting interviews. Tickets sold out. The Society’s head added more dates and these sold out, too. You booked hotels, you liaised with assistants, you scheduled press days.
You darted in and out of the interviews. Phone calls came in all the time for the directors: producers calling from the States, journalists from other countries, wives, girlfriends, casting agents, managers. You fielded the calls, you wrote down the messages, you carried slips of paper about the building. There was a buzz, an almost palpable frenzy. You gathered, from listening in on various interviews and phone calls, that these directors were all under the age of thirty. They were reinventing the parameters of film, expanding the potential of the medium.
There was a dinner. You booked the dinner. You didn’t choose the restaurant – one in Soho, owned by an artist – but you called it, you confirmed the numbers; you discussed dietary requirements with all concerned. You sent out invitations to members of the press, carefully selected and vetted by the Society’s head. You booked cabs when the time came, you went and told the various directors that the cabs had arrived, you rounded up the directors, you guided them to the doors, where the cabs were waiting, you gave directions to the drivers: over the river, to Soho.
As you shut the door of the last cab but one, something caught on your sleeve. You turned. A director had you by the wrist, his index finger hooked into your cuff. ‘Are you coming?’
You said, no. You said, not tonight. The truth was that you weren’t invited, you were too lowly, too assistanty, but it didn’t feel right to say so.
‘That’s too bad,’ the man said, in a mixture of American vocabulary and Scandinavian accent. He was Swedish, you knew, and had closely cropped blond hair. When he was with the others in the group, he seemed reserved and watchful; he didn’t say much.
You shrugged and smiled. You gestured towards the final cab, where two other directors were waiting.
But he didn’t move to get in. ‘Where are you going now?’ he said instead.
Home, you said. I’m going to walk over the river, then get the tube.
The man lit a cigarette. ‘Is it OK if I walk with you?’ He lifted one shoulder, then the other. ‘I’ve been indoors all day. A walk is just what I need.’
What about the dinner? you said, and the man, Timou Lindstrom was his name, waved his hand, motioning the cab to leave.
‘I’ll go later,’ Timou Lindstrom said.
You walked. He walked. He told you stories about the other directors, some of them rude. He related an on-set anecdote from when he was a runner about an actress who asked him to help strap on her false breasts. You tried not to be anxious about the dinner: would you be blamed if he didn’t turn up? What would your boss say if there was an empty seat? Would he go to the dinner when you reached the other side of the Thames?
He showed no inclination to head to the restaurant. You reached Aldwych, you went past Holborn, you walked through Covent Garden. At Cambridge Circus you took the plunge and stopped. The restaurant is just up there, you said. You pointed. You smiled. You put out your hand for him to shake.
He looked at your hand and laughed. ‘You think I want to go to the dinner? You think that’s why I’m walking with you? I hate those dinners. I hate those guys. They drive me mad with all their narcissistic jabbering. I’m walking with you because I want you to have a drink with me.’
Oh, you said. Oh, I see.
You went for a drink. You were secretly proud that you knew of a place just round the corner, up some steps and along a corridor. A row of grimy fairy-lights framed each window. The table was unbalanced. Timou wedged it with a beer mat. You leant your elbows on it to test: it no longer rocked back and forth. Magic, you said.
He asked you about your job, about London, about where you came from. You told him about your English father and your French mother, how they were wildly incompatible but had somehow made it work, about how your father had died when you were a teenager, about how you and your brother hated your suburban comprehensive school and lived only for the holidays, when your mother would whisk you back to Paris. She was, you said, the only mother who came to parents’ evenings dressed in Chanel.
As you spoke, his eyes roamed over your face, as if he was collating information about you that he might use later, as if he was thinking up his next question, his next line of enquiry. Tell me more, he said, while you were talking about the car ferry to France, about growing up bilingual; what kind of things did she wear, he said, when you were describing your mother walking into the school hall.
Timou told you about the script he was writing. It was about a group of friends who take a trip to a remote Swedish island. It unfolded in real time, he said, and he was just in the middle of describing the technical challenge of this, when he said, ‘Have you ever acted?’
You were so surprised that for a moment you said nothing. Then you shook your head, laughing a little, saying, no, never, maybe once or twice at school, but really not at all.
‘Look …’ he began, then grinned. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t even know your name. What is your name?’
Claudette, you said.
‘Claudette,’ he repeated, took your hand and shook it; he was holding a drink with his right hand so he shook with his left. It had a strangely unbalanced, one-sided feel. ‘I am pleased to meet you. Very pleased.’ He kept your hand in his for a moment longer than necessary. ‘I’ve never met anyone whose name suits them so perfectly.’
You withdrew your hand. You took a swig of your drink. You weren’t sure whether whatever was happening here – if anything was happening – was a good idea. Would it be embarrassing at work if you slept with this man? You hadn’t been in the office long enough to judge. Did you even want to sleep with him? You’d never been with someone like him – your boyfriends, to date, had been students, as you had so recently been. You’d never slept with a grown-up. You felt you needed to decide where you stood in the next few minutes because things seemed to be moving quite fast. It wasn’t right to lead people on, you knew that, so you needed either to cut and run or stay and see how things progressed. You dithered as you swished ice cubes round your glass.
Timou was still talking about his film, about how you should be in it. This irritated you at such a basic level that it was putting you off the whole idea of him. It was so shallow a chat-up line, so obvious, so well-worn, that you felt insulted to think he might view it as effective. How dare he think that nonsense would work on you? Did he think you were a child?
You shoved your straw back in your glass as he told you he’d been watching you all week. You had, he said, a particularly mobile face, a way of frowning that he liked, a bone structure that took natural light well. That’s it, you decided. You wouldn’t sleep with him. You’d wrap things up, then head home.
‘You’d be great in the role,’ he was saying, in a low voice. ‘Absolutely perfect.’
You groped under the table for your bag. ‘But I’m not an actress,’ you said, lifting your bag onto your lap.
‘That,’ he said, ‘is precisely why you are so perfect. I don’t want actors in my film, people who have been trained, like circus animals, to display themselves to a camera in a certain way. It makes everything so formulaic, so conscious. I’m going to use people who have never been near a film-set before. It will make things fresh and unpredictable. I want to rip up the rulebook of film-making and this is one way to take things a stage further. No professional actors. Real people only.’
You stared at him. He stared back at you. It was like playing that game where you’re waiting for one of you to blink first.
‘I’m not making a pass at you,’ he said and, you couldn’t help it, you blinked. ‘I swear. I don’t mix work and romance. I have a girlfriend back in Gothenburg,’ he said, then added: ‘We went to art school together.’
‘But I have a job,’ you said. ‘And I don’t want to be an actress.’
He reached out for a strand of your hair. It was long but not as long as it will be later. He lifted it to the light then tugged it, as if it were something he required and it was inexplicably stuck.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘how about making an exception, just this once?’
Down at the Bottom of the Page
Niall, San Francisco, 1999
N
iall Sullivan waits, standing on the school steps – his father is, of course, late. He holds his arms slightly away from his body so that the early fall air may pass around him, between his limbs and his torso, between his fingers where webs might have been in another life. His skin, the outermost layer of him, prickles and seethes like lava. If he stands still enough, his clothes won’t rasp against it. This is one of the ways Niall has developed to deal with his eczema. Coping strategies, the doctor calls them.
At the sound of his father’s car coming around the corner, Niall steps sideways, twice, then back, a move that reminds him of the knight on a chessboard, and conceals himself behind a pillar.
He opens his schoolbag, pulls out his binoculars, loops their strap over his head and leans around the pillar just enough for a clear, close-up view of his father, sitting behind the wheel of his car.
Daniel
, he thinks to himself,
arrives nine minutes late. Facial expression tense, gloomy – worse than this morning
.
Niall was recently allowed to withdraw his first ever book from the adult section of the library. It had been about asteroids, and the layout of the page had been different from anything he had ever seen before. The text had been scattered with small numbers, and right down at the bottom of the page, in very small type you had to squint to read, there were extra facts. ‘Footnotes’, his father had told him they were called, when Niall had asked, and shown him how the numbers linked and guided you to the right information. Niall had been enthralled by this system, struck by its beauty, the way there could be one main narrative and right there, at the bottom of each page, additional helpful information on all the things you couldn’t understand. He decided there and then that his life needed footnotes and that he, Niall, should be the one to provide them.